Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Nelscott, Kris

  I pushed the half-eaten cinnamon roll aside and leaned back.

  After a moment, all four came in. Three of them pushed past the woman and took her table, cleaning it off daintily as if they worked in the bakery.

  She slipped out the door as they moved past her.

  The other gang member, one of the men without a tam, scanned the room, his gaze finally alighting on mine. He raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

  I nodded, then kicked the chair across from me back with my foot.

  He grinned, grabbed it, and said, “Me and my boys—”

  “I’m only talking to you,” I said.

  His voice hadn’t been the one on the phone. Someone had relayed the message to him.

  “I don’t talk without my main men,” he said.

  “Then we don’t talk.” I looked over at the young woman behind the counter. She was staring at me in both fear and wonder. I raised my hand and beckoned with my fingers, reminding her about the coffee. She already thought I was an asshole because I was associating with these guys. Might as well complete the picture.

  After a moment’s reflection, he sat down. He was too thin, and his eyes were red-rimmed. His nose was caked, and either he or his clothes or both hadn’t been washed in a while.

  I was glad I had finished with the cinnamon roll, because there was no eating around him.

  “You got information on Donna,” he said.

  “You’re not the person who answered the phone this morning,” I said.

  “I’m her brother,” he snapped.

  This guy was one of Jeff Fort’s lieutenants? He looked too strung out to be someone the head of a gang as big as the Blackstone Rangers would trust. Maybe he had been one of Jeff Fort’s main men a year or two ago, but now, he was just another junkie, one who was getting lost in the product he’d been selling.

  My heart sank. I had been hoping for a young tough man like the ones I had met a year ago.

  He spoke into my silence. “You said you have news about her. You do something to her?”

  “No,” I said, and then clammed up as the young woman came over with a paper cup filled with coffee, a small pot of cream, and five sugar packets. Apparently, she knew Loring enough to know how he took his coffee.

  He took it with enough sugar to make me wonder if heroin was his poison of choice.

  She set everything down, then glanced at me. Keeping her face out of Loring’s view, she mouthed, Friend? Really?

  I ignored her, and she walked away. The line that had existed five minutes ago was gone. Most everyone who had been in the bakery was either gone or sitting silently at the tables, waiting for this meeting to end.

  “It’s too quiet,” he said. “Let’s go to my place, talk this through.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You sure as hell say no a lot,” he said.

  I shrugged. “My information, my terms.”

  He studied me for a moment, clearly surprised I wasn’t frightened of him like everyone else in the place seemed to be.

  Then he grinned. Slowly. “You’re the guy with the scar! You’re a legend, man. You got a flock of kids, and you’ll break a guy’s balls if he gets near them. Literally.”

  So the Blackstone Rangers had an organizational memory. That surprised me. I was not surprised that the guy I had used as an example had ruptured something. Apparently that incident had done exactly what I hoped: It had kept the gangs away from the Grimshaw kids.

  Too bad it hadn’t kept other predators away as well.

  “So,” Loring said, “you got news about Donna, you say. Which means you want something in trade.”

  I had wanted something. I wanted the gang to join me, under my orders, inside the Starlite. But Loring here had that easy doped-up laziness that came from too much drug use, and his men didn’t look a lot better. One tried to watch me, but one of the others had fallen asleep with his head on the table.

  The Mighty P. Stone Nation didn’t seem so mighty all of the sudden.

  “No trade,” I said. “I just stumbled on something while I was looking for something else.”

  “Looking?” he asked.

  “I do odd jobs. I was finishing one of those,” I said.

  He stirred the coffee with his dirt-encrusted little finger. The scalding temperature didn’t seem to bother him.

  “So who’s got Donna?” he asked.

  “No one,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  That caught him. He frowned at me. “What’re you saying?”

  “I was at a West Side precinct, looking for a missing girl, and the cops there told me about a girl they saw on the street a lot.” It didn’t matter who Loring was, I couldn’t quite bear to tell him his sister had become a hooker, although from the irritation that flashed across his face, it looked like he figured out my meaning clearly enough. “They called her La Donna, the lady, and they found her last fall.”

  “Found her how?” His voice had grown chilly. The two awake Stones focused on me. One put a hand on his side. Gun under his coat.

  “Someone had killed her,” I said. “Beat her to death.”

  Loring was shaking his head. “That’s not possible. She wouldn’ta been on the street. We made sure she had a home.”

  “I don’t think she had a choice,” I said. “I found a man who’d been kidnapping girls and then…sending them to work.”

  “She wouldn’t have. She would have come home.”

  “He might have told her you didn’t want her anymore. One of the girls I found,” I said as carefully as I could, “said that this man had broken her.”

  “Who?” he asked, and he was starting to get jittery. “Who is this son of a bitch?”

  I had planned to tell him about Eddie Turner. I’d planned to mention the Starlite. But this young man and his friends were in no condition to do anything. I doubted they even had Jeff Fort’s ear. And if they did, I couldn’t trust them. If drugs had infiltrated the Stones in this way, then they were completely unreliable on job like the one I had planned. They would have no discipline, and they wouldn’t listen to me.

  Innocents would die, and I couldn’t have that.

  “His name is Clyde Voss,” I said truthfully. “He chats up girls after school, and eventually takes them somewhere, rapes them, and imprisons them for days, maybe weeks. Then he puts them to work.”

  Loring knocked his coffee off the table. Brown liquid spattered across the floor. He kicked his chair over, pounded a fist on the table beside us.

  The young lieutenant who had put his hand on his gun pulled it out of his belt. Idiot. That was a good way to shoot something off.

  The girl behind the counter had run into the back. A couple of the other customers dove under their tables.

  I remained in my seat, watching these jerks tip over tables and kick aside chairs.

  Finally, they stopped. Loring pushed his face under mine, his index finger half an inch from my nose. “You’d better not be making up any of this.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Someone shoulda told me Donna’s dead,” he said.

  “It was on the West Side. That’s not your territory, right?”

  “Still,” he said.

  “I’m sure you have someone who can check out the police reports,” I said.

  He kept his face close to mine. His teeth were rotting and his skin was turning yellow, either from jaundice or hepatitis.

  Then he let his hand drop. He braced himself on the table. “Why the hell would anyone hurt Donna?” he asked more to himself than to me. He raised his head. “What’re you gonna do about this?”

  “I told you,” I said. “That’s what I’m gonna do.”

  If the organizational memory went real deep, he would know—or someone in the Stones would know—that I had told them something important before, something that had gotten rid of a mutual enemy.

  “You want us to take care of Voss?” he said softly, as if no one had heard our conversation, even though t
he entire bakery had.

  “I want you to do what you do,” I said.

  “Who’d he take of yours?”

  “My family’s all right,” I lied.

  “You don’t need no girl rescued?” Loring asked.

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  He barked out a laugh. “You’re something, old man. Does anyone stand up to you?”

  “Not if they’re smart,” I said, keeping up the bravado. It was the only way to deal with these guys.

  “Jesus,” he said, and stood all the way up, swaying a little. “This don’t check out, we’ll have us a little talk.”

  “It’ll check out,” I said.

  The other Stone, the one without the gun, shoved the one who had fallen asleep. He snorted, then sat up, looking like a little boy awakened in the middle of the night.

  Loring snapped his fingers, and the others fell in line around him. He said nothing to me. He nodded at them, and together, they walked out of the bakery.

  I waited until they had disappeared down the block. Then I stood up, and began putting the tables back into place.

  “You’ve done enough.” The man behind the counter had come out of the back room.

  “I didn’t expect them to do this,” I said. “I would have picked another place if I thought they’d trash your bakery. I’m sorry.”

  “Sure,” he said. He clearly didn’t believe me. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m going to.” I put the tables back, set the napkin holders on top, checked for damage. The girl had given Loring a paper cup and the pitcher that held the milk was plastic. Loring had broken nothing with his fit of temper, for which I was relieved. I would have paid for the damage, if there had been any.

  I couldn’t have done anything less.

  The man carried a mop and bucket around the counter. “What the hell are you doing with those guys?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I said. “They’ve obviously been here before.”

  “Of course they’ve been here,” he said. “About five years ago, they decided they owned the neighborhood. What the hell are we supposed to do about it?”

  His hands were shaking. His cheeks were flushed.

  “The bakery’s been here a long time,” I said.

  “My dad built this place. I grew up working here.” He dry-mopped the coffee first, then dipped the mop head into the bucket and squeezed out the coffee with his bare hands. “I keep praying for these assholes to go away, but I’m afraid worse assholes will join show up in their place.”

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “I used to think they were the worst part of the neighborhood.”

  “They’re not?” He looked at me in surprise.

  “Everything changes, and not always for the best.” I put a five next to my half-eaten cinnamon roll. “Again, I’m sorry.”

  “Just don’t come back, okay?”

  It was a promise I could keep. “Okay,” I said, and let myself out.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I DROVE HOME, feeling more frustrated than I had when I left. I had actually been counting on Loring’s anger. I had wanted to use it to manipulate him and some of his friends into helping me.

  I would probably have to abandon my plans after all. It broke my heart. With Laura’s help, I could get Jimmy and the Grimshaw kids away from Starlite Hotel, but their friends and their friends’ friends were stuck.

  Dozens of girls had already disappeared into that place, and so many more would go as well.

  And as everyone pointed out to me, day after day, I couldn’t go up against the mob or their police protectors all by myself. I had already narrowed my focus to that damn hotel.

  Now I had to narrow it further, to the kids I loved.

  That was what made these messes in the first place. Everyone ignored the neighborhood or thought action was too hard or too risky.

  But, I had to admit to myself as I parked the van in its usual spot, in this case, action was both hard and risky and not something the average person could do.

  Hell, it was looking like it wasn’t something I could do either.

  I pulled the parka close and hurried inside. Theoretically it had gotten warmer—at least that was what the radio told me on the drive back—but “warmer” was a relative term. The cold in this city was nightmarish, the kind that could kill you in less than an hour.

  I had lived in Boston: I should have known about this kind of cold when I brought Jimmy to Chicago. I just hadn’t thought it through.

  And now we were entrenched.

  I walked up the stairs to my apartment, feeling twenty times older than I had when I left. Marvella had taped an envelope to my door.

  I unlocked the door before carefully peeling off the tape and taking the envelope inside. Then I shut the door with my foot, opened the envelope’s flap, and pulled out a slip of paper.

  Had to move the meet to 3. I hope you can still make it. We’ll be at the ballroom at the Wabash YMCA (3763). Be there until at least 3:30. Thanks!

  M.

  Her note managed to provoke a reluctant smile out of me, although had anyone been in the apartment, they probably would have considered my expression a grimace. I didn’t need the address. I’d investigated the Wabash Avenue YMCA when Franklin and I were looking for a site for the after-school program.

  The Y wanted to control our classes, and I didn’t blame them. They wanted to make sure we didn’t let gang kids inside. Besides, there was a membership fee. That, plus the money we were paying our teacher, made the Y unaffordable for us. The church gave us its basement for free.

  And then, abruptly, the Y canceled its programs at the end of the year. Lately, there’d been talk of shutting the Wabash Y down. Apparently, the much bigger, more modern Washington Park Y had taken most of its members.

  I glanced at the kitchen clock. I had more than enough time to get to the Y. In fact, I had time to have a leisurely lunch before I left. I hung up my parka and paced the apartment.

  I would go to the Y. Marvella had gone to the trouble of getting these women there. But I wouldn’t do anything else. My plans were pipe dreams. Maybe later, when I had people who could actually help me, maybe then we could solve the problem of the Starlite Hotel.

  I had just wanted to move quickly. I wanted this hotel off the street, away from the school, away from easy pickings. I would tell Decker, of course, and get parents to monitor, but it wouldn’t be enough.

  By waiting, I was dooming at least half a dozen girls to life inside that hellhole and a fate similar to Donna Loring’s.

  I took out a couple of pieces of fried chicken and ate them cold, along with one of the biscuits Marvella had made. I organized a few things, and made some calls to line up next week’s work. I would have to figure out how I could call Memphis as well and get the information I needed on my savings account back there.

  I dithered until 2:30, then grabbed the parka and started out the door. At the last minute, I went back into my apartment, grabbed the folder with the flyers, and shoved my drawings inside. Maybe the women would have some ideas on what we could do down the road.

  I was out of ideas. What I did know was that I needed backup. Malcolm was gone, and Sinkovich couldn’t help without losing his job. I had no idea how to bring someone else into my little operation.

  Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I would just have to do jobs for Sturdy and for Bronzeville Home, Health, Life, and Burial Insurance. Safe jobs.

  As if that had worked. I’d been working for Laura when I discovered that damn house last fall. It had nearly cost two good men their lives.

  I hurried down the stairs and back to the van. The drive to the Y took less time than I expected. The traffic was light. Finding a parking place near the Y was hard, however. The plows had pushed snow up against the curb in gigantic mounds, so there was no street parking. I spent ten minutes circling until I finally decided to park in a liquor store’s lot two blocks away.

  I hated walking in this cold. I shoved
my hands in my parka’s pockets and realized I hadn’t removed the gun. I debated going back to the van and putting the gun inside the glove box, then decided the neighborhood was too dicey for that. Someone could have been watching. One tire iron to my passenger-side window, and some kid would have easy access to a gun.

  The Y dominated this part of South Wabash. The five-story red-brick building towered above its neighbors, and look like nothing short of a nuclear bomb could knock it down.

  A nuclear bomb and neglect. As I got close, I noted that some bricks were missing and the white concrete first level had turned brown with age and dirt. The red doors, which seemed so cheerful just last spring, had soap across their windows.

  This place was obviously going to shut down. The only question was when.

  I pushed the doors opened and stepped inside. The building smelled dusty and abandoned, even though a man sat behind the sign-in desk. He was reading the Defender. He lowered it and peered at me warily.

  “You’re meeting them?” he asked.

  I didn’t have to ask who “them” was. “Yeah,” I said. “Ballroom, right?”

  “It’s your funeral,” he said, and shook the Defender back into position. It covered his face, as if he didn’t want to see what was about to happen to me.

  The first floor of the Y showed decades of use. Elevators hugged one wall, but the stairs were more dramatic because they were original to the building. It had been built at least fifty years ago, and had that solid permanent sense that most public buildings from the time had. Signs mentioning the second floor areas were falling off the wall, and another sign, older, maybe from the 1930s, mentioned guest rooms upstairs.

  Like so many Ys, this one doubled as a hotel, a home for the nearly homeless. I wondered what would happen to them if this building closed for good.

  The ballroom was a remnant from a better time. This Y had been one of Chicago’s major Negro hotels. Booker T. Washington had stayed here. This place provided everything for displaced Southerners who had come to Chicago for work during the Great Migration. There had been job training courses, famous dining rooms, and of course, that ballroom.