Memorial Bridge (12 page)

The waiting men reminded him of stunned cows in the slaughter chute. They were clutching bills or coins, not trusting their pockets with their puny weekly interest payments. Dillon saw the men for the grov-elers, drunks and losers they were, and in the fear in their faces he read the key to Buckley's success. In his unflinching willingness to squeeze even these husks, squeeze them ruthlessly, Buckley's power lay. These men would all know very well what had happened to Mike Foley the day before. They were the exact point, Dillon saw, of what had happened.

The shadow of Buckley's presence overspread the day, chilling Dillon despite the summer heat as he traveled downtown. He went to the law library intending to study for the torts exam, but in the dark reaches above the cone of light at his table, he kept seeing the images, in turn, of those stooped men, of the corpse in the blood sewer, of Cass Ryan's face looking up at him as if he could help. This was the first time in Dillon's life that he found himself unable to push through a tangle of emotions to the inner calm of his concentration. As the hours passed and the time of the makeup exam approached, he began to feel a mounting sense of panic. Rifling through his notes and books, he could not break his mind free. Eventually he succeeded in putting Mike Foley and Buckley aside, but that only enabled the stronger image of Cass Ryan to take over the entire field of his consciousness. Finally he surrendered to it, forgetting the exam.

He put his head down on the table, closed his eyes and allowed himself to think of her. His mind came back to one scene in particular. She kept turning in place on that night sidewalk outside Walgreen's, her hair swirling across her perfect cheek, her legs shifting the weight of her perfect body, shifting it toward him. That picture of Cass, like a hypnotist's fixture, calmed him. The storm of what had followed his dashing after her that night—
last
night—simply went away. No woman's image had ever so soothed him before. He clung to it. Soon he felt strangely at peace. And then he was asleep.

He woke up seven minutes before four o'clock, just time enough to get to Professor Corrigan's office. The professor wouldn't even look at him. He gestured toward the narrow table in a corner of the small room. The table was cleared of everything except a pencil and the examination booklet. Dillon sat and opened the booklet, marveling at how this scene differed from the classroom trauma the day before. Professor Corrigan pointedly buried himself in the tome on his desk. Dillon picked up the pencil and began to read the first question. Nothing else existed for him but breaches whereby persons acquire a right of action for damages. He took the test with the detached efficiency—the infallibility also—of a veteran sleepwalker.

As he approached the Ryan house at dusk, his heart sank at the sight of the knot of men in front. They were the spillover from Michael Foley's wake, an informal throng, but the line of Buckley's supplicants was what Dillon thought of. How awkward his fellow yarders were in their collars and suits! They looked better when their elbows showed, he thought. He sensed in their uneasiness something else, however: the accuracy with which they'd registered the warning Mike's death was. This wake would not be raucous.

Dillon drew closer and saw that the house itself was jammed with people, mostly women. These men would have dutifully passed in pious silence before their friend's casket, then eased out onto the porch and into the warm, twilit street for their smokes and furtively passed bottles. Dillon read their anxiety more accurately now, understanding that they thought they were risking something by coming to Foley's wake at all.

As Dillon joined the cluster, a man in a green martial tunic and Sam Browne belt leapt at him. It was Hanley, and in tow behind him was another bedecked figure, although he was too stout to fully button his tunic, and the breast belt of his Sam Browne was extended with a piece of rope.

"This is the doc," Hanley said urgently.

The doctor, too, eyed Dillon with rampant worry.

They drew away from the others. "We haven't told anybody," Hanley said.

"Good, Jack. Told them what?"

Hanley's eyebrows shot up as he deferred to the doctor.

The doctor began a rambling report on what he'd found in the autop
sy, and as Dillon listened he focused unprofitably on the man's half-drunken state, on his ludicrous Hibernian get-up, on the Celtic cross tattooed absurdly on his wrist.

Suddenly, as if the doctor were aware of Dillon's perception, he stopped. Then, in clipped language he made the statement that enabled Dillon, in turn, to make the crucial connection.

It came as an upward surge of recognition, a miracle of obviousness, the ground of a second mystery, but the absolute obliteration of the first. Doc Riley told Sean Dillon that in his examination of Michael Foley's corpse he had found lodged in the cavity of its thorax a half-dollar-sized, teeth-severed piece of what could only have been a human ear.

Darkness. South Bryant Avenue in darkness. Sean Dillon walked rapidly along the rough edge of the street. Despite the designation "avenue," there was no question of curbs or sidewalks here, for this was a ragtag trucking district, and the unfriendly buildings were marked more by loading platforms than doorways. Dilapidated lorries and carts were parked at uneven angles, and Dillon had to cut between them, zigzagging, to stay in deep shadow. He was lugging a roll of cloth on his shoulder, like a cowboy's bedroll, and as he went first this way, then that, he had to keep an arm hooked on the roll to steady the thing. It was three o'clock in the morning. The warehouses and factories loomed over the deserted street like walls of a canyon. A faint mist hung in the air, what remained of a midnight rainfall, and Dillon had to hop occasionally to keep his feet dry.

Two blocks away the grim walls on the left side of the street gave way to stockade fencing, and that clued Dillon. When he'd come here in daylight the broad gate had been wide open, but he had noticed the formidable wooden pickets and the strings of barbed wire topping them. Now the gate was closed, locked. He picked his spot, the midpoint between two barbed-wire stanchions, then stood below it in silence for a moment, to listen.

In the distance were faint night-city sounds, but here on this street,
and over the fence, inside the junkyard, nothing disturbed the night's tranquility.

The wooden pickets were seven feet high, and the two strands of barbed wire added another foot above that. Dillon shrugged the cloth from his shoulder, a section of heavy canvas tarpaulin. He bent to refold the tarp into a thickness of four layers, a yard square, and in one swift, leaping movement hurled it up to the top of the fence. It fell across the wires like a horse blanket, and in clambering up the rough fence, hooking his leg over the barb-smothering tarp, he felt like the star of an Old West movie.

In seconds he was over the fence and down.

Once more he froze, listening. He was ready for a watchman, but who would steal this junk? The forms of the iron wreckage cluttering the yard—rods, engine blocks, automobile fenders, radiators—poked eerily through the mist. Nothing moved.

The one-story building into which the line of coin-clutching supplicants had filed two mornings before was dark too. From his vantage now, it looked like a gas station shack. He made for it.

Halfway there he heard a cough.

He dropped behind the rusted hulk of a tractor motor.

Someone coughed again.

Not coughed. Only after the fact did Dillon recognize the sound of snoring.

Again he heard a loud, satisfied snore, then the lip-smacking grunt of a happy sleeper.

Dillon could still get away. He could retrace his steps to the fence and get up and over. Even if the sleeper woke up, he would never catch him. The smart thing would be to take off, now.

But instead he came out of his hiding place and crept forward. Near the building, to the left of the door, was the form of a man prone on a low cot. Not a cot, but the upholstered backseat of a car, propped now in the open air between a pair of crates. Dillon ignored the voice in his head that warned him not to approach.

The man was sound asleep on his stomach, his face turned aside, his arm hanging from the seat, his hand still clutching an empty bottle of hooch. Not asleep, but passed out. A pool of spittle had soaked the fabric by his mouth, and even now strings of drool blew in and out with each breath.

Dillon bent over, ready to hit the man if he woke, but then saw the flash of metal on the man's collar, a small silver pin, the letters "C.P.D." At the sight of the uniform Dillon straightened. The man's hat was on the ground near his feet. Dillon picked it up, eyed the badge, then dropped it. "Christ," he muttered. The cop had a ring of keys on his belt, and a flashlight. Dillon took them both, thinking, Someone must want me to succeed at this.

At the door, even in the dark, it was a simple matter to find the key that opened the lock, and without thinking more about it than that, he went inside. Once in the shabby dark room Dillon realized he had no idea what to do next. The plan in his mind hadn't even taken him this far, and the fact that the passed-out cop's key ring had solved his largest problem only emphasized the absurdity of his having come here so unprepared. The outrageous violation of his act hit him, not violation of the law or of Buckley's code, but of his own history. When had he ever behaved so impulsively? To have come here equipped only with a piece of tarp seemed suddenly childish, a caper from the Keystone Kops. He could not have justified himself to anyone at that moment. What
was
his purpose here? What did he hope to find? His uncertainty now, after having so easily slipped past the watchman, sparked an unprecedented bolt of fear, as if the threshold he had just crossed had in fact brought him into a trap. Buckley's office a trap?

He shook the thought off. The true threat—what
could
ensnare him—was the rampant set of his own feelings, utterly uncharacteristic, what had brought him here like this.

Now what? To move into the room and against it? Or slip back out and be gone? He crossed to the oversized, littered desk; the movement itself was his choice, and it made everything obvious. He removed the top desk drawer and placed it on the floor, below the level of the window, so that he could use the flashlight without being seen. After examining the desk drawers, he would move to the cabinets that lined one wall. He had time, he told himself. The cop was dead asleep. There were no other hitches. Someone
did
want him to succeed at this. He was here to learn whatever secrets the room would give up to him. It does not matter, he told himself, if I don't know ahead of time what they will be.

As he removed the second desk drawer, he froze again on instinct, to listen.

No sound anywhere, not even the stoned cop outside. All Dillon could
hear was his own breathing, and to his surprise it was steady, regular. His body was attuned, his hands dry. His fear was completely gone. He had come here on the power not of his rational mind but of his intuition. His rational mind had given him pause, but now, by intuition again, he knew, even before finding what he did not know to look for, that he'd been right.

Someone wants me to succeed at this? Yes, I do.

Sean had approached her in the cemetery itself. To do so had seemed not quite decent, and he'd been full of apology, but he was only proposing that they talk when there was a chance. Cass knew she'd surprised him by abandoning her unfinished prayer to say, Let's talk now. They had—just down the hill from her uncle's hole in the ground, in the company of, once the others had departed, only the merciless grave markers. While listening to Dillon she had focused on those tombstones, measuring them like a farming lady might her crop. The idea that the granite slabs might keep growing, like cornstalks, was no more offensive against nature than what Dillon had told her.

Now, the day after the funeral, she was walking just ahead of him, up the stairs of a dark building in the Loop. They were having to climb four flights in the airless sweltering stairwell because the elevator was broken. What kind of a law school is it, she wondered, that can't keep its elevator working? Compared to her own building, American Bell, two blocks away, Loyola was dreary and ill-kempt. Was it the Depression that had so wearied the place, or was this the way downtown night schools always were? At the phone company, stairwells were brightly tiled. Here the unclothed, corrugated-iron structure shook with each step. These were hardly the tranquil tidy halls of learning one saw pictured in the magazines. But what did she know about such places, of whatever stripe? She never admitted being bothered that she hadn't finished high school—a dozen girls she was in charge of had—but she felt like an interloper even in this unappealing building.

At the landing Cass turned back to Dillon. A shortness of breath from the climb keyed her anxiety. "Who will it be, again? Besides the priest?"

"Someone Father Ferrick knows, a man to trust." The unreality of their situation hit him. They were two lively young people whose picture could have been on a subway poster, pointing to the amusement park at the World's Fair or to the lakefront beach with a gang of chums. Especially her picture, selling Wrigley's or Palmolive. I should be taking her to a movie, he thought, or, if she feels fancy, to the nightclub at the Drake, where we could ask each other questions about where we learned to dance so wonderfully. Dillon had to laugh as he turned away because he did not know how to dance. He couldn't afford the Drake. God, she's pretty, he thought.

"Father Ferrick has friends in the police department who went to Jesuit schools, men we can trust," he said again, as if she'd asked for this point of reassurance. "Father Ferrick was anxious to help. This meeting was his idea. He was one of the leaders of the reform, one of the people who helped break Capone."

Those words jolted Cass. How could he imagine that such a statement would reassure her? Capone? What could the gangland monster of her childhood have to do with her? She felt dizzy, and looking at Dillon didn't help. He was a stranger. Why had she allowed him to bring her to this frightening place? When he touched her arm as he opened the door, Cass felt, rounding through, that she was spinning on a tilted axis.