“Did she come to Chicago to find you?” I asked.
“No—she had her own complicated story, which I got tired of hearing. She was married by then, she’d gone back to Austria after the war to interpret for the British Army and married an American GI. They came to Chicago because K?—Kitty thought her own mother was here, that was her story. I couldn’t bear hearing about all the people who’d mistreated her, or lied to her, how she found her mother, she hadn’t found her mother, her mother left Chicago without seeing her, her mother was dead. We all had our dead to mourn, our lives to build, no one was holding my hand and I didn’t want to hold hers!”
I sat still: if I’d gone to her at that moment she would have pushed me away like another cobweb.
Finally she walked back to her chair. “I liked Len—Leonard Binder, that was Kitty’s husband. Judy was their only child. Len died about eighteen months ago and that was the last time I saw Judy, at his funeral. She told me she’d joined a commune downstate, that she was turning her life around, and I wanted to believe her even though I was pretty sure she was high at the time.”
At that I did go over to her, knelt next to her chair, put my arms around her. Lotty’s breath slowly returned to normal. She sat up abruptly and said, “Didn’t you say the sheriff down there had never seen Judy? What if she wasn’t part of that drug house at all?”
I walked over to the couch where I’d left my handbag and pulled out the two photos I’d found in the wreckage in Palfry. I handed Lotty the one of the mother with a baby.
Lotty looked at it briefly. “Oh, yes. Judy with the one baby she carried to term. Poor thing, she gave him to Len and K?the when he was a year or so old.”
I looked at the bleached-out picture again. It was hard to make out Judy Binder’s expression, but she seemed puzzled, like a dreamer who doesn’t understand where she’s woken up. She’d given the baby to her parents, but she’d kept the picture; that must mean something.
I showed Lotty the picture of the metal pod on stilts that had been on the floor of the meth house. “Do you know what this is?”
“It looks like a child’s design for a spaceship. But the people—” She frowned over the photo. “I feel as though I should recognize them, but—I don’t know, I think it’s the clothes. They make me think of my childhood.”
I took back the pictures and put them in a folder in my bag. The mantel clock chimed eleven, startling both Lotty and me. It had been a long day; I was more than ready for bed. As she walked me to the elevator, Lotty thanked me formally for all the trouble I’d taken.
When the car arrived, she held my arm and said with her self-mocking smile, “Victoria, I know it’s an imposition, but will you go see K?the—Kitty, I mean—and see if she knows anything?”
3
FAMILY PORTRAITS
KITTY BINDER LIVED in Skokie on Chicago’s northwest border in a tan brick house. Most of her neighbors had small front gardens, with marigolds and rosebushes set around squares of perfect grass. At the Binder place, a few patches of unmown grass warred with dandelions in the dry ground. The trim around the windows was peeling; squirrels had bitten holes underneath the eaves. Depression, age, lack of money, or all of the above. I sucked in a breath to buoy myself and rang the bell.
Two fingers cautiously parted the blinds in the front window. After a moment, I heard the lock’s tumblers clunk as the dead bolts were undone; the front door opened the length of a stout chain. Through the crack I could just make out a shadowy face.
“Ms. Binder? I’m V. I. Warshawski. We spoke earlier this morning.”
It had been a difficult phone call. At first, Kitty Binder said she wasn’t interested in her daughter, she had no idea where Judy was, and furthermore, why had I let Charlotte Herschel involve herself in affairs that were no business of hers?
When I described Judy’s terrified message on Lotty’s answering machine, Ms. Binder became even fiercer. She wished she had a nickel for every threatening phone call Judy had made over the years. Judy played on Lotty’s sympathies like Isaac Stern with a Stradivarius. Judy knew that she, Kitty, wouldn’t stand for such nonsense, so Judy turned to Lotty instead.
“Not that Charlotte is gullible. She sees plenty of drug addicts in that clinic of hers. She knows exactly what’s going on. She just wants to make me look bad in my daughter’s eyes by acting as if she were a saint.”
I flinched at my end of the phone. Lotty and Kitty definitely were not best friends forever. I didn’t want to have to listen to decades of grievances from either of them, so I cut Kitty off abruptly.