The Skeleton's knee

22

Norm Runnion sat back in his office chair and looked at me over the tops of his glasses. “You talked to Angelo Salierno?” His voice was tinged with amazement.

“His adviser, Bonatto.”

He shook his head. “Are you this crazy back home?”

“I didn’t feel there was any great risk.”

He looked like he’d bitten into something sour and muttered, “Not to you, maybe.” And then, more directly, he said, “Why? You were almost handed your plane ticket home yesterday.” Amazement had quickly yielded to irritation.

I pulled the hospital’s now creased and folded Social Services form from my pocket. “Because of this.”

He studied the form, chewing on his lip. “Christ, this is getting strange. So the man with the knee was an Outfit guy?”

“I don’t think so. Both Shattuck and Bonatto were very interested in what I had to say, but judging from the way they reacted-or pretended not to-I think that whoever had his knee repaired put down Shattuck and Salierno’s names to stick their noses in it.”

“In what?”

“I don’t know, but at some point the three of them shared something in common. The Social Services report was the mystery man’s way of flipping the finger at the other two.”

Runnion raised both bushy eyebrows high. “How did he know that report would ever surface again?”

I hadn’t actually thought any of this out in detail, but as the words came out, they began to gain credibility. “He didn’t, any more than any kid does when he throws a bottle into the ocean with a message in it. This guy, whoever he was, was about to disappear forever. It was a gesture, pure and simple-a last chance to write ‘Kilroy was here,’ or even ‘Up yours.’ It didn’t matter if no one saw it, because he did it for himself.”

“So maybe he ripped off Salierno back when and retired to Vermont with his collection of hundred-dollar bills?”

“Could be-there’re a lot of blanks to fill in.”

“Yeah, like where does Shattuck fit in.” Runnion was looking doubtful. “He couldn’t have been a button man for the Outfit; they hate people like him-they’re superconservative red-white-and-blue types, in a twisted kind of way.” He shifted suddenly in his chair and looked at me with a renewed keenness. “How did you get Bonatto to talk to you?”

“It turns out Tommy Salierno died-or more likely was declared dead-twenty-four hours after ‘Shattuck’s’ knee operation.”

Runnion’s brow furrowed. “I remember hearing about Tommy,” he said vaguely.

I pulled a copy I’d made of the article from my pocket and handed it over. He read it carefully, his brain obviously teeming with possibilities. “You think Tommy’s death was faked?”

“I think the time of death was faked. According to the papers, Tommy had a history of striking out on his own, of setting up operations independent of his father. Old man Salierno and his bunch might not have touched the likes of Shattuck with a ten-foot pole, but Tommy could have. He was always breaking convention, screwing things up in the process. If he’d been up to his ears in something with Shattuck and this other guy and gotten himself killed, it stands to reason that Salierno would try to tidy things up. He couldn’t hide his son’s death altogether, but he could make it look more presentable to his peers.”

Runnion was quiet for a long time, mulling it all over. Finally, he took off his glasses, rubbed the corner of one eye, and asked, “So you just drove up to Salierno’s front door and dropped all this in their lap, adding your face to the Chicago PD candid-camera collection in the process.”

I felt like a complete rube, not having thought of any potential police surveillance. “You have a team on Salierno?”

Runnion snorted. “You kidding? We have a whole division that does nothing but eat junk food and squint through camera lenses, all so a bunch of college boys back at headquarters can build files of how many times the don orders out pizza or goes to see his girlfriend. I worked there myself a few years back.” His voice trailed off.

I remembered his initial alarm when I’d told him of my visit to Salierno’s-his questioning my sanity. “And since you’re my babysitter, you’re now in deep shit, too,” I finished for him softly. I was both sympathetic and embarrassed that I’d repaid his kindnesses by threatening his livelihood, just a few months shy of retirement.

He just looked at me in silence. His expression, however, wasn’t disapproving or even distressed; it was merely thoughtful, which prompted me to ask, after a full minute of this, “Are you okay?”

A slow smile spread across his face, mystifying me. “You know what it’s like to hear yourself talk sometimes? When you’re thinking things that never would have crossed your mind just a couple of years back?”

I went with it, although I was no longer following him. “You mean you’re not in deep shit?”

“Deep enough-nothing terminal. I was just wondering how much that mattered.”

Something cathartic was happening here, something I was pretty sure I’d caused but didn’t understand. Runnion and I had been friendly enough from the start; we were similarly aged, with similar dispositions. We’d fit together casually without much effort. I sensed now, however, that our relationship was about to undergo a fundamental change.

“What’re your plans now?” he asked, seemingly out of the blue.

“I’m not sure you’ll like them. You may not even want to know.”

“Try me.”

“I was thinking of diving back into the newspaper morgues and digging up everything I could on Shattuck.”

“Why?” His tone was interested-unalarmed that I might be coming close to trespassing into the ongoing Shilly case.

“To see if I can identify some of his fellow travelers from the sixties. From what we know of him so far, he was part of a big crowd. I was hoping that through photo captions or feature articles I might be able to find a handful of people that I could chase down-people who knew him well enough to still be helpful.”

I was pretty certain of Runnion’s reaction, but he surprised me by simply nodding. “I might have a better idea,” he said, “one that’ll give us more information.”

He reached for his phone and for what appeared to be an inner-agency directory. “But first I better throw a little water on the flames.”

He dialed and asked for a name I didn’t catch. “Hi Walt; it’s Norm Runnion in Area 6. I just got something I thought you’d be interested in-in fact, your field boys’ll probably be bringing it in soon all hot and excited. It’s about Angelo Salierno. I’m babysitting some hick cop from Vermont…” Here he gave me a conspiratorial look. “Yeah, Vermont… He waltzed up to Salierno’s front door today and got an audience with Bonatto. Name’s Joe Gunther, lieutenant… Yeah, he’s chasing down some twenty-year-plus homicide from his side of the mountains. The point is, if I bring him in to talk to you guys, I don’t think you’ll get much-he’s not what you’d call too sophisticated-very suspicious of us city folk. Let me work on him for a couple of days, soften him up, and I’ll let you know what he’s up to, okay? Sure… No, it’s no problem; I’m stuck with him, anyway-might as well make it worthwhile… Yeah, okay. Bye.”

He hung up and smiled-half to himself, I thought. “That ought to hold ’em off for a while.”

“You make them sound like the Hounds from Hell.”

“Don’t laugh; I think they’ve been studying Outfit types for so long, they’ve started to act like ’em.”

“You used to work with them?”

He waved his hand. “Yeah, but a while back. There was less technology and more street work-it was more personal.”

He reached for his phone again.

“So who’s next?”

“Intelligence again, only now it’s to one of the good guys.” He paused, his hand still on the receiver. “There are almost thirteen thousand uniformed police officers in Chicago, not counting secretaries, janitors, and what have you.”

“That’s the size of Brattleboro,” I muttered, suitably impressed.

“Well, there you go. The trick is to make the system work for you, to set up your own channels. So, while the Outfit surveillance boys are happily thinking I’m slowly loosening your tongue, we’ll be digging through their own files: There is a certain charm to it, you got to admit.”

I listened to him set up a meeting with his Intelligence contact, remembering Leslie, the helpful computer operator at the University of Chicago, and all the people I’d met at the Cook County Building. Establishing contacts within a department and having a good stable of street snitches was almost a must among policemen, but Norm Runnion was obviously a master at it.

The question was, why was he sticking his neck out, lying to his own people and working behind their backs? Previously, I’d thought of him as a man at peace with himself, resigned to biding his time pushing papers until retirement. Now, all caution seemed thrown to the wind-which made me more concerned about the risks he was taking than he was.

He hung up and chuckled slightly. “Okay, time for a little subterfuge. Want to go for a ride?”

“Sure.” I stood up with him as he slipped into his jacket.

“This guy’s name is Miles Stoddard,” he told me as we made our way out to the parking lot. “He’s like a historian, or a librarian-been gathering information on gangs, cults, groups, and the Outfit for over fifteen years. It’s funny, in a way; I don’t think he’s ever seen any action, except maybe right when he was starting off. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been like a hermit, locked away with his files and records, but he knows everything about everybody. Pretty incredible.”

As I opened the car door, my eyes idly took in the commercial neighborhood around the police station. People were going about their business-loading up delivery vans, pushing grocery carts to their cars, entering and exiting the numerous stores. The only odd note was a large dark four-door sedan parked across West Belmont, with two men in the front. They weren’t looking in our direction; in fact, the one I could see best had eyes only for an attractive young woman walking up the sidewalk in a mini-skirt. His companion, half-obscured by the sun reflecting off the windshield, was reading a newspaper I could see propped up against the steering wheel.

“You coming?” Runnion asked.

I slid into the car next to him, saying nothing about the two men across the street. As we moved into traffic and pulled away, I looked back over my shoulder to see the young woman stopped by the side of the car, her hand resting on its roof, talking and laughing.

We headed south, passing through seamlessly abutting neighborhoods that by nature should have been separated by either miles or barbed-wire fencing. Teeming commercial streets festooned with Asiatic signs yielded to neighborhoods lined with BMWs, leafy trees, and decorous wooden town houses, which abruptly bordered scarred and barren combat zones dominated by grim cement housing projects.

“So what did you mean when you said it didn’t matter if all this got you in trouble?” I asked after some ten minutes of silence.

He took a long time before answering, his eyes sweeping the street ahead of him. I couldn’t decide if he was trying to choose the right words or merely wondering how much he should tell me. “When they yanked me out of Intelligence, where I’d been covering the Outfit, and put me in Area 6, we hadn’t won that war and we hadn’t lost it-I was just out of it. That really bugged me, after all I’d put into it. Those were the best years I’d ever had in the department, when I thought what I was doing really amounted to something.”

He turned to me suddenly, taking his eye briefly off the road. “When we first met, I thought you were a pretty good guy, not just goofing off on company time, and you gave me a chance to get out a little and catch some air-practice the craft a bit. But until this Salierno angle cropped up, I was pretty happy to just let you do your thing and watch you leave town… The sooner the better after Shilly got popped.”

He returned his attention to the road. “I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but this Salierno angle got me to thinking. I don’t know if we can do anything with what you got-the Outfit’s a tough nut to crack-but I wouldn’t mind trying one last time. It would give me a better feeling about calling it quits.”

There was a short pause before he added, “And it’d make me feel better about those assholes looking down their noses at me yesterday for letting you go haywire.”

He chuckled and nodded to himself.

“What about the fallout when we get caught?”

His smile merely broadened. “Humor me.”

Miles Stoddard worked in the same building I’d visited upon my arrival in Chicago-police headquarters on South State Street. The only difference was that this time, instead of going upstairs to visit the brass, Runnion took me down to the uppermost of two basement levels.

Being under the same roof as the people who could ruin Runnion and chase me out of town made me a little uneasy-for Norm’s sake, if not mine. “What are Miles’s obligations to his bosses?” I asked diplomatically as we shared an otherwise empty elevator.

Runnion grinned ruefully. “Will he squeal on us? No-we go pretty far back, and we’ve covered for each other before. Besides, I don’t think we’re heading out on thin ice yet.”

I didn’t respond, which he took as encouragement to explain further. “The investigation of Shilly’s murder is being done in the here and now-neighbors are being interviewed, co-workers, relatives, friends, what have you. Shilly’s place will be taken apart inch by inch, and so will Shattuck’s. It’ll take ’em days before they start thinking of going further back in time, and if they get lucky and find Shattuck early, they won’t even do that. It’s the standard routine, especially when you’ve got as many homicides as we have every week, and it usually gets results. I don’t think we’ll bump into each other.”

We found Miles Stoddard in a room from bygone times-an anachronism in the age of the computer. It was long, low, windowless, lit by a variety of overhead fixtures, and stuffed with an odd assortment of shelves, bookcases, freestanding metal bracket units, and even boards on bricks-anything that could possibly be used to carry the reams of files, books, reports, and folders that lurked in untidy ranks on almost every horizontal surface. It made the University of Chicago’s medical archives look sterile by comparison. Just seeing how the pages tended to stick out messily from their manila restraints, I could tell this massive library was in constant use, not simply being preserved.

Like a shepherd in the midst of his silent, bedded flock, Stoddard was seated in the middle of the room at a battered old wooden desk, under a shaded lamp that hung from a wire from the gloom overhead.

He looked up as we approached along a narrow central aisle, giving Norm Runnion a beaming smile. “My God-there’s a face from the past.”

He rose to greet us, Norm making the introductions. He wasn’t what I’d expected-no thinning white hair, sallow skin, and Coke-bottle glasses. Instead, he looked like a barely over-the-hill football hero: clear-eyed, athletic, suntanned, the very image of someone who wouldn’t be caught dead in a mausoleum like this.

Catching my skepticism, he spread his arms wide to encompass his realm and grinned. “Welcome to the hole of holes-the ultimate in job security.”

I shook my head, remembering the intelligence files Runnion and I had reviewed on the computer. “What is all this?”

“History, pretty much pure and simple-a lot more than any flatfoot wants to know when he calls up a name on his console, which is why we keep it off the central network. I don’t have current rap sheets or addresses or DMV information down here; it’s all deep background. If you have a problem understanding the relationship between two street gangs, or why it is that a certain ward or alderman behaves in a certain way, you come here. The only catch, of course, is that something criminal has to play a part. There are definitely no saints down here.” He looked fondly over the rows and rows all around him. “Also, it’s got to be older than yesterday’s headlines-current intelligence files are kept on Maxwell Street.”

“Which is what brings us here,” Norm joined in. “What can you tell us about a sixties radical named Robert Shattuck? We’re looking for people he may have formed special connections with.”

Stoddard gave him a half-dreamy look, the smile still on his face. “Let’s look him up.”

He stepped away from his desk and we followed him farther back into the shadows, wending our way down various pathways until we came to a distant wall, lined, as usual, with shelves. A glowing computer was parked there at chest level.

I let out a small grunt of surprise, which Stoddard obviously found amusing. “What did Norm tell you? That I was some gnome sitting in a damp cellar with all this crap in my head? Forget it. It may look old and messy, but it’s organized. And I’m just the head of the section; there’re a half-dozen guys like me who wander around this place. I’d be swamped otherwise. Okay, let’s see where our friend is hiding.”

He typed in Shattuck’s name, along with a few commands. A nearby printer spit out a location list of all references. Only then, list in hand, did Stoddard do the expected and begin ferreting among his informational gold mine. I noticed, here and there, there were indeed other desks and other archivists, tucked away in their private corners like secretive monks. It pleased me, for some perverse reason, to know that an enclave like this was alive and well in a bureaucracy given over to uniformity, strip lighting, and doing away with the “old.”

It took over an hour. He set us up at a work table under a hanging fluorescent light and began feeding us with bits and pieces, periodically appearing with memos, captioned intelligence photos, old arrest records, FBI inter-service data sheets, even magazine and newspaper articles that either dealt with Shattuck directly or with aspects of the causes he’d espoused over the years.

Runnion and I went through it all, taking notes, building lists of names, addresses, dates, and events, trying both to establish a chronology of Shattuck’s political life and to gain insight into his personal relations. As we went along, we also kept a separate list of those names that moved with our quarry in his successive shifts toward the radical militant left, pegging them as the true inner circle and the most likely to have kept in touch with him up to the present.

That list was not long, for Shattuck had explored well beyond the political extremes we’d found on his rap sheet. There were connections to the Weather Underground and to other, more violent splinter groups, although nothing for which he’d ever been arrested, which explained the relative tameness of our first official view of his activities.

Near the end, Norm tapped the list with his finger. “You know, it occurs to me that if any of these hard-core people are still around, they’re not likely to be too friendly to us.”

I pulled my note pad from somewhere under the growing pile and waved it at him. “I’ve been scribbling down a few names of those who went only so far with him. Whether they broke ranks or just left town, I don’t know, but I’m hoping at least one or two of them grew disenchanted enough to tell us why.”

We had also made a separate pile of all the photographs Stoddard had delivered, which included mug shots of eighty percent of everyone on our lists. Getting booked back then had been the unintentionally ironic equivalent of a battlefield promotion. I pulled the pile toward me now and leafed through the rebellious young faces, putting Shattuck’s off to one side.

Runnion watched me, smiling sometimes at the extreme Afros and love beads. “So what do you think of Mr. Shattuck now?”

I laid the pictures down, thinking back to my conversation with Gail the night before. “His killing Shilly seems a lot more in character. He was obviously a lot more than a radical protester, at least by the early seventies. Some of the people he hung out with were robbing banks, grabbing hostages, and blowing up buildings. Seems the only difference was, he didn’t get caught.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out Abraham Fuller’s picture. “I am disappointed, though, that this guy hasn’t surfaced. I know God-damn well Shattuck recognized him.”

“You run his prints through our files yet?” Stoddard asked from behind us.

“Yeah, when I was still in Brattleboro.” I waved my hand across the assembled mug shots. “He either never made the A-team or he was a lot more clever than they were.” I placed Fuller on the table next to Shattuck. “It makes me wonder if the guy with the metal knee is here, staring at us right now, or if he’s as lost as Mr. Fuller.”

That thought made me dig into my pocket once more, and pull out the birth date Billie Lucas had deciphered from the astrological chart, an item I’d almost forgotten about. I handed it to Stoddard. “Can you run a check just on a date of birth?”

He took the slip of paper from me. “Sure.”

Runnion cleared his throat, obviously sensitive of overstaying our welcome here, despite Stoddard’s continued affability. “I have one more favor to ask, too, Miles.”

Stoddard let him off the hook. “Shoot.”

“What can you tell us about Tommy Salierno-the night he died, and any connections he might have had with any of these folks? That was before my time in Intelligence.”

Stoddard suddenly looked doubtful and checked his watch. “Angie’s boy? The first part of that maybe I can handle, if you can accept a verbal report, but connecting Tommy to the radicals will take some time-more than we’ve got left today. The Outfit takes up more shelf space than anyone-besides the politicians,” he added with a laugh. “Hang on a sec; let me get you the resident expert.”

He disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a man I thought far better suited physically to this environment-wispy white hair, thick glasses, and not built like a quarterback. “This is Ray-Mr. Mafia. You see Tommy Salierno tied in with a bunch of radical hippies, Ray?”

I held up my hand to interrupt. “Not tied in necessarily; let’s say having any interactions with them.”

Ray ran his hand up and across the top of his bald head, pausing to scratch the back of his neck. “It’s possible-he did things just to drive the old man crazy. I don’t remember anything specific, though. The politics sure don’t line up. Tommy was as right-wing as his father-most of them are.”

“What do you remember about his death?” Runnion asked. “Was there anything suspicious or unusual about it?”

Ray looked surprised. “Suspicious? It seemed straightforward enough-bad-boy mobster crosses one husband too many.”

“You emphasized seemed.”

“Yeah. Well, he had been a pain in Angelo’s neck, from when he was a teenager. People talked about how maybe he got to be too much, but I don’t think so. Despite the movies, you don’t see much of that kind of activity in the Outfit. They tend to be stoics about blood family-good or bad, they figure they’re stuck with them. Especially an old-timer like Angelo-blood ties are sacred to him.”

“You think Tommy died the same day he was found?” I asked.

Ray’s eyes widened slightly. “Like did he die some other day or something? Interesting… He could have.”

“Why?”

“Only because there’s no proof he didn’t. All the autopsy files disappeared. About twelve or fifteen years ago, some reporter was doing a story on the local Mafia-a routine feature piece-and he decided to check Tommy’s autopsy report. I think just to show what a hotshot he was. It wasn’t there. A small article appeared about it, the medical examiner acknowledged that sometimes files wandered, and the system was revamped. No one made much of it.”

“What about the doc who did the autopsy?”

“Dead end. He’d moved on, and he died a couple of years later. Natural causes,” he added to our collective but unstated question.

“Still,” Runnion persisted, “Tommy’s death being vague like that sure is curious.” He gathered together the lists of names and handed them to Stoddard. “I know you said it would take a while, but could you copy these and see if any of them connect to Tommy?”

Stoddard shrugged, passed them to Ray with a nod, and Ray turned to get back to work. I reached out and touched his elbow before he left. “One last question.”

He looked back at me, his face expectant. “What’s that?”

“Mafia types-the Outfit, I mean-they favor small-caliber weapons for the most part, don’t they?”

“Depends. The button men like.22s or.32s ’cause they’re small and quiet. Those boys tend to work up close. But some of the others-the general bodyguards, the soldiers-they might carry anything, especially nowadays.”

That wasn’t what I was hoping for. I tried a different, more specific angle. “What about Tommy Salierno? Did he use something special?”

Ray nodded with a smile. “Oh yeah. Typical, really, given his attitude. He had a nickel-plated, ivory-handled Colt automatic, just as showy as he was.”

“A.45?” I asked.

“Yup-big enough to blow your head off.”

“Or your knee,” I muttered, and one more piece of the puzzle-hypothetical, unsubstantiated, and utterly compelling-fell into place.