War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  She let out a contemptuous noise. “He thinks because he grew up in France, he’s special. He never saw how the French treat us, like some kind of exotic animal. Whenever I went to see Grand-mère and Grand-père in Paris, I was treated like a piece of art or a sculpture, not a person. Something other, not human. I hated it.”

  “More than you hate it here?” I asked.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I’m an American, just like everybody else. We shouldn’t have to put up with the second-class citizen crap. It was a great ideal, this country, but it’s fucked, you know?”

  Of course I knew. I knew better than she did, with her privileged background and her protected upbringing. But I said nothing.

  Instead, I took one step toward her.

  She kept her back to the wall, watching me warily.

  I touched my cheek. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” But a look crossed her face, a slight frown, a memory. Something that showed she wasn’t as tough as she pretended to be.

  “You know,” I said, “I met Daniel for the first time last summer. And while I thought he was pretty committed politically, I never knew he was violent.”

  She shrugged one shoulder and looked down. Then she wiped toast crumbs off her lap, as if I weren’t even in the room.

  “You can talk to me,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?” I didn’t expect the force of her anger or the fierce expression on her face as she raised her head. “Why can I talk to you? Because you know my father? Or because you say so? Because I can see you’re a pretty crappy detective. I thought you knew about the incident last fall, and then you come in here and say, ‘I never thought he was violent.’”

  She did a fair mocking imitation of my voice.

  “I know that he beat up that boy,” I said, “but if someone was attacking my girlfriend, I might get violent, too.”

  “Danny nearly beat him to death,” she said.

  I nodded. “They were hurting you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “They were just trying to scare me. They did it to a bunch of the girls, trapped them in a room and told them all kinds of crazy stuff, most of which I knew wasn’t true because I’d been around Yale my whole life. They weren’t even scaring me, and they never touched me.”

  That was so different from the reports I’d heard that it took a moment for her words to register. Yale wouldn’t have told me the story that she’d been attacked unless they believed it. I had certainly believed it.

  Why would she lie to me now?

  “So what really did happen?” I asked.

  “I just told you.” She glared at me defiantly.

  “That boy did get hurt, right?”

  “There you go,” she said. “Expecting me to trust you.”

  “What do you have to lose?” I asked.

  She didn’t move for the longest time. Then she turned toward me, as if she were actually thinking about what I had to say. “Danny thought maybe the fight would start investigations into the way regular people were treated at Yale. He thought it would be the beginning of the end. It was just the beginning of his end.”

  Such contempt in her voice. She was still shaking, her hands clasped in her lap. I felt slightly off balance, uncertain of what I had walked into.

  “So,” I said, “Daniel came in the room while these guys were crowded around you, right?”

  “Him and a bunch of lower classmen.” Her eyes lit up when she noted my surprise. “Danny said that these guys had tried to rape me, and it became a huge fight. He didn’t take on four guys like everybody made it sound. Just one, and he nearly kicked him to death.”

  Then she looked at me. Her lips were upturned ever so slightly. She was enjoying this conversation.

  I felt a chill run down my back. “The others involved in the fight, they never spoke up.”

  “They had a lot to lose,” she said.

  “So did Daniel.”

  “Daniel hates Yale. He hates the Establishment. He hates what the world has done to us, all of us. He thinks everything has to change from the top down.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think things are pretty fucked,” she said.

  “And everything has to change?” I asked.

  “It would be nice,” she said, which wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of Daniel’s position.

  “But you don’t believe change will happen,” I said.

  “It’s like Yale,” she said. “Daniel went head-to-head with it, brought a scandal, hoped to get public attention, and instead, he got tossed out on his ass, and no one would listen to him.”

  “It sounds like the dean of his college listened to him.”

  “I mean the press, the government, the important people. No one listened.”

  “Maybe because he nearly kicked someone to death?” I asked.

  Her lips thinned.

  “Violence doesn’t solve everything,” I said.

  This time, she touched her cheek, and she wasn’t referring to her bruise. She was referring to my scar. “I suppose you got that in a nonviolent confrontation.”

  “I didn’t duck fast enough when a white guy came after me with a knife.”

  “And I suppose you diplomatically talked him down.”

  It was my turn to smile, ever so slightly. “No. I defended myself. Sometimes you have to.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you look at the world as one big confrontation between the haves and the have-nots, then you’ll see that what we’re doing is really a matter of defending ourselves.”

  With bombs? How involved was Rhondelle? “What are you doing?”

  She blinked, as if she hadn’t realized what she had said. She looked away, moved her plate, then leaned back in her chair. “I guess you could say we’re trying to figure out the best course.”

  “The best course for what?”

  Her eyes met mine again. Her eyes weren’t really brown. They were more of a light brownish-green.

  “What happened to the white guy who knifed you?” she asked, not answering my question.

  “He’s in prison,” I said.

  “What’d he do? Knife somebody else?”

  She hit close to the truth, but I wasn’t going to let her know that. “Sometimes the system works.”

  “That’s the problem with you Establishment Negroes,” she said, putting an ironic emphasis on the last two words. “You get one victory in the middle of a thousand defeats, and think you won the war.”

  “We didn’t used to get any victories at all,” I said. “Change takes time.”

  “Time’s what we don’t have.” She was spouting the party line as if she believed it, which meant that she probably believed as deeply as Daniel did.

  She stood, picked up her plate, and carried it to the sink. As she brushed past me, I caught a faint scent of floral perfume. The scent surprised me. Unlike so many people I’d met in the past week, she still cared about herself and her appearance.

  Which made that bruise seem all the more unusual. Maybe she had been posturing a moment ago. Testing me. Maybe she was afraid not to contradict Daniel.

  “You can come with me.” I said to her back.

  She turned back toward me slowly. For a moment, I thought I had her. Then she laughed. “Oh, and go home? I could go back to my little girl’s school and learn how to be somebody’s really smart wife, and go to cocktail parties and smile nice and nod a lot, and raise two-point-five children—”

  “Or you could go home, put your life back together, and figure out what you want to do,” I said. “You’re what? Eighteen? Nineteen? You can do whatever you want.”

  “I know,” she said. “I want to stay here.”

  “I’ll have to tell your dad I found you,” I said.

  “Fine,” she snapped.

  “He said you didn’t have a key to this place.”

  “He’s more stupid than he looks.” She braced both hands on the countertop and leaned against it. “You know how easy it is
to get keys made, especially when he leaves his key ring on the entry table every night when he gets home?”

  I had suspected as much. But Whickam would probably be shocked at the daughter who was speaking to me now.

  “He’s not going to like the fact that you and your friends are here without his permission,” I said. “It doesn’t look like they’re taking good care of the place.”

  “No one else was using it,” she said.

  “Even if you don’t go home, your father might ask you to leave this building.”

  “Fine,” she snapped again. “It’s probably time for us to move on anyway.”

  I studied her. She seemed very young. But I had learned in Chicago that youth wasn’t any guarantee of innocence. I wondered if I should ask her about the explosives I found in the Barn or if I should wait until I saw Daniel. I didn’t want to scare the group away from here too quickly, but I also didn’t want them to do anything stupid. First, I needed to figure out how to stop them.

  “When’s Daniel due back?” I asked.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I want to talk to him,” I said.

  “I’ll tell him you were here.” Rhondelle crossed her arms.

  “I need to talk to him, for his mother’s sake. Even if he chooses not to go home, I need to tell her I saw him.”

  Something passed across Rhondelle’s face, something sad and lonely and filled with regret. Then she blinked up at me, the expression gone.

  “Let me take you home,” I said so softly that for a moment, I wondered if she heard me.

  “Why?” she asked, and this time, she didn’t laugh at me.

  “Because,” I said, “you don’t deserve to be treated like this.”

  She shook her head slightly, her eyes downcast. Then that half smile returned to her face.

  “You think you know everything don’t you?” she said, and walked out of the room.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  My phone call to Whickam was short.

  “I found her,” I said, using the phone across the street from my apartment. “She’s in your parents’ place.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Whickam said. “I will be down there as fast as I can.”

  “You might want to reconsider that.” The phone, which had been sitting in the sun, was hot against my hand. People milled around me, going about their business. The day had grown unbearably muggy.

  “She is my daughter,” he said. “I need to bring her home, for my wife’s sake. For my sake.”

  “That may be so,” I said, “but right now, she needs a little time, and what I’m afraid of is that she’ll move out and we’ll have to start the search all over again.”

  Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted Whickam to walk into that mess. Not the messy row house; the possible bombs, the rhetoric, the strange uneasiness I’d felt ever since I stepped through that beautiful mahogany door.

  “What about Daniel?” he asked.

  “I’m going back later today. I hope to talk to Daniel then.” And I hoped he would give me something. Some clue to what he was planning. Some idea of how dangerous he truly was.

  “I worry about her, all alone there,” Whickam said.

  “She’s not alone.” I wiped the sweat off my forehead. I didn’t like standing in the sun. “She’s with a number of other people. I’m not sure how many.”

  “They are all in the house?” Whickam asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “I could arrest them for trespassing.”

  “I’m sure you could try,” I said. “But I don’t know if you’ve noticed how run-down the neighborhood is getting. Even if you call the police, I doubt they’ll come, and if they do, I doubt they’ll arrest anyone.”

  At least not for that. The police might not go in for other reasons. If they suspected the group of militant activity, they might be spying on the row house, and they wouldn’t go in if it compromised their investigation.

  A trickle of sweat ran down my back. I hoped the house wasn’t under surveillance. The last thing I needed was to be back in some police file.

  Whickam sighed heavily. “Can you assure me that’s she’s in no danger?”

  “Just give me a day,” I said. “That’s all I ask. Then you can come down here if you want.”

  “What if they leave? What if they decide it’s not safe there and run, now that you have found them?”

  “That’s the risk we take,” I said. “If you don’t show up immediately, they might think everything’s all right.”

  “I want my daughter back,” Whickam said.

  “I think you’re going to have to realize that your daughter is an adult who makes her own choices. Whether you agree with them or not.”

  There was not much more to say after that. I promised to call him if anything else changed. Otherwise, I would get back in touch with him late the next day.

  I let myself out of the booth, crossed the street, and headed into my new apartment. Jimmy and Malcolm were gone. They had planned to go to Central Park, and if they didn’t enjoy themselves there, they would go to Morningside Park. They planned to end their day in the library, in air-conditioned comfort.

  Air-conditioning sounded good to me, too.

  There wasn’t much I could do until later. I went into the back bedroom, clicked the air conditioner on high, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  I woke to the sound of thunder. The room was dark, even though the cheap alarm clock beside the bed told me it was late afternoon. The stress of the last few days had gotten to me, and so had the lack of sleep. I had slept for more than four hours, and my growling stomach told me that I needed something to eat.

  I showered, got myself dinner, and headed back to the Whickam apartment. The sky had turned black, and a vicious wind made its way through the canyons between the buildings. I hoped that Malcolm and Jimmy had gone to the library already — I didn’t want them caught in this.

  The moment I had that thought, the heavens opened up, and water poured out of them. I climbed into a doorway, waiting for the rain to pass by.

  After fifteen minutes, it became clear that the rain wasn’t going to let up. I ran the last two blocks to the row houses. By the time I climbed the steps to the Whickam house, I was so wet that my shoes sloshed.

  I pounded on the knocker. This time, the door swung back, and Daniel Kirkland faced me. He was taller than I remembered, and thinner. His Afro doubled the size of his head, making his face seem very tiny.

  “I thought maybe it was you,” he said without inviting me in. “Tell my mom I’m fine.”

  There wasn’t a single breath of emotion in his words. He didn’t care about Grace. I wondered if he cared about anyone.

  “You tell her,” I said. “She thought something horrible happened to you. She doesn’t hear from you, then she finds out you dropped out of school and you’re going to lose your scholarship.”

  He shrugged. “It’s my life.”

  “She’s the one who worked hard so that you would get that scholarship. She’s the one who sacrificed nearly twenty years of her life for you, and you’re just walking away as if it doesn’t matter.”

  His eyes were flat. “There’s more important things than my mother right now.”

  “Like what?”

  “This country,” he said. “It’s killing us.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I had promised myself I would listen to him. I had hoped that he might let something slip.

  “It’s sending us to war,” he was saying. “It’s stifling us, it’s destroying good people. You know that, man. You know how these things work. It’s time to stop it.”

  He was giving me clues. I just had to get through the rhetoric. “How are you going to stop an entire nation?”

  “Not just me,” he said, not giving me the answer I had hoped for. “Lots of us feel this way. It’s not enough to stop the war anymore. We got to stop the people who think that war is their right. This is a revolution. And
in a revolution, everything changes.”

  Thunder boomed above me, and then the rain started to hurt. It made tapping noises as it hit the ground.

  Hail, barely bigger than the raindrops themselves, but it stung.

  I pushed the door open as wide as it went, and stepped inside, dripping on that fine wood floor.

  “I didn’t ask you in,” Daniel said.

  “It’s a revolution,” I said. “People do what they want.”

  He glared at me. I didn’t care. We didn’t like each other, which was fine. I didn’t have to like him. I just had to find out what he was up to and stop it.

  I walked past him toward the kitchen where I had last seen Rhondelle. A woman stood inside, heating refried beans on the hot plate. The smell was foul. Two young men sat at the table, eating a tabouli salad made with too much vinegar.

  All three people in the kitchen were white. All three of them had long blondish brown hair, wore jeans and short tops, and had bare feet.

  “Is this the man harassing you?” one of the young men asked Daniel, who had come in behind me.

  I dripped on the tile floor. Without asking, I grabbed a towel and wiped off my face. “How many of you live here?”

  “Who wants to know?” the girl asked, taking the pan of beans off the hot plate. She was classically beautiful, her features small and well drawn.

  The power flickered. The lights dimmed for a moment, then came back up.

  “He’s a detective,” Daniel said. “My mom hired him.”

  “Your mom?” the other young man asked. “I thought she didn’t care about anything.”

  What a strange description of Grace. If anything, she cared too much.

  “I see you’ve been lying to them,” I said.

  Daniel’s right hand clenched into a fist, and then he forced himself to relax it. “You don’t have any rights here. You barged into our place—”

  “Actually, this place belongs to Professor Whickam’s parents, not any of you. You’re trespassing. I just might tell the police. If they come in here to evict you, what else will they find? Components for a Molotov cocktail, like I found in the Barn? More dynamite? Some blasting caps?”