My own dogs—a golden retriever and her half-Lab son—greeted me as if we’d been separated for twelve months instead of twelve hours. I hadn’t been able to give them a proper workout the past two days, so I took them over to Lake Michigan for a long swim. My downstairs neighbor, who shares them with me, rode over to the lake with us. I floated in the lake for a bit, letting the cool water ease away some of the stresses of the day.
Back on land, while I threw balls for the dogs, Mr. Contreras and I caught up on each other’s lives. He was less reproachful than usual over his exclusion from my adventures: he had received a long e-mail today from my cousin Petra. He adores her and was bereft when she left Chicago for the Peace Corps. Her remote El Salvadoran village doesn’t often get an Internet connection, so today’s e-mail had pepped him up.
When he heard my story, his main focus was on the Rottweiler. “What do you think we should call her, doll?”
“‘My Own True Love,’” I said brightly. “As in, ‘Fare thee well, my own true love.’”
Mr. Contreras looked at me reproachfully. “That ain’t right and you know it, cookie. It seems like it was meant, you going down there to find Dr. Lotty’s gal and saving this dog’s life along the way. We got two dogs already, how much trouble can a third one be?”
Mr. Contreras is almost ninety, with the energy and personality of a pile driver. Even so, his days of running big dogs are behind him.
I put an arm around him. “We’ll make a budget. We’ll see whether we can afford a full-time dog-walker, and whether Mitch and Peppy will welcome a half-feral outsider into their pack. For now, the Rottweiler has to be in segregation until she stops shedding heartworm larvae.”
Mr. Contreras’s lips were moving; I wasn’t sure he’d been listening to me. “We’ll call her Mottle, for ‘My Own True Love.’”
7
ROCKET SCIENCE
JEANINE AND ZACHARY Susskind met me at their front door together. Sort of together. Zachary was a bulky guy. Even though Jeanine was slim, she couldn’t fit herself quite next to her husband in the doorway.
Before I finished announcing myself, Zachary demanded to see my ID. Something about Skokie gave its residents a mania for inspecting my credentials. I handed him a card and showed him my PI license. He frowned over it but reluctantly decided I could be allowed inside.
“What’s this about? Why does Kitty Binder think my son should talk to a detective?” Zachary said.
His gut was pushing me against the edge of the open door. I leaned forward into him and he backed up a step.
I had my spiel about Martin’s disappearance down to a thirty-second sound bite. “Your son is the one person Ms. Binder says Martin was friends with,” I finished. “I’d like to talk to Toby to see if he knows where Martin was heading.”
“He doesn’t,” Zachary said flatly.
“Did you ask him? Did you know Martin was gone?”
Zachary scowled. “If Martin took off to do something illegal or dangerous, Toby is smart enough to stand clear. I don’t—we don’t—want you harassing our son.”
“I don’t want to harass him, just ask him if Martin talked to him.” I was tired. I’d ended up not having time to eat more than a few bites of Mr. Contreras’s mac and cheese—sans broccoli and mushrooms—before heading north again. It took an effort to keep my voice level.
“If Martin turns up dead in a ditch and a few words from your son could have brought me to him in time, I won’t be a happy detective.” I decided not to put in the effort.
Jeanine Susskind said gently that we would all be more comfortable in the living room. “And we’ll all be more comfortable not threatening each other,” she added.
The Susskinds lived on the street behind the Binders, in a house that was bigger and airier. We went into a front room whose beige couches and armchairs made a suitable backdrop for a wall-sized abstract painting in blues and golds. A tray with coffee cups and a thermos sat on a glass table in front of a gas fireplace.
“Look,” Zachary said, when his wife had finished the coffee ritual. “Everyone knows that Martin Binder’s mother has a serious drug problem. When Martin and Toby were ten or so, she showed up one day and took them off to Great America without talking to Jeanine or to Kitty. She ended up driving her car into a streetlamp on Skokie Highway. It’s a miracle that everyone walked away from that outing, and she’s goddamn lucky we didn’t sue her behind to hell and back.
“I told Toby he was never to go anywhere alone with Martin again unless he talked to me or his mother first, and he’s been good about that, even when they got to be in high school. They went camping together a couple of times, but I was on the phone with Toby every day making sure that addict wasn’t anywhere near them.”
I rubbed the crease between my eyes. “Mr. Susskind, are you saying that Martin talked to Toby this past August and told him he wanted to visit his mother?”
“I—no.” For the first time, Susskind paid attention to what he was saying; when he spoke again the belligerence level in his voice had gone down. “But if Martin had talked to Toby about doing anything alone, Toby would have told me.”