Stone Cribs: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  And for questions, should the police have them.

  “I promised my girlfriend I’d wait in the waiting room,” I said, deliberately describing Laura that way.

  “But I thought you said—oh.” The nurse blushed. “Of course. It’s down the hall and to your left. I’ll take you there.”

  So that I wouldn’t go to the examination room and cause more trouble, the way that Laura had just done. I wondered if the doctor had sent this little nurse or if she had watched the whole thing, knowing what her duties were.

  She started down the corridor, her rubber shoes squeaking on the tile floor. I followed. This part of the hospital was quiet. Apparently Easter wasn’t a big day for emergencies.

  I was glad that Jimmy was with the Grimshaws. I didn’t have to call anyone or explain my absence or find someone to watch him while this new drama played itself out. The last time I’d brought a woman to an emergency room, I’d stayed all day.

  We passed the corridor that veered toward the right. I thought I heard Laura’s voice raised in protest. I turned in that direction, but the little nurse caught my arm.

  “They don’t need you,” she said. “I’m sure they’re taking good care of things.”

  I wasn’t that certain. Considering how this visit had started, I wasn’t sure they were doing well at all. But Laura seemed to be ahead of me on this particular crisis, and she had shown an earthy determination that I had never seen in her before.

  In all the time I’d known her, I hadn’t heard her swear like that or use her father’s name to open a door. But she had done so here without any hesitation at all.

  The nurse led me to a large room with plastic sofas, presswood coffee tables, and a few armchairs. Unlike the hospital I’d waited in last December, this hospital closed off the waiting room with a wall of glass.

  I stepped inside and nearly choked at the stench of cigarettes. The waiting room had a bluish tint to it, the kind found in bars that hadn’t had any fresh air for generations.

  “Do you have a fan?” I asked the nurse, but she had already vanished down the corridor. So I propped the door open with a tall silver ashtray. The sand at the top was filled with half-smoked cigarette butts.

  The last person who had been in this room obviously had been very nervous. He had also left that day’s Chicago Tribune, and I picked up the pieces even though I had no real interest in it.

  I finally had time to review what had happened. Marvella’s absence bothered me. If this woman had truly had a miscarriage or an abortion, she shouldn’t have been left alone.

  It had looked like someone had been trying to care for her. Now that I knew what had happened, the clutter in the apartment had made sense. Marvella had made the woman a comfortable bed on the couch, had brought her food and liquid, and had tended her with towels.

  I clutched the newspaper, still frowning. We hadn’t left a note or anything. We’d left the apartment door open and a blood trail down the stairs. If Marvella had gone out for something—more ice, perhaps—and returned to that, she had to be in a panic.

  I cast about for a telephone and saw none. So I walked to the front desk. It was long and it dominated a room filled with official wooden chairs and tables. A round clock hung on the wall behind a huge green plant.

  No one seemed to be at the desk, but my sense of that changed as I drew closer. A typewriter rat-tatted importantly, then stopped. The desk was designed so that the employees were invisible when they sat down. The patient side of the desk was solid blond oak over five feet tall. Most people had to stand to see over it. I leaned on it.

  The woman behind it looked up at me as if she hadn’t expected me. She had gray curls and a round face. Her part of the desk was positioned so that she could work on it while sitting down. A phone with six lines sat beside her, and in front of her, a dozen patient records were open. She was writing in the top one, completing some kind of form.

  “May I help you?” Her voice was cool.

  “I was wondering if there’s a phone here I could use.”

  “Pay phone down the hall, near the restrooms.” She nodded toward a corridor on the other side of the desk.

  I thanked her and walked in that direction.

  This corridor was as wide as the others. The walls were painted an institutional green that no one had tried to decorate with paintings or pictures. The corridor dead-ended in a bank of elevators. Two bathrooms, obviously not for patients, were on one side of the hall. Two pay phones hung on the other side, their phone books neatly tucked in the metal slot beneath the phones themselves.

  I went to the first phone, grabbed the book, and looked up Marvella’s phone number. She was listed halfway down a page of Walkers, her full name as well as her address. Apparently she had decided it wasn’t worth hiding her gender under an initial, not that such things fooled anyone.

  I picked up the receiver and plugged the machine, listening as my dime ting-tinged its way through the coin slot. Then a dial tone started. I dialed Marvella’s number, and waited for her to answer.

  Instead, I found myself counting rings. Two, five, ten. My stomach clenched. Something had gone wrong. Maybe Laura and the doctor had been wrong in their interpretation of the mysterious woman’s injuries. Maybe something else had happened, something that had affected Marvella as well.

  I hung up the phone and leaned on the metal frame for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Even though I had known Marvella for most of the year, I didn’t know her that well. Since she had started insulting Laura, I hadn’t talked with her as much and I had stopped asking her to watch Jimmy for me during emergencies.

  Outside of the people in the building, I had no idea who her friends were, how she spent her days, or where she might have gone. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for her.

  If time was of the essence, I had already wasted a great deal of it.

  I walked down the corridor until I could see the round clock near the front desk. It was a few minutes after midnight.

  Not as late as I had expected. With all that had happened since the benefit, I would have expected half the night to have gone by. Instead, only an hour and a half passed since Laura and I had gotten into her car on Clark Street.

  I walked back to the phones. My shoes had left little flakes on the tile floor. The blood I had stepped in had apparently dried, and was now coming off.

  I returned to the same phone, and thumbed through the newsprint inside the phone book until I found the listings for Johnson. Marvella’s cousin, Truman Johnson, was a policeman who had worked with me on a dangerous case last December. He was gruff and difficult, and he wouldn’t like being awakened this late at night, but he was the only person I could think of to contact.

  Johnson, at least, would know who Marvella’s friends were. He would be able to make an effective search for her.

  I found his number, and dialed it. Someone answered in the middle of the sixth ring, and then I heard an oath as the phone clattered to the floor. A man swore, then the line crackled as the phone was picked up.

  “This had better be good.” Johnson’s voice, thick with sleep, sounded loud in my ear.

  “Truman,” I said, “Bill Grimshaw.”

  I had never told him my real name, and I wasn’t about to. He had seen the FBI reports about me and Jimmy that listed me as Smokey Dalton, and Jimmy as James Bailey. The reports had crossed his desk last April, and, because Jimmy and I met the descriptions of the two people in those reports, Johnson had asked me about them in August.

  I had lied to him, but I wasn’t sure he was convinced, and even though we had worked well together, I didn’t think I could trust him with something as important as Jimmy’s life.

  “Do you know what time it is, Grimshaw?” Johnson asked.

  “I do, and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t think of anyone else to call.”

  “We need to get you new friends,” he mumbled.

  “Look, Truman, it’s about Marvella.”

  “Wh
at did she do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s missing.”

  I explained the circumstances—the woman in the apartment who was now here at the hospital, and the fact that Marvella hadn’t been there then, and still wasn’t answering her phone. I did not tell him what Laura and the doctor had been arguing about. All I mentioned was that the woman we found had been bleeding heavily, and we had taken her to the emergency room.

  “I’m calling from the hospital,” I said. “I was going to go look for Marvella, and then I realized I didn’t know where to start. I don’t even know who the woman we found is.”

  “She conscious?”

  “She wasn’t real coherent,” I said. “Laura’s with her, and the doctor’s trying to stop the bleeding. I’m still not sure she’s going to make it through the night.”

  “I told her she was going to get in trouble one of these days,” Johnson said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about the mystery woman. “Living alone, making people angry, not taking enough precautions. Hell, she doesn’t have as many locks on her door as you do, Grimshaw.”

  I had noticed that, and last summer, I had thought I would do something about it. But our relationship had become so prickly, I had decided not to.

  Now I wondered if that had been a mistake.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” Johnson said. He sounded wide awake now. “Where’ll you be?”

  “Here until I can figure out what’s going on. Then I’ll be heading back to the apartment.”

  “Is the kid there?” He meant Jimmy.

  “No, he’s spending Easter with friends.”

  “Easter.” Johnson said the word as if it were a curse. “You know what would be really nice, Grimshaw? If for one day, just one—Christmas, Easter, I don’t care—all the world’s problems would be put on hold, and I could get a decent night’s sleep.”

  He hung up. I had known him long enough to understand that he was worried about Marvella, and the worry came out as complaint. But I wished he had told me what he had planned to do—if he was going to call his partner and make this a police investigation, or if he was going to look into it on his own.

  I walked back down the corridor. Just as I reached the front desk, the woman looked up. She had fear-filled eyes, as if she didn’t like sitting alone at night in the front of a hospital surrounded by strange men.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “did you bring in our Jane Doe?”

  Caught. I had forgotten they would want information from Laura and me, in case the woman had had an abortion. If the hospital chose to prosecute, all of us could be named as accessories to an illegal operation, or worse.

  I sighed. “Yeah.”

  The woman slipped me a clipboard. “Would you fill this out and bring it back? I know you don’t know much about her, but anything you can tell us would be good for the record.”

  What a sneaky way of getting information for the police. Any Good Samaritan would have thought nothing of it, filling out the form, handing it back, and signing up for weeks of investigation or legal troubles.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked.

  She handed me a blue ballpoint with the name of a construction company written on the side.

  “Mind if I fill this out in the waiting room?”

  “Be my guest,” she said and returned to her work.

  I carried the clipboard and pen back to the waiting room. It was still empty and the door was still propped open. Some of the blue haze had dissipated.

  I set the clipboard on the table in the center of the room, then piled some magazines on top of it. I kept the pen, though, in case I got restless enough to scribble in the crossword magazines.

  I picked up the Tribune, trying not to worry about what was keeping Laura. I thumbed through the pages, looking at the reports about the Martin Luther King marches and memorial services all over the country. I found myself shaking my head, stunned, even now, that my old friend Martin was gone.

  So I paged on, past the articles about Saturday’s anti-war demonstrations, past the picture of police in riot gear trying not to repeat last August’s nightmare, and searched for something diverting.

  I had finally found the comics when I heard footsteps outside the door.

  “Bill Grimshaw?”

  I looked up. Marvella stood there, a man I didn’t recognize beside her. The man was almost hidden behind her, so I couldn’t see him clearly.

  Marvella was a statuesque woman. She had high cheekbones, a narrow chin, and the most magnificent eyes I had ever seen. In the past few months, she had let her hair go natural, which made her look like the drawings of African tribal goddesses.

  Her clothes accentuated the look. She wore a short, dressy rain coat over black high heel-boots. The boots made her as tall as I was.

  I stood.

  Her eyes narrowed. Even with the expression of displeasure on her face, she remained the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  She crossed her arms. “Do you have any idea just exactly what kind of damage you’ve done?”

  THREE

  MARVELLA’S WORDS shook me. At first I thought she was referring to the mess in her apartment. But that shouldn’t have made her so angry.

  The man beside her stepped out of her shadow. His balding head shone in the dingy fluorescent light. He was shorter than Marvella, and rounder, as if he had been very well fed all of his life. He wore a black suit with a white shirt, and shiny black shoes. All of his clothes were clean and ironed so meticulously that they had no wrinkles.

  I wondered if he had put them on recently or if he had worn them all day.

  He didn’t even seem to notice me. Instead, he looked up and down the corridor, as if he expected to be attacked at any moment.

  “Where is she?” Marvella wore no makeup, but she didn’t need any. Her anger had given her cheeks a dusky rose color that accented her almond-shaped eyes.

  Her beauty was distracting, as always.

  “Are you all right?” I still didn’t know what had happened in that apartment. I also didn’t know who the balding man was or why he was with Marvella. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  My words couldn’t convey the worry I had felt all evening.

  “You brought Val here, right?” Marvella took a step into the waiting room. She held the door open with one hand, as if she were afraid the tall ashtray wouldn’t hold the door’s weight. “Where is she?”

  “Val?” Finally the woman had a name, but it wasn’t a familiar one. I had never heard Marvella mention anyone named Val.

  “Valentina Wilson, the woman you carried out of my apartment, waking up everyone in the building.”

  The sound of my thudding feet, our yelling voices, the banging as we had left the building all returned to me. Of course we had woken people up. Of course they would have looked out to see what was happening.

  And they would have seen me and Laura in our fancy clothes, carrying an unconscious woman into a Mercedes.

  I wondered what they had thought.

  Marvella was angry about this? She was angry that I had brought that poor woman to the emergency room?

  “She was dying, Marvella,” I said.

  “So you’re a doctor now?” Marvella let go of the door. She stalked into the room, clutching one hand into a fist. For a moment, I thought she was going to hit me. Instead, she yanked the newspaper out of my hand, and waved it in my face. “Tell me where she is or so help me God, Bill, I’ll create a scene until I do find her.”

  The color in her cheeks had deepened. I had never seen her so angry.

  “They took her to one of the exam rooms,” I said. “I don’t know after that. Laura’s still with her.”

  But Marvella didn’t seem to hear my last two sentences. She beckoned the man into the room. He looked up and down the corridor again before stepping inside.

  Then he grabbed the ash tray and pulled it in with him, letting the door close behind him.

  Even so, Marvella spoke s
oftly when she turned to him. “You’d better see what’s going on.”

  His eyes widened. The whites were bloodshot. He was sweating in that pristine suit. His body odor overwhelmed the residual odor of cigarette smoke.

  “I can’t, Marvella.” His voice was deep and it shook. “It’s someone else’s case now.”

  Marvella shook her head once, almost as if she didn’t want to hear any more.

  She faced me again, blocking the balding man with her body, as if she were afraid I had already seen too much.

  “The doctor treating Val,” Marvella said. “Is he white?”

  I knew where she was going with this. I had heard the argument before and I didn’t agree with it. Some white doctors were bad, just like some black doctors were. But a person’s color wasn’t a good determination of his medical skill.

  “He seemed competent enough,” I said.

  Her expression hardened. She looked at me with something akin to hatred.

  Then she turned to the man behind her. He had moved sideways, so that he could watch the corridor through the glass wall.

  Marvella grabbed his sleeve. He looked down at her hand.

  “You know what they’ll do,” she said to him. “You have to go in there.”

  “There’s no guarantee anything bad will happen,” he said, without looking at her.

  She pulled on his arm, and I finally caught a glimpse of her face as she looked at him. It was the face of a supplicant.

  “Please,” she said.

  He sighed, just like the white doctor had when faced with Laura, and glanced at me. His eyes had a weariness that I hadn’t expected. A weariness, and a sadness.

  “Excuse me, Marvella,” he said as he put a hand on her arm. He pushed his way around her, and stopped in front of me.

  “How did you find her?” he asked. He was talking about Val.

  I glanced at Marvella. She nodded, as if she wanted me to tell this man everything.

  “She was asking for help,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure those small birdlike cries could be considered a request. They were more like the sounds of desperation, as if she had known she was dying, and was crying out to the cosmos for someone, anyone, to save her. “She was hemorrhaging.”