Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (43 page)

And that was the problem he had with sensitivity.
He tried, and usually failed.

“People is good,” I said.

“I’m doing you a favor,” he snapped.

“I know,” I said. “I appreciate it too.”

“So you know, the department ain’t in the habit of — or at least wasn’t in the habit of — recognizing the work of
people
,
not until the last few years, and even then the rumor is that they only get the commendations when they’re being run out or getting too much media attention.”

“Yeah,” I said dryly.

“Didn’t know if you knew that,” he said. “What it means is that I can’t tell from his record how good a cop he was, but he looks okay — at least on paper.”

“That’s good to know,” I said, and meant it.

“Wasn’t able to look up the other thing for you, though.
Tried, but half the crap isn’t filed yet or in the right place.
So I’ll get back on it soon’s I can.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’d rather be chasing your paperwork than putting on this monkey suit,” he said
,
and hung up.

Since he wore a suit every day to the precinct, I didn’t know quite what he meant.
But I did know that some of the detectives had their suits for work and their suits for court. And Sinkovich had mentioned that he was going to the courthouse today.

I just hoped it wasn’t more hassle with the divorce.

I rousted Jim, took him and the Grimshaw children to school, and then picked up LeDoux.
No one followed me — or at least the tail wasn’t obvious.
When we got to the Queen Anne, LeDoux pressed me into service for the first few hours of the morning.

I hadn’t been in the secret room for nearly two days. I was surprised at how much he’d gotten done.
He’d pulled down some of the bricks himself in front of the B, C, D, and E sites, but he was having trouble with F, G, and H.
Whoever had done the brickwork there had been a master craftsman compared with the earlier sites.

So I labored at pulling down brick to enable LeDoux to go inside the tombs.
I tried to ignore the bodies facing me in each site, wondering who they were and who they had left behind.

Wondering what their connection was to Pruitt, Ellis, and Talgart, and to Baird or Hanley.

After LeDoux finished with the F, G, and H sites, he would need Minton.
He would also need me to see what was on the back walls of those tombs — or perhaps better stated, what was behind them.

Neither of us really discussed much more than that.
I couldn’t imagine working down here, alone like he had
t
he last few days, with only the dead for company.

He told me he was used to it, but I wasn’t sure how anyone got used to that kind of work.

I certainly knew I couldn’t.

FORTY-FOUR

After I finished helping LeDoux, I went to Poehler’s. The basement work area was filled with bodies, most of them elderly, most of them, Minton told me, part of the weekend
funeral
schedule.
He was buried — quite literally — in work.

But he promised me he’d come to the Queen Anne the following morning.
He’d gotten permission to spend his afternoons and evenings at Poehler’s, so long as he arrived around two.

He also told me that Minnie Pruitt had come in, demanding to see her husband.
Minton hadn’t let her, nor had he told her where the body was found.
But he did show her the wedding ring he’d found near the fingerbones.

“I think from the way she cried,” he said, “that we have a positive identification.”

I nodded, thanked him for keeping the location quiet, and promised to pick him up in the morning.
Then I drove to the address Sinkovich had given me.

Irving Talgart lived in a rundown part of the West Side, not too far from some of Sturdy’s other buildings and the Black Panther offices.
He had a one-bedroom apartment in a converted house and it looked like he hadn’t left it in a long time.

“Neighborhood’s not safe anymore,” he told me as he led me inside the overheated apartment.
The weather had turned cold the last couple of days, but not that cold.
The steamy temperature of the apartment made me feel like I’d entered a sauna.

A smelly sauna.
Two cats draped over newspaper piles like they’d been the ones who’d read every single word.
I assumed the smell came from their unattended litter box.

Talgart pointed to an empty space on the cluttered couch.
I gave it a quick once-over, hoping to avoid any cat accidents before I sat down.

He sat in an armchair positioned in front of the television set.
He pulled a blanket across his legs, and one of the cats leaped from the newspaper pile to
the
armchair and made its way to Talgart’s lap.

I said, “I’ve come about your brother Lawrence.”

Talgart started as if I’d used a forbidden word.
“What do you know about Lawrence?
You wasn’t even born when he died.”

The word “died” surprised me.
The women had thought the other two men had run off.
I wondered why Talgart knew what happened to his brother.

“When did he die?” I
asked.

Talgart put one bony hand on the cat’s back, gently pushing the animal down onto the blanket.
“October, 1919.
What a hell of a year that was.”

“Because of the race riot,” I said.

“And the bombings and going dry.
Then Lawrence finally gets what’s coming to him.” Talgart shook his head.
“I was happy when 1920 rolled in.”

“What do you mean, he got what was coming to him?” I asked.

“My brother wasn’t a nice man, Mr. Grimshaw,” Talgart said.
“He was the reason I became what I did.
I saw him hurt our ma, hurt us kids, hurt everyone who came in touch with him just because he was out to make a buck, and I vowed I wasn’t going to be a thing like him.
I hope to God I wasn’t.”

“But
‘
what was coming to him.
’
That’s harsh language.”

“You don’t anger the kind of people my brother angered without payback,” Talgart said.
“He got his.”

“I was led to believe no one knew what happened to him.”

Talgart rolled his eyes.
“We all knew.
They found that car of his in Orchard Place.
What they call O’Hare now.
It was just a field back then, but north of the city.
Folks like us didn’t go up there much.
We wasn’t welcome.”

“Like now,” I said.

“Not like now,” he snapped.
“You won’t get lynched if you go to the north suburbs.
There’s no way Lawrence drove up there.
No way.
Someone drove him.”

“Do you know who?”

“Yeah,” he said.
“Can’t prove it.
Never could.”

This was not the conversation I’d expected to have with him.
I’d expected it to be similar to the other conversations, filled with guesses and misinformation.

“Why can’t you prove it?” I asked.

“Need a body, son.
Or don’t they teach that to you in investigating school these days?”

I’d told him that I wasn’t a cop, that my investigation was private.
I’d worried about that too, because a lot of police officers didn’t respect private detectives.
But Talgart
had had no problem letting me in, and I had a hunch that dig would have remained the same whether I was a private detective or a police officer.

“I didn’t realize you hadn’t seen the body,” I said.

“Don’t play games with me,” he said. “There’s only one reason you’d be here.
You found Lawrence, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.
“We might have, but it might be someone else.
The body has no identification, and there’s not a lot to go on.”

“Body?
After all this time?” He gave me a sideways stare.
His eyes were clear, shining with intelligence.
I wouldn’t have wanted to face him in an interrogation room.
He would have seen right through me.

“That’s what I mean.
There’s nothing recognizable left.” I didn’t want to give him much more than that.
I was here to find out what he knew, not to give him information.

“So what makes you think it’s Lawrence?” he asked.

“Some anecdotal evidence,” I said, “and this.”

I opened my briefcase and removed the damaged letter. It was still in its plastic evidence bag.
I handed it to him.

He took it with two fingers.
“I thought you weren’t police.”

“I’m working with a forensic team,” I said.

“One of those off-the-book nightmares who thinks he’s knows what he’s doing?”

“A highly credentialed man who occasionally runs independent investigations,” I said.

“On crimes no one cares about.” He hadn’t looked at the letter yet. Instead, he was watching me.
“He’s out
-
of
-
state, is he?”

“He’s from out of state,” I said.

“Good thing.” Talgart brought the bag closer to his face. As he reached for the side with his other hand, I moved forward to tell him not to open the bag.

He saw the movement and smiled.

“I know, I know.
Don’t contaminate it.
Wasn’t planning to.
That paper looks too fragile to touch.”

He stared at it, as if he didn’t want to understand it, then his eyes moved as he read.

“Edwina,” he said softly.
Then a moment later he added, “And Lulabelle.
I haven’t thought of her for forty years.
Hated the Dickersons.
And Ma….”

He shook his head, then leaned forward, nearly knocking the cat from his lap, and handed the letter back to me.

“It’s not conclusive identification,” he said.

“I know that.”

“But judging from content, my sister Karla wrote it to Lawrence.
She would be the only one who’d call him dearest. The rest of us hated him.”

Those last two words had a vehemence that added to their veracity.

“Edwina was my momma’s cousin.
They were close as sisters. She died of some kind of female complaint — I suspect we’d call it a cancer of the female parts these days — and Momma insisted on staying with her until she was gone.
Then Momma came up here, along with the rest of the family.
I forgot she lived with Aunt Lula for a while.
We was saving up money to bring her.
Or I should say
I
was saving up money.
Lawrence was spending it as fast as he got it.
Then he got all the credit when the money arrived.
Ain’t it always like that?”

Apparently
,
in Talgart’s life it had been, and he hadn’t let go of it, even though the other players were long dead.

“Which is,” he said, “a long way of saying if you found that letter on his body, and I’m thinking from the stains you did, then you found my brother.
Where’d they put him?
A ditch somewhere?”

I shook my head.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

He narrowed his eyes.
“Something else going on?”

“I can’t tell you that either.
But I can ask you some leading questions.”

He inclined his head toward me, a regal movement that acknowledged I was giving him more information than perhaps he deserved.

“Did you or your brother know a Mortimer Hanley?”

“Can’t answer for my brother on most things.
We had pretty separate lives, and he died fifty years ago.
But I never heard of this Hanley.”

“What about Gavin Baird?”

To my surprise, Talgart smiled. “Yeah, I knew him.
Everyone working the South Side knew him.
My brother routinely bilked him of the fortune he inherited.”

“I thought you didn’t know about your brother’s business.”

“This one was hard to avoid.
Baird came into the precinct one night demanding to see me.
Now, if you knew Baird, you’d know he didn’t normally associate with anyone with dark skin.”

“Except your brother.”

“I can’t vouch for what Baird did on the Levee.
There folks went to be something they weren’t.
He slummed a lot, and men like him often dipped into the things they professed to hate.”