Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (44 page)

I’d seen that.
I never completely understood it either.

“But to come into the precinct, and ask for a colored patrolman — no, demand to see him — and in a public place, well that was nigh unheard of.”

“What’d he want?” I asked.

“He wanted me to give him his money back.
He said, and I got no reason to doubt him, that my brother pulled the last of his savings — about five grand — off him in one night.”

“That was a lot of money then,” I said.

“It’s a lot of money now,” Talgart said.
“I’d love a piece of that.”

“Then too?”

His smile faded. His eyes became hard and his jaw rigid.
Even though he had shrunken with age, his expression gave him a power that suggested he could take me in a fair fight.

“I’m not dirty.
I’ve never been dirty. I’ve had plenty of opportunity, starting with my brother, and right up until the day I retired I never once took a bribe, never once hit someone who didn’t deserve it, never once lied to get a righteous conviction.
So don’t you come into my home and accuse me of stealing.”

My cheeks were warm.
I hadn’t quite accused him of that.
But I had implied it.

“My mistake,” I said.

“That’s not an apology,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was out of line.”

“Damn right you were.”

I took a deep breath, waiting for him to toss me out.
But he didn’t.
We stared at each other for a moment, and since I was the one who had offended him, I was the one to break the eye contact first.

“I guess what I was trying to ask you is if you told your brother you envied him that kind of money,” I said.

“Now why in holy hell would I do that?”

I shrugged. “You said you were supporting your mother.
Wouldn’t there be some resentment—”

“You asking me if
I
killed my brother?” That flinty look was back.

“No,” I said. “I’m trying to gauge your relationship with your brother and how you reacted to Baird that night.”

“How I reacted to Baird was I told him to solve his own damn problems.
Another colored officer was there with me, and he asked Baird if the money changed hands in an illegal vice game.
Baird took issue, a scuffle ensued, and that was the last I saw of him that night.”

“A scuffle?”

“He lunged at the officer — I can’t recall his name now — and some of the others in the precinct broke it up.
They hauled Baird off, and that was the end of that.”

“That other officer, was he —”

“He was just trying to help the idiot.
If it’d been an illegal game, which it was, we might’ve been able to arrest Lawrence and get Baird’s money back.
But by the time we got confirmation the game was illegal, there was no game to be seen, no one to arrest. Not that I would’ve gone up to the Levee anyway.
Black police officers didn’t end up so good up there.”

I nodded.
“When did all this happen?”

“About a week before Lawrence and his expensive automobile disappeared.”

“And that was the end of it?” I asked.

“The incident? Sure,” he said. “No one was gonna tell me how they got Baird’s money back. My captain talked to me, to see if I was in on the fleecing.
When he realized I wasn’t, he sent me back onto the streets, warned me to stay away from Baird and the Levee and Lawrence, and I did.”

“So you didn’t see your brother at all before he died.”

Talgart sighed and handed me the letter. “I didn’t even know he got that, which would’ve been nice, because I spent three months writing letters to my mother before one of them actually got to her.
I had no idea where she was.”

“You finally had enough money to bring her up here?” I asked.

“Her and my sister.
I sold Lawrence’s car to do it too.”

“Wasn’t it evidence?” I asked.

“In what? The death of a colored man?
A colored man who stole from white people? Who was going to investigate that?”

“His policeman brother?”

He petted the cat, then leaned back in his armchair.
The springs squeaked.

“You’re that type, aren’t you?” he said. “The type that rushes in, feels each death’s got to be examined, each killer’s got to be brought to justice.”

“I didn’t know it was a type,” I said.

“It’s a type, and it’s a dangerous one.
Because not every killer should be brought to justice.
You pick up those rocks, and you find dirty little secrets that cost even more lives.
And sometimes the life lost should’ve been lost.”

“Are you saying your brother should’ve died?” I asked.

“I said he got what he deserved and I meant it.”

“You weren’t curious? Or worried that the same people might come after you?”

“Curious? No.
My brother was so deep in Chicago’s cesspool that I figured he finally crossed the wrong person.
I wasn’t about to make that same mistake.
Worried that they’d come after me? Not really.
I had enough to worry about just walking around in my uniform.”

“Being a policeman made you a target?” I asked.

“It was 1919, son.
I was a colored policeman.
I was in trouble from the Irish gangs who hated me in a patrolman’s uniform, and I was in trouble from the coloreds who thought they owned the South Side.
I had ‘betrayed my race,’ sided with the white man.
I couldn’t hardly walk out of the precinct without worrying about being beat up or shot.
So why worry that my brother’s killer was coming after me? I figured it was just one more name on the Get-Talgart list.”

“Why didn’t you leave
Chicago?” I asked.
“Family?”

“If you mean a wife and kids, I never got that lucky. Had two wives, both left me because I seemed too taken up with my work.
I always wondered what they expected, marrying a policeman.
That I wouldn’t be involved with my work?”

He placed both hands on the cat’s back.
The cat licked his fingers, then bit one.
Talgart didn’t seem to notice.
The cat’s ears went back and it jumped down.

Talgart adjusted the blanket.
“I stayed because I had a good job.
A
professional
job, one I couldn’t get back in Mississippi.
I stayed because I knew it was worse other places.
East St. Louis rioted for weeks —
weeks
— that year.
You read about 1919, son.
You’ll learn that all the upsets we’ve been having about the war, about the racist stuff, about the bombings, barely compares to fifty years ago. Back then, coloreds weren’t just taking to the streets, they were getting shot, fire-bombed, lynched, and not just in the Deep South.
In places like Iowa and Illinois and Missoura.
And not just us, neither.
Germans was worse.
You were a German or had a German last name, and you could be lynched same as a colored man.
I never thought anyone’d make it out of that year alive.”

“Your brother didn’t,” I said.

“Nope, he didn’t,” Talgart said.

“You ever have proof of that besides the car?” I asked.

“And that paper you just handed me?” Talgart said.
“Not proof.
But words.”

“Words?” I said.

“About a week after the car got found, some of the Levee boys came to me and told me that I had to give them what was in Lawrence’s apartment or else.”

“Or else what?”

“You just dumb or do you like asking dumb questions?” He gripped the arms of that chair.
“Or else I’d end up just like him.
It was implied, but the implication was clear, just like yours was earlier.”

I nodded. “Who were those Levee people?”

“Boys,” he said. “That’s what we called them.
And they wasn’t colored. They were whiter than white.
They worked the area.”

“For Colosimo?”

“Not on paper.”
Talgart shook his head. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “I know very little about that period in Chicago history.”

“It ain’t that different from now.
Pay the right person and he’ll look the other way.
The city’s corrupt down to its core, and what’s interesting about that is this city
don’t
try to hide it.” He smiled.
“I kinda like that.”

“You’re saying these ‘boys’ worked for the city?”

“I’m saying that if you think you’re gonna solve my brother’s
murder from this distance and with your lack of understanding, you’re not going to get nowhere.”
He pounded the flat of his hand against the upholstery.
Dust and cat hair rose.
“I’m saying the Levee
b
oys
was
police officers, hired by the city, and paid by Colosimo and his ilk to look the other way.”

I felt cold.
I wasn’t sure if his news upset me more because the corruption went back so far or because he did nothing about it in all his years on the force.

“Your brother was killed by policemen?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know if they killed him or just pretended not to notice.
Same thing, right?”

I guessed it was.
And by not doing anything, he looked the other way too.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“A coupla losers named Rice and Dawley,” he said. “But we always called them Friends of Gavin Baird.”

My breath caught.
Talgart looked pleased with himself.
He watched me put all the pieces together.

“I didn’t surprise you, then, when I mentioned Baird,” I said.

“Nope,” he said.

“You think Rice and Dawley killed your brother for Baird?” I asked.

“Dunno if it was intentional.
Don’t even really know if it was for Baird.
Always thought that they probably roughed him up a little, trying to get the money, and he died along the way, but no one told me that. No one even implied it.
Like I said, what I do know is that Rice and Dawley were Baird’s personal security team.
They were there when my brother died. They told me how he cried and begged them not to let him die.”

Talgart said all of this in a flat voice.

“But what they did, what they saw, who did what to whom, I don’t know. I don’t care.
Rice and Dawley ain’t here no more and neither is Baird. I made it through forty-three years on the force and got threatened maybe four thousand times, and I decided it wasn’t going to touch me.
It never did.”

It did touch him, whether he admitted it or not.
He was one of the coldest men I’d ever seen.

“You never asked them about it?” I asked.

“Never wanted to,” he said.
“That little conversation was enough for me.”

I let out a small sigh.
I was never going to get past that statement. I didn’t even know how to ask a question that would take me beyond that statement.
Maybe Talgart didn’t allow himself to think more about his own motivations than that.

“Did you give them the contents of the apartment?” I asked.

“I figured, what could it hurt? I didn’t want none of that stuff.
Most of it was either stolen or came from stolen money.
I sure didn’t want my ma to know about it.”

“But you could’ve used the proceeds to bring her here sooner.”

He eyed me as if he really couldn’t figure out how the younger generation had gotten so stupid.
“I didn’t want her here, not till the whole thing with Lawrence blew over.
And I told you. That stuff was stolen.”

“So you have qualms about stolen goods, but you don’t have qualms about working with the men who murdered your brother.”

His face grew bright red.
I’d never seen a transition like that; one moment his skin was grayish brown, and the next so red I thought he might have a heart attack.

“I didn’t know if they murdered my brother.
I told you that.”

“But you suspected it.
And they told you they were there. That makes them accessories.”

“I know the goddamn law.”

“Then why didn’t you enforce it?”

He held out his hands. They were bent, the knuckles swollen with arthritis.
“Do I look white to you?”

“You were a police officer. It was your job.”