My heart started to pound. When I’d found the booze storage in one of the other apartment buildings, the door had been hidden as well. I tried this door’s knob. The knob turned, but the door didn’t open. It had a lock beneath the knob, an old-fashioned lock that took an old-fashioned skeleton key.
There was only one such key on the entire ring.
I inserted it, and it turned easily, as if the door had been opened just the day before. The door pushed inward. The damp, musty smell that seemed like this building’s signature eased out of the back.
I sneezed again, then flicked the flashlight back on and looked.
Ahead of me, I saw a small open area, surrounded by more brick. I frowned. I had expected brick all along the far walls so that no one could see inside the windows, but I hadn’t expected a tiny room. Instead, I had thought I’d find a wide-open space filled with old boxes, broken furniture, or nothing at all.
I stepped inside. Piles of brick and mortar filled the room to my left. Tools were scattered along the concrete floor. The expected brick covered the far wall, hiding the window. But that brick wasn’t the same color or shape as the brick wall in front of me.
That wall seemed to have been built later than the far wall. As the flashlight played along the newer wall, I noticed that it was uneven. Some of the work seemed professional, but some of it was slapdash, as if the person who put the bricks on the mortar had never done that before.
That wall ran the width of the building, with no visible door. That didn’t make any sense to me. Or maybe it did, judging by the knot that was growing in my stomach.
To my right there was an alcove, with more brick in the back, where the window probably was. That brick wall formed a U that ended against the wall I had just come through.
I let the flashlight play on the ceiling, looking for one more light bulb, and finding it. Only this one had burned out and the cord looked frayed enough that I didn’t want to take one of the bulbs from the janitor’s shelves and replace it.
Instead, I relied on my flashlight. I turned it into the alcove, noting that the brick was uneven here, too. Then there was the section to my right. It was part of the uniform wall, but it had been bumped over the years. Mortar was crumbling out of it and falling onto the concrete floor. Near the bottom, some of the bricks had fallen inward.
I crouched and played the light inside. The space was open, more or less, like a little cubby hole. I eased the light along the crumbled dust, until it caught something yellowed.
Bone.
Long bones, like those found in the human leg.
I stumbled backward so fast that I nearly fell against the bags of mortar.
My heart was racing.
I’d been thinking of horror movies, that was all. I was in a dank, smelly basement with unexpected walls, and I was making things up.
I had probably seen a dead rat or a pile of trapped mice. Maybe an old pipe, covered with dust.
I made myself swallow, then took several deep breaths, hoping to slow down my heart rate and make the shock die away. I’d been on edge a lot lately, and it was simply showing because I was alone in a creepy house where a man had died just two weeks ago, alone and neglected.
After a few minutes, I felt calmer. I went back and played the light slowly.
The bricks, the crumbled mortar, the long yellow thing (like a bone or a pipe), and then next to it, a curved shape — a pelvis? — and an unmistakable skeletal hand. A rib cage leaned against the wall, and a spinal column that led all the way up to a recognizable human skull.
I started to pull out more bricks, then stopped myself. I had to leave this as intact as possible, at least until I figured out exactly what I was going to do.
Still, I crouched even lower and ran the light over every visible inch of that space. I saw a lot more bone crammed next to that first body, and saw at least two more skulls.
Three bodies.
What had I stumbled into?
I shuddered, afraid I already knew the answer.
THREE
I made myself leave the Queen Anne slowly, careful to turn off lights, close doors, and replace all the locks. I didn’t want anyone else stumbling onto my discovery, not before I talked to Laura.
I had parked my van in front of the house, and as I walked around the building, I brushed cobwebs, dust, and dirt from my clothes. Halfway down the narrow chasm between the house and the six-flat, I realized I had left my clipboard inside near the top of the stairs.
I decided not to go back for it.
The van was old and had a lot of miles on it. I’d been planning to trade it in on something else before winter came, but I hadn’t yet, and for the first time in a long time, I was relieved to see it. It looked so normal on that tree-lined street, familiar rust along the bottom of the frame, the windows half open against the early autumn heat.
Inside, papers from previous inspections were scattered along the bench seat, and even that mess looked welcome. I opened the driver’s door and climbed in, making myself breathe.
Bodies, hidden. At least three, in the basement long enough to decay, to become remains.
I had no idea how Laura was going to take this. Her father had left a life of petty theft in Atlanta shortly after she was born. He had brought her and her mother to Chicago, where he made a career of classier crime, using the corrupt building trade to make himself one of the richest men in the city.
He had sheltered Laura from his business dealings, sending her into the heart of Chicago’s upper class. She had been a staple of the society pages, especially after her marriage to the younger son of one of Chicago’s big department-store families. Her divorce had taken away some of her luster; by then her father was dead, and her mother was dying.
It wasn’t until Laura met me in Memphis that she learned about her father’s criminal past. Laura claimed she had come to terms with her father’s illegal activities, but I knew she hadn’t. She was now spending her life repaying all the debts he had accumulated, trying to reverse the damage he had done, one mistake at a time.
I had no idea what she would think of this, but I knew she would harbor the same fear that I had — that somehow her father was connected to those bodies in the basement.
I sighed, started the van, and made myself drive slowly to my neighborhood, which was south of Hyde Park, not too far away from the Queen Anne. Yet it seemed to belong to a different city altogether. I lived in the South Side proper, the part of Chicago that Mayor Daley referred to as the ghetto — or, when he was feeling charitable, the slums.
He, like so many other whites here, ignored the fact that Chicago had a thriving black community, one that had been here for as long as that horrible Queen Anne house. Daley used that community when he needed it for re-election, or political propaganda, but otherwise he considered us an urban blight to be eradicated, and he’d been doing a pretty good job — putting the Dan Ryan Expressway between us and his Bridgeport neighborhood, building housing “projects” where homes used to be, and refusing to spend federal monies to clean up the streets and the parks nearest to us.
Still, we managed to have a solid community here, and it was the one I had come back to during the summer after an abortive attempt to find a new home in another town. Jimmy and I had a nice apartment in a building full of nice apartments. We had good friends and people that we considered to be family not too far from us. Jimmy went to church every Sunday, staying in touch with that community, and he reveled in his after-school study program, which taught him the things the Chicago Public School system was supposed to teach but didn’t.
In the middle of the day, my street was pretty deserted. The sun beat down here, turning the grass a shade of brown and baking the ground hard. I had to be careful where I parked — street gangs repeatedly knocked out the streetlights, and the residents of the street promptly replaced them instead of waiting for the city crews that would never come.
I parked in front of the building. It was a turn-of-the-centu
ry apartment building, made of white brick. The tenants in this building kept it up, unlike some of the neighboring six-flats. This entire neighborhood had been built as rental housing way back when, and most of the places hadn’t been fixed up since.
After some of the apartments I’d seen in New York last July, I was happy to be here, in a three-bedroom that I could afford, with neighbors I could trust.
I went inside, and hurried up the worn wood steps to my apartment. The breakfast dishes still sat in the sink — it had been my turn to do them, but Jim and I had been running late, so I’d left them — and as a result the entire place smelled of spoiled milk.
The apartment’s main room had a half-kitchen, a small dining area, and a living-room section. We had separated them with the couch we had inherited from the Grimshaw family, who had had the apartment before us.
I leaned on the couch, picked up the phone, and dialed Laura’s office number from memory. Her secretary picked up and told me that Miss Hathaway was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed.
“Tell her to call me as soon as she gets out,” I said. “Tell her it’s important.”
When I hung up, I realized that I couldn’t tell her what I had found over the phone. I debated calling back and asking for a meeting of my own, then changed my mind.
Sturdy Investments had offices in the Loop. I wasn’t about to go up there right now. It had become one of the craziest parts of the city. For the past two days, white Chicago construction workers were staging demonstrations, protesting a federal plan to allow black construction workers into the labor unions. I’d been in riots that started over racial issues; this felt like it could be another.
And that wasn’t all. The Loop also had become host to the entire national press corp. The Trial of the Century, as they were calling it, had begun on Wednesday — eight people had been charged with conspiracy under a new federal statute. The government claimed that the eight had come to Chicago in the summer of 1968 with the intent to incite a riot.
The defendants, all famous and none of them from Chicago, represented such diverse groups as the Yippies, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers. Those groups were out in full force as well, holding rallies all over the city, protesting the unfairness of the charges, and the violence of the Chicago police.
I had vowed to stay out of the Loop until this media circus was over, but I wasn’t sure I could manage it. The current estimates were that the trial would last for several months.
I could at least stay away until the construction workers stopped looking for blacks to beat up.
Laura wouldn’t call back for a while, so I stripped out of my filth-covered work clothes and took a shower. Even though I’d only been in that house an hour or so, I was covered in dirt. It swirled down the drain and disappeared, making me shudder as I watched it go.
I’d gone through a lot of buildings for Sturdy, but none of them left me feeling as grimy as this one did.
By the time I got out of the shower, I still hadn’t heard the phone ring. I called Laura’s secretary back and asked Laura to come to dinner around six, stressing that our meeting was important.
Laura knew I wanted to see her, maybe rekindle the relationship that I had torn apart in the summer. If she didn’t come for me, maybe she would come for Jimmy, whom she loved.
The secretary took my message. I did the dishes, straightened the apartment, and got it ready for company. Jimmy would be happy when he learned that Laura was coming over.
A few minutes later, the phone rang. Laura said, without preamble, “Smokey, I can’t come tonight. I’m swamped. We have investigators here from the Model Cities program, and this whole construction worker thing is causing some problems within our ranks. The whole city’s up in arms.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I don’t want to come down there.”
“Can you just tell me? I’m sure we can find some kind of solution to whatever you’ve got for me without some kind of meeting.”
So different from how she’d been just six months ago. Then she, like me, looked for any excuse to get together.
“No,” I said. “I need to see you. You’ll understand why once I tell you what’s going on.”
She sighed theatrically. “It can’t be tonight. I’m supposed to take these bureaucrats to dinner and drinks and you know how it is.”
I didn’t, really. My jobs had never included wining and dining anyone. But hers did. It was just one of the many ways in which our lives differed.
“How about tomorrow, then?” I asked. “I’ll make us lunch.”
“Why don’t I meet you somewhere?” she asked. “Maybe—”
“Laura, we’re not talking about any of this at a restaurant. You need to come here.”
Something in my voice must have finally gotten through to her.
“This is serious,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Life-and-death serious?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Possibly.”
“You’re not leaving again, are you?” she asked.
“Laura,” I said, trying to keep the aggravation from my voice. “This is about work I’m doing for you.”
“All right then.” She sounded so businesslike. “How does one o’clock sound?”
Like the heat of the day. But I’d make it work.
“Perfect,” I said, and hung up before she could change her mind.
I wiped my hands on my pants and leaned against the back of my couch. I was nervous as a boy, and not just because of those skeletons in the basement of that Queen Anne.
I wanted to patch things up with Laura, and I wasn’t sure I knew how.
FOUR
Saturday dawned clear and warm, with just enough of a lake breeze to keep the heat from becoming unbearable. Jimmy slept in, which surprised me. He’d been thrilled to learn that Laura was coming for lunch, and in the past that would have gotten him out of bed before sunrise, cleaning and planning and bursting with excitement.
But he was moving into adolescence. When I got up at nine, he was sprawled across his bed, lying on the covers, his toes brushing against the floor. He was beginning to look more and more like the brother who had abandoned him, lanky and thin, and I was going to have a heck of a time keeping him in clothes.
I’d made potato salad the night before, and after I mixed up a green salad, there wasn’t a lot more for me to do until Laura arrived. I went into the backyard, moved the picnic table under the complex’s one shade tree — not that it would do much good at midday — and staked our claim with a tattered plastic tablecloth held in place with Jimmy’s battered American history textbook.
I woke Jimmy and then I paced, trying to figure out what the next steps were.
If this were a normal investment company in a normal city, I would have already called in the authorities and let them handle the investigation. But Sturdy’s shady past and Laura’s precarious hold on the company’s future didn’t allow me to follow the rules.
There was a good chance that the people who had put those bodies in the basement were still alive; there was an even better chance that some of them still worked at Sturdy.
If Laura’s father was connected to these deaths in any way, a lot of Chicagoans would believe that Laura knew about the deaths as well. The press would have a field day with it. They already felt that a woman heading one of the city’s major corporations was wrong; this would only compound the matter.
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 w
ould 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 appliqué 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.
Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 2