“Right. Of course, this isn’t the whole intelligence file-just a synopsis. We don’t put the nitty-gritty on the network, in case somebody ever breaks in. Later, maybe we can pull his file at Central and get some details, as well as double-check on Shilly.”
I nodded and pointed at the screen. “Could you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“See if you have the name Abraham Fuller in there.”
Runnion entered the name and waited for a response. He merely raised his eyebrows at the blinking NO ENTRY FOUND message.
“Thanks,” I muttered. “It was a long shot.”
He stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, and prepared to type again. “Okay. Let’s get into the archives and access the police log for that night.”
I watched him pecking away, a graceless typist but a master at getting what he wanted out of the machine, his keenness further fueled by the smell of something amiss. I sympathized with his pursuit, but I didn’t share his enthusiasm. Maybe the absence of a gunshot report and a visit to the hospital by a patrol unit that night did implicate the police. More likely, Shilly had simply agreed, maybe for a little extra on top, to run interference with the ER staff. I doubted the police had ever been called.
Runnion dropped his hands to his lap and straightened his back, sighing. “Guess I’ll have to go at it the hard way. There’s not enough in here to give me what I want-too far back. I need to find the actual dispatch transcripts to see if a unit was even sent to investigate. Incidentally, while I was at it, I did check to see if any big money scam went down that night.” He shook his head. “Nothin’-no banks, no armored cars, no illegal bookie joints-at least nothing we responded to, which probably amounts to about ten percent of all the shit that goes down in this town.”
He leaned forward and switched off the computer. “I guess we can give it a rest ’til tomorrow. You want to drop by my office in the morning, we can go over to city hall and get a home address and whatever other information there is on Kevin Shilly. See if we can shake him up a little.”
He led the way outside to his car so he could drive me back to where I’d left my rental. “We can work on Shattuck, too, assuming he’s still in the area, but I think Shilly’s our best bet. He put the knee in, after all, and he’s obviously not bragging about it for some reason.”
We drove north in easy traffic, catching the lights just right, heading up State Street at a steady clip toward the piled-up building blocks of downtown, whose streets-usually the informational garden for most cultivating detectives-were as barren to me as the asphalt they were made of.
I was disappointed. When Bob Shattuck’s criminal report had first flickered up on that computer screen, I’d felt the satisfaction of a hunt well conducted. I’d followed the evidence, had gone with my instincts, and had landed the prize-or so I’d thought.
Now I just had a surgeon who wasn’t talking, the name of a burned-out radical that had probably been borrowed for the occasion, and my still-nameless pile of bones back home.
I knew Runnion’s case load would soon be knocking at his conscience, especially once his own interest in all this had been satisfied. He’d still help me open a few bureaucratic doors, partially to be helpful and partially out of nostalgia, but the piles of paper on his desk were beckoning.
I needed to regain the steam I’d thought I had earlier, but my options were either limited or diplomatically risky. I’d either have to follow in Runnion’s wake, hoping to get lucky very soon, or I’d have to become more independent, a little less circumspect, and perhaps stimulate a few people’s interest. To start with, I wasn’t at all sure that going back to Shilly was the reasonable next step. I’d challenged him once, after all, and he’d outbluffed me fair and square. I didn’t see where harassing him would better my prospects. But Shattuck interested me. Assuming he hadn’t been at the hospital that night, I wanted to know why his name had been used.
“You going to turn in or sample a little of the nightlife?” Runnion asked, negotiating the thicker traffic of the bustling city’s heart, his face reflecting the garish colors of its neon life signs.
I hedged my response. “I might wander around a bit.”
19
I sat in my car for a good twenty minutes, watching the last known address of Robert Shattuck. It was an odd building, tall, bland, and gray, its first floor blatantly commercial-with a sandwich shop and a shoe-repair place, both closed now that it was long after hours-while its upper floors remained vaguer in purpose. Some windows were lit, most were not. It was hard to tell what the place was used for.
The neighborhood appeared similarly ambiguous. From my vantage point in the deserted parking lot across the street, I was conscious of emptiness and silence, despite the fact that I was within walking distance of where the Chicago River’s north, east, and south branches converge, right across the water from the famed Chicago Loop. None of that was readily apparent, however-the looming cliff-like mass of the darkened Merchandise Mart just behind me blocked all sights and sounds of anything lying beyond it.
Indeed, it was perhaps the stultifying influence of that one building, second only to the Pentagon in sheer mass, that affected the entire area around it. There were few people on the sidewalks, few cars passing by. Only the occasional rumbling of the elevated train around the corner disturbed what appeared to be the sole grave-still pocket in this otherwise teeming city.
I’d been waiting for signs of life either entering or leaving the building, if only to locate which of several unpromising candidates was the building’s front door. I was finally rewarded by a small, bent-over man coaxing a small dog on a leash, who briefly appeared under the streetlight near the middle of the building’s west wall before shambling off into the gloom.
I slowly got out of my car, looking around, sensitive to the echo that greeted my slammed door. I’d been expecting something entirely different after reading Shattuck’s rap sheet. Knowing nothing of the address at the time, I’d envisioned him as the only white holdout in a ghetto slum, true to his reformist soul; or, alternatively, in a not uncommon about-face, inhabiting the quintessential suburban home, complete with an aged Volvo bedecked with environmental bumper stickers. This austere gray huddling of faceless concrete walls, as hospitable as an abandoned factory, fit neither image and left me nothing to go on.
I crossed the dark, empty street, my eyes warily on the windows above me, and entered the side street into which the old man had stepped with his dog. Opposite the streetlight that had briefly caught him, almost flush with the cement wall, was a metal fire door, one of several I’d noticed. I turned the knob, expecting resistance, and instead stepped into a half-lit hallway, lined on one side with copper-colored mailboxes and blocked at the far end by a locked glass door with a speaker by its side.
I studied the rows of mailboxes, each one of which, under its keyhole, had a nameplate slot and a buzzer to gain admittance. Many of the boxes had no names, others were obviously businesses, their official cards substituting for hand-lettered nameplates, and the rest were presumably what I was after-apartments.
I had just located the name Shattuck in a red-ink scrawl when the front door opened behind me. I swung around to face the old man with the dog, startling him.
“Just me,” he said nervously. “Come on, Butch.”
The dog, as wide as it was long, reluctantly waddled into the lobby, looking around like some dispirited, overgrown, ancient rodent. Nevertheless, despite his anemic charisma, Butch was obviously a bolster to his master’s courage, who now nodded knowingly but mistakenly at the car keys I was inexplicably still holding in my hand, and commented, “No mail today, huh? Me, neither. Not even junk.”