Zimmerman's Algorithm

2.03 Tue. Mar. 17

GIDEON drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge as late morning light was picking out the New York skyline. He headed into Brooklyn with almost no sleep, looking for Julia Zimmerman's family.

The Zimmerman family lived on a block of narrow frame houses. Again, he was cautious about pulling up to park, circling twice before he pulled to the curb on the side of the street opposite the Zimmermans' address.

Their house dated from the early 1900s and had made it nearly a century without any vinyl siding. The clapboards were painted a cream color that was almost yellow, and the trim was colored a deep violet. The postage-stamp front lawn, all two feet of it, was spilling over with brown plants that marched back to the porch. Gideon thought it must be quite a garden in the spring. Right now, in mid-March, it seemed long dead.

It made Gideon think of Rafe and Kendal.

He crossed the street without his crutch. He limped, and his leg hurt, but he bore the pain. When he climbed up onto the Zimmermans' porch, he could lean against the doorframe and rest his leg.

Gideon stood there a while, looking at the porch. There was a patio set hiding under vinyl covers. Depressions in the candy-striped vinyl had collected dirty water. In a corner next to the door, a ceramic gnome, about three feet high, stood half-facing the wall, as if trying to hide.

Gideon checked his watch. It was about ten-thirty.

He pressed the doorbell and inside he heard chimes play the first few bars of "It's a Small World."

He stood there a long time, waiting, not knowing exactly what to expect. Given the neighborhood, he wouldn't be surprised if Julia's parents looked out on the porch, saw a black man, and dolled the cops.

The front door swung open behind the screen, and a small, wrinkled, gray-haired woman peered at him through the mesh. She wore a floral print blouse that was at odds with the time of year. "Can I help you?"

From deeper inside the house he heard a male voice ask, "Who is it, Ellie?"

That answered Gideon's primary question. From the records he'd unearthed, he knew that Julia's parents were named Ellice and David Zimmerman. Gideon gave Ellice his most reassuring expression. It was something he did a lot as a cop, and it rarely worked—people were always convinced that he was about to tell them someone had died. Fortunately, since he worked robbery, he didn't have that job much. For all the supposed glamour of the homicide boys, they still told a lot of mothers that their children were dead.

That was all running through his head as he asked, "Are you Ellice Zimmerman?" He was picturing her reaction when he identified himself, and asked about her daughter. Some parents, faced with that, would turn hysterical—

Ellice nodded, "What can I do for you?"

"You're Julia Zimmerman's mother?" Gideon continued.

Ellice smiled, and her eyes lit up. The transformation was eerie, the way all suspicion was wiped from her face. Before she was almost dour, with deep frown lines crossing her jaw. But at the mention of Julia's name, her face took on a youthful cast that seemed to erase decades. Now Gideon could see some of Julia that he'd seen in her pictures. "Yes, dear. Yes, I am."

Gideon smiled back and said, "I'm Detective Gideon Malcolm, from the Washington D.C. Police Department." He braced himself for the inevitable torrent. A cop asking about a child, that always opened an emotional can of worms, and Gideon braced himself for Ellice's reaction. Why are you looking for her? What’s happened to her? Why aren’tyou doing anything about it? She never did anything wrong. ..

Ellice managed to surprise him.

"You must come in," she said as she pushed open the screen door. Gideon began to feel that there was something more deeply wrong about Ellice's expression. "Come on, wipe your feet."

Gideon did as requested, disturbed that she hadn't even asked for his identification.

"Who is it, Ellie?" The male voice repeated. It came from upstairs.

Ellice called up the stairs. "It's one of Julia's friends.

He's from Washington." She held out a hand and said, "Can I take your jacket?"

Gideon looked at her hand, spotted and trembling slightly. He thought of the gun clipped to his belt. "If you don't mind, I'd like to keep it on."

Ellice walked into the house and asked, "Can I get you some coffee, tea—"

Gideon followed into her living room and nodded. "Coffee would be great, thanks." Did she just not hear him say "detective" or "police?"

"Please, sit down," she motioned to a long yellow couch.

Gideon sat and looked around at the house that Julia Zimmerman must have grown up in. The decor was a few decades out of sync. The wallpaper was faded geometric shapes on a mylar backing that was worn to a matte gray. A pair of olive-green enamel table lamps flanked the lemon-yellow couch. A long dead console television sat across the room from an equally ancient Hammond organ whose fake wood-grain lamination was separating from the particleboard beneath it. A fat pink princess phone sat on one of the end tables like a dead salmon.

Unlike Julia's mantel, the mantel here, across from the couch, was covered with pictures. The frames crowded the space and climbed up the wall to either side of the flat mirror mounted above the faux gas fireplace. Most of the pictures seemed to be of Julia or the younger woman— Gideon suspected a younger sister.

Gideon stared at a number of the pictures and had the eerie realization that none of them seemed to be more recent than Julia's high school graduation. He heard someone coming down the stairs, preceded by the odor of pipe smoke.

The man stepped out into the living room. David Zimmerman was a tall man, stockily built. His hair was still brown, but had receded considerably. He wore thick trifocal glasses that fractured his eyes when he looked at Gideon. He was shaking his head, and seemed about to say something when his wife returned with the coffee.

"David." Her voice was almost aggressively cheerful. Gideon watched David frown at her, but Ellice didn't seem to notice. "This is Gideon, one of Julia's friends from Washington."

"Uh-huh," David said. Gideon could read David's expression. Whenever he was in a position to see someone's wife go flying off the handle—screaming, crying, or otherwise going nuts—about half of the husbands would take on this same attitude of detached wariness. It was a way of broadcasting, This all is her problem, I'm just married to it.

It probably wasn't even conscious on David's part.

"I'm sorry Julia isn't here." Ellice sat down, cradling a cup of coffee in her hands. She was staring at Gideon, or maybe through him. "Maybe if you wait here a little while, you can catch her when she comes home. Don't you think so, David?"

David Zimmerman didn't say anything. He just sucked on his pipe and silently took a seat in an overstuffed leather recliner. He kept his eyes on Gideon, as if he were sizing him up.

"It's so nice to have one of Julia's friends here. She doesn't tell us anything about what she does anymore. Does she, David?" She said it as an aside that didn't really wait for her husband's answer. "I suppose it happens to everyone. Children growing up, having their own lives."

She stared momentarily into her coffee, and for those few moments it seemed the cheerful facade crumbled. For just a moment, her face, shadowed and bent, took on the aspect of someone who was grieving.

Then she turned back to Gideon and it was as if it had never happened. "So how do you know Julia? Are you one of her friends from college?"

Gideon shook his head. "No. I'm just trying to find out a few things."

"Well, I'm certain that Julia can help you. Our daughter is a genius." She glanced at David who contributed another "Uh-huh." Now Ellice was beaming. "I know, every mother thinks that of her child. But Julia really is. She went off to college when she was only sixteen." Ellice walked up to the mantel and picked up a picture. The trembling in her hand became more pronounced as she held the picture. For a moment Gideon was afraid that she would drop it to shatter on the floor in front of the fireplace.

Looking at Ellice, it was easy to picture her shattering, too.

She talked at the picture. "It was so nice to see her do so well, after all her problems. And getting a scholarship—our baby went all the way to California—"

"UCLA," Gideon said.

David looked across his glasses at him, but didn't say anything.

"Here's a picture of her," Ellice said, showing him the picture she held. For a moment he thought the frame was empty, but when he concentrated, he could make out a grainy black-and-white image that he

thought he'd seen before. She turned to face him. "Do you know what the Fields Medal is?"

Gideon shook his head.

"It's like a Nobel Prize for mathematics—they don't have a Nobel Prize for mathematics, you know. They gave Julia one, even before she got her job at MIT. She was the first woman to ever receive one."

"That's impressive," Gideon said. He was impressed. He was even more intrigued when he recognized the picture in Ellice's hand as the same one that was on Julia's mantel. But where Julia had a color photograph, the one her mother was touching right now had the grainy black-and-white quality of a newspaper clipping.

"Impressive?" Ellice said. "It is exceptional." She took the picture and stared into it. "My daughter is an exceptional woman." The grieving expression flashed across her face like a passing shadow. She shook her head and the smile returned. "But you know all that, don't you? You're her friend."

Gideon sipped his coffee.

"What is it you do?" she asked him suddenly. It was as if the woman who'd been talking for the past ten minutes was gone, replaced by someone with more normal suspicions.

"I told you, I'm a detective in the Washington D.C. Police Department." He braced himself as he said it, as if Ellice was finally going to go into threatened parent mode, assuming the worst had happened to her daughter—which, the way things looked, might not be that far from the truth.

Ellice gave him a suspicious look. "A policeman . . ."

This time Gideon could almost see her force the concept into some sort of mental box where it could safely fit with the way she was perceiving the world. Gideon felt uneasy when she said, "Why, that's kind of what Julia does now, isn't it, David? She works for the government. She catches spies . . ."

"Ellie," David finally spoke.

"Like I said, our daughter is an exceptional woman."

"Ellie," David said, a slight hardness creeping into his voice.

Ellice turned and looked at her husband. For a few moments she stared at him as if she didn't quite know who he was, or how he'd gotten here. Slowly, the smile draining from her face, she said, "Yes, honey?"

"I'm sure we've kept—" David looked at him and asked, "Gideon, is it?"

Gideon nodded, setting his coffee down on the table in front of him.

"I'm sure we've kept Gideon long enough. Julia isn't here right now—"

"But if he just waits a little bit." Ellice's voice sounded weak and a bit frightened.

"I'm sure he'll come back when Julia's here." He looked at Gideon, his thick glasses cutting faceted holes in his expression. "Won't you?"

Gideon took the cue to get to his feet. He nodded. "I'm sure I will."

Ellice shook her head. "I'm sorry for keeping you. Sometimes I forget myself. I'm so proud of my daughter, you see. . ."

"I'll walk Gideon out," David said, standing himself. "Why don't you put the dishes away?"

"Yes, I should do that." She gathered Gideon's coffee cup. All signs of the unnatural cheer were gone.

David walked around the table, took Gideon by the arm, and led him to the front door. Ellice took the few dishes to the kitchen without looking back at either of them.

David Zimmerman walked him out to the porch, and didn't say anything until the door was closed behind them.

"They haven't found her yet, have they?"

Gideon turned to look at David, and began seeing a weight there that he hadn't noticed while he was confronted with Ellice. "You mean Julia?"

"Who else?" David took the pipe out of his mouth. "Thank you for not forcing things with Ellie. When the Feds came here, it was a nightmare. When she said she expected Julia any moment, they badgered her ruthlessly. I had to throw them out—and Ellie still cried for days."

"She doesn't really expect Julia to come home soon, does she?"

"I don't know what she thinks," David looked back toward the house. "But she's been expecting Julia to show up, any minute, since she graduated from UCLA."

Gideon thought about the framed newspaper clipping. "She doesn't call home at all, does she?"

The expression on David's face was stony. He kept looking back toward the house. "That's our pain. You and your government bureaucrats can mind your own business."

David reached for the door and Gideon placed a hand on his arm. "Does she talk to her sister at all?"

David turned to face him. "Ruth? I suppose you want to talk to her, too. Just like the Feds."

"How long ago did the Feds come here?"

"Right after New Years, looking for Julia . . ." David's look became harder, more threatening. "Who are you, to come here, looking for my daughter?"

"My name's Gideon Malcolm, I'm a detective with—"

"I heard." David reached over and removed Gideon's hand from his arm. "That gives you no right to drag Julia's memory into this house. I don't care what you government people say, Julia was lost years ago. Please leave us, Agent Malcolm, Detective Malcolm, whoever the hell you are."

David turned back to the door, and Gideon asked, "Do you have any idea where she might be hiding?"

He stood in the half-open doorway and spoke without turning to face Gideon. "I'll tell you what I told them. She's gone somewhere where she can choose her own commitments, her own rules. You have your psychological profiles, use them." David slammed the door in Gideon's face.