Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (24 page)

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—”
h
e 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 rate, 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.

I went to the door and peeped through the spyhole.
Two men stood outside. They wore black leather jackets and one of them had on sunglasses indoors.

The men looked familiar, but it was hard to tell in the peephole’s fisheye.

I knew they’d heard me.
They’d both moved slightly when I leaned against the door.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We’d like to hire you,” said the man toward the back.
His voice was unfamiliar.

I sighed, debating whether or not to open the door.
I didn’t need the work — this job from Laura would take most of my time for the foreseeable future — but I really did want something else to think about: kind of a rest job that would allow me to concentrate on a different problem for a while.

I unlocked all three deadbolts and pulled back the chain.
Then I opened the door — and immediately tried to push it shut.

The man in back
,
the one who’d spoken
,
put his foot in the door.
“Do us the courtesy of listening to us,” he said.

But I wasn’t looking at him.
I was looking at the tall, broadshouldered man with the familiar face.
He pulled off the sunglasses and smiled at me, and that smile had as much charm as I remembered.

Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.

He was the last person I wanted in my home.

“We really do want to hire you.” He had a deep voice that resonated even when he wasn’t doing public speaking.
He was only about twenty or so, but he had more physical presence than anyone I’d met since Martin.

I blocked the door with my body.
“I don’t need the work.”

“Then why didn’t you jus’ tell us to fuck off?” the other man asked.
“Seems to me you needed the work until you figured out who we was.”

Hampton glanced at him, a calculated look instructing him to shut up.
“This is William O’Neal.
He’s my bodyguard.
My name is Fred Hampton. I’m with the—”

“I know who you are,” I said.
“I’m not going to do any work for you.”

“You don’t like the Panthers?” he asked.

“I don’t like anyone who draws the wrong kind of attention to our neighborhood.”

“Our offices are on the West Side,” he said, “not down here.”

“I know,” I said.
“And whenever you make one of your pronouncements, the cops show up here too.
You have an ‘action’ like you did at Cook County Hospital the other day, and the cops knock some heads on
Sixty-third
and Woodlawn.
We’re tied together, your neighborhood and mine, and you know it.”

He gave me a half smile.
“You been following what I do.”

“It’s hard to miss.” I kicked O’Neal in the shin, and he yelped, pulling his foot away.
I shoved at the door, but Hampton caught it with the flat of his right hand.

“Do me a favor.
Hear me out.”

“No,” I said. “You bring cops and FBI wherever you go.
I don’t want any informant telling them you’ve been inside my place, especially if you stay longer than ten minutes.”

Hampton leaned back slightly.
He was slimmer than I was, but just as tall.
He had no obvious weapons on him, but he didn’t look very muscular either.
I could probably shove his arm out of the way, push him backward into that so-called bodyguard, and get the door closed in record time.

“If someone’s watching,” Hampton said, “and they probably are, they’ve already seen us coming into the building.”

“But they don’t know where you went,” I said, realizing the argument was weak.

“It wouldn’t be hard to find out, would it?”

He had a point.
They were already here.
If the police investigated the tenants, they’d figure Hampton either came
to see me or the grandson of the lady upstairs. The grandson was a member of the Blackstone Rangers, the street gang I’d made a deal with and that Hampton had negotiated a truce with last spring.

“All right,” I said. “You have five minutes.
Your ‘bodyguard’ has to wait outside, though.”

“Don’t lock the bolts,” O’Neal said.
“I wanna be able to come in if there’s trouble.”

“I didn’t mean outside the apartment,” I said.
“I meant outside the building.”

O’Neal looked at Hampton.
Hampton nodded to him.

“I don’t like this,” O’Neal said, but he clomped his way down the stairs just the same.

I waited until he stepped outside before I opened my door all the way to Hampton.
He gave me a boyish grin and stepped in.
He had a loose, angular way of walking that suggested comfort.
But it was as deceptive as the walk of a large cat.
That comfort hid a preparedness.
If I had gone for Hampton, he would have blocked me.
Hampton
seemed to see his surroundings as clearly as I did.

I shut the door behind him and locked the top deadbolt for good measure. I didn’t want O’Neal to come back here and barge his way in.

Hampton took in the dirty dishes at the sink, the opened Sunday paper, the boy’s jacket hanging on the coat tree.

“Family man,” he said.

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to give him any information about myself. I
also didn’t take him down the hall to my office, like I would have any other potential client.
We remained right in front of the door, so I could usher him out quickly if I had to.

“I approve,” he said. “I’m gonna be a father myself in December.”

That surprised me.
I hadn’t thought of him as much more than a creative and eloquent street thug, a young man who had one foot in the gangs and another in a rising political movement. In the past few months, I felt like he’d moved closer to politics, but he still liked guns and violence too much for my
taste.

“You’re wasting your five minutes,” I said.

He nodded, grabbed the front of the paper, and turned it over to reveal the headlines.
More frightened reporting about the radicals and their Days of Rage.
Only this time, the reporters had something to discuss — in yesterday’s riots downtown, a district attorney working on the Conspiracy Trial had been critically
injured
.
More than a hundred demonstrators had been arrested, and the police were taking credit for the riot’s fifteen-minute duration.

“We’re not dangerous like them,” he said.
“We don’t agree with them.”

“I know,” I said. “I heard you call them custeristic.”

He smiled. “You do keep track.”

“I need to know what’s happening in my community,” I said.

His smile faded. “Then you know about the Soto brothers.”

I thought of the young man on that steel table, his hair cut off by the U.S. Army, his friends and family so frightened of the police they were paying for a second autopsy in the hopes of gathering some wrongful death evidence, evidence that might help them down the road.

“Yeah.” I kept my answers terse.
I didn’t want to let him know how I felt about anything.

“You know the cops killed them.”

“Both sides agree on that,” I said.

He stuck his hands in the pocket
s
of his black jacket.
“You and I both know that those brothers didn’t provoke the cops.
They were targeted.”