Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (22 page)

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 —”
m
eaning the bodies “— yeah.
The implications —”
m
eaning 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:
w
ho 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, m
ore 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 Weatherm
e
n 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.”

“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?”