Julius’s face turned the color of putty and he swayed. For a moment I thought he might be going to fall over, but he held on to the doorknob.
“Fifty years ago,” he repeated. “Is that what I said? Maybe I meant sixty. Could have been seventy. I lose count. Fifty years ago, I was a dropout and a loser living in my mother’s house while my two sisters screamed their heads off about finding a job. When our mother died—and believe me, no one ever called her ‘mom’: Ilse definitely was not a ‘mom’ kind of woman. When she died I was disappointed to learn that she wore old-fashioned corsets: I always thought she had an exoskeleton that she’d bequeathed to Herta. I was softer, like our father. Prone to panic in a crisis. I doubt I could have killed Judy Binder, even if Ilse had ordered me to.”
“Did you think your father stole his Nobel Prize research from one of his students?” I asked.
Julius gave a crack of unpleasant laughter. “From Martina Saginor, for instance? That would make a fine Dan Brown novel, wouldn’t it, conspiracy, death, Martina disappears so no one can check on who did the work. No. In his youth, Benjamin was a brilliant scientist. The record is there for anyone to see.”
“Is he the person you killed? Is that what the detectives who never came were supposed to investigate?”
His face contorted into a terrible sneer. “You could say Benjamin and I killed each other. He wasn’t a Nietzschean übermensch, and neither was I. When we had to face disagreeable realities, we both collapsed. Unlike Edward and Cordell Breen, who flourished like that famous biblical tree. Tell that to Herta, and Martin, and anyone else who wants to ask. Good night.”
I moved out of the doorway. He’d pulled himself together; he wasn’t going to crack again, not until I had a better hammer and chisel to attack him with.
I went over to the park in time to cheer my friend through the final minutes of her football game, which entitled me to join the team for a vegan barbecue. It was past nine when I got home again, as happy as if I’d never heard of Binders or Dzornens or Nobel Prizes.
Mr. Contreras had been in the pocket handkerchief of a park up the street, giving the dogs their last outing of the day. We walked inside together, but Mitch insisted on pushing past me up the stairs. Peppy joined him, her tail waving like a red flag.
I called to them sharply, but they didn’t respond. I ran up after them. At the second-floor landing, I managed to step on Mitch’s leash, but he gave a short bark and broke free.
“You got mice, or a steak or something he’s smelling?” my neighbor said, stumping up behind me.
The two dogs were at the top by the time I reached the last landing. Mitch hurled himself against my front door, snarling and growling. Peppy began to bark in loud, sharp repetitions: beware, danger!
“Get downstairs,” I cried. “Call 911. Someone’s in my place.”
The old man started to argue with me: he wasn’t leaving me to face—
“Just go, just do it, I don’t want you shot.” I yanked the dogs back.
My arms were still weak from yesterday’s work. All I did was move the dogs into a potential line of fire. I let the leashes go and the dogs attacked the door again. I stood with my back flush with the wall, gun in my hand.
On the second floor, the Soongs’ baby began to wail. A newcomer to the building, a woman who sold bar appliances, appeared at the second-floor landing. “Those dogs are a major nuisance to everyone in this building. I’m calling—”
“Do it!” I shouted. “Call the cops! Someone broke into my apartment; that’s why the dogs are crazy.”
“Yeah, stop being a pain in the you-know-what,” Mr. Contreras added. “We’d all be dead if the dogs hadn’t—”
“Get out of the line of fire,” I screamed at him.
I pulled my cell phone from my hip pocket to dial 911 myself. “Home invasion.” I croaked out my address, repeating it twice over the dogs’ noise.
“Stay on the line, ma’am; we’ll get someone there as fast as possible. Keep talking, tell us what’s happening.”
My door has a steel core. You don’t hear much through it, but over the dogs’ noise, I could tell the locks were being rolled open. I made another desperate grab for the leashes, but I had to drop the phone.
A gun muzzle appeared through a crack in my door. I backed against the wall again, screaming at Mr. Contreras to get down.
Mitch broke from me and made another dash at the door. His weight forced it open. The gunman fired, but the shots went wide. Mitch knocked the man to the ground and stood with his forelegs on his chest, his muzzle near the man’s throat. I flung myself in after and squatted with my own gun next to the thug’s head. His eyes were rolling wildly.
A second man appeared in front of me. “Call off the dog or I’ll shoot him.”
The downstairs doorbell began to ring.