The Skeleton's Knee (33 page)

“You wouldn’t have one of him grinning, would you?”

She paused in her excavation and looked down at me, her face quizzical. “Why would you want that?”

It would have been perfectly all right to tell her the truth. There was nothing confidential about the skeleton we’d found back in Vermont, but somehow I felt it would have been grossly inappropriate—even gratuitous—to do so. The fact that she hadn’t asked a single question about why I was here indicated to me that despite her seeming flat-footedness, Agnes Nilsson had been as much a victim of this disastrous family as any one of its members, perhaps more so, since she had chosen to remain in its midst, even over her husband’s objections.

So I shrugged at her question and responded lightly, “Pictures of people grinning are usually more helpful. The face looks more animated, more like what people are used to.”

She nodded, as if that made perfect sense to her. “I think I have a couple of him at a fair we had here. I can’t remember if he’s smiling or not…”

Suddenly, she looked up. “Of course. There’s a perfect shot of him in his college yearbook.” She handed a shoebox to me and rose to attack the shelves once more.

I cradled the box on my lap and began flipping through the slim collection, catching glimpses of landscapes and pets and Bernie and small sailboats. I found the half-dozen taken at the fair and scrutinized them, trying to locate the handsome young man with the chipped front tooth. What I found froze me in place.

“Here we go,” Mrs. Nilsson finally announced, pulling out a book and flipping through it. “I never liked this picture much—looked much too phony to me—but maybe it’ll suit you; it does look like him.”

She thrust the book at me, open to a large, clear, full-face shot of David Pendergast, his mouth wide in a toothy grin. I looked at it absentmindedly, knowing it was exactly what I was after but suddenly finding it of only minor interest.

I nodded agreeably and put the book aside, showing her the picture I’d found in the box. “When was this taken? I mean, how old would David have been?”

She sidled over next to me so we could both look at it together. “Well, he was in college in Chicago, at the University of Illinois. It was shortly after his parents died, so that would put him in his early twenties. He’d come up on vacation.”

I pointed to a figure standing to one side and slightly behind David. “Do you know who this is?”

She peered more closely at the picture. “That was a friend of his, I think—a boy he’d brought up with him from college.” She straightened and stared off into space. “They stayed here a week. You’d think I’d remember his name.”

“How about Abraham Fuller?”

AGNES NILSSON HADN’T REACTED
to Abraham Fuller’s name, nor had she remembered anything else about him, except that he, like everyone David gathered about him, had seemed diminished somehow in his presence. Nevertheless, my satisfaction at having finally linked Fuller to Pendergast remained complete. The nagging uncertainty that had come with everyone’s inability to recognize Fuller from his picture was finally quieted, along with some of my own frustration at producing so little for the time and money I had spent on this case.

Which is why, after checking into a motel on the highway heading back to the Marquette airport, I called Brandt and gave him a full report.

“Have you found anything at your end?” I asked after I’d finished.

“Yeah, actually, we have. We’ve been concentrating on Coyner, since he’s the only one we can actually lay our hands on. Kunkle remembered that when Sammie gave you her account of Coyner’s life history, she said his fortunes made an upturn ‘fresh from the funeral.’ That started him wondering about who’d paid for the funeral, since Coyner was supposedly up to his ears in debt.

“Kunkle can be a little heavy-handed, so I sent Sammie to interview the mortician. Turns out he’s ancient—at the Retreat now and a little out of it. After some head scratching, he remembered that Coyner did have a couple of unusual friends hanging around, helping with the arrangements, including the financial end.”

“Unusual how?”

“Long hair, bell-bottoms, weird smell. She showed him Fuller’s photograph, but it was too long ago and the old man’s eyes aren’t what they used to be. He said he was struck more by the clothes than the faces, anyhow. They seemed odd companions for Coyner to have. Still, it sounds right.”

“And he said there were definitely two of them?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll mail you a copy of Pendergast’s mug shot. Maybe that’ll jar his memory.”

“I doubt it. He’s half-blind. Send the picture, though, ’cause there’s more. Ron started wondering how Coyner would’ve wound up connected to two mysterious hippies. Remember Coyner shooting the bus windows at Hippie Hollow? We’re hoping to find out who was living there back then and show them Fuller’s—and now Pendergast’s—pictures. If the people we’re after were hiding out with the bus crowd, and providence suddenly came knocking in the shape of an alcoholic recluse with a shotgun, financial problems, and a shack out back, it might give us a lead on the machine gunner.”

I recalled that the State’s Attorney had once represented the denizens of Hippie Hollow. “You get Dunn to cooperate?”

Brandt laughed. “Yeah. He’s digging through his files right now. It was a pretty transient crowd, but maybe a few of them are still around. So how soon do you think you’ll be able to wrap things up out there?”

“Shouldn’t be too much longer. I’m going back to Chicago tomorrow. There’re still a few loose ends I hope to clear up fast.”

I knew that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but he paid me the courtesy of merely muttering, “The sooner the better.”

I called Norm Runnion next, but not, as it turned out, to share my good news.

“Where are you?” he demanded, his voice sharp and excited.

The hairs on the back of my neck began to tingle. “Still in Marquette. Why?”

“How soon can you get back here?”

I grabbed an airline schedule out of my back pocket, where I’d shoved it absentmindedly. “There’s a flight in ten minutes, but I won’t be able to make it.”

“Catch the one in ten minutes. I’ll call the airport and tell ’em to wait.”

“What’s happening?”

“Someone complained about the high-speed number we did on the expressway. They got the number of the guy who was tailing us. I’m about to stake his place out.”

“Is he mob-connected?”

“No—which means it has to be Shattuck. Come on, move it. I’ll make the call. Take a cab to the corner of Montana and Sheffield when you hit town and walk west on Montana. I’ll find you.”

The line went dead. It had begun to rain outside.

· · ·

It was a rough flight back, especially as we neared Chicago. The small plane bucked and shuddered in the night, and the pilot came on at one point to say that an alternate airport might be necessary. I stared out the window and saw nothing besides the rain streaking by at a sharp angle.

I was worried about Norm. It was he, after all, who’d read me the rules of the game concerning the Shattuck investigation: The here and now was Homicide’s concern; past history was ours. It seemed to me that his eagerness to retire in glory might get us in some serious trouble.

We did land at Chicago, although I wished we hadn’t tried. The buffeting from the wind had turned violent, and I saw lightning from the cabin’s window as the city’s lights lurched and bounced into view. Leaning out of my seat and looking down the length of the tiny cabin, I could see the pilot and copilot through the half-curtained cockpit, their shoulders hunched to the task. The pilot was holding the wheel in a death grip, jerking it spastically to correct the small plane’s wild leaps and bounds. The copilot kept wiping his hand against his trouser leg.

The landing was by no means feather-smooth, accompanied as it was by the simultaneous crashing of several items in the galley and at least three pieces of hand luggage, but it was successful, and instantly followed by a spontaneous burst of applause from everybody on board, including, I noted glumly, the stewardess, sitting alone at the back.

The cab ride into town reemphasized why our plane should have landed elsewhere. Through near-deserted, half-flooded streets littered with debris, we drove in the midst of a near hurricane.

At Montana and Sheffield, almost directly under the elevated subway tracks, the cabbie pulled to a stop, and looked over his shoulder at me with a pity reserved for the deranged. I handed him the seventy-five dollars that had been his absolute minimum for venturing out in this filth, then struggled against the wind to open the door.

The effect of finally stepping into the storm, instead of just watching it through various windows, had a strange and contradictory impact. In one sense, it became more real because I was instantly drenched to the skin, yet in another, the threat of it lessened when I found that the wind, though both ferocious and quirky, was not enough to lift me off my feet. It was of a staggering intensity, however, and its erratic gusts, affected by the buildings all around, made progress down Montana a real effort.

I was walking near the buildings, one hand outstretched for stability, the other still hanging on to my overnight case, when I heard a loud, deep rumbling behind me, as of metal against metal. To my amazement, it was the elevated subway, still running despite the weather. Squinting against the driving, lashing rain, I could see the train’s row of brightly lit windows passing serenely by, almost all of them empty.

“Joe. In the car, goddamn it.” I looked around, trying to locate who’d called me. The street was totally deserted—dark, gleaming wet, the few lights blurred and ineffectual.

I stared stupidly down and saw Norm peering out above his barely opened window. I lurched out into the street, around the car, and half fell into the front seat, almost losing the door to the gale.

He looked at me, both amused and slightly embarrassed. “I guess you caught the plane.”

I wiped my face with my hand. “This better be worth it.”

He pursed his lips and wiped the foggy windshield with a rag from the glove compartment. “It’s that brownstone over there.”

I caught the flatness in his voice. “But you haven’t seen a thing yet.”

“Nope.” I looked down at myself, sitting in a puddle, and concentrated on lowering the adrenaline that had fueled me all the way here. “Great. So who’s supposed to be living there?” I asked.

“Guy named Russell Grange—old-time radical, according to Stoddard, although no direct link to Shattuck that we know.”

“You tell Homicide?”

He paused a moment, renewing my fears about his motives. “No. I don’t really have anything to tell ’em, except that someone from this address tailed us, which then begs the question of what we were up to at the time.”

I mulled that over. If this did turn out to be nothing, and he had told his colleagues of it, he would lose two ways, by both tipping his hand and having nothing to show for his efforts.

“Something else,” Runnion added. “I got twitchy after sending you out of town the way I did, so I decided to call Penny Nivens, just to see how she was. She’d had a visit a few hours after we left her—at her home.”

A cold wave spread down my spine. “Who?”

“I’d say Outfit boys. Two of ’em, polite but tough, scared her without lifting a finger. She told ’em what she told us.”

“How the hell did they get to her?” My question was mostly rhetorical, but Runnion’s self-conscious stillness made me look at him more closely.

He frowned and a crease appeared between his eyes, which stayed glued to the house down the street. “We…I wasn’t as clever as I thought. This guy—or whoever borrowed his car—wasn’t our only tail. My car had one of those direction-finding gizmos stuck to it—a transmitter.”

I stared dumbfounded for a few seconds, realizing only then that Norm’s sharpened interest in being here tonight had less to do with going out in glory and more to do with wounded professional pride.

“There,” he suddenly said, interrupting my reflections.

I sat forward and peered through the murky gloom. A figure had appeared in the doorway of the house, dressed in a raincoat and droopy hat.

“Check him out.” Norm thrust a pair of binoculars at me.

I brought the binoculars to bear, trying to overcome the blurring effects of the windshield, the rain, and the darkness.

“Is it Shattuck?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I saw the figure in the coat pull his hat farther down and his coat collar up. He kept his face pointed up the street, toward the Elevated’s dark, ugly overhead roadway. As he stepped from the building’s shelter and began walking away, braced as if he was on a ship’s tilting deck, I saw a gray ponytail break free of the hat and string out in the wind.

“I think it is. I can see his hair.”

Norm started his engine but stayed put. “Russell Grange’s car is parked near the end of the block. I’ll wait ’til he gets in.”

The seconds ticked by, exposing an additional disadvantage to the weather. No matter if he walked or drove, this man and we would be the only ones moving on the street tonight, as conspicuous as dancers in a morgue.

“Shit, he walked past it.”

The man in the raincoat reached the corner, instinctively looked both ways, one hand holding his hat on his head, and crossed the street, now walking directly into the wind and leaning forward at a sharp angle.

“Where’s the son of a bitch going?” Norm waited until our quarry had vanished from view, going south on Sheffield, before pulling the car out of its parking place and rolling slowly up to the corner. The El now loomed overhead, mysterious and vaguely threatening.

I wiped the mist from my side window, but the rain was like a waterfall against the outside. “I can’t see. Pull around so we can get the wipers working for us.”

Norm gunned the accelerator a bit, turned left, and we both scanned the sidewalk ahead.

We didn’t get a chance to focus, however. Without warning, like lightning bursting from nowhere, the entire windshield exploded before us. The car was transformed from a dry, warm cocoon into a screaming, glass-filled, rain-soaked bedlam before either one of us could so much as flinch. Appearing between us as if by magic, slicing the top of Norm’s head with a burst of blood, was a metal road sign, still attached to its thick javelin-like steel post.