"What is it?"
Instead of answering, Riley put the thing in his mouth, swelling his cheek to a knob, and chewed. Riley loved it when Dillon went pale, and he fished in the canister for another. Instead of eating this one, he snipped at it with scissors until he had a crescent of raw flesh the size of the first digit of his finger. He held it up for Dillon to admire, all the while gnawing away at the one in his mouth.
"What the hell is it?"
"Pickled pig's foot." Riley laughed out loud. "Knuckles," he said. "I'm a sucker for them."
Dillon slapped the doc's shoulder, craning to look into the canister, Riley's snack supply. Dillon had seen the awful things in jars on tavern counters, but he hadn't tasted one in years. When he and the doc grinned at each other, Dillon felt a blast of the fellowship that took men like them into those taverns together.
While Riley found just the right small container, Dillon removed his shirt and hopped onto the examining table.
Riley washed his hands, then applied the cold disk of his stethoscope to Dillon's chest.
Each relaxed into the role he would play now. He's trusting me, all right, Dillon thought. Who am I trusting?
Dillon was surprised at the doctor's steadiness. His hands moved over his body easily. I'm trusting Riley, he thought. Their bond made him feel powerful. If we have to, we will bring Buckley to trial on our own.
When the knock came, they were ready.
"You're Dr. Riley?"
"Yes." The doc stood aside as the cop and the civilian entered.
"I'm Captain Gallagher. I've come for the..." The policeman was a large, self-sure Irishman, but he hesitated and glanced at his companion. Buckley's man was staring at Dillon, who was still bare-chested, seated on the table, his legs dangling. Sensing that the man was trying to place him, Dillon kept his eyes on the floor, like an intimidated yarder. He noticed the man's highly polished shoes, the cuffs of his fancy suit riding them just so.
"...the evidence in the Foley case," the captain said.
"The cartilage."
"If that's what it is."
Doc Riley moved away from Dillon toward the cluttered table that served as his desk. "It's about time you got here. I don't want the thing." He picked up a tin canister and turned back to the policeman with convincing readiness.
Gallagher crossed to Riley, prepared to take the canister. But the doc shook his head. "Where's my receipt?"
"Your what?"
Riley looked quickly toward Dillon, who inwardly groaned, What's this? Just give it over.
"I'm not releasing evidence to anybody without a receipt. What if you—?".
"You needn't bother yourself about it, Doc. There's no question of a receipt." Gallagher smiled, but without friendliness.
Buckley's henchman forgot about Dillon, and went to the other side of Riley. "Listen, you—"
"Never mind," the policeman said, and he put his arm out to block Buckley's man, as if to prevent the rough stuff. But then, without warning, he himself seized Riley by the wrist, twisting his arm so violently that Dillon thought it would break. He checked the impulse to protest. Riley cried out in pain and dropped the container.
The civilian picked up the tin canister and opened it. He winced at the sight of the piece of flesh, the stink of the chemical soaking it. "Jesus."
Gallagher, in releasing Riley, shoved him aside. Riley fell against his desk, spilling papers and folders. While he struggled to regain his balance, the two men left the room. Riley rubbed his arm, staring at Dillon. The boozer's cloud had swept out of the doc's eyes, replaced by the cold, sharp glint of fear.
Six
On the morning of the inquest Dillon went to Doc Riley's rooming house to pick him up. What alarmed him first was that the guard was gone. After today, but only after, Riley was not going to need protection. Once his finding was formally endorsed by the medical examiner—a piece of the killer's ear in the victim's throat!—the coroner's jury itself would replace him as the accuser of Raymond Buckley. The case wouldn't hinge on Riley anymore, and more to the point, the Kelly-Nash machine's commitment to its South Side overlord would evaporate. Buckley, not because of his brutality but because of its being exposed, would be finished.
But that was after today. Dillon hurried up the stairs of the by now familiar stoop. Every other time he'd come here this week, the uniformed sheriff's deputy had been sitting in his car right in front, but now the car was gone, the deputy nowhere in sight. Was the Sheriff's Office the same as Eddie Kane's after all?
When Father Ferrick had learned from Dillon that his old pal Eddie was in league with Buckley, he had immediately reached for his phone, announcing, "It's time to get serious about this shit." The crudity had surprised Dillon, and so had what the Jesuit did. He called up Cardinal Stritch on the spot, and then so bluntly demanded the cardinal's intervention that for an awful, paranoid moment Dillon thought the entire phone call was a show for his benefit, that the cardinal was not on the other end of the line at all, or that, if he was, Father Ferrick was a secret Buckley ally and was trying to get the cardinal to dismiss him. But not so. The cardinal matched Ferrick's indignation and went to work. By the end of that day, the state's attorney for Cook County, a prosecutor named Tom Courtney, had launched his own investigation into the death of Michael Foley, and the sheriff's men had been dispatched to protect Riley.
But now the sheriff's men were gone. Dillon hopped steps all the way up to Riley's room. The boardinghouse was a dark, overcurtained place, essentially like Dillon's own. Several times that week, Dillon had felt a pang of pity for the doc, that he had wound up living alone in such dilapidation. And not only that: Dillon had more than once bumped against the cold wall of his own fear that he too would be in such a place when he was old. But now his only feeling was a screeching anxiety. Where are you, Doc? Where are you?
At Riley's door he knocked, and knocked again. "Doc! Doc!" His voice died against the wood. The door was locked. He put his ear to it, then banged it. The doorjamb hardware was as flimsy as that on his own door, at his house in another corner of the same rotten neighborhood. Without a further thought, Dillon bumped the door with his hip, a swift concentration of his full weight. The door burst open and Dillon went through so easily that he thought at once, with stark incredulity, This is where I let Courtney leave him?
The room, with its gray, twisted bed linen, its clutter of chop suey cartons and empty whiskey bottles, was an expression of the surrender Riley had made, not to Dillon but, long before, to the inertia of an unhappy life alone. The room was wreckage, but of a normal sort for a man like him. Riley was gone, but Dillon saw nothing to suggest that he'd been forced from the place against his will.
One corner held a dark old wardrobe. Dillon sidled between the bed and a basket of soiled clothing to open it. Riley's suitcase and the rest of his clothes were there. On the bureau was his black medical bag. If Riley had left the place of his own accord, intending to flee Dillon as much as Buckley, surely he'd have taken some of this with him, or all of it. Dillon examined the bed sheets, but they were dry, unslept-in. The doc had promised Dillon repeatedly that he would not leave the room, not even to walk around the block for air. Only the evening before they had grinned at each other, feeling they had made it through the chancy week. Dillon had finally decided he'd been obsessive in insisting that the sheriff's men protect Riley around the clock, but now he saw he hadn't done enough. Everyone in Chicago had his price, the sheriff too. If goddamned Buckley knew that already, why didn't I?
"Trust me," he'd said so glibly to Riley. Dillon felt a surge of a coming panic as he began slamming the drawers of the bureau, rifling Riley's belongings, desperate for some clue to explain what happened.
That he found nothing was the clue.
Buckley's men had come for Riley at some point the night before, after Dillon had departed and after the sheriff's deputy had been taken care of. Riley would have had no choice but simply to go with them. He was no Mike Foley, had neve
r claimed to be.
Now Riley was—Dillon pictured this as if he knew it for a fact—at the bottom of Lake Michigan. He banged a drawer shut, a lamp fell over. He pounded his fist on the bureau top, bouncing the lamp again.
When he had quit the seminary, the rector had told him contemptuously that he was a man with no follow-through. The red margin between the rector's lips had narrowed to nothing, a thin white line of suppressed fury. He had treated Dillon as if he had broken a vow when, out of respect for a vow's solemnity, he had refused to make one.
But a vow was what he'd made to Riley. "Trust me." The words in his own voice would haunt him, he knew. But then he heard them in Riley's voice, now as, "I trusted you."
Dillon crossed to the window and snapped the shade. The sound of its recoil around the spring tube was like a gunshot. Morning light flooded into the room and, suspended in it, a fleet of dust particles.
Maybe not Lake Michigan; an incinerator someplace, a grinder. Dillon knew very well that Doc's body would not turn up incriminatingly in a drain box at Swift's. Not this time. When had he ever failed so utterly? Now instead of Riley's face or the rector's, Dillon saw his father's.
He closed his eyes, turning away from the room, then opened them. On the street below he saw a thin man in a dark suit, alone, staring up at him.
The sheriff's deputy?
The deputies were all in uniform. They never left their cars.
The man did not disguise his interest, and that refusal of the surreptitious, with its presumption of invulnerability, infuriated Dillon. His rage vied with his self-loathing, an emotional turmoil he had not felt before. He braced himself against the frame of the window, as if to keep from leaping out, aiming his own body, like an arrow, at the bastard's throat. The man's cocky presence was one last message from Buckley.
Dillon backed away from the window, moving slowly for as long as he thought himself visible to the man below. Then, at the door, he exploded through, hurling himself down the stairs, as if bringing Doc Riley back were a simple matter of moving faster than Buckley's man did.
Dillon knew from books and movies that the reward for whipping down to the street and confronting the watching hoodlum and forcing him to confess would be the discovery of where his friend was being held. Having magnified humanity with his righteous indignation, he would go at once to his friend and free him.
Even crashing down the boardinghouse stairwell, his mind a frenzy of aggression, Dillon knew very well the difference between this moment and the golden time of movies. One difference was that these bastards would stuff a man into a blood sewer. Another was the despair he already felt, the certain knowledge that Riley was already dead.
And the man on the curb was already gone.
Dillon stood there, breathing painfully, staring at the vacant place by the lamppost. Now he was a sparrow to himself, a South Side pseudo-canary, not flying through the bright warm hall of a movie screen but skittering in the dark, pecking at grains of real food but eating what was around it, shit.
"German Army Attacks Poland; Cities Bombed, Port Blockaded; Danzig Is Accepted Into Reich."
Cass Ryan stared at the newspaper in her hands, trying to take its headlines in.
"Hitler Gives Word."
She looked up from the paper, startled, as if Aryan boys were trooping down the main corridor of the Cook County Courthouse. The wide hallway was crowded with citizens and functionaries striding past in both directions: jurors, witnesses, plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers, bail bondsmen, magistrates, marshals and police. There were secretaries, clerks and messengers too; yet they seemed, every one, figures of immense authority to Cass Ryan. Mature women in their dark brown pumps and old-fashioned stifling wool suits, and girls in cloche hats and colorful light dresses, men with gray hair and men with dazzling shoes, zoot-suited boys in custody and an old derelict under escort, trailing the odor of his own stale urine. Cass watched them all, wondering if Hitler was more to them than he was to her. She sat alone on a bench opposite another bench, which was vacant and which, with hers, seemed a kind of sentry for the ornate doorway of the hearing room. She wanted to hail one of those prim ladies—they reminded her of Switchboards senior supervisors—for an explanation for her of what she was reading.
"British Children Taken From Cities."
Cass could hardly imagine such a scene. What, millions of boys and girls in flight from German bombs? She pictured her own Aileen and Jerry. But her sisters and brothers were no longer children. They were like the fleet of ships that had left the harbor, each on its own, before the war began. But what of her cousins? What of Molly?
"Roosevelt Warns Navy; British Warships Mass."
Each clerk and magistrate moved along the corridor in his own way. Some read papers as they walked. Some carried rolled newspapers and used them to gesture with. All of their mouths were moving at once.
Cass felt that her ears were stoppered. The corridor hummed with talk, hut she could make out nothing. She knew that events on the other side of the world—"Hitler Vows Fight"—were as awful in their way as what had brought her here, but it made her teeth ache right to her eyes to think that, because of Poland, the coroner's jury would not convene.
It was five minutes before ten, the appointed time. That none of the others had arrived fueled her worry. She felt as if she had been camping there, awaiting an apparition, like a woman in the Bible. When the young man in white arrives, he denies being the Lord. He is one sent to say that the Lord is not coming; the Lord has been called to Poland.
Cass thought of the Paroffs, who lived on her block of Forty-fifth Street, though they belonged to St. Stan's, the Polish parish in Englewood. She had only the vaguest notion of what the war would mean to them, for it confused her that Mrs. Paroff was one of the women who regularly came to Cass's own house on Sunday afternoons to listen to Father Coughlin. The radio priest thought well of Hitler. Cass hated the things he said, but her mother and her mother's friends always sat at the radio, nodding in agreement. What now, though? What if Father Cough lin said the Poles had somehow asked for this invasion?
Cass looked down at her hands, which were black with newsprint. She saw the coiled outlines of her fingerprints. Her palms glistened with perspiration. She folded up the paper and put it beside her on the bench. Poland would have to take care of itself today. She opened her purse for her handkerchief. I'm taking care of my Uncle Mike.
While wiping the smudges from her hands, Cass failed to notice the man approach her. She felt his shadow sweep over her, though, as he blocked the light from the ceiling lamp.
"Miss Ryan?"
"Yes?"
"I'm Raymond Buckley."
He hovered above her, a lean man with leathery features and flinty eyes which sparked behind rimless glasses. Cass had never seen him up close before, and his appearance surprised her. He was younger than she expected, and in his drawn face there was nothing to suggest the pampered life she had assumed was his. He was wearing an expensive dark suit and a laundered shirt with a high formal collar, that was true, but in his bent shoulders and bony hands Cass saw the signs of a man who had worked hard. A line of moisture made his forehead glisten, and Cass's mind tossed up a picture of him hunched over the wheel of a forklift tractor. If she was disappointed that he was not one of those overweight, soft-skinned bosses, it was because she sensed in him at once the capacity to survive the rigors of prison.
He was about to speak when he turned his head slightly, and she saw the bandage on its side—not what she expected either, a little white cap on his ear, hardly anything. But the sight made her quiver, and she felt her pain and rage afresh.
"I'm sorry for all of this," Buckley said, but not at all smoothly. He spoke with a near lisp.
It was as if he were standing in the sweltering air of a summer dream she was having. He would not go away. She was powerless to speak to him.
A man with a briefcase tugged at Buckley from behind. Buckley allowed himself to be drawn away. "You'r
e the kid I feel for. Did your aunt get the flowers I sent, the wreath?"
Cass watched him, as if a curtain had fallen across his face, and in her mind she watched herself. She was a doe in an open field, aware of the hunter aiming at her, convinced he would fire only if she moved.
Buckley took a seat in the middle of the bench opposite, his lawyer next to him. Then the lawyer deftly moved to Buckley's other side, to whisper in his unbandaged ear.
That ear. It reassured her. How could he deny what it implied? She knew nothing about the laws of evidence, but the white tape on the side of Buckley's head seemed a certain flag of his guilt. She worked slowly back from her paralysis, and what she came to first was gratitude that her uncle had found a way to mark his murderer.
Buckley shook a cigarette from a pack. The lawyer snapped a lighter in front of his face. When Buckley guided his eyes back to Cass, she saw him flinch behind the flame.
Sean Dillon and Mr. Courtney arrived, but before they could tell her anything, an official called them all into the hearing room. Cass nudged Sean as they went through the doors. "That's him."
Dillon hadn't even looked Buckley's way and did not now, but he nodded. "I know."
"Where's Doc?" Cass asked as they made their way up the aisle. The raised table at the far end of the room was vacant, as were the witness chair and a dozen jury chairs to the side. Ceiling fans beat the air, but the room felt smothered, and Cass touched her wet forehead.
Instead of answering, Dillon shook his head.
Cass stopped him. "What do you mean?"
Again he shook his head. He took her elbow. Choking for air, she let him direct her toward the chairs. It was like a phone line going dead in her ear. When that happened, even if she knew linemen were testing splices, she always felt it was her fault.
Cass and Sean sat in the front row on Courtney's side. Behind them, seats were taken by two dozen spectators, including the pair from Swift's who had introduced themselves at her uncle's wake. Cass realized that most were sitting on Buckley's side of the room, like a wedding. They had chosen sides.
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