“We’re here until five,” he said, “should you have any problems.”
I had problems, but none of them were with the apartment. I didn’t want to walk the path I’d set for myself, but I would. And I didn’t want to hurt Grace, but I had a hunch I would do that, too.
I clutched the keys and got the boys, taking the first step toward finding Daniel, and his bombs.
THIRTY-TWO
The apartment was a third-floor walk-up in an old brick building that had been recently renovated. Inside the main door was a small entry with a locked door, security buzzers alongside apartment numbers, and a working intercom. A young man, his clothes so filthy that they looked like they’d been crusted to him, slept against the wall.
The building manager had been told to expect us. I pushed the bell to his apartment, and the door buzzed without him even checking to see who was standing outside. For all he knew, the smelly young man could have been trying to get in.
The hallway was wide and well lit. The paint on the wall had a few handprints, and moving scrapes from furniture being carried past, but no graffiti. The stairs were new and didn’t creak as we went up. The railing was made of a sturdy metal that wouldn’t buckle under repeated use.
Despite the stink in the entry, the hallway smelled of dryer lint and laundry soap. A sign pointed down a flight of steps, indicating that the building provided its own laundry facility.
Malcolm glanced over his shoulder, as if he had expected someone to follow us inside. No one had. We went up the steps, Jimmy taking them two at a time. He held one key in his right hand, reciting the apartment number under his breath as he hurried.
“Wait for us,” I called at the main landing.
Jimmy didn’t wait, though. He skipped ahead, and I heard him as he reached the third floor.
“We’re right near the stairs.”
He made that sound like a good thing. I supposed it was in case of fire, but for day-to-day living, it would be annoying. Malcolm and I had reached the landing between the second and third floors when I heard the apartment door open.
“Cool, man,” Jimmy said, his voice fading. “This is cool.”
Malcolm followed him. I rested a moment, wiped the sweat off my face, and hoped that the promised air-conditioning was working. Then I carried my suitcase up the remaining steps.
The hallway was dark. The light was either burned out or turned off. At the far end, a window opened onto a fire escape. The other apartment doors were closed, but the one nearest the steps was open.
Jimmy stood in the living room of our apartment, his suitcase on the floor beside him. The room was long and rectangular with double windows at one end. The windows had a window seat built below them, and beneath the seat someone had installed cabinets.
The furniture was cheap and threadbare, but adequate. The couch was pushed against one wall. Two easy chairs faced the window. End tables with old lamps stood on either end of the couch.
“I don’t see no TV,” Jimmy said.
“There isn’t one,” I said. “This isn’t a hotel room. If we want TV, we have to buy one.”
“People rip them off.” Malcolm had set his suitcase down as well. He walked through the living room to the small kitchen beyond. The kitchen had a butler’s window that opened into the living room. To one side, a tiled area marked a square dining room. The table was silver Formica, with arching metal legs, and four matching chairs.
I followed him into the kitchen. At the far end, near the stove, another door opened, leading to the bathroom. It was small and mean, without enough room for a bathtub, only a built-in shower. The toilet itself had no seat. Apparently, the money that had been used to fix this place up hadn’t been spent here.
“I hope there’s bedrooms,” Malcolm said from behind me.
“He said there were two.” I turned around, and looked, hoping to see the door. It was in the kitchen, painted white to match the walls. I had initially thought it was a broom closet.
Instead the door opened onto a short hallway. Two doors stood across from each other. Once this had been a separate apartment, or maybe two separate apartments, all sharing the bath with the apartment we were standing in.
Malcolm flicked on the hall light, then peered into one of the rooms. “Fancy,” he said, and his tone was mocking.
I looked in, too. There was the promised air conditioner, as far from the living room as it could possibly be. Only the bedrooms could be cool, and only if we kept our doors open all night long.
The bed in the room with the air conditioner was a double, with an end table on either side. The other room, smaller and with no window at all, had room only for a bunk bed.
“I get the top,” Jimmy said as he came up beside us.
“I get the top,” Malcolm said. “I’ll hit my head underneath.”
“It can’t hold your weight,” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to die when you come crashing down on me.”
“It’ll hold him,” I said. “And if you guys don’t like sharing, one of you can take the couch.”
“No thanks.” Malcolm went around me and disappeared into the kitchen.
“He doesn’t like any of this,” Jimmy said.
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe he should go home. I’ll be okay by myself. You told me how to get around.”
This was absolutely the worst place for Jimmy to be alone. He probably hadn’t noticed the teenagers loitering in doorways, or the men leaning against walls, their eyes half closed in some drugged-out ecstasy. I knew he had seen the guy in the entry because we’d all had to step over him.
But Jimmy could have selective vision sometimes. He had seen a group of children his own age playing stickball up the block. He had also seen another group on the basketball court at the nearby school, playing as if their lives depended on it.
“Sorry, Jim,” I said. “You’re going to need to be with one of us at all times around here. This isn’t a good neighborhood.”
“I thought you said we’d stay some place safe.”
“It’s safe enough,” I said, “but it’s not somewhere I’d choose to put down roots.”
“Didn’t say I wanted to move here,” Jimmy said sullenly. “We’re not moving here, right?”
“Not permanently,” I said. “Not this apartment.”
“Yeah,” Malcolm said, coming up behind us. “This is a cruddy place. There isn’t even a phone.”
“That’s something else we’d have to pay for if we were staying,” I said, remembering all the things the lease enumerated as our responsibility. “There’s a pay phone across the street. We can use that if we need to make calls.”
Malcolm took his suitcase into the room. He tossed the case on the top bunk as if to claim it as his own.
“It’s safer for me to be up there, Smoke,” Jimmy said.
“Let him,” I said quietly.
“Jeez,” Jimmy said. “No TV, and a stupid bottom bunk, and you guys gotta babysit me all the time. This is just dumb.”
“Where are the books Grace had you bring?” I asked. “In the van?”
“Some,” he said. That surprised me. I had expected a yes. “I brought three.”
No wonder he had struggled with his suitcase.
“Three’s a good start,” I said. “Looks like between the books and the newspapers you’re supposed to read every day, you’ll have plenty to do.”
“Can we at least get a radio?” Malcolm asked.
“That’s probably wise,” I said. “We’ll pick up a transistor this afternoon.”
For the moment, though, I wanted to get the air conditioner working. I wanted to sit down and rest for a few minutes, then figure out my plan.
I wanted, with an intensity that surprised me, to be somewhere else.
THIRTY-THREE
We spent the rest of the day settling in and exploring the neighborhood. It wasn’t as bad as it had initially seemed. Even though there were junkies in doorways, there was also a newly f
ormed neighborhood watch.
The building’s manager, a strongly built man in his midthirties, found me as I was coming down the stairs. He made a point, he said, of meeting all the short-timers, especially since the neighborhood watch had gotten so diligent.
I quizzed him about the area. Turned out that the rental agent had been right — the neighborhood was cleaning itself up. Even though half the residents were on welfare, they were mostly elderly people who had lived in the area since the 1920s. Many had been in the same apartment for more than forty years.
The rest worked. Most of the drug addicts had been routed from the apartments as part of the government’s condition for cleaning up the place.
The manager had most of these figures courtesy of the government. This had been one of the first model cities projects in 1964. It had been designed as a working experiment in not just cleaning up the buildings, but improving the lives of the residents as well.
The apartments had been improved. The rats were mostly gone, at least inside, and so were the cockroaches, thanks to diligent spraying efforts. The locks worked, there were no exposed electric wires, and the buildings themselves were as secure as the residents desired. Apartments had more than one room now, functioning bathrooms, and actual closets.
But the government’s work had stopped there. The neighborhood watch had come out of a committee the residents had put together to force the government to fulfill its promises, promises to provide the drug center, the jobs, and adult education—the very things that would keep the neighborhood improving.
At least I didn’t feel any despair here. Maybe the watch worked.
That night before it got dark, I showed Malcolm and Jimmy the way to the nearest subway station. I showed them how to read the map, and then I took them up to 135th and Lenox, where the public library was located. The neighborhood wasn’t as good as I remembered, but it was all right for them to be here during the day, while I was working.
I checked the library hours for the Fourth of July, and noted that the building was closed. On that day we might have to make special plans.
The next day, I left Malcolm with Jimmy. I had Malcolm give me his estimated itinerary, so that I could find them if I had to, then I headed for Sugar Hill to see if I could find Daniel Kirkland and Rhondelle Whickam.
The address that Whickam had given me was in one of the older neighborhoods closest to the park. All of Edgecomb Avenue had a great view of the Harlem Plain, but this area had a quiet air of comfort.
Even though it was about nine A.M., the day was already getting warm. Traffic moved by quickly, as if the cars knew that they could overheat if they stopped for too long. Headlines on a discarded newspaper caught my eye: Hanoi was releasing three U.S. prisoners; four Arab jets had been shot down over the Suez Canal.
The entire world continued to burn, and here, in Sugar Hill, the radiant heat seemed to envelope everything.
I walked up the nearly empty sidewalks, stepping over broken bottles and piles of garbage in bags that sat out for collection. The stench was amazing — rotted food, spoiled milk, and other odors I couldn’t identify mingled with the heaviness of the air.
Rows of wrought-iron banisters rose toward the row houses, looking identical despite the bicycles chained to some and the clothes hanging on others. From my sideways angle, the door arches looked like sculptures. If I squinted, I could almost see the past, when this neighborhood was in its prime, the red brick was clean, and people walked with pride.
I finally found the address I was looking for. I walked up the concrete steps to the small stoop and stopped. The door was made of fine wood, which had once been polished, but lost its luster to time and the elements. The door knocker had survived, though, and a wonderfully detailed lion’s head with a ring in its mouth suggested the elegance that this place had once had.
I grabbed the ring and pounded it against the brass with force. For a moment, I didn’t think anyone heard me. Then the door opened a slight crack.
“What?” a female voice asked.
“I’m looking for Danny,” I said.
“He’s not here,” the woman said.
“How about Rhondelle?”
“What do you want her for?”
Finding them had been easier than I expected. I tried not to let my surprise show.
“I got some business to finish up,” I said.
The door opened all the way. A young white woman, in shorts and a cropped T-shirt, held it open for me. Her dark hair was gathered at the back of her neck, and her eyes were red with exhaustion and maybe something else.
“C’mon in,” she said, and moved away.
She didn’t ask who I was or what I wanted. She didn’t seem to care.
I stepped inside. The entry was ornate. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, the chain trimmed in gold. To my right, a floor-length mirror as big as a door was framed in mahogany, and brass clothes hangers hung in a square pattern on each side, waiting for coats. Just beyond that, stairs rose to the house’s upper floors.
“She’s having breakfast,” the young woman said, motioning toward a hallway that disappeared toward the back.
Then she climbed the stairs like an elderly person. She didn’t even look back to see if I had taken her direction. Her manner was odd and unnerving, and even though this place didn’t smell of pot like some of the places I’d found in New Haven, I wondered if her lack of response was due to drugs rather than a natural lack of interest.
I felt uneasy. I had thought I would find no one here. I had planned to spend the day talking to the neighbor, searching for Daniel and Rhondelle, going through the same sort of wild goose chase that I had pursued in New Haven.
Now that I had found them, I would have to find out what was going on without alienating them.
I walked down the hall, the wooden floor squeaking beneath my shoes. Another door opened to my left, leading into a back parlor. I peered inside. Clothing was strewn all over the heavy Victorian furniture. The fireplace screen was being used as a drying rack for underwear. Dirty dishes sat on an expensive wood table. Above it all, someone had left yet another chandelier burning, its dusty globe sending a dim light through the room.
I continued forward. Ahead of me, an unprepossessing door remained closed. I pushed it open, and found myself in a long narrow kitchen. A utility sink with an orange base leaned against the wall, the top covered with copper dishes that had once been used as decoration.
The room smelled faintly of peanut butter and toast. A young woman sat at a small table toward the back, barely visible beyond the huge turn-of-the-century cast iron stove. She was hunched over the table, reading as she drank from a steaming mug. Her hair was frizzed into an oversized Afro that looked teased instead of natural.
“Rhondelle?” I said.
She jumped and faced me all in one movement. A bruise ran from her left cheek to her jaw, distorting her face. Her left eye was blackened. But she was still recognizable from that scholarship picture.
I hadn’t expected the bruise. I tried not to stare at it.
She clutched her toast as if it were a shield. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Bill Grimshaw. Your father hired me to find you.” I kept my voice low so that I wouldn’t scare her further.
“Who let you in here?” She was still pressed against the wall.
“A girl,” I said. “She told me you were here, and then she went upstairs.”
“She just let you walk in?”
“It’s not her fault,” I said. “I told her I had some business with you and Daniel.”
“Daniel,” she said as if the name were unfamiliar.
“Is he here?” Now that I’d found Rhondelle, I wanted to talk to him. I had a hunch she knew very little about his activities.
“Not at the moment.” She bit her lower lip and glanced over my shoulder, then back at me.
I resisted the urge to follow her gaze. I hadn’t heard anyone come up behind me. “When do you expect him
back?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m working for his mother, too. Grace is really worried about him. She—”
“That’s bullshit.” The harshness of Rhondelle’s words startled me. They seemed at odds with the fear she had shown a moment before. “Danny’s mother doesn’t care about him.”
She seemed to believe that, and it seemed to matter to her. It would do me no good to argue Daniel’s family dynamics with this girl. I decided to focus instead on the one thing that concerned only Rhondelle.
“Your dad thinks that something’s happened to you,” I said quietly. “He hired a detective in Poughkeepsie. He thought you were kidnapped on the way to Vassar in January—”
“Yeah, my dad would think that.” She set the toast down. The fear had disappeared. Instead, her expression hardened. “So you’re from Poughkeepsie?”
It wasn’t a polite question.
“No,” I said. “I’m from Chicago. I was initially looking for Daniel, and I had gotten a lot of information about you in the process.”
“Really?” She looked away from me, picked up her coffee mug, and sipped from it. Her hands trembled ever so slightly. “What kind of information?”
“About the incident at Yale last fall,” I said, “and all the trouble it caused.”
Her shoulders relaxed. I wondered if she had expected me to say something else.
“Trouble.” She scooted her chair so that she faced me. “Is that what my fascist father calls it?”
Her father didn’t strike me as a fascist. I made myself take a deep breath before I spoke. “He was never sure what happened. No one told him.”
She raised her eyebrows. They weren’t plucked like they had been in that photograph. “I told him. I asked him how he could work there with all those bigots and fucking conforming Negroes, and he said that I didn’t understand.”
Her language didn’t sound Ivy League to me. I was amazed that her father was as sympathetic to her as he had been.
“I’m not sure I understand either.” I swept a hand to indicate my surroundings, which must have been quite expensive and modern in their day. “But it seems that your father came from a different tradition than I do.”
War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 21