Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I put the gun back in its shoulder holster, sat on the arm of the couch grabbed the phone book, looking up Johnson’s precinct.

  Someone answered and promised to patch me through. The wait seemed interminable. I glanced at the clock. It was after four. I was late for work.

  I squinted, felt the tip of an anger that had been building since I saw that crumpled body on the step. If I had been less concerned with going to work, making a salary, guarding rich white people in their rich white hotel, maybe I would have seen all of this coming. Maybe I would have talked with Brian’s mother, felt that frisson of warning, searched and found Brian while he was still alive.

  Maybe. But I would never know.

  A female voice came on the line and told me that Detective Johnson was not at his desk and would I like to leave a message?

  I left the address of the abandoned building, told him to check the basement. When the woman asked my name, I hesitated.

  “Tell him his hotel informant called.”

  “Your name, sir?”

  “That’ll have to do.”

  And then I hung up, still staring at the clock. By the time I got to work, it would be nearly five. Things were probably already getting rough on the streets. This was the night that Humphrey was supposed to win the nomination. The Secret Service had already informed us that the candidate didn’t go to the convention hall—it was customary for him to wait in the hotel and watch on television.

  There would be more police, federal officials, and demonstrators than I cared to think about. If Johnson hadn’t gotten me thinking about that list, I wouldn’t go to work at all.

  I peeled off my borrowed suit, threw it on the twin bed in the boys’ room, and hid my gun beneath it just in case Malcolm arrived unexpectedly. Then I headed for the shower.

  I would go to work, but not so much for Johnson as for me. This had become personal. I wanted to see the names on the guest list as badly as he did—as well as the names in the restaurant’s reservation book and maybe, if I could find it, the names of the outsiders working security detail at the hotel.

  But I had a hunch I might learn something at the hotel. I would stop in, and see what I could find. If nothing panned out, then I would go to Lincoln Park and see if anyone had heard of the Professor.

  * * *

  Getting to work was a problem all by itself. I had to go past the International Amphitheater and Grant Park. My normal route up Michigan was out of the question—it had been periodically closed for the last few days for marchers or delegates or police. Lake Shore Drive was usually my second option, but that required me to cross Grant Park on Congress—and if the park was even more congested than it had been the night before, I might never make it.

  So I took the new Dan Ryan Expressway. I had never taken the Expressway. Franklin disliked it because it had made so many people homeless—especially through the Black Belt—and I had let his opinion influence mine.

  Still, I had to admit, merging into traffic at sixty-five miles an hour felt heady, and I wondered why I hadn’t done this before. Chicago politics weren’t my politics, and Chicago’s problems weren’t my problems.

  I had let myself get suckered into someone else’s way of doing things, into living a life I didn’t recognize and didn’t want.

  I had put my gun and flashlight back in the glove box, and I wore my Hilton pass around my neck. Late or not, I was going to get into the building. As much chaos as there had been all week, I doubted anyone would be paying attention as to when an employee clocked in.

  There was a lot of traffic, but it moved quickly. The breeze from the open window was heavy with exhaust and humidity. I had the radio on as loud as it would go, listening to the report from the convention. The delegates were voting on the platform plank about the Vietnam War. It sounded like the peaceniks were going to lose.

  I switched stations as I got closer to downtown, heard the voice of WBBM’s Jerry Williams urging calm. Williams was an acerbic talk show host who liked to stir up trouble; I had no idea why he was telling people to calm down—until I realized he was talking about rioting in Grant Park.

  At that moment, I took the off-ramp into the Loop and found myself in the middle of a fog. I recognized the smells—mace and tear gas mixed. I rolled up my window, kept one hand on the wheel, and reached across the passenger side, rolling up the other window, while trying to keep my stinging eyes on the road. I weaved, missed another car, and then got my bearings again.

  Shouting and voices amplified through bullhorns echoed throughout the Loop. White college kids, Yippies, hippies, and sedate-looking demonstrators mixed with the after-work crowd, all wiping at their faces as the cloud rolled over them. The tear gas had to be coming from the park. The cloud seemed thickest to the east of us.

  A wall of blue seemed to fill each intersection and police squadrols were parked kitty-corner to block access to Michigan Avenue. I didn’t want to go there. I needed to get to the Hilton.

  The back entrance and the parking garage would be open. The delegates and candidates would have to be able to come and go. As I made my way down Eighth, I could see the edges of Grant Park in the distance. Crowds and crowds of people filled the park, surrounded by National Guard and police. The tear gas cloud was thinner here—obviously the tear gas had been deployed earlier and wasn’t being used at the moment.

  Chants echoed and nearly drowned out the squeal of bullhorns, but I couldn’t make out any words. I reached Wabash, and turned north.

  The parking garage below the Hilton was guarded by more police than I had ever seen. I lifted my pass as I drove into the garage, and a white policeman wearing a gas mask indicated that I should roll down the window. I plugged my nose and shook my head. He pointed again at the window, and instead, I pressed the pass against the glass.

  He bent, his eyes hidden by his mask, and peered at the pass before waving me forward.

  I drove down two levels into the darkness, as far from the floating toxic cloud as I could get. The crowd noise grew faint and my radio crackled with static. I let out a small sigh, relieved to be away from the tension in the streets.

  Before I got out of the car, I made sure the glove box was locked. I didn’t want anyone using my weapon in the heat of the moment. Then I got out, locked the car, and headed to the service elevators.

  The smell of tear gas was faint down here, and it mingled with the stench of vomit and gasoline. The service elevator was covered with red, white, and blue confetti, as if a garbage bag filled with it had exploded.

  I got out, went down the familiar back corridor to the employee lockers, feeling the weight of the job fall on my shoulders as if it had never left. There was even a part of me that worried because I was late.

  I clenched my fist, made myself remember the funeral, that horrible basement, and move on. The locker room was empty—shifts generally changed at the same time—and my uniforms hung side by side on the employee rack. I grabbed the closest uniform, brought it to my locker, and changed quickly, hoping no one would see me here. Then I went to the time clock, grabbed my card, and punched in.

  Then I returned to the hallway and walked to the tiny Housekeeping office. To call it an office was charitable. It was a cubicle, and the two women who headed the Housekeeping division did most of their paperwork there—paperwork that included check-in and check-out times per room.

  Usually that paperwork was a very faint carbon of the main desk’s daily check-in, check-out sheet, complete with names. It had been done like that for years, apparently because it was easier to type one list with half a dozen carbons than two or three lists with two or three carbons. From there, the heads of Housekeeping made the cleaning assignments.

  The Secret Service had put an end to that practice at the Sunday meeting once someone had realized it was going on. But that still left the forms from the previous week, if no one had destroyed them yet.

  The light was on in the cubicle, but it was empty. I slipped inside. A row of clipboards h
ung on the wall. I grabbed the closest, saw the typewritten form with no names. The check-out and check-in information was listed by room. I thumbed through the sheets of paper, saw that all of these forms had been specially typed and set the clipboard back on the wall.

  Then I grabbed the next one. Under the first sheet was the first faded carbon—the names smudged and some of the letters unreadable. Most of the rooms had no names—instead were blocks reserved for delegates from various states. Others had reservations by campaigns.

  It was also clear why the Secret Service clamped down on this practice. Senator McGovern’s room on the fourth floor was clearly marked on the sheet. I scanned back through the previous day’s sheets, looking for familiar names. I saw none, and felt my frustration grow. A lot of rooms simply had “Government” marked across from them—obviously the places where the various Secret Service, FBI, and other authority figures were staying.

  I’d have to get to the Haymarket Lounge and see if I could find a way to look at the reservation book without drawing too much attention to myself.

  I took the stairs up to the first floor. The green carpet was stained—remains from the acid attacks earlier in the week. The stench of rotten eggs remained too.

  As I opened the steel door and stepped into the main part of the hotel, the din assaulted me. Voices in agitated conversation, shouting, and the sound of television sets on full blast, tinny strains of “We Shall Overcome” caught my ears and I looked at the nearest TV screen—a portable set sitting on front desk as a courtesy to the delegates. The set’s rabbit ears were extended as far as they could go, and the reception was still lousy.

  On the screen, white people in suits were waving handmade Stop the War signs in the convention hall. That anger that I was keeping tamped down flared—they had no right to that anthem—and then disappeared as the convention’s band started playing “Happy Days are Here Again.”

  Beside me, a white woman wearing a green dress and pearls, snorted. “Happy Days are where again?” she asked me, sweeping her hand toward the windows. “Do they even know what the hell’s going on here?”

  I glanced at the windows and then froze in surprise. People, most of them wearing T-shirts and blue jeans, stood in front of the building, so many of them that I couldn’t see past them to the street beyond. At the moment, they were peaceful, but if they decided to move in any direction, there would be trouble.

  The woman continued to stare at them—I wasn’t even sure she was aware she had spoken to a security guard—and I moved away from her, toward the Haymarket Lounge. No delegates crowded the hallways—they were all at the convention—but campaign workers did, wearing their bright buttons and cheerful hats. Their smiles were long gone, though, and as I approached the hotel bar, I realized a lot of McCarthy supporters were inside it, drinks in hand.

  This was the night their loss would be confirmed, and they knew it. Or perhaps it had been the defeat of the peace plan that had gotten to them.

  The waitresses were working hard—several had quit during the week and those who were left were scrambling. Their short skirts rode high, and more than one tugged at her low-cut blouse as she carried a tray toward the drinkers.

  Outside, the gas was so thick it looked like smoke. The lounge’s patrons watched the windows as if the demonstrators were out there for entertainment; only a handful stared at the television screen in the corner.

  The restaurant itself was busy, patrons huddling at their tables. Waitresses were busy here too and the hostess was dealing with a long line of drop-ins, many of them with wet handkerchiefs in their hands. They were refugees from the streets who had somehow gotten past the police barricade at the front door; many wore press passes and all of them had red, teary eyes and blotchy skin from being gassed.

  I went behind the hostess desk. The reservation book was open to the middle, the day blocked off in units. I had just turned to the beginning of the book to see where it started when I heard my name.

  I turned. Roy Gaines, the Secret Service man who was coordinating everything with the Hilton, stood behind me, arms crossed.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  I expected him to take me outside or lead me to one of the doors, but instead we went behind the main desk to the hotel offices. He led me inside one of the smaller offices and closed the door.

  The room was a mass of paperwork. Maps, Yippie posters, and Dump the Hump signs covered the walls. A large map of the hotel behind the desk had areas circled with black Magic Marker. There were no windows. The desk itself was covered with more anticonvention literature and newspapers. On the top was that day’s Chicago Tribune, headline blaring “Dems Recess in Uproar: Galleries Lead Cry, ‘Let’s Go Home.’”

  Gaines shut the door and stared at me for a moment. I saw a coldness in his face that I hadn’t actually seen before.

  “Who do you work for?” he asked.

  Whatever I had expected him to ask, it hadn’t been that. “The Hilton.”

  “I can listen to the bullshit or you can tell me the truth. Who’re you working for?”

  “The Hilton,” I said, letting myself sound a little panicked because that was what any normal citizen would do. I didn’t feel panicked. I felt very calm.

  “I’m not going to charge you with anything if that’s what you’re worried about. Just tell me who you’re working for. The Panthers? MOBE?”

  “I’ve been working here since May,” I said.

  He shrugged. “MOBE has had an office in the Loop since February. Some groups plan ahead. What’s your mission here, Grimshaw?”

  The name startled me. Hardly anyone at work called me by the last name I’d hidden behind. I wasn’t used to it.

  “I don’t have a mission, except to do my job.” I nodded toward a poster that read Confront the Warmakers. “And I think you need me to do it right now.”

  “The last thing we want is you out there,” he said. “What were you doing in the restaurant?”

  “Didn’t you see the crowd in front of the plate glass window? Half the people in line looked like they’d been gassed. How many unauthorized people are in this hotel at the moment?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was flat. “You tell me.”

  I felt as if I’d walked in the middle of a dream. I’d gone from being a valued employee to this in less than a week. “What’s this about?”

  “Tell me who you work for.”

  “Tell me why you’re asking.”

  “I’m here to protect the candidates,” he said, “and I have reason to believe that you’re a threat.”

  “That I’m—?” I shook my head. “Why?”

  “We’ve been hearing a lot of questions about you in the last day or so, questions we can’t answer.”

  “Questions?” I felt numb. But this wasn’t unexpected. I should have been ready for this from the moment the delegates descended on Chicago. “What kind of questions?”

  “You know the drill. Who’re your friends? Where do you spend time? We realized that no one knows much about you, Mr. Grimshaw.”

  “Who has been asking these questions?” This time the urgency in my voice was real.

  “I got some phone calls suggesting you may not be who you seem to be. And then today, we had to throw out a man who was questioning some of the security guards.”

  I felt cold. “What did he look like?”

  “Does it matter?” Apparently that last question sealed my guilt in his mind because he said, “Consider yourself fired. You’ll wait here until I can get someone to escort you off the premises.”

  “Wait,” I said. I wanted to keep him there, wanted to keep him talking, to find out what he knew about me. “How do you know this isn’t a setup? Maybe someone is trying to get rid of me.”

  “Why would anyone care about you, Mr. Grimshaw?” he asked and let himself out the door. I heard the lock turn. I was trapped inside.

  I paced the room, wondering how long they’d keep me here, wondering how much they k
new. Who had been calling? What had the Secret Service learned?

  Then I stopped, realized this was my last opportunity to search the Hilton records. I went to the desk and began rifling the papers, not sure what I was looking for. I found duty rosters, dates, names of suspicious persons. I found reports on Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and David Dellinger. An analysis of the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam told me that’s what MOBE stood for, and I saw other reports on the Blackstone Rangers and the Devil’s Disciples.

  But I saw no names of officers, no names of FBI officials or Secret Service operatives. I found nothing useful, and I was getting desperate. Someone knew who I was, but I had no idea who they were.

  I had been alone for at least half an hour, maybe more, when I heard a key in the door. I backed away from the desk, careful not to knock any of the piles down, and hurried to one of the chairs. I sat there, hands folded, biting my lower lip and trying hard to look terrified when two of the other security guards entered.

  One of them, a white man from the day shift, looked vaguely familiar. His name badge read Duffy. He glowered at me. The black man beside him, Donald Lavelle, had worked with me on the July thefts.

  “Let’s go,” Duffy said as he flanked me. Lavelle walked to the other side of me and didn’t say a word.

  We stepped out of the office and the air got cooler. I could hear conversation still rising from the lobby, but beyond that, there were sirens and screams.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “None of your fucking business,” Duffy said.

  We went to the service elevator, and as Duffy punched the subbasement for the parking garage, I said, “I have to clear out my locker.”

  He didn’t respond. I reached past him, hit the button for the basement, and he glared at me. I raised my eyebrows at him, daring him to do something.

  He didn’t.

  The doors opened to the employee level and I walked down the hall to the locker room, now leading my escorts. All I had in my locker was my clothes, but I didn’t have many and I wasn’t about to leave them. Besides, I wasn’t going to make this easy for anyone.