“I’ll prop it up at the dining room table and talk to it over dinner; that will make us both forget we miss you.”
I casually mentioned the dog I’d rescued from a meth house, and he groaned. “No more dogs, V.I., please. Peppy’s mellow, but I can only just tolerate Mitch; a third dog and we’re going to do some serious talking.”
“A third dog and I’ll be in a witness relocation program,” I assured him. “Don’t you care that I was risking life and limb in a meth house?”
“Victoria Iphigenia, what can I do about that? If I told you to steer clear of them you’d do your cactus imitation. Anyway, I’m three thousand miles away. Even if I were right next to you, I know you’re the person on our team who takes down meth dealers, not me. I’d be worrying about my fingers and you’d have to protect both of us.”
I had to laugh. I abandoned the effort to extract worried cluckings from him and moved on to Kitty Binder and her missing family.
That did get his attention. “You say Lotty told you this Kitty’s birth name was Saginor? Was she related to a Viennese musician named Elsa Saginor?”
“I don’t know.” I was surprised. “Who is that?”
“She was one of the Terezín musicians. She played flute, but she composed, also; some of her music was in the scores from the camp they discovered several years ago. We perform it from time to time. It’s rather intricate, fugal but in a serialist style. The fun thing, if it isn’t sacrilegious to talk about having fun with death camp music, is to lay about ten tracks of the recording over each other and then play live against the backing. It’s exhilarating to concentrate so hard.”
I wondered if mentioning a musical aunt would make Kitty Binder unbend with me, or if she would purse her lips still further and utter some pithy condemnation of people who had their mouths on their flutes instead of their eyes on the prize.
Before we hung up, Jake said, “Don’t get in over your head, V.I. I miss you. I’d hate like hell to spend the rest of my life missing you instead of just the next three weeks.”
9
SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN
IN MY DREAMS, Jake was playing his bass for the King of Sweden, who said he would perish in the death camps if he didn’t build a new kitchen for him by morning. “Keep your head in the clouds,” the king cried, “or I will cut it off.”
I spent a strenuous night, fighting the king, hiding Jake’s bass, getting lost in the clouds. When I got up in the morning, I was almost as tired as when I’d gone to bed. I went for a long run, on my own, without the dogs, to clean out my head.
Jake’s response to my poor rescued Rottweiler had rankled a bit, but it also hit home. It was a strain to look after two big dogs, even with Mr. Contreras’s help; I didn’t often have enough time to do the meditative running I enjoy. A third dog would make it impossible.
After four miles, I was moving in an easy rhythm that made me want to keep going all the way to the Indiana border. It was hard to turn around and face a day in a chair, but I was one of those people who keep their feet on the ground, their shoulder to the wheel, their nose to the grindstone. What a boring person I must be.
While I showered, I mapped out a program for the day. Track down Martin’s friend Toby Susskind to see if he could tell me anything about where Martin had gone. Library work on Nobel Prize winners to guess a father for Kitty Binder: Martin Binder might have gone hunting his putative family. I’d round out this fun-fest by following up with my pal from the PD’s office, to see if he’d unearthed any of my dead meth maker’s associates.
It would have been easier to find Toby if I’d had his cell phone, but I finally learned he was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The school wouldn’t give me a phone number for him, but they let me have his college e-mail address, since that was essentially public information. While I waited for him to answer my e-mail, I started my search through the list of Nobel laureates from the 1920s and thirties.
It wasn’t the slam-dunk search I’d been imagining. I went down to the University of Chicago science library so I could use their reference support, assuming I’d be in and out within an hour. That wasn’t my biggest mistake of the day, just the first.