Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (34 page)

I hadn’t thought of that.
But all I said, in keeping with my pose as a man helping a friend, was, “Wow.”

“I can tell you a few things about the number, though,” she said. “The Calumet region was the Levee.
If I remember right, Capone’s number at the Lexington was a Calumet number.”

“How would you know that?”

“Trivia,” she said. “My husband always teased me about that.
He said if anyone wanted to know useless things, they should ask me.”

Then she flushed again.

“I think it’s fascinating
,
all that you know,” I said.

“Well, he never saw me reach my calling. I got this job after he died.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She nodded, then shrugged.
“Life never takes you where you expect, does it?”

No, it didn’t.
I never expected to be in Chicago, let alone working on a case that had such deep Chicago roots.

Which made me think of something.
In the South, the red
-
light district was often segregated.
Black women did not work in the same houses as white women.

I had no idea if the North was that way, so I asked.

She frowned.

“You mentioned white slavery, so I assume most of the prostitutes were white, and I know that Capone was.”

“So was Big Jim.
Everyone I mentioned,” she said, her flush growing.
“But the Levee was at the edge of what we call Bronzeville.
I even think the Everleigh became a boarding house for blacks, but I don’t know for sure.”

“Would the women who worked in these places be black?” I asked.

She shrugged.
“But this is Chicago.
And even if blacks weren’t patrons, they would have some work.
Maids, porters, drivers — unobtrusive work, you know.”

Then she shot me an apologetic look.

“I do know,” I said.
“It’s all right.
It’s past.”

“Is it?” she asked, and she fixed that non-librarian gaze on me.

I smiled.
“Sometimes.”

She smiled back.
“That phone number.
It’s early.
Real early.
If you can find a phone book from before 1920, it would help you.”

“Is there one here?”

She shook her head.
“No one saw those as important.
No one realized what kind of history they have.”

I sighed.
I hadn’t worked on a case this old.
I found it ironic that one of my favorite methods — using a phone book — would be as important to an old case as it was to a modern one.

“You know,” she said, “I have some resource books I can look in.
Can you give me that number again?”

I did, and she wrote it down.

“If they used it as advertising,” she said, “and they clearly did, some of the records should tell me.
I’ll check in the next few days.
I’m in the stacks for the next two days, but then I have the information desk again on Friday.”

“I’ll make a point of being here,” I said.

THIRTY-FIVE

I left Serena Wexler, my head spinning.
I had assumed
most of
those bodies were black.
Now, it seemed, there was a good possibility that
many
belonged to whites.
And, oddly enough, that made me uncomfortable.

I knew that the original owners of the house had been white and so had Hanley.
I had just assumed — probably because we were using techniques pioneered by civil
-
rights advocates — that the bodies we found scattered through the basement were black.

It made more sense for them to be white, given Sturdy’s involvement.
Given that the neighborhood had always been mixed, because of the University of Chicago.
Given the ties, however tenuous at the moment, to the Levee, which specialized in white graft, not black.

My assumption had been false, and I hadn’t even realized I held it.
I wondered how many other assumptions I held about this case that I hadn’t even realized I had.

I went out a side door, feeling a little uncomfortable.
In my zeal to talk with the librarian at the information desk, I hadn’t noticed if someone had followed me inside.
Then Wexler’s tales were so absorbing that I hadn’t looked around
to
see if someone suspicious lurked nearby.

I had no idea if I was being followed on foot or if, like yesterday, the tail waited in his sedan.
There was no way to find out either, without constantly checking over my shoulder, which would only show the tail that I knew I was being followed.

Since my contact with Sturdy was common knowledge, I
suppose
I shouldn’t have been worried that someone followed me to their building.

The clouds had grown dark since I had gone inside the library, and as I walked the few blocks to Sturdy’s offices, lightning flared against the blackness.
No thunder yet, so the storm was still miles away.

But I hated late
-
fall storms.
They felt wrong, like something left over from the summer, as if the weather gods couldn’t remember what season they were easing us into.

I hurried as the sky grew darker, noting that there were more protestors today outside the City Hall
-
County Building, where the trial was taking place.
The same signs made the rounds with a few new ones, including
Support the Moratorium!
and
Send Hayden to Vietnam
!

I wasn’t sure if that last was a joke or a lone voice of dissent in those protestors.
The moratorium was a nationwide march against the war in Vietnam.
Jimmy had already asked me if he could skip school and attend Chicago’s version.

Even though I didn’t want him to go, I didn’t say no.
Instead, I asked him how our friend Malcolm Reyner would feel, knowing that Jimmy was protesting the war Malcolm had chosen to fight.

Jimmy hadn’t answered me, but he hadn’t asked to attend any more either.
I wasn’t sure if the issue was done; we’d see about that tonight.

Laura wasn’t in when I arrived, so I left the package with Judith, giving her strict instructions to hand it to Laura the
moment she entered.
Judith nodded and promised she would.

Then I hurried back to the main doors, only to be greeted by a downpour.

Four other people huddled in the antechamber between the revolving door and the emergency doors, waiting for the rain to stop.
As the rain continued, more people joined us.

A man wearing a suit sidled up beside me.
His suit was dark and cheap, his shoes lacking a shine.
He had a crewcut, and I remembered Jimmy’s description of our tail.

“You Grimshaw?” the man asked softly.

A few people looked over at him, but most of them turned away when they saw who he was talking to.
Outside, thunder boomed so loud it shook the stone building.

“What’s it to you?” I asked.

“Just wondering.”

I didn’t respond to that.
I watched the rain grow heavier.
The water could no longer be called raindrops — there wasn’t enough space between the wetness.

“How come Fred Hampton visited you Sunday morning?”

So he was the tail, and he was beginning to think what I’d wanted him to think — that I was just a family man with an unusual job, trying to make ends meet.

I had to play this right to keep him away from me.

I looked over my shoulder at him, making sure I showed surprise.

“We keep an eye on Hampton,” the man said quietly.
Two other people stood close to us, both of them men.
I wondered if they were FBI or police as well.
I couldn’t tell just from a simple glance.

I made myself swallow hard, so that it looked like I was nervous.
“You know what I do?”

“I heard odd jobs.
Don’t know exactly what that means.”

I shrugged one shoulder.
“Painting for one client.
Helping someone move.
You know, whatever needs to be done.”

“Some investigating?” Another man, older, heavyset, asked that question.
He was one of the two standing near Crewcut.

“I look into things.
For friends. That’s all.”

“Heard Hampton wanted you to investigate a murder.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose.
Fred Hampton had promised me no one else would know about this.
I had believed him.
But he hadn’t been the only person at my apartment that day.
His bodyguard knew why he was there, and I hadn’t asked the bodyguard to make any confidentiality promises at all.

Rather than deny what Hampton wanted
,
which would automatically make me suspicious to these men, I lied.
“I don’t investigate murders.”

“How come Hampton thought you would?”

I shrugged.

Thunder boomed again, just as loud, with lightning right on top of it.
The lights inside the building flickered.
The rain was still coming down heavily.
I couldn’t even see the protestors across the street.

“So he didn’t hire you?” Crewcut asked.

“There was no reason to.
I didn’t have the expertise he needed.”

“Odd he would talk to you if you didn’t have the skills, don’t you think?” Older Guy asked.

“Not really,” I said. “I get recommended for jobs I can’t do all the time.
Usually I refer those people to someone else.”

“Who’d you refer Hampton to?”

“I told him there were some good detective agencies in the Black Belt.
He didn’t ask who they were and I didn’t volunteer.”

“You think he’s going to hire them?”

“You’re the ones following him.
You probably know better than me.”

Crewcut gave me half a smile.
Older Guy looked annoyed.

“You know what murder he wanted looked into?” Crewcut asked.

“Sato? Soto? Kid killed over a traffic light.
Hampton said no one would investigate.”

The two men looked at each other.
I wondered if I should have played that dumb.
Would they think everyone knew about the Soto brothers?

“You said no.”

“And asked him to leave before my son got home,” I said. “I didn’t want my boy to see the Black Panthers at my house.”

That got a lot of people’s attention.
I had spoken too loudly.
I hadn’t planned to, but it didn’t matter.
They eased away from me and the three FBI/cops, and let us finish the conversation.

“You scared of the Panthers?” Crewcut asked.

“I don’t want my son involved with gangs,” I said, which was a true answer. It also covered my ass in case these were Chicago PD officers.
Since I had acquaintances in the police department, these men might have heard about my encounters with the Blackstone Rangers and how I convinced them — at least in the short term — to stay away from Jimmy.

“So you avoid gangs too,” Crewcut said.
I didn’t like his flat tone.
It implied that he already knew the answers.

“I try to.
Every now and then I have to remind them that they don’t have automatic rights to the kids in the neighborhood.”

“How do you do that?” Older Guy asked.
He actually looked interested.

I smiled.
I made sure the smile was slow and cruel.
“I did some street fighting in my day.
I know how to hurt a boy and impress him.
I did that once to a Ranger, told him that going after my son was like he was walking on my turf, and I told him I’d defend my turf just like he defended his.
I suggested a truce, and they agreed.”

“Why would they?” Crewcut crossed his arms.
The story made me guilty of something, in his mind.

“They like things easy,” I said.
“I made it clear that taking my son would be hard.
It’s that simple.”

“And you know this how?” Crewcut asked.

“I do some volunteer work with my cousin Franklin.
It includes some gang reclamation. I’ve been told by former members what works and what doesn’t.”