Memorial Bridge (20 page)

To the side, at a smaller table, sat a young girl, a Bureau stenographer, hands poised at her machine. A glance was all it took to make her once again invisible.

Fitz swept a hand toward Sean. "This is my colleague, gentlemen. Special Agent Sean Dillon, who came up from Washington to give us a hand."

"Mr. Buckley and I have met," Dillon said as he closed the door. He
stepped aside to lean against the wall, pulling cigarettes out of his pocket.

Buckley leaned to whisper in his lawyer's ear, not the man who'd represented him at the Foley inquest. The lawyer listened for a moment, his eyelids lowered. He nodded, then abruptly glared up at Dillon. "My client says you threatened him."

Dillon did not react.

But the lawyer turned back to Fitzgerald. "Which perhaps answers our question? Is this agent's personal vendetta the reason for my client's indictment? Whatever the reason, it amounts to selective enforcement, and it won't stand up."

"Not 'selective enforcement.' Selective
Service.
" Fitzgerald began to fuss tobacco into the scorched bowl of his pipe. "The reason for the indictment is right in front of you." He gestured at the photostats on the table. "Shall I recite that last sentence for you again, the one just above your client's signature? 'I fully understand that it is a federal crime punishable by fine or imprisonment or both to knowingly make any false statements concerning any of the above facts as applicable under the provisions of Title 16, United States Code, Section 1032.'"

"Which we deny."

Fitz glanced at Dillon while putting a match to the pipe now at his mouth. "He forgot that his mother died."

"That is not what we asserted." The lawyer slapped the table. "And my client is in no way responsible for the classification rulings of the Selective Service board. If you follow up on these charges against Mr. Buckley, you're going to have to bring charges against a lot of people."

"What is your draft status, counselor?" Dillon asked.

"How is that relevant?"

Dillon pushed away from the wall. "May I see your draft card, please?"

"It's in my desk."

The two agents exchanged a look. Fitzgerald asked, "Have you read the statute?"

"I'm over-age. They're only drafting up to thirty-five."

"Men up to forty-five are required to carry their registration cards on their person at all times. As surely you know."

"How old are you, counselor?" Dillon asked.

The lawyer only stared at Dillon.

Dillon said, "American men may take their obligations under this law more seriously when they learn that the federal grand jury—which convenes, by the way, in
New York
—has handed down this week indictments identical to Mr. Buckley's against seven hundred and twelve men."

"Out of a total of what?" the lawyer was relieved to ask.

Fitzgerald glanced at Dillon.

"Millions, right?" the lawyer pressed. "That proves my point. This is politics, not justice."

"Would it be justice," Fitzgerald asked, "if I arrested you?"

Dillon watched Buckley, who sat with his hand at his eyeglasses, hiding that ear, tilting the lenses slightly to read the form that bore his signature, as if trying to grasp how such a trivial matter—he barely remembered dealing with it—could be coming back at him like this. He was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt. His tie was carefully knotted. A gold cufflink showed at his sleeve.

"The papers said there were forty-seven indictments in Chicago." The lawyer put his hand on Buckley's arm as if to restrain him, though Buckley had continued to read with the equanimity of an accountant.

Dillon was disappointed that he could sense so little of Buckley's reaction, and he realized that by rising to the lawyer's bait, he and Fitzgerald had been suckered. The lawyer's job was to draw the heat away.

Dillon had been imagining this moment for months, and he had gotten it completely wrong. He'd remembered Buckley lunging at him outside the coroner's hearing room, threatening to kill him too, and he'd counted on some similar display here. He never anticipated this cool detachment, what seemed a radical self-control.

Finally, as if in response to Dillon's stare, Buckley shook his head, pulled his arm out from under the lawyer's hand, looked up at the agents and said, "It doesn't matter. It's obvious what you've cooked up, and it doesn't matter."

Dillon had forgotten Buckley's speech impediment, that thick-tongued slurring. Unconsciously, he had eliminated it, as if such unmanly imperfection didn't square with the proper image of an enemy.

"I got to admit, I didn't see it coming." Buckley leaned back in his chair, unhooked his eyeglasses and only then allowed his direct gaze to fall on Dillon.

"Fine or imprisonment or both, Mr. Buckley."

Buckley shrugged, but could not resist asking, "How long?"

"Up to five years."

Buckley glanced at his lawyer, who shook his head: never.

And then, for an overlong time, nothing happened. Fitz smoked his pipe, still with his leg on the chair. Dillon continued to hold his position against the wall. The ash from his cigarette fell on the floor because he did not want to lean forward to the ashtray. Dillon quite deliberately called up the memory of Mike Foley's corpse dripping with blood on the edge of the slaughterhouse sinkhole. Cass Ryan's uncle seemed more dead than ever because Dillon had no memory of what he looked like alive. It made no sense to him now that, in fact, he had never met the man.

Buckley's face was white, unsmiling, set like plaster.

Dillon realized that Buckley and his lawyer were waiting for an offer, as if what Washington had wanted was a piece of Buckley's loan shark operation to help finance the coming war. The bright room with its four blank walls and overhead light sank into the silence of human refusal.

No one moved or spoke.

Then Leo did.

He tapped the bowl of his pipe on the table, and said, "Take your break, Marie."

The stenographer stood up and, without a backward glance, left the room.

Fitzgerald now took his foot off the chair and sat down, leaning across the table toward the lawyer. "We are pressing for the maximum penalty in this case, and given the importance the government attaches to making the draft law work, I think we'll get it. Your client should understand what he's up against here, and so should you. Do you want to deal with us or not?"

Dillon's surprise took him off the wall. He nearly screamed, Deal? Deal with this bastard? What are you talking about?

Dillon steadied himself by leaning on the table, a standing version of Fitzgerald's craning posture.

The lawyer picked up a pencil and began tapping idly. "What do you have in mind?"

"Not what, who. We want Edward J. Kelly."

The lawyer dropped the pencil.

Buckley continued to sit stone-faced.

But Dillon had to grip the table to keep from challenging his partner: What the hell is this?

"We want John M. Bolton. And we want Jimmy Martin."

Now the lawyer laughed abruptly. "Why stop at the mayor and a couple of aldermen? What about Pat Nash? And Governor Horner? Don't you want them, too?"

"We would take them. We are prepared to quash the indictment against your client in return for his help in developing certain cases."

"What cases?"

"Misappropriation of NRA funds, interstate transportation of gaming equipment, violations of the Mann Act."

Raymond Buckley cut Fitzgerald off simply by raising his hand. "Or what?"

"Or you go to prison as a draft dodger."

"Up to five years?"

"That's right."

Buckley leaned forward to put his face opposite and level with Fitzgerald's. "Federal lockup?"

"Yes."

Dillon was staring at Buckley's upraised hand, as if trying to see specks of dried blood in its swirling pores; he was not ready for it when Buckley turned to face him. It was to Sean Dillon that he wanted to make his declaration.

"I can do five years standing on my head."

It was the exact statement Dillon would have predicted, and his anger was aimed as much at Fitzgerald as at Buckley. Who could ever have expected this callous bastard to break so easily? What was he, a pickpocket? A Canaryville pimp? Toothless as the draft law snare turned out to have been, still its jaws were closed on Buckley. Who was Leo Fitzgerald to offer him a way out of it? Leo had his own strategy, obviously, but to Dillon it felt like betrayal.

But Dillon's anger curled back on himself: How could I not have seen this coming? To bring down the majordomos of the Kelly-Nash machine, Leo would offer Buckley his own stained-glass window in the cathedral; he would make Buckley an FBI agent, if it would help.

Like he did me.

Dillon remembered what Cass had said about their great strategy
against the man who had so brutalized her uncle: "That is not enough. You are rolling over for them too, by thinking it is."

Cass Ryan had known instinctively that Buckley would shrug at them.

Raymond Buckley, who, on page after page of the yellow sheets which Cass had so compulsively covered with her nun-pleasing handscript, and which Dillon had by now all but memorized, showed himself to be completely ignorant of the relationship between acts and consequences.

And us? he thought now. What consequence was five measly years in starched denim compared to the swollen hulk of Mike Foley's body?

"Leo, can I talk to you for a minute?" Without waiting for a reply, Dillon moved to the door, opened it and went out into the hallway. Fitzgerald followed him. They faced each other.

"You were going to let that bastard off."

"I'll let the devil off if he gives me Kelly."

"You've misread Buckley, Leo." Dillon poked Fitzgerald's chest, a brisk expression of anger. "And you've misread me."

"We're not just settling scores here."

"What are we doing?"

"Trying to pry these spiders out from under their rocks. You brought me back a sweet set of draft laws from Washington, but it's up to me to use them the best way I can. This is Chicago. The draft law doesn't mean squat here, except as a rod to poke and pry with. That's all it's ever meant to us."

"Tell that to the director."

"Hoover knows how this is played. You're the one who's learning, Dillon."

"Buckley would never give you anything. I could have told you that."

Fitzgerald shrugged. "That leaves me forty-six other rocks to pry up. And as for Buckley, he can serve five years on his head? Good for him. Let's make sure he does."

Fitzgerald turned to go back into the room, but Dillon stopped him. "That's not enough."

"What?"

"Five years, and with good time it will be three. That's not enough for Buckley."

"So what are you saying?"

"Let me have him."

With those words Dillon had pushed into another realm, the uncertain one, more familiar to Fitzgerald than to Dillon, in which obligations were not spelled out, nor limits; in which famous distinctions blurred over, as between ends and means, as between justice and revenge. It was a realm supposedly forbidden to men like them, but they both knew—now that Dillon knew—that it was also the realm in which they had their true existence.

"What are you going to do with him?"

"I'm going to spend the afternoon sitting in that room with him, letting him stare me down. And then I'll invite him again to help us develop a case against Kelly. And he'll say no. Then I'll let him go. Tomorrow, Thursday and Friday, I'll help you interview the other big shots. A few of them I'd like to take by myself. And then on Monday, I'll want it announced that the draft indictment against Raymond Buckley has been dropped."

Fitzgerald put his hand on the wall, leaned into it. "What do you have, Dillon?"

"Just a feeling, Leo."

"What do you
have?
"

"A feeling."

Fitzgerald sighed wearily. "I don't tell you everything, so you don't tell me—is that it?"

Dillon arched his eyebrows, but in his mind, the long yellow scroll of Cass's transcript unrolled: calls to commissioners, tip-offs to casino operators, bribes to judges, orders to leg breakers, rewards to cops, name after name, secret after secret, more than enough to stun Buckley's colleagues with what he, Dillon, knew. The FBI in possession of reams of information that could only have come from Buckley.

"It won't work, Sean, unless you have something. You've been gone for a year. What could you have?"

Dillon stared back at him. "I want the Buckley indictment quashed, Leo."

"Just as if he talked to us. You're setting Buckley up to get him killed."

"You've seen too many gangster movies, Leo. I didn't spend six years at night school learning to be an accomplice to murder, not even Buckley's. I want to use the force of law against this bastard. I want him faced with what he's done, and I want him punished."

"Forget it. Let's go with what we've got."

"Give me a week, Leo. Let me have him for a week—alone. After that it's all yours. What do you say?"

"You've pulled ahead of me, Sean. What do they teach you guys in Washington now?"

Dillon put his hand on the doorknob, going back to work. "That anyone could forget that his mother died."

Dillon spent that entire afternoon in the interrogation room with Buckley and his lawyer, just the three of them. Except for intermittent protests from the lawyer, no one spoke. Dillon claimed to be waiting for Buckley to cooperate. Buckley was glad for the chance to show that he could wait too. Dillon leaned against the wall, smoking in silence, watching as Buckley resolutely stared at his thick knuckles.

Throughout the day on Thursday, and again on Friday, Dillon interviewed the other draft law violators, a series of small-time Chicago politicians, assistant county commissioners, magistrates, ward committeemen and party functionaries. Dillon emphasized their vulnerability to federal prosecution, and at a certain point in each interview, he asked the stenographer to leave. As Fitzgerald had done with Buckley, he then offered to quash the draft indictments in return for help in developing cases against senior members of the Kelly-Nash machine. As Dillon expected, each one refused.