Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “It ain’t that different from now. Pay the right person and he’ll look the other way. The city’s corrupt down to its core, and what’s interesting about that is this city don’t try to hide it.” He smiled. “I kinda like that.”

  “You’re saying these ‘boys’ worked for the city?”

  “I’m saying that if you think you’re gonna solve my brother’s murder from this distance and with your lack of understanding, you’re not going to get nowhere.” He pounded the flat of his hand against the upholstery. Dust and cat hair rose. “I’m saying the Levee boys was police officers, hired by the city, and paid by Colosimo and his ilk to look the other way.”

  I felt cold. I wasn’t sure if his news upset me more because the corruption went back so far or because he did nothing about it in all his years on the force.

  “Your brother was killed by policemen?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know if they killed him or just pretended not to notice. Same thing, right?”

  I guessed it was. And by not doing anything, he looked the other way too.

  “Who were they?” I asked.

  “A coupla losers named Rice and Dawley,” he said. “But we always called them Friends of Gavin Baird.”

  My breath caught. Talgart looked pleased with himself. He watched me put all the pieces together.

  “I didn’t surprise you, then, when I mentioned Baird,” I said.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “You think Rice and Dawley killed your brother for Baird?” I asked.

  “Dunno if it was intentional. Don’t even really know if it was for Baird. Always thought that they probably roughed him up a little, trying to get the money, and he died along the way, but no one told me that. No one even implied it. Like I said, what I do know is that Rice and Dawley were Baird’s personal security team. They were there when my brother died. They told me how he cried and begged them not to let him die.”

  Talgart said all of this in a flat voice.

  “But what they did, what they saw, who did what to whom, I don’t know. I don’t care. Rice and Dawley ain’t here no more and neither is Baird. I made it through forty-three years on the force and got threatened maybe four thousand times, and I decided it wasn’t going to touch me. It never did.”

  It did touch him, whether he admitted it or not. He was one of the coldest men I’d ever seen.

  “You never asked them about it?” I asked.

  “Never wanted to,” he said. “That little conversation was enough for me.”

  I let out a small sigh. I was never going to get past that statement. I didn’t even know how to ask a question that would take me beyond that statement. Maybe Talgart didn’t allow himself to think more about his own motivations than that.

  “Did you give them the contents of the apartment?” I asked.

  “I figured, what could it hurt? I didn’t want none of that stuff. Most of it was either stolen or came from stolen money. I sure didn’t want my ma to know about it.”

  “But you could’ve used the proceeds to bring her here sooner.”

  He eyed me as if he really couldn’t figure out how the younger generation had gotten so stupid. “I didn’t want her here, not till the whole thing with Lawrence blew over. And I told you. That stuff was stolen.”

  “So you have qualms about stolen goods, but you don’t have qualms about working with the men who murdered your brother.”

  His face grew bright red. I’d never seen a transition like that; one moment his skin was grayish brown, and the next so red I thought he might have a heart attack.

  “I didn’t know if they murdered my brother. I told you that.”

  “But you suspected it. And they told you they were there. That makes them accessories.”

  “I know the goddamn law.”

  “Then why didn’t you enforce it?”

  He held out his hands. They were bent, the knuckles swollen with arthritis. “Do I look white to you?”

  “You were a police officer. It was your job.”

  “It was theirs too, Mr. Morality.”

  “And they should’ve been taken off the force.”

  “It was 1919, you moron. Things only got worse in Chicago. And you think they take dirty cops off the force now? Hmmm?”

  “That’s your excuse?” I asked.

  “Who’s gonna listen to me? Especially then.”

  “How about the Defender? It was being read all over the country.”

  “And what woulda happened? Everyone woulda said tough luck. Some stupid Nigra got himself caught skimming a rich white boy. What did he expect? And what can we do about it? Next page.”

  I stood up. I still had questions for him, but I couldn’t sit with him any longer. He disgusted me, and he knew it.

  “Besides,” he said, his voice trembling with rage, “He wasn’t worth it.”

  I looked at him. He was halfway out of that armchair, the blanket in a jumble on the floor. He hadn’t talked about this in a long time, and he clearly felt the need to justify himself to me, somehow.

  “Your brother wasn’t worth the fight?” I asked.

  “Maybe if he’d been some upstanding citizen, but he wasn’t. He was a low skunk who hurt women and stole from people he shouldn’t’ve. I tried to get him out of there. I tried to talk to him. He didn’t listen. He laughed at me. He said it was rubes like me what got the short end, not a B.T.O. like him. He told me to crawl back in my hole and not bother him again, and I did it. I didn’t want nothing to do with him, and if he was going to kill himself using a police-issue, it wasn’t my problem.”

  I threaded my way through the slang, still standing. I hadn’t heard a lot of it since I was a boy. “B.T.O.,” I said finally. “A Big-Time Operator.”

  “You may be slow, but you ain’t stupid.” He lowered himself back into the chair. Either his anger was easing or he was getting tired.

  “You expected him to suicide by cop?” I asked.

  “I don’t think it was that calculated, but yeah. I expected him to die in one of them shoot-outs that was becoming more and more popular. I didn’t expect a quiet beating on a back road.”

  “You’re sure that’s what happened?” I sat down again as well.

  “No, I’m not sure. I told you. I’m guessing. You don’t think that’s what happened, and you ain’t revealing why.”

  “He was found with two other bodies,” I said.

  “You’re admitting it’s him now, not just using me as a means of identification.”

  “You said—”

  “I know what I said,” he snapped. “And you don’t think he was beat to death.”

  “One of them had been shot in the head.” I didn’t know which one yet. I hadn’t even thought to ask Minton if he knew.

  “Shot.” He leaned back, tilted his head away from me and looked at the empty television screen. I could see our reflections in it, distorted by the bubble-shape of the glass. I looked round with a small head and he looked thinner, as if he were being pulled in a thousand different directions.

  “We think the other two were Zeke Ellis and Junius Pruitt.”

  He closed his eyes. “That explains it,” he said in a small voice.

  “Explains what?”

  He opened his eyes, reached down, and pulled the blanket back over his legs. Then he smoothed it long after the wrinkles were gone.

  “Explains why he begged for his life,” Talgart said. “I always thought Lawrence woulda laughed when someone threatened to kill him. I knew he would’ve. I saw it once. So I couldn’t understand why he begged.”

  “He would’ve begged for his friends?” That didn’t sound like a hopeless case to me.

  Something of that must have come through my voice because Talgart glared at me. “You’re mighty judgmental, son.”

  “And you picked up some neat verbal tricks from your white colleagues,” I said. “I’m not your son.”

  He tugged at the blanket, not looking at me any longer. “Those three
were trouble together. Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it, because Ellis disappeared right at the same time, and so did Pruitt. But their families had reasons for believing them gone. Never put it together.”

  “You think Rice and Dawley threatened the others, trying to get Lawrence to give them the money?”

  He shrugged. “Or maybe give them some information, or maybe they were just playing. I don’t know.”

  “But they didn’t get the money,” I said. “Did they find it in the search of the apartment?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “Didn’t ask. But they laid offa me.”

  “I heard that Baird lost his fortune by then.”

  He grinned. The grin was a mean one. “Just cause his trained watchdogs found the money don’t mean they gave it to him.”

  “They weren’t well trained, then, were they?” I said.

  “They were just like everyone else back then. Out for themselves.”

  Like you, I thought, but didn’t say. I’d antagonized him enough.

  “You said Rice and Dawley are dead,” I said. “Is there anyone else still around who might know what happened?”

  “Not that I know of.” He gave me a superior little smile. It made my skin crawl. “You’re such a hero. You got long-dead victims and long-dead perpetrators. It’s ancient history, hero. No one cares.”

  “I care,” I said as I stood and headed for the door. “Which is more than anyone could ever say about you.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  I left, feeling very unsettled. I had driven nearly five blocks from Talgart’s apartment before I realized that I hadn’t asked him for Rice and Dawley’s first names.

  Talgart had gotten to me. He had intended to upset me, but he had upset me in ways that he hadn’t even realized. He was the kind of man who had irritated me all my life: the grateful black man who had his job and his minimal acceptance in the white world, a man who was willing to bow and scrape and ignore to keep that relatively meaningless position.

  He was a house nigger — which was exactly what Fred Hampton had called me when I had refused to take the Soto case. And that was what had upset me — a nagging feeling that I finally understood where Hampton had been coming from.

  Talgart and I both knew the risks of getting involved in these cases, and we both knew there wouldn’t be any rewards except the satisfaction of a job well done. And maybe not even that. Maybe the only satisfaction would be knowing what had happened, knowing down to the minute detail, rather than in broad strokes.

  But Talgart had been trying to protect his work and himself. I had been trying to protect Jimmy. I would have argued with anyone that my reasons for staying away from the Soto case were better than Talgart’s were for staying away from his brother’s.

  But were they? Hampton probably wouldn’t agree. Hampton, who had a baby on the way and presumably a wife somewhere. He had already given up a scholarship to college to work for black people in his own way.

  From his point of view, I hadn’t given up anything.

  He didn’t know that I was living in Chicago under an assumed name, having abandoned my own family — my adopted parents, my friends, and my home in Memphis — to take care of a boy who wasn’t even my blood child. That’s why Jimmy came first. Because if our identities got revealed, he would die.

  I didn’t see anything similar in Talgart’s life, but I was judging from fifty years distant. Fifty years distant and based only on an afternoon’s conversation. A conversation that did reveal a family side to him as well.

  He’d wanted to bring his mother and sisters here, and he hadn’t done so until his brother’s death. Talgart had said that Lawrence wouldn’t beg for his own life, but he would beg for his friends. Given that, he might have begged for his family’s too. And the only thing that had saved his brother Irving from the same fate that Junius Pruitt and Zeke Ellis had suffered was the fact that Irving Talgart had been a cop.

  My hands were shaking on the wheel. I didn’t remember the last few blocks I’d driven. There was no way to know other people, not deep down, not their motivations, not their rationalizations.

  Talgart had been right. I was being judgmental, based on very little evidence. Just like Hampton had been with me.

  There was an element of truth to Hampton’s assumptions, and there was an element of truth to mine.

  Just not the whole story.

  About six blocks away from the Queen Anne, I finally remembered to look for a tail. I didn’t see one, but that didn’t mean a thing. I hadn’t been watching, so I wouldn’t know if the same car had been behind me for the last mile.

  I went around two separate blocks, narrowly avoiding college students on bicycles hurrying toward their late-afternoon classes. Still no one. So I made my way to the Queen Anne, put on the coveralls inside the van — in the back, away from the windows — and hurried inside.

  When I reached the secret room, I announced myself by saying, “Give me some good news.”

  LeDoux popped his head around a corner to my left. He was covered in brick dust that made his pinkish skin a deep red.

  “We actually have some,” he said. “With the exception of the body in B, all the others come with identification.”

  I blinked, not expecting that at all. I had feared that I would be spending weeks of my life following bread crumbs, just like I had the last few days.

  Minton peeked out of E. He was covered in dust too, but he didn’t look quite as sloppy.

  “These guys were just tossed in here, wallets and all,” he said.

  “The last time the wallet didn’t have any identification,” I said.

  “Driver’s licenses,” Minton said, as if they were the holy grail. “Sometime between Suite B and Suite C the state started requiring driver’s licenses, and men started sticking them in their wallets.”

  “You’re calling these things suites now?” I asked.

  “It’s better than using the word tomb. We could slip up in outside conversation, and then we’d all be in trouble.”

  “It looks like you got pretty far,” I said. “I thought this would take you days.”

  “I left the skeletons for later,” Minton said. “I photographed everything so far, but as for packing up, I’m doing the intact guys first.”

  I winced at the thought of those bloated decaying corpses being considered “intact.”

  “Figure out yet how come some of these guys aren’t as decayed as the others?” I asked. “Or is it a mystery like the way the decay worked with the letters?”

  “The letters aren’t a mystery,” LeDoux said. “At least one was in that wallet, which protected it. The other one wasn’t really close to the third body. It got protected by the wall and some other fiber, something I haven’t identified yet.”

  How typical that he would answer the second question, which I had only meant as rhetorical, and ignore the first.

  Minton waited until LeDoux was through, throwing me a private grin as he did. Then he said, “It’s no mystery why these bodies are in different condition. It’s the same reason the walls were built differently.”

  I waited.

  He smiled, a young, proud-of-himself smile. “C’mon, Bill. It’s obvious if you think about it. They died at different times.”

  “I knew that. I know they weren’t all killed together, because if they had been they’d’ve been buried together.”

  “No,” Minton said. “Different times, meaning different decades. I figure the span between Suite A and Suite E over here has got to be at least thirty years, maybe more.”

  I felt slightly dizzy, as if I couldn’t catch my breath. “What?”

  “The guys in Suite E died ten to twenty years ago. The guys in Suite A died forty to fifty years ago.”

  “In 1919,” I said. “They died in October of 1919.”

  “See how good you are without ID? Imagine how quickly you’ll find out information when you actually have the victims’ names.”

  Minton was still smil
ing, but I wasn’t. I looked at all of those tombs, and felt the dizziness increase.

  I had thought I was actually onto something. I thought that Gavin Baird had worked his own scam or got his own revenge through his personal security team, Rice and Dawley, and for his own reasons, reasons we would never understand, buried them down here.

  But Gavin Baird had died in 1938. Thirty-one years ago.

  “I thought this would please you,” Minton said, apparently reading my reaction on my face.

  “At first, I thought Hanley had done this. Then we figured out who was in A, and I realized that Baird had done it. Now you tell me that the guys in E died a minimum of eleven years after Baird.” I glanced at LeDoux. “Could the skeletons we found in A have been moved?”

  LeDoux shook his head. “Not in the last ten to twenty years. They died somewhere else and were moved to Suite A, but they decayed right there. And they were probably placed in there shortly after they died.”

  I didn’t like the direction my mind was going in. Someone had known about this place — several someones, in fact. Maybe street gangs, maybe the Levee thugs, maybe Capone’s boys. Certainly, Baird’s “security team” had known about it, but those corrupt police officers had died — if Talgart was to be believed — before Baird.

  Vivienne Bontemps had said that Baird had lost his fortune. Talgart had said that he had lost five grand, which would have been a fortune to a prostitute in 1919, but would have explained how he kept his house.

  I knew little about Baird and I hadn’t tried to look. What I did know was pretty miniscule — he had remained single his entire life, he loved to gamble, and he had been important enough to have police officers do his bidding. He had enemies, he was intemperate with money, and he professed to hate blacks. He also misused Vivienne Bontemps, which may have reflected his attitude toward women or, given that he might have known she was passing, his attitude toward blacks.

  He had managed to keep his house after the “loss” of his fortune through the 1920s and into the Great Depression. He sounded like a young man in 1919 from the descriptions I heard, but I had no idea if that was the case. He died in 1938, not quite twenty years later, and I had no idea what he died of.