Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (30 page)

I scanned for familiar faces — an old
habit — and wondered if the tail had come inside to keep an eye on me, or if he had waited in his car as per law
-
enforcement regulations.

I guessed I would find out soon enough.

The rain had stopped, but the sidewalk remained wet.
Water dripped off building cornices, and passing cars drove through puddles, splashing
bypassers.

By the time I reached my van, my feet were wet and I was more tired than I would have been if I had spent the day in that basement, lifting bricks and bodies for Minton.

My parking meter had expired, and a soggy ticket adhered to the van’s windshield.
I pulled the paper off and looked at the numbers bleeding into the each other from the rain.
They looked as fuzzy as the numbers had on the ledgers inside my briefcase.

If Hanley had a free apartment, how come he had received a salary?
And if Hathaway had changed the payment notation from salary to commission so that he wouldn’t get in trouble for failing to pay taxes — and did someone have to pay employment or social security on a commission? I didn’t know for certain — why hadn’t he changed his practices in 1948 or 1949?
Why not change the notation back to salary, remove the taxes, and ensure that everything balanced?

I hoped the rest of the file that Laura had given me had the information I needed. Because, at the moment, the more I learned about Hanley and the Queen Anne, the more confused I got.

THIRTY-ONE

The tail followed me down Michigan Avenue into Bronzeville.
It was the same car, and it looked like the same driver.
I still had no idea if he had followed me into the library, but if I had to guess, I would have thought that he hadn’t.

Still, I had to lose him on the drive back, which wouldn’t be as easy to mask.
Most people didn’t drive south in rush hour.
Many of the people who lived in Bronzeville, Bridgeport, and the near South Side took public transportation.
People from the suburbs and the Gold Coast drove, making most of the afternoon rush hour traffic head north.

So I had to do some creative driving, heading west farther than I wanted to find a small tangle of roads near the stockyards.
I arrived just as the shifts were changing, which added a confusion of traffic, and I slipped through it, gunning the van when it wasn’t appropriate and making a few illegal U-turns.

I suspected I had lost him there, but I knew I had lost him when he didn’t show up behind me in the relatively minor traffic near Fiftieth
S
treet.

Still, I drove through some of the back roads of Hyde Park, pausing too long at stop signs and pulling over now and then to see if anyone in a black sedan appeared behind me.

No one did, but a police car passed me.
As I glanced inside, I thought I saw the same two cops I’d seen the previous week.

They didn’t notice me.
They drove by, and although I checked my rearview, they didn’t follow.

I made my way safely to the Queen Anne.

LeDoux and Minton were still in the basement, still working the first crime scene.
I had joined them, after I donned my coveralls and cap in the van, and was startled to see that they hadn’t made much progress at all.

I mentioned that as politely as I could.

“Actually, we’ve made quite a bit of progress,” LeDoux said.

He handed me a rolled
-
up grocery bag.
I opened it and looked inside, discovering several small, full evidence bags.
I pulled one out.
It held a faded box of matches, the logo almost unreadable.
The label attached to the plastic bag written in LeDoux’s characteristic scrawl, read:

Right Pocket

Tan? pants

Skeleton one [see drawing]

Item 105A

“I assume you know what this tag means,” I said.

He nodded.
“This,” he said, sweeping his hand toward the first crime scene, “is area A.
We’ll go as far down the alphabet as we need to.”

I set the matchbox in the bag beside the other evidence.
“I thought you’d have to process all of this for fingerprints and stuff.
You haven’t finished that, have you?”

“Heavens, no,” LeDoux said.
“I really don’t want you to touch anything but the evidence bags.
But write down the information.
Both Tim and I thought, however, that you could find out things about these victims from these items.”

“No ID, then,” I said.

“Nothing we can use.”
Minton’s voice floated out of the crime scene area.
“Some letters, some torn pieces of paper, a few wallets with money but no real ID”

A group of flashlights surrounded him, washing out his skin and making him seem larger than he was.
He was still crouched near the skeletons, only he had a long box near him and he was lining it with paper.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Packing these men up,” Minton said.

I wasn’t sure what to respond to first — the fact that he had figured out gender or the fact that he wasn’t using a body bag for each skeleton.

“We have tarps,” I said
,
before I actually made a conscious decision.

“Hmmm?” Minton asked.

LeDoux was looking at me strangely as well.

“Tarps.
To cover the body bags. It’ll look like we’re carrying out painting equipment if we’re careful,” I said.

Minton let out a small laugh.
It had surprise but no real humor in it.
“That’s not why I’m using the box.
This is the preferred way to carry old bones.
If I put them in a bag, they’ll knock together and chip.”

He held up a femur.
It looked yellow in the odd light.

“See?” he said.
“It has no connecting tissue, nothing to hold it to the other bones.”

“So you can’t tell which body it belongs to?”

“I can guess,” Minton said.
“I’m going to try to put the right bones with the right person.
But I’m not going to be entirely sure until I get back to Poehler’s.
There’s been some animal activity — mouse or rat, I can’t tell —”

“Don’t worry,” LeDoux said, apparently seeing my expression.
“It was a long time ago.”

“—and some of these parts have been moved around.”

“But we’ve already made one discovery.” LeDoux actually sounded pleased.

I glanced at him.

“The bones are old,” he said.

“How old?” I asked, feeling the muscles in my shoulders tighten, hoping they wouldn’t implicate Hathaway — not for his sake, but for Laura’s.

“These bones are yellow and brittle,” Minton said.
He had set a femur at the bottom of the box and was packing soft white cloth around it as if it were the most precious thing he’d ever seen.
“They flake easily and are very fragile.”

“Which means what?” I asked.

“These bodies have been here thirty or forty years minimum,” Minton said.
“Probably closer to forty.
The area’s pretty dry, and except for some early bug activity and those long-ago mice, they’ve been relatively unmolested.
The exposure to air’s pretty minimal, so decay would have taken longer, and the walls — especially basement walls — would have protected them from the extremes of Chicago’s weather.
So it would take longer for them to reach this condition.”

“Forty years,” I said numbly.
Forty years ago was 1929.
Earl Hathaway hadn’t even stolen his name yet, let alone moved to Chicago.
I had no idea where the man was in 1929, but I would have wagered everything I owned that he hadn’t been anywhere near the Windy City.

“They’re probably older than that,” LeDoux said, “given some of the items we found.”

“Items?” I asked, feeling like I’d missed a great deal.

“One of the letters,” LeDoux said, “has a date of 1917.”

I frowned. “Letters.”

“In your bag.
And no, you can’t remove it, but I packed it so that you can read it.
If you’d like, I’ll supervise you while you take down the information.”

LeDoux always managed to sound condescending, even when he wasn’t trying to.

Minton looked up from his packing and grinned at me. Since LeDoux was calling him Tim now instead of reprimanding him on his language, I assumed they had come to some kind of truce.

“These bodies could have been down here longer than forty years?” I asked.

“Sure,” Minton said.
“They might even date to the turn of the century.
I don’t think the smaller bones would still be here if they were older than that.
Eventually we do turn to dust, just like the Bible says, but I’m only guessing.
I’ve worked with some old bodies — mostly identifiers from unmarked graves
,
but never anything quite like this.”

He’d clearly gotten over his revulsion at the site and had moved to intellectual intrigue.
I couldn’t quite get past the way he was laying the bones in that box, as if he
were disassembling a puzzle.

“The lack of connective tissue,” he said, “the condition the clothes are in, the things we found near the bodies
,
like that book—”

“Book?” I asked.

“It’s more of a notebook, really,” LeDoux said.
“The kind you’d put in your breast pocket and use to keep track of spending or something.”

“And it’s in here?” I peered into the grocery bag.

“No,” LeDoux said.
“I’m keeping it.
It’s too fragile for any kind of handling.
I’ll go through it and see what I can read out of it, and then I’ll give you that
.
”

“Sooner rather than later,” I said.

He looked pointedly at the rest of the hidden room.
“It’s hard to prioritize.”

“Plus you have a lot of gems in that grocery bag.” Minton folded up more cloth, making barriers that seemed unnecessarily deep to me.
In each tiny area, he put one small bone.
It took me a moment to recognize them.
They were the small bones of the fingers.

“It’ll keep you busy for a while,” LeDoux said.

As if they wanted me out of here.
They probably did.
I was the one who was unnecessary.

“You think the other bodies are forty years old?” I asked.

“No,” LeDoux said.

Minton looked up from his work and glared at LeDoux.
“You’d be surprised.
I’ve seen bodies I’ve known were in the ground since the 1890s that are in the kind of shape some of those bodies are in.”

“You’ve looked at them then?” I asked.

“I peered through those openings you made,” Minton said.

“The bodies you saw in those graves,” LeDoux said, “had been embalmed.”

“Not all of them,” Minton said. “Embalming was not an exact science eighty years ago, nor was it used in all cases.
Some of these bodies were in wooden caskets.
It just depends on the ground conditions.”

“Which are pretty benign in this basement,” I said.

“You got it.” Minton put a lid on that box, scrawled on the top of it, then handed the box to me.
“Be careful.”

“Where do you want it?”

“Near the stairs’ll do for the moment,” he said.

I carried the box, labeled
300A Human male skeleton [bones missing—skull in box 300AA]
and signed by Minton.
The box seemed to weigh nothing, even though I had watched him put several dozen bones in there.
Amazing what a human being was reduced to after so much time.

I found it hard to believe that this body had been dead as long as I had been alive.
Forty years.
Maybe more.

That meant Hanley hadn’t killed these people.
Had he known about them?
He had certainly known about the attic room.
Many of the clippings up there were more recent, and I would have wagered that some of those teeth were recent too — the fillings looked like fillings done in this century, not at the turn of the last one.

I had no idea what the condition of dentistry in Chicago had been in 1929, but I would have wagered that it wasn’t very good.
Dentists had made a lot of advances in the last ten years, advances that I’d personally experienced.

I set the box down near the stairs, making sure that no one would accidentally step on it, and then went back to the hidden room.
LeDoux handed me a smaller box labeled
300AA Skull of Unknown Male
and signed by Minton.