Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (41 page)

“What about Lawrence? Would any of them hurt him?”

“Hell if I know,” she said.
“I tried not to pay attention to him.”

“Is there anyone who did pay attention to him? Anyone I can talk with about him?”

She stared at me for a long minute, as if she suddenly realized she was talking to a crazy man.
“You trying to
solve
this thing?”

“If I find out what happened to them, it might help on another case I’m working on,” I said.

“You think their deaths are tied to something now?” she asked. “I thought you wasn’t even sure you had the right people.”

I pulled the plastic evidence bag back toward me.
“Do you think I have the right people?”

She looked at it, ran her finger over the words again.
“Somebody could’ve stole his wallet,” she said without conviction.
“Everybody knew he carried cash.”

“The cash was still in it,” I said.

“They didn’t get a chance to spend it.”

“So that somebody, he’d end up dead with a guy who had Junius Pruitt’s name sewn into his clothes and a letter addressed to Lawrence?”

She looked chagrinned.
It was becoming clear how easily, and how often, she had lied about those years.

“Can I…see him?” she asked quietly.

“I’m afraid there’s not much to see,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, as if she hadn’t realized that entirely, and looked down.

“You can do one thing for me, though,” I said.

“What’s that?”

I pushed the evidence bag toward her again.
“That logo on the napkin, it’s a phone number, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you know what for?”

To my surprise, she smiled.
“The Everleigh Club, the gold standard.”

“I thought that was closed in 1919,” I said.

“It closed in 1911,” she said. “I missed the good years.
I was too young.”

She sounded regretful, although her expression was carefully neutral.

“Where’d you get the napkin then?” I asked.

She laughed.
“Zeke lived in the Everleigh Club.”

“Before it closed?” I asked.

“After.
It was his boarding house, and even all run down, it was something.
The Everleigh sisters, they just left a lot of the stuff.
Some of the things in here —” she swept her hand toward the living room “—came from there.
That gold ashtray, and a few of the antimacassars, some of the vases.”

“And the napkins,” I said.

“They were in a drawer in the hallway.
We used them for notes between us.
People saw them and thought they came from before.”
She touched the bag one final time, as if she were touching Zeke himself.
“I’d forgotten all about those.”

The words hung between us for a moment.
Then I pulled the bag back.

“Do you know anyone I can talk to who might’ve known Larry Talgart?” I asked.

“I know a lot of people,” she said.

“People who might have an idea what happened to him? People who knew him well?”

She wrapped her arms around her waist, as if just thinking of Talgart made her nervous.
Then she shrugged.

“Guess the only person who fits that description is his brother, Irving.”

“Do you know where I can find him?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said.
“But the police probably do.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’d he do?”

She gave me a sly smile.
“He didn’t do nothing, Mr. Grimshaw.
He just went to work every single day like a good citizen.”

“Irving Talgart was a cop?” I asked.

“One of Chicago’s finest,” she said.

FORTY-ONE

The meeting with Vivienne Bontemps was a lot more profitable than I had imagined it would be.
Not only did she give me Lawrence’s full name, but she also gave me another lead to follow.

But she also confused matters, in such a way that I was beginning to despair of ever figuring out what happened in the Queen Anne.

I hadn’t expected the tie to Gavin Baird. I had somehow expected Mortimer Hanley to have some kind of link to the house, even back then.
That staircase leading to the attic room still confused me.

Had Hanley found it and reveled in it?
Or was there some other explanation, one I hadn’t found yet
?

I drove away from her house, checking the time before I checked my mirrors.
I would be glad when the World Series was over.
I didn’t like cutting my afternoon short, even though I was enjoying the time spent with Jimmy.

I had one more stop before I went back to pick up LeDoux
: t
he post office where Carter Doyle worked.
I hoped I would be able to catch him as he ended his shift.

This postal branch was a large stone building like so many other official Chicago buildings. But unlike the ones downtown, this one didn’t look like it had been built by the Founding Fathers.
It was a mixture of stone and brick and looked worn from the weather and time.

I parked around back, where the postal delivery trucks parked.
Someone tried to wave me away, but I ignored him.
I was close to quitting time for the mailmen — nearly a dozen trucks were parked there, some with mailmen still carrying mail bags from the trucks to the post office itself.

As I got out of my van, I ignored two of the white carriers who were staring at me.
I walked to the nearest black carrier.

“I’m looking for Carter Doyle,” I said.

The carrier pointed to a man dumping contents of postal tubs into a large canvas bin.
I thanked the carrier and walked toward Doyle like I visited the back of the post office every single day.

“Carter Doyle?” I asked
,
as I climbed the stairs to the bin area.
A sign hanging beside a post warned me that only official postal personnel were permitted beyond that point.

Doyle raised his head.
He was younger than I was, and tall.
His shoulders were broad, and his arms corded with muscle.
He looked like an aging football player, one who hadn’t gone to fat.

“I’m Bill Grimshaw,” I said. “I’m investigating the death of Mortimer Hanley.”

“Yeah?” Doyle set down the tub he’d been holding and pointedly crossed his arms.
“What’s that got to do with me?”

“I understand you found him.”

“Huh?”

“The body.
I was told you were the person who found his body.”

He blinked and his arms fell to his sides.
“I don’t know who told you that, but they got it all wrong.”

I started in surprise. Laura had told me that.
“You didn’t find him?”

“Nope.” Doyle frowned at me, no longer as hostile as he was at the beginning.
“Why’re you asking?”

“Because there were some discrepancies,” I said.
“I was told you saw him through the window of his living room and then called for an ambulance.
But it was clear that he died in his bed, which isn’t visible from the living
-
room window.
So I was going to ask you what really happened.”

Doyle lifted his cap and scratched his head.
Then he kicked aside one of the tubs, and walked toward me.
“You a cop?”

“No,” I said.

“Some kind of private detective?”

“Some kind,” I said.

“You work for Hanley’s family?”

“I don’t believe he has any,” I said, “at least that I can find. I’m working for the owner of the building.”

Doyle tilted his head slightly, as if I had surprised him.
“I thought Hanley owned the building, the way he acted.”

“No,” I said. “He just managed the place for more than twenty years.”

“Wow,” Doyle said. “I never had any idea that someone else owned it.”

I could feel the clock ticking.
Jimmy would be struggling through his last subject of the day right now, counting the minutes until the bell rang and we could go home for the final game.

“So you really didn’t find him?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Know who did?”

“Nope.”

I sighed.
This case was getting stranger and stranger.

“Thanks,” I said to Doyle, and started down the stairs.

“You know
,
this Hanley guy,” Doyle said, “he was one mean piece of work.”

I stopped and turned. Doyle was coming down the stairs beside me.
He glanced over his shoulder as if he didn’t want to be seen.

We hit the parking lot together and he led me to one of the mail trucks.
We stood beside it, hidden from the back door.

“You didn’t like him?” I asked.

“Hell, if I
had
found him, I woulda left him there to rot,” Doyle said. “And my friends would not call me a particularly vindictive guy.”

“What’d he do?” I asked.

“What didn’t he do?” Doyle said. “When I got the route, he called and complained.
He’d throw crap at me, stuff I couldn’t identify, and he said he wouldn’t touch any mail that I touched, demanded I wear gloves.
Called that in too.”

“What’d your boss do?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Doyle’s mouth thinned.
“That’s just part of my job.
I got a crossover neighborhood.”

No wonder he looked so strong.
He probably kept himself in shape just in case something did happen in one of those neighborhoods he had to walk into alone every day.

“I’ll wager you didn’t wear gloves,” I said.

“I didn’t,” Doyle said. “And they didn’t put me on a different route.
They told him he could sign up on the waiting list for a post office box or he could deal with it.
He told me one morning that he disinfected the jigaboo germs off the letters before he opened them.”

I shook my head.
Stories like this made me glad that I worked for myself. I wouldn’t have taken such abuse day after day. I would have had to respond to it or avoid it.
I couldn’t have walked the route every single morning knowing that Hanley and his foul mouth waited for me.

“Did he ever harm you?” I asked.

“No one gets that close to me,” Doyle said.

“Did he try?”

Doyle shook his head. “He was one of those all-talk bigots.
I was glad too. Last thing I wanted was him aiming a gun at me.”

“You don’t think he was violent?” I asked.

“Maybe if he had someone weaker living with him, a woman or a kid, he mighta been violent.
But he wasn’t going to go after – what’d he call me that time? – a big strapping spade like me.”

“Every day he’d say something like that?” I asked.

“Every day for ten years,” Doyle said.

“You didn’t report him?”

Doyle gave me a cold smile.
“To who? I got my job to do, and part of that is interacting with the customers
,
good and bad.
And you know about the cops around here.”

I nodded. “But there are blacks on the force.”

“
Sure there
are,” he said
,
with great sarcasm.

I almost corrected him, and then I understood what he meant.
He felt that the blacks on the force were more interested in keeping their jobs than helping their people.

“Not every cop is bad,” I said.

“Maybe not, but none of them would’ve helped me.
Besides, they were visiting that house enough.”

I frowned. I hadn’t heard this.
“Domestic disputes?”

“I don’t know what it was, but it seemed like every coupla weeks I saw some cops there.”

“Doing anything special?” I asked.

Doyle shook his head.
“We’d just get there around the same time, is all. I don’t know if they were responding to something or bringing donuts, and I didn’t want to know. I got outta there as fast as I could.”

“Was that around noon?” I asked, remembering the police car I’d seen driving by.

He shrugged.
“Early afternoons
,
usually.
That’s when I got to that house.”

I frowned, wondering what that meant.
Surely the police had known that Hanley was dead by the time I’d seen them.
Or had there been a lot of visible trouble at the house, trouble that made them stop on their regular sweep of the neighborhood?