Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  That more than anything confirmed my suspicions. I wondered if Franklin had reached Laura and I prayed that he had.

  I pushed open the door to the stairwell and took the stairs two at a time. No one else joined me on the stairs, and when I reached the penthouse level, the door was propped open again.

  I burst through it, expecting to find Withers or blood on the floor, but the hallway was empty. Laura’s door was closed. I pressed my ear against it, but heard nothing through the thick wood. The weight of my body made the door ease open and I nearly tumbled inside.

  The apartment felt unfamiliar. Lights were on, and through the windows on the far end, I could see the city glittering in the darkness. But something was different here. It took me a moment to know what it was. It was the smell. Cigarettes.

  Laura didn’t smoke.

  The phone rang and a shiver ran through me. I knew, without answering, that Franklin was on the line.

  I pushed the door closed, careful to latch it quietly. Then I moved down the hallway, gun in front of me, careful to look all around me. A familiar voice spoke softly from the living room.

  “…not your fight, is it? You have all this. Why lose it over a scruffy little street urchin who would probably knife you in your sleep if he got the chance?”

  Withers. Sounding so reasonable. Talking about Jimmy. Which meant he had no idea where Jimmy was.

  The phone continued to ring. I peered around the edge of the hallway. Laura was tied to one of her ornate metal chairs. Her feet were tied separately and her arms were bound in two places, the biceps and the forearms. The left side of her face was bruised and her mouth was red with blood.

  Withers stood behind her, smoking a cigarette, the tip glowing coal red as he inhaled. Another cigarette had been stubbed into an ashtray on a nearby table, and I wondered if its tip had touched her skin at all.

  He had once told me that he could make anyone talk. That, if he were given his head, he could remake them in his own image.

  I couldn’t sneak around behind him, not with the layout of the apartment, and I couldn’t risk a direct shot. He was too close to Laura.

  He hadn’t seen me yet. He had taken the cigarette from his mouth, and held it between two fingers as he ran his hand down Laura’s hair.

  “How much are you willing to risk for a child that isn’t even yours? Your looks?” He brought the cigarette near her eye. “Your life?”

  Laura didn’t flinch. She kept staring straight ahead as if she hadn’t heard him at all.

  I leaned back against the wall, completely out of Withers’s view. The ringing phone became a backdrop. I had to ignore it and concentrate on Withers’s voice.

  I slipped my left hand in my pocket, grabbed one of the dimes, and clutched it between my thumb and forefinger. Then, crouching, I pitched the dime toward the window as if I were skimming stones across a lake.

  The dime clattered against the glass and tumbled to the ground. Withers looked in that direction and I launched myself at him.

  Laura screamed and ducked her head away from his hand.

  Withers started to turn toward me as I tackled him. He stubbed the cigarette into the back of my neck, the stench of burning hair mixing with the smell of tobacco. Then the pain hit me, running all along my nervous system, making me tremble.

  He used his knees to get me off him and rolled away from me. I yanked his shirt, pulling him toward me. His fingers scrabbled toward an end table, knocking down a hunting knife. I reached for it, and so did he. He found it first, and slashed at me, missing.

  I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him into a sitting position.

  He slashed at me again, cutting through my shirt and nicking my belly.

  I shoved my gun against his heart.

  “Drop the knife,” I said.

  His gaze met mine. To my surprise, he smiled.

  “Don’t threaten me, Dalton. We both know you can’t go through with it. Just tell me where the kid is and I’ll be on my way.”

  His hand still clutched the knife. I saw his fingers tighten, felt the muscles in his arm move to start the thrust, and I pulled the trigger.

  The sound was impossibly loud in the space, an explosion times fifty. His blood splattered the floor behind him. He jerked once, his face having no time to register a reaction, and then his entire body collapsed.

  I held him up by his shirt collar, staring into his lifeless eyes. His weight pulled on my arm.

  “Smokey?” Laura sounded as if she were speaking through a deep tunnel.

  I let him go. He fell backward, slamming against the floor, sliding on the blood, smearing it.

  There was blood on my hand and arm, my chest and face. His blood, still warm.

  “Smokey?” Laura said again.

  I turned to her. She looked terrified. Of me? Of everything? I didn’t know. “Where’s Jimmy?”

  “He’s okay.” The wounded side of her mouth didn’t move. “Are there others?”

  It took me a moment to realize what she was asking. Other people who were going to come after Jimmy. Other threats on this long and horrible night.

  “I don’t know.” I looked at Withers. His mouth was open, his eyes staring at nothing. The scars that pockmarked his face made him look vulnerable.

  I hadn’t asked him anything, hadn’t found out the extent of his investigation, hadn’t found out who he told.

  “He came here alone?” I asked Laura.

  She nodded, twisting her body toward me. She was still tied.

  I stood and undid the ropes on her arms, my fingers staining the cord. There was a belt wrapped around her chest, just below her breasts, a standard black belt with an open gold buckle. I glanced at Withers. His dark pants had no belt at all.

  I went to the front of her, untied her feet as her hands struggled to unbuckle the belt. She was shaking too.

  Logically, Withers wouldn’t have told anyone he was coming here. His job was to kill Jimmy, and the fewer people who knew that the better.

  But had he informed his superiors that he had found us or was he only supposed to contact them when he got the job done?

  “What did he tell you?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” She got the belt off and flung it across the room as if it burned her. The thought made the back of my neck throb. I didn’t feel the cut on my stomach, though. I looked at it, realized it was just a flesh wound, and decided not to worry about it.

  We had a much larger problem.

  Laura was staring at him, her face a greenish white. She had obviously never seen a corpse before. “We should call the police.”

  “Laura, for chrissake. He’s an undercover FBI agent. How do you want to explain that?”

  “Would they know?”

  “They’d know.”

  Her eyes, wide and blue, met mine. “He used your name.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This isn’t about Jimmy?”

  “It’s about Jimmy.” I glanced around the apartment. There was no sign of him. “Where is he?”

  “Safe,” she said again. The word sounded rote, and that was when I realized she had used the same word in answer to Withers. She hadn’t told him anything else.

  “Laura, you can tell me. Where’s Jimmy?”

  She blinked, glanced at Withers, and then stood, slowly. Her legs buckled and I caught her. She was shaking so hard I thought she was going to come apart. I pulled her into my arms.

  “I didn’t think anyone was going to come,” she said against my chest. “I didn’t think you’d come. He was so strong, and he would tell me what he was going to do to me. I didn’t know how long I would be able to stay quiet. I thought maybe I could survive the burns, but I’m not good with pain, Smokey. I was afraid he’d find a place that I couldn’t tolerate, and I’d tell him.”

  I wrapped my arms around her tight, holding her as close as I could. “You did fine.”

  “No, I didn’t. He got in and he got me, and it was only a matter of time—”
r />   I grabbed her elbows and pushed her back so that I could see her face. It was smeared with the blood from my shirt.

  “Yes, it was only a matter of time,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. Everyone breaks. That’s why torture works. He set out to torture you, Laura, and he would have continued until you finally told him what he wanted to hear.”

  Her lower lip trembled.

  “But that’s not a failing for you. You did wonderfully. You got Jimmy out of his way. You held him off, and I got here. You did what you had to do. You did better than most would have in this situation.”

  “I was so frightened, Smokey.”

  I nodded, then held her again. This wasn’t over, not yet, but I wasn’t willing to let her go. She had nearly died because I had asked a favor of her. And she was worried that she had somehow failed.

  “Where’s Jimmy?” I asked again.

  She let out a small sigh, and collapsed against me for a brief moment before standing up. Her clothes were ruined, the blood on her face streaked even more than it had been a minute before.

  “My father built this place,” she said. “For me.”

  Her father was a small-time crook who had moved up to become a wealthy businessman. Obviously I was supposed to find some significance in that.

  “There’s a false wall behind my closet. It leads into a big storage room. For my important papers, he said. I put Jimmy in there, told him to be quiet.”

  A closet. I had hidden in a closet the night my parents had been murdered. “How did you know that Withers was coming?”

  “He picked the lock.” Her voice got stronger as she spoke. She was coming back to herself. “I heard it. I’d already showed Jimmy the closet. I pushed him there, got him inside, and went for the phone. That’s when he got in. Withers. Him.”

  She gestured toward the body and winced.

  The phone. It was still ringing. I turned away from her and found it, picking it up. “Franklin?”

  “Smokey?”

  “It’s okay. Thanks for the help. I’ll talk to you soon.” And then I hung up.

  Laura was frowning at me.

  “I called you too late,” I said.

  “It started to ring after he already had me. I tried, Smokey. I threw things at him, I tried to get past him. I figured if I could get to the stairs I’d be all right. I made it to the hallway and that’s when he got me and I couldn’t get away.”

  Her voice broke.

  “He do anything else to you?”

  “Hit me, threw me in the chair. I think I passed out.”

  I was certain she passed out.

  “We need to get Jimmy,” she said.

  I looked at her, blood-covered and bruised, and knew I looked no better. The living room was a mess—shattered table, the knife, and blood all over the marble floor.

  And the body in the middle of it all. Jimmy had seen one death. He didn’t need to see another—and he didn’t need to know that I caused it.

  “We need to take care of this first,” I said.

  “But he would have heard everything.” She was right about that. I remembered how it felt to be tucked up in a small space, listening to the violence—and then, even worse, the silence.

  “All right,” I said. “Tell him you’re fine. Tell him he can come out as long as he doesn’t leave your room. I don’t want him to see this, Laura. I don’t want him to see the body or the blood.”

  She nodded, looking at Withers. “What are we going to do about him, if we can’t call the cops?”

  I had the beginnings of a plan. But it was going to take a lot of work, and it was going to be a very long night.

  “You could leave,” she said. “I could call them, say he broke in here. Say I shot him.”

  “With my gun?”

  She shrugged.

  “And what about Jimmy? Certainly people in the building saw you with Jimmy.”

  “I don’t know, Smokey. I’m just trying to figure out what to do.”

  “We don’t bring in the Chicago police, and we certainly don’t lie to them.” I could feel her rising panic. The reality of what happened was finally hitting her. “Talk to Jimmy, but don’t let him see you yet. Wash your face and put some iodine on that lip. Get some clean clothes, but don’t change into them. We have some cleanup to do.”

  Her lips thinned, but she didn’t say anything. As she started down the hall, I said, “Is that rug in the entry the only one you have?”

  She stopped, glanced at Withers again, and swallowed. “It’s the widest.”

  “It’s not some priceless antique, is it?”

  “No. It’s not priceless.”

  “But it’s traceable?”

  “It’s just an oriental rug, Smokey. It’s expensive, but it’s not that unique.” Then she walked down the hallway, looking as haughty as she had when she had first come to my office six months before. Her defense mechanism: look imperious. It probably worked most of the time. Once I got Withers out of here, it might work again.

  I crouched and examined the mess. The blood had spattered to the front and back, but very little of it had gone to the side. There was the smear, but so far neither Laura nor I had stepped in it. There were no telltale tracks away from the body.

  Blood had hit the wall and part of an ornamental table, but nothing else. I had probably gotten blood on the phone. Cleanup would be hard, but we could do it.

  I took off my shoes and examined the soles. There was no blood on them at all. I set them far from the body and took off my socks, putting them over my hands. Then I rolled up my pants legs and went to work.

  First, I searched him. He had fifteen dollars in his front pocket. I unrolled the money to see if anything was hidden inside it. Just an unidentified receipt, printed from an old cash register, with yesterday’s date on it. I left the entire wad plus some miscellaneous coins in the pocket. All I wanted to remove was anything that identified him, the city, or me and Laura. Everything else would remain on him.

  His other front pants pocket was empty. His breast pocket had been ruined by the gunshot—bits of cigarette were mixed with the blood, and the package of Pall Malls had crumpled oddly. I didn’t touch that at all.

  I slid my hands under his back and propped him on his side. Blood dripped off his shirt into the pool on the floor. The blood moved slowly, already beginning to congeal. I reached into his back pocket, found a wallet that contained a hundred dollars and a New York driver’s license with Withers’s photo, claiming his name was Earl Cameron. Tucked farther back was a staff parking permit from Columbia University, and a professor’s university identification.

  So he had posed as a professor. It made sense, considering the unrest at the university in April. Perhaps he had been involved with that. He certainly seemed to be in all the hot spots this year.

  His other pocket contained a small notebook. It was soaked with blood, but I opened it anyway. The first few pages were hard to read. Careless notes with July dates. At the end of some of them, he wrote “Report filed.” The farther into it I got, the more I realized what I had.

  These were his case notes.

  He had infiltrated the local Panthers at the end of July, and by August, had this notation: “No plans—checking Rangers.” If he had been investigating the Rangers, that would have brought him to my neighborhood. I thumbed forward, and found what I was looking for.

  “8/21: Surprise, surprise. S.D. in Chicago.”

  No further notes like that, although my address had been scribbled down, and so had the Hilton. Then there was a list of last names that read like a Who’s Who of my acquaintances in Chicago, a checkmark beside each.

  Laura’s name was not there. Although one notation from the day before chilled me. It was a list of all the residents of the building at Randolph and State. Had he followed me into the Sturdy Investments office last Saturday? I hadn’t seen him do it. Or maybe someone else had seen me. I was in the Loop, after all. Any one of my co-workers could have seen me
enter the building.

  And then the last notation in the book was that day’s date and Laura’s address, followed by exclamation points. He had figured it out, maybe through the connection to Sturdy Investments.

  And that had led him here.

  I thumbed through the notebook again, searching for all the “Report filed” notations. He had marked the last one on August 15—and he hadn’t found me until August 21. He had been waiting, just as I figured.

  He hadn’t told anyone he had found us. No one knew we were in Chicago.

  I let out a small sigh of relief, then forced myself to continue. I stuffed the notebook in my pocket, patted Withers down to see if he had anything else on him, and found nothing. Then I picked him up and carried him to the rug.

  He was heavier than he looked. I dumped him on the rug, but didn’t roll it up yet. Instead, I stood, found Laura’s utility room, and washed my hands, drying them on a rag, which I threw in the sink. She was rich. She had a washer and a dryer in that room. Both of them would come in handy.

  I went back and rolled up the rug, careful not to get any blood on the outside of it.

  Laura returned just as I was finishing. Her face was bruised and swollen, and the side of her mouth was a comic orange. “Jimmy wants to see you.”

  “He will,” I said. “Just for a moment. When we’re done.”

  She looked at the rug, then at the mess on the floor. “I’ll get a mop.”

  “Rags first,” I said. “We need to wipe down some surfaces.”

  She nodded, got me some cleaning rags, and we set to work. It took longer than I expected to get the blood off the floor. I kept carrying the bucket back to the utility room and dumping it in the sink. If I got caught getting this body out of the building, we were in trouble. The traps would be full of blood.

  Laura found something that made the marble shine. She was wiping across the spot where Withers had lain when I came back into the living room.

  “I’ll finish up,” I said. “Go take a shower, put on some clean clothes. We’ll see Jimmy in a few minutes.”

  She frowned at me, but didn’t question any further. She walked down the hallway, disappearing into the darkness.