Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “We must be great fighters,” he said. “We both survived.”

  A woman three tables down rose slightly out of her seat and shushed us. Twombly glared at her, and she sat back down.

  “Guess we can’t talk here. You buy me breakfast, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about Big Jim, Al Brown, and the rest of them.”

  “Al Brown?” I asked.

  “Capone back in the day. Before he got so famous.”

  Another woman rose from a seat farther back — I hadn’t even seen her — and shushed as well.

  “Breakfast it is,” I said.

  He closed the LA Times and slid it back on the dowel. Then he shoved the other papers to the edge of the table and said to me in a conspiratorial whisper, “Hardly any staff today. I doubt anyone’ll have touched the papers when I get back.”

  He grabbed his bowler and led me out of the library and down the Loop to a restaurant I hadn’t even noticed before. It was hidden between two of the larger department stores, and looked like it had been there since the Chicago Fire.

  I had to struggle to keep up with him. He walked very fast, and as he opened the door to the restaurant, he gave the man behind the counter a two-finger salute.

  “Usual, Manny. And whatever my friend wants too.”

  The man behind the counter nodded, then turned and shouted something in language I didn’t recognize. From the kitchen came the sizzling sound of meat slapping on a grill.

  “If you don’t know what to get,” Twombly said, as he slid into a booth toward the back, “get the potato pancakes. Me, I’m having them after my hamburger steak. Since you’re buying.”

  I nodded and wondered how much this would cost me. I also wondered if it would be any good. We were the only two customers on a Sunday morning, which didn’t seem like a recommendation.

  He slid a greasy menu at me. The owner came by with two cloudy glasses of water, and some good, strong coffee. I ordered a fried egg sandwich, figuring no one could ruin eggs fried hard.

  “So who’re you trying to find out about?” he asked.

  I decided to ease my way into the information. “Serena told me about Big Jim and the Everleigh sisters. The Levee sounded like an interesting place.”

  “It was,” he said. “I only caught the end of it, and I was a bit young for the Everleigh Club, but I reaped the benefits anyway, if you know what I mean.”

  Then he winked at me, and I had to sit through fifteen minutes of stories about famous ladies of the night, and how well trained they were. Halfway through that long speech, I realized he thought I was as interested in the female side of vice as Serena Wexler had been.

  I let him think so.

  Then, after we’d spent some time comparing vice in the Levee to vice in the bootleg era, I said, “I’ve been hearing some stories about a man named Gavin Baird.”

  Twombly used the arrival of our meals to cover his reaction, but I still saw his features twitch with surprise. “How’d you hear about Baird?”

  “Apparently he hung out with two cops, men named Rice and Dawley. I was actually looking into them when I learned that Baird lost five grand in a single night, and yet somehow remained flush. That caught my attention.”

  The smiles had left Twombly’s face. “There’re some things I didn’t put in my book, you know? Things that echo through the generations.”

  I added ketchup to my fried egg sandwich, pretending that I didn’t see his reaction. “Well, Baird’s been dead over thirty years. I doubt he echoes.”

  Twombly set his fork down. “What do you really want?”

  He saw through me. Not many people did.

  “I need someone to level with me,” I said, dropping my pretense at innocence as well. “I need to know what Baird was into.”

  “Because?”

  “Because if it’s what I think it is, it might echo through the generations and hurt a friend of mine.”

  He pulled his plate closer, as if protecting it from me. “In my day, we wouldn’ta done nothing for a nigra.”

  My cheeks warmed, and I had to remind myself he hadn’t been bothered by my skin color when we met. He was obviously trying to bait me, and he had done it because he didn’t want to talk about Gavin Baird.

  “This isn’t your day,” I said. “It’s mine, and I’m buying your meal.”

  He clung to the plate. He might have known a lot of things, but he clearly didn’t have a lot of money. This meal mattered to him.

  “There’s no one here but us,” I said. “You can tell me and it won’t go any further.”

  “Sure it will,” he said.

  “If it does,” I said, “I can promise that I won’t mention your name.”

  “You want to know about Baird?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And Dawley and Rice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what come after?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded. “Then you buy me a week’s worth of meals.”

  He had done this before — not over meals, but over information. How strange it must have seemed to him now to sell information for food.

  “Today’s lunch and tonight’s dinner,” I said.

  “A week’s worth of dinners,” he said.

  “Today’s lunch, tonight’s dinner, and tomorrow’s lunch,” I said.

  “A week’s worth of lunches. That’s twenty dollars if you pay Manny here ahead.”

  “He wouldn’t just pocket the money?” I asked.

  “He’s okay like that,” Twombly said.

  I leaned forward, grabbed my wallet, and pulled out a twenty. I’d been planning to use that for new clothes for Jim.

  I slid the twenty across the table but kept my fingers on it. “You can decide where you go to lunch.”

  He reached for the twenty and I pulled it back.

  “After you tell me about Gavin Baird, Rice and Dawley, and what came after.”

  He looked down at the cash, then sighed a little and picked up his fork as if the money didn’t matter to him. “Gavin Baird. Only surviving son of the Kenwood-Hyde Park Bairds, a family that got most of its money in the upscale rebuilds after the Great Fire.”

  I nodded. Upscale rebuilds meant they rebuilt homes for the wealthy at a huge price.

  “There were daughters, but they only got a portion of the fortune, more if they married well. I don’t know what happened to them. Gavin got the house, the business, which he promptly sold, and all the rest of the inheritance. He spent most of it gambling at Everleigh, and when that closed, he went to private games.”

  None of this surprised me.

  “You was right, he lost big one night in 1919, lost big, claimed he was cheated, and happened to be playing against a nigra dealer and his nigra partner.”

  “You can stop using the word now,” I said. “I get your point.”

  “I can use any damn word I want,” he snapped. “You’re the one who’s here for information.”

  “You’re the one who needs lunch,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed, and he sucked in air as if he were preparing to launch himself across the table at me. Then he flattened his hands on the Formica surface. They were big hands, as scarred as his neck, and they still had strength in them. Those were the kind of hands that could choke a man and not even feel sore afterward.

  “Gavin Baird,” he said slowly, “told Rice and Dawley what happened, asked them to take care of it and bring his money back. They took care of it, but claimed they couldn’t get the money. Even though they were living high off the hog in those days before Big Jim Colosimo died.”

  “When was that?”

  “May 11, 1920, the end of an era. Those in the know mark that — and not July 1, 1919 — as the start of Prohibition in Chicago.” He recited that as if he had said it often.

  “You think they got the money from Baird,” I said.

  “I know they got the money from Baird through that…colored boy what stole it from him. Baird noticed to
o. He was pretty hungry the fall of 1919, selling off some of his momma’s lovely lamps and his daddy’s gold cuff links. Then he realized Rice and Dawley was spending the last of his money.”

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “He threatened to go to the papers. Seems they stored something in his basement.”

  A surge of excitement ran through me.

  “And I think you know what that something is.” Twombly met my gaze.

  I didn’t confirm or deny. “What good would going to the papers do?”

  “Big reform movement going on at that point. Mayors got elected on the platform of cleaning up the Levee — that meant the madams, the white slavers, and the dirty cops. It’d shut Rice and Dawley down, having their names in the papers, and it’d probably’ve shut down a bunch of others as well.”

  “But he didn’t go to the papers,” I said.

  “They made a deal with him.” Twombly finished his meal, sopping up the last of the salt on the side of his plate with the last of the pancakes.

  I couldn’t swallow the last of my egg sandwich. “What was it?”

  “I think you know that too.”

  “I think I’m paying you to tell me.”

  He sighed, and looked around. “They got to use his basement to get rid of things that no one should ever see again. For that they paid him regular every month, like rent, for the usage. He wasn’t to ask questions, and he wasn’t to bump the rent up, though he got the next guys to give him what he called a ‘cost of living raise,’ and he got them to bump it even more every few years. He didn’t die rich, but he lived comfortable.”

  I was cold. “Rice and Dawley weren’t the only cops who used this house?”

  Twombly pushed his plate aside. “They died in twenty-five. He died in thirty-eight. You figure it out.”

  “How’d the others know about it?” I asked.

  “Dirt runs in packs,” Twombly said. “Rice and Dawley used the place, but they had a trainee, who was the contact with Baird. That way they wouldn’t get their hands dirtier than they already were. The trainee lived to twenty-nine, shot by a woman, if you can believe that, and by then he was the Big Palooka and he had his own little trainees. It’s like a secret, passed down through generations.”

  “How did you know about it?” I asked.

  He leaned back in the booth. “The stink was something awful by December 1919. They needed someone what could do good, lasting ceiling brickwork.”

  The egg sandwich rolled in my stomach. I wanted to pick up my twenty and leave the place. But I needed to know.

  “You didn’t do it forever,” I said.

  “I had other work. I trained a guy and moved on. It was dumb. I didn’t realize the yahoo that bought the house outta probate was amenable to keeping up the basement.”

  The yahoo was Earl Hathaway.

  “By then, how many people knew about this?” I asked, trying not to let my disgust show.

  “Rice and Dawley and the trainee was dead. The new guys, they worked it with the others like this: they’d handle a problem someone got himself into for a fee, but they wouldn’t tell him what they done with the physical remains of that problem, if you get my meaning.”

  I nodded, not entirely trusting my voice.

  “So there was two of them, the second trainee and his partner. They set up new with the yahoo and the sad sack he hired.”

  Hanley.

  “Those men are still connected with the house?” I asked.

  “Nope. Moved onto two new guys long about ’49. The trainee’s the only one I met. Mean SOB name of…Fault? Fold?”

  “Faulds?” I asked. I felt cold. No wonder the police had cruised the neighborhood. They were keeping an eye on the house.

  “That’s him. Told me in no uncertain terms he didn’t need some old fart down there laying brick. That was after I’d retired, asked for some work. He’s a little thick too. Don’t think he understood I knew what was going on down there.”

  “Why didn’t you do anything to stop it?” I asked.

  His eyebrows rose almost to his hairline. “Ain’t you listened to nothing, boy? These’re cops we’re talking about, and I don’t got the cleanest reputation even now. I do what I do, or at least I used to. Not much use for what I know any more. That’s why I wrote the book. Promised a few guys I’d only have it in the library, unless they crossed me. Then I’m sending it to some real publisher. Those places in New York, they like shoot-’em-ups about dirty Chicago in Prohibition. I’ve got some interest.”

  I actually believed him, and I believed his reasons for not doing it.

  I kept my hand on that twenty. “How much are you going to make off me?”

  “Telling Faulds some colored boy’s found his little hidey-hole?” Twombly shrugged. “Should be worth a hundred or more. You got an extra hundred in there to keep my yap shut?”

  I grabbed my wallet and slid out of the booth. Then I slowly and ostentatiously opened the wallet and stuffed the twenty back in it.

  “We hadda deal,” Twombly said.

  “We did,” I said. “And this colored boy is proving himself as trustworthy as you are.”

  “The twenty’ll hold me,” he said.

  “Nothing will hold you,” I said. “Get your money from Faulds.”

  And then I hurried out of the diner. I had to get to the Queen Anne before Twombly reached Faulds on the phone.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Every city had dumping grounds. The cops used them, the gangs used them, and in some places, organized crime used them. I had known this.

  I guess I never figured the cops were still using the Queen Anne because on the South Side they didn’t bother hiding the bodies anymore. They left them on the street after shooting them in broad daylight, like they had done with the Soto brothers.

  Which explained why business had dropped off at the Queen Anne. As black and Puerto Rican gangs grew in stature and number from the late 1950s on, the police stopped feeling the need to hide the “accidental” deaths of people in custody, and the outright murders of people they didn’t want to bring to trial.

  And why not? The police knew Chicago’s white population wouldn’t object.

  Even white bodies could be tossed into gangland territory, and the gangs would get blamed, not the police.

  The dumping areas had moved aboveground.

  And because of that, because my history with Chicago was relatively new, I never once considered the modern police force among my suspects. As collaborators, yes. But not instigators.

  Of course, Faulds wrote the report on Hanley, and of course, Faulds listed someone else finding the body. If Faulds hadn’t been so detailed in his report, I wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong.

  Faulds had discovered Hanley. Faulds, who had a key to the building. Faulds who had probably come in to give Hanley his monthly payoff.

  I was nearly to the Queen Anne. I didn’t remember most of the drive. I knew I was probably going too fast, but I hoped no cops were watching, not this early on a Sunday.

  Because Twombly would find the nearest pay phone — maybe he’d even use the diner’s phone — and he’d tell Faulds we were investigating his old dumping ground.

  Then he’d tell Faulds that I had shown disgust when I learned Twombly’s connection to the Queen Anne, and that I had refused to pay the bribe.

  Faulds would know what that meant, just like Twombly had. Faulds would know that he couldn’t buy me off. He would come after all of us — me, Minton, and LeDoux. He might even go after Laura, if he thought she knew too much about that house.

  I pulled into the neighborhood and saw nothing out of the ordinary — no people on the streets, which I was getting used to around here, no unusual cars parked along the curb. I started to turn into the driveway beside the Queen Anne when I saw the nose end of a squad car.

  My chest constricted. He was already here. He must have been on duty and close by, and he’d come.

  He’d come.

 
; The squad was too close to the building, the kind of close you got when you were hiding something.

  I parked him in, then got out. Halfway to the front of the van, I stopped. The position of that squad car bothered me.

  It was too close. It prevented anyone from getting out of the house too fast — they’d have to run past that squad first, or run over it, or squeeze by. It also prevented anyone from getting in too quickly.

  Something was happening in there.

  Something I hadn’t anticipated.

  I hurried to the passenger side of my van, unlocked the door, opened it, and took out my gun. I made myself move slowly, made sure the safety was off, made sure the gun was loaded, then grabbed my coveralls and tossed them over my arm, hiding the gun.

  I didn’t want any neighbors panicking because a black man with a gun was on the streets. I didn’t want anyone to call more police.

  My breath sounded raspy to my own ears. I made myself walk around the building, checking as I went by to make sure the front door was closed. I didn’t see any movement through the stained glass. I doubted Minton and LeDoux had gone back to painting up front.

  In fact, I was gambling on that. I hoped they were hiding behind the secret door in the basement, and no one had found them yet. I hoped Faulds was off-duty, and had simply requested a squad to check out what was going on in the house.

  I doubted I would be that lucky.

  I barely made it around the squad. The radio was on, crackling, words lost to the static. I climbed up the back stairs, breathing shallowly.

  The main door was open but the screen was closed. Through it I thought I heard voices, faint as the radio voices. A cry reverberated, then stopped mid-thrum.

  A shiver ran down my back. I opened the screen, went in, and then closed it, keeping my hand on it until the latch caught. The last thing I wanted was a thud that might alert people to my presence.

  Something banged — slapped — pounded. I couldn’t quite identify the sound. I walked along the edge of the floorboards, cursing myself for not paying attention all these weeks to see where the creaks in the floor were.