Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (46 page)

“See how good you are without ID? Imagine how quickly you’ll find out information when you actually have the victims’ names.”

Minton was still smiling, but I wasn’t.
I looked at all of those tombs, and felt the dizziness increase.

I had thought I was actually onto something. I thought that Gavin Baird had worked his own scam or got his own revenge through his personal security team
,
Rice and Dawley, and for his own reasons, reasons we would never understand, buried them down here.

But Gavin Baird had died
in 1938
.
Thirty-one years ago.

“I thought this would please you,” Minton said, apparently reading my reaction on my face.

“At first, I thought Hanley had done this.
Then we figured out who was in A, and I realized that Baird had done it. Now you tell me that the guys in E died a minimum of eleven years after Baird.” I glanced at LeDoux.
“Could the skeletons we found in A have been moved?”

LeDoux shook his head.
“Not in the last ten to twenty years.
They died somewhere else and were moved to Suite A, but they decayed right there.
And they were probably placed in there shortly after they died.”

I didn’t like the direction my mind was going in.
Someone had known about this place — several someones, in fact.
Maybe street gangs, maybe the Levee thugs, maybe Capone’s boys.
Certainly, Baird’s “security team” had known about it, but those corrupt police officers had died — if Talgart was to be believed — before Baird.

Vivienne Bontemps had said that Baird had lost his fortune.
Talgart had said that he had lost five grand, which would have been a fortune to a prostitute in 1919, but would have explained how he kept his house.

I knew little about Baird and I hadn’t tried to look.
What I did know was pretty miniscule — he had remained single his entire life, he loved to gamble, and he had been important enough to have police officers do his bidding.
He had enemies, he was intemperate with money, and he professed to hate blacks.
He also misused Vivienne Bontemps, which may have reflected his attitude toward women or, given that he might have known she was passing, his attitude toward blacks.

He had managed to keep his house after the “loss” of his fortune through the 1920s and into the Great Depression.
He sounded like a young man in 1919 from the descriptions I heard, but I had no idea if that was the case.
He died in 1938, not quite twenty years later, and I had no idea what he died of.

But I knew who could help me.
A woman who loved this sort of research. A woman who specialized in the Levee.
She might even know something about Baird, something she had come across in her various readings.

Serena Wexler.

FORTY-SIX

I had forgotten that I had told Serena Wexler I would return to the library that afternoon.
So many things had happened since we first spoke, and my question — what was Calumet-214? — no longer mattered.
I had gotten the answer.

But I felt relieved nonetheless that I would be able to see her. I had liked her.
I wouldn’t be able to bring her the matchbox like I’d promised, but I would show up just the same.

First, I had to help Minton remove some of the bodies.
They were intact enough that he had put them in body bags.
We draped the bags in a tarp, and carried them out as if they were stacks of wood that we were trying to protect from the impending rain.

I hoped no one was watching too closely.
Our behavior bordered on suspicious, and if Laura’s employee had been right, the neighbors already worried about what we were doing.

Even though the following day was Saturday, Minton and LeDoux wanted to come back to the house.
I promised to drive them – I only wanted the van here while they worked – but I wouldn’t stay.
I had promised the weekends to Jim, and I was going to keep that promise as much as I could.

We dropped off Minton and the bodies at Poehler’s.
Then LeDoux and I picked up Jimmy.
Jim was excited about having dinner with Laura, and I had to admit that I was too.
For the first time in a long time, it felt like we were going on an actual date, even though we weren’t.
Perhaps it was because it was Friday night, or maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part.

LeDoux wanted to talk to Laura as well, but I told him to call her.
I had other stops before we went to her offices.
I let him out near his apartment building, then back tracked to the library, parking in the same old spot.

I had an odd sense that I was still being followed, but not by someone as obvious as the FBI had been.
Even though I hadn’t seen cars for the last two days, I had that creepy
,
eyes-on-the-back-of-my-neck feeling that you sometimes got when people stared at you too long.

“How come we’re parked here?” Jim asked as he plugged pennies in the meter for me.

“I’ve been doing it ever since those guys started to follow us,” I said.

“I haven’t seen them,” he said. “They’re not even at the school any more.”

That made me look at him.
“They were at the school?”

“Yeah.
Every day somebody’d wait there and then followed us to the church for after
-
school.
I thought you knew that.”

I hadn’t, even though it made sense.
Two black sedans — one for the apartment because they knew I’d return to it eventually
,
and one for Jimmy because I’d return for him too.

“We all took turns watching them,” Jim said as we walked to the library.
“Keith wanted to go knock on their window and scare them, but I told him to stay away.
Told him we didn’t know who they were and they might hurt us if we got too close.”

“Good thinking.” I was taking slow, deep breaths, trying to force back my anger.
If I had known those clowns had gotten that close to my son the day they spoke to me, I’d’ve taken them apart.

“It’s okay, Smoke,” Jimmy said, looking up at me. He could sense my change in mood.
“They’re not going to do nothing now.”

“We don’t know that,” I said. “We’re going to keep an eye out anyway.”

We went up the stone steps into the library.
Jimmy did what he always did in this place — looked up at the ceiling three stories above us.
He loved the feeling of space and had told me, after we returned from Yale, that his favorite part of the campus had been the spectacular buildings. That was when I started to point out Chicago’s spectacular buildings as well.

He wanted to go to the children’s section, and I let him, promising to get him within the hour. Then I walked across the large lobby to the information desk, and Serena Wexler.

She was there, just like she’d promised she’d be.
Her hair wasn’t pulled back as tightly today, and she wore more makeup.
Her dress was a pale peach, which was a better color for her skin tone.
At first glance, she no longer seemed severe.

I hoped that she hadn’t changed her look for me, and then I grinned at my own egotism.

“I was afraid you would be gone already,” I said.

She smiled at me, and took her glasses off her nose.
They hung on a pearl-studded chain that fell around her neck like a piece of jewelry.
She did look amazingly good this afternoon.

“Was that your son I saw come in with you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I had to pick him up from school today, so I didn’t have time to go home and get the matchbox.”

Her smile faded just a little.
She had been looking forward to my return, but to see a bit of history, not me.

“Well, that just gives you an excuse to come back,” she said.

I nodded.
I would have to figure out a way around that evidence bag.

“I guess we’re even then,” she said, “since I wasn’t able to find that phone number.”

“I did find it.” I rested my hands against the polished marble surface of the information desk.
She had a stack of books behind it, all of which looked older than both of us.
“It was for the Everleigh
Club
.”

“How did you find that?”

“I ran into an old woman who wanted to work there,” I said.

Serena’s eyes sparkled.
“Now, why would she tell you that?”

I shrugged.
“Why would you tell me about your fascination with the Levee?”

“You’re just that kind of man, huh?” she asked.

“I guess,” I said.
“I still have some research I’m doing for my friend.
Since you’d been so knowledgeable about the Levee before, I thought maybe you’d know this.”

She rested a hand on those books.
“Let’s give it a try.”

“You ever hear of a man named Gavin Baird?” I asked.

She thought for a moment, then shook her head.
“Not once. He’s not in the materials I read
,
that I know of.
I’ll look for him
,
though.”

“Look for some friends of his too.
Two policemen, one named Rice and the other named Dawley.”

Her face lit up.
“I don’t have to look for them.
That’s Stanton Rice and Alfred Dawley.
They’re notorious.”

She said the word “notorious” like it was a good thing.

“For what?” I asked, surprised that they were better known than Gavin Baird.
Had I misjudged the relationship? Had the police officers been the ones in charge?

“They were so crooked, they outdid the crooks.
They took payoffs from the entire Levee, said it was protection money.
And they did protect. Their favorite method was to extort money from big winners of various card games — gin, poker, bridge.
I heard they sometimes took as much as two thousand dollars a week off unsuspecting types, which was a lot of money in those days.”

“I’d heard five thousand,” I said.

“From your lady of the night?” Serena asked, that sparkle still in her eyes.

“
Ex
-lady of the night,” I said.
“She’s a grandmother now.”

Serena shook her head. “That’s what I love about history.
People become such different things as they get older.
All those secrets.”

“What were Dawley and Rice’s secrets?” I asked.

“They were big rough-
’
em-up men. They didn’t have a lot of secrets.
Even the other cops knew to stay away from them and knew why.” She frowned, then thumbed through her pile of books.
A few titles caught my eye, but I didn’t recognize the subjects.
Then I saw
Gem of the Prairie
go by. That had been the book she’d recommended to me.

She stopped near the middle of the pile, looked in a battered old book with yellowing pages.

“Here it is,” she said.
“In the early twenties, a reformer named Stuart Breen caught wind that Rice and Dawley had a dump site for the people they’d killed.
Until then, everyone who crossed them just disappeared and people believed they had given them concrete boots and tossed them in Lake Michigan.”

“Concrete boots?” I said.

She raised her head and grinned at me.
“You’re lucky I’m paraphrasing. This is a self-published book, a memoir of the gangster period
,
as the author called it, and I just love it. But to call the language colorful is a bit of an understatement.”

I stood very still, trying not to let my curiosity overwhelm her. A dump site.

“Breen claimed it was on the South Side, that he’d actually seen them carry bodies to it in the middle of the night.
He promised the
Chicago Evening Post
an exclusive story, but the day they were supposed to run it, they ran a retraction instead.
Apparently Stuart Breen vanished a few days before.
His family said he was murdered, but other witnesses say he ran off, afraid of Rice and Dawley.”

“What does your author say?”

“My author coyly avoids the entire issue of what happened to Breen.
My author knew Rice and Dawley, and occasionally acted — at least in this book — as if they’re still alive.”

“They’re dead?” I asked, even though I knew they were.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Theoretically, they died in a shoot-out with some of Capone’s boys when they tried to confiscate some moonshine out of one of his South
S
ide warehouses.”