The venom of those last three words swirled in the air like smoke as she stalked rigidly back to her post. Runnion wiggled his eyebrows at me in mock horror and set a course in the opposite direction.
We sat side by side, the file open before us, trying to nail down a chronological sequence of events. I was holding an Emergency Room admittance sheet, struggling to make the hieroglyphic scrawl become English. From prior experience, I’d discovered that doctors, nurses, EMTs, and just about everyone else who learns how to take a blood pressure not only lose their penmanship in the process but also a large chunk of the English language.
“What the hell does CAO x 3 c/o mean?”
Runnion looked up and took the form from me. “Okay, you got the Admit. That’s ‘conscious, alert, and oriented to time, place, and date’-that’s pretty good, considering the injury.” He scanned the sheet generally, seemingly unstumped by the jargon. “I’ll translate-I’ve gotten pretty good at this garbage.”
I pulled my note pad from my pocket and opened it flat on the table.
Runnion spoke slowly, occasionally turning to other pages to fill in the blanks. “Okay-bottom lines first. Name: Robert Shattuck; date of birth: 9/11/38; address: transient; physician: doctor on call, meaning he took what they gave him. Apparently, he was a ‘walk-in’-I have a hard time believing that…”
“Does it say who helped him walk in?”
He flipped through several pages. “Nope, just that; no more. He was suffering from a gunshot wound to the knee…”
Runnion looked up suddenly. “That would have been reported-or it should have been. We can run Shattuck through our computer later and see what we come up with; maybe that’ll identify whoever helped him get to the ER.”
He returned to his scrutiny. “Says here the wound was self-inflicted and accidental-with a.45 semiautomatic. Jesus-that explains the damage. There’s a note here further on-could be from Shilly himself-that says the damage fits the story. There’re a couple of other reports from other docs-I can’t really tell what they’re about. Here’s a comment by one of them saying, ‘The large-caliber missile caused only transient nontraumatic bruising.’ That sounds like bullshit.”
“Is there anything there that explains why Shilly moved so fast?”
Runnion was clearly distracted, having latched onto yet another scrap of officialese. “I don’t know yet-but here is something. Apparently Mr. Shattuck checked himself out five days later, in the middle of the night.”
“Legitimately?”
Runnion shook his head. “Not hardly. Reading between the lines here, I’d say there were a lot of red faces the next day. Physical therapy was supposed to start the following morning, so they obviously didn’t think he was mobile; the nurses’ patient-care log shows he was still using a bedpan. I guess he was faking how weak he was.”
“No one went after him?”
“No reason to. The bill was paid.”
“With hundred-dollar bills, no doubt,” I muttered.
Runnion paused, obviously recalling the case history he’d read at his office. “Just like your guy with the aneurysm. Well, they don’t say what denominations, but he’s labeled ‘self-pay,’ which means no insurance, and ‘Paid in Full’ is stamped across the bottom.” He showed me the page.
I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. “When did Shilly get pulled into the case?”
Runnion checked. “That night, about five minutes after admit. He was the orthopedist on duty.”
I smiled at that. “The workings of fate maybe.”
“Makes you wonder what happened to make Shattuck so eager to disappear. I can check our files to see if somewhere in the city a large amount of money changed hands with a bang that night.”
I was still mulling over Shilly’s appearance in all this. Shilly might have cut corners for fortune and spite, but the fact that his patient vanished immediately afterward must have looked pretty suspicious-like he knew from the start Shattuck was somehow on the lam. “Makes you wonder why nobody asked any questions.”
Runnion was very still next to me. “Which says what?”
I was suddenly aware of how he was looking at me. My focus in that hypothesis had been the possibility that Shilly had known Shattuck before the shooting. But Runnion had looked up Shilly’s name in his computer just a few hours earlier at my request, and the fact that he wasn’t there made it clear that Shilly had no history with the police, which he would have had if they’d investigated a case as suspicious as this. Without intending to, I’d turned the searchlight we were both tending onto the Chicago Police Department itself. I lamely murmured an answer to his question, “Maybe nothing.”
“Assuming our computer-or the archives-spit out an explanation I can live with,” he finished for me.
There was a long silence. Runnion broke the ice by letting out a small laugh and standing up. “I think if either one of us is going to get a good night’s sleep, we’d better do a little checking.” He nodded toward my small notebook. “You got enough of the pertinent details? We’ll probably be back here at some point, anyway.”
We didn’t drive all the way back to his office but, rather, a mere couple of blocks to South Wentworth Avenue and the Area 1 headquarters building. Runnion was obviously in no mood to let his impatience fester.
He found us an empty computer-equipped office and arranged two chairs side by side in front of the smudged and battle-scarred terminal.
“Okay,” he said, directing his erratically jabbing fingers across the keyboard, “we know Shilly’s not on board, so let’s see about Robert Shattuck. Maybe we’ll get lucky. What was the DOB?”
I checked my notes and read him the birth date.
He typed it in and we watched as the screen slowly filled with information. “Holy shit. This guy’s been around.”
Runnion scrolled the screen by slowly so we could follow the itemized arrests one by one. The top of the list was promising enough-a series of civil-unrest complaints dating back to the period I was interested in-but as the data marched on, my spirits began to sag. Year by year, with occasional gaps here and there, Robert Shattuck’s activities drove a wedge between the old skeleton I was tracing and the identity I’d hoped we’d pinned to it. Shattuck’s career of political disturbances petered out in the mid-1980s, but it was already clear to both of us that he and the man with the metal knee were not the same.
Runnion finally sat back in his chair with a sigh. “Well, that kills that theory. Let’s see what kind of intelligence we’ve got on him.”
He called up another file, and we read the opinions the Chicago Police Department had formed from its years-long relationship with Shattuck. It was a study in evolutionary radicalism, from peripheral involvement in mid-sixties protest marches, in which he was occasionally rounded up as part of an antiwar group, to more prominent roles within increasingly hard-core militant leftist cells suspected of far more than sit-ins and peace demonstrations. There was some jail time now and then, but the tone of the intelligence report made clear the frustration at never catching Shattuck at the kind of gunrunning and bomb manufacturing the police suspected him of.
And it was a frustration they would never get to satisfy. As with most of the rock-ribbed radicals of those days, Shattuck’s career eventually hit its inevitable downward curve, caving in to a nation’s growing disinterest, to the war petering out, and perhaps to the weariness of encroaching middle age. Like a storm reaching full cycle, Shattuck returned to the gentler forms of protest that had marked his early years, finally sliding altogether from the police department’s spotlight. The report listed a last known address, which I dutifully took down.
Runnion rubbed his eyes with both palms. “You notice the same thing I did?”
“No mention of Shilly or the hospital or anything criminal around the time of the operation.”