Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “You wanna keep them all?” Yancy said. “Stop making things worse. Eventually they’ll come after you. And you’re no match for the 9 millimeter that Jeff Fort prefers.”

  The thing was, he was right, and I knew it. But I wasn’t going to let him know that I agreed. “Don’t you feel odd, sitting here watching schoolchildren while Jeff Fort turns the Stones into the Black P. Stone Nation, more than four thousand strong?”

  “We’re doing what we can, Grimshaw,” Yancy said. “The only way to kill this body is to cut off the head. We haven’t figured out how to do that yet.”

  I stared at him for a moment, not sure he’d actually said that to me, admitted that they were willing to do what they could to get rid of Fort and the other leaders of the Stones.

  “The body’s pretty lethal all by itself,” I said. “Especially if you keep letting it grow one kid at a time.”

  “We don’t got control of that,” He said. “It’s concerned parents like you that have all the cards.”

  Then he rolled up the window. I felt as if he’d struck me a blow as hard as the one I’d just dealt that kid. Concerned parents. I’d enlisted Franklin, but that was it. How many others were handling this same thing, and doing it all alone? And what happened if we did it together?

  The idea held me all the way to the car. I unlocked the driver’s door and climbed in. Norene was still sniffling as she sat on Lacey’s lap and stroked her Barbie’s blonde hair. Mikie’s face had turned gray. Keith held her hand. Jimmy was staring out the back window, his face turned away from me.

  I was afraid for him, afraid for all of them. I wanted to protect them, make the world perfect for them, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t even keep them safe for an afternoon. I had no idea how to do it for a lifetime.

  “Let’s go home, kids,” I said and we did, because there was nothing else we could do.

  FIFTEEN

  THAT NIGHT I got three phone calls. The first, just after Jimmy and I finished our early dinner, was from the owner of a South Side insurance company that catered to blacks. He’d heard that I did good work and he wanted to talk with me about doing occasional claims investigation for him. We talked for a little while and I found I was interested. We agreed to meet after the holidays, to see if we were compatible.

  The second call came from Alice Foster. She was ecstatic. She and a newly hired lawyer went through the stock certificates. She was rich and she hadn’t even known it.

  “Mr. Grimshaw,” she said, “how did you learn about the stocks?”

  “A business partner of your husband’s—”

  “I spoke to the other dentists,” she said. “They didn’t know a thing.”

  “It wasn’t them,” I said, deciding it was time to tell her the truth, since the news panned out. “Your husband was going to buy you a nice home as an anniversary present. Something like the kind of home you’d always dreamed of. He told the real estate agent he was working with that he planned to use money from a proposed stock sale. She double-checked the information before showing him some of the more expensive houses.”

  There was a long silence. I wished I had waited to tell her when we were face-to-face.

  “Was this what got him killed?” Mrs. Foster asked.

  Honesty, I reminded myself, even though I didn’t like breaking her good mood. “I don’t know yet.”

  More silence.

  I finally said, “Remember the gesture, Mrs. Foster. I found no traces of another woman or anything suspicious. Your husband loved you. He wanted to surprise you by giving you one of your dreams.”

  She gave a weak laugh. “I would rather have him alive, Mr. Grimshaw.”

  “I know that,” I said gently and promised her a report by Friday before I ended the conversation.

  When I hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Laura.

  “Smokey,” she said. “Do you have a minute? I need to talk to you about Sturdy.”

  I suppressed a sigh. I didn’t care about her problems at the moment, although I probably should have. She was paying me to. “All right,” I said.

  She told me about Sturdy’s latest move—contacting her old attorney with the same plan the men had proposed on Sunday, as if her old attorney could explain it to her more clearly and convince her to take the deal. McMillan had gotten angry, informing the management team they were out of line, but they responded again to the old attorney, not him. They seemed to think he was the problem, a puppetmaster controlling Laura.

  I paid only partial attention to the story. While she was talking, I watched Jimmy do the dishes. His shoulders were slumped and he moved slower than usual.

  “So anyway, Smokey,” Laura was saying, “we still haven’t gotten the requested documents. I need to go into Sturdy tomorrow and get them. Drew said he’d accompany me, but I figure he’s a lightning rod right now. It’s better if you come. Can you?”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Not too long,” she said. “A couple hours at most.”

  “I need to be home by three or so.” I no longer intended to leave Jimmy alone after school.

  “Maybe we should go in the morning, then,” Laura said. “Just in case they keep us waiting.”

  “All right,” I said. “Meet me at the Randolph Street entrance to the public library at ten-thirty.”

  “We could meet here,” she said, “have some breakfast, talk a little.”

  “I’m on a case, Laura. I need to do library work and my time is pretty limited right now.”

  “All right.” She sounded disappointed. “I’ll see you at the library at ten-thirty.”

  When she hung up, I went to Jim’s side and grabbed a towel, drying off the dishes he’d already placed in the rack.

  “You don’t gotta do that,” he said. “I can get it.”

  “I know,” I said.

  We worked in silence for a while. He had gotten good at his chores, when he chose to do them. The dishes sparkled.

  “You think those guys’d hurt Norie?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “They were trying to get to you.”

  “I figured.” He rinsed the final pan and handed it to me, then let the water out of the sink. “I didn’t mean for none of this to happen, Smoke.”

  “I know that, too,” I said. “They threatened you right from the start, didn’t they?”

  He shrugged.

  “Tell me about it, Jim.”

  He wiped out the sink, then wrung out the dishrag before hanging it over the faucet. “Can’t.”

  “This’ll just be between us. You know I can keep a secret.”

  He nodded once, but kept his head bowed. I could see the tight muscles in the back of his neck. One of them twitched slightly. I hadn’t realized how much strain he’d been under.

  “It was Keith.” He finally spoke so softly I had to strain to hear.

  “Keith?” I asked, surprised.

  “He was hanging out with those guys. I told him he didn’t know what he was doing, but he said he grew up with them and they was all fine. Then they started asking him to take stuff for them, you know, wrapped stuff that he wasn’t supposed to look at.”

  Jimmy understood all of that. His real brother, Joe, had used the same trick to get Jimmy to deliver drugs in Memphis.

  “I said this ain’t right, and I told him to stop. He was getting scared, so he did. He give the sun back, just like you done. Only then they threatened to do stuff to Mikie. They didn’t know about Norie or Lacey. I asked ’em what they really wanted and they said it don’t matter so long as they had a body to do their stuff. They asked me if I wanted to volunteer, and I said yes just to get them off Keith’s back.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. That was something I would have done. Maybe he had been observing me a little too closely.

  “That was Friday. They give me the sun, and then you found it. I wasn’t going to say nothing, figuring they’d just pick on me and leave Keith alone. Bu
t they’re not, Smoke.”

  “That wasn’t the first time they went after you guys this week, was it?” I asked.

  He shrugged again. “It was okay. They couldn’t do nothing until today.”

  His matter-of-fact tone hurt a lot worse than an accusation would have. They didn’t try anything until I arrived late, unable to protect the boys like I had promised.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked him.

  “I dunno,” he said with such quiet conviction that I knew he’d been thinking about it for some time.

  “We’ll figure something out,” I said, and hoped it was true.

  * * *

  I was up several times that night, awakened by dreams, voices and memories that were mingling together. Sinkovich’s description of his neighborhood association, Yancy’s mention of concerned parents like me, and my own memories of school haunted me.

  After my parents died, my adopted parents sent me to an excellent school, and there was a focus on learning at home. There were kids who ran with a bad crowd, as we used to say, but they did so because they couldn’t keep up or because they had nothing else. I was so busy with my studies I never had time to be idle.

  By the time Franklin arrived the next morning, I had the beginnings of a plan. I wanted to assemble all of the concerned parents together and form a group that protected our kids like Franklin and I were doing, and one that educated them as well. I even knew who we could ask to run after-school sessions that included homework and a focus on reading.

  Grace Kirkland, who’d hired me in August, had a son who was attending Yale, and it looked like her youngest son would go to a good college as well. She’d managed all of this as a single parent, sending her children to the same schools Jimmy went to. She knew how to emphasize learning.

  I presented all of this to Franklin, without telling him about Keith’s involvement. Jimmy listened silently.

  “There’s less than two weeks until Christmas,” Franklin said. “I doubt anyone has enough time for a meeting-and-planning session.”

  “This is important,” I said. “I think concerned parents would make the time.”

  Concerned parents. It seemed so logical, but they could be a loaded weapon. Concerned parents tried to stop the busing of black students into white schools. Concerned parents were probably behind the attempted arson that Sinkovich had been talking about.

  And here I was considering putting together more concerned parents. Still, I couldn’t think of anything else.

  Franklin studied me for a moment, then nodded. “We’ll do it at my house. I’ll find a time—probably next Wednesday night—then send a notice to the Defender. We’ll have to talk to the parents in the neighborhood ourselves. I think Althea has a list from last year’s fund-raiser.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “But I’m not doing this one alone, Smokey,” he said. “If we get people there, you’ll run the meeting.”

  “Deal.” I had hoped to do that anyway. I had some clear ideas on what I wanted to do. “I’ll talk to Grace, too.”

  “We’ll have to pay her.”

  “I know,” I said, and hoped the other parents agreed on a way to pay her what she was worth.

  “Until then, we’ve got to be on time for those kids.” It was the only time since the incident that he’d blamed me.

  “Is Norene all right?”

  “She didn’t want to go to school this morning,” he said. “It’s a good thing I’m driving today.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry, Franklin.”

  He gave me a halfhearted smile, then led Jimmy out the door. I stood in the silence for a long moment, realizing that for the first time in our friendship, Franklin hadn’t accepted an apology. He saw all of this as the fault of me and Jimmy, without really understanding how very complicated it all was.

  * * *

  I made it to the library with more than an hour to spare before I had to meet Laura. I used that time to look through the Daily News, which, along with the Sun-Times, were the only white papers in the city that had a chance of covering the kind of news I was looking for. I hoped that their reporters might have better access to the police than the Defender’s did.

  This time, I went directly to the weeks of the murders, finding all but the killing of Violet Stamps in the Daily News and no mention of three of the killings in the Sun-Times. They only bothered to report Foster’s death because he was a well-known dentist.

  I got no new information from those papers, and I resigned myself to an afternoon searching through the 1967 version of the Defender, most of which was on microfiche. I finished with the main dailies just in time to meet Laura on the front steps of the library.

  She was already there, huddled against the wind. The temperature, according to the radio, was only in the fifties, but it felt colder. The wind had a damp chill to it, a way of clawing through clothing and promising severe weather to come.

  Her hair was down but not styled, and she wore casual pants beneath her rabbit-fur coat. She hadn’t worn any makeup, but she didn’t need any. Her cheeks were red with cold, and her eyes were a warm, vivacious blue.

  “Thanks for meeting me, Smokey,” she said as she slipped her hand through my arm.

  I put my cold, bare hand over her warm, leather-gloved one. “I said I would.”

  “I know,” she said, “but you’ve seemed preoccupied lately. This is really my fight.”

  That it was, although I didn’t say anything as we walked down Randolph toward Dearborn. I’d never walked through the Loop with Laura, certainly not arm in arm, and it felt oddly comfortable. Since people were wrapped in their winter coats, faces and skin color weren’t clearly visible. No one gave us a second glance.

  As if we’d made a mutual pact, we drew apart outside the eight-story building that housed Sturdy Investments. We walked into the main entrance and crossed the dingy two-story lobby.

  This building had once been grand, like many of Chicago’s downtown buildings, but as with most of them, the grandeur was covered in decades of grime and filth. The atrium, which was supposed to have a skylight effect, made the lobby seem dark.

  We entered the only open elevator and Laura greeted the attendant by name. He was an elderly black man, like most of the elevator attendants in the city. He didn’t look at me as he shoved the lever toward the seventh floor, pretending, just like white people did, that a black person was beneath his notice.

  Laura and I watched the red lights behind the metallic scroll numbers light up, indicating each floor. When we reached seven, she exited and I waited half a beat until I could walk a step behind.

  The clear glass doors with STURDY INVESTMENTS, INC. written on them in gold were closed. Laura gripped the glass handle on one and pulled, letting herself in.

  I’d only been here once before, on a weekend in midsummer, and the building had been empty. Now the reception area was full. People read newspapers on the blue plastic couches, and a receptionist, sitting behind a blond wooden desk, struggled to answer the constantly ringing phone.

  When she saw Laura, she smiled and ignored the phone altogether. “Miss Hathaway, were we expecting you?”

  Without the smile, the question would have been rude. As it was, it seemed like an innocent query, with just a hint of the trouble underneath.

  “In a way, Darlene. Is Marshall in?”

  “No, ma’am. He stepped out for an early lunch. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Do you have papers for me? I’ve been requesting them now for most of the week.”

  “Papers.” She patted her clean desktop as if the papers could be invisible. “No, ma’am. Let me get Mr. Parti for you.”

  “No need, Darlene,” Laura said. “I’ll see Marshall’s secretary instead.”

  Then, without waiting for the receptionist to summon the secretary, Laura walked around the desk and down a narrow hallway. I followed, feeling the gaze of everyone in the waiting room on my back.

  We reached a
large office area with a separate secretary’s desk. The office door was closed, and it had Marshall Cronk’s name posted on a gold plate against the wood. Before the door was another blond wooden desk. The woman behind it was heavyset. She wore her hair in a black beehive whose color could not have been natural.

  When she saw Laura, she smiled. “Miss Hathaway! To what do we owe this honor?”

  Again, I thought I heard an undercurrent of discord, but it was too subtle for me to be certain.

  “I’ve come for the papers that Marshall promised me.”

  “Mr. Cronk hasn’t sent any papers by me,” the secretary said. “Are you sure you requested them?”

  “No games, Henrietta. You’ve received multiple requests from my attorney and from me for the monthly statements and the annual reports. I’m entitled to all of it as a stockholder.”

  “This isn’t my area, Miss Hathaway, you know that—”

  “I know that everything that happens in Sturdy goes past you,” Laura said with admirable toughness. “You know about the requests and you know why I haven’t gotten the papers.”

  “Oh, Miss Laura,” the secretary said. “You’re in over your head, dear.” The secretary had a look of concern on her round face. Her gray eyes darted back and forth, as if making certain they were all alone. “Some of the old-timers here don’t like what’s been going on.”

  “So?” Laura asked.

  “They’re going to make things as difficult as possible for you. I say continue things the way they are. The team is making you a mountain of money. No need altering that.”

  Laura’s smile faded. “Do you believe that, Henrietta?”

  “Honey, if I had as much money as you, do you think I’d be sitting in a stuffy old office?”

  “No,” Laura said, her voice cold. “I don’t believe you would.”

  I wanted to put a hand on her arm, to remind her to stay calm, but that wasn’t my place. My place was to guard her, although at the moment, it didn’t seem like she needed me at all.

  “Tell Marshall,” Laura said, “that if I don’t receive the papers to which I am legally entitled by the close of business tomorrow, I will see him back in court on Monday. Can you see beyond your loyalty to give him that message, Henrietta, or should I write him a note and slip it under the door myself?”