The Skeleton's Knee (28 page)

“I didn’t feel there was any great risk.”

He looked like he’d bitten into something sour and muttered, “Not to you, maybe.” And then, more directly, he said, “Why? You were almost handed your plane ticket home yesterday.” Amazement had quickly yielded to irritation.

I pulled the hospital’s now creased and folded Social Services form from my pocket. “Because of this.”

He studied the form, chewing on his lip. “Christ, this is getting strange. So the man with the knee was an Outfit guy?”

“I don’t think so. Both Shattuck and Bonatto were very interested in what I had to say, but judging from the way they reacted—or pretended not to—I think that whoever had his knee repaired put down Shattuck and Salierno’s names to stick their noses in it.”

“In what?”

“I don’t know, but at some point the three of them shared something in common. The Social Services report was the mystery man’s way of flipping the finger at the other two.”

Runnion raised both bushy eyebrows high. “How did he know that report would ever surface again?”

I hadn’t actually thought any of this out in detail, but as the words came out, they began to gain credibility. “He didn’t, any more than any kid does when he throws a bottle into the ocean with a message in it. This guy, whoever he was, was about to disappear forever. It was a gesture, pure and simple—a last chance to write ‘Kilroy was here,’ or even ‘Up yours.’ It didn’t matter if no one saw it, because he did it for himself.”

“So maybe he ripped off Salierno back when and retired to Vermont with his collection of hundred-dollar bills?”

“Could be—there’re a lot of blanks to fill in.”

“Yeah, like where does Shattuck fit in.” Runnion was looking doubtful. “He couldn’t have been a button man for the Outfit; they hate people like him—they’re superconservative red-white-and-blue types, in a twisted kind of way.” He shifted suddenly in his chair and looked at me with a renewed keenness. “How did you get Bonatto to talk to you?”

“It turns out Tommy Salierno died—or more likely was declared dead—twenty-four hours after ‘Shattuck’s’ knee operation.”

Runnion’s brow furrowed. “I remember hearing about Tommy,” he said vaguely.

I pulled a copy I’d made of the article from my pocket and handed it over. He read it carefully, his brain obviously teeming with possibilities. “You think Tommy’s death was faked?”

“I think the time of death was faked. According to the papers, Tommy had a history of striking out on his own, of setting up operations independent of his father. Old man Salierno and his bunch might not have touched the likes of Shattuck with a ten-foot pole, but Tommy could have. He was always breaking convention, screwing things up in the process. If he’d been up to his ears in something with Shattuck and this other guy and gotten himself killed, it stands to reason that Salierno would try to tidy things up. He couldn’t hide his son’s death altogether, but he could make it look more presentable to his peers.”

Runnion was quiet for a long time, mulling it all over. Finally, he took off his glasses, rubbed the corner of one eye, and asked, “So you just drove up to Salierno’s front door and dropped all this in their lap, adding your face to the Chicago PD candid-camera collection in the process.”

I felt like a complete rube, not having thought of any potential police surveillance. “You have a team on Salierno?”

Runnion snorted. “You kidding? We have a whole division that does nothing but eat junk food and squint through camera lenses, all so a bunch of college boys back at headquarters can build files of how many times the don orders out pizza or goes to see his girlfriend. I worked there myself a few years back.” His voice trailed off.

I remembered his initial alarm when I’d told him of my visit to Salierno’s—his questioning my sanity. “And since you’re my babysitter, you’re now in deep shit, too,” I finished for him softly. I was both sympathetic and embarrassed that I’d repaid his kindnesses by threatening his livelihood, just a few months shy of retirement.

He just looked at me in silence. His expression, however, wasn’t disapproving or even distressed; it was merely thoughtful, which prompted me to ask, after a full minute of this, “Are you okay?”

A slow smile spread across his face, mystifying me. “You know what it’s like to hear yourself talk sometimes? When you’re thinking things that never would have crossed your mind just a couple of years back?”

I went with it, although I was no longer following him. “You mean you’re not in deep shit?”

“Deep enough—nothing terminal. I was just wondering how much that mattered.”

Something cathartic was happening here, something I was pretty sure I’d caused but didn’t understand. Runnion and I had been friendly enough from the start; we were similarly aged, with similar dispositions. We’d fit together casually without much effort. I sensed now, however, that our relationship was about to undergo a fundamental change.

“What’re your plans now?” he asked, seemingly out of the blue.

“I’m not sure you’ll like them. You may not even want to know.”

“Try me.”

“I was thinking of diving back into the newspaper morgues and digging up everything I could on Shattuck.”

“Why?” His tone was interested—unalarmed that I might be coming close to trespassing into the ongoing Shilly case.

“To see if I can identify some of his fellow travelers from the sixties. From what we know of him so far, he was part of a big crowd. I was hoping that through photo captions or feature articles I might be able to find a handful of people that I could chase down—people who knew him well enough to still be helpful.”

I was pretty certain of Runnion’s reaction, but he surprised me by simply nodding. “I might have a better idea,” he said, “one that’ll give us more information.”

He reached for his phone and for what appeared to be an inner-agency directory. “But first I better throw a little water on the flames.”

He dialed and asked for a name I didn’t catch. “Hi Walt; it’s Norm Runnion in Area 6. I just got something I thought you’d be interested in—in fact, your field boys’ll probably be bringing it in soon all hot and excited. It’s about Angelo Salierno. I’m babysitting some hick cop from Vermont…” Here he gave me a conspiratorial look. “Yeah, Vermont… He waltzed up to Salierno’s front door today and got an audience with Bonatto. Name’s Joe Gunther, lieutenant… Yeah, he’s chasing down some twenty-year-plus homicide from his side of the mountains. The point is, if I bring him in to talk to you guys, I don’t think you’ll get much—he’s not what you’d call too sophisticated—very suspicious of us city folk. Let me work on him for a couple of days, soften him up, and I’ll let you know what he’s up to, okay? Sure… No, it’s no problem; I’m stuck with him, anyway—might as well make it worthwhile… Yeah, okay. Bye.”

He hung up and smiled—half to himself, I thought. “That ought to hold ’em off for a while.”

“You make them sound like the Hounds from Hell.”

“Don’t laugh; I think they’ve been studying Outfit types for so long, they’ve started to act like ’em.”

“You used to work with them?”

He waved his hand. “Yeah, but a while back. There was less technology and more street work—it was more personal.”

He reached for his phone again.

“So who’s next?”

“Intelligence again, only now it’s to one of the good guys.” He paused, his hand still on the receiver. “There are almost thirteen thousand uniformed police officers in Chicago, not counting secretaries, janitors, and what have you.”

“That’s the size of Brattleboro,” I muttered, suitably impressed.

“Well, there you go. The trick is to make the system work for you, to set up your own channels. So, while the Outfit surveillance boys are happily thinking I’m slowly loosening your tongue, we’ll be digging through their own files: There is a certain charm to it, you got to admit.”

I listened to him set up a meeting with his Intelligence contact, remembering Leslie, the helpful computer operator at the University of Chicago, and all the people I’d met at the Cook County Building. Establishing contacts within a department and having a good stable of street snitches was almost a must among policemen, but Norm Runnion was obviously a master at it.

The question was, why was he sticking his neck out, lying to his own people and working behind their backs? Previously, I’d thought of him as a man at peace with himself, resigned to biding his time pushing papers until retirement. Now, all caution seemed thrown to the wind—which made me more concerned about the risks he was taking than he was.

He hung up and chuckled slightly. “Okay, time for a little subterfuge. Want to go for a ride?”

“Sure.” I stood up with him as he slipped into his jacket.

“This guy’s name is Miles Stoddard,” he told me as we made our way out to the parking lot. “He’s like a historian, or a librarian—been gathering information on gangs, cults, groups, and the Outfit for over fifteen years. It’s funny, in a way; I don’t think he’s ever seen any action, except maybe right when he was starting off. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been like a hermit, locked away with his files and records, but he knows everything about everybody. Pretty incredible.”

As I opened the car door, my eyes idly took in the commercial neighborhood around the police station. People were going about their business—loading up delivery vans, pushing grocery carts to their cars, entering and exiting the numerous stores. The only odd note was a large dark four-door sedan parked across West Belmont, with two men in the front. They weren’t looking in our direction; in fact, the one I could see best had eyes only for an attractive young woman walking up the sidewalk in a mini-skirt. His companion, half-obscured by the sun reflecting off the windshield, was reading a newspaper I could see propped up against the steering wheel.

“You coming?” Runnion asked.

I slid into the car next to him, saying nothing about the two men across the street. As we moved into traffic and pulled away, I looked back over my shoulder to see the young woman stopped by the side of the car, her hand resting on its roof, talking and laughing.

We headed south, passing through seamlessly abutting neighborhoods that by nature should have been separated by either miles or barbed-wire fencing. Teeming commercial streets festooned with Asiatic signs yielded to neighborhoods lined with BMWs, leafy trees, and decorous wooden town houses, which abruptly bordered scarred and barren combat zones dominated by grim cement housing projects.

“So what did you mean when you said it didn’t matter if all this got you in trouble?” I asked after some ten minutes of silence.

He took a long time before answering, his eyes sweeping the street ahead of him. I couldn’t decide if he was trying to choose the right words or merely wondering how much he should tell me. “When they yanked me out of Intelligence, where I’d been covering the Outfit, and put me in Area 6, we hadn’t won that war and we hadn’t lost it—I was just out of it. That really bugged me, after all I’d put into it. Those were the best years I’d ever had in the department, when I thought what I was doing really amounted to something.”

He turned to me suddenly, taking his eye briefly off the road. “When we first met, I thought you were a pretty good guy, not just goofing off on company time, and you gave me a chance to get out a little and catch some air—practice the craft a bit. But until this Salierno angle cropped up, I was pretty happy to just let you do your thing and watch you leave town… The sooner the better after Shilly got popped.”

He returned his attention to the road. “I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but this Salierno angle got me to thinking. I don’t know if we can do anything with what you got—the Outfit’s a tough nut to crack—but I wouldn’t mind trying one last time. It would give me a better feeling about calling it quits.”

There was a short pause before he added, “And it’d make me feel better about those assholes looking down their noses at me yesterday for letting you go haywire.”

He chuckled and nodded to himself.

“What about the fallout when we get caught?”

His smile merely broadened. “Humor me.”

· · ·

Miles Stoddard worked in the same building I’d visited upon my arrival in Chicago—police headquarters on South State Street. The only difference was that this time, instead of going upstairs to visit the brass, Runnion took me down to the uppermost of two basement levels.

Being under the same roof as the people who could ruin Runnion and chase me out of town made me a little uneasy—for Norm’s sake, if not mine. “What are Miles’s obligations to his bosses?” I asked diplomatically as we shared an otherwise empty elevator.

Runnion grinned ruefully. “Will he squeal on us? No—we go pretty far back, and we’ve covered for each other before. Besides, I don’t think we’re heading out on thin ice yet.”

I didn’t respond, which he took as encouragement to explain further. “The investigation of Shilly’s murder is being done in the here and now—neighbors are being interviewed, co-workers, relatives, friends, what have you. Shilly’s place will be taken apart inch by inch, and so will Shattuck’s. It’ll take ’em days before they start thinking of going further back in time, and if they get lucky and find Shattuck early, they won’t even do that. It’s the standard routine, especially when you’ve got as many homicides as we have every week, and it usually gets results. I don’t think we’ll bump into each other.”

We found Miles Stoddard in a room from bygone times—an anachronism in the age of the computer. It was long, low, windowless, lit by a variety of overhead fixtures, and stuffed with an odd assortment of shelves, bookcases, freestanding metal bracket units, and even boards on bricks—anything that could possibly be used to carry the reams of files, books, reports, and folders that lurked in untidy ranks on almost every horizontal surface. It made the University of Chicago’s medical archives look sterile by comparison. Just seeing how the pages tended to stick out messily from their manila restraints, I could tell this massive library was in constant use, not simply being preserved.

Like a shepherd in the midst of his silent, bedded flock, Stoddard was seated in the middle of the room at a battered old wooden desk, under a shaded lamp that hung from a wire from the gloom overhead.