Kitty wouldn’t have kept her belief in her own royal lineage secret from her family. I could imagine her bragging to her husband, or her complaints to her daughter: My father won the Nobel Prize, you must get your weak genes from your father’s family.
If Martin was on the trail of something that didn’t add up, was it something he’d discovered about his mother? His grandmother? What if it had nothing to do with drugs or money, but rather that he feared he had symptoms of a genetic disorder? He’d have gone to his father’s family in Cleveland, but he’d also have tracked down the people he’d been raised to believe were his mother’s family.
Dzornen died in 1969; Ilse survived until 1989 without remarrying. I looked at where their kids had landed. The son had never married, but the two daughters had. They’d produced children and now grandchildren. I counted them: five grandchildren for Benjamin and Ilse, eleven great-grandchildren. One of Dzornen’s daughters had died, but that still left eighteen people who might know something about Martina Saginor and her daughter. They were far-flung—two were in South America, three in Europe, the others spread out across North America.
None of Dzornen’s three children had gone into science. The son, Julius, didn’t seem to have gone into anything. He was about seventy now, living in a coach house near the University of Chicago, without any assets to speak of. In contrast, the surviving daughter lived on the Gold Coast with a tidy portfolio of bonds and a winter place in Arizona.
The computer turned up an old photo of Ilse, Benjamin and the two daughters standing in front of a frame house in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1937, with Ilse visibly pregnant. I tried to remember the snapshot on Kitty Binder’s credenza: Had the girls looked anything like these?
Kitty said her family had all been killed in the war. She also said she had come to Chicago because she’d learned her parents were here. Had she said parents or father? Maybe she tried to find Dzornen, but he rebuffed her: he was an important player in the post-war American scientific world; he wouldn’t have wanted an inconvenient reminder of a protégée/lover who hadn’t survived the war. Or he wasn’t Kitty’s father and she was a nuisance.
Dzornen’s children might know something about Kitty, or Martina, or even Martin. Julius Dzornen’s coach house was on University Avenue, not far from where I’d been yesterday. It seemed odd to me, the more I thought about it: he didn’t have any visible means of support, he hadn’t strayed far from his parents’ house. It would be quite a detour to visit him before seeing Nadja Hahne at the high school, but I could just fit it in if I really hustled with my to-do list.
I did an hour’s worth of work with the wine retailer, agreeing to help him buy and place discreet surveillance cameras. I talked to the law firm about their receivables, then set up a phone date with a mining company in Saskatchewan. Two hundred dollars of billable hours duly entered in my spreadsheet.
On my way south, the odometer in my Mustang rolled over the hundred-thousand-mile marker. If I was ever going to afford a new car, I’d have to stop racing around the city like this. I suppose some detectives might bill the way lawyers do, for every six minutes spent even in thought on a particular client, but I didn’t think poor Kitty needed to pay for the time I spent driving, let alone my fracas at Freddie Walker’s drug house.
It was still early enough in the day that I made good time to Hyde Park. Julius’s coach house lay behind a square frame house on University Avenue. The top of an ash, its leaves already yellow, towered over the house from the back.
I wondered if I should cross the lawn to get to Julius, then noticed a flagstone path that bordered the fence. I followed it past the big house to a large yard that held a swing set and a badminton net, although the giant ash had sent out so many knobby roots that it would be a challenge to run down stray shots. The coach house stood behind the tree, its windows so covered with ivy that I couldn’t tell if any lights were on inside.
Shrubs along the fence were hung with bird feeders. The birds squawked off at my approach, reminding me unpleasantly of the crows around Derrick Schlafly.
I pounded on the door: there didn’t seem to be a knocker or a bell. Behind the door I could hear faint noises, a radio, perhaps. After three or four minutes of knocking, when I was beginning to wonder if Julius might have died, he suddenly opened the door. He was a short, stocky man with his mother’s high-domed forehead. He had a two-day growth and his eyes were red: too much beer, not enough sleep.
“Mr. Dzornen? My name is V. I. Warshawski. I’m a detective—”
He started to slam the door on me. “No cops without a warrant.”
I stuck my flashlight into the jamb and pushed against his weight. “I’m private, not with the cops.”
“Then there’s no way you can get a warrant, so fuck off. I don’t talk to detectives.”