The Skeleton's knee

Part Two
16

I never realized how big Lake Michigan was until the plane’s lowering wheels shook me awake. I instinctively glanced out the window. All I could see, clear to the razor-sharp horizon, was water.

The shoreline, when it did come into view, was verdant, well tended, and littered with golf courses-hardly the image I’d harbored of Carl Sandburg’s famed “City of the Big Shoulders,” which a glance out the opposite windows would have revealed stretching out to the south.

All of it quickly vanished, however, replaced by O’Hare’s black-streaked pale runway shooting into view. Now the horizon consisted solely of chain-link fences, parking lots, and commercial buildings with bland fronts. There was no longer a tree in sight, nor an unsullied blade of grass.

The plane’s approach, made over Chicago’s affluent northern suburbs, slipped from me, half-remembered, leaving only wonder and a twinge of homesickness-this was as different from Vermont as I could imagine.

It was hard shrugging off an otherworldly sense as I drove along the interstate toward the center of town. The unusual flatness of my surroundings made the approaching city center, spiraling up toward the distant sky, seem unreal, like some gargantuan glass and metal stalagmite around which everything revolved. The Sears Tower, with its dramatically overbuilt twin antennae, was the aspiring apex, encircled by a fawning group of increasingly stunted attendants, each supported by its slightly shorter neighbor until the outer ring faded into the horizontal landscape. It was an heroic image-bold, thrusting, heaven-bound and new-but at the same time strangely futile, encased as it was by that impassive, impenetrable, dismissively vast blue sky.

The sensation didn’t last. The expressway came within reach and then broke free of downtown’s gravitational pull, continuing south and away, eventually letting me peel off onto the side streets near South State, where the Chicago Police Department had its headquarters.

Here was a different environment entirely. Just beyond the city’s grandiose and gaudy downtown, but several miles outside the reach of the old, abandoned stockyards and the notorious high-rise projects to the south, the police department held sway over a borderline demilitarized zone that appeared neither blighted nor truly viable. Whole buildings stood empty, their windows intact but blank, their smeared brick walls touting hand-painted advertisements of companies thirty years out of business. A rusted elevated railway roared and rattled with the rhythmic passing of commuter trains heading elsewhere. And yet there was some commerce-parking lots, a few small shops, a tired motel here and there-leftovers from what had obviously once been a much more muscular, healthy, but now-forgotten, section of town.

I parked my car on the wide, lightly traveled street and walked up the sidewalk toward my destination. The police headquarters building was a curious reflection of its surroundings. Its street-facing facade was a smooth, almost sleek, pale cement slab, regularly punctured by severe rectangular windows, looking like one of those old computer punch cards standing up on end. The rest of the building-most of its sides and its back-was old white-painted brick, bristling with air conditioners and a rusty fire escape zigzagging down to the parking lot. It was incongruous in appearance-half a face-lift-and made me wonder whether, like the neighborhood, the building was coming or going.

As I stood across the street, waiting for a bus to pass, I was struck not only by the number of assertive-looking, cheaply dressed men who were using the front door but also by the number of parked cars that had that familiar lived-in look about them-paperbacks and windbreakers or hats on the rear seat, styrofoam cups, sunglasses, and mashed cigarette packs littering the dashboards and floors. They looked like what they were: places where people sat for hours on end, observing, waiting, struggling to keep awake, as worn and familiar as the offices I was about to visit. It was like having my own provincial policeman’s experience expanded and multiplied a hundredfold. It reminded me with a jolt just how enormous the contrast was between my own department and Chicago’s, and yet how deep the similarities ran.

The lobby reminded me of the airport-barren, harsh, with signs and arrows, a uniformed officer at an information booth, and to his right, a roped-off area corralling people through two metal detectors. There was an instant feeling of hostility and paranoia in the air.

I went to the patrolman in the booth and introduced myself, mentioning that I was supposed to meet with Chief of Detectives Donahue.

The cop stared at my shield and identity card as if they were poor forgeries, his wrinkled, vein-mapped face impassive. “Donahue, huh?”

“That’s what I was told. My chief made the arrangements.”

Finally, he handed back the ID, grinning. “Okay. Straight to the back, through those double glass doors. Didn’t know they had cops in Vermont. You ski?”

“No,” I lied, “I just shovel the stuff.”

It hadn’t been unfriendly, but it also hadn’t been the fraternal embrace I’d hoped for in my heart. Of course, the man had been an older patrolman, set in his prejudices against detectives, no doubt, and he was part of a police force that had more cops in it than the entire state of Vermont. Still, it was a bit of a dampener, a reminder that a single Brattleboro policeman chasing down a twenty-year-old lead was not going to move anyone here to the edge of their chair.

I paused by the detector, uncertain whether to wait docilely in line or to flash my badge and go through the opening that was obviously reserved for cops.

The man ahead of me was a tourist, camera in hand, asking about public tours of the police department. The uniformed man opposite him, younger and more jovial than the one in the booth, shook his head. “Wouldn’t know nothin’ about it. Talk to PR, but you can’t take the camera in.”

The visitor stared at the camera, a small Instamatic. “Okay. Can I leave it with you while I ask?”

“Uh-uh. Might be a bomb.”

The man’s mouth fell open.

The cop smiled. “Sorry. If you came in your car, why don’t you put it there and come back?”

The tourist left, shaking his head. I showed my badge and was waved through.

The receptionist beyond the advertised double doors gave me directions with a friendliness that quieted some of the “stranger in a strange land” qualms that had been nagging me, and set me off on my quest.

I found Donahue, or at least his secretary, four floors above; an hour later, I was ushered into his office. The wait hadn’t bothered me. The secretary, as pleasant as her colleague downstairs, told me it would be a long time and urged me to poke around discreetly. This I did, wandering the halls and studying the bulletin boards. What I came away with, and took with me into Donahue’s office, was an appreciation of the work load these people wrestled with. Never before had I seen such piles of case files, distributed among so many desks, being worked on by so many exhausted-looking people. Nor had I ever seen so many phones used simultaneously. By the time I was ushered over the chief ’s threshold, I was eternally grateful to be the small-town cop I was-despite the laughter and the familiar corridor high jinks that I’d also witnessed, the supposed allure of the “big time” just wasn’t there.

Chief of Detectives Donahue was a short, gray-haired, burly man who smoked a cigar and sported a large Marine Corps ring. He was seated at an overloaded desk in an office decorated with calendars, roster sheets, and a row of clipboards hanging from nails in the wall.

“Lieutenant Gunther.” It had been a statement of fact.

I nodded without speaking, which brought a thin smile to his lips. He stuck his hand out. “Glad to meet you. Have a seat. Your chief says you’re checking out a metal knee on a twenty-year-old skeleton.”

“That’s about it.”

“You got any more than that?”

“Nope. I don’t know who the skeleton is, I don’t know when the knee was put in, and I don’t know who might have put it in. I’m not even sure the procedure was done in Chicago, although I have been told the knee was sold here by the manufacturer.”

Donahue nodded. “You know where to look?”

“I figured I’d start asking around at the big hospitals.”

He frowned and shook his head, dropping the sheet of paper back onto his desk. “Well, good luck. You’ll need it. I’m assigning you to Area 6-that’s Commander Jeffers. You know the city at all?”

“I’ve got a good map.”

He handed me a small slip of note paper. “Belmont and Western. 2452 West Belmont, to be precise-that’s about twenty blocks west of Wrigley Field and a little south. I’ll tell him to expect you.”

He stood up and shook hands. The interview was over. I left without having the slightest idea what the system was I was obviously being plugged into or why my particular address within it was almost halfway back to the airport. Presumably, Commander Jeffers would be the enlightener on those subjects. As I crossed the street to get back to my car, I felt like a freshman on his first day on campus, being shuttled from office to office, accumulating scraps of information from a bureaucracy in full tilt that could just barely give me a few moments of its time. Still, I thought hopefully, he had known who I was.

According to the map, the quickest route to Area 6 was to retrace my way back up the Kennedy Expressway. But having already done that once, I decided to expand my horizons. I headed east toward the lake and took Lake Shore Drive north.

The contrast to my drive into Chicago was startling. Going up alongside Grant Park, by the Navy Pier, and through Lincoln Park above that, I was dazzled by how well the city met the shore. Paralleling a pristine, tree-filled no-man’s-land between the distant serried ranks of downtown’s elegant turn-of-the-century buildings and the enormous, dizzying, ocean-like emptiness of Lake Michigan, Lake Shore Drive affords a tourist’s-eye view of urban development at its most beautiful. The vague sense I’d had earlier at the airport of infiltrating fresh air-a hint of nature’s struggle against the spread of concrete-was here given full rein. The sky and water utterly dominated the scene, and yet the city-with its older, lower, more graceful buildings facing Grant Park and the taller, more futuristic obelisks of gleaming glass and metal just behind them and north of the river-held its own. From this theatrical angle, Chicago flaunted its own majesty. Unsheltered by the lee of a nearby friendly mountain range, as was Los Angeles, or tucked among the islands, rivers, and bays of New York, Chicago was merely there, on center stage, arrogantly exposed to the elements it had set out to challenge. It reminded me of Dallas-another city that existed solely because of the aggressive business drive of a country hell-bent on achievement.

I fought the allure of the many parking lots at the water’s edge, and leaving North Shore Drive, disappeared instead back into the city, impressed by how often, in such a short time span, Chicago had shown me some totally different aspect of its character.

Behind Lincoln Park, away from the lake, I found the process continuing. From traveling between high rises on one side and sailboats and yachts on the other, I was now surrounded by buildings that for the most part seemed plucked from another town entirely. Rarely over three or four stories high, many of them hovering near a hundred years old, the landmarks of this neighborhood looked complacently ignorant of being surrounded by a far larger city. The variety of shops and restaurants, movie theaters and bars all pointed to a self-sustaining, thriving independence.

I continued west, losing some of that isolated security. The buildings became coarser, newer, more functional, and less gentrified. At the corners of Belmont, Western, and Clybourn, I paused before a small confusion of roads, cement buildings, and a shopping mall parking lot. Looming overhead, ominously omnipotent, a red and white radio tower stared down on us all. Near its foot, its low-slung, bland, modern brick walls absurdly set off by a hulking red-white-and-blue metal monstrosity of a sculpture, was the address I was seeking: Police Headquarters, Area 6, 19th District.

For the second time today, I parked and prepared to meet my hosts. There was a better feeling to it this time, though. For one thing, the neighborhood seemed friendlier-at least alive if not aesthetic-and for another, I was hoping that this might become my surrogate office, the launching pad for what I’d come to do here. Driving around Chicago from police station to police station had been educational, but it did nothing to answer the questions posed by those two bodies in Vermont.

The entrance to 2452 West Belmont was a lot less imposing than its big brother downtown. The metal detector was still there, but the atmosphere was more pleasant, and there were no comments about skiing.

As befitted the newer building, Commander Jeffers’s office was also more user-friendly, as was its occupant, who actually came out to the reception area to greet me before I’d had a chance to sit down and who escorted me inside.

“Don’t think we’ve ever had a police officer from Vermont before. Want some coffee?”

“No thanks.”

He poured himself a cup from a counter behind his desk. “Donahue tells me you’re chasing down an old kneecap-that you got squat to go on.”

I laughed at the way my ambitions were being miniaturized and filled Jeffers in on the whole story, from Fuller’s blown aneurysm to the machine-gun nest above I-91.

But by the end of it, like his State Street boss, Jeffers wasn’t overly impressed. “So, you’re basically here for a name and an address, both of which may be history by now.”

“I’m also hoping to get a handle on what happened-the cash, the guns.”

“But only if you’re lucky.”

I conceded the point. “Right.”

That obviously pleased him, apparently settling some private, unvoiced question. He leaned forward and stabbed a button on his intercom. “Get me Norm Runnion.”

He then stood up, encouraging me to do likewise, and wandered slowly toward the door, talking as he went. “I’m assigning you one of my men, primarily as a contact and resource person. If you feel the need, you can have him accompany you on your rounds, but from what you’ve told me, it sounds like you can do most of the legwork on your own. It’s your choice, though.”

I saw where he was headed. “I don’t mind going it alone.”

“Fine. You armed?”

“Yes-it’s in my luggage right now.”

“Okay. We’re pretty relaxed. Donahue tells me you’re your department’s chief of detectives?”

“That’s right.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, then. ’Course, if your nosing around goes beyond just that-if you think you’re onto something that might interest us-we’d like to know.”

“Sure.” The door opened and a tall, stooped man with a full beard and glasses stepped in. He reminded me instantly of some disheveled English professor who’d just been interrupted in mid-chapter. I guessed, both from the gray in his beard and the bags under his eyes, that he was somewhere in his mid-fifties.

Jeffers introduced us. “Lieutenant Gunther-Detective Runnion. The lieutenant is chasing after a twenty-year-old metal kneecap from Vermont. Here’s the file. Right now, he just needs a liaison man.” He handed Runnion a thin folder I hadn’t noticed earlier, welcomed me to the department once more, and closed his door in our faces.

Runnion looked down at the folder in his hand without opening it. He then stared at me for a moment and gave me a wan, bushy smile. “Looks like you’ve been reduced to a couple of pieces of paper. Follow me and I’ll read about you. You can tell me later what they fucked up.”

I trailed him through part of the building, until we came to a large room with a dozen desks scattered about, each one looking like someone’s private camping place, with decorative postcards, assorted memorabilia, and the usual piles of paperwork. About half the desks were manned by people either typing or talking on the phone. One man was leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, and slowly, meditatively scratching his balls.

Runnion motioned me to a chair and slumped into his own, already reading the file. After a few minutes, still reading, he grunted and muttered, “’67 ammo-I’ll be damned. Too bad there were no prints on the shells.”

I’d never mentioned the absence of prints, which made me suddenly realize that the merry-go-round I’d been following with Donahue, Jeffers, and now Runnion had been far less arbitrary or bureaucratic than I’d thought. Runnion was reading about my case-with details only Brandt or I could have supplied-on a fax-paper flimsy, which presumably had originated in Brattleboro and been passed along by Donahue. Apparently, while both Jeffers and Donahue had played ignorant, they’d already read what was now in Runnion’s hands. I’d therefore been given the official once-over… twice. That Jeffers had ushered me out the door with such little concern obviously proved that I’d come up to snuff, but it still made me feel somehow processed, like a side of beef passing inspection.

Runnion finally tossed the file onto his cluttered desk, his face and demeanor noncommittal. “You got yourself a real mystery. How’re you going to solve it?”

I pointed at the folder. “Does that mention the Articu-Tech angle?”

He nodded.

“Well, they apparently sold the three knees with that particular lot number in Chicago sometime in early 1969. So I thought I’d start with the major hospitals around here-the ones that were doing that kind of operation back then-and see if I get lucky.”

Runnion grunted again but didn’t react with Donahue’s dismissiveness. “That’s probably why they put you here. Area 6 includes Northwestern. They’ve been doing hotshot procedures for years.”

“Who else?”

“Right offhand? University of Chicago. In fact, I would’ve thought of them first. There’s also Cook County Hospital, Rush Presbyterian, and a bunch of others.”

“What area is the University of Chicago in?”

Runnion looked surprised. “One, but that doesn’t matter-you can work out of here regardless of where you’re poking around, unless you and I develop marital problems, of course.”

“What is this area thing, anyway?”

Runnion brushed it off. “Oh, it’s like precincts. Chicago has twenty-five police districts for the patrol division and six detective areas, with each area covering several districts, but that’s all organizational. If you need me to help you out on any of this, it won’t matter where it is, as long as we’re within city limits.”

I nodded and checked my watch. “Great, then I guess I’ll start with Northwestern tomorrow morning and see where I end up.” I stood up. “And as for us developing marital problems, I won’t throw the first dish if you won’t.”

An appealing grin appeared through the thick beard. “Deal. Where’re you staying?”

“The La Salle Motor Court.”

He nodded and smiled. “Tight budget, huh? It’s an okay place.”

He got up and walked me to the building’s lobby, handing me a business card at the door, his earlier reserve replaced, I thought, by relief that I wasn’t going to be much of a burden. “Enjoy yourself. Normally, I’d have to babysit you, so they obviously think you’re okay on your own. But don’t get lonely, okay? If you need help, whether it’s pushing a bureaucrat around or something bigger, call me. This city can get a little unruly sometimes-real quick.”

I shook his hand. “Thanks. Shouldn’t be too tough.”

Runnion gave me a long, quiet look, his soft brown eyes world-weary and wise, which made me half regret my cynicism of a moment ago. “Don’t go in thinking like that.”

The drive back into town on Lake Shore Drive-an impractical, roundabout route I chose out of pure prejudice-was considerably less enjoyable the second time around. Rush hour had kicked in, and while the heaviest traffic was headed north, for the great suburban escape, the combination of quitting time and an inordinate amount of road repair work-with the attending barricades and single-lane detours-made my side of the street just as slow. For well over an hour, I crawled along, still enjoying the sights, especially as the sun set and the lights came on, but by the time I arrived at the hotel-located within a long walk of the Northwestern campus, as it turned out-all I wanted to do was to grab a sandwich and turn in.

The La Salle Motor Court was not as bad as I’d feared from Runnion’s lackluster endorsement. It was a standard-issue motel-two floors, flat roof, exterior staircases, all wrapped around an open-sided parking lot. Although it was old and slightly battle-scarred, it was clean and, for the moment at least, relatively quiet, barring the expected traffic noise. Given my personal habits, I was as happy here-especially with the fast-food restaurant I’d noticed at the corner-as I might be in downtown Brattleboro.

Much later, unable to sleep, I stood by the window, with all the lights off, looking down across the parking lot at the street. There was no view to speak of-just the traffic and the buildings opposite-but the activity was impressive. At a time when most people in Brattleboro were either heading for bed or groping for a midnight snack, this street was humming with twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock energy.

I’d read in some old guidebook that Chicago had 3 million residents-six times the population of Vermont. It made me wonder just how many of them were out there now, walking, driving, working, partying, breaking and entering, or just breaking-the law and each other’s heads-and how many of those I might get to meet personally.

Norm Runnion’s parting words of caution came back clearly to mind.