War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 13

  “But they found us,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I think I know how. But I want a chance to confirm it.”

  Jimmy glanced at the room. “I don’t know if I can sleep here.”

  “Other hotels aren’t going to be any better,” I said. “In fact, they might be worse. We don’t know if Officers Sanford and Prauss have hit those motels. We know about this one.”

  Jimmy’s lips thinned.

  “Let me see if my hunch about them is right,” I said. “If it is, we don’t have much to fear from them.”

  “How can you prove it, Bill?” Malcolm asked.

  “By having a little talk with the manager.” I patted Jimmy on the back one more time, then nodded at the van. “Why don’t you two straighten out the back of the van first? That way if we have to pack, we have room.”

  “We could always camp,” Jimmy said.

  “If we have to, we will,” I said, and headed across the parking lot to the motel manager’s part of the building.

  The manager’s apartment jutted out into the center of the parking lot. The overhang almost looked like a separate part of the building, the plants growing on the iron scrollwork looking perky after the morning’s rain.

  Puddles had formed across much of the lot, and I walked around them as I headed toward the main door.

  The screen was open. Cool air from a wall-unit air conditioner blew outside. A radio played loudly in the back, blaring Nancy Sinatra, singing that her boots were made for walking.

  Lucky I wasn’t wearing my boots. The mood I was in they’d be made for kicking.

  I pushed the screen door open, and shouted, “Hello!”

  A skinny white man I hadn’t seen before peeked out of the back room. He had a blond crewcut, and a birthmark on his right cheek. He was my age, with a face flushed either from too much sun or too much drink.

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  I turned around and gently closed the main door.

  “Hey!” he said, and I could hear the fear in his voice. “Hey, what’re you doing?”

  “Trying to find out what your take is,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “Take of what?” His gaze flicked toward the door, then back to me.

  “When your little transistor radio told you about the robbery in Wallingford today, you called your two favorite cops and told them that you had some blacks staying at the motel.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So that they would trash our room, take what cash we had, and give you some of it.”

  He took a step toward the front desk. “Get out of here.”

  “You know,” I said, “if I had a private detective friend of mine do some checking through the guest register, I bet we’d find some other black guests who had the same problem here that I did today. I’d bet we’d find a series of black guests with that problem, and a strong memory of Officers Sanford and Prauss.”

  The manager took another step toward the desk.

  “If you have a gun in there, you might want to think twice about grabbing it,” I said. “Shoot me, and my sons will report this incident, not just to the New Haven police, but to the press as well.”

  He stopped moving.

  “There are several ways we can settle this,” I said. “I know you don’t own this motel, and I’m sure your boss would love to hear what you’ve been doing on the side.”

  I didn’t know for certain that the man in front of me was only the manager, but it stood to reason. This behavior was too risky for the owner, especially near a big alumni and tourist attraction like the Yale Bowl.

  The manager raised his head, and didn’t deny my statement.

  “Or you can get my money back for me,” I said. “Or better yet, you can promise that this will never happen again, and give us a break on the room price.”

  “What kind of break?” he asked, and I knew I had him.

  * * *

  When I left the manager’s office, I had a receipt that showed that I had paid in full for the last four nights and paid in advance for the next two. I knew it was a risk to stay any longer, but I also knew the risks of moving to another motel.

  Malcolm and I would take turns guarding the room at night, and from that moment on, we would keep most of our valuables hidden in the car.

  And I had a measure of revenge planned as well. I wasn’t going to let the motel’s manager get away with this scam of his for very long. In the morning, I would go to the Crow’s office and see if Rueben Freeman wanted to pursue this story, not for the local market, but for the national. If he was too afraid to cover it (and that wouldn’t surprise me if he was), then I would call Saul Epstein, a Chicago reporter and photographer who helped me with a case last December.

  No matter what, I was going to make sure the manager and those two New Haven cops felt a little heat from all of this.

  When I got back to the room, Jimmy and Malcolm had it mostly straightened up.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, “is the van locked?”

  “You better believe it,” Malcolm growled. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him so angry. “You get the information you wanted?”

  I closed the door, picked up one of the shirts that still remained on the floor, and then grabbed Jimmy in a bear hug. He resisted for a moment, then fell against me, his body still tense as a wire.

  “Come on,” I said, leading him to one of the chairs. “Let’s just sit for a minute.”

  He took the bed instead, fluffing back the pillows. He looked like the picture of comfort until I realized that from that particular vantage, he could see out the window.

  “Can we leave?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “It’s better to stay. This is a scam, like I thought, and I let the manager know that we wouldn’t stand for it. In the morning, I’ll do a few extra things, making sure we’re covered in case something else happens. But I think from now on, none of us remain here alone, and we don’t use this as a refuge.”

  “I still think another hotel would work,” Malcolm said.

  “We’re getting this one for free this week,” I said. “With luck, we’ll have found Daniel, and then we’ll be gone by Sunday at the latest.”

  “All right,” Malcolm said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  Jimmy just looked out the window, his face impassive. That was the expression he had had when we were driving away from Memphis. The loss had been so deep for him that he retreated somewhere inside himself to deal with it.

  “Did you threaten the manager guy?” Malcolm asked.

  “We came to an understanding,” I said.

  “He’s not going to revisit that understanding in the middle of the night, is he?” Malcolm asked.

  I shook my head. “It’s in both of our best interest to forget this ever happened.”

  “I hate that,” Jimmy mumbled.

  “What would you like to do to handle it?” I asked. “Besides run?”

  “You said running’s okay sometimes,” Jimmy said, finally looking at me. I saw the anger in his eyes. It was directed at me.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is. Just not this time.”

  “They know where we are now,” he said.

  I nodded. “They know where Jimmy and Bill Grimshaw are, along with Malcolm Reyner.”

  I didn’t look at Malcolm as I said that. We would deal with his letter after Jimmy fell asleep.

  “If we left, they wouldn’t know where any of us are.”

  “But they’d let other cops know, and maybe the state police,” I said. “They’ve seen the van. They’d keep a lookout for us, and probably harass us about that robbery or worse. It’s better to stay here for now.”

  Jimmy sighed. “How come we gots this problem? How come it don’t happen to other people?”

  “It does,” Malcolm said. “Just not white people.”

  “We should live with Laura,” Jimmy said to me. “Then we’d be okay.”

  “I wish it were that easy,” I said.
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  He grimaced, pulled his legs up, and wrapped his arms around them. Then he began to rock.

  Malcolm looked at him, then looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked softly.

  “We left Memphis because he had a very bad run-in with the police.” I spoke quietly, too.

  “Can you tell me about it?” Malcolm asked.

  I shook my head. “It’s not something we discuss.”

  Malcolm gave Jimmy a long, sympathetic look. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Jim.”

  Jimmy didn’t seem to hear him. He continued rocking. Malcolm glanced at him, then at me, and finally stood.

  “You know,” he said, “maybe we should get some dinner.”

  I couldn’t think of anything better. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

  * * *

  Dinner seemed to break the cycle. Dinner, dessert, and an episode of The Outsider, which at first seemed to me like a bad choice. Darren McGavin’s David Ross was an unconvincing private eye to me — the kind of guy who had too much luck and jumped to the wrong conclusions too quickly.

  But Jimmy seemed to like the quick solutions, and he found some comfort in the TV justice. Malcolm obviously enjoyed the distraction.

  I took point in the chair by the window, keeping an eye on the parking lot while watching the inane plot unfold. I was the one who wasn’t calm; I was annoyed. I wanted to be able to relax, even in this tiny room, and that wasn’t possible.

  Jimmy fell asleep during the news, curled up on the bed farthest from the window, his back to the wall. Malcolm got up and turned down the set, but left the picture running. It sent a flickering gray light throughout the room.

  “So, you going to say anything to me or what?”

  I pulled the letter out of my back pocket. “You mean about this?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s to say?” I asked. “You’re going home in a week or so and report, right?”

  “I thought this trip might take all summer.”

  “It’s a crime to skip out on the draft, Malcolm,” I said softly, looking at Jimmy. His breathing was even, and his body still. He was asleep and not faking it. Still, I would have rather had this conversation out of his earshot. “A federal crime.”

  “I know.” Malcolm took the letter, folded it, and slipped it into his wallet. “If they’d bombed us like Pearl Harbor or something, I wouldn’t complain, but they’re not. They’re just some ignorant peasants, and we’re supposed to murder them.”

  I moved my hand slightly, indicating that he should keep his voice down. “I didn’t fight in World War Two, Malcolm. I fought in Korea. And it was pretty similar to this war in a lot of ways.”

  “Then you should understand why I don’t want to go.”

  “I don’t think anyone wants to go,” I said, wondering if that was true, barely remembering the man I had been before I left for Korea. I had been a dreamer, too — the kind of idealist that Daniel had denounced in his last speech to Sidbury. I had thought, since the Army had integrated, that my life in it would be so much better than my life outside it.

  I had been wrong.

  I leaned the chair back on two legs. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d gotten this before we left?”

  “You wouldn’t’ve brought me along,” he said. “You need me this trip, now more than ever.”

  I glanced at Jimmy. I did need Malcolm. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough of an excuse to help him out of the draft.

  “I’m not going back,” Malcolm said. “Not till we find Daniel.”

  “And if we don’t find him before it’s time for you to leave?”

  Malcolm was silent for a long moment. Then he said again, “You need me.”

  The choice, then, fell to me. I could take Malcolm home and abandon the search for Daniel Kirkland, which might be prudent given today’s incident. But I felt like I would betray Grace if I did that, as if I hadn’t really given this investigation a chance.

  My other choice was to send Malcolm home alone and try to slog along without him, although I didn’t know what I’d do if the search for Daniel became in any way dangerous.

  “How did the draft board find you?” I asked.

  “GED.” Malcolm sounded bitter. He had wanted his high school diploma. He’d been proud to get it, afraid that he never would finish his education. And then, after the GED had been logged with the Board of Education, this letter came.

  No wonder he felt betrayed.

  He had no family to speak of, so he couldn’t get a hardship deferral. He had no health problems and no history of mental illness. He had no money for college, so he couldn’t get another student deferral. He couldn’t even object on religious grounds. Even if he had an argument, which I didn’t think he did, the government had made getting conscientious objector status nearly impossible.

  “Let’s say we get you back to Chicago on time,” I said, “what would you do then?”

  “I don’t know.” Malcolm was looking out the window now, and it was clear he wasn’t seeing anything. “I really don’t. I don’t want to go to prison, I don’t want to go to Canada, and I don’t want to go to Vietnam.”

  “You can’t just do nothing,” I said. “Eventually, you will have to make a decision, or the government will make it for you.”

  “I know that, too,” Malcolm said. “I just didn’t expect this, Bill. I thought they’d never find me, not after Mom died. I figured I’d be okay.”

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “you’ve got about a month before they start looking for you.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You’ve used a week of it.”

  He nodded.

  “We’re going to have more than one discussion about this,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe by then, I’ll have made up my mind.”

  SEVENTEEN

  In the middle of the night, I left the motel room and walked to the office again. There I found the friendly night manager who had checked us in. I told him about our afternoon, watched his face go gray with anger, and then showed him the receipt the afternoon manager had given me.

  The night manager confirmed that the receipt was good, and he assured me that he would personally vouch for our safety. I wasn’t sure how he’d do that, but I thanked him anyway.

  Malcolm had been awake when I left, and he was awake when I returned. He had guard duty for the first half of the night. I would take over near dawn.

  Jimmy hadn’t moved except to roll over once, about midnight. The day had caught up with me, and I surprised myself by falling into a sound sleep.

  My dreams, however, were of cold and ice, and of carrying a dead man from a trench we had dug together back to the base, his blood hot against my freezing hands.

  I woke shaking. I’d had that nightmare off and on since I’d come home from Korea, and I had always awakened disgruntled. In the past, it had been worse, and sometimes it acted as a warning. In this case, I hoped it was only a response to stress.

  The morning paper didn’t help my mood. The two cops had known that the bank robbers wouldn’t be at a motel. Those robbers had arrived at the Wallingford Colonial Bank and Trust at eleven A.M., exactly the time when an armored car arrived at the bank to deliver twenty-seven thousand dollars.

  Only someone who had spent weeks casing the bank would know when the armored car delivered, which varied from day to day, but did follow a pattern if observed over time.

  I didn’t show Malcolm the paper. He was upset enough.

  We had a quick breakfast and headed downtown. I dropped Malcolm and Jimmy at the Green, letting them choose whether they wanted to ask more questions at Yale, go to the library and while away the day, or sightsee around downtown New Haven.

  Me, I had a lot of legwork, none of which I was looking forward to.

  I started at the Crow. Rueben Freeman wasn’t there, but the receptionist remembered me and gave me his home phone number.
Rueben was at home, working on an article for some education journal, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to expose the officers’ motel scam, not even for a national byline.

  The call wasn’t entirely wasted: he gave me a list of buildings that catered to students and landlords who might be amenable to a visit from me. I used the Crow’s phone book, and found a list of rental agencies that would also give me a place to start.

  It soon became clear that I couldn’t hog one of the Crow’s phones. I went to a nearby drugstore, and bought a roll of dimes. Not far from the Crow, I found a phone booth with an intact glass door. When I pulled it closed, it locked out most of the street noise. Then I took over the phone booth as if it were my office.

  My ploy was simple. I introduced myself with a fictitious name, claiming to be a landlord from nearby Branford. I told the people I talked with that I had had a tenant named Daniel Kirkland and that he had skipped out on three months’ rent, trashed the place, and cost me enough in damages to make it worth my while to take him to court.

  All I needed, I said, was an address so that my process server could find him.

  My story was horrible enough that other landlords would check their records just to see if this Kirkland deadbeat was on their rolls. It didn’t hurt to tell me as well.

  That afternoon I went through half of my roll of dimes, and ended up with nothing. After my third call, I got smart enough to have them check for Rhondelle’s name, and still I came up with zero.

  I was beginning to get discouraged. I took five more dimes and called the numbers Grace had given me, getting no answer. And no answer either from Whickam’s number at home or at his office.

  Finally, I decided to call it a day. Deep down, I was very concerned for Daniel Kirkland and, oddly, the more roadblocks I ran into, the more concerned I became.

  Jimmy showed up shortly after I arrived at the Green. He was out of breath and sweat-covered. I hadn’t even seen him come toward me. Malcolm took his time reaching us, looking from side to side as if he were searching for someone.

  “Didn’t think you’d be here yet,” Jimmy said.