Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (5 page)

“Yeah, but I don’t know if he got the key as part of a key ring that opened everything in the building or if he was in charge down there.
I didn’t have enough time to investigate that.”

She stopped moving her glass.
She took a final sip, then set it
aside t
oo.
“What’re you afraid of, Smokey?”

“Your father,” I said softly.

She leaned her head back.
“You think he was behind this?”

“I don’t know, but he owned the building.”

“He’s been dead almost ten years.
There’s no proof—”

“These three bodies have been down there for a long time,” I said.
“I’m no expert.
I don’t know if it takes five years or ten years for a body to completely decay, particularly in a bricked-off part of an old basement.
But I think there’s a good chance that those bodies were placed there before your father died.”

She bit her lower lip, clearly thinking.
“If my dad knew about it—”

I thought it was interesting that she didn’t think he was involved, just that he knew.
My understanding of the old man was that he had an incredible ruthless streak.
We had no proof of murder yet in the things he’d done, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

“—then his partners knew about
it
too.”

His partners.
The men Laura had bested in her takeover of the company.
They had hated her, underestimated her, and fought her all the way.
She had fired them, but she hadn’t fired all their minions.
Too many layoffs in the beginning of her tenure as CEO would have scared the shareholders.

“If the old partners do know and get wind of this,” I said, “then they’ll fight to protect themselves.
They’ll fight dirty.
They’ll blame you.
Even if it comes out that you had no ties to those bodies, the damage will have been done.”

A crease had formed on her forehead.
She was thinking hard, going through the same implications that had disturbed me since the day before.

I continued, “You might lose your position, and all the good that you’re doing with it. Or worse.”

“Worse?” she asked.

“People who commit murder aren’t afraid to commit another to cover the first.”

She let out a small breath.
“You think we’re in that kind of danger?”

“I have no idea,” I said.
“I’m just looking at worst case.
Best case, these bodies came from some Prohibition murder, and we call the police to deal with them.”

“But you don’t think so,” she said.

“I have no idea,” I said.
“I really don’t.
Not yet.”

“What about the manager?” she asked.
“Could he have placed the bodies there?”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead.
Even in the shade, it was too hot for me.

“It’s possible,” I said.
“But we can’t turn the investigation over to the police until we have some idea what we’re dealing with.
Does anyone know that I was at the building?”

I had always worked directly for Laura, not for Sturdy and not with anyone else’s approval.
She wasn’t supposed to tell anyone in the company what buildings I was inspecting, but we hadn’t confirmed that in a long time.

She shook her head.
“I didn’t tell anyone you were going there.
I didn’t even mention that someone was going to inspect it.”

“Good,” I said. “We’re going to have to keep this between the two of us, at least for the time being.”

She looked at me, her blue eyes troubled.
“What’re you going to do? See the extent of what we have?”

“I’m not qualified for that,” I said.
“If we mess with it too much and then turn it over the police, we’re tampering with evidence in a possible murder investigation.”

“I thought we weren’t going to the police,” she said.

“Not yet,” I said.
“We have to find some things out first.”

She frowned, not quite with me.

“You’re going to have to go into the company records, find out when your father bought the place, whether he spent any time there—”

“That’ll be in the file?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Can’t you get the land history at the courthouse?” she asked.

“The less I’m involved at this stage, the better,” I said.
“We don’t want anyone to know that we’re looking into this.
If someone still connected with Sturdy does know about this, then they might do something if they think we’ve found the bodies.”

She nodded.

“So find out how long this building has been owned by Sturdy. For all we know, the company might have bought it in 1965, which takes your father off the hook.”

“But not the company itself,” she said.

“We don’t know that,” I said.
“You’re new management.
If the building is a recent acquisition, then you can report what you find without tainting.
If your father was involved, that’s different.
That’ll taint you automatically.
Everyone’ll assume you knew because you’re his daughter.”

She rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger.
She looked tired.
“Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days when I thought he was just a rich, reclusive man.”

I understood that.
I’d learned a lot of things over the years that I wished I hadn’t.

She nodded.
“What else should I look for in those files?”

“How long the manager lived there,” I said.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Look to see who owned the place during Prohibition,” I said.
“We’ve found enough old stills and liquor
-
storage places to make this less unusual than I would like.”

“God,” she said, shuddering.
“You think this is a planned burial site.”

“I know it is,” I said.
“I just don’t know the extent.
And if it’s planned, then it’s got to be tied to some kind of criminal activity.”

“Or one crazy guy,” she said, obviously thinking of the manager.

“Or one crazy guy,” I agreed.
Only I wasn’t sure the manager was our suspect.
I had already voiced my doubts about Laura’s father.
If I had to place money on who put the bodies in that basement, I’d bet on him.

“If I order up the files,” she said, “everyone’s going to know what I’m doing.
I’m going to have to do this work on my own.”

“And leave no fingerprints,” I said. “Don’t move anything in the files, don’t even take the files out of their storage area.
Try not to disturb anything near them.”

“What if I find something unusual?”

“Like what?” I asked.

She shrugged.
“I don’t know.
Something implicating someone.”

“We’ll worry about it if you find it,” I said.
“I just want to know what the possibilities are.”

She studied her hands for a long moment.
“What are we going to do if this predates my father’s death?”

“I don’t know,” I said.
“But while you’re looking up the building’s background, I’ll try to figure something out.”

FIVE

I had made it sound like I knew what to do next, but I really didn’t.
I hoped that Laura would find that the previous management team had bought the building a few years ago, and we wouldn’t have to consider her father as a suspect at all.
More than anything, I wanted to leave those bodies in the hands of the police.

But I had a hunch that wouldn’t happen.
So I spent the next few days getting my other cases in order.

I worked for a number of different organizations, doing investigations, most of them routine.
I charged less than the leading black detective agency, but I also made it clear to my clients that they would get
less
too.

I wasn’t licensed — I didn’t want any arm of local government to investigate me, even with my excellent fake identification.
My real name is Smokey Dalton, but everyone in Chicago, with the exceptions of Laura, Franklin and Althea Grimshaw, and Jimmy, thought I was Bill Grimshaw, Franklin’s cousin.
I’d been using that identity for more than a year now.
Jimmy was registered in school as James Grimshaw, and he had adopted that name as his own.
I think sometimes he forgot that his real last name was Bailey, which was fine with me.

Most of my cases dealt with insurance fraud, or building inspections, or petty theft.
Occasionally I took on individual cases as well, although I didn’t have one at the moment.
I was grateful for that.

It meant I could concentrate on the Queen Anne if I had to.

In the meantime, I wrote reports, mailed invoices, and closed every pending case that I had.
If this case for Laura came to nothing, I would have to scramble for work in October, but that was all right.

My financial situation was a lot less precarious than it had been the year before, when Jimmy and I fled Memphis for Chicago.
I had a savings account in Memphis, one that my friend Henry Davis put money from the rental of my house into, but I hoped to use that as Jimmy’s college fund.
With Jim’s recent talk of Yale, I was beginning to think I would need that fund more than ever.

By late Tuesday, I still hadn’t heard from Laura.
I knew she’d been busy with the construction demonstrations and the Model Cities representatives.
I had a hunch she hadn’t found a private moment to visit Sturdy’s files.

I didn’t want to call her, though. I didn’t want to draw any more attention to this than I had to.

I also wanted to continue avoiding the Loop.
If anything, the city had gotten crazier in the last few days.
Even though Mayor Daley ordered an end to the construction demonstrations — he brokered a meeting over the weekend between the white construction workers’ union and the black coalition members — the Conspiracy Trial kept the Loop too active for me.

Laura’s call finally came early Wednesday morning.
We decided to meet at student hangout we liked near the University of Chicago.
She was curt and businesslike, and I couldn’t shake the underlying feeling that she was upset.

The hangout was on Fifty-seventh, near some bookstores and funky student shops.
The food wasn’t stellar, but the ever-changing mix of students and professors that went through the restaurant guaranteed that no one would notice me or Laura.

It was the perfect place for a quiet conversation.

She was already sitting at a table beside the pie counter, as far from the pinball machines as she could get.
A dingy
,
half-full water glass sat near the battered menu that she was staring at.
She wore a short blue sheath that showed her legs to great advantage.
Her
blond
hair was pulled back and her makeup was heavier than I liked.

Her business attire made her look, here in this place, like an eager young professor who hadn’t learned the university’s laid-back dress code.

“Hi,” I said, slipping into the chair across from her.
“Order yet?”

She shook her head, then smiled at me.
The smile was wan.
“Not that hungry.”

“You’ll have to have apple pie or Jimmy’ll never forgive you,” I said, sliding that battered menu toward me.

She laughed, reluctantly
,
it seemed.
But she understood my reference.
Jimmy loved this place
,
for the pinball mostly
,
but also for the pie.
And apple was fresh today.
Soon they’d move into pumpkin season, and I wouldn’t be able to keep him away.

“Maybe you should take a piece home for him,” she said.

“Maybe I should,” I said in a tone that meant I wouldn’t.
The waitress came by.
She was an older woman whom I’d seen before. She looked like she had worked in this place since the university opened its doors in the
nineteenth
century.

I ordered a meatball sub, then nodded to Laura.
She ordered chicken noodle soup and half a turkey sandwich, then waited until the waitress left before looking at me again.

“I hate this,” Laura said.
“I lived for nearly thirty years before I found out that my father was a son of a bitch, and now I can’t seem to get away from it.”