Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “Had he?”

  “He doesn’t seem to have any. Our rental agency actually looked. The office manager over there is really quite a nice woman, unlike so many other Sturdy employees.”

  “This guy die?” Jimmy asked.

  “Alone and unloved,” I said. “It’s a recommendation against living life as a mean SOB.”

  “Smokey!” Laura said with a smile.

  I shrugged. “It’s true. Everyone I talked to hated him. Even his mailman.”

  “I thought mailmen were supposed to be nice to everybody,” Jim said.

  “Me too,” I said, thinking about what Laura had told me. The police station told them the mailman had found the body. Which meant I needed that death report from Sinkovich more than ever.

  This was more police involvement. It was a pattern, one I didn’t like.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  My Saturday started out good. Marvella watched Jim for an hour while I delivered LeDoux and Minton to the Queen Anne. Then Jim and I spent the morning and the early part of the afternoon running errands and living what I liked to call a Normal Life.

  That normal life changed when I left Jim with Marvella for a second hour, and returned to the Queen Anne.

  The lights were out and the basement door was locked. Neither man answered when I called for them. The hair on the back of my neck rose.

  I walked around to the front of the building. The main door was open about a foot. My heart started pounding hard.

  I didn’t like this.

  I went up the steps. The sharp odor of paint caught me, followed by voices. I pushed the door open.

  Tarps covered the scuffed wood floor. LeDoux and Minton stood near the far wall. LeDoux was pouring paint into a tray, and Minton was rolling paint on the plaster, doing an adequate job. It would’ve looked better if the paint I’d bought, on sale, hadn’t been a robin’s egg blue.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked.

  They both jumped as if I’d shouted at the top of my lungs. LeDoux set the can of paint down, wiped his hands on his coveralls, and came toward me, one blue-stained finger to his lips.

  “He still out there?” he asked.

  My stomach knotted. “Who?”

  “There was a guy, claimed he wanted to buy the place,” LeDoux said. He peered out the front door. “I don’t see him.”

  I hadn’t noticed anything, and I had been looking.

  Minton balanced the roller on the edge of the tray, then joined us. He stepped outside, stretched on the porch as if he’d been working all day, and then came back in.

  “Car’s gone,” he said.

  LeDoux visibly relaxed. He walked over to the stairs, sat down, and covered his face with his hands. “I’d never been so scared in my life.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Minton pulled the front door closed. The paint smell grew sharper. “We were having lunch out back. We’d decided to go outside because that last body was whew!”

  He raised his eyebrows and flapped his hand in front of his nose to accompany that descriptive non-description.

  “This guy comes around the side of the building.” LeDoux rested his arms on his thighs. He looked tired and pale, as if the strain had been too much for him. “He’s big—”

  “White,” Minton said.

  “Crewcut,” LeDoux said.

  “Mean-looking,” Minton added. “Little piggy eyes.”

  “Strapping shoulders,” LeDoux said. “Like he’d been in a lot of fights.”

  I nodded.

  “He comes up,” Minton said.

  “Talks to me, and completely ignores Tim, like he’s not even here.” LeDoux’s mouth tightened in disgust.

  “Like I’m the ignorant help,” Minton said.

  “And he asks when Sturdy’s putting the building up for sale.”

  “Sturdy?” I asked. “Not even the mailman knew who owned the building.”

  “I remembered that,” LeDoux said, “and before I could answer, Tim said —”

  “I told him we were just painters and we didn’t know nothing.”

  “He said it that way too, as if he’d never opened a book in his life,” LeDoux said.

  “The guy still ignored me,” Minton said. “He looked right at Wayne here, and said in this tone of utter contempt —”

  “ ‘You haven’t spent these last few weeks painting, have you? No one takes that long to paint a house.’ ” LeDoux managed to catch both the contempt and a bit of a South Side Chicago accent.

  “I said it does when you gotta sand and spackle. The house’s been settling for a hundred years. And he still didn’t look at me. He said to Wayne, ‘You let this boy do all the talking?’

  “And I said, ‘I work for him. You have a problem with that?’ ” LeDoux’s face was even paler. I could see how much this cost him. “And he said to me, ‘I wouldn’t work for him.’ And I said, ‘Your loss.’”

  “He wasn’t interested in the building, that was for sure,” Minton said. “He was interested in us.”

  “Thank God we were covered in dust from the mortar. I’d had Tim helping me remove some bricks this morning. We wanted to see what was behind Suite B.”

  “What was?” I asked.

  LeDoux shook his head slightly. “Just what we were afraid of. More.”

  “I figure the tombs go all the way back. There’re probably a bunch of bodies underneath us right here. It’ll take weeks to get to them,” Minton said.

  I sighed. It didn’t sound like we had weeks. “So how did you get rid of the guy?”

  “I asked him for a business card,” Minton said. “I told him that we’d have someone call him.”

  “He clearly didn’t have a business card,” LeDoux said. “He ignored Tim and told me he’d come back when we were done. Then he asked when I thought that would be.”

  “That’s when I shrugged,” Minton said, “and told him we got paid by the hour.”

  In spite of myself, I laughed. Minton let this intruder think that they were working slowly and unsupervised so that they could make as much money as possible.

  “The thing was,” Minton said, “when we finally got rid of him, he just walked across the street and sat down on the curb. So we decided we had to make it look like we were painting.”

  “The only place I could think of that wasn’t connected to the crime scenes was out here,” LeDoux said.

  “So there I am, carrying tarps and paint buckets through that stinky manager apartment, up that horrible staircase, and down the front. That was something. I don’t envy you going through everything in there.”

  “See why I’ve been putting it off?” I asked.

  Minton nodded.

  “Did you have any idea who he was?” I asked.

  “Not a clue,” LeDoux said. “I’d never seen him before.”

  I looked at Minton. “I hadn’t seen him before either. But he didn’t look like a guy who wanted to buy an apartment building. And once he started into the questions, it was clear he wanted us out of here.”

  “Was he older?” I asked, thinking of Kaztauskis.

  “Hell, no,” Minton said. “He was my age.”

  “There was something menacing about him,” LeDoux said, “and if you ask me to describe it, I couldn’t. It was the way he stood, the way he looked at us, the way he treated Tim—”

  “He wanted to scare us,” Minton said.

  “It worked,” LeDoux said.

  “You think he’ll be back?” I asked.

  Minton glanced at the door, as if he were considering. “He wanted us to know he’s keeping an eye on this place. I think if he wanted to hurt us, he would’ve done it.”

  “He wants us out of here, that much was clear,” LeDoux said. “But what he’ll do to get rid of us, I can’t say.”

  “Since he knows about Sturdy,” Minton said, “I think he’ll go through channels — back channels — and put some pressure there.”

  “He doesn’t think we found a
nything,” LeDoux said. “That was also clear. He almost relaxed when Tim mentioned being paid by the hour.”

  I smiled at Minton. “Good thinking.”

  “You warned me people might ask questions. I just figured I’d better have some answers.”

  I nodded. “They’ve officially put us on notice. Someone’s watching us. I wondered if that was going to happen.”

  “Doesn’t it worry you?” LeDoux asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I have a hunch the threat won’t be to us.”

  Minton frowned, but LeDoux tilted his head as if he were considering.

  “You’re worried about Miss Hathaway.”

  I nodded.

  “You think someone’ll hurt her?” He sounded almost like Jimmy.

  “Not physically,” I said.

  LeDoux waited. Then, when I didn’t elaborate, he said, “You’re not going to tell me any more, are you?”

  “It’s better if you don’t know,” I said.

  He let out a small, humorless laugh. “Last week, I would have agreed with you. Now I want to know everything.”

  “Someday,” I said, making a promise I wasn’t sure I could fulfill. “I’ll tell you as soon as I can.”

  FORTY-NINE

  LeDoux stayed up front and painted while Minton and I loaded the day’s bodies into the van. We had three in body bags and five more boxes of carefully packed skeletal remains.

  “I think it’s best if I do as much here as I can,” Minton said. “Get this done as fast as possible.”

  “You think they’ll be back,” I said.

  “I do,” he said. “and I think the longer we take, the more hostile they’ll become.”

  “You were worried he was going to hurt you?” I asked.

  Minton nodded. That surprised me, even though he had said the man was menacing. I still didn’t expect a physical threat here.

  “I can take care of myself,” Minton said. “But Wayne can’t.”

  I nodded. “We might need a new cover story.”

  “You might need to get that from your lady boss at Sturdy. She might have to head them off, give us a little more time.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said. Maybe she could make a comment to that Kaztauskis, after we come up with something. We didn’t discuss a new cover story last night, and we had planned to, but Jim ended up dominating the conversation, and Laura and I didn’t mind. I liked being more relaxed with her. I liked the comfortable feeling we were returning to.

  We locked up the van, got LeDoux and his two boxes of evidence, then drove to the new building. It wasn’t far from Poehler’s. It was at the end of a row of warehouses, not too far from the steel mills on the South Side.

  We went inside and found three rooms and the rest warehouse space. LeDoux was pleased, Minton less so. They had suggestions, which I was to pass along to Laura. The warehouse was set up for a refrigeration unit — a large one, the kind restaurants used — but didn’t have one. We’d have to get one installed for Minton, and he also needed a walled-off work area.

  We decided not to store any evidence here until the workers finished redoing the interior.

  LeDoux said he’d keep the evidence he brought in his apartment. After the interaction with the stranger that afternoon, both LeDoux and Minton wanted as much removed from the building as possible.

  I had a hunch my next few days would be a combination of interviews and work at the Queen Anne, probably in Hanley’s disgusting apartment. I mentally braced myself for the task.

  I was glad the baseball games were over. I would probably have to spend more time working on this case than I wanted to. We had a time pressure that I hadn’t felt before.

  My journey around Chicago had taken an hour and a half longer than I had expected. When I got back to the apartment, Marvella was sitting at my kitchen table with Jimmy and Jack Sinkovich. Sinkovich clutched a can of beer, Marvella was drinking hers from one of the jelly glasses I’d saved, and Jimmy was drinking from a can of Coke.

  The apartment smelled of pizza and Sinkovich’s disgusting aftershave.

  “Took you long enough,” Sinkovich said, tilting his chair back on two legs. He wasn’t a small man, and the movement put a lot of strain on my cheap furniture. “I’m saying it because the lady’s been wondering about it and she’s too much of a lady to say something to you.”

  Marvella gave him a fond grin. They’d met in passing before, but so far as I knew had never had an interaction. I wouldn’t have thought they would get along — in the past, Marvella had gone out of her way to make any whites who showed up at my apartment uncomfortable.

  “Jack was telling me and Marvella about the trial,” Jimmy said. He sounded excited.

  Sinkovich’s pale cheeks turned a light pink. “I only been saying what’s in the papers.”

  “What trial?” I asked.

  “There is only one trial in Chicago right now, Bill,” Marvella said. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”

  “The Conspiracy Trial?” I said. “I’ve been trying not to.”

  I pushed the door to my apartment closed, hung up my coat, and walked into the kitchen to wash my hands. I would have liked a shower after all that body removal, but since I suddenly found myself to be entertaining guests, I figured I’d be somewhat social. The need for a shower was more psychological than physical anyway.

  “How come my kitchen smells like pizza?” I asked.

  “Because Jack brought three pizzas,” Marvella said, “and I went to my place, got us some pizza trays, and we’ve been keeping them warm.”

  “Which is why she’s been worrying,” Sinkovich said. “She’s afraid the pizza’s getting dried out.”

  “Pizza’s good no matter how it is,” Jimmy said loyally. He and Sinkovich had words last year, and since then they’d been sort-of friends.

  “You run into trouble?” Marvella asked me, and her question seemed pointed. Was she thinking of the Panthers? If so, it was good of her to keep that part of things quiet.

  “No,” I said. “I just had to make one more stop than I’d planned on, and it was clear across town.”

  “You coulda called,” Jimmy said, and the inflection was such a perfect imitation of Sinkovich that I knew where Jimmy had gotten the idea.

  “I could have,” I said. “Finding a pay phone would’ve added another fifteen minutes on my arrival time.”

  I took some plates out of the cupboard, then ripped up some paper towels as napkins. Marvella got up and took one of the pizzas out of the oven. It was pepperoni and sausage, and it looked like it hadn’t dried out yet. Sinkovich had gone out of his way to get the pizza too — the pepperoni and sausage looked homemade, not like the mass-manufactured kind most pizza places bought.

  “Three pizzas’re a little excessive, don’t you think?” I asked Sinkovich.

  He shrugged. “Jim’s a growing boy. I could pack away an entire pizza by myself at his age.”

  “Don’t give him ideas,” I said, and then grinned at Jimmy, who had already taken three pieces in the time it had taken me to grab a can of beer out of the refrigerator.

  “Beer?” Sinkovich said. “The world must be ending. I thought nothing so crass would touch your lips.”

  “It sounded good,” I said, thinking crass was appropriate right now. I sat down, took two large pieces, and tucked in. This was perfect, better than I could’ve expected. Jim and I hadn’t been eating well lately, and for once I didn’t care. Food was food, and pizza was even better.

  For the first hour, we talked and laughed and gossiped. Sinkovich had dozens of stories about the Conspiracy Trial, some quite funny.

  “I ain’t supposed to talk about it,” he said, “but screw them. They’re not following the rules, so I’m not gonna either.”

  “Is that right?” Jimmy asked me. “Can you break the rules when other people do?”

  “Jim hasn’t read Emerson yet, has he?” Marvella said, surprising me.

  “I think it’s Thoreau,�
�� I said, “and no, I don’t think teaching budding teenagers about civil disobedience is always a good idea.”

  “Bull pucky.” Sinkovich took the last piece of pizza, then took the tray and, without standing up, set it in my sink. “Kid, sometimes there’re rules you follow and sometimes there aren’t. Your dad knows this. He knows about Dr. King. And the good doctor, he broke a lotta laws. Went to jail a few times for it, too.”

  “You’re saying that telling us about the Conspiracy Trial is the equivalent of breaking segregation laws?” I asked.

  Sinkovich’s grin faded. “Guess I am. Those bastards — pardon my French — think they own the world.”

  “I’m pretty sure coming to court under guard has changed their minds about that,” I said.

  “I don’t mean the defendants, Grimshaw. I mean the prosecutor, the goddamn judge, and the assholes lying on the stand.” He bowed at Marvella. “Excuse the language.”

  “Why?” she said. “Mine’s worse.”

  “But Jim’s isn’t yet,” I said. “Let’s be careful, shall we?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Jimmy said with a grin. “I like French.”

  Sinkovich got up and took the second pizza out of the oven. He set the tray on the nest of hotpads Marvella had built, then gave us each another piece, before adding to his own pile.

  “They got me and four others sitting in there day after day, undercover, you know why?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine why they would want five undercover cops in the courtroom.

  “They say it’s because they need help when those kids get out of hand. They say they’re expecting riots inside the courtroom.”

  I had seen a shooting inside a courtroom. I would’ve expected something like that in the trial of the Chicago Eight.

  “You don’t?” I asked.

  “Hell, half those kids think it’s theater, and two of them are just plain confused. Only one of the white kids seems real serious about it — and he’s not a kid. He’s the old guy, what’s his name? Dillinger?”

  “Dellinger,” Marvella said quietly. Obviously she’d been following the trial too.