Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I glanced at him, wondering if he would tell me what was bothering him on his own. I would wait until our meeting with Laura ended. Sometimes she managed to draw things out of him that I didn’t even know existed.

  The large wooden door opened, and a skinny white student exited, his stocking cap pulled down over his long brown hair. He clutched a book, Das Kapital, in his left hand, and a pen in his right. He looked very serious. I supposed I would have, too, if I were forced to read that volume again.

  We brushed past him as we stepped inside. The interior smelled of burnt coffee beans and bread—a combination I found seductive. I knew Laura wouldn’t be here yet; it took a while to drive down from the Gold Coast, so I found a table near the back.

  “This is the place with pinball!” Jimmy said, turning toward the machine as he spoke. It was against the wall near the jukebox, which was silent this afternoon. Someone had the radio on, and disembodied voices discussed the end of the college football season.

  “Can I play?” Jimmy asked.

  “As soon as Laura gets here.”

  He wrinkled his nose and sat down, but didn’t complain. His patience was one of the things I appreciated about him, even though I didn’t like that he’d learned it from the mother and brother who had abandoned him.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Do we got to wait to order?”

  “No. We can do that now.”

  He grinned. A waitress, wearing a gingham uniform and a white apron stained with food, approached as if she’d overheard. I ordered pumpkin pie for both of us, coffee for me, and milk for Jim.

  By the time I was done, Laura had joined us.

  “The same,” she said, as she slipped into the chair nearest the wall.

  She looked beautiful. Her cheeks were red with the cold, her blue eyes glowed, and her shoulder-length hair was flipped up in a style I hadn’t seen her wear since Memphis. It took me a moment to realize that she also wore lipstick and mascara.

  She pulled off her leather gloves and gave Jimmy a quick kiss on the top of the head, which he made a face about even though he didn’t try to move out of her way. Then she slipped off her rabbit-fur coat. Beneath it she wore a simple black dress and a strand of pearls. She looked elegant and expensive, out of place in a student hangout.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  “Court,” she said and then smiled at me. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her so radiant. She seemed alive with joy.

  “You get in trouble?” Jimmy asked, and we both turned to him. I understood what he meant almost immediately. His mother had been in and out of court during her last few years in Memphis, mostly on soliciting charges. At one point, the court had tried to find Jimmy’s real father, so that Jimmy would have a different home, but his mother had no idea who his father was.

  Laura seemed surprised. “No, of course I’m not in trouble.”

  “Then why’d you go to court?”

  She glanced at me, an expression I’d become used to in dealing with her and Jimmy. She wanted me to explain how a child knew to ask these questions. I’d explain it to her later.

  “It was business.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Not like your mother’s business,” I said.

  Laura blushed. “He thought—”

  “It is what he knows,” I said.

  “What kind of business, then?” Jimmy asked.

  “It’s similar to bank business,” she said, “only much more complicated.”

  “Oh.” That ended the discussion for him. He turned toward me. “Can I go play now?”

  “After the pie,” I said.

  “You said that I could play when Laura got here.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” I grinned. “All right. But if you’re not here when the pie arrives, I’m going to eat it.”

  He stared at me for a moment. We’d had this discussion before, and once he had called my bluff. I ate his dessert that day, mostly because I felt that I had to live up to what I had said. And because the desserts at that restaurant had been particularly good.

  “Guess I’m staying,” he said.

  Laura grinned. She finger-combed her hair. A ruby-and-sapphire ring I had never seen before glittered on her right hand, and her fingernails were covered in polish.

  “You went all out,” I said.

  “Drew said I had to look like Quality.” Drew was Drew McMillan, Laura’s lawyer.

  “You always look like Quality to me,” I said.

  Her gaze met mine, and for a moment, it seemed like we were the only two people in the room. The attraction flowed between us, deep and fine, as if it had never left—which, I guess, it hadn’t. We simply had been trying to ignore it.

  “Here we go!” The waitress’s chirpy voice broke the moment. She set pieces of pie covered in whipped cream in front of all three of us. Then she gave Laura and Jimmy glasses of milk and set down two coffee cups, one for me and one for Laura. “Be right back with the coffee,” she said as she disappeared.

  Laura looked at her full milk glass and her empty coffee cup. “Wow,” she said, “I guess I should have been more specific about my beverage.”

  Jimmy giggled, his mouth already full of pie. He had a smear of whipped cream along his bottom lip, and he was clutching the fork with his entire fist—a boy prepared to shovel sweets into his mouth quickly so that he could get to the game.

  The waitress returned with the coffeepot and a tiny metal pitcher of milk. Laura saw it, her eyes twinkling. We both knew more milk wasn’t necessary. But she didn’t say anything, waiting until the waitress left before letting out a short laugh.

  “What?” Jimmy asked.

  Laura shook her head. “Nothing, Jim,” she said. “It’s just been a good day.”

  “Glad somebody had one,” he mumbled, his mouth stuffed with pie.

  Her smile faded. “Something happen to you today?”

  “Naw,” he said and shoved his chair away from the table. “Can I go?”

  All that remained of his piece of pie was the crust, beautifully folded and covered with a layer of whipped cream. He never ate the crust, liking the sweet center the best.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He hurried toward the machine, as if he was afraid someone else would get there first. The students were more interested in books this Friday afternoon. Jimmy wouldn’t have any competition at all.

  “Is he feeling all right?” Laura asked.

  “Why?”

  “He’s still wearing his coat.”

  I looked. He was, and he hadn’t unzipped it. Well, that solved part of the mystery at least. He was hiding something beneath that coat. I’d figure out what it was later.

  “So what’s your news?” I asked.

  Her smile was so bright that it lit the entire room. “We won!”

  I smiled, too. I knew how important this case was to her, although I wasn’t exactly sure why. “Congratulations.”

  “This changes everything, Smokey,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. And I wanted a little celebration, too.”

  My smile softened, became real. I was glad she counted us as part of her celebration. “You’ll be busier,” I said, “but beside that, I’m not sure how things will change.”

  The lawsuit had been no surprise to me. Laura and I had initially met because she was trying to resolve problems she’d found in her parents’ wills. Her mother had died a year ago, leaving Laura the controlling shares in her father’s corporation, Sturdy Investments, Inc.

  However, Laura did not have the right to vote those shares. Her father had given the voting proxy to a team of managers he had handpicked to carry out his plans.

  That management team had run the company for eight years. Initially, Laura had asked for the voting rights back, something she was entitled to do, but the managers refused. Their argument was a simple one: Her father had left her independently wealthy and she had no need to trouble her
pretty little head with business concerns.

  Only Laura’s head was more than pretty. It had gotten her through the University of Chicago with a degree in business. She had done so to prove to her father that she could work in his company, but he, like the management team after him, felt that she could live a life of leisure.

  But Laura wasn’t cut out for a life of leisure. She had taken control of her mother’s finances in her mother’s last year. Our investigation of her father’s personal affairs had raised as many questions as it had answered. I had known it was only a matter of time before Laura would turn her attention to Sturdy Investments.

  That she focused on Sturdy after the traumatic events of August made a kind of sense. She was returning to what she knew, and trying to gain control of a life that had been controlled by others from the beginning.

  Laura hadn’t responded to my statement. Instead, she’d been eating her pie. Her movements were delicate, but they were as focused as Jimmy’s had been, as if the pie was something to be gotten through, not enjoyed.

  “Laura?” I asked. “Am I missing something?”

  She pushed her plate away and picked up her coffee cup, cradling it in her manicured hands. “Do you remember when you met me and Jimmy in the office last summer? I had been going through files.”

  “Yes,” I said, although I hadn’t thought of that moment in a long while. A moment when Laura was upset, a moment that she never explained, had seemed unimportant at that chaotic time.

  “I found out that there’s a lot about my father’s company that I don’t understand—that I can’t understand, really, because the corporation is so diversified.” She leaned back, still holding the cup.

  I nodded and finally started in on my own pie. I didn’t want it as much as I had when I arrived, but I suddenly felt as if I needed something to do.

  “I did find out one thing though,” she said. “A lot of Daddy’s holdings were in the Black Belt.”

  “I figured that out when you helped Franklin find a house,” I said.

  Her smile was bitter. “Do you know what I went through for that? His house is close enough to Hyde Park that the company didn’t want to rent to him. They thought they could get—their words now—‘a better class of tenant.’ I had to vouch for him and offer to pay the rent myself if something happened. Only then would they even consider him for that place.”

  I’d often wondered how she had found a place big enough for Franklin’s family and yet with rent low enough that he could afford it. I’d figured that she had pulled some strings, but I hadn’t realized what kind.

  “That day,” she said, “I had found the files for some of our real estate.”

  I waited. She set the coffee cup down and looked at me. The joy had left her face.

  “I realized that we had a lot of holdings in the Black Belt—and most of those holdings had files inches thick. Logged complaints, letters, requests from the property manager, if there was one, to fix things. Lists of building inspectors. It took me a while to realize what was going on, but I finally got it. Sturdy Investments, through one of its own companies, is one of the biggest slumlords in Chicago.”

  Her gaze held mine, as if she were daring me to react. But I wasn’t as shocked as she had been.

  “Laura,” I said, “if your father had holdings in the Black Belt, it only makes sense that he was a slumlord. Most landlords here are.”

  She didn’t move. “You don’t seem upset.”

  “Some things are just a fact of life,” I said.

  “Well, I was shocked,” she said, leaning forward. “The money I live on came from screwing people.”

  “Partly.” I was being charitable. Her father had started as a small-time thief and had graduated into a well-connected Chicago businessman. Most, if not all, of his initial business dealings had to have been illegal at best. Being a slumlord was legitimate; I was certain there were a lot of criminal things he had done as well. “What are the rest of the company holdings?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “and after a while, no one would tell me. I mean, I went through the obvious files—the construction contracts, the other real estate holdings. But Sturdy is a corporation, and we have a lot of partnership agreements with many other businesses. Plus there are holding companies and dummy corporations and a variety of other things that are simply untraceable to me. Or were.”

  “But you can trace them now.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been talking to Drew about this—”

  I felt a pang. She’d confided in someone else long before she had spoken to me.

  “—and he reminded me that if I took action as the majority stockholder, I would be vulnerable. I can’t make sweeping changes in the company. They could throw me off the board for mismanaging the assets. Or worse. There could be stockholder lawsuits that would be directed at me. I have to take things one step at a time.”

  “You have a one-step-at-a-time plan then?” I asked, not sure if I wanted her to answer yes or no.

  “I have to get through the first board meeting. I have to get rid of the team, vote my own shares, and essentially take back the company. I’ll put myself in place as chairman of the board and CEO of Sturdy. Then I have to learn how to run it.”

  I set my fork down. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped eating the pie. My stomach twisted, and I wasn’t exactly sure why.

  “What’s your ultimate goal?” I asked.

  “Long term?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “To restructure Sturdy, take it out of the business of screwing people and into the business of improving the city—for all the residents.”

  She looked sincere, sincere and innocent. Her white skin reflected the pale light coming in from the windows. I had seen that fresh-scrubbed hopeful look before, on the Freedom Summer students who had poured into the South four and a half years before.

  “Laura, it—”

  “I know,” she said, waving a hand. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Sure it does,” she said. “It takes time. I realize that. You asked me for my long-term goals, not my short-term ones.”

  “Running a company of that size isn’t easy.”

  Her expression froze. “Do you think I’m not capable of it?”

  Usually when she asked me questions like that, there was frost in her tone. She got imperious—the rich girl from the Gold Coast talking with an inferior. Only this time, I heard something else. Determination, anger, and a hint of need.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You think I’m too naïve.”

  “I didn’t say that either, Laura.” But she was right; I had thought it.

  “Drew thinks so, too. He says my motives are admirable, but I’ll learn how the world works soon enough.”

  That wasn’t how I would have phrased things, but the sentiment was the same. I’d seen it before: idealists jumped into a situation they didn’t understand and either quitting or becoming co-opted by it. Laura’s desire to help was sincere, but I doubted that her passion would sustain her through years of fighting, on both business and personal levels.

  Her plucked eyebrows rose. “You agree with him, don’t you?”

  “You’ve never run a corporation before,” I said.

  “Neither have you.”

  I ignored that. “You’re going to have a lot of trouble, Laura.”

  “I know.”

  I held up my hand. It was my turn to silence her. “I’m not sure you do.”

  She pressed her lips together, but didn’t say anything.

  “Your father showed that he didn’t believe you or your mother could handle the company by the way he structured his will. He—”

  “Because he wanted—”

  “Let me finish.” I made sure my voice was soft. I glanced over my shoulder at Jimmy. He was leaning over the pinball machine, his arms gripping it so hard it looked as if he were wrestling a mo
nster.

  Laura didn’t take her gaze off me. I took a deep breath. “They’re not going to look at your brains or your business degree, Laura. To them, you’re just a woman. A woman whose father didn’t believe she could handle his business.”

  A flush rose in her cheeks. “So you think I should quit.”

  “I think you should know what you’re up against.”

  “I know.” Her voice was as low as mine, and her eyes snapped with anger. “You think I haven’t considered this? I’ll be the only woman on the board. As far as the stockholders are concerned, the business is being run well. I’ll turn it upside down and I won’t be doing it to improve profits—although, I think, I will improve them down the road.”

  “That’s a different argument altogether,” I said, shoving the pie plate aside and threading my fingers together. “You’re never going to get to it. They’re going to dismiss you the moment they see you.”

  “And I should give up because of that?” She was watching me closely.

  “It’s going to be a hell of a fight, Laura, and you probably won’t be able to make the gains you want. You’re going to be attacked personally. It’s going to be ugly.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “I wonder if you do.”

  Her lips thinned. She leaned back in her chair. “It seems to me that in the last year of his life, Dr. King said that poverty was the biggest crisis facing America today, and that eliminating poverty would go a long way toward eliminating racial injustice.”

  I hated it when people brought Martin up in the middle of an argument. “You think you’re going to eliminate poverty by taking over Sturdy Investments?”

  “The Reverend Jackson has been saying that people must make a difference in their own communities—black and white.”

  Black Christmas again. I glanced at Jimmy. He was still wrestling with the pinball machine.

  “I’m finally in a position to do something,” she said. “I can make a real difference in people’s lives.”

  “For the short term,” I said, “you’ll still be a slumlord.”

  She nodded. “The very short term.”