He held up his knife. “Plus, it takes strength to jam a bread knife through a woman’s neck.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that. But it does add up to somebody on the young side.”
He pointed the knife at me. “I was developing a list of just that kind of suspect... only I got pulled off before I could follow up.”
I’d hoped for something like this.
“Where’s that list now?”
“In my field notes,” Drury said. “But let me stop by Town Hall, and nose around a little. Before I give you anything. You want me to check around at Summerdale station, too? I got pals there.”
“No,” I said. “I already got Kruger, there. He’s going to keep me in the know.”
“Kruger’s okay,” Drury said, nodding. “But why’s he cooperating with you, Nate?”
The fried potatoes were crisp and salty and fine, but I wished I’d asked for gravy. “That reward the Trib’s promising. Cops aren’t eligible to cash in.”
“Ah,” Drury said, and drank some dark beer. “Which applies to me, as well.”
“Sure. But that’s no problem.”
“I’m an honest cop, Nate.”
“As honest as they come in this town. But you’re human. We’ll work something out, Bill, you and me.”
“We’ll start,” Bill said, pushing his plate aside, grinning like a goof, “with dessert.”
9
That night I stopped in at the funeral home on East Erie. Peg wasn’t up to it — felt funny about it, since she’d never met the Keenans; so I went alone. A cop was posted to keep curiosity seekers out, but few made the attempt — the war might have been over, but the memory of personal sorrows was fresh.
The little girl lay dressed in white satin with pink flowers at her breast; you couldn’t see the nicks on her face — she was even smiling, faintly. She looked sweetly asleep. She was arranged so that you couldn’t tell the arms were still missing.
Norma Keenan had been told, of course, what exactly had happened to her little girl. My compassionate lie had only lessened her sorrow for that first night. Unbelievably, it had gotten worse: the coroner had announced, this afternoon, that there had been “attempted rape.”
The parents wore severe black and, while family and friends stood chatting sotto voce, were seated to one side. Neither was crying. It wasn’t that they were bearing up welclass="underline" it was shock.
“Thanks for coming, Nate,” Bob said, rising, and squeezed my hand. “Will you come to the Mass tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said. It had been a long time since I’d been to Mass; my mother had been Catholic, but she died when I was young.
At St. Gertrude’s the next morning, it turned out not to be a Requiem Mass, but the Mass of the Angels, as sung by the one hundred tender voices of the children’s choir. “A song of welcome,” the priest said, “admitting another to sing before the throne of God.”
JoAnn had belonged to this choir; last Christmas, she’d played an angel in the Scared Heart school pageant.
Now she was an armless corpse in a casket at the altar rail; even the beauty of the children’s voices and faces, even the long, tapering white candles that cast a flickery golden glow on the little white coffin, couldn’t erase that from my mind. When the priest reminded those in attendance that “there is no room for vengeance in our hearts,” I bit my tongue. Speak for yourself, padre.
People wept openly, men and women alike, many hugging their own children. Some thirteen hundred had turned out for the Mass; a detail of policemen protected the Keenans as they exited the church. The crowd, however, was well behaved.
And only a handful of us were at the cemetery. The afternoon was overcast, unseasonably chilly, and the wind coursed through All Saints’ like a guilty conscience. After a last blessing of holy water from the priest, the little white casket was lowered into a tiny grave protected by a solitary maple. Flowers banking the grave fluttered and danced in the breeze.
I didn’t allow myself to cry, not at first. I told myself Keenan was an acquaintance, not a friend; I reminded myself that I had never met the little girl — not before I fished her head out of a goddamn sewer, anyway. I held back the tears, and was a man.
It wasn’t till I got home that night, and saw my pregnant wife, that it hit me; knocked the slats right out from under me.
Then I found myself sitting on the couch, crying like a baby, and this time she was comforting me.
It didn’t last long, but when it stopped, I came to a strange and disturbing realization: everything I’d been through in this life, from close calls as a cop to fighting Japs in the Pacific, hadn’t prepared me for fear like this. For the terror of being a parent. Of knowing something on the planet was so precious to you the very thought of losing it invited madness.
“You’re going to help your friend,” Peg said. “You’re going to get whoever did this.”
“I’m going to try, baby,” I said, rubbing the wetness away with the knuckles of one hand. “Hell, the combined rewards are up to thirty-six grand.”
10
The next day, however, I did little on the Keenan case. I did check in with both Kruger and Drury, neither of whom had much for me — nothing that the papers hadn’t already told me.
Two janitors had been questioned, and considered suspects, briefly. One of them was the old Kraut we’d borrowed the broomstick from — Otto Bergstrum. The other was an Army vet in his early twenties named James Watson, who was the handyman for the nursery from which the kidnap ladder had been stolen. Watson was a prime suspect because, as a juvenile offender, he’d been arrested for molesting an eight-year-old girl.
That long-ago charge had been knocked down to disorderly conduct, however, and meanwhile, back in the present, both Bergstrum and Watson had alibis. Also, they both passed lie-detector tests.
“It doesn’t look like there’s any significance,” Kruger told me on the phone, “to that locker the killer broke into.”
“In the so-called ‘murder cellar,’ you mean?”
“Yeah. Kidnapper stole rags and shopping bags out of it. The guy’s clean, whose locker that is.”
“Any good prints turn up?”
“No. Not in the murder cellar, or the girl’s room. We had two on the window that turned out to be the cleaning lady. We do have a crummy partial off the kidnap note. And we have some picture-frame wire, a loop of it, we found in an alley near the Keenan house; might’ve been used to strangle the girl. The coroner says she was dead before she was cut up.”
“Thank God for that much.”
“We have a couple of odd auto sightings, near the Keenan house, in the night and early morning. We’re looking into that.”
“A car makes sense,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d think somebody would’ve spotted this maniac hand-carrying the body from the Keenans’ over to that basement.”
“I agree. But it was the middle of the night. Time of death, after all, was between one thirty and two a.m.”
Kruger said he’d keep me posted, and that had been that, for me and the Keenan case, on that particular day.
With one rather major exception.
I was about to get into my Plymouth, in a parking garage near the Rookery, when a dark blue 1946 Mercury slid up and blocked me in.
Before I had the chance to complain, the driver looked out at me and grinned. “Let’s take a spin, Heller.”
He was a thin-faced, long-chinned, beak-nosed, gray-complected guy about forty; he wasn’t big, but his presence was commanding. His name was Sam Flood, and he was a fast-rising Outfit guy, currently Tony Accardo’s chauffeur/bodyguard. He was also called “Mooney,” which was West Side street slang for nuts.