Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story Page 2

  “Women are not illogical creatures,” Valentina snapped.

  Marvella had come out of the bedroom. She was wearing an orange dress with a matching orange and red scarf tied around her hair. She had heard the last part of this conversation, and she was grinning now.

  She knew the mistake I made.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “I just meant that people can be irrational.”

  “Linda’s not irrational,” Valentina said.

  I was already tired of this fight. “You mean the woman who wouldn’t get into the car with me and Marvella because she was afraid of black people? That Linda?”

  Valentina made a sound halfway between a sigh and a growl. “Smokey, look. You have to trust me on this. I got a real sense of her. It took her a lot of guts to run away from Duane. It took even more to go to Chicago. But she knew it was right for Annie. Linda wasn’t going to go back to him. Not ever.”

  “I didn’t say she would,” I said. “Maybe she thought she could do better on her own.”

  “She knew she couldn’t,” Valentina said. “She was terrified of being on her own. That’s why she didn’t get into the car with you. She knew she couldn’t defend herself and Annie, and you — I’m sorry, Smokey — but you look like every white person’s nightmare. I don’t think she’d ever spoken to a black person until she spoke to me. Asking her to go with you and Marvella was one step too many for her. But she did go to Chicago, she did get her GED, she did start over.”

  “Yeah.”

  I must have sounded as skeptical as I felt because Valentina added, “You have no idea how hard all of that was for her. She wouldn’t be the kind of woman who would do it all over again all on her own. Especially not with Annie.”

  I sighed. Marvella crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows, as if asking if I was going to finish soon.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s say I grant you that she wouldn’t run off. What then, in your mind, could have happened?”

  Marvella rolled her eyes.

  “I think the husband found her,” Valentina said. “I think she’s in trouble, Smokey. Both her and Annie.”

  “And this is a gut sense,” I said.

  “Stop patronizing me!”

  I almost denied that I was, but then I realized that I would have been lying.

  “I need to know if you have facts to back up this assumption,” I said.

  Valentina didn’t answer for nearly a minute. Finally she said, “No.”

  “So,” I said. “It begs the question. How could the husband have found her? Is he particularly bright?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Did you tell anyone where she went?”

  “Not even the folks here at the hot line. Only one of the women knew what I was doing, and all she knew was that I was going to take Linda to some of my friends in Chicago.”

  “So,” I said, then winced again. I was even sounding patronizing. “Would she have called this man for any reason?”

  “I don’t think so,” Valentina said. “No.”

  “Then how could he have found her?”

  “I don’t know,” Valentina said. “I just want you to check on her. You and Marvella have made it really, really clear that Helping Hands doesn’t track people who vanish. So how about this? How about I hire you to find her, Smokey. Does that work for you? I have a lot of money. I’ll pay your standard rates plus expenses. I can put a check in the mail today.”

  I almost told her that it wasn’t necessary, that I would do this one for free. But I was a little annoyed at her stubbornness, and besides, Jimmy was growing so fast that I couldn’t keep him in shoes. My regular work for local black insurance companies and for Sturdy paid the bills, but couldn’t cover the added expenses of a growing teenage boy.

  “All right,” I said, and quoted her my rates. “I’m going to need a few things from you, too. I need some basic things. I need the husband’s full name. I need to know where he lives and, if possible, where he works. I need to know where he lived with Linda and Annie.”

  “Okay,” Valentina said.

  “But — and this is very important — I don’t want you investigating or talking to him. If you can’t do the work by phone, using a fake name, I don’t want you doing it. Is that clear?”

  “I know how to investigate, Smokey,” she said with some amusement in her voice.

  “Good,” I said. “Because the last thing I want is for this nutball to go after you.”

  “He won’t,” she said.

  But I got the sense, as I hung up the phone, that Valentina Wilson — the new version, the muscular woman I’d seen three months ago — would welcome his attack. She’d welcome it, and happily put him out of commission.

  “Well?” Marvella asked.

  “Well,” I said, “it looks like I have a missing persons case.”

  She rolled her eyes again. “And I thought you were a tough guy.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “it’s just easier to do what the client wants than it is to convince them they’re wrong.”

  “Is she wrong?” Marvella asked.

  “Probably,” I said with a sigh. “Probably.”

  ***

  Linda Krag’s new apartment was in student housing near the University of Chicago. The neighborhood had once been filled with middle class professors’ homes, but now those homes were divided up into apartments, with bicycles parked on the porch and beer cans lying in the lawn.

  Those lawns were brown. Winter hadn’t arrived yet, despite the chill.

  In the early fall, when Linda Krag had seen this place, it had probably looked inviting. Now, with the naked trees stark against the gray skyline, the leaves piled in the street, the battered cars parked haphazardly against the curb, the block looked impoverished and just a little bit dangerous.

  Or maybe I was projecting. Linda Krag, white and young, might have felt comfortable here, but I felt out of place, despite the University neighborhood’s known color-blindness and vaunted liberalism.

  I had the skeleton keys from Helping Hands. Linda’s stuff had not been removed from the apartment — she had until the end of the month before her belongings would become part of the charity’s donation pile. I doubted anyone had visited this place once everyone realized she was gone.

  The apartment was on the second floor. More bikes littered the hallway, and so did several more beer cans. The hall smelled of beer.

  Linda’s door was closed tightly. There were scrapes near the lock and the wood had been splintered about fist-high. I had no idea if that damage predated Linda’s arrival. With student housing, it was almost impossible to tell.

  I unlocked the deadbolt and had to shove hard to get the door to open. It had been stuck closed. As I stepped inside, I inspected the side of the door and noted that the wood was warped.

  I pushed the door closed, but it bounced back open. The warped wood made it as hard to close as it was to open.

  I had seen the apartment she had been given on the South Side. That had been a two bedroom with a full kitchen and stunning living room. I had put up another family there a year or so ago. They had worked their way through the Helping Hands program and had bought their own house last summer.

  I couldn’t believe she would have left that place for this one.

  But people’s prejudices made them do all kinds of crazy things.

  The apartment smelled sour. A blanket was crumpled at the end of the couch, and a sweater hung off the back of a kitchen chair someone had moved near the window. The kitchen was to my right. The table, with two chairs pushed against it, was beneath a small window with a good view of the house next door.

  A full ashtray sat on the tabletop, along with a coloring book and an open –and scattered — box of crayons. Dishes cluttered the sink, which gave off a rotted smell.

  More cigarettes floated in the water filling the bowls at the bottom of the sink. A hand towel rested on one of the burners. It was the only thing I mo
ved, using the skeleton keys so that I wouldn’t have to touch it.

  Then I went through the kitchen into a narrow hallway. The second bedroom was back here. A bed was pushed against the wall. Clothing — pink and small — was scattered all over the floor. More clothes hung on the make-shift clothing rod by the door.

  The clutter was every day clutter, not slob-clutter. It looked like the kind of mess a person made when she left in a hurry, meaning to clean up later. It disturbed me that a woman who cared so much about her daughter — a poor woman — would leave most of her daughter’s wardrobe behind.

  The hair rose on the back of my neck. I didn’t want Valentina to be right. If she were right, then we had lost more than a week in searching for this woman.

  And a week, in a missing person’s case, was a long, long time.

  I made myself walk back through the kitchen and down another narrow hallway to the full bedroom. It wasn’t much larger than the daughter’s room. The full-sized bed left barely enough space between the wall and the side of the bed for me to walk around it.

  The bed was unmade. Pillows sideways, blankets thrown back. But the bottom of the blankets — along with the sheets — was tucked in. The tucks were perfect military tucks, something that wouldn’t last during weeks of restless sleep.

  Linda Krag usually made her bed. She usually made it with great precision.

  Her clothing hung in the small closet, separated by color. A pair of shoes was lined neatly against the wall.

  The sour smell was stronger here. It didn’t smell like dirty dishes, but something else, something that I should have recognized, but couldn’t.

  I pushed open the bathroom door, and the smell hit me, making my eyes water. Vomit. Old vomit. It lined the edge of the bathtub, the floor beneath the sink, and the toilet itself. It had crusted against the wall.

  I made myself go into the room. Another cigarette butt floated in the sloppy toilet water. The bathroom mirror was cracked, and a small handprint — child-sized — marred a white towel still hanging on the rack.

  I looked at the handprint, wondering if that delicate little girl had been the source of all this vomit.

  But as I pushed against the towel, I realized the handprint was a different color.

  The handprint was made of dried blood.

  ***

  I couldn’t find any more answers in Linda Krag’s apartment, so I drove home.

  I’m sure my neighbors wondered why I hurried out of my car that afternoon, and took the steps to my apartment two at a time.

  Jimmy had a half an hour of school left before Franklin picked him and the Grimshaw children up and took them to an after-school program we had started three years ago. If I called Franklin now, I could probably arrange for Jimmy to stay the night.

  I wasn’t sure I would need all that time, but I figured I had best plan for it.

  Linda Krag and her little daughter Annie had been missing for several days. Some would have argued that a few more hours would make no difference, but to me, they would have.

  If the woman was in trouble, then every second wasted would be a second closer to her death. Because, if Valentina was right, and Linda Krag had been taken by her husband, that man wouldn’t be interested in rebuilding their relationship.

  He would punish her.

  And he would do it one of several ways. If he was just a man filled with uncontrollable rage, he would beat her until he felt better. But if he was a sadist — and if what Valentina said was true, that Linda Krag’s daughter was the most important thing in her life — then he would hurt the daughter to punish the mother.

  People who got punched in the stomach hard or repeatedly often vomited, sometimes uncontrollably. I hoped that the amount of vomit in that small bathroom had come from an adult, but there was no way to tell.

  I clenched my fists. Then I released the fingers slowly, making myself breathe. I picked up the phone, called Franklin, explained the case — since he was part of Helping Hands too — and asked him to take care of my son for at least the next twenty-four hours.

  Then I hung up and set about finding Linda Krag.

  ***

  Unlike the stuff you see on Mannix or Hawaii 5-0 , detective work is seldom fisticuffs and confessions. Usually it’s long and repetitive legwork. I was going to try to cram a week’s worth of legwork into a single day.

  So I went into my office and made calls.

  My office was in the bedroom between mine and Jim’s. I decorated it with used office furniture (bought at a bargain when I first moved here), filing cabinets that were nearly full, and a new-fangled answering machine that Laura had bought me. I hadn’t taken the thing out of the box yet.

  I pushed the box aside, picked up the phone, and called Valentina. She wasn’t there, so I left a message, asking if she had found that information for me. I hoped she would call me back while I was still at home.

  Then I started a series of calls to area hospitals and doctors’ offices. I had found, over the years, that if I put on a slight East Coast accent and spoke a little quicker than I usually did, people gave me information without many questions.

  Hospitals, trained to keep some information confidential, were a tougher nut to crack. But my years as an insurance company investigator helped there. If I called Billing and told them I had an unpaid bill from the hospital itself, I usually got full cooperation.

  I did this now, saying that I had a bill for my client Linda Krag, without dates of her hospital stay or any listing of her procedure. I couldn’t pay the bill unless I had that information.

  Billing departments all over the city scrambled to help me. They hand-searched their records. I told them that we had received the bill today, which made us (or more accurately, them) believe that the procedure happened within the past month.

  Each call took about fifteen minutes, because the billing person I spoke to did a thorough search. Each call also ended with the same discouraging phrase:

  It seemed that Linda Krag had not shown up at any doctor’s office or hospital in the Greater Chicago area in the past month. At least, not under that name.

  The next thing I did was check the morgues and funeral homes. That was a little easier — with funeral homes, I asked when the Linda Krag funeral was scheduled, and with morgues, I just asked my question in a straightforward manner.

  No one had heard of her.

  When I finished, I realized I should have asked after her daughter as well — Annie Krag. But the very idea of searching for death records for a child made my stomach twist.

  I thumbed through the phone book, wondering if I could run the same hospital scam for the daughter on the same day, when my phone rang.

  It was Valentina.

  She gave me an address on the east side of Madison, the husband’s full name — Duane G. Krag, age 35, and the make and model of his car, a white 1968 Olds with Missouri plates. Up until three weeks ago, he had worked at the Oscar Mayer plant not far from his home.

  I didn’t like that last detail at all. “Did he give notice or did he just disappear?”

  “He finished his shift on Friday and failed to show up on Monday,” she said.

  “You got this information how?” I asked.

  “A few well-placed phone calls,” she said. “I know some people here now.”

  I didn’t quite trust her tone. “You didn’t go there, right?”

  “No,” she said. “I have no reason to. Do I?”

  “None,” I said.

  “Besides,” she said. “He’s been using his phone.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “How do you know that?”

  “One of my volunteers at the hot line also works for the phone company. It’s amazing what they can find out about you.”

  I bet it was.

  “Do you have information for me?” she asked.

  “I’ve been to the apartment,” I said. “So if she did leave on her own, she left a lot behind.”

  I wasn’t going to tell her a
bout the vomit or the blood. I had no idea what had happened, so I wasn’t going to scare Valentina unnecessarily.

  “She wouldn’t do that, Smokey.” That edge of worry had returned to Valentina’s voice.

  “I tend to agree with you. I’m about to go back to see if her neighbors saw anything unusual.”

  She was silent on the other end. I wondered if she could tell that I was withholding information from her.

  “I hope you find her,” she finally said.

  “Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”

  ***

  I hadn’t lied to Valentina about one thing: My next step was to return to the neighborhood and ask if anyone saw anything unusual. I didn’t relish going back to this neighborhood, but I saw no other choice.

  It was already dark when I drove back into the neighborhood, which made me even more uncomfortable. As I approached Linda’s block, I debated whether or not I wanted to park there or on a nearby street.

  I ended up with no choice. Every parking spot for blocks was taken. I finally found a parking place near a bookstore on 57th, and I walked to the apartment building.

  I didn’t have a date or an exact incident, but I did my best. I stopped student after student, asking if they had seen the woman with the little blond girl who lived just down the block. Most remembered her — there weren’t a lot of children on this street — but none had talked to her.

  And no one had seen her for at least a week.

  By the time I got to her apartment building, I was feeling discouraged. I took the steps up the porch just as a young man came out of the front door wheeling his bicycle.

  His red hair brushed the collar of his coat. He smelled faintly of incense and marijuana. His eyes were clear, however.

  He started when he saw me.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I’m here to see Linda,” I said. “I’m a friend of hers from Madison.”

  He studied me for a minute, then he said, “Linda didn’t have any friends in Madison.”

  Finally, someone who knew her.