The Junkyard Dog (Jimmy Flannery Mysteries Book 1)

by Robert Campbell

  When she sees me, she likes to tease and tells me that after lying on the covers with me—even though we was fully dressed—she couldn't stand the convent. I'd ruined her for Christ, she says, but she don't really mean it. She has a boyfriend who is some kind of Latin and they go to church every morning and twice on Sundays.

  In my car, Mary Ellen Dunne sighs like a tired child and puts her head on my shoulder like we know each other twenty years. Her hair has red glints in the brown. I think about a fireplace and wish I had one in my flat.

  "Mary Ellen Dunne . . ." I says.

  "Hush. Please, hush," she says.

  I don't say another word and she don't move her head. We get to Passavant. She gets out of the car without waiting for me to open the door. I lock up and follow her up the gray stone steps. Inside the lobby, she turns right and I follow her down the corridor to the coffee shop. She puts her palm out to warn me off. So I sit at a table while she goes to the counter and brings back two coffees and two sweet rolls.

  "So, all right, James Flannery, ask me what you want to know."

  "How do you know my name?"

  "Your father told me. He told me how you're the man to see for favors in the precinct, and that you're a comer. He told me that you like cats and barley soup. He told me your mother died of cancer eight years ago."

  "Did he tell you she was the person in the family who called me James?"

  "No, he didn't tell me that. So, did I do something good?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Not every man wants to marry a woman like his mother."

  Then she smiles and I see she's pulling my leg . . . and I don't mind.

  "That why you got cozy with me in the car?" I kid her back. "Was you setting your cap for me?"

  The smile goes away and the sunshine leaves her face. "No, James, I put my head on your shoulder for the reason I told you. I was sick and tired of so much that's awful, and you smelled of lemon soap and clean linen."

  "Tell me how it went."

  "Do you know anything about the routine?"

  "The doctor explained . . ."

  "Chapman."

  "Doctor Chapman gave me the drill from his point of view."

  "He left the examining room."

  "So you were talking to the girl . . ."

  "Young woman."

  "You were explaining what was going to happen . . ."

  "I explained it, and told her to go into the operating room."

  "The next room."

  "Not exactly the next room. There's no connecting door. You have to go out one door and into the next. The clinic was a chicken market. One big room and a meat locker. We hammered up some partitions and tried to make a plan that would give the patients as much privacy as we could."

  "Chapman said he waited in the office for the knock that told him the next patient was ready for him."

  "The doctor's office is over on the other side of the operating room. It's the only one that has a door that connects with another room. In fact, the operating room is the only one that has two doors. One to the corridor and one to the outside."

  She sees that I'm lost and draws a floor plan of the clinic on a napkin. Then I've got it.

  "So you show the young woman the door to the operating room and . . ."

  "No, I leave first while she takes a minute. Some times they want me to hold their hand all the way. Sometimes they want to be left alone for a minute before going into the room where their baby is going to be taken from them. Sometimes they even decide not to go through with it."

  "What do you do next?"

  "I go to get the information on the next patient, if there is one."

  "And there is one. She's with an older woman."

  "Yes. But I didn't go to them right away."

  "Why not?"

  "There was a man in the corridor. I asked him what he was doing there. He showed me a badge and said he was sent to make sure Joe Asbach and the Right-to-Lifers didn't make any more trouble."

  That is a favor I owe Pescaro. He might have been keeping an eye out anyway, but I figure the man inside is special favor he done for me after I take him the knife and explain my concern.

  "Is this the skinny man with thinning hair?" I says. "No. This a tall, good-looking man with black hair combed like Rudolph Valentino."

  "What is Mrs. Klutzman doing in the operating room? She ain't a nurse."

  "She's the best kind of nurse," Mary Ellen Dunne says, "but I know what you mean. Rose . . ."

  "That's her name?"

  ". . . was the best aide I ever knew," she says, nodding her head.

  "I never knew her first name."

  "Even the professionals at Passavant are not as good as she is."

  "So, please, was she always in the operating room when the patient walked in?" I says.

  "I don't know about that. Sometimes, I suppose. But she didn't have to be. We worked so well together that it wasn't often the doctor or I had to tell her what to do or where to be. She just did what needed doing."

  "I'm just trying to figure was she there when the girl walked in after the examination, or did she walk in after the girl was already in it."

  "I can't help you there. I don't know."

  "Did any of the demonstrators come in?"

  "I don't know that either. Anybody could come in. With just a little luck, nobody would even see them, I suppose."

  "Was there anything else—any threat—besides the knife and the ketchup?"

  "There was something," Mary Ellen Dunne says. "Monday night I go home from work and my cat is lying dead on my doorstep with its head cut off."

  After Mary Ellen Dunne stops crying, she gets me the number of Mrs. Klutzman's room, but when I get there, Mrs. Klutzman is dead.

  I ask Mary Ellen Dunne does she want to ask for the night off and I'll see her home.

  "Death is a thing that happens in the work I do," she says.

  "I know, but Rose was a friend," I says.

  "That's why I'm going to work my shift."

  Back at my place on Polk Street, I climb the six flights to the door of my flat like I'm a hundred and six years old. There's two more flights up to the roof. From there you can look out across the city in practically every direction except east, where there's another apartment building taller than the one that I live in. I hesitate at the bottom of the first flight, wondering if I can make it, but wanting a look at the sky so bad I can feel it tugging at my belly.

  I climb the stairs and push open the metal-clad door. The hinges and springs screech like a woman with a hand over her mouth.

  There's a wood railing all around.

  The roof is laid with tar which bubbles in the summer. I played on such roofs all my life, even when we lived in a one-family house. After the sun went down and the bubbles hardened, my friends and me would bust them with ice-cream sticks.

  The housewives hung out their clothes to dry on the roofs. There was catwalks built so they wouldn't damage the tar under the paths where the lines was strung. Most of the younger women take their stuff to the laundromat nowadays, but Mrs. Warnowski still does her wash in an old Maytag with an electric wringer and hangs it on the roof. She probably doesn't know it, but on summer days, I come up to the roof and bury my face in her clean sheets. Sun has a smell. Most people forget that, or never knew it.

  At night it's a place I go like women and old men go to church.

  There's somebody else up on the roof leaning on the rail. At first I think it's somebody who lives in the house, but when I get closer I see it's my old man.

  "What are you doing here this time of night?" I says.

  "Checking up on you to see if you was coming home late or coming home at all," he says. "Is she Irish?"

  "I didn't ask."

  "I don't think she's Irish, but I think she's a very nice girl," he says.

  I can see his concern for his unmarried son is getting very bad if he's touting a filly who might have foreign bloodlines.

  "Did
O'Shea come back for his beer?"

  "Oh, sure, they both come. He's all right. Just he grew his skin too thick."

  "Rourke's a sweetheart."

  "Yes, he is, but I think it would be a toss-up which cares the most."

  "What about the girl in the waiting room and her . . ."

  ". . . friend. The old woman was a neighbor. The girl's got no family here."

  "They see the skinny guy?"

  "Their backs was to the door."

  "How about the cop?"

  Mike shakes his head.

  "So he must have come in the side door through the doctor's office."

  We stand there leaning on the rail, looking out over the city.

  "God works in mysterious ways," my old man says. I feel a twinge over my heart. I realize how old my father's getting and how he could be turning to God the way people do when they can see death waiting for them, not too far away, down there in the fog at the bottom of the road.

  "The girl's going back to her hometown and have the baby," he says. "So there was that much good come of it."

  "It's mysterious like you say, but I don't know if two, maybe three for one is a very Christian bargain."

  SIX

  I go up the outside back stairs of the six-family where Mrs. Klutzman lived. There's a big tree with its top right where it blocks the morning light from Mrs. Klutzman's kitchen window. I remembered the last time I sat at the table by the window having a bagel and a cup of tea with Mrs. Klutzman, whose name I didn't know was Rose.

  "Mr. Flannery, could you do for me a favor?"

  "That's what I'm here for, Mrs. Klutzman."

  "You could maybe talk to whoever and ask them would they trim that big limb off the tree outside this window? You can see how it steals the sun. Get as old as me and the sun on the bones is as good as a sirloin steak, which I cannot afford and probably could not digest even if I could afford it, in the belly."

  "I'll put a word in the right ear."

  "You're a good boy."

  That was quite a while ago when she asked me to have it trimmed and I forgot to do the favor for the first time in I don't know when. She only asked me the one time. People who don't complain, don't get remembered, I'm sorry to say.

  The kitchen door to the porch is open even though the leaves are turning yellow and it's getting cold. An old man hands me a paper yarmulke, but I ask him is it all right. I wear my crushed tweed hat.

  "You want you should look like an Irisher in a kosher house, so what difference is that to God?" he says sweetly.

  There's no furniture in the house, which is the way the Orthodox do when they are sitting shiva. They take out all the furniture and wear old clothes and put ashes on their faces and breasts. They sit on orange crates. Lately they sit on plastic milk crates or cardboard boxes. Who makes from wood anymore?

  I don't know everyone, but nearly everyone, in the parlor. Joe Pakula is there with his mother and his sister, Pearl. He comes over and takes my hand in his hand. He looks like a Spanish saint.

  "It's cold in here," I says.

  "So, we should feel the cold and know our fate," he says, and leads me to a Coca-Cola carton.

  I sit there feeling foolish and sad. The Jews know how to make a person feel humble in the presence of death.

  Mrs. Klutzman is wrapped in a white sheet. Even her neck, cheeks, and hair are wound in it. I can only see her hands, which look like wax, and her dry lips and her nose, sharp like a knife, sticking up. She is laying on a plank set on two chairs.

  It's all very old-fashioned. Modern times ain't caught up with a good many people who live in the Twenty-seventh. Somehow I like them better for it.

  Joe Pakula puts his hand on my sleeve and leans over to whisper in my ear. "The Irish drink at these affairs, don't they?" he says.

  It's in all the papers, but it ain't all in the papers. The Tribune has a one-column head, first page, that says "Explosion at Abortion Clinic." Three inches tells the public that a woman seeking an abortion was killed in the explosion of what appeared to be a faulty gas connection . . . " though the remote—possibility that it was planned and not a case of misadventure is being investigated by police, firemen, and city building inspectors."

  The Sun-Times don't even give it that much on the third page.

  The death of Mrs. Klutzman ain't mentioned because she dies after they go to press. The next day there will be a little obit, but no story to go with it linking her death to the clinic.

  There's no mention of a bomb in either paper, either day. Who's being cautious? Why's somebody being cautious?

  Mary Ellen Dunne says, "Are we having a date . . ."

  It's Friday morning. The early light is like dish water on the bricks outside the diner window across from Passavant. I'm having ham and eggs. She's having hot cereal and milk.

  ". . . or are you going to ask me more questions?"

  "I expected to see you over to Mrs. Klutzman's last night," I says.

  "I meant to be there."

  "Dead before morning, they bury before nightfall."

  "I know. I was ready to go, but I felt so many tears here"—she tapped herself between her breasts—"I knew I'd drown if I went."

  "It's okay. I don't think anybody expected . . . Only old people and a few neighbors were there."

  "Doctor Chapman?"

  "Yes, he was there. He come in while I was leaving."

  "He knew the customs. Figures. He'd make it his business to know such things."

  "You like him?"

  "What's not to like? So, you haven't answered me. Is this a date?"

  "You want it to be a date?" I says.

  She eyes me for a minute like I'm getting used to, and then she smiles. "If this is a date, buy me a piece of peach pie."

  The dead girl's name is Helen Addison, it says on the records in the clinic files that have escaped the blast and fire. I write down the name and the address she gave. Badger Street is in the neighborhood.

  Chapman sits there in his office wearing a sports jacket and topcoat looking like a high-class bookie without his granny glasses.

  "What are you doing?" he says. "What do you expect to find?"

  "I just like to go over and pay my respects. I take care of these people."

  "You didn't take care of a couple of them very well."

  "That sonofabitch Joe Asbach is a hun from outside the district. He gets himself a license to march in my neighborhood. He didn't get it from me."

  "You're not going to find anyone by that name ever lived at that address," he says.

  "Don't I know that?" I says, "She's laying down there in the morgue unclaimed . . ."

  "Practically none of them give a real name and address," he says.

  ". . . but she wrote down an address she might have been familiar with," I says. "She maybe gave the name of a friend. Most people ain't very good at making things up."

  "Well, I don't think this one would . . ."

  He fumbles in his pocket and takes out the granny glasses. When he puts them on, I don't know if they make him look meaner or milder.

  "Would what?"

  "Have any trouble making things up."

  "You got to translate. How come you say that from just looking her over?"

  "I think she was a professional. New to it, maybe, but there were signs."

  "Why did you hesitate about saying that?"

  "I don't know. How can I be sure you won't attack me for saying something disrespectful about a white girl?"

  "Is it still that bad for you out there?"

  "It's that bad," he says. "They going to pick up this Asbach?"

  "I'm going to find out why they haven't got him in the slam already. Why you sitting around here?"

  "We're going to clean this place up," he says. "People like Asbach aren't going to drive us out."

  "Ain't you got volunteers who can do the dirty work?"

  "Everything's dirty work," he says, "and nothing's dirty work."

  "The girl who
was waiting her turn . . ."

  "The last one scheduled . . . ?"

  ". . . and the old lady who was a friend what was with her didn't see the cop Mary Ellen Dunne saw in the corridor."

  "That's not hard to understand."

  "That would mean he didn't pass through the waiting room."

  Chapman stared at my throat as though that was the spot where he was planning to put the knife.

  "Which would mean he got into the building through your office and got out the same way."

  Chapman stood up. For a second I thought he was going to take a swing at me. Then he turns around and makes his way through the rubble like a soldier on parade. "Follow me," he says.

  I follow him into the corridor and down another hall to the back where there's a door marked MEN. He pushes it open and I follow him into a room with two urinals, a toilet in a cabinet, and a cracked tile floor. It's very cold. There's an open window big enough to let a big man pass through and a heavy pipe halfway up the wall that could be used for a step.

  The Department of Streets and Sanitation has a bunch of offices where you could get lost even if you know your way around. The trick is to find Wally Dunleavy's, which is in the middle of the floor with a single window facing an air shaft like he wasn't one of the most powerful patronage bosses in the city. He ain't even got an outer office, or a secretary to keep people out.

  When I walk in, he looks up from a street map, which he is working on with a ruler and a red pen, and says, "You're Mike Flannery's kid."

  "Yes, I am, Mr. Dunleavy."

  "You look just like him. I got an eye."

  "You also got a memory. My father says he ain't seen you in fifteen years."

  "More like sixteen, but who's counting, right? Sit down. Sit down."

  I move some books off the one other chair in the office, which is as big as a broom closet and stuffed with rolled-up maps from one end to the other, and wait for him to do the rest of his act, even though I know he's been finding out about me from the minute I stepped through the first door into his department. By the time I made the first turning, somebody had me identified by name. By the second, my pedigree was out of the files. By the third, memories of my old man had already been dredged up from somebody's head and delivered to Dunleavy.