A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 3

  “Don’t say nothing, man,” he said as he passed me. “You don’t understand.”

  His hostility surprised me. I hadn’t seen Joe since January, and although he often got defensive with me, he had never before been hostile.

  I turned around and caught up with him. “Jimmy isn’t in school today.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “He’s too young to be on his own all day.”

  “Someone should tell our momma.” Joe glanced at me. He was as tall as I was these days. That was disconcerting. “I ain’t got time for this, Smokey.”

  “Joe—”

  But he was already weaving his way through the crowd, walking so fast that I would have had to run to keep up with him. I stopped instead and put my hands on my hips. Going to their mother would do no good at all. If she was home. If she wasn’t entertaining. Calling the cops wouldn’t help either. They’d put Jimmy in some foster home, probably white-run, and he’d be even more miserable than he was now. He’d become one of the lost, as my friend Henry called them. Although I was wondering if he wasn’t becoming one of them already.

  I crossed back to my side of Beale. I couldn’t spend my entire day searching for Jimmy, but I could do my other work and look for him at the same time.

  Besides, my meeting with Laura Hathaway had left me with some unfinished business.

  I went back across the street. My office was on the south side of Beale, closer to Third than it was to anything else. The Gallina Building held a lot of history and some of that history still showed in the three-story façade. It had exquisite brick work, including massive arches that framed the third story windows, and an orange terra cotta cornice at the top of both sides of the structure. But the building was falling apart. The brick work was dirty and the arches were crumbling. One of the downstairs tenants, the owner of the Memphis Meat Company, once told me he had trouble putting in his Double Cola sign: he was afraid the attachment would cause serious damage to the building’s front. It didn’t. That happened a month later, when one of the newer businesses put a Schlitz sign next to the rusting fire escape staircase.

  Still, for all its decay, it was more home to me than my own house was. I had spent years there developing my business in the time after I returned from Korea. Just going inside relaxed me, and entering my office, messy as it was, made me feel like I could accomplish something. Not much, maybe, but enough.

  I didn’t close the door all the way, in case Jimmy was lurking in the hallway. Then I stopped on the far side of my desk, turned the telephone around, and dialed Shelby Bowler, one of the most eccentric lawyers Memphis State University ever produced. Not surprisingly, he answered his own phone.

  “Been thinking I’d hear from you,” he said. “I settled a case this morning and got the afternoon free. You wanna come down to my place? I ain’t too fond of yours.”

  He said that every time I spoke to him, which wasn’t often. I first met Bowler in June 1960 when he came to my office and handed me a check for $10,000. Attorney-client privilege, he told me, prevented him from revealing my benefactor. And no matter how hard I tried, I hadn’t been able to pry the information from him.

  I waited almost a year before I cashed the check; I thought there was some trick attached. I investigated everything, including Shelby Bowler, and learned nothing, except that, for all his eccentricities, Shelby Bowler could be trusted despite the lightness of his skin.

  I drove to Bowler’s office, taking the long way, searching for Jimmy. Black kids clustered throughout the downtown, some of them carrying signs, others looking for trouble. It seemed like there were more kids out of school than usual—or maybe I was just paying attention for the first time. Either way, it bothered me.

  I cruised all the hangouts I knew, and didn’t see Jimmy. I wondered what had brought him to my office that morning. I knew what made him leave. My tone when I asked him about school, and Laura Hathaway’s presence.

  I was worried about him, but I also knew that he’d been on his own before. If he ran true to form, he’d find me again, and we’d talk about whatever it was.

  I left the neighborhood and headed south.

  Bowler’s office was on Highway 51, right near the border of Tennessee and Mississippi. Bowler liked having his office that far out of town. It was his way of controlling his clients, just like word of mouth was my way of controlling mine. He once told me he could tell who would be worth representing just by the way they reacted to the drive and the neighborhood. The location benefited me, especially when I first drove there, in July of 1960. There weren’t a lot of neighbors around to worry about what a black man was doing in that part of town. I didn’t like going to a lot of white people’s offices, but I didn’t mind going to Bowler’s.

  I drove a white Ford Falcon that I paid cash for in 1961. The car was battered and its underbelly had a coating of rust, but the car and I, we took a liking to each other. It wasn’t too fancy, so it didn’t broadcast my windfall in the days when people like me didn’t get windfalls, and it got me around Memphis easily. I liked the shift on the steering column, and I even liked the old push button radio with the button for WDIA so loose that it always threatened to come off.

  Bowler’s office was a square building made of sand-colored brick. The original layout was long gone and almost impossible to guess at. Bowler had ripped out and remade the interior into four rooms: the reception area, where his legal secretary usually sat and barked at people; his associate’s office, often empty because the junior lawyers came and went as soon as they learned just how strange Bowler was; a conference room that doubled as a law library; and Bowler’s private office, which was filled with antique mahogany furniture he once told me had been carved by slaves.

  I parked on the gravel lot that stretched behind the chain-link fence that protected the office from the road and let myself inside. The office smelled of Bowler’s cherry pipe tobacco and dusty legal tomes. His secretary, a woman who’d been with him since he first hung out a shingle, looked up from her typewriter and grunted. I took that for the greeting it was and slipped through the door to Bowler’s private office.

  He was sitting behind the mahogany desk, nearly hidden by thick green books, all of which were open and stacked on top of each other. A pencil was stuck in his silver hair, and earlier that day, he’d spilled tobacco on his gray suit and failed to wipe it off. His pipe was resting in a tin ashtray and looked as if he’d filled it, then forgotten to light it. When he saw me, he waved me in.

  “Been expecting you,” he said.

  “That’s what you told me on the phone.” I headed toward one of the mahogany chairs. It had been reupholstered in dyed red leather and looked damned uncomfortable, although I knew from personal experience that it wasn’t.

  “Lucinda!” he yelled. “Shut the door.”

  His secretary got up and walked toward the door, grabbing it and pulling it closed, not before she shot me a filthy look. I couldn’t tell if it was because I should have closed the door myself or because she just didn’t approve of me. I suspected the later, but knew if I said anything, Bowler would claim it was the former.

  “Some private detective from Chicago called me three days ago to ask if you were still alive.”

  I sank into the chair. Laura Hathaway really should have asked for her money back. The detective had done nothing that she couldn’t have done.

  “Did he say why he thought I was dead?”

  Bowler picked up his pipe and tamped the tobacco down. Then he placed it in his mouth but didn’t light it. “That’s what I asked,” he said, “and he made some comment about us killing lots of you folks down here the last few years.”

  “Stupid,” I murmured.

  He took the pipe out of his mouth, and stared at me for a moment. “He’s from the North.”

  “That’s no excuse for one-sided thinking.”

  “Television—”

  “Doesn’t create all our evils.”

  He rolled his eyes. “We’v
e had this discussion before.”

  “And never finished it.”

  He stared at me, then put his pipe back in his mouth and lit it with a gold monogrammed lighter. He puffed, and blue smoke smelling of rancid cough medicine filled the room.

  “This private detective,” I said, “he wouldn’t have anything to do with the money I got in 1960, would he?”

  “Smokey, I got lawyer-client privilege—”

  “Laura Hathaway visited my office this afternoon,” I said.

  He leaned back in his leather chair. It squeaked. He took another puff off the pipe, then removed it ever so slowly, cradling it in his left hand. That was one of his courtroom tricks, making him look relaxed and calm, while in reality it gave him time to think.

  “Laura Hathaway,” he said, using the repetition as another stall.

  “She was the one who hired the detective, or didn’t he tell you that?”

  “Oh, he did.” Bowler put his pipe back in the tin ashtray. “I was getting to that.”

  Actually, he had been startled that I knew her name, only he didn’t want me to know that.

  “She says her mother left me some money in her will,” I said. “You know what this is about?”

  “Why would I know?”

  “Why would the detective call you?”

  “I was your lawyer.”

  “No, you’re not. I have never needed a lawyer. You’re someone else’s lawyer who just happened to pay me money.”

  “People’ve got my name before,” Shelby said. “Maybe he called lawyers till he found one who’d heard of you.”

  I shook my head. “Sounds like a lot of legwork. This investigator doesn’t believe in legwork.”

  Shelby’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been on the receiving end of his work all day, and it’s clear.” The smell of cherry pipe tobacco was getting thick. I rubbed my nose and resisted the urge to sneeze.

  “What’re you here for, Smokey?” Shelby asked.

  “You said you were going to call me,” I said.

  “To warn you about the detective. I didn’t know what it was about.”

  “And you thought it could be bad.”

  “Hell, Smokey, most things are bad these days.” He set his pipe in the tray. The tobacco still glowed red, but the embers would die in a moment, and Shelby would have to relight it. “What are you really here for?”

  “I’ve only received money that I didn’t earn once in my life,” I said slowly, “and you’re the guy who gave it to me.”

  “It was from a client.”

  “I know,” I said. “And now I’m about to receive more money I didn’t earn, this time as part of a will.” I leaned back in my chair. “I have a hunch, Shelby, that this money comes from the same source.”

  His left hand fidgeted with the pipe stem. The expression on his face didn’t change. He said nothing.

  I crossed my arms. “Shelby, your client is dead. Confidentiality doesn’t apply any more.”

  “That’s never been adequately determined.” He spoke, and then he flushed. It was the flush that gave him away.

  “Why is this Hathaway family interested in me?”

  “You’re the detective.”

  I smiled slowly. “I do odd jobs.”

  “That too.” Shelby picked up his pipe, tamped the tobacco down, and picked up his lighter. Then he must have realized he was fidgeting, for he set the entire mess down.

  “Look, Smokey.” He folded his hands and rested them on the desk, giving me that fatherly lawyer approach he was famous for. “I had a hell of a time forcing you to take that money eight years ago. I think one of the reasons you did was because I wouldn’t tell you who your benefactor was. Now it looks like you might get some cash again. Let me give you some advice. Take it. Take it, and pay off your house—”

  “I did that last time.”

  “—or put it away for your retirement, or buy a new car for crissakes. But don’t question it. Don’t worry about it. Just take it.”

  He seemed so sincere, his blue eyes watering and his face still slightly flushed. But we’d had this go-around eight years ago, and I hadn’t changed since then. I finally took the money then because Shelby threatened to use it to pay off my bills—which were considerable in those days—without my permission. I told him to give the money to charity, and he refused, saying it belonged with me, and he would dog me about it for the rest of my days.

  I took the money. I paid off my debts and my house and bought my car.

  I tried not to think about what kind of trouble I was buying.

  I let that windfall put me on the right road. But I’d been cautious with money ever since, and I didn’t need money this time. I could afford to be ethical.

  “We’re different, you and me,” I said.

  Shelby closed his eyes. Such an eloquent way of expressing disgust. The movement was slight—his eyes opened a half second later—but not before I saw it and understood it.

  It didn’t stop me. “You come to this world with a sense of entitlement.”

  “Smokey—”

  “Let me finish.” I’d never told him this. Not in the eight years we’d known each other. In 1960, speaking of such things black to white was unthinkable. We’d come a long way since then. A long, long way. “You get money like this, you think it’s a windfall and you don’t question it—except maybe to find out who to thank. I get money like this, I want to know what the strings are. I want to know who’s gonna pull the rug out from underneath me before somebody does.”

  “I thought you said this Hathaway woman is dead.”

  “But her daughter isn’t. And I don’t know how many other relatives are alive. These are white people, Shelby. Rich white people. They may not like it that their mother or their grandmother is giving money away to blacks they don’t know. In fact, the girl already don’t like it. She shows up at my office wearing angora and pearls and acts like the whole place smells bad.”

  “It does smell bad, Smokey,” Shelby said. “It smells like Mississippi River rot and mold. That building should be condemned—”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Shelby closed his eyes again. He pushed his leather chair back and placed his folded fingers across his soft stomach. He appeared to be in deep contemplation. Finally he opened his eyes, and when he looked at me, they were clear and blue and filled with light.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean. I look at you and the way you live and the choices you have and I think a bit of money will help. If you can’t use it, I’m sure you know folks who could. A little bit of cash in the right hands can do a lot of good, Smokey.”

  “You used that argument on me in 1960.”

  “And you took the money.”

  “There wasn’t some prim white woman looking down her nose at me, wondering what my connection was to her mother.”

  “What was your connection to her mother?”

  “Damned if I know.” I squirmed in that soft leather chair. “The girl even showed me pictures. I didn’t recognize the mother, but that doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve lived an interesting life, Shelby.”

  He smiled. “Been around a lot of older white women, have you?”

  I shrugged. “It could have been a job, or it could have been when I was in the army or it could have been at Boston University or it could have been some connection I don’t even know.”

  “Is that what’s got you worried? That you don’t know who this woman was and what her connection to you is?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?”

  “I’ve been listening. You’ve been complaining about a lot of things, some of which make sense and some of which don’t. It seems to me that you should just take what’s offered.”

  I stared at him a moment. He was a good man, an ethical man for all his liking to play devil’s advocate, and things weren’t always straightforward with him.

  “Would you take the money?�
�

  “Yes,” he said, with a touch of impatience.

  “Wouldn’t you want to know where it came from?”

  “Of course, but that wouldn’t stop me from taking such a lucrative gift.”

  “Sure it would, Shel,” I said. “If the circumstances were right. If you were running for public office, you wouldn’t take a gift like this.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Is it?” I stood and walked toward the large windows in the back of the office. They were covered with heavy velvet curtains. You couldn’t tell that it was daylight outside. “Those are the kinds of strings I’m talking about. In everyday life, you never think of them. I do.”

  “So,” Shelby said. “You’ve got the girl. Ask her.”

  “She doesn’t know. I doubt she’ll be back.”

  “Then do some investigating on your own.”

  I turned. “That’s what I’m doing. And I’m starting with you. Did that first check come from someone named Earl Hathaway? Or his wife, Dora Jean?”

  Shelby’s eyes had gone flat, the light gone from them. It was that look that made him such a good attorney. He could pin anyone with that look, from the governor to the lowliest criminal.

  But he wasn’t pinning me. I waited.

  “What if it was?” he asked.

  I got the game. He wasn’t going to say yes, and he wasn’t going to say no. He was going to tell me all that he could, while retaining the ability to deny everything.

  “Then I’d have to ask to see any correspondence that came with the bequest.”

  “That wouldn’t be possible.” Shelby flattened his hands against his stomach. “Confidentiality again.”

  “Of course, that assumes there was correspondence.”

  “It would be odd to receive such a bequest without it,” Shelby said. “But normally, such correspondence only contains instructions for the attorney.”

  “Do you think any correspondence in a case involving the Hathaways would be normal?”

  He smiled. The movement was small, but it was there. “I don’t see how it could be anything but.”