Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Nelscott, Kris

  I was still trying to wrap my mind around the things that Sinkovich had told me. Because I really hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the Chicago mob, even with its affiliation with Sturdy.

  All we had been trying to do was get the mob out of Sturdy. We hadn’t really—or maybe I hadn’t really—focused on what the mob was.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “The mob would work with a black businessman in the Black Belt? I thought the mob was white only.”

  “In other cities, yeah, but imagine some white guy coming deep in the Black Belt and trying to get stuff done. He might own a building, but he couldn’t run policy or handle the girls in a way that didn’t arouse suspicion.”

  “So the mob has black members,” I said.

  “In Chicago, yeah, sure,” Sinkovich said. “They ain’t lieutenants, most of them, but if they got juice, they got connections.”

  I was still frowning. I hadn’t realized that. It challenged a lot of my assumptions about life on the South Side.

  Sinkovich could see that I was still grappling with this.

  “Okay,” he said. “Think it through. Chicago had a syndicate long before the Outfit, and before that, we got gangsters up the wazoo. Y’know, the Depression? Capone? There was a big Irish contingent in the Chicago Syndicate. We got Yids, we got Micks, we got Wops—”

  “Now you’re just doing that to piss me off, aren’t you?” I snapped.

  He grinned, then shrugged. “Hey, I’m your basic Polack. Whaddo I know?”

  I shook my head. “Stop now, all right?”

  “All right,” he said. “But what I’m telling you is this: We’re clannish and bigoted in this city, but we’ll go to bed with whoever we need to go to bed with to make money. The Outfit is mostly I-tals and Jews, but they ain’t gonna get a lot done in parts of this city with that background. So there’re Irish in the mob, which is where you get your connection to the mayor. And then, here in the Black Belt, they ain’t got no qualms about working with the right blacks. Rumor says they do it through Dawson.”

  “William Dawson?” I asked. “The United States Congressman?”

  “One and the same,” Sinkovich said. “He used to approve whatever went on down here, but after the Lewis shooting, folks was saying that Daley defanged Dawson, put some power white guys over him, and let him think he was still in charge. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds true, and in this city, what sounds true usually is.”

  “Okay,” I said as I tried to clear my head of all the racist slurs mixed in with the strange history lesson. “You’re telling me that the Outfit has an interest in the Starlite.”

  “I know Eddie Turner, owner of the Starlite, used to run numbers for the Outfit. I know he had a way with systems, and I suspect he got rewarded big time when Garon bit it. Turner ain’t small potatoes. He shows up at all kindsa functions all over the city.”

  “And he’s black?” I thought I would have known about black men who received city-wide attention.

  “E-yup. He don’t get his name in the papers much, but you see him, lurking around the edges of events, kinda like. Camera-shy. Like you.”

  It surprised me that Sinkovich had noticed that. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, since he was a cop, and a better one than I usually gave him credit for.

  “Camera shy because of his mob connections?” I asked.

  “You got mob connections?” Sinkovich asked, and then answered himself. “’Course you don’t. Because one don’t follow the other. I think there’s some other reason this guy’s not letting his mug get into the papers. But I ain’t been curious enough to investigate.”

  There could be a million reasons for Turner’s unwillingness to be photographed, although the main one might be exactly the same as mine: His name didn’t match the name others knew him under.

  “And this Eddie Turner,” I said, “he owns the Starlite. He doesn’t just run the operation.”

  “Oh, he runs the operation,” Sinkovich said. “Not that you’d find that out from any newspaper or legal document. On paper, the Starlite hotel and its restaurant are the only businesses he owns.”

  “On paper,” I repeated. “Meaning those are his only legitimate businesses. What else does he do?”

  “Your kid stumbled into it, my friend,” Sinkovich said. “It ain’t just about the by-the-hour girls. It’s about selling them off like so much meat.”

  The casserole rolled over in my stomach. I stood, unable to sit with that image, especially since my brain immediately applied it to Lacey. I walked over to the window and stood in front of it, but didn’t see anything except my own reflection, a big grim man who looked vaguely defeated.

  “You knew about this,” I said after a moment.

  Sinkovich’s reflection raised its hands like I had pulled a gun. “I just found out today, Grimshaw, because you asked.”

  “That’s a lot to find out in one hour,” I said.

  “That’s the second time you said that. You implying something?”

  “This morning, you said you didn’t know anything about the Starlite,” I said.

  “And I didn’t.” Sinkovich moved the chair with a scrape so that he faced my back. “I’m in deep shit because I was looking into this.”

  His expression, reflected in the glass, looked frightened. He wasn’t putting on a show for me because he didn’t know I could see him.

  “Someone told you all of this?” I asked.

  His expression had changed as I turned around. He hadn’t wanted me to see how scared he was.

  “Well, some of this I did know,” he said. “You know, Lewis, the death of his policy guys, shit like that. It was big news in my circles, not that it all hit the papers.”

  “But you didn’t know about the Starlite,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  I leaned against the big wooden filing cabinet. “They’re paying protection.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “So they’re in bed with the cops and the Outfit.”

  “No,” he said, and sighed. “The cops don’t care about some lowlife in some hotel in the Black Belt. No offense, Grimshaw.”

  “None taken,” I said. “Although he would pay protection right? Some cop in the area is on the take.”

  “Not just some,” Sinkovich said. “More than I like to think about. They figured I wanted in. I had to do some pretty dancing to get my so-called colleagues outta my face.”

  I hadn’t expected him to get into trouble with one simple question. “Clarify something for me,” I said. “If a bunch of cops get protection money from an operation like that, then either the powers that be are looking the other way or taking part of that cash, right?”

  “There’s been a lotta lookin’ the other way,” Sinkovich said. “The law says you can’t practice prostitution within one thousand yards of a school. If you do and get caught, it raises the charge one felony grade.”

  I frowned. “And they let the Starlite stay in business? How much would that cost on weekly basis?”

  Sinkovich sighed. “I ain’t with internal affairs. I don’t know that shit. I never took money from no businesses. I thought you knew that.”

  “I do know that,” I said. He was getting testy. I didn’t mean to insult him. He had done me a favor, apparently at a great personal cost. “You wouldn’t be a continual guest in my home if you were that kind of man.”

  “If I were that kinda man,” he muttered, “my kid would be going to De La Salle for fucking free.”

  He was right; some people were uncorruptible, even when it benefitted them. Maybe that was what I liked about Sinkovich. He was raised to be a bigoted hard-ass, and he had gotten disturbed by the things that attitude had brought him. He didn’t like how it made him feel, and with just a little support from a man he barely knew, he changed enough to destroy much of his life.

  “So,” I said, “I’m not asking you this because I think you’re involved. I’m asking you because you’re the only person I can as
k who might actually have a clue. An accurate clue. Do the powers that be just look the other way or do they make money too?”

  “Depends on what you call the powers that be. That fat slug of a mayor, they’ve been trying to bring him down on corruption charges for years. He ain’t interested in money. He don’t stockpile it. He wants the freakin’ city to bow down to him and kiss his tiny little feet.”

  I smiled at the image. “I didn’t really mean the mayor. I meant within the police department. If cops are on the take, then how high does it go?”

  Sinkovich shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I can tell you this much, though. With businesses like the Starlite, the orders we get come from one of two places.”

  “The Outfit or the Machine,” I said.

  “Yep,” he said. “One or the other or both.”

  “In this case, you think what?” I asked.

  He bit his thumbnail like a little boy. He thought for a long moment before answering me.

  “Grimshaw,” he said, “I got an order to stop looking after an hour. One fucking hour. And everyone’s nervous. Okay? I stopped asking questions. I got a little scared so I bought me some comfort food and decided to share. Decided that the mayor and the department and that stupid Judge Hoffman wasn’t going to ruin my day. I was gonna see you and your super-duper kid and that pretty neighbor of yours, and I was gonna enjoy my night. You should too.”

  Loops upon loops. Sinkovich said one thing and often meant another. Or everything. He wanted me to stop asking questions, even though he knew I wouldn’t.

  What I did know was that I had to stop asking them of him. At least for now.

  When I didn’t respond, he tapped his forefinger on my desk. “I mean it. You lay off this one. The little girl’s safe. Your kid’s a hero. You’re done now.”

  I nodded. “You’d think I would be.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Let it go.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “That hotel is right next to the school. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Move your kids,” he said. “Jim, them cousins of his, everybody.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Sinkovich said. “Borrow money from your rich girlfriend. It’s worth saving your kid’s life, right?”

  I bowed my head. There were days—months, years really—where it seemed like nothing would ever go right. Ever since Martin died, it felt that way. Ever since I fled Memphis while the entire damn country burned.

  Thing was, the flames hadn’t made the country any better. It wasn’t worse either. It was just the same, mired in the same old shit, and no matter what happened, we couldn’t seem to escape it.

  “Eddie Turner and his operation recruits girls out of that school,” I said softly. “Those girls not even in high school yet.”

  “And you are not the savior of the entire world, Grimshaw,” Sinkovich said in a tone I’d never heard him use before. “First thing you learn as a cop is that you can’t clean up all the filth. You just gotta rejoice in the small victories.”

  “What victory do we have here?” I asked him. “Lacey’s in the hospital, the entire family’s traumatized, and in the Starlite, there’s some joker who is making a boatload of money off girls just like her.”

  “I told you. Your kid’s a hero. The girl’s safe. Those are victories,” Sinkovich said.

  I shook my head.

  “Jesus, Grimshaw. Think. When I solve some murder, I don’t bring back the dead. I put some scumbag away, get him off the street, and maybe save some other person he’d’ve touched. Does it stop murder? Hell, no. It don’t even stop murder on that block maybe even for that day. But it’s a small victory.”

  “Lacey knew one of the other girls,” I said. “I’ll wager that the Grimshaw children know a lot of the girls who’ve disappeared into this ‘operation’ as you call it.”

  “And there’s fucking hookers in the Bible,” Sinkovich said. “Each one—each hooker from then to now—has some sob story about how she got there.”

  “So, if we hadn’t rescued Lacey, she would have had a ‘sob story’?”

  Sinkovich knew he had misspoke. But he wasn’t backing down, and he usually backed down when I pushed him.

  He tapped his finger on the desk again. “You don’t mess with the Outfit. You don’t mess with the Machine. They got protection, Grimshaw. Good enough protection that I got warned away in less than an hour. There ain’t no cavalry here, and if you go after this Turner guy, then you’ll end up in a ditch somewhere.”

  He ran a hand through his thinning hair. He sighed, and gave me a set look. I realized that the fear I had seen reflected in the window was behind his eyes now.

  Sinkovich was terrified.

  “I thought you was smart enough to know how to pick a fight,” he said. “You can’t win here. You’ll leave your kid without a dad, and you’ll make sure that the attention comes down on the whole family. You can’t do that. You can’t.”

  I thought about the Panther house, shot up and still filled with dried blood. I thought about how I had taken Lacey there, and how she thought I was exaggerating about the way the world worked, how she thought such things didn’t apply to her.

  And they shouldn’t have.

  Then I thought about her blood-covered go-go boots, about Keith’s determination to call the police, about Franklin’s anger, and Althea’s heartbreak.

  And Jimmy, who knew it was all going to happen because he had grown up with it. I believed I had rescued him from a life like that, and maybe I still could if I did the right thing by him.

  But he was one kid, among hundreds of kids, thousands of kids, all of them at risk.

  I couldn’t go to the city government. Parents had been fighting the city all along, trying to get better schools, trying to improve education and security and get rid of the gangs and the drugs. It never seemed to end.

  No progress got made, and the fights continued, year in and year out.

  “There’s gotta be something we can do,” I said, more to myself than to Sinkovich.

  But he heard me. “Yeah, there is something we can do. We can walk away.”

  I hated that. I had fled here because I had to save Jimmy. I’d been running for years. And it didn’t matter. The worst things still caught up to me.

  To us.

  “You walk away,” I said. “I still have a few things to try first.”

  Sinkovich rocked back in his chair and ran his hand over his face. “Son of bitch, Grimshaw. You don’t get this. If something happens to you, I can’t take care of your kid. I can’t even take care of my own. And what’ll happen to the other kids, the ones you drive to school every goddamn day? What happened to that poor little girl, it’s just the tip of a very nasty iceberg. Walk away, Grimshaw. Please.”

  He wasn’t going to let go, and he wasn’t going to be able to help me.

  “I will walk away,” I said. “I promise. After I try two things, I’ll walk.”

  “That might be two too many,” Sinkovich said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But right now, I tried enough.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I SAT ON THE COUCH as all three television stations signed off for the night. I kept one light on, a yellow legal pad on my lap, but I hadn’t written anything down. I wasn’t sure what there was to write.

  Jimmy had gone to sleep after too many chapters of The Hobbit. We’d read it three times already, but he’d talked Marvella into reading it again last night, and he wanted to continue tonight. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him, although I drew the line at singing the songs. It was hard enough to read them aloud, particularly when my attention really wasn’t on it.

  Marvella had left with Sinkovich. On the way out, he had turned to me, pointed, and said, “I mean it,” as if I had had doubts about his veracity. I had nodded, thanked him for the surprisingly good casserole, and closed the door.

  Then I read to Jimmy, and watched the evening news, wishing, for the first time,
that I had more than one television so I could watch more than one channel at a time.

  I watched WMAQ, figuring if anyone had found Voss, that channel would have the story.

  So far, no news.

  That was when I got the legal pad and a pen from my office, and turned on the single light. I had planned to write down all the options I was thinking about, but I couldn’t for two reasons.

  The first was simple: I didn’t want a record of anything untoward. The second was related to that: I wasn’t sure what all of my options were.

  Still, Sinkovich had made an impression. Twice, I reached for the phone and started to dial Laura before hanging up. Twice, I nearly told her to stop her investigation of that building.

  Finally, I had to remind myself that she was the only person who could handle the investigation into the building itself. Sturdy had mob ties. Most people had no idea she was cleaning house.

  And, after my discussion with Sinkovich, I wasn’t sure there was enough of a top-down organization that would care about what she was doing. Just because one lieutenant heard that Sturdy was slowly dismissing its mobbed-up members didn’t mean the lieutenant would tell anyone else.

  If someone thought it a threat, they would have come after Laura already, and not in the corporate ways that a handful of people had already used against her.

  She would have ended up handcuffed to a chair with three gunshots to her head.

  The image made me shudder. In December of ’68, we had made plans so that she would survive the takeover, figuring someone would take her out then if they were going to take her out.

  But I had been under the mistaken assumption that the Chicago mob didn’t kill truly well-known people. Sinkovich’s story about Benjamin Lewis changed my mind on that.

  I got up and changed the channel as WMAQ signed off. WBBM was still on the air, and I let it talk to me for a while. I started doodling on the legal pad, trying to calm myself. For the second night in a row, I wasn’t sure I would get much sleep.

  I hadn’t lied to Sinkovich: I hoped that Laura could buy the Starlite and shut it down. I understood that doing so would move the operation elsewhere. Operations like that didn’t just vanish because they’d lost a home.