“Zach, they’re twenty now, not ten. You can’t be sure of that,” Jeanine said.
“I don’t think Martin’s any less reckless or dangerous now than he was ten years ago,” her husband said. “Since Len died, there hasn’t been anyone to balance Kitty’s lunatic ideas. For all I know, she persuaded Martin to find the people she keeps claiming are following her.”
“That’s a persistent fear, is it?” I asked. “I wondered this morning if it stemmed from her childhood experiences, or if it had roots in something more recent, such as her daughter’s drug problems.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” Zachary said. “With that kind of stepmother, or grandmother, I guess, it’s no wonder Martin grew up to be such a lone wolf. Jeannie feels sorry for him, but even she has to admit, some of what he got Toby involved in was downright dangerous.”
The coffee was weak for my taste. I took a few sips to be polite before putting my cup back on the tray.
Jeanine laughed softly. “It wasn’t dangerous, not in that way. Martin wanted to re-create the Challenger disaster. When he was around twelve or thirteen he got fascinated by the history. He and Len built a series of rockets; Martin wanted to see if he could replicate what went wrong and Toby couldn’t stay away, not when the boy across the alley was launching rockets!”
“He could have put out Toby’s eyes, or his own,” Zachary grumbled. “But you know darned well, Jeannie, they came close to suffocating when Martin filled the garage with CO2.”
“Ms. Binder told me how much that episode distressed you,” I said.
“Zach,” Jeanine said. “Please. You’re giving Ms. Warshawski a very distorted picture here.”
She turned to me, leaning forward over her coffee cup. “Martin idolized Richard Feynman. Do you remember him showing us all on national television how the O-ring in the rocket broke when it froze in outer space? Martin’s enthusiasm infected Toby, who brought the story home to us.”
“It was the rockets,” Zachary said dryly. “No twelve-year-old boy could resist those rockets that Len was helping Martin build.”
“That’s true,” Jeanine admitted. “All the kids in the neighborhood who’d been calling Martin names all those years, they crowded around, they wanted to go to the lakefront when Martin and Len were going to fire them off.
“Anyway, Martin was trying to get his rockets to freeze, so he got Len to buy a huge vat of dry ice. They filled the garage with it and Martin left his rockets in there to freeze, that was all. He and Toby got a little light-headed, but nothing came of it.”
“And nothing came of the rockets, either, except one of them landed on the Tubman roof and set it on fire,” Zachary said.
“It was so cool!”
We all three jumped at the words: none of us had noticed the younger Susskind boy standing in the doorway. He had a mop of the thickest, reddest hair I’d ever seen on a boy.
“Voss!” Jeanine said. “Don’t you have homework?”
“I’m mostly done, honest, just history and physics left and—”
“Upstairs now,” Jeanine said. “I don’t want another night of you in bed after midnight.”
“Voss,” I interrupted, “do you know where Martin Binder was going when he took off last month?”
“Don’t question my son without my—” Zachary began, but his wife silenced him with a head shake.
“Voss, this is Ms. Warshawski,” Jeanine said. “She’s a detective, she’s trying to find out what happened to Martin.”
Voss nodded: he’d been listening ever since I arrived. He shot an uneasy glance at his father, who told him petulantly to go ahead.
“Me and Sam Lustic were—”
“Sam and I,” Jeanine interrupted.
“Sam and I, we were going over to the pool and Martin came out of the garage with his camping stuff strapped to his bike. You know, he has that cool tent that folds up like a kite, so I guessed he was going camping. Only not with Toby.”
“Would that have bothered your brother?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” Jeanine said. “Toby has a lot of friends; he always did, whereas Martin was, well, he was kind of a one-friend person. If he went camping without Toby, it’s because Toby didn’t want to go. They haven’t been as close since Toby started college, anyway.”
“Martin’s been gone almost two weeks,” I repeated. “I’ve got to tell the police, even though Kitty feels very strongly that they not be involved.”
Voss was listening, mouth agape. “Has Martin been killed?”
“I doubt it,” I said with a heartiness I didn’t feel. “If he’d been killed someone would have told his grandmother by now.”
“Are you still here?” Jeanine said to her son. “This conversation is not for you or about you.”