The Skeleton's knee

19

I sat in my car for a good twenty minutes, watching the last known address of Robert Shattuck. It was an odd building, tall, bland, and gray, its first floor blatantly commercial-with a sandwich shop and a shoe-repair place, both closed now that it was long after hours-while its upper floors remained vaguer in purpose. Some windows were lit, most were not. It was hard to tell what the place was used for.

The neighborhood appeared similarly ambiguous. From my vantage point in the deserted parking lot across the street, I was conscious of emptiness and silence, despite the fact that I was within walking distance of where the Chicago River’s north, east, and south branches converge, right across the water from the famed Chicago Loop. None of that was readily apparent, however-the looming cliff-like mass of the darkened Merchandise Mart just behind me blocked all sights and sounds of anything lying beyond it.

Indeed, it was perhaps the stultifying influence of that one building, second only to the Pentagon in sheer mass, that affected the entire area around it. There were few people on the sidewalks, few cars passing by. Only the occasional rumbling of the elevated train around the corner disturbed what appeared to be the sole grave-still pocket in this otherwise teeming city.

I’d been waiting for signs of life either entering or leaving the building, if only to locate which of several unpromising candidates was the building’s front door. I was finally rewarded by a small, bent-over man coaxing a small dog on a leash, who briefly appeared under the streetlight near the middle of the building’s west wall before shambling off into the gloom.

I slowly got out of my car, looking around, sensitive to the echo that greeted my slammed door. I’d been expecting something entirely different after reading Shattuck’s rap sheet. Knowing nothing of the address at the time, I’d envisioned him as the only white holdout in a ghetto slum, true to his reformist soul; or, alternatively, in a not uncommon about-face, inhabiting the quintessential suburban home, complete with an aged Volvo bedecked with environmental bumper stickers. This austere gray huddling of faceless concrete walls, as hospitable as an abandoned factory, fit neither image and left me nothing to go on.

I crossed the dark, empty street, my eyes warily on the windows above me, and entered the side street into which the old man had stepped with his dog. Opposite the streetlight that had briefly caught him, almost flush with the cement wall, was a metal fire door, one of several I’d noticed. I turned the knob, expecting resistance, and instead stepped into a half-lit hallway, lined on one side with copper-colored mailboxes and blocked at the far end by a locked glass door with a speaker by its side.

I studied the rows of mailboxes, each one of which, under its keyhole, had a nameplate slot and a buzzer to gain admittance. Many of the boxes had no names, others were obviously businesses, their official cards substituting for hand-lettered nameplates, and the rest were presumably what I was after-apartments.

I had just located the name Shattuck in a red-ink scrawl when the front door opened behind me. I swung around to face the old man with the dog, startling him.

“Just me,” he said nervously. “Come on, Butch.”

The dog, as wide as it was long, reluctantly waddled into the lobby, looking around like some dispirited, overgrown, ancient rodent. Nevertheless, despite his anemic charisma, Butch was obviously a bolster to his master’s courage, who now nodded knowingly but mistakenly at the car keys I was inexplicably still holding in my hand, and commented, “No mail today, huh? Me, neither. Not even junk.”

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.

He shuffled over to the glass door, inserted his key, and swung it open. “You comin’?”

I yielded to temptation, pocketed my own keys, and followed him in. “Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.”

“Probably just get bills,” he muttered, half to me and half to Butch.

I headed up the cement stairs to the upper floors as the old man kept on going down the dark hallway, until all I could hear of either of them was the shuffle of his shoes and the light clittering of Butch’s nails.

The number over Shattuck’s name had been 46, implying the fourth floor. I climbed slowly and quietly, but the crunching of the grit underfoot still reverberated off the hard, plain walls with the brittle harshness of a maximum-security prison. I had rarely been in a dwelling so utterly devoid of any soothing human touch. There wasn’t even any graffiti on the walls.

I still wasn’t sure why I’d taken the old man up on his offer to bypass the security system. My interest in Shattuck was purely informational-on the surface, at least. But there was something nagging me about all this, like a tune I couldn’t quite bring to mind. Chicago was to have been the place where the puzzle pieces would make sense-where the bones would be given a name, and their appearance in Vermont an explanation. Sitting out in that parking lot, waiting, I’d had time to question that notion. Shilly’s denial had nothing to do with some ethical misbehavior from the past. His reticence-perhaps his fear-had struck me as being as fresh as the shots that had perforated the hearse back in Brattleboro.

The bones, and the money, and the wound in Abraham Fuller’s back may all have had their birth in the late sixties, but none of them had stopped there. Indeed, they may have been only the beginning.

That was the thought that made me cautious now.

Shattuck’s door was at the end of the hallway. I listened for a few seconds, hoping again for some small insight into the man I was pursuing-the kind of music he liked, or the TV show he preferred to watch at this hour-but there was no sound. I knocked loudly and waited.

“Who is it?”

I started at the soft voice, from both its proximity and the fact that I’d heard no footsteps announcing its arrival. It was like a disembodied entity of its own, hanging at eye level on the other side of the door.

“Mr. Shattuck?”

“Who is it?” The tone hadn’t changed. It was still light, flat, and without noticeable interest.

“My name’s Gunther. I’ve come a long way to talk to you. From Vermont.”

“Why?”

I hesitated, not wanting to give him enough to turn me down before he’d even opened the door. “Can we do this face-to-face? It’s kind of a long story.”

The flatness was replaced by either suspicion or curiosity-I couldn’t tell which. “Who are you?” This was where suspicion would keep the door shut or curiosity would open it up.

“I’m a policeman.”

The door opened. “From Vermont? No kidding.” The man before me, only half-visible in the dim hallway light, was tall and thin, with a tangled gray beard and long hair tied back in a ponytail. He was wearing blue jeans and a faded T-shirt with FARM AID emblazoned across a stylized guitar. “Come in; watch your step-it’s a little dark.”

In fact, it was almost pitch-black, the only source of light being a single guttering candle planted in the middle of the floor ahead of me. Shattuck led the way, pointing to the vague outline of a pillow. “Have a seat. I was meditating.”

I lowered myself awkwardly to the floor, moving the pillow back a little so I could prop myself against the wall.

“So what’s going on in Vermont?” He was more of a ghost than a living being, with only the white highlights of his clothing and hair visible in the gloom. But his voice was now open and friendly, and while the lighting was unconventional, it was also curiously soothing.

“We found a skeleton that we’ve traced back to Chicago, and we just tagged your name to it.”

“My name? To a skeleton? Far out. How old a skeleton?”

“About twenty years-a little more. Do you-or did you ever-know anyone in Vermont?”

The shadowy head shook from side to side. “No-never even been there. I don’t understand, though-how did you connect my name to a bunch of bones?”

“Do you know a Dr. Shilly?” I asked instead.

“Shilly? Doesn’t ring a bell. What kind of doctor?”

“Orthopedic surgeon.”

“Bones again. No-never heard of him.”

“You were here in Chicago in the late sixties?”

“I’ve always been here-born and bred.”

“Pretty active in the protest movement and such?”

There was a pause, and I felt the genial atmosphere chill by several degrees. “I guess by that you’ve already seen my sheet. What’s your point?”

I tried to defuse the tension slightly with a friendlier approach. “Sorry, bad habit. I didn’t mean to give you the third degree. I really am just trying to put a name to this body. I did see your record, but that’s when I thought you were the skeleton. The implication was that you became quite radical-had maybe even become one of the leaders…”

His gentle laughter interrupted me. “Leaders? Not hardly. Look, I don’t know how you run things in ol’ Vermont, but here-especially back in those days-the cops were making paranoids look mellow. They saw a conspiracy every time two hippies shook hands. We didn’t have rank-we had beliefs. We worked together for a common cause-”

This time, I interrupted. “Yes, but not all those causes saw eye-to-eye. The Weathermen were hardly the peaceniks.”

Shattuck seemed to reflect on that for a moment. “And you want to know which one I was.” His voice became guarded. “What’s your interest?”

It wasn’t the ideal interview of a potentially hostile witness. Usually, I was pre-armed with facts that merely needed confirmation or clarification. Here, I was after raw data and didn’t know if the witness was hostile or not. It tended to throw most of the rules of interrogation right out the window.

I decided to backtrack a little. “This body-or what’s left of it-might have been involved in a fairly violent branch of the protest movement around here.”

I reached into my inside jacket pocket and pulled out one of the composite five-by-sevens I’d made of Abraham Fuller’s face, both as a corpse and with twenty years taken off it and the eyes airbrushed in, open and lifelike. “Does this man look familiar?”

Shattuck leaned far forward, holding the photo almost directly in the timid candle’s flame. He spent a long time studying it. “I thought you said he was a skeleton.”

“This is somebody else. Do you know him?”

He shook his head. “No. Are these two different shots? The one with the eyes open looks strange.”

“It’s been touched up to make him look younger.” Shattuck looked up at me, the candlelight making his eyes shine.

“So he just died? You never got to talk to him?”

I looked at him closely, interested by the precision of his last question. “You sure you don’t know him?”

He returned the photo and receded into the dark, his voice casual again. “Sure I’m sure; I was just a little confused by the chronology. I didn’t know you also had a fresh body on your hands. You think he’s connected to the skeleton?”

“You ever hear the name Abraham Fuller?”

He sounded more comfortable again. “Nope-sounds vaguely biblical. Was that his name?”

I switched tacks slightly. “You still keep in touch with anyone from the old days?”

“A few-not many. A lot’s changed.”

“Bobby Seale in a three-piece suit?”

I could almost see the rueful smile-and I could hear it in his voice. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Could you give me the name of anyone else who might be able to help me out?”

He shifted his weight, recrossing his legs. “I don’t know; giving references to cops isn’t a great way to keep friends in this group.”

“It’s all ancient history,” I lied.

He caught that immediately. “That’s not what that photograph says.”

“The only thing he did recently was die.”

“Of natural causes?”

I stood up, ready to leave, knowing I’d gotten all I would get and that Shattuck was now trying to turn the tables. “Natural to him, I think.”