A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I picked it up.

  “Mr. Dalton?”

  I’d recognize that voice anywhere. “Miss Hathaway.”

  “I have found some more pictures. I would like to show them to you. I’ll be in your office tomorrow at 10 A.M. sharp. Will that suit you?”

  It wasn’t really a request. It was an order. But that was all right. I was curious enough to continue this. “I’ll be here,” I said, and hung up.

  FIVE

  THE NEXT MORNING, I pulled up in front of Jimmy’s apartment building. It was an old four-story brick from the turn of the century, and hadn’t received much care since. I arrived early, hoping to have a few words with Jimmy’s mother, but Jimmy was waiting outside in the cold morning air. He clutched his books to his chest as if he were using them to keep warm.

  I had no choice. I reached across the front seat and opened the door, and Jimmy got in.

  We went to Pantaze Drug. I asked him about his classes and he told me which ones he liked. He was getting behind in math, he said, although he didn’t tell me why. I waited for him to explain why he wanted to see me the day before, but he didn’t. I thought of mentioning Joe and the man in the beret, but I decided it wasn’t time yet.

  When we finished, I took Jimmy to school and waited at the curb for ten minutes after he went inside. He didn’t come back out, which I saw as a good sign. If he could get to school, he would stay there.

  It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. I stopped at the Salvation Army and looked for coats. The winter coats, one of the volunteers told me, had sold long ago. What they had left disappeared once the strike started. They had a few in back that had arrived the day before. I looked at them, found a small man’s pea coat that would be too big for Jimmy, and took it anyway. Better to get lost in a coat than to have one that he couldn’t fit into at all.

  By ten proper, I was in my office, just as Miss Hathaway ordered. The pea coat hung on my shabby coat rack next to the other coats, and it looked like something a client had forgotten. Next to my hand was a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee that was slowly going cold. I had a file open and I was trying to peck out a report, but my mind wasn’t on it. I kept thinking about that small brown package in Jimmy’s hand and the way that, no matter how hard I tried, the boy seemed destined for the streets.

  Then I thought about Laura Hathaway and her inheritance, her self-assurance, and the way she spoke to me, as if I were someone she had charge of. She probably thought all little black boys ended up like Jimmy. If she gave it any thought at all. She didn’t see how the community fought for each and every one of them, and cried when they were lost.

  I thought Jimmy had had a chance. His mother, irresponsible as she was, loved him and his brother used to look out for him. I had a sense Joe wasn’t looking out for him any more.

  Then I saw Laura Hathaway’s shadow outside my door. She turned the knob as if she were trying it, then pushed the door inward. She wore her raincoat open and clutched her gloves in her left hand. Beneath her coat, she had on a long-sleeved dress with a high collar. A black purse hung over her right forearm, and matched her black ankle-high boots. Pearls were clipped to her ears. I wondered how much luggage she had brought with her to Memphis, and then decided that I didn’t want to know.

  “Well,” she said. “You’re here.”

  “You ordered me to be here.” I wasn’t in the mood for her attitude.

  She closed the door gently as if there were someone outside whom she wanted to protect from my rudeness. “I brought the pictures.”

  She remained by the door. I wondered if she wanted me to come and get them.

  “All right.” I stayed in my seat. She pulled her purse even tighter, and came closer.

  “It’s warm in here,” she said.

  “Take off your coat.”

  “How long do you think this will take?”

  I shrugged. She pulled off her coat and put it over the only other chair, instead of hanging it on the rack beside pea coat. She wrinkled her nose as she did so. The pea coat had a faint odor of mothballs that the heat was bringing out. I hoped the smell would be gone later in the day.

  Then she opened the clasp on her purse and removed a small manila envelope. She set it on my desk.

  I lifted the flap. Inside were a fistful of photographs of all shapes and sizes. Most dated from the forties, and several were of the same woman Laura Hathaway had shown me the day before. Only this woman was younger. She still had the same homely features, and I realized what I hadn’t the day before. What I had seen as age was resignation.

  Why would a woman like this, a rich white woman, look so defeated?

  “My parents moved to Chicago when I was a little girl.” Laura Hathaway had come around the back of the desk and was looking over my shoulder. “They didn’t have a lot of money in those days. My father was one of the few men his age to stay home from the war—some old eye injury—and he got a lot of work. They put all the money away that they could. They made some good investments early, and by the time I was a teenager, we’d moved into a house in one of the nicer neighborhoods.”

  I was staring at a photo of Dora Jean Hathaway, her arms protectively around Laura, who had to be only three. The look in Dora Jean’s eyes hadn’t been put there by poverty. It had been put there by fear.

  “How did your father learn about investments?” Poor people didn’t save their money and invest it. Poor people spent as much as they could to live as well as they could. I knew that from personal experience.

  “His father taught him, he said once.”

  “So your paternal grandparents were rich?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I never got to meet them.”

  “Never?”

  She shook her head. “They were dead by the time I was born.”

  I nodded and went through the photographs. The fear never left Dora Jean’s eyes. In the fifties family portrait, clearly done by a reputable studio, the look had etched itself into her skin. I had never seen this woman before, not when she was young and not when she was old. I was certain of it.

  I was less certain of Earl Hathaway. The older version of him—a tall stately man with a receding hairline and fleshy gray skin—had a familiar brightness around the eyes. There was only one picture of him as a younger man, and that was blurred. He was holding Laura, who had to be about four, and he was turning his face from the camera. I saw the same receding hairline—he had apparently started to lose his hair relatively young—a narrow face with a strong jawline, and a powerful neck, the kind weight lifters, boxers, and football players have. He looked like the generic 1940s white man, the kind who would be used as an extra in movies or an office employee in a magazine ad.

  “What?” she said, noting my interest. “What is it?”

  “Where did your folks come from?”

  “Chicago,” she said, as if I hadn’t been listening.

  I decided to let the tone slide. “Before that.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You said they moved to Chicago when you were a girl. Where did they move from?”

  “The South.” She spoke hesitantly, almost as if she didn’t want to. Finally, we were getting somewhere.

  It was my turn to give her a meaningful look, my turn to put sarcasm in my voice. “I understand that most Northerners think the South is a small and provincial place, but we’re actually quite a large region of the country.”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said, color rising in her cheeks. “They never said.”

  I set the photo of her father on my desk. “They never said?”

  She shrugged. “I got the sense there was some bad blood with my grandparents. I’m not just here for you, Mr. Dalton. I’m also here to see if I can find any remaining family. I’m not sure my grandparents are dead.”

  I waited. She stared at me. The color in her cheeks had gone from a soft rose to a deep red. If she had been black, she would have asked me outright to help her. But she wasn’t, and she e
xpected me to offer, and because of that expectation, I wouldn’t.

  “You think they’re in Memphis?”

  “You’re in Memphis.”

  “I lived in Atlanta until I was ten. Then I moved to Washington, D.C., and lived there for eleven years. I was in Boston for a couple of years, and then I went to Korea. Your parents could have known me from anywhere.”

  “My parents had nothing to do with the war. They remained in Chicago. I told you that.”

  “You did.” I picked up the family portrait. “I don’t remember seeing them in Memphis. If our meeting was significant, and it must have been for your mother to want to leave me money, I would have remembered her face.”

  Laura’s eyes narrowed. She apparently thought I’d insulted her mother.

  “It’s a striking face,” I added.

  Laura’s expression softened. “Yes,” she said. “It was.”

  She reached for the portrait. I moved it just out of her grasp. “Your father, on the other hand, seems somewhat familiar.” I gazed at her. Her eyes were wider than his—although some of that could have been the effect of the eyeliner and the false eyelashes. Her nose was softer, up-turned in the way every white American parent wants a daughter’s nose to be. She had lips so bow-shaped that she didn’t have to use lipstick to mask their form.

  “I suppose there could be a family resemblance,” I said, “something I’m not quite seeing.”

  “I look more like my father than my mother,” Laura said primly. That much was obvious. Laura was conventionally pretty. Her mother, in later life, was one of those women who would have been called handsome if someone had to find a kind word to say at all. “But I really don’t look like either of them. I sometimes wondered if I favored another relative.…”

  She let her voice trail off. Again, I could have offered—and was probably expected to—to help her. But I wasn’t about to.

  “The South,” I said, reflectively. Laura’s initial impression was probably right. I was probably a shirt-tail relative, and her mother, keeping step with the times, felt guilty and wanted to share part of the family windfall with the darker, less fortunate relations. But that didn’t feel right. There would be no reason to hide that information from Laura, would there? Except, perhaps, the stigma of being distantly related to someone like me. “What was your mother’s maiden name?”

  “Jones.” She looked away from me as she said that.

  “Dora Jean Jones? Someone gave a child a name like that?”

  “It was—”

  “The South, I know,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I was going to say it was a slip of the tongue. Or it could have been. She only told me once, and that was when I went for my driver’s license. They asked me, and I didn’t know, and I asked her and she shrugged and said, ‘Jones.’”

  “And you didn’t believe her, even then.”

  “I told you. There was bad blood with my grandparents.”

  “I thought it was with your father’s parents.”

  “If I knew which set of grandparents it was, I would understand what was going on,” she snapped.

  “And your detective?” I asked. “What did he find?”

  “I’m not going to hire you, if that’s what you want, Mr. Dalton. This is not an odd job.” So she had found out what I really did and wasn’t willing to tell me. Apparently she had noted my two snubs and was going to snub me in return. Perhaps this woman and I were related. We certainly acted childishly around each other.

  “You’re the one who came to me, Miss Hathaway, wanting information. I don’t know the information, but I could find it out for you. Or you could return to that big city detective who probably charged you way too much money for his call to the operator.”

  She raised her chin slightly. I was beginning to recognize that look. She wasn’t going to answer me.

  “So your detective didn’t find anything,” I said. “Just like he didn’t find anything about me.”

  “This is my personal quest, Mr. Dalton. I don’t need you.”

  “You don’t,” I said. “But if you want to know how I’m involved in your family, it might make sense to hire me.”

  “You’ll be getting money from my mother’s estate.”

  “So you say.”

  She snatched the portrait out of my hand. “I’m not paying you anything more than your inheritance.”

  “You haven’t given me any money so far. And you have ordered me about and taken my time.” I picked up the remaining photos and placed them inside their envelope. “I guess it’s my turn to order you. I’d like you to leave my office, Miss Hathaway.”

  “We’re not finished yet.”

  “We are,” I said. “I don’t need you or your family’s make-believe money. I’ve got a lot of other things that need doing, things that are a lot more pressing.”

  “You’re not a detective,” she said, clutching the envelope against her purse.

  “Not like your talented Chicago man, no. I actually get the job done.” I almost added that I would have motivation on this project, since I wanted to know the connection between her family and me as well, but I wasn’t going to try to sway her. If she decided to walk out the door, that was fine with me.

  She rounded the desk, and grabbed her coat. I thought she was going to leave. But she stopped halfway to the door. Perhaps she expected me to break down, call her, beg her to stay. But I did none of those things, and that left the choice up to her.

  Her shoulders rose and fell in a silent sigh. Then she turned around. The flush was back in her cheeks. “Then it’s true, isn’t it? You do detective work?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She still wasn’t looking at me. “How much do you charge, Mr. Dalton?”

  I told her. I also mentioned a retainer, since I knew she could afford one.

  “You’ll keep your findings confidential?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She took a deep breath. “My attorneys said I was crazy to come down here. They said their detective could find what I was looking for.”

  “It was their detective who found me, wasn’t it?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “And you don’t like him either, do you?”

  “He’s old and fat and lazy,” she said, and then put a hand to her mouth.

  I smiled. “Don’t worry. I like it when my clients are honest.”

  She sank into the chair, letting her coat fall across her knees. “I’m afraid I’ve been behaving like an ass, Mr. Dalton. It’s just that the attorneys said you’d try to cheat me out of the money.”

  I felt my back go rigid.

  “Only you haven’t even asked me how much you were entitled to. And you would have kicked me out of your office without a penny.”

  “Maybe I’m manipulating you,” I said without a trace of humor.

  “Then you’re doing a piss-poor job of it.” She raised her head slightly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dalton.”

  My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t remember the last time a white person apologized to me. Perhaps one never had.

  “It’s all right,” I said, even though she had done several things that weren’t all right, and which she probably wasn’t even aware of. It wasn’t my job to raise the consciousness of every white person I came into contact with. And now that she had dropped her defensive attitude, I had a feeling we could get along. “You’re under strain.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “I don’t know anyone here, and I’m trying to find out something without having a clue how to go about it. There are no Hathaways in Memphis, at least none with our spelling. And there are a million Joneses.”

  “There are easier ways,” I said. And then, just because I was feeling fair, “I could recommend a white detective if you would feel more comfortable.”

  “I suppose I deserve that.” She pulled her coat closer to her stomach. “I would rather have you. You might remember some things, know some things—I mean, obviously my mother
knew who you were.”

  “Are you sure the connection is with your mother?”

  A slight frown creased her forehead. “Positive. The bequest is in her will.”

  “But your father is dead. Are you sure she wasn’t just carrying out his wishes?”

  Laura’s frown deepened. “I hadn’t thought of that. No. I’m not sure. And I don’t know where to begin. I really thought you would remember them. I thought you would know.” The color still stained her cheeks. “It was the lawyers who suggested that you were probably a distant relation. That’s what makes you think I’m a bigot, isn’t it? The way I treated you from the start?”

  I wasn’t going to get into that at all. We were finally communicating, and I didn’t want to ruin it. I wanted to find the answer to this conundrum almost as much as she did.

  “Did you bring family papers with you?” I asked. “Or do you have access to them?”

  “I can get them.” She took a deep breath. “What do you need?”

  “A Bible with the family genealogy would be nice.”

  She opened her mouth, but before she could speak, I said, “But I know that’s not possible. So let’s start with birth and death certificates, the will, medical and financial records, and go from there.”

  “Financial records?” Even though she had decided to be nice, this obviously wouldn’t be easy. She was predisposed to mistrust me, a predisposition that couldn’t be blamed entirely on the lawyers.

  “Maybe other payments went out.” Now was the time for truth. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I had received a previous payment in 1960; I had trouble enough admitting that to myself. “Perhaps when your father died…?”

  That was as close as I would get, and she didn’t pick up on it. Instead she closed her purse and hung it on her arm. “I know nothing about the family’s financial affairs prior to my mother’s illness.”

  “What about the will?” I asked.

  Her shoulders straightened. “What about it?”

  “Any other beneficiaries besides us? Any other surprises?”