Buckley? Cassie tried to grasp the relevance to her uncle's fate of Raymond Buckley, if that's who they meant. He was the local Kelly-Nash ward boss, the man in charge of South Side disbursement of city jobs and of the dole. Everyone knew who Buckley was.
But to Cassie's knowledge Buckley had had nothing to do with her uncle. Certainly he'd never helped him find a job.
Instinctively she knew not to pursue it. She leaned down to put her face by the fading Hanley's, despite his odors. "Then who did see what happened? Who can I talk to?"
Hanley twisted his head away, as if Cassie Ryan were the one who reeked.
"You should go now, Miss." The policeman touched her elbow.
Cassie didn't move.
Hanley's pale eyes told her nothing until, finally, his dazed look gave way to one of recognition. "Dillon," he said abruptly. "Talk to Dillon."
"Who?"
"Sean Dillon. My helper. He was with me. He saw what I saw." A shudder curled through Hanley's body. "Which you don't want to hear about."
Cassie glanced at the policeman and at others nearby who shrugged. They'd never heard of Dillon. She turned back to Hanley. "How can I find him?"
But his face had clouded over already.
Sean Dillon was standing by himself near the bar. He'd come into Doran's after the woman had, but for the same reason, as he'd understood by listening, with everyone in the room, to her interrogation of Jack.
He watched as she drew herself up over Hanley, then turned, tossing her hair back, and looked into the eyes, a pair at a time, of the men she had to squeeze past to leave.
She moved steadily across the room toward the door, toward Dillon.
When she got close to him he did not step out of her way. "I am Sean Dillon."
She stopped before him, startled.
"I was with Jack. I'm sorry about your uncle."
Cassie put her hand to her lips. When Dillon noticed her fingers trembling, he realized she wasn't as tough as she pretended.
"Can you tell me what happened?" She spoke quietly, but the policeman who'd followed along behind her had heard.
Before Dillon could answer, the policeman stepped between them. "Don't go into the terrible details, son. It isn't what the lass needs. Her poor uncle died by an accident in the yards. That's all you need tell her."
Dillon found it easier to face the burly cop than the raw young woman. How could he speak to her of the grotesque pulpy mass who had been her uncle? He felt an incoming wave of what the priest had called his hesitation, but it wasn't about protecting the girl. Like others in the room, he had heard the name from Hanley's lips—Buckley, Raymond Buckley. Would he be the one now to splash that name with the blood of this woman's uncle? What about protecting himself?
Dillon knew very well what it meant then when he checked his hesitation. It almost surprised him that he could. He said to the po liceman, but pointedly aware of speaking more to her, "It was no accident."
"What do you mean?"
"A man doesn't fall into a blood pipe, then haul the cast-iron cover closed above himself."
"Blood pipe?" Cassie said, revulsion in her voice.
"You see what I mean?" the cop said.
But now Dillon was fixed on the woman who had come into this place to hear the truth. "We found your uncle's body in the box basin where two large drainage pipes meet. The pipes draw blood out of the slaughter rooms."
"They told me he fell in a vat from a cutting table."
"He was nowhere near the cutting tables. There was no vat. It was the box basin near the pickle rooms—"
"Pickle rooms?" Cassie felt bile spurt into her mouth.
The policeman took Dillon's forearm and squeezed it hard, intending to hurt him. "You don't want to put your mouth where your feet shouldn't be, my friend. You should check your facts with the man at Swift's before you go upsetting people."
Sean was far from indifferent to the threat he heard in the cop's voice, felt in the vise of the cop's grip, the cop who had nothing to do with any of this, but who also knew instinctively the importance of sticking to the official story, whatever it was.
The men in the tavern moved away from Dillon and the cop, pointedly not listening anymore. Dillon recognized their unsubtle distancing as a form of what he had been doing for years. He might have moved away too at that moment, but the policeman was still holding on to him.
He said, "I don't know what the man at Swift's said. I came here looking for Hanley, to find out what happened."
"Well now you know. The bloke slipped."
"He was flogged," Dillon said, but under his breath so the woman would not hear.
"He still slipped."
It was like offering his soft throat to the wolf astride him when Dillon muttered, "If that's what Hanley says..."
"It is."
The woman interrupted, "But what about what you said?"
Dillon looked at her briefly, but his eyes went involuntarily back to the cop, who said easily, "Don't open that closet door, McGee."
But now, instead of a door, Dillon thought of the iron lid on that downpipe. Before he could respond to the dead man's niece, the policeman released his grip on Dillon's arm and faced her.
"Shall I be taking you home, Miss?"
Miss Ryan refused the policeman by shaking her head. When she glanced around the awful room one last time, it was as if Dillon weren't there. She moved between him and the cop to the door, where she turned and said, "You should all be ashamed of yourselves." Then she walked out into the blue-black night alone.
Dillon followed her.
When he hit the street, she was most of the way to the corner. "Hey, wait up!"
She ignored him.
He began to run after her.
The night air, even here, a mile from the lake, had turned clammy. Dillon was suddenly aware of the sweat on his shirt, his filthy shirt.
The sound of his own hurrying feet faded in his ears as he picked up the sound of hers. He called out again, but she only went faster, not quite breaking into a run. At the corner, across from the Stone Gate, she was swallowed by a throng of night-shift workers streaming out of the yards. Dillon had to cut through them, skipping like a halfback.
When he saw her figure out in the street, crossing toward Walgreen's, he leapt into traffic too. But the drivers did not yield for him as they had for the pretty young woman. The spectacle of his crossing Peoria Street—horns blaring, tires screeching, curses—had the effect, at least, of stopping her.
"Are you crazy?" she asked when he joined her on the sidewalk. "You wouldn't even answer me back there. And now you're getting hit by a car to catch up with me?"
He saw that her face was covered with marks like bruises, and it took him a moment to understand what had happened. Tears pouring freely from her eyes had flooded her makeup. He felt color rising in his own face, and he retreated. "I'm sorry."
"Don't tell me you're sorry!" she said. "I don't care if you are sorry. This has nothing to do with you."
This pain, she meant, this grief. This mess on my face which you have insisted on exposing!
She wasn't finished. "Nothing to do with you! Isn't that what you just said?"
"It was Jack Hanley who said that, not me."
"But it's what you meant."
And of course it was. Dillon had to look away from her. His eyes fell on the old Stone Gate.
"And you know what?" The woman pushed Dillon's arm, to make him look at her again. He saw how angry she was. "It's true. It has nothing to do with you! So leave me alone! Do you hear me?"
"I think the whole South Side hears you."
"Well, do you?"
"Yes."
At that Cassie Ryan turned and stalked away.
Dillon didn't move, but knowing he had only a moment more in which to reach her, he called out very loudly, "But you wanted to know what happened to your uncle!"
She stopped cold.
Customers went in and out of the all-night drugstore
, pointedly ignoring them. If their spat was different from other arguments that were carried so frequently into those streets, it was in their being so young, in his not being drunk—though to passersby, didn't it seem that she had, like a Canaryville wife, just dragged him from his tavern?
At last she faced him. A dozen yards of open sidewalk separated them. Those passersby were staying clear.
"But you won't tell me."
Dillon slowly closed the distance. "I don't know what happened to your uncle. I came to Doran's like you did—to hear what Hanley knew."
"What they said happened—about him falling into the vat—something told me that wasn't possible."
"You're right."
"You made it sound, at first, like someone ... killed him. Is that what you think?"
Dillon glanced toward the blinking neon of the Walgreen's sign.
"But then you took it back."
Dillon nodded, but his silence thickened, becoming his positive statement, despite himself.
He broke it, aware of the change this was. "I'm not taking it back now. I won't take it back again. Something awful happened to your uncle. I became involved in it because I was one of the people to find him. If you want to find out what happened—"
"Of course I do." Her feeling brought her right against him, her hands pressing into the sleeve of his shirt.
"Then I'd like to help you."
"What happened to crush my uncle's head like that?"
She asked the question coldly, so that was how he answered it. "We found him head-first in the downpipe. He had been stuffed into it. When his head swelled up..." Dillon let a shrug finish for him.
"Was he already dead, do you think?"
"An autopsy would show that. Will there be an autopsy?"
Cassie stared at Dillon with yet more horror on her face. "They dissect the body, don't they?"
"Partially."
"Well how could we—?"
"If you want to know what killed him, you do an autopsy. It would show if he choked, if he drowned, if he was hit..."
The girl's eyes had clouded over. She was seeing those panhandlers downtown, the men into whose upturned eyes she had for years now poured her hope and her despair.
"You say he's at Riordan's?"
"Yes."
"Who in your family is in charge of—?"
"I am."
"Do you know..." Dillon softened his voice for the unspeakable again. "Have they started the embalming?"
Cassie nodded. "Mr. Riordan said they do it at night." Her hand went to her lips, an abject gesture. "He said it would be disrespectful to wait."
"Who's paying him?"
"Mr. Riordan? Why I—" Bewilderment got the better of her. Paying? What did paying have to do with this? Cassie forced herself to focus. "He hasn't mentioned it yet."
Dillon shook his head. "They mention it first." He took her arm. "Why don't we go back over there and see what Mr. Riordan says."
Cassie fell easily into step with him, but because, really, since getting off that streetcar hours before to have her cousin hail her with the news, she had been operating in a kind of trance. Her aunt and her mother both had surrendered all initiative to her, and making one decision after another had protected her from her grief and anger, as moving with this stranger now protected her from having to decide what to do next. She only half heard what he was saying.
"If they haven't started the embalming, you can ask them to wait. There's no hurry. Embalming can wait until tomorrow."
Sean was aware of her emotional drift, and he was relieved that their movement through the streets made further talk impossible. He felt her thin arm in his hand, and at one point he imagined his fellow pipefitters ragging him about the canner he was with last night. A canner is any animal too thin for the butcher's block.
They left the Stone Gate and the glaring, pole-lit abyss of Section Five behind, and the soft yellow lights of the broad avenue too, its confusion of cigar stores, shuttered newsstands, boisterous taverns and pushcarts covered for the night. They passed into the tranquil reserve of the neighborhood itself, coming finally, in ten minutes, to the block of Forty-fifth Street in the middle of which stood the squat, reddish-brown church of St. Gabriel the Archangel. Only its tower, a pseudo-Tuscan belfry, had any boldness, and in the dark it loomed above the plain of grim rooftops like a sentry looking out for the mellow hills of the former countryside.
Across from the church was the funeral home, a converted residence, one of the few brick houses in an area famous before the Depression for its modest but well-kept wood frame dwellings. Now those houses were run-down, even dilapidated, because money was so short, of course, but also because so many of the men who'd have kept those clapboards scraped and painted had disappeared. Buildings that had housed one family before now housed three, and the patches of soil in front, where squares of grass once grew, were now planted inexpertly with tomato vines and poles of beans.
"Riordan's Funeral Parlor," the tidy sign read. With its green awning overhanging the sidewalk directly opposite the pillared entrance of the Romanesque church, Riordan's was as much a part of St. Gabe's as the nuns' school farther down the block. Parishioners were always taken aback to be reminded, and at the worst time, that funerals, unlike the other functions of the parish, were conducted for a fee. No wonder Cassie hadn't thought to ask who was paying. Maybe she was.
Sean Dillon led the way up to the door which, under the awning, was the darkest on the street. When he glanced back at Cassie, only to see her wiping her cheeks with her handkerchief, he froze. Were her feelings of devastation taking her under?
But instead of dabbing at fresh tears, she was repairing her ravaged eyes. She brought them immediately up to meet his and he saw a depth of cold determination.
He knocked, then knocked again. They waited.
The tall bespectacled bald man who opened the door was familiar to them both, as to every parishioner, despite his collarless shirt, the sleeves of which, like Dillon's, were rolled past his elbows. He was drying his hands with a ragged towel. The stench of formaldehyde clung to him. Usually they saw Riordan in his charcoal suit and gray gloves, leading the casket down the aisle like death's father. Usually he reeked of cologne; this chemical was why.
"Mr. Riordan, I'm Sean Dillon, and this is Miss Ryan."
Riordan nodded, but his voice was thick with negation when he said, "Miss Ryan and I met earlier tonight. I'm closed now. I told you, Miss, we can make arrangements in the morning."
"Miss Ryan and her family want you to delay preparing the body." Dillon had unconsciously assumed the air of the family representative, as if he did this. "Thé family is going to have an autopsy performed."
"An autopsy!" Riordan faced Cassie. Light flashing off his glasses underscored his amazement. "Why?"
"To find out how he died."
"You don't need a postmortem report for that, Miss. I've already begun on him. Your uncle drowned. Do you imagine he was poisoned or something?"
Dillon noted that the man's surprise, and mystification, seemed genuine. Perhaps he wasn't in a hurry to hide something.
With an eyebrow arched above the wire rim of his glasses, Riordan said, "Your uncle unfortunately found himself where his anatomy meant he shouldn't be. His lungs were full of..." His pointed hesitation flagged the next word as euphemism. "Fluid."
"You mean blood," Cassie said.
"Yes. Blood wastage. He drowned in it. He was still breathing when he went under. Otherwise—" Riordan checked himself and turned brusquely to Dillon. "Why are you letting this girl subject herself to this?"
Dillon replied in the calm but insistent tones he'd imagined himself using in court. "She wants to know what happened to her uncle, beyond his having drowned. What do the man's bruises reveal?" What was he flogged with? he added to himself. "The man was found in blood pipes, Mr. Riordan, not in a vat of pickle fluid, as Miss Ryan was told. And not in Lake Michigan either. An autopsy—"
Riordan cut
him off to hiss, as if the girl wouldn't hear him, "An autopsy would show how much alcohol was in the man. Is that what you want? Talk about pickle juice! That man was too baffled from drink to know where he was. Is that what you want established?"
"Yes," Cassie said, startling Dillon and Riordan both. When they looked at her she added in an undefiant voice, "If that's the truth of it. No one needs to know but me."
Riordan draped the towel over his shoulder and folded his arms. "You're a little late, as it happens, Miss. Your uncle's fluids are all but drained, if you'll forgive the indelicate detail. There'd be no question of a proper autopsy now."
"Nevertheless..." Dillon wasn't sure what his point was, beyond helping this girl take some control over things. "Your instructions from the family are to cease the embalming of Mr. Foley's remains. A doctor will be in touch with you tomorrow."
Riordan pointedly waited for some endorsement from Cassie. She gave it with a nod. Riordan smiled the thin, empty smile of his profession. "I'll have to talk to Mrs. Foley."
"But stop the embalming," Cassie ordered.
"As you say, Miss." He stepped back from the door to close it.
Dillon stopped him. "One more thing, please."
"What?"
"Who's paying you?"
The firmness in Dillon's voice as he asked the simple question stirred in Cassie a deep sense of gratitude. Where had this man come from?
"The ward committee," Riordan answered.
"What?" Cassie was aghast.
"Your uncle is a beneficiary of the Democratic Party. He—"
"The party? My uncle had nothing to do with the party."
"The committee pays for a lot of funerals, Miss."
"Who gave you your instructions?" Dillon asked.
"Arthur Nolan. He works for Mr. Buckley."
"Buckley?" Cassie touched Dillon. "Jack Hanley mentioned Buckley."
Dillon stepped back from Riordan's door, but the mortician leaned after him. "Now do you see? You'd better butt out of this, Mister."
"See what?" Cassie asked. She grabbed Riordan's arm.
"Ask him," he said, jerking free. Then he fell back into the darkness of his funeral home, and he closed the door.
"See what?" Cassie repeated, now to Dillon.
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