Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (45 page)

“It was theirs too, Mr. Morality.”

“And they should’ve been taken off the force.”

“It was 1919, you moron.
Things only got worse in Chicago.
And you think they take dirty cops off the force now? Hmmm?”

“That’s your excuse?” I asked.

“Who’s gonna listen to me?
Especially then.”

“How about the
Defender
?
It was being read all over the country.”

“And what woulda happened? Everyone woulda said tough luck. Some stupid Nigra got himself caught skimming a rich white boy.
What did he expect? And what can we do about it?
Next page.”

I stood up.
I still had questions for him, but I couldn’t sit with him any longer.
He disgusted me, and he knew it.

“Besides,” he said, his voice trembling with rage
,
“He wasn’t worth it.”

I looked at him.
He was halfway out of that armchair, the blanket in a jumble on the floor.
He hadn’t talked about this in a long time, and he clearly felt the need to justify himself to me, somehow.

“Your brother wasn’t worth the fight?” I asked.

“Maybe if he’d been some upstanding citizen, but he wasn’t. He was a low skunk who hurt women and stole from people he shouldn’t’ve.
I tried to get him out of there. I tried to talk to him.
H
e
didn’t listen.
He laughed at me.
He said it was rubes like me what got the short end, not a B.T.O. like him.
He told me to crawl back in my hole and not bother him again, and I did it. I didn’t want nothing to do with him, and if he was going to kill himself using a police-issue, it wasn’t my problem.”

I threaded my way through the slang, still standing.
I hadn’t heard a lot of it since I was a boy.
“B.T.O.,” I said finally.
“A Big-Time Operator.”

“You may be slow, but you ain’t stupid.” He lowered himself back into the chair.
Either his anger was easing or he was getting tired.

“You expected him to suicide by cop?” I asked.

“I don’t think it was that calculated, but yeah. I expected him to die in one of them shoot-outs that was becoming more and more popular.
I didn’t expect a quiet beating on a back road.”

“You’re sure that’s what happened?” I sat down again as well.

“No, I’m not sure. I told you. I’m guessing.
You don’t think that’s what happened, and you ain’t revealing why.”

“He was found with two other bodies,” I said.

“You’re admitting it’s him now, not just using me as a means of identification.”

“You said—”

“I know what I said,” he snapped. “And you don’t think he was beat to death.”

“One of them had been shot in the head.” I didn’t know which one yet. I hadn’t even thought to ask Minton if he knew.

“Shot.” He leaned back, tilted his head away from me and looked at the empty television screen.
I could see our reflections in it, distorted by the bubble-shape of the glass.
I looked round with a small head and he looked thinner, as if he were being pulled in a thousand different directions.

“We think the other two were Zeke Ellis and Junius Pruitt.”

He closed his eyes.
“That explains it,” he said in a small voice.

“Explains what?”

He opened his eyes, reached down
,
and pulled the blanket back over his legs.
Then he smoothed it long after the wrinkles were gone.

“Explains why he begged for his life,” Talgart said.
“I always thought Lawrence woulda laughed when someone threatened to kill him.
I knew he would
’ve
. I saw it once.
So I couldn’t understand why he begged.”

“He would’ve begged for his friends?” That didn’t sound like a hopeless case to me.

Something of that must have come through my voice because Talgart glared at me.
“You’re mighty judgmental, son.”

“And you picked up some neat verbal tricks from your white colleagues,” I said. “I’m not your son.”

He tugged at the blanket, not looking at me any longer. “Those three were trouble together.
Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it
,
because Ellis disappeared right at the same time, and so did Pruitt.
But their families had reasons for believing them gone.
Never put it together.”

“You think Rice and Dawley threatened the others, trying to get Lawrence to give them the money?”

He shrugged. “Or maybe give them some information, or maybe they were just playing.
I don’t know.”

“But they didn’t get the money,” I said.
“Did they find it in the search of the apartment?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Didn’t ask. But they laid offa me.”

“I heard that Baird lost his fortune by then.”

He grinned.
The grin was a mean one.
“Just cause his trained watchdogs found the money don’t mean they gave it to him.”

“They weren’t well trained, then, were they?” I said.

“They were just like everyone else back then.
Out for themselves.”

Like you,
I thought, but didn’t say.
I’d antagonized him enough.

“You said Rice and Dawley are dead,” I said. “Is there anyone else still around who might know what happened?”

“Not that I know of.” He gave me a superior little smile.
It made my skin crawl.
“You’re such a hero.
You got long-dead victims and long-dead perpetrators.
It’s ancient history, hero.
No one cares.”

“I care,” I said as I stood and headed for the door.
“Which is more than anyone could ever say about you.”

FORTY-FIVE

I left, feeling very unsettled. I had driven nearly five blocks from Talgart’s apartment before I realized that I hadn’t asked him for Rice and Dawley’s first names.

Talgart had gotten to me.
He had intended to upset me, but he had upset me in ways that he hadn’t even realized.
He was the kind of man who had irritated me all my life: the grateful black man who had his job and his minimal acceptance in the white world, a man who was willing to bow and scrape and ignore to keep that relatively meaningless position.

He was a house nigger — which was exactly what Fred Hampton had called me when I had refused to take the Soto case.
And
that
was what had upset me — a nagging feeling that I finally understood where Hampton had been coming from.

Talgart and I both knew the risks of getting involved in these cases, and we both knew there wouldn’t be any rewards except the satisfaction of a job well done.
And maybe not even that.
Maybe the only satisfaction would be knowing what had happened, knowing down to the minute detail, rather than in broad strokes.

But Talgart had been trying to protect his work and himself. I had been trying to protect Jimmy.
I would have argued with anyone that my reasons for staying away from the Soto case were better than Talgart’s were for staying away from his brother’s.

But were they?
Hampton probably wouldn’t agree. Hampton, who had a baby on the way and presumably a wife somewhere.
He had already given up a scholarship to college to work for black people in his own way.

From his point of view, I hadn’t given up anything.

He didn’t know that I was living in Chicago under an assumed name, having abandoned my own family — my adopted parents, my friends, and my home in Memphis — to take care of a boy who wasn’t even my blood child.
That’s why Jimmy came first.
Because if our identities got revealed, he would die.

I didn’t see anything similar in Talgart’s life, but I was judging from fifty years distant. Fifty years distant and based only on an afternoon’s conversation.
A conversation that did reveal a family side to him as well.

He
’d
wanted to bring his mother and sisters here, and he hadn’t done so until his brother’s death. Talgart had said that Lawrence wouldn’t beg for his own life, but he would beg for his friends.
Given that, he might have begged for his family’s too.
And the only thing that had saved his brother Irving from the same fate that Junius Pruitt and Zeke Ellis had suffered was the fact that Irving Talgart had been a cop.

My hands were shaking on the wheel.
I didn’t remember the last few blocks I’d driven.
There was no way to know other people, not deep down, not their motivations, not their rationalizations.

Talgart had been right.
I was being judgmental, based on very little evidence.
Just like Hampton had been with me.

There was an element of truth to Hampton’s assumptions, and there was an element of truth to mine.

Just not the whole story.

About six blocks away from the Queen Anne, I finally remembered to look for a tail.
I didn’t see one, but that didn’t mean a thing.
I hadn’t been watching, so I wouldn’t know if the same car had been behind me for the last mile.

I went around two separate blocks, narrowly avoiding college students on bicycles hurrying toward their late
-
afternoon classes.
Still no one.
So I made my way to the Queen Anne,
put on the coveralls inside the van — in the back, away from the windows — and hurried inside.

When I reached the secret room, I announced myself by saying, “Give me some good news.”

LeDoux popped his head around a corner to my left.
He was covered in brick dust that made his pinkish skin a deep red.

“We actually have some,” he said.
“With the exception of the body in B, all the others come with identification.”

I blinked, not expecting that at all.
I had feared that I would be spending weeks of my life following bread crumbs, just like I had the last few days.

Minton peeked out of E.
He was covered in dust too, but he didn’t look quite as sloppy.

“These guys were just tossed in here, wallets and all,” he said.

“The last time the wallet didn’t have any identification,” I said.

“Driver’s licenses,” Minton said
,
as if they were the holy grail.
“Sometime between Suite B and Suite C the state started requiring driver’s licenses, and men started sticking them in their wallets.”

“You’re calling these things suites now?” I asked.

“It’s better than using the word tomb.
We could slip up in outside conversation, and then we’d all be in trouble.”

“It looks like you got pretty far,” I said. “I thought this would take you days.”

“I left the skeletons for later,” Minton said. “I photographed everything so far, but as for packing up, I’m doing the intact guys first.”

I winced at the thought of those bloated decaying corpses being considered “intact.”

“Figure out yet how come some of these guys aren’t as decayed as the others?” I asked. “Or is it a mystery like the way the decay worked with the letters?”

“The letters aren’t a mystery,” LeDoux said. “At least one was in that wallet, which protected it. The other one wasn’t really close to the third body.
It got protected by the wall and some other fiber, something I haven’t identified yet.”

How typical that he would answer the second question, which I had only meant as rhetorical, and ignore the first.

Minton waited until LeDoux was through, throwing me a private grin as he did.
Then he said, “It’s no mystery why these bodies are in different condition.
It’s the same reason the walls were built differently.”

I waited.

He smiled, a young, proud-of-himself smile.
“C’mon, Bill. It’s obvious if you think about it.
They died at different times.”

“I knew that.
I know they weren’t all killed together
,
because if they had been they’d’ve been buried together.”

“No,” Minton said. “Different times, meaning different decades.
I figure the span between Suite A and Suite E over here has got to be at least thirty
years, maybe more.”

I felt slightly dizzy, as if I couldn’t catch my breath.
“What?”

“The guys in Suite E died ten to twenty years ago.
The guys in Suite A died forty to fifty years ago.”

“In 1919,” I said. “They died in October of 1919.”