The Skeleton's knee

21

I shut my eyes gratefully at the sound of Gail’s cheerful voice, letting it, like the motel bed beneath me, act on my mind like a balm.

“I was hoping you’d call soon. How’re things going?”

“They could be better.”

“Oh-oh.”

I smiled wanly. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Are you all right, Joe?”

“I’m okay.” Having initiated the call, I was now suddenly reluctant-even slightly embarrassed-to turn it into a confessional. “I just got off the phone with Brandt and Klesczewski. Apparently nothing new on our sniper. Ron said they’re looking for other angles, but Brandt’s obviously pretty anxious for me to come home with the goods.”

“I noticed there hasn’t been anything on the news.” There was a small pause. “So tell me what’s really wrong. You sound totally flattened.”

I let out a sigh and told her. “I probably played a direct role in getting a man killed over here-tortured and killed, to be accurate.”

“My God. Who?”

“No one you know, but he was doing fine until I mentioned his name to somebody I was questioning. I’ve never felt like a such a jerk.”

“Who were you questioning?”

“His name is Shattuck-supposedly a retired peace freak turned radical, but now I don’t know… and probably never will.” The last four words were delivered in a flat tone.

Gail picked up on it. “Did the local cops pull the rug out from under you?”

I laughed, although without much pleasure. Leave it to Gail to grasp the political reality immediately. “It’s their case now, and they made it pretty clear they don’t see some woodchuck from Vermont as an asset. In fact, they put me through a four-hour grilling. Pretty hostile session; they don’t make any bones about my having screwed up. One of them’s okay-Norm Runnion-he’s my babysitter. But he’s a few months shy of retirement, and he stuck his neck out by giving me more leash than he should’ve, so now he’s almost as much on the outs as I am.”

“But he’s still your local contact, right? With access to their computers and whatnot?”

I saw where she was headed. “True, except that if the guys running the homicide investigation catch either one of us snooping around their case, there’ll be hell to pay. Besides, why would Runnion risk it? He told me earlier that Chicago averages nine hundred and fifty homicides every year, not to mention a few thousand unsuccessful shootings and stabbings.”

There was silence at the other end: Gail running out of suggestions. “Does that mean you’ll be coming home?”

But suggestions, or at least questions, were finally beginning to stir in my tired brain, despite my own pessimism. “Remember Abraham Fuller?”

“What about him?”

“I’m pretty sure Shattuck knew him. It was the one thing he really focused on during our interview.”

“Who is Shattuck, anyway?”

I explained to her about finding Kevin Shilly, tracing the metal knee through inventory, discovering Shattuck’s name on the hospital records, and what I’d found out about him through the police files. I told in detail of the conversation by candlelight.

“And you’re sure it was Shattuck who killed Shilly?”

I hesitated a moment. “Pretty sure. It was Shattuck who removed him from his apartment building. He used my name at the desk, assuming that would grab Shilly’s attention, and when they finally located the night deskman, his description of ‘Gunther’ fit Shattuck like a glove.”

“But why would Shattuck take Shilly back to his own place to kill him, and even leave the door open? Why kill Shilly at all, for that matter? Shattuck had been so innocuous before this.”

I’d thought a lot about that over the past several hours. “I can’t prove it yet, but I think my telling Shattuck about what we found in Vermont changed everything for him, like I guess it did for whoever machine-gunned us in Brattleboro. We’re looking at all this dispassionately-connecting old bones to old money and trying to make sense of it. But something violent and angry is brewing here, something involving more people than we thought. I think I hit Shattuck’s button without knowing it and set him off like a rocket.

“He used my name because it was efficient and practical to do so; he used his place to torture Shilly for the same reason; and he killed him either out of pent-up frustration or because he feels he has nothing more to lose. Whether it was consciously done or not, leaving that front door open served notice to everyone that he’s come out from under a peaceful-looking twenty-four-year-old rock.

“All of which,” I concluded, “also helps explain the paranoia that made whoever it was shoot at the hearse on I-91.”

Gail played devil’s advocate. “Wasn’t that because the shooter wanted to protect his new life? You said yourself that he did it to stop you from tracing the knee.”

“I know, but setting up a machine gun and firing at the local police seems a little drastic. It would’ve made more sense to liquidate his assets quickly and quietly and then disappear without a trace-just like he’d done once before. Having seen what happened to Shilly, I no longer think the Brattleboro Police Department was this guy’s biggest concern.”

“You think he did it to stop Shattuck from finding out?” Gail said, her voice slightly incredulous.

“Why not? There were three people at the very least who were involved in all this-Fuller, the guy with the knee, and the person who both stole the astrological chart and opened fire on us on the interstate. If I’m right that showing Fuller’s picture was enough to get Shilly killed, then our local shooter has bigger reasons than the police to stay hidden. It’s got to make you think the money alone is not the issue here.”

“Revenge, then? Setting an example?”

“It sounds right, judging from what I’ve seen.” There was a long pause while I mulled that over. Unfortunately, that was about all I could do.

Gail apparently sensed that impasse. “None of which gets you anywhere if they’ve frozen you out of the investigation.”

But I was no longer feeling so hopeless. Our conversation had kindled an enthusiasm that this afternoon’s third degree had almost extinguished. “Maybe not. The investigation is on who killed Shilly-or maybe just on locating Shattuck. But it’s not concerned with putting a name to that goddamn metal knee. I might still be able to do that without getting in their way.”

“Isn’t that a little like sharing a meal with lions?”

“Maybe, but with a routinely high homicide rate, you go for the obvious solutions. Assuming Shattuck did knock off Shilly, and that the local Mounties get their man, that’s where it’ll end, and it still has nothing directly to do with why I came here.”

Gail’s silence was skepticism itself.

“Hey-wish me luck.”

“I wish for you to stay out of prison, or at least alive.”

The woman guarding the archives room in the basement of the University of Chicago medical center was less than thrilled to see me, even though I’d made sure to appear just after opening time.

“Again?” was all she said as I smiled and walked by, hoping that Hoolihan’s order to cooperate was still in place.

“You don’t need me to show you where that file is again, do you?” she added, establishing her conscientiousness for the record.

“No, ma’am. All set.”

In fact, it took me quite a while to ferret it out again, the rows of shelves being similar and the files themselves all but identical to one another. I took it to the same table we’d used before and, page by page, photographed its contents with a secondhand camera I’d bought an hour before at a pawnshop.

What I was doing was more a threat to the case than to my liberty; in legal parlance, Hoolihan’s grumpy blessing the first time had amounted to a consent search, and this second visit was, in essence, riding the coattails of the first. Indeed, the archivist, by letting me in, had implied consent. Still, Hoolihan didn’t know about this second visit, nor had he ever agreed to our removing the files, which I was in the process of doing photographically.

But I was running out of time, Brandt was running out of patience back home, and this was the only clue I had in this city that might get me beyond a single metal knee and the dead surgeon who’d implanted it.

Two hours later, after spending a reasonable sum at a While-U-Wait processing lab getting my roll of film developed, and a small fortune having eight-by-ten enlargements made, I was parked once again in Dr. Milton Yancy’s office at Northwestern, hoping he could shoehorn me in between patients.

“Lieutenant,” he said, his expression beaming and his hand outstretched. “Nice to see you again. Is the plot thickening?”

“You could say that. You read the papers today?”

“No. I wait until I get home for that, assuming the rest of the family has left any of it intact.” He made a scissors motion with his two fingers.

“Kevin Shilly was found murdered yesterday.”

Yancy’s face fell. “Oh, my Lord.” He unconsciously groped for a chair and sat down heavily. “Did it have anything to do with what you’re investigating?”

“I think so, yes.”

He shook his head. “How sad. Was he shot?”

“Yes,” I said without elaboration. Given Yancy’s sensitivity, I saw no point in becoming more graphic. I handed him the pile of photographs. “I was wondering if you could look these over and help me decipher them a bit. They’re the patient file on that skeleton I introduced you to the other day.”

He spread them across his examining table, shaking his head. “First the skeletal X-rays, now the patient file. It’s like seeing a life in reverse. You do this a lot, I suppose…”

His voice drifted off as he read, so I saw no need to respond. It was an interesting point, though, and one I’d never thought about. “I was reading this with a colleague earlier,” I said to the back of his head. “He mentioned something about reports from other doctors?”

Yancy’s voice was back to normal, the shock of Shilly’s death having yielded to professional curiosity. “Oh yes.” He pawed through a few of the photos. “Doctors Butterworth and Yamani; vascular surgeon and neurosurgeon, respectively. I met Yamani, actually, a few years ago. I think he’s in California now.”

“Why did Shilly bring them in?”

Yancy straightened suddenly and gave me a large conspiratorial grin. “To cover his ass. Proceeding the way he was, he knew the risks, so he brought in the other two during surgery to back up his opinion and get more names in the file. It’s just the kind of thing that eventually landed him in hot water.”

He turned back to the pages. “Not in this case, though. The wound was straightforward. Butterworth reports no traumatic damage to the major vessels posterior to the knee, and Yamani says roughly the same thing about the tibial, the peroneal, and the saphenous nerves.”

“So only the bone was damaged? Isn’t that a little unlikely?”

Yancy shook his head. “Not particularly. They usually don’t get away scot-free-there is commonly some bruising of the nerves, as there is here-but that takes care of itself. Mr.”-here he referred back to the ER sheet to find the patient’s name-“Shattuck was a lucky man, comparatively speaking.”

“My understanding is that he disappeared five days after the surgery-faked being dependent on the bedpan so nobody would realize he could get around.”

Yancy returned to the file. “Really? I hadn’t gotten to that yet.”

“My question is, Could he have done that without help? I mean, he did just have his entire knee replaced.”

“Oh, he could have done it. The pain would be excruciating-no doubt about that-and he’d have had the stitches to worry about later, but it’s certainly possible.” He waved his hand at the photos. “There’s the proof, after all.”

“True, but that doesn’t say he walked out on his own. He could have been rolled out in a wheelchair by someone else.”

Yancy’s eyes widened. “Oh, I see what you’re saying. Well, he could have left the hospital on his own. There’s a physical write-up on him somewhere in here-they do that to see how fit a patient is for surgery-and he passes that with flying colors: athletic build, no medical problems, good chemistry… Apparently as healthy as a horse, barring the leg, of course.”

“Does it say whether he was right- or left-handed?”

Yancy looked surprised. “No. Why do you ask?”

“The skeleton was a lefty. How about any other personal information?”

He picked up a single sheet of the file, offering it to me doubtfully. “You didn’t see this? The Social Services report?”

I took it from him, remembering how Runnion and I had become sidetracked by the question of a gunshot wound being reported to the police. We’d never gotten this far into the file. I found myself reddening slightly as I looked it over now.

Yancy had the sensitivity to cover my awkwardness. He pointed to midway down the sheet. “It’s not complete-barely filled out, actually-but it has a couple of things you might find handy. These forms are usually done when more time is allowed before surgery; in fact, if I interpret this correctly, Social Services started the process without Shilly’s okay. See where it says ‘incomplete per phys’? Shilly obviously shut them down when he found they’d started the form; that’s his signature underneath the notation.”

“Why not just throw it out?”

“Turf. Social Services obviously didn’t want to catch flak later for failing to do their job, so they forced him to take responsibility. I can almost smell the animosity when I read something like this.”

“That’s not unusual?”

“Oh yes-the Social Services report is standard and useful, and it can sometimes be quite extensive. Depending on the physician, they’ll go so far as getting the names of pets and favorite pastimes, favorite vacation spots, all sorts of things.”

“What’s the point?” I asked, ruing Shilly’s interruption.

“The primary questions are medically relevant-possibly inherited conditions, like hemophilia, or an allergy to some drug, or a family history of stroke, or whatever. The secondary details are mostly so the various docs can be friendly with the patient. A crude example would be my checking a patient’s chart before visitation, finding out he had three collie dogs, and opening my conversation with him by alluding to my love of collies. It’s a fast and easy way of breaking the ice with people. Sounds a little cynical when I put it that way, but the intention’s honorable.”

I was still a little mystified, staring at the form. “This has virtually nothing on it. Wouldn’t Shilly have needed to know some of this?”

“He probably had most of it verbally. Patients are asked half a dozen times whether they have any past medical history or allergies. If I were to play at your job for a moment, I’d guess that this incomplete form is another indication that something was going on under the table between patient and doctor.”

I looked at the mostly blank sheet. Shattuck’s name appeared again, along with “no current address” and “deceased” under “next of kin.” “A. Salierno” was written next to “in case of emergency, contact,” with an address. I showed it to Yancy.

“That ring a bell?”

He raised his eyebrows. “No, but that doesn’t say much; I’m hardly a man about town. Give him-or her, I guess-a call; maybe you’ll get lucky.”

After my encounter with Shattuck, I was a little shy about dropping by people’s homes without researching them first. I did use the phone book in the lobby, though, just to see if A. Salierno was listed. I drew a blank.

I was, however, within walking distance of both the Chicago Tribune and its chief competitor, the Sun-Times, both of which flanked the two-winged Wrigley Building, making the latter look like a spread-armed referee, keeping two fighters apart.

Not that they were difficult to distinguish architecturally, one being as extreme as the other. But where the Tribune Tower looked like a keep without a castle or a Gothic spire in search of a nave, the Sun-Times Building, its southern wall almost flush with the riverbank, was reminiscent of a huge submarine with squared-off corners. I chose the Trib simply because my route down Michigan Avenue delivered it to me first.

Two hours later, I sat back in the plastic chair I’d been furnished and ground my aching eyes against the heels of both hands, glorying in the brief darkness following endless streams of flickering microfilm.

A.-for Angelo-Salierno, it turned out, had acquired a bit more than a clipping here and there. In fact, as thirty-year head of the local Mafia, he and his family-blood-related and otherwise-had earned enough coverage to merit a decent-sized encyclopedia. I had read hundreds of column inches linking the “Dour Don,” as the press had dubbed the unsmiling Salierno, to everything from racketeering in Cook County and all its neighbors to playing a major role in the creation of the Vegas mob. The don, who for years had worked out of a sealed and guarded compound in upscale River Forest-the same address listed in “Shattuck’s” hospital file-was apparently a cautious, reserved, publicity-shy, traditional leader from the old school.

Presumably, his antique style of leadership owed its endurance to an almost corporate stolidity, which served it well in times of crisis. Despite its 1920s machine gun-toting reputation, the Outfit, as the mob was called in Chicago, had come a long way when it came to discretion.

The low-key style, however, had not fitted all the Saliernos so comfortably. Angelo’s eldest son, Tomaso, predictably nicknamed “Tommy,” had strained at his father’s conservative leash. Indeed, it was Tommy and his private guard of henchmen who had usually landed the Salierno name on the front page, either by getting involved in deals of their own, which had a propensity for going sour, or simply by doing the wrong thing in the wrong place, as when Tommy took a bar stool to a window just as a free-lance photographer happened by. From my reading of his activities, Tommy Salierno was short-tempered, mean-spirited, egotistical, and ambitious. He was also neither smart nor lucky. He ended up facedown in a back alley with a bullet in his chest, the apparent victim of some inner-gang rivalry. The police nailed a minor family functionary for the crime-a numbers runner who’d reportedly lost his wife’s affections to Tommy. Angelo retreated even further into his heavily guarded shell, and the Salierno name slid from the headlines, gaining a mention only now and then in articles dealing with the Mafia in general. Angelo himself hadn’t been seen outside the River Forest compound in over twenty years, although he was reported to be still very much in charge. On the rare occasions that the Tribune was able to give a titillating glimpse of the Salierno hierarchy, it was invariably in the shape of Alfredo Bonatto, Angelo’s “adviser.” Balding, paunchy, slightly stooped, and wearing thick glasses and dark suits, Bonatto-who was also a lawyer-had become the inglorious image of an organization most people still connected in their minds to the likes of Al Capone.

To my mind, that was precisely what Angelo Salierno had been after all along-to become too outwardly boring to warrant much media attention, and too insulated legally to be touchable by the police.

That he had finally come to my attention, therefore, shouldn’t normally have been of great interest to the Dour Don. No single hovering police officer, even from such a metropolitan hot spot as Brattleboro, was worth the time of day, especially without a warrant.

Unless that officer had a hook.

The street Salierno lived on in River Forest was predictably impressive-broad, silent, smelling of flower beds and closely cropped grass. The homes were different in style-English Tudor, fake Southern Plantation, Modern Confused-and more or less discreet, running from totally walled estates to five-thousand-square-foot architectural wedding cakes perched on huge weedless green patches for all the world to see.

The address I was after was predictably retiring: an ivy-covered brick wall, topped by broken glass-along with less visible, more lethal deterrents, no doubt. It was pierced by a single large wrought-iron gate, guarded by a gray intercom perched on a pole.

I parked in front of the gate, feeling self-conscious, convinced that everyone was watching me, although the street to my back looked perfectly normal.

I leaned out the window and stabbed the button under the speaker grille.

“Who is it?” The voice was male and unfriendly.

“My name is Joe Gunther. I’m a lieutenant with the police department in Brattleboro, Vermont.” I figured honesty might suit me best, considering the people I was addressing.

“Got a warrant?”

“No, but I know why Tommy Salierno was killed.”

There was a long pause. “Wait.”

I stood there, feeling the sun gentle on my left shoulder, aware of a lawn mower working steadily some distance away and the sounds of songbirds in the trees lining the street. Ten minutes later a broad-shouldered man in a tight dark suit walked down what I could see of the drive. He stopped on the other side of the massive gate, his eyes in constant motion, taking in as much of the surroundings as possible-a habit I’d seen in Secret Service agents.

“Got any credentials?”

I exited the car, pulled my badge and ID from my inner pocket, and handed them over.

He took his eyes off the scenery long enough to scrutinize my paperwork with an intensity worthy of an art expert. He finally handed them back. “Go to the coffeehouse six blocks that way and two blocks left and wait.” He jerked a thumb up the street, turned on his heel, and marched back out of sight.

I did as I was told, finding a parking place diagonally across the street from the Cup-N-Saucer, which looked like a typical gathering spot for regulars, located on a standard version of a small-town main street. Like other sections of Chicago, this area had blocks that looked transplanted from central Iowa, right next to others that rivaled Beverly Hills.

There’d been no indication of how long I should wait, so I figured I’d better make myself comfortable. I chose a rear booth, sat so I could watch the front door, and ordered a hamburger and a milk shake for lunch.

Over the next two and a half hours, nursing a countless string of coffees, I watched people come and go-mostly go, after the noontime rush-never seeing anybody who struck me as unusual. I pegged most of them to be either retired people, traveling reps on break, or the rarer local office worker running in for a quick cup of something hot and stimulating.

It was therefore pretty obvious when the first of my expected company walked in. Not only was he built like a wrestler in a loose-fitting sports shirt-which conveniently hid anything tucked underneath-but he appeared from the hallway behind me, leading to the rest rooms and the storage room beyond. He, too, had those shifty, watchful eyes. He parked himself in a booth not too far away.

A second man, thinner, with a light jacket, entered the front and sat at the counter. A third walked to the only occupied booth not far from me, spoke inaudibly to the two old men who were chatting there, and apparently asked them to leave, which they did without comment. Finally, a last one appeared, gestured to the short-order cook and the sole waitress, muttered a few words to them, and escorted them out the door, flipping the CLOSED sign around and drawing the shade as he did so.

By this time, the hair on the back of my neck was rigid. Nobody spoke to anyone. The guards stayed at their posts. My coffee and my confidence began getting cold.

Finally, a shadow appeared at the front door, there was a gentle knock, and the last man in opened up, ushered in an older man wearing a dark three-piece suit, and locked the door again.

The newcomer I recognized by his newspaper photos-he was a little more stooped, the face a touch heavier and more lined, but the eyes were still sharp behind the thick glasses. He walked down the center of the coffee shop and stopped in front of my table. I stayed put, my hands on either side of my cup.

“May I see some identification?”

I pulled out my credentials again, and he read them carefully before handing them back. “Gunther doesn’t sound like a Vermont name.”

“I was born there, as were my father and grandfather.”

He nodded like a thoughtful banker. “The melting pot, of course.” He finally slid onto the bench opposite mine. “My name is Bonatto; I am Mr. Salierno’s adviser. Why have you come to see us?”

I knew-unlike when I’d been with Shattuck-that I was of value to this man. His presence here proved that. My strength, therefore, would come from carefully fanning those embers I’d inadvertently brought back to life, letting their energy do most of my work for me.

I decided to stay away from Tommy Salierno for openers. “Mr. Salierno’s name has been connected to a double homicide in Vermont.”

Bonatto played along. “Mr. Salierno has never been to Vermont.”

“The connection was made in Chicago. One of the victims I’m referring to had an operation here over twenty years ago, before being killed shortly thereafter in Vermont. He listed Mr. Salierno as the one to contact in case of an emergency.”

Bonatto’s eyes were very still, in contrast to his men’s, and looked directly into mine. “Over twenty years ago? What kind of operation?”

“Knee surgery.”

“What was this man’s name?”

“We don’t know. He used an alias.”

A flicker of impatience crossed the older man’s face. He tried a bluff. “Well, Lieutenant, I don’t see where any of this concerns us…”

“The surgery was to repair a massive gunshot wound-from a.45.”

The caliber seemed to mean something to him. “When was this operation?”

“October 10, 1969, twenty-four hours before Tommy Salierno was reportedly found dead.”

He looked at me hard for a moment, then smiled, ignoring the reference to Tommy. “I must admit, I find all this very confusing. Do you think Mr. Salierno’s name was used as a joke of some kind?”

I let him go with it. “Why would that be a joke?”

Bonatto spread his hands. “Because we haven’t the slightest idea what this is all about. Perhaps your homicide victim with the anonymous name picked Mr. Salierno at random.” He paused. “I am curious, though… How does a shooting and some surgery in Chicago concern a policeman from Vermont, especially after such a long time?”

I shrugged, pleased at his interest. “One thing leads to another.”

Bonatto absorbed that for a few seconds. “You mentioned a double homicide.”

I rose to my feet, acutely aware of Fuller’s photograph in my pocket and of the fact that I didn’t want to go too far into such details with this man-at least not yet. My purpose here had been to see if I could stimulate any interest-and that had been achieved. “Yes, that’s right. It’s a complicated case-the double homicide is only part of it. There’s a third person, still alive, who took a few shots at me a while back. Which maybe makes him the killer, and maybe not. But since you and Mr. Salierno are apparently uninvolved, I might as well leave it at that.” My rising caused every shifty eye in the place to lock on me-especially my hands-which I kept clearly in the open. “Good-bye.” I walked to the door and was blocked unobtrusively by the bodyguard at the counter sliding off his stool and standing in my way.

Bonatto hadn’t risen, but he turned his head and looked at me. “If we should hear of something, where might we get in touch with you, Lieutenant?”

“Call Norm Runnion at Area 6 headquarters. He’ll pass on any messages.”

The man at my shoulder smiled quietly at that.

“We don’t work it that way, Lieutenant. Where will you be?”

I gave him the address of my motel.

Bonatto nodded, those cool eyes unblinking. “Thank you. Good luck.”