Butcher's Road

by Lee Thomas

  “No hospital,” Butch said. He barked out a flurry of damp coughs and snatched the napkin from the tabletop to press against his mouth. “I’ll get by.”

  “The thing is, I have something of a rare domestic situation,” Hollis said.

  Butch hummed again and performed the shallow head bob, which Hollis took as agreement but the distance and murk in the wrestler’s eyes suggested he might well have missed every word Hollis had spoken. His head lolled, and he drew in another ratcheting breath. “I’ll get by,” he repeated.

  “No doubt,” Hollis said with false merriment.

  He’ll be dead by morning, Rossington thought. If he doesn’t get someplace warm and get some medicine in him, he’s going to die.

  When Williams came back with a second cup of coffee for Butch, Hollis waved him away. He had to get the man back to his house. He’d manage the inevitable conflict over Lionel when it arose.

  Hollis stood and walked around the table, where he put his hand on Butch’s back. “Come on, pal,” he said. “We’ll get a taxicab out front.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To my house,” Hollis said as if it had been the plan all along.

  Butch tried getting to his feet and dropped back into the chair. On his second attempt, Hollis slid close and helped the man up and wrapped an arm around his back. He was glad Butch’s legs held him this time. Even in top shape, Hollis would have had trouble holding up a guy Butch’s size. But between the two of them, they managed to make it through the restaurant, past the interested and humored gazes of the other patrons, and onto the walk in front of the café, where Rossington waved his hand at a man sitting in a mule-drawn carriage.

  Chapter 11

  Speak When Spoken To

  Lennon sat on a stool at a counter in the evidence cage three floors below his office. Once a block of narrow holding cells, the cage was grim and cold. The stone floor, fenced in by rusting bars and chipped brick walls, was covered by any number of unwholesome stains. The place had been little more than a dungeon and it felt as if it still held many of the emotions loosed by the caged men who’d spent time there. Anger, fear, and hate were as palpable as mist. Squinting through the dim light added to his persistent headache, as did a frequent clicking behind the damaged bricks, which might have been a leaking pipe or the teeth of persistent vermin. Lennon imagined a prisoner lost over the decades, trapped behind the stone and attempting to dig his way free. The notion brought tingles to his neck, but he couldn’t shake it whenever he heard the click, clickety, click.

  He picked through the contents of two cardboard boxes—items removed from Lonnie Musante’s home. Thumbing through the carton, he found the victim’s belongings: cigarettes, matches, anything that wasn’t nailed down and might belong to the killer. A banged-up Mauser 1914 lay in a small box, nestled among a handkerchief and a pair of gloves. The gun’s handgrip was cracked and the barrel was scratched to hell. This was the murder weapon Butch Cardinal had dropped after shooting Musante. Nothing special. The German firearm was common enough. He and Conrad had pulled one off a vagrant just last month, after the guy had used it to hold up a grocery.

  Lennon held the weapon, turned it in his palm. Satisfied that he had the all of it in his head, he replaced the gun in the evidence box, and reached in for a stack of cards. They were large with a white frame surrounding a field of black. He flipped one over and saw an intricate painting of a midnight sky with crimson dogs lifting their muzzles to howl at a silver moon. Over the years he’d heard about cards like these—the tarot, they were called. Carnie fortunetellers hauled them around. He considered what Valentino had told him, and Lennon couldn’t help but wonder if a thug like Marco Impelliteri actually cut his path through life based on what Musante had seen—or at least, claimed to have seen—in a tarot deck? He found it hard to believe that anyone so firmly entrenched in the guns and blood of Chicago’s outfits would hold close to such nonsense.

  Medieval witch shit in the big and shiny city.

  He flipped another card, showing a man in sapphire and emerald harlequin garb performing an exaggerated bow. The word Fool was written at the bottom. Lennon smiled, figuring that was the only card a deck like this one needed, then he replaced the cards in the box. Next he withdrew a brown leaflet with a number of holes punched through: a train ticket from Milwaukee. He turned it over and saw the date matched the day Lonnie Musante was murdered.

  Lousy thing to come home to, Lennon thought.

  The contents of the second box seemed to be the things the coroner’s office had removed from Musante’s pockets: a wallet with assorted bits of paper, mostly receipts; a money clip with three bucks pinched between tin fingers; a set of cheap false teeth as yellow as the front of a bum’s drawers; three cigar stubs; a tin flask—empty.

  Lousy life to come home to, Lennon added.

  The scraping behind the wall returned, startling Lennon. He shook off the silly fear and rubbed his eyes, imagining it might remove a fraction of his headache. It didn’t.

  After feeling certain he’d committed the items to memory, he closed the boxes and returned them to the shelves, then he left the cage and wished Sergeant Jones, the cage’s keeper, a good afternoon. Upstairs he sat behind his desk and looked at the collection of meaningless files, wondering all the while where Conrad had gotten to, but the afternoon passed with no sign of his partner, and then it was time to call it a day, but that meant going home to Edie and playing husband and father, even though he didn’t feel he was through playing cop for the day. Lennon lit a cigarette and stared through the smoke and the windowpane at the coming darkness. He considered heading to the Palermo Club or the Grand for a few drinks and the company of a woman that would speak to him without making him feel regret. Before he could commit to the plan, however, another idea surfaced.

  Lennon picked up the phone and called home to tell his wife that he would be working late.

  • • •

  Lennon reached Lonnie Musante’s house after sunset. Pulling up before the darkened dwelling, a strange thought—perhaps a memory or some mental flotsam—played behind his eyes. He pictured Curt Conrad’s fat face dripping sweat in the freezing cold car; his partner shook his head furiously, mouthing protests. Lennon couldn’t remember the words, couldn’t say for sure that he remembered the incident at all, but Conrad seemed to be arguing with him. He struggled to recall the moment, but instead Butch Cardinal filled his mind’s eye—barreling down like a coal train draped in an overcoat.

  Why did he drop his gun? Lennon wondered. He pops a couple in Lonnie, and Conrad busts in and Cardinal tosses his piece? Why? Had he suffered the panic of the inexperienced?

  Leaving his car, Lennon strolled up the walk to Musante’s front door. The place had been secured with a two-by-four nailed to the jamb. It came free with a good tug and Lennon tossed it on the icy lawn before trying the door. He’d expected some kind of lock to slow him down, but the knob turned easily in his palm, and the door opened with a squeak of rusted hinges. Lennon reached in and felt along the wall for the switch. He gave it a twist but the house remained dark. A second later his flashlight beam cut a trough through the center of the living room, and Lennon stepped inside.

  He played the light over the space. The chalk frame of Musante’s last pose remained on the floor, very white against the gray planks. Lennon noted the few pieces of shabby furniture and the bare walls. Thin clouds of breath rose from his nose and feathered the edges of the lantern’s beam. The place smelled of stale cigars, old milk, cheap whiskey, and mold. At the center of the room, Lennon stopped. He’d driven to Musante’s on a hunch, but now he couldn’t figure out what he had hoped to gain by the trip. This wasn’t his case. There was nothing for him to solve. So why was he here?

  It was the near-empty house of a dead man: a box holding the trinkets of a life, likely misspent and certainly unenviable. Musante had been the pet mystic of a powerful man, with no ambitions of his own beyond scraping by at Marco Impelliteri
’s heels, making himself useful by weaving superstition and fantasy for his boss’s…what? Amusement? Peace of mind?

  But Musante had been free, Lennon thought: no mooring lines of guilt or obligation. Standing in the center of Musante’s home with its tattered furniture and sad wallpaper, Lennon had rarely found the exercise of independence so repulsive.

  He wandered to the kitchen and peered out the back window. There he saw the dark heap of bricks beyond the porch. Patches of persistent ice and snow clutched the blocks like lichens. And again he pictured Butch Cardinal charging him, and he remembered swimming backwards, and the darkness rushing up to meet him. Lennon shook the oddly substantial memory away and left the kitchen. In the hallway, he kicked a door open with the toe of his shoe and darted the light around an empty room with a badly cracked wooden floor. Dust covered the planks like a carpet, only marred by a series of footprints, likely belonging to Lennon’s colleagues who had combed the place after Musante’s death.

  At the end of the hall he found Musante’s pitiful bedroom. A short, narrow cot had been shoved into a corner and an old whiskey barrel stood beside it, a candle melted to the nub at the center of the drum. Lennon walked farther into the room, playing his light over the dirty window. The beam reflected back, and for a moment the sight of his own pale face on the glass startled him. His head began to feel light, and Lennon knew he shouldn’t be spending so much time on his feet, but he had no intention of taking his rest in Lonnie Musante’s bedroom.

  A rap sounded in the front of the house, quickly followed by another and another: footsteps. Lennon turned away from the window and snapped off his flashlight. He drew his service revolver and moved quietly to the doorway where he listened to the sounds at the end of the hall. Whispers cut the frigid air like crackling static. He made out two voices, but he couldn’t understand the conversation. The syllables were curt and delivered in breathy monotone, dying when they hit his ear rather than forming coherent phrases.

  Lennon urged his eyes to adjust to the gloom flooding the hall as the voices and the echoes of footsteps worked their way down the corridor. His heart tripped rapidly. His palms sweated. When he felt certain the men were only a few steps away, Lennon lunged forward, thumbing on the flashlight.

  But his light’s beam fell on empty air. Confused, Lennon stepped back.

  “Come out now, Mr. Police-man,” a deep, dry voice called. “We’re in the living room.”

  “Identify yourself,” Lennon called.

  “Our names would mean nothing to you.”

  “This is a crime scene,” he shouted. “You’re trespassing.”

  “Yes, we are,” the man agreed. Distance and the drumbeat pulse filling Lennon’s ears deadened the voice.

  “What do you want?” he called. At the end of the hall just inside the archway opening onto the living room, Lennon paused and adjusted his grip on the gun. “Were you friends of Musante’s?”

  “Not in the least. But we are in some ways family. We came to pay our respects.”

  “They have funerals for that.”

  Lennon peered around the corner and saw a man sitting on the sofa. His body was a smudge of darkness atop the shadowed furniture and his face stained the gloom like a pale thumbprint. Lennon couldn’t tell whether the man was armed, nor did he see anyone else in the room, though he’d heard two separate voices and two sets of footsteps.

  “Where’s your buddy?” Lennon asked.

  “He’s seeing to—” An ugly lamp, like a dead sapling in the corner, burst on, momentarily shocking Lennon’s eyes. “He’s seeing to that, Mr. Police-man,” said the man on the sofa, pointing over his shoulder at the lamp.

  “Stand up,” Lennon said, “and keep your hands in sight.”

  The man shrugged. With his salt-and-pepper hair and thick neck, he reminded Lennon of his father-in-law, but Edie’s dad had never worn such intensity in his eyes.

  “I’m unarmed,” the man said.

  “Heard that one before,” Lennon said. “Come on, stand up.”

  The man worked himself forward on the sofa cushion. Once standing he held himself tall and straight. His presence seemed to suck the air from the room, leaving Lennon in a frigid vacuum.

  “My name is Hayes,” the man said.

  “Pleased,” Lennon said, sarcastically. He threw glances around the room, checking the dining room on his right and the bit of kitchen he could see beyond. “Is your friend in the basement?”

  “No,” Hayes said.

  An arm wrapped around Lennon’s neck, throwing off his aim. He fired the gun, but the shot went wide. Then a glimmer of metal passed near his chin, and the warm blade of a long knife came to rest against his throat. Simultaneously, a sharp pain flared at his shoulder; it drove in deep and his hand spasmed. He dropped the gun. It landed with a thud on the carpet. His mind scrambled even as his legs began to turn soft and unstable beneath him. He grasped at his wounded arm and felt a long, oval piece of metal attached to his jacket.

  “Leave it,” the man behind him said. His breath stank of meat and onions.

  “No one has to die here, Detective Lennon.” Hayes said, his voice rich and commanding. “We have questions. You’ll give us answers.”

  A strong palm planted itself in the middle of his back, guiding him toward the sofa. The knife pulled away from his throat and Brand shoved him hard. Lennon stumbled. He nearly righted himself but his shins crashed against the front of the sofa and he toppled onto the cushions. Quickly, he rolled onto his back.

  Brand moved fast, climbing onto the sofa, keeping his knife close to Lennon’s face. The burly little man straddled Lennon’s waist and sneered down at him. He wore a sleeveless undershirt beneath a leather butcher’s apron. Muscles bulged along his right arm and shoulder, but his left arm was shriveled in comparison. The knobs of his wrist and elbow rose like welts on the scrawny appendage. A copper coil wrapped the arm. In his hand Brand held a fat-bladed knife. Lennon had never seen anything like the weapon, curved and ornate, with what appeared to be gears in and among three arced blades and polished like a brand new dime.

  “Mr. Brand,” the man who’d called himself Hayes said, “is the pin secure?”

  The man reached out and grasped Lennon’s arm tightly, pressing the piece of metal deeper into the meat of his shoulder. Lennon winced and ground his teeth against the pain.

  “It is, Mr. Hayes.” Brand leaned back, but kept the point of his knife near Lennon’s chin.

  “You’ll tell us the truth, now, Detective Lennon,” said Hayes. He leaned in, his chin hovering above his colleague’s shoulder. “If you don’t, your experience will be thoroughly unpleasant.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You aren’t our enemy, Detective Lennon,” Mr. Hayes said.

  “I guess the knife at my throat confused me.”

  “We’ve encountered a number of aggressive men recently, and it seems violence is the only logic that resonates with them, except perhaps greed.”

  “Human nature,” Lennon muttered.

  “Yes, Detective Lennon, the nature of some. Why are you here tonight?”

  “To remember,” Lennon said before he could even consider his answer.

  “The night of Mr. Musante’s murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have you remembered?”

  “No.”

  Pain erupted in his arm as if the metal piece there injected pure agony into his veins. Lennon squeezed his eyes closed and bellowed. The suffering spread across his chest and back as if he were being submerged in acid. His body went rigid. He couldn’t breathe, and the searing misery blossomed across the back of his head before it vanished completely.

  “You remember nothing at all?” Hayes asked, appearing to have been saddened by Lennon’s torture. His buddy, Brand, just looked amused.

  “Nothing I can be certain of,” Lennon said, speaking slowly, ready to stop himself should the pain reappear.

  “What do you think you remember?”


  “I tried to stop him,” Lennon said. “My partner. I argued with Curt, because I thought he was doing something stupid, but I don’t know what.”

  “What about the wrestler?” Hayes asked. “Do you know where Mr. Cardinal is currently?”

  “No.”

  “As we understand it, he took something valuable from Mr. Musante.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Lennon said, wincing. Even though he was telling the truth, he felt certain the agony would return if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

  “Or perhaps you took the item yourself?”

  “What item?” Lennon asked. “I was knocked cold about two seconds after I opened the door that night. Then I woke up in the hospital. What was taken?”

  “It’s not your concern, Detective Lennon. Do you have any notions about where Mr. Cardinal might be now?”

  “South.”

  “Why south?” Hayes asked, cocking his head to the side.

  “It’s where I’d go,” Lennon replied. “He couldn’t get his money out of the bank, and if he has any friends, we couldn’t find them. He won’t freeze to death in the south, and the states down there keep things close to the vest. They don’t trust northerners, so he could set himself up with a new name and live out the rest of his life and nobody would blink. Alabama might as well be Timbuktu.”

  “Why did you mention Alabama?”

  “I have family there. It was just an example. What did you do to me?”

  “As long as you tell the truth, it shouldn’t concern you.”

  “It hurts.”

  “Did you know Mr. Musante before coming to this house, Mr. Lennon?”

  “Detective Lennon.”

  “My apologies, Detective. Did you know him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you work for the Italians or the Irish?” Brand asked.

  “I work for the City of Chicago. I don’t—”

  Again the agony spread across his body like a pool of acid. Lennon screamed into the faces of his captors, neither of whom did so much as blink.