Memorial Bridge (9 page)

Her question landed like an accusation. "Everyone knows it, Cassie. You and I saw as much back in Doran's.
They
knew, the policeman knew, Riordan knew. And the monsignor who will conduct your uncle's funeral knows."

"/ don't know."

Dillon looked away from her, up toward the shadowy church. He remained silent.

"You're telling me everyone submits to—what did you call it, 'the discipline of the system'? Everyone allows it? Everyone supports it?"

"Not everyone submits," Dillon said slowly. "I think your uncle fought them, and that's why they killed him so brutally.
That
is the point they are making: don't resist."

"You said you would help me."

Sean didn't answer her at first. If he wanted some version of the "Count me out" he'd said years before to the Church, and had been saying ever since to his chums in the yards, and was trying to say now to Swift and Company itself, he could not summon it. But neither could he summon its opposite, a restatement of his enlistment in this woman's struggle. What exactly
had
he said to her? And how had it bound him?

He had been "submitting to the discipline" for a long time. If he was somehow now to set himself against the corrupt system of generalized overlordship that had so efficiently and ruthlessly replaced the mob—Capone was dying of syphilis in Joliet; his mantle had fallen to Frank Nitti, but not his power—Dillon knew that his own habit of passivity implicated him. He had fixed his attention on the law books at Loyola in part as a way of avoiding a confrontation with Chicago's radical lawlessness. Yet he knew very well that the Kelly-Nash precinct captains and bosses, the aldermen and commissioners and supervisors, the party chairmen, were in reality pimps, gambling moguls, loan sharks and killers. The true measure of their skill was the respectability the men of the Chicago machine had achieved, for it stretched from the parish to the nation as a whole. Roosevelt owed his recent election to the illegal manipulations of these very pols, and he continued to depend on them. Their alliances with and control over every level of law enforcement, including apparently the federal, made them more immune from legal challenge than Capone had ever been. They cultivated the image of local philanthropists, and in Canaryville they liked to act like the Irish songbirds that Roosevelt and the bankers and the packinghouse owners were happy to pretend they were. But they were vultures feeding on the spillage of human need. And unfortunately, first for Mike Foley, and now for Cassie Ryan, one of those vultures was Raymond Buckley.

And unfortunately, Dillon added to himself, for me. "Yes, I did offer to help you. And I meant it. But in all honesty I'm not sure what else there is to do."

"Well, to begin with there's telling Mr. Riordan that my uncle was not a derelict. We won't need Buckley's generous help in paying for the funeral."

"You don't need to use Riordan at all. You could use Gibson's on Halsted Street. That would make a point everyone would understand. I know Gibson."

"Would you arrange it?"

"Yes."

"And the autopsy. What about the autopsy?"

Dillon cursed himself for that bold, earlier impulse of his. It was one thing to refuse to submit to Buckley, but to go after him?

He studied Cassie carefully, but the shadows obscured her face. He wanted to search her eyes for fear. He felt ashamed of the fear he sensed in himself. He said quietly, "Riordan's right about the autopsy. I didn't realize it was Buckley when I suggested that. As long as you understand..."

She said nothing. She was not going to release him from this. He said, "Before crawling into pipes, steamfitters ask each other, 'How far in shall we go? Far enough in to tell the boss we've been there? Or far enough in to get the job done?'"

"What doctor would do an autopsy if Buckley didn't want it?"

Despite himself Dillon smiled at the way she'd refused to be deflected. When had he last beheld such nerve? "Don't worry about the doctor," he said, resigning himself, the way he did when he went into a hateful pipe. "I'll get the doctor."

Dillon registered the charge enlivening the field between the woman and himself, and he recognized—belatedly, but look how new this was
to him—that her anger and grief had released into the air an energy that was somehow essentially sexual. They were Irish Jansenists, and neither would have openly acknowledged their connection as the first stirring of an erotic emotion. Yet there it was, and Dillon recognized the thing viscerally. Cassie Ryan's pert body, even shadowed, revealed itself to him suddenly, from the lift of her hair to the line of her throat to the simple fall of fabric over her womanly curves. It was her passion that had drawn him, his intuition that her intensity of feeling might complete him somehow. Now here was a first hint of passion of another kind.

Cassie stepped away awkwardly, as if aware of the shift in Dillon's preoccupation. She moved toward St. Gabriel's. "I haven't even said the prayers yet, prayers for the dead." And with that, only that, she turned and went up the stairs to the empty, dark church.

Sean Dillon was back at the yards at dawn, lost in the swarm of austere men funneling through the Stone Gate into Section Five. Above them the last stubborn stars refused to leave the sky. On this morning Dillon differed from the others not only in the purposefulness of his step, but in his being dressed in a dark suit, a collar and necktie. The workers wore the usual overalls and brogans, carried toolboxes and lunch sacks. Dillon walked with his arms moving at his sides, his fingers curled lightly into fists. His fellows seemed to ignore what set him apart, except for the automatic way they gave him room, like cattle ovaling a rider.

They moved through the morning haze as they had for years, blind to the forms and shapes around them, the stout pen walls, the looming chimneys; deaf to the scrape of their own thick-shod feet and to the rough hum of the yards' cold engines and to the drum sound of railroad cars bumping, of coupling chains snapping to; not smelling the congealed-guts stench exploding from every drop of moisture in the fog.

But Dillon was different here too. His senses were far more concentrated than usual, but instead of smelling the generalized offal, he smelled that particular putrid odor of the blood pit, he saw the naked human carcass, white and wrinkled. He heard his own stomach groan in revolt. He tasted that wave of vomit that he'd only barely been able to swallow back. It was not the outrageous stockyards, so familiar in their
vastness, that he was entering, in other words, but the narrowly perverse scene that had spiked the heart of the day before. As a pipefitter's helper he had often come across long-drowned rats in tunnels. He had helped clear the cadavers of sheep from runoff gutters. He had seen maggots crawling through the muscle folds of fouled meat. Every yarder had seen such things. But this—he recalled how the slimy film coating the object's swollen skin had made his own hands and fingers useless in gripping. He and Hanley had been able to hoist the corpse only by locking arms around it.

When he had crossed through Section Five and turned onto the broad asphalt-covered tractor way that would take him to Swift's, he awakened to his surroundings. Suddenly the pitch of sensation, until now so internal, extended to the brightening sky and a flock of welcoming sparrows wheeling down from the roofs of the packinghouses.

Sparrows! Dillon tried to see the birds as emblems of a world he wanted. How had Father Ferrick put it? Human life is the sparrow's flight.

But what about Cass Ryan's uncle's human life? Dillon felt a fresh rush of the anger and shame. Not canaries or sparrows, he thought, but vultures!

His emotion fueled his energy, sharpening his reactions. Now when he looked around at the knifemen whose caps hid their eyes, at the cattle scraping their filthy hides on the board walls of their pens, at the forklifts and tractors jolting into motion, spewing exhaust, his old sense of dislocation came back more acutely than ever. He remembered walking in an endless stream of men like this, but then it was black-robed lads filing from the refectory to the chapel. At the seminary they had always moved in a flock, a herd, and that enforced massing had always left Dillon feeling, ironically, completely isolated.

But those kind-hearted, pious boys, soft as the satin vestments they hoped to wear, had not been scavengers.

Dillon looked at the hard, clomping bodies around him, and it struck him now that these men weren't scavengers either. They were losers like Mike Foley had been, sparrows in St. Bede's sense, frightened creatures who had no understanding of what brought them here, where they'd come from, where they were going.

Dillon felt a rare urge to protect his fellow yarders, to save them—here he was apart again—from themselves.

He had been awake all night, mostly at his table, bent over his books, but he had taken in nothing of the law. His mind had been tethered to the image of Cass Ryan. He had bounced through the chutes of a dozen different approaches to the mystery of her uncle's death, but they all, like the corridors of a labyrinth, took him to the wall of Raymond Buckley.

The wall's shadow overspread most of the South Side, but it was very unlikely that a penny-ante deadbeat, if that's what Mike Foley was, would have come to Buckley's explicit attention. Buckley would have insulated himself from the harsher operations of his machine, and in that he'd have been like Gustavus Swift III, who made a point never to come near his own reeking slaughterhouse. Swift's namesake grandfather, the founder, had been a butcher who knew what it was to have blood on his arms up to his elbows. Capone had been a butcher too, but Buckley was a businessman and politician. Times change.

Dillon's night had been an ordeal of doubt and second thought. He knew nothing, really, about how a system like Buckley's worked, and he admitted finally that what he had effectively promised to help Cass Ryan do—lay responsibility for her uncle's death at Buckley's feet—was impossible.

When he got up from his table, Dillon had washed and shaved and dressed in his best clothes without knowing why. He looked better, but his head was ringing with pain. He had scorched the remains of day-old coffee and forced himself to swallow it, a potion to get him through the day. It had only sickened his stomach.

And now he had joined the throng of first-shift automatons, although he might better have been one of the dumb animals filing out of a railroad car into the chutes that would take him—where? Dillon may not have slouched along like the zombies around him, but his purpose was in fact far cloudier than theirs.

He found Jack slumped on the bench in front of his locker, his head in the clamp of his gnarled hands. His hat was on the floor in front of him. Other workmen were moving through the room in their usual early morning stupor. A knifeman named Smitty bumped Dillon, noticed his clothing and said gruffly, "Who died?" He didn't wait for an answer.

Dillon touched Hanley's shoulder. "Jack, it's me."

Hanley slowly hauled his face out of his hands. His skin was gray, his eyes were red. He looked old.

"Christ, Dillon," he said hoarsely, and then he fell silent.

"Jack, I want you to do me a favor. I need some help from one of the docs. You have a friend at the yards dispensary, don't you? What's his name?"

"Doc Riley?"

"Right."

"What's wrong? You sick?"

Dillon stooped for Hanley's hat, picked it up and handed it to him. "No, I'm all right. How about you, Jack?"

"I'm sick. Real sick." He put his hat on his lap as if it were a basin.

"You look it."

The shift whistles sounded in the yard outside. The noise carried shrilly even into the building, and the other workers in the changing room snapped up their overalls and hurried away. But Hanley stayed where he was, and so did Dillon. Gradually the whistles faded. Then silence filled the room the way the noise had.

Hanley looked around and realized their privacy. His shoulders settled, relaxing in it, then he said, "I'm going to quit the booze, Dillon. That's what."

The slur was still on his words, and Dillon realized that his boss was far from sober even now. The poor bastard. "Good for you, Jack." He sat down on the bench next to Hanley, feeling the weight of his own exhaustion. We're all poor bastards.

Hanley then mumbled a few words.

"What?"

"Mike Foley was a friend of mine."

"I know he was." Dillon watched as Hanley stared into his hat, and he saw the complete futility of the only idea he'd come up with. Without Hanley, he would have to approach the yards doctor himself, but what was the point of that? The doctor wasn't going to risk offending Raymond Buckley because a pipefitter's helper he'd never heard of asked him to.

"If it was you, Jack, instead of Foley, I wouldn't let it go at this."

Hanley turned toward Dillon, an expression of drunken self-pity on his face. "What would you do?"

"For starters, I'd find out what the hell happened." Dillon paused to light a cigarette, wanting the air of detachment. He knew how easily spooked Hanley was, like a skittish animal. Dillon's part in all of this had begun the day before with Hanley's panic, but not only that. It had
begun with his own feelings for Hanley, his own inability on the lip of that blood hole to let Hanley confront it alone. Dillon was standing now before a feeling he had not articulated before, for he was a South Side Chicago man, a man of the yards, and they could make the simple statement of such a truth only when drunk. Nevertheless, then he said, "You're a friend of mine, Jack."

Hanley felt the force of his partner's statement, but apparently as a blow. He crushed his hat angrily. "But what can I do? Mike's dead!" He'd spoken much too loudly. When he glanced around the empty locker room, he registered what it meant that the others had gone. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we're late." He put his hat on and started up.

Dillon held him down. "You can go to Doc Riley, Jack. You can get Doc Riley to check Foley out. He could do an autopsy."

"A what?"

"A postmortem exam."