Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “It’s not great,” he said, “but at least I’m away from the Loop and whatever those crazy kids were doing.”

  “Those crazy kids were in the Gold Coast two nights ago,” I said, in case he didn’t know what part of town Laura’s apartment was in.

  “Yes, but those buildings had security. The hotel actually went into something they called lockdown during the riot yesterday morning; they locked the building tight and wouldn’t let anyone in or out.”

  That was a new policy since the convention, and one hotel patrons probably hated.

  “If you’d brought me back at lunch,” he was saying, “I wouldn’t have been able to get into the hotel, let alone my room.”

  I nodded. I wouldn’t like that either. “Most of those buildings don’t have hidden parking areas, so I’ll be conspicuous picking you up. We should probably meet somewhere else. Have Laura show you a nearby restaurant where you can have a good breakfast, and I’ll pull up outside at a designated time. All right?”

  He nodded, looking out the window at the changing neighborhoods. “This city is such a damn mess. It’d be a lot easier if I could just travel on my own.”

  “Not down here,” I said, as we took the last turn before we reached the Queen Anne. “Any car you drive would be conspicuous, and so would you.”

  “I know.” This time his words were soft. I empathized. I wouldn’t be in Chicago either if I could have found a better place to live. But LeDoux probably had a better place to live. He wasn’t protecting a fugitive child, and he was white. A lot of smaller cities in this country — a lot of smaller towns — weren’t really touched by the violence that seemed endemic in the larger ones.

  I parked the van in the same spot that I had the day before. We carried a few more paint cans to the door, which I unlocked with ease. The place looked undisturbed yet again.

  I wondered how long that would last.

  It only took a few minutes to get LeDoux back to work. For all his complaining about Chicago, this Queen Anne intrigued him. He wanted to collect all its secrets.

  As I gathered my flashlight and my clipboard, I turned to him. “Did you talk to Laura about evidence storage?”

  He had returned to the side of the cabinet, crouching just where I had found him the night before. His lips thinned in disgust. “I forgot. Did you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll take care of it later.”

  “We’re all right at the moment.” He glanced at the open cabinet doors. “But I have no idea how long that will last.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  Then I left the basement. I stopped in the back entry, near Hanley’s apartment, and ran the flashlight along the walls. Victorian houses usually had a servants’ stair off the kitchen. Since Hanley’s apartment had been built over the site of the original kitchen, the stairs had to be somewhere nearby.

  But they weren’t in the entry, and I still wasn’t ready to look in the place where he had died.

  So I went back outside, grabbed my toolbox from the van, and walked to the front of the building. I let myself in, feeling less conspicuous than I had the day before.

  I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, if I was getting used to this neighborhood. It certainly didn’t seem much different than it had been the day before, but I couldn’t look around. I had done that the day before, and if I did it every day, I would look suspicious.

  Once inside, I closed and locked the door, then left the toolbox in the entry. This time, I didn’t turn on the lights, preferring to use my flashlight. I hurried up the oak stairs, then took the narrower stairs to the third floor.

  My heart was pounding, and it wasn’t from the exertion. I didn’t like it up here, and I wasn’t sure why. I went all the way to the end of the hall and stopped at that bathroom, using the flashlight the way I’d seen LeDoux use his, as a way of examining each bit of flooring and every inch of wall.

  The bathroom was as filthy as I had thought. The claw-footed tub had some kind of brownish-black goo lining its porcelain surface on the inside, and all sorts of scratches and scuff marks on the outside.

  The water in the toilet was brackish and brown. I debated the lifting the lid on the storage tank to see if that water had rust in it, then decided against it. Just the condition of the tub alone convinced me that LeDoux would have to examine this room. He could take care of the lid.

  An ancient medicine cabinet stood partially open near the toilet. I was glad for the gloves as I used my index finger to pry the cabinet open the rest of the way.

  A surprising number of things greeted me, some that I expected, and some that I didn’t. I expected the aspirin and the Mercurochrome, but not the two dozen other pill bottles that seemed to be arranged by type, although they weren’t marked. The tweezers seemed normal to me, but not the small pair of pliers. And what was a medicine cabinet without Band-Aids — only this one had treated bits of gauze as well, all of them separated by some kind of paper.

  I eased the cabinet closed and turned to the built-in linen closet. That door I had to pry open. There were no towels or sheets inside. Instead, the top rows held empty jars with rusted metal screw-tops, as if someone had planned to use them for storage (for the nails in apartment nine or for the bullets?).

  The jars made some kind of quirky sense — tenants left the darndest things — but the rest of the closet held items I’d never seen in an apartment building before, at least not in this quantity.

  One entire shelf held adhesive bandages, sterile roller gauze, and adhesive tape. Next to those were light, stiff boards that took me a moment to recognize. When I was in the service, we’d had them in our field medical kit so that we could make impromptu splints.

  Then there were the bottles — rubbing alcohol (nearly a dozen), hydrogen peroxide (five large bottles), iodine (more small bottles than I could quickly count), and Phisohex (which seemed to fill up one entire shelf all on its own).

  Forceps, tongue depressors, and thermometers lined the front of a lower shelf, with more items behind.

  I let go of the door, watching it close on its own, and finally remembered to breathe.

  I was looking at medical supplies — for what, I didn’t know. But a normal home only had a few of these things, and an apartment complex, even with a shared bathroom, generally had none.

  At least that I had ever seen, and I’d been inspecting these places for almost a year now.

  The entire thing disturbed me more than I could say, and so did the pile of dirty rags that filled the corner behind the door. To my eye, the brownish-red substance on those rags was blood, but I knew from experience that substance could be a lot of things.

  I’d been put in mind of blood by the bodies downstairs and the medical supplies up here.

  I made myself examine the rest of the room, finding more cobwebs and dust than I cared to think about. I had no idea how old any of this stuff was, but I was certain LeDoux would figure it out. He’d probably read every label and would make a report that noted how long each bottle had been inside that closet.

  As I left the bathroom, I remembered to remove that pair of gloves. I grabbed one of the plastic bags that I’d shoved in the back pocket of my coveralls, wrote on the white label that LeDoux (or someone) had pasted onto the outside “third-floor public bathroom,” and dropped the gloves inside. Then I closed the bag, pressing down on the piece of tape, and dropped the entire thing in the hallway outside apartment nine.

  I’d forgotten to bring one of the grocery bags that LeDoux also insisted we carry.

  Then I put on another pair of gloves, unlocked apartment nine, and stepped inside.

  It smelled just as bad as it had the day before. I sneezed, covering my mouth with my arm. I turned on the fluorescents and waited for them to catch. This time, I vowed to ignore the tarps and the bullets and the gardening equipment, and examine the walls of the room.

  I used my flashlight to look for any suspicious cracks or lines on the walls. Mostly they we
re covered with old newsprint or good-girl art taken from old calendars. I couldn’t see much. So I started beside the door and rapped on any available wallboard that I could see.

  Dirt occasionally fell to the floor, and I dislodged one clipping. The clipping slipped behind a box of bolts, and I decided to leave it all for LeDoux.

  I was only going to be able to touch three of the four walls. The one farthest from me was buried behind all that equipment. To reach the third, I had to reach over those upholstered chairs that, up close, smelled of rodent droppings and terrible mildew.

  The paint was a different color here, grayer — older, perhaps. I braced my right hand on the back of the nearest chair, and then knocked. The sound wasn’t hollow. It was barely a knock.

  My fingers hadn’t hit plaster and lath; they’d found particle board.

  I stepped back. This was the interior wall, but it shared a corner with the outside wall. I silently apologized to LeDoux, then slid the two chairs out of my way. I rapped on the interior wall again — yes, particle board — and then on the exterior wall, which was clearly plaster and lath.

  The walls didn’t line up well either. The particle-board wall had warped and moved about an eighth of an inch away from the exterior wall.

  I trained my flashlight on that tiny crack, then peered inside. I couldn’t see much, but something reflected white at me.

  My stomach churned. This place seemed to always make me queasy. I didn’t want to pull that wall aside, but I was going to. And I wasn’t sure I would like what I found inside.

  It didn’t take a lot of strength to knock a good-sized hole in the particle board. I didn’t even have to set down my light. I looked inside, afraid I’d find more bodies, but all I saw were yellowish-white walls, a dust-covered wooden floor, and a door.

  Another hidden door.

  There had to be a better way to get inside, but I couldn’t see it. I widened the hole until I could step through it, letting the pieces of particle board fall inside the hole instead of out (that way LeDoux would know what part came from my destruction and what came from things that had happened before we arrived).

  First I leaned in and let the flashlight explore all the angles of the cubbyhole. There wasn’t much to see — just someone’s desire to hide yet another door from prying eyes.

  Then I stepped inside and looked again. Cobwebs on the ceiling indicated that no one had been in here for quite a while. There was a small space behind the particle-board wall.

  It had been engineered to slide back. If I had tried hard enough, I could have slid it toward the apartment’s door, and then stepped through without doing any damage.

  Someone had designed this to give easy access to the door hidden by this wall. But that same someone hadn’t wanted anyone to know the door was there.

  I tried the knob. The door was locked, just like I expected.

  I fumbled through the ring of keys, trying almost two dozen before I finally found the one that worked.

  The lock clicked, and the door actually creaked open, sending a shiver along my spine.

  I shone the light inside, surprised to see a landing. Narrow stairs ran down to the right, and up to the left.

  The servants’ staircase. I had a hunch it ended in Hanley’s apartment on the first floor.

  I opted to go up first.

  But again, before I did, I propped this door open, then left it, went into the main part of the apartment, and propped the apartment door open as well. If LeDoux came looking for me, he would at least have an idea where I had gone.

  I walked back in the hole. Butterflies had replaced the queasiness. I was breathing too shallowly — the smell and the dust caused that — and I was feeling lightheaded.

  I made myself take a deeper breath, even though I really didn’t want to taste the fetid air.

  The stairs leading up were so tiny that I had trouble fitting my shoes on them. I had to climb up on the balls of my feet, once again using the wall as a banister.

  The air smelled stale up here, dust-filled, and old in a way that I couldn’t describe. That pervasive odor of rot was here too, but not as offensive as it had been in some other places. Just a lingering afterthought, as if this part of the building had once housed something awful, but did no longer.

  The stairway turned and opened under the eaves. I had to crouch to keep from bumping my head. The edges of the walls were unfinished — newspapers and some kind of material peeked out from behind the wallboard, obviously an old-fashioned source of insulation.

  Gravel and dirt lined the edges, and along the very side I saw mouse prints, hundreds of them, along with black flecks of mouse droppings.

  I had to remain bent at the waist to get all the way into the room. I braced a hand against the ceiling, and when it became clear that I could stand, I did.

  Tables surrounded me. Tables covered with things — jars filled with buttons and campaign pins and marbles. Folded bits of clothing, blankets, and coats. Socks rolled up the way my mother used to do when she’d put them in my bureau drawer, and underwear that looked used.

  Beneath the tables, open boxes. The one nearest to me was filled with newspapers — not clippings this time, but entire editions of the Chicago Tribune. Another box held the Chicago Record, and a third held the Chicago Times.

  The boxes trailed back into the darkness, filled not just with newspapers, but magazines and snapshots as well. I felt vaguely overwhelmed and hoped that most of this was just items abandoned by previous tenants.

  But of course, I wasn’t that lucky.

  I turned and banged into the table behind me. A jar tumbled toward me, jingling as it fell, and I caught it.

  At first I thought it held stones in the bottom, maybe a child’s collection of something, and then those stones reflected my flashlight beam.

  I turned the beam on the jar completely, brought the jar closer so that I could see it clearly, and then nearly dropped it.

  What I had thought were stones were teeth.

  Gold caps, gold fillings, and bits of loose gold.

  Some of the fillings hadn’t been removed from their tooth. The tooth remained at the bottom of the jar, bits of tissue hanging off the jagged ends.

  The queasiness was back full-force. I set the jar down, careful not to dislodge it again, and made myself breathe evenly.

  The table I had bumped into was a worktable. In the very center someone had carefully laid out a blotter, placed a lamp beside it, and set tools along the right edge.

  Behind the table, a straight-backed chair with no cushion had been pushed up close, its wooden seat worn smooth from use. A few empty jars sat to the left side, a few full jars to the right.

  This was the only table with nothing stored beneath it.

  I made myself look at the tools. A dental pick, tweezers, and another pair of pliers. Some jewelers’ cloths lay to one side, and beside them, one of the bottles of hydrogen peroxide. A small bowl was placed on top of the peroxide, upside down, obviously intended for use whenever the owner of all this stuff returned.

  I scanned the flashlight over the end tables behind this main table. More jars, these holding jewelry, separated by rings and watches and pins.

  The window behind all of it had been boarded up except along the bottom — perhaps so that it could be opened a crack in the heat of the summer — and along the back wall, hats. Dozens of them, all hanging on pegs. Bowlers and stocking caps and fedoras. There were a few straw hats and a haymaker, as well as billed tweed caps. Along the bottom were several garrison caps and a few other military caps, the foldable kind used in both World Wars.

  I let out a small breath, feeling shaky. Maybe the air was bad up here or maybe the sheer numbers were starting to overwhelm me.

  A bulletin board had been pasted on the eave wall beside some of the caps, and on it someone had pressed papers — pictures, cards, postcards, letters. I couldn’t get back there, not without disturbing everything else, but knew I would have to as soon as I could g
et LeDoux up here to photograph everything.

  Then my light caught another table, the one directly behind the worktable, and I realized that one was a worktable too. Only on it were gun parts, oil, a cleaning rod, and a repair kit like the one I had had in Memphis. A grip lay on its side, unattached, and a barrel with a dent along the edge sat in the middle of yet another blotter.

  This was clearly a workroom of some kind, but all the clues kept miscuing me. What kind, exactly? The teeth implied one thing, the gun another, the hats yet one more. And then there was the newspaper storage, not to mention the medical supplies downstairs.

  What kind of business had been run out of this place? What had been going on?

  I turned all the way around — carefully this time — and headed back down the stairs. Much as I didn’t want to, I would have to consult with LeDoux. We would have to make decisions together on all these finds, how we were going to investigate them, and then what we would do with the remaining pieces.

  I would also have to call Laura and update her.

  She wouldn’t welcome this news, any more than I did.

  I shuddered and went down through the cobwebs, all the way to Hanley’s apartment.

  EIGHTEEN

  The stench of decaying flesh grew worse the farther down the stairs I went. I knew it would; no one had cleaned Hanley’s apartment after finding him there during a heatwave, dead for more than a week.

  I went down the stairs carefully, the flashlight in my right hand. I didn’t touch the walls for balance here; I didn’t want to think about what could be on them.

  Halfway down the first flight, a cobweb brushed my face. I jumped, brushed the web away, and kept going, my heart pounding. I had put this off for a long time — going to Hanley’s apartment, seeing what kind of damage his decaying corpse had done. Now I would have to face it.

  There was no landing on the second floor like there had been on the third. Apparently servants weren’t supposed to enter the second floor unless they absolutely had to. There was a door, but it had been boarded over and painted shut a long time ago. The nails in the boards had rusted. No one had used this door since the building was converted to apartments decades before.