A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “You’re always so serious, aren’t you, Smokey?”

  The bacon suddenly didn’t taste as good. I finished chewing, then set my own plate in the sink without getting out of my chair. I supposed I was serious—I never laughed as much as my friends, and I was always responsible, even though my foster parents accused me of being irresponsible.

  “Did we make a mistake, Smokey?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”

  Her smile was wide and beautiful. “You think you took advantage of me? A girl in a fragile emotional state? I snuck into your bed, not the other way around.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But you’re still worried.”

  “You hired me to do a job.”

  “As a convenience for both of us.”

  “And your whole life has been turned around.”

  She nodded, the smile fading. “I’ve needed someone to hold me for a long time, Smokey.”

  “And I was here.”

  “No,” she said. “I waited until I found someone I wanted instead of someone I needed.”

  My mouth was dry. I made myself sip from the coffee cup.

  Her face slowly turned pink. “But if you don’t want—if I did something that you’re not—”

  I set my cup down and stood in the same movement, crossing the small distance between us so that I could kiss her properly. She held me tightly, and I realized she had had similar fears to mine, only she had hidden them better.

  I took her back into my bedroom, and laid both of our fears to rest.

  * * *

  We couldn’t go anywhere on Friday. Memphis was at a standstill. Outside, snow covered the garbage littering the curbsides. The road itself was pristine, the houses a matching shiny white. It was a surreal scene. It made me feel as if we found a special moment, a moment all to ourselves, and the entire world stopped for it.

  We stayed in the house for the entire weekend. It was long, lazy, and glorious, and yet it passed in an instant. She wore my clothes because I didn’t want to go to the Peabody with her and we ate chili until I thought I never wanted to taste it again. Neither of us wanted to go out. Neither of us wanted to spoil this magical world we had created. Neither of us wanted to see reality, at least for three private days.

  We almost made it. But I woke from the nightmare, the old familiar nightmare, in around three on Sunday morning with more than an ancient case of the chills. I had promised myself when I lay down on Thursday night that I would discover what I had overlooked in this case, and when I woke up, I knew what it was.

  The papers I had pulled from the detective’s report. I had set them aside to look at them, and I never had.

  I had a feeling that something in them was important.

  My movements didn’t wake Laura. She was sprawled beside me, hair across her back, hands clutching both pillows. I leaned against the headboard and watched her sleep, knowing that I would have to bring the world back into our fragile new relationship in just a few hours.

  I wish I could say I was at peace, but I was not.

  * * *

  She wore her own clothes when I dropped her at the Peabody at eight o’clock that morning. Roscoe saw me—he was taking luggage from the back of a Cadillac—and he started to wave, until he saw Laura emerge from my Falcon. She wrapped her coat around herself like a woman who didn’t want to attract attention and disappeared through the revolving doors without a glance at me.

  Roscoe watched in wonder. I nodded to him and drove away. The car felt empty without her. It had felt empty with her as well. We had separated at the house without saying a word. It was as if the morning after had happened on Monday instead of Friday. We acted like two drunken strangers who had met in a bar and had awakened in the same bed, uncertain as to what had happened.

  I didn’t know how it would go when she showed up at the office. I wasn’t even certain I wanted to be there. I was tempted to work on another case, one of the ones I’d been ignoring the past few weeks, but that was running away, and I knew it.

  Besides, I wanted to go through those papers.

  The drive from the Peabody to Beale was much too short. Snow was piled high on all the street corners, making visibility difficult. There were icy patches on the road and my bald tires slid on a number of them. Some pickets were out, standing in front of department stores whose lunch counters served breakfast, but the morning seemed quiet. We had seen a few strikers on the way in from my house, and the morning news had promised more of the same.

  The radio news was full of Martin’s decision to return to Memphis. When the march got postponed on Friday, he checked his schedule and found that he could be back here by Thursday. One of the few phone calls I had received this weekend had been from Henry, making sure I knew of the change, making sure I would be at the march.

  I promised I would.

  I parked and went up to my office, not even stopping for my customary cup of coffee. My stomach had been upset since I woke from that dream, and I had the familiar unsettled feeling—the lost feeling—that the dream always brought. I unlocked, went in, flicked on the lights, and cursed at the heat. The radiator was clanging at full bore again.

  But I didn’t go downstairs to complain. Instead, I sat at Laura’s customary spot on the floor, even crossing my legs as she did, and searched through the piles.

  I had marked the papers I pulled from the detective’s report as something to look at later. I finally found them, under a stack of dress ads. I picked up the entire mess and set it on my lap.

  The papers were mostly notations, inexplicable scribbles—a phone number, a note (“meet June at 4:15”)—but one was a gem. It was a handwritten receipt from a Milwaukee detective agency. Someone had billed for fifteen hours and had been paid in full. That same someone had marked on the receipt “cash.”

  The receipt was dated February 28, 1960.

  I pulled it out, hand shaking, and as I did, I knocked over the dress ads. They scattered across the floor. I picked up the first and stopped as something jumped out at me. Words. Half of the caption beneath a ripped photograph:

  …Junior Leaguers in their grandmother’s dresses…

  …before five thousand guests in the City Auditorium.

  I turned the clipping over. On the other side was a full dress ad, just as I thought. Discreet and tasteful. Hand-drawn in the custom of the times. I couldn’t quite tell the date on the ad, but I knew it was prewar just from the fashions it showed and the coy poses of the women.

  My hand started to shake. I turned the clipping back to the half-ripped photograph, the ruined caption. I looked at what I could see of the photograph. There, in the middle of the grainy newsprint, someone had penciled in an arrow. It pointed at a group of children in the background, seated on the floor near some Ionic columns. The children were dressed as pickaninnies.

  But the arrow pointed at just one of them.

  It pointed at me.

  * * *

  Somehow I made it to the phone, still clutching the newspaper clipping and the receipt. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the receiver.

  I dialed Milwaukee. The Gruner Agency. A man answered. Henrik Gruner. He sounded very old.

  I identified myself. I didn’t think to disguise my name. I asked if he had ever worked for a Mrs. Dora Jean Hathaway in 1960.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I will check my files.”

  He clunked the receiver down, and I heard—through hundreds of miles of phone line—a chair squeak, the banging of a metal file drawer, a man’s soft curse. Then paper slapped against a desk, and the receiver crackled as he picked it up.

  “I have the file here,” he said.

  “What did she hire you for?”

  “I don’t usually—”

  “She’s dead, Mr. Gruner. I’m working for her daughter. Please. What did she hire you for?”

  There must have been something in my voice. Some urgency, some raw emotion.

  “Le
t me see,” he said. “Ach, yes, that one. She wanted me to trace a young boy, a Billy Alburty.”

  I started. I hadn’t heard that name in years. My name. The name I’d been born with.

  “I found out he was adopted, found out who took him, and she had me stop there. Paid me in cash and wanted nothing in writing.”

  My mouth was dry. “How did you trace him?”

  “You, you mean, Mr. Dalton? How’d I find you?”

  Sharp old man. He was staring at the file. Of course he saw my name.

  Both of my names.

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “Your cousin. Seems he never did like you much.”

  I closed my eyes. Saw my cousin’s face covered in blood, the ache in my knuckles from the force of the blow. Each event, it seemed, came around.

  “Did she say why she wanted to find me?” I asked.

  “Nope.” His voice was flat now. I used that voice with emotional clients. “Thought it seemed fairly obvious.”

  “I suppose,” I whispered. Fairly obvious.

  Of course.

  Somehow I thanked him. I pressed the disconnect button as Laura walked into the room.

  She stood in the doorway for only a moment, and when I didn’t move, she shut the door gently. “You found something?”

  I nodded.

  She came over beside me and peered at the clipping, obviously not seeing anything. I pointed to the arrow.

  “My mother did that,” she said.

  I looked at her, startled.

  Laura shrugged. “She had a distinct way of marking things. I’d recognize that anywhere.” She leaned closer. “What’s it pointing at?”

  “Me,” I said.

  She took the clipping. She frowned at it, turned it over, then turned it back again. “What is this? A play?”

  “The Junior League Ball, held on December 14, 1939, in the City Auditorium in Atlanta, Georgia.” I heard the same flatness in my voice that I had just heard in Gruner’s. Maybe it was a defense. Maybe all of us private eyes developed it to prevent ourselves from feeling anything.

  “You remember this?” she asked, handing the clipping back to me.

  “It was for the premiere of Gone With the Wind.” Now the bitterness was beginning to creep into my voice. “Clark Gable was there.”

  “And you—”

  “Sang.” I took the clipping from her, stared at my round and innocent face. “I sang.”

  “I don’t understand.” She hadn’t taken off her coat. “Are you saying my parents are from Atlanta?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “And they knew you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But—”

  “Laura.” I didn’t want her to talk any more. I stepped away from her, unable to be close. My entire body felt as if a fire were burning beneath my skin, all prickly and hot. I wanted to move away from myself, but couldn’t.

  “I don’t understand, Smokey.”

  I hadn’t spoken of this to anyone. Not since I left Atlanta. I felt the heat rise in my face: an old familiar shame. They must have done something. That’s how the feeling went. That it was somehow their fault, and somehow mine. Maybe they smiled at the wrong person, forgot to give say “ma’am” when speaking to a white woman. Maybe they purposely stood up for themselves in a way that just wasn’t allowed then.

  Amazing how deep the training went in, how much of it I absorbed and couldn’t shake free. For the first time in years, I wanted to talk to Martin, to find out how he managed to shake loose of his training, how he managed to understand that he was greater than what he had been told.

  “Smokey?”

  “Two nights after this picture was taken,” I said, “when all the celebrities were gone, and the streets were littered with balloons and confetti, and the city fathers were arguing about whether or not to leave the Rebel flags flying in front of Lowe’s theater, my parents were kidnapped from our home—” my voice was shaking. Laura had moved closer—“taken to some fucking red clay dirt road, beaten until they couldn’t stand any more and maybe even my mother—”

  “Smokey, you don’t have to—”

  “—and lynched.” I clenched my right fist. “My cousin, my fucking betraying cousin, said my father didn’t die right away. He said that they found him clutching the rope like he was trying to pull it away from his neck.”

  Laura put her hand on my shoulder. I wrenched away and walked to the window. Through the filthy glass, Beale looked no different. People were walking to their jobs. A handful of picketers were carrying signs down Third as if they were headed somewhere.

  I couldn’t breathe. My entire chest felt as if someone had been sitting on it for years, and the pressure was growing worse. It wasn’t a heart attack. It was a function of memory, of a past so deep that even talking about it made my throat raw.

  “Smokey.” Her voice was trembling too. “You don’t think my parents—I mean, were they running because they—”

  “Killed my parents?” The words came out harsher than I intended. I shook my head. “Among some people, it was a badge of honor to kill niggers. It still is.”

  “You don’t mean that…”

  I turned, and the look on my face silenced her. I did mean that. I meant every word. And it was my own fear, my own realization that occurred quite young that no matter what I did, I was second- or third- or maybe even fourth-class. I didn’t leave the black community because it wasn’t safe to leave my community. I didn’t go anywhere unknown where I didn’t know the rules because I didn’t know what would get me killed and what wouldn’t. I didn’t look at women like Laura—

  I bowed my head. Every single act in my life was informed by that moment, by the fear that caught and held me in that closet, when I knew—I knew—I would be alone for the rest of my life.

  She reached for me again, her fingers brushing the side of my face. I caught her wrist and pushed her away from me.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Not now.”

  I moved back a step, rested my palms flat on my desk, and made myself breathe. I had learned this trick in the service. Count the breaths, concentrate on the breaths, feel the breaths go in and out and in until the anger passed.

  It didn’t entirely pass. But it receded enough to allow me to talk to Laura in a civilized way.

  I brought my head up.

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked. The question was gentle, gentler than I deserved. She held the clipping tightly in one hand.

  “No.” My voice sounded funny, strained, to me. I cleared my throat. “I—we—have to discuss this.”

  I walked behind my desk and took my chair, hoping it would make me feel more like Smokey Dalton the adult than little Billy Alburty the orphan sent, without explanation, to his uncle’s farm in South Georgia. Sent away, gone for weeks, and then taken, not to his own family, but to Washington, D.C., to a foster family found by the Grand, a family who promised him—and tried to deliver—a good life.

  “I—I warned you that there might be things here you wouldn’t like.” I rubbed a hand over my face. “I never expected that the same would apply to me.”

  “We never thought of it as blood money,” she said, sinking into her chair. Her face was pale and she spoke as if she were afraid her words would offend me again.

  “It can’t be that simple,” I said. “People who murder others don’t repent, and people who committed that kind of crime never thought of blacks as human. Why would they worry about me? And why so late?”

  “Maybe…” she swallowed so hard I could see the motion. “Maybe my father participated and my mother disapproved. Maybe—”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t feel right. To me anyway. Does it to you?”

  “No,” she whispered. “I can’t believe my father would kill anyone.”

  I raised my head and looked at her. Two spots of color formed on her cheeks, and her eyes swam with tears. Her lower lip trembled. She bit it to hold it in place, the
n, like I had done, took a deep calming breath.

  “I can’t believe it, Smokey,” she whispered. “No matter what else he did. He was a gentle man. He never even raised his voice at me, or at my mother. She wouldn’t have tolerated it. She wouldn’t have tolerated any violence. One of my earliest memories of her was her sitting by the radio, listening to the war broadcasts and weeping. ‘All those boys,’ she would say. ‘All those young boys.’”

  I ran my hand through my hair. I was picking up her nervous gestures. I couldn’t believe it either, although not for her reasons, but for the reasons I had named earlier. It didn’t fit. It just didn’t. But I was going on gut, without any proof. I needed something more.

  “Whatever happened,” I said, “the tie was back there, in Atlanta. Your mother knew about Atlanta. I just spoke to another detective she hired. He confirmed it. She knew me.”

  I picked up a loose staple and bent it between my thumb and forefinger. No wonder I didn’t remember them. I didn’t remember much about Atlanta before my parents died—purposely wiped out of my memory, my foster mother used to say—and I didn’t remember anything about any white people. At least not individual white people. I remembered them in groups, such as the Junior League Ball, or the hostile group of older kids who had screamed obscenities at my first grade class on an outing.

  I licked my lower lip, felt the control coming back, at least as much as it could. “I’m going there,” I said. “I’m going to Atlanta. I’ll see what I can find.”

  She stood as if we were leaving at that moment. “I’ll come with you.”

  I shook my head. “It won’t work.”

  “Sure it will. You’ll need someone in the white community. I can probably go places—”

  “No,” I said, even though she had a good argument. I never went to Atlanta. Not even after my foster parents moved back there three years ago, after my foster father was granted a full professorship at Morehouse, with tenure. They had been so proud and wanted to show me their new house, have me celebrate his good fortune—he had only been an associate professor at Howard—and I hadn’t come. I couldn’t face the city. I never wanted to see Atlanta again.