Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I rousted Jim, took him and the Grimshaw children to school, and then picked up LeDoux. No one followed me — or at least the tail wasn’t obvious. When we got to the Queen Anne, LeDoux pressed me into service for the first few hours of the morning.

  I hadn’t been in the secret room for nearly two days. I was surprised at how much he’d gotten done. He’d pulled down some of the bricks himself in front of the B, C, D, and E sites, but he was having trouble with F, G, and H. Whoever had done the brickwork there had been a master craftsman compared with the earlier sites.

  So I labored at pulling down brick to enable LeDoux to go inside the tombs. I tried to ignore the bodies facing me in each site, wondering who they were and who they had left behind.

  Wondering what their connection was to Pruitt, Ellis, and Talgart, and to Baird or Hanley.

  After LeDoux finished with the F, G, and H sites, he would need Minton. He would also need me to see what was on the back walls of those tombs — or perhaps better stated, what was behind them.

  Neither of us really discussed much more than that. I couldn’t imagine working down here, alone like he had the last few days, with only the dead for company.

  He told me he was used to it, but I wasn’t sure how anyone got used to that kind of work.

  I certainly knew I couldn’t.

  FORTY-FOUR

  After I finished helping LeDoux, I went to Poehler’s. The basement work area was filled with bodies, most of them elderly, most of them, Minton told me, part of the weekend funeral schedule. He was buried — quite literally — in work.

  But he promised me he’d come to the Queen Anne the following morning. He’d gotten permission to spend his afternoons and evenings at Poehler’s, so long as he arrived around two.

  He also told me that Minnie Pruitt had come in, demanding to see her husband. Minton hadn’t let her, nor had he told her where the body was found. But he did show her the wedding ring he’d found near the fingerbones.

  “I think from the way she cried,” he said, “that we have a positive identification.”

  I nodded, thanked him for keeping the location quiet, and promised to pick him up in the morning. Then I drove to the address Sinkovich had given me.

  Irving Talgart lived in a rundown part of the West Side, not too far from some of Sturdy’s other buildings and the Black Panther offices. He had a one-bedroom apartment in a converted house and it looked like he hadn’t left it in a long time.

  “Neighborhood’s not safe anymore,” he told me as he led me inside the overheated apartment. The weather had turned cold the last couple of days, but not that cold. The steamy temperature of the apartment made me feel like I’d entered a sauna.

  A smelly sauna. Two cats draped over newspaper piles like they’d been the ones who’d read every single word. I assumed the smell came from their unattended litter box.

  Talgart pointed to an empty space on the cluttered couch. I gave it a quick once-over, hoping to avoid any cat accidents before I sat down.

  He sat in an armchair positioned in front of the television set. He pulled a blanket across his legs, and one of the cats leaped from the newspaper pile to the armchair and made its way to Talgart’s lap.

  I said, “I’ve come about your brother Lawrence.”

  Talgart started as if I’d used a forbidden word. “What do you know about Lawrence? You wasn’t even born when he died.”

  The word “died” surprised me. The women had thought the other two men had run off. I wondered why Talgart knew what happened to his brother.

  “When did he die?” I asked.

  Talgart put one bony hand on the cat’s back, gently pushing the animal down onto the blanket. “October, 1919. What a hell of a year that was.”

  “Because of the race riot,” I said.

  “And the bombings and going dry. Then Lawrence finally gets what’s coming to him.” Talgart shook his head. “I was happy when 1920 rolled in.”

  “What do you mean, he got what was coming to him?” I asked.

  “My brother wasn’t a nice man, Mr. Grimshaw,” Talgart said. “He was the reason I became what I did. I saw him hurt our ma, hurt us kids, hurt everyone who came in touch with him just because he was out to make a buck, and I vowed I wasn’t going to be a thing like him. I hope to God I wasn’t.”

  “But ‘what was coming to him.’ That’s harsh language.”

  “You don’t anger the kind of people my brother angered without payback,” Talgart said. “He got his.”

  “I was led to believe no one knew what happened to him.”

  Talgart rolled his eyes. “We all knew. They found that car of his in Orchard Place. What they call O’Hare now. It was just a field back then, but north of the city. Folks like us didn’t go up there much. We wasn’t welcome.”

  “Like now,” I said.

  “Not like now,” he snapped. “You won’t get lynched if you go to the north suburbs. There’s no way Lawrence drove up there. No way. Someone drove him.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Can’t prove it. Never could.”

  This was not the conversation I’d expected to have with him. I’d expected it to be similar to the other conversations, filled with guesses and misinformation.

  “Why can’t you prove it?” I asked.

  “Need a body, son. Or don’t they teach that to you in investigating school these days?”

  I’d told him that I wasn’t a cop, that my investigation was private. I’d worried about that too, because a lot of police officers didn’t respect private detectives. But Talgart had had no problem letting me in, and I had a hunch that dig would have remained the same whether I was a private detective or a police officer.

  “I didn’t realize you hadn’t seen the body,” I said.

  “Don’t play games with me,” he said. “There’s only one reason you’d be here. You found Lawrence, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We might have, but it might be someone else. The body has no identification, and there’s not a lot to go on.”

  “Body? After all this time?” He gave me a sideways stare. His eyes were clear, shining with intelligence. I wouldn’t have wanted to face him in an interrogation room. He would have seen right through me.

  “That’s what I mean. There’s nothing recognizable left.” I didn’t want to give him much more than that. I was here to find out what he knew, not to give him information.

  “So what makes you think it’s Lawrence?” he asked.

  “Some anecdotal evidence,” I said, “and this.”

  I opened my briefcase and removed the damaged letter. It was still in its plastic evidence bag. I handed it to him.

  He took it with two fingers. “I thought you weren’t police.”

  “I’m working with a forensic team,” I said.

  “One of those off-the-book nightmares who thinks he’s knows what he’s doing?”

  “A highly credentialed man who occasionally runs independent investigations,” I said.

  “On crimes no one cares about.” He hadn’t looked at the letter yet. Instead, he was watching me. “He’s out-of-state, is he?”

  “He’s from out of state,” I said.

  “Good thing.” Talgart brought the bag closer to his face. As he reached for the side with his other hand, I moved forward to tell him not to open the bag.

  He saw the movement and smiled.

  “I know, I know. Don’t contaminate it. Wasn’t planning to. That paper looks too fragile to touch.”

  He stared at it, as if he didn’t want to understand it, then his eyes moved as he read.

  “Edwina,” he said softly. Then a moment later he added, “And Lulabelle. I haven’t thought of her for forty years. Hated the Dickersons. And Ma….”

  He shook his head, then leaned forward, nearly knocking the cat from his lap, and handed the letter back to me.

  “It’s not conclusive identification,” he said.

 
“I know that.”

  “But judging from content, my sister Karla wrote it to Lawrence. She would be the only one who’d call him dearest. The rest of us hated him.”

  Those last two words had a vehemence that added to their veracity.

  “Edwina was my momma’s cousin. They were close as sisters. She died of some kind of female complaint — I suspect we’d call it a cancer of the female parts these days — and Momma insisted on staying with her until she was gone. Then Momma came up here, along with the rest of the family. I forgot she lived with Aunt Lula for a while. We was saving up money to bring her. Or I should say I was saving up money. Lawrence was spending it as fast as he got it. Then he got all the credit when the money arrived. Ain’t it always like that?”

  Apparently, in Talgart’s life it had been, and he hadn’t let go of it, even though the other players were long dead.

  “Which is,” he said, “a long way of saying if you found that letter on his body, and I’m thinking from the stains you did, then you found my brother. Where’d they put him? A ditch somewhere?”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Something else going on?”

  “I can’t tell you that either. But I can ask you some leading questions.”

  He inclined his head toward me, a regal movement that acknowledged I was giving him more information than perhaps he deserved.

  “Did you or your brother know a Mortimer Hanley?”

  “Can’t answer for my brother on most things. We had pretty separate lives, and he died fifty years ago. But I never heard of this Hanley.”

  “What about Gavin Baird?”

  To my surprise, Talgart smiled. “Yeah, I knew him. Everyone working the South Side knew him. My brother routinely bilked him of the fortune he inherited.”

  “I thought you didn’t know about your brother’s business.”

  “This one was hard to avoid. Baird came into the precinct one night demanding to see me. Now, if you knew Baird, you’d know he didn’t normally associate with anyone with dark skin.”

  “Except your brother.”

  “I can’t vouch for what Baird did on the Levee. There folks went to be something they weren’t. He slummed a lot, and men like him often dipped into the things they professed to hate.”

  I’d seen that. I never completely understood it either.

  “But to come into the precinct, and ask for a colored patrolman — no, demand to see him — and in a public place, well that was nigh unheard of.”

  “What’d he want?” I asked.

  “He wanted me to give him his money back. He said, and I got no reason to doubt him, that my brother pulled the last of his savings — about five grand — off him in one night.”

  “That was a lot of money then,” I said.

  “It’s a lot of money now,” Talgart said. “I’d love a piece of that.”

  “Then too?”

  His smile faded. His eyes became hard and his jaw rigid. Even though he had shrunken with age, his expression gave him a power that suggested he could take me in a fair fight.

  “I’m not dirty. I’ve never been dirty. I’ve had plenty of opportunity, starting with my brother, and right up until the day I retired I never once took a bribe, never once hit someone who didn’t deserve it, never once lied to get a righteous conviction. So don’t you come into my home and accuse me of stealing.”

  My cheeks were warm. I hadn’t quite accused him of that. But I had implied it.

  “My mistake,” I said.

  “That’s not an apology,” he snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was out of line.”

  “Damn right you were.”

  I took a deep breath, waiting for him to toss me out. But he didn’t. We stared at each other for a moment, and since I was the one who had offended him, I was the one to break the eye contact first.

  “I guess what I was trying to ask you is if you told your brother you envied him that kind of money,” I said.

  “Now why in holy hell would I do that?”

  I shrugged. “You said you were supporting your mother. Wouldn’t there be some resentment—”

  “You asking me if I killed my brother?” That flinty look was back.

  “No,” I said. “I’m trying to gauge your relationship with your brother and how you reacted to Baird that night.”

  “How I reacted to Baird was I told him to solve his own damn problems. Another colored officer was there with me, and he asked Baird if the money changed hands in an illegal vice game. Baird took issue, a scuffle ensued, and that was the last I saw of him that night.”

  “A scuffle?”

  “He lunged at the officer — I can’t recall his name now — and some of the others in the precinct broke it up. They hauled Baird off, and that was the end of that.”

  “That other officer, was he —”

  “He was just trying to help the idiot. If it’d been an illegal game, which it was, we might’ve been able to arrest Lawrence and get Baird’s money back. But by the time we got confirmation the game was illegal, there was no game to be seen, no one to arrest. Not that I would’ve gone up to the Levee anyway. Black police officers didn’t end up so good up there.”

  I nodded. “When did all this happen?”

  “About a week before Lawrence and his expensive automobile disappeared.”

  “And that was the end of it?” I asked.

  “The incident? Sure,” he said. “No one was gonna tell me how they got Baird’s money back. My captain talked to me, to see if I was in on the fleecing. When he realized I wasn’t, he sent me back onto the streets, warned me to stay away from Baird and the Levee and Lawrence, and I did.”

  “So you didn’t see your brother at all before he died.”

  Talgart sighed and handed me the letter. “I didn’t even know he got that, which would’ve been nice, because I spent three months writing letters to my mother before one of them actually got to her. I had no idea where she was.”

  “You finally had enough money to bring her up here?” I asked.

  “Her and my sister. I sold Lawrence’s car to do it too.”

  “Wasn’t it evidence?” I asked.

  “In what? The death of a colored man? A colored man who stole from white people? Who was going to investigate that?”

  “His policeman brother?”

  He petted the cat, then leaned back in his armchair. The springs squeaked.

  “You’re that type, aren’t you?” he said. “The type that rushes in, feels each death’s got to be examined, each killer’s got to be brought to justice.”

  “I didn’t know it was a type,” I said.

  “It’s a type, and it’s a dangerous one. Because not every killer should be brought to justice. You pick up those rocks, and you find dirty little secrets that cost even more lives. And sometimes the life lost should’ve been lost.”

  “Are you saying your brother should’ve died?” I asked.

  “I said he got what he deserved and I meant it.”

  “You weren’t curious? Or worried that the same people might come after you?”

  “Curious? No. My brother was so deep in Chicago’s cesspool that I figured he finally crossed the wrong person. I wasn’t about to make that same mistake. Worried that they’d come after me? Not really. I had enough to worry about just walking around in my uniform.”

  “Being a policeman made you a target?” I asked.

  “It was 1919, son. I was a colored policeman. I was in trouble from the Irish gangs who hated me in a patrolman’s uniform, and I was in trouble from the coloreds who thought they owned the South Side. I had ‘betrayed my race,’ sided with the white man. I couldn’t hardly walk out of the precinct without worrying about being beat up or shot. So why worry that my brother’s killer was coming after me? I figured it was just one more name on the Get-Talgart list.”

  “Why didn’t you leave Chicago?” I asked. “Family?”r />
  “If you mean a wife and kids, I never got that lucky. Had two wives, both left me because I seemed too taken up with my work. I always wondered what they expected, marrying a policeman. That I wouldn’t be involved with my work?”

  He placed both hands on the cat’s back. The cat licked his fingers, then bit one. Talgart didn’t seem to notice. The cat’s ears went back and it jumped down.

  Talgart adjusted the blanket. “I stayed because I had a good job. A professional job, one I couldn’t get back in Mississippi. I stayed because I knew it was worse other places. East St. Louis rioted for weeks — weeks — that year. You read about 1919, son. You’ll learn that all the upsets we’ve been having about the war, about the racist stuff, about the bombings, barely compares to fifty years ago. Back then, coloreds weren’t just taking to the streets, they were getting shot, fire-bombed, lynched, and not just in the Deep South. In places like Iowa and Illinois and Missoura. And not just us, neither. Germans was worse. You were a German or had a German last name, and you could be lynched same as a colored man. I never thought anyone’d make it out of that year alive.”

  “Your brother didn’t,” I said.

  “Nope, he didn’t,” Talgart said.

  “You ever have proof of that besides the car?” I asked.

  “And that paper you just handed me?” Talgart said. “Not proof. But words.”

  “Words?” I said.

  “About a week after the car got found, some of the Levee boys came to me and told me that I had to give them what was in Lawrence’s apartment or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “You just dumb or do you like asking dumb questions?” He gripped the arms of that chair. “Or else I’d end up just like him. It was implied, but the implication was clear, just like yours was earlier.”

  I nodded. “Who were those Levee people?”

  “Boys,” he said. “That’s what we called them. And they wasn’t colored. They were whiter than white. They worked the area.”

  “For Colosimo?”

  “Not on paper.” Talgart shook his head. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “I know very little about that period in Chicago history.”