Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  As it were, the monument seemed somewhat generic. A bronze soldier stood on top of a large spire that trailed down to a base covered with plaques. On one side, a row of old gravestones was lined up like chess pieces. Clearly, this was some kind of war memorial, but from a distance, I couldn’t tell which war was being remembered.

  I walked closer and no one tried to stop me. They didn’t even seem to notice me as they worked in relative silence, gathering evidence off the manicured lawn and marking off areas with great precision. About five men worked the scene, while two uniformed officers stood on the side of the access road, talking to an elderly white woman who seemed very distressed.

  The closer I got, the odder the monument seemed. Concentric trenches surrounded it, and the base, or mound, that the plaques covered, seemed to go on forever. The base’s shape was rectangular and I approached it along one of its long sides. It wasn’t until I reached a shorter side that I saw the body.

  It looked tiny against the aging stone, but I knew that had to be an optical illusion. Any human being would look small against that base.

  A man looked up from his position near the body. He dusted himself off, walked around one of the trenches, and came toward me.

  Johnson. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all.

  “How’d you call me from out here?” I asked.

  “Dispatch patched me through.”

  I hadn’t even noticed. His voice should have had an odd quality—probably did—but I had been so sound asleep that it hadn’t even registered.

  “When did you get here?”

  “Uniforms called me about forty-five minutes ago.”

  “They knew you were working on cases like this?” I asked.

  Johnson shook his head. “It’s my turf. And even if it wasn’t, brass would probably figure that it’s safer to have a black detective at this cemetery than a white one.”

  “What about the Gang Intelligence Unit?”

  “Not even an amateur would think this is a gang killing.”

  “Why?”

  He nodded toward the monument. “Because of that.”

  “What is it? World War One?”

  His eyes widened, then he shook his head slightly. “I keep forgetting you’re new around here. It’s Civil War.”

  “So? I don’t—”

  “Confederate,” he said. “It’s a Confederate monument.”

  “In Chicago?”

  “It’s the largest Confederate memorial in the North.”

  I frowned. “What’re you saying? There was a battle around here? A lot of Southern sentiment?”

  “No.” He sighed. “There was a Confederate prison camp not far from here. Six thousand Confederates are buried here, and in eighteen ninety-five someone felt they deserved a monument.”

  I let out a small snort of surprise. “I will never understand white people.”

  “It gets even more interesting,” Johnson said. “I guess the old lady there has a grandfather buried here. She brings him flowers every December. She was a little surprised this morning.”

  I glanced at the body, still an undistinguishable mass of flesh, hair, and coat from this distance. “Can I see?”

  “Wouldn’t have asked you this far if I didn’t want you to.”

  He led me past the trenches. The monument was clearly marked. The bronze plaques on the sides looked like they had been added later—they weren’t built into the monument, but attached.

  A shiver ran down my spine. The South was full of monuments like this. I’d trained myself not to study them, because they honored a cause that was a centuries-long atrocity, an atrocity that was, in some ways, still continuing.

  I had never, ever, expected to see something like that this far north.

  As we stepped onto the concrete apron, I made myself focus on the body. A purse sitting on the top of the base, above the plaques, told me that this was a woman long before I saw her features.

  Johnson led me to the front of the body, keeping me away from areas that he didn’t want trampled. Her position was right—on her side, arm sprawled before her like a supplicant, one high heel dangling off her foot.

  The high heel made me uneasy. I scanned her nylon-covered legs to the expensive cloth coat and felt my breath catch. The coat was closed, the knife slit and faint bloodstain easily visible against the camel color.

  I was already holding my breath when I looked at her face. Even before I saw her delicate features, I knew.

  I knew.

  Not twelve hours before, she’d been loading groceries into the back of a brand-new Oldsmobile. I’d stopped, but I’d moved on because I thought she was safe.

  “Know her?” Johnson asked.

  “I should have,” I said. “It might have saved her life.”

  “You want to explain that cryptic statement?” Johnson asked.

  But I wasn’t ready to. Her purse sat on top of the monument like a beacon, but I didn’t see the groceries or anything else that seemed to belong to her.

  “Where’s her car?”

  “Car?” Johnson shrugged. “Hell, it could be anywhere, if she even had a car. I don’t know why a woman that fine would have come to this cemetery—”

  “She didn’t, Truman,” I said. “She was dumped, like the others.”

  “Probably,” he said. “But you’re making an assumption, and you know that we can’t do that at this stage of the investigation.”

  “I’m not making an assumption,” I said. “I saw her last night. She was loading groceries into a late-model Oldsmobile.”

  Johnson looked at me, eyebrows raised. “She was that obvious? Or do you always notice pretty women at the grocery store?”

  He wasn’t joking. He was sincerely interested.

  “She was that obvious,” I said. “I had just gone to investigate a house that Louis Foster had been….”

  My voice trailed off. I stared at her sightless eyes, her slack mouth. She looked so much like Foster, not because they were related, but because everyone looked the same in death. Facial muscles relaxed, expressions were lost, the things that made a person unique vanished as the last breath left the lungs.

  “Had been what?” Johnson prompted.

  “We have to check the files,” I said.

  “What?” He looked confused.

  “I think we may have our link.”

  “What link?”

  I finally pulled my gaze from her, this unknown woman who had seemed so vibrant the day before. “The neighborhood. She was at a grocery store in the same neighborhood that Foster had been in when he was last seen.”

  Interest flickered across Johnson’s face. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

  * * *

  By noon, we had a police-department map of the South Side spread across my kitchen table. Using different-colored inks, we charted the places where the murder victims lived, where they were found, and where they were last seen.

  All points converged on the very neighborhood I had been in the night before.

  Sinkovich and I had done most of the work while Johnson finished up at the crime scene. Sinkovich had arrived at my apartment around nine, complaining that we hadn’t called him to the cemetery.

  I was pretty certain that Johnson wanted to keep their association a secret, not because of Sinkovich’s actions the previous week, but because he didn’t want either of them getting in trouble for doing work that didn’t exactly follow departmental regulation.

  When he arrived, Johnson brought burgers and root beer from A&W. The greasy smell of meat and fries filled the room.

  “I didn’t expect you to have this done,” he said as he came in.

  “It was easy once we knew what we were looking for,” Sinkovich said.

  Johnson set the food on the counter. “Any other links beside the neighborhood?”

  “Nothing obvious,” I said. “Louis Foster contemplated buying a house there, Matthew Gentz had just gotten a new bicycle and friends saw him taking off in that d
irection, and Viola Stamps was visiting her grandson, who had just moved in with his white father.”

  “The other little boy, Allen Thomason, was doing a solicitation for his church, raising money for the War on Poverty,” Sinkovich said. “And Otis Washington, the homeless guy, often fell asleep in doorways. I think he might have picked the wrong one.”

  “That’s not everyone,” Johnson said, handing me a paper-wrapped, lukewarm burger.

  “No,” I said. “Some of these people don’t seem to have obvious ties to the neighborhood. But they were all doing something unusual the day they died. One was job-hunting. Another was doing lawn work. We have no way of knowing where they last were, because they never checked in with anyone.”

  “What about today’s victim?” Sinkovich asked Johnson.

  Johnson set the fries on the counter and handed Sinkovich his burger. The root beers remained on the counter as well. I toyed with taking the map off the table, but I really didn’t want to.

  “Didn’t Grimshaw tell you?” Johnson asked.

  “About the grocery store, sure,” Sinkovich said. “But not who she was or what was going on.”

  “Her name was Bonita Henderson. She had just been transferred here from New York. She rented an apartment on the cusp of the neighborhood, about a block north.”

  “Still an all-black area,” I said.

  Johnson nodded. He took a bite out of his burger and closed his eyes, as if it were the best food he’d ever tasted. It took him a moment to chew and swallow. “The store you saw her at was between her apartment and her new job with an all-black insurance company.”

  “Secretary?” I asked, thinking it odd that they would transfer her.

  “Claims adjuster. Apparently one of the best in the company.” This time, Johnson spoke around his mouthful of food.

  I took a bite of my hamburger as well. It was flat and tasteless. There appeared to be more mustard than beef between the bun.

  “Anyway,” Johnson said. “I talked to one of the grocery store clerks. She said that Miss Henderson had come in three weeks in a row and that the previous week, the manager had asked her not to come back. The clerk said Miss Henderson had laughed at him and asked why she had to drive farther to pay higher prices when he was nearby.”

  “That’s odd,” I said.

  “Why?” Johnson asked.

  “She was with a man last night. He was helping her with her groceries.”

  “Black guy?” Johnson asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t get a good look at him.”

  “Think she brought him as protection?”

  I shrugged.

  “Think he’s our killer?” Sinkovich asked.

  “She seemed comfortable with him,” I said, “so no. I don’t think he did it.”

  “There’s a racial component to these killings,” Johnson said. “Maybe if she was with a white guy, someone decided to punish her for it.”

  “What about the white guy?” I asked. “Wouldn’t he have gotten killed, too?”

  “Maybe someone followed her home,” Sinkovich said. “Waited until he left, then went after her.”

  So many maybes. We still had a lot of work ahead of us, and we had a new victim. The more time we took, the more lives could be lost.

  “It would make sense for her to bring a bodyguard of some kind.” Johnson finished the last of his burger, then got up and grabbed some fries. “Last week, the manager talked to her. Told her that if she didn’t go away, someone would put the fear of God into her. It was better if she just left—”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The manager talked to her,” Johnson said.

  “No,” I said. “Did you use the phrase ‘the fear of God’ as a description or did the clerk actually say that?”

  “She actually said that. Why?”

  “Because Delevan mentioned the same thing. He told Rudy Hucke to put the fear of God into Louis Foster.”

  “He told who?” Sinkovich put his still-wrapped burger on the map. Johnson, obviously irritated, took the burger off and leaned his chair back to set it on the counter.

  “Rudy Hucke,” I said. “You know, the neighbor who was supposed to take Foster to the association meeting?”

  “I didn’t think you knew his name.” Sinkovich was frowning.

  “Is there a problem?” Johnson asked.

  “Yeah.” Sinkovich stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think we can do this.”

  “Do what?” Johnson said.

  “Investigate this neighborhood,” Sinkovich said.

  Johnson’s face flushed. “Why the hell not?”

  “Rudy Hucke,” Sinkovich repeated, as if the name would conjure an image. “He’s a precinct captain.”

  I had spent nearly three months in Chicago before I had learned that a precinct captain was not a police officer. In Chicago, a precinct captain was a person who was in charge of a voting precinct. Precinct captains had close ties with the city’s Democratic machine. Mayor Daley had been a precinct captain as a young man.

  The other important fact about precinct captains was that they were supposed to form a close personal relationship with every voter in their territory. If a voter needed a job or a good apartment, the precinct captain made sure the voter got that job—in exchange for a vote. If a voter got into trouble, a precinct captain could get him out—for a price.

  “So?” I asked Sinkovich.

  “He has ties to the mayor,” Sinkovich said.

  “Yeah, so?” I asked again. “We have no idea who committed these killings. Why should we care about Hucke?”

  “He knows everybody in the neighborhood,” Sinkovich said. “He might even know who’s doing this, but he’s not going to let us close to that guy. From what you said, Hucke’s in the neighborhood association. Even if we find the killer, Hucke’s not going to let us arrest him. The neighborhood association is affiliated with Hucke and Hucke is affiliated with the machine. That’s too much scandal. We won’t be able to crack this.”

  “We’re not talking about cracking anything,” I said. “We don’t even know if the neighborhood association is involved. All we know is that they might be the last people to see Louis Foster alive.”

  Johnson tapped the map. “But we know someone in the neighborhood did this.”

  “Yes, we do. Or someone who frequents the neighborhood. But that’s all we have,” I said. “That and some anecdotal evidence, and a catch phrase.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sinkovich said. “Precinct captains protect their own.”

  “Like cops,” I said.

  Sinkovich nodded.

  But my own comparison reminded me of something. I got up and went into my office, grabbed the photographs out of my desk, and returned. I kept the photographs in their envelopes, but thumbed through quickly until I found the batch I wanted, the ones of the police investigation.

  I pulled them out, along with the ones that Epstein had originally taken of Foster’s body, and handed them, in order, to Johnson. “You ever seen a murder investigation like this?”

  “Where the hell did you get these?” he asked.

  “What are they?” Sinkovich leaned forward, taking photos away as Johnson looked at them. When Sinkovich saw the first one, he whistled. “Who did this?”

  “A photographer I know,” I said. “He was one of the people to find the body.”

  “And rape the corpse,” Sinkovich said. “Jesus. How much did he make selling these fuckers?”

  Both Johnson and I looked at him. Sinkovich was getting more worked up than we were. But his emotions were closer to the surface. His wife had already started divorce proceedings. He wasn’t sure he had enough money to hire his own lawyer, and he was afraid he’d never see his child again.

  “He didn’t sell these pictures,” I said. “I’m not even sure he showed them to anyone but me.”

  “But he developed them.”

  “To give to me.”

 
Johnson was still looking through them, his expression grim. Without comment, he handed a photo to Sinkovich. Sinkovich studied it, two spots of color rising on his cheeks.

  “Is this what you were talking about?” Sinkovich turned the photograph toward me, showing the police searching the body.

  I nodded. “There’s another.”

  Johnson found it and slammed the stack on the table. Then he got up and walked away, just like I had when I saw it.

  Sinkovich reached for the stack and searched until he found the photograph of the cop flicking his cigarette ash on Foster.

  “I even know this prick,” he said. “He’s one of the ones who pushed for me getting kicked off the force.”

  “Who is he?” Johnson asked.

  “Ed Joravski,” Sinkovich said. “We went to school together.”

  “He’s from your neighborhood?” I asked.

  “Naw. A couple of blocks west and about a mile south. He moved out, but he hasn’t really left. No one does….” His voice trailed off and then he stood, bending over the map.

  After a moment, he put his finger on an intersection just inside the neighborhood we were studying.

  “There,” Sinkovich said. “He grew up there.”

  “You think the police did this?” Johnson’s hands were braced on the sink. His head was down, but his body shook with repressed rage.

  “Naw. These guys think they’re honest. They’re upholding life as we—they—know it.”

  Johnson raised his head and slowly turned to face Sinkovich. We both caught the slip, only I was willing to let it go. Apparently Johnson wasn’t.

  “We?” he asked.

  Sinkovich’s jaw worked. The spots of color in his face had grown to encompass his cheeks and were starting to move down to his chin.

  “Look,” he said holding out his hands as if he expected us to attack him and he was going to fend us off. “I was raised a certain way. It ain’t pretty and I ain’t proud of it, but I didn’t think nothing of it until that boy died last summer.”

  “Why would that change anything?” Johnson asked, his voice harsh. “You’ve seen dead black children before.”

  “Sure. But I could always explain it away, you know? The gangs or the drugs.” Sinkovich apparently realized what position his hands were in, because he brought them together and interlaced the fingers. “Then this kid—and you guys, wanting to stick with your own because you didn’t trust white detectives.”