Memorial Bridge (15 page)

"Hello, Doc."

Riley started. Fresh blood splotched the left sleeve of his frayed white coat. As he capped his pen, his hands shook. "What happened? What'd they say?"

"It went the way I hoped. Father Ferrick—"

"Did they arrest Buckley?"

"Not yet. Cass Ryan made the charge. They'll have to get a statement from you first. They'll want the..." He glanced over at the shelves. Which bottle? Which beaker? "Specimen."

"They can have it. Then I'm out of this, right?"

"You'll have to say where you got it. They'll take your statement now, and then they'll ask you to repeat it at the hearing."

"I thought all I had to do was give it over." Riley scraped his chair around to look at a small white cold-cream jar on the window sill. His voice cracked when he faced Dillon to ask, "When will this hearing be?"

"Soon, I hope. That's up to them." Dillon crossed to the window and picked up the white jar. "Is this it?"

"In formaldehyde."

The heft of the jar reminded Dillon of a baseball. "Who ever heard of such a thing?"

"I'll tell you, if I'd of known who that piece of cartilage belonged to, I'd of flushed it down the toilet."

"You could still do that. You could have done it anytime." Dillon
reached a hand behind his own neck to rub it, aware of the tension he felt. He saw how scared Riley was. "Why didn't you?"

"I wish I had."

The man's fear so openly displayed made Dillon see his simple courage, and Dillon realized that this was nothing new. Riley had been living by it somehow all his life. Otherwise he would not have been able to swallow his terror now.

Dillon turned back to the window sill, to replace the jar. He looked out at the broad cinder-paved avenue that ran between the fertilizer factory and the Armour cannery. In the distance he saw the top of the Stone Gate, that Druid dolmen that so weighed on all those Irish. A tractor was hauling an overloaded offal cart toward the bins, and had to swerve when a forklift backed out of its shed. Up the wall of the nearby factory, he saw a Negro coughing at a small window on the third floor.

And then he saw the two coming. The policeman was no surprise. Dillon didn't know him, but even from the distance of fifty yards he read the rank insignia that marked him as a captain at least, one of Eddie Kane's deputies, no doubt. It was the sight of the other man, the civilian, that set off the alarm, for Dillon remembered at once where he had seen him—at Raymond Buckley's elbow at the Stockyards Inn. This bastard had ushered Buckley's vassals in and out of the Sirloin Room.

Dillon turned back to Riley and forced himself to speak calmly. "I see them coming now, Doc, the policeman and a lawyer or somebody. I've had a second thought about how this thing should go. Will you play it my way?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not ready to trust these people yet." Or you, he might have added. Dillon knew better than to say that their bold move against Buckley had already been betrayed. So much for Father Ferrick's old friend.

"How are we going to do this thing if we can't trust somebody? What are we supposed to do, bring Buckley to trial by ourselves?"

"I'm asking you to trust me for now, Doc. Just me."

Dillon slipped the cold-cream jar into his coat pocket, then took his coat off and slung it on the bentwood rack in the corner. As he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, he squinted at the doctor. "What would you be checking me for? Maybe I've got a bad cough or something."

Riley's eyes slowly focused. "A cough?"

"Maybe my chest hurts bad when I cough. What would that be?"

"Pleurisy, maybe, or TB. We've had TB, you know."

Dillon picked up the stethoscope. "Check me over, Doc. We want them to think you're just checking me out. I'm nobody to these two."

Riley deftly hooked the stethoscope around his neck.

"But what can we give them? They've come for the evidence, that's what they'll be interested in."

"Evidence?"

"The piece of cartilage, the ear." Dillon's eyes bounced off his coat on the rack. "We can't give that to them yet. While we see how they're playing this, we have to give them something else."

"A base on balls."

"Sort of, yes." Dillon openly surveyed the various bottles. "Something they can look at as the thing you took from Foley's throat." Something, he added to himself, they can throw down the gutter and think it's gone.

Riley's hesitation lasted only a moment. He moved Dillon aside to get at his counter. "This is what we want," he said, reaching for a quart-sized metal canister. He twisted the lid off, then fished in the vinegary liquid with two nicotine-stained fingers. He pulled out a shriveled walnut of flesh and held it up in triumph.

"What is it?"

Instead of answering, Riley put the thing in his mouth, swelling his cheek to a knob, and chewed. Riley loved it when Dillon went pale, and he fished in the canister for another. Instead of eating this one, he snipped at it with scissors until he had a crescent of raw flesh the size of the first digit of his finger. He held it up for Dillon to admire, all the while gnawing away at the one in his mouth.

"What the hell is it?"

"Pickled pig's foot." Riley laughed out loud. "Knuckles," he said. "I'm a sucker for them."

Dillon slapped the doc's shoulder, craning to look into the canister, Riley's snack supply. Dillon had seen the awful things in jars on tavern counters, but he hadn't tasted one in years. When he and the doc grinned at each other, Dillon felt a blast of the fellowship that took men like them into those taverns together.

While Riley found just the right small container, Dillon removed his shirt and hopped onto the examining table.

Riley washed his hands, then applied the cold disk of his stethoscope to Dillon's chest.

Each relaxed into the role he would play now. He's trusting me, all right, Dillon thought. Who am I trusting?

Dillon was surprised at the doctor's steadiness. His hands moved over his body easily. I'm trusting Riley, he thought. Their bond made him feel powerful. If we have to, we
will
bring Buckley to trial on our own.

When the knock came, they were ready.

"You're Dr. Riley?"

"Yes." The doc stood aside as the cop and the civilian entered.

"I'm Captain Gallagher. I've come for the..." The policeman was a large, self-sure Irishman, but he hesitated and glanced at his companion. Buckley's man was staring at Dillon, who was still bare-chested, seated on the table, his legs dangling. Sensing that the man was trying to place him, Dillon kept his eyes on the floor, like an intimidated yarder. He noticed the man's highly polished shoes, the cuffs of his fancy suit riding them just so.

"...the evidence in the Foley case," the captain said.

"The cartilage."

"If that's what it is."

Doc Riley moved away from Dillon toward the cluttered table that served as his desk. "It's about time you got here. I don't want the thing." He picked up a tin canister and turned back to the policeman with convincing readiness.

Gallagher crossed to Riley, prepared to take the canister. But the doc shook his head. "Where's my receipt?"

"Your what?"

Riley looked quickly toward Dillon, who inwardly groaned, What's this? Just give it over.

"I'm not releasing evidence to anybody without a receipt. What if you—?".

"You needn't bother yourself about it, Doc. There's no question of a receipt." Gallagher smiled, but without friendliness.

Buckley's henchman forgot about Dillon, and went to the other side of Riley. "Listen, you—"

"Never mind," the policeman said, and he put his arm out to block Buckley's man, as if to prevent the rough stuff. But then, without
warning, he himself seized Riley by the wrist, twisting his arm so violently that Dillon thought it would break. He checked the impulse to protest. Riley cried out in pain and dropped the container.

The civilian picked up the tin canister and opened it. He winced at the sight of the piece of flesh, the stink of the chemical soaking it. "Jesus."

Gallagher, in releasing Riley, shoved him aside. Riley fell against his desk, spilling papers and folders. While he struggled to regain his balance, the two men left the room. Riley rubbed his arm, staring at Dillon. The boozer's cloud had swept out of the doc's eyes, replaced by the cold, sharp glint of fear.

On the morning of the inquest Dillon went to Doc Riley's rooming house to pick him up. What alarmed him first was that the guard was gone. After today, but only after, Riley was not going to need protection. Once his finding was formally endorsed by the medical examiner—a piece of the killer's ear in the victim's throat!—the coroner's jury itself would replace him as the accuser of Raymond Buckley. The case wouldn't hinge on Riley anymore, and more to the point, the Kelly-Nash machine's commitment to its South Side overlord would evaporate. Buckley, not because of his brutality but because of its being exposed, would be finished.

But that was
after
today. Dillon hurried up the stairs of the by now familiar stoop. Every other time he'd come here this week, the uniformed sheriff's deputy had been sitting in his car right in front, but now the car was gone, the deputy nowhere in sight. Was the Sheriff's Office the same as Eddie Kane's after all?

When Father Ferrick had learned from Dillon that his old pal Eddie was in league with Buckley, he had immediately reached for his phone, announcing, "It's time to get serious about this shit." The crudity had surprised Dillon, and so had what the Jesuit did. He called up Cardinal Stritch on the spot, and then so bluntly demanded the cardinal's intervention that for an awful, paranoid moment Dillon thought the entire
phone call was a show for his benefit, that the cardinal was not on the other end of the line at all, or that, if he was, Father Ferrick was a secret Buckley ally and was trying to get the cardinal to dismiss him. But not so. The cardinal matched Ferrick's indignation and went to work. By the end of that day, the state's attorney for Cook County, a prosecutor named Tom Courtney, had launched his own investigation into the death of Michael Foley, and the sheriff's men had been dispatched to protect Riley.

But now the sheriff's men were gone. Dillon hopped steps all the way up to Riley's room. The boardinghouse was a dark, overcurtained place, essentially like Dillon's own. Several times that week, Dillon had felt a pang of pity for the doc, that he had wound up living alone in such dilapidation. And not only that: Dillon had more than once bumped against the cold wall of his own fear that he too would be in such a place when he was old. But now his only feeling was a screeching anxiety. Where are you, Doc? Where are you?

At Riley's door he knocked, and knocked again. "Doc! Doc!" His voice died against the wood. The door was locked. He put his ear to it, then banged it. The doorjamb hardware was as flimsy as that on his own door, at his house in another corner of the same rotten neighborhood. Without a further thought, Dillon bumped the door with his hip, a swift concentration of his full weight. The door burst open and Dillon went through so easily that he thought at once, with stark incredulity, This is where I let Courtney leave him?

The room, with its gray, twisted bed linen, its clutter of chop suey cartons and empty whiskey bottles, was an expression of the surrender Riley had made, not to Dillon but, long before, to the inertia of an unhappy life alone. The room was wreckage, but of a normal sort for a man like him. Riley was gone, but Dillon saw nothing to suggest that he'd been forced from the place against his will.

One corner held a dark old wardrobe. Dillon sidled between the bed and a basket of soiled clothing to open it. Riley's suitcase and the rest of his clothes were there. On the bureau was his black medical bag. If Riley had left the place of his own accord, intending to flee Dillon as much as Buckley, surely he'd have taken some of this with him, or all of it. Dillon examined the bed sheets, but they were dry, unslept-in. The doc had promised Dillon repeatedly that he would not leave the room, not even to walk around the block for air. Only the evening before they had
grinned at each other, feeling they had made it through the chancy week. Dillon had finally decided he'd been obsessive in insisting that the sheriff's men protect Riley around the clock, but now he saw he hadn't done enough. Everyone in Chicago had his price, the sheriff too. If goddamned Buckley knew that already, why didn't I?

"Trust me," he'd said so glibly to Riley. Dillon felt a surge of a coming panic as he began slamming the drawers of the bureau, rifling Riley's belongings, desperate for some clue to explain what happened.

That he found nothing was the clue.

Buckley's men had come for Riley at some point the night before, after Dillon had departed and after the sheriff's deputy had been taken care of. Riley would have had no choice but simply to go with them. He was no Mike Foley, had never claimed to be.

Now Riley was—Dillon pictured this as if he knew it for a fact—at the bottom of Lake Michigan. He banged a drawer shut, a lamp fell over. He pounded his fist on the bureau top, bouncing the lamp again.

When he had quit the seminary, the rector had told him contemptuously that he was a man with no follow-through. The red margin between the rector's lips had narrowed to nothing, a thin white line of suppressed fury. He had treated Dillon as if he had broken a vow when, out of respect for a vow's solemnity, he had refused to make one.

But a vow was what he'd made to Riley. "Trust me." The words in his own voice would haunt him, he knew. But then he heard them in Riley's voice, now as, "I trusted you."

Dillon crossed to the window and snapped the shade. The sound of its recoil around the spring tube was like a gunshot. Morning light flooded into the room and, suspended in it, a fleet of dust particles.

Maybe not Lake Michigan; an incinerator someplace, a grinder. Dillon knew very well that Doc's body would not turn up incriminatingly in a drain box at Swift's. Not this time. When had he ever failed so utterly? Now instead of Riley's face or the rector's, Dillon saw his father's.