I grinned. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, Kitty Binder seems troubled enough about her parentage that Martin likely grew up with a lot of questions about his own background. Not to mention the fact that there seems to be no way of knowing who his own birth father was.”
Hahne played with the wispy ends of her hair. “Martin’s mother did phone the school a couple of times, asking about him, or wanting to talk to him. The principal told me, since he knew I was the teacher who was closest to Martin. I guess his mother was pretty high every time she phoned. The two of us had to inform the grandmother, since she was Martin’s legal guardian. She said not to let Martin know.”
I nodded. “The grandmother thinks Martin obeyed her and never saw his mother, but I’m betting he did; kids need to see their parents. They keep hoping they’ll get love, even if the parent is as unstable as Judy Binder.”
“Did Ms. Binder, the grandmother, I mean, hire you to find Martin?” Hahne asked.
“At least for today,” I said. “First Kitty—Ms. Binder, the grandmother—told me to leave Martin alone, but then she asked me to find him. I have a dozen wildly incompatible theories, but one of them is that Martin might have gone off the skids and started killing people he imagines as corrupting his mother.”
“I refuse to believe that!” Hahne flushed to the roots of her mousy hair. “He wasn’t that kind of boy. Socially awkward, but not—not unstable!”
A couple of people chatting nearby looked at us curiously, wondering what I could be saying to upset her. I didn’t challenge Hahne: Martin was her special student.
“If he didn’t disappear to hunt for his mother, where else could he be?” I asked. “His grandmother says something happened his final weeks at home that upset him. The last thing she remembers him saying was that something didn’t add up. He left for a few hours in the morning, came home for a short time, then took off for good.”
Hahne frowned. “That sounds as though he was analyzing a problem, not planning revenge. He used that phrase when he couldn’t make sense of a problem or a theory, if he thought his approach was off-base, or if he thought the theory wasn’t right.”
“Martin hasn’t been in touch with you? If he has, if you know he’s safe, I won’t pry, but—here he’s disappeared, while his mother is jumping from one drug house to another with a posse of furious meth makers behind her.” I leaned forward in my intensity; Hahne shrank back into her chair.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that the people she hangs with are absolutely ruthless. If what doesn’t add up in Martin’s mind has to do with her or them, I need to know.”
Hahne spread her hands helplessly. “If I knew, I’d tell you, but honestly, Martin hasn’t talked to me since he left high school.”
We talked a little longer about Martin, his infatuation with Feynman, his gift as a musician—he played bassoon, although he sometimes fooled around with bongo drums just because Feynman had.
“I always told him the ugly duckling turns into a swan,” Hahne said, escorting me to the door. “I still believe it. If he’s in trouble of some kind, if you find him and he needs any kind of support, legal, financial, anything, you must let me know at once.”
I promised, but drove away from the school more worried than when I’d arrived. An arithmetic problem. Something he couldn’t make sense of, but in an intellectual way? Of course, Hahne felt a maternal protectiveness toward her gifted awkward student; she might not want to recognize a fissure in him that would break under the wrong pressure.
Still, there was the fact that he’d emptied his computers. Something didn’t add up, but he couldn’t bear for anyone else to know about it? But who would look at his machines, besides his grandmother? She might make a scornful remark about people who waste their time on theories, but I couldn’t picture her hacking into his files.
I was equally puzzled by Julius Dzornen’s behavior. He’d stonewalled me completely about whether Martin had come to see him before disappearing, which made me believe that he had. To ask him—what? What could Martin have said that would make his great-uncle—if Julius was, indeed, Kitty’s half brother—clam up?
Just as baffling was what had derailed Julius fifty years ago, so much that he’d dropped out of school and almost fainted at the sight of a detective. He was seventy-three or -four now. Something in his teen years, or his early twenties.
I pulled over at a gas station on Irving Park and found his sister Herta’s phone number. Herta Dzornen Colonna. I started to dial the number but hesitated; I wanted her to see me and it’s so easy to say no and end the conversation when you’re on the phone. Besides, a cell phone with the trucks roaring down the nearby expressway was a recipe for unsuccessful communication.