Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story (3 page)

The apartment was on the second floor. More
bikes littered the hallway, and so did several more beer cans. The hall smelled
of beer.

Linda’s door was closed tightly. There
were scrapes near the lock and the wood had been splintered about fist-high. I
had no idea if that damage predated Linda’s arrival. With student housing, it
was almost impossible to tell.

I unlocked the deadbolt and had to shove
hard to get the door to open. It had been stuck closed. As I stepped inside, I
inspected the side of the door and noted that the wood was warped.

I pushed the door closed, but it bounced
back open. The warped wood made it as hard to close as it was to open.

I had seen the apartment she had been
given on the South Side. That had been a two bedroom with a full kitchen and
stunning living room. I had put up another family there a year or so ago. They
had worked their way through the Helping Hands program and had bought their own
house last summer.

I couldn’t believe she would have left
that place for this one.

But people’s prejudices made them do all
kinds of crazy things.

The apartment smelled sour. A blanket was
crumpled at the end of the couch, and a sweater hung off the back of a kitchen
chair someone had moved near the window. The kitchen was to my right. The
table, with two chairs pushed against it, was beneath a small window with a
good view of the house next door.

A full ashtray sat on the tabletop, along
with a coloring book and an open –and scattered — box of crayons. Dishes
cluttered the sink, which gave off a rotted smell.

More cigarettes floated in the water
filling the bowls at the bottom of the sink. A hand towel rested on one of the
burners. It was the only thing I moved, using the skeleton keys so that I
wouldn’t have to touch it.

Then I went through the kitchen into a
narrow hallway. The second bedroom was back here. A bed was pushed against the
wall. Clothing — pink and small — was scattered all over the floor.
More clothes hung on the make-shift clothing rod by the door.

The clutter was every day clutter, not
slob-clutter. It looked like the kind of mess a person made when she left in a
hurry, meaning to clean up later. It disturbed me that a woman who cared so
much about her daughter — a poor woman — would leave most of her
daughter’s wardrobe behind.

The hair rose on the back of my neck. I
didn’t want Valentina to be right. If she were right, then we had lost more
than a week in searching for this woman.

And a week, in a missing person’s case,
was a long, long time.

I made myself walk back through the
kitchen and down another narrow hallway to the full bedroom. It wasn’t much
larger than the daughter’s room. The full-sized bed left barely enough space
between the wall and the side of the bed for me to walk around it.

The bed was unmade. Pillows sideways,
blankets thrown back. But the bottom of the blankets — along with the
sheets — was tucked in. The tucks were perfect military tucks, something
that wouldn’t last during weeks of restless sleep.

Linda Krag usually made her bed. She
usually made it with great precision.

Her clothing hung in the small closet,
separated by color. A pair of shoes was lined neatly against the wall.

The sour smell was stronger here. It
didn’t smell like dirty dishes, but something else, something that I should
have recognized, but couldn’t.

I pushed open the bathroom door, and the
smell hit me, making my eyes water. Vomit. Old vomit. It lined the edge of the
bathtub, the floor beneath the sink, and the toilet itself. It had crusted
against the wall.

I made myself go into the room. Another
cigarette butt floated in the sloppy toilet water. The bathroom mirror was
cracked, and a small handprint — child-sized — marred a white towel
still hanging on the rack.

I looked at the handprint, wondering if
that delicate little girl had been the source of all this vomit.

But as I pushed against the towel, I
realized the handprint was a different color.

The handprint was made of dried blood.

***

I couldn’t find any more answers in Linda
Krag’s apartment, so I drove home.

I’m sure my neighbors wondered why I
hurried out of my car that afternoon, and took the steps to my apartment two at
a time.

Jimmy had a half an hour of school left
before Franklin picked him and the Grimshaw children up and took them to an
after-school program we had started three years ago. If I called Franklin now,
I could probably arrange for Jimmy to stay the night.

I wasn’t sure I would need all that time,
but I figured I had best plan for it.

Linda Krag and her little daughter Annie
had been missing for several days. Some would have argued that a few more hours
would make no difference, but to me, they would have.

If the woman was in trouble, then every
second wasted would be a second closer to her death. Because, if Valentina was
right, and Linda Krag had been taken by her husband, that man wouldn’t be
interested in rebuilding their relationship.

He would punish her.

And he would do it one of several ways. If
he was just a man filled with uncontrollable rage, he would beat her until he
felt better. But if he was a sadist — and if what Valentina said was
true, that Linda Krag’s daughter was the most important thing in her life —
then he would hurt the daughter to punish the mother.

People who got punched in the stomach
hard or repeatedly often vomited, sometimes uncontrollably. I hoped that the
amount of vomit in that small bathroom had come from an adult, but there was no
way to tell.

I clenched my fists. Then I released the
fingers slowly, making myself breathe. I picked up the phone, called Franklin,
explained the case — since he was part of Helping Hands too — and
asked him to take care of my son for at least the next twenty-four hours.

Then I hung up and set about finding
Linda Krag.

***

Unlike the stuff you see on
Mannix
 
or
Hawaii
5-0
, detective work is seldom fisticuffs and confessions. Usually it’s
long and repetitive legwork. I was going to try to cram a week’s worth of
legwork into a single day.

So I went into my office and made calls.

My office was in the bedroom between mine
and Jim’s. I decorated it with used office furniture (bought at a bargain when
I first moved here), filing cabinets that were nearly full, and a new-fangled
answering machine that Laura had bought me. I hadn’t taken the thing out of the
box yet.

I pushed the box aside, picked up the
phone, and called Valentina. She wasn’t there, so I left a message, asking if
she had found that information for me. I hoped she would call me back while I
was still at home.

Then I started a series of calls to area
hospitals and doctors’ offices. I had found, over the years, that if I put on a
slight East Coast accent and spoke a little quicker than I usually did, people
gave me information without many questions.

Hospitals, trained to keep some
information confidential, were a tougher nut to crack. But my years as an
insurance company investigator helped there. If I called Billing and told them
I had an unpaid bill from the hospital itself, I usually got full cooperation.

I did this now, saying that I had a bill
for my client Linda Krag, without dates of her hospital stay or any listing of
her procedure. I couldn’t pay the bill unless I had that information.

Billing departments all over the city
scrambled to help me. They hand-searched their records. I told them that we had
received the bill today, which made us (or more accurately, them) believe that
the procedure happened within the past month.

Each call took about fifteen minutes,
because the billing person I spoke to did a thorough search. Each call also
ended with the same discouraging phrase:

It seemed that Linda Krag had not shown
up at any doctor’s office or hospital in the Greater Chicago area in the past
month. At least, not under that name.

The next thing I did was check the
morgues and funeral homes. That was a little easier — with funeral homes,
I asked when the Linda Krag funeral was scheduled, and with morgues, I just
asked my question in a straightforward manner.

No one had heard of her.

When I finished, I realized I should have
asked after her daughter as well — Annie Krag. But the very idea of
searching for death records for a child made my stomach twist.

I thumbed through the phone book,
wondering if I could run the same hospital scam for the daughter on the same
day, when my phone rang.

It was Valentina.

She gave me an address on the east side
of Madison, the husband’s full name — Duane G. Krag, age 35, and the make
and model of his car, a white 1968 Olds with Missouri plates. Up until three
weeks ago, he had worked at the Oscar Mayer plant not far from his home.

I didn’t like that last detail at all. “Did
he give notice or did he just disappear?”

“He finished his shift on Friday and
failed to show up on Monday,” she said.

“You got this information how?” I asked.

“A few well-placed phone calls,” she
said. “I know some people here now.”

I didn’t quite trust her tone. “You
didn’t go there, right?”

“No,” she said. “I have no reason to. Do
I?”

“None,” I said.

“Besides,” she said. “He’s been using his
phone.”

I leaned back in my chair. “How do you
know that?”

“One of my volunteers at the hot line
also works for the phone company. It’s amazing what they can find out about
you.”

I bet it was.

“Do you have information for me?” she
asked.

“I’ve been to the apartment,” I said. “So
if she did leave on her own, she left a lot behind.”

I wasn’t going to tell her about the
vomit or the blood. I had no idea what had happened, so I wasn’t going to scare
Valentina unnecessarily.

“She wouldn’t do that, Smokey.” That edge
of worry had returned to Valentina’s voice.

“I tend to agree with you. I’m about to
go back to see if her neighbors saw anything unusual.”

She was silent on the other end. I
wondered if she could tell that I was withholding information from her.

“I hope you find her,” she finally said.

“Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”

***

I hadn’t lied to Valentina about one
thing: My next step was to return to the neighborhood and ask if anyone saw
anything unusual. I didn’t relish going back to this neighborhood, but I saw no
other choice.

It was already dark when I drove back
into the neighborhood, which made me even more uncomfortable. As I approached
Linda’s block, I debated whether or not I wanted to park there or on a nearby
street.

I ended up with no choice. Every parking
spot for blocks was taken. I finally found a parking place near a bookstore on
57
^th
, and I walked to the apartment building.

I didn’t have a date or an exact
incident, but I did my best. I stopped student after student, asking if they
had seen the woman with the little blond girl who lived just down the block. Most
remembered her — there weren’t a lot of children on this street — but
none had talked to her.

And no one had seen her for at least a
week.

By the time I got to her apartment
building, I was feeling discouraged. I took the steps up the porch just as a
young man came out of the front door wheeling his bicycle.

His red hair brushed the collar of his
coat. He smelled faintly of incense and marijuana. His eyes were clear,
however.

He started when he saw me.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Linda,” I said. “I’m a
friend of hers from Madison.”

He studied me for a minute, then he said,
“Linda didn’t have any friends in Madison.”

Finally, someone who knew her.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“She did,” he said.

“Well, that’s a little awkward,” I said,
trying to seem humble. “She lived next door to me and my wife and we talked all
the time. We’re in Chicago to see family and I was wondering if she and Annie
could join everyone for lunch tomorrow. I guess I thought we were better
friends than we were.”

The boy shrugged. “Maybe I misunderstood
her. We only talked a few times. My roommate knew her better.”

“Knew her?” I asked, then realized the
question sounded sharp, so I did my best to cover. “Did your roommate move?”

“No,” the boy said. “Linda and her
husband reconciled. He said he was taking them back to Madison. I would’ve
thought you knew that, since you lived next door.”