Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I went to the door and peeped through the spyhole. Two men stood outside. They wore black leather jackets and one of them had on sunglasses indoors.

  The men looked familiar, but it was hard to tell in the peephole’s fisheye.

  I knew they’d heard me. They’d both moved slightly when I leaned against the door.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “We’d like to hire you,” said the man toward the back. His voice was unfamiliar.

  I sighed, debating whether or not to open the door. I didn’t need the work — this job from Laura would take most of my time for the foreseeable future — but I really did want something else to think about: kind of a rest job that would allow me to concentrate on a different problem for a while.

  I unlocked all three deadbolts and pulled back the chain. Then I opened the door — and immediately tried to push it shut.

  The man in back, the one who’d spoken, put his foot in the door. “Do us the courtesy of listening to us,” he said.

  But I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at the tall, broadshouldered man with the familiar face. He pulled off the sunglasses and smiled at me, and that smile had as much charm as I remembered.

  Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.

  He was the last person I wanted in my home.

  “We really do want to hire you.” He had a deep voice that resonated even when he wasn’t doing public speaking. He was only about twenty or so, but he had more physical presence than anyone I’d met since Martin.

  I blocked the door with my body. “I don’t need the work.”

  “Then why didn’t you jus’ tell us to fuck off?” the other man asked. “Seems to me you needed the work until you figured out who we was.”

  Hampton glanced at him, a calculated look instructing him to shut up. “This is William O’Neal. He’s my bodyguard. My name is Fred Hampton. I’m with the—”

  “I know who you are,” I said. “I’m not going to do any work for you.”

  “You don’t like the Panthers?” he asked.

  “I don’t like anyone who draws the wrong kind of attention to our neighborhood.”

  “Our offices are on the West Side,” he said, “not down here.”

  “I know,” I said. “And whenever you make one of your pronouncements, the cops show up here too. You have an ‘action’ like you did at Cook County Hospital the other day, and the cops knock some heads on Sixty-third and Woodlawn. We’re tied together, your neighborhood and mine, and you know it.”

  He gave me a half smile. “You been following what I do.”

  “It’s hard to miss.” I kicked O’Neal in the shin, and he yelped, pulling his foot away. I shoved at the door, but Hampton caught it with the flat of his right hand.

  “Do me a favor. Hear me out.”

  “No,” I said. “You bring cops and FBI wherever you go. I don’t want any informant telling them you’ve been inside my place, especially if you stay longer than ten minutes.”

  Hampton leaned back slightly. He was slimmer than I was, but just as tall. He had no obvious weapons on him, but he didn’t look very muscular either. I could probably shove his arm out of the way, push him backward into that so-called bodyguard, and get the door closed in record time.

  “If someone’s watching,” Hampton said, “and they probably are, they’ve already seen us coming into the building.”

  “But they don’t know where you went,” I said, realizing the argument was weak.

  “It wouldn’t be hard to find out, would it?”

  He had a point. They were already here. If the police investigated the tenants, they’d figure Hampton either came to see me or the grandson of the lady upstairs. The grandson was a member of the Blackstone Rangers, the street gang I’d made a deal with and that Hampton had negotiated a truce with last spring.

  “All right,” I said. “You have five minutes. Your ‘bodyguard’ has to wait outside, though.”

  “Don’t lock the bolts,” O’Neal said. “I wanna be able to come in if there’s trouble.”

  “I didn’t mean outside the apartment,” I said. “I meant outside the building.”

  O’Neal looked at Hampton. Hampton nodded to him.

  “I don’t like this,” O’Neal said, but he clomped his way down the stairs just the same.

  I waited until he stepped outside before I opened my door all the way to Hampton. He gave me a boyish grin and stepped in. He had a loose, angular way of walking that suggested comfort. But it was as deceptive as the walk of a large cat. That comfort hid a preparedness. If I had gone for Hampton, he would have blocked me. Hampton seemed to see his surroundings as clearly as I did.

  I shut the door behind him and locked the top deadbolt for good measure. I didn’t want O’Neal to come back here and barge his way in.

  Hampton took in the dirty dishes at the sink, the opened Sunday paper, the boy’s jacket hanging on the coat tree.

  “Family man,” he said.

  I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to give him any information about myself. I also didn’t take him down the hall to my office, like I would have any other potential client. We remained right in front of the door, so I could usher him out quickly if I had to.

  “I approve,” he said. “I’m gonna be a father myself in December.”

  That surprised me. I hadn’t thought of him as much more than a creative and eloquent street thug, a young man who had one foot in the gangs and another in a rising political movement. In the past few months, I felt like he’d moved closer to politics, but he still liked guns and violence too much for my taste.

  “You’re wasting your five minutes,” I said.

  He nodded, grabbed the front of the paper, and turned it over to reveal the headlines. More frightened reporting about the radicals and their Days of Rage. Only this time, the reporters had something to discuss — in yesterday’s riots downtown, a district attorney working on the Conspiracy Trial had been critically injured. More than a hundred demonstrators had been arrested, and the police were taking credit for the riot’s fifteen-minute duration.

  “We’re not dangerous like them,” he said. “We don’t agree with them.”

  “I know,” I said. “I heard you call them custeristic.”

  He smiled. “You do keep track.”

  “I need to know what’s happening in my community,” I said.

  His smile faded. “Then you know about the Soto brothers.”

  I thought of the young man on that steel table, his hair cut off by the U.S. Army, his friends and family so frightened of the police they were paying for a second autopsy in the hopes of gathering some wrongful death evidence, evidence that might help them down the road.

  “Yeah.” I kept my answers terse. I didn’t want to let him know how I felt about anything.

  “You know the cops killed them.”

  “Both sides agree on that,” I said.

  He stuck his hands in the pockets of his black jacket. “You and I both know that those brothers didn’t provoke the cops. They were targeted.”

  “I suspect it,” I said. “I don’t know it.”

  He grinned at me. That grin was winning; no wonder people liked him. “That’s what I heard about you. You’re thorough.”

  Not as thorough as LeDoux. “You’ve heard about me?”

  “I asked around. I wanted the best, someone discrete, someone who could handle a crisis, someone a little unorthodox who’d be willing to work with the Panthers. Everyone said that was you.”

  “Everyone was wrong,” I said.

  “Look.” He took his hands out of his pockets and spread them open in a movement of supplication. “We’re not as bad as folks make us out to be.”

  “I know,” I said. “But you’re visible.”

  “And you’re what? Invisible?”

  “I don’t like trouble,” I said. “You court it.”

  “No one’s gotta know that we’re tied. We hire you, one job, and we�
�ll pay you. We got a backer who’ll pay for the answers.”

  “Why don’t you investigate this yourself?” I asked. “You’ve got the manpower.”

  “But not the expertise,” he said. “We want hard-hitting, real evidence, more than eyewitness accounts, something I can take to the mainstream media. I got their eye right now. They talk to me and listen to me—”

  “And put you on the ten o’clock news where your celebrity goes to your head.”

  He laughed. “You are hostile, man. You are more hostile than the tough guys who come to me, wanting to off the pigs.”

  “I’m not taking your job,” I said.

  “It’s the only way the Sotos is gonna get justice and you know it. White folks don’t care that black kids die when they come home from school, just trying to cross the street. John was trying to change that, so he got murdered. Michael, he says John’s cause is a just one, and he gets murdered. Why’s that? Because the police are hiding something about that streetlight? Or because the police don’t like uppity niggers?”

  “The police have never liked us,” I said.

  “Right back to the moment Lincoln freed our black asses.”

  “Oh, probably long before that,” I said.

  He tilted his head. “Your politics are in the right place. It wouldn’t hurt to work on this case.”

  “It’d hurt my family,” I said. “I’m staying out of it.”

  He studied me for a moment, as if he was trying to figure me out. “We’ve met before.”

  “I’ve heard a few of your speeches,” I said.

  “So you know about the Free Breakfast for Children program, the Free Clinic, everything we’re trying to do to build up our community.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And you still won’t help?”

  “Taking on the police is…” I paused for dramatic effect, “…custeristic.”

  His smile was long gone. “The cops’re targeting us.”

  “They’ll target any black man who parades around in a pseudo-military organization and shows off his guns. We frighten them. No sense in provoking them.”

  “We’re not provoking,” Hampton said. “We’re just standing up for our own.”

  “You don’t need the news media to help you stand up,” I said.

  “Is that what’s bothering you?” he asked. “I can guarantee no one’ll know where we got the information. I’ll be the only one who’ll deal with you.”

  “You and that bodyguard,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I might’ve actually trusted Hampton if I hadn’t seen him with the bodyguard. I didn’t like the other man. He seemed shifty, although I couldn’t say why.

  I said, “Your five minutes are up.”

  “Look, Grimshaw —”

  I started at his use of the name I was using. It brought home that he had found out about me, and that startled me.

  “— what we’re proposing isn’t that new. We’re not the first black men — hell, we’re not the first Chicagoans — to take up arms against the pigs to defend our homes. It’s a proud tradition here, going back to World War One. I got brothers whose grandfathers stood on the roofs of houses not far from here and shot at any pig that ventured into the South Side.”

  I hadn’t heard of any of this, but that didn’t surprise me.

  “So how come you’re advocating the same thing fifty years later?” I asked. “You’d think, if that strategy worked, things would’ve changed.”

  His eyes sparkled. He clearly liked debate. “If I had more than five minutes, I could convince you, I could win you over. The political theorists—”

  “Mostly sat around in European coffee shops and played chess while other people fought their battles. I don’t need to reread Mao’s Little Red Book or get yet another lecture in Marx. I do need you to get out of my apartment.”

  “What about Machiavelli?” he asked. “You got to outsmart the other guy, outmaneuver him.”

  “And that worked so well for Machiavelli,” I said. “He died in prison. I’m not sure you and your friends’ll make it to prison before someone kills you.”

  The sparkle left his eyes. I wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken to anyone who’d read the same books he had, and had longer to think about them.

  I’d tried the idealistic route. It took me down a similar road. Only mine ended in Korea, with friends getting shot around me.

  “That’s why I came to you, man. We’re gonna defend ourselves if we get attacked. But we’re getting attacked all the time now. Our offices got invaded ten days ago. The pigs arrested six brothers on trumped-up murder charges, even though they barged into our place and set fire to our files and destroyed food and medical supplies. Medical supplies, man, for poor people. What kind of justice is that? We’re peace loving, but we’re American. We believe in the right of self-defense.”

  “I’m not arguing with that right,” I said. “I’m exercising it myself by asking you to leave. Your very presence here endangers my family.”

  He leaned closer to me, an intimidating move, designed to get me to physically back away. I stood my ground.

  “Listen, man. In June the police raided our offices and set fires. In the middle of July, they murdered Larry Robertson. At the end of July, they come back and claim we started a gun battle — hell, we just returned fire — and then, last week, they come again. And that doesn’t count Cox, who got beaten to death in the Eleventh District Police Station, or Green, who got shot when the police busted into his house for no reason at all, or Medina, who was just driving his car when the cops pull him over for a burglary he wasn’t nowhere near, and they shot him in the goddamn stomach, killing him. That’s just the month of May, Mr. Grimshaw. I can tell you about June and July and August and September, but hell, that’ll take all day, and that’ll really use up my five minutes.”

  “You’ve already used it up and then some,” I said.

  “You don’t care? You don’t care about the so-called gang-related shootings the cops do that usually happen to non-gang members. You don’t care?”

  “I care enough to keep my family away from organizations that require their members to wear some kind of uniform, talk about their leaders as ‘chairmen,’ and egg on the cops.”

  He paused, as if he were going to say something else, then shook his head. “You should look beyond the clothes.”

  “I do. I don’t believe in provoking people who already hate us.”

  “We don’t provoke,” he said. “We organize.”

  I shrugged, but said nothing.

  He walked to the door, put his hand on the knob, and then looked down at it, as if he were considering his next few words. It was an excellent theatrical maneuver, and if I hadn’t already seen him at rallies and on TV, I would have thought it spontaneous.

  “At some point,” he said, raising his head, “people’ve got to do something. Keeping silent is just what the pigs want.”

  I didn’t respond.

  His gaze met mine. “We can’t get the mainstream press to cover what happens here and on the West Side. They’re run by rich white people who think every nigger’s a crook, and every black man rapes white women, and every black woman’s a whore. So who cares if the pigs are shooting us, hmm? We deserve it.”

  I’d made this argument myself. It had a lot of truth. Too much truth.

  “I was asking you,” he said, his voice lower than it had been since he’d come into the apartment — his real voice, probably, the one he used with his friends and family — “to help us on a pretty straightforward case. Michael Soto’s a war hero, for crissake, and John was a good kid who just wanted to save the lives of littler kids. These guys didn’t deal dope or steal or whistle at white women. They were good citizens who were murdered for poking their heads out of the hole the Man forced them into.”

  I didn’t move. I didn’t dare. I didn’t want Hampton to see he was actually reaching me.

  “These two guys — men, really good men
— were murdered. And I was asking you to help me find evidence of it. Good, hard evidence that I can bring to the media, to let the white folks know that good black folks’re dying down here. We’re being massacred, and no one seems to care. Not even fucking house niggers like you.”

  He yanked the door open and walked through it, slow enough that I could have stopped him if I’d wanted to.

  Then he turned before closing the door. “You know where I am if you change your mind.”

  “I’m not going to,” I said. “And calling me names won’t convince me to.”

  “I’m not calling you names,” he said. “I’m just pointing out where complacency leads.”

  Then he pulled the door closed.

  I listened to him stomp down the stairs, and then I walked to the door and locked the deadbolts.

  I leaned on it, my heart pounding. I’d given similar speeches, and meant them. Hell, I had given similar speeches this past year.

  I believed in taking action, I truly did. And it had taken all my restraint not to agree to take, Hampton’s case. I’d seen Michael Soto’s body. I knew the man had been murdered, and I knew why.

  Hampton was right. The Soto brothers had aggravated the authorities by making “uppity” demands and not staying in their place. These two men were object lessons — clear object lessons — to the entire Henry Horner housing project, and if someone didn’t stand up to that lesson and call it wrong, then people would absorb it, and stop standing up at all.

  Had anyone else brought this to me, anyone — even Minton — I might have considered it. I would have tried to ignore the public nature of the case. I would have taken the evidence — if there was any — to a reporter friend of mine, Saul Epstein, who’d won some national journalistic prizes with the last story I took to him.

  But I couldn’t link up with Fred Hampton. He was too visible. And his people were targets, just like he’d said.

  If I were alone, I could be a target. But I had Jimmy.

  And Jimmy always had to come first.

  TWENTY-SIX