Butcher's Road (14 page)

At the end of the hall he found Musante’s pitiful bedroom. A short, narrow cot had been shoved into a corner and an old whiskey barrel stood beside it, a candle melted to the nub at the center of the drum. Lennon walked farther into the room, playing his light over the dirty window. The beam reflected back, and for a moment the sight of his own pale face on the glass startled him. His head began to feel light, and Lennon knew he shouldn’t be spending so much time on his feet, but he had no intention of taking his rest in Lonnie Musante’s bedroom.

A rap sounded in the front of the house, quickly followed by another and another: footsteps. Lennon turned away from the window and snapped off his flashlight. He drew his service revolver and moved quietly to the doorway where he listened to the sounds at the end of the hall. Whispers cut the frigid air like crackling static. He made out two voices, but he couldn’t understand the conversation. The syllables were curt and delivered in breathy monotone, dying when they hit his ear rather than forming coherent phrases.

Lennon urged his eyes to adjust to the gloom flooding the hall as the voices and the echoes of footsteps worked their way down the corridor. His heart tripped rapidly. His palms sweated. When he felt certain the men were only a few steps away, Lennon lunged forward, thumbing on the flashlight.

But his light’s beam fell on empty air. Confused, Lennon stepped back.

“Come out now, Mr. Police-man,” a deep, dry voice called. “We’re in the living room.”

“Identify yourself,” Lennon called.

“Our names would mean nothing to you.”

“This is a crime scene,” he shouted. “You’re trespassing.”

“Yes, we are,” the man agreed. Distance and the drumbeat pulse filling Lennon’s ears deadened the voice.

“What do you want?” he called. At the end of the hall just inside the archway opening onto the living room, Lennon paused and adjusted his grip on the gun. “Were you friends of Musante’s?”

“Not in the least. But we are in some ways family. We came to pay our respects.”

“They have funerals for that.”

Lennon peered around the corner and saw a man sitting on the sofa. His body was a smudge of darkness atop the shadowed furniture and his face stained the gloom like a pale thumbprint. Lennon couldn’t tell whether the man was armed, nor did he see anyone else in the room, though he’d heard two separate voices and two sets of footsteps.

“Where’s your buddy?” Lennon asked.

“He’s seeing to—” An ugly lamp, like a dead sapling in the corner, burst on, momentarily shocking Lennon’s eyes. “He’s seeing to
that
, Mr. Police-man,” said the man on the sofa, pointing over his shoulder at the lamp.

“Stand up,” Lennon said, “and keep your hands in sight.”

The man shrugged. With his salt-and-pepper hair and thick neck, he reminded Lennon of his father-in-law, but Edie’s dad had never worn such intensity in his eyes.

“I’m unarmed,” the man said.

“Heard that one before,” Lennon said. “Come on, stand up.”

The man worked himself forward on the sofa cushion. Once standing he held himself tall and straight. His presence seemed to suck the air from the room, leaving Lennon in a frigid vacuum.

“My name is Hayes,” the man said.

“Pleased,” Lennon said, sarcastically. He threw glances around the room, checking the dining room on his right and the bit of kitchen he could see beyond. “Is your friend in the basement?”

“No,” Hayes said.

An arm wrapped around Lennon’s neck, throwing off his aim. He fired the gun, but the shot went wide. Then a glimmer of metal passed near his chin, and the warm blade of a long knife came to rest against his throat. Simultaneously, a sharp pain flared at his shoulder; it drove in deep and his hand spasmed. He dropped the gun. It landed with a
thud
on the carpet. His mind scrambled even as his legs began to turn soft and unstable beneath him. He grasped at his wounded arm and felt a long, oval piece of metal attached to his jacket.

“Leave it,” the man behind him said. His breath stank of meat and onions.

“No one has to die here, Detective Lennon.” Hayes said, his voice rich and commanding. “We have questions. You’ll give us answers.”

A strong palm planted itself in the middle of his back, guiding him toward the sofa. The knife pulled away from his throat and Brand shoved him hard. Lennon stumbled. He nearly righted himself but his shins crashed against the front of the sofa and he toppled onto the cushions. Quickly, he rolled onto his back.

Brand moved fast, climbing onto the sofa, keeping his knife close to Lennon’s face. The burly little man straddled Lennon’s waist and sneered down at him. He wore a sleeveless undershirt beneath a leather butcher’s apron. Muscles bulged along his right arm and shoulder, but his left arm was shriveled in comparison. The knobs of his wrist and elbow rose like welts on the scrawny appendage. A copper coil wrapped the arm. In his hand Brand held a fat-bladed knife. Lennon had never seen anything like the weapon, curved and ornate, with what appeared to be gears in and among three arced blades and polished like a brand new dime.

“Mr. Brand,” the man who’d called himself Hayes said, “is the pin secure?”

The man reached out and grasped Lennon’s arm tightly, pressing the piece of metal deeper into the meat of his shoulder. Lennon winced and ground his teeth against the pain.

“It is, Mr. Hayes.” Brand leaned back, but kept the point of his knife near Lennon’s chin.

“You’ll tell us the truth, now, Detective Lennon,” said Hayes. He leaned in, his chin hovering above his colleague’s shoulder. “If you don’t, your experience will be thoroughly unpleasant.”

“What do you want?”

“You aren’t our enemy, Detective Lennon,” Mr. Hayes said.

“I guess the knife at my throat confused me.”

“We’ve encountered a number of aggressive men recently, and it seems violence is the only logic that resonates with them, except perhaps greed.”

“Human nature,” Lennon muttered.

“Yes, Detective Lennon, the nature of some. Why are you here tonight?”

“To remember,” Lennon said before he could even consider his answer.

“The night of Mr. Musante’s murder?”

“Yes.”

“And have you remembered?”

“No.”

Pain erupted in his arm as if the metal piece there injected pure agony into his veins. Lennon squeezed his eyes closed and bellowed. The suffering spread across his chest and back as if he were being submerged in acid. His body went rigid. He couldn’t breathe, and the searing misery blossomed across the back of his head before it vanished completely.

“You remember nothing at all?” Hayes asked, appearing to have been saddened by Lennon’s torture. His buddy, Brand, just looked amused.

“Nothing I can be certain of,” Lennon said, speaking slowly, ready to stop himself should the pain reappear.

“What do you
think
you remember?”

“I tried to stop him,” Lennon said. “My partner. I argued with Curt, because I thought he was doing something stupid, but I don’t know what.”

“What about the wrestler?” Hayes asked. “Do you know where Mr. Cardinal is currently?”

“No.”

“As we understand it, he took something valuable from Mr. Musante.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Lennon said, wincing. Even though he was telling the truth, he felt certain the agony would return if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

“Or perhaps you took the item yourself?”

“What item?” Lennon asked. “I was knocked cold about two seconds after I opened the door that night. Then I woke up in the hospital. What was taken?”

“It’s not your concern, Detective Lennon. Do you have any notions about where Mr. Cardinal might be now?”

“South.”

“Why south?” Hayes asked, cocking his head to the side.

“It’s where I’d go,” Lennon replied. “He couldn’t get his money out of the bank, and if he has any friends, we couldn’t find them. He won’t freeze to death in the south, and the states down there keep things close to the vest. They don’t trust northerners, so he could set himself up with a new name and live out the rest of his life and nobody would blink. Alabama might as well be Timbuktu.”

“Why did you mention Alabama?”

“I have family there. It was just an example. What did you do to me?”

“As long as you tell the truth, it shouldn’t concern you.”

“It hurts.”

“Did you know Mr. Musante before coming to this house, Mr. Lennon?”

“Detective
Lennon.”

“My apologies, Detective. Did you know him?”

“No.”

“Do you work for the Italians or the Irish?” Brand asked.

“I work for the City of Chicago. I don’t—”

Again the agony spread across his body like a pool of acid. Lennon screamed into the faces of his captors, neither of whom did so much as blink.

“Detective Lennon,” Hayes said.

“The Italians.” After he’d said the words, the pain receded. What had they attached to him? How could it know fact from fraud?

“Do they pay you well?” Hayes wanted to know.

“Yes.”

“Do they pay you well enough to die for them?”

“No.”

“And your family? Do the Italians pay you enough to put the necks of your family under Mr. Brand’s knife?”

A gray fog of panic settled over him. He pictured Bette and Gwen playing on the stoop of their house, marching dolls across the living room floor, kneeling besides their beds and saying their prayers wearing matching sleeping gowns and slippers. He saw their laughing faces over the dinner table, remembered them chasing gulls on the lake shore. Then he pictured Edie’s face, and she looked at him with disappointment—such a familiar expression.

“You haven’t answered me,” Hayes said. “Do the Italians pay you enough—”

“No,” he barked.

“Very well,” Mr. Hayes said, “we’re going to take your identification, Detective Lennon. It will have your home address on it. You know what that means, yes?”

“I’ll kill you if you go near my family.”

“Well, we’ll hope it doesn’t come to that,” Hayes said.

Brand shook his head as if in wonder of an idiot.

“We’re done, Mr. Brand,” Hayes said. He placed a hand on the muscular shoulder of his accomplice. “He knows nothing about what happened here or why it happened.” Hayes turned his eyes back to Lennon. “Thank you, Detective. Perhaps one day we’ll meet under kinder circumstances.”

Brand reached out and yanked the metal pin from Lennon’s shoulder. He flipped it in the air like a coin and slid it smoothly into the pocket of his leather apron. Then Brand hopped off the sofa and followed Hayes from the house, leaving Lennon stunned, ashamed, and intensely frightened. He rolled off the couch and struggled to his feet. He was in such a hurry to reach his car, he didn’t bother closing Lonnie Musante’s front door behind him.

Rabin sat in his car, staring at Ripper’s Gym from half a block away. The neighborhood was typical. Drab. Low brick apartment buildings hovering over dismal retail spaces, a full third of which were empty, their windows soaped with instructions for prospective renters. Rusted ladders and steel grate platforms clutched the filthy exteriors like metallic insects. On the corner a boy with oddly sized features—ears and nose too large, barely enough chin to support his lower lip—hawked newspapers and occasionally blew warm breath into his palms. Rabin sipped from his thermos cup, having replenished his coffee at a diner down the street. Though he hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours, he didn’t feel fatigued. He was somewhat disappointed because he had not been able to visit his wife, but Irene had always understood about his job, even if she didn’t know exactly what it was her husband did for a living. She’d taken him at his word when he’d told her that he worked for the city as a hog inspector, and since she rarely asked about the details of his day, the lie had been easy to maintain.

The police’s failure to capture Butch Cardinal came as little surprise to Rabin. The authorities in this city had gotten lazy, so used to having their jobs done for them by the men they’d been hired to pursue. A few roadblocks and some dim-witted ox at the train station wouldn’t be enough to catch a gaggle of nuns in full habit. Cardinal’s file had revealed no personal connections, save for a sister named Clara who lived in Pennsylvania. Rabin already had that address, if he needed to use it. Otherwise the dossier had been useless, with one exception: the gym. He wasn’t surprised a detective like Conrad would dismiss such a thing. A typical Chicago cop, though certainly not Conrad, might lift weights or skip rope in the gloomy basement of the police station, but few of them had any genuine commitment to physical fitness. To them, a gym was a place of annoyance and chore, but to an athlete like Butch Cardinal it would be as warm and comforting as a mother’s lap. Likely the police had spoken with Rory Sullivan, the gym’s owner, questioning him as they would any other acquaintance of Cardinal’s, never understanding the deeper connection.