Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (19 page)

Then I stepped inside and looked again.
Cobwebs on the ceiling indicated that no one had been in here for quite a while.
There was a small space behind the particle
-
board wall.

It had been engineered to slide back.
If I had tried hard enough, I could have slid it toward the apartment’s door, and then stepped through without doing any damage.

Someone had designed this to give easy access to the door hidden by this wall.
But that same someone hadn’t wanted anyone to know the door was there.

I tried the knob. The door was locked, just like I expected.

I fumbled through the ring of keys, trying almost two dozen before I finally found the one that worked.

The lock clicked, and the door actually creaked open, sending a shiver along my spine.

I shone the light inside, surprised to see a landing.
Narrow stairs ran down to the right, and up to the left.

The servants’ staircase.
I had a hunch
it ended in Hanley’s apartment on the first floor.

I opted to go up first.

But again, before I did, I propped this door open, then left it, went into the main part of the apartment
,
and propped the apartment door open as well.
If LeDoux came looking for me, he would at least have an idea where I had gone.

I walked back in the hole.
Butterflies had replaced the queasiness.
I was breathing too shallowly — the smell and the dust caused that — and I was feeling lightheaded.

I made myself take a deeper breath, even though I really didn’t want to taste the fetid air.

The stairs leading up were so tiny that I had trouble fitting my shoes on them.
I had to climb up on the balls of my feet, once again using the wall as a banister.

The air smelled stale up here, dust-filled, and old in a way that I couldn’t describe.
That pervasive odor of rot was here too, but not as offensive as it had been in some other places.
Just a lingering afterthought, as if this part of the building had once housed something awful, but did no longer.

The stairway turned and opened under the eaves.
I had to crouch to keep from bumping my head.
The edges of the walls were unfinished — newspapers and some kind of material peeked out from behind the wallboard, obviously an old-fashioned source of insulation.

Gravel and dirt lined the edges, and along the very side I saw mouse prints, hundreds of them, along with black flecks of mouse droppings.

I had to remain bent at the waist to get all the way into the room.
I braced a hand against the ceiling, and when it became clear that I could stand, I did.

Tables surrounded me.
Tables covered with things — jars filled with buttons and campaign pins and marbles.
Folded bits of clothing, blankets
,
and coats.
Socks rolled up the way my mother used to do when she’d put them in my bureau drawer, and underwear that looked used.

Beneath the tables, open boxes. The one nearest to me was filled with newspapers — not clippings this time, but entire editions of the
Chicago Tribune
.
Another box held the
Chicago Record
, and a third held the
Chicago Times
.

The boxes trailed back into the darkness, filled not just with newspapers, but magazines and snapshots as well.
I felt vaguely overwhelmed and hoped that most of this was just items abandoned by previous tenants.

But of course, I wasn’t that lucky.

I turned and banged into the table behind me.
A jar tumbled toward me, jingling as it fell, and I caught it.

At first I thought it held stones in the bottom, maybe a child’s collection of something, and then those stones reflected my flashlight beam.

I turned the beam on the jar completely, brought the jar closer so that I could see it clearly, and then nearly dropped it.

What I had thought were stones were teeth.

Gold caps, gold fillings, and bits of loose gold.

Some of the fillings hadn’t been removed from their tooth.
The tooth remained at the bottom of the jar, bits of tissue hanging off the jagged ends.

The queasiness was back full-force. I
set the jar down, careful not to dislodge it again, and made myself breathe evenly.

The table I had bumped into was a worktable.
In the very center someone had carefully laid out a blotter, placed a lamp beside it, and set tools along the right edge.

Behind the table, a straight-backed chair with no cushion had been pushed up close, its wooden seat worn smooth from use.
A few empty jars sat to the left side, a few full jars to the right.

This was the only table with nothing stored beneath it.

I made myself look at the tools.
A dental pick, tweezers, and another pair of pliers.
Some jewelers
’
cloths lay to one side, and beside them, one of the bottles of hydrogen peroxide.
A small bowl was placed on top of the peroxide, upside down, obviously intended for use whenever the owner of all this stuff returned.

I scanned the flashlight over the end tables behind this main table.
More jars, these holding jewelry, separated by rings and watches and pins.

The window behind all of it had been boarded up except along the bottom — perhaps so that it could be opened a crack in the heat of the summer — and along the back wall, hats.
Dozens of them, all hanging on pegs.
Bowlers and stocking caps and fedoras.
There were a few straw hats and a haymaker, as well as billed tweed caps.
Along the bottom were several garrison caps and a few other military caps, the foldable kind used in both World Wars.

I let out a small breath, feeling shaky.
Maybe the air was bad up here or maybe the sheer numbers were starting to overwhelm me.

A bulletin board had been pasted on the eave wall beside some of the caps, and on it someone had pressed papers — pictures, cards, postcards, letters.
I couldn’t get back there, not without disturbing everything else, but knew I would have to as soon as I could get LeDoux up here to photograph everything.

Then my light caught another table, the one directly behind the worktable, and I realized that one was a
worktable
too.
Only on it were gun parts, oil, a cleaning rod, and a repair kit like the one I had had in Memphis. A grip lay on its side, unattached, and a barrel with a dent along the edge sat in the middle of yet another blotter.

This was clearly a workroom of some kind, but all the clues kept miscuing me.
What
kind
,
exactly? The teeth implied one thing, the gun another, the hats yet one more.
And then there was the newspaper storage, not to mention the medical supplies downstairs.

What kind of business had
been
run out of this place? What had been going on?

I turned all the way around — carefully this time — and headed back down the stairs.
Much as I didn’t want to, I would have to consult with LeDoux.
We would have to make decisions together on all these finds, how we were going to investigate them, and then what we would do with the remaining pieces.

I would also have to call Laura and update her.

She wouldn’t welcome this news, any more than I did.

I shuddered and went down through the cobwebs, all the way to Hanley’s apartment.

EIGHTEEN

The stench of decaying flesh grew worse the farther down the stairs I went.
I knew it would; no one had cleaned Hanley’s apartment after finding him there during a heatwave, dead for more than a week.

I went down the stairs carefully, the flashlight in my right hand.
I didn’t touch the walls for balance here; I didn’t want to think about what could be on them.

Halfway down the first flight, a cobweb brushed my face.
I jumped, brushed the web away, and kept going, my heart pounding.
I had put this off for a long time — going to Hanley’s apartment, seeing what kind of damage his decaying corpse had done.
Now I would have to face it.

There was no landing on the second floor like there had been on the third.
Apparently servants weren’t supposed to enter the second floor unless they absolutely had to.
There was a door, but it had been boarded over and painted shut a long time ago.
The nails in the boards had rusted.
No one had used this door since the building was converted to apartments decades before.

I continued down.
The stairwell seemed even darker than it had above, even though I knew that was a figment of my imagination.
The stink grew worse.
The air was actually coated with it, and it felt like it had gotten on my skin.

At the bottom of the stairs there was a narrow landing and a brand-new light switch — at least, brand new in the context of this house.
The switch had been installed in the last five years.
I flicked it on just to see if the light bulbs worked.

They did. The entire stairwell lit up, revealing unfinished walls and rough wood stairs.
The cobwebs were thin, not the kind that had been woven and rewoven year after long year.
These webs came from spiders that felt free to build, but only recently.
Some were so thin I hadn’t felt them as I broke through them.

Now I felt crawly, and I willed the sensation away.

The door in front of me had a shiny new deadbolt, as well as a brand new knob.
It was a hollow-core door, obviously a replacement for an older door, and it locked from this side.

I turned the deadbolt, then turned the knob and opened the door.
A waft of heat hit me, and that stink, even worse than before, oily and grotesque.

My eyes watered.
I blinked, forcing myself to breathe, knowing that the only way to deal with the smell was to get used to it.

The door opened into a good-sized kitchen, clearly remodeled from the house’s original kitchen.
A stove stood next to the wall and a deep sink stood under a window.
The table in the middle had the remains of a meal on it.
The food was green and covered with flies.

More food rotted on the counters
,
all of it unidentifiable, except for a bunch of bananas, thin and black and melting into a puddle on the linoleum.
There were no dirty dishes in the sink; Hanley had been neater than I expected.

The
Sun-Times
and the
Tribune
sat on the table as well, yellowing in the sun that had poured in from that window.
The newspapers were unopened, probably dating back to the day Hanley had died.

I closed the door to the stairwell, then turned to look at it. The door looked like any other; its placement in the remodeled kitchen suggested a closet door or a door that led into a small storage area, not one that opened onto a narrow stairway

I checked the knob.
It locked automatically.
If I remembered, I’d come back and thumb through my keyring until I found the key to the deadbolt.

For the moment, though, I had to get out of that kitchen.
I went through an archway into a room I guessed had once housed the icebox.
A refrigerator was plugged into the wall nearest the stove, but the rest of the room had filing cabinets and keys hanging off the wall.
A desk stood near another small window.
Piled on top of the desk were bills, their envelopes also yellowing in the sun.

I couldn’t tell where the heat was coming from.
I’d checked the stove as I passed, and it was off.
This room was just as warm as the kitchen had been.
Sweat trickled down my back.

A narrow archway opened into yet another room.
This archway had been cut into the wall later — in the original flow of the house, no one had been meant to go from the icebox room to what had to have been a back parlor.

It had been Hanley’s living room, and I finally found the source of the heat.
This room had electric heaters built into the wall; it wasn’t on the boiler system at all.
The heaters had been cranked up to high, and no one had shut them off.
Apparently no one had noticed when they came to pick up the body.

I shut them off now, thankful that the building hadn’t burned down.
I opened a window, as much for the heat as the smell, and felt relief as a cool breeze floated in.