Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “Forty years,” I said numbly. Forty years ago was 1929. Earl Hathaway hadn’t even stolen his name yet, let alone moved to Chicago. I had no idea where the man was in 1929, but I would have wagered everything I owned that he hadn’t been anywhere near the Windy City.

  “They’re probably older than that,” LeDoux said, “given some of the items we found.”

  “Items?” I asked, feeling like I’d missed a great deal.

  “One of the letters,” LeDoux said, “has a date of 1917.”

  I frowned. “Letters.”

  “In your bag. And no, you can’t remove it, but I packed it so that you can read it. If you’d like, I’ll supervise you while you take down the information.”

  LeDoux always managed to sound condescending, even when he wasn’t trying to.

  Minton looked up from his packing and grinned at me. Since LeDoux was calling him Tim now instead of reprimanding him on his language, I assumed they had come to some kind of truce.

  “These bodies could have been down here longer than forty years?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Minton said. “They might even date to the turn of the century. I don’t think the smaller bones would still be here if they were older than that. Eventually we do turn to dust, just like the Bible says, but I’m only guessing. I’ve worked with some old bodies — mostly identifiers from unmarked graves, but never anything quite like this.”

  He’d clearly gotten over his revulsion at the site and had moved to intellectual intrigue. I couldn’t quite get past the way he was laying the bones in that box, as if he were disassembling a puzzle.

  “The lack of connective tissue,” he said, “the condition the clothes are in, the things we found near the bodies, like that book—”

  “Book?” I asked.

  “It’s more of a notebook, really,” LeDoux said. “The kind you’d put in your breast pocket and use to keep track of spending or something.”

  “And it’s in here?” I peered into the grocery bag.

  “No,” LeDoux said. “I’m keeping it. It’s too fragile for any kind of handling. I’ll go through it and see what I can read out of it, and then I’ll give you that.”

  “Sooner rather than later,” I said.

  He looked pointedly at the rest of the hidden room. “It’s hard to prioritize.”

  “Plus you have a lot of gems in that grocery bag.” Minton folded up more cloth, making barriers that seemed unnecessarily deep to me. In each tiny area, he put one small bone. It took me a moment to recognize them. They were the small bones of the fingers.

  “It’ll keep you busy for a while,” LeDoux said.

  As if they wanted me out of here. They probably did. I was the one who was unnecessary.

  “You think the other bodies are forty years old?” I asked.

  “No,” LeDoux said.

  Minton looked up from his work and glared at LeDoux. “You’d be surprised. I’ve seen bodies I’ve known were in the ground since the 1890s that are in the kind of shape some of those bodies are in.”

  “You’ve looked at them then?” I asked.

  “I peered through those openings you made,” Minton said.

  “The bodies you saw in those graves,” LeDoux said, “had been embalmed.”

  “Not all of them,” Minton said. “Embalming was not an exact science eighty years ago, nor was it used in all cases. Some of these bodies were in wooden caskets. It just depends on the ground conditions.”

  “Which are pretty benign in this basement,” I said.

  “You got it.” Minton put a lid on that box, scrawled on the top of it, then handed the box to me. “Be careful.”

  “Where do you want it?”

  “Near the stairs’ll do for the moment,” he said.

  I carried the box, labeled 300A Human male skeleton [bones missing—skull in box 300AA] and signed by Minton. The box seemed to weigh nothing, even though I had watched him put several dozen bones in there. Amazing what a human being was reduced to after so much time.

  I found it hard to believe that this body had been dead as long as I had been alive. Forty years. Maybe more.

  That meant Hanley hadn’t killed these people. Had he known about them? He had certainly known about the attic room. Many of the clippings up there were more recent, and I would have wagered that some of those teeth were recent too — the fillings looked like fillings done in this century, not at the turn of the last one.

  I had no idea what the condition of dentistry in Chicago had been in 1929, but I would have wagered that it wasn’t very good. Dentists had made a lot of advances in the last ten years, advances that I’d personally experienced.

  I set the box down near the stairs, making sure that no one would accidentally step on it, and then went back to the hidden room. LeDoux handed me a smaller box labeled 300AA Skull of Unknown Male and signed by Minton.

  I carried that box, which was even lighter, to the stairs as well, and glanced at my watch. I’d have to get these men to work quicker, or I was going to have to pick up Jim, drop him unplanned at the Grimshaws, and come back.

  But Minton was nearly done with the third box by the time I’d returned. LeDoux handed me a fourth—200AA Skull of Unknown Male—and I realized that Minton had boxed up the skulls first, and was working on the other bones second.

  “You’re sure these are men?” I asked when I came back the third time.

  “Yeah,” Minton said. “All three pelvises are here. They confirm what at least one of the craniums didn’t — that these are men.”

  “You think maybe there are four bodies here, if one of the craniums isn’t male?”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Minton said. “I just said it wasn’t immediately obvious on one of them. He was probably young. Tests’ll confirm that. He had all his teeth. But the things I look for — the front nose angle, the curve of the eyebrow, the thin cranium wall — weren’t immediately obvious in this one skull. All three pelvis were definitely male, though, just at a glance.”

  LeDoux handed me the fourth box—100AA Skill of Unknown Male—and prevented me from asking a question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to — how did one tell the difference between a male and female pelvis?

  “How much longer?” I asked when I came back. “I have to pick up my son in less than an hour, and if I have to drive you both back—”

  “Almost done.” Minton scrawled on top of the second large box. “This’s going to take me days, Bill.”

  “I realized that when I got back here,” I said.

  “We’re going to have to juggle it with my own work schedule. I’ll probably have to work nights.”

  “I really don’t want the neighbors to see lights here,” I said. “I’d prefer it if you can come in the afternoons. Can you switch hours at Poehler’s?”

  “I’ll see,” he said. “There’re just fewer questions if I bring the bodies in to the funeral home at night.”

  “If we get you a different workspace for these bodies, would that help?” LeDoux asked. I knew he had already discussed this with Laura, but I didn’t think they had the space set up.

  “Yeah, it would. Poehler’s doesn’t mind if I do side work, but this much — and all of it obviously old — would raise some questions.”

  He handed the fifth box to me. I carried it out and set it near the others. How many days would I be doing this? This work was surprisingly similar to carrying real bodies out of the trenches in Korea. Even though those bodies still had flesh — some of them were still warm — they weren’t human any longer. They were parts and materials, things that could be — and eventually would be — stored in a box.

  Then I went back and waited while Minton packed the sixth and last box. I opened the grocery bag one last time and peeked into it. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it: If I brought it home, Jimmy might get into it and the evidence would be compromised.

  “I’m going to leave this here,” I said to LeDoux. “Laura hasn’t told us where we�
��re storing the evidence yet, and my home office is too open.”

  LeDoux nodded. I’d spoken about Jimmy enough that LeDoux understood what I meant.

  “I’ll go through it all tomorrow and make notes. That way the evidence never leaves your custody.”

  “That’s probably better,” LeDoux said.

  Minton finished placing the small bones in the last box. He always ended with the bones of the fingers. Apparently he had quite a system.

  He handed the box to me. It seemed even lighter than the others.

  I mentioned that.

  He nodded. “This one seemed smaller. Remember? I told you we had a younger one? This is it.”

  Not him. It. Maybe that was how Minton handled such old death. I knew I couldn’t do his work, but I also knew I couldn’t call that boy it and not him.

  The label on the box was as neat as the others: 100A Unidentified Male.

  It would be my job to identify these men. My job to find out who they had been. Some of that would come through the items in the bag. The rest through legwork.

  I couldn’t imagine that Minton would find much that would help me. And if the bodies were as old as he said, I doubted these poor souls would have dental records in some kind of file.

  “Are we done for the day?” I asked.

  Minton nodded and started turning off flashlights.

  I carried the box up the stairs and to the van. The walk felt oddly ceremonial — like a funeral procession with only me left to mourn.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Even though I’d left the grocery bag of evidence at the Queen Anne, I still had a lot of material to go through. I had spent the entire drive from the Queen Anne to the funeral home to LeDoux’s new apartment convincing myself that nothing had yet disqualified Hanley as our chief suspect.

  Maybe he had known about earlier killings. Maybe he had committed them himself. I still didn’t know his age or what he had done before he had come to work for Earl Hathaway.

  Maybe Hanley had some kind of connection to the house’s previous owner.

  Anything was still possible. I had to keep my mind open.

  I also had to keep my eyes open. I made sure I drove slowly through my neighborhood on the way to pick up Jimmy so that the tail would see me and follow again. Sure enough, I picked him up and he spent the rest of the afternoon tracking me.

  We went to the church where the after-school class was held, to the Grimshaws’ to drop of their children, to a nearby market for that night’s dinner, and then home, where we stayed.

  All the while, Jimmy watched through the back window, reporting on the driver of the sedan.

  He started with, “It’s some white guy.” A few minutes later he added, “He’s wearing a suit!” as if that were strange behavior late on a Monday afternoon. By the time we stopped at the market, Jimmy told me, “He’s got a buzz cut too. Is he military?”

  “Police, probably,” I said.

  That satisfied Jimmy for the rest of the drive home.

  Satisfied me too. There was nothing unexpected about the driver’s appearance or his behavior. I only hoped that by the end of the week, he’d be gone, convinced that I had nothing to do with the Black Panthers.

  That night, while Jimmy struggled over some math equations that would lead him (and Keith, his partner) to a container filled with one million poppy seeds, I struggled with equations of my own.

  The math on the Queen Anne changed in 1952, the year Sturdy incorporated. That year, the business had gone legit or, at least, had to respond to shareholders and a board of directors.

  Laura and I both knew her father had kept two sets of books — the one that got scrutinized by outsiders, and the one he kept for himself. Unfortunately, we hadn’t found all of them, and she hadn’t included any in this packet, which made sense, considering I had only asked for things that pertained to Mortimer Hanley.

  The changes on the Queen Anne’s accounts were vast. The apartment numbers went from one to twenty to one to ten. The tenth was marked as comped, and the comp went to Hanley. A notation along the side mentioned a missing Social Security number, which led me to believe that the new bookkeeper, whoever he was, had decided that Hanley’s free apartment ranked as a salary.

  The lump-sum payment for apartments eleven to twenty had disappeared as well. There was no remodeling expense attached to the building, and nothing that showed where that payment went.

  There was also no cash compensation to Hanley.

  I cross-checked the books. Hanley’s initial salary, the one that Hathaway had marked as “commission,” had been about fifty dollars less than the lump-sum payment which came in every month. If Hathaway had been smart — and I knew he had been — he would have had funneled that money to Hanley himself.

  If that money had gone to Hanley, then it stood to reason that the cash payment was somehow affiliated with the Queen Anne.

  If the cash payment vanished and Hanley lost his compensation, then I had to assume that the money had nothing to do with the house.

  I would have to see if I could track it when I looked through Hanley’s personal papers.

  The rest of the files seemed pretty straightforward. There were receipts, most of them for plumbing repairs, some electrical work – most of it in the upstairs apartments – and something that made me smile: an invoice from Hanley himself for modifications done to the attic space to make it into a “potential residential area.”

  Instead, he had used it to store things.

  Had Earl Hathaway known that? Approved it? Or lost interest in the Queen Anne?

  The files didn’t tell me.

  I continued to look through them, but found nothing else. Until I reached to the back of the file and found some phone-message slips, held together by an old, rusted paperclip.

  I pulled the clip off, and read.

  At first, they were nothing special. Written up in a flowery hand, all they contained were the day of the week, no date, a time, and Hanley’s name, followed by a phone number. As the days went by, the secretary started adding “Urgent!” to the messages, but it became clear that whoever these went to wasn’t responding.

  Finally, the last message had a slip attached to the back, also in the secretary’s hand:

  Marshall—

  Mr. Hanley says you must meet him tomorrow. He has items that could embarrass Sturdy. Perhaps you would like to collect them? If not, he will donate them to anyone who seems interested.

  If you chose not to meet him or return his calls, please let me know how to deal with him.

  —B.

  I wasn’t sure if Laura had seen this or, if she had, if she understood the implications. Even though there was no date, I was pretty sure that Marshall was Marshall Cronk, Earl Hathaway’s right-hand man, the person who ended up controlling the team that ran Sturdy from Hathaway’s death in 1960 to Laura’s takeover eight years later.

  I also found it odd that the messages had found their way into the file. It led me to believe that the secretary, whoever she was, believed she needed a paper trail to prove — what? That she had given the messages to Cronk? That Hanley had called? That she had acted professionally?

  I couldn’t imagine why Cronk would want to keep these, except perhaps as evidence that Hanley was not always reasonable. Even though the messages were calmly written, it was clear from the secretary’s bland prose that the conversations with Hanley had become more and more heated.

  He remained employed at the Queen Anne through those phone calls and beyond. Even though the ledgers disappeared — they became corporate ledgers rather than hand-scrawled things, and Laura couldn’t take those — Laura had managed to find the year-end documents pertaining to the building, one that cited revenue in, expenses, and any net income.

  The Queen Anne earned substantially from 1952 on, even without the cash payment. It seemed to have a good occupancy rate throughout the first ten years of the corporation, dropping off only after 1962. Then, it seemed, when a tenant vacated,
no one made an attempt to rent the apartment again.

  Was the Queen Anne slated for remodel? Demolition? Nothing in this file told me that.

  Or was Cronk responding in his own passive-aggressive way to the blackmail that Hanley had obviously used to keep his job? It would make sense; why pay someone to manage an apartment building if there were no tenants?

  I checked the files. The last two tenants moved out this year, six months after Cronk had been fired. His plan had taken time, but it worked.

  Of course, I was just guessing, and I would have to continue guessing. I wouldn’t ask Cronk what happened. The old Sturdy team was still looking for leverage against Laura, and I wasn’t about to give them any.

  Although it was beginning to look like Earl Hathaway had given them more than enough.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I went through the same routine Tuesday morning to lose the tail, although this time I dumped him near Jimmy’s school, just for variety’s sake.

  Eventually, the tail would figure out that I was losing him on purpose, rather than through bad traffic and poor driving. I only hoped he wouldn’t be assigned to me long enough to figure out the pattern.

  I spent my morning in a basement work area that I’d set up in the storage room away from the boiler. Minton had asked for a few days to work on the skeletons and to see if he could rearrange his schedule so that he could come during the daytime.

  LeDoux was working on the next opening — the one farthest from the original site. We now had pasted little cards on top of each one. That one was unoriginally called Site B.

  The grocery bag was a small gold mine of information. It contained torn letters, a well-worn pocket knife, coins, and tobacco tins. In addition, there were matches, some paper money, and some tags that I didn’t recognize.