Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Nelscott, Kris

  I could either call the numbers that De Palma gave me as Eustace Fittle or I could continue my trolling for information.

  I decided to try a different tack. I contacted the next precinct, not too far from first one I had called.

  When the dispatch answered, I said, “I need to talk to someone in Vice.”

  I got patched through to a Detective Stan Birns. It only took a moment.

  He answered with a curt, “Stan Birns. What can I do you for?”

  “This is Detective Michael Larew,” I said, making sure my vowels had flattened. I pitched my voice higher than it usually was. “I’m calling from Gary, Indiana. Last night, two of our officers picked up a strung-out young woman who says her name is Donna Loring. She says she’s from Chicago, and she’s telling quite a story. She claims she’s been kidnapped and taken across state lines. Because she is so strung out, I am disinclined to believe her. She’s dressed like a hooker. She smells like a hooker. I believe she’s saying these things so that we do not arrest her. But my captain wants me to contact Chicago PD to see if she has an arrest record there.”

  “How did you end up calling this precinct?” Detective Birns asked. “You should contact headquarters and request something from the department of records.”

  “I have,” I said. “They tell me it will take a week or more to get the paperwork I need if indeed she has any records with the Chicago Police. I then asked for the numbers of precincts in your colored neighborhoods, hoping that someone there might remember a girl with this name. She’s very thin, about 5’4”, and has one of those kinky hairdos the colored girls like so much now. She says she has family in Chicago, a brother who is associated with some stones? She actually wanted me to contact him, as if I would do that. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you….”

  “It rings a bell, actually,” Detective Birns said. “I’ll call you right back.”

  “How about I call you?” I said. “That way the charges are not on you. I don’t know about your district, but ours is getting quite rigid about long-distance telephone charges.”

  “All right,” he said, and he sounded distracted. He was thinking of something. “Give me about fifteen minutes.”

  I promised that I would call back shortly. Then I hung up and wondered if I dare call another station. I decided to wait.

  I got up, made myself that cup of coffee I had skipped, and by the time it was poured, my fifteen minutes were up. I called him back in twenty, just so that I wouldn’t seem to eager.

  “Found the file I was looking for,” he said, without preamble. “I don’t think your girl is Loring, but the story she tells is pretty curious.”

  “What were you looking for?” I asked.

  “We pulled up a body in November, dumped in on West Madison. We have a lot of burned-out properties there from the riots in ’68.”

  “At the Democratic Convention?” I asked.

  “Naw,” he said. “The niggers went nuts when King got shot, burned half their neighborhoods, which I guess you gotta expect.”

  A wave of anger flowed through me. I had to take a deep breath, mentally reminding myself this was why I used the phone. He automatically assumed I was white, and automatically assumed I agreed with him.

  If I tried to agree with him, my voice would betray me. So I said, “You found her in a burned-out building?”

  “Naw,” he said. “A lot of ’em were just bulldozed. Empty fields that the mayor wants someone to invest in but with the gangs and the Panthers and the crime, smart money is staying away.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it would.”

  “So she was in one of them burned-out lots. She’d been dumped.”

  “And she’s—?”

  “Donna Loring,” he said.

  “You know that for sure?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “We didn’t say nothing about it though. Her brother’s big in the Stones, and they’re at war with the Panthers. We were afraid something would get set off. But the brother more or less ID’d her anyway.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “We all knew her as La Donna, which one of the guys said in Italian meant ‘the lady’ and we thought it was funny because it was kinda true. She acted like hooking was beneath her. She didn’t call guys, she didn’t go up to cars unless she had to, she didn’t do nothing, never smiled, never looked at anyone. If you wanted to pay for a strung-out warm body, you got it with her.”

  I shuddered. Hadn’t Jonathan said everyone loved her? He compared her to Norene, always happy, always effervescent.

  “Wasn’t even worth my time to arrest,” he said. “Just a skinny piece of meat.”

  A series of thoughts went through my mind. Wouldn’t someone like Donna have been an opportunity for Vice? If she was clearly unhappy in the life, then she would have been a prime target for helping the cops go after the pimps or the organization that she worked for.

  Then I realized what he meant, exactly. He worked Vice, because he got what he considered benefits.

  “Never took her in, never made her promises?” I asked, trying to sound like a comrade.

  “No point,” he said. “Usually it’s tit for tat if you know what I mean. And there wasn’t tit there, let alone tat.”

  He confirmed what I thought. I swallowed coffee-tasting bile.

  “But you said her brother identified her,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. When we found her. We had to figure out what to do about her—Potter’s Field, send her home, you know. And one of my guys remembered some flyer the brother’s lieutenants were putting up about a year before. We actually got one in the file. She had some mark on her wrist…”

  I could hear papers fluttering.

  “Yeah, here it is. ‘Distinctive mole on her left wrist.’ And she had one. Big as a bruise, ugly thing.”

  “Flyer,” I repeated. “You had a flyer?”

  “She disappeared. The brother wanted her back. We figured the Panthers or the Vice Lords or someone took her for a few days, made him upset. Then he got her back and she was damaged goods, so he put her to work.”

  “You know that for a fact?” I asked.

  My tone might have been off, because he snapped, “Well, yeah, of course. You know your neighborhoods too. Girls like this, they work for gangs, bringing in money. She got broke in somewhere, then got sent home, and they put her to work.”

  “I thought you said she was in a new neighborhood.” I hoped he had said something like that, because I needed to confront him on this. I needed to confront him on something.

  “Stones are South Side, this is West Side, we figured they were just making inroads to piss off the Panthers.”

  “Who had kidnapped her in the first place,” I said.

  “What’s it matter?” he said, his voice going up. “She was just a hooker.”

  She was someone’s sister, someone’s daughter. Good friend, great sister, beloved daughter. Hadn’t he seen that on the flyer as well?

  “What did she die of?” I asked.

  “Who the hell knows?” he said. “What they always die of. The life killed her.”

  That much was probably true. “You didn’t do an autopsy.”

  “Dunno about you, but if your superiors are breathing down your neck to save phone costs, then they really don’t like it when you order an autopsy on a dead hooker.” He sounded angry now.

  “I was just wondering, considering what my girl was telling me. It sounds like there was something strange going on.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sounds like your girl’s trying to get out of whatever lockup you got her in, thinking you might know some of the Chicago stuff because Gary’s almost a suburb, right?”

  I had a hunch those were fighting words to someone from Gary. “Look,” I said, letting a low level of the fury I felt at him into my voice, “you’ve been helpful, and I know I was taking quite a bit of your time. If we find out something about this girl or your dead hooker, you want me to
let you know?”

  “Naw,” he said. “Hookers die. Gangs fight. The monkeys burn their neighborhoods. And we let them. If they kill each other off, things get better in the Great City of Chicago.”

  I hung up. I couldn’t do anything else. Let him think I was pissed about the Gary comment. I simply couldn’t deal with that level of inhumanity.

  Was this what Sinkovich was talking about when he said that cops learned to take small victories? They ignored girls like Donna Loring, girls taken just a few miles from their homes, destroyed, and then put to work. Their deaths weren’t even worth an investigation? They weren’t pretty enough to arrest. Hell, Birns didn’t even think he should contact her family when they first figured out who she was.

  Maybe she could have been saved. Maybe she would still be alive now, and maybe she would be on the road to some kind of recovery.

  Then I shook my head. I could almost hear Sinkovich. You think a girl like that, with her brother, coulda gone home and become a citizen? Birns’s right. She’d just keep hooking. Can’t save them all, Grimshaw, and sometimes you gotta cut your losses.

  I knew for a fact that the Blackstone Rangers had brokered a truce with the Panthers by the time her body had been dumped. She’d been dumped on West Madison, which put her body right near the house where Hampton died. Or maybe on the same road.

  Would the Stones have retaliated against the Panthers?

  I wouldn’t have put it past them.

  The cops seemed to believe in Panther involvement. But no one had told Conlisk or any of the higher level members of the department. Because if they truly believed that Donna Loring had been killed by Panthers, they would have leaked that information to the Stones and hoped that the Stones took out the Panthers.

  The cops had tried several times to do it themselves last year, and succeeded only when they raided that house in December.

  People on the West Side only knew her as La Donna, not as Donna Loring. The fact that she ended up there, on the low end of the hooker ladder, meant either she hadn’t worked out or the operation was more low-end than Sinkovich thought.

  Although it would make sense that the operation had prostitutes of all levels, from the high-end ones to the streetwalkers who barely knew their own names.

  I thought of Jonathon’s fingers, tracing that image of her face.

  I thought of her infectious smile.

  I stood up. I had one of the links I wanted. A direct line from the school to the hotel to a dead prostitute on Chicago’s West Side.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with it all yet, but I would figure it out.

  I always did.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I WAS TOO SICK to my stomach to eat lunch. I went back into the kitchen and poured out my coffee, leaving the mug on the counter. Then I shut off the burner beneath the percolator and moved the percolator to another part of the stove.

  I cleaned off the kitchen table, making certain I kept my piles in order, and slowly carried those piles to the office. I didn’t want Jimmy to come home and see all of those missing faces.

  I took the list of questions I had written up for Lacey and tucked it into my shirt pocket. Then I put on one of the few good pairs of shoes I had left, covered them with galoshes, and grabbed the parka.

  I needed to see Lacey, not just to get my questions answered. I needed to see my small victory, just to remind myself that she was safe.

  I locked the apartment door and paused for just a moment in front of Marvella’s. I didn’t hear any sound inside. I had yet another favor to ask her and no time to do it. I had no idea where she had gone off to, but I would find her eventually.

  I hurried down the stairs and out into the cold, zipping the parka as I went. It felt colder than it had a few hours ago, and I wasn’t certain how that was possible. The entire street had a breathless quality, as if it had been frozen under glass.

  I unlocked the van and got in, wishing, as I had all winter, that I lived in a neighborhood where I could leave the van running while it heated up. Instead, I had to sit on the cold seat, looking at my breath, while the van coughed its way into some kind of life.

  I checked the glove box for the gun, saw that it was still there, and closed the box. The van’s chugging smoothed as it warmed, and my face slowly stopped stinging.

  I put the van into gear and headed to the hospital.

  I probably should have called first on the off-chance that Lacey had gone home. She struck me as too ill to leave quickly, but I wasn’t a doctor, and I could never quite figure out how they made these decisions.

  The hospital looked grim in the pale winter sunlight. Some of the trees along the edge of the parking lot were covered in a layer of ice. I hadn’t noticed anything like that in my neighborhood, but then there weren’t many trees there. All it would take was a short ice storm or some ice fog, and everything would get coated.

  I got out, put my head down, and headed to the hospital’s front door. A blast of hot air as I entered made me realize that the van’s interior had never heated up all the way. I walked past the information desk to the children’s wing, deciding to take the stairs to both warm up and to burn off some of that anger that had arisen in my talk with Detective Birns.

  I had to realize over and over again that the bigotry I heard out of Sinkovich’s mouth was nothing compared to the filth he had to listen to all day long.

  Lacey was still in her room. Someone had brought her a beautiful pink-and-white crocheted bed jacket. The colors accented her lovely brown skin and her black hair, but it also accented just how battered she was. Some of the puffiness in her face had receded, although her left eye was now nearly swollen closed. The worst bruise on her face was starting to turn yellow, making her seem jaundiced.

  She was alone. She started when she saw me at the door, then smiled and gestured me inside.

  The smile warmed me, and I smiled back.

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked.

  “They think I might be able to go home tonight, and so she’s getting my room ready.” She sounded a bit stronger than she had the day before.

  The stuffed dog I had given her rested on the far side of the bed. I suddenly felt awkward, as if I should have brought her something else for this visit. I hadn’t been thinking in terms of healing or nurturing. I’d spent the last two days thinking about vengeance, which wasn’t at all the same thing.

  “When will you find out for sure?” I asked.

  “The doctor’s supposed to be here at four,” she said. “If he says I can go, I can go.”

  “You happy about that?” I asked.

  She nodded, but didn’t look at me. I wasn’t sure how to take that reaction.

  “Do you mind if I sit?” I asked.

  She shook her head and gave me another of those tentative smiles. I was beginning to love them.

  I sat down in a nearby chair with an inadequate leather cushion, at least for someone my size. I eased out of the parka and let it rest behind me, protecting me from the chair’s badly designed metal back. Then I scooted the chair close enough that I could touch Lacey if she wanted me to.

  “I have some more questions,” I said. “Is it all right if I ask them?”

  She tugged on the collar of her bed jacket as if it rubbed against her neck. “You didn’t get him after all?”

  She misunderstood the reason I wanted to talk to her. She thought I was still searching for Voss, even though I had told her the last time that I was not.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “He’s not going to bother you. I promise. Like I said yesterday, he’ll never bother you again. But it looks like he might have hurt some other girls, and I’d like to find them if I can.”

  I hadn’t planned that approach but it sounded right. I hoped Lacey wouldn’t ask too many questions. I knew that underneath her brave front, she was scared to death, and I didn’t want to make the fear worse.

  “I guess it’s okay,” she said in a tone that told me she’d rather I didn’t ask
.

  “It’s probably good your mom’s not here,” I said. “I want you to be as honest with me as you can, even if you broke some rules, okay? I promise, I won’t tell your parents.”

  She looked at me then, good eye wide. Her eyelids fluttered. I could feel her nerves. “Okay.”

  “All right.” I took the paper out of my shirt pocket. She watched my every move as if she expected me to jump across the hospital bed’s railing and grab her.

  If I knew how to make that reaction go away, I would do it first.

  “I wrote these down so I wouldn’t forget,” I said. “Some might not seem important, but they all are. I’m finding pieces of information and I need to put them together.”

  She punched up the pillows behind her, slid back, and took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said again.

  I held the paper tightly but didn’t look at it. I wanted to maintain eye contact with Lacey as long as I could.

  “You had said to me that you saw Voss with Karen Frazier before the holidays. Then you saw him during the holidays, and he took you out and bought you stuff.”

  She nodded, her fingers toying with the holes in the crochet.

  “When you saw him with Karen Frazier, was that before school let out for the year?”

  She nodded, but didn’t look up at me.

  “How long after, then, before you saw him again?”

  She shrugged a shoulder.

  “Lace,” I said gently, “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to ask about him. I thought he’s not going to bother us. This sounds like you’re still looking for him.”

  She was a very smart kid, and I couldn’t hide a lot from her. I didn’t want to tell her how big I thought this organization was. I wanted her to regain her confidence and go back to living her life.

  I wasn’t sure I could ask all the questions and keep her in the dark about the nature of the organization itself.

  “I’m not looking for him. I found him. He’s no longer going to hurt anyone.”

  She raised her chin, took another deep breath, and nodded. Maybe this time my reassurance would go in.