“He’ll need a place to store his evidence.”
“I know,” she said. “He also mentioned that we’ll need a place to store the bodies. He doubts any funeral home will be able to keep them for an indefinite period of time.”
No wonder she wanted the police involved. I hadn’t even thought of the body storage.
“Did he have any ideas on how to do that?” I asked.
She shook her head. “But I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been worrying about laws — I don’t know if it’s illegal to store body parts in a warehouse.”
I winced.
“I think we might be better off in an old medical building or a funeral home, some place already zoned for this sort of thing.”
She had been thinking about it.
“Does Sturdy have something like that?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I do.”
I sat up in surprise. “You do?”
She frowned at me. “I own properties in my own name. My mother insisted. You know that, Smokey. I own my apartment building.”
“I just thought it was the only one.”
She shook her head. “When I got married, Daddy gave me a bundle of properties, all for me. Not for me and Addison. Just me. Mother wanted to make sure I was protected. She never really liked Addison much.”
“Addison,” I repeated. Laura never talked about her ex-husband. This was the first time I’d heard his name, although I’d read it. I just didn’t realize how snobby the name sounded when spoken out loud.
She smiled, hearing my tone, and perhaps sensing my disapproval. “I was young.”
“Clearly,” I said.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back again. “He was a nice man.”
“Just not nice enough for you?”
“A little too…bland…for me. I don’t know. He sent me a rather perplexed note when I took over Sturdy.”
My heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t mentioned that before. “Perplexed?”
“It was nice. He wished me well. I could just tell he’d had no idea I ever wanted to be anything but a wife.”
I couldn’t imagine Laura as a wife at all. She wasn’t arm decoration or a homemaker. She clearly loved Jimmy and was willing to give him her all, but she didn’t cater to him.
I reached for my scotch, amazed at my reaction. I hadn’t realized that I never thought of Laura as a traditional woman. I thought of her as unique, one-of-a-kind, someone who had never fit into society’s roles.
“Surprised you, didn’t I?” she said, looking at me, her head turned sideways.
“I keep forgetting you were once someone’s wife,” I said.
“Not someone. Addison Lake’s. I was a society matron who held the right parties and gave to the right charities. I managed a large household and I was expected, at the right moment, to have at least two children, the first of whom had to be a son.”
“As if you could plan that.”
She chuckled. “It would have been Addison’s responsibility if the first one had been a girl. That’s one of the comforting thing about biology. Gender is the male’s job, not the female’s.”
Comforting. She was making light of something that had clearly been part of a large argument.
“I didn’t realize you wanted children,” I said, feeling awkward. Was our on-again, off-again relationship keeping her from a life she wanted?
“I’m not sure I do,” she said. “I was never sure. And I’m really uncertain now. I think I’m doing more for children in this city right where I am. If we can clean up the slum housing that Sturdy owns and keep up Helping Hands, I might be making more of a difference right there.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask her more, and yet I didn’t want to hear her answers. I didn’t want her to say that I was the roadblock I feared I was — or worse, say that I wasn’t. I didn’t want to put the idea in her head if she hadn’t thought of it, and conversely, I didn’t want her to think I wanted something more than what we’d had — when things were good, that is.
So I settled for, “You can have children and keep your job, you know. Black women do it all the time.”
She smiled at me. “And white women, although no one talks about it.”
Then her smile faded. She swirled that drink again. She’d been nursing it since she arrived. I’d been nursing mine too, which showed just how unsettled both of our moods were.
“How did we get from that horrible house to this?” she asked.
I took her cue and let her change the subject. I guess I wanted to off that topic as well.
“I know you’ve been checking the records,” I said, “but I’m going to need to see what you have on Hanley. Everything, from his employment applications to his pay stubs to notes in his file.”
Disappointment flitted across her face, so brief I almost missed it, and then she squared her shoulders, coming back into the conversation we’d run from, finding refuge in a conversation we’d avoided for more than eighteen months.
Should I have gone on? I didn’t know, and now it was too late.
“My father hired him,” she said. “Isn’t that what we needed to know?”
“No,” I said. “We need much more than that. How independent he was, and what he did. We don’t even know the occupancy rate of the house. Maybe it was always poor. Can you find that?”
“That’ll take work,” she said. “I’ll try.”
“It has to be somewhere.”
“At some point, people are going to notice my interest.”
“I know,” I said. “We just have to stay ahead of them.”
“I’ll be ready,” she said.
But neither of us knew what she had to be ready for. This was all unknown, and worrisome. Disturbing, she had called it when she came in, and it was that. It was disturbing, and had grown more so each day we spent in that house.
She put her hand on mine. “Why does this scare me so, Smokey?”
I threaded my fingers through hers. I didn’t have an answer for her, and I didn’t want to tell her that it scared me too.
TWENTY-THREE
The next morning I picked up LeDoux at a restaurant in Old Town. He waited under an awning, arms clutched around his thin shirt. It was pouring rain and fifty-some degrees, and it finally felt like fall.
I hadn’t planned on working Saturdays in this job, but LeDoux and I had agreed we’d spend the morning at least preparing for the mortician. Jimmy was at the Grimshaws — he and Keith had a joint homework project that intrigued them: they had to bring a million of something to their after-school class later in the week.
I was glad the entire thing fell to Franklin and Althea. I didn’t mind helping Jimmy with his practical math homework — showing him how to use a budget, how to calculate a grocery bill — but I really didn’t want to spend my entire weekend counting something.
Neither did Jim. He made me promise I’d be back right after lunch. We had a date I didn’t dare forget.
The World Series started this weekend and his new team, the Mets, were in it. They’d creamed the Atlanta Braves, and now planned to do the same to Baltimore.
I hoped they did. I needed something else to think about besides corpses and built-in tombs and hidden secrets. I wanted something to celebrate, even for a few hours.
I dropped LeDoux, already in his coveralls and cap, at the house, along with that big ring of keys. He would work the first area we found, take whatever evidence there was from the cubby near the skeletons, and then we’d let Minton take them away.
I drove on to Poehler’s Funeral Home. Saturdays, apparently, were big days at funeral homes. When I had spoken to Minton before I had left the apartment, he told me to go around back where the hearses parked. He said he would leave the door open for me.
I parked in a bottle-strewn alley, next to a shiny hearse. Another was parked in front of the funeral home, the back doors of the vehicle wide open. Apparently it was taking a body to a church for a f
uneral later in the day. Minton had said most of Saturday was about transportation or viewing; he figured he’d have some time to spend with me, barring any emergencies.
The back door was propped open, by a brick, of all things, and I slipped inside, wincing at the smell of formaldehyde and flowers. I sighed and went down the back stairs. My parents would be with me in every funeral home I walked into for the rest of my life.
Three bodies covered in sheets rested on stainless-steel tables. The stench of formaldehyde was stronger in here. Minton stood near the back. He was sliding on a white doctor’s coat, his hands already covered by gloves.
When he saw me, he grimaced. “I forgot.”
“I take that to mean you can’t come with me,” I said.
He glanced through another door, as if he thought someone overheard us.
“I have an emergency peek,” he said. “I didn’t know about it when I talked to you.”
“An emergency what?”
He beckoned me to come with him. In a narrow room just off the main room, a man had been laid out on yet another stainless-steel table. This room was claustrophobically small and had none of the equipment that the main morgue had.
“Why’s he here?” I asked.
“He’s not here,” Minton said. “He’s with me.”
I looked at him, not entirely understanding.
“Like your job.”
Then I nodded. This one was off the books too. I walked over to the body. The man was maybe in his twenties, but young enough to still have some acne around his chin. He had a buzz cut, which was unusual for this part of Chicago. His face was the only part of him that looked halfway normal. His torso had been opened and then sewn back shut in the traditional autopsy Y.
“You’re done, then,” I said.
“Haven’t started,” Minton said. “He’s just come from the police.”
I looked up at him. “The police are here?”
“Hell, no. He came in that hearse out there. The family’s got him set up at a different funeral home, not far from here. Some folks just thought he should see me first.”
“What folks?” I asked.
Minton gave me a faint smile. He clearly wasn’t going to answer that question.
“What happened to him?”
“That’s the question,” Minton said. “You didn’t hear the news yesterday?”
I shivered, remembering that snippet I’d heard the night before. “Just a piece of it.”
He nodded. “This here’s Michael Soto.”
“I thought you had him earlier in the week,” I said.
“That was his brother, John. Michael here brought him to me last Sunday.”
“The Henry Horner traffic-light issue,” I said.
Minton nodded.
“And now this boy’s dead?” I felt cold.
Minton shrugged one shoulder. “The police say he charged them, him and two others, after committing a robbery.”
“You don’t believe it.”
“No one believes it,” Minton said. “Michael here is an Army sergeant.”
“He’s the one you said was in ’Nam.” I remembered now.
“Yeah,” Minton said. “He knew better than to rob a convenience store or go after the police.”
I sighed. “They shot him because he questioned his brother’s death?”
“Most like,” Minton said. “I get to look at him quick enough to see if his wounds correspond to their stories. I only got about three hours. Can you get me after noon?”
I almost said yes, and then I remembered my promise to Jim. “Not this afternoon,” I said. “How’s Monday morning?”
“Probably hectic if this weekend’s anything like last weekend. But I’ll make time for you.”
“I’ll be here,” I said.
He nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me any longer. He was looking at Michael Soto, an Army sergeant who found the streets of his hometown deadlier than the jungles of South Vietnam.
I turned around and left, wondering how a family dealt with the loss of two boys in the space of a week. Two nearly adult boys with good hearts, who had been murdered by the police.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Mets lost.
It was a heartbreaker, almost as if the team that Jimmy and I had watched during the last week had vanished, replaced by a bunch of minor leaguers.
Jimmy took the loss philosophically. He had hope — the best four out of seven, he reminded me — but I was oddly devastated. I’d been hoping for something joyful, something upbeat.
Instead, I’d gotten a 4-1 loss that boded poorly for the games to come.
But I didn’t say anything to Jim. I was afraid I’d sound even more bitter than I felt.
My meeting with Minton had shaken me. The body of poor Michael Soto reminded me just how much I hated this city — how much I hated most cities, after this summer had shown me that Chicago was not unique.
Then I’d gone back to the house, where I took out the bricks on the remaining sections while I waited for LeDoux to finish fingerprinting and measuring and searching the tomb where we’d found the first three.
And sure enough, those remaining areas had bodies as well. One in such a state of preservation that he looked almost alive — not like Michael Soto, who seemed (if you didn’t look at that Y incision) like he could wake up and get off the table at any moment — but like someone who’d only been dead a few days although, fortunately, he didn’t smell that way.
I was startled enough to call LeDoux over. He groused, but came, holding his flashlight like a club.
“What do you make of this?” I asked, shining my light on the corpse’s graying face. In life, he’d been a rather heavyset black man. In death, he seemed a little sunken, and quite sad.
LeDoux stared at the corpse for a moment, frowning. Then he said, “This one’s fairly recent.”
“That’s what I thought. You think just before Hanley died, he killed this guy?”
“No.” LeDoux’s answer was curt. “By fairly recent, I mean he’s been down here for less time than our skeletons there.”
“How much shorter?” I asked.
“That’s for your invisible friend to figure out.” LeDoux was unhappy that Minton hadn’t come. I didn’t explain why, figuring Minton’s side work for the Soto family was none of LeDoux’s business.
“Do you have a guess?” I asked.
“Five years, six. Maybe a dozen. Maybe last year. I really don’t know.”
“He could have been here that long?” I asked. “I thought bodies lost their flesh when that much time passed.”
“As I told you the other day,” LeDoux said, using the tone professors used with particularly dumb students, “it all depends on the conditions under which the body was stored.”
“The condition is the same as all the other bodies,” I said.
“Nonsense.” He frowned at me as if he had expected better. “This little nook is as different from the one next to it as an expensive casket is from no casket at all. The brick is different, the mortar used is different, the air-flow, if any, is different. And I would wager that this poor soul had a concrete floor, while our friends over there—” he nodded at the skeletons “—were resting on the actual ground itself. More bug activity, more variation in temperature.”
“It’s not just a time difference?” I asked.
He sighed, and pushed past me, shining his light down the hole. “I was right. Concrete.”
I had to look as well. Only the heavyset black man filled this space. He still had his shoes, pointed-toed oxfords, which seemed awfully expensive. Past the shoes there was a floor. A real floor, concrete, like the visible part of the basement had.
“You think this was put in when the boiler got put in?” I asked, my stomach knotting. If that was the case, that tied this body back to Laura’s father. The boiler dated from the 1940s when he worked on premise.
“No way to know until I get down there,” LeDoux said. “And at this r
ate, it’ll be a while.”
That phrase, more than anything, made me bite back anger. LeDoux wanted to work evenings and weekends until we had this place cleared out. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.
It had been a mistake to tell him that Jim and I planned to watch the World Series. LeDoux saw that as frivolous, a waste of his precious time.
When I refused to work Sunday as well, he pointedly asked me if it was because there was another baseball game.
There was, and Jimmy and I planned to watch it, but that wasn’t why I had said no.
“Church in my community,” I’d said to him, “sometimes lasts all day.”
That sentence was true, but the implication — that I would be in a pew, participating in the service — wasn’t. Jimmy would be there. I believed that his church attendance with the Grimshaw family was almost more important than his schooling. The black community’s heart was its churches, and even if Jimmy became an agnostic like me, he needed to know where he could go for help — real, physical help — any time he needed it.
LeDoux had raised his eyebrows, muttered something about having trouble believing that I was a church-going man, and then went back to work. He stayed until I threatened to drag him out of the building, and then, rather sullenly, asked me how he should spend the rest of the day.
I recommended the Series, which I now regretted. LeDoux was from New York, unlike me or Jim, and might have had an even greater stake in the Mets than we had.
“You know,” Jim said when the game was finally over. “It’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?” I asked. There’d been some bad calls, but all in all, it had been a good ballgame.
“How you get your hopes up and then something comes in to smash ’em down. I hate that, Smoke.”
I nodded. “At least you still have hopes,” I said.
TWENTY-FIVE
Early Sunday morning, someone knocked on my door.
I debated answering, feeling irritated. I had just gotten back from dropping Jimmy at the Grimshaws’ so that they could take him to church. How could someone else know that I had planned to use the next few hours to catch up on my sleep? My little adventure in the basement had brought back the nightmares I’d had since I’d come home from Korea, and I often spent the wee hours pacing.
Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 15