Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (32 page)

Or was Cronk responding in his own passive-aggressive way to the blackmail that Hanley had obviously used to keep his job?
It would make sense; why pay someone to manage an apartment building if there were no tenants?

I checked the files. The last two tenants moved out this year, six months after Cronk had been fired.
His plan had taken time, but it worked.

Of course, I was just guessing, and I would have to continue guessing.
I wouldn’t ask Cronk what happened.
The old Sturdy team was still looking for leverage against Laura, and I wasn’t about to give them any.

Although it was beginning to look like Earl Hathaway had given them more than enough.

THIRTY-THREE

I went through the same routine Tuesday morning to lose the tail, although this time I dumped him near Jimmy’s school, just for variety’s sake.

Eventually, the tail would figure out that I was losing him on purpose, rather than through bad traffic and poor driving.
I only hoped he wouldn’t be assigned to me long enough to figure out the pattern.

I spent my morning in a basement work area that I’d set up in the storage room away from the boiler.
Minton had asked for a few days to work on the skeletons and to see if he could rearrange his schedule so that he could come during the daytime.

LeDoux was working on the next opening — the one farthest from the original site.
We now had pasted little cards on top of each one.
That one was unoriginally called Site B.

The grocery bag was a small gold mine of information.
It contained torn letters, a well-worn pocket knife, coins, and tobacco tins.
In addition, there were matches, some paper money, and some tags that I didn’t recognize.

LeDoux had told me that all the paper, except for one letter, came from the leather wallet, which somehow protected the paper from disintegration.
The other letter had been found in the breast pocket of one of the shirts — it had fallen away from the body, and hadn’t been subject to the worst of the decay.

He had bagged the wallet.
It was longer than any wallet I’d seen and looked like it would fit into a breast pocket or a jacket pocket instead of the back pocket of someone’s pants.
It was covered with a long
,
greenish-grayish stain that looked foul.

I was happy the entire thing was bagged, so I wouldn’t have to smell it.

I set it aside.
LeDoux had already pulled the pertinent items, so I didn’t have to do much with it.
I would want to look inside to see if there were maker’s marks or if someone had written a name or initials in it, small things that LeDoux might not think to look for.

Then I turned my attention to the matchboxes.
One had a paper label that was half worn away.
It had been blue or green or some similar color, and the letters KITC were visible.
I assumed the box contained kitchen matches,
but I would check.
Nonetheless
,
I wrote everything down.

The other matchbox had
The Four Deuces
written on it, with cards with deuces of each suit sketched under the name.
The drawing was crude, as if it were done by an amateur.

The penknife had no real markings on the outside.
But a lot of knife owners carved their names on the blade. I had promised I wouldn’t open the evidence bag, and I didn’t, but I was tempted.

I started a second page in the legal pad I’d been using for my notes.
This page was directed at LeDoux, asking him to look for certain things on the evidence when he examined it.
The first thing I wanted him to do was see if someone had scratched a name on the blade of that knife.

I also added the wallet to the list, asking LeDoux to check for maker’s marks or a hidden name.

Then I looked at the coins.
They were old.
I hadn’t seen most of them since I was a boy.
One was a Morgan dollar, with a woman’s face on one side.
I seemed to recall that nowadays the Morgan dollar had value to coin collectors, but how much I didn’t know.

The rest of the coins were
also
American — they had United States and their denomination engraved on them — but I had never seen them in circulation.
That they had been in circulation, I had no doubt.
They were worn from use.
Even the dirt from the years in the tomb hadn’t hidden that.

But the most interesting thing in my searches so far was the currency.
The wallet had held one-dollar bills — three of them — and a single five-dollar bill.

I had never seen anything like them.
They were bigger than any money I’d ever seen before.
The dollar bills had Washington’s portrait stamped on the left side and a bluish mark on the right.
They were marked with the phrase
Federal Reserve Note
and they had the words
New York
prominently displayed on one side.
One note had a reddish mark instead of the blue one.

The blues were dated 1918,
the red 1914.

The five-dollar bill was the same size and general design, only it had Lincoln instead of Washington.
It also carried the 1918 date.

I marked the dates down and set the money aside to examine later. There were coin shops in Bronzeville that might help me with the money
,
should I need it.

I had saved the other paper for last.
The first item I picked up was a cocktail napkin.
It had been folded, but it seemed remarkably intact.

The notation LeDoux had made on the evidence bag said that the napkin had been hidden in a flap in the long leather wallet, underneath other pieces of paper, most of which were unreadable.
LeDoux had even made a small drawing of where the napkin had been located and stapled it to the bag.

The napkin itself had a small gold logo in the corner.
All it said was
Calumet-412
.
In ink, someone had written:

Sorry.

Love forever

V.

I stared at it, unable to make much sense of it.
Yet it looked distinctive enough to be important.

A tattered business card had been in the same wallet.
The card came from a place called Colosimo’s, which claimed to be “The Best Italian Restaurant in Chicago.”
It also had “refined cabaret and good music” as well as “public dancing” between four and one.
The address, listed in small print below the name, was 2128 South Wabash Avenue, right in the heart of Bronzeville.

Finally, there were the letters.
The first one had pieces torn out of the center, probably by the mice as they ate their way to the bodies.
That letter had a date — May 1, 1917 — and a salutation,
Dearest Lawrence.

The rest I had to piece together.
It seemed that Lawrence’s younger sister was either writing the letter or had had something bad happen to her.
“Ma” insisted on sending him a package.
And Edwina had died.
Her death was “a mercy” so Lawrence “shouldn’t be sad.”

The only other intact area read:

Ma thanks you for the money.
She’s moving in with Aunt Lula, so if you want to write, do so care of Lulabelle at the Dickerson’s.

The other letter was intact.
It had also been folded up in that long wallet.
The letter was written in ink again, only this ink was smudged, not by time, but by the writer.
Dabs of ink marked the beginning of some of the phrases, as if the person hadn’t been used to using a pen.

Zeke

Coming 6 Nov morning

train

Miss you

Darcy

I didn’t have a lot to go on — no addresses, and only a few dates — but it was more than I’d had before.

For the first time, I felt like I had a place to start.

THIRTY-FOUR

Colosimo’s was not listed in the phone book.
Neither was
T
he Four Deuces.
The missing listings were not a surprise.
Nothing about this investigation was going to be easy.

I left the Queen Anne just before lunch and ate at home again, for the benefit of my tail.
Then I called Franklin Grimshaw to see if he remembered a business named Colosimo’s on South Wabash Avenue.
He didn’t.
And he didn’t recognize Calumet
-
412 either, although he did say that it made him think of a phone number.

“You know,” he said, “like when we were kids.”

“But there aren’t enough digits,” I said.

“It depends on how old the number is,” Franklin said.
“The phone company kept adding numbers as more and more people got phones.”

Of course.
I’d been thinking so hard about the other items I’d found that I hadn’t put this together.
How old did a phone number have to be to only use three digits?

“Would you mind asking around about both things? See if anyone knows what they are?”

“Sure,” he said.
“Can you tell me why?”

“Investigation,” I said.

He knew better than to ask for more, and I didn’t offer anything.
I hung up, packed up the ledgers from Laura as well as the other items, retaped the envelope
,
and set it in my briefcase.

I called Laura and told her I was returning the documents.
She sounded strained.
She said, “I’ve been getting hang-ups at home.”

“Any idea who it is?” I asked.

“None,” she said.
“It might not even be related to this.
For all I know it’s a wrong number.”

My stomach clenched.
She was right, but I worried that this had something to do with our case.
“Be careful,” I said.

“I always am,” she said, which wasn’t exactly true.
But I didn’t argue with her.
She was in a hurry, and so was I.
She asked me to leave the papers with Judith, since she would be out of the office again.

Then I got back into the van and headed uptown.
The tail followed me.
I wished Jimmy was in the van, so he could tell me if the driver was the same man.
I had no way of knowing.

I headed to
Twenty-first
and Wabash.
It was a desolate part of town, near the Coliseum where, in June, the SDS
had held their convention.
The Coliseum was a decaying wreck, obviously built in the previous century and not maintained.

Most of the buildings in that area hadn’t been maintained either, not even the one at 2128 South Wabash, the address on the business card. That building was relatively new — built or remodeled in the forties or fifties
,
I would have guessed — but not touched since.
It looked like it was about to tumble down.

Nothing on the building read Colosimo’s.
Not a faded sign, not paint on the corner.
The building did house a restaurant, but it had been closed for a long time.
The windows were soaped and covered with dirt, and the door had been padlocked shut.

A dead
end, which was not a surprise, given the age of the money, the age of the letter, and the age of the bodies.
So far, the indications that I had
were
that the skeletons had been in that tomb longer than forty years.
They’d been put inside in the teens, not the twenties.

I drove over to Michigan and went back to the library.
I had a hunch that I would spend a lot of time here over the next few days as I worked the identification part of this case.
I wished I was still in Memphis or even Atlanta.
I knew the history of those cities as well as I knew my own.

Chicago, pre-1950 or so, was a true mystery to me.

Once again I parked near a meter rather than go to the parking garage under the Conrad Hilton like I would have done had someone not been tailing me.
I grabbed the briefcase and headed into the library.

I had planned to go through the same routine as I had the day before, but the library’s information desk actually had someone staffing it and no one stood in line to talk with her.
I decided to take advantage of that small bit of luck.