The Skeleton's Knee (18 page)

“Yeah, early ’69.”

“Would that mean that the knee was put in around the same time? Or can things like that sit on the shelf for a long time?”

“Beats me. You may have to go to Chicago to find that out.”

I FOUND TONY BRANDT
where his secretary said he would be, sitting alone on the glassed-in second-floor balcony of the Common Ground Restaurant, overlooking Elliot Street. It was just after 4:30 in the afternoon, and the place was officially closed, except for the odd tea drinker who could serve himself from a side counter lined with a wide variety of leaf-filled jars. The Common Ground was a perfectly preserved throwback to the 1960s, serving a full line of Indian-influenced vegetarian meals sporting strange names and sometimes stranger appearances. It was an unusual place for a cop—which partially explained Brandt’s presence. He was rarely one to do the expected.

He was sitting at a small corner table, where he could watch the street below, holding a mug in both hands, just below his chin, so he could fully catch the aroma. “Hi, Joe,” he said without surprise.

I pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down. “Hi, yourself. What’re you drinking?”

He glanced down at the mug. “Don’t know. The label was too long to read; tastes good, though. How was Burlington?”

“I think it’s given me the only strong lead we’ve got.”

“Will it give us last night’s shooter?”

“Maybe, in a roundabout way.”

“How roundabout?” His eyes were still on the street, which I could see reflected in his rimless glasses.

“Chicago in the late sixties.”

He looked at me and smiled thinly. “Time travel? They’ll love the voucher on that one.”

He finally put the cup down and sat back in his chair, his arms crossed. “All right, give me the guided tour.”

“Fred Coyner’s wife died in 1970, after her cancer wiped out the family finances.”

Brandt nodded, having read the updated reports.

“But right after her death, Coyner settled all his debts, from what we can tell, just about the time Abraham Fuller set up camp in his back forty. Considering the amount of money we found at Fuller’s, it seems likely he paid off Coyner to hide him. I think that’s what Fuller meant when he accused Coyner of a ‘breach of faith’ for calling the ambulance.”

“All right.”

“There are more people involved in this than just Fuller, as our little encounter with the machine gunner made clear…”

Brandt shook his head. “Hold it; couldn’t that have been Coyner? Didn’t you think he’d taken the chart?”

“Yes, yes, but bear with me, okay? There are a lot of coincidences involving 1969 that go well beyond Coyner. Coyner, after all, we can account for up to 1970. The money in Fuller’s possession, thanks to the bank bands, can be dated back to ’69, and so can the artificial knee. Hillstrom and her anthropologist pal swear the guy wearing it died within a few months of the operation. Also, the ammunition used in the ambush last night was made in 1967, and while Hillstrom can’t swear that Fuller’s original wound is older than five years, she did say that, based on her experience, she’d guess it was much older. Long story short, an amazing amount of shit was hitting the fan back then, and I don’t think Fred Coyner played a bigger role than landlord in any of it.”

Brandt merely shrugged.

I leaned forward. “All right. Why would Coyner steal the chart? It’s not his—the birth date is all wrong—and the astrologer I consulted pegged the chart owner as a neurotic loner, and maybe a homosexual male. Coyner was married for decades and almost flipped out when his wife died. If the chart was Fuller’s, which does sound more likely, it still makes no sense, ’cause he’s already dead and there’d be no point stealing it, unless, of course, it either meant a great deal to somebody—like a grieving lover, maybe—or it implicated someone.

“In any case, all three of those possibilities point to a missing person—the same person Fuller left a message for when he circled the title of
The Scarlet Letter
with blood from his fingertip.”

“All right,” Brandt conceded, “maybe there is a missing player; why Chicago?”

“I just came from the office. So far there’s been no feedback on the bank notes, or on Fuller’s face and prints, or on any unsolved twenty-year-old shootings. Nor have we found any medical facility or doctor who admits treating a wound like Fuller’s back then. On the prints, we haven’t heard from the FBI officially yet, but I called a contact there, and he told me to forget it. And the Secret Service came up blank on the money—as far as they’re concerned, it’s clean.

“Now, Richard Schimke—he’s the money expert I talked to at the bank—says those hundred-dollar bills came from the West and the Midwest, not from around here, and we confirmed that with the Secret Service. Finally, I traced that skeleton’s metal knee to a company called Articu-Tech, which sold three like it in the Chicago area in 1969. It seems reasonable to me that at least some of the answers to this case are out there. It was pretty obvious that whoever took those shots at us last night wanted to destroy the skeleton; I think it’s because he was afraid the knee would point us to Chicago. If nothing else, I ought to be able to come up with an I.D. for the guy in the grave.”

Brandt thought all that over for a few moments, gently sliding his cup back and forth on the table before him. “What about the search for the shooter?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. Kunkle’s the best on that kind of digging, and he warned us to expect little or less. He says there aren’t even ripples out on the street—his contacts are as curious as we are about it.”

Brandt made a face, rose to his feet, and began heading for the door. “Okay, you got it—one trip to Chicago. I’ll give you a week to match that kneecap to a name.”

· · ·

Gail rested against the headboard of my bed, sitting cross-legged on both pillows, watching me as I packed. “Chicago. I’ve always wanted to go there. It’s supposed to be wonderful.”

“I doubt I’ll get to enjoy the highlights. With my luck, I’ll be stuck pawing through hospital medical records.”

“I wish we could go together.” Her voice was soft and wistful.

I paused to squeeze her foot. “I’ll keep my eye peeled for hot spots. If it looks like a fun town, maybe we could go there on vacation sometime.”

She smiled doubtfully and changed the subject, knowing from experience it never led anywhere. A small-town boy with a penchant for confusing work with pleasure, I didn’t yearn for time off, nor did I feel comfortable far from home. It was a provincialism she often worked to erode, although not this time. “What ever happened with Billie? You never told me.”

I made a disappointed face. “Not much. Apparently, a chart reveals more when you can compare it to the owner. She did spend a lot of time on it, though, especially tracing the birth date, but all I got was that we’re looking for a screwed-up gay loner who was abused as a child by a mother he hated.”

Gail looked startled, so I quickly covered for her friend. “I admit, I coerced most of that out of her. I got her to say she’d seen the same kind of thing with a gay client of hers. She stressed you couldn’t do that, but I was getting frustrated. To be honest, I think she was as glad to see the back of me as I was to give up on that chart.”

She was obviously disappointed. “Do you still have it?”

Somewhat sheepishly, I pulled a folder out from the bottom of my suitcase and flipped it open. “Yeah. I thought I’d take it with me just in case. Maybe it was done out there.” I located the colorful document and handed it to her.

She looked at it thoughtfully. “It is a stressful chart. You know, she’s been at it a long time. Just because you were pushy doesn’t mean you forced her to say things she didn’t partly believe. Do you have a copy of this?”

“That is a copy. I had Harriet run off several color copies across the street, just in case I had to spread them around. Keep that one if you like.”

“Thanks. Maybe I’ll hit the books while you’re gone. I love doing these things.”

I smiled at her enthusiasm, and at her ability to pull herself out of the blues. I leaned over and kissed her. “Don’t stop reading travel brochures.”

I NEVER REALIZED HOW BIG
Lake Michigan was until the plane’s lowering wheels shook me awake. I instinctively glanced out the window. All I could see, clear to the razor-sharp horizon, was water.

The shoreline, when it did come into view, was verdant, well tended, and littered with golf courses—hardly the image I’d harbored of Carl Sandburg’s famed “City of the Big Shoulders,” which a glance out the opposite windows would have revealed stretching out to the south.

All of it quickly vanished, however, replaced by O’Hare’s black-streaked pale runway shooting into view. Now the horizon consisted solely of chain-link fences, parking lots, and commercial buildings with bland fronts. There was no longer a tree in sight, nor an unsullied blade of grass.

The plane’s approach, made over Chicago’s affluent northern suburbs, slipped from me, half-remembered, leaving only wonder and a twinge of homesickness—this was as different from Vermont as I could imagine.

It was hard shrugging off an otherworldly sense as I drove along the interstate toward the center of town. The unusual flatness of my surroundings made the approaching city center, spiraling up toward the distant sky, seem unreal, like some gargantuan glass and metal stalagmite around which everything revolved. The Sears Tower, with its dramatically overbuilt twin antennae, was the aspiring apex, encircled by a fawning group of increasingly stunted attendants, each supported by its slightly shorter neighbor until the outer ring faded into the horizontal landscape. It was an heroic image—bold, thrusting, heaven-bound and new—but at the same time strangely futile, encased as it was by that impassive, impenetrable, dismissively vast blue sky.

The sensation didn’t last. The expressway came within reach and then broke free of downtown’s gravitational pull, continuing south and away, eventually letting me peel off onto the side streets near South State, where the Chicago Police Department had its headquarters.

Here was a different environment entirely. Just beyond the city’s grandiose and gaudy downtown, but several miles outside the reach of the old, abandoned stockyards and the notorious high-rise projects to the south, the police department held sway over a borderline demilitarized zone that appeared neither blighted nor truly viable. Whole buildings stood empty, their windows intact but blank, their smeared brick walls touting hand-painted advertisements of companies thirty years out of business. A rusted elevated railway roared and rattled with the rhythmic passing of commuter trains heading elsewhere. And yet there was some commerce—parking lots, a few small shops, a tired motel here and there—leftovers from what had obviously once been a much more muscular, healthy, but now-forgotten, section of town.

I parked my car on the wide, lightly traveled street and walked up the sidewalk toward my destination. The police headquarters building was a curious reflection of its surroundings. Its street-facing facade was a smooth, almost sleek, pale cement slab, regularly punctured by severe rectangular windows, looking like one of those old computer punch cards standing up on end. The rest of the building—most of its sides and its back—was old white-painted brick, bristling with air conditioners and a rusty fire escape zigzagging down to the parking lot. It was incongruous in appearance—half a face-lift—and made me wonder whether, like the neighborhood, the building was coming or going.

As I stood across the street, waiting for a bus to pass, I was struck not only by the number of assertive-looking, cheaply dressed men who were using the front door but also by the number of parked cars that had that familiar lived-in look about them—paperbacks and windbreakers or hats on the rear seat, styrofoam cups, sunglasses, and mashed cigarette packs littering the dashboards and floors. They looked like what they were: places where people sat for hours on end, observing, waiting, struggling to keep awake, as worn and familiar as the offices I was about to visit. It was like having my own provincial policeman’s experience expanded and multiplied a hundredfold. It reminded me with a jolt just how enormous the contrast was between my own department and Chicago’s, and yet how deep the similarities ran.

The lobby reminded me of the airport—barren, harsh, with signs and arrows, a uniformed officer at an information booth, and to his right, a roped-off area corralling people through two metal detectors. There was an instant feeling of hostility and paranoia in the air.

I went to the patrolman in the booth and introduced myself, mentioning that I was supposed to meet with Chief of Detectives Donahue.

The cop stared at my shield and identity card as if they were poor forgeries, his wrinkled, vein-mapped face impassive. “Donahue, huh?”

“That’s what I was told. My chief made the arrangements.”

Finally, he handed back the ID, grinning. “Okay. Straight to the back, through those double glass doors. Didn’t know they had cops in Vermont. You ski?”

“No,” I lied, “I just shovel the stuff.”

It hadn’t been unfriendly, but it also hadn’t been the fraternal embrace I’d hoped for in my heart. Of course, the man had been an older patrolman, set in his prejudices against detectives, no doubt, and he was part of a police force that had more cops in it than the entire state of Vermont. Still, it was a bit of a dampener, a reminder that a single Brattleboro policeman chasing down a twenty-year-old lead was not going to move anyone here to the edge of their chair.

I paused by the detector, uncertain whether to wait docilely in line or to flash my badge and go through the opening that was obviously reserved for cops.

The man ahead of me was a tourist, camera in hand, asking about public tours of the police department. The uniformed man opposite him, younger and more jovial than the one in the booth, shook his head. “Wouldn’t know nothin’ about it. Talk to PR, but you can’t take the camera in.”

The visitor stared at the camera, a small Instamatic. “Okay. Can I leave it with you while I ask?”