Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Smokey Dalton Novel Read online

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  THE SMOKEY DALTON SERIES

  in order:

  Novels

  A Dangerous Road

  Smoke-Filled Rooms

  Thin Walls

  Stone Cribs

  War At Home

  Days of Rage

  Street Justice (March 2014)

  Short Stories

  Guarding Lacey

  Family Affair

  For Steve Braunginn

  who made my days in the trenches

  some of the best of my life

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A number of people helped with this book by providing information when I most desperately needed it. Thanks to Don McQuinn, Bill Fawcett, Steve Braunginn, Richard Gilliam, and Dean Wesley Smith.

  I also owe a debt to Kelley Ragland and Paul Higginbotham, whose suggestions greatly improved the manuscript.

  Thank you all. I couldn’t have written this book without you.

  [Chicago] is the city that invented the smoke-filled room, that locked-door cliché of cigar-chomping politicians bent on shifty deals.

  —Jack Schnedler

  Chicago

  Repression turns demonstration protests into wars…It forces everyone to pick a side.

  —Jerry Rubin

  The people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.

  —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  ONE

  I HAD BEEN IN THE LOOP all morning. I had found a seat on the concrete steps leading up to the “L,” and no one had asked me to move. Dozens, maybe hundreds of us crowded the steps. For an hour, the trains hadn’t stopped and the platforms above me were closed, although policemen patrolled them.

  They were searching for snipers.

  The year of assassinations continued.

  I hadn’t told anyone where I’d gone. I wasn’t talking much these days. I no longer felt as if I had anything valid to say.

  It was September 4, 1968, only a week since the entire city of Chicago had erupted into chaos. Only a week since I had made a choice I couldn’t have contemplated a year ago.

  Only a week since everything had changed. Again.

  The street was eerily silent. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered under the steel-and-concrete skyscrapers and didn’t say a word. Police and National Guard, their rifles ready, kept the crowd on the sidewalks. Squadrols—paddy wagons in any other town—were on side streets, waiting in case last week’s riots started anew.

  I had no real idea why I had come. I’d felt drawn here, as if this place, these people, this moment could give me some perspective.

  There were very few black faces in the crowd. We stood out so dramatically that the police gave us special attention. I sat so that no one realized how tall I was or how broad. My very size intimidated people. And I kept my hands in view at all times. I didn’t want to start anything, even inadvertently.

  Chicago had witnessed enough violence in this long hot summer.

  I’d witnessed enough violence—caused enough violence—to last an entire lifetime.

  I had embraced darkness because it was the only choice left.

  The year of assassinations continued.

  And in the midst of all these thousands of people, I was more alone than I had ever been.

  TWO

  IT ALL BEGAN with the dreams. I had the first one on the night of August twenty-first.

  I dreamed I was back in Korea, toward the end of the war. Our trench was waist-deep and not very wide, certainly not the kind required by regulations. It was on a lower hill, about eight hundred yards from the nearest Chinese trench. In that eight hundred yards there were higher hills and rice paddies, frozen over in the cold.

  The enemy hills had no vegetation at all. The First Marine Air Wing had destroyed all of it, making the vista on moonlit nights eerie and unnatural.

  The cold was unnatural too—biting and harsh, worse because nothing protected us from the wind. We patrolled and listened to the sounds of our unseen enemies digging in the frost-bitten earth. With each scrape-scrape-scrape of their shovels, the tension rose.

  One day, we knew, we would fight them. One day, we would kill them.

  The tension, the cold, the feeling that something horrible was about to happen were so strong that I could barely breathe.

  I woke then, cramped onto the narrow couch in Franklin Grimshaw’s, covered with sweat on that hot August night, the nap of the couch sticking to my back, and yet feeling so cold it seemed like I would never warm up.

  The apartment was large, but the heat gathered in there like a live thing. The open windows didn’t help—all they did was let in the noise of the street. Summer noises: people shouting, a radio blaring down the block, the roar of an engine, each sound magnified in the humidity, as close as the air.

  I was used to heat—Southern heat—but somehow this Chicago weather was worse than any I’d experienced. Perhaps it was just the way I was living. For more than three months, I’d slept on that threadbare couch, forced to wake up whenever someone passed through the room. I had no privacy unless I went out onto the fire escape, and even then I had to share myself with the city.

  Chicago. It was not my home. I hadn’t even been to the city before May first, when Jimmy and I finally decided to find a permanent place to stay. Jimmy was ten and needed more stability than a life on the road could give him. But he was afraid to settle anywhere, and I wasn’t sure there was any safe place for him to go.

  I got off that couch and went into the apartment’s only bathroom, leaving the door open as I splashed cold water on my face. The water smelled of rust, tasted of it too, but I drank, not wanting to raid the Grimshaw’s refrigerator more than I had to.

  I’d been living on their charity for too long. I’d known Franklin in Memphis. We’d been friends for years when he decided to take Althea north for a better life. In 1958, Chicago had looked a lot better than Memphis. Now I wasn’t so sure that this city was better than any other.

  Even though I’d paid a minimal rent to salve all of our consciences, money wasn’t the problem. Space was. The apartment had three tiny bedrooms. Franklin and his wife, Althea, shared one, their three daughters another, and their two sons—along with Jimmy—had the third.

  I leaned against the sink, feeling the warm condensation on the cracked porcelain, and wondered why I was dreaming of Korea.

  And why it left me so cold.

  * * *

  That morning, Jimmy and I had an appointment to see a new apartment. I included him in all of my decisions. No one had ever done that before, and his reaction varied from gratitude to exasperation, depending on what I interrupted in order to bring him along.

  He’d had as rough a night as I had. He was grateful to be looking for someplace new.

  I gave him a once-over before we went out. He had put on weight since we’d moved to Chicago—Althea’s meals were large and plentiful—but he also had deep circles under his eyes.

  He hadn’t slept well since the night Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot. Jimmy had witnessed the assassination. He’d also seen the assassin—and it wasn’t the man they’d arrested in June.

  That night, I’d gotten Jimmy out of Memphis. It was the only way I could save his life.

  He wasn’t my child by blood, but he’d become my family. By the time we got to Chicago, we were telling people that we were father and son.

  I adjusted his short-sleeved shirt, made sure his pants were clean, and double-checked his shoes. I knew we had a better chance of getting the apartment if we both
made a good impression.

  Jimmy squirmed under my administrations. “I dressed up, Smokey, and I’m hot. Let’s go ’fore I start looking sloppy.”

  I smiled at him. He wanted to be out of here as much as I did. We were both loners in our different ways, and living in such close quarters with so many people was driving us both crazy.

  “All right.” I stood and put my hand on his back, happy that I could no longer feel his bones through his skin. “Let’s go.”

  Jimmy opened the door and we stepped into the wide hallway. It was high ceilinged and clean, despite the number of tenants in the building. The Grimshaws lived in a nice area. Still, I had to lock three deadbolts before pocketing the keys.

  Marvella Walker was coming up the stairs. She wore a halter top and tight shorts that showed every curve. She looked cool despite the heat.

  “Hey, Bill,” she said, calling me by the name everyone in the building used. Franklin had told them that I was his cousin from Memphis. He never used my last name, and at my insistence he called me Bill in public. My legal name is Billy Dalton, although I’ve been called Smokey since I was a little boy. Smokey was too obvious and easy to track, I thought, and Billy no longer suited the man I’d become. So Bill it was.

  Jimmy had stopped at the top of the stairs. He had never liked strangers, and that trait had gotten worse since the assassination. He’d become close to most of the men in the building, but he still had trouble with women—a fact I blamed on his abusive, neglectful, mostly absent mother.

  I came up beside him. “How’re you doing, Marvella?”

  She let out a small sigh and gripped the thick wooden railing, as if she suddenly needed it. “I swear if this heat don’t end, I’m gonna melt.”

  I gently moved Jimmy toward the wall. I knew better than to try to get him down the stairs while she was on them.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes I think it’s hotter inside than it is outside.”

  She smiled at me. Her smile lit up her dark eyes, brought her regal cheekbones into focus, and accented her narrow chin. I thought if she cut her hair short instead of ironing it smooth and forcing it to curl along her shoulders, she’d look like one of those busts of African princesses sold at that imports store near Washington Park.

  “I’d think you’d be used to the weather,” she said.

  “It seems hotter here.”

  Jimmy looked up at me, unable to hide his pleading look. He wanted to leave.

  Then her smile faded. She looked to either side, as if she didn’t want anyone to hear what she was going to say.

  “Bill.” Even her voice was soft. “You’re not one of those outside agitators, are you?”

  Beside me, Jimmy froze. I could sense him, a rabbit in the headlights.

  “Outside agitators?” I knew the phrase, but it meant many things in many places. In Mississippi, during the height of the civil rights movement, the cops were using the phrase to imprison white civil rights workers, saying they were communists.

  She shrugged, sheepishly, it seemed to me. “You know my cousin the cop, right?”

  Franklin had told me she was related to a cop. Unlike Memphis, where the police department was just starting to become integrated, Chicago’s force had had black cops for more than a hundred years.

  Jimmy was shivering. I put my hand on his shoulder, partly to hold him in place, and partly as comfort. “I’ve never met him.”

  “Well,” she said, as if my knowing him really didn’t matter, “he says that potential troublemakers are being followed by undercover cops and the FBI.”

  I felt my breath catch.

  “You’re not a troublemaker, are you, Bill?”

  I made myself smile. “Just a poor working man. Why?”

  Her voice got even lower. “I thought I saw someone tailing you yesterday. He was doing his best to stay out of your line of vision, which didn’t make sense to me.”

  I tried to remain calm, even though I felt my brain kick into high gear. I’d been on alert since April for just this kind of moment.

  “It makes sense to me, Marvella,” I said. “If they’re following potential troublemakers, they’re not going to want to be seen.”

  “No, that’s not the point,” she said. “My cousin said they do want to be seen. So that these guys know they’re being watched and so that they don’t try anything when the Democrats come to town.”

  The Democratic National Convention wasn’t going to start for another four days, and even before this conversation, it had become the bane of my existence.

  “Are you sure they’re looking at me?” I asked. “I thought Mrs. Witcover upstairs had a grandson in the Blackstone Rangers.”

  Jimmy was shaking so violently that I was sure Marvella would notice. I tightened my grip on his shoulder.

  “Maybe that’s it,” she said. “It just seemed odd to me and I thought you should know.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “You only saw this guy the once?”

  She shook her head. “He’s been outside a few times. Not too obvious, but there. He was black, Smokey. My cousin says most of these guys are white.”

  “So that they wouldn’t blend in.”

  She nodded. “He was staring at Franklin’s place.”

  “And you thought of me? Not Franklin?”

  Her laugh was hardy. I liked a strong laugh in a beautiful woman. It made her more human somehow. “Franklin? He’s as innocent as they come. You don’t look innocent, Bill.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose I do. Thanks for the tip, Marvella.”

  I started down the stairs, bringing Jimmy with me. A knot, solid as a fist, filled my stomach. How had they found us so soon? Or was this just paranoia in a hot city, rife with tension?

  “We gots to get out of here, Smoke,” Jimmy said when we reached the bottom of the stairs. Fortunately the lobby was empty. Circular flyers lay on the floor beneath the metal mailboxes, always a signal that the mail had arrived. The front door itself was closed and latched, and the lobby was stifling hot.

  “We are, Jimmy,” I said, keeping my voice down. Sounds echoed upward from this lobby. It was not a private place.

  “No, I mean this town. They—”

  I put a finger over his lips. “We have to get to the car. We’re going to be late.”

  Then I opened the front door and stepped onto the wide porch. The apartment building had been built in the 1920s out of brick, the only wood on the interior. The lack of wood, I’d learned, was a strangely Chicago fetish—apparently no one had forgotten the Great Fire a hundred years before. City ordinances insisted that no buildings in the city limits be made of wood.

  Sometimes that gave Chicago a grandeur it didn’t deserve, especially in the poorer neighborhoods. This one, just south of Hyde Park, was considered middle class, although by whose standards, I wasn’t sure.

  There were a lot of people on the street, most of whom I recognized. The other buildings on this block looked the same—white brick with tan trim, wide porches, and broad expanses of sidewalk leading to them. The grass was untended, and the shrubbery overgrown. The buildings themselves went up four and five stories, and the wealth of the inhabitants marked itself in the curtains (or lack thereof), the items left on the porches and fire escapes, and the cars parked outside.

  Jimmy was still trembling. I didn’t see anyone skulking in the shadows, but then, I wasn’t sure who I’d be looking for. I felt at a huge disadvantage in this new town. In Memphis, I knew all the ins and outs, the smallest detail had great significance, and told me more than most people could imagine.

  Here, though, I saw the details and wasn’t sure how to process them. For all I knew, the faces I thought familiar might have been as new as mine. Had someone watched Jimmy and me for months without either of us realizing it?

  “Smokey,” he said. “We gotta—”

  “I know,” I said quickly. “We don’t want to be late.”

  We hurried off the porch and headed toward
the rusted blue Impala parked against the curb. It wasn’t a great car, but it was the best I could do when I traded in the green Oldsmobile Jimmy and I had traveled in. We’d stopped at a discount auto dealer whose very sign looked shady, and made him a deal that he couldn’t refuse.

  I unlocked the passenger door and pulled it open, almost pushing Jimmy inside. Then I went to the driver’s side and got in.

  Jimmy’s head was down. “We gotta go, don’t we? They found us.”

  “They might have,” I said, putting the key in the ignition, “but there’s a lot going on in this city, especially this month, and I don’t think Marvella’s the most reliable source we’ve ever talked to.”

  “But, Smokey, if they find me, they’ll kill me.” He was staring out his window, his hands clenched into fists.

  He’d never said that before. I wasn’t sure if he’d understood it. But he was right. He’d seen enough to implicate the Memphis police. I knew that if the police were involved, so was the Memphis city government and the FBI. The FBI had major ties with Memphis’s leadership—and the Feds’ involvement had been my biggest unspoken concern.

  Apparently, Jimmy had picked up on it.

  My silence must have startled him. He gave me a sideways look. “Right?”

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” I said. “I promise you that.”

  “How can you promise?” he asked. “Stuff happens all the time.”

  That knot in my stomach grew harder. The kid knew more about the world than I gave him credit for. “I’ll check it out. I’m not going to ignore anything.”

  “But what about nights when you’re working? Franklin can’t do nothing. He don’t even notice when his family’s there. All he cares about is his books and those papers—”

  “I’ll make sure you’re protected,” I said, “and not by Franklin.”

  My assessment of Franklin was the same as Jimmy’s. I liked the man—I always had—but he wasn’t a physical person. He was taking night courses, studying for a law degree, and it suited him. Franklin did his battles with words, not his fists.