That closed all my leads. No professional would leave tracks, not that it mattered in a case this old. What it did lead me to believe was that Laura’s parents were criminals before she was born. They had probably operated in the South, and had probably done something high profile.
I was hoping it would be possible to find reference to a couple, a pregnant woman and a man, who had done these crimes, but I knew it would be another needle in a haystack. It would take a lot of digging through old crimes before I found the one I wanted.
And, I had to admit to myself, even that might not work. The Hathaways had committed a crime; that much was clear from their behavior. But what if they hadn’t been seen? What if no one had known what they had done? Or what if the crime was not deemed as important as they thought?
Then I would not find them this way. And I doubted the records that Laura had brought would carry any information about this, although I would go back to the office and check.
I could only hope that her memory might turn up something, now that she knew her parents weren’t what they seemed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon searching the Hathaways’ records in my office. I dug through the pre-1945 stuff, a handful of receipts and some newspaper clippings folded together. Most made no sense to me—they were about some of the minor war campaigns, and a few were about Chicago society meetings. One seemed to predate the war—it was an ad for women’s clothes, clipped in its entirety. There had been dozens of clipped ads for women’s clothes scattered among the records. Apparently Laura’s mother saw a style she liked, clipped the ad, bought the dress, and saved the ad. I thought it was an odd way to do business, but there was nothing normal about the Hathaways.
By the next morning, I had sorted through the 1940s papers and had seen nothing unusual. Even the clippings made a strange sort of sense. Most were about businesses, local Chicago businesses, and I suspected, after I spent some time examining the documents, that Earl Hathaway had either invested in them or bought them outright.
Laura was late. That didn’t surprise me. I thought of calling the Peabody. But we hadn’t really made an appointment to see each other, and I was not her keeper. She was, as she had reminded me, an adult. She had to come to terms with this strange news on her own.
Still, I held my hand over the phone for a long moment before I picked it up and used my Chicago contacts to trace the owner of the apartment building that the Hathaways had lived when Laura was a little girl.
For once, I was in luck. The building was still under the same ownership and managed by the owner’s real estate firm. I got through to one of the firm’s managers, and even though he didn’t keep records from the 1940s, he did confirm that Earl Hathaway and his family had rented an apartment from him.
“I always thought it was, you know, kinda ironic, the way they lived in this two-room apartment, and he went on to own so much of the city,” the manager said.
“You watched this transformation.”
“I did,” the manager said. “Thought I was watching a kinda history. My grandfather did the same thing, bootstrapped himself right outta poverty and into—this place, anyway.”
“It’s your grandfather’s real estate firm?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, but everything was hands off by the time the Hathaways moved in.”
“Do you know when that was?”
“Not exactly, and like I said we don’t have the records. But it was during the war. I know that.”
“It was too bad you didn’t keep anything.”
“Yeah, well, how’re you supposed to know?”
How indeed. I thanked him for his time and hung up. By then it was eleven-thirty and still no Laura. Maybe she was giving all of this a second thought. Maybe she didn’t want to know any more. It was the end of the week. I could prepare my bill, with the thought that it might be a final, and then present it to her when she told me it was over.
The office door opened then, and Laura came in, wearing her dirty white coat. She looked tired and bedraggled and smaller than she ever had. Her eyes were red-rimmed and sunken into her face, her mouth a pale pink line against chalky white skin.
I stood and went to her, but she turned away from me—clearly on purpose—and pulled off her coat.
“So,” she said, her voice trembling. “It’s going to get worse, isn’t it? Before it gets better. It’s going to get worse.”
I stopped near the chair and nodded. “Most likely.”
“I spent all night trying to think of why they’d do this, why they’d lie like that. It would be to escape someone’s parents, or to elope. They could have done that without changing their names, and twenty-eight years ago, no one would have known how to look for them.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“So they did something. Something bad.” She clasped her hands in front of her like a schoolgirl. “And all that money, it came from the same something bad, right?”
This was the kind of information we needed, information she hadn’t realized she had. Information she hadn’t been willing to look at, until now.
“What money?” I asked.
“When I was little, my mother used to say that everything would be all right, that soon we’d be taken care of. Then one day, my father moved us to this great place and from then on, everything was better.” She put the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Or they thought everything was better. I had lessons. Elocution, and dancing, and classes, and it was so that I could be the perfect daughter. Mom used to say they’d raise me better.”
“Better than what?”
“I don’t know.” She brought her hand down. “But that’s the phrase I can’t get out of my head. They’d raise me better.”
I watched her. All the patrician confidence was gone. Beneath it was a child, a little girl who had just learned that the world was not what she expected, that it wasn’t what she was prepared for, and that scared her.
It scared her a lot.
“And I don’t think,” she said slowly, “that my father had mob ties. He never seemed to owe anyone anything. He was pretty accepted in town except…”
She let her voice trail off.
“Except?” I asked.
She raised her gaze to mine. “He didn’t want his picture taken. Not then, not ever. And if the papers wanted an interview, it was with the express understanding that he would do it by phone, not in person.”
“What was he hiding from?” I asked, more to myself than to her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell. I’ve been thinking all night, and all I can come up with is that they stole the initial money.”
“And waited until it cooled down before using it,” I said.
She nodded.
“Probably to avoid notice.”
“Then the money would have had to be traceable, right?” she asked.
I thought about it for a moment. “Perhaps,” I said slowly. “Or perhaps they stole something they had to sell, and had to wait until they had a buyer.”
We looked at each other.
“How do you trace that?” she asked.
“We dig,” I said.
She frowned. “How can you do this work, day in and day out? You dig through eighty things to find a detail.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes the details find me.”
I took her hands and led her to the chair. She allowed me to do so and sat cautiously. I wanted to run my fingers along her cheek, to squeeze her shoulder, to make her feel better, but I didn’t. I went back to my desk and sat there, hands folded.
“Now,” I said. “Tell me everything you remembered.”
And she did.
* * *
Laura Hathaway was a golden child. Raised primarily by her mother, Laura spent her days learning how to be part of her “social set.” It was clear from Laura’s earliest childhood that her mother didn’t belong to that set. Her friends’ mothers went to teas and benefits and concerts; her mother stayed
home. Once Laura had asked her about it, and her mother had given a nervous little laugh.
“Sweetie,” her mother had said softly, “you have to be invited.”
As Laura grew older, her parents were invited to the more important events, mostly because of her. Sometimes her mother accompanied Laura. More often, Laura went with a girlfriend’s family and made excuses for her parents. No one seemed to care that her parents didn’t come, not really. All that mattered was Laura and, as her friend Prissy Golden had said, her money. Everyone knew that Laura’s parents wanted her to marry well; they also knew that Laura would bring to the marriage poise, intelligence, beauty, and more money than the rest of them had combined.
* * *
“This was common knowledge?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” Laura said.
“And no one cared that your parents were so eccentric.”
Her smile was tiny and tight. “Not as long as they were rich.”
* * *
Laura’s parents were eccentric in other ways. Her mother seemed to live for her, but her father would do anything for her mother. He rarely spent any time with Laura and often ignored her when he was there.
“That meant,” she said, “I spent a lot of time trying to gain his approval.”
When she got into the University of Chicago, she was convinced he would be proud of her. He barely noticed. When she decided to major in economics—and managed to get into the department, one of the most influential in the world, and the most competitive in the school—he told her that the world had its own economic system, one that could only be lived.
He died shortly after her twentieth birthday, but he’d been sick for weeks. Two days before he died, he asked to see her alone.
“You’re your mother’s,” he had said to her. “She has dreams for you. See that you live them.”
He said nothing about love or affection, nothing about his hopes and dreams for his only daughter. He only spoke of her duty to his wife.
* * *
“‘You’re your mother’s?’” I repeated.
She nodded. “He used to say that to me a lot when I was a girl. If I’d ask him a question, he’d say, ‘You’re your mother’s girl. Ask her.’ It was his way of acknowledging the truth in our family. He really didn’t care about me. Mother did.”
Interesting. I made a note of that fact. It might become useful.
Laura clasped her hands tightly together. She bit her lower lip and then said, “I don’t remember much about my father’s businesses, but they seemed legal enough. He never owed anyone anything.”
“Did he travel?”
“Not that I remember,” she said. “You’d think I’d know, Smokey.”
I was beginning to believe her. It made the Washington, D.C., connection all the stranger. “And he never wanted to be photographed?”
“No.”
“What about your mother?”
“I don’t think photography was an issue at first,” she said. “And then as I grew older and we started to go to functions together, she didn’t seem to mind.”
* * *
If her father had friends, they were all in his business, and she never saw them. Her mother made all her friends at the society functions. There had been no one until then.
Laura hadn’t thought that strange. It was, after all, how she grew up.
* * *
“And no talk of the past?” I asked.
“None,” she said.
“None at all?”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “I thought about it all night. There was no talk at all.”
* * *
And that was all she knew. I asked every question I could think of, probed each part of her memory as best I could, and we learned, together, that her parents had been very disciplined in their silence.
“And I was so damned self-centered I didn’t even notice,” she said.
What I didn’t say was that it seemed they had raised her that way intentionally. She didn’t look to them because they didn’t invite the looks. Her parents had been very secretive people, even from their own child.
What little she was able to tell me gave me supposition, and nothing more. It seemed as if her father was the one who committed the crime and perhaps had done it, in some way, for her mother.
I doubted Laura was his child. He was too indifferent to her, and that phrase, “You are your mother’s,” was telling. Yet they didn’t want her to know that she wasn’t theirs. Was that part of the identification deception? Or was there another reason?
Perhaps her father had hooked up with her mother after Laura had been born, after the crime—whatever it was—had been committed. Whatever crime they had committed it was apparently their last. Their lives from the day they arrived in Chicago until the day they died seemed exemplary.
“What about that mob rumor?” I asked.
She shrugged. “All I can guess,” she said, “is that it had to do with the money.”
I wasn’t that naive. I suspected that Earl Hathaway did have ties to the Chicago mob and that was one reason he stayed away from all the social events. His wife gradually gained acceptance through her rich and pretty daughter. The family apparently decided not to push it with Earl.
But again, that was merely supposition. What seemed even more likely to me was that Earl fronted for the mob and got paid very well for doing so. That way, he kept his own record clean and still managed to make a better living for his family than he could have done any other way. The mob connection could have been, as Laura said, a rumor brought on by the family’s mysteriousness and its sudden wealth. But a person in my business learns that rumors often have a basis in fact.
After she finished telling me everything, Laura leaned back in the chair. She looked even more exhausted than she had before, and I realized we had talked through lunch. It had grown dark outside, and that meant we were missing dinner as well.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now let me feed you,” I said. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”
Her smile was small but real. “You mean I haven’t yet?”
“Not yet.” I stood up from my desk and got her coat. Then I held it out to her. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, then stood and slipped her arms into the sleeves. “You warned me.”
“I know. But I didn’t expect this.”
“I didn’t either.” She turned and faced me. We were only inches apart. “And the strangest thing is, I feel like I’ve inherited the secret. I can’t tell anyone but you.”
I put my hands on her shoulders. “For now. Maybe when we find out what really happened—”
“What if we’re right?” she asked. “What if my parents did steal the money that they lived on, that my father built from? What then?”
I let my hands run along her upper arms. I knew what she was asking; she was asking what I would do. Would I make her lose everything? Give it all back?
“It’ll be your choice,” I said. “You and I are the only ones who’ll know.”
She tilted her head back slightly, but she didn’t move out of my grasp. “But you’re an ethical man, Smokey.”
It was as close as she was going to come to questioning me again. “I suspect you’re ethical as well.”
She closed her eyes. “But that would mean—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t make a decision yet. It’s all what-ifs right now. You’ll be better equipped to decide when you know what happened.”
“If I know.” She opened her eyes.
“If you learn it, yes,” I said.
She patted my side and gave me a small, sad smile. “You promised me dinner, Smokey.”
“And so I did.” I let my hands fall. Then I shut off the office lights and let us into the dark hallway. I was feeling better than I had that morning, even though Laura was understandably upset. I felt like we were finally moving on this, as if there were answers out there; we just had to find them.
I tightened my grip on Laura’s arm. I led her across the street to the King’s Palace. We walked past the arched doors and in to the main door of the restaurant. It was Thursday night, so there wasn’t a line, for which I was grateful. No music either.
As we waited near the bar for a waiter to seat us, a man watched us from one of the booths. Laura didn’t notice him, but I did. I recognized him as another of Joe’s friends.
When he realized I had made eye contact with him, he stood and sauntered over. He was wearing a black beret, sunglasses, and a black leather jacket over black pants. As he got closer, he let the sunglasses slip to the end of his nose.
“See you brung your white bitch,” he said, loud enough to carry over the conversation in the restaurant.
Laura turned. I tightened my grip on her arm.
“Ain’t no one told you that black is beautiful, man? What you doing with some honky woman when you could be with one of ours?”
“We just came for dinner,” Laura said, her words trailing off as I squeezed her elbow warningly. I stepped between her and the man.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
“We seen each other before.”
“You’re one of the men who’s been sending little boys out to deliver drugs?”
Behind me, Laura hissed slightly.
The man just pushed his sunglasses up with his thumbs. “You should pay more attention. We been advising on the way things should go around here.”
“As if you’re an expert.”
“I might be. More than you, any way. You and your white bitch.”
A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 18
