Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (4 page)

And then there were the police.
The Chicago Police Department was one of the most corrupt in the nation, and in the past, Sturdy had bought its share of policemen.
Laura had stopped a lot of those payments.
If this came out, the police wouldn’t hesitate in arresting her in a very public manner.
Or they might give her another choice: resume the bribes and any potential charges would simply disappear.

Laura wouldn’t like either option.
I was worried about all of this, and uncertain about how to present it to her
,
even though I knew she would understand the implications once I told her what I
’d
found.

I also didn’t want Jimmy to know that anything was wrong.

I already had the grill going by the time Laura arrived.
Jimmy’d been nurturing the bratwurst I’d splurged on, soaking it in beer and butter — something he’d devised after eating Althea Grimshaw’s hamburgers that way.

The afternoon already felt a little surreal to me: it had been a long time since Laura had come to my apartment for a meal.
One of the last times had been just before I left for the East Coast.
I’d grilled hamburgers and told her that we were leaving to work on an out-of-state case.
She figured out, almost immediately, that in addition to the case, I was looking for somewhere new to live.

The coals looked just about perfect when I heard a car door slam.
A few minutes later, Jimmy came around back, holding the bowl with the bratwurst in it.
Laura followed closely behind him.

She wore a pair of cut-off blue jeans, a white blouse covered with appliqu
é
flowers, and flip-flops.
She had pulled her blond hair away from her face, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
She had a light tan, which the white of her blouse accented.

She looked beautiful.

I set my tongs on the TV tray I’d set out beside the grill, and walked over to greet her.
She smiled when she saw me, but her expression was cool.

“Smokey,” she said.

“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“I’ve missed you.”

“Really?”

Jimmy looked back and forth between us.
When she dismissed my comment, he rolled his eyes, then shook his head.
He was siding with Laura — he had all summer — and he said I had to do something “really spectacular” to make things up to her.

I wasn’t sure anything would make things up to her, and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to try.
My trip to the East Coast had been the right decision for Jimmy and me, even if it hadn’t worked out.

I took the bowl of brats from Jimmy and carried it to the grill.
“One or two?” I asked Laura.

“Two,” she said with a smile.
“You know I can’t resist those things.”

I put six brats on the grill.
They sizzled as the wet meat touched the metal.
Smoke rose.
From this moment on, cooking became an art
form, and I was wedded to the grill until the brats
were
done.

I sent Jimmy back upstairs for the plates, buns, silverware, and potato salad.
Laura offered to help, but Jimmy turned her down.
He was trying to give us time alone, thinking this lunch was about our relationship, not about business.

I would let him continue to think that.
I really didn’t want him to hear about my discovery.

“What had to be discussed in person?” Laura stood next to me, out of the smoke, watching me turn the brats.

“The last house you assigned me,” I said.
“The one near Jackson Park where the manager died.”

Jimmy marched toward us, plates in hand.
He held the package of buns as well, and set them all on the TV tray beside me.
Then, without asking, he took the bowl which had held the brats and took it back upstairs.

“He’s becoming quite responsible,” Laura said.

“When he wants to be.”
I turned the brats again.
They were turning brown.
They had grill lines on their plump sides.

“What about the house?” she asked.

I looked at her.
She was still staring at the grill as if it provided all the answers.

I sighed.
There was no easy way to tell her this.

“I found three bodies in the basement,” I said.

“Jesus!” She jumped backward, as if I had put the bodies there.
“Did you call the police?”

“Not until I talked to you.”

Jimmy came back around the building, hugging catsup, mayonnaise, mustard
,
and relish to his chest.
He set those items on the picnic table, which was several yards from us.

“Does Jim know?” Laura asked quietly.

I shook my head.

“Bodies,” she whispered.

Jimmy came over to us.
He looked from me to Laura, sensing something wrong, and blaming me for it.

“Smoke tell you that we’re staying?” he asked Laura.

She blinked at Jimmy, then frowned.
Obviously the change of subject confused her.
“Staying?”

“In Chicago,” Jimmy said.
“He says we got a community here.
We got to stay for it.
It’ll help me grow up.”

Laura, bless her, made the transition.
She smiled at Jim as if nothing was wrong.
“Smokey says that, does he?”

Jimmy smiled back at her, as if they shared a secret.
“I know, I told him before we went that we got friends here, but sometimes Smoke’s got to see stuff for himself.”

Laura nodded, then looked at me sideways.
“He hadn’t told me that.”

“Figures.” Jimmy grabbed the bag of buns, opened it, and pulled one out.
Then he carefully split the bun and set it on a plate.

“You forgot the potato salad,” I said.
“And the green salad.”

“Yuck,” Jimmy said, and set his plate on top of the pile.
He headed back toward the apartment.

“You’ve got quite a defender,” Laura said.

“Actually, you do,” I said.
“He’s been calling me stupid and dumb and a real jerk ever since last summer.”

Laura was silent for a moment.
“You were just protecting him.”

I couldn’t tell if she believed that or if she was just parroting my own words back to me.
“I didn’t do a very good job of it.
There’s no place safe, at least for him and me.”

She put a hand on my arm, startling me.
I looked down at her.
Her gaze met mine for the first time since she arrived.

“You do better than most,” she said.

Yeah.
With my dangerous job that the entire community I’d come back to wanted me to quit, and my devil’s bargain with the local gangs, and my struggle to stay away from law enforcement.
Jim and I were a unit, but my side of it was iffy at best.

Laura walked to the TV tray, spread the plates out on it, and then took the rest of the buns from the package.
She split them, just like Jimmy had been doing.

“How long have they been dead?” she asked.

Now it was my turn to feel confused.
Then I realized she had gone back to the original conversation, the one about the bodies.

“I have no idea,” I said. “They’re skeletons, Laura.
And that’s not the worst of it—”

“We don’t got nothing but Thousand Island,” Jimmy announced as he came around the building.
He carried the covered bowls of potato salad and regular salad.
A nearly empty bottle of Thousand Island dressing rested precariously on top of the pile.

“I almost forgot,” Laura said. “I brought root beer.”

She headed around the building as Jimmy placed the last items on the table.
One of my neighbors peered out her back window, saw me, and waved.
I waved back.

“She forgive you?” Jimmy grabbed the grilling fork and poked at the brats.

I took the fork from him.
“It’s not that simple.”

“Yeah, you always say that.” He picked up a plate.
“These look done.”

They were.
I stabbed two and put them on Jim’s plate.
Laura brought a jug of A&W
R
oot
B
eer
,
ice cold from one of the nearby restaurants
,
and set it on the table.
Jim exclaimed his pleasure, and if she hadn’t already had his heart, she would have captured it right there.

I served up the remaining brats, then I put the lid halfway on the grill, hoping that none of the neighborhood kids would come and play near here while the thing cooled off.
Jimmy came over and got his plate.
I carried mine to the table, which sat in the middle of a pool of sunshine.
Laura had already found the tiny sliver of shade.

She gave me a glance, and I understood it.
We agreed
,
with just one look
,
to pretend we were having a normal picnic.
Neither of us wanted to discuss bodies in front of Jim.
When the meal was over I’d ask him to leave, and then I’d talk to Laura.

For the most part, she and Jimmy carried the conversation.
They talked about his schooling, particularly the after-school program.
Laura had helped me and Franklin Grimshaw find another teacher for the after-school program after Grace Kirkland decided she needed the year off.
Jimmy didn’t like his new teacher — she wasn’t Mrs. Kirkland, he’d say, as if that explained it — but he had a newfound seriousness, one that he’d acquired over the summer, when he walked through the gates at Yale.

I listened and ate my two brats smothered in relish.
Jimmy kept looking at me as if he expected me to jump into the conversation at any point, but I didn’t.
He and Laura didn’t get enough time together; I wasn’t going to get in the way.

Finally, Jimmy finished his brats, most of his potato salad, and enough of the green salad to impress me.
He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, then said, “Should I clean up?”

I raised my eyebrows.
He never volunteered for kitchen duty.
“Laura’s not finished yet.
And didn’t you want some dessert?”

He looked tempted for a moment, even though he knew we only had store-bought cookies.
Then he shook his head.
“I’m gonna go.
Is that okay?”

I had to work at suppressing my smile.
He really did want me and Laura to talk.

“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ll clean up.”

“Thanks.” He slipped away from the table so fast that it almost seemed like something was chasing him.

“Be back by five,” I called after him.
He waved a hand to show that he’d heard me and understood, then he disappeared around the front of the apartment building.

“He’s not very subtle,” Laura said, scraping the remaining potato salad onto her fork.

“But he means well.” I smiled at her.
She smiled back.
For a moment, we had a connection.

Then she looked away.
The mood changed, from the lighthearted, almost family-like conversation, back to something ugly.

“So,” she said with a sigh, “tell me about these bodies.”

I did.
I told her how I found them, and the fact that the entire basement looked built-up.
I suspected there were more than three skeletons down there.

“Bricked into the wall?” she asked, her voice low.
Even though we were the only people in the apartment building’s backyard, we were being careful.
We didn’t want anyone to overhear through an open window.

“The work down there is shoddy,” I said.
“And it differs from section to section.”

“You saw all that in one glance?”

“It’s hard to miss,” I said.
“Then there’s the remaining bricks and mortar.
Someone planned to continue the work.”

“But they stopped.”

I nodded.
“I don’t know if they stopped because they sold the building, or because they died
,
or because they moved out.”

Laura pushed her plate away.
The last part of her second brat would go forever unfinished.
She did take her glass of root beer and cup it between her hands.

“You said that
the
manager had a key to this room.”
She rubbed the sides of the glass so that it moved back and forth.