Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (50 page)

Sinkovich was the extent of my police
-
department contacts these days, and as he said, he was on the outs.
With his attitude, he might get fired before he quit.

But there were a lot of disadvantages, including his volatility, his family situation, and the fact that he had never lived without a paycheck.
Not to mention his inadvertent racism and my inability to trust someone one
hundred percent.

“Why do you want to work with me?” I asked.
“Why not do it on your own?
Or go with one of the big white firms in town
?
They’d be happy to have an ex-cop on their force, and they could pay you a salary.”

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about both those things,” he said.
“But most of those firms, they do shadier stuff than the cops do.
And I don’t like them.
Hell, I busted half of them.”

“I do shady things,” I said, hoping I wasn’t saying too much.
“It’s part of the job.”

“You do shady things for the right reasons,” Sinkovich said.
“You’re a stand-up guy, and you been showing me there’s other ways to be, you know?
You got an open mind.
And you can’t be bought.
I don’t want to be bought neither.”

“You think you would be if you worked for the other detective agencies?”

“Hell, half of them are owned already.”

“What about working for yourself?”

He took a deep breath.
“I’ll be honest.
Working for myself scares the crap outta me.
Maybe we could say I’m training, huh, and then I could see if I like this.”

“And if you don’t? You’ve already resigned, you’ve lost your pension, you won’t be a cop any more.
You’d have to do something else.”

“Yeah, like nighttime security at the steel mills or something.
I can do that.
But I want to try this first.”

It would be a crime to let Sinkovich work a security job at a steel mill. He did have a good investigative mind.

“Don’t say no right away,” he said. “Think about it, okay?
I mean, give it a chance.”

I could do that.
“How much time do I have?”

“As much as you need,” he said.
“I can stay with the force if I gotta.
I’m gonna decide the family thing no matter what.
But if I’m gonna be the kinda guy who can make my kid proud, I’m not sure it can be as a Chicago cop no more.”

“That’s a sad statement,” I said.

“But it’s true,” he said.
“It’s fucking true.”

FIFTY

After Marvella and Sinkovich left, I assigned Jimmy kitchen clean-up and went back to my office to read the death report.
The file folder held three standard pieces of paper, just like I expected — the incident report, the coroner’s report, and a death certificate.

Before he left my office, Sinkovich tapped the file on my desk and said, “One thing you need to know.
The guy who answered the call?
I’d call him one of Them.”

Meaning Sinkovich didn’t trust him and thought the cop could be bought off.
It was a good thing to know, because it affected the reliability of the report.

The death certificate was on top.
It was a carbon of a carbon, so faint that it was almost impossible to read.
But it did certify that Mortimer Hanley had passed from this world on September 15, 1969.
The coroner’s report was less precise, claiming Hanley died in the weeks before September
fifteenth
, the exact date impossible to determine
,
given the condition of the apartment where he was found and the excessive heat of the last few days before his body was discovered.

There was no autopsy.
The coroner guessed that Hanley died of natural causes, and then checked off the box that said no autopsy had been requested.

The incident report was a lot more interesting.
It said that the mailman had gone into Hanley’s bedroom to drop off the mail, and found the man dead. Then the mailman used the apartment’s phone to call an ambulance.

There was no interview or incident report with the ambulance drivers, which made sense, since everyone thought Hanley had died of natural causes.

But the report made me wonder.

There were a lot of errors, inconsistencies, and missing information for a page-long typewritten report.
First of all, the mailman’s name wasn’t listed.
Not anywhere in the document. It wasn’t in the coroner’s report nor anywhere in the file.

Secondly, anyone who smelled that empty apartment wouldn’t have casually walked into that bedroom when the body was still inside.
The stench had to have been infinitely worse.
Add to that the fact that the heat was on full blast in the middle of a fall heat
wave, and the stink had to be unbearable.

Anyone with half a nostril would have opened that door, smelled what was inside, and fled, using a phone in a neighboring building or down the street.

Thirdly, if it was the mailman’s custom to walk into the apartment and drop off the mail in the bedroom, how come he hadn’t done it the previous eight to ten days that Hanley’s body had lain on that bed?
How come he’d only done it the once?

And finally, if this was a substitute mailman, where had he come from? I’d spoken to the post office, and the person on the other end of that phone had had no reason to lie to me.
Carter Doyle had worked every single day in September, and wouldn’t ever have entered Hanley’s apartment, not to deliver mail
,
and certainly not in that stench.

Sinkovich had said the cop who completed the report — presumably the cop who had arrived on scene when “the mailman” had called the police — wasn’t trustworthy.
In fact, Sinkovich’s comment assumed that the cop would lie.

So the question was
,
who was he lying for? Himself? Or someone else who found the body? Someone who paid him to keep his mouth quiet?

I looked at the name typed beneath the illegible signature.
Herman Faulds.
I’d never heard of him, but that meant nothing.
Chicago had over five thousand police officers on the payroll.

I wondered if I could talk to him without revealing what my mission was about.

This was where Sinkovich would actually come in handy.
He could ask questions about this case without raising suspicions at all, maybe even after he had retired.

I sighed, unable to believe I was actually considering his proposal.

I was also unable to believe what I saw on the report in front of me.

The death certificate had a firm date on it.
The coroner was more circumspect, but he too had used the same date.

September
fifteenth
.

I looked at my notes from Laura’s accounting books.

Back in the 1940s, that extra rent payment came into Sturdy’s accounts on the fifteenth of every month.

The person who had found Hanley was the same one who’d been paying him off.

And that person was important enough – or rich enough – to get Herman Faulds to falsify his police report.

I was one step closer, but I wasn’t quite sure what I was closer to.

FIFTY-ONE

I spent most of the following morning ferrying people all over Chicago.
Jimmy and I were running late, so I called the Grimshaws and told them to meet him at church.
Then I took Jimmy, in his Sunday best, to Poehler’s with me, where we picked up Minton on the way to Sunday services.

While Minton put on his coveralls, I dropped Jimmy at the church’s back door.
Then Minton and I went uptown to get LeDoux, who was waiting for us outside his favorite restaurant.
The three of us went back south to the Queen Anne.

I dropped them off, promising to return after my interview with Twombly, the self-published writer.
I figured that wouldn’t take very long, no matter what he had on Gavin Baird, and then I would be back.

I would finally do the task I was dreading: I would go through the files in Hanley’s odor-filled apartment.
I warned LeDoux about that and told him to get what evidence he could off those file drawers.

He shot me a contemptuous look and told me to wear gloves.

I knew then that it was going to be a long day.

By the time I got to the library, a conventional white Sunday service would have been half over.
Thank heavens Althea Grimshaw believed in good
,
old-fashioned preaching.
Lately, Althea had said she felt the need for a lot of the Lord’s word.

Jimmy would be hallelujahing and praising Jesus for hours.
Then he’d go to the Grimshaws for dinner, which might even give me time for a shower before I picked him up.

I was already looking forward to that shower as I walked into the library.
That took me just how much I was dreading my time in Hanley’s apartment.

Serena Wexler wasn’t at the information desk, but Lloyd Twombly was exactly where she
’d
said he would be: in the leather
,
overstuffed chair near the arched windows of the newspaper room, the week’s newspapers from
t
he
New York Times
to the
San Francisco
Examiner
in a pile around him.

He was a
small
white man with snow
-
white hair.
He wore spats and a brown suit that was older than I was.
A
bowler sat on the edge of the marble table that held his week’s worth of newspapers.
When I sat down near him, I caught the faint scent of mothballs.

He looked up from last Sunday’s
Los Angeles Times
, and frowned at me.
“This table’s taken.”

His face seemed slightly deformed and it took me a moment to realize why.
His right ear had cauliflowered.
Someone had once beaten him so badly that the ear was destroyed.
Several smaller scars disappeared under his collar, some of them looking like the work of an intent person with a knife or a straight razor.

“Mr. Twombly?” I extended my hand.
“I’m Bill Grimshaw.
Serena Wexler told me I could find you here.
I found some items that date back to 1919, and she told me you can give me the history of the people involved.”

His expression softened just a little, but his blue eyes remained cold.
He touched the left side of his face.

“Knife fight?” he asked, referring to my scar.

I nodded, then touched the right side of my neck.
“Looks like you were in one too.”

He grinned.
It was an impish grin, a boyish grin that made me understand why the library had taken a self-published book, and why Serena Wexler had known where to find him.

“We must be great fighters,” he said. “We both survived.”

A woman three tables down rose slightly out of her seat and shushed us.
Twombly glared at her, and she sat back down.

“Guess we can’t talk here.
You buy me breakfast, I’ll tell you everything you
want
to know about Big Jim, Al Brown, and the rest of them.”

“Al Brown?” I asked.

“Capone back in the day.
Before he got so famous.”

Another woman rose from a seat farther back — I hadn’t even seen her — and shushed as well.

“Breakfast it is,” I said.

He closed the
LA Times
and slid it back on the dowel.
Then he shoved the other papers to the edge of the table and said to me in a conspiratorial whisper, “Hardly any staff today.
I doubt anyone’ll have touched the papers when I get back.”

He grabbed his bowler and led me out of the library and down the Loop to a restaurant I hadn’t even noticed before.
It was hidden between two of the larger department stores, and looked like it had been there since the Chicago
F
ire.

I had to struggle to keep up with him.
He walked very fast, and as he opened the door to the restaurant, he gave the man behind the counter a two-finger salute.

“Usual, Manny.
And whatever my friend wants too.”

The man behind the counter nodded, then turned and shouted something in language I didn’t recognize.
From the kitchen came the sizzling sound of meat slapping on a grill.