The Skeleton's Knee (24 page)

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.

He shuffled over to the glass door, inserted his key, and swung it open. “You comin’?”

I yielded to temptation, pocketed my own keys, and followed him in. “Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.”

“Probably just get bills,” he muttered, half to me and half to Butch.

I headed up the cement stairs to the upper floors as the old man kept on going down the dark hallway, until all I could hear of either of them was the shuffle of his shoes and the light clittering of Butch’s nails.

The number over Shattuck’s name had been 46, implying the fourth floor. I climbed slowly and quietly, but the crunching of the grit underfoot still reverberated off the hard, plain walls with the brittle harshness of a maximum-security prison. I had rarely been in a dwelling so utterly devoid of any soothing human touch. There wasn’t even any graffiti on the walls.

I still wasn’t sure why I’d taken the old man up on his offer to bypass the security system. My interest in Shattuck was purely informational—on the surface, at least. But there was something nagging me about all this, like a tune I couldn’t quite bring to mind. Chicago was to have been the place where the puzzle pieces would make sense—where the bones would be given a name, and their appearance in Vermont an explanation. Sitting out in that parking lot, waiting, I’d had time to question that notion. Shilly’s denial had nothing to do with some ethical misbehavior from the past. His reticence—perhaps his fear—had struck me as being as fresh as the shots that had perforated the hearse back in Brattleboro.

The bones, and the money, and the wound in Abraham Fuller’s back may all have had their birth in the late sixties, but none of them had stopped there. Indeed, they may have been only the beginning.

That was the thought that made me cautious now.

Shattuck’s door was at the end of the hallway. I listened for a few seconds, hoping again for some small insight into the man I was pursuing—the kind of music he liked, or the TV show he preferred to watch at this hour—but there was no sound. I knocked loudly and waited.

“Who is it?”

I started at the soft voice, from both its proximity and the fact that I’d heard no footsteps announcing its arrival. It was like a disembodied entity of its own, hanging at eye level on the other side of the door.

“Mr. Shattuck?”

“Who is it?” The tone hadn’t changed. It was still light, flat, and without noticeable interest.

“My name’s Gunther. I’ve come a long way to talk to you. From Vermont.”

“Why?”

I hesitated, not wanting to give him enough to turn me down before he’d even opened the door. “Can we do this face-to-face? It’s kind of a long story.”

The flatness was replaced by either suspicion or curiosity—I couldn’t tell which. “Who are you?” This was where suspicion would keep the door shut or curiosity would open it up.

“I’m a policeman.”

The door opened. “From Vermont? No kidding.” The man before me, only half-visible in the dim hallway light, was tall and thin, with a tangled gray beard and long hair tied back in a ponytail. He was wearing blue jeans and a faded T-shirt with FARM AID emblazoned across a stylized guitar. “Come in; watch your step—it’s a little dark.”

In fact, it was almost pitch-black, the only source of light being a single guttering candle planted in the middle of the floor ahead of me. Shattuck led the way, pointing to the vague outline of a pillow. “Have a seat. I was meditating.”

I lowered myself awkwardly to the floor, moving the pillow back a little so I could prop myself against the wall.

“So what’s going on in Vermont?” He was more of a ghost than a living being, with only the white highlights of his clothing and hair visible in the gloom. But his voice was now open and friendly, and while the lighting was unconventional, it was also curiously soothing.

“We found a skeleton that we’ve traced back to Chicago, and we just tagged your name to it.”

“My name? To a skeleton? Far out. How old a skeleton?”

“About twenty years—a little more. Do you—or did you ever—know anyone in Vermont?”

The shadowy head shook from side to side. “No—never even been there. I don’t understand, though—how did you connect my name to a bunch of bones?”

“Do you know a Dr. Shilly?” I asked instead.

“Shilly? Doesn’t ring a bell. What kind of doctor?”

“Orthopedic surgeon.”

“Bones again. No—never heard of him.”

“You were here in Chicago in the late sixties?”

“I’ve always been here—born and bred.”

“Pretty active in the protest movement and such?”

There was a pause, and I felt the genial atmosphere chill by several degrees. “I guess by that you’ve already seen my sheet. What’s your point?”

I tried to defuse the tension slightly with a friendlier approach. “Sorry, bad habit. I didn’t mean to give you the third degree. I really am just trying to put a name to this body. I did see your record, but that’s when I thought you were the skeleton. The implication was that you became quite radical—had maybe even become one of the leaders…”

His gentle laughter interrupted me. “Leaders? Not hardly. Look, I don’t know how you run things in ol’ Vermont, but here—especially back in those days—the cops were making paranoids look mellow. They saw a conspiracy every time two hippies shook hands. We didn’t have rank—we had beliefs. We worked together for a common cause—”

This time, I interrupted. “Yes, but not all those causes saw eye-to-eye. The Weathermen were hardly the peaceniks.”

Shattuck seemed to reflect on that for a moment. “And you want to know which one I was.” His voice became guarded. “What’s your interest?”

It wasn’t the ideal interview of a potentially hostile witness. Usually, I was pre-armed with facts that merely needed confirmation or clarification. Here, I was after raw data and didn’t know if the witness was hostile or not. It tended to throw most of the rules of interrogation right out the window.

I decided to backtrack a little. “This body—or what’s left of it—might have been involved in a fairly violent branch of the protest movement around here.”

I reached into my inside jacket pocket and pulled out one of the composite five-by-sevens I’d made of Abraham Fuller’s face, both as a corpse and with twenty years taken off it and the eyes airbrushed in, open and lifelike. “Does this man look familiar?”

Shattuck leaned far forward, holding the photo almost directly in the timid candle’s flame. He spent a long time studying it. “I thought you said he was a skeleton.”

“This is somebody else. Do you know him?”

He shook his head. “No. Are these two different shots? The one with the eyes open looks strange.”

“It’s been touched up to make him look younger.” Shattuck looked up at me, the candlelight making his eyes shine.

“So he just died? You never got to talk to him?”

I looked at him closely, interested by the precision of his last question. “You sure you don’t know him?”

He returned the photo and receded into the dark, his voice casual again. “Sure I’m sure; I was just a little confused by the chronology. I didn’t know you also had a fresh body on your hands. You think he’s connected to the skeleton?”

“You ever hear the name Abraham Fuller?”

He sounded more comfortable again. “Nope—sounds vaguely biblical. Was that his name?”

I switched tacks slightly. “You still keep in touch with anyone from the old days?”

“A few—not many. A lot’s changed.”

“Bobby Seale in a three-piece suit?”

I could almost see the rueful smile—and I could hear it in his voice. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Could you give me the name of anyone else who might be able to help me out?”

He shifted his weight, recrossing his legs. “I don’t know; giving references to cops isn’t a great way to keep friends in this group.”

“It’s all ancient history,” I lied.

He caught that immediately. “That’s not what that photograph says.”

“The only thing he did recently was die.”

“Of natural causes?”

I stood up, ready to leave, knowing I’d gotten all I would get and that Shattuck was now trying to turn the tables. “Natural to him, I think.”

“
WHAT WAS HE LIKE?
” Runnion asked as we waited for the crosswalk signal to staunch the early-morning downtown traffic.

I’d been thinking about Shattuck half the night, lying in bed, listening to the sounds of the unfamiliar city around me. “Seemingly a pleasant, slightly off-the-wall retired peace protester—just as advertised in your files.”

Runnion looked at me with a smile. “Seemingly?”

“Call it my own paranoia, but I was pretty sure he knew more than he was letting on. When I showed him Abraham Fuller’s photograph, I felt like I’d handed him a gold coin—not that he showed it much.”

Runnion was unimpressed. “Oh, hell, that happens sometimes. Maybe something’ll come of it.”

We were standing across from Chicago’s City Hall and Cook County Building, a heavy, squared-off, flat-roofed monster. With an army of six-story-tall pale stone Corinthian columns on the outside and turn-of-the-century metal-encased windows peeking out in between them, the whole structure looked like a hundred-year-old office building that had been swallowed up by an ancient Greek temple.

We crossed Randolph Street and walked through the building’s north entrance, taking the stairs down from the first floor’s vaulted grandeur to the conventional modern basement below. Runnion pushed through a pair of glass double doors marked
COUNTY CLERK BUREAU OF VITAL STATISTICS—BIRTH, MARRIAGE, DEATH
. Ignoring the rows of plastic chairs in the waiting area, already half-f of depressed-looking people, he waved to a heavyset black woman sitting at a desk beyond the counter clerks.

She gave him a small smile, which I took as a form of professional supervisory reserve, and met him at the far end of the counter, where her enthusiasm rose more clearly, albeit quietly, to the surface. “Hey, Norman. What you been up to?”

“Hi, Flo. Not much—waiting for the pension. This is a friend of mine—Joe Gunther—lieutenant from Vermont.”

Flo’s eyes widened. “Vermont? Long way from home.”

I shook hands with her. “Don’t I know it.”

She smiled broadly, then shifted her attention to Runnion. “So, what’s on your mind, Norman? Who do you want the goods on?”

Runnion slipped her a piece of paper with Kevin Shilly’s name on it. “He’s white, rich, and uncooperative.”

She laughed and took the paper with her, disappearing through a door behind the desks.

Runnion pushed himself away from the counter, heading back toward the door. “That’ll take her a few minutes; let’s see what else we can dig up.”

He turned right out the door and headed down the hall to a distant door marked
MARRIAGE BUREAU, NOTARY & BUSINESS REGISTRATION
. “Maybe we can get something on his practice.”

His request for information at the Business Registration desk roughly mirrored his chat with Flo, as did similar requests upstairs at the county treasurer’s office, the county assessor’s office, and a number of other places throughout the building. At every stop, he had a friendly acquaintance, an exchange of pleasantries, and parted with another person digging on our behalf. At the end of the tour, he returned to Flo’s counter to collect what she’d discovered, then continued to each office in turn, reaping what he’d sowed.

We were back on the sidewalk some two hours later, clutching a fistful of copied documents. “Let’s get some coffee and look this stuff over.”

There was a doughnut shop nearby, narrow and long, almost empty during the mid-morning lull. We took a booth at the very back.

“So how did you build up all those contacts?” I asked as we doctored our coffee. “That can’t be typical of every cop in this town.”

He grinned, pleased that I’d recognized his prowess. “Took me years. Even so, I’m not sure I could have done it anywhere else. I visited New York once, on assignment like you, and was led through their version of the paper chase. Lasted forever. Amazing number of cranky people. Chicago’s a whole lot friendlier.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “Takes work, of course. I get to know these people, their families. I help ’em out when I can—keep them up to date on friends or relatives in jail. I buy ’em presents sometimes, or spring for a meal. Mostly, I make myself available. I become their own private policeman—the guy who can cut through the red tape. It’s a ‘you help me, I help you’ kind of thing.”

He pushed his cup to one side and began laying out his treasure on the table between us. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

What we had was a fairly complete portrait of the capitalist system at its most rewarding: a luxury apartment in a glistening tower overlooking the lake; a yacht; a Mercedes-Benz and an Alfa-Romeo; a wife born of one of the city’s prominent families; two boys now in exclusive prep schools; and a cumulative estate assessed by the county at about $5 million.

Whatever it was Kevin Shilly was hiding, it was pretty obvious what the stakes were. I hoped I could use that to my advantage when I went to pay him a second call.

· · ·

I entered Shilly’s office building off Michigan Avenue and waved to the security guard who’d helped me the day before. He returned the salute and added, “He’s not in.”

I hesitated, and the guard added, “Never showed this morning.” I thanked him and headed for the elevator bank. Maybe Giovanna knew what was up.

I was without Runnion by now, who’d begun to feel the gravitational pull of his paperwork. He was still chewing over the mysteriously absent gunshot report—he’d found no mention of it anywhere in the files. His assumption now was that the hospital had never called it in, and agreed with me that Shilly had probably run interference. That was one question he’d asked me to add to my own list.

Giovanna was distinctly less delighted to see me. “He’s not here,” she said as I crossed the threshold.

“So I gather. Off playing golf?”

“He doesn’t play golf.” She looked as immaculate as before, in a different suit this time, wearing a silky-looking blue blouse with an enormous droopy bow that hung down the front. Her expression, however, wore more than just her displeasure with me.