Love & Other Crimes

by Sara Paretsky

  It was six hours later that the police came for Karin.

  3

  “What’s she doing in handcuffs?” Temple demanded.

  She had found Karin in a side room, where prisoners were held after their bond hearings until court ended, when they would be put on buses to Cook County Jail.

  The sheriff’s deputy bristled. “It’s the law, and if you want to talk to her, you won’t carry on in here.”

  Temple sized up the deputy, the gun, the attitude, and squatted next to her mother, who gave her a wobbly smile. Temple was overcome with shame: she had heard her mother’s message when she got home at one, and decided if there was a crisis, it had something to do with Temple’s visit earlier in the evening. She didn’t feel like hearing a lecture on why she needed to treat Jessica with more consideration, so she’d erased the message and gone to bed.

  It was only when she was dressing for work the next morning that she’d heard the news: her mother had been arrested for murder. Traces of the explosive used at the Spadona Institute, a common household cleaner mixed with fertilizer, had been found in the greenhouse at the back of the garden.

  “I don’t believe it, any of it,” Temple announced to her kitchen. “This is insane.”

  She had called the house to try to find out where her mother was. The phone rang a dozen times before Jessica answered it. She was surly, as if annoyed that Temple wanted to talk about Karin. The police raid had totally freaked out Titus, she said: he’d cried until three in the morning.

  “I don’t know where Karin is and she’s not my responsibility. If she blew up the Spadona Institute, then I am out of here—I am not getting involved in her crimes.”

  “Sheesh, Jessica, after all my mother’s done for you, all the babysitting, letting you run off when you need your own space, or whatever sob story you lay on her. What happened? What grounds did they have for arresting her?”

  Jessica bristled at Temple’s criticism, but she did confirm the news reports, that the cops had found what they were looking for in the greenhouse.

  Temple frowned. “I was in that greenhouse yesterday afternoon, and didn’t see any buckets or bottles of cleaner. And you know Karin doesn’t use that kind of product, or let anyone in the house use it—didn’t you tell the police that?”

  “It was the middle of the night, the baby was howling, what was I supposed to do, give them a lecture on nonviolence and green gardening?”

  Temple pressed the off button hard enough to bruise her finger. In her head she could see a spreadsheet with a to-do list, the items filling in as if written with invisible ink. Number one, evict Jessica, had to be moved to number four, she decided: number one had to be to find a criminal lawyer for Karin. Number two was to find out what evidence the state had, and number three was to see if Karin was guilty.

  Since Cheviot Engineering was a forensic lab, her boss, who’d testified in a gazillion or so criminal cases, surely knew a good criminal lawyer. She caught him on his way to a meeting. He thought for a minute, said that Freeman Carter was the best, if he was available, and that Carter could also find out exactly where Karin was. Carter wasn’t in when Temple called, but his paralegal traced Karin and told Temple that Carter or one of his associates would meet her in Bond Court as soon as possible.

  Temple was still squatting in front of her mother, rubbing her cuffed hands, and sniffing out an apology for not responding to Karin’s SOS last night, when Freeman Carter arrived. He was such a model of the corporate attorney, from the bleached hair cut close to his head to the navy suit tailored to his tall body, that Temple was sure her mother would reject him. She was astounded when Karin got to her feet, awkwardly because of the cuffs around her ankles, and held out her chained hands to Carter.

  “Freeman, of course! If I hadn’t been so rattled last night, I’d have thought of you myself. Bless you—that is, I assume you’ve come for me?”

  “Of course, I should have known it was you.” Carter turned to Temple. “Our parents had adjoining cottages in Lakeside when we were growing up. I knew your mother before she went to India and changed her name to Shravasti. Let’s get you out of here.”

  “They set bail at a million dollars,” Karin said. “Even if I take out a higher line of credit on the house, I can’t come up with that much money.”

  “That’s why you’ve hired me. Or why your daughter has. Million-dollar bonds for felons are just part of our complete service.”

  4

  “I won’t pretend that I’m going to wear black and sob at their funerals, but I didn’t kill Epstein and Brooke,” Karin said.

  “I don’t want any hairsplitting here,” Freeman Carter said sternly. “If you placed an explosive device in the house, intending to blow it up before the guys got there, you’re still liable for their deaths.”

  “Freeman! I don’t know word one about explosives, and I am utterly and completely committed to nonviolence.”

  “That’s really true,” Temple said. “And besides, she’s totally green, you know. They’re saying she mixed ammonia with fertilizer from the compost heap, but Karin wouldn’t buy a cleaning product with ammonia in it.”

  “But they found her gardening gloves in the greenhouse and they’re saying they had traces of the ammonia and some fertilizer on them,” Jessica put in.

  They were sitting in Karin’s private parlor. When she turned her house into a co-op, she’d kept a suite of four rooms for herself at the back of the second floor. Normally at a meeting like this, all the housemates would have taken part, but Jessica—and Titus, happily banging away on a drum improvised out of old milk cartons—were the only ones at home. Three were trekking in Uzbekistan and the fourth, an elderly civil rights lawyer, was visiting his daughter in northern Michigan.

  “But I don’t garden,” Karin said. “Maybe I have some old work gloves, I guess I do, but Sandra—one of our housemates—looks after the greenhouse, and she’s one of the ones away trekking right now. In fact, it’s been on my conscience that I haven’t looked at her seedlings to see if they’ve been watered.”

  “It’s impossible to prove, Karin.” Freeman held up a hand as Karin and Temple both began to protest. “I’m not saying I doubt you, but I can’t prove it in court, which is where it matters. If you’re innocent, someone planted your work gloves in there, coated with ammonium nitrate. Who could have done that?”

  “Anyone,” Temple said. “Karin keeps an open house. Doors are locked at night, but I bet you never lock the gate leading to the alley, do you?”

  “Of course not, darling, why would I? It just makes twice as much work. It’s bad enough that people are always losing house keys, without worrying about the garden, too.”

  “Are you sure it was an ammonium bomb?” Temple said. “I’m surprised it behaved like this one did.”

  “What do you mean? How does an ammonium bomb behave?” Jessica gave the word a sarcastic inflection.

  Temple saw Karin mouthing “let it go” and took a deep breath before she answered. “Ammonium nitrate bombs leave a big hole. The house would have fallen in on itself if the bomb had been set inside, and if it was outside, the front or the back would be missing. The Spadona building just has roof damage and a pattern of burn marks around the second floor.”

  “Are you an expert?” Freeman asked.

  “No, but that’s the kind of thing everyone knows,” Temple said.

  “Everyone?” Jessica sneered.

  “Everyone who thinks logically about fire and burn patterns,” Temple said. “What about the samples from the house? Where was the bomb set? What was it made of?”

  Freeman jotted a note. “I’ll see what the Feds are willing to say. Going back to who could have planted this on you, do you have any ex-tenants, or old enemies in the neighborhood, who might have it in for you?”

  “Just Ruth Meecham,” Jessica said. “She’s always calling the alderman’s office about the number of people living here.”

  “Oh, Ruth—” Karin said
dismissively, but Temple interrupted her.

  “There’s something I need to check on. I’ll talk to you later, but get some rest, go to the Buddhist temple, do something for yourself, okay? Today isn’t your day for being Titus’s babysitter.”

  She darted from the room without waiting for anyone’s reaction—just as well, Karin thought, given Jessica’s furious expression. A moment later, they heard the clatter of metal lids. Jessica and Karin went to the window, followed by Freeman. They looked down to see Temple rummaging through the recycling bins. A flash of light made Karin look across the yard. Ruth Meecham also had her binoculars trained on Temple.

  5

  Alvin and Lettice had spent the whole morning discussing Karin’s arrest, and how she’d managed to plant the bomb. When Temple finally arrived at the lab, a little after noon, they pounded her with questions.

  “My mother did not put a bomb in that building,” Temple snapped at them.

  She pulled a couple of specimen bags from her canvas briefcase and laid them on Lettice’s desk. One held the distended plastic jug, the other a newspaper. “Can you analyze these?”

  Alvin came over to look down at the bag. “Hmmm. Small print, lots of words, a screed about liberals in the media, must be the Wall Street Journal.”

  “Please don’t joke about it, Alvin—these might help with Karin’s defense.”

  “What are they?” Lettice asked.

  “The Wall Street Journal and an empty water jug,” said Alvin, unrepentant.

  Lettice picked up the specimen bags. “What am I looking for?”

  “Yes, what is she looking for, and why are you giving her the assignment?” It was their boss, Sanford Rieff, who had materialized in the doorway.

  “Oh, sir, it’s—you know, the Spadona building, my mother was arrested, they planted false evidence in her greenhouse, I’m sure of it, and I want—”

  “Slow down, Temple. I can’t follow you. Give me a step-by-step picture of what this is about.”

  Temple shut her eyes. Where Karin chanted for harmony, Temple saw her to-do list, laid out in her head like a spreadsheet. It was so clear to her that she had trouble putting it into words, so she went to her computer and typed it all out.

  Sanford Rieff looked at it and nodded. “And who is the client? Who is going to pay for time on the mass spectrometer, and for Lettice’s time?”

  Temple swallowed. “I guess that would be me, sir.”

  Sanford looked at her for a long minute, then walked over to her computer and typed a few lines. “Okay. I’ve added you to the client data base. You can finish Lettice’s tests on the water in the Lyle township pool—you know enough chemistry for that, right? And do you know what you expect Lettice to find?”

  Temple took a deep breath. “I don’t know if these are connected to the explosion, but—I’d look for ammonium nitrate, to see if the stuff they found in the greenhouse is on these, and check for acetone in the jug. I knew it smelled funky when I took it away from the baby yesterday, but it was only just now I realized it was nail polish remover, I mean, I never use it, and I’d forgotten, I had a college roommate who was always doing her nails, but what I ought to do is go back to the Spadona building and get samples.”

  “You’re not making sense again, Temple,” her boss said, “but what you ought emphatically not to do is go back to a closed-down explosion site to get samples. You could be arrested, or even worse, injured. Someone has taken samples and we’ll see if we can find their reports.”

  Sanford Rieff pushed her gently toward the door. “You have the makings of a forensic engineer, Temple, but we need the swimming pool analysis this afternoon. Alvin, what are you doing, besides trying to best Temple’s time at Candy Crush? Get me all the reports that are available on the Spadona bombing, then go back to the electronics lab to give Dumfries a hand with the timing problem he’s working on.”

  It was six before Lettice was able to get time on the spectrometer. Temple, who’d finished her work on the swimming pool an hour earlier, stood next to her while Lettice read the bar graphs into her computer.

  Temple pointed at a peak on the graph. “Would C3H6O spike there?”

  “Temple, I swear, you are hovering like a bumblebee, and if you don’t stop, I am going to swat you. I’m not going over these with you—I’m taking them to Sanford first, and he’s left for the day, so get out of my hair!”

  “I’m the client,” Temple objected.

  “And you’re like every other annoying client, trying to run the investigation for us. Can’t you do something useful? A yoga headstand or something?”

  Temple stepped away, fiddling with her watchband, and looked at the samples she’d brought in. Lettice had returned the Wall Street Journal to its protective bag, but the jug was standing open on the counter. Come to think of it, who at her mother’s house read the Journal? They got their news from The Nation and In These Times. And if she was right, if that was acetone in the jug, well, that came from nail polish remover, and she was sure no one in Karin’s house used polish or remover—Karin didn’t approve of environmental toxins, whatever use they were put to.

  But Ruth Meecham—that was another story. Temple had seen the polish on her toenails earlier this week, and Ruth, supporter of Clarence Epstein and the Spadona Institute, she surely read the Journal.

  She walked over to her desk and called her mother. Jessica answered the phone and told her Karin was resting. “Do you want me to give her a message?”

  Temple hesitated, trying to balance her jealousy of Jessica with her need for information. “Where did you get that jug, the one that I took away from Titus yesterday?”

  “I told you—I found it in the backyard! Did you call up to give me another lecture on child safety? Because I don’t need it.”

  “Don’t yell at me, Jessica. I’m trying to figure out how to clear my mom’s name, and I think that whoever planted the ammonium nitrate in her greenhouse made a bomb out of something different, probably out of acetone. I don’t know how it worked, but if a fire had gone up through the air-conditioning vents, it would have left the kind of burn pattern you can see on the outside of the house, following the track of the vents around the perimeter, and acetone would be a really good fast-igniting agent. We’re waiting on the test results, but I’m wondering if Ruth Meecham might have tossed the jug into our—into Karin’s yard.”

  Jessica paused before answering, then said, “If she did, what motive could she possibly have for blowing up the Spadona Institute? She adored Clarence Epstein, she talks about him as if he were a saint. I think they were lovers or something back in college and she kept mooning over him even when he obviously had moved on to bigger and better things. He was a star, but she was only a moon.” She laughed at her own pun.

  “I don’t know motives,” Temple said impatiently. “Ms. Meecham hates the way Karin uses the house as a commune, she hates the causes Karin supports—maybe she’s deranged and figured if she could plant a big crime on Karin and send her to prison, the house would shut down. But I need to go through her garbage and see if I can find any traces of the ammonium nitrate before she gets rid of it, or even worse, dumps all of it in Karin’s trash. I think I’ll come down tonight and have a look, before it’s too late. Don’t tell Karin—she doesn’t like people thinking vengeful thoughts.”

  Before leaving, she checked back at the spectrometer lab, but Lettice had disappeared. She wandered back to Lettice’s desk and looked at her computer. Lettice probably used her cat’s name as a password. Temple’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, then withdrew. She knew it was acetone in the jug; she bet it was some kind of dried acetone compound on the newspaper that had burned her fingers yesterday afternoon. It was more important that she get down to Ruth Meecham’s house and go through her garbage before Meecham decided to move it. And despite what Sanford Rieff had said, she’d go through the basement at the Spadona Institute and get some samples there. She had a hard hat in her trunk, she had a briefcase full
of specimen bags, and she had a camera in her glove compartment.

  The late-summer dusk was turning from gray to purple when she reached Hyde Park. She left her car on a side street and came up behind her mother’s house through the alley—other neighbors were probably just as nosy as Ruth Meecham, and she was less visible in the alley. Ruth Meecham’s back gate was locked, but Karin’s—naturally—stood open to anyone who wanted to come in that way.

  Temple came through the gate as quietly as she could. The fence that separated her mother’s and the Meecham property ended at her mother’s greenhouse; there was just enough space behind the greenhouse for her to squeeze past. When she reached Ruth Meecham’s side of the yard, someone tapped her on the shoulder and she almost screamed out loud.

  “Temple? Sorry to scare you.” Jessica’s face loomed over her in the dark. “Something worrying has happened.”

  Temple could still feel her pulse thudding against her throat.

  “Right after we talked, Ruth Meecham called Karin, and Karin went over to Ruth’s house and—I don’t know. If Ruth was really crazy enough to blow up the Spadona Institute just to get back at your mom, I’m worried what she might be up to now.”

  “We should call the police,” Temple said.

  “To tell them what? That Karin has gone to visit a neighbor and we don’t like it?”

  “I guess I could go in and see what’s going on,” Temple said uneasily.

  “I’ll wait here. If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’ll call the police and tell them I saw someone breaking in,” Jessica said.

  “Where’s your little boy?” Temple suddenly remembered Titus.

  “He’s asleep. He’s okay by himself for a few minutes. Don’t worry about him—you’re as bad as your mother, fussing over me!”

  Temple shut her eyes briefly: let it go. Jessica was a major pain in the ass, but she was helping, so don’t waste valuable energy fighting her. She didn’t say anything else but walked around Ruth’s house to the front door and rang the bell. Jessica stayed behind her at the bottom of the steps, squatting so she couldn’t be seen from the front door.