The Skeleton's Knee (32 page)

I held a mug shot labeled “David Pendergast” in my hand, studying the handsome broad face—the square Hollywood chin, the straight, almost Greek nose, the clear, widely set pale eyes—trying to see in his features some hint of the skeletal remains I’d seen on Beverly Hillstrom’s autopsy table.

“Can I use your phone?” I asked.

Norm pushed it across to me and I dialed Vermont.

“Medical examiner’s office.”

“This is Lieutenant Joe Gunther calling from Chicago. Is Dr. Hillstrom available?”

The next voice was Hillstrom’s. “Chicago? What are you doing there?”

“I think I’ve got a name for your skeleton. What would you need to make it stick legally? And please don’t say X-rays.”

There was a long pause. “Do you have a photograph?”

I smiled, sensing victory in the air. “Yeah—head shot.”

“Is he grinning?”

The smile died. “Grinning? It’s a mug shot.”

“If we can get a picture of him with his teeth showing, we might be able to superimpose the photograph on a same-size X-ray of the skull and make a match, but we need the skeletal landmarks to lock in the alignment and the sizing of the superimposition—the bigger the grin, the better.”

I sighed. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“There is something else,” she added quickly before I could hang up. “If you can find some member of his family, see if you can get the location of his old dentist. His dental files might still be around.”

“I’ll give it a shot.”

I hung up and reached for the one sheet of paper we had on David Pendergast. He’d been booked just once in his political career—for civil disturbance, in 1967. The home address listed then had been torn down twelve years ago for a mall. All we had left was a birthplace: Marquette, Michigan.

The phone rang while I was reading, and Norm picked it up, muttered a few monosyllabic responses, and hung up, looking depressed. “That was Intelligence, wondering how I was faring in softening you up for an interview about Salierno.”

I looked at him carefully. “Any hints that they might have been tailing us this morning?”

“None—they’re either good poker players or it wasn’t them.”

“Leaving Bonatto and Shattuck.”

· · ·

Much later in the day, I was sitting in a de Havilland Otter—a boxy, rugged twin-engine commuter aircraft—headed for Marquette, in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. My departure had been delayed several hours, not through any fault of the airline but because Norm had orchestrated a “tailproof” way out of the city.

He had taken our chase on the expressway very seriously. On the off chance that our tail was still in place, he had outlined a detailed route for me to follow to the airport. I was to use several taxis, and to catch each one only after having ducked through a variety of specific buildings or alleyways. His hope was that even if I couldn’t shake a tail, I’d at least be able to spot one on my side trips from cab to cab. In the meantime, Norm checked me out of my motel and returned my rental car.

I followed his plan to the letter, but with mixed feelings. Despite what had happened to Shilly, I was still convinced that I personally ran little risk of harm. As I saw it, I was a bird dog for Bonatto and Shattuck both. They were depending on me to flush out the quarry—or information—whoever or whatever that might be; it wouldn’t benefit either one of them if they stopped me before I’d done the job.

The only problem was that my privileged position could change at any time, and for reasons I wouldn’t understand. For while my goals were to positively connect David Pendergast to the pile of bones in Hillstrom’s morgue, find out why and by whom he’d been buried in Abraham Fuller’s backyard, and to nail whoever it was who’d turned I-91 into a shooting gallery, Shattuck and Bonatto already knew most of that—or at least a hell of lot more than I did. That meant that at some point there was a real possibility I might uncover some fact, or somebody, which would mean far more to one of them than it would to me, at which point the rules would change—I could become superfluous, even disposable.

I stared out the plane’s window at the distant greenery below. The effort I’d expended so far and the guilt I carried for Shilly’s death were driving me as hard as my legal obligations. I wanted to know who had done what, and to whom, and why.

· · ·

Marquette lies along the southern shore of Lake Superior; with the town to one’s back, the watery vastness stretching out to the horizon is reminiscent of the bland blue oblivion that borders Chicago. But somehow, Superior is more threatening than Lake Michigan. Although calm upon my arrival, it felt wilder, colder, and ominous.

Marquette also is less oblivious to its neighbor than Chicago is to its. A far smaller town, it is more respectful of its lake, and more dependent upon it. Here there are few leisure boats and yachts, and more crafts of industry. The city’s history as a shipping center for ore and lumber is still strong in the low, dark, turn-of-the-century industrial architecture. It is not a beautiful place, nor an inspiring one, but it speaks much of effort and toil, and of endurance.

It was late afternoon when I landed at the small airport outside of town, so I took a cab directly to City Hall to see what luck I would have in chasing down anyone named Pendergast.

Forty minutes later, thanks to both the rarity of the name and the willingness of the various personnel who passed me from office to office with a familiar small-town eagerness to please, I ended up back on the sidewalk with the address of Lucius and Pamela Pendergast, deceased, parents of David, Susan, Elizabeth, and Megan.

The address was northeast of downtown, on a ridge of older buildings overlooking the deep-water port and the imposing, almost quarter-mile-long ore-loading dock to the south. It was a view at once muscular and utilitarian.

The house had been titled to Agnes and Bernard Nilsson in the mid-sixties. It was one of the older, more statuesque buildings on the street. But while built in a quasi-Victorian style of faded dark wood, it had exchanged whatever splendor it once had for a brooding, neglected, weather-stained misery. The paint was half gone, the roof haphazardly patched, the steps leading to the precarious porch rotten and sagging, and one of the bay windows was propped up on an endangered-looking sawhorse.

Still, it retained a grip on its former glory—the gap-toothed gingerbread, the fancy molding, the leaded windows and stained glass, the solid oak door with the heavy brass knocker—all bygone clarions to wealth and status and social propriety.

The woman who eventually opened that heavy door shared many of the same qualities. She was very old—white-haired, bent, skinny as a stick, supporting herself on two metal half crutches whose upper bands encircled her bony forearms. She was nevertheless bright-eyed, clear-spoken, and obviously in full control of her faculties.

“May I help you?” she asked.

I smiled instinctively at her lively face, as full of hopeful anticipation as her house was not. “Mrs. Nilsson? I’m Lieutenant Gunther, from Brattleboro, Vermont.” I showed her my credentials, which she peered at with great interest.

“All the way from Vermont. It must be very important.”

“We think so, but I don’t wish to alarm you. I’m here because this house once belonged to the Pendergasts. They’re the ones I’m actually interested in.”

She opened the door wider and motioned me inside. “That’s quite right. This was their house—their son, David, gave it to my husband and me many years ago.”

“Gave it to you?” I stepped into a large dark-walled foyer.

My hostess shuffled toward one of two glass inner doors leading off to opposite corners of the house, speaking over her shoulder. “That’s right. It was a gift. The most extraordinary thing. My husband and I worked for the Pendergasts. I was David’s nanny.”

She opened the door and led the way down a gloomy hallway to a huge living room at the far end. The air smelled sour—of cooking, mustiness, and decay.

“Where are his parents?”

“Long dead—thirty years or more. They died in a boating accident, right out there.” We had reached the living room—long, low, wood-paneled, and crammed with heavy, ornate overstuffed furniture, none of which looked like it had been touched in years. The entire place felt like an abandoned museum—left to rot in mildew under layers of fine dust. Through the dim bay windows, I could see the leaden mass of the lake, undulating ever so gently, like the belly of something fast asleep and inconceivably gigantic.

“So the children were left in your care?”

“Oh, no. Megan died as a young child, Beth has been institutionalized almost since birth, and Susan ran away to Alaska when she was fourteen and hasn’t been seen since. Only David was left by the time their parents died, and he was twenty-two and already in college.”

She was standing in the middle of the room, looking a little uneasy. I sensed she’d led me here for social reasons—to receive me properly—but that she actually spent so little time here, surrounded by all this musty, forgotten elegance, that she was now at a loss as to what to do next.

“And your husband has also passed away?”

She nodded, her eyes on the floor, where she’d left tracks in the dust across the rug.

I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Nilsson, I appreciate your showing me the view, and it’s a lovely room, but to be honest, I was wondering if we could sit in the kitchen or someplace a little less formal?”

She looked up then and smiled, patting my forearm. “Like a funeral parlor, isn’t it? I never liked it, even when the place was full of people. This was Colonel Pendergast’s room. Follow me.”

She took the lead once more, through another door, down another hallway, closer to the smell of cooking I’d noticed earlier. “What was he a colonel of?”

“Marines—retired.”

“He didn’t work?”

She pushed open a swinging door and the smell overtook us both—sauerkraut, cheap sausage, and overboiled potatoes, bathed in vinegar. But it was a familiar odor, and not unappealing.

“No. Mrs. Pendergast came from a wealthy family. Her parents built this house when she was very little. The Colonel ‘managed’ the money, although he obviously didn’t do it very well. The will consisted of this house and nothing else. Would you like to stay for supper?”

I stopped my visual inspection of the ancient, massive kitchen and stared at her back as she checked the pot on the World War II–vintage gas stove. Normally, I would have passed on such an invitation out of professional habit. But I was hungry, and she’d been open and cooperative from the start. I didn’t see any point in refusing.

“Thank you—only if you have enough.”

She smiled at me with those perfect yellow store-bought teeth. “I’ve got plenty. Sit down.” She motioned to the metal, enamel-topped table in the middle of the room.

I pulled out a chair and watched her as she puttered around the room, fetching bowls, glasses, and a limp plastic-wrapped log of white bread. She filled a bowl from the stovetop and placed it before me.

“It was nice of David to give you the house,” I said.

She laughed. “It only happened because he wanted to wash his hands of it. He didn’t remove a single item from it, either, not even his own things.”

“What was he like?”

“As a little boy, before the others were born, he could be wonderful. I often wished later I could have stolen him then and taken him away and given him the love and support he needed. I think he would have turned into a fine man. But I didn’t, and he didn’t, which I suppose was inevitable. It probably wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. Bernie used to say it was in the genes, and maybe he was right.”

“I take it David didn’t turn out to be a model citizen.”

She chuckled again. Despite her long-standing ties to the family, she obviously suffered from no sentimental delusions. “Oh, my goodness, no. He could charm you out of your socks, of course, and as a little boy, that was real. But after he grew up, it didn’t mean a thing. He became his father, in a way—a modern version. Just as cold and calculating and manipulative.”

“How did father and son get along?”

“They hated each other, but David was better at it than his father, and eventually he got the Colonel to think he loved him. That’s how David got the house, and why he didn’t want it later.”

She paused in her eating and placed her thin blue-veined hand to her cheek. “Bernie kept wanting us to leave—let them murder each other in peace, he’d say—but I couldn’t do it.”

“Where was David’s mother in all this?”

“Mrs. Pendergast stayed in her garden or in her own bedroom, listening to music and reading, barely speaking to anyone, taking her meals alone, always dressed in her Sunday best. For all intents and purposes, none of the rest of us existed for her.”

“Was David ever violent?”

She took a few bites before answering. “Yes, in a manipulative kind of way. He could get people to do nasty things. It got to be a problem at school.”

I was recalling the anthropologist’s description of the skeleton on Beverly Hillstrom’s autopsy table. “He was left-handed?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“With perfect teeth—no cavities?”

“No cavities, but he had a chipped front tooth from a football accident. He had it capped by the dentist so it looked like new, but he stopped playing after that.”

I remembered Hillstrom’s request. “Is the dentist still around?”

She shook her head several times. “Oh, Lord, no. He died years and years ago and the business closed.”

We had both finished eating by now. “Do you have any pictures of David?”

She rose slowly to her feet. “Come with me. I’ll show you what I’ve got. It isn’t much.”

We left the kitchen for a short back hallway and entered a tiny living room with a wooden chair facing a television set. An armchair sat in the corner near the window and the walls were lined with shelves stuffed with odds and ends—boxes, bundles, some books, lots of knickknacks.

“Sit there,” she ordered, pointing to the armchair. “I can’t use it, anyway.” She grinned suddenly. “Couldn’t get up if I did.”

I took my place and she began slowly checking the shelves, muttering to herself. She stopped at one point and warned me, “It’s not an album. None of them was very big on picture taking, but I do have a shot or two of David… If I could just find the right box.”