A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  The real Earl Hathaway may not have been rich, but it seemed as if he had a warmth that the Chicago Earl Hathaway clearly lacked.

  At that thought, the door opened, and Laura came in. She pushed the door closed with her shoulder and struggled with the sleeves of her white parka. It was streaked with dirt.

  I got up to help her, but she twisted away.

  “What happened to you?” I asked, wishing that today, of all days, she had arrived in her customary good mood.

  “Did you know they’re picketing on Main Street?”

  “No,” I said.

  “They are. Some big huge signs saying ‘Stay Away. No Shopping Today,’ and some crap about decency.”

  I was stunned by her tone. Just the day before she had been telling me how much she wanted to join the march. “What were you doing on Main?”

  “One of the stores has a counter that serves a great breakfast,” she said. “I never had trouble getting in there before.”

  I felt myself go cold. “You did today?”

  “Oh, yeah. Some teenage boy started shouting about whities not supporting the strike, and me crossing a picket line, and then some other boys yelled at me for wearing a white coat, and the next thing I know, they’re throwing garbage at me.” She looked at me, blue eyes flashing. “I didn’t think I was crossing any picket line. They weren’t parading in front of the building.”

  I nodded. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

  “This is the kind of trouble you’ve been worried about.”

  Actually, I’d been worried about worse, but I lied. “Yes.”

  She wiped at her face, and her fingers came away dirty. She grimaced. “Excuse me,” she said, and headed for the restroom down the hall.

  I picked up her coat from where it had fallen. The soft material was wet and streaked with dirt. I wondered if it would ever come clean.

  I brushed it off as best I could and hung the coat on the coat rack. Then I wiped my hands on one of the napkins I kept on my desk and put the file together. My hands were shaking. I was worried about this client’s reaction to the news I was about to give her, and that was not good.

  She came back in my office, her face red and shiny from being scrubbed. She carried a faint scent of the industrial soap used in the bathrooms. I wanted to put my arm around her, but I didn’t.

  “Did you get breakfast?” I asked instead.

  She nodded. “The manager got me inside. They fed me and let me out the back. They apologized as if it were their fault.”

  “And then they called the police, right?”

  “Yeah. But the police were busy. You know there’s been some violence near the dump?”

  “I know,” I said.

  She sank into the chair, looking drawn. “I’ve never been attacked like that.”

  I wrapped my arms around the file to keep from trying to soothe her. Then I leaned against the desk, as far from her as I could get and still seem compassionate.

  “Do you need to go back to your hotel?” I asked. I tried to tell myself that I asked out of concern, but my question partly came from cowardice. I didn’t want her to see the file. “I’ll drive you.”

  She smiled at me and shook her head. “I’ll be all right.” She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I guess I should get to the files.”

  “Laura,” I said, and was going to hand her the file. But I couldn’t, not yet.

  “What?” She was combing her hair with her fingers.

  “You could get attacked worse than that on Friday. At the march.”

  “I’m beginning to realize that.” Then she looked up at me and saw what I was cradling. “What’s that?”

  I could have lied. I wanted to. But she would have to learn it soon enough.

  “It’s from the doctor’s wife,” I said. “It’s a Photostat of the file we requested.”

  “A Photostat—?” She frowned, and that wan look was back on her face. “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

  I took a deep breath. “Remember that I told you if we dig you might not like what we find? This is that moment. You can choose not to look, Laura. You can turn your back on all of this and go home as if nothing has happened.”

  Her gaze met mine. It was level and flat and assessing.

  “In fact,” I said. “We’ll call the debt even. You won’t have to pay me from your folks’ will, and I’ll swallow all my costs.”

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked, and in that question I knew she wasn’t going to give up.

  “It’s not what we were expecting.”

  She sighed and held out her hand.

  “Laura—”

  “I’m an adult, Smokey. Let me make my own decisions.”

  I handed her the file. She took it, opened it, and squinted, much as I had.

  “I can’t read this,” she said.

  “Take it to my desk.”

  She did and sat at the edge of my chair as if she didn’t belong in it. I pulled out the first Photostat, slipped a white sheet of paper behind it, and turned away from her. I didn’t want to watch as she learned that everything she knew—right down to her own name—was a lie.

  For a long time, the only sounds in the room were the clink of the radiator, the sound of her breathing—even and steady—and an occasional rustle as she turned the pages of the Photostats. My heart was pounding as if I had been running. I shoved my hands in my front pockets, feeling somehow responsible. If there hadn’t been money left to me, if I hadn’t spent that first ten thousand, maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t be here now, learning something she really didn’t want to know.

  “What does it mean?” she asked, her voice rusty, as if she had never used it before. “Smokey? What does this mean?”

  I bowed my head. She knew. She had to know. But she wanted me to confirm.

  “Your parents found the graves,” I said. “They requested the birth certificate. Laura’s birth certificate, and maybe Dora Jean’s as well.”

  “But it says here that Earl is still alive. That isn’t my father?”

  I turned. I had never seen an expression like that on anyone’s face before. It was both hopeful and sad, frightened and curious. The emotions bled one into another and back again, so quickly I could barely keep track. And they all moved across her face without a single change in her features. Only her eyes revealed her feelings. Her wide, blue—tearless—eyes.

  “That isn’t your father.”

  “So the siblings aren’t mine, either,” she said, and there was sorrow in her voice.

  “No.”

  “But how…”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.” I held my position in the center of the room, my hands still firmly in my pockets. “We were wrong about when your parents were in Birmingham. They were probably there in December at the earliest, maybe January of 1940, spring at the latest. It usually takes a month to carve headstones and place them on a grave. Sometimes it takes longer. It was winter. Even in Alabama undertakers sometimes wait until spring. Your parents were there, going through the cemetery, looking at baby graves.”

  “For me.”

  “For you,” I said, waiting. Waiting for it all to hit.

  “But why wouldn’t they use my real birth certificate? I had to have one, right?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Then the energy left her face as she understood. “They were running from something. They didn’t want to use their names.”

  “Or yours.”

  “Or mine,” she whispered.

  “My guess is they were looking for a way to get I.D. for the whole family. This was the first or best opportunity they found. A mother and a daughter, dead at nearly the same time. If they had checked, they would have found an illiterate laborer struggling to raise four children on his own. He wouldn’t come after them. He probably didn’t even know such documentation existed.”

  And, as I spoke, I realized that I hadn’t asked Earl Junior an important question. I hadn’t as
ked if his parents were buried together under the same gravestone. If they were, the kind Dr. Calhoun had probably placed Earl’s name on it, with his date of birth, so that everything would be ready when he died. Laura’s parents may have gotten Earl’s birth certificate as well.

  The realization must have shown on my face.

  “What?” Laura asked.

  I didn’t know how to tell her this. I didn’t want to tell her much more than I needed to. “How old were you when your parents moved to Chicago?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Two. Three.”

  “Do you remember?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Did they call you anything besides Laura? A pet name? Anything?”

  She thought on that, then shook her head slightly. “No. Not that I remember.”

  “Do you remember being in Chicago during the war?”

  She nodded. “Little things. Our apartment was small then. We had to walk up. There were always people on the streets selling war bonds. Things like that.”

  “Where was the apartment?”

  She blinked at me blearily.

  “Surely you know,” I said. “All little kids have to memorize their addresses.”

  She thought for a moment, then recited a street number and name that meant nothing to me. I made a note of it. Perhaps I could check building records. Anything might be helpful at this point. “And what about Rockford? Do you know where you lived there?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you ever go back there? Visit family? Visit friends?”

  She shook her head again. She was looking stunned.

  “What about your parents’ friends? Did people from out of town visit them?”

  “No,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and took my hands out of my pockets. I hated the question I had to ask next, but I had to ask it. “Forgive me, Laura,” I said. “But I have to ask you this.”

  Her eyes suddenly focused on me. They seemed hard and vulnerable at the same time, as if she were steeling herself for something even more difficult.

  “Did your father have any shady friends? Mob friends?”

  She rose, the old indignant Laura, the one I hadn’t seen for weeks. The file fell to the floor, the Photostats scattering. “I told you before. He would never traffic with criminals. Not my father. Not—”

  Her voice broke and she gaped at me, as if she had just heard what she was saying. Her lower lip trembled.

  “Oh, God, Smokey,” she said, and burst into tears.

  This time I did go to her. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. She was fragile, her bones so delicate that it felt as if I could crush them with the hug. Her entire body shook. I patted her back as if she were a child and tried to think of her that way, instead of the softness of her against me, the faint rose scent of her hair mingling with that industrial soap.

  I didn’t tell her everything would be all right; it wouldn’t be, maybe not ever again. She had just discovered incontrovertible proof that her parents had lied; that her own identity, her legal identity, belonged to someone else; that she wasn’t who she had thought she was. What she learned threw her entire life into doubt, and nothing would be the same again.

  Her tears were soaking through my shirt. She took three deep, hitching breaths and backed out of my arms, wiping her face with the back of her hand like a lost little girl.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that. I’m so, so sorry—”

  “Don’t be.” I kept my own tone dry and calm. No sense in upsetting her more. “I would have been surprised if you hadn’t had some reaction.”

  She sniffled. I reached around her and grabbed a napkin off my desk. She took it, wiped her face, and blew her nose heartily. Then she sank back into the chair as if her legs had lost all power to hold her.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  The question sounded rhetorical, but I chose to answer it anyway. “You don’t tell anyone. Your parents spent twenty years creating this fiction, and it’s a solid one. As far as the world is concerned, you are Laura Hathaway. The real one only lived a few days. You’re not doing any harm.”

  “But those people, the real Hathaways—”

  “Don’t have a clue. I spoke to the son this morning. The father died before your father did. They’re doing just fine. The last thing they need to know is that their father’s identity was stolen.”

  “You spoke to them?”

  I nodded.

  “But won’t that clue them to this?”

  “Why?” I said. “They just think I had the wrong Earl Hathaway. And they have no way of contacting me. It’ll be all right.”

  “The doctor’s wife. She knows.”

  “She suspects,” I said. “And she won’t do anything. If she were going to, she would have already. Besides, she’s a smart old woman. She knows that you wouldn’t come after your own birth information if you had any idea about the scam.”

  I regretted the use of that word the moment it left my mouth. But Laura didn’t seem to hear it.

  “I’m not Laura Hathaway,” she said, looking at her hands. “I don’t have any identity at all.”

  I crouched before her and took those hands. They were cold. “You are Laura Hathaway. In that, nothing has changed—”

  “Everything has changed.”

  “Nothing has changed,” I said. “Except that you now know more about your parents. You were suspecting something when you came to me. Now what you have to do is go back in your mind through everything, all that you learned from them, and remember what didn’t fit, what seemed to contradict. Write down their irrational fears. Make a list of the things you weren’t allowed to talk about. Write down the differences between you and the other children you played with.”

  Her eyelashes were spiky from the tears. “Have you done this before, Smokey?”

  I shook my head. “Not a case like this.”

  “You warned me.” She bowed her head. “You told me I might not like what I find.”

  “Usually people hide things for a reason.”

  “And you don’t know what that reason is?”

  “No.”

  “Even though they sent you money?”

  I squeezed her hands and stood. It all came back to that. To that money they had sent. There was a tie, somewhere. A tie they felt guilty about. But I knew I had never seen those two people before, under any name.

  She wiped at her face again. “We’re not related, are we, Smokey? Not even distantly.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “It’s something else, isn’t it? You’ve been warning me all along that it could be criminal. You’re a detective. Maybe you worked on a case for them.”

  “I would remember,” I said. But would I? I remembered my clients, but not always the people that I came across in the course of a case.

  And if it had been a case, how had Dora Jean Hathaway known that I grew up in Washington, D.C.? I didn’t usually divulge personal information to clients.

  Maybe I was looking at this wrong. Why would anyone feel they owed me money? Did I hold a secret I wasn’t supposed to? If so, why didn’t they pay me before they died? Did I render service that I was unaware of?

  Or was it something else? Something related to another case, perhaps?

  “I’m going to review my files,” I said. “See if anything rings a bell.”

  “You do think this is related, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It would be a mistake not to pursue the relationship, just as it would be a mistake to assume that my inheritance is related to your parents’ unwillingness to use their own names.”

  She nodded and swallowed hard. I could see the effort she was making to remain calm. “The question really is, who were they?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That is the big question.”

  And I had a hunch we wouldn’t like it when we found out.

  SEVENTEEN

  I DRO
VE LAURA BACK to the hotel so that she could rest. I gave her my home phone number with instructions to call me at any time for any reason. I didn’t know what else to do with her. I wanted to send her back to Chicago, but I knew she wouldn’t go, now more than ever. I wasn’t even sure she regarded it as home any more.

  The drive to the Peabody was short, but along the way I saw the pickets she was talking about. They were scattered along Main and Union, carrying signs that read “Integrity and Decency for our Sanitation Workers” and “Keep Your Money in Your Pockets.” Tellingly, there were no pickets in front of the Peabody.

  I pulled into the valet parking in front of the Peabody to let Laura out. She kept her head bowed, and she carried her coat over her arm. Without saying much more than a whispered good-bye, she let herself out of the car and headed inside the hotel.

  No one gave me a second glance, and I didn’t see Roscoe Miller. He was probably fetching someone’s car. I swung through the parking area and headed back to Main.

  I thought of yelling at the picketers, but they weren’t the people who had attacked Laura. It had to have been Invaders or members of the Black Organizing Party. This was the first incident that I had heard of since Martin’s speech.

  It did not bode well for Friday’s march.

  It seemed a long way away. I couldn’t concentrate on it or the plans I was making for the security team. All I could think of was Laura.

  My guess was that Laura’s parents had never been to Birmingham. They had been on the run for some years before hooking up with the Chicago mob, probably in a small way, and the mob had gotten them the identification. Very few decent people knew how to legally change their identities, let alone illegally, and most didn’t have the wherewithal to get identities for their entire family. The mob probably used one of their guys, who had to find the right year for Laura, and a southern background for her parents. Then he had to find parents who had died in an unspectacular manner or who wouldn’t notice if their identification had been used.

  The mob guy had succeeded admirably.

  If the mob hadn’t done it, someone else had. Someone Laura’s father had paid. Either way you looked at it, the birth certificate pointed to Earl’s involvement with career criminals. The move was too sophisticated to fit the scenario I had described to Laura.