The Cassidy Posse (30 page)

Mike sat up in his seat and and was suddenly alert. After his close encounter with death at the hands of Kid Del Rio, his heightened senses had come down slowly like a drunk sinking into a hangover. He really hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings since he got on the train to go home.
It’s all over
. That was the message his tired body and frazzled mind had wanted to hear. Now he was getting a wake-up call—the alarmed feeling you get when you’re strolling along daydreaming and discover you’ve walked into a bad neighborhood.

“Duh tall fellow,” said Mike leaning forward in the seat. “How tall is he?”

“Why he’s the biggest man I’ve ever…”

Mike was immediately out of his seat with Sean Daugherty in tow, pushing past the surprised conductor before he could finish his sentence. Mike looked frantically out the windows as the train ground to a stop. He had Sean by his collar and was jerking him from seat to seat.

“What the hell is wrong with yuh?” yelled Sean.

When they reached the door, he got his answer. A bullet whizzed by his head and split the wooden doorframe. Mike turned to see that the gunsmoke had come from the shadows of the unlit entrance at the other end of the car. He dropped to the floor and tried to turn the door handle with Sean and the frightened conductor both pressed against him. It finally gave way and all three of them tumbled out onto the steel grated platform outside the door just as a second shot passed over their heads. Pulling Sean out of the way, he closed the door and the shots stopped. He drew his .38 service revolver and peered cautiously through the window of the door towards the far end of the car but saw no movement.

“What happened?” asked the dazed conductor who had gotten a little more excitement than he had bargained for.

“I got sloppy,” Mike replied curtly.

Henry Bockleman sat in his leather parlor chair watching his four year-old son galloping a toy horse across the floor. Their cramped third floor apartment on Chicago’s south side did not allow the miniature horse much running room. When Henry was a kid growing up on a farm in Indiana, space was never a problem. Time had always been his constant restriction. He could not remember when he was so young that he was not assigned some chores to do. His earliest memories were of working. When he was about six, a rooster chased him around the henhouse while he was doing chores with his grandfather. The old man kicked the bird into the air and gave out a hearty laugh. He always seemed to be in good sprits although he did nothing but work until the day he died. At his funeral years later, Henry, then a restless teenager, had resolved to break the cycle.

His grandfather had grown up forty miles from Chicago but had never been there. Henry’s father went to the Chicago stockyards once to get rid of some dry milk cows and vowed he would never return. A drunk had bumped into his father knocking him into another man. When he got home, he discovered his wallet was gone.

Life did not open up for Henry until his Uncle Bill became a county deputy sheriff. Henry accompanied him to Chicago to deliver some legal papers involving an extradition. The boisterous crowds, the traffic and even the filth of the city seemed exciting to a sixteen-year old farm boy. He remembered most vividly the precinct station house. The police officers in their sharp blue uniforms with copper buttons chided him good-naturedly. One had taken the time to show him the interrogation room and the lock-up. On the street, the officers usually carried themselves with solemn authority, but once inside the station house, there was a carefree camaraderie that had a magnetic appeal to Henry.

From that day on, Henry rejected all things rural. He became even more lax about doing the endless chores that were assigned to him. This began to alienate him from his father and two older brothers who had to finish his work while Henry stayed late in town with his new friends. His fresh interest in knowledge had caught the attention of the new school principal. Mr. Chapton had moved from Indianapolis to accept the small town job and shared Henry’s dislike for rural living. He gave Henry books to read about far-away places and taught him to play the gentleman’s game of chess.

“What’s wrong with you, Henry?” asked his wife Clara, momentarily bringing him out of his reminiscences. “You’ve been sitting there gloomy as a rain cloud since you got home.”

“Ah, just tired is all. It was a tough day.”

He watched Clara as she busied herself in the kitchen. They had been married six years now, and he still enjoyed just watching her. It was as though he didn’t believe she was really there with him. Clara, slender and blonde, was easily the prettiest girl in Dyer, Indiana, but she had been elusive to all her suitors. Regardless of how much land their family owned or their local prominence, she held them at arms-length. It wasn’t until she heard Henry expounding upon the virtues of the big city that she understood her own reluctance to be pinned. She and Henry began spending so much time together they became a couple in the eyes of the town. When Henry left to go to Chicago to join the police force, they corresponded frequently. Two years later he returned to town wearing his new uniform, and he and Clara were married. In four more years he had made detective, one of the youngest in department history. When he received his next promotion, they were planning to move to one of the new suburbs.

“Didn’t things go well at your meeting this afternoon with Chief Barnes?” asked Clara.

“Oh, yeah, ah, okay,” he stammered. “I was just thinking what a dump this little apartment is.”

“Don’t worry,” she said pleasantly. “When you make Lieutenant, we can move to Rogers Park. Kate Roberts and I are going there next week to walk around and dream.”

“Great, but don’t pick out a dream home yet. We may be a few years away from that.”

“Henry, where’s the old confidence?” she chided. “That doesn’t sound like the man I married.”

Easy for you to say
, he thought. He suddenly envied her being a woman. As she took care of their son and performed those mundane household chores, she was sheltered from the reality of what it took to make those eagerly awaited promotions. She did not have to be immersed daily in the grimness, danger and politics of his job. Now the politics of promotion were becoming increasingly complicated because of his loyalty to his partner, Mike McGhan.

Henry was a rookie patrol officer when he first met McGhan on a crime scene. Mike was still a sergeant then. He had thought him to be surly and overbearing but efficient. When he made detective, he was assigned to be McGhan’s partner. Henry knew he was in for a tough time. Mike was already a Chicago legend - the hero of the Haymarket riot of ‘86. There was no way Henry could immediately ask for reassignment. He had to wait and make it look right.

Henry had expected the worst and wasn’t disappointed. McGhan regarded him as a naïve country boy who had no business being in the big city. Henry endured his partner’s distain in exchange for the knowledge he gained. Mike knew everyone in the city, and just being his tag-a-long brought him some acceptance. Mike had an uncanny ability to sniff out trouble brewing between any of the many gangs, ethnic and racial groups in Chicago.

Their chilly relationship changed on a hot July night two years ago. He and Mike had inadvertently walked into a robbery in progress at Kelsey’s Saloon on Halsted. Mike had pulled his service revolver and quickly had two men backed against the bar with their hands up. Henry was still standing in the doorway, out of sight, when he saw a third robber pointing a gun at Mike’s back from the balcony behind him. Mike heard a shot behind him and turned to see the unseen accomplice pitching forward over the railing to the floor below. As he watched, one of the men at the bar seized the opportunity to go for a Derringer he had hidden. There was a second shot and Mike turned back towards the bar to see the would-be back-shooter grab his shoulder and the Derringer clattering on the floor. Henry was standing in the doorway, shaken but stalwart, with his smoking gun in his hand. Mike stood there with his unfired revolver, stunned for a moment. He looked like he was trying to find the words to thank Henry, but he couldn’t get them out.

Mike was quiet for a few days; he scarcely looked at Henry. Then Mike surprised him by throwing him a party at Kelsey’s a week later. He told everyone how his partner covered his back for him and they all drank to Henry. Mike left out the part about the second man with Derringer. It was as though he couldn’t reconcile his own sloppiness in handling the situation. When someone asked, Henry said that Mike had taken care of it.

Their relationship changed after that. Mike realized he needed a partner who could back him up, and that he had just that sort of man. Henry was pulled out of the shadows. He had a new identity overnight. He was the man that Mike McGhan relied upon.

“Did something happen at the meeting that upset you?” asked Clara, putting her hand on his shoulder and bringing him out of his thoughts.

“No, I was just thinking about Mike. I’m just a little worried how he’s doing out West.”

Something did happen at the meeting that upset him. It was business as usual with department reports and crime statistics followed by the usual standing around bullshitting afterwards. Same old boring stuff until he headed for the door. As he passed by Chief Barnes and gave him a perfunctory handshake, the head of the Chicago Police Department made a seemingly casual remark about Henry being a chess player. He paid it no mind among the bustling camaraderie that accompanied the conclusion of the monthly meeting. As he was walking down the steps of city hall alone, the thought finally struck him. Was it a reference to the telegraph to Mike? The move that he hoped would suggest that the pawn would be jumped by his own knight. It was the best idea he could come up with at the time to tell his partner that forces here in Chicago seemed to be working against him. He didn’t feel he could trust anyone, and he knew telegraph messages had a way of getting around to the wrong people. It was the only subtle way he could think of to tell Mike to watch his back. Of course, that depended upon Mike finding a chess player in the wilderness that could figure out the abstract hidden message.

Things became a little strange after Nell Quinn’s death. Being a close friend of Mike’s, he knew that his partner would expect him to investigate the homicide. His first rebuff was when he was told that the case was assigned to Clancy, a new detective who was not working out too well. That was to be expected. After all, Nell Quinn was a madam. No one would expect Chicago’s finest to be assigned to find her killer. When he approached Clancy on the matter, he admitted the top brass told him to put it on the back burner. An investigation sitting on Clancy’s front burner didn’t have much chance of being resolved, so Henry started to dig into the case. Doors began to close immediately. He wanted to examine the body. Not possible. The body was buried yesterday in a pauper’s grave. Street people had to be interned in a big city as a part of the way of life. They usually let them set around a couple days until they had accumulated a day’s work for the gravediggers.

He went to Nell Quinn’s parents and they were very upset. The father who had refused to let her come home had a change of heart. On hearing of her death, he went down to the morgue to claim the body. He was too late. They did not even receive word of her fate until she was already in the ground.

Coincidence? Maybe. But he also ran into roadblocks when he started checking out the story of Sean’s escape. How did Sean get the gun inside the cell? Here was a kid that had never been charged with a crime showing that kind of street savvy. And it was a Colt 45 revolver. He certainly didn’t walk into Cook County jail with a weapon that size. He would have to have had an accomplice among the guards. Maybe a sympathetic Irish cop? He checked out that theory only to find out that the last person to leave the cell was none other than their old friend Van Ech. It was unusual for a patrolman to help put a prisoner in a cell. Van Ech was probably there until the final closing of the steel door to make sure he received the maximum publicity from this high profile case. He never made it any secret that he wanted to make detective. Henry had tried to question the malicious Dutchman about the arrest, but his seething contempt brought the questioning to a quick halt.

“Do you want to get that, dear?” said his wife. “My hands are full right now.”

“What - get what?” asked Henry, again startled out of his contemplations.

“The door - someone is at the door.”

There was a persistent knock that now invaded Henry’s state of consciousness. He rose from his leather chair and walked to the door. The persistent knock had a familiar rhythm to it. He opened the door only a few inches; the last few days had made him cautious. There were three men standing in the hall.

“Mike?”