Memorial Bridge (11 page)

But no, that wasn't what she was saying. Cass put her arms around her Aunt Flo's shoulders. Mrs. Foley leaned into her, the goiter pressed warm against the side of Cass's throat. Oh, Aunt Flo.

Mrs. Foley kneaded her niece's thin body, weeping quietly. Cass stroked her.

After a few minutes Cass said with the simple authority that had now fallen to her, "The undertaker will almost certainly call you this morning to ask for your approval. I want you to give it to him."

"But won't an autopsy show if your uncle was drinking?" Mrs. Foley pulled abruptly back, applying the comer of her apron to her eyes. "Oh, look, I'm sorry, darling."

Cass's dark dress was covered with flour. Both women brushed at it.

"It doesn't matter if he was drinking, Aunt Flo."

"People will laugh at him if it was his own fault."

"But it wasn't his fault." Cass took her aunt by the shoulders again. This was the core of it for her. "That's the point. Not that he was drunk. Not that he was where he shouldn't have been. Not that what happened was his fault at all. That's the point. It's what we owe him, finding out what happened."

"If he was drunk, though"—she was a child at the mercy of a night fear—"even if it wasn't suicide, that means he died in mortal sin, without confession. Do you want
that
put out for your cousins and your brothers and sisters to know?"

The phone rang.

Both women faced it where it hung on the wall near the window, opposite the icebox. Mrs. Foley wiped her face with her hands and, crossing, wiped her hands on her apron. "Hello."

Mrs. Foley looked helplessly at her niece, who was slowly moving toward her. "What?" she said to the mouthpiece.

Cass drew steadily closer.

"Dr. Riley? I don't know him."

Cass heard the impending collapse in her aunt's voice. She put her arms around Mrs. Foley's waist, thinking, If we stand together with each other, we can do this.

Sean Dillon was his name. This call was proof that he'd meant what he said, that he was helping her. If we stand together—

Cass moved her head up and down, supporting her aunt, but also commanding her. "Say yes. Say yes. You tell him yes, Aunt Flo."

Sean Dillon, she thought again. How could she have forgotten that name? To have recalled it now exhilarated her. The sun hadn't risen above the eaves of the parish church yet, and already he had produced a doctor for the autopsy.

Mrs. Foley saw in her niece's will, as she had so many times, her
complete refuge. She did as she was told, letting go of her own impulse, which was so much easier to do than it ever would be letting go of her Mike.

The Stockyards Inn billed itself as the finest example of authentic Tudor architecture in the Midwest. With its multiple gables and finely wrought leaded windows, its mortar-and-beam siding above a first story of tawny brickwork, its clumped hedges, perfectly shaped spruce trees, regimented garden flowers and swarded lawns, it had the air of a well-kept Elizabethan manor house, or perhaps of an English Benedictine monastery, or, at very least, of a New England boarding school. But in fact it was a two-hundred-room hotel facing rough-and-tumble Halsted Street on the east side of the yards. Designed originally for the yards' owners to accommodate leaders of the livestock industry, now it also served patrons of the mammoth exposition building, the Kelly-Nash monument to itself, the site of FDR's triumphant renomination. Stockyard workers like Dillon had no occasion to enter the inn, and for the Irish among them it had come to function as an oversized Chicago version of the Big House, to which, in the old country, they had access only as servants.

Meals at the inn were served in the Sirloin Room, and even at breakfast, steak was the feature of the menu. The waiter whose job it was to enforce the rules of this sparkling universe did not bother to mask his disapproval when Dillon ordered only coffee and toast. He lacked enough money for anything else.

When the waiter left, Dillon snapped his newspaper open and went back to watching Raymond Buckley.

He was distracted by the entire scene before him, for here, on the very edge of the slaughter fields, which Dillon identified with everything he wanted to leave behind, was a display of opulence such as he'd rarely seen. The room could seat several hundred diners and was perhaps a third full. The waiters wore tuxedos. The guests, almost all of them men, wore dark suits and waistcoats, the tailoring of which put his own poor suit to shame. Gleaming shoes and flashing cufflinks and sleek oak wall paneling and polished silver serving trays bounced the light around the room while patrons talked softly to one another or read their papers with a show of well-being and assurance. Dillon read a message of order, harmony and permanence both in the nobly proportioned room and in its self-satisfied occupants that clashed utterly
with the message—violence, death, stink, greed—of the yards outside.

Buckley was sitting with a pair of companions at a table in a far corner. Dillon's view of them was wide-open. From behind his spread newspaper he could watch without fear of drawing notice. But soon it was apparent that Buckley, so at ease, so expansive with the men before him, wanted to be watched. He was performing for the brilliant room the role of a great captain of business, and that required an exaggerated bonhomie that would carry out across the tables.

But the two men with Buckley held themselves in check before him. The one on his right was apparently a clerk of some kind, fixed as his attention was on an oversized ledger in front of him. In the more than ten minutes that Dillon had been watching, the clerk had said nothing, confining himself to jotting notes. The man across from Buckley had only just sat down, replacing another, and another before him. They had conducted their business with gingery agitation. This one too wore the demeanor of pure underling, a man in unrelieved haste to be about his orders. His orders now had brought him here.

Dillon surmised that a supply of men was waiting in a small chamber off Buckley's corner of the dining room, each to be brought for his moment with the ward boss. This was a routine, Dillon saw, and it was easy to grasp what was going on. The tavern owners, policy runners and gamblers who operated in or around the stockyards—canaries, Dillon thought, picking grains out of manure—came to Buckley at regular intervals to be informed of adjustments in their assessments. No money changed hands. Dillon saw how that would be pushing it, but he also saw that the public character of this obeisance, offered no doubt by every petty operator in the district, was essential to Buckley's hold on it. The hearty arrogance of the man; Dillon sat there and, despite himself, admired it.

Raymond Buckley was thin and, Dillon guessed from the reach of his bony legs under the table, taller than average. He wore a dark gray suit and an out-of-fashion celluloid collar that made the knot of his black tie ride high up on his gaunt neck. From where Dillon sat he could see a two-thirds profile of Buckley. Behind him the gray glass of a narrow window filtered the sunlight in such a way as to highlight something somber in the man. His pinched face, slicked hair and rimless eyeglasses gave him the prim look of a schoolteacher which contrasted sharply with
his expansive manner. He had continued to eat his breakfast, cutting morsels of food with arch fastidiousness, but then plunging them into his mouth with sudden gusto. Dillon was seeing the man now in his contradictions, and he sensed how difficult it would be to penetrate to the truth of who he was. Buckley's highly mannered behavior was intended to satisfy the curiosity of onlookers while revealing nothing.

When the waiter brought Dillon his coffee and toast, served prettily with fresh parsley sprigs, he touched the man's sleeve and pointed across the dining room. "Isn't that Harry Booth, the Union Transit man?"

"Who, sir? The man in the corner?"

"Yes."

"Why, no, that's Mr. Buckley," the waiter said easily, without a trace of the fear with which Hanley and the other yarders spoke the name. Buckley was a big tipper, no doubt. In this realm he sauntered more than swaggered.

"I took him for Booth because he seems to be interviewing those fellows. What's he hiring for?"

"Oh, I don't think it's hiring. Mr. Buckley is an iron dealer."

"An iron dealer? What's that?"

"Used iron. Scrap iron."

"You mean a junk dealer?" Dillon didn't even try to keep the surprise from his voice. He smiled blithely, like a harmlessly curious stockman.

"He's very successful. A place like the stockyards moves a lot of iron. Anyway, most of his breakfast business is about the Democratic Party. He's also the ward committeeman here. He brought the mayor here for lunch last month."

"Who, Mayor Kelly?"

"None other." The waiter glanced toward Buckley. Furtively? "The party does a lot of business in this ward. He always has people who need to see him."

I need to see him, is what Dillon wanted to say, but the waiter moved away.

Should I be posing as a commission man, a buyer, a valve salesman? What if I was a lawyer for Swift and Company? Or for Lambert, Rowe. Dillon's mind stalled at that thought.

If I did dare approach him, would it be with the direct set of my questions? Who was Michael Foley to you? What more than nickels and
dimes? Why the brutality of how you killed him? What were you avenging? What could such a nobody possibly have done to you?

Dillon turned back to the
Trib,
tugging uncomfortably at his tie. He felt the falsehood of his presence here, not only that he was pretending to be a member of this circle, but that he could never close the distance across this room, bridge the gulf of what he did not know. He sat hunched over his paper, moving nothing but his fingers which absently stroked the crisp linen tablecloth, aligned one ornate piece of silverware, pushed at his untouched plate of toast. He lifted his gaze to let it float around the bustling room. The breakfast trade was picking up as more and more of the hotel's guests—the real buyers and sellers, the real lawyers—presented themselves at the maître d's rostrum. The heavy mix of aromas—steak, leghorn eggs, fried potatoes—wafted off the platters on the trays of passing waiters, yet Dillon had no appetite. In truth, he could not imagine eating ever again.

The futility of his thrust at Buckley struck him. Thrust? A flaccid wave of a hand was more like it. Raymond Buckley could ply his trade, a barely hidden system of loan sharking, influence peddling, protection and extortion, in this most opulent and open setting in Canaryville because, on this narrow but well-tended turf, he was invincible. Buckley had made himself essential not only to the petty hoodlums who ran the local gambling houses and brothels, but to respectable businessmen right up to the packinghouse bosses, and to the neighborhood police and magistrates who were on his payroll, and to the political big shots downtown who used him as the lever of their vise grip on the entire South Side. Dillon could see, as he and everyone else were intended to, the full reach of Buckley's power. What had ever made Dillon think he could take on this man? That he could penetrate the stockyards-wide collusion that protected him? That he could link, before the law, this dapper big shot with the grotesque pulpy mass found head-first in the blood pit?

Was that only yesterday? No wonder he had no appetite.

He stared at Buckley as his first question—What did you do to Foley?—gave way to a new one: What am I going to say to Cass Ryan when she asks me what we can do to you?

A large man in a suit made of sheeny cloth approached Buckley from another table. Dillon leaned back casually, watching closely. The man's face had a bashed-in look, and Dillon recognized him as a famous boxer. A diamond flashed on the hand he held out. Raymond Buckley rose from his chair, waved his napkin in welcome, delighted to be so acknowledged by a genuine celebrity.

This move gave Dillon a fresh view of Buckley as he swung around to shake the boxer's hand, and something new struck him. A bandage had been applied to Buckley's right ear, the ear which until now had been hidden from Dillon's view. The white cloth and tape covered the ear like a muff. A swimmer's infection? Such a mundane infirmity so contrasted with the impression Buckley had made on Dillon that it drew his absolute attention. But his curiosity about Buckley's ear faded as quickly as it had been aroused when the ward boss took his chair again and that side of his face once more disappeared.

Dillon stayed for most of another half hour, watching as the string of cohorts continued unbroken. Buckley's lackey ushered them in and out efficiently.

When Dillon stood, crushing his napkin onto his plate, he felt a wave of disgust at himself for not having seen an opening in the wall around Buckley. Thus, without having planned to, he touched the waiter's elbow as the waiter collected the check. "That man's iron company," he said.

The waiter looked at him quizzically.

"What's it called?"

"Shamrock," the waiter said. "Shamrock Scrap Iron."

"Where is it?"

"Why don't you ask Mr. Buckley?"

Dillon grinned. "I wouldn't want to trouble him, not yet." And now he winked. "I may have something for him later, though. And I'll tell him you sent me. What's your name?"

"Malloy. Mick Malloy."

"Good fellow, Mick." Dillon slapped his shoulder and started off, then stopped. "But where is it?"

"South Bryant Avenue. Near the carshops. You'll see the sign. 'Shamrock Scrap Iron and Metal Company.' Big green sign."

Dillon thanked the man, winked again and left the Sirloin Room under the steam of his fresh impulse. By the time he got to South Bryant Avenue he had already imagined what he would find there, a scene similar to the one he'd witnessed in the opulent restaurant. Everything on this sooty street was shoddy, of course, and the supplicants lined up
outside the ramshackle office of Buckley's junkyard were not tavern owners or politicians but two-bit debtors whose elbows showed through their sleeves. But they were in a line of Buckley's, just like the others, even if here it took them to a table inside the office at which a mere collector sat. The office windows were clouded over, and as each man entered, the door was firmly shut behind him, so Dillon had no glimpse of the transactions inside. But he didn't need it.