Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 6

  It was Jimmy.

  He was screaming and struggling as if he was afraid he was going to be killed. The cops were having trouble holding him. They called for backup.

  I had to get to him, but I couldn’t let the cop who was holding me know what I was doing.

  “Just let go of me and I’ll walk out of here,” I said to the cop.

  I must have said it with enough force because he dropped my arm. I started to turn to throw him off, make him believe I was leaving the restricted area. Then I switched directions and ran toward Jimmy.

  Cops tried to stop me, but I managed to dodge them. I reached Jimmy fast, and pulled the cops off him, elbowing one cop in the stomach and pushing the other away.

  A third came toward me, and I kicked him before he could get close. The driver of the squad started to get out of the car, but by then, I had Jimmy’s arm.

  With the help of the crowd, I got him out of there and to my house. I made sure we weren’t followed. After we got inside, he told me what happened.

  He had gone to the Canipe Amusement Company because I had seen his brother there a few days before. Jimmy’s brother wasn’t in Canipe, so Jimmy had gone to a nearby vacant lot to wait. The lot was across from the Lorraine Motel. Some vagrants sitting on a cardboard box beneath a low-rent apartment complex pointed out Martin Luther King standing on the hotel balcony. Jimmy looked, curious to see such a famous man.

  Then Jimmy heard a shot behind him, and Martin collapsed. A moment later, a man carrying a rifle ran past Jimmy, taking his gun apart. He threw part of the gun under a bush and put the rest in his jacket. Then he jumped onto the street and started to walk as if nothing happened.

  Jimmy understood what he saw and for the first time in his life, he went to the authorities for help. Once he got inside the nearby fire station, he told some cops that he had seen the shooter.

  They pulled Jimmy into a corner and asked him what he saw, where he lived, and who he was. He answered all their questions, but wondered why no one was going after the guy with the gun. Eventually, more cops came into the building. He heard one of the firemen tell them that Jimmy had seen something he shouldn’t have. Before Jimmy could run, the cops grabbed him, and tried to force him into a squad car.

  That was when I had arrived.

  His story had startled me but didn’t surprise me. There had been too many cops on the scene too soon after the shooting and most of the cops hadn’t seemed upset. The hell of it was that I didn’t think the Memphis cops were acting alone. The Memphis chief of police had once worked for the FBI and had maintained his ties. He had removed Martin’s usual security detail, and replaced it with a detail of his own, a detail that had disappeared just before the shooting. There were other discrepancies—including the fact that the description of the shooter—James Earl Ray, not the man Jimmy had seen—was released to the news media minutes before Martin was shot.

  Even if I hadn’t believed Jimmy when he told me the story, I would have believed him soon after. Not an hour after we escaped Mulberry Street, the police showed up at Jimmy’s foster home. They spent the night searching for Jimmy more vigorously than they searched for James Earl Ray—or any other shooter.

  We’d barely gotten out of Memphis in time.

  * * *

  “There’s FBI all over town,” Franklin said when I was done. He wasn’t surprised by the story. Not many black folks would be. We’d all had our run-ins with white authority. We knew how it could be.

  “I know there’s FBI,” I said. “And Marvella saw someone tailing me.”

  Franklin leaned back in his chair. “They got pictures of Jimmy?”

  “No. Jimmy didn’t have much of a family. His mother abandoned them in December, and he and his brother got evicted in March. Jimmy was able to salvage a few things, but I doubt there were any pictures in the belongings.” I got up, rinsed out my lemonade glass, and filled it with water. “I don’t think the authorities know much more than the fact that he’s with me.”

  “They don’t know he’s in Chicago?”

  “I was as careful as I can be. Cash only, fake names at motels. We switched cars before we left, and then I bought that Impala with cash, using a false name. I’m not on your lease here, everyone who doesn’t know me calls me Bill, and they all think Jimmy’s last name is Grimshaw. Besides, he blends in with your family. Not too many people know he’s mine.”

  “Seems to me you did all you can.”

  “I don’t know.” I drank the water down, but it wasn’t enough to cool me off. “I probably should have changed our names and gone far away, like L.A. or San Francisco. Started all over. This is the halfway measure, Franklin. I was hoping we could go back to Memphis someday.”

  He folded his hands on top of his law books. I had no idea if he’d make a good lawyer, but he’d be a good judge. “After all this?”

  “At first, I thought the truth would come out. There’s too many people involved to keep it hidden. And maybe it would have, if Bobby hadn’t died. But with that shiny Kennedy name, and the fact he was an anointed white man, well, no one seems to think of Martin much anymore—except as a martyr and a political tool.”

  “Cynic.”

  “Don’t you agree?”

  Franklin’s smile was rueful. “I didn’t say you were wrong. Just a cynic.”

  “So you understand why I wanted the kids out of here.”

  “I appreciate precautions, Smokey.” His gaze met mine. “So, now what do we do to find out who’s following you?”

  “I have a few ideas,” I said. “It won’t be easy.”

  “I know that,” Franklin said. “But white guys stand out down here and—”

  “We’re not looking for a white man, Franklin. We’re looking for a black man.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Come on, Smoke. None of our people would be involved in Dr. King’s assassination.”

  I stared at him for a long moment.

  His frown deepened. “You believe this.”

  “Ask Marvella. The man she saw tailing me was black.”

  Franklin pushed his chair away from the table. “Why would anyone do this?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t entirely understand it either. “A lot of blacks worked undercover for the FBI in Mississippi in ’64.”

  “I’m sure they had to,” Franklin said. “When a person’s family is threatened—”

  “No, Franklin.” My voice was soft. “A lot of black people came in from the North as undercover operators. The practice hasn’t stopped. I ran into a guy in Memphis who was pretending to be a Panther. He got the street gangs to incite the riot during Martin’s last march.”

  “How do you know he was undercover? The Panthers don’t believe in Martin’s teachings. Maybe he—”

  “I’d known him for a long time,” I said. “He was with army intelligence when I saw him last.”

  That made Franklin stop. “Army intelligence?”

  I nodded. “He enjoyed that work too. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d give it up.”

  Franklin stared at me.

  “The Army gave these guys a place to belong. They continued to work for the government after they retired. They felt that they had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps so everyone else should. They call fighting for equal rights whining.”

  Franklin shook his head. “I can’t picture it, Smokey. I mean, they live it. They should know.”

  “Come on, Franklin,” I said. “You’ve met men like that. I’m sure Mayor Daley has a few black toadies on the payroll.”

  “Yeah,” Franklin said after a moment. “Oreos.”

  I grinned. I hadn’t heard the term before, but it fit. Black on the outside, white on the inside.

  “Well, we got one after me,” I said. “And we have to find a way to stop him.”

  FIVE

  FRANKLIN AND I STAYED UP for several more hours, raiding the refrigerator and talking. It was possible, even likely, that the shadow Marvella had seen hadn’t been mine. Frankl
in believed she thought the tail was after me because I was new in the neighborhood, and an unknown factor.

  I wondered if Marvella’s cop cousin had asked her to lie to me about the shadow, just to make sure I wasn’t some kind of unknown trouble. Franklin admitted that might be a possibility as well.

  We made a list of the people in the building that the shadow might actually be tailing. At least one member of the Blackstone Rangers, the largest street gang in the city, lived here. His grandmother had an apartment a floor above ours. I’d seen him a few times and he looked surprisingly harmless.

  Franklin said that the man in the attic apartment, a teacher at the local high school, was becoming active in the Black Panthers, the California Black Power group that had spread nationwide in the last year. Chicago had only recently established a branch and, Franklin said, it hadn’t been on very fertile soil. There were other Black Power advocates in the neighborhood, most of them Black Muslims who had followed Elijah Mohammed or were devotees of Malcolm X, who had been assassinated three years before.

  We decided, as dawn inched closer, that Franklin would discretely canvass the neighbors—most of whom were his friends—to see if any of them had seen anything out of the ordinary. I would talk to Marvella and find out exactly what she really had seen.

  And then we would go from there.

  * * *

  It was daylight when Franklin went to his room. I put new sheets on one of the twin beds in the boys’ room, and lay down there, the first real bed I’d been on in months. But I couldn’t shut my mind off.

  I worried about Jimmy and Laura, and Franklin’s entire family. Maybe the next best step for me was exactly what I had told Franklin: get a new name and a new life, start over far away, with Jimmy posing as my son.

  I supposed it might even be logical for me to send Jimmy to a real family, and me to a city I’d never been in before. But I couldn’t do that.

  The main reason, of course, was Jimmy. He’d never known his father, been abandoned by his mother and brother, and then lost his best hope for a real family when he saw Martin’s killers. I was the only constant in his life, and I felt guilty for leaving him with Laura. The boy needed someone to be there for him. I had to be that someone.

  But there was more to it than that. When I was a boy, my parents had been lynched. I was sent to my uncle’s family, who couldn’t deal with me, and then adopted by a couple I barely knew. They changed my name from Billy Taylor to Billy Dalton, then nicknamed me Smokey. They rarely referred to my past.

  I knew how devastating it was to be cut off from everyone and everything familiar, how difficult it was to go through life without acknowledging the events that formed you. I didn’t want any of that for Jimmy. I’d do everything I could to prevent it.

  I had to find a solution that allowed us to remain together and that kept us both safe. I wasn’t sure that was possible in Chicago, but I had to try. I had to give it my best.

  * * *

  Marvella lived alone in a small one-bedroom apartment across the hall from ours. Apparently she had lived there through two husbands and several jobs. She was as much a part of the building as the walls.

  I had never been inside before. The living room had a high ceiling—a feature of most of the apartments in this part of the city, and a huge bay window that overlooked the backyard. A windowseat, covered with plants that trailed to the hardwood floor, circled around the window.

  The kitchen was small, an add-on like Franklin’s. Marvella kept it clean. The entire apartment was decorated in oranges, browns, and reds, with striking wooden sculptures of faces that looked vaguely familiar to me. As I studied them from the couch, I realized that most of them looked like Marvella.

  She pulled over one of her kitchen chairs, and sat on it backward, resting her chin on the chair’s metal back. She wore tight red shorts that accented her legs, no shoes, and a white tube top that set off her skin. On her left arm, she wore thick wooden bracelets that also had an African look to them.

  She had just given me a root beer in a brown glass that matched the rest of the room. “You sure I can’t make you some lunch?”

  I shook my head. I wanted to be out of the apartment as quickly as I could. “I’m meeting a friend.” Franklin. We were going to prepare notes.

  Marvella tilted her head. Her dark eyes missed nothing. “This isn’t social, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “I wanted to talk with you about what you saw.”

  “That man?”

  “You’ve seen him again?”

  She shook her head. Strands of hair clung to the nape of her neck. Her apartment was cooler than the Grimshaws’ but it was still hot.

  “What did you see?”

  She frowned. “He was about a block away. That day you talked with the boys playing in the water pouring out of the fire hydrants, he watched the entire time. Arms crossed, leaning back, just staring, like that were the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.”

  I glanced at her bay window, with its view of the backyard. The yard wasn’t much, mostly brown dirt and sickly trees due to the heat of the summer. The hydrants were in front. Not even her bedroom window would have a view of the street.

  She saw my glance, and flushed. “I was coming back from the store when I saw him. I remembered what my cousin told me. I wanted to see who this guy was looking at. He was looking at you.”

  “You’re sure of it?”

  She nodded.

  “Have you seen him since?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes seemed wider than before, as if she were finally realizing that I took this entire matter very seriously.

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Tall as you. Thinner, maybe. Had a ’fro, which threw me. I didn’t think cops had ’fros.”

  Most of them didn’t, but undercover cops often looked different from the others. “What about his face?”

  “Couldn’t see that real clear.”

  “Then what was it about him that made you notice him?”

  A frown creased her brow. She closed her eyes for a moment, as she tried to remember. I studied her. She was certainly the most beautiful woman I had seen in years. Maybe ever. And I felt no attraction to her. If anything, I found myself thinking of Laura, and wondering how she and Jimmy were faring. I’d have to call them when I was through here.

  “He didn’t move.” She opened her eyes and found me staring at her. A faint smile touched her lips. “I thought he was some kind of statue at first.”

  “How’d you know he wasn’t?”

  “A statue? He nodded to me.”

  “I thought you watched him.”

  “That was after. I was going to the store when I first saw him. He was still there when I got out. I just stood back for a while. He didn’t see me. He was concentrating on you.”

  “You’re sure it was me? Not the building? Not one of the boys?” I made sure that last question sounded no different from the others. I didn’t want her to know that Jimmy was a possible target.

  “No,” she said. “You went to your car and got a bag out of it. He was looking at you.”

  I finally remembered which day she meant. Tuesday, just a few days before. I had bought squirt guns for Jimmy and the boys. I gave them out while they were playing in the water. When I went to the car to get them, I had a feeling that I wasn’t alone. But I had canvassed the neighborhood and seen nothing.

  Yet Marvella and this man had been watching me. It worried me that I missed both of them.

  “Where was he exactly?”

  “You know that building they’re rehabbing at the end of the block?”

  I did. There were a number of abandoned buildings near here. Only one was being restored kitty-corner from the apartment. Anyone standing there would have had a good view of our front lawn.

  “He was in the doorway, just under the awning. In the shade. If I hadn’t seen him on the way there, I wouldn’t’ve known he was there.”

  I’d looked directly
at him and I hadn’t seen him. A shiver ran down my back. He was good.

  “Where were you?”

  “About a half a block east. I sat on one of the stoops and ate some strawberries while I kept an eye on him.”

  I had seen her. She had smiled at me. I had waved a hand in greeting, and had assumed that she had been the one watching me. Then I had turned my back on the person who really had been.

  She peered at me. “It bothers you, don’t it, that you didn’t see him?”

  “Yeah.” I took a sip from the root beer. It was warm.

  She got up and came over to the couch. She sat so close to me that I could smell her faint floral perfume. “What’re you running from, Bill?”

  I rolled the root beer glass in my hands. I supposed it was obvious that I didn’t belong, that things made me uneasy. But I didn’t like that she had seen me clearly.

  “That’s not your real name, is it?” she asked.

  “It’s my name,” I said softly.

  “You don’t like it, though.” She was too perceptive by half. “You wince whenever I say it.”

  I set the root beer down. “I feel like I’m suddenly talking to your cousin the cop.”

  She was silent. I looked up at her. A chill ran down my back.

  “He asked you to question me, didn’t he?”

  She shrugged, a careless female gesture that implied she was talking of unimportant things. “In June.”

  “You’ve been spying on me since June?”

  She laughed, that open throaty sound that I had always admired about her. “Of course I have, Bill. A good-looking single man across the hall? I’ve watched you from the moment you moved in.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Marvella.”

  Her gaze was steady. I could see her pulse beat a small rhythm in a vein in her throat. “He heard me talk about you and your boy and that you were from Tennessee. He said the station got some weird wanted notice from the FBI for a man and a boy just after Dr. King died. He said I was to ask you a few things.”

  The muscles in my back and shoulder were rigid. “Did you ask those things?”