The Skeleton's knee

28

I spent the rest of the night and part of the next day in the hospital, getting stitched, X-rayed, medicated, poked, and questioned. I felt like a used car getting a wax job so that everybody around me would feel better.

Norm Runnion and his colleagues had found me a couple of hours after my brush with Shattuck’s version of Russian roulette. They’d traced the train back to the littered platform, to the blood-spattered floor and the open hatchway just beyond, but found no sign of Robert Shattuck-only the well-supplied hideaway he’d been living in for the past several days, at the end of one of those infrequently traveled electrical tunnels.

They did find out about my and Runnion’s involvement in chasing Shattuck down, however, which was enough to get me a ticket out of town on the next morning’s flight and to put Norm in the hot water he’d gambled on avoiding.

Norm came by around midday, cleaned up and looking rested, sporting a bandage around his head similar to my own. With his beard, it gave him a vaguely rakish air-the aging pirate wearing a tie.

He sat in the chair facing the bed and propped his feet on one of the bed’s lower rungs. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like I was rolled in a cement mixer. They going to punch your ticket?”

“With three months to go? Not likely. They’ll huff and puff.”

He looked at his shoes for a moment.

“I’m sorry the Outfit connection didn’t work out,” I said.

He sighed. “Yeah-that would’ve been nice.”

“I told Shattuck about their involvement.”

He grinned at that. “No shit, really? He might be crazy enough to try something with them. That would be interesting.”

There was another pause. “I hear you got until sunset to leave town.”

“More like sunrise-earliest flight they could book. They filed an official complaint with my chief for willfully meddling in an ongoing investigation and for unprofessional and discourteous conduct.”

“How’s that going to sit back home?”

“They don’t give much of a damn about what outsiders think. It’s one of the advantages of provincialism.”

“What about the case? Did you get enough?”

“I would’ve liked to chase down the University of Illinois connection between Pendergast and Fuller-put a real name to Fuller. A yearbook might’ve done that. Then interview anyone who knew them, find out why Fuller never appeared with David except in that one shot.”

“Hell, I can check out some of that.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Norm.”

But he waved his hand dismissively. “Oh shit, Joe, don’t worry about it-it’ll give me a chance to use my contacts one last time. Believe me, the brass’ll never know.”

I nodded my appreciation. He stood up to leave, leaning over to shake my hand. “I better get back to work. This little stunt added about two feet to my paperwork. It was nice knowin’ you.”

I held his grip for a moment, spurred by an impulse that had hit me the night before, during my little chat with Shattuck. “There is one more thing, Norm-kind of a strange favor.”

“Shoot.”

“Is there any way you can contact Bonatto-ask him to meet me somewhere?”

He gave me a long look. “It’s a good thing for both of us you’re headin’ out tomorrow. I can do it, but I can’t guarantee they’ll agree to it, and they’ll want to set it up themselves, in any case. They’ll need to know where to find you.”

“Same motel-I reserved a room for tonight.”

He nodded. “All right, but only if you promise to tell me about it later.”

I thanked him for his help and apologized again for the way things worked out. He brushed it off but paused at the door. “In the report, you said that after he tied you up, you and Shattuck talked for a while before he left.”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t do anything? I was thinking of Shilly, you know? It made me wonder…”

I thought back to those last moments, staring down the pistol barrel, watching that smile, my despair trying to turn it into something hopeful. “No. We just talked.”

Runnion nodded and left, obviously unconvinced. It seemed unfriendly, after all Norm had done for me, but how do you tell somebody about something like that?

The old Navy Pier sticks out almost a mile into Lake Michigan-an ancient, crumbling artifact that the city is working to resurrect into some sort of tourist attraction. All of downtown Chicago lies like a jeweled crescent reflected on the water-distant, stellar, and magnificently still, its distant rumble quelled by the gentle lapping of the waves against the pier’s corroded cement sides.

I pulled into the near-deserted parking lot at midnight, as the phone call had instructed, got out of my car, and walked over to the pier’s entrance-a gaunt and shabby brick building with an archway in its center and two six-sided towers on the ends. Its once imposing aura had been diminished by the restoration crew’s efforts to beef up its failing frame-there were huge gaps where the brick had been torn away to reveal the original rusty I-beams. The whole structure looked like a doddering old lady whose sole remaining dignity had been removed along with her clothes.

I approached the chain-link fence that barred the archway and was met by a dark form separating itself from the shadows.

“You Gunther?”

“Yes.”

“ID?”

I pulled out my identification and handed it over. A flashlight beam suddenly blinded me as the man compared my battered, bandaged face with the one pictured next to the badge. Satisfied, he unlocked the padlock on the gate and let me through.

“Walk to the back.”

The “back” was actually another building like the first, only gaudier, with fancier towers and a pitched slate roof. It straddled the far end of the pier, a half mile away. It was dark also, but visible in the reflected glow from the city behind me, looking like a lost piece of castle that had floated out to sea.

I walked down the center of the wide concrete pier, as broad and as long as a runway. My footsteps clattered loudly across the cracked, potholed cement. Aside from the guard at the gate, I’d seen no one, nor had I heard any sounds from behind the compressors, generators, bulldozers, and other equipment that littered the pier’s length. But I sensed them nevertheless, watching me, watching out for Bonatto, as silent and lethal as high-strung Dobermans.

I had no idea if the money originally had belonged to the mob, or to Shattuck, or someone else entirely. I didn’t know if Pendergast, Fuller, and their mysterious friend had fled to Vermont as victims running for cover or as criminals on the lam. And who had killed Tommy Salierno? Pendergast, Fuller, the third guy, or Shattuck…? Or had he been knocked off by his own people, whose interest now was in shutting up the witnesses?

I rubbed my tender forehead, the far pavilion getting much closer now. Whatever the truth, both my competitors and I had avenues to follow, none of us knowing which of the others would get to the prize first, and all of us relying in part on one another to give one of us the advantage.

At least that’s how I was hoping it would turn out after tonight’s meeting.

A second shadowy figure appeared from out of the dark and asked me to spread my legs and arms, a procedure they’d bypassed the first time. He checked me thoroughly and jerked his thumb toward the glass door leading into the pavilion. “The door on the left.”

I entered a semicircular lobby, veered off to the left, and went through the indicated door.

What I entered was an enormous vaulted room, its hemispherical ceiling buttressed by a converging latticework of curved steel I-beams that met at its apex high overhead. Strung along the lower edge of each of the beams, from the polished hardwood floor to where they all came together like a single muted burst of fireworks, were lines of tiny low-wattage bulbs. It was a concert hall, perched at the end of the pier, its floor-level row of windows looking out onto a cement promenade and the vast emptiness of the lake beyond. In the distance, to the right, the slow, red, rhythmic flashing of a lighthouse reminded me of a dying pulse.

“Over here.”

I turned at the familiar voice. Alfredo Bonatto was sitting alone on a metal folding chair in the center of the stage, between the door I had entered and its mate on the other side.

I walked up to the stage, my footsteps loud on the polished floor.

“Did the police department candid-camera crew follow you here?”

“Why is that a concern of yours?”

“My poking around has gotten a fellow cop in trouble. It would be better for him if his colleagues didn’t know you and I were meeting.”

Bonatto’s heavy, sad face lifted slightly in a small smile. “You needn’t worry. How are you coming with your little mystery?”

“What’ve you heard?”

He raised his eyebrows. “It means nothing to us. I was merely being polite.”

I let him know what I thought of that. “I hear your boys were pretty polite to Penny Nivens-a little scary maybe.”

He rose from his chair slowly, steadying himself by resting his hand on its back for a moment. Then he motioned to the stairs at the end of the stage and began walking toward them. “Let’s step outside. It’s a beautiful night.”

I followed him through one of the double glass doors leading out to the promenade. The air was fresh and cool and clean, filled with the sound of lapping water and the occasional deep-throated bleat of a foghorn. The city, doubled in size by the mirror-smooth reflection, shimmered like a diamond-dusted cloud on the horizon. Not for the first time, I was struck by the absence of a sea’s briny odor-the fundamental paradox of all the Great Lakes.

“I’d heard you ran into some trouble. You look as though you did.”

I unconsciously touched the bandage on my forehead, which had been extended down the side of my face to cover the burns there. “That’s part of the reason I wanted to meet with you.”

Bonatto had placed both hands on the railing above the water and was staring at the view. “Ah.”

“The man I was after is a sixties radical named Robert Shattuck. He tortured a Dr. Kevin Shilly to death trying to get information.”

I paused. Bonatto didn’t move for several moments, then looked at me in mock surprise. “I’m sorry-is that supposed to mean something to me?”

I pursed my lips in irritation. “You wouldn’t be here if it didn’t.”

He looked away again. “Why are you telling me about Robert Shattuck?”

“I think you and Shattuck are after the same person, though for different reasons. There’s not much I can do about that, at least not at the moment. But Shattuck’s got a head start, seems to know who he’s after, and now knows that person was last living in Vermont. I thought I’d slant the playing field a little.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“Shattuck’s a loose cannon-the one who could cause the most damage. It’s his treatment of Shilly versus your treatment of Penny Nivens, if you want. If I have to have either one of you dogging my heels, I’d just as soon it be you.”

He chuckled softly. “So you want us to handle Shattuck for you? That’s pretty good.”

“He knows you’re interested in all this, and he’s not discriminating.” I pulled Shattuck’s mug shot from my pocket and handed it over.

Bonatto released his grip on the railing, taking the picture without comment. Finally, he turned to face me. “Where did you work before Vermont?”

“I saw action in Korea-did a couple of years of college in California on the way home. That’s it. Why?”

He hitched his shoulders ever so slightly. “You have a peculiar way of doing business. I doubt we’ll meet again.”

He left me then, alone on the pier, to enjoy my last view of Chicago, my mind full of doubt and self-recrimination, my heart longing to get back home. This was not my town, and I had not navigated its waters well. Instinct had filled in where procedure and practice had been wanting, and that was rarely a good basis for sound police work.

I didn’t know how my last chat with the locals would play out in the long run, but it couldn’t be any worse than what Shattuck had done to Shilly. And now, if my guess was right, Shattuck was heading for my turf.

I therefore took comfort in one telling detail-Bonatto had left with Shattuck’s picture in his pocket.