“I don’t know her well enough for that,” Lotty said. “I’m the person she comes to when she’s in trouble, which started when she was in her teens. I was astonished when she appeared at my clinic the first time, but after that, it became chronic—she had STDs, she was pregnant, she turned up one evening in the middle of a terrifyingly bad drug reaction. She landed in a locked ward for a month that time.
“After that, I didn’t see her for years, really, until the day she showed up pregnant with Martin. I thought then she’d turned her life around: she stayed clean throughout the pregnancy and for four or five months after. It didn’t last, though.”
“Do you know who the father was? Would she have stayed in touch with him?”
Lotty lifted her arms in a helpless gesture. “I was her doctor, not her confidante. Besides, Judy slept around so much that she probably didn’t know which particular man was responsible for the pregnancy. The miracle to me is that Martin has turned out to have a brilliant mind. If a drug addict was the responsible, or rather, the irresponsible man, the risk of brain damage was high.”
“Yep,” I said. “Kid got perfect math scores on his SATs. Not too much brain damage there, just a lot of psychic damage from living with your old friend.”
“Victoria, please. You’re hurting me in a sore point.” She hesitated, twisting her coffee cup in her fingers. “Judy asked if I would adopt Martin when she realized she couldn’t look after him. I told her I’d help her find a good family for him, but I had an active surgical practice; if I’d taken him, a nanny would have raised him.”
I reached across the metal table to squeeze her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Don’t tell me I did the right thing. A nanny would have been better than K?the, but before I could do anything, Judy had given the baby to her parents.”
In the dim light coming from the living room I saw her mouth twist in a bitter line. “She felt I betrayed her: I’ve only seen her twice since that day. She and I both appeared at Martin’s bar mitzvah, and again at Len’s funeral. She didn’t look well, either time. She must be around your age, but she looked worn and old enough to be your mother. At Len’s funeral, she said she was going to live on a farm, to see if life in the country would help her get clean and sober. I wanted to believe her. Of course I was deluding myself, the way one does when confronting someone whom you feel you’ve let down. You hope their problems will solve themselves without you. I hope she hasn’t dragged her son into her unhealthy world.”
“I don’t think so. He’s twenty—if he’d been going down that road someone would have seen signs by now.”
I told Lotty what Martin had said to Kitty about uncovering an arithmetic error, and my speculation about whether Martin thought his mother had been stealing from him.
“I’m thinking he rode his bike down to Palfry to confront her. But why did he and Judy both disappear? I don’t think he was with her when she screamed at you for help.”
“What can you do?” Lotty asked.
“I have someone in the public defender’s office tracing any associates of the man whose body I discovered. Martin disassembled his computers, so there’s no way to hack into them to find a trail there, but if I can get a working e-mail address I may be able to find out where he’s been logging in from. And then, I guess I’ll see if I can find out whether there’s any possibility that Kitty Binder’s parents were here right after the war. Martin probably heard tales about them when he was growing up—he might have tried to track them down. What was Kitty’s birth name?”
“Saginor,” Lotty said. “But remember, that was her mother: we don’t know her father.”
“It’s easy to get a list of Nobel laureates,” I said. “Someone who won the prize between 1920 and 1939, that should fit the bill. Unless her father was a builder. Perhaps he was a builder who dined with the King of Sweden, though: he wasn’t a Nobel laureate, but simply the king’s carpenter.”
Lotty laughed at that, but her face remained worried as she ushered me through her apartment to the elevator.
As I drove home, I remembered, a bit belatedly, that I’d promised Kitty Binder I’d keep her affairs confidential. I also remembered vowing not to let other people put their problems into the center of my stage. One more day, I vowed: one more day on the Binder-Saginor mystery and then I’d turn my back on them.
It was close to eleven when I got home, but I stayed up another hour to talk to Jake Thibaut, the bass player I’ve been seeing for the last few years. One of the chamber groups he belongs to was on tour along the West Coast. They had started in Alaska and were working their way south to San Diego. They’d made it as far as Victoria on Vancouver Island.
His absence made my schedule easier in some ways, but it also meant I was lonely at the end of a long day. I waited up until his concert had ended, so we could exchange news of the day. His had definitely been more fun than mine: the concert, held in a refurbished church, had been a major success. Tomorrow, on their day off, a friend was taking them out deep-sea fishing.
“If I catch a salmon I’ll send it home to you.”