“Can’t do that,” Finchley said easily. “Not if it’s the guy they pulled out at Stickney. I just got asked to come in and take a look at him—seems they think he may belong to Chicago, not the county.”
The deputies started looking meaner. I wondered if they were going to slug me or Finchley first. The hostility in their bodies radiated throughout the room; the man at the counter felt it and came around to the front. The attendants leaning on the wall behind us stopped their light conversation and moved closer to us too.
Hendricks and Jaworski saw them coming and looked angrily at each other. Since all three attendants were black, it was a good guess that they would side with Finchley if it came to a fight.
“Take him, then,” Hendricks spat out. “We got better things to do than look after some dead alkie anyway.”
He and Jaworski turned on their heels in unison and marched to the exit. I thought I heard one of them mutter “jigaboo” on his way out, but I didn’t want to make a federal case of it.
Another Chicago Float Fish
“Thanks, Terry,” I said gratefully. “I don’t know if they were throwing their muscle around just to have a good time or if there’s some real problem with the dead man.”
“Both,” Finchley said. “They like sticking out their chests and looking like storm troopers. And the guy they pulled out was dead before he went in the water. You think you know him?”
“We didn’t get that far. We’d like to be able to look at the body.” I tried to keep from sounding acerbic—Finchley had saved us from grief that might have taken the form of a blow to the jaw or an arrest.
“Who’s your friend?”
“Salvatore Contreras. The closest thing to family the guy we’re looking for has.”
Mr. Contreras held out a hand to Finchley automatically, but said, “Strictly speaking, you know that ain’t so, doll. He’s got a wife and a kid out in Arizona, at least they was last I heard about them. She walked out on him thirty-five years ago, same as any sensible woman would do if her husband was drinking away his paycheck every Friday and leaving her and the kid in rags. But Mitch and I go way back, and he really doesn’t have anyone else, Officer, Detective, I mean.”
Finchley blinked under the barrage. “I don’t think we need to send to Arizona for a next of kin. Let’s just take a look at him.”
He headed toward the dissecting room that lay to the right of the entrance. I put a hand on his arm.
“Maybe Mr. Contreras would rather look at the video screen. He’s not as case-hardened as you are.”
If you’re too squeamish for a direct look at a body, the county will run a video camera over it; you can watch a screen in a small viewing room outside the cooler. That way it can seem like one more TV show where the dead all rise to walk again.
“Don’t worry about me, cookie,” Mr. Contreras assured me when I explained the procedure. “I was at Anzio, in case you forgot.”
One of the attendants wheeled the body out of the cooler for us. A black plastic bag covered it up to the throat, but we got a good look at the head.
It had been in the Sanitary Canal for some days and the last week had been warm. The face was swollen and purple. I wouldn’t have sworn to my own father in that shape, let alone a man I’d only met three or four times. The hair looked like Kruger’s and the general shape of the head, beneath its bruised distension, seemed the same.
I felt a little queasy. I’m not as used to looking at dead bodies as I got to be in my days on the county defender’s homicide task force. Mr. Contreras, by the greenish cast to his face, had likewise lost the immunity he’d acquired on the battlefields of Italy fifty years ago.
He cleared his throat and spoke in a husky voice. “It kinda looks like Mitch. I just can’t be sure. The face—the face…” He waved a hand and his legs buckled.
The attendant caught him before he fell. I found a chair against one wall and pushed it over. The attendant sat him down and pushed his head into his lap. In the bustle of looking after him, finding a glass of water, and getting him to drink it, my own nausea passed.
After a few minutes Mr. Contreras sat up. “I’m sorry.
Can’t think what came over me. I don’t know if that’s Mitch or not. It’s kind of hard to tell. Could you look at his left hand, cookie? He sliced off the top of his middle finger maybe thirty years ago, working drunk like he did too many afternoons. I was there and I shoulda seen what was coming, got him off the mill, but I just didn’t think it was dangerous.“ Tears that had nothing to do with the old injury were flowing down his cheeks.
I forced myself back to the distended body. The attendant pulled the plastic down so that the left hand was visible. The fingers, too, were swollen and discolored, but it was clear that the middle one was missing most of its first joint.