“Did anyone go with him when he left?”
She shook her head, half-baffled, half-lost in the past and her own confusion. “Who knows? They weren’t going to tell us.”
I took a shot in the dark, based on the lead that had drawn us to this woman in the first place. “What about your fellow ballet dancer?”
She stared at me with her mouth open. “You mean David? David Pendergast?”
“I don’t know. I have a description without a name.”
She hugged her arms across her narrow chest, looking smaller and frailer than before. She was silent for a while, breathing deeply, fighting with her emotions. When she finally spoke, she looked grieved, and much older. “David could have gone with Bobby. He’s another one I never heard from again.” A single large tear broke loose from her eye and coursed unchecked down her cheek.
“You and David were close?”
Her smile was tired and without joy. “I thought we were all close. Those people were the best friends I ever had, or will ever have. My time with them burns bright in my heart.” She tapped her chest lightly with her fist, her intensity utterly erasing any hint of theatricality.
I let the silence persist, sensing there was more to come.
After a minute or so, she added, “David and I danced together. We slept together, for a while. I thought I loved him. But he was dangerous… He scared me-like Bobby ended up scaring me.”
“And you think they might have joined a more violent element of the movement together?”
She nodded without comment.
I rose from my chair and looked down at her, her shoulders slumped, her head bowed, no longer the pixie. She sat on her desk now like something fragile and ailing, drooping from the pain, the loss, and a sense of bewilderment.
I had one last question to ask: “You mentioned you haven’t seen Pendergast since the late sixties; do you know where he was from originally?”
She looked up, her face troubled and tear-stained. “What I remember best about David was his dancing-hard, risky, sometimes beautiful and sometimes scary. He’d throw me high in the air with no warm-up, no practice runs-for the spontaneity, he said. We didn’t talk about where we were from-we talked about where we were going.”
Her voice drifted off. I waited for more, then finally gave it up. I joined Norm as we made our way back to the hallway door. I noticed, however, that he, like I, stepped more lightly than we had upon entering, as if preserving the sanctity of some funereal occasion. On the threshold, I glanced back at Penny Nivens, utterly reduced by the enormity of her ornate, empty surroundings. She was looking across the expanse of floor at the wall of mirrors, as if mystified by her own reflection.
25
Runnion hung up the phone with a satisfied grunt. “Miles says Pendergast is presumed out of the area. There’s no current address in the file, and the last entry on our books was exactly twenty-four years ago.”
I held a mug shot labeled “David Pendergast” in my hand, studying the handsome broad face-the square Hollywood chin, the straight, almost Greek nose, the clear, widely set pale eyes-trying to see in his features some hint of the skeletal remains I’d seen on Beverly Hillstrom’s autopsy table.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked.
Norm pushed it across to me and I dialed Vermont.
“Medical examiner’s office.”
“This is Lieutenant Joe Gunther calling from Chicago. Is Dr. Hillstrom available?”
The next voice was Hillstrom’s. “Chicago? What are you doing there?”
“I think I’ve got a name for your skeleton. What would you need to make it stick legally? And please don’t say X-rays.”
There was a long pause. “Do you have a photograph?”
I smiled, sensing victory in the air. “Yeah-head shot.”
“Is he grinning?”
The smile died. “Grinning? It’s a mug shot.”
“If we can get a picture of him with his teeth showing, we might be able to superimpose the photograph on a same-size X-ray of the skull and make a match, but we need the skeletal landmarks to lock in the alignment and the sizing of the superimposition-the bigger the grin, the better.”
I sighed. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”
“There is something else,” she added quickly before I could hang up. “If you can find some member of his family, see if you can get the location of his old dentist. His dental files might still be around.”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
I hung up and reached for the one sheet of paper we had on David Pendergast. He’d been booked just once in his political career-for civil disturbance, in 1967. The home address listed then had been torn down twelve years ago for a mall. All we had left was a birthplace: Marquette, Michigan.
The phone rang while I was reading, and Norm picked it up, muttered a few monosyllabic responses, and hung up, looking depressed. “That was Intelligence, wondering how I was faring in softening you up for an interview about Salierno.”
I looked at him carefully. “Any hints that they might have been tailing us this morning?”
“None-they’re either good poker players or it wasn’t them.”
“Leaving Bonatto and Shattuck.”
Much later in the day, I was sitting in a de Havilland Otter-a boxy, rugged twin-engine commuter aircraft-headed for Marquette, in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. My departure had been delayed several hours, not through any fault of the airline but because Norm had orchestrated a “tailproof” way out of the city.
He had taken our chase on the expressway very seriously. On the off chance that our tail was still in place, he had outlined a detailed route for me to follow to the airport. I was to use several taxis, and to catch each one only after having ducked through a variety of specific buildings or alleyways. His hope was that even if I couldn’t shake a tail, I’d at least be able to spot one on my side trips from cab to cab. In the meantime, Norm checked me out of my motel and returned my rental car.
I followed his plan to the letter, but with mixed feelings. Despite what had happened to Shilly, I was still convinced that I personally ran little risk of harm. As I saw it, I was a bird dog for Bonatto and Shattuck both. They were depending on me to flush out the quarry-or information-whoever or whatever that might be; it wouldn’t benefit either one of them if they stopped me before I’d done the job.
The only problem was that my privileged position could change at any time, and for reasons I wouldn’t understand. For while my goals were to positively connect David Pendergast to the pile of bones in Hillstrom’s morgue, find out why and by whom he’d been buried in Abraham Fuller’s backyard, and to nail whoever it was who’d turned I-91 into a shooting gallery, Shattuck and Bonatto already knew most of that-or at least a hell of lot more than I did. That meant that at some point there was a real possibility I might uncover some fact, or somebody, which would mean far more to one of them than it would to me, at which point the rules would change-I could become superfluous, even disposable.
I stared out the plane’s window at the distant greenery below. The effort I’d expended so far and the guilt I carried for Shilly’s death were driving me as hard as my legal obligations. I wanted to know who had done what, and to whom, and why.
Marquette lies along the southern shore of Lake Superior; with the town to one’s back, the watery vastness stretching out to the horizon is reminiscent of the bland blue oblivion that borders Chicago. But somehow, Superior is more threatening than Lake Michigan. Although calm upon my arrival, it felt wilder, colder, and ominous.
Marquette also is less oblivious to its neighbor than Chicago is to its. A far smaller town, it is more respectful of its lake, and more dependent upon it. Here there are few leisure boats and yachts, and more crafts of industry. The city’s history as a shipping center for ore and lumber is still strong in the low, dark, turn-of-the-century industrial architecture. It is not a beautiful place, nor an inspiring one, but it speaks much of effort and toil, and of endurance.