Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I would check on that, just like I always did with clients who claimed they could afford me—and clients who claimed they couldn’t.

  “All right.” I quoted her my weekly rate, which did not include expenses. For that, she would get an update and a final report. At the end of each week, we both had the option to terminate the job. That way, I wouldn’t feel obligated to pursue a case that was going nowhere, and she wouldn’t have to pay me if I got too close to a secret she didn’t want discovered.

  The amount didn’t upset her and neither did the fact that our agreement was closed with a handshake. She did insist on writing the rates down, something I wished more clients would do, and then she tucked the slip of paper in her purse.

  Then she gave me her address and phone number. “I suppose you have questions for me.”

  “Not yet.” I wanted to study the pictures, see if I could find the newspaper article, discover if I agreed with the police—that this was a random act of violence. “I’ll call you when I know what questions to ask.”

  She nodded and stood, shaking my hand again. “Thank you for taking me seriously, Mr. Grimshaw.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, hoping she would still be grateful later. Then I showed her out.

  I went to the window that overlooked the street, waiting until she reached the ground floor. I wanted to see how she had gotten here. That alone would tell me a lot about her.

  She left the building, walking out purposely toward a gray sedan new enough to confirm her claims of a middle-class income. I wouldn’t use that as my final determination of course, but it was a good start.

  The living room was still too hot. I debated opening the window, then decided against it since the outdoor air had chilled my office so fast and there was no way to know when the heat would come back on. I poured myself a glass of water and went back down the hall.

  Mrs. Foster had seemed pretty strong, but I couldn’t imagine the impact those photographs had on her. She had seen her husband’s body in the morgue and that had been bad enough. But I’d learned over the years that seeing the actual murder site, the body in the last position it had assumed in life, the first position it had taken in death, was somehow worse. Seeing the death pose always made the violence come clear.

  I sat down and opened the folder, turning first to the newspaper article from the Defender. It was from the Monday, November twenty-fifth edition, two days after the body was discovered.

  Body Found In Washington Park

  Two teenage boys found the body of Louis Foster around 9:00 A.M. Saturday morning as they walked through Washington Park. Mr. Foster’s body lay against a tree in the east end of the park. He had been fatally stabbed and his wallet was missing.

  The boys, whose names were not revealed, called the police, who arrived on the scene nearly a half an hour later. When asked about the tardiness of the response, the police acknowledged that they first thought the call was a prank….

  I set the article aside. The other articles from the Tribune, the Daily News, and the Sun-Times were much shorter, mostly acknowledging that a man had been found stabbed in the park. I skipped the obituaries and turned to the photos.

  The first was of two police officers staring at the tree, whose naked limbs twisted crookedly toward the sky. It was an artistic photograph instead of a newsworthy one—the composition clearly something the photographer cared about.

  I set that photograph on top of the newspaper articles, knowing I’d comb through all of this later. Then I grabbed the second photograph, and froze.

  It was of Louis Foster’s body. He was big, as his wife had said, and he was still wearing his coat, a dark cloth coat that covered his long frame. His eyes were open and so was his mouth, the face’s slack expression making him look like a caricature of surprise.

  But it wasn’t the expression that caught me. It was the position of the body itself. It had been posed against the tree, one arm outstretched, the other across his stomach. His feet were extended and a shoe dangled off his left foot.

  I held the photograph up, as if moving it would change the image. My breath caught, and I felt myself shake. I wondered if Truman Johnson had seen these photographs. I would have bet anything that he hadn’t.

  Johnson was a detective with the Chicago Police Department. Our paths had crossed in August, and he had told me about two cases similar to this one.

  The first had occurred in April and another in July. But both of the victims in those cases had been ten-year-old boys, not grown men, men so large that no one thought they’d have trouble defending themselves.

  Foster had been stabbed, the newspaper said, and I didn’t have to talk to the coroner to know exactly how. Once, through the heart. A quick, sudden movement, guaranteed to kill anyone—no matter how big or how small—in a matter of seconds.

  The cops who were photographed at this scene were white. They wouldn’t call in a black detective, and they probably hadn’t looked up similar killings. Even if they had, they might have missed the boys.

  And, I was willing to wager, Johnson hadn’t combed the cold-case files for adult victims. He’d told me last summer that he thought the M.O. was for young boys. That was the information he’d given to the FBI as well.

  The FBI. The very thought of them made me shudder. They had issued an APB for me and Jimmy last April, after they realized that Jimmy had witnessed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Jimmy had seen the sniper who shot King—and it wasn’t James Earl Ray, the man they’d arrested in London in June.

  It had become very clear, very quickly, that both the Memphis police and the FBI had been involved in Martin’s death. They came after Jimmy even before they started looking for the “real assassin.” I managed to get Jimmy out of Memphis, and so far, I’d kept us from being caught, but I knew that if I made one mistake, Jimmy would die.

  I looked at the photos again. They held a lot of information. The body’s position remained the same in all of them. No one had touched it—at least not while the photographer was working.

  I closed the file, feeling unsettled. I didn’t want to go to Johnson—not yet. The longer I kept the police and the FBI out of the investigation, the better it would be for both me and Jimmy.

  But I had a hunch that what was good for us wouldn’t be good for others. And I knew I couldn’t, in good conscience, be able to keep this quiet for long.

  TWO

  THE SLAM OF THE FRONT DOOR made me jump. I looked at the clock on top of one of the filing cabinets. It was after three. Jimmy was home.

  I slid the file into the top drawer and turned the lock. Then I came out of the office and into the living room.

  Jimmy was in the half-kitchen, getting a Fig Newton from the canister that served as our cookie jar. He still had his coat on.

  “Hey, Jim,” I said.

  He turned quickly, almost guiltily—the cookie already in his mouth. “Hi, Smokey.”

  He was heavier than he’d been in Memphis, but his face was still thin. Deep shadows outlined his eyes, as they had all year. He had bad dreams almost every night. They woke both of us up and we spent a lot of time watching late movies until one of us fell asleep on the couch.

  I scanned the room. No schoolbooks, no notebooks, even though this was Friday and there was a weekend ahead.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “Okay.” He grabbed a glass from the dish rack, shook out some stray water droplets, and set it on the counter. Then he opened the refrigerator and poured himself some milk.

  “No homework?”

  “Smoke—”

  “It’s important, Jimmy.”

  “I gots homework,” he said grumpily. We’d been working on his language skills all year and he knew better. He also knew that lapsing into bad grammar was one of the quickest ways to provoke me.

  “Oh?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He gulped the milk fast, then wiped the milk mustache off his lip with the back of his hand.

  “Where is
it?”

  “I got to report on Black Christmas.”

  “You have to write a report on Black Christmas?” I couldn’t help the lilt in my voice. Jimmy hadn’t had a writing assignment since he started school in September.

  “No, silly,” he said. “I got to report on it. You know—the parade?”

  “Your assignment is to go to the parade tomorrow?” I didn’t like that at all. “Why?”

  “Because the teacher said we should all be thinking about Black Christmas and what it means.”

  I let out a small sigh. Jesse Jackson had declared this Christmas season a Black Christmas, which meant that all black people should do their Christmas shopping only at black-owned businesses.

  The entire Black Belt had caught onto the spirit, leading to articles in the local paper, discussions on the radio, and a few somewhat derisive reports on the local white-run television stations. Jackson’s idea did make some economic sense. After all, black-owned businesses couldn’t survive without patronage.

  But Black Christmas seemed to me the latest attempt by Jesse Jackson to try to take Martin Luther King, Jr.’s fallen mantle and keep it for himself. Jackson had been looking for ways to do that all year.

  Jackson was one of Martin’s minor lieutenants, and our paths had crossed more than once. I doubted he would remember or recognize me, but I didn’t want to give him the chance. Jackson traveled all over the country. The wrong comment to the wrong person might reveal our location.

  I’d avoided Jackson from the moment I’d come to Chicago, and that wasn’t as easy as it sounded. On Tuesday, I’d walked half a mile out of my way to avoid the ground-breaking ceremonies at Woodlawn Gardens, the new public housing development, because I’d heard from Franklin that Jackson would be there.

  I couldn’t go to the parade, especially not with Jimmy. I’d have to find someone else to take him, something I didn’t want to do, especially with an event that concerned Christmas.

  “What’s wrong?” Jimmy asked.

  “I just wish you had to write it up,” I said.

  “Who cares about writing something,” Jimmy said, “if you seen it and can talk about it?”

  “I care.” I was getting more and more disturbed about Jimmy’s education. He never had homework. He didn’t bring books home, and when I asked him about his day, he always told me what people said, not what he learned.

  He shrugged. He still had his coat on and as his shoulders rode up and down, his coat did too. At least he wasn’t outgrowing this one yet.

  “Maybe I should have you write something—”

  “Smoke!”

  “—if your teacher’s too lazy to do it.”

  “She’s not lazy,” Jimmy said, his voice rising. I knew he liked Mrs. Dunbar. I’d only met her only once and found her very young, very enthusiastic, and already overwhelmed. “She got too many students and not enough books. She says so all the time. Yesterday, she was talking to the principal—”

  The phone rang and Jimmy stopped speaking, as if he were just realizing how much he had said. I hadn’t known about the lack of textbooks and the number of students. I’d been so concerned with making money for the two of us that I really hadn’t done anything after enrolling Jimmy and speaking to his teacher on the first day. I’d missed the parent/teacher conferences—if there had been any—and I hadn’t seen a report card. I had no idea when the things were issued.

  The phone rang again.

  “You want me to get that?” Jimmy asked. We had agreed that I would handle most of the phone calls, since we couldn’t afford a second line for the office.

  “I got it,” I said, picking up the receiver. “Yes?”

  “Smokey?” Laura Hathaway’s voice sounded close. Her warm, rich tones always made my breath catch.

  “Hi, Laura,” I said, trying not to sound as pleased as I felt. “What’s up?”

  Jimmy grinned at the sound of her name. He liked Laura and she liked him. She made a point of seeing him every week, sometimes twice, and I was grateful for that. He usually didn’t get along with women—something I blamed on his mother—so I figured that good female influences, like Laura and Althea, would help him more than I could.

  “Want to meet me for some dessert?” she asked. “I have news.”

  “Good? Bad?”

  “Both, actually,” she said, but I heard a smile in her voice.

  “Jimmy just got home from school.”

  “Bring him. I know a place near the University of Chicago with great pinball machines.”

  Jimmy adored pinball. I hadn’t known that until Laura found out when Jimmy had stayed with her in August. When I learned about Jimmy’s love of pinball, I realized that his appearance on Mulberry Street the night Martin died had two motivating factors: Jimmy’s search for his brother Joe—who had earlier made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Jimmy—and the pinball machines at the Canipe Amusement Company.

  Jimmy had never admitted the pinball to me, even when I’d asked in early September, but his cheeks had flushed. He had probably played a few games that day, and it had taken some time because he was very, very good.

  “Sometimes I feel like we’re encouraging an addiction,” I said.

  “Maybe we are.” The smile in her voice was dangerously close to a laugh. “But it gives us a chance to talk.”

  A chance to talk. We’d had so few lately. Laura had been busy with a court case involving her father’s estate, and I’d been trying to hold hearth and home together while setting up my own business.

  We were closer than we’d been over the summer, but not as close as we’d been in Memphis before Martin was killed.

  “Tell me where and when, and we’ll be there,” I said.

  She did, and we hung up. Jimmy was leaning against the counter, watching me.

  “You leaving?” he asked.

  “We are,” I said, “so I guess you kept your coat on for the right reason.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and ducked his head so that I couldn’t see his eyes.

  He was hiding something. I wasn’t going to push at the moment, but I would find out soon enough.

  * * *

  The student hangout Laura had named wasn’t that far from the apartment. Jimmy and I walked there partly because I needed to stretch my legs and partly because the Impala was in terrible shape. On cold days, it coughed as it started, and I worried that it wouldn’t survive the winter. Rust was flaking off the sides and the undercarriage, affecting heaven knew what. The tires were bald and dangerous in both rain and snow.

  Walking also helped me become familiar with the neighborhood and its faces. Last summer, when I was working on my first case in Chicago, I hadn’t had a sense of my neighbors and I’d found that to be a handicap. I still wasn’t as versed in this city as I had been in Memphis, but I felt more comfortable. I now knew when someone looked out of place.

  We walked in the early December twilight, taking a meandering course through the blocks. The air had a chill dampness. The sky was cloudy, and it felt like it was going to snow at any moment.

  So far, Chicago’s winter wasn’t much different from Memphis’s, but the locals had been telling me this was a mild year. We’d had snow, but it hadn’t stayed. Most days we had a chill rain that turned into black ice by evening.

  The main difference was the darkness. It had been overcast for weeks and as the days got shorter, the darkness got more pronounced. It felt as if we never had any daylight at all. I would wake up before dawn, watch the sky turn a hazy gray, and then wait for a brightness that never came.

  Despite the cold, Jimmy refused to wear a hat, and I had to struggle to get him to wear his gloves. One of my major expenses this fall had been clothing—neither Jimmy nor I had clothes that would take us through Chicago’s vicious winters. I’d been fortunate enough to find some secondhand boy’s clothing, including a coat that had a removable lining, but I hadn’t been so lucky with my own size.

  As a result, I was still weari
ng Franklin’s castoffs, which were old and too bulky around the waist. Sometimes, like now, I wore the windbreaker I brought from Memphis, but it was too thin for the weather.

  By the time we got to the hangout, I was very cold.

  The hangout was on Fifty-seventh, near a group of bookstores and funky shops that catered to the college students. The nearby neighborhood was mixed—full of student apartments and beautifully apportioned homes for the faculty, as well as other middle-class neighbors who liked the atmosphere.

  The most striking part of this area, known as Hyde Park, was that it was the only truly racially mixed area in Chicago. Black and white lived side by side. There was an air of tolerance here that you couldn’t find anywhere else in the city, and as a result, Laura and I had taken to meeting here when the students returned in the fall.

  The place Laura had chosen this time was a glorified coffee shop. Open twenty-four hours, it was a student gathering place, especially late at night. An on-premise baker made certain there was a large mix of fresh cinnamon rolls, cakes, cookies, and breads available, even in the wee hours. The sandwiches were mediocre and the coffee was burned more often than not, but the desserts were always special.

  This afternoon, a sign in the window advertised pumpkin pie—one of Jimmy’s favorites—and Christmas cookies. Someone had hung a single strand of bulbs around the door, and they glowed red, green, and blue in the thin afternoon light.

  Through the window, I could see students taking up most of the tables, leaning over books with a dedication that surprised me until I remembered that the term was nearly finished. Even students who spent most of the year protesting had to work hard now—particularly the men, if they wanted to hang onto their student deferments from the draft. No one wanted to end up fighting in Vietnam because he hadn’t studied enough.

  Jimmy hadn’t said anything as we walked, his hands stuck in his pockets, and to my surprise, he didn’t say anything now. Usually he would have mentioned the pie or brightened up because he knew this was the place with the pinball machine.