Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (27 page)

When I mentioned that, Minton said, “Monday’s our slow day.
Most folks take it off. The weekends’re always busy, and even though Death never rests, we do.”

“Or at least some of you do,” I said rather pointedly.
He wasn’t resting.

“Yeah, well,” he said.
“Some of us are on a mission to save the world.
Being a superhero and a mortician doesn’t leave you a lot of time for sleep.”

He’d meant that as a joke, but I knew what he was referring to.
He was still shaken by the Soto case.

He handed me several body bags, and I slung them over my arm.
They felt like garment bags, only heavier and longer, and I knew I wouldn’t carry clothes in quite the same way again.

“You find anything on Michael Soto?” I asked.

“Any
unrefutable
proof that he was murdered?” Minton’s voice was bitter.
He was facing away from me, rummaging in a closet of stuff.
“Besides the bullets in his body, you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“Yeah.” He stood up.
He had a box of gloves, and some evidence bags just like the ones LeDoux used.
“Short of finding a note inside the poor guy saying that he’d been shot in cold blood, there’s no way to prove that the shooting was one kind or another.
It’s all circumstance.
We said versus they said.
And I can’t show whether or not Michael Soto was carrying a gun.
All I can show was what direction he was shot from, how close the cops were, whether the evidence jibes with what they say.”

“Does it?”

He shrugged.
“They’re not talking much about the actual shooting itself.
Only that he had a gun and was planning to use it.
Until I learn whether they say they were ten feet away or two feet away — if they ever say it — I can’t figure out whether the evidence jibes or not.
And if they’re smart, they’re gonna stay quiet about the whole how-when-what part of the case.”

We stared at each other for a moment.
Then he clasped the box of gloves to his chest.

“Hear you had a visitor Sunday,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Hear you said no to taking on the Soto case.”

“Yeah.”

“How come I should help you then? Hmmm? Those brothers were good men.”

“You’re friends with Chairman Hampton?” I asked.

“Fred’s a good guy.
He gets written up as this big revolutionary, but he just cares about people.
He’s trying to save the world, just in his own way.”

“He’s fond of guns,” I said.

“He’s fond of self-defense, and who can blame him?
He was a
n
honor student once, you know that?
Star athlete, one of the most popular kids in his community.
He was going to college, prelaw, before all this.”

“He should’ve stayed there,” I said.

Minton shook his head.
“A couple things happened — nothing major, stuff we’ve all gone through — and he lost his faith in the law.
He come to realize that the only ones who’ll ever take care of us is
us, just like you and I are now.”

I was beginning to like Hampton more than I already did, which was more than I wanted to.
Staying out of cases like this was not my strong suit, but it had to be this time.
Too many police, too many journalists, too much explaining to do.

“I know Hampton’s trying, and I know you want some justice for the Sotos.” I ran my hand over the body bags, trying to smooth them out.
“It’s just too high
-
profile for me.”

“High profile?” Minton said.
“Since when is that a consideration?”

“Since I became a father.” It was the first time I’d ever used that word in that context, but it applied.
Jimmy was my son, just not legally, because we didn’t dare make it legal.
But I was as committed to him — more committed to him — than any real family he had.

“Your kids’ll thank you for taking this on,” Minton said. “Someday — someday soon, I hope — we’ll get these dirty cops.
We’ll stop them, we’ll show the world what they’re doing, and things’ll change.”

I stared at him for a moment.
He believed that.
He’d just autopsied two boys shot by the police, probably for no reason except that they were “troublemakers,” people who didn’t know their “place,” and he thought that someday, someone would stop that.

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “But until things do change, I’ve got to keep a low profile.”

“For heavens’ sake, why, man?
What’ll it gain you?
More dead kids, that’s what. And if you’re not careful, one of those kids’ll be your own.”

I stared at him.
Minton flushed, but didn’t look away.

“What’re you doing this for?” I asked him.
“This work.
How come you’re not
a detective or a Panther
?
How come you’re in this basement on your day off, coming to help me with a case that could be as important — just not as high profile — as the Soto brothers?”

“How come I dig through the evidence?” he asked.

“Not just the evidence,” I said. “The evidence as it manifests on dead bodies.”

He sighed and grabbed a small bag of equipment, slinging it over his shoulder.
For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to answer me.

Then he said: “Emmett Till.”

I looked at him.
Was poor Emmett Till Chicago’s only frame of reference in the recent race wars?

“What about him?” I asked.

“You know what happened, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.
“I know.”

Probably better than he did.
Definitely better than he did.
My parents died a death very similar to Till’s.
And so many other people I’d met over the years had died the same way and for the same kind of non-reason.

“Then you understand,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.
I understand joining the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
I understand marching.
I understand protesting. I don’t understand how Till brought you here.”

Minton sighed, then nodded toward the door.
“Let’s get to your van before someone shows up for work.”

With his free hand, he grabbed a gurney and wheeled it toward the small freight elevator.
When we reached it, Minton pressed a button, and the doors opened. We stepped inside.
I helped him bump the gurney over the gap between the doors and the wall.

The elevator smelled of damp and rot, just like the Queen Anne did. No formaldehyde here, no pretext, no made-up corpses.
Just the smell of death, old death, decaying, half-forgotten, and never completely gone.

He pressed the top of two buttons and the door slid shut.
“I went to school with Emmett.
He was a good kid. Quiet, but fun.
His eyes always twinkled, you know?”

I wanted to ask if Minton thought Till had actually whistled at that white woman. But he continued before I could say anything.

“He, ah —.” Emotion I hadn’t heard from him before
,
the kind a little boy felt for the loss of a friend
,
strangled him.
Minton shook his head as if shaking off the feelings, then started again.
“Did you see him?”

“After he was dead?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I shook my head.
“I hadn’t moved here yet.”

The elevator bumped to a stop, then bounced for a moment before releasing us.
I glanced at Minton, who seemed unconcerned by the malfunction.

He grabbed one end of the gurney, pushing it out of the elevator and onto the ground floor near the freight doors.
I wondered, for just a moment, if funeral homes called those wide double doors freight doors, then decided they probably didn’t.
They probably had some euphemism, something that sanitized even the transportation details of death.

“What made Emmett’s death so powerful,” Minton said as he headed toward those doors, “wasn’t his youth or what he did.
It was how he looked.
And what they did to him.”

Minton paused, his hand on the red switch that would automatically swing the freight doors open.

“You couldn’t look at Emmett’s body and believe that his death was easy.
Everything those bastards did, everything, was imprinted on him.
His eye was coming off, for
G
od’s sake.
His face was smashed.
He barely looked like Emmett at all.”

Minton slammed his fist against the switch, activating it.
The doors creaked as they started to move.

“My momma, she made me get in that line of people coming to view his body.
I didn’t want to, and my dad said I was too young.
‘The boy needs a childhood,’ he said, but my momma said, ‘Emmett Till had a childhood and they stole it from him.
Our boy needs to know what could happen to him.’”

“That’s harsh,” I said, even though I understood both impulses. If I could hide the filth of this world from Jimmy, I would have. But I would have had to have gotten him when he was an infant. By the time he was two, he’d seen a lot.
By the time I met him, he’d probably seen more depravity than I could even imagine — and not much of it came from whites.
Whites were the great unknown in his life, until he met me.

“It may be harsh, but my mom was right.”

The doors had opened.
Rain pounded the parking lot, huge fat drops that sounded like they were landing with the power of hail.

Minton grabbed the gurney and shoved it out the door.
I hurried ahead of him and opened the back doors of the van.
Together we lifted the gurney inside.

“I expect you want me to wear one of those coveralls,” he said, nodding toward mine.

“Yeah.” I set down the body bags and grabbed one of the last of the coveralls, handing it to Minton.
He nodded.

He set his equipment inside, then we closed all the doors and ran to the front of the van.

I started it up, shut off the radio, and turned on the wipers. Then I drove out of the alley and onto the street.

“I still don’t get why you didn’t become an investigator,” I said. “Or even a reporter.
It was the journalists covering that funeral who really got the nation’s attention.”

“No,” Minton said. “That was Mrs. Till.
I’d never seen anyone so angry.
She wanted the world to see what happened to her son, and by God, the world saw it.”

In still black-and-white photographs.
A lot of the Southern papers didn’t carry the story, but I saw the photographs in the
Defender
,
which a lot of people subscribed to in Memphis.

He shook his head, lost in his memories.
“My momma took me to that line, and we threaded past that casket to pay our respects. That was the first time I saw anyone dead, and it was a boy I knew, and he hardly looked human any more.”

I wanted to close my eyes against the images that rose.
I’d seen victims of
s
outhern “justice.” That was how I’d learned some of these behind-the-books techniques in the first place.

“I didn’t just learn about death or excessive cruelty that day, Mr. Grimshaw.
I learned that bodies talk.”

I glanced at him.
He was staring at the buildings going by, places with their own secrets, filled with people who lived mostly quiet lives.

“Emmett Till’s body didn’t just talk.
It screamed.
And because it screamed, the white world finally listened.”

A little.
They listened a little.
Not enough to stop all the racism and prejudice and cruelty.
But enough for some folks to say that the violence was unacceptable.
Loyce Kirby, my old partner, had been teaching me the detecting business during the Till uproar.

He said it was kinda like white folks had just discovered their neighbors were beating their dogs.
You had to stop the cruelty because you saw it.
But they never did see blacks as human.
Just dumb animals who couldn’t defend themselves.

“So you went into the body business,” I said.

“At first I thought I wanted to heal them,” Minton said.
“But then I figured out that you couldn’t step in.
A woman could come in, beaten by her husband, and you could patch her up. But then she’d go home to the same bastard who hurt her in the first place, and you couldn’t do a damn thing.”