Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (15 page)

When I went back inside, I grabbed my building inspector’s clipboard and Hanley’s thick wad of keys.
I made sure that LeDoux didn’t need me for the next few hours.
After he had reassured me — again — that he didn’t, I went back outside
,
since the front door seemed to be the only way to get to the other apartments.

As I walked around the building, I looked at the windows, hoping that I had misunderstood what I had seen the first time.
I wanted them to be merely dirty instead of boarded over from the inside, but it soon became clear that they were both dirty and covered.

This building had a full basement, and most of it was inaccessible.

The queasiness in my stomach got worse.

I stopped looking at the foundation as I went around to the front of the building.
I didn’t want to look too odd.
Too late, I realized I should probably have carried a can of paint or the ladder just for show.

I hoped the clipboard was enough.

The neighborhood remained quiet. The cars that were parked along the street were the same ones that had been there when we arrived.
A quick glance reassured me that no one was peeking through their curtains.

Still, as I mounted the front stairs and unlocked the door, I felt conspicuous.
It wasn’t until I stepped inside that I realized I had braced myself for excessive heat.
Amazing what the memory did.
I could barely remember how the interior looked, but I could remember how stifling it had been.

It wasn’t stifling now.

The entry seemed even darker than I remembered.
I punched the ancient light switch and that filthy chandelier gave me its meager light. I had forgotten my flashlight, but I wasn’t about to go around the house unless I actually needed it.

I decided to skip apartments one and two, and head up the oak staircase.

I would start at the top of this place and work my way down.

The staircase had been built to last.
The stairs, though worn, were sturdy, and so was the banister.
As I glanced at it, I didn’t see any signs of repair:
no spindles that had a different shape or were made out of a different wood; no cracks in the polished handhold.
Even the steps seemed to be in good condition.
No one had put another piece of wood across the top of one or shored up the bottom of another.

The staircase made a gentle curve to the second floor.
The banister continued — obviously the second floor hallway had once opened to the entry below.
The banister was against a wall now, although not touching it. There was a good foot of space between the banister and the wall itself, space that went all the way down to the first floor.

I would never have rented any upper floor apartments to people with children, not with that hazard in place.
But I’m sure no one thought of such things in the early years.
I peered over the edge, missing the flashlight now, wondering what waited for me in that one foot space below.

Then I
remembered
the corpses in the basement and shuddered.

The chandelier’s light did not reach the second floor, but apparently that light switch turned on all the hallway lights.
The lights on the second floor were brighter; the fixtures dating from the 1940s.
These “improvements” might have been the result of work done by Laura’s father.
I wondered if he had done the carpentry and electrical himself.

I pulled out the clipboard and made notes.
A real electrician had to inspect this place, and someone had to repair that gap between the banister and the wall.

At the place where the staircase blended into the floor, becoming the hallway, stood the next door.
It had a metal
3
on its front and four fairly recent deadbolts.
I knocked for the hell of it.
For all I knew, there could be squatters in here.

But the knock sounded hollow.
If someone was squatting in there, they weren’t home now.
And if they were squatting, they hadn’t brought a lot of furniture with them.

The thought of squatters made me shake my head.
I had been thinking so hard about the bodies in the basement that I hadn’t even recalled the possibility of living people upstairs.
I’d been worried about that when I first arrived here, and completely lost track of it in the intervening days.

I knocked one last time, then pressed my ear against the door.
Nothing so far.
I would have to open each door before we got too far in our investigation
,
just to make myself feel more secure.

I continued down the hall.
Another door to the left, marked
4
, seemed to have been carved into the wall at a later date — obviously dividing up a bedroom suite or a larger area into something smaller.

Then at the end of the hall was the fifth apartment, with a grand door that seemed like part of the original construction.
These last two doors only had regular locks, which looked flimsy compared to those deadbolts.

A narrow hallway continued past apartment five, leading (I suspected) toward the third floor.
The hallway felt cramped and was dark — the light didn’t extend from the main hall, and the fixtures above me either didn’t work or needed new bulbs.

A window at the end of the hall provided what light there was.

When I reached it, I realized the window was original to the house, which meant that this hallway was.
The stairs were to my right.
Once, a door had covered them, but not any longer.

In the original design, these stairs had either led to the servants
’
quarters or to the attic.
Sometimes those were one and the same.

Right beside the window was another light switch.
I punched it on, but nothing happened.
I peered up the stairs, seeing only darkness.
I sighed heavily.
Looked like I would have to go back for my flashlight after all.

Then something brushed against my cheek, making me jump.
I reached up and found string.
A pull
-
cord for a light switch.
I pulled, and strong light filled the stairwell. This light bulb had been changed recently.

The stairs were narrow and sharp edged, made without the finesse of the lovely main staircase.
If someone tumbled down these things, they’d end up more than scratched or bruised.
They’d have broken bones, serious cuts
,
or both.

I made my way up carefully, using the wall as a support because no one had put in a railing.
I made a note of that too before I started to climb.
The stairs twisted and turned, narrowing the higher they got.
I had to crouch halfway up, and when I reached the top I was nearly bent in half.

It was a relief to reach the end of the staircase, which opened into another hallway.
This one was narrow, with high ceilings.
The door at the end of the hall stood open, revealing a toilet and a bathtub, both old.
The toilet had the shape of an old pull-flusher, and the tub had a clawfoot.

Obviously this had been the servants
’
quarters and hadn’t been modified much.
Four doors
,
two on each side of the hall
,
probably provided single rooms for apartment dwellers, allowing them to share a bath.

I looked for another doorway, one that would lead to the attic, but didn’t find it out here.
So I struggled with my keys, trying to find the one that opened apartment number
9
.

It took some time.
I nearly gave up and pushed the door open, breaking the lock, even though I knew better.
I’d actually learned, in the course of doing this, that any action like that would make it easy for people to squat in the building.

Even though Laura had funded a charitable organization that helped squatters find real jobs and homes (something she put together after we discovered that the churches and Salvation Army were constantly full), it still took hours, sometimes days, of my time to help anyone who’d been living for free inside one of the buildings.
I didn’t always succeed either — for every person I helped, another ran away after seeing me, never to return.

I hated that part of the job.

The door finally opened, and a waft of stench blew toward me.
It took a minute to figure out what it was: a combination of rust and mildew and loam.
I struggled for a moment to find something that would turn on a light; I was surprised when my fingers found a modern switch, which I flicked upward.

Fl
u
orescents
flickered on, taking a second to catch. When they did, they showed me a room filled with gardening equipment — rakes, shovels, and small pickaxes, all stacked against the back wall. I’d been right; this was a single room, and once upon a time it had probably been rented as such. But it hadn’t served as anything but storage in a very long time.

I had no idea what anyone would need all this gardening equipment for either. There was no lawn here except for that small patch out front, which only needed mowing.
And in no way was anyone going to carry a lawn mower way up here.

Canvas tarps, like painters’ tarps, were stacked to my left, and beyond them, several rolled rugs.
Some old chairs had been shoved against the wall.
One of them had become a rat’s nest — stuffing everywhere.
I couldn’t smell the rodents though: I wondered if they were long gone or had simply not yet moved back inside for the winter because of this
F
all heat wave.

I went inside, careful to prop the door open.
For some reason, I didn’t want it to close on me.

There were other tools in here, rusted and old, some of them so encrusted with dirt that I couldn’t quite tell what they were.
Others were obvious: hammers, nails, screwdrivers, several old saws.
Cobwebs showed me that these hadn’t been used in a long, long time.

Past the rakes, a utility sink had a board across the top and the faucets capped off.
On top of the board were small screws, some kidney-shaped bits of leather, and small metal objects.
I squinted, leaning forward, careful not to hit anything, and stared at the metal.
Those were bullets.

I let out a small breath, then peered around again.
Mixed with the rakes and shovels were a few rifles.
Along the floor, some unattached barrels rested against a pile of dowels.
And near the sink itself, some grips for handguns were stacked into a small pile.

LeDoux would want to see this
room
too.
It was probably part of the crime scene — maybe even the murder site, although I didn’t see any blood spatter on the walls or dried blood pools on what was left of the carpet.
The room didn’t quite smell bad enough either, but maybe that was because I had grown accustomed to foul odors after being in this building for so long.

Somewhere in this room, if the house continued to follow standard Queen Anne layout, which it had so far, would be the entrance to the attic.
I didn’t see it, but it could have been hidden behind one of the chairs or all the equipment.

Still, I could almost hear LeDoux, cautioning me not to do anything, touch anything
,
or step in anything.

I backed out of the room, trying to walk in the prints my shoes had left in the dust.
When I got to the door, I removed the block and pulled it closed, letting the lock latch automatically.

Sweat ran down the side of my face, even though I hadn’t been aware of being hot.
Both my shirt and the coverall stuck to my back, and I felt grimy, just like I had on that very first day.

I stood in the middle of the hall and stared at the remaining doors, wondering what else I would find.

FIFTEEN

As it turned out, I found only empty rooms in the remaining third
-
floor apartments.
The rooms were similar: they all had a utility sink and a tiny counter with a single cupboard hanging above it.

The floors were bare wood covered with dust, indicating that no one had been inside for a long time.
A single window either overlooked the street out front or the alley in the back.
The glass was clouded and dirt-streaked, and I dutifully marked on my clipboard that there might be dry rot and mildew around the frames.

I wasn’t able to check the bathroom: the overhead light didn’t work, and not enough light came in from the hall.
I could tell that my initial assumption had been right: the bathroom hadn’t been remodeled since it was installed in the 1920s.
But as to cleanliness, dirt, and the interior of the medicine cabinet, not to mention a small closet off the side, I had no way of knowing, not until I came back up prepared.