Memorial Bridge (16 page)

He closed his eyes, turning away from the room, then opened them. On the street below he saw a thin man in a dark suit, alone, staring up at him.

The sheriff's deputy?

The deputies were all in uniform. They never left their cars.

The man did not disguise his interest, and that refusal of the surreptitious, with its presumption of invulnerability, infuriated Dillon. His
rage vied with his self-loathing, an emotional turmoil he had not felt before. He braced himself against the frame of the window, as if to keep from leaping out, aiming his own body, like an arrow, at the bastard's throat. The man's cocky presence was one last message from Buckley.

Dillon backed away from the window, moving slowly for as long as he thought himself visible to the man below. Then, at the door, he exploded through, hurling himself down the stairs, as if bringing Doc Riley back were a simple matter of moving faster than Buckley's man did.

Dillon knew from books and movies that the reward for whipping down to the street and confronting the watching hoodlum and forcing him to confess would be the discovery of where his friend was being held. Having magnified humanity with his righteous indignation, he would go at once to his friend and free him.

Even crashing down the boardinghouse stairwell, his mind a frenzy of aggression, Dillon knew very well the difference between this moment and the golden time of movies. One difference was that these bastards would stuff a man into a blood sewer. Another was the despair he already felt, the certain knowledge that Riley was already dead.

And the man on the curb was already gone.

Dillon stood there, breathing painfully, staring at the vacant place by the lamppost. Now he was a sparrow to himself, a South Side pseudo-canary, not flying through the bright warm hall of a movie screen but skittering in the dark, pecking at grains of real food but eating what was around it, shit.

"German Army Attacks Poland; Cities Bombed, Port Blockaded; Danzig Is Accepted Into Reich."

Cass Ryan stared at the newspaper in her hands, trying to take its headlines in.

"Hitler Gives Word."

She looked up from the paper, startled, as if Aryan boys were trooping down the main corridor of the Cook County Courthouse. The wide hallway was crowded with citizens and functionaries striding past in both directions: jurors, witnesses, plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers, bail bondsmen, magistrates, marshals and police. There were secretaries, clerks and messengers too; yet they seemed, every one, figures of immense authority to Cass Ryan. Mature women in their dark brown
pumps and old-fashioned stifling wool suits, and girls in cloche hats and colorful light dresses, men with gray hair and men with dazzling shoes, zoot-suited boys in custody and an old derelict under escort, trailing the odor of his own stale urine. Cass watched them all, wondering if Hitler was more to them than he was to her. She sat alone on a bench opposite another bench, which was vacant and which, with hers, seemed a kind of sentry for the ornate doorway of the hearing room. She wanted to hail one of those prim ladies—they reminded her of Switchboards senior supervisors—for an explanation
for her
of what she was reading.

"British Children Taken From Cities."

Cass could hardly imagine such a scene. What, millions of boys and girls in flight from German bombs? She pictured her own Aileen and Jerry. But her sisters and brothers were no longer children. They were like the fleet of ships that had left the harbor, each on its own, before the war began. But what of her cousins? What of Molly?

"Roosevelt Warns Navy; British Warships Mass."

Each clerk and magistrate moved along the corridor in his own way. Some read papers as they walked. Some carried rolled newspapers and used them to gesture with. All of their mouths were moving at once.

Cass felt that her ears were stoppered. The corridor hummed with talk, hut she could make out nothing. She knew that events on the other side of the world—"Hitler Vows Fight"—were as awful in their way as what had brought her here, but it made her teeth ache right to her eyes to think that, because of Poland, the coroner's jury would not convene.

It was five minutes before ten, the appointed time. That none of the others had arrived fueled her worry. She felt as if she had been camping there, awaiting an apparition, like a woman in the Bible. When the young man in white arrives, he denies being the Lord. He is one sent to say that the Lord is not coming; the Lord has been called to Poland.

Cass thought of the Paroffs, who lived on her block of Forty-fifth Street, though they belonged to St. Stan's, the Polish parish in Englewood. She had only the vaguest notion of what the war would mean to them, for it confused her that Mrs. Paroff was one of the women who regularly came to Cass's own house on Sunday afternoons to listen to Father Coughlin. The radio priest thought well of Hitler. Cass hated the things he said, but her mother and her mother's friends always sat at the radio, nodding in agreement. What now, though? What if Father Cough
lin said the Poles had somehow asked for this invasion?

Cass looked down at her hands, which were black with newsprint. She saw the coiled outlines of her fingerprints. Her palms glistened with perspiration. She folded up the paper and put it beside her on the bench. Poland would have to take care of itself today. She opened her purse for her handkerchief. I'm taking care of my Uncle Mike.

While wiping the smudges from her hands, Cass failed to notice the man approach her. She felt his shadow sweep over her, though, as he blocked the light from the ceiling lamp.

"Miss Ryan?"

"Yes?"

"I'm Raymond Buckley."

He hovered above her, a lean man with leathery features and flinty eyes which sparked behind rimless glasses. Cass had never seen him up close before, and his appearance surprised her. He was younger than she expected, and in his drawn face there was nothing to suggest the pampered life she had assumed was his. He was wearing an expensive dark suit and a laundered shirt with a high formal collar, that was true, but in his bent shoulders and bony hands Cass saw the signs of a man who had worked hard. A line of moisture made his forehead glisten, and Cass's mind tossed up a picture of him hunched over the wheel of a forklift tractor. If she was disappointed that he was not one of those overweight, soft-skinned bosses, it was because she sensed in him at once the capacity to survive the rigors of prison.

He was about to speak when he turned his head slightly, and she saw the bandage on its side—not what she expected either, a little white cap on his ear, hardly anything. But the sight made her quiver, and she felt her pain and rage afresh.

"I'm sorry for all of this," Buckley said, but not at all smoothly. He spoke with a near lisp.

It was as if he were standing in the sweltering air of a summer dream she was having. He would not go away. She was powerless to speak to him.

A man with a briefcase tugged at Buckley from behind. Buckley allowed himself to be drawn away. "You're the kid I feel for. Did your aunt get the flowers I sent, the wreath?"

Cass watched him, as if a curtain had fallen across his face, and in her mind she watched herself. She was a doe in an open field, aware of the
hunter aiming at her, convinced he would fire only if she moved.

Buckley took a seat in the middle of the bench opposite, his lawyer next to him. Then the lawyer deftly moved to Buckley's other side, to whisper in his unbandaged ear.

That ear. It reassured her. How could he deny what it implied? She knew nothing about the laws of evidence, but the white tape on the side of Buckley's head seemed a certain flag of his guilt. She worked slowly back from her paralysis, and what she came to first was gratitude that her uncle had found a way to mark his murderer.

Buckley shook a cigarette from a pack. The lawyer snapped a lighter in front of his face. When Buckley guided his eyes back to Cass, she saw him flinch behind the flame.

Sean Dillon and Mr. Courtney arrived, but before they could tell her anything, an official called them all into the hearing room. Cass nudged Sean as they went through the doors. "That's him."

Dillon hadn't even looked Buckley's way and did not now, but he nodded. "I know."

"Where's Doc?" Cass asked as they made their way up the aisle. The raised table at the far end of the room was vacant, as were the witness chair and a dozen jury chairs to the side. Ceiling fans beat the air, but the room felt smothered, and Cass touched her wet forehead.

Instead of answering, Dillon shook his head.

Cass stopped him. "What do you mean?"

Again he shook his head. He took her elbow. Choking for air, she let him direct her toward the chairs. It was like a phone line going dead in her ear. When that happened, even if she knew linemen were testing splices, she always felt it was her fault.

Cass and Sean sat in the front row on Courtney's side. Behind them, seats were taken by two dozen spectators, including the pair from Swift's who had introduced themselves at her uncle's wake. Cass realized that most were sitting on Buckley's side of the room, like a wedding. They had chosen sides.

Just before the coroner and his jury were ushered in, Jack Hanley arrived, hat in hand, looking like a frightened cow. Somewhere he'd found the nerve to walk right to the front and take a seat directly behind Cass. She reached her hand back to him, to let him squeeze it. Suddenly she felt sure that Doc Riley would make it too. She turned in her chair, scanning the room steadily until her eyes came around to
Buckley, who, staring back, chose that moment to moisten his lips with a slick tongue.

The coroner was a stout, red-faced man dressed in a rumpled linen suit. Cass had expected someone more like a judge, those robes at least. The jurors were striking only in their ordinariness. Of the twelve, four were women. They looked like people Cass saw every day on the El.

As the coroner banged a gavel on his table, unnecessarily, since there wasn't a sound in the room except the whirring of the ceiling fans, he used his other hand to wipe a gray handkerchief across the back of his neck. "The matter of Michael J. Foley, deceased," he read, then squinted up toward the state's attorney. "Mr. Courtney?"

Courtney stood at his table. "I'd like to call Dr. Ferguson for testimony."

The coroner shook his head and brought his palm down on a folder in front of him. "I have the medical examiner's report." He glanced at the jury. "My people have had it read to them. There's no need for Ferguson here."

Buckley's lawyer stood. "Mr. Blodget, we stipulate the medical examiner's finding without objection. The point of contention is not the tissue match but where Dr. Riley obtained his specimen. The question is, What exactly happened by way of injury to my client's ear?"

The coroner nodded and peered at Courtney. "That is the issue, is it not?"

Dillon shifted to look at Cass, displaying his worry by raising his eyebrows.

Cass whispered, "Where is he?"

"He's not coming. He won't be here."

"Where is he?" she repeated more loudly.

But Dillon's gaze had gone past her. He saw, standing in a rear corner, the man who'd been watching Riley's place from the street. He reined an abrupt impulse to cross the hearing room and seize the bastard, to choke him until he said what he'd done to Doc Riley.

But Cass repeated her question more loudly still.

The coroner banged his gavel at her. "I expect the demeanor of a court of law here! This
is
a court of law!"

Cass dropped her eyes, focused once more on the smudges of newsprint on her fingers.

The coroner aimed the handle of his gavel at Courtney. "You have witnesses to call besides Dr. Ferguson?"

"Yes, sir. One. Dr. Richard Riley." Courtney could not bring himself even to look at the coroner. From the glow of his thick neck, Cass realized how he was blushing.

"Then call him."

Courtney did not move.

Sean Dillon stood and closed the short distance from the spectators' section to whisper in Courtney's ear. He slid into the vacant chair next to Courtney, who said, "Dr. Riley's sworn statement, taken by the Cook County Sheriff's Office, is that he removed the specimen in question from the Foley cadaver's throat."

"So where is he?"

"I don't know. He has disappeared."

Cass came half out of her chair. Disappeared! Her question formed itself as, "Where am I?" She reached a hand toward Dillon, saw it was impossible, then folded back into her seat.

"Disappeared?" the coroner said skeptically. "You mean he didn't show up."

"No, sir. I mean disappeared. My associate here went to his house. The man has disappeared."

"This entire hearing was called to enter the family-commissioned postmortem into the record. Mr. Courtney, you told me yourself it was grounds for an overrule of the cause-of-death finding."

"We believe it is, sir. And we have entered the report—"

"I've seen the report. I've seen Dr. Ferguson's report. What we need is Dr. Riley. His report does not stand without him. The Sheriff's Office does not rule on the cause of death. My office does."

Courtney was mute. Dillon leaned toward him and whispered. Courtney hesitated, then, clearing his throat, said, "On the grounds of the Riley autopsy and the medical examination, the county moves—"

The coroner slammed his gavel down.

As the clap reverberated, Cass raised her eyes to the blades of the ceiling fan, which was up there slicing away at all of these absurd disputes. She saw the fan as the wheel of an old cart, and she thought, British Children Taken From Cities.

"You are out of order!" the coroner said.

"May I move postponement, sir?" Courtney glanced at Dillon for support.

But Dillon's thought was, No wonder Kelly rules this city like Genghis Khan, if this is the opposition.

The coroner was about to deny the motion, thought better of it, then looked across at Buckley.

Buckley's lawyer slowly came to his feet. He had a patrician calmness that contrasted with the layered-over tough-guy impression that Buckley had made on Cass. Buckley's lawyer, with his manicure and his watch fob, was what she had expected of the boss himself.