Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (7 page)

“They’re not all bad,” Laura said, “and you know it.
Your friend Sinkovich—”

“I’m still not sure I’d call him a friend,” I said.

“He’s a friend,” she said.
“He’s a good man at heart.”

“With no power.” And I almost added that the other good man I’d known on the force had been murdered because he’d been following his own heart.

“What are our options?” Laura asked.
“If we don’t go to the authorities —”

I noted that she didn’t say “can’t,” which was the word I would have used.

“— then what can we do? Sturdy owns this building, and I can’t just let it rot.
People would notice.”

“Would they?” I asked.
“The company’s done that in the past.”

“Always with a plan,” she said. “Usually one to turn the property around when the building finally got torn down.
Usually that was a way to avoid city regulations or zoning or something like that.”

“Make up a plan,” I said. “Who would know that you didn’t intend to go through with it?”

She glared at me.
“And leave those unknown people in the basement?”

I shrugged.

“Smokey, even if I wanted to — and I don’t — they’d get discovered when we tore the building down.”

“Years from now,” I said. “The building’s well made.
It’ll last a while.
And you’ll have solidified your position at Sturdy then. There’ll be a scandal, but by then you’d be able to weather it.”

She shook her head.
“I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
I’d wonder who those people were and what they did to deserve such a horrible fate.”

Her hand was clenched into a fist beside her water glass.
I put my hand on top of her thumb.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “Ethics.
I just gave you the chance to pretend you didn’t know any of this.
I gave you a solution that a lot of CEOs would have taken, and you won’t do it.”

“I’ll probably pay for it,” she said.

“At least financially,” I said. “Because this isn’t something I can do alone.”

The waitress came back with our pies.
One piece was already in a little cardboard pie-shaped box, just waiting for Jimmy.
Laura slid it toward me as she also grabbed the check from the waitress.

“Smooth,” I said.

“It’s a business lunch,” she said.
“My business.”

One of the students looked our way then.
Apparently he had overheard that, and hadn’t been thinking we were having a business lunch.

“You guys should really factor in John Maynard Keyes,” I said, letting the student know that I could hear his conversation
t
oo. “Or haven’t you gotten to him yet?”

“It’s 101,” the student muttered
,
and blushed.
Obviously, he had no idea who Keynes was.

They all looked at us, then turned their chairs slightly, making it clear they were shutting us out.

Laura grinned.
“How do you do that?”

“What?” I asked.

“Say the right thing to get people off your back?”

I shrugged. “It’s a gift.”

The waitress had watched the interaction too.
“Now is there anything else?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

“I’m going on break,” she announced as if she thought we cared, and left us.

Laura ate a bite of pie.
I slid my plate closer.

“Is there any way to tell how long those bodies have been there?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said.
“I suppose a specialist like a coroner or medical examiner can guess within a range of years or decades.
I didn’t get a good enough look down there.
Things in the basement might point us to a date as well.”

“Things?” Laura asked.

“Clothing, items in the pockets, or even the type of brick used
,
or mortar.”

She nodded.
“But we’re going to need an official eventually.”

“It depends on what you want to do,” I said. “If you want to clear them out and give them a decent burial, no, we don’t need anyone other than a funeral home.”

“Smokey,” she said loudly.
Then she took a deep breath and lowered her voice so much that I had to lean forward to hear her.
“These people were most likely murdered.
Someone did something bad in that place.
Isn’t it our responsibility to find out who?”

“Why is it our responsibility?” I asked
,
more to hear how her thoughts went than to challenge her.
My natural inclination would be to find out what happened as well, but I also knew there were times you just let things fade into the past.

“We found them,” she said.

“I found them,” I said.

“And you don’t feel responsible for them?”

I shook my head.
“I do feel curious, however.”

Her lips thinned and she leaned even closer to me.
Our faces were practically touching.
“What if the person responsible is still alive?”

I leaned back.
I felt as if our very posture was calling attention to us.
A lot of people in Chicago didn’t like blacks and whites at the same table, let alone sitting so close.

“I think it’s possible, but not likely
,
that
the
person responsible is still alive,” I said.
“Those bodies are so well hidden that only a handful of people could have even known about them.
Baird, Hanley, your father maybe
,
or—”

“Someone else at Sturdy,” Laura said. “My father’s been gone a long time now.”

“You’re thinking Cronk and the bastards,” I said.

“Cronk and the bastards” was Laura’s term for the team her father had appointed to run Sturdy Investments after his death.

She opened her hands, a simple gesture that meant the implications were obvious.

“That would solve some problems for you, wouldn’t it?” I said. “If you can show criminal activities under their watch, activities that occurred after your father died with no benefit to the corporation.”

“I can get rid of all their cronies,” Laura said.
“I can do a clean sweep of Sturdy without getting in trouble with the stockholders or any of our clients.”

I took a bite of pie.
It was sweet, with just the right amount of cinnamon.
“And here I thought you were being altruistic.”

“I am.” She spoke loudly again.

The students stopped their arguments over which chapters to study and looked at us again.
When we glanced at them, they looked away.

Laura sighed as if she were exasperated at me.
“I wouldn’t be able to sleep, knowing we just left them there.
And I’d want to know what happened, not just because of my family connection, but also because they were people.
Someone loved them once.
Someone cared.
Someone probably still wants to know what happened to them.”

I followed my second bite of pie with a sip of coffee.
I was stalling before I answered her.
She really wasn’t aware of all that this entailed.

“If we discover that this happened after your dad, and we bring it to the proper authorities, then we could get into trouble,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Tampering with a crime scene,” I said.

“An old one.”

“Not that old,” I said.
“Not in this kind of case.”

She bit her lower lip.

“If it predates your father, then the authorities might not care that we’ve been digging around down there.
But they might, particularly if they want to go after you for some reason.”

“Shit,” Laura said.

I raised my eyebrows at her.
She rarely swore.

Her cheeks flushed slightly.
“It’s damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“But you said you’d think about it,” she said. “You said you’d have a plan.”

“It’s risky,” I said. “But here’s what I think we should do.”

Laura listened while I laid out my plan.
It was based on things I’d seen in the South before the Civil Rights
M
ovement had gotten national attention.

Often murders of blacks, particularly in rural counties, got covered up or were committed by the law enforcement agencies in the area.
Sometimes the families and friends of the victims were able to do some investigating themselves.
They soon learned that no one would pay attention the investigation if it wasn’t conducted properly — with documentation, correct evidence
-
handling procedures, and accurate autopsies.

Soon white law enforcement learned to restrict access to those crime scenes, but for a brief window, a number of higher
-
profile cases had got northern newspaper coverage because the victims’ families had photographic or physical evidence that contradicted the stories the authorities told.

“Emmett Till,” Laura said, citing a famous case from 1955.
Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, had been visiting relatives in Mississippi when he supposedly whistled at a white woman.
I never believed that part of the story.
I always figured he had just looked at her and smiled, with that directness most Northern children had and all black Southern boys had learned to avoid.

For his crime — whatever it was, smiling or whistling or just plain being in the wrong place at the wrong time — Till had been kidnapped and brutally murdered.
His mother, outraged that Mississippi law enforcement had done nothing, got her son’s body back for the funeral and
,
contrary to all advice, held an open
-
casket funeral so that the world could see what had happened to her son.

Emmett Till became a cause c
é
l
è
bre, part of the budding
C
ivil
R
ights
M
ovement.
When his funeral was held here in Chicago, Laura would have been sixteen — only two years older than Till had been.
No wonder she remembered it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Like Emmett Till.
Only a lot of cases got more evidence.
Enough to attempt bringing those cases to trial.
We wouldn’t be going for a trial.
We’d just document everything in case we needed to bring this to someone’s attention.”

“I have no idea how to go about that,” Laura said.

“I know the kind of people we need,” I said, “and if we were in Memphis, I even know who I’d hire to help.
But I don’t have those contacts here yet, so I’m going to have to bring Franklin into this.”

She nodded. “I suspected as much.”

“It would be better,” I said, “to hire some of these experts from out of state.
Just in case.”

She bit her lower lip again. The lipstick was completely gone now.
“This is going to get expensive, isn’t it?”

“Probably,” I said.
“And we have another problem.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I’m going to have to oversee everything. I’m the only person with the time and the ability.
But if we do take the case to the authorities, we’ll have to leave me out of it.
Anyone we hire is going to have to swear they won’t mention my involvement.”

“If they go to court, that can be a problem,” Laura said.

I nodded.
“We might be worrying about something that’ll never happen.”

“Then again,” she said, “this could be a bigger problem than we think.”

SIX

Franklin knew a local funeral home director who occasionally did autopsy work and some forensic investigation, mostly of corpses.
Franklin swore that the man was trustworthy.
I took the name and decided to do a little investigating of my own.
I wanted someone so incorruptible that I didn’t have to worry about him at all.

When it came to actual forensic investigation, however, the kind that police departments did in actual murder investigations, Franklin knew no one.

I couldn’t use my own past contacts, because they all knew me as Smokey Dalton, and even if they were trustworthy, they would know where I was.
I had long ago decided that no one outside of Jimmy, Laura, Franklin
,
and Althea would know that I had moved to Chicago. Even Henry Davis, who managed my Memphis home for me and was one of my closest friends, had no idea exactly where I lived.