A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  My heart was racing. I was breathing shallowly, and I was queasy. Laura and I had been right. I had taken blood money. The first down payment from her parents, a guilt offering that put a value on my parents’ lives.

  Ten thousand dollars each.

  Apparently that was the going rate for Negroes in 1939.

  A block away from my foster mother’s, I had to pull over. I lost the pie and the makeshift lunch. I gripped the side of the car for a moment, then made myself breathe.

  The queasiness was fading, but the disgust remained. I had spent blood money.

  The rational part of my brain told me that I did need more information. I couldn’t go to Laura with what I had. I didn’t have anything.

  Not yet.

  I wiped my face and got back in the car, holding the steering wheel as if I were driving. Then I concentrated on calming myself.

  I had always thought the attack on my parents had been random violence. Part of me thought it was in response to the hysteria whipped up by the Gone With the Wind premiere. It wasn’t until years later, when I saw the movie, that I made up a reason for it: the revenge sequence after Scarlett had been attacked by a group of former slaves after the war, only to be saved by Big Sam. I thought that for some reason, my parents had become targets of drunken good ole boys. It was as good an explanation as any, and it made some sort of sense out of something my nasty cousin had said to me:

  “It all goes back to that Gone with the Wind stuff, remember?” he had said. “It was in all the papers.”

  He had been referring to the lost baby, which had been in the papers, my foster mother said, a week later. Only I had never seen those papers. I was protected and hidden and kept in the dark about what happened to my parents for a very long time. I guess my aunt and uncle, who were taking care of me before my foster parents took over, thought protecting me was the only way to take care of me.

  And perhaps it was.

  Perhaps it was.

  * * *

  It was the memory of my cousin’s remark, though, that brought me to myself.

  The papers. There had been more in the newspapers. My foster mother had confirmed as much.

  Newspapers were open on the weekend. Someone would be able to help me.

  I drove to the offices of the Daily World, Atlanta’s first black newspaper, and asked if I could look through their archives.

  I remembered my father reading the Daily World as if it were the Bible. It had always been, even after I left, the ideal of black journalism for me. But the Daily World had competition now. The new voice of black Atlanta was the Atlanta Inquirer, and it was driving the Daily World out of business.

  That was evident even to my casual eye. The reporters lacked the enthusiasm I had always associated with them. The newspaper’s pace was slow and steady. Even the paper itself looked familiar, as if no one had thought to change fonts or layout in the last thirty years.

  The weekend receptionist I spoke to gave me a polite but distant smile. “We don’t let just anyone go through our archives, sir,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that I had forgotten to go through much of my usual routine with her. “My name is Smokey Dalton. I’m investigating a case for a client, and I need to look up some records. It would be kind of you to let me use the archives.”

  “Mr. Dalton, I can’t—”

  “Smokey Dalton?” A voice boomed from the back. “Billy Dalton, Oran’s son?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  A man came out of the small office. He was bald and hunched over, carrying a pipe in one hand. He held out the other to me. “Regent Porter,” he said.

  I had heard of him. I remembered reading his Monday and Wednesday columns when I was reading the Daily World. “It’s a pleasure.”

  “What brings you to us?”

  “A case.”

  “You’re a detective now,” he said, and it wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

  “More or less.”

  “I remember you at Ebenezer Baptist. Martin King, well it was clear he was going to be a preacher like his daddy, but I always pegged you for music, like Geeky Dobbs.”

  I froze. It startled me that someone would recognize me, know who I really was. Maybe there was something to those fears everyone had for me after all.

  He smiled. “Relax, son. I’ve known Oran most of our lives. And I was a friend of the Grand’s. I knew about you, and I was one of only three people who did. I never said a word.”

  I swallowed hard, not sure what to say. Ultimately I didn’t have to say anything. He seemed to sense my discomfort.

  “What kind of case?” he asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “You said you were here on a case. What kind?”

  I met his warm brown eyes. “The worst kind. It got personal a few days ago.”

  “Involvement with the client?”

  I shook my head, even though that had happened. “The case wraps into my own family.”

  “Mmm,” he said, and stuck the pipe in his mouth. He patted the receptionist on the shoulder, then took my arm. He led me past metal desks covered with manual typewriters that were at least twenty years old. A few of the reporters were typing. Others were talking on the phone. Half the desks were empty. Monday’s paper would be thin.

  “So,” he said, as he led me into a back room. “It doubles back on your family how?”

  I took a deep breath. I was still shaky from my conversation with my foster mother. “My parents’ murder.”

  “A sad case, that,” he said.

  “How familiar are you with it?”

  “Very. Atlanta’s version of the Lindbergh baby. Only our accused weren’t immigrants. Our accused were Negro and therefore didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of a trial.”

  It took me half a beat to hear the sarcasm in his voice. “Do you think they were guilty?”

  “Hell, no,” he said, walking past a series of filing cabinets, his thick arthritic finger pointing at dates as he did so. “I think they were convenient.”

  He stopped in front of one of the cabinets and tugged open a drawer. In it were a series of dusty accordion files with names written on them in faded ink. He braced himself against the open door, then pulled out a thick file and set it before me.

  “I wrote three columns on your folks. Always wished I could do more. But it was a dangerous case. The powers that be didn’t like questions, and they were worried that there was a conspiracy. I guess they saw shades of Nat Turner or something.”

  I had to think for a moment before my history came back to me. Nat Turner, the slave who led a successful slave rebellion in 1831. He murdered his masters but the whites, in turn, slaughtered every slave for miles.

  “Others were killed?” I whispered.

  “Threatened,” he said, “especially if someone thought they knew something.” He set the file on a wobbly table underneath the only window. “There’s microfiche too, but I suspect you won’t need it when you’re done with this.”

  I put my hand on the file, not wanting him to go, not yet. “You always keep your notes?” I asked.

  “On the controversial ones,” he said. “Habit.” He flicked a file cabinet with his finger, the metal making a soft pinging sound. “Fortunately not everyone in this place is as fastidious as I am or we’d be buried in paper.”

  He smiled and patted my shoulder, a gesture that was oddly comforting. “Come talk to me when you’ve finished thumbing through everything.”

  I nodded, then reached forward and flicked on the metal desk lamp that stood in the corner of the wobbly table. The lamp provided a bit more light than the thin florescent on the ceiling. I bent over the accordion file and with trembling hands, pulled out all the manila files stored inside.

  They were labeled in that same spidery hand I had seen inside the cabinet. Columns, Competition, Interviews, Lies, Photographs, and Police Reports. I opened the Lies file first because it intrigued me.

  In it were h
andwritten notes, scrawled on yellowing paper:

  Why assumption of murder?

  What happened to body?

  What happened to coin collection?

  Why not investigate noise?

  Back door?

  Always blame the Colored housemaid.

  No ransom note.

  I felt my stomach twist. I closed the Lies file, deciding to save the remaining pages for last. Instead I opened the Columns file and found Porter’s three columns on the topic, which I did not read. Columns were usually opinion, and I wanted to form my own. I set that file aside as well and opened the Competition file.

  In it were yellowing newspaper clippings from the Journal, the Georgian, and the Constitution. Lurid headlines that seemed to get only worse as the end of the year approached.

  SOCIETY’S FAVORITE DAUGHTER MISSING

  MISSING CHILD FEARED GONE FOREVER

  POLICE BELIEVE BABY MURDERED BY

  COLORED HOUSEKEEPER

  RATLEDGES STILL HAVE HOPE

  I spread the articles out in front of me and began reading. In the white press, the notion of Negro guilt was there from the start. It was as if they considered no other options.

  I turned the pages and read, wincing at the descriptions of my family, the way my mother was referred to as stupid and careless; my father as conniving and dangerous. In one article there was a mention of me and the fact that according to the white press, I was “missing.” Only Ralph McGill’s Constitution reserved judgment, and even worried that assuming so quickly that the Negro (and he did capitalize the word) housekeeper had taken and killed the child was perhaps the wrong way to approach the information.

  None of them seemed to know at this point my parents were already dead.

  I turned the fragile newsprint and then stopped, my breath catching in my throat. For on the second page of the Journal was a studio photograph of the Ratledges. Ross Ratledge had the long thin face that was considered both fashionable and handsome in the 1930s. But I didn’t look at him much.

  Instead I stared at his wife.

  Looking at a portrait of Susan Ratledge was like looking at a still photograph of Laura.

  * * *

  I went through the rest of the files with shaking hands. The queasiness had returned, so strong that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to swallow after a while. Occasionally I had to stop and wipe my eyes, and once I stood, shoved my hands in my pockets, and leaned my forehead against the cool metal of a filing cabinet.

  It didn’t soothe my feverish brain. I was thinking a thousand things at once and none of them pleasant. I knew my parents; I knew they weren’t killers, and so had all of their friends. But the stupidest thing about this was that Laura had been kidnapped as a baby, and no one knew. No one tried to find her. That meant there had been no ransom note.

  They all assumed she was dead.

  Laura. I raised my head and opened my eyes. I had no idea how I would tell Laura.

  I have no idea how long I stood there, hands in pockets, staring at the gray metal of the cabinet. Eventually, I heard a door creak behind me, and Porter returned.

  “Strong stuff,” he said.

  I nodded without turning around.

  “Your parents were good people. They didn’t deserve what happened to them.”

  I didn’t even lash back at him with my usual response: no one deserves to be lynched. Instead I nodded again.

  “Did the file help with your case?”

  “More than you know,” I said. My voice came out strangled and strange. I cleared my throat, took a deep breath, and silently told myself to pull myself together. I turned to him, hoping that my face looked somewhat normal. A man couldn’t read about the needless death of his parents and not look a bit shaken, but I didn’t want to look as devastated as I felt.

  “Forgive me, I haven’t lived in Atlanta since...” I couldn’t finish the sentence, so I jumped to the next. “Are you still writing columns?”

  “Monday’s is due at six.” He smiled. The look was reassuring. He had to have been my foster father’s age—my father’s age too—in his early sixties.

  “If things go as I think they will, I’ll have another column for you.”

  His smile widened. “That’s what I was hoping for.” Then he nodded at the table. “You can have the file, if you return it.”

  I didn’t want it. I wanted to take it, shove it in a cabinet, and never see it again.

  But I needed it. Laura would never believe me. I wouldn’t have believed me. Not after thirty years of brainwashing. Not after thirty years of lies.

  “Thank you,” I said. I put the pieces back together carefully so that I didn’t rip any clippings or lose any of the smaller scraps of paper. I reached into my wallet and took out a battered card with my name, address, and phone number on it. I had little occasion to use these things, and I usually forgot I had them. I was pleased to have one now.

  I handed it to him. “In case you need to track me down.”

  “I suspect I could have done that with Oran or Lucinda,” he said, but took the card anyway.

  The queasiness in my stomach became a burning in my throat. I turned back to the accordion file and attempted to tie the top of it with the attached brown strings, but my hands were shaking too much. Porter came up beside me, tied the file, and handed it to me. He said nothing about my obvious distress, for which I was very grateful.

  He walked me out of the office and to the street. When we reached my car, he shook my hand, and then he patted it just once. “Times have changed,” he said, “and I have hopes for the future. Small hopes, but hopes nonetheless.”

  I frowned, trying to make myself concentrate.

  “But,” he said, “the hopes never take away the sting of the past. Sometimes, I think they make it worse.”

  I nodded, not sure I understood him, and not sure I agreed with him. Then I thanked him again, got in my car, and drove away.

  * * *

  I barely remember the dinner at my foster parents’. Mostly my foster mother forced food on me and touched my forehead to see if I was ill. My foster father, who always knew more than he admitted, finally ordered her to stop fussing.

  “The boy’s had a shock,” he said. “Let him grieve.”

  And they did.

  We sat in their bright living room and watched Lyndon Baines Johnson declare a limited halt to the bombing in Vietnam.

  And then he said, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

  My foster parents cheered, and I might have too. But I was too numb to recognize the implications, not then.

  I went back to the motel room that night and didn’t sleep. Twice I reached for the phone to call Laura, and twice I brought my hand back. Finally I got up and reread the file, then compared the photographs of Laura’s parents—the people she believed were her parents—to the photographs in the file. I hadn’t made this up. It had happened.

  I bowed my head, and there, over information three decades old, I finally fell asleep.

  * * *

  I stayed in Atlanta one more day, ostensibly to clear up loose ends. I did dig up small pieces of information, things that confirmed what I already knew, but that was work I could have done from Memphis. In reality, I stayed because, for the first time in my life, I found my foster parents’ presence oddly comforting. I finally understood what they went through to allow me to grow up in their home, and I was grateful, truly grateful, an emotion I had never allowed myself to feel toward them. If I had felt that one in the past, I might have felt all the others, the ones that swirled around me now, the ones that nearly overwhelmed me whenever I tried to speak.

  It was easy to find information on the Ratledges, even though they had withdrawn from Atlanta society; apparently a white person never entirely withdraws. They still rated articles in the local papers, and they eventually had more children, who made news when they had their coming-out parties at the Piedmon
t Driving Club or married or had children of their own.

  Laura had an entire family she didn’t even know about.

  I never did try to contact the Ratledges, though. Even if they didn’t associate me with my parents, I knew they wouldn’t believe a strange black man who came to their door saying he knew what had happened to their missing daughter. And if they ever discovered my true identity, well, it would probably only confirm—in the Ratledges’ minds—the fact of my parents’ guilt.

  No. Contacting them was up to Laura. I had done my part. And after I called Laura and gave her the news, I would be finished with this case.

  Before I left the motel, I tried to call her. The phone rang three times, but when someone answered, I hung up.

  I didn’t want to talk to her, not from Atlanta. I had visions of her flying here, expecting me to stay, of going to the Ratledges with her or putting her back together when it was over.

  I didn’t like any of those images. I had to keep the situation in my control. The problem was that I didn’t know how to do that. The situation had long since left my control.

  And I wasn’t sure if I would ever get it back.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE DRIVE TO MEMPHIS was a long one, made even longer by melting snow and slush. I kept the radio off the entire time, my mind too busy to be distracted.

  I had taken $10,000 from the people who had murdered my parents. I’m sure the Hathaways hadn’t meant for my parents to die in their stead, but that had happened, the unseen consequences of a well-planned crime. And it had bothered one of them, probably Mrs. Hathaway, bothered her enough to offer a small token from their considerable fortune—$10,000 per person, what they considered a black life to be worth.

  I had spent the money. I had none of it in reserve. I couldn’t even write a check and give it all back to Laura, not without some planning.

  And part of me wasn’t sure I should pay it back. Part of me wanted to expose her parents for what they were and demand a percentage of their fortune—a sizable percentage.