The Skeleton's Knee (23 page)

Runnion looked up suddenly. “That would have been reported—or it should have been. We can run Shattuck through our computer later and see what we come up with; maybe that’ll identify whoever helped him get to the ER.”

He returned to his scrutiny. “Says here the wound was self-inflicted and accidental—with a .45 semiautomatic. Jesus—that explains the damage. There’s a note here further on—could be from Shilly himself—that says the damage fits the story. There’re a couple of other reports from other docs—I can’t really tell what they’re about. Here’s a comment by one of them saying, ‘The large-caliber missile caused only transient nontraumatic bruising.’ That sounds like bullshit.”

“Is there anything there that explains why Shilly moved so fast?”

Runnion was clearly distracted, having latched onto yet another scrap of officialese. “I don’t know yet—but here is something. Apparently Mr. Shattuck checked himself out five days later, in the middle of the night.”

“Legitimately?”

Runnion shook his head. “Not hardly. Reading between the lines here, I’d say there were a lot of red faces the next day. Physical therapy was supposed to start the following morning, so they obviously didn’t think he was mobile; the nurses’ patient-care log shows he was still using a bedpan. I guess he was faking how weak he was.”

“No one went after him?”

“No reason to. The bill was paid.”

“With hundred-dollar bills, no doubt,” I muttered.

Runnion paused, obviously recalling the case history he’d read at his office. “Just like your guy with the aneurysm. Well, they don’t say what denominations, but he’s labeled ‘self-pay,’ which means no insurance, and ‘Paid in Full’ is stamped across the bottom.” He showed me the page.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. “When did Shilly get pulled into the case?”

Runnion checked. “That night, about five minutes after admit. He was the orthopedist on duty.”

I smiled at that. “The workings of fate maybe.”

“Makes you wonder what happened to make Shattuck so eager to disappear. I can check our files to see if somewhere in the city a large amount of money changed hands with a bang that night.”

I was still mulling over Shilly’s appearance in all this. Shilly might have cut corners for fortune and spite, but the fact that his patient vanished immediately afterward must have looked pretty suspicious—like he knew from the start Shattuck was somehow on the lam. “Makes you wonder why nobody asked any questions.”

Runnion was very still next to me. “Which says what?”

I was suddenly aware of how he was looking at me. My focus in that hypothesis had been the possibility that Shilly had known Shattuck before the shooting. But Runnion had looked up Shilly’s name in his computer just a few hours earlier at my request, and the fact that he wasn’t there made it clear that Shilly had no history with the police, which he would have had if they’d investigated a case as suspicious as this. Without intending to, I’d turned the searchlight we were both tending onto the Chicago Police Department itself. I lamely murmured an answer to his question, “Maybe nothing.”

“Assuming our computer—or the archives—spit out an explanation I can live with,” he finished for me.

There was a long silence. Runnion broke the ice by letting out a small laugh and standing up. “I think if either one of us is going to get a good night’s sleep, we’d better do a little checking.” He nodded toward my small notebook. “You got enough of the pertinent details? We’ll probably be back here at some point, anyway.”

· · ·

We didn’t drive all the way back to his office but, rather, a mere couple of blocks to South Wentworth Avenue and the Area 1 headquarters building. Runnion was obviously in no mood to let his impatience fester.

He found us an empty computer-equipped office and arranged two chairs side by side in front of the smudged and battle-scarred terminal.

“Okay,” he said, directing his erratically jabbing fingers across the keyboard, “we know Shilly’s not on board, so let’s see about Robert Shattuck. Maybe we’ll get lucky. What was the DOB?”

I checked my notes and read him the birth date.

He typed it in and we watched as the screen slowly filled with information. “Holy shit. This guy’s been around.”

Runnion scrolled the screen by slowly so we could follow the itemized arrests one by one. The top of the list was promising enough—a series of civil-unrest complaints dating back to the period I was interested in—but as the data marched on, my spirits began to sag. Year by year, with occasional gaps here and there, Robert Shattuck’s activities drove a wedge between the old skeleton I was tracing and the identity I’d hoped we’d pinned to it. Shattuck’s career of political disturbances petered out in the mid-1980s, but it was already clear to both of us that he and the man with the metal knee were not the same.

Runnion finally sat back in his chair with a sigh. “Well, that kills that theory. Let’s see what kind of intelligence we’ve got on him.”

He called up another file, and we read the opinions the Chicago Police Department had formed from its years-long relationship with Shattuck. It was a study in evolutionary radicalism, from peripheral involvement in mid-sixties protest marches, in which he was occasionally rounded up as part of an antiwar group, to more prominent roles within increasingly hard-core militant leftist cells suspected of far more than sit-ins and peace demonstrations. There was some jail time now and then, but the tone of the intelligence report made clear the frustration at never catching Shattuck at the kind of gunrunning and bomb manufacturing the police suspected him of.

And it was a frustration they would never get to satisfy. As with most of the rock-ribbed radicals of those days, Shattuck’s career eventually hit its inevitable downward curve, caving in to a nation’s growing disinterest, to the war petering out, and perhaps to the weariness of encroaching middle age. Like a storm reaching full cycle, Shattuck returned to the gentler forms of protest that had marked his early years, finally sliding altogether from the police department’s spotlight. The report listed a last known address, which I dutifully took down.

Runnion rubbed his eyes with both palms. “You notice the same thing I did?”

“No mention of Shilly or the hospital or anything criminal around the time of the operation.”

“Right. Of course, this isn’t the whole intelligence file—just a synopsis. We don’t put the nitty-gritty on the network, in case somebody ever breaks in. Later, maybe we can pull his file at Central and get some details, as well as double-check on Shilly.”

I nodded and pointed at the screen. “Could you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“See if you have the name Abraham Fuller in there.”

Runnion entered the name and waited for a response. He merely raised his eyebrows at the blinking NO ENTRY FOUND message.

“Thanks,” I muttered. “It was a long shot.”

He stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, and prepared to type again. “Okay. Let’s get into the archives and access the police log for that night.”

I watched him pecking away, a graceless typist but a master at getting what he wanted out of the machine, his keenness further fueled by the smell of something amiss. I sympathized with his pursuit, but I didn’t share his enthusiasm. Maybe the absence of a gunshot report and a visit to the hospital by a patrol unit that night did implicate the police. More likely, Shilly had simply agreed, maybe for a little extra on top, to run interference with the ER staff. I doubted the police had ever been called.

Runnion dropped his hands to his lap and straightened his back, sighing. “Guess I’ll have to go at it the hard way. There’s not enough in here to give me what I want—too far back. I need to find the actual dispatch transcripts to see if a unit was even sent to investigate. Incidentally, while I was at it, I did check to see if any big money scam went down that night.” He shook his head. “Nothin’—no banks, no armored cars, no illegal bookie joints—at least nothing we responded to, which probably amounts to about ten percent of all the shit that goes down in this town.”

He leaned forward and switched off the computer. “I guess we can give it a rest ’til tomorrow. You want to drop by my office in the morning, we can go over to city hall and get a home address and whatever other information there is on Kevin Shilly. See if we can shake him up a little.”

He led the way outside to his car so he could drive me back to where I’d left my rental. “We can work on Shattuck, too, assuming he’s still in the area, but I think Shilly’s our best bet. He put the knee in, after all, and he’s obviously not bragging about it for some reason.”

We drove north in easy traffic, catching the lights just right, heading up State Street at a steady clip toward the piled-up building blocks of downtown, whose streets—usually the informational garden for most cultivating detectives—were as barren to me as the asphalt they were made of.

I was disappointed. When Bob Shattuck’s criminal report had first flickered up on that computer screen, I’d felt the satisfaction of a hunt well conducted. I’d followed the evidence, had gone with my instincts, and had landed the prize—or so I’d thought.

Now I just had a surgeon who wasn’t talking, the name of a burned-out radical that had probably been borrowed for the occasion, and my still-nameless pile of bones back home.

I knew Runnion’s case load would soon be knocking at his conscience, especially once his own interest in all this had been satisfied. He’d still help me open a few bureaucratic doors, partially to be helpful and partially out of nostalgia, but the piles of paper on his desk were beckoning.

I needed to regain the steam I’d thought I had earlier, but my options were either limited or diplomatically risky. I’d either have to follow in Runnion’s wake, hoping to get lucky very soon, or I’d have to become more independent, a little less circumspect, and perhaps stimulate a few people’s interest. To start with, I wasn’t at all sure that going back to Shilly was the reasonable next step. I’d challenged him once, after all, and he’d outbluffed me fair and square. I didn’t see where harassing him would better my prospects. But Shattuck interested me. Assuming he hadn’t been at the hospital that night, I wanted to know why his name had been used.

“You going to turn in or sample a little of the nightlife?” Runnion asked, negotiating the thicker traffic of the bustling city’s heart, his face reflecting the garish colors of its neon life signs.

I hedged my response. “I might wander around a bit.”

I SAT IN MY CAR
for a good twenty minutes, watching the last known address of Robert Shattuck. It was an odd building, tall, bland, and gray, its first floor blatantly commercial—with a sandwich shop and a shoe-repair place, both closed now that it was long after hours—while its upper floors remained vaguer in purpose. Some windows were lit, most were not. It was hard to tell what the place was used for.

The neighborhood appeared similarly ambiguous. From my vantage point in the deserted parking lot across the street, I was conscious of emptiness and silence, despite the fact that I was within walking distance of where the Chicago River’s north, east, and south branches converge, right across the water from the famed Chicago Loop. None of that was readily apparent, however—the looming cliff-like mass of the darkened Merchandise Mart just behind me blocked all sights and sounds of anything lying beyond it.

Indeed, it was perhaps the stultifying influence of that one building, second only to the Pentagon in sheer mass, that affected the entire area around it. There were few people on the sidewalks, few cars passing by. Only the occasional rumbling of the elevated train around the corner disturbed what appeared to be the sole grave-still pocket in this otherwise teeming city.

I’d been waiting for signs of life either entering or leaving the building, if only to locate which of several unpromising candidates was the building’s front door. I was finally rewarded by a small, bent-over man coaxing a small dog on a leash, who briefly appeared under the streetlight near the middle of the building’s west wall before shambling off into the gloom.

I slowly got out of my car, looking around, sensitive to the echo that greeted my slammed door. I’d been expecting something entirely different after reading Shattuck’s rap sheet. Knowing nothing of the address at the time, I’d envisioned him as the only white holdout in a ghetto slum, true to his reformist soul; or, alternatively, in a not uncommon about-face, inhabiting the quintessential suburban home, complete with an aged Volvo bedecked with environmental bumper stickers. This austere gray huddling of faceless concrete walls, as hospitable as an abandoned factory, fit neither image and left me nothing to go on.

I crossed the dark, empty street, my eyes warily on the windows above me, and entered the side street into which the old man had stepped with his dog. Opposite the streetlight that had briefly caught him, almost flush with the cement wall, was a metal fire door, one of several I’d noticed. I turned the knob, expecting resistance, and instead stepped into a half-lit hallway, lined on one side with copper-colored mailboxes and blocked at the far end by a locked glass door with a speaker by its side.

I studied the rows of mailboxes, each one of which, under its keyhole, had a nameplate slot and a buzzer to gain admittance. Many of the boxes had no names, others were obviously businesses, their official cards substituting for hand-lettered nameplates, and the rest were presumably what I was after—apartments.

I had just located the name Shattuck in a red-ink scrawl when the front door opened behind me. I swung around to face the old man with the dog, startling him.

“Just me,” he said nervously. “Come on, Butch.”

The dog, as wide as it was long, reluctantly waddled into the lobby, looking around like some dispirited, overgrown, ancient rodent. Nevertheless, despite his anemic charisma, Butch was obviously a bolster to his master’s courage, who now nodded knowingly but mistakenly at the car keys I was inexplicably still holding in my hand, and commented, “No mail today, huh? Me, neither. Not even junk.”