Memorial Bridge (8 page)

When he saw her figure out in the street, crossing toward Walgreen's, he leapt into traffic too. But the drivers did not yield for him as they had for the pretty young woman. The spectacle of his crossing Peoria Street—horns blaring, tires screeching, curses—had the effect, at least, of stopping her.

"Are you crazy?" she asked when he joined her on the sidewalk. "You wouldn't even answer me back there. And now you're getting hit by a car to catch up with me?"

He saw that her face was covered with marks like bruises, and it took him a moment to understand what had happened. Tears pouring freely from her eyes had flooded her makeup. He felt color rising in his own face, and he retreated. "I'm sorry."

"Don't tell me you're sorry!" she said. "I don't care if you are sorry. This has nothing to do with you."

This pain, she meant, this grief. This mess on my face which you have insisted on exposing!

She wasn't finished. "Nothing to do with you! Isn't that what you just said?"

"It was Jack Hanley who said that, not me."

"But it's what you meant."

And of course it was. Dillon had to look away from her. His eyes fell on the old Stone Gate.

"And you know what?" The woman pushed Dillon's arm, to make him look at her again. He saw how angry she was. "It's true. It has nothing to do with you! So leave me alone! Do you hear me?"

"I think the whole South Side hears you."

"Well,
do you?
"

"Yes."

At that Cassie Ryan turned and stalked away.

Dillon didn't move, but knowing he had only a moment more in which to reach her, he called out very loudly, "But you wanted to know what happened to your uncle!"

She stopped cold.

Customers went in and out of the all-night drugstore, pointedly ignoring them. If their spat was different from other arguments that were carried so frequently into those streets, it was in their being so young, in his not being drunk—though to passersby, didn't it seem that she had, like a Canaryville wife, just dragged him from his tavern?

At last she faced him. A dozen yards of open sidewalk separated them. Those passersby were staying clear.

"But you won't tell me."

Dillon slowly closed the distance. "I don't know what happened to your uncle. I came to Doran's like you did—to hear what Hanley knew."

"What they said happened—about him falling into the vat—something told me that wasn't possible."

"You're right."

"You made it sound, at first, like someone ... killed him. Is that what you think?"

Dillon glanced toward the blinking neon of the Walgreen's sign.

"But then you took it back."

Dillon nodded, but his silence thickened, becoming his positive statement, despite himself.

He broke it, aware of the change this was. "I'm not taking it back
now. I won't take it back again. Something awful happened to your uncle. I became involved in it because I was one of the people to find him. If you want to find out what happened—"

"Of course I do." Her feeling brought her right against him, her hands pressing into the sleeve of his shirt.

"Then I'd like to help you."

"What happened to crush my uncle's head like that?"

She asked the question coldly, so that was how he answered it. "We found him head-first in the downpipe. He had been stuffed into it. When his head swelled up..." Dillon let a shrug finish for him.

"Was he already dead, do you think?"

"An autopsy would show that. Will there be an autopsy?"

Cassie stared at Dillon with yet more horror on her face. "They dissect the body, don't they?"

"Partially."

"Well how could we—?"

"If you want to know what killed him, you do an autopsy. It would show if he choked, if he drowned, if he was hit..."

The girl's eyes had clouded over. She was seeing those panhandlers downtown, the men into whose upturned eyes she had for years now poured her hope and her despair.

"You say he's at Riordan's?"

"Yes."

"Who in your family is in charge of—?"

"I am."

"Do you know..." Dillon softened his voice for the unspeakable again. "Have they started the embalming?"

Cassie nodded. "Mr. Riordan said they do it at night." Her hand went to her lips, an abject gesture. "He said it would be disrespectful to wait."

"Who's paying him?"

"Mr. Riordan? Why I—" Bewilderment got the better of her. Paying? What did paying have to do with this? Cassie forced herself to focus. "He hasn't mentioned it yet."

Dillon shook his head. "They mention it first." He took her arm. "Why don't we go back over there and see what Mr. Riordan says."

Cassie fell easily into step with him, but because, really, since getting off that streetcar hours before to have her cousin hail her with the news, she had been operating in a kind of trance. Her aunt and her mother both
had surrendered all initiative to her, and making one decision after another had protected her from her grief and anger, as moving with this stranger now protected her from having to decide what to do next. She only half heard what he was saying.

"If they haven't started the embalming, you can ask them to wait. There's no hurry. Embalming can wait until tomorrow."

Sean was aware of her emotional drift, and he was relieved that their movement through the streets made further talk impossible. He felt her thin arm in his hand, and at one point he imagined his fellow pipefitters ragging him about the canner he was with last night. A canner is any animal too thin for the butcher's block.

They left the Stone Gate and the glaring, pole-lit abyss of Section Five behind, and the soft yellow lights of the broad avenue too, its confusion of cigar stores, shuttered newsstands, boisterous taverns and pushcarts covered for the night. They passed into the tranquil reserve of the neighborhood itself, coming finally, in ten minutes, to the block of Forty-fifth Street in the middle of which stood the squat, reddish-brown church of St. Gabriel the Archangel. Only its tower, a pseudo-Tuscan belfry, had any boldness, and in the dark it loomed above the plain of grim rooftops like a sentry looking out for the mellow hills of the former countryside.

Across from the church was the funeral home, a converted residence, one of the few brick houses in an area famous before the Depression for its modest but well-kept wood frame dwellings. Now those houses were run-down, even dilapidated, because money was so short, of course, but also because so many of the men who'd have kept those clapboards scraped and painted had disappeared. Buildings that had housed one family before now housed three, and the patches of soil in front, where squares of grass once grew, were now planted inexpertly with tomato vines and poles of beans.

"Riordan's Funeral Parlor," the tidy sign read. With its green awning overhanging the sidewalk directly opposite the pillared entrance of the Romanesque church, Riordan's was as much a part of St. Gabe's as the nuns' school farther down the block. Parishioners were always taken aback to be reminded, and at the worst time, that funerals, unlike the other functions of the parish, were conducted for a fee. No wonder Cassie hadn't thought to ask who was paying. Maybe
she
was.

Sean Dillon led the way up to the door which, under the awning, was
the darkest on the street. When he glanced back at Cassie, only to see her wiping her cheeks with her handkerchief, he froze. Were her feelings of devastation taking her under?

But instead of dabbing at fresh tears, she was repairing her ravaged eyes. She brought them immediately up to meet his and he saw a depth of cold determination.

He knocked, then knocked again. They waited.

The tall bespectacled bald man who opened the door was familiar to them both, as to every parishioner, despite his collarless shirt, the sleeves of which, like Dillon's, were rolled past his elbows. He was drying his hands with a ragged towel. The stench of formaldehyde clung to him. Usually they saw Riordan in his charcoal suit and gray gloves, leading the casket down the aisle like death's father. Usually he reeked of cologne; this chemical was why.

"Mr. Riordan, I'm Sean Dillon, and this is Miss Ryan."

Riordan nodded, but his voice was thick with negation when he said, "Miss Ryan and I met earlier tonight. I'm closed now. I told you, Miss, we can make arrangements in the morning."

"Miss Ryan and her family want you to delay preparing the body." Dillon had unconsciously assumed the air of the family representative, as if he did this. "Thé family is going to have an autopsy performed."

"An autopsy!" Riordan faced Cassie. Light flashing off his glasses underscored his amazement. "Why?"

"To find out how he died."

"You don't need a postmortem report for that, Miss. I've already begun on him. Your uncle drowned. Do you imagine he was poisoned or something?"

Dillon noted that the man's surprise, and mystification, seemed genuine. Perhaps he
wasn't
in a hurry to hide something.

With an eyebrow arched above the wire rim of his glasses, Riordan said, "Your uncle unfortunately found himself where his anatomy meant he shouldn't be. His lungs were full of..." His pointed hesitation flagged the next word as euphemism. "Fluid."

"You mean blood," Cassie said.

"Yes. Blood wastage. He drowned in it. He was still breathing when he went under. Otherwise—" Riordan checked himself and turned brusquely to Dillon. "Why are you letting this girl subject herself to this?"

Dillon replied in the calm but insistent tones he'd imagined himself using in court. "She wants to know what happened to her uncle, beyond his having drowned. What do the man's bruises reveal?" What was he flogged with? he added to himself. "The man was found in blood pipes, Mr. Riordan, not in a vat of pickle fluid, as Miss Ryan was told. And not in Lake Michigan either. An autopsy—"

Riordan cut him off to hiss, as if the girl wouldn't hear him, "An autopsy would show how much alcohol was in the man. Is that what you want? Talk about pickle juice! That man was too baffled from drink to know
where
he was. Is that what you want established?"

"Yes," Cassie said, startling Dillon and Riordan both. When they looked at her she added in an undefiant voice, "If that's the truth of it. No one needs to know but me."

Riordan draped the towel over his shoulder and folded his arms. "You're a little late, as it happens, Miss. Your uncle's fluids are all but drained, if you'll forgive the indelicate detail. There'd be no question of a proper autopsy now."

"Nevertheless..." Dillon wasn't sure what his point was, beyond helping this girl take some control over things. "Your instructions from the family are to cease the embalming of Mr. Foley's remains. A doctor will be in touch with you tomorrow."

Riordan pointedly waited for some endorsement from Cassie. She gave it with a nod. Riordan smiled the thin, empty smile of his profession. "I'll have to talk to Mrs. Foley."

"But stop the embalming," Cassie ordered.

"As you say, Miss." He stepped back from the door to close it.

Dillon stopped him. "One more thing, please."

"What?"

"Who's paying you?"

The firmness in Dillon's voice as he asked the simple question stirred in Cassie a deep sense of gratitude. Where had this man come from?

"The ward committee," Riordan answered.

"What?" Cassie was aghast.

"Your uncle is a beneficiary of the Democratic Party. He—"

"The party? My uncle had nothing to do with the party."

"The committee pays for a lot of funerals, Miss."

"Who gave you your instructions?" Dillon asked.

"Arthur Nolan. He works for Mr. Buckley."

"Buckley?" Cassie touched Dillon. "Jack Hanley mentioned Buckley."

Dillon stepped back from Riordan's door, but the mortician leaned after him. "
Now
do you see? You'd better butt out of this, Mister."

"See what?" Cassie asked. She grabbed Riordan's arm.

"Ask him," he said, jerking free. Then he fell back into the darkness of his funeral home, and he closed the door.

"See what?" Cassie repeated, now to Dillon.

Instead of answering, Sean drew her down the stairs and out from under the awning. They crossed the street to stand in front of the entrance to St. Gabe's.

"My uncle was nobody to Mr. Buckley. Why would—?"

"He must have owed them money," Dillon said simply. "They had him killed, and now they're having him buried. They want everyone to know what happened. That's why they brought the stockyards to a halt. They're making an example of your uncle."

"But he doesn't gamble. He couldn't have owed them that much money."

"It doesn't take much. And gambling is less what snags them than drinking." Dillon was speaking coldly now. These were realities which he, like every yarder, knew very well. But he'd kept them at a distance. "A dollar a bottle. Two bottles a day. Fourteen, fifteen dollars a week. Could your uncle afford that?"

Cassie lowered her eyes pitifully. "I gave him five a week. I thought it was enough."

Dillon shook his head. "Saloon keepers advance them credit to a point. Of course, it isn't
their
credit they're advancing. And once the debt is on the poor sap, then in addition to the cost of booze every week, he has to come up with interest payments. A quarter a week per ten dollars owed is the usual rate. That's the 'vig.' It's not that much for any one guy. There's the genius of it, keeping a man's payment due within his ability to get it, while keeping the total owed high enough that he can never fully pay it off. Interest payments—every bum on the South Side is making them to somebody, but most of every nickel and dime goes to one guy, who fortunately is very generous and lenient." Dillon stopped, then added quietly, "To a point. The point at which the discipline of the system has to be enforced."

"Is that what happened to my uncle?"

Dillon stared at her. The girl's skin, even in that pale light, was the color of her striking hair. "It's not that often that they kill people for—"

"Are you saying somebody killed my uncle because he didn't pay his quarters?" A baffled fury had made her face savage. "How do you know all this?"