Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (13 page)

I wondered what the vandalism proved. Then I sighed. I didn’t understand any of this — not on a deep level — and that concerned me.
Maybe my lack of understanding was a product of my age and my upbringing.
Or maybe I still clung to Martin’s vision of non-violent resistance to a violent world.

I did understand how people like Black Panther leader Fred Hampton could talk about self-defense, how black people needed to protect themselves against the police brutality that hit our neighborhoods, often for no apparent reason.

But I did not understand wearing riot gear, gathering weapons, and planning to provoke the police, all with the intent of – what? Getting attention? Scaring the city? Protesting a trial where the defendants were accused of the very same thing: coming to Chicago with the intent to riot?

Although most sensible people knew the defendants were not guilty.
Even the government-commissioned Walker Report, which came out last year, called the events at the Democratic National Convention a police riot.

Tonight was a planned action, a planned provocation, made worse by yesterday’s destruction of the Haymarket
s
tatue.
The Chicago police were already angry and confused, and most of them weren’t sympathizing with anyone outside the blue brotherhood.

I had no idea what they did tonight in other neighborhoods, but here, near Laura’s place, it seemed to me that the police were restrained. I hadn’t heard gunshots and the air did not smell of teargas.

Was that because the rioters were white? Or because the national press corps was nearby, ready to attack the Chicago PD one more time?

Maybe Daley had issued a different order than the one he’d issued during the riots that happened after Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Then Daley had told the police to kill all the arsonists and maim all the looters.
Maybe this time he’d been reasonable.

He was a canny man. If he urged restraint this week, he would win this public fight.

So long as he didn’t send his storm troopers into the ghettos.
Like Franklin feared.

Like I feared.

So long as he didn’t let the entire city take out their frustrations on us.

TWELVE

The next morning, the headlines screamed disaster:
RADICAL INVASION and RADICALS RAMPAGE ON THE NEAR NORTH SIDE.
I set our paper front
-
side down on the kitchen table and kept the radio off, but I didn’t have to.
Even though Jimmy saw the headline, he didn’t associate the
n
ear North Side with Laura.
He had no idea how close I had been to the riot.

He was more concerned with homework. Mrs. Armitage, his after
-
school teacher, had assigned him an essay on the Haymarket Riot, and he didn’t understand the language of the book he had checked out of the library — socialists, anarchists, labor rally.
I didn’t help him because I’d been warned not to.
Instead, I urged him to look up each and every detail until it all became clear.

He glared at me as if I had made the assignment and didn’t talk to me all the way to school.

After I dropped Jimmy off, I picked up LeDoux at the Blackstone Hotel. The Blackstone was across the street from Grant Park. Most of the action during the Democratic National Convention had taken place here, and rumor had it that the radical protestors would stage one of their actions nearby.

I parked in the Conrad Hilton’s lot across the street because I was familiar with it. I had briefly worked at the Hilton when I had first come to Chicago, thinking that a regular job would be better for both me and Jimmy.
That assumption turned out to be a false one; I chafed at being an employee.
I discovered that summer that I preferred getting into trouble on my own.

I met LeDoux in the lobby of the Blackstone.
He had been waiting for me, cameras slung over his arms, and a thick black case near his feet.
I carried the case as we headed back to the parking lot.

Then I opened the back of the van, had him stuff his case and cameras into a duffel, and gave him the painter’s coveralls that we had agreed we’d wear.
He slid the coveralls on in the back of the van, put on the painter’s cap I’d bought him, and then climbed into the front seat.

The sky was dark, the clouds heavy, promising rain.
That pleased me.
Neighbors would be indoors and probably not paying a lot of attention to any activity outside.

When we got to the Queen Anne, I parked in the driveway with the back of the van facing the street. If anyone was watching us, I wanted them to see us remove the equipment so that they wouldn’t call the rental agency and ask what we were doing.

Laura had told Sturdy’s rental agency that she was hiring a few down-on-their-luck friends to paint and repair the interior of the Queen Anne.
Because the company knew she had unusual friends (namely me)
,
she had a hunch no one would question this news.

We all hoped this cover would work.

By the time LeDoux and I had reached the Queen Anne,
rain dotted the windshield.
The air was humid, and it felt like the storm would only get worse.
I got out first, opened the back of the van, and pulled out the wooden ladder that I’d bought — it was the only piece of this new equipment that we’d probably use.

LeDoux joined me, took his duffel and a single paint can, and headed toward the back door like we’d planned. The billed cap, coveralls, and his poor posture made him look like a man who had spent his entire life painting other people’s homes.

I leaned the ladder against the back stairs, went up them, and unlocked the back door.
The stale odor of rot reached me first, and I winced.
Then I stepped inside, relieved to find the place much cooler than it had been on my first visit.

My clipboard remained near the door at the top of the stairs.
No one had been in the building since I had been here nearly two weeks before.

“Where’re we going?” LeDoux asked.

“Basement,” I said, opening the door farther.
“Be sure to take the paint.”

He grinned at me, then headed down the stairs.
I went back out for some brushes, another paint can, and a tarp.
Then I closed and locked the van, and came back into the house.

It still gave me the willies.
That rot smell made the entire place feel unpleasant — or maybe it was my knowledge that three unknown people had been buried in that basement long ago.

When I went down the stairs, I found LeDoux photographing the stairs.

“We’re not even close to the site yet,” I said.

“I want everything documented,” he said. “We don’t yet know what we’ll need.”

So he photographed the door to the boiler room, the boiler room itself, the metal cabinet that led to the hidden room.
He did a quick diagram of everything, marking the locations, telling me we would get exact measurements later.

When I opened the double cabinet doors, revealing the secret door, LeDoux whistled.

“I did not expect it to be so elaborate,” he said.

Before we went through the secret door, he stopped me.

“The cabinet itself is evidence,” he said.
“Not only will it give us fingerprints, which we may or may not find useful, but somewhere on it, we should find the name of the manufacturer. It should give us some kind of hint as to
who
felt the urge to hide that door.”

“If this is the first cabinet,” I said.

“We’ll look for evidence of that as well.”

He photographed everything about the cabinet, including the floor, before he let me step inside and open the secret door.
As I unlocked the door, he asked, “Are you wearing the same shoes you wore the last time you were here?”

“Probably,” I said. “I don’t have many pairs.”

“But you can’t say for certain,” he said.

“No.”

“Before the day is out, I would like to measure them, take a print of the sole, and photograph them, just to keep them out of the evidence pile.
I’d also like to see any other shoes you might have worn here.”

I nodded, a little stunned.
Previous forensic investigators had asked for my fingerprints (which I wasn’t about to give LeDoux), but not my shoes.

I nodded, unlocked the door, and flicked on my flashlight.
The room was smaller than I remembered, and dust motes floated across the beam of light.
The damp
,
musty smell that I had noticed on my first visit returned just as strong as before, and I had to resist the urge to sneeze.

Then I stepped back, out of the cabinet, and let LeDoux go in first.
He stood inside the door’s frame, examining the entire area with his flashlight, one inch at a time.

“Think that light will work if we change the bulb?” he asked.

“We can try it,” I said.

“Later,” he said, and continued his meticulous examination.

I sighed, careful not to lean on anything,
and waited for him to get done.
Finally he turned the light toward the decaying wall, and froze in place.

“Oh, dear,” he said faintly.
“We do have a problem.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
“That’s why we brought you here.”

“No, no.”
He sounded fussy.
“Your instincts of criminality were correct.
That third skull — the one farthest away — has a gunshot wound through the cranium.
Unless I miss my guess, someone shot that poor soul in the back of the head.”

How had I missed that? A crushed or damaged skull was fairly obvious.
One with a gunshot wound was even more obvious.
Clearly I hadn’t looked at the details as carefully as I thought I had.

LeDoux leaned forward, a gloved hand placed gently against the crumbling brick, his flashlight all the way inside the hole.
The light reflected against his face, making his skin deathly white.

“Oh, dear,” he said again.
“And these poor things were tossed in here like yesterday’s garbage.
This probably isn’t the primary crime scene, but it’s a part of it.
We’ll have to investigate the house and see what else we
f
i
nd
.
”

“The house has been apartments for decades,” I said, “and judging by the look of these bones, they’ve been down here for a long time.”

“That’s a safe assumption, given the conditions.
The walls would have protected them from the worst of Chicago’s heat and cold.” He stuck his head inside the hole.
The light pouring out now illuminated the extra bricks and bags of mortar that sat in the only real empty space.

“Do you have a guess how long they’ve been here?” I asked.

“Not yet.” He rocked back on his heels, and looked at me. His painter’s cap, which he had forgotten to remove when we got inside, was slightly askew, and covered with mortar dust.
“I’ll have to get them out first to give you a real guess.”

“How about a tentative one?” I asked.

He shrugged.
“They could’ve been killed as recently as two years ago, or back when the house was built.
I have no real idea. There are remnants of clothing that should give us an answer.”

I clung to the idea that the bones could be as recent as two years old. That took Laura’s father out of the picture, and while Sturdy would still have problems from this discovery, Laura herself would not be implicated.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get them out, then.”

“Not so quickly.
I still have a great deal of work to do.”
He sighed.
“We both do.”

“I know,” I said. “Measurements, photographs, footprints.”

“Bits of trace evidence, seeing if we can find anything that will lead us to the killer, from something caught in the mortar itself to something dropped alongside the bodies.”

“You’re hoping for fingerprints?”

“I’m hoping for many things,” he said.
“Primarily, I’m hoping that those bits and pieces of clothing include wallets or some sort of identification.
Quietly discovering who these corpses belong to without a driver’s license or some other indicator is going to be hard.
We’d be looking for dental records and at missing persons reports.
Either the authorities will find out what we’re doing, or we won’t identify these corpses.”

My stomach twisted.
Three people had been tossed down here, missing for God knew how long.
It would be nice to let their families know what happened to them.