Memorial Bridge (7 page)

The policeman went in. Cassie hesitated only a moment longer before following him. When she stepped into the tavern the thick air clogged her nostrils. To the warmth and joy of the room was added suddenly a fresh attentiveness as the men became aware of her. The tone of their banter shifted. Those nearest the door who had closed in behind the policeman made way again, opening her an avenue as the commuters on the North La Salle sidewalk had.

Cassie nodded at them as she pressed on through to the bar.

The bartender saw her coming. He held a finger up at the policeman, meaning Wait, and slid along his side of the rail to intercept her as close to the door as possible. He leaned toward her, quite obviously not to take an order but to hear whom she'd come looking for.

"Jack Hanley," she said.

In the din he hadn't heard. He cocked his ear at her. His face grew twisted and savage-looking.

"Jack Hanley. I'm told he's here."

The bartender drew back. Cassie saw the vein in his temple swelling and she sensed he was deciding whether to point him out. Cassie had no idea what Hanley looked like. She had gotten his name from the night supervisor at Swift's only by threatening to call the priest at St. Gabriel's. From Swift's she'd gone to Hanley's house. Hanley's wife had told her at once where she'd find him, but this bartender was like the supervisor in being a man. She was still at the point of taking this reticence as a simple part of how these men habitually dealt with women. Cassie felt she knew them. She felt a rush of resentment. She knew them all.

The weight with which she'd packed her expression gave the bartender no choice. He turned and craned, looking across his room. His eyes stopped and Cassie followed them to the far corner where half a dozen overall-clad men were sprawled at one of the narrow tables.

As she moved toward them the drinkers once more cleared the way
for her, some unsteadily, some eyeing her with bleary shock. More than one man inhaled quickly at the sight of her. Now the shift in the room's tone was more pronounced as the others became aware of her. Even those young enough or sober enough to be struck by her rare green eyes and bright auburn hair, by her red lips even in that hard-set mouth and by the sure, certain way she carried herself, like a dame in the movies—even they reacted first to the intrusion she was. Gradually they stopped talking as she cut through the aisle they opened for her. In silence they watched as she approached the corner. When they saw that it was Hanley slumped there with his back to the room, they all guessed that she'd come because of the blood pipes.

Those at the table with Hanley were the last to sense her presence. When finally they stopped talking—two froze with mugs nearly to their mouths—it was to peer upward quizzically. Jack Hanley was dead last to turn. His hat was cocked to one side, forgotten. When he looked up at Cassie the grief and fright she saw in his unfocused eyes seared themselves into her brain and she knew at once that this was him.

"I'm Mike Foley's niece," she said.

"Oh." Hanley started to get up, but he couldn't. He fell back into his chair. He reeked of alcohol. "Oh, darling," he said weakly.

"I've come to find out what happened."

Hanley looked quickly at his nearest companion, as if for guidance. The man was also drunk. He tossed his head toward Hanley's hat, which Hanley then took off. Now when he faced Cassie again a satisfied expression filled his face; by doffing his cap he had discharged what responsibility he had toward her.

But Cassie repeated herself coldly, "What happened to my uncle?"

Again Hanley cast his eyes about, but no one would meet them. He stared at the hat he clutched between his beefy hands. "He died."

"I know he died. I've been to Riordan's. I've seen his body. But what happened to him? They told me he drowned in a vat at Swift's. But what was he doing at Swift's? What happened to make his head like that? Where did he—?" Cassie stopped abruptly as the rampant emotion began once more to overtake her. She had become hysterical at Riordan's. The undertaker had felt free to put his arms around her. Now she hugged herself hard, choking off the violent shudder she felt coming. If she held herself in the vise of her own arms she could do this. "You have to tell me," she said. Only she knew how close she was to weeping.

Hanley's lips were set in a line. He thought if he didn't move she would go away. But she stood where she was above him, a grim statue. He said quietly, to soften her, "I knew him." He felt a fresh hit of the shock with which he'd heard who that pulpy mass had been.

"Then tell me, please."

Hanley brought his face up. "I mean years ago, I knew him years ago. I didn't know him now." Hanley clenched and unclenched his hands. "I don't know what happened."

"But you found him."

"I'm just a pipefitter, Miss. Your uncle was in the pipe. They made me go in for him."

"Pipe?"

Hanley realized he'd told her something she did not know. Stay out of this, he told himself. Stay out! Even drunk as he was, he knew enough to turn his back on the poor girl.

"Pipe?" Cassie repeated. She took Hanley by the shoulder, to force him to look at her, but he wouldn't budge. She heard the screech of emotion in her own voice; she hated it. "They told me
vat.
He fell into a giant vat. He took a short cut across a slippery cutting table, lost his footing and slid into a giant pickle vat. That's what they told me at Swift's. They said it was his own fault."

"Well then, what's your question, Miss?"

Cassie was surprised by the sober, calm voice behind her. When she looked she saw the policeman she'd followed in. His tunic was open at the throat. His hat was off now. His head was shiny bald. He held a shot glass in one hand, a beer mug in the other. A black cigar poked out from the glass, between his fingers.

"My question?" Cassie stared at him. She became aware of the press of stinking men. Why couldn't they give her room? They were all glaring at her as if it were an offense that she should want to know what happened to her uncle. The man at Swift's had concocted that story, she just knew it. When she'd challenged him, he'd as much as admitted it. He had told her he wasn't sure what had happened. My question, she repeated to herself. My only question.

Her real question had little to do with the famous dangers of the slaughter pits. What had made her dear uncle's sweet, loving heart so weak? And, before him, why had her father disappeared? That was what she wanted to ask someone, but these stewed prunes were too much like
her uncle and her father, as her stoical mother and aunt were too much unlike them.

She looked at the policeman with a sudden incredulity, as if snapping out of a trance. "My uncle died at Swift's. But he didn't work for Swift's. He hasn't had a job in years."

The policeman shrugged. "An odd-lot day laborer, Miss. Lots of fellows never tell them at home if they pick up a shift here or there." He lowered his voice to emphasize its Irish warmth. "Though usually they keep day workers away from the cutting tables. I'm sorry for your troubles, Miss."

The policeman's sympathy took Cassie by surprise. She deflected her emotion by turning back to Hanley. "I asked to talk to someone who saw it happen. I told them I wouldn't leave until they said who I could talk to. Then they told me you."

Hanley shot bolt upright. "I never saw it happen! I never saw anything happen!" He looked wildly about. "I just found him, is all. This has nothing to do with me. The blood was backing up into the slaughter rooms—"

"Jack." One of the men next to Hanley tried to silence him by squeezing his forearm.

But Hanley grabbed the man roughly in return. "You tell Buckley this has nothing to do with me! Moran sent me down there—"

"Shut up, Jack!" The man pushed Hanley back into his chair.

Cassie Ryan saw what a weary, frightened man he was. The onlookers were mainly expressionless, though at the mention of the name Buckley she'd seen the furtive rustle of their anxiety.

Buckley? Cassie tried to grasp the relevance to her uncle's fate of Raymond Buckley, if that's who they meant. He was the local Kelly-Nash ward boss, the man in charge of South Side disbursement of city jobs and of the dole. Everyone knew who Buckley was.

But to Cassie's knowledge Buckley had had nothing to do with her uncle. Certainly he'd never helped him find a job.

Instinctively she knew not to pursue it. She leaned down to put her face by the fading Hanley's, despite his odors. "Then who
did
see what happened? Who can I talk to?"

Hanley twisted his head away, as if Cassie Ryan were the one who reeked.

"You should go now, Miss." The policeman touched her elbow.

Cassie didn't move.

Hanley's pale eyes told her nothing until, finally, his dazed look gave way to one of recognition. "Dillon," he said abruptly. "Talk to Dillon."

"Who?"

"Sean Dillon. My helper. He was with me. He saw what I saw." A shudder curled through Hanley's body. "Which you don't want to hear about."

Cassie glanced at the policeman and at others nearby who shrugged. They'd never heard of Dillon. She turned back to Hanley. "How can I find him?"

But his face had clouded over already.

Sean Dillon was standing by himself near the bar. He'd come into Doran's after the woman had, but for the same reason, as he'd understood by listening, with everyone in the room, to her interrogation of Jack.

He watched as she drew herself up over Hanley, then turned, tossing her hair back, and looked into the eyes, a pair at a time, of the men she had to squeeze past to leave.

She moved steadily across the room toward the door, toward Dillon.

When she got close to him he did not step out of her way. "I am Sean Dillon."

She stopped before him, startled.

"I was with Jack. I'm sorry about your uncle."

Cassie put her hand to her lips. When Dillon noticed her fingers trembling, he realized she wasn't as tough as she pretended.

"Can you tell me what happened?" She spoke quietly, but the policeman who'd followed along behind her had heard.

Before Dillon could answer, the policeman stepped between them. "Don't go into the terrible details, son. It isn't what the lass needs. Her poor uncle died by an accident in the yards. That's all you need tell her."

Dillon found it easier to face the burly cop than the raw young woman. How
could
he speak to her of the grotesque pulpy mass who had been her uncle? He felt an incoming wave of what the priest had called his hesitation, but it wasn't about protecting the girl. Like others in the room, he had heard the name from Hanley's lips—Buckley, Raymond Buckley. Would he be the one now to splash that name with the blood of this woman's uncle? What about protecting himself?

Dillon knew very well what it meant then when he checked his hesitation. It almost surprised him that he could. He said to the po
liceman, but pointedly aware of speaking more to her, "It was no accident."

"What do you mean?"

"A man doesn't fall into a blood pipe, then haul the cast-iron cover closed above himself."

"Blood pipe?" Cassie said, revulsion in her voice.

"You see what I mean?" the cop said.

But now Dillon was fixed on the woman who had come into this place to hear the truth. "We found your uncle's body in the box basin where two large drainage pipes meet. The pipes draw blood out of the slaughter rooms."

"They told me he fell in a vat from a cutting table."

"He was nowhere near the cutting tables. There was no vat. It was the box basin near the pickle rooms—"

"Pickle rooms?" Cassie felt bile spurt into her mouth.

The policeman took Dillon's forearm and squeezed it hard, intending to hurt him. "You don't want to put your mouth where your feet shouldn't be, my friend. You should check your facts with the man at Swift's before you go upsetting people."

Sean was far from indifferent to the threat he heard in the cop's voice, felt in the vise of the cop's grip, the cop who had nothing to do with any of this, but who also knew instinctively the importance of sticking to the official story, whatever it was.

The men in the tavern moved away from Dillon and the cop, pointedly not listening anymore. Dillon recognized their unsubtle distancing as a form of what he had been doing for years. He might have moved away too at that moment, but the policeman was still holding on to him.

He said, "I don't know what the man at Swift's said. I came here looking for Hanley, to find out what happened."

"Well now you know. The bloke slipped."

"He was flogged," Dillon said, but under his breath so the woman would not hear.

"He still slipped."

It was like offering his soft throat to the wolf astride him when Dillon muttered, "If that's what Hanley says..."

"It is."

The woman interrupted, "But what about what
you
said?"

Dillon looked at her briefly, but his eyes went involuntarily back to
the cop, who said easily, "Don't open that closet door, McGee."

But now, instead of a door, Dillon thought of the iron lid on that downpipe. Before he could respond to the dead man's niece, the policeman released his grip on Dillon's arm and faced her.

"Shall I be taking you home, Miss?"

Miss Ryan refused the policeman by shaking her head. When she glanced around the awful room one last time, it was as if Dillon weren't there. She moved between him and the cop to the door, where she turned and said, "You should all be ashamed of yourselves." Then she walked out into the blue-black night alone.

Dillon followed her.

When he hit the street, she was most of the way to the corner. "Hey, wait up!"

She ignored him.

He began to run after her.

The night air, even here, a mile from the lake, had turned clammy. Dillon was suddenly aware of the sweat on his shirt, his filthy shirt.

The sound of his own hurrying feet faded in his ears as he picked up the sound of hers. He called out again, but she only went faster, not quite breaking into a run. At the corner, across from the Stone Gate, she was swallowed by a throng of night-shift workers streaming out of the yards. Dillon had to cut through them, skipping like a halfback.