The Skeleton's knee

20

“What was he like?” Runnion asked as we waited for the crosswalk signal to staunch the early-morning downtown traffic.

I’d been thinking about Shattuck half the night, lying in bed, listening to the sounds of the unfamiliar city around me. “Seemingly a pleasant, slightly off-the-wall retired peace protester-just as advertised in your files.”

Runnion looked at me with a smile. “Seemingly?”

“Call it my own paranoia, but I was pretty sure he knew more than he was letting on. When I showed him Abraham Fuller’s photograph, I felt like I’d handed him a gold coin-not that he showed it much.”

Runnion was unimpressed. “Oh, hell, that happens sometimes. Maybe something’ll come of it.”

We were standing across from Chicago’s City Hall and Cook County Building, a heavy, squared-off, flat-roofed monster. With an army of six-story-tall pale stone Corinthian columns on the outside and turn-of-the-century metal-encased windows peeking out in between them, the whole structure looked like a hundred-year-old office building that had been swallowed up by an ancient Greek temple.

We crossed Randolph Street and walked through the building’s north entrance, taking the stairs down from the first floor’s vaulted grandeur to the conventional modern basement below. Runnion pushed through a pair of glass double doors marked COUNTY CLERK BUREAU OF VITAL STATISTICS-BIRTH, MARRIAGE, DEATH. Ignoring the rows of plastic chairs in the waiting area, already half-full of depressed-looking people, he waved to a heavyset black woman sitting at a desk beyond the counter clerks.

She gave him a small smile, which I took as a form of professional supervisory reserve, and met him at the far end of the counter, where her enthusiasm rose more clearly, albeit quietly, to the surface. “Hey, Norman. What you been up to?”

“Hi, Flo. Not much-waiting for the pension. This is a friend of mine-Joe Gunther-lieutenant from Vermont.”

Flo’s eyes widened. “Vermont? Long way from home.”

I shook hands with her. “Don’t I know it.”

She smiled broadly, then shifted her attention to Runnion. “So, what’s on your mind, Norman? Who do you want the goods on?”

Runnion slipped her a piece of paper with Kevin Shilly’s name on it. “He’s white, rich, and uncooperative.”

She laughed and took the paper with her, disappearing through a door behind the desks.

Runnion pushed himself away from the counter, heading back toward the door. “That’ll take her a few minutes; let’s see what else we can dig up.”

He turned right out the door and headed down the hall to a distant door marked MARRIAGE BUREAU, NOTARY amp; BUSINESS REGISTRATION. “Maybe we can get something on his practice.”

His request for information at the Business Registration desk roughly mirrored his chat with Flo, as did similar requests upstairs at the county treasurer’s office, the county assessor’s office, and a number of other places throughout the building. At every stop, he had a friendly acquaintance, an exchange of pleasantries, and parted with another person digging on our behalf. At the end of the tour, he returned to Flo’s counter to collect what she’d discovered, then continued to each office in turn, reaping what he’d sowed.

We were back on the sidewalk some two hours later, clutching a fistful of copied documents. “Let’s get some coffee and look this stuff over.”

There was a doughnut shop nearby, narrow and long, almost empty during the mid-morning lull. We took a booth at the very back.

“So how did you build up all those contacts?” I asked as we doctored our coffee. “That can’t be typical of every cop in this town.”

He grinned, pleased that I’d recognized his prowess. “Took me years. Even so, I’m not sure I could have done it anywhere else. I visited New York once, on assignment like you, and was led through their version of the paper chase. Lasted forever. Amazing number of cranky people. Chicago’s a whole lot friendlier.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “Takes work, of course. I get to know these people, their families. I help ’em out when I can-keep them up to date on friends or relatives in jail. I buy ’em presents sometimes, or spring for a meal. Mostly, I make myself available. I become their own private policeman-the guy who can cut through the red tape. It’s a ‘you help me, I help you’ kind of thing.”

He pushed his cup to one side and began laying out his treasure on the table between us. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

What we had was a fairly complete portrait of the capitalist system at its most rewarding: a luxury apartment in a glistening tower overlooking the lake; a yacht; a Mercedes-Benz and an Alfa-Romeo; a wife born of one of the city’s prominent families; two boys now in exclusive prep schools; and a cumulative estate assessed by the county at about $5 million.

Whatever it was Kevin Shilly was hiding, it was pretty obvious what the stakes were. I hoped I could use that to my advantage when I went to pay him a second call.

I entered Shilly’s office building off Michigan Avenue and waved to the security guard who’d helped me the day before. He returned the salute and added, “He’s not in.”

I hesitated, and the guard added, “Never showed this morning.” I thanked him and headed for the elevator bank. Maybe Giovanna knew what was up.

I was without Runnion by now, who’d begun to feel the gravitational pull of his paperwork. He was still chewing over the mysteriously absent gunshot report-he’d found no mention of it anywhere in the files. His assumption now was that the hospital had never called it in, and agreed with me that Shilly had probably run interference. That was one question he’d asked me to add to my own list.

Giovanna was distinctly less delighted to see me. “He’s not here,” she said as I crossed the threshold.

“So I gather. Off playing golf?”

“He doesn’t play golf.” She looked as immaculate as before, in a different suit this time, wearing a silky-looking blue blouse with an enormous droopy bow that hung down the front. Her expression, however, wore more than just her displeasure with me.

“What’s up? You look worried.”

She seemed surprised by the question and touched her cheek with her fingertips as if to brush away a blemish. “He was supposed to be here. I’ve been canceling appointments all morning.”

“You call his home?” A faint chill began to trickle down my spine.

“Of course. There’s no answer.”

“How about his wife?”

“She’s in Europe.”

“He ever done this before?” The chill was now becoming a dread that I’d just committed a tremendous blunder.

“No.”

“Did he go home last night?”

“I think so. He sometimes spends the night on his boat, but that number doesn’t answer, either.”

“Call his apartment building,” I said as I stepped back into the hallway. “Tell security I’m coming and to let me up to his apartment. But they are not to move a muscle before I get there, understand? And call Detective Norman Runnion at Area 6 headquarters and tell him to meet me at Shilly’s right away.”

Shilly’s apartment tower was a ten-minute drive from North Michigan on Lake Shore Drive-a sixty-story black glass and steel cylinder standing alone, almost directly opposite Navy Pier. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have had Giovanna call ahead, but I was hoping it would convince the building’s rent-a-cops to let me in without asking questions.

I parked in the NO PARKING zone directly in front of the doorman, whom I addressed with a hurried but authoritative, “Police business.”

The man behind the half-round desk in the lobby was less startled, rising as I announced myself and indicating a second armed guard who was standing by the elevator bank. “One of our men will go with you.” In the background, bolstering my credibility, we could all hear an approaching siren.

“Can he get inside the apartment?”

“Yes, sir.”

The tall black security cop and I rode up in silence. He stood with his back to the far wall of the elevator, his right hand nervously rubbing his holstered gun butt, his eyes fixed on the row of floor numbers, no doubt wondering what kind of mess I was about to get him in.

On the forty-fifth floor, the doors whispered open. “Which one is it?” The guard nodded silently at the door opposite us. I rang the doorbell and waited. “When did you come on this morning?”

“Six.”

“See this guy at all?”

“No, sir.”

“Would you know him if you did?”

“No, but Will checked the log. He left last night.” That surprised me. “You mean late?”

“’bout midnight.”

“And he hasn’t been back?”

“No, sir.” I pondered that for a moment, ringing the bell again. “Did he have any visitors?”

“One, just before. He left with him.”

“You get a name?”

“Will told it to me-’case you asked. Name was Gunther.”

I felt like a mild electrical jolt had hit the base of my skull. “You better unlock this.”

We were greeted by total silence, punctuated only by the ticking of a distant clock and the steady faint hum of the building’s circulatory system. We stood, the guard slightly behind me, in the front hallway of a huge apartment, its acreage of living room stretching out before us. It was not the apartment, however, that caught the eye, but what extended beyond it. Through the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bank of windows, Lake Michigan reached as far as the eye could see-a solid blue sheet as clear and featureless as the sky above it, giving me the giddy feeling of somehow being in flight, high over the earth.

I turned back to the guard. “Why don’t you stay here? I want to look the place over.”

The kitchen, dining room, guest bedroom, even the bathrooms all had spectacular vistas, either out onto the lake or along its shore. And all of them were appointed in the latest modern spaceship fashions, with an excess of tubular steel, glass, and synthetic marble. It occurred to me that Shilly had decorated his home much like an operating room.

I located the master bedroom last-again huge, sterile, and expensive, but not pristine. The bed had been slept in-one side only-and there were clothes on the floor, a pair of pajamas draped messily over the foot of the bed. One of the closets was open and a single drawer of a gigantic recessed chest gaped wide open. The one jarring note was the delicate, rhythmic, melodious pulse of the alarm clock by the side of the bed-designed, no doubt, to drag you ever so comfortably away from your dreams.

I stood in the middle of the room, taking my time, ignoring the alarm. Indeed, it was helpful-it and the pajamas and the clothes on the floor all told me he’d been in bed when his midnight caller had come visiting.

There was a slight sound behind me and I turned to see Norm Runnion standing in the doorway, as attuned as I was that something had gone wrong here.

“This may not be exactly legal,” he said.

“If I’m right, it won’t matter much. You see the log downstairs?”

He nodded. “I take it that wasn’t you.”

“I think it was Shattuck-right after I told him about Shilly.”

My tone of voice told him what I thought of myself at the moment. He pursed his lips. “I’ll call in a lab team. You check the place out already?”

“Not completely.” Nor would I be able to, now that the locals were here. But he surprised me. He smiled thinly and muttered, “Well, finish up-I won’t be long.”

With that reprieve, I moved swiftly to the kitchen and then to the bar just off the living room, all my senses focusing on the fastest search of my career.

Apparently, Shilly had eaten dinner out, which his dishwasher, pantry, and fridge told me he did regularly, and he hadn’t entertained his late-night guest with a cocktail-no dirty glasses, no melted water in the ice bucket.

I returned to the bedroom, playing back Shilly’s activities here according to the evidence. So, a normal evening, finished when he sets the alarm and goes to bed. The desk then rings from downstairs. Shilly answers from the box by the bedroom door. Gunther again. No doubt cursing the name but not daring to refuse him, Shilly lets him up and opens the front door. There is no peephole-the building has armed guards, after all, and his visitor is a cop.

I made a mental note to get a description of “Gunther” from the night deskman later. Maybe the guy’s holding a gun, or maybe he’s just the holder of Shilly’s secret-enough to get him out of his pajamas and into… what?

I moved over to the open closet and the drawer, hearing Runnion’s distant voice on the phone down the hall. Casual clothing only-blue jeans, windbreakers, sweaters, T-shirts. I continued searching, finding the suit he’d worn the day before inside another closet filled with suits and dress shirts. It was on a special counter, to be taken out and cleaned. No doubt people came and did things like that for him every day-clean and wash and tidy up.

So, dressed casually, Shilly leaves with Mr. Gunther. But maybe not quite yet. I went into the bathroom. If I’d been under duress, I’d use the bathroom to leave a sign of some sort-the one place I could have a moment’s privacy before being forced out the door. Hollywood stuff, but that’s what people fall back on when they have no personal experience to guide them.

I got close to the mirror-ten feet long and half again as high, looming over two marble sinks. The surface over one of them was smeared, slightly greasy, and vaguely pink, over about a two-foot square area. I shook my head, muttered, “Christ,” and poked carefully in the trash basket near the toilet. There was a thick wad of toilet paper covered with red, and a flat-nosed lipstick, its usual perfect tip crushed like the end of a crayon.

On the floor, near the corner, was a broken glass with a toothbrush nearby, and a rack where the towel was so skewed, it was barely hanging on. I faked the motions, pretending to write on the mirror, being hip-checked by someone coming through the door, being thrown across the room, knocking the glass off its perch and disturbing the towel below it. On the floor, near the glass, barely discernible except from my hands and knees, I found a single half-wiped drop of blood. A cut hand? A lip? Maybe a nose? Again, something to ask the night crew in the lobby.

Kevin Shilly had been snatched-just a few hours after I’d given his name to Bob Shattuck. Small-town cop in the big city helps prominent local citizen get abducted-or worse.

“Why would Shattuck grab Shilly?” Runnion asked from the door.

I got up. “I don’t know. When we talked, he was all innocence. He’d even been meditating when I knocked on his door… Son of a bitch.”

Runnion mulled that over for a few moments before finally saying, “I have to wait here for the lab crew, but I can have a unit meet you at his place so you’ll be a little more official. What’s the address?”

I gave it to him. “Is this going to get your butt in a sling?”

He shrugged. “It’s a little unorthodox, that’s all. No problem, as long as you don’t go inside without an invite or a warrant.”

I gave him a quick smile. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” He looked vaguely wistful as I headed for the elevator, as if he envied me. I couldn’t see the attraction myself, considering how hard I was kicking myself in the ass.

Downstairs, I thanked the deskman for his help and asked him how the security worked in the building.

“This is the public entrance-the only way outsiders get in or out. They check in at the desk, give their name and maybe the company if they’re delivering somethin’, then we call the tenant. When they leave, we log ’em out.”

“How about when a client comes and goes? Isn’t there a garage under here?”

“Yeah, and another desk, right by the elevators. Same thing: They go in or out, we log ’em. And the garage has a remote gate-you can’t get in without a door opener, and an alarm goes off if a second car tries to piggyback in. There’s a camera, too, so the guard can see who’s coming. Plus, we got a roamer-J.J. there, who went up with you-who mostly just keeps an eye out.”

“You better see if you can get the night crew here. People’ll want to talk to them.” Especially, I thought, about the use of the name Gunther.

The deskman gave me a pissed-off, weary look, realizing all his cooperation had just been turned against him.

Bob Shattuck’s neighborhood didn’t look much livelier by day. Both the shoe-repair store and the sandwich shop were open but empty. The temporary quarters of the Chicago Public Library, which I hadn’t realized occupied one end of the parking lot, was the only door that had people going in and out.

I was standing on the sidewalk, looking up at Shattuck’s building, when a patrol car slid to a stop opposite.

The driver stuck his elbow out the window. “You Gunther?”

I nodded and crossed over as they both swung heavily out of the car-one, an overweight white man; the other, a small, wiry guy with Hispanic features and careful, watchful eyes.

I led the way to the unobtrusive front door and pushed it open for them. They entered, looking around, casually cautious, always aware of what a city like this might tuck behind its doors. They had an animal sharpness to them, even the fat one, which made me think of my own squad back home-less wary, not used to being targets.

The small patrolman looked at me. “You got a key?”

“No.”

He grunted softly and pushed the intercom button to the superintendent’s apartment. A squawky voice asked who it was.

“Chicago Police.”

“What the hell do you guys want?”

“Just checking on one of your tenants.”

“They ain’t my tenants.”

“Open the door, please.”

“Open it yourself.”

There was a loud buzzing and the electric lock on the double glass doors sprang open. The big cop pushed it open. “So much for security.”

I preceded them up the stairs, our shoes making a horrendous clatter against the cement. “You know,” the wiry one said, “if nobody’s home, that’s it. We don’t got a warrant.”

“I know.”

On the fourth floor, as dark as in the middle of the night, I paused, looking down the length of the landing.

“At the end?”

I looked at the big one-Ross, according to his nameplate. “Yeah.”

He cleared his flashlight from his belt and switched it on. As he did, his companion-Diaz-instinctively moved to the other side of the hall, slightly in the lee of a door frame.

The flashlight’s brilliant halogen glare catapulted to the end of the hallway, through the open, gaping door, and flattened against a distant wall.

“Guess we won’t have to worry about knockin’,” Ross muttered.

We moved toward the doorway, my companions no longer disinterested-on the balls of their feet, their hands on their gun butts. We positioned ourselves to both sides of the entrance and waited briefly, listening to the interior of the dark apartment. I didn’t know what they knew of me, except that I was obviously a “suit,” and therefore the asshole who would probably get their tails shot off. I decided I’d better lead the charge.

I reached around and hammered on the open door with my fist. “Shattuck? It’s Joe Gunther.”

Nothing came back. I thought of Shilly’s apartment-that same stillness. Only here, there was something-a feeling of someone waiting.

“Shattuck? Come on out.”

Again, nothing. I gestured for Ross’s light and shined it around inside, keeping myself behind the door frame. The room, with the extinct candle still sitting in its dish on the floor, was empty. I stepped inside, moving along the wall.

I felt Ross and Diaz hesitate behind me, no doubt silently debating the legality of my actions, before pulling their weapons and following me in.

I hadn’t seen a thing the night before, but I’d sensed what I saw now-spareness, almost emptiness: a few pillows on the floor, a few posters on the wall. All the windows had been covered with tinfoil; not a sliver of daylight got through.

Ross stayed in the entrance hall; Diaz moved across the room to the kitchenette, quickly checking the open closet as he went. I waited for them to position themselves before I approached the only other door, presumably to the bedroom and bath beyond.

Again, I stood to one side and knocked, calling out Shattuck’s name; still, I got nothing in response.

I leaned over, twisted the doorknob, and pushed. The door swung back with a faint protest and hung open. I poked the flashlight around the corner and took a quick look.

Sitting in a wooden chair facing me, naked, covered with cuts and cigarette-sized welts, his mouth taped shut to stifle his screams, was Kevin Shilly. There was a neat black hole in his forehead.

The rest of the room and the bathroom were empty. Diaz and Ross stood at the bedroom door, watching me, their arms limp but still holding their guns. Diaz’s eyes were hard on the corpse. Mr. Beautiful, Shilly’s office guard had called him. No longer.