Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  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.”

  I was the one who had initially helped her find out how much of a son of a bitch her father had been, and I still felt guilty about it. Sometimes I think it might have been better for her to never have come to Memphis, to have stayed in Chicago and done the charitable good works society expected of her.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  “Oh, God.” She rested the knuckles of her right hand over her mouth. I wasn’t even sure she realized she was doing it. Then she moved them away, grabbed her napkin and dabbed at what was left of her lipstick.

  I wanted to tell her we could stop right here, that we could ignore the problem. But we couldn’t. Not with three bodies in that basement. Someone else would find them. Or worse, no one would ever find them again.

  “It was the first property my father bought,” she said.

  I let out a small breath. I had hoped, for her sake, that the property had been newly purchased.

  “He bought it in 1940,” she said.

  A long time ago. Maybe even before the bodies went into the basement.

  She said, “He got some help with the financing.”

  “Who helped him?”

  She shook her head. “That’ll take more digging.”

  “I thought you told me that you lived in an apartment — a walk-up, if I remember right — during the war.”

  “We did,” she said.

  The waitress came back with water and a cup of coffee for me. Then she moved on to a group of freshman who were trying to study for their first exam. Economics 101. The matching textbooks littered the table, as did notebooks and piles of folders.

  No one else sat close enough to us to overhear anything.

  “I don’t understand all of it,” Laura said as the waitress took the students’ orders. “But let me tell you what I found out.”

  I nodded.

  “The house was built after the Great Fire and the same family lived in the place until the late thirties.”

  “That’s a long time,” I said.

  “Sixty years,” she said. “First the parents, and then a son who apparently inherited. He remained single, died in 1938, and then I don’t know what happened. I’m guessing he died without a will and there was probate, and everything went through the state courts. But that’s just a guess. It wasn’t in the files I saw, and I didn’t have time to look elsewhere.”

  “I can check that out later,” I said. “I wouldn’t have to go by property address. I can go by his name—”

  “Gavin Baird,” she said, as if he didn’t matter. “My father bought the house in late 1940. His name is the only one on title, but there’re forms in the file that suggest he paid cash. I know that my folks didn’t have the money to pay cash for a house, and if they did, why did they rent an apartment then?”

  The waitress passed us with a laden tray of pies, shakes, and coffee. I didn’t have to look to know she was taking it to the students.

  “We know that your memory of the walk-up is correct because I spoke to the building’s owner,” I said, not waiting for the waitress to get out of earshot.

  “You did?” Laura seemed surprised.

  “In Memphis, when I was working for you.” I gave her a rueful smile.

  Someone cleared their throat. I looked up, startled. The waitress set down Laura’s soup and sandwich, sloshing some of the chicken noodle on the side of the plate. Then she slid the sub in front of me. Its spicy tomatoey smell made my stomach rumble.

  The waitress slapped the ticket on the table, then left. The moment left with her. Laura was focused on her soup.

  “You spoke to the building’s owner, and he remembered us?” she asked.

  I nodded, trying to recall all of the details of a conversation that had taken place nearly two years before. “He said he remembered because your dad ended up owning most of the city.”

  “Not most.” Laura crushed saltines into her soup. “But a lot.”

  “If I remember right,” I said, “that apartment was downtown.”

  Laura shook her head. “Bridgeport. Back of the yards. Daley country.”

  Every area of Chicago had its own name and its own history. Bridgeport wasn’t very far from our location in Hyde Park, and yet it could have been in another state.

  “Was the neighborhood still predominately Irish?” I asked. It was now, but not as much as it had been. I had even looked for an apartment in Bridgeport when I had first come to Chicago, not realizing, of course, that Jimmy and I were about as far from ideal Bridgeport neighbors as two people could get.

  “Yeah,” Laura said. “Mostly, though, I remember the stink.”

  Most of the yards were gone now, but Union Stock Yards remained. On a bad day, the odor of butchered animals could combine with the smoke from the steel mills to the south into one of the foulest odors I’d ever encountered.

  “So,” I said, lifting my messy sub, “your father had an apartment and a house.”

  She nodded. “That house was his until 1952, when he incorporated Sturdy. Then he listed it as one of the assets of the corporation.”

  “He sold it to the corporation?” I asked.

  She stirred her soup. “I couldn’t find any record of that. But we both know he ran separate books. The records might be destroyed, they might be somewhere else, they might be right under my nose. I didn’t have a lot of time, Smokey.”

  “I know.” I took a bite of the sub. It was greasy and drippy and excellent. I had discovered during the summer that this place had the best su
bs in Chicago’s South Side, which was good, because the other sandwiches here weren’t that great.

  “But the records are pretty clear. Sturdy rented the house from 1952 on.” She finally ate some of her soup. Then she sighed, as if she hadn’t realized how hungry she had been.

  I frowned, set down the sub, and wiped my mouth with the napkin. A lot about Laura’s discoveries bothered me. I couldn’t piece all the information together.

  “When did the house get converted into apartments?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Laura said. “I don’t think my father did it, although they were upgraded in the fifties — new appliances, some paint, things like that.”

  “What did you see? Invoices?”

  She nodded.

  “Any bricks and mortar.”

  “I looked,” she said after taking another bite of soup. “I didn’t see any brick or mortar on anything in that file. That stuff’s a mystery.”

  “How extensive is the file?” I asked.

  “The one in our offices is pretty scanty. It only refers to the buying and selling. I had to go down to the rental agent’s office for the rest of the records.”

  “How’d you sell that?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I have a key to everything. I didn’t tell anyone. I just went.”

  I nodded, then ate more of my sub. It probably hadn’t been the best choice for a meal that involved a conversation. I managed to use the few bites I’d taken to contemplate what she’d told me so far.

  “What about after your father died?” I asked when I could finally speak.

  “Everything stayed the same. Tenants in, tenants out. A few evictions, some notices, but no repairs even though there were some complaints. Most of the time the manager took care of it.”

  “When was the manager hired?” I asked.

  “Late forties,” Laura said. “My father owned a lot of properties by then, and he needed help managing them. He hired a rental agent for most of them, but he put Mortimer Hanley on-site.”

  “Was there an application in the files?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t tell where Hanley came from or who he replaced, if he replaced anyone. I got a sense, from some of the earlier documentation, that my dad posed as the live-in manager, but that’s not possible. He lived with us.”

  I ate the last of my sub. The students were arguing over whether Adam Smith’s laissez-faire doctrine led to the economic excesses of the late nineteenth century. No one at that table was listening to us, and the rest of the restaurant remained empty. Even the waitress had disappeared.

  “It might be possible,” I said after a moment. “I mean, who keeps track of the people in nearby apartments? Your father could have used the Queen Anne to run his fledgling business. Did he have another office?”

  She frowned. She had finished the soup and moved to the tiny half sandwich.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I never thought to ask.”

  “Maybe we should find out,” I said.

  “You think it’s important?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what’s important right now,” I said. “But your father was pretty involved with this building, more than I would have liked. Which means that we’re going to have to be careful. We can’t call the police to investigate.”

  I lowered my voice for this last. Even though the students weren’t listening, sometimes phrases like that caught people’s ears.

  Laura sighed and pushed her half-finished sandwich away. “I know. I keep hoping that all this stuff happened before my dad bought the place.”

  “Maybe it did,” I said. “We don’t know what happened after — Baird? — died.”

  “Gavin Baird,” Laura said absently.

  “And we don’t know anything about him, either,” I said. “So there’s a lot of unknowns before your father got the building.”

  “You really think those bodies—” and now she was whispering “—predate the 1940s?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said. “I do think it’s interesting that in one of Chicago’s highest crime periods, you can’t easily track what happened with the ownership of that house.”

  A hand reached down and took my plate away. The waitress had reappeared. She took Laura’s plate as well.

  “Dessert?” she asked, as if she really didn’t want us to have any.

  “Three pieces of apple pie,” Laura said. “Put one in a to-go box.”

  “Laura,” I said.

  She grinned at me. It was the first time all day that she looked relaxed. “You can tell Jim it’s from me.”

  “You’re going to spoil him,” I said.

  “I’m trying,” she said.

  She had always spoiled him, buying him things I couldn’t afford, taking him expensive places that made me uncomfortable, pushing to finance things from his schooling to his wardrobe. Usually I turned her down before Jimmy even heard what she planned, but this time I was going to let it slip. I wasn’t domestic by any stretch, and dessert was usually something out of a box.

  The waitress scooped up the ticket as if redoing it would ruin her day, and left us. I watched her go.

  “The way I see it,” I said, not quite whispering, “is that it’s too much of a risk to bring in the authorities.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I want to, though.”

  I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, she waved a hand at me.

  “I know the arguments,” she said. “I thought about everything we discussed on Saturday, and I agree. I signed on for all the problems. I’m the one who thought she could change the world.”

  “You are changing it,” I said. “Just by being who you are.”

  “The daughter of a one-time petty thief who didn’t even acknowledge her presence?”

  “A University of Chicago graduate who actually understands how to balance a bottom line and her ethics.”

  “The balancing act isn’t working well,” she said. “And now there’s this. If I were truly ethical, I would go to the police.”

  “The Chicago PD?” I said. “The Gestapo wing of the Daley administration? The ones who held a ‘police riot’ a year ago, and beat college students into unconsciousness? The ones who are shooting teenagers in my neighborhood because they could be gang members? Those people?”

  “They’re not all bad,” Laura said, “and you know it. Your friend Sinkovich—”

  “I’m still not sure I’d call him a friend,” I said.

  “He’s a friend,” she said. “He’s a good man at heart.”

  “With no power.” And I almost added that the other good man I’d known on the force had been murdered because he’d been following his own heart.

  “What are our options?” Laura asked. “If we don’t go to the authorities —”

  I noted that she didn’t say “can’t,” which was the word I would have used.

  “— then what can we do? Sturdy owns this building, and I can’t just let it rot. People would notice.”

  “Would they?” I asked. “The company’s done that in the past.”

  “Always with a plan,” she said. “Usually one to turn the property around when the building finally got torn down. Usually that was a way to avoid city regulations or zoning or something like that.”

  “Make up a plan,” I said. “Who would know that you didn’t intend to go through with it?”

  She glared at me. “And leave those unknown people in the basement?”

  I shrugged.

  “Smokey, even if I wanted to — and I don’t — they’d get discovered when we tore the building down.”

  “Years from now,” I said. “The building’s well made. It’ll last a while. And you’ll have solidified your position at Sturdy then. There’ll be a scandal, but by then you’d be able to weather it.”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. I’d wonder who those people were and what they did to deserve such a horrible fate.”

  He
r hand was clenched into a fist beside her water glass. I put my hand on top of her thumb.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “Ethics. I just gave you the chance to pretend you didn’t know any of this. I gave you a solution that a lot of CEOs would have taken, and you won’t do it.”

  “I’ll probably pay for it,” she said.

  “At least financially,” I said. “Because this isn’t something I can do alone.”

  The waitress came back with our pies. One piece was already in a little cardboard pie-shaped box, just waiting for Jimmy. Laura slid it toward me as she also grabbed the check from the waitress.

  “Smooth,” I said.

  “It’s a business lunch,” she said. “My business.”

  One of the students looked our way then. Apparently he had overheard that, and hadn’t been thinking we were having a business lunch.

  “You guys should really factor in John Maynard Keyes,” I said, letting the student know that I could hear his conversation too. “Or haven’t you gotten to him yet?”

  “It’s 101,” the student muttered, and blushed. Obviously, he had no idea who Keynes was.

  They all looked at us, then turned their chairs slightly, making it clear they were shutting us out.

  Laura grinned. “How do you do that?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Say the right thing to get people off your back?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a gift.”

  The waitress had watched the interaction too. “Now is there anything else?” she asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going on break,” she announced as if she thought we cared, and left us.

  Laura ate a bite of pie. I slid my plate closer.

  “Is there any way to tell how long those bodies have been there?” she asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose a specialist like a coroner or medical examiner can guess within a range of years or decades. I didn’t get a good enough look down there. Things in the basement might point us to a date as well.”

  “Things?” Laura asked.

  “Clothing, items in the pockets, or even the type of brick used, or mortar.”

  She nodded. “But we’re going to need an official eventually.”