Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (23 page)

“It was nice.
He wished me well.
I could just tell he’d had no idea I ever wanted to be anything but a wife.”

I couldn’t imagine Laura as a wife at all.
She wasn’t arm decoration or a homemaker.
She clearly loved Jimmy and was willing to give him her all, but she didn’t cater to him.

I reached for my scotch, amazed at my reaction.
I hadn’t realized that I never thought of Laura as a traditional woman.
I thought of her as unique, one-of-a-kind, someone who had never fit into society’s roles.

“Surprised you, didn’t I?” she said, looking at me, her head turned sideways.

“I keep forgetting you were once someone’s wife,” I said.

“Not someone.
Addison Lake’s.
I was a society matron who held the right parties and gave to the right charities.
I managed a large household and I was expected, at the right moment, to have at least two children, the first of whom had to be a son.”

“As if you could plan that.”

She chuckled.
“It would have been Addison’s responsibility if the first one had been a girl.
That’s one of the comforting thing about biology.
Gender is the male’s job, not the female’s.”

Comforting. She was making light of something that had clearly been part of a large argument.

“I didn’t realize you wanted children,” I said, feeling awkward. Was our on-again
,
off-again relationship keeping her from a life she wanted?

“I’m not sure I do,” she said.
“I was never sure.
And I’m really uncertain now.
I think I’m doing more for children in this city right where I am.
If we can clean up the slum housing that Sturdy owns and keep up Helping Hands, I might be making more of a difference right there.”

I didn’t know what to say.
I wanted to ask her more, and yet I didn’t want to hear her answers.
I didn’t want her to say that I was the roadblock I feared I was — or worse, say that I wasn’t.
I didn’t want to put the
idea in her head if she hadn’t thought of it, and conversely, I didn’t want her to think I wanted something more than what we’d had — when things were good, that is.

So I settled for,
“You can have children and keep your job, you know.
Black women do it all the time.”

She smiled at me.
“And white women, although no one talks about it.”

Then her smile faded.
She swirled that drink again.
She’d been nursing it since she arrived.
I’d been nursing mine too, which showed just how unsettled both of our moods were.

“How did we get from that horrible house to this?” she asked.

I took her cue and let her change the subject.
I guess I wanted to off that topic as well.

“I know you’ve been checking the records,” I said, “but I’m going to need to see what you have on Hanley.
Everything, from his employment applications to his pay stubs to notes in his file.”

Disappointment flitted across her face, so brief I almost missed it, and then she squared her shoulders, coming back into the conversation we’d run from
,
finding refuge in a conversation we’d avoided for more than eighteen months.

Should I have gone on?
I didn’t know, and now it was too late.

“My father hired him,” she said. “Isn’t that what we needed to know?”

“No,” I said.
“We need much more than that.
How independent he was, and what he did.
We don’t even know the occupancy rate of the house.
Maybe it was always poor.
Can you find that?”

“That’ll take work,” she said.
“I’ll try.”

“It has to be somewhere.”

“At some point, people are going to notice my interest.”

“I know,” I said.
“We just have to stay ahead of them.”

“I’ll be ready,” she said.

But neither of us knew what she had to be ready for.
This was all unknown, and worrisome.
Disturbing, she had called it when she came in, and it was that.
It was disturbing, and had grown more so each day we spent in that house.

She put her hand on mine.
“Why does this scare me so, Smokey?”

I threaded my fingers through hers.
I didn’t have an answer for her, and I didn’t want to tell her that it scared me too.

TWENTY-THREE

The
next
morning I picked up LeDoux at a restaurant in Old Town.
He waited under an awning, arms clutched around his thin shirt.
It was pouring rain and fifty-some degrees, and it finally felt like fall.

I hadn’t planned on working Saturdays in this job, but LeDoux and I had agreed we’d spend the morning at least preparing for the mortician.
Jimmy was at the Grimshaws — he and Keith had a joint homework project
that
intrigued them: they had to bring a million of something to their after
-
school class later in the week.

I was glad the entire thing fell to Franklin and Althea.
I didn’t mind helping Jimmy with his practical math homework — showing him how to use a budget, how to calculate a grocery bill — but I really didn’t want to spend my entire weekend counting something.

Neither did Jim.
He made me promise I’d be back right after lunch.
We had a date I didn’t dare forget.

The World Series started this weekend and his new team, the Mets, were in it.
They’d creamed the Atlanta Braves, and now planned to do the same to Baltimore.

I hoped they did.
I needed something else to think about
besides corpses and built-in tombs and hidden secrets.
I wanted something to celebrate, even for a few hours.

I dropped LeDoux, already in his coveralls and cap, at the house, along with that big ring of keys.
He would work the first area we found, take whatever evidence there was from the cubby near the skeletons, and then we’d let Minton take them away.

I drove on to Poehler’s Funeral Home.
Saturdays, apparently, were big days at funeral homes. When I had spoken to Minton before I had left the apartment, he told me to go around back where the hearses parked.
He said he would leave the door open for me.

I parked in a bottle-strewn alley, next to a shiny hearse.
Another was parked in front of the funeral home, the back doors of the vehicle wide open.
Apparently it was taking a body to a church for a funeral later in the day.
Minton had said most of Saturday was about transportation or viewing; he figured he’d have some time to spend with me, barring any emergencies.

The back door was propped open, by a brick
,
of all things, and I slipped inside, wincing at the smell of formaldehyde and flowers. I sighed and went down the back stairs.
My parents would be with me in every funeral home I walked into for the rest of my life.

Three bodies covered in sheets rested on stainless
-
steel tables.
The stench of formaldehyde was stronger in here.
Minton stood near the back.
He was sliding on a white doctor’s coat, his hands already covered by gloves.

When he saw me, he grimaced.
“I forgot.”

“I take that to mean you can’t come with me,” I said.

He glanced through another door,
as if he thought someone overheard us.

“I have an emergency peek,” he said.
“I didn’t know about it when I talked to you.”

“An emergency what?”

He beckoned me to come with him.
In a narrow room just off the main room, a man had been laid out on yet another stainless
-
steel table.
This room was claustrophobically small and had none of the equipment that the main morgue had.

“Why’s he here?” I asked.

“He’s not here,” Minton said.
“He’s with me.”

I looked at him, not entirely understanding.

“Like your job.”

Then I nodded.
This one was off the books too.
I walked over to the body.
The man was maybe in his twenties, but young enough to still have some acne around his chin.
He had a buzz cut, which was unusual for this part of Chicago.
His face was the only part of him that looked halfway normal.
His torso had been opened and then sewn back shut in the traditional autopsy Y.

“You’re done, then,” I said.

“Haven’t started,” Minton said.
“He’s just come from the police.”

I looked up at him.
“The police are here?”

“Hell, no.
He came in that hearse out there.
The family’s got him set up at a different funeral home, not far from here.
Some folks just thought he should see me first.”

“What folks?” I asked.

Minton gave me a faint smile.
He clearly wasn’t going to answer that question.

“What happened to him?”

“That’s the question,” Minton said.
“You didn’t hear the news yesterday?”

I shivered, remembering that snippet I’d heard the night before.
“Just a piece of it.”

He nodded.
“This here’s Michael Soto.”

“I thought you had him earlier in the week,” I said.

“That was his brother, John.
Michael here brought him to me last Sunday.”

“The Henry Horner traffic
-
light issue,” I said.

Minton nodded.

“And now this boy’s dead?” I felt cold.

Minton shrugged one shoulder.
“The police say he charged them, him and two others, after committing a robbery.”

“You don’t believe it.”

“No one believes it,” Minton said.
“Michael here is an Army sergeant.”

“He’s the one you said was in ’Nam.” I remembered now.

“Yeah,” Minton said. “He knew better than to rob a convenience store or go after the police.”

I sighed.
“They shot him because he questioned his brother’s death?”

“Most like
,
” Minton said.
“I get to look at him quick enough to see if his wounds correspond to their stories.
I only got about three hours.
Can you get me after noon?”

I almost said yes, and then I remembered my promise to Jim.
“Not this afternoon,” I said. “How’s Monday morning?”

“Probably hectic if this weekend’s anything like last weekend.
But I’ll make time for you.”

“I’ll be here,” I said.

He nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me any longer.
He was looking at Michael Soto, an Army sergeant who found the streets of his hometown deadlier than the jungles of South Vietnam.

I turned around and left, wondering how a family dealt with the loss of two boys in the space of a week.
Two nearly adult boys with good hearts, who had been murdered by the police.

TWENTY-FOUR

The Mets lost.

It was a heartbreaker, almost as if the team that Jimmy and I had watched during the last week had vanished, replaced by a bunch of minor leaguers.

Jimmy took the loss philosophically.
He had hope — the best
four out of seven
, he reminded me — but I was oddly devastated.
I’d been hoping for something joyful, something upbeat.

Instead, I’d gotten a 4-1 loss that boded poorly for the games to come.

But I didn’t say anything to Jim.
I was afraid I’d sound even more bitter than I felt.

My meeting with Minton had shaken me.
The body of poor Michael Soto reminded me just how much I hated this city — how much I hated most cities, after this summer had shown me that Chicago was not unique.

Then I’d gone back to the house, where I took out the bricks on the remaining sections while I waited for LeDoux to finish fingerprinting and measuring and searching the tomb where we’d found the first three.

And sure enough, those remaining areas had bodies as well. One in such a state of preservation that he looked almost alive — not like Michael Soto, who seemed (if you didn’t look at that Y incision) like he could wake up and get off the table at any moment — but like someone who’d only been dead a few days although, fortunately, he didn’t smell that way.