We were both tense. We didn’t talk during the milk-run up to Howard. Alison, who felt at ease navigating the labyrinth of Mexico City, had never been on the L; she kept looking around with a nervous frown anytime a late-night beggar started a sales pitch in our car. We were lucky at Dempster—we just made the Skokie Swift’s last run of the day.
At the end of the line we had a mile walk to Kitty Binder’s. Boom-Boom’s jersey hid not only my breasts but my picklocks, a flashlight and my gun. By the time we got to the bungalow on Kedvale, the flashlight was hitting my rib cage in an unpleasant way.
It was well past midnight and the little houses were shut down for the night, or so I hoped. The last thing we needed was for an insomniac dog-walker to spot us.
Alison’s nervousness increased when she saw the police tapes and a Cook County State’s Attorney seal on the doors. “If we get caught, won’t they put us in prison?” she whispered.
“If we get caught, you hop off like a bunny; if anyone stops you, say that I kidnapped you,” I muttered: a prison-yard guttural doesn’t carry the way whispers do.
The authorities hadn’t bothered to seal the garage, which had a back door with a simple lock. While Alison held the flashlight in an unsteady hand, I quickly undid the tumblers. We were inside within thirty seconds. I put a hand over her mouth as she started to speak, counted eight slow breaths in my head. No one shouted out or tried the doorknob behind us.
I used the flashlight sparingly, since the garage had a couple of skylights in the roof. We could see a workbench where Len had kept his tools. They were dusty now, but chisels and wrenches were laid out on a cloth in careful size order. He’d hung pictures of himself with his grandson across the wall behind the bench. I’d seen the one with Martin and the rockets, but others showed the two of them playing ball, or working on a car together. Alison gave a crow of delight when she saw them and insisted on taking them down from the wall to carry into the house with her.
On the far side of the bench, a door led into the kitchen. It, too, was easy to open. Strange that Kitty, with her fears, and all the dead bolts on her front and back doors, had left this easy route into her home. Odd, too, that the intruders, who’d torn up the house with a ruthless hand, had left the garage alone. Maybe they’d found what they were looking for inside, or maybe they hadn’t been looking for anything. If these were drug dealers going after Judy Binder they might have trashed the place on principle—or lack thereof.
Inside the house, the crime scene hadn’t been touched. Books and papers were still strewn across the floor. What I hadn’t noticed when I ran through here on Friday was that the intruders had also emptied flour and sugar canisters and dumped the contents of the freezer. The food was beginning to rot. A trail of ants led from under the back door, which had been boarded over, to the spilled sugar.
Alison wrinkled her nose in disgust. “This smells as bad as the barrios I pass on my way to one of our schools. We can’t stay here.”
“Unless you want to call a cab and go home, we don’t have a lot of choice right now. Let’s do some cleaning, my sister,” I said. “It’ll make it all seem bearable.”
I didn’t want to run appliances or turn on lights that might alert someone to our presence. I stopped Alison as she switched on the exhaust fan. Inside the basement door was a rack that held brooms and mops, garbage bags and Clorox. I set to work with a grim will. After a moment of staring at me like a tragedy queen, Alison gave her head a shake, dislodging the baseball cap and her shiny chestnut hair, and joined me.
“Martin’s room is downstairs,” I said softly. “I think he has blackout curtains, so we ought to be able to clean in there more easily.”
Alison volunteered to take care of that while I finished the kitchen and Kitty’s bedroom. I helped her down the stairs with the flash, warning her there would be dried blood on the floor. The disarray in Martin’s suite wasn’t as horrible as the kitchen because he’d left so few belongings behind. Alison looked less miserable as she started to explore the space her sometime lover had grown up in.
I left Alison fingering Martin’s rockets and went up to the second floor. I put Kitty’s mattress back on her bed, hung clothes in the closet, folded her stretched-out bras and torn underpants into a drawer. What rule says you have to give up beautiful underwear after you collect Social Security?
I couldn’t bear to sleep in the bed, even though Kitty hadn’t been killed there. It was an atavistic revulsion to death, or perhaps to Kitty’s tormented life.