Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “But that black kid, Seale. Man, he’s the only one who’s been respectful, standing every day when the judge comes in, yessir and nossirring him, and the judge is treating him like dirt. Worse than dirt, not letting him have a lawyer or speak up for himself. Which ain’t legal, by the way. I asked some lawyer friends of mine. They’re part of that national group of lawyers that’s been calling for a mistrial.”

  “Jack told us how they tried to talk to the court yesterday,” Jimmy said, his mouth full of pizza.

  The sense of relaxation had left the room. Sinkovich was unhappy about all of this, and the feeling radiated. Jimmy didn’t seem to notice, but he was the only one.

  I didn’t need any more tension in my day, and I was about to ask him to change the subject when Marvella said, “Tell Bill why you think you’re there, Jack.”

  Sinkovich nodded, then ran a hand through his thinning blond hair. “I don’t think it’s coincidence that the five of us who gotta wear a suit and tie every day and scatter ourselves around that room were the five who wouldn’ta lied on the stand if we were called.”

  The tension increased. “Lied about what?” I asked.

  “What you yelled at me about after the Democratic National Convention. What got me thinking about what I was doing in the first place. Birdshot in our gloves, going out there to beat up the kids and start the riots ourselves, the speeches the bosses gave before the cops headed out to Grant Park those days. All the stuff the defense claims happened, which did happen, which half the cops on the stand and more than half the officials’ve been lying about, saying none of it happened.”

  He was getting red. We had had a fight back then. I’d told him exactly what I thought of a cop who would beat up an unarmed student. Sinkovich actually listened to me, which was the beginning of his transformation from a guy who went along with department policy, whatever it was, to a guy who stood up for what he believed was right, no matter what the cost.

  “Thing is,” he said, “we got the assignment before we know what it is, before we can say no. I’m hearing undercover, which after being at a desk for almost a year is like a blessing. Then when we show up, in our suits and stupid neckties, we get told where to sit. First day of testimony — because you know what? If we hear the testimony, we ain’t gonna be considered good witnesses. They deliberately contaminated us. Deliberately.”

  I wasn’t sure he took a breath throughout the entire speech. Jimmy finished two more pieces of pizza while he listened, but Marvella watched, spellbound. I wasn’t even appalled any more. On the scheme of what I was dealing with, this seemed relatively minor.

  “Which brings me to what I gotta talk to you about,” he said to me. “Can we go to your office?”

  “Sure.” I got up. Marvella picked up her dishes. I waved her away. “Leave them. You’ve done enough. You’re welcome to stay. I don’t think this’ll take long.”

  She smiled at me. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said, “and I’m not sure Jim’s done with his entire pizza yet.”

  “I get hungry,” he said.

  “It’s not a competition. Just because Sinkovich could eat an entire pizza at your age doesn’t mean you have to.”

  And with that I went to my office. It was the smallest bedroom in the apartment. I had crammed a desk, credenza, and some filing cabinets in there. They were the nicest furniture we owned, all thick, polished, blond wood. I sank in my heavy metal desk chair. Sinkovich took the wooden table chair across from me.

  “Before I forget, I got your report.” He had been carrying his coat. He slipped his hand underneath it and pulled out a manila file.

  “You brought the actual report?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “No one else’s using it. Give it to me next week.”

  He set it on the desk.

  “That’s not what you wanted to talk to me about?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I got issues,” he said. “I got the divorce — my wife, she found some guy who’s convinced her he’s in love with her, and he wants to take her and my kid to Northern Minnesota, if you can believe it.”

  “I thought you said Wisconsin.”

  He frowned at me. “What’s the difference? It ain’t Chicago. My attorney says I don’t got much to fight with. My job’s hanging by a string, and if I lose it, I can kiss any chance of taking the kid bye-bye. Then there’s the issue of me. I wasn’t the best father in the first place, and I ain’t sure I can do it alone.”

  “You want me to advise you on how to raise a child alone?” I asked. “Jim was a lot older when he moved in with me than your son is.”

  “No,” Sinkovich said. “I know my limitations. I don’t even got family close.”

  “You’re gonna give in,” I said.

  “I’m gonna make the right decision for my son. If he can have a real family and me, y’know, summers or something, then that’s maybe the best. She ain’t staying here. That much I know. It’s either her family in Wisconsin or Northern Minnesota, and if I follow her, I got nothing.”

  “Except your family,” I said.

  “Not even that. She says she’ll make it real hard on me if I do that. She wants out. She means to get it however. That can’t be good for my kid.” He was shaking. This was hard for him, and he clearly had been thinking about it. “My lawyer says I can split Christmas and Easter with her fifty-fifty, then get all the other holidays and summer too, if I just play ball. That’s like half the year in little chunks.”

  I nodded, wondering how this concerned me.

  “If I do that,” Sinkovich said, “I don’t need this cocksucking job no more. I can resign and tell these motherfuckers what I think of their games and their lies and the way they treat the people they’re supposed to protect.”

  He had obviously been doing a lot of thinking. He had lines on the sides of his face that hadn’t been there before. His hair was nearly gone and he looked older — as if the past year had been harder on him than any other in his life.

  “What would you do?” I asked.

  “That’s where you come in.” He rubbed the side of his nose nervously, then looked out my window as if there was no more interesting view than the side of the neighboring apartment building.

  “Me?” I asked.

  He nodded, still not looking at me. Then he took a deep breath. “I’m wondering if maybe we can join up, you know, two detectives. Rent an office not far from here, work together. You need help. You got the kid most of the time, and you can’t be everywhere all the time. Then when my kid comes, I got back-up, you know? We trade off.”

  The pizza I ate turned into a lead ball in my stomach. “I’ve never worked with anyone.”

  “I been a cop my whole life,” he said. “My dad was a cop. My grandpa too. We’d be learning how to do this business thing together.”

  “It takes money management,” I said. “Some months you don’t get paid at all. And an ability to keep a secret.”

  He flushed. “Which I wasn’t doing out there because I was pissed off.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That worries me.”

  I didn’t want to say no outright. This man had been trying very hard this past year and everyone had rejected him for doing the right thing. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to work with him either.

  “I got department contacts, like a million of them, guys who’d be willing to give me information even if I’m not on the force. There’re a lot of disgruntled guys out there who need an outlet, maybe someone to take a few cases the police ignore, you know? We’d get those. I know the city better than most. I grew up here. My grandparents grew up here. I went to school with half the mayor’s office. I’d be willing to be the junior guy, the trainee, you know? And if you need an investment up-front, I got some savings. I could rent the office.”

  He said all that in a rush. I stared at him. He fidgeted in the chair, knowing that I was as uncomfortable as he was.

  But he had some points. I had trou
ble working alone. In the past I’d hired Malcolm Reyner to help me on some cases, but Malcolm got drafted this summer and wouldn’t be back from his tour for more than a year. I didn’t know a lot of people in the city, and I certainly didn’t know a lot of white people.

  Sinkovich was the extent of my police-department contacts these days, and as he said, he was on the outs. With his attitude, he might get fired before he quit.

  But there were a lot of disadvantages, including his volatility, his family situation, and the fact that he had never lived without a paycheck. Not to mention his inadvertent racism and my inability to trust someone one hundred percent.

  “Why do you want to work with me?” I asked. “Why not do it on your own? Or go with one of the big white firms in town? They’d be happy to have an ex-cop on their force, and they could pay you a salary.”

  “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about both those things,” he said. “But most of those firms, they do shadier stuff than the cops do. And I don’t like them. Hell, I busted half of them.”

  “I do shady things,” I said, hoping I wasn’t saying too much. “It’s part of the job.”

  “You do shady things for the right reasons,” Sinkovich said. “You’re a stand-up guy, and you been showing me there’s other ways to be, you know? You got an open mind. And you can’t be bought. I don’t want to be bought neither.”

  “You think you would be if you worked for the other detective agencies?”

  “Hell, half of them are owned already.”

  “What about working for yourself?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’ll be honest. Working for myself scares the crap outta me. Maybe we could say I’m training, huh, and then I could see if I like this.”

  “And if you don’t? You’ve already resigned, you’ve lost your pension, you won’t be a cop any more. You’d have to do something else.”

  “Yeah, like nighttime security at the steel mills or something. I can do that. But I want to try this first.”

  It would be a crime to let Sinkovich work a security job at a steel mill. He did have a good investigative mind.

  “Don’t say no right away,” he said. “Think about it, okay? I mean, give it a chance.”

  I could do that. “How much time do I have?”

  “As much as you need,” he said. “I can stay with the force if I gotta. I’m gonna decide the family thing no matter what. But if I’m gonna be the kinda guy who can make my kid proud, I’m not sure it can be as a Chicago cop no more.”

  “That’s a sad statement,” I said.

  “But it’s true,” he said. “It’s fucking true.”

  FIFTY

  After Marvella and Sinkovich left, I assigned Jimmy kitchen clean-up and went back to my office to read the death report. The file folder held three standard pieces of paper, just like I expected — the incident report, the coroner’s report, and a death certificate.

  Before he left my office, Sinkovich tapped the file on my desk and said, “One thing you need to know. The guy who answered the call? I’d call him one of Them.”

  Meaning Sinkovich didn’t trust him and thought the cop could be bought off. It was a good thing to know, because it affected the reliability of the report.

  The death certificate was on top. It was a carbon of a carbon, so faint that it was almost impossible to read. But it did certify that Mortimer Hanley had passed from this world on September 15, 1969. The coroner’s report was less precise, claiming Hanley died in the weeks before September fifteenth, the exact date impossible to determine, given the condition of the apartment where he was found and the excessive heat of the last few days before his body was discovered.

  There was no autopsy. The coroner guessed that Hanley died of natural causes, and then checked off the box that said no autopsy had been requested.

  The incident report was a lot more interesting. It said that the mailman had gone into Hanley’s bedroom to drop off the mail, and found the man dead. Then the mailman used the apartment’s phone to call an ambulance.

  There was no interview or incident report with the ambulance drivers, which made sense, since everyone thought Hanley had died of natural causes.

  But the report made me wonder.

  There were a lot of errors, inconsistencies, and missing information for a page-long typewritten report. First of all, the mailman’s name wasn’t listed. Not anywhere in the document. It wasn’t in the coroner’s report nor anywhere in the file.

  Secondly, anyone who smelled that empty apartment wouldn’t have casually walked into that bedroom when the body was still inside. The stench had to have been infinitely worse. Add to that the fact that the heat was on full blast in the middle of a fall heat wave, and the stink had to be unbearable.

  Anyone with half a nostril would have opened that door, smelled what was inside, and fled, using a phone in a neighboring building or down the street.

  Thirdly, if it was the mailman’s custom to walk into the apartment and drop off the mail in the bedroom, how come he hadn’t done it the previous eight to ten days that Hanley’s body had lain on that bed? How come he’d only done it the once?

  And finally, if this was a substitute mailman, where had he come from? I’d spoken to the post office, and the person on the other end of that phone had had no reason to lie to me. Carter Doyle had worked every single day in September, and wouldn’t ever have entered Hanley’s apartment, not to deliver mail, and certainly not in that stench.

  Sinkovich had said the cop who completed the report — presumably the cop who had arrived on scene when “the mailman” had called the police — wasn’t trustworthy. In fact, Sinkovich’s comment assumed that the cop would lie.

  So the question was, who was he lying for? Himself? Or someone else who found the body? Someone who paid him to keep his mouth quiet?

  I looked at the name typed beneath the illegible signature. Herman Faulds. I’d never heard of him, but that meant nothing. Chicago had over five thousand police officers on the payroll.

  I wondered if I could talk to him without revealing what my mission was about.

  This was where Sinkovich would actually come in handy. He could ask questions about this case without raising suspicions at all, maybe even after he had retired.

  I sighed, unable to believe I was actually considering his proposal.

  I was also unable to believe what I saw on the report in front of me.

  The death certificate had a firm date on it. The coroner was more circumspect, but he too had used the same date.

  September fifteenth.

  I looked at my notes from Laura’s accounting books.

  Back in the 1940s, that extra rent payment came into Sturdy’s accounts on the fifteenth of every month.

  The person who had found Hanley was the same one who’d been paying him off.

  And that person was important enough – or rich enough – to get Herman Faulds to falsify his police report.

  I was one step closer, but I wasn’t quite sure what I was closer to.

  FIFTY-ONE

  I spent most of the following morning ferrying people all over Chicago. Jimmy and I were running late, so I called the Grimshaws and told them to meet him at church. Then I took Jimmy, in his Sunday best, to Poehler’s with me, where we picked up Minton on the way to Sunday services.

  While Minton put on his coveralls, I dropped Jimmy at the church’s back door. Then Minton and I went uptown to get LeDoux, who was waiting for us outside his favorite restaurant. The three of us went back south to the Queen Anne.

  I dropped them off, promising to return after my interview with Twombly, the self-published writer. I figured that wouldn’t take very long, no matter what he had on Gavin Baird, and then I would be back.

  I would finally do the task I was dreading: I would go through the files in Hanley’s odor-filled apartment. I warned LeDoux about that and told him to get what evidence he could off those file drawers.

  He shot me a contemptuous look and
told me to wear gloves.

  I knew then that it was going to be a long day.

  By the time I got to the library, a conventional white Sunday service would have been half over. Thank heavens Althea Grimshaw believed in good, old-fashioned preaching. Lately, Althea had said she felt the need for a lot of the Lord’s word.

  Jimmy would be hallelujahing and praising Jesus for hours. Then he’d go to the Grimshaws for dinner, which might even give me time for a shower before I picked him up.

  I was already looking forward to that shower as I walked into the library. That took me just how much I was dreading my time in Hanley’s apartment.

  Serena Wexler wasn’t at the information desk, but Lloyd Twombly was exactly where she’d said he would be: in the leather, overstuffed chair near the arched windows of the newspaper room, the week’s newspapers from the New York Times to the San Francisco Examiner in a pile around him.

  He was a small white man with snow-white hair. He wore spats and a brown suit that was older than I was. A bowler sat on the edge of the marble table that held his week’s worth of newspapers. When I sat down near him, I caught the faint scent of mothballs.

  He looked up from last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, and frowned at me. “This table’s taken.”

  His face seemed slightly deformed and it took me a moment to realize why. His right ear had cauliflowered. Someone had once beaten him so badly that the ear was destroyed. Several smaller scars disappeared under his collar, some of them looking like the work of an intent person with a knife or a straight razor.

  “Mr. Twombly?” I extended my hand. “I’m Bill Grimshaw. Serena Wexler told me I could find you here. I found some items that date back to 1919, and she told me you can give me the history of the people involved.”

  His expression softened just a little, but his blue eyes remained cold. He touched the left side of his face.

  “Knife fight?” he asked, referring to my scar.

  I nodded, then touched the right side of my neck. “Looks like you were in one too.”

  He grinned. It was an impish grin, a boyish grin that made me understand why the library had taken a self-published book, and why Serena Wexler had known where to find him.