War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel Read online

  “They didn’t even say they were sorry.” Her voice was nearly a whisper now. “And when I asked them why they hadn’t notified me when he had gone missing, they said that he was an adult and they weren’t required to. I said that I bet they notified white parents, and they got all hissy on me, like I was the one at fault. ‘We make accommodations for scholarship students, Mrs. Kirkland, but sometimes they just don’t fit in.’”

  I could almost hear the male voice with its upper East Coast WASP accent, calmly informing Grace Kirkland that her son was missing and it was her fault.

  I walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder, leading her to her desk. She leaned on me for just a moment, then smiled and moved away.

  “Did you call his friends?” I asked.

  “And his roommate, for what good that did. The boy was just about to leave for Greece and couldn’t have cared less what happened to Daniel.”

  “Did the roommate know?”

  “I don’t think so. I got the sense they didn’t get along.” She sighed. “The thing is that they are right and he is an adult. But it’s not like him to just disappear.”

  Actually, it was just like him. The boy I met, with his oversized Afro and antiwar rhetoric, hadn’t even noticed the sacrifices his mother had made to keep him in such a prestigious school. He had taken a protest bus last summer without letting her know he would be in Chicago. The fact that he had dropped out during the school year and hadn’t told her didn’t surprise me at all.

  But I didn’t challenge her. I didn’t see the point. “What did you want to ask me?”

  She took a deep breath, then glanced at the row of desks as if they were full of students. “I called the New Haven police. They couldn’t help me. They said the same thing the school did, that he was an adult and what he did was his business. So I called a private detective in New Haven. I got his name from the operator. He wanted to charge me half a year’s salary, and he made no guarantees. When I told him I couldn’t afford that, he suggested I look myself. Only I don’t know how, Bill. I’ve done everything I can think of. I was wondering if you would mind — I mean, I’m taking advantage here, but I thought maybe you could tell me what to do next.”

  She surprised me. I had expected her to hire me like she had done before.

  “Let me make a few calls,” I said.

  She put a hand on my arm as if she were going to physically hold me back. “No, really. I’ll do this. He’s probably on some bus going to some rally. I just need to know.”

  “When will they take away his scholarship?” I asked.

  “September first if they don’t hear from him,” she said. “And he needs a good reason for not going to class last year.”

  She had less than three months to find him. America was a large country. People could easily disappear inside its borders. Jimmy and I had proven that.

  “That’s not a lot of time,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding. I keep thinking that maybe Elijah knows, but I worry about losing him, too. I don’t want him to go searching for Daniel all on his own. Not again.”

  I nodded. I didn’t want that either. If anything, the country had become more dangerous since last summer.

  “Let me make some calls,” I said again.

  She licked her lower lip. “I’ll pay you for your time.”

  She sounded relieved that I had made the offer. Relieved and a little embarrassed.

  “Let’s see what I come up with first,” I said. “Then we’ll decide if payment is even necessary.”

  “I believe in compensating people for their work,” she said.

  “You are.” I smiled as warmly as I could, trying to reassure her. “You’re worrying about my son. That’s compensation enough.”

  THREE

  By the time I got home, all of the Yale business offices were closed. New Haven was an hour ahead of us, and obviously, Yale had summer hours.

  I didn’t. I worked as much as I could. Our money situation had improved greatly this year, but not enough for me. I had two dreams, one I talked about all the time, and one I never spoke of.

  I wanted Jimmy to go to college, and not just any college. A good school. That was the dream I spoke of. The one I kept to myself was the dream of owning a house again.

  I still owned a home in Memphis, but I couldn’t return to it. A friend of mine, Henry Davis, rented it out for me and put the money in a savings account that I secretly thought of as Jimmy’s college fund.

  At the moment, Jimmy and I lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s South Side. Since I started working as a sometime building investigator for Sturdy Investments, I had learned that our apartment was large and spacious by South Side standards.

  The apartment didn’t seem that way. The bedrooms were cramped, and the living room also served as the dining room. A half-kitchen stood off to the side.

  I had one of the bedrooms, and Jimmy another. The third served as my office. I had furnished it with used pieces I bought at garage sales. I’d managed to find a large old-fashioned desk, a metal office chair on rollers, and some excellent filing cabinets. The office looked official, and I kept it neat, since I occasionally met clients in there.

  This last month, I had splurged and bought myself an electric typewriter, which sat on a credenza to my right. When I typed, I had a view out the window, not that I saw much more than the next building over.

  I doodled on the blotter as I waded my way through a variety of Yale phone numbers. When that failed, I called the New Haven Police Department. I put on my best white man’s voice, and claimed to be something I wasn’t — a licensed private detective. I’d never been willing to go through the state bonding procedures in Tennessee, and I felt that I didn’t dare jeopardize my position here in Chicago by bringing myself to the attention of the authorities.

  The New Haven police didn’t keep records of missing students. The police saw the college students as upper-class transients and didn’t concern themselves with any missing persons cases, except those involving very rich families.

  Grace had gotten the same information. But I took the call a step farther than Grace had. I asked if the police had a record of arrests involving a Daniel Kirkland.

  “He your college kid?” the desk sergeant asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I told you. We don’t keep records on these kids.”

  “Not even arrest records?” I asked.

  “You know how it is,” he said. “No sense pursuing something that ain’t gonna stick.”

  I had a hunch Daniel Kirkland wasn’t going to get mistaken for a rich college student, but I had already goofed in my conversation with the desk sergeant. I had mentioned Yale, and no amount of backtracking would get him to look up records for me.

  So, on a whim, I called the jail and asked if they had records of holding a Daniel Kirkland. They did not — at least, none in the past few months.

  Grace had already covered the hospitals. Aside from speaking to the registrar and other authorities at Yale, there was little more that I could do until the next day.

  * * *

  The following morning, I finally reached Edward St. James of the Yale Registrar’s office. I used my white man’s voice again, and introduced myself as Mr. William Grimshaw of the University of Chicago. I claimed to be reviewing a Daniel Kirkland’s application for admission.

  “He seems excellent on paper, but I have run into a few problems,” I said, purposely rustling the files on my desk so that it sounded like I was working. “I understand that his national scholarship is in jeopardy, although the scholarship people tell me they’re not at liberty to say why. So I assume something must have happened at Yale.”

  St. James made a noncommittal sound on the other end, showing attention and little more.

  “And,” I said, lowering my voice conspiratorially, “while I know that the University of Chicago is one of the best schools in the nation, I also know that Yale is even bett
er. So I do find it curious that Mr. Kirkland would abandon your fine education for ours, even if it is in his hometown.”

  “I’ll see what I can find.” St. James sounded distracted. “Would you like to hold while I look up the file or call back?”

  As distracted as he sounded, I figured I’d better hold. He excused himself and the phone clunked as he stepped away from it.

  I leaned back in the chair. I understood St. James’s distracted tone. I had a hunch he got these calls a lot. Many students had given up on conventional schooling to protest. Harvard had shut down in April as students rioted, taking over the campus. So had San Diego State and Columbia. Student riots had become so common that most of them never reached the national news.

  Even those that included burned and bombed buildings — and there were several — seemed to only merit a single paragraph mention on the national page of the Chicago Tribune.

  “Mr. Grimshaw?” St. James had returned to the phone. “I have your file.”

  “Good,” I said as I heard him turn pages.

  “It seems.…” His voice trailed off. He cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable. “It seems that your Mr. Kirkland is no longer a student here.”

  “When did he leave? I don’t have that in my files.”

  “You said you’re considering his application?” St. James no longer sounded distracted.

  “Yes,” I said. “Normally, I wouldn’t call, but I just have a sense — and it is only a sense — that things don’t add up here.”

  “Indeed they don’t,” St. James said. “Give me a moment to examine these documents.”

  I heard more paper rustling on his side. I tapped my pen on the blotter, then hauled a legal pad out of my top drawer. Something in St. James’s tone made me think I needed to take notes.

  “It appears.” St. James said, “that Mr. Kirkland had a less-than-exemplary record with us.”

  “I suspected as much. I figured there had to be some trouble for him to return home.”

  “Some is a bit of an understatement.” St. James lowered his voice. “You realize he was a scholarship student?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I also understand his scholarship is in jeopardy.”

  “I should say.” St. James sounded disapproving. “Most full scholarships, especially those like his — given to students based on merit and nothing else — require back-to-back enrollment with only the summer break, or barring that, some sort of explanation for time off.”

  “His application says that he didn’t attend last semester, but doesn’t give a reason,” I said.

  “Well.” St. James sounded even more conspiratorial. “He was asked not to return.”

  “He was expelled?” That caught me by surprise.

  “No,” St. James said, “we don’t expel, exactly. Usually we come to a mutual arrangement. You understand, either the school isn’t right for the student or the student isn’t right for the school.”

  I tensed. “Is that what happened with Mr. Kirkland?”

  “Looking through the file, it seems that the admissions committee had concerns about him from the beginning. Apparently, he comes from quite a disadvantaged area and most of our colored students generally have a more middle-class background. His admission was part of our new outreach program. Until a few years ago, we hadn’t been sending recruiters to public high schools.”

  “Previously, your – ” I couldn’t bring myself to say “colored,” in this context, no matter how much I was pretending. “Your black students came from private schools?”

  “Or schools that rated quite high academically,” St. James said. “His school is in the middle of one of the more disadvantaged areas of Chicago, yet his SAT scores were quite high, and his essay was phenomenal.”

  “So,” I said, trying to put all the doublespeak together in my mind. “You had hoped he would perform better academically? I have his SAT scores, his IQ test score, and his high school records in front of me, and I see nothing wrong with his mind.”

  “He has an excellent mind, Mr. Grimshaw,” St. James said, “and quite frankly, his academic performance, at least during his first year, was above expectations.”

  “So I don’t understand,” I said. “If he was getting good grades, why did you conclude that he wasn’t right for the college.”

  “He’s — how shall I put it? — an agitator. Trouble followed him, Mr. Grimshaw. He didn’t participate in things. He started them.”

  “Riots?” I asked.

  “We don’t have riots at Yale.” St. James all but sniffed that last. “But we have had difficult moments in the last few years, and Mr. Kirkland was always in the middle of them.”

  “But if he was making his grades, attending his classes, and not breaking any rules or laws, I don’t understand the problem,” I said.

  St. James sighed. “Let me speak frankly, Mr. Grimshaw. Yale College was founded as a Christian school more than two hundred and fifty years ago. Even though we have become more secular, we keep many of the traditions of our founders. We don’t merely teach young men letters. We teach them a way of life. We have found, as our admissions policy has become more open, that the young men who have the most difficulty with our system are the impoverished, the colored, and the Hebrew student. They do not participate in the social life, which is so much a part of Yale. Consequently, they aren’t well known enough to join the various societies, and rarely participate in extracurricular activities. Young men learn how to be leaders here, Mr. Grimshaw. You can’t lead with only one side of the equation. You must become a well-rounded human being.”

  I was clutching my pen tightly in my right hand, so tightly that my fingers hurt. “You expelled Daniel Kirkland because he wasn’t popular?”

  “On the contrary,” St. James said, “he was quite popular. He simply didn’t fit in. He kept trying to change things. We do accommodate the colored students, just like we accommodate the Hebrew students. The Hebrew students have their own rabbi now, and the colored students were allowed to form their own organization. But Mr. Kirkland wanted more. Black studies programs, more Negro professors, and an historical context that we don’t believe will help our young men become the next leaders of this great country.”

  “I still don’t understand—”

  “Mr. Kirkland was not polite in his requests,” St. James said. “He used language we do not find acceptable, and made demands of people whom he shouldn’t have contacted at all. Presidents visit our university, Mr. Grimshaw, and we make them available to the students—”

  “He insulted President Nixon?”

  “One of the President’s advisors visited Mr. Kirkland’s college last fall. Mr. Kirkland was not a good representative of Yale.”

  “I can’t imagine that a lot of the students were,” I said.

  “Those students didn’t choose to attend the special luncheon,” St. James said. “It’s documented in the file. Frankly, I would have spoken to him sooner and not allowed him to come to the luncheon. But we attempt to be egalitarian here.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, and then bit my lower lip. I hadn’t meant to let the sarcasm out.

  “While the University of Chicago is a different type of school,” St. James said, oblivious to my comment, “you still have important visitors and well-known professors who have participated in things Mr. Kirkland does not believe in. He might do well academically, but at what cost to the university?”

  “Things he does not believe in,” I said. “The war?”

  “The war, the current administration, the socioeconomic system.” Paper rustled as St. James turned the page. “The white patriarchal society. I could go on, Mr. Grimshaw.”

  They had documented a lot, apparently expecting trouble from Daniel. I wished I could get my hands on that file. “So you asked him not to return for spring semester, but how did he do in the fall?”

  “Our conversations began before midterms,” St. James said. “Mr. Kirkland was skipping many of his classes and e
ncouraging others to do so. He flunked two of his courses because he did not believe the ‘garbage’ the professors were teaching.”

  “And the other fall courses?”

  “Much to the irritation of his professors, he succeeded in getting Bs without attending the last month of classes. He said it was proof that Yale’s vaunted academic difficulty was a myth.”

  “Too bad a mind like that is being wasted,” I said, more to myself than to St. James.

  “My point exactly,” St. James said. “If you believe the University of Chicago can get him off this path and make him a reliable citizen, more power to you.”

  “Thank you for your candor,” I said.

  “Believe me, I wouldn’t have spoken up unless it were an extreme case.”

  I did believe him, and I knew he was dancing around the edges of something, something that he couldn’t tell me from the file. Taken together, Daniel Kirkland’s violations at Yale were a lot less than other students had done in the past few years at Columbia, Harvard, and other Ivy League schools. Many of the students who closed down buildings hadn’t been expelled from their campuses. I couldn’t believe that Daniel Kirkland would be tossed out for speaking plainly — if rudely — to the administration.

  “May I ask one more question?” St. James’s round-about way of speaking was rubbing off on me.

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “Did you inform Daniel’s mother of your decision?”

  “Our view is that our students are adults. We inform the parents if they foot the bill for the education, but for the most part we let the students themselves handle their own affairs.”

  At least the scholarship students, the “colored” students, and the “Hebrews.” All of the undesirables to WASPy Yale.

  “So no one outside of Yale and Mr. Kirkland know that he is persona non grata?”

  “Unless they specifically ask, as you have, Mr. Grimshaw, we have no need to tell them.”

  “Not even his scholarship administrators?”

  “They received a copy of the file,” St. James said with a hint of satisfaction.