A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 2

  For me, though, the end began on Monday, February twenty-sixth. That was the day I saw Laura Hathaway for the first time.

  She showed up at 9 that morning. My office was on the second floor of the Gallina Building on Beale Street, the center of black commerce in Memphis, and home of the blues. Sometimes, late at night, I could hear blues coming from the clubs below, ever so faintly, accompanied by laughter and the sounds of revelry. Those sounds had grown softer over the years—most of the music clubs had moved to West Memphis—but I still heard them, and still treasured them.

  The Gallina building was seventy-seven years old, and had housed several businesses, from a saloon and twenty-room hotel to a gambling den to a dentist’s office that had just closed when I rented my room near the top of the stairs. I had been a practicing private detective for over ten years, and until that day, I had never seen a white woman come through my door.

  Laura Hathaway was tall and slender and in her late twenties. She carried a coat over one arm and a white clutch purse under the other. She wore an ever-so-proper pullover angora sweater and trim skirt that went modestly—and unfashionably—to her knees. Her little white boots didn’t do much to protect her feet against the garbage that had been pushed against the curbs below. Around her neck, she wore a strand of pearls. Her blond hair was cut shoulder length, ends flipped outward in a style that looked as if it took a lot of care. She had on just enough makeup to enhance her conventionally pretty face, but not enough to suggest she was willing to do anything immoral, illegal, or both.

  I stiffened my shoulders, but didn’t stand. I was six feet tall, muscular, and broad-shouldered. Sometimes my physical presence frightened white people, especially white women. There was no percentage in scaring her, at least not right away.

  I figured she was either another observer from the Civil Rights Commission—one of their observers had been injured Friday morning, and they weren’t taking too kindly to it—or the fifteenth reporter who was trying to find out what I had seen from my window.

  On Friday morning, we had had what the mayor’s office was calling a “riot” and what the sanitation workers were calling “a march that had gotten out of hand.” The mayor had set Thursday as the last day the strikers had to come back to work, or they would be fired and replacement workers would be hired. The city council opposed the mayor and had promised to vote on Friday morning to support the strikers. But Friday came, and the council didn’t vote as planned. So the union members marched in protest back downtown, and somehow the march grew violent. Men, women, and children—bystanders and participants—were maced, clubbed, and bloodied.

  I was in my office that day, and I had a great view of the mess. Only I didn’t watch. I went to the window, saw the mêlée, and decided I would only get hurt if I went below. I waited until things calmed down, then I finally went to the street, helping up people who couldn’t see because their eyes were swollen shut and tearing, cleaning the blood off a young girl who had met with the wrong end of a truncheon, and generally cleaning up anything that looked like it needed cleaning.

  That was how I saw myself: as a man who didn’t get involved with a crisis, but who did clean up other people’s messes—usually for a price.

  I had offered no opinion on the strike to the reporters who had talked to me over the weekend, and I wasn’t about to now.

  “What do you want?” I asked the woman.

  She raised her eyebrows, which had been plucked and then marked over with a darkening pencil. “Mr. Dalton?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m Smokey Dalton. And you are?”

  “Laura Hathaway.” She said the name as if I should know it. I didn’t.

  I threaded my fingers together. I could wait for the information. Patience usually threw off white reporters. It often irritated white members of the Civil Rights Commission. I’d see which one she was.

  “Your real name is Billy Dalton,” she said. “Not William. Billy. Right?”

  Only good friends knew my first name, and very few of them used it. She was not a good friend. I kicked my chair back so that it rested on two legs. “Look, Miss. I only deal with people through referrals. So unless someone told you about me—”

  “The only person who told me about you was that man who works valet parking at the Peabody,” she said.

  Roscoe Miller. I kept my expression carefully neutral. Roscoe Miller owed me. He wouldn’t send just anyone my way. And he was conscious of the debt. While I had never been able to locate his daughter’s rapist, I had been able to raise enough money to fly her to Switzerland and pay for the legal abortion. Roscoe didn’t do favors for white people, not after what happened to his daughter. And he never turned on me.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “I asked him where your office was,” she said. “He told me.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded, and I thought I might be seeing nerves beneath that made-up exterior. “He didn’t really tell me about your office, not until I asked exactly where it was. Then he wanted to know what I wanted with you.”

  That was the Roscoe I knew. She obviously had some important business then. “And what is that?” I asked.

  She raised her chin slightly. “I’m Dora Jean Hathaway’s daughter.”

  Again, she spoke as if the name meant something to me. It didn’t.

  “So?” I asked.

  Something flashed through her eyes, so quick that I almost didn’t recognize it. Surprise. She expected me to know the names.

  “Earl Hathaway was my father.”

  I kept my face impassive, let two fingers tap on the desktop as if I were tired of the conversation. I wasn’t. I finally felt as if we were getting somewhere. I just didn’t want Miss Laura Hathaway to know it.

  “I need to know,” she snapped, “why my mother believed you were entitled to a payment from her estate at the time of her death.”

  “Your mother’s dead?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Laura Hathaway swallowed hard, so hard I could see the movement in her long and lovely throat. When she did speak again, her voice had an edge of disbelief. “You didn’t know her, did you?”

  “I never knew anyone named Dora Jean Hathaway,” I said carefully. “When did she die?”

  “Just before Christmas,” Laura said.

  “Where are you from, Miss Hathaway?”

  “Chicago,” she said.

  “I’ve never been to Chicago.” I put my chair back on all four legs. “Are you sure you got the right Dalton?”

  She swallowed again. It was a subtle nervous gesture that probably no one saw when she wore high-collared sweaters against a midwestern winter. But here, in the warmth of my office, her rising nerves were as palpable as humidity in June.

  “‘A Negro named Billy, not William, Dalton, known as Smokey, of Memphis, Tennessee.’ Is there anyone else in this town that answers to that description, Mr. Dalton?”

  Negro. At least she didn’t say nigra. Or nigger.

  “Not to my knowledge,” I said. “How old is the will?”

  “Updated last June, but the lawyer assured me that clause has been there since my father died.”

  “And he died when?” I asked.

  “Nineteen sixty,” she said. “January.”

  My tapping fingers froze, and I had to concentrate in order to relax them. I didn’t want her to see my reaction.

  “How much money did your mother want to give me?” I asked.

  “I would really rather not say, Mr. Dalton.”

  “Enough to bring you down here, though,” I said. “Enough to make you investigate me. Why didn’t you hire a private detective, Miss Hathaway? It would have been easier.”

  “I wanted to see you myself,” she said.

  “So your private detective found no connection between me and your family.”

  She flushed. I had caught her. “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s always interesting to
listen to what folks don’t say.”

  At that moment, my door opened. Jimmy Bailey peeked around it. He was ten but his scrawny body made him look younger. His eyes looked older.

  “Smokey?” He sounded plaintive.

  I stood. “Jimmy? Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I was goin’, but I—”

  At that moment, Laura Hathaway turned her head. Her movement made the old chair squeak.

  Jimmy caught his lower lip with his teeth. “Never mind,” he said, and pulled the door closed. His footsteps echoed as he ran down the hall.

  “Excuse me,” I said. I hurried to the door, yanked it open, and ran toward the stairs. I made it in time to see Jimmy disappear out the front door.

  I ran down, but by the time I got to the street, Jimmy was gone. I put my hands on my hips and sighed. Jimmy was a good kid, smart. I’d been keeping an eye on him, unofficially, since I caught him crying near my doorstep three years ago. His mother was a hooker who started the work to make ends meet, and who lost herself somewhere along the way. The day I first met Jimmy, she’d been arrested and the cops had been violent. They’d ignored her son and shoved her in their wagon, leaving him and his older brother to fend for themselves.

  It had been the first time Jimmy had witnessed such a scene, but it wasn’t the last.

  The February air was cold and I shivered once. Jimmy was gone. I’d see if I could track down Jimmy later. But first, I had to deal with the white woman in my office.

  As I went back up the filthy marble stairs, I tried to suppress the feeling of unease that was growing inside me. The money, the dates, had to be more than a coincidence. But I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.

  I pulled open the door to my office. She still sat in the chair, clutching her purse. “Is the boy all right?”

  As if she cared about a kid like Jimmy. “Show me a picture,” I said.

  She frowned, not making the mental leap.

  “Of your mother,” I said. “Maybe I’ll recognize her then.”

  “Oh.” She flushed slightly. She knew I wasn’t going to talk to her about Jimmy or anyone else. She flicked the clasp on her white clutch purse, opened it, and pulled out a photograph. It had the tiny wavy edges and white border so common to snapshots taken in the 1950s. She handed the photograph to me.

  I took it to my desk and sat down. Then I leaned back in my chair and studied the picture.

  It was black and white, a candid shot of a woman seated at a glass table, a cup of coffee before her. She wore long white gloves and a Mamie Eisenhower hat that covered her short curly hair. Her face had the same planes and lines as her daughter’s, but the features were different. Dora Jean Hathaway had small eyes, a pug nose, and a wide mouth. It almost looked like someone had grafted parts of various heads together to form hers. Yet hers was a formidable face, a memorable face, the face of a woman who seized life and held it. I tried to imagine it without its character lines and wrinkles, and found that I couldn’t.

  “Do you have another photo?” I asked. “Something taken when she was younger?”

  Laura Hathaway was watching me. “You don’t recognize her?”

  “Not from this shot. Give me something older.”

  “I don’t have anything older with me.”

  I shrugged. “Then I can’t help you, Miss Hathaway.”

  She sighed, and glanced around the room, and I saw it through her eyes: the pull windows, their outsides covered with the grime of decades of city dirt; the high ceilings; the papers scattered everywhere. There were piles of paper on the floor, the filing cabinets tilted against the scarred wood paneling, and a shabby coat rack on which I had hung two shabby coats. My desk had its own stack of papers and there were two chairs—the wooden one in front, and the metal one on wheels that I used to annoy my downstairs neighbors.

  “What exactly,” she asked with just the right note of curiosity, yet somehow maintaining a touch of distaste in her voice, “is it that you do here?”

  She wouldn’t have been able to tell from the door. It had the frosted glass, but no name stenciled in. No number. I liked the anonymity. It allowed me to control who became a client and who didn’t. “Your detective didn’t tell you?”

  She turned toward me. Her eyes were flat, her gaze cold. “I expected him to find some connection between our families. I had assumed we were distant relatives, going back to the days of slavery, and that you were blackmailing my mother to get some of the family money.”

  My palms had grown wet. I took up a napkin and wiped my hands slowly, deliberately, wondering what good it would do to never invite another white person in my office again. I really wasn’t a supporter of Black Power. When I thought politically, I thought like Martin did, that integration would be a good thing. But I never really acted on it. I had no white friends.

  Now I knew why.

  “I’ll take that to be another no, that your detective failed again,” I said. “I hope you didn’t pay this idiot very much money. He sure as hell didn’t find out anything useful for you.”

  “He found you,” she said.

  “Anyone with a Memphis phone book could have found me.”

  “So what do you do?” she asked.

  I almost continued the games. I almost taunted her about her sources, about her decision to come here instead of sending someone else. But it was that decision that stopped me. For all her good-girl manners and her condescending ways, she had taken that long two-block walk from Union to Beale. She had sought me out.

  “I do odd jobs for people,” I said, the official answer, the answer I gave white people, coming out of my mouth so fast that I didn’t have to think about it.

  “Odd jobs.” She frowned. “From an office?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Seems strange, that’s all.” She tucked her clutch purse under her arm, and started for the door.

  “I’d hold that if I were you,” I said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “That purse,” I said. “I’d hold onto it, at least till you cross Gayoso, and maybe even after that.”

  It was as if she were reassessing me each time she looked at me. “All right.”

  “And I’d move from the Peabody,” I said. “A woman like you shouldn’t stay in this part of town.”

  “A travel agent recommended it. She said the ducks—”

  “Are great for tourists. But you’re not one, are you, Miss Hathaway? And as you can tell this neighborhood isn’t the best.”

  “I thought the Peabody wasn’t in your neighborhood.” She flung that at me just as I was warming to her.

  I shrugged. It wasn’t my concern whether the lady got followed from Beale, mugged, and put in her place. The Peabody was a grand, expensive hotel in Memphis, but I expected trouble there and soon. It had just desegregated as part of a union concession, although that fact wasn’t well known, and I was afraid that when the first blacks registered, there’d be hell to pay.

  It is amazing how wrong I was.

  “I’ll bring an older photo for you,” Laura Hathaway said. “See if it jogs your memory.”

  “Why bother?” I asked. “This means nothing to me.”

  “I’m obligated to make sure you get your cash.” Her eyes clouded for a moment. It was beginning to look like disposing of Momma’s assets had become a tricky and uncomfortable proposition.

  “You know,” I said, “sometimes people should be allowed their secrets.”

  “Do you think so, Mr. Dalton?” she asked, and this time there was no condescension in her voice. “Do you really think so? A man like you who takes odd jobs? Do you allow people their secrets? Or do you just want to hang onto yours?”

  Then she let herself out, closing the wooden door gently behind her. Her shadow moved across the frosted glass, and then she was gone.

  I stared at the door for a long moment, and then I stood up. I finally had a lead in a personal quest that had bothered me for eight years.

  I w
as going to go to work—for myself.

  THREE

  AFTER SHE LEFT, I picked up the phone and called Jimmy’s school. He had been marked absent which, the secretary said, wasn’t that unusual anymore. Her tone had a touch of blame to it as if I were the one responsible for the boy. He had a mother, such as she was, and a brother who was older. They were supposed to be looking out for him.

  I wondered why I was always the one who did.

  Before I faced the feelings that Laura Hathaway’s visit had stirred, I wanted to find Jimmy. His abrupt departure bothered me. Jimmy rarely came inside my office, and when he did, he slipped in like a wraith. This morning, he had barged in, and my response, along with my client, had frightened him off.

  With luck, he’d be waiting for me across the street, beneath the statue of W.C. Handy and his famous trumpet.

  I left the office. The late-morning sun shed a pale cold light on Beale Street, revealing the garbage piled on the curbs. Several shoppers hurried by, their faces tense and harried.

  The daily march to the courthouse was over, and near Handy Park, I saw several men carrying placards. They were going somewhere else with them, holding the signs horizontally so that I couldn’t read them. But I wasn’t really trying to. I was looking beyond the men to the center of the park, just behind the statue.

  Jimmy’s brother, Joe, sat on one of the concrete benches. He was as thin as his brother, and five years older. Joe should have been in school too, but of course he wasn’t. No wonder Jimmy was skipping. His brother had already shown him that it was all right.

  I crossed with the light and walked toward the park. As I got closer, I saw that Joe wasn’t alone. An older man in a black beret was talking with him. Their heads were bent together and the discussion looked serious.

  They stood as I walked into the park. The man with the beret turned and headed toward Union. Joe came toward me.