Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Smokey Dalton Novel Read online

  I put the car into drive and pulled out, checking my mirrors for a tail. I hadn’t done that since mid-June. For some reason, I’d assumed we were safely hidden.

  No one pulled out behind us, but I continued to watch as we drove north through the Black Belt, heading toward the heart of Bronzeville.

  Most of Bronzeville was a ghetto. Slums, broken-down buildings, gangs roaming the streets. But other parts reflected Chicago’s long and proud black heritage. Stately homes lined some of the avenues—and one even housed a museum of black history in some lady’s parlor. She’d been raising funds to move it into a proper building, and Franklin had been helping her.

  The riots which hit Chicago after Martin Luther King died happened mostly in the black neighborhoods on the Near West Side. Buildings had been burned, looted, and destroyed. It was so bad that I no longer looked for housing there. I stayed on the South Side, having heard horror stories of what happened to blacks who ventured outside the Black Belt.

  Jimmy and I had enough problems. We didn’t need gangs of armed whites blocking the door to our home.

  The apartment building we were going to go see was on Forty-sixth Street, just off the new Dan Ryan Expressway. Over the phone, the apartment manager had assured me that the apartment was in a good neighborhood, well kept, and clean. I’d checked the address with Franklin, who’d shrugged.

  “Housing market as tight as it is, Smokey, you’re gonna have to take what you can get around here.”

  He’d been saying that to me from the beginning, and I knew he was right. It was just that I owned my own house in Memphis—a house that had been locked and unoccupied since early April. It was in a good neighborhood where children played happily on the street.

  I wasn’t able to go back to it yet, but I wasn’t willing to trade that sense of security for a little bit of privacy. I’d look as long as Franklin was willing to tolerate two extra presences in his small home.

  Jimmy had turned around in the seat, his chin resting on his arms as he stared out the back window.

  “See anyone?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  The apartment complex was on Forty-sixth. I scanned for the address as I drove slowly up the street; there were several apartment complexes and none with a For Rent sign in the window. I wasn’t sure I liked the neighborhood—there were few trees, and the faint lingering odor of the stockyards permeated the area. I was sure the smell was exacerbated by the heat—the stockyards were no longer in use—but the old scent of manure and cows lingered all the same.

  “I thought this was a good one.” Jimmy sounded as disgruntled as I felt. I had had high hopes for this place. It was close to an elementary school and the price was one of the more reasonable I’d heard. Rents in Chicago were ridiculous—although I had nothing to compare them to in Memphis. I hadn’t paid rent in eleven years.

  I finally saw the address, metal letters on a steel-and-concrete building, about ten stories high. There was no yard to speak of, only dirt and scraggly brown grass. No trees, and a view of the houses across the street and the empty stockyards beyond.

  “Maybe it’ll be all right inside,” I said.

  “Not if it’s like the last one.”

  He was right. We’d seen some ugly buildings in our search for a place to live. Still, I had been promised that this apartment had some amenities. It was worth the look.

  “Let’s check it out anyway.” I got out of the car, and my feet crunched on broken glass. Several beer bottles had been shattered along the side of the street. The glass was hard to see against the gray concrete. I hoped my tires would survive.

  Jimmy opened his door and got out as well. He immediately scanned the neighborhood, his eyes wide and alert. Looking for our shadow. Apparently not trusting me to see anything.

  I’d been looking too and on this empty street, I knew we hadn’t been followed. No cars had been behind us for the last several blocks.

  I didn’t like how quiet the street was, and I was glad that my car had almost nothing to steal. Its parts were nearly as useless as it was, but my .38 was locked in the glove box. I kept the gun there because I didn’t want to bring it into an apartment full of children. Taking the gun out would draw too much attention to it, and carrying it would make the wrong impression on the landlord.

  “Come on,” I said, and headed up the walk.

  Jimmy stayed at my side, closer than he’d been in weeks. He would have clung to me if he had been a few years younger. At ten, staying close was the best he could do.

  As I approached the building, I thought I saw a white face peer at me from one of the windows. A trickle of unease ran through me. There shouldn’t have been a white face for miles. Bridgeport, the nearest white enclave, was at least six blocks north, and Hyde Park, one of the few areas in Chicago where the races mixed at least a little, was over five blocks south.

  “What is it, Smokey?” Jimmy asked in a hushed whisper.

  “Nothing,” I said just as softly, even though it appeared we were one of the few people on the street. I didn’t like that either.

  We walked underneath the small overhang that led to the main door. It had a security lock, and an intercom at the side. The system was sophisticated enough that someone had to buzz a visitor in. There was a series of buttons that ran along the left side of the door, each labeled with an apartment number. Only a few went so far as to add the name.

  I pressed the one marked “Manager.”

  “Yeah?” A tinny voice answered.

  “I’m here to see the apartment.”

  In response, an electronic buzzer sounded, so loud that both Jimmy and I took a step back. Then I grabbed the door and yanked it open.

  It was heavy and metal, a security door without dents, a good sign. We stepped into a narrow interior that smelled faintly of garlic and grease. It was hot too, as if it never got any air.

  The manager’s apartment was directly behind the security door. There was another door, this one glass, that led into the main part of the building. That door was propped open and I could see into the first floor hallway. It was clean enough. No broken lights, no damaged doors. But it also didn’t have toys on the floor or bicycles propped up against the wall or even mats in front of the doors.

  Jimmy shook his head just a little as the manager’s door opened.

  The manager wasn’t what I’d expected. I thought the white face I had seen belonged to him, but it hadn’t. This man was short, bald, and had a goatee threaded with silver. He wore a clean white shirt and dark pants and was carrying keys in his left hand.

  I was about to introduce myself when he turned away from me and unlocked the glass door.

  “It’s upstairs,” he said.

  I glanced at Jimmy, who shrugged. Then we followed the manager through the door and up the metal stairs.

  Our footsteps echoed. That was the first real strike against the building. Any sounds in the hallways would carry. We went up all ten flights. Halfway up, I asked if there was an elevator.

  “Service only,” he said. “I let people use it when they move.”

  I didn’t like that much either. Jimmy opened his eyes wide, then grimaced at me. He was already ready to leave. I still wanted to see. We’d had such poor luck finding a place to live that my standards were coming down. How far, I hadn’t yet figured out.

  We reached the tenth floor. The manager was puffing but Jimmy and I weren’t. Jimmy was in the best shape of his life. Some of that had to do with the fact he was finally getting regular meals, but the rest of it had to do with fear. He wanted to be able to run as far as he could to escape anything that came after him.

  This hallway was darker. I thought I saw a movement in the shadows, but I wasn’t sure. Jimmy hadn’t seen anything or he would have been running for the stairs.

  The faint odors of stale sweat and perfume filled the hallway. Someone had been here before us. The smells mixed with the scent of frying hamburger. Down the hall, a woman was screeching—angry sho
uts, followed by a slap.

  Jimmy winced.

  The manager didn’t even seem to notice. He led us to Number 1037, unlocked the door, and stood back.

  The apartment was empty. It had a large living room with a stained gray carpet, a hole in one wall, and the gray remains of a leak down the other. The kitchen was to the right, its cupboards grease stained, the stove so filthy that the dirt would have to be dynamited off. I gave the bathroom a cursory glance and the bedrooms, which smelled faintly of rot, an even shorter glance.

  Jimmy remained at the living room window. I joined him. The view was the only good thing about the apartment. We were high enough to see over the rows of apartment buildings and houses to the stockyards. On Halstead, just in front of the yards, sewer workers were sealing manhole covers. On the far side of the yard, I could see other workers fortifying a cyclone fence covered with barbed wire.

  The International Amphitheater sat in the middle, a concrete monstrosity that seemed more like a bunker than a building. Police cars surrounded it, as did several trucks marked Andy Frain Security Services.

  Apparently anyone who lived here would have a bird’s-eye view of the Democratic National Convention.

  To me that was the most major strike against the building. The papers had been full of the various preparations Mayor Daley had ordered to protect the city and the delegates, including blocked-off roads and searches of motorists in that area. That kind of attention was the last thing Jimmy and I wanted.

  “Apartment’s available September 1,” the manager said. It was, apparently, his only sales pitch.

  “It’s empty now,” I said.

  “Got some work.”

  Obviously. But I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “The ad said that the apartment was ready for immediate rental.”

  “That was a different apartment,” the manager said, and I had the sense he was lying. “This is the only one we got and it’s ready for September first.”

  “All right.” I turned away from the window.

  A tall, thin white man was standing just inside the door. The manager gave him an uneasy look. Jimmy hadn’t seen the white man yet, but I knew that he would be startled. The white man looked official in his black suit, narrow tie, and polished shoes.

  “You interested in this place?” the white man asked me. “Because if you are, there are security forms to fill out.”

  No one filled out security forms to rent an apartment. Applications, yes. Financial forms, maybe. But not security forms. This man was either police, FBI or Secret Service. A chill ran through me, and I resisted the urge to glance out the window again.

  Of course. Mayor Daley’s panic over some kind of black uprising during the Democratic National Convention had filled the papers all summer. The authorities would be watching sites like this, apartments that a sniper could rent, wait for the right moment, train his scope on the potential nominee and blow the election process all to hell.

  I think if Martin had been the only person assassinated this year, preparations wouldn’t have been so bad. But with Bobby Kennedy’s death in June, the entire country believed these political murders would continue.

  “All I want,” I said making myself sound both calm and confused, “is an apartment for me and my boy.”

  Jimmy slipped his hand in mine. He squeezed and I felt the panic in his fingers.

  I turned toward the manager. “You told me over the phone that this neighborhood was safe. Your definition of safe and mine are very different.”

  “It’s a good neighborhood,” the manager said.

  “It’s not what we’re looking for.”

  “You looking for suburbia?” he asked. “Nice, clean house with a great big yard? Chicago’s got lots of places like that but not for people like you and me, pal. You go outside the Black Belt and you’ll learn what violence really is. Those places, they’re only safe for white people.”

  I got the sense that speech wasn’t so much for me as it was for his unwelcome white watchdog. I kept my grip on Jimmy’s hand and maneuvered my way out of the apartment.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said to the manager, but I said nothing to the white man as I passed him. In fact, I kept my eyes averted, just in case there were pictures of me floating around some bureau office somewhere.

  I hustled Jimmy to the stairs, silently cursing myself. If this had been Memphis, I would have known to avoid this neighborhood. It was only common sense that there’d be security in apartment buildings like this. With the level of paranoia the city government was exhibiting, they would do everything they could think of to guard against trouble, even if it meant trampling on some citizen’s rights.

  I’d allowed myself and Jimmy to be noticed—and not in a positive way. If the government assumed everyone who viewed the apartment was a sniper, then I might just have caught the attention of the very people I had tried to avoid all summer.

  My abrupt departure probably hadn’t helped, but I hadn’t had much of a choice. I looked guilty whether I stayed or whether I left. And it was up to that official white man to determine if I was enough of a threat to be followed or investigated.

  Fortunately, I hadn’t given anyone our names. I’d have to make sure that I didn’t drive past the building so that he could take our license number—not that it would be easy to read. I’d coated it with mud the second day I had the car, not wanting anyone to trace us easily. Some of the mud had fallen off, but not all of it.

  Jimmy tried to tug me down the stairs, but I made him walk, listening for footsteps behind us. Once he started to speak, and I put my free hand over his mouth. We had walked into the exact type of place we did not want to be, and I had to get us out as unobtrusively as possible.

  On the first floor, a young girl played with a doll in front of one of the apartment doors. It stood ajar, and the sounds of a television, blaring one of the noontime Chicago news and talk programs. The girl didn’t even look up, for which I was vaguely relieved.

  I pushed open the glass door, then the security door, and stepped out onto the brown lawn, feeling like I could breathe for the first time in an hour. Jimmy pulled me toward the car and I let him. The quicker we got out of here, the better.

  I didn’t glance at the building until I was behind the wheel with both doors locked. I saw no white faces in the windows. No black faces either. But I had the feeling that we were being watched.

  “They knowed us, didn’t they?” Jimmy asked. I’d been teaching him good grammar all summer, but when he got nervous, old habits returned.

  “No, they didn’t know us,” I said.

  “But they think we done something.”

  “They think we’re going to do something.” I put the car in reverse and went down the middle of the block until I found a place wide enough to make a U-turn without letting anyone in the apartment complex see my license. No matter how much mud was on it, it was still better to be safe than sorry.

  “What’d they think we’re gonna do?”

  “There’s going to be a big convention a few blocks from here.” I checked the rearview mirror. No tail. “I’m sure they suspect we’ll disrupt it.”

  “I don’t care about no convention.”

  I took a side street. I was going north, although Jimmy hadn’t realized it yet. I would take a number of back roads until I was absolutely positive no one was following us.

  “I don’t care about the convention either.” I might have once. But with the way my life had changed, worrying about politics seemed like a luxury. “But everyone else around here does.”

  “Why?”

  The next side street was blocked off. Sewer workers again. Daley’s people were thinking of every single way this convention could be compromised, and were struggling to prevent it.

  “It’s where they’re going to choose one of the two candidates for President of the United States.”

  “I thought they already killed that guy.”

  His matter-of-fact tone threw me. I gla
nced at him. “You mean Bobby Kennedy?”

  “Yeah.” He was looking out the window. His voice was calm but his expression wasn’t. He was learning from me, just not the things I wanted him too.

  “He was a candidate,” I said. “But right now there are several others. At these conventions, they narrow the choices to two.”

  “There’s gonna be another?”

  Sometimes the depth of his ignorance astonished me. It shouldn’t have. In Memphis, I had struggled to keep him in school, but I would have been surprised if he attended more than half the time. And I sometimes forgot that for all his street smarts, he was still only ten years old.

  “There was another,” I said. “The Republicans met in Miami last week. They chose a guy by the name of Richard Nixon.”

  “What’s he like?” Jimmy asked.

  I thought of the charges of corruption that had followed Nixon like a stink, the petulance which culminated in the famous “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech he made to the press a few years back, the methodical coldness with which he destroyed anyone he suspected of being a communist. Not to mention the things he said about my people, or implied, or simply failed to acknowledge.

  I couldn’t encase all of that into a simple sentence, so I didn’t even try.

  “Smokey?” Jimmy asked. “What’s he like?”

  “We’ve got two and a half months to the election,” I said. “Why don’t you study him and find out?”

  “Sounds like school.” Jimmy flounced back in his seat.

  “No, Jim,” I said. “I wish politics was simply something you studied in school. But it’s more important than that. It’s life.”

  “So if that’s true, how come you’re not gonna pay attention to this convention.”

  “I’ll be paying attention,” I said. “Just not in the ways I want to.”

  He frowned, then leaned forward. “Hey. We’re not going home.”

  He caught me. But our destination was hard to miss with the downtown skyscrapers looming before us.