Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (2 page)

The water damage might be a problem
,
since the tiny basement windows lining the building’s sides and back had, for the most part, been bricked closed.
But that was a problem I’d worry about once I got inside.

The back faced yet another set of apartments, which were about twenty years old.
Sturdy owned most of this neighborhood and had converted it to student housing for the nearby University of Chicago.

It was a smart move: students didn’t care what kind of apartment they lived in so long as it was cheap and provided a place to sleep, eat, and study.
The turnover was great, and the need for apartments was even greater.
Sturdy, in the bad old days, was one of Chicago’s largest slumlords, and student housing was one of the easiest areas in rentals to ignore repairs.

The manager’s apartment was on the first floor in the back. That was how the mailman managed to see inside just enough to get worried.
I expected the back door to open directly into the apartment, but it didn’t.
The door, which wasn’t even locked, opened into what had once been a mudroom.
The entrance to the apartment was to my right, and a door, closed and locked, was to my left.

Like I expected, the rot smell was stronger here.
I shuddered and wiped at my nose this time
,
even though I knew that wouldn’t make the smell of death go away.
I propped the back door open, hoping for a breeze, something – anything – that would make both the heat and the stench go away.

The door to my left had to be the door to the basement. I grabbed the bundle of keys and started working through them one by one, trying to find a key that fit into the deadbolt on the unmarked door.
That door was the only one that I had seen so far with a deadbolt, which helped me a little in looking for the correct key.
There had to be a hundred different keys on a variety of interlocking rings, many of the keys so old that they looked like they hadn’t been used in decades.

Obviously
,
the manager had been the kind of man who kept everything.
I wondered what his apartment looked like, and realized I would find out soon enough.

Halfway through the ring, I finally found the key that opened the deadbolt.
Then I tried the knob.
It was also locked, but it didn’t latch tightly enough to provide any protection.
I pushed the door open.

It creaked, the sound loud in the house’s silence.
I switched on the flashlight.
Its wide beam revealed dust and cobwebs and old wooden stairs that disappeared into the darkness.

I sighed.
This was one of those times that I wished I was working in a team.
If the stairs collapsed under my weight, no one would find me for hours.
I was supposed to pick up my son
,
Jimmy
,
from his afterschool program around five.
No one would notice I was missing until then.

I propped the basement door open, and tested the top step with my right foot.
The step seemed sturdier than I expected.
They
had been reinforced against the wall.
I looked between the steps and saw that someone had added extra wood underneath so that the steps could hold more weight.

On the second step, I turned and set my clipboard near the door.
I’d make my notes from memory.
I wanted both hands free as I descended into that darkness.

I hadn’t seen any light switch near the top of the stairs, so the flashlight had to serve.
Still, I braced the side of my left hand, the hand in which I held the light, on the rough concrete that formed the narrow tunnel that housed the stairs.
Even if the stairs fell out from underneath me, I could hold myself in place with the railing and the wall.

That worked until the wall stopped halfway down.
By then, I had a sense of the basement.
It was narrow and musty.
It smelled of damp, old clothes, and that persistent odor of rot.

When I reached the bottom of the steps, something brushed against my hair.
I cringed, thinking more cobwebs, then looked up.
It was the dangling cord attached to a bare light bulb.
I pulled, having no faith that the bulb still worked.

But it did. This bulb was stronger than the one in the main entry.
The light reached all parts of this side of the basement room.
Ahead of me, wooden storage units had been built against the wall.
Each unit had a number painted on it, one
which
presumably matched an apartment number above.
The units were closed, and some of them had very old padlocks attached to them.
The latches were rusted and covered with dirt.
No one had touched this area in years.

The basement should have extended to my left, but it didn’t.
Someone had built a wall across that area.
The wall looked old, but well made, clearly dating from the days when this building had been a single
-
family home.

I’d found a few large liquor
-
storage units in previous buildings in this part of town.
Chicago’s reputation as the center of sin during Prohibition was well deserved.
In one old building, I’d even discovered some unopened bottles.
They had disappeared into Laura’s custody. She promised to destroy them, saying that a lot of the old homemade liquor from that period was deadly.

Behind the stairs, I encountered another wall, and a door that had been padlocked shut.
Someone had scrawled
Boiler
with a pen along what had once been white paint
,
but which had turned yellow-gray with time.

I wasn’t surprised to find the lock.
Most public basements in apartment buildings locked off the furnace and the water heater so that tenants couldn’t adjust them to their own particular needs.
Sometimes that meant — at least in the case of Sturdy’s bad old days — that the heat wouldn’t come on until someone complained to the rental agency or the police, but often it was just a precaution to keep the temperature in the building uniform.

The bulb’s light didn’t reach here.
I had to hold the flashlight while I searched for the right key.
Fortunately
,
it didn’t take too long.
I undid the padlock, found the key to the knob, and let myself in the boiler room.

A wave of steam heat nearly pushed me backward.
I stopped, caught my breath, and went inside.
This room was neat and clean, clearly used a lot.
To my left, a small metal shelf held a variety of tools.
The boiler itself was ahead of me, a large metal thing that looked like it could play the villain in a horror movie.

It only took a minute to find the overhead bulb in this room.
That bulb was relatively new, and so was the cord.
I clicked it on, and clicked the flashlight off.

The boiler was pretty standard.
I found the wrench that allowed me to switch the entire system off.
Since no one lived in the building, the heat could remain off until the first serious freeze.

I set the wrench back onto its shelf and sighed.
The boiler clanked as the water settled in the pipes.
The building would talk to me for the rest of the day as the heat dissipated, the water cooled, and the radiators gradually shut down.

This room would be easy to inspect.
I had to check the connections on the boiler, but I was no professional on that level. This thing was old enough that I’d have Laura bring in a repairman to flush the system, and then see if it was working properly.

There was nothing behind the boiler except open space, and the only other item in the room was a large metal cabinet on that mysterious wall.
The cabinet was padlocked closed.

This padlock was tiny, so the key had to be as well.
That made my search through the rings an easy one.
I unlocked the lock, removed it, and pulled the double metal doors open.

They squealed as they moved. They’d been closed a long time.
A cloud of dust came toward me, and I sneezed.
Then I wiped my face for a third time in the past half hour, and frowned.

There were no shelves in the cabinet.
In fact, there was nothing in the cabinet at all — no supplies, no treasures, no records.
The cabinet had been placed against the wall to cover a door that looked as old as the wall itself.

My heart started to pound.
When I’d found the booze storage in one of the other apartment buildings, the door had been hidden as well.
I tried this door’s knob.
The knob turned, but the door didn’t open.
It had a lock beneath the knob, an old-fashioned lock that took an old-fashioned skeleton key.

There was only one such key on the entire ring.

I inserted it, and it turned easily, as if the door had been opened just the day before.
The door pushed inward.
The damp
,
musty smell that seemed like this building’s signature eased out of the back.

I sneezed again, then flicked the flashlight back on and looked.

Ahead of me, I saw a small open area, surrounded by more brick.
I frowned.
I had expected brick all along the far walls so that no one could see inside the windows, but I hadn’t expected a tiny room.
Instead, I had thought I’d find a wide
-
open space filled with old boxes, broken furniture
,
or nothing at all.

I stepped inside.
Piles of brick and mortar filled the room to my left.
Tools were scattered along the concrete floor.
The expected brick covered the far wall, hiding the window.
But that brick wasn’t the same color or shape as the brick wall in front of me.

That wall seemed to have been built later than the far wall.
As the flashlight played along the newer wall, I noticed that it was uneven.
Some of the work seemed professional, but some of it was slapdash, as if the person who put the bricks on the mortar had never done that before.

That wall ran the width of the building, with no visible door. That didn’t make any sense to me.
Or maybe it did, judging by the knot that was growing in my stomach.

To my right there was an alcove, with more brick in the back, where the window probably was.
That brick wall formed a U
that
ended against the wall I had just come through.

I let the flashlight play on the ceiling, looking for one more light bulb, and finding it.
Only this one had burned out and the cord looked frayed enough that I didn’t want to take one of the bulbs from the janitor’s shelves and replace it.

Instead, I relied on my flashlight.
I turned it into the alcove, noting that the brick was uneven here
,
too. Then there was the section to my right.
It was part of the uniform wall, but it had been bumped over the years.
Mortar was crumbling out of it and falling onto the concrete floor.
Near the bottom, some of the bricks had fallen inward.

I crouched and played the light inside.
The space was open, more or less, like a little cubby hole.
I eased the light along the crumbled dust, until it caught something yellowed.

Bone.

Long bones, like those found in the human leg.

I stumbled backward so fast that I nearly fell against the bags of mortar.

My heart was racing.

I’d been thinking of horror movies, that was all. I was in a dank, smelly basement with unexpected walls, and I was making things up.

I had probably seen a dead rat or a pile of trapped mice.
Maybe an old pipe, covered with dust.

I made myself swallow, then took several deep breaths,
hoping to slow down my heart rate and make the shock die away.
I’d been on edge a lot lately, and it was simply showing because I was alone in a creepy house where a man had died just two weeks ago, alone and neglected.

After a few minutes, I felt calmer.
I went back and played the light slowly.

The bricks, the crumbled mortar, the long yellow thing (like a bone or a pipe)
,
and then next to it, a curved shape — a pelvis? — and an unmistakable skeletal hand.
A rib cage leaned against the wall, and a spinal column that led all the way up to a recognizable human skull.

I started to pull out more bricks, then stopped myself.
I had to leave this as intact as possible, at least until I figured out exactly what I was going to do.