Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  Poehler’s Funeral Home was in a transitional neighborhood. The Blackstone Rangers claimed the area as their territory, and legitimate businesses were starting to thin out. But some old-timers remained, partly because they had been in the area for decades, and partly because their services were still needed.

  These days, Poehler’s probably had more business than it could handle.

  The building dominated one corner and made the street look more respectable than it was. I parked in the nearby lot, and as I got out, I realized that several nearby buildings had broken windows or were boarded up. Even more were covered with graffiti.

  But no spray paint had touched Poehler’s brick walls — or if it had, the funeral home had paid a pretty penny to get it scrubbed off. Unlike the Loop, which was filled with people, the sidewalk here was nearly empty, and littered with broken beer bottles. I avoided as much glass as I could, but still checked the bottom of my shoes before going inside the funeral parlor.

  The parlor’s doors were made of solid oak. I actually had to brace myself to pull the door open. As I stepped inside, the scent of lilies and formaldehyde greeted me, a scent that always sent me back to my childhood, to that hideous afternoon when the Grand had smuggled me into a funeral home in Atlanta to whisper my good-byes to my parents before he sent me to my family upstate.

  He’d taken me into the building hidden between four large, strong men — all vowing to protect me in case someone tried to take me away too. At the time, I didn’t know — I wouldn’t know for another twenty-nine years — that my parents had been accused of a major crime, and half of Atlanta’s black community wondered if they had done it.

  Even so, I had the community’s support. My parents had been lynched by a white mob, never able to prove their innocence or even to answer the charges. And that alone made them sympathetic in the eyes of the community.

  I squared my shoulders, and stepped along the dark burgundy carpet in the waiting area. A listing of this week’s viewings was on a board near one of the doors, and farther down was a hand-scrawled list of the funerals, their times and their locations.

  I was looking for a bell or some way to contact someone, when a man came out of the back room. He was wearing a black suit and a starched white shirt. He had a five-o’clock shadow and he looked tired.

  “How may I help you?” he asked in a low tone. Not too sympathetic, not too friendly. Perfect to deal with someone who might be grieving or someone who was simply there to ask for information.

  “My name is Bill Grimshaw,” I said. “My cousin Franklin sent me here to speak to Tim Minton.”

  The man nodded as if nothing surprised him, then ushered me into a small room to the side. Heavy velvet curtains hung across the archway instead of a door. Inside were two upholstered armchairs and two matching couches, all set up in a square, so that seated people could see one another.

  Behind the chairs were potted plants that climbed toward the ceiling, expensive vases on shining wooden tables, and a single vase filled with one perfect white rose.

  The entire room smelled faintly of perfume, which did succeed in masking the hated odors of formaldehyde and lilies.

  I was inspecting the rose — it was made from some kind of fabric, probably silk — when the curtains moved.

  A slight man entered. He was wearing a blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His blue jeans were stained with various fluid marks, and on his feet, he wore sneakers that had once been white.

  He was younger than I was, probably in his late twenties, and moved with the grace of an athlete. He was too small to play most sports, but his lower arms were roped with muscle, perhaps from the job itself.

  “You don’t look nothing like Franklin.” He was the first person to ever note that aloud, although I was certain a number of people had thought that in the past.

  “I know,” I said with a smile. “I don’t look like any of my cousins.”

  Which was true, but irrelevant. I nicely dodged the fact that Franklin and I weren’t really related.

  “He says you got a project for me.”

  “So you’re Tim Minton then,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Bill.”

  He took my hand reluctantly. His fingers were callused and covered with small scars. “I’m only talking to you because of Franklin.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “He says this could be something big.” Minton was still standing near the curtain, as if he planned to bolt at any moment.

  “He already spoke to you?” I asked.

  Minton nodded.

  I looked at the seating arrangements. “You mind if we sit?”

  “I’ve still got a lot to do before I can go home,” he said. “We got three viewings tomorrow.”

  But he walked to the nearest couch and sat in the middle of it, leaning forward, as if he couldn’t contain his own energy.

  I sat on the couch opposite him. “So you’re the one who prepares the bodies.”

  “Most of them.” He bit his lower lip. “The Poehlers help when they can, but they’re better at the people stuff. The old man used to work with me. He can’t no more. We’re hoping to hire someone else, but hardly anyone wants to come down here.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure how to approach him. I’d been thinking about this all day. Finally, I plunged in.

  “Franklin told you that I’m an investigator, right?” I said.

  Minton nodded.

  “And he told you that I have a case involving a possible crime?”

  “He said you can’t go to the cops with it.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Although we might have to at some point — or some sort of authority — so any work that would be done on the victims would have to be something acceptable in court.”

  “Franklin wouldn’t’ve called me otherwise.” Minton tilted his head. “You interviewing me?”

  “I’m making sure we’re on the same page,” I said. “Franklin said you were the best person in Chicago.”

  “Right now, I’m the only person in Chicago. At least for us.” He didn’t smile as he said that. “You worried I’d talk to someone I shouldn’t?”

  “Honestly, I’ve never done this before,” I said, silently adding that I had never done this in Chicago. The Memphis people I had never had to quiz. “I’d be trusting you with something that could be big.”

  “I’d be trusting you too. Franklin says you’re stand-up, but he also says some white woman calls the shots. So I’m a little leery. I don’t work for white people.”

  “She’s my client,” I said. “But you’d be working for me. If I have to step beyond her on any of this, I will.”

  He looked at his folded hands. “She’s not official or nothing, right?”

  “You mean is she connected to law enforcement?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Or a lawyer looking to make a buck on something that’s got nothing to do with her.”

  I suddenly understood his hesitation. He didn’t want to be an expert witness for a cause or a case that might compromise his ethics.

  “She’s not a lawyer,” I said. “She owns the building where I found the bodies.”

  “Bodies,” he said. “How many we talking?’

  “I don’t know,” I said. “At least three.”

  He whistled. “Timetable?”

  I shrugged. “Depends on who they are. I don’t even know that. This discovery was a complete surprise to me.”

  “But you think something’s up.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “You think a friend done this? Or your white woman?”

  “No,” I said, glad he didn’t ask about Laura’s family. “I think this is an old crime, and given the history of the house, which I’m not going to delve into, there could be some big ties, if you know what I mean.”

  He studied me for a moment. I wasn’t sure he did understand me.

  “Does something controversial bother you?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” h
e said. “I’m getting John Soto tomorrow, if the city releases the body by then. Poehlers ain’t handling him. I’m just doing the work for the family because they want another eye.”

  The name wasn’t familiar to me. “John Soto?”

  “Gunned down yesterday at the Henry Horner housing project. You haven’t heard?”

  I had heard something — a teenager had died near the project, shot by the police. But Henry Horner was on the West Side, and I had found myself listening to news reports lately and reacting by area. If someone died in a different part of the city, I had a smaller chance of knowing them — and so did Jimmy.

  “Not enough, I guess.”

  “Traffic-light issue? Those kids being killed in that intersection near the projects? You ain’t heard about that? Your cousin’s in the middle of it.”

  I did know about Franklin’s work. “He’s been consulting with the people who want to get the city to put in a traffic light near the Henry Horner project. But he doesn’t think the city’ll do it. He’s looking for alternate ways of accomplishing the same thing.”

  Minton pointed at me, as if I had answered a question right on a test. “The Soto brothers’ve been leading the protests about the light. Your cousin was none too happy with the actions. He prefers being behind the scenes.”

  Minton spoke as if Franklin had done something wrong by trying to find alternate ways to solve what sounded like a bad problem. Little children were killed at that intersection, the last two on separate days, one child on the way to school, the other on the way to a medical clinic.

  “And now one of these brothers is dead?” I asked, because I hadn’t tied the news of the shooting to the traffic-light issue. Franklin hadn’t said anything either, but he often didn’t on things he was working on for other people. Just like I rarely discussed my cases with him unless I needed his help.

  “The sixteen-year-old. Cops say they stopped him for acting suspicious and he attacked them. Family and friends say he was shot and he wasn’t doing a thing. I’m hearing that he was shot in the back, but none of us’ve seen the body yet. So I don’t know for sure.”

  I nodded. “You’re doing a backup autopsy then, in case the family wants to do something against the city?”

  “Yeah. Soto’s older brother, Michael, wants to have everything covered in case. He’s heading back to ‘Nam in a few weeks and he wants to make sure as much of this’s taken care of as possible before he goes.”

  I sighed, trying not to let the story go in too deeply, although I already knew it had. A young man fought to have a traffic light placed on a dangerous intersection. Because he held protests and drew attention to himself, he was dead. And now his brother was making certain that the city didn’t cover things up.

  “So,” Minton said, “that’s a long way of telling you the cops don’t scare me. I’ll do a report for the family, and if there’s evidence that John Soto was in a skirmish or even caused something, I’ll say it. If there’s evidence that he was shot in the back from a good distance away, I’ll say that. If the evidence is inconclusive, meaning I can’t tell you if he was shot while attacking the police or while enjoying a Coke with his friends, I’ll say that. You pay me to do the work, but the work is what it is. If the evidence says one thing, nothing you can do’ll make me say something else.”

  “That’s exactly what I want,” I said. “In fact, that’s exactly what I need. I’d like to hire you. Tell me your fees and how we can bring the bodies to you when we’re ready.”

  “I’ll come get them,” he said. “It always helps to see how they were found. I’ll take pictures too. Courts like that. Hell, people like that. They believe what they see.”

  I nodded, not saying that sometimes they could see the wrong things. He gave me his hourly quote, told me he’d bill me, and then gave me several ways to contact him. He wasn’t afraid to come at odd hours.

  That detail alone made me realize he had worked a lot of these sorts of on-the-side cases.

  We shook hands, and as I left, I hoped we were doing the right thing. Because the more people I brought into this case, the harder it was going to be to back away if we had to.

  And I was still worried that we might have to.

  EIGHT

  The next morning I started early, making calls before Jimmy was even awake. I took a break between calls, got him out of bed and into the shower, then made half a dozen inquiries while he got ready for school. It was my turn to drive Jimmy and the Grimshaw children to class, which I did, always on the lookout for the Blackstone Rangers street gang, who had given Jimmy and Keith Grimshaw trouble last year.

  Nothing happened, which was the way it had been ever since school started. On days like this, I hoped that my devil’s bargain with the gang had worked.

  By the time I went through my phone-call list of lawyers, I had my second expert. Wayne LeDoux, the criminalist that McMillan recommended, had impeccable credentials. Attorneys who had hired him for their cases said he was thorough but expensive; attorneys who had gone head-to-head with LeDoux in court hated how well he stood up to cross examination and admitted (off the record, of course) that he was so unimpeachable they would consider hiring him themselves if they had a case that warranted it.

  That was good enough for me. I called McMillan and told him I approved. I also told him we had someone to do the autopsies, and were ready to go whenever the experts could start.

  I was making a lunch of Campbell’s tomato soup and toast when the phone rang. It was Laura. McMillan had spoken to her. Apparently he had gotten LeDoux to come to Chicago on the next available flight.

  She wanted all of us to get together at her apartment Wednesday night so that we could get this investigation underway.

  I decided not to bring Minton — he didn’t need to know much more than what he saw when he went into the basement — but agreed to come myself. I’d have to find someone to care for Jimmy, but that wasn’t hard. The Grimshaws and I often exchanged babysitting duties and, for once, they owed me more than I owed them.

  After Laura hung up, I went back to my lunch, feeling slightly unsettled. Experts rarely came to another city on such short notice. Of course, a man who dealt with crime scenes couldn’t always control his own schedule — he would have to come when the scene still existed, not waiting until he had an opening in his calendar.

  Still, I had the feeling that McMillan had hired LeDoux without waiting for my approval. I wasn’t sure if I would confront him about that or not, but I did hold the suspicion in reserve. If the three of us — Laura, McMillan, and I — were going to work together on this case, we were going to do so on an equal basis.

  Before that meeting, I had some logistics to figure out. We had to go in and out of the Queen Anne without drawing suspicion. If anyone at the rental agency or at Sturdy thought we were doing construction work in that building, they might get nervous. If they noticed us carrying items out of the building, they might get worried.

  Somehow, we would have to do our work — photographing, removing the three bodies, taking evidence, and taking down the brick walls — without drawing attention to ourselves.

  I figured there were two times we could work: in the middle of the night or during Jimmy’s school hours. Both had advantages. Night provided its own cover. Most people slept and did not watch what was going on in a neighboring building.

  But the moment a neighbor became suspicious, he would notice everything we did and maybe call the police. Since the neighborhood had white students as well as black families, there was a chance the police might actually show up. If they did, we would be in trouble.

  Of course, at night no one could call the rental agency or try to track down the building’s owners. And sometimes what seemed suspicious at 3:00 A.M. seemed normal or not worth the effort to contact authorities in the light of day.

  Daylight brought its own problems. We would have to park in that alley. We would have to remove items from the building while people could see what we were do
ing. A call to the rental agency would show that no one was working on the building, which might lead to a call to the police.

  But most neighbors in places like that didn’t like to get involved. Most of them wouldn’t be home in the middle of the day either. And most would accept the presence of a painters’ van or carpet cleaners in the middle of the day if we could find a way to disguise our vehicles like that.

  I preferred daylight, provided we could make it work, and not just because it was more convenient for me. People got nervous about nighttime activity, and I didn’t want them to think we were robbing the place, selling drugs, or running some kind of illegal scam out of the Queen Anne.

  By the time I had to pick up Jimmy from the after-school program, I had a short, typewritten plan that I hoped would work.

  * * *

  Wednesday morning, I woke to the news that a dynamite bomb had blown the police statue in Haymarket Square a hundred feet from the pedestal. Haymarket Square was on the West Side, past Greektown, a place we never went. I wasn’t even sure I had seen the statue.

  But the news unnerved me nonetheless.

  I planned to keep the radio in the kitchen off while we had breakfast, but Jimmy had gotten there before me. He’d already put out the milk and cereal, taken raisins and the sugar bowl from the cupboard by the time I staggered out of the shower to make coffee.

  He looked up at me, face taut. “Somebody’s bombing stuff here now.”

  Our trip last June had ended when a bomb went off in a building I was in. I was injured, but not critically. I simply gained some scars on my legs and arms to match the one that ran down the left side of my face. For several weeks, though, I was black and blue and moved as if I had aged fifty years.

  “I got news for you,” I said, wishing I didn’t have to. “They’ve been bombing things here for a long time.”

  “I don’t remember nothing.”

  “Goldblatt’s Department Store got bombed last Easter,” I said, “and there’ve been other things.”

  Worse things, which I didn’t want to explain.