Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  THIRTY-ONE

  I BUTTED HIS HEAD with my own, feeling the sharp but expected pain shudder from my skull through my spine. At the same time, I rammed him with my shoulder, shoving him away from me.

  His grip on my coat tightened, pulling me with him, but the knife flailed wildly, slicing my cheek and narrowly missing my eye. I could see the knife come back for a second attempt, and I managed to move out of its way.

  My arms were hopelessly trapped in the coat. There was no way to free them without breaking his grip, no way to get to the gun pressing against my rib cage.

  I caught my foot under his ankle, and he stumbled backward but didn’t let go. The knife came for me again, slashing my left shoulder. I thought I heard something tear.

  Blood dripped into my mouth, tasting of iron. I went for his feet again, and missed. He was quick, he was strong, and he was determined. I had never seen such rage in anyone’s eyes, and I wondered fleetingly if I was the only victim who had had enough warning to be able to fight back.

  I changed direction and shoved him farther back, slamming his hand against the wall so hard that a picture fell off and shattered. He uttered a guttural cry and stabbed at me, hitting but not penetrating the skin. I slammed him into the wall again, and again, until I felt his grip loosen.

  Then I staggered away, dropping the coat and reaching under my sweater for the gun. He came at me, left hand clawing, right hand still stabbing. I managed to duck, and the knife swooped past.

  He ran an extra step forward, carried by momentum, and by the time he turned, I had the gun out, cocked and ready to fire.

  “Give me a reason,” I said, spitting blood as I spoke.

  His eyes were the only thing that moved. They gauged the distance between himself and the gun, between me and the knife. I could see him wondering if he could finish me off before I shot him, if he could disarm me faster than I could hurt him.

  Not unlikely. Most people, even professionals like cops and soldiers, were afraid of knives. It was a gut reaction that was hard to train out.

  But he’d already cut me, and I was alive. His knife didn’t frighten me. And I wasn’t afraid to use the gun.

  “This is what they call a Mexican stand-off,” he said. “One of us has got to make a move, and if you shoot me, guaranteed, someone in this city will lynch you.”

  The word made me recoil. My parents were lynched. I had to fight to control my trigger finger.

  “No, they won’t,” I said.

  At that moment, the door burst open and someone shouted, “Police! Freeze!”

  Sinkovich came in beside me, his gun out. Hucke looked startled. Another door banged open and Johnson yelled the same thing.

  Then there was a blinding flash of light, and I realized we weren’t alone. Epstein had just taken a picture.

  I turned. His camera was pointed at Hucke, bloody knife in hand.

  Hucke was blinking, looking small. Sinkovich sidled toward him, one hand out as the other held the gun.

  “Give me the knife,” Sinkovich said.

  I kept my gun trained on Hucke. Johnson came in through the kitchen. His gun was out as well. His gaze flicked to my face, to the blood dripping down my chin onto my sweater. My left arm was very tired. It took an effort to hold it up.

  “Face me, you son of a bitch,” Johnson said.

  Sinkovich shook his head once. He knew what Johnson was going to do.

  “Give me the knife,” Sinkovich said again, desperation in his voice.

  Hucke’s mouth opened in confusion at the two different commands. Epstein took another photograph. Johnson didn’t seem to care. All he seemed to be thinking about was making certain he didn’t shoot Hucke in the back.

  “Give him the knife, for crissake,” I said.

  “What the hell is this?” Hucke asked.

  “Police,” Sinkovich said again. “Give me your knife.”

  That seemed to get through. Hucke put the knife in Sinkovich’s palm, then raised his hands just a little, palms out in front of his chest.

  “Now, turn toward me,” Johnson said, his voice cold.

  Hucke started to turn.

  “No!” I shouted. “Truman, he’s unarmed.”

  My words made Hucke freeze. Johnson’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment, I thought he was going to shoot. Then he lowered his gun and reached for his handcuffs.

  “I said—” Johnson looked over at me as he spoke. “—turn so that I can cuff you.”

  “Huh?” Hucke said.

  Johnson grabbed one arm and pulled it behind Hucke’s back, then grabbed the other. Epstein continued taking pictures of the arrest. Sinkovich didn’t close his hand over the knife. Instead, he set it on the floor so someone could bag it later.

  The handcuffs clicked shut. I still hadn’t brought my gun down, but I wasn’t sure if I was protecting anyone anymore or just unable to move. Black spots were rolling across my vision and my head felt heavy.

  Hucke looked up at me. My left eye was closing, blood caking along the rim. “You’re a cop?” he asked.

  “I get that question a lot,” I said as the floor came up to greet me. “I get that question a lot.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  I WOKE UP the next morning in the hospital, the entire left side of my face feeling as if it were on fire. Jimmy sat beside the bed, looking terrified, and I later learned that he’d thrown such a fit the nurses decided it was better to let him in my room than remain in the visitor’s lounge.

  “You ain’t supposed to move your face,” he said when he realized I was awake. He didn’t move from his chair, nor did he let go of my good right hand. “Got stitches.”

  “Aren’t,” I mumbled.

  “Huh?”

  “Aren’t supposed to…”

  “Mr. Grimshaw,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere above me. “I see that we are awake.”

  A nurse. Only nurses spoke with that annoying royal “we.” I tried to open my left eye further, only to realize there was a bandage around it. With my right, I could see Jimmy, the door, and the puke-green cinderblock wall. Whoever thought that color was healing I’d never know.

  The nurse bent into my line of vision. She was younger than I expected, full-bosomed, and white. Her fingers found the pulse in my wrist and she timed it.

  She wrote that down on my chart, then she smiled at me. “Welcome back.”

  I tried to smile, only to feel a tugging on my cheek.

  “No, don’t,” she said. “You have twenty very small stitches there. The doctor is hoping to avoid an obvious scar. So no smiling, and talk only through the right side of your mouth until the stitches come out.”

  “When?” I asked, carefully using the right side of my mouth as instructed. It made me feel like I was doing a bad Jimmy Cagney imitation.

  “Just after Christmas.”

  “I can’t stay here for Christmas,” I said, trying put push myself up. That was when I realized that my left arm was in a sling.

  “Oh, no. I suspect you can leave after the doctor sees you. I’ll let him know you’re awake.”

  And then she vanished out of my range of vision.

  “You lost lots of blood,” Jimmy said. “That’s why you passed out. Then they gave you stuff while they stitched you up. That’s why you didn’t wake up right away.”

  I looked at him. There were deep circles under his eyes. “Were you here alone the whole time?”

  He shook his head. “Althea’s been here, and Franklin. They wanted me to go to school, but I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he said, and I remembered how he had reacted last summer. I thought you was gonna die. But he wasn’t saying that this time, even though the fear was evident.

  I squeezed his hand. “Guess you can miss one day.”

  He started to smile, but then his eyes filled with tears. He leaned forward and pressed his face into the rubbery blanket, as if he couldn’t hold himself up any more. It was such an adult movement th
at it startled me.

  I put my good hand on the back of his head and kept it there. I didn’t die. But I nearly had. It would have been so easy, so quick. Hucke trapping my arms, shoving his knife into my heart. He had done some version of that with all the others. Charmed them, then when they least expected it, attacked them, and killed them with a single movement.

  So easy. So quick.

  I had been lucky, and I knew it.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for all the pieces to come together. Hucke had been doing the killings. There were even more than we had known about, beginning shortly after his wife left him fifteen years before. The killings had escalated in the last two years and he’d started leaving the bodies in public places.

  The places got more and more obvious as well, culminating in the Confederate monument in Oak Woods cemetery. He would often wait in his car, watching the body until someone discovered it before he drove away.

  Even though Hucke didn’t start killing until his wife left, the warning signs were there. He used to beat up black children when he was a teenager. Then he went into the army and someone taught him how to use a knife.

  He also got religion. The dangling shoe was a reference to something that Jesus had said—that if a town did not accept the word of God, then the disciples should leave the town and wipe its dust off their shoes. Apparently, Hucke had twisted that quote to mean that the dust of his precious neighborhood shouldn’t touch the shoes of the unclean.

  After I passed out, Johnson made the arrest while Sinkovich got me to the hospital. Epstein did more than his share. The photographs were so stunning they went across the United Press International wire, which panicked me when I heard about it.

  Then I saw them and realized I wasn’t in them. Not a one. Johnson had seen to that. Epstein later gave me all the negatives with me in the shots, and never asked why I didn’t want my face plastered all over the news.

  He was having enough to deal with on his own. UPI had hired him as a stringer to follow up on this case, and to cover other Chicago stories that weren’t being pursued by the city’s major dailies. He was working hard and he still wasn’t healed. Now his grandmother was worrying that he was doing too much rather than too little.

  My plan did work, though. Epstein had gotten the photographs and a short version of the story to the wire services immediately. Word trickled through the upper echelons of the machine, and the lawyer Hucke had been expecting never materialized. His face was all over the next day’s paper, and it was clear that his political cronies had decided to let him swing alone.

  And swing he did. With story after story coming out in the national presses first under Epstein’s byline, it soon became clear to all of Chicago that Hucke had been killing any black person who wandered alone into his neighborhood.

  The prosecutor was putting together a case that didn’t involve me. This had nothing to do with Johnson, but with logic. After arresting Hucke in his home for assaulting me, Johnson called a forensic backup team. They found solid evidence linking Hucke to most of the murders.

  Most of the evidence, besides the knife, consisted of car parts stored in the garage. Apparently Hucke had driven the cars to another neighborhood, parked near an El line, and taken something from each car as a souvenir. Then he’d ridden the El home. Often the souvenirs were personal—an insurance card or the car’s registration. He kept all the papers in a box that Johnson swore he found open on a workbench.

  Johnson also said a lot of the other evidence linking Hucke to the crimes was in plain sight throughout the house, making them easy to trace. I had to wonder, and I hoped that in his zeal, Johnson hadn’t done anything to jeopardize the case when it went to trial.

  But that was no longer my worry. As long as I remained a forgotten incident, the reason for the arrest but not the reason behind the charges, I was happy. Jimmy and I were free to continue with our own lives.

  Which we did. The Blackstone Rangers didn’t bother us during the last few days of school, and I had hopes that they would leave us alone for good.

  Mrs. Foster paid me a generous amount, plus a bonus, pleased to know what happened to her husband after all. I used some of the money for Christmas presents—even going to Marshall Field’s again to buy Norene her own Crissy doll. I probably spent too much, and I didn’t adhere to Black Christmas principles, but I felt free for the first time in weeks. I put the rest of the money into an account as a cushion and felt some of the financial pressure ease.

  Not all of it, though. I called the insurance company and reconfirmed our talk after the new year. If I could continue to freelance and find jobs that were a little less dangerous, both Jimmy and I would be happy.

  I still had one job to wrap up. McMillan and I planned to meet in the week between Christmas and New Year’s to pick the security team for the board meeting. I would bring in a few of my people; he would bring in some of his, and we would both review their backgrounds.

  Until then, I concentrated on healing and the holiday. On Christmas Eve, Althea managed to guilt me into joining them for midnight services. The church was full, just like church had been during the Christmas Eves of my childhood. The smell of fresh pine boughs brought back that last holiday, when I’d stepped out in front of the choir and sung “Silent Night” in my pure boy’s soprano. Martin Luther King Jr., then just a child, stood in the row behind me, and there were all sorts of possibilities ahead of us.

  On this Christmas Eve, in the last week of that horrible year 1968, Jimmy stood beside me, his face turned toward the altar as his raspy, untrained voice struggled with carols he had never learned. I kept a hand on his shoulder and didn’t sing. My wounds ached. I hadn’t been in a Christmas service in decades, and I always thought that when I returned, the feeling of warmth and security from the years before my parents died would return also.

  It didn’t.

  I left the church, carrying a candle into the darkness with the rest of the congregation, feeling more bereft than I had in ages.

  THIRTY-THREE

  LAURA RETURNED on January second, as scheduled. McMillan picked her up at the airport while I assembled our security team. We met in the lobby of Sturdy’s office building.

  My bandages were off and my arm, while sore, was fine. The scar on my face hadn’t puckered, thank heavens, but it was an angry red line that crossed from my temple to my chin. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize myself, and I was beginning to understand the despair that Elaine had felt when she saw all the stitches running across her beautiful skin.

  Laura saw my scar first, and reached to touch it, stopping herself just in time.

  We had agreed that this meeting would be all business.

  Although it was hard. I had missed her more than I wanted to admit. She looked tanned and fit, as if the trip had done her good. That afternoon, she wore a mannish suit and little makeup, her hair pulled away from her face like a woman about to do battle.

  We arrived at the eighth-floor conference room a few minutes late, by design. Laura marched in, McMillan beside her, and the five members of the security team flanking them, surprising all but a handful of board members—the handful that Laura knew would vote with her as majority shareholder.

  I stood near the arched windows, arms crossed, and watched the proceedings. Laura handled herself beautifully. Cronk challenged her the moment she walked in, demanding that McMillan and the security team leave so that the board meeting could continue. Laura calmly explained the threats she had received and said that she was not going to relinquish her security, especially since she planned to take over Sturdy Investments that very afternoon.

  The meeting went from there. With several neat votes, Laura became chairman of the board, fired the team her father had put into place—including Cronk and the men who had insulted her at lunch—and established her own team to run Sturdy Investments.

  In the space of a few hours, Laura had gone from the daughter of the company’s founder to the h
ead of the company. Cronk and his team didn’t seem to know what hit them.

  They’d figure it out soon enough. And by then, their jobs—and their power—were already gone.

  After the meeting, we assembled again in the lobby.

  “How much trouble do you think they’re going to give us?” Laura asked McMillan.

  “None,” he said. “They don’t dare. They wanted to prevent you from doing this, and you did an end run around them. Now that you’re in, they can’t get you out without calling attention to themselves.”

  He smiled at her, squeezed her arm, then said, “I have some public-relations announcements to take care of, but I think we need a victory celebration. Tell me when and where, and I’ll meet you.”

  “Smokey?” Laura said.

  “I have some errands to run myself,” I said. A victory celebration would be easier without me, and I did have one errand I had promised Mrs. Weisman I would complete that afternoon.

  “All right,” Laura said. “My apartment at six. I expect both of you to be there.”

  Then she left us, skirting through the crowd, looking more regal than I had ever seen her.

  “A hell of a lady,” McMillan said, watching her go.

  “A hell of a woman,” I said, and headed to my car.

  * * *

  There was half an hour of daylight left when I parked my Impala on the access road leading into the newer part of the cemetery. Chicago was filled with graveyards. This one, on the northeast side, hid in a cluster of trees so old that they could have been part of the city’s park system.

  My dress shoes sank into the ground as I walked. The snow the day before had melted, just like it had done all winter. The ground wasn’t yet frozen solid, which was why the tombstone Mrs. Weisman and I bought had been erected even though it was January.

  My hands felt naked. I hadn’t brought a flower or any token—I hadn’t even realized until now that I needed one.

  I stopped at the plot that had, until this morning, been marked by a small square number. The earth still looked disturbed, even though the grave had been there for weeks. I crouched beside the new stone. It glistened in the dim light, the carvings fresh and precise, not worn away by time—