The Blade Itself

24

The hamburgers at Top-Notch had been getting smaller over the years – no way that was half a pound of meat – but they were still good, juicy and dripping cheese, and when the waitress spotted the radios Sean Nolan and Anthony Matthews always left on the table, she’d write “Police” on the ticket so the counterman rang it up half price. Which wasn’t much consolation when Matthews’s cell phone rang thirty seconds after their meal arrived. Nolan watched him roll his eyes and wipe the grease off his fingers before he answered.

“Hey. Lunch. Nolan. The Top-Notch. Yeah.” A pause. “Where?” He began patting his pockets, and Sean pulled the pen from his own and slid it across the table. Matthews nodded as he wrote on the napkin. “Okay. We’ll be there shortly.” He laughed. “No chance. See you in a bit.” He closed the phone and picked up his burger.

“What’s up?”

“That was Willie. They just pulled a floater out of the river.”

“Where?”

“You know where the Stevenson and Archer cross?”

“Yeah.” Nolan chewed thoughtfully. “A smokehound who went for a swim?” People could generally be counted on to die in stupid ways, but drugs always made it worse. He’d once handled a job where a nineteen-year-old BD, Black Disciple, had been found torched. At first he’d liked the rival Gangster Disciples for it. But the medical examiner said no, there weren’t any indications of a struggle, and no premortem injury besides the fire. Turned out the genius had fallen asleep lighting his crack pipe, caught the mattress on fire, and was just too high to notice. Another criminal mastermind.

Detective Matthews shook his head. “Not this time.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s got a bullet hole in his chest.”

Nolan looked longingly at the rest of his cheeseburger. Most of the time he made himself eat well, and the occasional burger was a rare luxury. He sighed. “Let’s roll.”

A gust of wind tagged them as they stepped out, the kind Chicago was famous for, brutal, cold, and hard enough you could lean into it, let it hold your weight. They’d left the blue Ford in a no-parking zone, but cops knew cop cars, marked or not. Nolan fired up the engine, changing his radio frequency from the seventh to the ninth district in case any news came over while they were en route. “He tell you where they were?”

“Just said east side of the river.”

The drive up to Bridgeport took twenty minutes, but finding the scene turned out to be easy. A dozen squad cars sat beneath the overpass, their lights painting the underside of the freeway in garish sweeps of color. Traffic racing above made the dim space hammer and thrum. One of the beat cops from the district, a tall guy with wind-burned ears and the barrel-chested look of a tactical vest under his uniform – Peter Bradley, that was his name – spotted them and came over with a grin.

“Hey, Detective. You slumming?”

“Yeah. You can go home now, Bradley – the real cops have arrived.”

The beat cop laughed, started to lead them toward the water. “Detective Jackson is down here.”

“What’s the story?”

“Couple of kids saw the body, called it in.”

“You take their story?”

“Cutting class, said they came down here to hang out. They’re headed to the ninth now. Want me to have the sergeant save them?”

Nolan nodded. It wasn’t likely they were involved, but they might have seen something useful. That was crucial these days. The running joke was that in the war on crime, the Felony Review Board was France. Way they saw it, you didn’t have a witness, may as well surrender. Nothing like CSI, teams of researchers working round the clock to make the physical evidence. Unless you were dealing with a high-profile case, somebody white and North Side, it took upward of four months to get anything more complicated than a print back from the crime lab.

Amid the sea of blue-shirted beat cops, Detective Willie Jackson was easy to spot in green corduroy pants, a purple shirt, and a fedora with – no shit – a feather in the band. Before Nolan made detective, he used to wonder why they all wore hats. Once he got bumped up, he found that standing out made it clear to everybody who was in charge. It was a little thing that made a difference. Some of the guys, it tended to be the ones who wore big mustaches, they went so far as cowboy hats. He’d just gone with a brown leather golf cap. Made the point and kept his head warm.

Jackson stood with arms crossed, watching an evidence technician as she knelt beside the body. Nolan could smell it from here. Floaters were notorious. The scent lingered in your nostrils for hours, even after a shower.

“You guys bring me one of them burgers?” Jackson turned to them, nodded to Matthews, shook hands with Nolan.

“Shit, no,” Matthews said. “You mess with a man’s lunch, you’re on your own.”

Nolan ignored them, moving over to get a better look at the body. He didn’t know the evidence tech, a woman maybe thirty-five, neat brown hair, but she clearly took her work seriously. She had the dead man’s arm laid out on the cold concrete as she painted his fingertips with black ink. The victim had washerwoman wrinkles on his hands, and she held each finger firmly to soak it with ink. It felt intimate.

When it came to bodies, Nolan had a method. He didn’t like to start with the face. Better to begin with the impersonal parts, the limbs, the clothing. That way you could look without emotion. There was a trick to being able to screen your vision, see only a part of the whole.

The arms showed no tracks, no sign of junk abuse. A tattoo marked the inner forearm, the ace of spades. The skin had started to get the green-brown tinge of a body that had been in the water a couple of days, and was marked by typical postmortem trauma, the result of scraping against God knew what on the river bottom.

His gaze circled inward. Black jeans, boots. A T-shirt that might once have been white, now dingy with river water and blood. Gases had swollen the belly – that was what made it float. A ragged wound gaped in his chest. At least the rats hadn’t been at it yet. Sometimes with a body out of the river, the only way to find a wound was to look where they’d eaten.

Finally, the facts straight in his mind, cataloged and filed, he looked at the man’s face.

Matthews joined him, wrinkling his nose. “I hate floaters.”

“He’s pretty, huh?” Jackson said. “Any takers that it’s homicide?”

Matthews knelt down. “He was shot somewhere else.”

“The lividity, yeah.” Jackson directed his voice toward the evidence tech. “You able to pull clean prints?”

She laid the arm down gently before breaking her quiet communion with the dead. “I won’t know for sure until we try to find a match. It’s tricky when a body’s been in water.”

“How long you figure he floated?”

She shrugged. “The skin hasn’t started sloughing. A couple days? The medical examiner can say for sure.”

Jackson nodded, clapping his hands together and rubbing them for warmth. “Man, I hate this weather. Not even Halloween and it’s cold enough to snow.” His voice echoed and rebounded under the concrete of the overpass. “Nolan, you’re pretty quiet. What do you think?”

“Run the prints.” Nolan kept his voice low as he stared at the man’s face. “But that’s Patrick Connelly.”