Judy didn’t say anything, but her mouth twitched in a sly smile.
“Martin saw the picture of Martina in her Vienna lab when he was younger,” I persisted, “but something happened that made him come down to Palfry to get the picture and the other papers you’d, uh, preserved after his bar mitzvah. What made him want them?”
“It’s your story, you tell me.” Judy flounced on the pillows, at least as much as she could with her arms in restraints.
“He argued with you over the papers. He tried to take them, you tried to grab them back, some of them fell into the meth pit where you let them lie. That was when you realized that these papers had more than sentimental value. And then you and Ricky tried selling them online. You thought you had Nazi nuclear secrets, always a popular item. Someone saw the auction and came to collect the papers.”
“It wasn’t me,” she said quickly. “Just Ricky. He saw Martin arguing with me and came down to see what was going on. I told him they were my granny’s heritage, she died in the Holocaust, but Ricky didn’t have any respect. He even sold his own grandmother’s drawer handles, like he thought they were really gold when they were just polished brass. I never would have sold my own granny—”
“Of course not,” I said soothingly. “Who were the buyers? Did Ricky ever actually get any money, or did they just drive up in their Lincoln Navigator and try to collect the papers at gunpoint?”
“You’re so smart, you know everything, you should know that, too.” She began weeping. “I’m in pain, you won’t leave me alone, you won’t help me. I’m supposed to do all the work around here, my mother’s dead, my daddy’s dead, the Dzornens stole my money, and all you want to do is talk, talk, talk. Go away, I hate you, I hate you!”
Lotty tried to put in a few questions of her own, including what Judy wanted us to do with Kitty’s body, but Judy began screaming loudly for meds. “Put old batty Katty in the ground, I don’t care, just get the fuck out of here if you won’t help me.”
I looked at her thin, tormented face, her mouth one large pain-filled gash in her head. She’d worn me out. I looked at Lotty and jerked my head toward the door.
Lotty stayed in the room a bit longer. She came out a few minutes later, looking grim. We didn’t talk on the way back to the parking lot. As I strapped myself into the Audi’s passenger seat, Lotty said she wanted to go to Evanston, meaning to Max’s house.
For once, Lotty drove at a normal pace, didn’t weave around slow-moving cars on the clogged streets, didn’t race the lights as they turned red. We got to Max’s around seven-thirty. His lovely old home, where he and Térèz, his long-dead wife, had raised their two children, is across the road from Lake Michigan. While Lotty filled him in on our stressful meeting with Judy, I wandered over to the lake.
The sun had set; there were a few families out on the private beach, but no one could really see me. I took off my clothes and folded them on a bench. The water was still warm from our long hot summer. I waded out and let it envelop my naked body. The lake seemed to fold arms of love around me. Jake’s long fingers caressing me, yes, but I thought more of my mother, whose love for me had been both fierce and tender.
Kitty and Judy Binder never had that bond. The invective Judy spewed had been her withdrawal speaking, but a painful wound underlay it. Kitty herself had drunk a toxic mix of worry, anger, loss—her real father, the builder, whoever that was, dead in the war; her birth father refused to acknowledge her; her mother cared more for protons than for Kitty; the grandmother who raised her was murdered in the Holocaust. There’d been precious little love for Kitty to pass on to her own daughter.
I swam to shore and fumbled my way in the darkness to the bench where I’d left my clothes. I found a towel on top of them. Max, or Lotty, had noticed I was swimming.
I dried off and joined them in Max’s rose garden, where he had set out cold roast duck and salads. He and I drank one of his bottles of Echezeaux. We talked of Jake’s West Coast tour and other musical matters.
It was only as Lotty and I were helping him clear the table that I went back to our visit to Judy. “It was my question about ‘duck and cover’ that got through to her. It frightened her. Why?”
“Do you think so?” Lotty said. “All I remember is her cursing me.”
“She was quiet for an instant, and then wondered if I was punishing her because she’d mentioned it. What’s so important about that?”