The Skeleton's Knee (31 page)

“Bingo. One just got on. He’s way back and doesn’t seem to know what to do. He’s straddling the breakdown line.”

“All right, here goes.” Norm punched the gas pedal and we catapulted forward to eighty miles an hour. Far behind us, almost blocked by the other traffic, I could see a nondescript beige model lurch away from the emergency lane, its rear tires smoking.

“They bit—they’re coming.”

Norm risked a glance into his rearview mirror, although they were still quite a ways back. “They just keeping pace, or trying to close the distance?”

“Keeping pace.”

He accelerated more, taking some risks now that we were without doubt the fastest car in any lane. He weaved right and left, using his horn, once or twice swinging out into the breakdown lane to maintain speed. Staying as far back as they could afford, our pursuers maintained the distance.

“Still there?” Norm shouted, his voice rising above the engine’s howl.

I glanced at him to answer and wished I hadn’t. We were passing cars like they were mere pylons in a suicidal obstacle course. I saw a station wagon just ahead move to get out of our way, realize we were coming on too fast, and switch back jerkily. Norm corrected his direction at the last moment and flew past within inches of the other car’s bumper. My hands were gripping the back of the seat so tightly, my fingernails hurt.

“Still there?” he repeated.

I looked back. “Yes.”

“Okay. Hang on.”

I stared at my white-knuckled fists, wondering how I could do any better. He wrenched the wheel right, slewed across two lanes to an outburst of car horns, and launched us through the air over the top lip of an off ramp. We landed with a sickening, swerving, tire-squealing thump, and Norm pumped the brakes just enough for us to half turn, half slide our way into a cross street.

“They comin’?” I looked out the rear window and saw no beige car. “Nothing yet, but they were pretty far back.”

“Okay.” He pulled a magnetically mounted blue light from under his seat, slapped it onto the dashboard, and stuck its dangling umbilical into the car’s cigarette lighter. He then cranked the wheel hard to the left, hit a switch on his dash that started his siren howling, and proceeded as quickly as possible against the traffic of a curving one-way residential street. Several blocks later, he killed both the light and the siren, turned right, and rejoined the normal flow of cars.

“How ’bout now?”

I checked again. “Clean as a whistle.”

· · ·

Penny Nivens, it turned out, did not teach ballet to the city’s up-and-coming prima ballerinas, nor had she opted to bring the arts to the South Side disadvantaged. Instead, Norm Runnion took me north, out of Skokie, where his careening, subsonic trajectory had landed us, and into the lush green embrace of Lake Forest.

A few hundred yards off the Deerpath Avenue exit from Highway 41, the standard tacky commercial mob of buildings yielded almost instantaneously to a rarefied—and artificial—ruralism, the kind I’d experienced at top-drawer country clubs and upscale modern zoos. Everything natural had been sculpted by experts to make it look “better”—no weeds, no dead branches, no rotting clumps of vegetation. The concessions to modern living had been tastefully blended in—the road smooth and gently curving to enhance that unhurried, country feeling; the sidewalks immaculate and free of cracks. Even the low-key police department, located like a discreet sentry along the main corridor to the violent wastelands, had all the bearing of a bland, retiring, almost embarrassed municipal office block.

Runnion drove through the center of town, past expensive inns, designer retail shops, and the only Ferrari car dealership I’d ever set eyes on, and continued into a vast, intricate, mazelike preserve of trees, lawns, and mind-numbingly gigantic houses.

Neither one of us spoke, our thoughts dulled by the massiveness of the wealth all around us, and it was in silence that Runnion finally parked the car under the protective shade of an ancient gnarled tree by the side of the road. Ahead of us was an ivy-swathed, slate-roofed series of red-brick buildings, surrounded by the playing fields of an exclusive private school.

“She teaches here?” I asked.

Runnion opened his door and swung his legs out. “So I’m told.”

We asked for Penny Nivens at the reception desk. A teenage girl, prim in a navy uniform and white blouse, her hair pulled back in a flawless ponytail, nodded gravely and used the phone by her side to summon a similarly dressed but slightly more disheveled schoolmate, who merely stood by the entrance to the inner hallway and waited.

There was a moment’s awkwardness before an unsmiling portly man in a three-piece suit stepped into the lobby from a side office. Obviously, this was not a place where one just ambled around at will.

“May I help you gentlemen?”

Runnion moved so the two girls couldn’t see his hand as he showed the man his badge. “Yes. We’re here to see Penny Nivens.”

Our challenger’s smile became strained, but he kept his poise. “Why don’t you come into my office and I’ll find out where Miss Nivens is.” He looked over to the girl at the hallway entrance. “Mary, why don’t you just wait there for a few moments?”

He led us through the door he’d appeared from and shut it behind us, his voice gaining a worried edge. “Is there some trouble?”

Runnion was his affable best. “We just have a couple of questions for Miss Nivens.”

“She hasn’t done anything wrong?” The question was asked skeptically.

“Not a thing. We’re just like any other visitors,” Norm suggested.

“Right.” He opened the door and smiled rigidly at Mary. “Okay—could you escort these gentlemen to Miss Nivens’s classroom, please? Thank you.”

He retreated behind his door with a slam, no doubt to swallow something for his stomach. I wondered how long it would take word of our visit to spread throughout the school, based on the fat man’s performance alone.

The girl named Mary led us down carpeted, quiet hallways, taking me back to my own high school—a drafty barnlike building with wood stoves, art-covered walls, and the restless hurly-burly of too many cooped-up children. This place was like being in a bank building, where any juvenile excess would be met with baleful glares.

Our guide stopped at a heavy wooden door, knocked quickly, and opened it without waiting for a response. She ushered us in and closed the door behind us.

We were left standing in an enormous, well-lit rectangular room, empty, with a highly polished wooden floor. The wall opposite us was lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, so that the first people we saw were ourselves, looking slightly startled.

“Over here.”

We both turned toward the clear female voice. In a corner at the far end of the room was a wooden desk, behind which was seated a slim dark-haired woman wearing a black tank-top jersey. She rose as we crossed to greet her, our shoes clattering noisily on the gleaming floorboards. She was dressed in leotards and was shaped like a young woman in her twenties, muscular and athletic. It made me wonder if we hadn’t come up with the wrong name somehow.

“Penny Nivens?” Runnion asked as we approached.

“Yes.” She came out from behind the desk to greet us. I studied her face, which was friendly and open but gently lined and tugged at by at least forty-odd years of living. My doubts evaporated.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I think so,” I started. “I’m Joe Gunther; this is Norm Runnion. We’re police officers, and we were wondering if we could ask you a few questions.”

The smile didn’t vanish; there was no sudden watchfulness in the eyes. Instead, she motioned to the single guest chair next to the desk and brought her own out to the front. “I only have two chairs, I’m afraid. I’ll sit here.” She lithely perched on the desk and drew her legs up underneath her.

I sat, but Runnion wandered off a few paces and leaned against the wall, putting me in the position of authority.

“Are you here about one of the kids?” she asked.

“It’s about Bob Shattuck,” I said, watching for a reaction.

Her brows furrowed and she frowned quizzically. “Bob Shattuck? I haven’t seen him in years—decades even.”

“When was the last time?”

“God.” She rubbed her forehead. “It must have been 1970 or something like that, right after the trial of the Chicago Seven, at some rally. Is he in trouble?”

“Why do you ask?”

Penny Nivens laughed. “Because you’re here. I didn’t even know he was still alive.”

“He was doing things back then that could have gotten him killed.”

She stared at me, her smile fading. “Those were violent times.”

“I had a conversation with Bob a couple of nights ago, asking him about the old days. The next morning, one of the people we discussed was found dead in Bob’s apartment. He’d been tortured and we’re pretty sure Bob did the honors.”

Penny Nivens passed her hand across her mouth, visibly confused. “I don’t understand. What would I know about this?”

“You and Shattuck were together for several years in the late sixties, but then you seem to have disappeared. What happened? Was he becoming too radical?”

Anger began to creep into her face.

“Miss Nivens, I’ve got no bone to pick with you. I’m investigating a twenty-year-old case that started when you and Bob Shattuck and Abraham Fuller were in the revolutionary front lines.”

“Abraham Fuller?” I pulled Fuller’s photo out and handed it over.

She stared at it for a long time. “He’s dead?”

“Yes.” Hope flickered inside me, but only briefly.

She shuddered and returned the picture. “I’m sorry. I don’t know him.”

“Did you split up with Shattuck?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Her face now downcast, she let out a long sigh. “Bobby and I were lovers for a while, not that that was anything special back then. He really believed in what we were doing, not like some of them who just wanted to say they got tear-gassed. Bobby was a teacher—a group leader—committed to changing all that shit we were against…”

She suddenly looked up, her eyes passing over my head at the large room behind me, a bitter half-smile on her face. “And now I’m teaching rich brats to dance so they can grow up and act superior when they visit the ballet… Christ.”

“So what happened with Bobby?” I kept my voice gentle.

“I thought he’d lost his way, that after years of fighting violence, he’d finally been corrupted by it and had ended up embracing it. But now I don’t think so; now I think maybe he was more honest than the rest of us. He saw it wasn’t working. He knew that Tom Hayden would end up marrying a movie star and selling out. He knew the only real revolution had to be a violent one, that by shunning violence, we were shunning reality—getting ready to go back to our middle-class comforts… Or to this.” She waved her hand toward the mirrored wall.

Her anguish seemed to be feeding on itself, expanding now that it had been allowed the space. “Who did he hook up with?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t tell us—we’d all sold out, in his eyes. He didn’t trust us anymore, and we weren’t too comfortable around him, either. He was so angry toward the end he scared me. I wondered sometimes if he wouldn’t just take us all out—us and the pigs—one and the same.”

“Did anyone go with him when he left?”

She shook her head, half-baffled, half-lost in the past and her own confusion. “Who knows? They weren’t going to tell
us
.”

I took a shot in the dark, based on the lead that had drawn us to this woman in the first place. “What about your fellow ballet dancer?”

She stared at me with her mouth open. “You mean David? David Pendergast?”

“I don’t know. I have a description without a name.”

She hugged her arms across her narrow chest, looking smaller and frailer than before. She was silent for a while, breathing deeply, fighting with her emotions. When she finally spoke, she looked grieved, and much older. “David could have gone with Bobby. He’s another one I never heard from again.” A single large tear broke loose from her eye and coursed unchecked down her cheek.

“You and David were close?”

Her smile was tired and without joy. “I thought we were all close. Those people were the best friends I ever had, or will ever have. My time with them burns bright in my heart.” She tapped her chest lightly with her fist, her intensity utterly erasing any hint of theatricality.

I let the silence persist, sensing there was more to come.

After a minute or so, she added, “David and I danced together. We slept together, for a while. I thought I loved him. But he was dangerous… He scared me—like Bobby ended up scaring me.”

“And you think they might have joined a more violent element of the movement together?”

She nodded without comment.

I rose from my chair and looked down at her, her shoulders slumped, her head bowed, no longer the pixie. She sat on her desk now like something fragile and ailing, drooping from the pain, the loss, and a sense of bewilderment.

I had one last question to ask: “You mentioned you haven’t seen Pendergast since the late sixties; do you know where he was from originally?”

She looked up, her face troubled and tear-stained. “What I remember best about David was his dancing—hard, risky, sometimes beautiful and sometimes scary. He’d throw me high in the air with no warm-up, no practice runs—for the spontaneity, he said. We didn’t talk about where we were from—we talked about where we were going.”

Her voice drifted off. I waited for more, then finally gave it up. I joined Norm as we made our way back to the hallway door. I noticed, however, that he, like I, stepped more lightly than we had upon entering, as if preserving the sanctity of some funereal occasion. On the threshold, I glanced back at Penny Nivens, utterly reduced by the enormity of her ornate, empty surroundings. She was looking across the expanse of floor at the wall of mirrors, as if mystified by her own reflection.

RUNNION HUNG UP THE PHONE
with a satisfied grunt. “Miles says Pendergast is presumed out of the area. There’s no current address in the file, and the last entry on our books was exactly twenty-four years ago.”