Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  This building had a full basement, and most of it was inaccessible.

  The queasiness in my stomach got worse.

  I stopped looking at the foundation as I went around to the front of the building. I didn’t want to look too odd. Too late, I realized I should probably have carried a can of paint or the ladder just for show.

  I hoped the clipboard was enough.

  The neighborhood remained quiet. The cars that were parked along the street were the same ones that had been there when we arrived. A quick glance reassured me that no one was peeking through their curtains.

  Still, as I mounted the front stairs and unlocked the door, I felt conspicuous. It wasn’t until I stepped inside that I realized I had braced myself for excessive heat. Amazing what the memory did. I could barely remember how the interior looked, but I could remember how stifling it had been.

  It wasn’t stifling now.

  The entry seemed even darker than I remembered. I punched the ancient light switch and that filthy chandelier gave me its meager light. I had forgotten my flashlight, but I wasn’t about to go around the house unless I actually needed it.

  I decided to skip apartments one and two, and head up the oak staircase.

  I would start at the top of this place and work my way down.

  The staircase had been built to last. The stairs, though worn, were sturdy, and so was the banister. As I glanced at it, I didn’t see any signs of repair: no spindles that had a different shape or were made out of a different wood; no cracks in the polished handhold. Even the steps seemed to be in good condition. No one had put another piece of wood across the top of one or shored up the bottom of another.

  The staircase made a gentle curve to the second floor. The banister continued — obviously the second floor hallway had once opened to the entry below. The banister was against a wall now, although not touching it. There was a good foot of space between the banister and the wall itself, space that went all the way down to the first floor.

  I would never have rented any upper floor apartments to people with children, not with that hazard in place. But I’m sure no one thought of such things in the early years. I peered over the edge, missing the flashlight now, wondering what waited for me in that one foot space below.

  Then I remembered the corpses in the basement and shuddered.

  The chandelier’s light did not reach the second floor, but apparently that light switch turned on all the hallway lights. The lights on the second floor were brighter; the fixtures dating from the 1940s. These “improvements” might have been the result of work done by Laura’s father. I wondered if he had done the carpentry and electrical himself.

  I pulled out the clipboard and made notes. A real electrician had to inspect this place, and someone had to repair that gap between the banister and the wall.

  At the place where the staircase blended into the floor, becoming the hallway, stood the next door. It had a metal 3 on its front and four fairly recent deadbolts. I knocked for the hell of it. For all I knew, there could be squatters in here.

  But the knock sounded hollow. If someone was squatting in there, they weren’t home now. And if they were squatting, they hadn’t brought a lot of furniture with them.

  The thought of squatters made me shake my head. I had been thinking so hard about the bodies in the basement that I hadn’t even recalled the possibility of living people upstairs. I’d been worried about that when I first arrived here, and completely lost track of it in the intervening days.

  I knocked one last time, then pressed my ear against the door. Nothing so far. I would have to open each door before we got too far in our investigation, just to make myself feel more secure.

  I continued down the hall. Another door to the left, marked 4, seemed to have been carved into the wall at a later date — obviously dividing up a bedroom suite or a larger area into something smaller.

  Then at the end of the hall was the fifth apartment, with a grand door that seemed like part of the original construction. These last two doors only had regular locks, which looked flimsy compared to those deadbolts.

  A narrow hallway continued past apartment five, leading (I suspected) toward the third floor. The hallway felt cramped and was dark — the light didn’t extend from the main hall, and the fixtures above me either didn’t work or needed new bulbs.

  A window at the end of the hall provided what light there was.

  When I reached it, I realized the window was original to the house, which meant that this hallway was. The stairs were to my right. Once, a door had covered them, but not any longer.

  In the original design, these stairs had either led to the servants’ quarters or to the attic. Sometimes those were one and the same.

  Right beside the window was another light switch. I punched it on, but nothing happened. I peered up the stairs, seeing only darkness. I sighed heavily. Looked like I would have to go back for my flashlight after all.

  Then something brushed against my cheek, making me jump. I reached up and found string. A pull-cord for a light switch. I pulled, and strong light filled the stairwell. This light bulb had been changed recently.

  The stairs were narrow and sharp edged, made without the finesse of the lovely main staircase. If someone tumbled down these things, they’d end up more than scratched or bruised. They’d have broken bones, serious cuts, or both.

  I made my way up carefully, using the wall as a support because no one had put in a railing. I made a note of that too before I started to climb. The stairs twisted and turned, narrowing the higher they got. I had to crouch halfway up, and when I reached the top I was nearly bent in half.

  It was a relief to reach the end of the staircase, which opened into another hallway. This one was narrow, with high ceilings. The door at the end of the hall stood open, revealing a toilet and a bathtub, both old. The toilet had the shape of an old pull-flusher, and the tub had a clawfoot.

  Obviously this had been the servants’ quarters and hadn’t been modified much. Four doors, two on each side of the hall, probably provided single rooms for apartment dwellers, allowing them to share a bath.

  I looked for another doorway, one that would lead to the attic, but didn’t find it out here. So I struggled with my keys, trying to find the one that opened apartment number 9.

  It took some time. I nearly gave up and pushed the door open, breaking the lock, even though I knew better. I’d actually learned, in the course of doing this, that any action like that would make it easy for people to squat in the building.

  Even though Laura had funded a charitable organization that helped squatters find real jobs and homes (something she put together after we discovered that the churches and Salvation Army were constantly full), it still took hours, sometimes days, of my time to help anyone who’d been living for free inside one of the buildings. I didn’t always succeed either — for every person I helped, another ran away after seeing me, never to return.

  I hated that part of the job.

  The door finally opened, and a waft of stench blew toward me. It took a minute to figure out what it was: a combination of rust and mildew and loam. I struggled for a moment to find something that would turn on a light; I was surprised when my fingers found a modern switch, which I flicked upward.

  Fluorescents flickered on, taking a second to catch. When they did, they showed me a room filled with gardening equipment — rakes, shovels, and small pickaxes, all stacked against the back wall. I’d been right; this was a single room, and once upon a time it had probably been rented as such. But it hadn’t served as anything but storage in a very long time.

  I had no idea what anyone would need all this gardening equipment for either. There was no lawn here except for that small patch out front, which only needed mowing. And in no way was anyone going to carry a lawn mower way up here.

  Canvas tarps, like painters’ tarps, were stacked to my left, and beyond them, several rolled rugs. Some old chairs had been shoved against the wall. One of them h
ad become a rat’s nest — stuffing everywhere. I couldn’t smell the rodents though: I wondered if they were long gone or had simply not yet moved back inside for the winter because of this Fall heat wave.

  I went inside, careful to prop the door open. For some reason, I didn’t want it to close on me.

  There were other tools in here, rusted and old, some of them so encrusted with dirt that I couldn’t quite tell what they were. Others were obvious: hammers, nails, screwdrivers, several old saws. Cobwebs showed me that these hadn’t been used in a long, long time.

  Past the rakes, a utility sink had a board across the top and the faucets capped off. On top of the board were small screws, some kidney-shaped bits of leather, and small metal objects. I squinted, leaning forward, careful not to hit anything, and stared at the metal. Those were bullets.

  I let out a small breath, then peered around again. Mixed with the rakes and shovels were a few rifles. Along the floor, some unattached barrels rested against a pile of dowels. And near the sink itself, some grips for handguns were stacked into a small pile.

  LeDoux would want to see this room too. It was probably part of the crime scene — maybe even the murder site, although I didn’t see any blood spatter on the walls or dried blood pools on what was left of the carpet. The room didn’t quite smell bad enough either, but maybe that was because I had grown accustomed to foul odors after being in this building for so long.

  Somewhere in this room, if the house continued to follow standard Queen Anne layout, which it had so far, would be the entrance to the attic. I didn’t see it, but it could have been hidden behind one of the chairs or all the equipment.

  Still, I could almost hear LeDoux, cautioning me not to do anything, touch anything, or step in anything.

  I backed out of the room, trying to walk in the prints my shoes had left in the dust. When I got to the door, I removed the block and pulled it closed, letting the lock latch automatically.

  Sweat ran down the side of my face, even though I hadn’t been aware of being hot. Both my shirt and the coverall stuck to my back, and I felt grimy, just like I had on that very first day.

  I stood in the middle of the hall and stared at the remaining doors, wondering what else I would find.

  FIFTEEN

  As it turned out, I found only empty rooms in the remaining third-floor apartments. The rooms were similar: they all had a utility sink and a tiny counter with a single cupboard hanging above it.

  The floors were bare wood covered with dust, indicating that no one had been inside for a long time. A single window either overlooked the street out front or the alley in the back. The glass was clouded and dirt-streaked, and I dutifully marked on my clipboard that there might be dry rot and mildew around the frames.

  I wasn’t able to check the bathroom: the overhead light didn’t work, and not enough light came in from the hall. I could tell that my initial assumption had been right: the bathroom hadn’t been remodeled since it was installed in the 1920s. But as to cleanliness, dirt, and the interior of the medicine cabinet, not to mention a small closet off the side, I had no way of knowing, not until I came back up prepared.

  The second floor provided more interest. The apartments there were empty as well, and, for two of them, just as dust-covered. These apartments were one-bedrooms with kitchens and their own bathrooms, some of them shoehorned into a very small space. Had there been no other problems in the building, I would have recommended these for cleaning and immediate rental.

  The most interesting apartment — at least on this floor — was the one directly visible at the top of the stairs, the one with all the deadbolts. It still smelled of Pine-Sol and Lemon Pledge.

  This apartment sparkled. The floor had no carpet: someone had lovingly restored the hardwood floor. The windows looked new too, and the walls were freshly painted. A built-in bookshelf was the source of the Pledge smell. Its wood shelves looked as lovely as the floor.

  I went in and explored, just like I had in the others. The main living area had an archway to the left which, as I went through it, surprised me. The windows curved outward, with a little built-in window seat below each one. This was part of the tower. I turned, saw a narrow staircase leading up, and followed it.

  The stairs opened onto a tower room, completely round, and completely detached from the third floor. Windows surrounded me, giving me a 360-degree view of the neighborhood. The room itself was spectacular, and the only one in the entire building so far that made me feel even slightly comfortable.

  If I hadn’t discovered the horrors in the basement, I would have told Laura that she had a prime piece of property here. I would have wondered at the gardening tools on the third floor, and worried slightly over the gun parts and bullets, but they wouldn’t have seemed sinister, not like they did now.

  How many other crime scenes had I dismissed in other buildings I’d inspected, thinking them abandoned storage areas or forgotten equipment?

  Probably quite a few.

  I left the tower room, and went down the stairs into the main part of the apartment. To the right of the main door, two more rooms opened up — one holding a kitchen and, off it, a bathroom, the other a small dark bedroom with only one window.

  These rooms told me nothing, except that the high level of cleanliness continued here as well. Had someone recently moved out and cleaned the place to perfection before Hanley died? Or did this cleanliness have a more sinister motivation, one that would hide the destruction that murder often gives to a building?

  I shuddered again, decided this was yet another problem for LeDoux, and left the apartment. I didn’t lock the deadbolts. Instead, I made sure the door latch worked so that we could get inside easier.

  The staircase down to the entry seemed darker than it had before. As I reached the first floor, I saw that the glass panels beside the main door had grown dark. Either a storm was coming or it was later in the afternoon than I thought.

  I glanced at the watch Jimmy had bought me for my birthday and saw that it was nearly four o’clock. It was my turn to pick up Jimmy and the Grimshaw children from their after-school classes. Their teacher had made it clear at the beginning of the year she would stay in that old church no later than five o’clock.

  I didn’t have time to go through the downstairs apartments. Still, I took a few minutes to unlock them and peer inside, just to see if this building had squatters.

  Both first-floor apartments were empty. The living rooms in each were covered in dust. No one had been inside in a long, long time.

  I closed the apartment doors, then let myself out the front. A few of the cars that had littered the street were gone now, and one unfamiliar car had parked near the corner. I hurried around the building as drops of rain dotted my coveralls.

  I would save Hanley’s apartment for the following day.

  As I hurried down the basement stairs, I checked my watch again. Barely enough time to drop off LeDoux and pick up Jim. But I would make it, if we hurried.

  I found LeDoux dusting the cabinet for prints. He insisted on finishing, claiming he only had one more to go, even though I stressed the time urgency. It took him five minutes to dust the print, photograph it, and then use a piece of tape to remove it. He taped the print to a slide, then put the whole thing in his evidence bag, marked Cabinet Boiler Room 1.

  “Now?” I asked.

  He stood, wiped his hands on his coveralls, which were finally looking as dirty as they needed to, and handed me a torn sheet of paper.

  “Here’s the make and model of this cabinet,” he said. “It’s fairly recent, judging by the label itself. I think you should start there.”

  I bristled at his suggestion, but said nothing. We wouldn’t be working together long. If this continued, I’d have to speak up, but for now I had to keep LeDoux happy.

  I nodded, folded the note, and clipped it to my board. The cabinet wasn’t a priority, yet. Those apartments were. I’d make certain I had my flashlight in the morning, when I’d start
in that third-floor bathroom.

  We left. I made certain both doors into the house were locked tight. I also locked the basement door for good measure. As we drove back downtown, LeDoux pulled off his coveralls and tossed his painters’ cap on top of them. At my instruction, he bundled them into a ball and tossed them at his feet.

  Maybe by the end of the week they’d look like as used as most painters’ clothing.

  I took back roads as long as I could, but eventually we ended up on Michigan Avenue, waiting in traffic. I had factored that into my timing; still, I found myself tapping the steering wheel impatiently.

  LeDoux shook his head slightly, as if he couldn’t understand me. I wasn’t sure I understood him either.

  “You find anything in the house?” he asked, much later than I expected him to.

  “No one’s living there. It looks like someone recently moved out of number three.”

  “How recent?”

  “Within the last few months,” I said. “I’ll know more tomorrow.”

  He nodded and kept staring out the window at the other cars, trapped like we were between the tall buildings and Grant Park. Police lights reflected off passing cars. I glanced in their direction, saw a squad car parked on one of the paths as if it were blocking someone’s way.

  My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. The park looked different than it had in the morning — more litter, a lot of paper, a few ripped signs.

  I glanced ahead, made sure the way to the hotel was clear, and concentrated on getting us there.

  “What’s that?” LeDoux asked, tilting his head toward the park.

  We were past the police car now, nearer to the Logan statue and the site of the main police riot during the Democratic National Convention, the horrendous one, the one the entire nation saw on television.

  A reporter stood near the fountain, a camera crew trained on him, an equipment truck blocking part of Michigan Avenue. The camera lights made it seem almost like nighttime, even though the sun wasn’t due to set for another two hours.