Memorial Bridge (19 page)

"Would you stop a minute?" When she did, he added, "You're always walking away from me."

"That's not true. For more than a year I've hardly taken a step, but how would you know?" She didn't care a damn suddenly if he saw how hurt she was. "You've been busy in Washington."

"Right. And now I'm in Chicago, without knowing for how long. And the first thing I do is check my suitcase in a locker at the train station and come to you. What I have been doing in Washington is setting a trap for Raymond Buckley, and I thought you had a right to know about it before we laid it out in front of him."

"I do want to know."

"Then let's find a place where we can talk."

"I can't now. I have to get to my job."

"But I have to talk to you before I report in. The first order they'll give me is to talk to nobody. I've already said too much."

Cass laughed harshly. "I know Raymond Buckley better than they do. How could they say something is secret about him from me? How could
you?
"

"I didn't, Cass. That's why I'm here."

"Then meet me after," she said coldly.

"What time?"

"Five o'clock. You're really going to get him?" With a rush of feeling she touched his arm. But the feeling
was
hatred.

"Did you think I wouldn't?"

She had to look away. Of course, that was what she thought.

"I'm here for the homestretch and the finish, Cass. I've had my binoculars on Buckley the whole year. And now..." He shrugged. "Leo arranged my TDY."

"Your what?"

"Temporary duty. I won't be here for long." How to explain that he wasn't in charge of himself anymore, of a schedule of time that reflected his own priorities. Buckley, for one. This woman, for another.

Her hand closed on his arm, pressing it hard, and her eyes sparkled as she said, "I have something of my own to tell you, a secret. That's another reason to wait until later."

"Where should we meet? I can't come to the Switchboards."

"But you'll be downtown?"

"Yes."

"Then Oak Street Beach."

Dillon remembered that afternoon—was it really more than a year ago? At the lakeside, the scene of their youthful bottle collecting, their hearts had opened to each other for a moment.

"At that pavilion," she added, "where the polka bands play."

"Polkas?" Dillon laughed with a pleasure he hadn't felt in years. He saw himself cavorting on the margins of those summer concert crowds, one of a gang of Irish kids pretending to know the dance, jerking around the slatted floor, mocking the thick-legged Polacks, but also themselves.

"We won't be dancing," Cass said.

She should be here by now, he thought. He lit a cigarette, but even in cupping his match, he kept an eye scanning across the sweep of Lake Shore Drive to the buildings beyond. He stood alone in the shadow of the weathered pavilion. From the shabby look of the place, he guessed it was years since bands had really played there. He had not anticipated the lakefront's autumnal desolation.

He had no way of knowing that Cass Ryan's impulse to meet there had come automatically because of the countless hours in the last year she had walked those boards, that sand, alone.

The wind blustered in from the lake, fluttering the brim of Dillon's hat. He leaned against a bench with his back to the water, staring now toward the stout, backlit skyline, then toward the tiny people moving
along the distant promenade. All those thousands within range of what he saw, and not one remotely aware of him.

Damn, she should be here.

He took a last drag on his cigarette and let it fly. It soared toward town with all the other litter.

"Hello, Sean."

Her greeting startled him. He whipped around to see that she had just stepped out from behind the bandstand, having approached from the direction of the water, and not from downtown at all. The hulking pavilion had blocked his view of her.

She had been carrying her shoes in one hand, crossing through the sand in her stocking feet. Over her shoulder was slung a large, dark woven bag, too big to be a purse. She put it on the bench, and leaned over to slip on her shoes again.

Her slim ankles struck him, the curve of her legs.

When she stood up straight again, she tightened the belt of her trenchcoat and pulled the collar up closer to her throat. She is so beautiful, he thought. Why is it again I have not been with her?

"I got off work early," she said, as if that explained her coming on him from behind.

Sean grinned. "I'm a pushover as a G-man, aren't I?"

"That depends." She picked up her bag again, clutching it with both arms, holding it before herself like a shield. Dillon noticed the bag's rough fabric and realized it was a messenger's satchel.

But what kind of G-man had he become? Raymond Buckley was the one measure of that. Depends?
Everything
depended on what he was going to say.

With a gesture he proposed they should sit on the bench, but she seemed not to notice, as if in her concentration she had been stripped to one thing.

He went forward a step. "We are launching..." he began, then hesitated at the stilted word. But argot, the language of his authority, was the point now. "...a special operation to bring highly public enforcement action against violators of the new draft law."

"The draft law?" Cass was sure she had missed something.

Dillon repeated himself. "The draft law. A month ago more than a million men registered for the draft. Two weeks ago local boards started issuing classifications and calling men up. You know that."

Cass nodded. Everyone knew it.

"For conscription to work, its has to be fair and it has to be
seen
as fair, which is where the Bureau comes in. Law enforcement is always targeted. Usually the targets are anything but the well connected and the powerful, but this time that's
just
who they are. The men who beat everything else and who people assume will beat the draft too—we have a surprise for them. In several key cities, beginning this week, agents will be nailing big shots who falsified their registrations or used influence with local boards to get exemptions. The point is the
show
of enforcement. The targets happen to include a Chicago fellow named Buckley." At last Dillon allowed himself to smile. "His name near the top of the list is my small contribution to the effort."

If by smiling Sean meant to elicit her congratulations, Cass missed the signal. "The draft?" she repeated with stark incredulity. "What does Raymond Buckley have to do with the draft?"

"He's a thirty-four-year-old male citizen, and therefore subject to the law." Dillon's voice went flat, a briefer's voice. "The Ward Seven draft board, at least two of whose members Buckley himself nominated, just this week classified him'S.S. 3-D, based on information Buckley was obliged to furnish under penalties of perjury."

"But what—?"

"3-D grants exemption from conscription due to hardship to wife, child or parent. In Buckley's case, since he's obviously unmarried, the hardship is to his widowed mother, whose address he gives as a La Grange old folks' home; he claims to be her sole support."

Dillon paused, wanting her to say something, but Cass only stared at him, waiting.

"The local draft board found itself disinclined to require proof, and so did not confront openly what everybody in the yards knows very well—that Buckley's widowed mother is dead."

Cass had begun to shake her head. "You're saying he fudged a draft registration? Who cares about that? The draft is nothing compared to—"

"But it's
ours,
Cass. His mother died four years ago. Buckley perjured himself. A federal violation. The draft law puts him on our field, in our court. He'll go to jail, Cass. He'll go to jail for
years.
"

"But for the draft? What about what he did to my uncle? I want people to know what he did! What he is
still
doing!" Cass pushed her satchel into Dillon's arms, but it fell, spilling papers, yellow sheets
filled with scrawl. The wind ripped several pages away, and Cass rushed to retrieve them, even as she continued frantically, "Anyone might cheat the draft"—she snagged a page, then another—"but only an animal would do what Buckley does. It's all here." She flourished the papers in Dillon's face. "This is what I brought you. It's
everything
about Buckley."

The satchel held manila folders crammed with hundreds of yellow sheets. "What is it?"

"It's Buckley's conversations, what he says to people, how he speaks to them, what he threatens them with, what he does to them. My uncle and Dr. Riley were just two. Buckley is an animal! I want people to know about this!"

"His conversations?"

"On the telephone."

"The telephone?" A steel spring snapped open in his mind, an entirely new image of the woman before him.

"The switchboards. It's where I work, remember?"

"
You
did this?" He fingered the pages of transcript, lists of names, dates, paragraphs of tidy handwriting.

"I've been doing it every free moment for a year. As supervisor, I make it a point to relieve the girls myself who handle Buckley's exchange. In front there's an index, a log of dates on which he talks about the killings. There are six separate killings at least. He talks about it like he's ordering sandwiches. It's everything you need."

The shock Dillon felt had transformed his face into something ugly. "I couldn't use it, Cass."

"Why?"

"Because this is illegal. And it's federal, it's FCC. You can't show these transcripts to anyone. Who knows you've done this?"

"Nobody."

"Cass, this is serious."

She grabbed the satchel. "You're saying
I
broke the law? You're saying what / did is serious?"

Dillon turned, holding on to the bag. She fought him for it. "Are you going to arrest
me?
"

He held the bag away from her with one arm. When she reached for it, he pulled her against himself with the other. Neither of them moved.

After a long time she spoke, her voice muffled against him, still thick
with incredulity. "You think I did something wrong?"

"That's not what I meant, Cass." He held her away, to see her. "It's Buckley I'm thinking of. If a judge knew about this, we couldn't convict him even of the draft violation."

"But it doesn't count, what's in there? What I heard him and the others say? Murder? Gambling parlors? They have slot machines in candy stores! There are police captains who call Buckley every week, and Buckley—"

"That's the problem, Cass. Their system works only if they stick together, and they do. Everyone from Mayor Kelly and the chief justice down will work to protect Buckley. Anyone who comes forward against him will disappear the way Doc Riley did. There have been six hundred syndicate homicides in Chicago in the last twelve years, not counting so-called accidents like your uncle's. Do you know how many convictions? Eleven." Dillon paused to let the number register. "We don't investigate or prosecute murder cases. The DA does, and he's either one of them, like that coroner was, or he rolls over for them, like Courtney did. And the same is true of the grand jury. We can only get Buckley if we get him into federal court. It's that simple."

"But the draft—"

"It's five years in prison if he gets maximum, and I promise you he will."

"That is not enough," Cass said with cold exactitude. "You are rolling over for them too, by thinking it is."

Her accusation was like a blast of wind off the frozen sea of her hatred, and Dillon wanted to turn away from it. But perhaps the chill he felt was from the bundle of pages he held under one arm, not only a record of Buckley's connivance, but evidence of his absolute immunity.
There
was the outrage. Dillon knew damn well the mockery it was to go after Buckley on the draft, like going after Scarface Capone on taxes. But you play the cards in your hand, or you fold.

Thinking about cards, he shifted the satchel to get a better grip on it. "I should look at this," he said.

"Even if it's against the law?"

"Do you want me to read it or not?"

"You were why I took it all down. I thought it would be a weapon."

"How?"

"I don't know." She felt the full force of her disappointment at his
scruple, his readiness to strike so weakly at Buckley, and at her own inability to think what else to do. "I have nowhere to take it but to you."

"That's just as well, Cass. No one else should know about it, just us."

They were not standing on the same spot at all; their South Side Irish-Catholic lives, with all they had in common, had made them very different people. Something in Cass Ryan frankly frightened Dillon. The unexamined purity of her perception? Her utter lack of second thought? Selfhood like a flame?

But he had just agreed to throw in with her, no? Now that he was going to read the pages filled with her painstaking handscript, therefore justifying them, he knew that what bound him to this woman was more powerful than what he once regarded as the flame of his own selfhood, his very conscience.

With that recognition, a feeling of amazement flooded him. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he leaned toward her, bringing his face to hers.

Cass instinctively lay aside her large question about him as she inclined slightly to meet him. It was as much her act, then, as his, their first kiss.

Dillon helped himself to a cone full of cooler-water and downed it like a shot, not to quench a thirst, but for the sheer release of crushing the paper cup in his fist. Then he turned and walked slowly down the long, brightly lit corridor to the room where they had Buckley.

Buckley and his lawyer, both seated on one side of the long table, looked up when Dillon entered. He enjoyed the shock of recognition in Buckley's face, but it went as quickly as it came, and he said nothing.

Dillon also enjoyed the sight of the gnarled pink notch in his ear.

"Aha, Dillon!" Leo Fitzgerald said from his place on the near side of the table. He was in shirtsleeves, standing with one foot on the seat of a wooden chair, the revolver on his hip on full display.