Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I took the bowl of brats from Jimmy and carried it to the grill. “One or two?” I asked Laura.

  “Two,” she said with a smile. “You know I can’t resist those things.”

  I put six brats on the grill. They sizzled as the wet meat touched the metal. Smoke rose. From this moment on, cooking became an art form, and I was wedded to the grill until the brats were done.

  I sent Jimmy back upstairs for the plates, buns, silverware, and potato salad. Laura offered to help, but Jimmy turned her down. He was trying to give us time alone, thinking this lunch was about our relationship, not about business.

  I would let him continue to think that. I really didn’t want him to hear about my discovery.

  “What had to be discussed in person?” Laura stood next to me, out of the smoke, watching me turn the brats.

  “The last house you assigned me,” I said. “The one near Jackson Park where the manager died.”

  Jimmy marched toward us, plates in hand. He held the package of buns as well, and set them all on the TV tray beside me. Then, without asking, he took the bowl which had held the brats and took it back upstairs.

  “He’s becoming quite responsible,” Laura said.

  “When he wants to be.” I turned the brats again. They were turning brown. They had grill lines on their plump sides.

  “What about the house?” she asked.

  I looked at her. She was still staring at the grill as if it provided all the answers.

  I sighed. There was no easy way to tell her this.

  “I found three bodies in the basement,” I said.

  “Jesus!” She jumped backward, as if I had put the bodies there. “Did you call the police?”

  “Not until I talked to you.”

  Jimmy came back around the building, hugging catsup, mayonnaise, mustard, and relish to his chest. He set those items on the picnic table, which was several yards from us.

  “Does Jim know?” Laura asked quietly.

  I shook my head.

  “Bodies,” she whispered.

  Jimmy came over to us. He looked from me to Laura, sensing something wrong, and blaming me for it.

  “Smoke tell you that we’re staying?” he asked Laura.

  She blinked at Jimmy, then frowned. Obviously the change of subject confused her. “Staying?”

  “In Chicago,” Jimmy said. “He says we got a community here. We got to stay for it. It’ll help me grow up.”

  Laura, bless her, made the transition. She smiled at Jim as if nothing was wrong. “Smokey says that, does he?”

  Jimmy smiled back at her, as if they shared a secret. “I know, I told him before we went that we got friends here, but sometimes Smoke’s got to see stuff for himself.”

  Laura nodded, then looked at me sideways. “He hadn’t told me that.”

  “Figures.” Jimmy grabbed the bag of buns, opened it, and pulled one out. Then he carefully split the bun and set it on a plate.

  “You forgot the potato salad,” I said. “And the green salad.”

  “Yuck,” Jimmy said, and set his plate on top of the pile. He headed back toward the apartment.

  “You’ve got quite a defender,” Laura said.

  “Actually, you do,” I said. “He’s been calling me stupid and dumb and a real jerk ever since last summer.”

  Laura was silent for a moment. “You were just protecting him.”

  I couldn’t tell if she believed that or if she was just parroting my own words back to me. “I didn’t do a very good job of it. There’s no place safe, at least for him and me.”

  She put a hand on my arm, startling me. I looked down at her. Her gaze met mine for the first time since she arrived.

  “You do better than most,” she said.

  Yeah. With my dangerous job that the entire community I’d come back to wanted me to quit, and my devil’s bargain with the local gangs, and my struggle to stay away from law enforcement. Jim and I were a unit, but my side of it was iffy at best.

  Laura walked to the TV tray, spread the plates out on it, and then took the rest of the buns from the package. She split them, just like Jimmy had been doing.

  “How long have they been dead?” she asked.

  Now it was my turn to feel confused. Then I realized she had gone back to the original conversation, the one about the bodies.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “They’re skeletons, Laura. And that’s not the worst of it—”

  “We don’t got nothing but Thousand Island,” Jimmy announced as he came around the building. He carried the covered bowls of potato salad and regular salad. A nearly empty bottle of Thousand Island dressing rested precariously on top of the pile.

  “I almost forgot,” Laura said. “I brought root beer.”

  She headed around the building as Jimmy placed the last items on the table. One of my neighbors peered out her back window, saw me, and waved. I waved back.

  “She forgive you?” Jimmy grabbed the grilling fork and poked at the brats.

  I took the fork from him. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yeah, you always say that.” He picked up a plate. “These look done.”

  They were. I stabbed two and put them on Jim’s plate. Laura brought a jug of A&W Root Beer, ice cold from one of the nearby restaurants, and set it on the table. Jim exclaimed his pleasure, and if she hadn’t already had his heart, she would have captured it right there.

  I served up the remaining brats, then I put the lid halfway on the grill, hoping that none of the neighborhood kids would come and play near here while the thing cooled off. Jimmy came over and got his plate. I carried mine to the table, which sat in the middle of a pool of sunshine. Laura had already found the tiny sliver of shade.

  She gave me a glance, and I understood it. We agreed, with just one look, to pretend we were having a normal picnic. Neither of us wanted to discuss bodies in front of Jim. When the meal was over I’d ask him to leave, and then I’d talk to Laura.

  For the most part, she and Jimmy carried the conversation. They talked about his schooling, particularly the after-school program. Laura had helped me and Franklin Grimshaw find another teacher for the after-school program after Grace Kirkland decided she needed the year off. Jimmy didn’t like his new teacher — she wasn’t Mrs. Kirkland, he’d say, as if that explained it — but he had a newfound seriousness, one that he’d acquired over the summer, when he walked through the gates at Yale.

  I listened and ate my two brats smothered in relish. Jimmy kept looking at me as if he expected me to jump into the conversation at any point, but I didn’t. He and Laura didn’t get enough time together; I wasn’t going to get in the way.

  Finally, Jimmy finished his brats, most of his potato salad, and enough of the green salad to impress me. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, then said, “Should I clean up?”

  I raised my eyebrows. He never volunteered for kitchen duty. “Laura’s not finished yet. And didn’t you want some dessert?”

  He looked tempted for a moment, even though he knew we only had store-bought cookies. Then he shook his head. “I’m gonna go. Is that okay?”

  I had to work at suppressing my smile. He really did want me and Laura to talk.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll clean up.”

  “Thanks.” He slipped away from the table so fast that it almost seemed like something was chasing him.

  “Be back by five,” I called after him. He waved a hand to show that he’d heard me and understood, then he disappeared around the front of the apartment building.

  “He’s not very subtle,” Laura said, scraping the remaining potato salad onto her fork.

  “But he means well.” I smiled at her. She smiled back. For a moment, we had a connection.

  Then she looked away. The mood changed, from the lighthearted, almost family-like conversation, back to something ugly.

  “So,” she said with a sigh, “tell me about these bodies.”

  I did. I told her how I found them, and the
fact that the entire basement looked built-up. I suspected there were more than three skeletons down there.

  “Bricked into the wall?” she asked, her voice low. Even though we were the only people in the apartment building’s backyard, we were being careful. We didn’t want anyone to overhear through an open window.

  “The work down there is shoddy,” I said. “And it differs from section to section.”

  “You saw all that in one glance?”

  “It’s hard to miss,” I said. “Then there’s the remaining bricks and mortar. Someone planned to continue the work.”

  “But they stopped.”

  I nodded. “I don’t know if they stopped because they sold the building, or because they died, or because they moved out.”

  Laura pushed her plate away. The last part of her second brat would go forever unfinished. She did take her glass of root beer and cup it between her hands.

  “You said that the manager had a key to this room.” She rubbed the sides of the glass so that it moved back and forth.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if he got the key as part of a key ring that opened everything in the building or if he was in charge down there. I didn’t have enough time to investigate that.”

  She stopped moving her glass. She took a final sip, then set it aside too. “What’re you afraid of, Smokey?”

  “Your father,” I said softly.

  She leaned her head back. “You think he was behind this?”

  “I don’t know, but he owned the building.”

  “He’s been dead almost ten years. There’s no proof—”

  “These three bodies have been down there for a long time,” I said. “I’m no expert. I don’t know if it takes five years or ten years for a body to completely decay, particularly in a bricked-off part of an old basement. But I think there’s a good chance that those bodies were placed there before your father died.”

  She bit her lower lip, clearly thinking. “If my dad knew about it—”

  I thought it was interesting that she didn’t think he was involved, just that he knew. My understanding of the old man was that he had an incredible ruthless streak. We had no proof of murder yet in the things he’d done, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

  “—then his partners knew about it too.”

  His partners. The men Laura had bested in her takeover of the company. They had hated her, underestimated her, and fought her all the way. She had fired them, but she hadn’t fired all their minions. Too many layoffs in the beginning of her tenure as CEO would have scared the shareholders.

  “If the old partners do know and get wind of this,” I said, “then they’ll fight to protect themselves. They’ll fight dirty. They’ll blame you. Even if it comes out that you had no ties to those bodies, the damage will have been done.”

  A crease had formed on her forehead. She was thinking hard, going through the same implications that had disturbed me since the day before.

  I continued, “You might lose your position, and all the good that you’re doing with it. Or worse.”

  “Worse?” she asked.

  “People who commit murder aren’t afraid to commit another to cover the first.”

  She let out a small breath. “You think we’re in that kind of danger?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’m just looking at worst case. Best case, these bodies came from some Prohibition murder, and we call the police to deal with them.”

  “But you don’t think so,” she said.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I really don’t. Not yet.”

  “What about the manager?” she asked. “Could he have placed the bodies there?”

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Even in the shade, it was too hot for me.

  “It’s possible,” I said. “But we can’t turn the investigation over to the police until we have some idea what we’re dealing with. Does anyone know that I was at the building?”

  I had always worked directly for Laura, not for Sturdy and not with anyone else’s approval. She wasn’t supposed to tell anyone in the company what buildings I was inspecting, but we hadn’t confirmed that in a long time.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t tell anyone you were going there. I didn’t even mention that someone was going to inspect it.”

  “Good,” I said. “We’re going to have to keep this between the two of us, at least for the time being.”

  She looked at me, her blue eyes troubled. “What’re you going to do? See the extent of what we have?”

  “I’m not qualified for that,” I said. “If we mess with it too much and then turn it over the police, we’re tampering with evidence in a possible murder investigation.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to the police,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “We have to find some things out first.”

  She frowned, not quite with me.

  “You’re going to have to go into the company records, find out when your father bought the place, whether he spent any time there—”

  “That’ll be in the file?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Can’t you get the land history at the courthouse?” she asked.

  “The less I’m involved at this stage, the better,” I said. “We don’t want anyone to know that we’re looking into this. If someone still connected with Sturdy does know about this, then they might do something if they think we’ve found the bodies.”

  She nodded.

  “So find out how long this building has been owned by Sturdy. For all we know, the company might have bought it in 1965, which takes your father off the hook.”

  “But not the company itself,” she said.

  “We don’t know that,” I said. “You’re new management. If the building is a recent acquisition, then you can report what you find without tainting. If your father was involved, that’s different. That’ll taint you automatically. Everyone’ll assume you knew because you’re his daughter.”

  She rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. She looked tired. “Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days when I thought he was just a rich, reclusive man.”

  I understood that. I’d learned a lot of things over the years that I wished I hadn’t.

  She nodded. “What else should I look for in those files?”

  “How long the manager lived there,” I said.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “Look to see who owned the place during Prohibition,” I said. “We’ve found enough old stills and liquor-storage places to make this less unusual than I would like.”

  “God,” she said, shuddering. “You think this is a planned burial site.”

  “I know it is,” I said. “I just don’t know the extent. And if it’s planned, then it’s got to be tied to some kind of criminal activity.”

  “Or one crazy guy,” she said, obviously thinking of the manager.

  “Or one crazy guy,” I agreed. Only I wasn’t sure the manager was our suspect. I had already voiced my doubts about Laura’s father. If I had to place money on who put the bodies in that basement, I’d bet on him.

  “If I order up the files,” she said, “everyone’s going to know what I’m doing. I’m going to have to do this work on my own.”

  “And leave no fingerprints,” I said. “Don’t move anything in the files, don’t even take the files out of their storage area. Try not to disturb anything near them.”

  “What if I find something unusual?”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Something implicating someone.”

  “We’ll worry about it if you find it,” I said. “I just want to know what the possibilities are.”

  She studied her hands for a long moment. “What are we going to do if this predates my father’s death?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But while you’re looking up the building’s background, I’ll try to figure something out.”

  FIVE />
  I had made it sound like I knew what to do next, but I really didn’t. I hoped that Laura would find that the previous management team had bought the building a few years ago, and we wouldn’t have to consider her father as a suspect at all. More than anything, I wanted to leave those bodies in the hands of the police.

  But I had a hunch that wouldn’t happen. So I spent the next few days getting my other cases in order.

  I worked for a number of different organizations, doing investigations, most of them routine. I charged less than the leading black detective agency, but I also made it clear to my clients that they would get less too.

  I wasn’t licensed — I didn’t want any arm of local government to investigate me, even with my excellent fake identification. My real name is Smokey Dalton, but everyone in Chicago, with the exceptions of Laura, Franklin and Althea Grimshaw, and Jimmy, thought I was Bill Grimshaw, Franklin’s cousin. I’d been using that identity for more than a year now. Jimmy was registered in school as James Grimshaw, and he had adopted that name as his own. I think sometimes he forgot that his real last name was Bailey, which was fine with me.

  Most of my cases dealt with insurance fraud, or building inspections, or petty theft. Occasionally I took on individual cases as well, although I didn’t have one at the moment. I was grateful for that.

  It meant I could concentrate on the Queen Anne if I had to.

  In the meantime, I wrote reports, mailed invoices, and closed every pending case that I had. If this case for Laura came to nothing, I would have to scramble for work in October, but that was all right.

  My financial situation was a lot less precarious than it had been the year before, when Jimmy and I fled Memphis for Chicago. I had a savings account in Memphis, one that my friend Henry Davis put money from the rental of my house into, but I hoped to use that as Jimmy’s college fund. With Jim’s recent talk of Yale, I was beginning to think I would need that fund more than ever.

  By late Tuesday, I still hadn’t heard from Laura. I knew she’d been busy with the construction demonstrations and the Model Cities representatives. I had a hunch she hadn’t found a private moment to visit Sturdy’s files.

  I didn’t want to call her, though. I didn’t want to draw any more attention to this than I had to.