Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  My heart was beating hard. The confrontation had taken more out of me than I expected. I had been as worried about it as Jimmy, maybe more so. I still wasn’t sure it was going to work, but I had to try. I was going to help Jim lead a productive life no matter what it took.

  I reached for my swinging keys when someone pounded on the driver’s side window. I jumped, startled, and turned. A man I’d never seen before pressed a policeman’s shield against the glass. He was wearing civilian clothing and his skin was darker than mine.

  I rolled down the window a few inches, enough to speak to him, but not enough for him to get a hand through.

  “Help you?” I asked in my coldest voice.

  “Chaz Yancy, Gang Intelligence Unit.” He nodded toward an unmarked van parked across the street. I hadn’t even noticed it, which showed just how preoccupied I had been. “What were you talking to the Stones for?”

  I kept my hands on my lap so he could see them. “They gave my son a hat. I returned it.”

  “Do you have any idea who those boys are, Mr.—?”

  “Of course I do,” I said, ignoring his not-so-subtle attempt to fish for my name. “I’m not real fond of the Blackstone Rangers. Why do you think I want to keep my kid away from them?”

  “If you’re so hot to keep your kid away, why’d you talk so long?”

  “And take a smoke from them?”

  “That too.” He had a gold front tooth. It caught the thin morning light.

  “We came to an agreement. The cigarette sealed the bargain.”

  “An agreement?”

  “If they left my kid alone, I’d leave them alone.”

  “You’re such a big tough guy that they’re all afraid of you?”

  I shook my head slightly. “I just convinced them it wasn’t worth their time to deal with me.”

  He let out a small snort. “What’s your name?”

  This time, I couldn’t ignore the question. “Bill Grimshaw.”

  “Well, Mr. Grimshaw, these boys aren’t afraid of anything. All you probably did was call attention to yourself and your little boy. You probably made things a lot worse for him.”

  “You think so?” I kept my voice bland, but he was beginning to anger me.

  “Whenever parents get involved, things get much worse. You people have no idea what you’re messing with.”

  “So you think I should’ve let my kid keep the tam, join the gang, get into trouble?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “What are you saying?” This time, I let him hear just a bit of the anger.

  His eyes widened slightly. “I’m saying you should have let us deal with it.”

  “You.” I nodded, pretending to be thoughtful. “The group of men hanging out in that van over there, watching little kids smoke cigarettes, carry dangerous weapons, and recruit other little kids into activities we all know are illegal.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Us.”

  “They gave my boy the tam on Friday. What did you do about it?”

  “We’d talk to him.”

  “Eventually.”

  He nodded.

  “Make him feed you information.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Put him in even more danger.”

  “Listen, Grimshaw, you’re out of your depth.”

  “No, Yancy. You are. No one uses my son for anything. Gangs or cops. You got that?”

  “You threatening a police officer?”

  “I don’t see a uniform,” I said. “So far as I’m concerned, this is one man talking to another.”

  I turned the key in the ignition and the car rumbled to life. Yancy backed away. I shoved the gearshift into drive and peeled out as if I were a teenager in a drag race.

  By now, my hands were shaking. If I had stayed a moment longer, I’d have been the one getting in trouble for harassing a police officer. My temper was snapping. A gang intelligence unit watching a grade school, seeing the recruitment and doing nothing about it—that was as criminal to me as the recruitment itself.

  I drove north and east. My plan had been to do as much research as I could into Foster’s life before I hit the libraries. Sometime that day, I’d also go to the hospital and see how Epstein and Elaine were doing.

  By the time I reached State Street, I was a little calmer. If I’d had Laura’s clout, I would have called the police commissioner and complained about his idle Intelligence Unit. Of course, if I had Laura’s clout, Jimmy and I wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place.

  I drove up State Street toward the Loop. Foster’s dental office was near the old Black Metropolis, which had once been the center of Bronzeville, the black neighborhood. Much of that had been gutted for housing projects and so-called urban renewal, but some of it was left. The office, which Foster shared with two other dentists, was on a block filled with business offices and private medical services that catered to the black community.

  Foster’s address was in a brown brick building in the center of a block. The building had its own parking lot off an alley. The alley was full of broken glass, but the lot itself was clean and well-tended.

  I parked near a new Mustang and got out, noting that it seemed even chillier this much closer to the lake. I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and hurried into the building.

  The interior reminded me of my old offices in Memphis. I hoped by now, Henry Davis had cleared out my files and stopped paying rent on the office space. Still, losing it gave me a pang. I tried not to think of that old life; it was gone for good. As long as I had Jimmy, I had no way of returning home.

  I shook off the thoughts, checked the black board that listed the office names in little white plastic letters, 1930s style. Foster’s office was on the third floor. I took the marble stairs two at a time, using exercise to shake off the last of the anger, and found myself feeling calmer when I reached the top.

  The entire floor had a sharp medicinal scent. The overhead lights had been replaced with bad fluorescents sometime in the last ten years, washing everything in a sickly glow. Foster’s office was the first one on the left. The sign on the door read simply DENTAL OFFICES. To find the dentists’ names, I had to look beside the call bell to the door’s right.

  The knob turned easily in my hand and as I stepped inside, the medicinal smell grew. The high-pitched whine of a dentist’s drill came from down the hall, as did the murmur of voices. Overhead, the radio advertised the newest show at Mr. Kelly’s—Flip Wilson for two full weeks.

  The waiting area was small and furnished with old wooden chairs. On a scarred coffee table, ripped and torn copies of Ebony, Time, and Reader’s Digest were lined up next to that day’s edition of the Defender and the Daily News.

  A phone rang behind the receptionist’s desk, but no one answered it. After a moment, the ringing stopped. I couldn’t tell if someone had picked up an extension or if the caller had just given up.

  I walked to the desk and leaned on it. Beside my elbow, a new patient information form rested on a clipboard, a pen tucked into the metal clasp. Behind the desk were shelves holding patients’ files, carefully arranged alphabetically. A number of the files littered the desk, one resting kitty-corner on top of an electric typewriter that someone had forgotten to shut off. Its hum was barely audible over the whine of the drill.

  I toyed with hitting the little silver bell that sat on the edge of the counter, but decided that wouldn’t ingratiate me with the staff.

  After a moment, the drill shut off, a woman laughed, and the minty scent of mouthwash filtered toward me from the back. The laughter grew closer until a woman came into view.

  She was heavyset, with a round face and coal-black eyes. She wore a white smock over a dark blue dress, and on her left hand she wore a flashy diamond engagement ring. Her laughter shook her entire body. When she saw me, she stopped, but the mirth was still apparent in the twitching of her full lips.

  “Fill out the patient information chart,” she said, tapping the clipbo
ard, “and I’ll be right with you.”

  “I’m not a patient,” I said. “I’m investigating the death of Louis Foster.”

  Immediately the laughter vanished from her face. “You with the police?”

  She asked the question with hope. Apparently the police hadn’t been here, either.

  “No,” I said. “I’m working for the family.”

  “Oh, you must be Mr. Grimshaw,” she said. “Alice told us you’d be coming by.”

  I wished she hadn’t. I wanted to catch them all before they had time to coordinate their stories—if, indeed, there was a need to coordinate stories.

  But I made myself smile. “Yes. I’m Bill Grimshaw.”

  “I’ll get Doctor Wright. He’s been wanting to talk with you.”

  “I’d like to talk to you first, if I could.”

  “I don’t have a lot to say.” She sank into her green office chair. It squeaked, needing oil.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I just wanted to check the information I have. I understand Mr. Foster left here at noon that Friday.”

  She nodded, and didn’t meet my gaze.

  “His wife thought he was leaving at four.”

  The receptionist shrugged. “He often left early on Fridays.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No.” She moved the file off the electric typewriter, then grabbed a sheet of white paper and put it in the platen. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  It clearly wasn’t. “Mrs.—”

  “Miss,” she said. “Paula Firness.”

  “Miss Firness, was Doctor Foster seeing another woman?”

  “What he did in his own time wasn’t my business.” She used the return key to wind the paper into the typewriter.

  “I had a long talk with Mrs. Foster.” I kept my voice low. “She says it’s worse not knowing who killed her husband than it is thinking that he had an affair.”

  Paula Firness sighed. She shook her head. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she said, “A woman called him a lot. I was always to put her directly through unless he was with a patient.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Jane Sarton.”

  “Did she ever come to the office?”

  “Not that I know of,” Paula said.

  “Did you ever meet her?”

  “No.” She sounded indignant.

  “Did he go to meet her on Friday?”

  She didn’t answer for a long time. She arranged papers before her, then set one on a typing stand. It became clear she wasn’t going to answer that question at all.

  “Miss Firness,” I said in a polite but firm voice. “Did he meet her on Friday?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “But you think so.”

  She closed her eyes. “He usually saw her on Friday afternoons.”

  “How long had he been seeing her?”

  Her eyes flew open and this time, she turned to me. “Dr. Foster was a good man. He was kind to all of us here, and we miss him a lot. You’re not going to make him out to be a horrible person.”

  “No, I’m not. But I need to know everything I can about him so that I can figure out what happened that day.”

  “He never hurt anyone.”

  “By having an affair with this woman?”

  “No, I mean at all.” She leaned toward me. “I always sent the frightened patients to him. He did his best to treat them light. He was a big man, but he had slender hands—long fingers like a piano player. He was good. Our business’s dropped off by almost half since he’s been gone.”

  I caught the implication. The others weren’t nearly as good as he had been. He brought in most of the revenue, and now that he was gone, she was worried about her job.

  “Do you have a phone number for her?”

  “For Miss Sarton?” She started to shake her head and then stopped. She opened a desk drawer and pulled out an appointment calendar for the front half of the year.

  She thumbed through it until she reached a Friday in May. There was Jane Sarton’s name, with a phone number beneath it. Unlike the rest of the entries, this one was in a slashing, masculine hand.

  Miss Firness copied the phone number onto a piece of paper and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, putting it in my shirt pocket. “I only have a few more questions.”

  She glanced toward the back. The whine of the drill had started again, followed by a deep masculine voice trying to sound soothing.

  I asked, “Was there anything else unusual about him? Strange friends? Abnormal behavior before he died? Unusually moody or preoccupied?”

  Miss Firness turned toward me again. Someone said, “Ouch!” rather loudly down the hall and she didn’t even seem to notice.

  “His mother-in-law was coming to visit. He hated that. But he seemed like he was in a good mood. He told me that he’d finally hit his savings goal. He said he had to tell someone that because—.” She stopped herself.

  “Because what?”

  “Because he couldn’t tell his wife.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “Why not?”

  “It was going to be a surprise.”

  “What was?”

  She shrugged. “He never said. He just laughed and told me it was better to save my money than spend it on frivolous things. He was real frugal, Dr. Foster was.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He always had candy for the little kids. The other dentists, they frowned on that, but he said any little kid could have candy in moderation, so long as they brushed. If the kid didn’t take care of his teeth, he didn’t get any candy on the way out.” She twisted her engagement ring. “Him and Mrs. Foster, they couldn’t have kids. I always thought maybe he treated kids so good because that was the only contact he’d have with them.”

  “Were there ever any gang troubles here, Miss Firness?”

  “Gangs?” She looked at me in confusion.

  “You know, like the Blackstone Rangers or the Vice Lords? Did he have any of them as patients?”

  “Heavens, no, Mr. Grimshaw. It was always peaceful here. The people who brought in their children, well, you’d recognize them from some of the finest families in Bronzeville.”

  “Did he have trouble with gangs at home?”

  She frowned. “Why’re you asking this?”

  “Because the police think his killing might have been gang-related. They might have targeted him.”

  “Dr. Foster?” She shook her head. “I’m not even sure he was really aware that the gangs existed, Mr. Grimshaw. He lived his own life on his own path and rarely strayed from it.”

  “Until the weeks before his death.”

  She pursed her lips. “Until that Jane Sarton started to call.”

  * * *

  My meeting with the rest of the office staff proved less helpful. The other two dentists took time from their busy round of patients to talk with me, but all they could add was that they would both miss Foster’s handling of the office financial affairs. He had been frugal to a fault, and had invested some of their income to a profit, something the others hadn’t realized until he died. Neither of them had a head for business and they were thinking of hiring an office manager to take over that part of Foster’s role.

  The dental assistants talked about his patients, and I heard nothing unusual. Some of the biggest names in Bronzeville brought their children to him because of his reputation with kids. Again, no gang connection and no reported troubles, either at home or at work. The other dentists weren’t even certain if he carried large amounts of cash with him.

  I left the office with Jane Sarton as my only lead, although I got a list of friends and acquaintances who might be able to help. I exited by the front of the building, hoping to find a pay phone. The closest one was two blocks down. Graffiti stained its exterior, and someone had ripped out the phone book.

  I slipped a dime into the slot, listened to it clang, and then dialed.
After a single ring, someone picked up.

  “Jane Sarton,” a cultured female voice answered.

  I was a bit startled by the greeting. I’d never heard anyone answer their home phone like that. “Miss Sarton?”

  “Yes?” Practiced patience.

  “My name is Bill Grimshaw. I’m investigating the death of Louis Foster and I was wondering if I could speak to you.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. I waited, listening to background noises, but hearing little over the traffic noise of South State Street.

  “The…what?” she said after a moment, all confidence gone from her voice.

  “The death of Louis Foster.”

  “Lou is dead?” she asked.

  I leaned against the booth’s glass wall. Of course no one had told her. She was the mistress that no one knew about. Why would anyone tell her?

  I doubted that anyone could fake this kind of surprise. Which made the events of the last afternoon of his life even more important.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you knew. It was in the papers.”

  “It was?” She sounded numb.

  “Yes. Last month. I was wondering if I could talk with you.”

  “Last month.” She repeated that as if I were asking for an appointment in the past. “When?”

  “The weekend before Thanksgiving.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what I’d like to talk with you about, ma’am. Could I come and see you? It’s easier to do this face-to-face.”

  “I—.” She hesitated. “I have a lunch meeting. Can we do it at one-thirty?”

  She had startled me again. If I had just discovered that my lover died, I would have wanted to find out more immediately.

  “One-thirty’s fine,” I said. “Where are you located?”

  She gave me an address in Old Town. “I’ll look for you at one-thirty then,” she said and hung up.

  I stared at the phone. She was the coolest woman I’d ever heard. I’d broken the news to others about their loved ones before and no one, no one had ever reacted so strangely.

  I’d find out what caused this odd reaction when I saw her. I had about two hours to kill before our meeting. Since she was north of the Loop, it wasn’t that much farther for me to go to the hospital. I’d wanted to check on Epstein and Elaine anyway; this was my chance.