Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

“What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know what happened to your friend. I know my neighbors couldn’t’ve killed him. That’s not what they do. They might’ve scared him, though, and they’ll do their best to scare you. Or hurt you. I’ll call them, let them know you’re coming. That way, it ain’t my fault if something happens to you.”

  The speech was probably more revealing than he had intended. He thought Foster’s death might be his fault, in one way or another. Or was Delevan smart enough to lead me astray, to make me think that his friends had beaten up Foster, when, in fact, he had taken care of the situation for them?

  And if that was the case, why wasn’t he going after me now? I could be a complication.

  “You’ve already given me the name of your friend Rudy,” I said. “Just show me where he lives and I’ll go there now. I need to talk to him anyway, since he saw Foster after you did. I might not need to talk to the rest of the committee.”

  “I told you. Rudy didn’t do—”

  “I’m not saying he did,” I said hastily. “He might have scared Foster off and never taken him to the committee. If that’s what happened, I need to know that, too.”

  Delevan’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be trying to see through me, to know what I was really about. After a moment, he appeared satisfied with what I’d said.

  “Rudy Hucke lives two doors down, this side. You go to the front door. Rudy’s awful protective of his garage. Thinks of it as part of the house.”

  I understood the warning. If I went inside anywhere without Rudy’s permission, he’d see that as a threat.

  “If he’s not there, is he going to be upset if I talk to his wife?”

  Delevan shook his head. “Wife left fifteen years ago. Best if you don’t mention her at all.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll call if I have other questions.”

  “I told you everything I know,” he said.

  Probably not, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead I thanked him for his time, and stepped off the porch, my back prickling. I knew he was watching me walk away. I felt relieved when I turned onto the city sidewalk. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Delevan standing where I’d left him, facing the street.

  He wasn’t the only one. Curtains up and down the block twitched, the movement visible because of the window-shaped squares of light that fell on the street. Only a handful of houses were dark—and one of them was Hucke’s.

  It was a small house, the kind that real estate agents sometimes called a starter. A single-story white house with a gray roof and a one-car garage. The house itself probably had no more than eight hundred square feet on the interior—two bedrooms, a bath, a tiny living room, and an even tinier kitchen. The way the house’s foundation was built up suggested that there wasn’t even a basement. If I went around back, I had a hunch that I’d find a slatted wooden door at a thirty-degree angle to the house and the ground, a door that led into a combination root and storm cellar.

  I mounted the cheap concrete stairs that someone had ill-advisedly painted deep red. The colors seemed even darker in the thin light from a makeshift lamp above the garage door. That door was closed and Hucke had even put shades over the windows.

  The shades in the house were drawn, too, and I could tell even before I knocked that no one was home. Still, I pounded the thick wooden door with my fist, listening to the thuds reverberate inside. As I did, I stood so that I could see the street as well as the house. I didn’t want anyone to sneak up behind me.

  No one did. The entire street seemed to be holding its breath, watching me. I expected to hear doors open, or shoe heels clicking on concrete, coming toward me, but none of that happened as well. The residents of this street were content to spy, probably hoping that I would go away.

  During any other investigation, I would have walked around the house, checked the windows and the back door, but I wouldn’t here. The night was too dark and so was I. Hucke’s neighbors were paranoid enough. I didn’t need to give them an excuse to come after me.

  I sighed as I walked down his steps. Now he would be warned that I was coming to visit him, not just by Delevan, but by his other neighbors, too. He’d have time to make up a story if he needed one, and he’d also have time to help the neighborhood association contrive a group story as well.

  I was almost to my car when a man came down the street toward me. He was wearing a heavy coat, unzipped over his denim work shirt, and denim pants. I felt the reassuring presence of my gun under my coat, and made certain my right hand was in position to grab it quickly.

  As he got closer to me, his stride did not slow down, but we made eye contact. “You ain’t thinking of moving to Delevan’s house, are ya?”

  I almost said no, and then I realized that I would find out nothing if I denied it. But if I let him believe I might move here, I might get the same reaction Foster had. If Foster did die here, I might find out. I was safer than Foster was: I had a gun. I could defend myself against a knife. And unlike Foster, I was prepared.

  All those thoughts went through my mind in an instant, as I heard myself say, “It’s a nice neighborhood.”

  “Won’t be,” he said as he came up alongside of me, “if there’s too many fucking jigaboos in it.”

  My hand went for my gun, finding the grip, hard and firm beneath my palm. I whirled, but he was already past me, not looking back. I kept him in sight, kept the gun under my coat.

  He was already several yards away. He hadn’t done anything more than deliver his message.

  But it was a chilling message, one I’d gotten over and over again in this part of the city. Ethnic white neighborhoods on Chicago’s far South Side did not want middle-class blacks—hell, any kind of black—to move in.

  And it was becoming clear that they’d do anything to prevent it.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE DRIVE HOME seemed to take forever. The threats had unnerved me. It took me a few blocks to realize that my reaction didn’t come from fear, but from anger.

  Usually, I responded to such threats in two set ways. Often those threats came before a physical confrontation, which I was more than suited for. Other times, they were a single one-shot comment, which I could respond to verbally.

  I had done neither here, and it felt uncomfortable.

  As I left the neighborhood, I approached the grocery store where I had received such harassment. To my surprise, it was still open, its red neon sign ablaze, and white florescent light pouring out of its front windows. I glanced at the clock on my dash.

  No wonder the store was still open. It wasn’t even six o’clock. Most stores closed between seven and eight.

  My encounter with Delevan had lasted less than an hour.

  It had seemed like a year.

  As I drove up, I noticed a black woman standing by the open trunk of a new Oldsmobile. She wore a knee-length cloth coat, obviously expensive, and a pair of high heels that looked too thin to protect her from the cold. Her black hair was pulled away from her face, accenting her delicate features.

  A full grocery cart sat beside the car, and as I approached, I toyed with stopping to help her load them into the trunk. I almost drove by but in the end, some instinct made me pull over.

  This woman shouldn’t have been alone, not near this store, in this neighborhood so late at night.

  I wasn’t able to stop near her. I was half a block back. I started to get out of the car when a man came out of the store, pushing another grocery cart. I didn’t recognize him, but he hadn’t moved away from the door. He was short, his face in shadow.

  He spoke to her, but I couldn’t make out his words. She laughed in response, and I realized that she didn’t need me after all. She had come with someone else, and she didn’t seem to have had trouble shopping there.

  Maybe evenings were the best time for blacks to shop, or maybe the butcher had managed to get store policy changed after all. Maybe the problem was the manager, who would probably have left by now.
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br />   I got back inside my car and drove on, somewhat relieved that I didn’t have to go over there. A year ago, I might have gone despite the other man’s presence. The woman was pretty, and obviously doing well at her work. It would have been worth my time to find out if she were single.

  But Laura had changed that. I really didn’t want to meet anyone else. Marvella was right; my heart was taken, whether I wanted it to be or not.

  I picked up Jimmy at the Grimshaws’, took him home and made us both dinner. He wanted to know about Laura, and I told him that she had flown out safely. I promised she would return, but I knew he still didn’t believe me.

  When we finished eating, I left him with the dishes and the television while I went into my office. I unlocked the file cabinet and pulled out the packets that Mrs. Weisman had given me. I poured the photographs out of the manila envelopes and spread them out on my desk.

  There had to be about one hundred photographs in front of me. Their edges curled upward and they smelled of developing fluid. I sorted them into thematic groups before examining them.

  Just as Saul Epstein had told me the day before he was beaten, most of the photographs were useless to me. There were a few gang pictures, but on close inspection, it seemed not to be a meeting of rival gangs but of Van Spillars and Gus Foley talking to some gang members their own age, trying to get the watch back.

  The gang shots hadn’t held him for long. He only took one roll of that. He’d taken more shots of early morning ground fog against a pair of twisted tree trunks in the center of the park. The effect he was going for appeared to be both Gothic and artistic—in the best shots, the trees looked like they were coalescing out of the mist.

  Then the photographs changed. There were a few shaky shots of the crime scene—obviously taken while the photographer was moving toward it. Two photographs caught the matching looks of horror on the faces of Gus and Van. A series of candid shots followed them as they ran out of the park to call the police.

  No one else appeared in those photographs. The park seemed empty, but I caught a glimpse of the blue car that the boys had mentioned. Its front end disappeared off the last two photographs in that series. Try as I might, I couldn’t make out the license plate. Even with the small magnifying glass I kept in my top drawer, I couldn’t see much more than the plate’s shape. I couldn’t even tell what state issued it.

  The bulk of the photographs were of the crime scene and they were beautifully done. Epstein hadn’t taken the most informative ones to the Defender—he had taken the most interesting artistic shots.

  He started his photographs from a good twenty yards away from the body, proceeding closer. I could almost imagine him walking forward, the camera in front of his face, as he snapped shot after shot.

  He got pictures of the ground leading up to the body, complete with cigarette butts and beer cans and, most informative of all, footprints still remaining in the early morning frost. I studied the prints for a long time.

  There were four sets. Two sets matched. They were small, not quite child-sized, but the size of a woman’s shoe, or a young boy’s. They had no tread; their smooth bottoms marked them as sneakers or well-worn regular shoes.

  I glanced back at the long-range photographs of the boys. Sure enough, they both wore sneakers. In one shot, Epstein had managed to get the back of one boy’s shoe as he ran, revealing no tread at all.

  The other two sets went in different directions. One came toward the body; the other veered away at a sixty-degree angle. After a few moments of study, I realized that these footprints were made by the same pair of boots—men’s boots, judging from their size. I couldn’t get a sense of the exact size, but it was clear that these boots were much larger than the boys’ shoes.

  The reason it took me some study to realize that the boots belonged to the same person was because of the way the footprint looked. On the way to the crime scene, the heel marks were so deep they actually broke through the frost into the ground. On the way from the scene, the footprints were fainter, in some instances, vanishing completely.

  One man had carried the body to this place. Alone. One very strong man.

  I set down my magnifying glass and rubbed my eyes. From the living room, the television rang with laughter, and a voice crying, “You bet your bippy!” echoed down the hallway. Laugh-In was on.

  I usually joined Jimmy for it, but tonight I couldn’t bring myself to do so. Looking at these photographs after meeting Delevan that afternoon brought the murder closer to me than it had ever been. Even after meeting Louis Foster’s friends and coworkers, I hadn’t felt this sense of urgency that I felt now.

  I slid another pile of photographs toward me. This group had surprised me when I had first seen it. Epstein had gotten close to the body—as close as a crime-scene photographer would get—and had taken precise, somewhat ghoulish pictures.

  Several focused on Foster’s face—the flaccid look of the features so common after death. He had no bruising, no cigarette burns like last summer’s copycat victim. If it weren’t for the slight slit in his coat just over his heart, marked only by blood as the knife exited the wound, he wouldn’t have seemed injured at all.

  I especially studied his hands: no defensive wounds. Like the other victims, Louis Foster had been surprised by his attacker, dying swiftly and silently with a minimum of fuss.

  Something about the poses was supposed to tell us something. The killer was leaving a message we were missing, a message we should somehow have understood.

  No matter how long I stared at the photographs, I couldn’t figure the message out.

  I skipped the duplicates of the photographs that Epstein had given the Defender and focused instead on the last set of photos. He had taken those after the police had arrived on the crime scene.

  He’d used only one roll’s worth, but that was enough to tell a tale of evidence destruction that was even worse than usual. The footprints—including Epstein’s own—were obliterated before the cops reached the body. Police officers searched the victim, moving his clothing, reaching into his pockets and patting his sides, searching for what, I could not tell. They had not followed their own department’s rules of evidence.

  The most shocking photograph was also the most artistic, almost as if it were posed, although it was clear it was not. The composition was of award quality. It was a shot of a detective, his shield on his blazer, leaning against the other side of the tree. Epstein had pulled his lens back far enough to encompass the entire trunk, and Foster’s body still splayed in death. The cop had a cigarette in his right hand. Smoke blew out of his mouth as he casually flicked ash on Foster’s coat.

  I made myself set the photograph down slowly, restraining the urge to crumple it. I pushed away from the desk and stood, clenching my fists as I walked toward the window. I hadn’t even closed the curtains, although my neighbor in the building next door had closed his. I wondered if he could see inside, see the anger that was beginning to fuel me, whether I wanted it to or not.

  I had to remain calm. That photograph was evidence—evidence of a lot of things, none of them good. Epstein would have to make copies of this one himself, or instruct me on how to use his dark room. I wouldn’t trust this photograph to any other developer, professional or not.

  When I was calm enough, I returned to my desk and gathered up the photographs. The Foster case could no longer be mine. I would have to share it completely with Johnson and Sinkovich.

  I wondered if they’d do anything about it. After all, the man with the cigarette was one of their colleagues. Perhaps they were inured to things like this.

  But I wasn’t—and I hoped I never would be.

  * * *

  The next morning, the phone woke me. It invaded a dream in which I was talking to Laura. She was reassuring me that she was all right, and I was yelling at her for contacting me at all. The ringing phone, I kept saying, is proof that someone is listening, someone knows where you are.

  And then, in my dream, I
hung up.

  The phone continued to ring, and somehow I realized that the sound was real. I grabbed my robe and hurried toward my office, where our only extension was.

  “What?” I said as I picked up. The room was dark. The sun hadn’t risen over the buildings yet. I squinted at my clock. Not even 6:00 A.M.

  “Get dressed, Grimshaw.” It took me a moment to wake up enough to recognize Truman Johnson’s voice. “I need you here, and fast.”

  “Where?” I asked, my mouth cottony from sleep.

  “Oak Woods Cemetery,” he said. “We have another one.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SOMEHOW, even with all the things I had to do—dress, make calls, and get Marvella (who demanded an apology from me, of all things) to watch Jimmy until Franklin took over my school duties—I still managed to make it to the cemetery in fifteen minutes.

  The morning was cloudy and cold, the lightening sky the only way to tell that the sun was coming up. I wore my heaviest jacket and a pair of thick gloves, but I still felt chilled. Part of me hadn’t yet left the warm comfort of my bed, believing all of this to be a horrible dream.

  It wouldn’t have been hard to find the crime scene even if Johnson hadn’t given me specific directions. Police cars, their lights revolving, were parked on the dirt access road. The gravestones were turning red and blue in the alternating light, a parody of color worthy of a Smothers Brothers spoof.

  Men in and out of uniform examined the scene, but unlike the Foster investigation, they did not appear to be compromising the evidence. I couldn’t see Johnson, but the gray light made everything seem diffuse.

  I also couldn’t see the body, and no one seemed to be standing near any of the trees. It took me a moment to realize they were working near one of the monuments.

  It was huge, standing at least forty feet tall, its edges gray against the gray sky. If it weren’t for the dark rivulets of dirt running down its sides, I wouldn’t have been able to make out details at all.