On my way from the reading desk, I saw a young woman who’d been near me when I’d been showing the head shots to the librarians. She was giving me the same sideways glance she’d given the pictures. I walked into the exhibition space, stopping in front of a newer Bible, a mere six hundred years old, written in Hebrew and Latin. I pretended to study it, long enough for a hesitating person to make up her mind.
When I saw her walking toward the reading room exit, I moved slowly out into the hall. In the long corridor, I stood in rapt attention in front of a description of the exhibit. Finally, I heard the door open behind me. I waited another second, then turned to look.
The woman appeared to be about Alison Breen’s age. She was wearing the frayed jeans and motorcycle boots that are the uniform du jour among Millennials. She moved from foot to foot but couldn’t figure out what to say.
“I went to school here, but I never knew they had a Bible that was thirteen hundred years old,” I said. “I also never knew about Fermi surfaces. I sometimes think I wasted my scholarship by focusing on languages and politics.”
She gave a nervous smile. “I heard part of your conversation with the librarian, about the Dzornen papers, you know.”
“I don’t know how much you heard, but I’m a detective.” I showed her my ID and gave her a thumbnail sketch of Kitty Binder’s death and my search for Martin.
“And you really think knowing who was pretending to be Julius Dzornen will help you find this lady’s murderer?” She was twisting a strand of hair, looking around to make sure no one was listening.
“I don’t know,” I said frankly. “But I’ve been putting a lot of muscle into searching for Martin Binder and I’m not getting very far. If you know something, I can promise I will not reveal that I learned it from you.”
“This is going to sound stupid,” she warned me.
“I’ve been a detective for over twenty years and I’ve learned that the smallest, silliest things can be the most important. Would you like to get coffee so you don’t have to worry about who’s listening to you?”
She nodded gratefully and led me along the corridor to the main part of the library. I followed her down a flight of stairs to a coffee shop. It was a Spartan space, part of the old stacks with tables and chairs and bright fluorescent lights. She let me buy her a cola, but I forwent coffee when I saw what it looked like. We sat in a corner where we could make sure no one was eavesdropping.
“Were you really a student here,” she asked, “or did you say that to get me to talk to you?”
“I really was a student here,” I assured her. “Undergrad and law. My senior thesis was on connections among the Mob, Chicago politicians and waste haulers and how they made sure the city’s garbage ended up in South Chicago.”
Her lips rounded in the kind of respect people accord a topic that sounds truly boring to them, but she responded with her name, Olivia, and her own senior paper, on witchcraft narratives in seventeenth-century France.
“That’s why I’m using Special Collections. Maybe this sounds trivial compared to studying the Mob, but I’ve been learning Medieval French and Latin and reading some of the old French narratives. Anyway, last week, I think it was Thursday, I was having cramps so I was in the bathroom a long time, and the two librarians who were on duty today came in.
“Ms. Turley, the one you were talking to, asked Ms. Kolberg, did she remember the kid who came in looking at the Dzornen papers a while back. She said he’d called himself Julius Dzornen, and she’d assumed he was like a grandson or great-grandson of Benjamin Dzornen, you know, he worked on the Manhattan Project and was a huge name in physics; they cover his work in the physics core.”
Olivia paused, waiting for a response; yes, I remembered the physics core.
“So Ms. Turley said someone else had come in last week, looking for something in the papers, and the box he requested held a genealogy chart. There aren’t any young Dzornens, Ms. Turley said. The only Julius is like seventy or something.
“Well, I was really eavesdropping by then, because my dad knows Julius Dzornen. I don’t know if you know him, Julius, I mean, but he’s kind of a weird guy, a real loner, but he’s a bird-watcher, and so is my dad, so they see each other out in the Wooded Isle on Sunday mornings. When I saw my folks that night, I mentioned it to my dad, about a young Julius Dzornen being in Special Collections.”
She looked at me unhappily. “I guess my dad told Julius when they were out birding on Sunday, because Monday morning, Julius Dzornen came into the reading room. He was furious, wanting to know who had been using his name. And of course it’s against library policy to say, like they told you today. So Julius started to go behind the counter, yelling out threats, and someone had to call campus security.”