Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “No one knows.” I knocked some mortar from the side of two bricks. I was getting more efficient, even though the work was getting harder. This mortar had a solid texture, and I was finding it difficult to scrape it aside.

  “That is the point,” LeDoux said. “No one knows.”

  He set his camera down, then looked in the hole again and sighed. I didn’t know if he felt sadness for the woman inside or if he was just thinking about the work that faced us.

  “Jack the Ripper’s famous,” I said.

  “Jack the Ripper was a taunter. They’re rare. Most of these mass killers work in silence, I think, not seeking any publicity at all.”

  Some of the mortar toppled inward. I winced, wondering whose grave I had disturbed this time.

  “There are others from all over the country, people you’ve never heard of.”

  “You keep saying that,” I said, letting some of the irritation I’d been feeling at LeDoux grow.

  “You need something sensational to make the news,” LeDoux said.

  “Like a basement full of bodies,” I muttered.

  “Like discovering a basement full of bodies,” LeDoux said. “And yes, I remember the agreement. I’m not going to disclose this to anyone. If I did, we’d never find out what was down here.”

  That wasn’t my priority. My priority was Laura. But he already knew that.

  “A basement full of bodies,” he said musingly, “or a taunting letter to the editor like that creature in California is doing —”

  There was a man who was sending letters to the California papers, claiming to have murdered people in the San Francisco area.

  “They’ve lost that battle, by the way,” LeDoux said. “They’ve given him a name. The Zodiac. These creatures love names.”

  “You said a lot of these people work in silence,” I said.

  “I believe most of them do.” LeDoux rose up again on his haunches, just enough so that he could see the floor of opening number three.

  I managed to loosen more mortar. If I got one more side, I’d be able to remove my first brick of this section.

  “And then there are the accidental sensationalists. Chicago had one a few years ago — what was his name? The young man who killed all the nurses?”

  “Speck.” That had been before I moved here, but I’d heard of it. People still talked about it, with fear in their voices. “He killed eight nurses in a single night.”

  “Like Starkweather in — what was it? Kansas?”

  That had been in the 1950s. The case had dragged on for what seemed like forever.

  “It was like these men just snapped and took people with them.” LeDoux made some notes on his clipboard. “But the mass killers who work in silence, they’re the dangerous ones.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because they’re smart.” He leaned back and looked at me. Then he swept a hand toward the wall. “If we’re right, this man has been killing for decades. Decades, Mr. Grimshaw. And we’re only figuring it out because he’s dead. The Grim Reaper stopped him. We didn’t.”

  “If Hanley is the one who killed them all.”

  “That stairway and your discoveries today suggest he was.”

  “But that’s an assumption.” I got the last brick free. More bodies, crammed into the space, flesh still on the bones. A waft of rot came toward me and my eyes watered. “I thought you weren’t going to speculate.”

  “I wasn’t. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “More?”

  I nodded. “Right up close.”

  I moved away, then stopped at the sixth section of wall. It looked different too — the bricks were small and evenly made. Machine-made bricks instead of handmade bricks. None of the previous sections had used them.

  “Do we need to open these last three?” I asked. “We know what we’re going to find.”

  “Now you’re speculating,” LeDoux said.

  I brushed the back of my glove over my face. The fabric, which wasn’t white any more, came away a dull gray.

  “How could anyone live with this stink? There were apartments in here.” I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine any of it.

  “The brick blocked a lot of the smell. If you’ll note, he even thought to brick the ceiling of each crypt. But this building does have an odor. I noticed it when we first arrived.”

  “I blamed it on Hanley dying in here and rotting for a couple of weeks.”

  “Me, too.” LeDoux finished marking the clipboard. Then he picked up the camera and took shots of section four. “Although it stands to reason that the place always smelled slightly foul and the tenants blamed it on each other. I’m sure you’ve been in a building that had awful cooking odors or tenants who didn’t bathe much.”

  I had, and recently too. The stench of urine in some of the buildings I’d inspected had been overpowering. And those places had been uninhabited for months, sometimes years.

  He was saying, “People don’t question much, especially if they have no other choice.”

  “I suppose.” I stood. My knees cracked. I’d been crouching too long. “You haven’t answered my question, so I’m going to make the decision. Those remaining sections’ll have to wait.”

  He let the camera fall against his chest. “Probably wise. Each one of these sections has brick behind it. Different brick.”

  I had noticed that and then put it out of my mind. I still didn’t want to think about it.

  “If we don’t report this,” LeDoux said, “this work could take months.”

  I nodded. It was up to me now. I had some outside investigating to do. If I could find out Hanley’s history, figure out — with Minton’s help — who these bodies belonged to and what had happened here, at least with the ones we’d found, I would have enough answers. I would know if Laura could bring the police in.

  “I think if we excavate all of this at once, we’ll be overwhelmed,” I said.

  LeDoux crossed his arms over his camera strap, clinging to the clipboard with one hand. He did not look happy, and I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for all of this on my own either.

  “Besides,” I continued, “we might lose a lot of evidence in all the brick and mortar debris if we go too fast. Let’s see what we can find out about what we’ve already found and go from there.”

  “I have days just on this area alone,” LeDoux said, “not counting what your pathologist will do with these corpses.”

  “I realize that,” I said.

  He sighed. “What are you thinking?”

  “If it was Hanley all alone, like you mentioned, then Sturdy’s off the hook,” I said.

  LeDoux shook his head. “He was their employee.”

  “But when would they have gotten the chance to inspect this? Besides, I suspect most killers are someone’s employee. The employer doesn’t get blamed when a man murders his wife. Sturdy won’t get blamed for this.”

  “In their building? Right under their noses?”

  “Their PR people should be able to handle it,” I said. “People will be more caught up in the whos and hows than the employer.”

  “He’s dead,” LeDoux said. “Someone will have to take the fall.”

  “And you think one of Chicagoland’s greatest companies, with ties to the mayor and the city, will take that fall? Especially considering how many employees it has and how many pies it has its fingers in?”

  “Put that way, I see no reason to avoid the press now,” LeDoux said.

  “Stock prices,” I said. “And uncertainty. At the moment, you and I suspect Hanley acted alone. If something proves otherwise, if this does go back into Sturdy’s past, then the situation could become more dire.”

  “And what if Hanley knew nothing?” LeDoux asked.

  “Tell me how he knew nothing with that staircase,” I said. “And the keys to this back door.”

  LeDoux nodded. “It does point to him.”

  “It does,” I said. “Now let me prove it.”

  T
WENTY-ONE

  We quit for the day soon after that. I think neither of us could continue, although we both made noises about being tired, needing showers, wanting time to complete some outside tasks. Even though it was only three in the afternoon, I needed to be shed of that place.

  So did LeDoux. Instead of driving back with me, he offered to take the El. I didn’t want to be in the van with myself either — not with that rotting stench still on my coveralls, on my skin — but I had no choice.

  I drove LeDoux to the nearest El stop. He had taken off his coveralls. In his blue jeans and T-shirt, he looked younger than he was. I convinced him not to carry his cameras or his cases — he was going through a few bad neighborhoods as the El took him back downtown — and then I waited until he boarded the train before driving to my apartment.

  I had peeled off my coveralls as well and stuffed them in an evidence bag. I wasn’t keeping that bag, though. It would stink up the van. I would have to clean the seats as it was.

  Before going into the building, I tossed the bag in one of the garbage cans around back. Then I hurried up the stairs to my apartment, peeled off my clothes and put them in another bag for the garbage, and climbed into the shower.

  The hot water felt good and I stayed under it much too long. As it grew tepid, I realized that I might get the smell off my hair and my skin, but I wouldn’t get it out of my nose. That would take time.

  I had a hunch I wouldn’t be eating well for a while.

  I got out, toweled off, and dressed, taking a minute to go outside with my clothes, tossing them on top of the coverall bag. Then I went back inside, picked up the phone, and called Laura.

  “You’re done early,” she said.

  “We found some things,” I said.

  She sighed. “Is it bad?”

  “What we found —” meaning the bodies “— yeah. The implications —” meaning her father’s involvement “— maybe not so bad.”

  “I wish you could explain that to me,” she said.

  “I will, just not now. I’m going to need records.”

  “Just tell me what kind, and I’ll get them.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’ll also need a place to store things.”

  “Things?” she asked.

  “The stuff your friend is working on,” I said. “He’ll need a darkroom in the very least.”

  “I have to pick him up in an hour. We’ll see what we can work out.”

  “Let me know where you drop him off,” I said, “and where I can pick him up in the morning.”

  “How about I come see you tonight, after I’m done?” she said.

  “Jimmy would love that,” I said, then silently cursed myself. I would love that. I should have said that first. Now it sounded awkward.

  “He might be in bed when I get there,” she said.

  “Having dinner with someone else?”

  “I think it’s rude to pick a man up at his hotel and not have dinner with him, don’t you?” she said.

  “I think rude is allowed at times,” I said.

  She laughed. “I don’t. I’ll be there late.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  I hung up, envying LeDoux his dinner with Laura and worrying that he would tell her the wrong things. But I couldn’t do anything about that. If she had questions, I would hope she’d asked when she saw me.

  In the meantime, I had a van to clean, a son to pick up, and dinner to cook. For a little while I’d pretend my life was normal, even though it was anything but.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Laura arrived after nine, looking tired. She still wore her corporate uniform, a conservative blue dress, too much makeup, and low-slung blue heels. Jimmy was up, waiting for her. He was watching Bracken’s World, a show he’d become addicted to, although I wasn’t exactly sure why. I didn’t like it: who cared what happened at a Hollywood studio? But it was on late on Fridays, in the same time slot that Star Trek, which Jimmy loved, had had. We had gotten into the habit of letting him stay up late on Fridays, and he argued that we shouldn’t change it.

  That, more than anything, I thought, explained his love for Bracken’s World.

  He gave it up the moment Laura walked through the door. He ran to her and hugged her, and she wrapped her arm around him, relaxing into the hug as if she’d needed it.

  I took her purse and set it on the table. “LeDoux told you?”

  She nodded over Jimmy’s head and gave me a sign that we both knew meant we’d discuss that later.

  Jim broke free of the hug. “You want some pop?”

  “I’d like a Scotch,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. Laura drank, but generally not around Jimmy. It wasn’t a political thing, more like habit. She wanted to be on her best behavior with him.

  “Smoke’s got to get that,” he said.

  I did. We talked, mostly about Jimmy’s day and the stuff he’d learned all week about the Haymarket riots.

  “Did you know,” he said to her, “that without them — right here in Chicago — we wouldn’t have an eight-hour workday?”

  Most of us didn’t have one right now, but neither Laura nor I mentioned that. We let Jim tell us about ancient history, all sparked by the Weathermen bombing, and then we coaxed him to bed. Laura had to promise to read to him — something he hadn’t asked me to do in months — and she did, disappearing into his room to read something out of the middle of The Hobbit.

  I cleaned up the living room and was about to shut off the now-forgotten Bracken’s World when the local news began. The Weathermen had apparently retreated today; a planned boycott of schools by the students had failed (something I hadn’t even heard of) and some rally got called off. RYM-II, the other branch of the SDS, held a demonstration at Cook County Hospital to protest the “exploitation of women” and the hospital’s “butcher-shop” techniques.

  That brought up too many bad memories from the previous spring, and I shut the television off. By the time Laura came out of Jimmy’s room, I had another scotch for her and a glass for myself.

  “It sounds horrible,” she said, without preamble.

  “It is,” I said, sinking onto the couch. I couldn’t tell her how grateful I was that she had come, not because we had to do some planning, but because I had to talk with someone other than LeDoux.

  “What’re we going to do?” she asked, swishing the liquid around in her glass.

  “Take it bit by bit,” I said. “See what else we can find.”

  She sat down beside me. “I think you’ve found more than enough.”

  “Your father might not have been involved,” I said. “In fact, there are good odds now that he wasn’t.”

  “Small comfort,” she said. “We’ve been renting apartments over an active graveyard.”

  It was worse than that. Renting apartments that placed people in close proximity to an active murderer. But I didn’t say that.

  Instead, I took the drink from her and set it on the coffee table. Then I took her hand.

  I knew platitudes wouldn’t comfort her. She understood how awful this was, even without her company’s involvement.

  “Now this becomes a battle for information,” I said quietly. “If we can find enough that implicates Hanley and keeps your father out of it, we can call in the authorities. This’ll become a police matter—”

  “And headlines,” she said. “Oh, so many headlines.”

  “And headlines. But you have PR people who can handle that.”

  “Handle it.” She shook her head. “Now you sound like the bastards who used to run the company. This isn’t handleable, Smokey.”

  “It is,” I said. “It’s awful, it’s gruesome, and it’s horrible. You say that. You let your shock show. And you vow you’ll do whatever you can to help the families of the victims.”

  “Victims,” she repeated softly.

  “You live up to that promise, and you have your publicity folks make it clear whenever you help someone connected to that
house.”

  She looked at me, her expression fierce, but she didn’t pull her hand away. “I don’t advertise charity. You know that.”

  “You have to break that habit for this place. To save — how many people work at Sturdy now? A thousand jobs?”

  “More,” she whispered.

  “You save them, and the shareholders’ investments, and by this time next year you’ll be able to go back to your anonymous works.” I knew how important they were to her. I also knew that she would be in the fight of her life, even if her father hadn’t been involved.

  “And the house?” she asked.

  “You tear it down.”

  “I was thinking it might be easier to raze the whole thing, and be surprised by what we find.” She stared at the ceiling. “Pretend we had no idea.”

  “You thought of that on the drive over, or did LeDoux suggest it?”

  “He warned me that this would cost a lot of money, and his actions, no matter how careful, could interfere with prosecution.”

  “I don’t think there will be prosecution,” I said. “Hanley’s dead.”

  “If he’s the one who did it.”

  “You wouldn’t have a lot of doubt, Laura, if you’d seen that attic and that staircase.”

  She turned her head toward me. “So raze the house. Then we can blame him and—”

  “If we tear down the house, we open all the questions again. The proof, what little of it we have, would disappear and people would wonder how Sturdy was involved.”

  “They’d know we weren’t,” she said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have torn it down.”

  “You’re expecting logic,” I said.

  She smiled. I’d said that to her before, in other contexts. She knew it was a failing, and yet she persisted. One of the things I loved about her was the way that she mixed naïveté with savvy, all of it caused by a willingness to believe the best of people.

  I didn’t know if I ever believed the best of people. I couldn’t quite imagine how to go through life that way. I suspected I would have been perpetually disappointed.

  “So we excavate,” she said. “That’s Mr. LeDoux’s words. He says it’ll be costly.”