Only when my call went through, someone else picked up Sinkovich’s phone. I asked for Sinkovich, wondering if I’d gotten the wrong number, and the voice on the other end — a disgruntled detective whose rank I’d caught but not his name — told me that Sinkovich had been reassigned again.
“Can you tell me how to reach him?” I asked.
“He’s not gonna be near a phone for the foreseeable future,” the detective said.
“Where can I find him, then?”
“Can’t,” the detective said. “I’ll let him know you called, Mr.—”
“Just tell him Bill called,” I said. “He’ll know who that is.”
Then I hung up and frowned. Sinkovich was undercover again, which was a surprise. He’d upset the brass enough that I would have believed the other detective more if he’d told me that Sinkovich had been fired rather than hinting that he was undercover.
Which made things difficult for me. As of last spring, I had two contacts in the police department. Now I had none.
And I needed one. I had hoped to get Sinkovich to pull the sheet on Hanley’s death. There had to be a report — that infamous mailman had to have called in the death itself — but now I had no access to it.
I grabbed my phone book and looked up the number for the central post office. When I got through, I asked for the name of the mailman who had the route that included the Queen Anne.
“Why?” asked the suspicious voice on the other end.
I hadn’t really thought this through. I wanted to talk with mailman about Hanley’s death and had planned to get his name through the police report, but I couldn’t very well tell the postal employee that.
“Because he did something nice for my son,” I said, “and I just wanted to make sure you folks know how pleased my wife and I are with the service we’ve been getting. Too many people call and complain.”
“That’s for sure,” the voice said, sounding less suspicious now. “I can take the information if you’d like.”
“I’d actually like to write a letter,” I said. “It’s always better when you have things in writing, right?”
“Yeah.” The voice seemed almost pleased now.
“I figured I could put down his route, but it’s better if I have his name. The incident happened in the middle-end of September, if that makes a difference. You don’t switch routes or anything, right?”
I could hear paper shuffling. “Only when someone retires,” the voice said. “We even discourage substitution. Neither rain nor snow, you know.”
The way he said it, it rhymed — that good old Chicago accent.
“I know,” I said.
“Here it is. You’re wanting Carter Doyle. You need me to spell that?”
I didn’t, but I asked, just for good form, and dutifully took down the name. Then I thanked the anonymous voice and hung up.
It never ceased to amaze me how much information I could get just by being polite and having the right cover story. The phone was my best weapon — sometimes I learned things I never suspected, from people who wouldn’t have given me any time at all face to face.
I found Carter Doyle’s address in the phone book — my second best tool — and jotted it down for later.
First, I had to get to Laura’s office and pick up the packet on Hanley, and find out what surprises might lurk in there.
I finished my lunch, rinsed the dishes, and left the apartment. I let the tail follow me downtown. I parked near the library, ostentatiously plugging pennies into a meter until I saw the tail circle past me, unable to find a nearby spot of his own.
I made sure he saw me go into the library. Then I wandered through the stacks, peered through the dirt-encrusted window on the second-floor landing, and watched the tail finally snag a space. As he plugged the meter, I headed out a different door on the far side of the building, and walked to Laura’s office.
It was still raining, but not as heavily. And now I blended in. I wore a felt hat and a black raincoat. I also carried a briefcase, so that I could put Laura’s information inside without anyone seeing what I was carrying.
The building was across from City Hall. Outside the building, a handful of protesters walked in the rain, holding signs that read Free the Chicago Eight, and Stop Nixon’s Dirty War.
No one seemed to pay them any attention. Most people ran from building to building, carrying umbrellas or newspapers over their heads even though the rain wasn’t that heavy.
I had become used to it in my short walk, and merely shook it off my shoulders as I went inside Sturdy’s building.
Judith smiled when she saw me. Laura had hired her over the summer. She was a heavyset young woman who had an air of competence to her that the secretary Laura had inherited hadn’t had. Judith wore her hair in a modified beehive — it didn’t stand as tall as the style seemed to on older women — and she wore dark, horn-rimmed glasses that hid half her face. I often felt that if she pulled her hair down and changed her glasses, she would have been a lot more attractive.
“Miss Hathaway left this for you,” Judith said, handing me a thick envelope that had been crisscrossed with masking tape. If anyone had wanted to get into it, they would have had to repackage the entire thing. Maybe Laura wasn’t as careless as I had thought.
I put the entire thing in my briefcase, thanked Judith, and left. I walked back to the library and went inside the way that I came.
Then I found a hidden table deep in the stacks and started to read.
THIRTY
Mortimer Hanley had not filled out an employment application. Laura had left me notes, annotating her assumptions as she had gone through the various files. She believed that Hanley’s application had been lost to time, but I believed he had never filled one out.
Earl Hathaway had hired Hanley for other reasons, probably because they had known each other and worked together long before Hanley started managing the Queen Anne.
Most of Hanley’s early records were buried in a set of accounting books that Laura had included. She had paperclipped a note to the top one which read I’ll need this back as soon as you’re done with it.
I sighed deeply — I had known that I wouldn’t have these records long, but I didn’t like the confirmation — and dug my legal pad and pen out of my briefcase. Then I started to thumb through the books.
The first accounting book dated from just after the war to 1947. The information on each ledger line was filled out in a cramped hand, as if the person who wrote down the figures wasn’t used to writing anything.
I guessed, since Sturdy hadn’t incorporated yet, that Laura’s father kept these books himself, although I would have to check that with her.
The ledger didn’t have a lot of information. Mortgages paid on various buildings, all identified by address; incoming rents, again identified by address; outgoing fees, most of which had an address but not an identification, so it was impossible to know what the fees were for.
The ledgers balanced, sometimes painfully — where I could see, even though I wasn’t an accountant — with an added expense that made sure the business had no profit or at least, a profit that could be taxed. It was many years too late to investigate now, but I would have wagered, had I investigated, that I wouldn’t have found a receipt for that added expense. Someone had just made up a number and written it in, hoping that no one would notice that the number just happened to be the one needed to zero-out the business.
Obviously, Earl Hathaway hadn’t been an accountant, and this practice changed in the next accounting book, which only covered 1948. The cramped hand had disappeared, replaced by a sure and slanting penmanship that suggested more education.
The income and expenses were better identified. And in January of 1948, I noted something odd: in addition to the rent paid for apartments one through nine at the Queen Anne, I also found rent paid for apartments eleven through twenty. That money arrived in one lump sum, and was labeled cash rents received.
I leaned back in my ch
air, lost in the smell of the library’s musty books, and ran through that building in my memory. Even with the manager’s apartment being rented, the attic room, and the storage areas on the third floor, in no way could that building house ten more livable apartments.
Apartment rental standards had changed since 1947, but even if some of the rented spaces were closets, there still wasn’t enough room for people to live. Unless the basement had once been subdivided into apartments. Maybe the entire building’s apartments had been reconfigured.
I wouldn’t know that unless Laura had given me all the books pertaining to the Queen Anne. All I’d asked for were the materials involving Hanley.
At some point, I might have to get her to go for those files. Or I would have to risk exposure and go to the records office for building permits and official changes made in that Queen Anne.
Still, this finding bothered me. It was subtle — unlike the material in that first ledger — and it suggested something else was happening at the Queen Anne, some kind of payment, some kind of bribe, being paid as “rent” and hidden in the doctored books.
I leaned forward and went back to that earlier ledger. None of the rents paid were marked as to which apartment had paid them, only which address they came from. I took the last month, December 1947, and counted the rents that came in from the Queen Anne, and found ten, one of which was a cash lump sum that matched the amount I found in the 1948 books.
That “rental” payment existed all the way back to the beginning of the ledger, although in 1946 it hadn’t been called rent. Then the deposit was simply marked C.P. It came in on the same day of every month.
I skipped ahead. Each ledger she had given me — and she had given me through 1951, the year before Sturdy incorporated — had that payment. It was the only payment that didn’t fluctuate, and it never missed a date. Not even, I realized, on weekends.
The fact that the payment hadn’t missed, even on weekends, bothered me more than the missing apartments did. So did the initials C.P. Because that led me to believe that apartments eleven through twenty were invented for people who had never visited the Queen Anne, and who would never know that those apartments didn’t exist.
The payment also predated Hanley’s appearance on the books. He started showing up in May of 1947, a regular salary paid in monthly increments. I didn’t find that unusual either, until I saw a correction to the bookkeeper’s neat scrawl in January of 1948. The word “salary” got crossed off, and above the cross-off, someone — the person with the cramped hand — had inscribed “commission.” From then on Hanley’s payment, which also ran to the end of 1951, was labeled as commission.
I glanced at my watch. I had to leave if I was going to help Minton and LeDoux finish up before I had to pick up Jim. Which was probably good. I needed time to digest those numbers. My brain was crammed full of them, all of them contradictory and confusing. I almost wished Earl Hathaway was alive so that I could question him about his early business practices.
I packed everything in the briefcase, closed it, and headed out of the stacks. High school students had arrived, doing homework on the oak tables in the main room, and occasionally being shushed by the librarians. Most of the older patrons who had been in the library that afternoon were already gone.
I scanned for familiar faces — an old habit — and wondered if the tail had come inside to keep an eye on me, or if he had waited in his car as per law-enforcement regulations.
I guessed I would find out soon enough.
The rain had stopped, but the sidewalk remained wet. Water dripped off building cornices, and passing cars drove through puddles, splashing bypassers.
By the time I reached my van, my feet were wet and I was more tired than I would have been if I had spent the day in that basement, lifting bricks and bodies for Minton.
My parking meter had expired, and a soggy ticket adhered to the van’s windshield. I pulled the paper off and looked at the numbers bleeding into the each other from the rain. They looked as fuzzy as the numbers had on the ledgers inside my briefcase.
If Hanley had a free apartment, how come he had received a salary? And if Hathaway had changed the payment notation from salary to commission so that he wouldn’t get in trouble for failing to pay taxes — and did someone have to pay employment or social security on a commission? I didn’t know for certain — why hadn’t he changed his practices in 1948 or 1949? Why not change the notation back to salary, remove the taxes, and ensure that everything balanced?
I hoped the rest of the file that Laura had given me had the information I needed. Because, at the moment, the more I learned about Hanley and the Queen Anne, the more confused I got.
THIRTY-ONE
The tail followed me down Michigan Avenue into Bronzeville. It was the same car, and it looked like the same driver. I still had no idea if he had followed me into the library, but if I had to guess, I would have thought that he hadn’t.
Still, I had to lose him on the drive back, which wouldn’t be as easy to mask. Most people didn’t drive south in rush hour. Many of the people who lived in Bronzeville, Bridgeport, and the near South Side took public transportation. People from the suburbs and the Gold Coast drove, making most of the afternoon rush hour traffic head north.
So I had to do some creative driving, heading west farther than I wanted to find a small tangle of roads near the stockyards. I arrived just as the shifts were changing, which added a confusion of traffic, and I slipped through it, gunning the van when it wasn’t appropriate and making a few illegal U-turns.
I suspected I had lost him there, but I knew I had lost him when he didn’t show up behind me in the relatively minor traffic near Fiftieth Street.
Still, I drove through some of the back roads of Hyde Park, pausing too long at stop signs and pulling over now and then to see if anyone in a black sedan appeared behind me.
No one did, but a police car passed me. As I glanced inside, I thought I saw the same two cops I’d seen the previous week.
They didn’t notice me. They drove by, and although I checked my rearview, they didn’t follow.
I made my way safely to the Queen Anne.
LeDoux and Minton were still in the basement, still working the first crime scene. I had joined them, after I donned my coveralls and cap in the van, and was startled to see that they hadn’t made much progress at all.
I mentioned that as politely as I could.
“Actually, we’ve made quite a bit of progress,” LeDoux said.
He handed me a rolled-up grocery bag. I opened it and looked inside, discovering several small, full evidence bags. I pulled one out. It held a faded box of matches, the logo almost unreadable. The label attached to the plastic bag written in LeDoux’s characteristic scrawl, read:
Right Pocket
Tan? pants
Skeleton one [see drawing]
Item 105A
“I assume you know what this tag means,” I said.
He nodded. “This,” he said, sweeping his hand toward the first crime scene, “is area A. We’ll go as far down the alphabet as we need to.”
I set the matchbox in the bag beside the other evidence. “I thought you’d have to process all of this for fingerprints and stuff. You haven’t finished that, have you?”
“Heavens, no,” LeDoux said. “I really don’t want you to touch anything but the evidence bags. But write down the information. Both Tim and I thought, however, that you could find out things about these victims from these items.”
“No ID, then,” I said.
“Nothing we can use.” Minton’s voice floated out of the crime scene area. “Some letters, some torn pieces of paper, a few wallets with money but no real ID”
A group of flashlights surrounded him, washing out his skin and making him seem larger than he was. He was still crouched near the skeletons, only he had a long box near him and he was lining it with paper.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Packing these men
up,” Minton said.
I wasn’t sure what to respond to first — the fact that he had figured out gender or the fact that he wasn’t using a body bag for each skeleton.
“We have tarps,” I said, before I actually made a conscious decision.
“Hmmm?” Minton asked.
LeDoux was looking at me strangely as well.
“Tarps. To cover the body bags. It’ll look like we’re carrying out painting equipment if we’re careful,” I said.
Minton let out a small laugh. It had surprise but no real humor in it. “That’s not why I’m using the box. This is the preferred way to carry old bones. If I put them in a bag, they’ll knock together and chip.”
He held up a femur. It looked yellow in the odd light.
“See?” he said. “It has no connecting tissue, nothing to hold it to the other bones.”
“So you can’t tell which body it belongs to?”
“I can guess,” Minton said. “I’m going to try to put the right bones with the right person. But I’m not going to be entirely sure until I get back to Poehler’s. There’s been some animal activity — mouse or rat, I can’t tell —”
“Don’t worry,” LeDoux said, apparently seeing my expression. “It was a long time ago.”
“—and some of these parts have been moved around.”
“But we’ve already made one discovery.” LeDoux actually sounded pleased.
I glanced at him.
“The bones are old,” he said.
“How old?” I asked, feeling the muscles in my shoulders tighten, hoping they wouldn’t implicate Hathaway — not for his sake, but for Laura’s.
“These bones are yellow and brittle,” Minton said. He had set a femur at the bottom of the box and was packing soft white cloth around it as if it were the most precious thing he’d ever seen. “They flake easily and are very fragile.”
“Which means what?” I asked.
“These bodies have been here thirty or forty years minimum,” Minton said. “Probably closer to forty. The area’s pretty dry, and except for some early bug activity and those long-ago mice, they’ve been relatively unmolested. The exposure to air’s pretty minimal, so decay would have taken longer, and the walls — especially basement walls — would have protected them from the extremes of Chicago’s weather. So it would take longer for them to reach this condition.”
Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 19
