Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I continued down. The stairwell seemed even darker than it had above, even though I knew that was a figment of my imagination. The stink grew worse. The air was actually coated with it, and it felt like it had gotten on my skin.

  At the bottom of the stairs there was a narrow landing and a brand-new light switch — at least, brand new in the context of this house. The switch had been installed in the last five years. I flicked it on just to see if the light bulbs worked.

  They did. The entire stairwell lit up, revealing unfinished walls and rough wood stairs. The cobwebs were thin, not the kind that had been woven and rewoven year after long year. These webs came from spiders that felt free to build, but only recently. Some were so thin I hadn’t felt them as I broke through them.

  Now I felt crawly, and I willed the sensation away.

  The door in front of me had a shiny new deadbolt, as well as a brand new knob. It was a hollow-core door, obviously a replacement for an older door, and it locked from this side.

  I turned the deadbolt, then turned the knob and opened the door. A waft of heat hit me, and that stink, even worse than before, oily and grotesque.

  My eyes watered. I blinked, forcing myself to breathe, knowing that the only way to deal with the smell was to get used to it.

  The door opened into a good-sized kitchen, clearly remodeled from the house’s original kitchen. A stove stood next to the wall and a deep sink stood under a window. The table in the middle had the remains of a meal on it. The food was green and covered with flies.

  More food rotted on the counters, all of it unidentifiable, except for a bunch of bananas, thin and black and melting into a puddle on the linoleum. There were no dirty dishes in the sink; Hanley had been neater than I expected.

  The Sun-Times and the Tribune sat on the table as well, yellowing in the sun that had poured in from that window. The newspapers were unopened, probably dating back to the day Hanley had died.

  I closed the door to the stairwell, then turned to look at it. The door looked like any other; its placement in the remodeled kitchen suggested a closet door or a door that led into a small storage area, not one that opened onto a narrow stairway

  I checked the knob. It locked automatically. If I remembered, I’d come back and thumb through my keyring until I found the key to the deadbolt.

  For the moment, though, I had to get out of that kitchen. I went through an archway into a room I guessed had once housed the icebox. A refrigerator was plugged into the wall nearest the stove, but the rest of the room had filing cabinets and keys hanging off the wall. A desk stood near another small window. Piled on top of the desk were bills, their envelopes also yellowing in the sun.

  I couldn’t tell where the heat was coming from. I’d checked the stove as I passed, and it was off. This room was just as warm as the kitchen had been. Sweat trickled down my back.

  A narrow archway opened into yet another room. This archway had been cut into the wall later — in the original flow of the house, no one had been meant to go from the icebox room to what had to have been a back parlor.

  It had been Hanley’s living room, and I finally found the source of the heat. This room had electric heaters built into the wall; it wasn’t on the boiler system at all. The heaters had been cranked up to high, and no one had shut them off. Apparently no one had noticed when they came to pick up the body.

  I shut them off now, thankful that the building hadn’t burned down. I opened a window, as much for the heat as the smell, and felt relief as a cool breeze floated in.

  The living room had a narrow couch with sagging cushions, two cheap blankets wadded on one side and a pillow on the other. The coffee table housed a collection of coffee cups, all half full, two empty Kleenex boxes, and a lot of wadded up tissues, as well as four plates, two bowls, and a spoon that all bore stains from the food that had once been on them.

  A console television — the most expensive item in the room — was pushed up against the far wall, but its top was curiously bare. Most people placed photographs on top or mementos, but Hanley hadn’t even put a TV Guide up there.

  The television sections from the Tribune did sit in a basket beside the couch. Hanley had apparently spent a long time there while his health got worse.

  This was a one-man apartment. There were no other chairs, no place for a visitor to put up his feet. The remaining door led to the bedroom. The bathroom was off the bedroom, a tiny afterthought without a window, and barely enough room for a shower.

  I couldn’t stay long in the bedroom — the smell was eye-poppingly bad in there. The blankets had been pulled away from the bed and a large stain covered the bottom sheet. I did make myself check the walls for another electric heater, but I didn’t find one.

  Then I frowned, wondering how the mailman would have seen Hanley if he had died in here — which the stench and the stain told me he had. The window was covered by a shade and curtains: when I raised them, I saw only the building next door.

  There was something odd about this entire setup, but I wasn’t confident enough in my memory to be sure about the story of Hanley’s death. Laura had told me how they’d found Hanley. She had heard it from someone else who had heard it from someone else.

  Perhaps she had gotten the story wrong, the way children did in a game of telephone.

  Or maybe there was a different version of the truth.

  Aside from that bed, the apartment had nothing unexpected — no tools, no guns, no jars filled with teeth. It looked like what it was: an apartment of a man who had lived most of his life alone, managing other apartments.

  I’d search drawers and closets when I got the chance, but I didn’t expect to find much else. I had a hunch all the scary stuff was on the third floor — and in the basement.

  That thought reminded me that I had to go back down there to talk with LeDoux. Instead of going out the apartment’s front door and down the nearby stairs, I backtracked, locking off the hidden staircase as I went. I didn’t remember to remove my gloves until I was all the way outside apartment nine.

  Then I removed the gloves, bagged them, and labeled that plastic bag as “Nine, Hidden, Manager.” If LeDoux wanted to know exactly what that meant, he’d have to ask me.

  I put on the third pair of gloves for the past hour, then went down the main flight of stairs, and out the front door. A police car drove by, going slowly. My stomach clenched.

  The officer in the passenger seat raised the bill of his cap so that he could see me better. I resisted the urge to lower my cap. Instead, I pretended I hadn’t seen him and headed down the side of the building, hoping that that tiny interaction hadn’t called too much attention to our activity at the house.

  It seemed odd for the police to cruise this neighborhood in the middle of the day—particularly a day like this, when the entire city was dealing with the Weathermen and the protests.

  But I didn’t live here, and I hadn’t worked here long enough to notice the neighborhood patterns. I hoped that no one had called the police to check us out this soon.

  When I reached the basement, I was covered in a fine layer of sweat despite the day’s cooler temperatures. LeDoux was standing just inside the hidden door. When he saw me, he wrinkled his nose.

  “Where’d you find that smell?” he asked.

  “Manager’s apartment,” I said, “just like I expected.”

  “Whew,” he said. “We’re going to have to take care of that.”

  I nodded.

  Then he frowned. “Thought you were going upstairs.”

  “I did. I found the servants’ stairs.” And I proceeded to tell him about the second hidden door, the stash in the attic, and the staircase that led to the manager’s apartment.

  “I don’t like where this is leading,” LeDoux said.

  “Have you seen anything like this before?” I asked.

  “Not exactly like this, no,” he said. “And we still don’t know what we’re up against, although it seems to me you’re going to have to d
o some preliminary research.”

  “On Hanley.”

  He nodded, then peered at the crumbling brick wall. He hadn’t moved any of the bricks, and so far had not gone inside the area where the skeletons were.

  “You want me to help you with the wall?” I asked.

  He bit his lower lip. “I’ve been debating how to proceed. I couldn’t decide between handling this area or figuring out what else this basement held.”

  He turned, then grabbed my flashlight and flicked it on. The beam centered on the other brick walls, their uneven construction even clearer in the light from the overhead bulb and the scrutiny LeDoux was giving them.

  “I think we need to know,” I said.

  “I think we do know,” he said. “I think we’re just afraid to find out that we’re right.”

  NINETEEN

  We skipped lunch. I doubted either of us could have eaten anyway. Even though I wasn’t hungry, my queasiness had vanished. Instead, I felt an odd bleakness.

  We had found evidence of a huge crime, perhaps several crimes, and we only found it because the perpetrator was dead. The only justice those three skeletons would get was a real burial after we identified them.

  If we could identify them.

  LeDoux and I didn’t talk much. He outlined our plan of attack on these brick walls as if he were a general and this was D-Day. I didn’t mind. I needed to do something physical.

  My task was simple: I had to remove a single brick from each of the differently made areas so that we could look inside and see if any other surprises awaited us.

  I started all the way to the left on the long wall facing us. I squeezed in beside the bricks and mortar that were down here to build more walls and crouched. LeDoux wanted that single brick to be removed about a yard from the floor. That way, we could see what was on the floor and have a sense of what was above the floor as well.

  Removing the brick took more work than I expected. I had to carefully chip out the mortar, then get my fingers on the side and pull the brick toward me. Mortar fell into the hole — there was no way to avoid that — and part of the brick itself crumbled into my hand.

  LeDoux didn’t watch me work. Instead, he was moving the supplies and stacking them against the wall behind me, making room to store any bricks we removed. We would have to label them, of course, and we were both wearing gloves, just in case.

  At first I had protested, but when the edges of the brick caught my fingertips through the material, I was grateful to have something protecting my hand, thin as the cotton was.

  I finally got the brick out. LeDoux took it from me, put it in a bag along with all the crumbly pieces that had caught in my palm, and set the bag — well marked — along that far wall.

  By the time he came back, I had already picked up my flashlight, and shone it inside the hole.

  Another brick wall greeted me. It looked like it was about a foot away, and from what I could tell in the circle formed by the flashlight’s beam, this new brick wall was different from all the others we’d seen.

  “Allow me,” LeDoux said as he crouched beside me.

  I moved aside. There was no way both of us would be able to see inside that tiny hole.

  He used his own flashlight as I went to the next brick. He’d marked the ones he wanted removed. I ran a screwdriver around the edge of the brick, noting that the mortar here wasn’t as crumbly. It also didn’t seem to have the same consistency — or lack thereof — as the previous section.

  The brick itself was wider horizontally than the previous one, but narrower vertically. I turned to LeDoux to ask him if he wanted me to remove a second brick, only to find him in a half-standing position, pointing his flashlight downward.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He glanced at me, his skin paler than it had been before. “I think we need to remove a few more bricks.”

  I got up, took my own flashlight, and peered in. The floor was covered with what looked like discarded clothing.

  “How many bricks would you like me to remove?” I asked.

  “These.” He touched two more beneath the one we’d already removed.

  I edged the mortar and gave LeDoux my screwdriver. He worked on the other brick. In a few minutes, we managed to loosen them both. I cleared the rest of the mortar away, and then gave him the bricks, one by one.

  He clutched them to his chest as I trained my flashlight inside. The pile on the floor still looked like old clothes to me. Until I saw the easily recognizable bones of a hand peeking out from underneath a flannel shirt.

  I kept the light on that hand, the tiny bones perfectly intact and arched downward, as if the skeleton’s owner had been trying to claw his way out of that tiny space.

  Oddly, there was no smell here. Just a dry-as-dust odor that might have come from the bricks.

  “Is that what you saw?” I asked.

  “No.” LeDoux nodded toward the right. “Against the wall.”

  He meant the built-in wall. I moved my light over, and caught what looked like flattened white stones.

  I shook my head.

  “In the corner,” he said with some impatience. “Against the wall. Toward the back.”

  Then I saw it. Teeth and part of a jawbone. The remains of someone’s mouth. Only the bottom part of the jaw had jagged edges. It had been broken off.

  “This person was dismembered?” I asked. I could hear the disbelief in my voice. I hadn’t realized that was how I was feeling, but it made sense. I didn’t want to know this, so I hadn’t seen the pieces of the body until LeDoux pointed it out to me.

  “No,” he said. “The parts are where they should be. But I think we’re going to find that this poor unfortunate’s skull was completely shattered. Once the skin holding it together was gone…”

  I nodded. I did understand, even though I didn’t want to. “He’s in there alone?”

  LeDoux shrugged. “We can’t tell, not from this.”

  I raised my head, my eyes sore from staring into that blackness. No one had looked into that space in years.

  “You think each one of these places is a tomb.”

  LeDoux sighed. “Let’s see.”

  “There’s more brick behind this one,” I said.

  “I know,” LeDoux said. “Let’s just do the ones we can see at the moment.”

  I stood, feeling a little lightheaded. I hadn’t been breathing while I crouched down there, looking in. A crushed skull, a bullet wound to the head. These were not accidental deaths.

  These were something else.

  I moved to the next part of the wall, and finished removing the long, narrow brick. I had to tell LeDoux I was done; he was still looking inside the first hole we’d made.

  He glanced at my work. “A bit more, I think. Like this one.”

  So I removed three more bricks. A swampy smell of decay floated around me, not as bad as it had been in the apartment, but there, almost like a memory. I trained my light inside. An eye greeted me, bloated and almost unrecognizable. I yelped and skittered backward.

  LeDoux looked at me, frowning, as if he hadn’t expected a reaction like that from me. I wasn’t sure I had either.

  He moved to the open space, peered it, and made an involuntary sound of disgust.

  “This one’s newer,” he said.

  “How much newer?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “There are a few in here. They’re not full skeletons yet. But that could be the effect of being crammed into such a tiny area.”

  Then, almost to himself, he added, “This one’s going to be a mess.”

  As if the rest of them weren’t. I glanced at the wall, counted the changes and the marks, and figured we had six more areas to open.

  I began removing bricks.

  TWENTY

  By the fifth opening, I had found that place inside myself that had helped me survive Korea. It was protected, analytical, cold. I had a job to do, and I was going to do it, no matter what I came across.

  The thi
rd opening had had a single body in it again, this one in women’s clothing, both femurs broken, but nothing else obvious—at least until we got the entire tomb open.

  The fourth opening held another single body with most of its flesh intact, but seeping and swollen as if it were filled with water. The fetid smell barely registered for me. That was when I realized that I had become detached.

  “I have no idea how one man could have done this,” I said. “Or why.”

  “It’s not my job to ask why,” LeDoux said. His tone had gone flat, just like mine. He was just working now, not reacting.

  “How is part of your job, right?”

  “I don’t speculate.”

  I wanted to snap at him. I needed speculation. I needed conversation, anything to keep my mind from weaving scenarios that made this basement even worse than it was.

  “But,” he said, “I do know that these types of things are more common than we like to admit.”

  So he did understand. Or maybe LeDoux needed to talk too, just to keep himself from speculating, which was, as he mentioned, one of the worst things he could do.

  “These types of things?” I asked, wondering exactly what he meant.

  “Mass murderers. They’re much more common than generally understood.”

  “Sure,” I said, not really believing him. “Hitler, Stalin. You look through history and you find —”

  “No.” LeDoux cut me off as if I were a particularly poor student. “Killers with more than one victim. With a dozen, maybe more. Killers we’ve never heard of. We’re discovering just how common they are.”

  “With no one noticing?” I asked. “I can believe a few victims, but dozens —”

  “It’s not a stretch if you think about it.” LeDoux was photographing the third hole, documenting our laborious work. “Jack the Ripper killed — what? five? — prostitutes in the space of a few months. Then what happened to him, hmm? Was he killed? Did he go to prison for another crime? Or did he move to a new killing field?”