Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (35 page)

“You believed them?” Crewcut asked.

“It’s worked so far,” I said.

“Gang reclamation,” Older Guy said. “Idealistic stuff.
You know
,
a minister was just murdered on the North Side for doing that kind of work.”

Franklin had told me.
He knew the minister, Bruce Johnson, and his wife, who’d been murdered in their home while their children slept.
The crime was, so far, unsolved.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“It’s risky. That’s why I don’t want these people anywhere near my house.
If Hampton hadn’t been armed, I would have taught him the same lesson I taught the Rangers.
But I don’t mess with people who carry guns.”

“You know we’ve been watching you,” Crewcut said.

“You have?” I made my body tense, just the way a normal person would if he suddenly found out he’d been tailed.
“Why?”

“To see what you were doing.
What’s so important at the library?”

I smiled, and this time I made the smile warm and a bit lecherous.
“There’s a librarian there I got my eye on.”

“Who’s that?” Older Guy asked.

The thunder was farther away now, and the rain was starting to let up.

“Why do you need to know?” I asked.

“Just curious,” Crewcut said.

I sighed, shifted as if I were nervous, then said, “If I tell you, you’ll just follow her around and harass her too.
You haven’t gone after my son, have you?”

My topic shift worked.
Crewcut actually looked a little uncomfortable, as if the idea of me threatening him unnerved him.

“Of course not,” he said.

“See that you don’t,” I said. “You can follow me all you want, but my boy deserves the best, you know? He doesn’t need to be treated like a criminal.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Grimshaw,” Older Guy said. He was smoother than Crewcut.
“Listen, if Hampton approaches you again, you contact the local branch of the FBI.”

So they were FBI.
I had thought so.

“We won’t let him harass you any more.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.
“Does that mean you won’t harass me any more?”

“I don’t believe we have been,” Crewcut said.

“You just said you’ve been following me,” I said.

“But you didn’t notice,” Crewcut said.

“I’ll notice now,” I said, deciding I could use that as leverage.

“We won’t bother you again, Mr. Grimshaw,” Older Guy said. He nodded to Crewcut, who gave me a small smile as if in acknowledgement.

Then they went out the emergency door into the rain.
The third guy, who had remained quiet through the entire conversation, followed a half second later.

I waited until the downpour stopped.
I had to catch my breath anyway.
I hadn’t expected them to approach me, although on reflection it made sense.

My ruse had worked. They had no idea who I really was.
They thought I was an ordinary guy who had been visited by the wrong people.
They worried that they were wasting manpower on me, and I had proven to them that they were right.

I hoped.

Because now that they had revealed themselves to me, they would be more circumspect if they followed me again. I had to assume that this was a little game they were playing, a game designed to see if I was deliberately leading them around (like I had been) or if I was as naïve as I had seemed.

I’d have to continue to be vigilant, even though I didn’t want to be.
Even though I wanted to believe that they were gone for good.

THIRTY-SIX

When the rain ended, I had to hurry out of the Loop.
I had nearly forgotten that I promised Jimmy a reprieve from his after
-
school lessons.
Game Three of the World Series was being televised that afternoon, and I told him he could watch.

Mrs. Armitage hadn’t approved when I told her my plans, but I promised her that he would do a paper on baseball and statistics, and she looked mollified.
Whether Jim was capable of such a paper, I had no idea, but since I’d gotten him into it, the least I could do was help him finish it.

The game wasn’t worth the trouble. The Mets won — and Jim loved that — but as baseball went, it was agonizingly slow.
Five-nothing Mets in Shea, the lead so big that the game ended after the Orioles’ dismal at-bat in the top of the ninth.

I hoped the next few games were more of a contest.
I’d had trouble concentrating while I watched, my mind wandering to Colosimo’s and matchbook covers and Serena Wexler’s enthusiasm for madams of the past.

Interesting that one of my first assumptions made before I found the bodies was probably right after all, that all this had to do with Chicagoland
v
ice.
That the vice predated Prohibition surprised me, and its location surprised me as well:
How come bodies associated with the Levee were entombed nearly thirty blocks south of it?

The problem was that I couldn’t look at any of that until Jim and I finished our game, our dinner, and our evening together.

I had just convinced Jim to prepare for bed when the phone rang.
It was Minton.
I asked him to hold for a moment, then gave Jim another reprieve, allowing him to read in his room until I finished the conversation.

My office was right near Jim’s bedroom, so I took the call in the living room and used that morning’s
Defender
as a notepad.

“Got something for you,” Minton said.

“Already?” I asked. “I figured you’d be at this for days.”

“The skeletons were pretty much intact,” he said.
“I’ll have to make sure some of the smaller bones were in the right place, but the longer ones were easier.”

“So what did you find?” I asked.
“More gunshot wounds?”

“Better,” he said. “I found a name.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and tapped my pen against the
Defender
.
“A name?”

“Sewn into the remains of one of the shirts — you know, like your mom used to do for your school clothes?”

My mother never did anything like that, figuring if I lost my clothing it was my fault, and I’d have to use my allowance to buy something new.
But I wasn’t raised poor — not in either household, my real parents’ or my adopted parents’.
I was middle
-
class.

Sewing names into clothing, especially adult clothing, showed how poor someone actually was.
Nothing dared get lost because it often couldn’t be replaced.

“Actually,” Minton was saying, “I’m not sure if it was a shirt or a jacket — you know, one of those heavy cloth jobs.
Maybe you can tell from the piece, but
—
”

“What is it?” I asked, still tapping my pen.

“The name?” Minton said. “Junius Pruitt.”

“Junius?” I said. “You sure it’s not Julius?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Minton said.
“In fact I’m positive.
I went to school with a Junius Pruitt.”

“But you said this body is over forty years old.
You’re not even thirty.”

“It’s not him.
Junius is off at Stanford or Berkeley or someplace like that, getting too much education.
But his mom is still here.”

“And she named him after someone,” I said, finally catching on.

“You got it.
You want me to call her or should you?”

Minton had worked with death a lot, and with grieving families, but he’d never done anything like this, at least that I knew of.

“Let me,” I said.
“But be prepared for visitors.”

“Oh, I will,” Minton said.
“She’s been in the same house forever.”

He gave me the address.
It was in the heart of Bronzeville, in a residential neighborhood that was still intact.

“So Junius Pruitt is black,” I said.

“Darker than either one of us, maybe than both of us combined,” Minton said.
“Why?”

I told him about what I’d found, and how my expectations had changed.
I thought now that these victims were white.

“Well, at least one of them’s black.
Unless he stole that coat before he died.”

Which was possible.
Anything was.

“Did you find anything else?” I asked.

“Not yet.
Can’t even tell how two of these poor souls died.
There’s nothing on the bones, and most of the clothing that I brought with me is too decayed.”

“Yet you saw the name,” I said.

“You can see it tomorrow if you want.
The shirt was underneath the last skeleton, the one that got shot in the head.
It was attached to the wristbone, so I brought it with me to separate it.
I think its position protected it from some of the worst of the body’s putrefaction.”

“Was that near the wallet?” I asked.

“That was on the other side, closer to the younger body.
LeDoux made a diagram.”

“I’ll take a look before I visit Mrs. Pruitt,” I said.

“What do you think this is?” Minton asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said, “but I think we’re about to find out.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

The Pruitt house sat in the middle of its block.
It was a decaying
,
single
-
story starter, built after the war.
Apparently that marked, in Minton terms, forever as longer than twenty years.

I arrived shortly after ten.
I had gone through what had now become my morning routine — driving like a madman through the Loop to lose any potential tail.

The traffic was horrendous, in part because it was National Vietnam Moratorium Day.
Marches, rallies
,
and speeches were going on all over the country, coordinated to draw the Nixon
a
dministration’s attention to the growing dissatisfaction with the war.

Chicago’s main rally would happen after five, when Jimmy and I would be happily ensconced at home, watching the World Series, but there were some preliminary speeches and rallies already happening all over the city.

I used them to make sure I wasn’t being followed.
I hadn’t seen anyone, just like I expected, but I was paranoid enough to believe the tail could still be there.

When I picked up LeDoux, he was happy to hear the news
;
happy too, I think, to have me out of the house again so that he could work in peace.
He found it odd that I had thought the bodies were black.
Until he heard about Junius Pruitt, he’d thought they were
mostly
white.

Amazing the conclusions we came to, based on ourselves and our views of the world.

LeDoux figured he’d be done with the first row of tombs by the end of the week. Then he’d need me again to see what was behind them.

We both hoped that there would be a single large room filled with liquor.
We both doubted that would be the case.

I parked a block away from the Pruitt house and waited for nearly fifteen minutes, to see if anyone had followed me. The streets were quiet here; this was an old Bronzeville neighborhood
,
one of the few that hadn’t been destroyed by the city’s quest for housing projects that would “benefit” the poor.

Most of the homes were stately or had once been impressive. This house looked like an afterthought, which seemed strange.
Maybe it had been built on a parcel of land sold off for the money.

I hurried up the cracked sidewalk, doubting anyone would be home at this time of the morning.
I figured I’d have to come back three or four times before I found Mrs. Pruitt.

Minton had told me that her husband was long dead — a heart attack in his forties, just after his eldest son
,
the Junius that Minton knew
,
had graduated from high school.
Mrs. Pruitt had raised two more boys and a daughter, getting them through school on her own.
The daughter stayed home to help her mother.
The boys had all gone to college, a remarkable feat that I was beginning to realize was less unusual in this part of Chicago than it had been in my adopted hometown of Memphis.

The stairs up to the front porch were also cracked, but the iron railing was new.
I rang the doorbell and listened to the chimes echo through the house.