I went up a steep flight of stairs to the bedrooms, two small rooms that overlooked the big house across the lawn. As I watched, two children came out the back door with a set of badminton rackets. Despite the chill wind, they began an energetic if inexpert game.
How strange it must be for Julius to sit in Edward Breen’s old workshop, looking at a house that had been part of his childhood. He must have come here often when his father and Edward Breen were working together.
I did a quick search through the two rooms, hoping for a diary, but found nothing except some bird-watchers’ magazines, along with back copies of the Physical Review. Julius might have dropped out of school, but he still kept abreast of the work in his father’s field. That probably would tell an analyst more than it told me.
When I went back to the ground floor, I saw an old photo album on the card table in the corner, half covering the cigarette butts that overflowed the big tin ashtray. I flipped through the pictures. Julius as a toddler with his two sisters, each holding a chubby hand. Julius with his father, standing in front of Chicago Pile Number One, which Fermi had built for the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Benjamin Dzornen in white tie next to President Eisenhower. Ilse Dzornen with Julius and his sisters.
In the middle of the book, just after the last of the photos, was a roughly torn square of paper, so fragile with age that it would crumble if I touched it. The left side was filled with equations. Most of the page was covered by a drawing that looked like a deep-fat— No. It was a pencil sketch of a ferromagnetic core for a computer, showing the direction of electric currents through the wires that extended from it. “Speicher” was printed next to it in tiny faded letters, and on the left side, some fifteen rows of equations appeared. In the bottom right was a small design so faded that I could only guess it showed a pair of linked triangles.
I stared at it in utter bewilderment. How had Julius come by the BREENIAC sketch? It had already disappeared before he got to the Breen mansion last night.
I couldn’t think straight about this. I’d been assuming that Cordell Breen had hidden the sketch himself, putting the blame on Martin for its disappearance. Maybe Julius was a regular visitor to the Lake Forest estate. He lived here in Edward Breen’s old coach house, the two men had grown up together. I suppose Breen’s wife or housekeeper could have let Julius in if he showed up unexpectedly one day; they’d assume he was an acceptable, if not a welcome, visitor of Cordell’s.
Was this the crime that Julius felt weighed down by, this BREENIAC drawing? Or the computer itself?
I undid the binder rings in the album and lifted out the page that the sketch lay on. I carefully slipped it into the folder with the letters I’d copied at the library. When I caught up with Julius, telling him I had the drawing might finally persuade him to talk to me.
On my way out, I used my picks to do up the double lock on the front door. The children, a girl and a boy about eight and ten, stopped their game to stare at me.
“Your mom home?” I asked.
The girl yelled “Mom” several times, without bothering to go up to the house. After the third shout, a young woman appeared, still in work clothes, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel, a phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear.
I walked over and introduced myself; the woman told her phone she’d get back to it and gave her name in turn, Melanie Basier.
“I’m looking for Julius Dzornen, Ms. Basier, and I’m worried because he hasn’t surfaced today. His front door was unlocked; do you know if that’s normal for him?”
Ms. Basier made a face. “I think he usually locks it, but to tell you the truth, I try not to pay too much attention to him.”
“I don’t know him well,” I said. “Is he disruptive?”
“Nothing like that, just—he’s so strange. He’s never worked, he lives on disability or something. My husband doesn’t mind him; he says I’m being unreasonable. The two of them talk about birds—Julius has all those feeders up—but—” She gave a nervous laugh. “I always think he’s one of those guys who looks quiet on the outside but turns out to be an ax murderer.”
“Disturbing,” I agreed. “Why do you let him live here?”
“It wasn’t our idea: he was already here when we moved in. Our house was cheap because of the bizarre legal arrangement about the coach house. We could never have afforded it otherwise, but I sometimes wish we’d moved to South Shore or even Forest Park, where we wouldn’t have such a creepy man on our property.”