A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel Read online

  The tension in her shoulders relaxed slightly. She was trying to control her responses. She was trying to shift her attitude, and that was clearly taking an effort. Her initial reaction to me each time was to bristle.

  When she didn’t answer, I sighed. “Look, Miss Hathaway. This probably won’t work. If you believe that my interest in this thing—as nebulous as it is—would be a conflict, then—”

  “The other beneficiaries,” she said slowly, “are an organization that helps abandoned children; several church charities; and a large sum that goes to the University of Chicago Foundation. That’s twenty-five percent of the estate. Then there’s the money that comes to you. The rest goes to me.”

  “I’m the only other individual mentioned in the will?”

  She nodded. “There is no other family that I know of.”

  “Except your grandparents.”

  “If they’re alive,” she said.

  “And if they are, will you give them part of the estate?”

  She leaned back as if she hadn’t thought of that.

  “They could be living in poverty. Most people in the rural South are. Perhaps your parents escaped that life and never wanted to go back. Or maybe—” I stopped myself, the thought making me cold.

  “Maybe?”

  How to explain to this naive white woman the other thought that I had? Maybe her parents weren’t white at all, not by racial categorization. Maybe they went north so that they could pass. No one would know who they were, and they would be judged by the color of their skin, not the color of their parents’ skin.

  “Maybe?” she asked again.

  “Maybe they eloped,” I said. The comment sounded lame to me, but I wasn’t going to express this new idea. Not yet. Maybe not ever, unless I had proof.

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think anything until I know it for a fact.” I took a deep breath. I had to ask the next question, even though I knew it would upset her again. “You need to tell me the amount your mother left for me in the will.”

  As I thought, she raised her chin, and her entire body became rigid. “Why?”

  “So that the cards are on the table, Miss Hathaway. We need to work from equality of knowledge. If you hire me, you hide nothing from me.” It wouldn’t work that way, I knew, but I had to make a stab at it.

  She bit her lower lip.

  “Besides, you don’t want me thinking I’m going to get half a million dollars when I’m only getting five hundred dollars.”

  She closed her eyes. Fine lines appeared around her mouth. “Ten thousand dollars,” she said, then opened her eyes to see my response. “My mother left you ten thousand dollars.”

  I clenched my fingers. It was the same amount as before. The dates matched up. These people, now dead, whom I didn’t know, had twice given me more money than I would have earned in a year, for no reason that I could understand.

  “It’s a lot of money.” Her voice rose. It probably wasn’t a lot of money in the scheme of the estate. If it were, she wouldn’t have been quite so defensive about it.

  “Yes, it is. Especially for something neither of us understands.” I rose. She watched me, without moving. “But it’s not enough for you to come all the way here from Chicago, spending money on a private investigator, and searching for me. I’ll bet those attorneys told you to put the money in trust until they could find me, and if they couldn’t, they would place a provision in your will to give that money to charity after your death.”

  The look of surprise on her face made her look younger. “How did you know?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what I would do. No sense finding a man who had no idea he was going to get the money. If you put the money in a trust, you wouldn’t have been violating the terms of the will. You would have been using your best efforts, am I correct?”

  “That’s what they argued.”

  “And you were being ethical, trying to carry out your mother’s last wish?”

  “Mother didn’t make finding you contingent on anything,” Laura said. “She just wanted it done.”

  “So you’re doing it.”

  Laura swallowed. I saw the high collar move. “I told you,” she said, her voice as low as it could get. “I’m looking for family.”

  “Even if that family is a coal black detective working out of a decrepit building in Memphis?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought about me,” I said. “But what about the rest of the family? What would you do if they were black?”

  She held out her hands and laughed. “How could they be? Look at me.”

  I did look at her. I knew things she didn’t. Like the fact that my grandmother was as white as Laura was, only she had dark hair and big brown eyes. Like the fact that wasn’t unusual in black Southern families. Like the fact that I had friends who came out of the army and didn’t go home, disappearing into northern cities, passing for white because life was better that way.

  “Do you really think that’s possible?” she asked.

  “Anything’s possible right now,” I said. “Get me the information I need, and then we’ll see what’s actually going on.”

  She stood, ran a hand over her hair, and then came toward the desk. “You need a retainer, you said.”

  “No, I don’t.” I glanced at her. She was shaking. “I changed my mind.”

  She pulled a checkbook out of her purse, and then cleared a small spot on the back corner of the desk so that she could write. “I expect to be treated like the rest of your clients, Mr. Dalton. I will pay your retainer and you will give me an accounting—how often?”

  “At the end of each week. An expense sheet will be attached.”

  “Very good.” She wrote the check, her handwriting flowing and smooth. Then she ripped it off and handed it to me.

  I didn’t take it. “Miss Hathaway,” I said, staring at the check that dangled between us, “there is a possibility that I’ll find nothing, the same as your Chicago detective.”

  “Give it your best shot, Mr. Dalton, and we’ll review after a month.”

  She was such an innocent. I wondered if she had ever managed money on her own before.

  “No, Miss Hathaway,” I said gently. “You need to put a financial limit on this. Otherwise I could—”

  “Bill me a thousand dollars for a call to an operator in Memphis?”

  I sighed and stared at that check. A license in my profession didn’t mean a thing, especially not when attorneys helped with the billing. “Yes. Or I could find excuses to fly all over the country, looking for your long lost relatives.”

  “Staying at exclusive hotels?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Maybe what I had taken for an attitude was actually a subtle sense of humor. “Exactly.”

  She set the check on my desk. “You’re the first ethical man I’ve met since my mother died, Mr. Dalton. I think your conscience will limit you enough.”

  She didn’t know how right she was. I took the check, set it in my ledger, and placed it in the top drawer of my desk. I’d use that check to find out a few things about my client, things she didn’t even know I needed to know.

  “Where do we start?” she asked after I had finished.

  “Let me ask you a few questions, unless you’re in a hurry.” I looked pointedly at the coat. She scrunched it up slightly, and returned to her chair.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not in a hurry.”

  “Good.” I sat down too. It felt odd, this subtle shift in our relationship. Suddenly I was in control, and she seemed content to have that happen. Was it two frustrating days in Memphis that did that? Or something else? “You said you moved to Chicago when you were very little. Where did you move from?”

  “Rockford, Illinois.”

  “That’s farther north,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Were you born there?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Birmingham, A
labama.”

  I looked at her. “I suppose you’ve already searched for family there.”

  “My mother told me they were just passing through.”

  “A pregnant woman traveling that close to her due date?”

  The flush grew on Laura’s cheeks. “I never thought of it that way.”

  “That’s why you’re going to pay me.” I leaned back in the chair, feeling my heart pound. “What hospital were you born in?”

  “St. Mary of Mercy,” she said.

  “And what was the date?”

  “November fifteenth, 1939.”

  I scrawled all of this down. “It would be nice to see a copy of your birth certificate.”

  “You can’t keep it,” she said with that damned primness.

  This time I expected it. “I know. I just want to see it. Sometimes birth certificates reveal a lot more than you’d think.”

  “Why mine?”

  “Because you have immediate access to it. If you have access to your parents’ as well, then I’d like to see them.”

  “I haven’t found them,” she said.

  That stopped me. No one lacked a birth certificate. A person couldn’t get a driver’s license without it, or a passport, or other identification.

  “You haven’t found them anywhere? For both parents?”

  She shook her head.

  “How old were your parents?”

  “Mother was sixty-four when she died. My father was sixty.”

  That narrowed it a bit. If they were born in rural communities, especially Southern ones, they might not have received a birth certificate. But most people their age had something. If they didn’t have an official birth certificate, they had a special certificate, often issued years later. She should have found an official piece of paper, some kind of proof of identity.

  “And you’re sure they were born in this country?”

  She chuckled at that, as if I had asked something so preposterous as to be laughable. “Absolutely.”

  Odd, but not unexpected. People who had something to hide often hid it from their own children even after death.

  “Let’s start with the papers, and then I’ll work from there. What can you get me?”

  “I have my own papers,” she said, “and I can have the lawyers wire me the rest.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve been going through everything, Mr. Dalton. I haven’t found any family references. What do you think you’ll find?”

  It was a fair question, couched in that imperious tone. I folded my hands. I would have to get used to the tone. She would have to learn to trust me.

  “Patterns, Miss Hathaway. The information you’re looking for may not have been on the surface. It may have been underneath. Just like you thought when you saw the bequest to me. There might be other things, things that lurk in your parents’ important papers. I’ve done this sort of search a lot for black folks, many of whom couldn’t read or write so the important information was often oral, and I’ve found things. Papers should make things easier.”

  “You think?” There was hope in her voice, a hope I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.

  “You may not like what I find, Miss Hathaway.”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m beginning to realize that, Mr. Dalton.”

  “At any point, you can end this investigation. If I’m digging up things—”

  She held up a hand, made a small wave, like beauty contestants did when they rode on the back of cars. Only she meant it dismissively. “Mr. Dalton, I’m sure that I can accept the truth of my family no matter how difficult it is.”

  I stared at her. Sometimes I wondered if we were ever prepared to face our family’s truths. “All right, Miss Hathaway. It’s your call. I’ll get started with what you’ve given me today. Can you bring your papers tomorrow?”

  She nodded. “And I’ll drop off the others as soon as they arrive.”

  “Good.”

  She stood, her coat hanging awkwardly over one arm. She glanced at the door, as if uncertain how to make her exit, then smiled at me and came forward. “I’m sorry I was so rude, Mr. Dalton.” She extended her right hand. “I’m glad we’ll be working together.”

  I stood too, staring with surprise at her long manicured fingers. Even though she wore other jewelry, she didn’t wear any rings.

  She must have taken my response as rejection because she started to move her hand back. At that moment, I took it, shook, and smiled.

  “I’ll do my best to make this work,” I said.

  “Me, too.” She slipped her hand from mine, and then walked out of the office. She closed the door before she stopped to put on her coat.

  I watched her, still feeling the warmth of her palm in mine. Beneath that abrasive, arrogant exterior was a very lonely woman. The risks she had taken coming to Memphis, coming to Beale, were signs of how badly she needed this information. I had read her wrong from the beginning. I had thought she resented me and the fact that I was taking money from her. But she now seemed more complex than that.

  Her shadow moved away from the door. I sat back down. I knew better than to trust a client without facts. I had learned that lesson the first week I had joined up with Loyce Kirby, the man who taught me the tricks of this trade. He’d given me one of his choicest clients, a man worth a lot of money, who had a poker face as smooth as any I’d ever seen. That man led me on a wild goose chase, then refused to pay me until Loyce got involved. Loyce had done it to teach me a lesson.

  The lesson stuck. I picked up Laura’s check and studied it for a moment. Then I dialed her bank in Chicago, put on my best white banker’s voice, and asked for help verifying funds.

  It was such a simple procedure, and no one ever checked to see if you were truly the business you said you were. I verified the check I held, then called back, got a different clerk, and using the same check number, asked for a funds verification of $100,000, and was told a check of that amount would clear.

  My sense of Laura Hathaway was right. She had money. That much was true. The rest would remain to be seen. I would spend the rest of the day investigating her before I ever turned my attention to her missing relatives. And then I’d focus on the connection between us. Because, despite what I said to her, I had no intention of dropping this investigation until I knew once and for all why her family felt it owed me money.

  SIX

  HOURS LATER, I had learned that Laura Hathaway was a 28-year-old white woman from Chicago who had never held a job. She was divorced from the younger son of one of Chicago’s big department store families, and because her attorneys had been as powerful as and more interested than his attorneys, she received a monthly alimony payment of $5,000. She lived in an apartment in a building that she owned on Lake Shore Drive, with a gorgeous view of the lake (the apartment had been decorated by 1965’s hot designer and had been written up in the Home and Family section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune). She was well known for her support of the arts, and for her successful fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Chicago Symphony. Her divorce last year had placed her down a notch on society’s list, but by then, it seemed that she didn’t care. Her mother was dying, and Laura devoted her own time to making sure the passage was a peaceful one.

  When her mother died, Laura inherited one of Chicago’s larger and more secret fortunes. Her parents had been virtual recluses, and they hadn’t received attention from Chicago society until Laura’s coming-out party in 1957. Even then, her father, Earl Hathaway, had refused to give the usual “I’m so proud of my daughter” interview to the press. Little was known about him, and what was known often came through his attorneys. It was widely speculated, and never disputed, that Earl Hathaway had ties to the Chicago underworld.

  I got most of that from the society columnist for the Tribune, with a little more from the city editor for the Sun-Times. They both promised to have their morgue forward me copies of the relevant stories. I didn’t care if I saw the storie
s or not.

  The rest I learned through the bits of information Laura had given me—her checking account number, her address, and her date and place of birth. A few times I had to pose as her husband, once I had to pretend to be his attorney, and another time I was a sympathetic reporter from the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. Never once did I use my real name in gathering this information, and never once did anyone challenge my right to ask for it.

  Such is privacy in America.

  I also learned a few other things. Laura had “gone crazy” since her mother died, snubbing her “friends” and refusing to donate what had to be a considerable fortune to “worthy causes like the symphony.” Instead, Laura had become obsessed with her past. Her best friend, a woman named Prissy Gargen Golden, said that Laura was determined to find out her parents’ secrets, even though everyone tried to talk her out of it. The attorneys were particularly upset, and Laura had nearly fired them. In fact, Laura took control of her mother’s financial affairs in the final year and insisted on maintaining her own expenses, something that “just wasn’t done” in their circles. Gargen Golden had apparently confided all of this to the society column at the Tribune, leading me to wonder what kind of best friend she really was.

  That bit of information—that Laura handled her own money—made me smile. She had patronized me, perhaps unwittingly, and I had done the same to her. Yet it was my concern for her financial affairs that had led her to state that I was the most ethical person she had met since her mother died, a statement I was only just beginning to understand. Somewhere in there, her world had shifted, and that shift had come with an understanding that when you had money, other people wanted to take it from you.

  All of that information, while making me feel that I was probably the strangest employee Laura Hathaway would ever have, also made me calmer about working with her. She had layers like anyone else, but her layers had less to do with me than they had to do with things she was dealing with out of her own life. I was supposed to have been a stepping stone to more information. That she decided to pay me for my services meant that I must have, in some way, given her a reason to believe in me. And that, oddly enough, gave me a bit of comfort in our strange partnership.