War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  The police? Possible. I wasn’t going to rule it out. But Detective O’Connor didn’t look like IAD and he seemed to be investigating the D’Amato shooting. However, he had given me Victor McCleary’s name with the others, and he had to know that McCleary’s shooting wasn’t connected. I didn’t dare underestimate the New York police.

  After I had eaten and had a chance to think things through, I felt better. I was calmer. I still hadn’t come up with the identity of the shooter, but I did have confirmation that Daniel, Rhondelle, and their little group had been collecting dynamite. The police knew it, and had acted on it once.

  But that didn’t mean they had found everything.

  A refrigerator full of dynamite wasn’t one-tenth the amount we had found in New Haven — at least based on the empty boxes. (And why were those boxes empty? What had happened to that dynamite?) If Daniel felt he needed a lot — and why would he? — then he needed some other place to store it.

  Some place that wouldn’t have been as easy to find.

  I got up, left a five on the table to cover my tab and tip, and went to the back, carrying one of the napkins and a pen. Near the restrooms was a bank of pay phones. Someone had scratched names and phone numbers into the wall beside them, and the entire area smelled like urine. If I hadn’t already eaten, I would have left without touching my food.

  Still, I grabbed one of the phones, plugged a dime into it, and had the operator hook me up with St. Vincent’s main line. Once I got the hospital’s operator, I asked for the accounting department.

  “You mean Billing?” she asked. “Or do you want Records?”

  “Are they in tonight?” I asked.

  “Billing is,” she said.

  “Then hook me up,” I said.

  She did. I heard the double click as she transferred me, and then I hung up.

  I redialed the hospital, got the operator, disguised my voice slightly, and asked for the nurse’s station on June’s floor. When the nurse answered, I introduced myself as John from Billing.

  “We need to confirm June D’Amato’s address. We have One West Twelth Street, but that address looks wrong to me. Do you think this kid could’ve faked her address when she came in? I don’t want to send information to the wrong place.”

  “What are you billing for now anyway?” the nurse asked. “The girl’s in a coma.”

  “It’s policy,” I said. “We get the file ready, send the preliminary information, just in case someone else is at the house and needs notification.”

  The nurse harrumphed at me. “Sounds like typical bureaucratic foolishness.”

  “I don’t make the rules,” I said with a verbal shrug.

  “Just a minute.” She put me on hold, and I crossed my fingers. A cook came out of the kitchen, pushed past me, and headed into the men’s room, trailing the odor of cooking grease behind him.

  “Got it,” she said as she got back on the line. “And your address is wrong, or maybe mine is. I know she didn’t fill out the paperwork because she’s been unconscious from the moment she arrived.”

  “Give me the second address anyway,” I said. “Between us, we might have the right one.”

  The nurse gave me a reluctant chuckle, and then she recited an address. I wrote it down, then repeated it back to her.

  “You ask me,” she said, “that sounds as suspect as your One West Twelth Street.”

  “Yes, it does,” I said. “You know how many of these kids give us fake addresses? What is she, an overdose?”

  “No. Poor thing was shot on the Fourth of July. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Wow,” I said, sounding as surprised as I could. “What was she doing?”

  “Just standing on the sidewalk, minding her own business.” The nurse sighed. “Sure hope she lives through this. She’s a pretty little thing.”

  I thanked her for her time, and hung up, then stared at the address. It might have been the one the police raided, but it might not.

  Daniel had been pretty shaken up when he carried June to that car. There was a chance he was even more upset at the hospital. There was also a chance that he wasn’t the one who had filled out the paperwork — that someone else in his group, someone less devious than he was — had done so.

  I needed to check out the apartment, but I didn’t want to stay in the city, not now that O’Connor had told me about the surveillance.

  I figured, however, that I could give it one more day.

  FORTY-NINE

  Early Monday morning, I took a train to the Village. Jimmy and Malcolm had one more day at the library. They weren’t happy about the library, but they were pleased to learn that we’d be leaving the following morning.

  The subway was filled with commuters holding coffee in Styrofoam cups, reading newspapers while standing, sitting with their briefcases shoved tightly between their legs. I pushed my way in and rattled along with everyone else as the train headed downtown.

  Most of the commuters got off in midtown. I rode the train down to Washington Square. I wanted to see how far the park was from June D’Amato’s apartment. The day was nice; the short walk from Washington Square Park to the address the nurse had given me on East Eleventh would be pleasant.

  In this part of town, the commuters gave way to street people, hippies, and card sharks, all of whom sat at makeshift tables and tried to catch unsuspecting people. Graffiti covered many of the buildings. Transistor radios blared conflicting styles of rock music along the block, and near the intersection with Second Avenue, a teenage boy who looked like he hadn’t had a bath in three months had another boy against the wall, a knife at his throat. Five other boys stood around them, egging them on, before a policeman walked through the group, slapping his truncheon against his hand, and shouting, “Break it up, break it up.”

  Two different hulks of burned-out cars sat near the curb, but no one seemed to notice them, which made me realize car burning had to be pretty common around here. The address the nurse had given me led me to an old tenement, its brick walls rough with time and neglect.

  I walked up the steps to the stoop, past two kids who swore at me in Spanish. I answered them in the same language, telling them it wasn’t polite to make fun of other people.

  They ran away.

  The door to the building was closed, but not locked. I pushed it open. The on-site manager’s apartment was listed as apartment one. As I walked past the open wiring and the flaking paint, I found the apartment. Beneath the crooked number was a hand-scrawled sign that read MANAGER.

  I knocked.

  After a moment, the door opened, releasing a waft of tobacco and marijuana smoke. I could almost get high standing there. A middle-aged white man, his naked gut hanging over a pair of filthy blue jeans, peered at me.

  “You don’t live here,” he said.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “We don’t got nothing,” he said and started to close the door.

  I put my hand on it. “I’m a detective. I’m here on a case.”

  “Oh.” He gave me a greasy smile. “Why didn’t you say so? Just a minute. Lemme get a shirt.”

  He closed the door, and I knew he was doing more than putting on a shirt. He was getting rid of the joint that had been smoldering on the table behind him, and probably hiding a few other things as well.

  Then he opened the door again. He was wearing a T-shirt that was too big. It floated around him like a nightdress.

  “Sorry,” he said, as he slid in front of the door, not letting me inside. “The wife’s not decent.”

  I bet, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Whatcha need?”

  “I suppose you heard that one of your tenants is in the hospital?”

  “If you mean little Junie D’Amato, she ain’t my tenant no more.”

  “She isn’t?” I asked.

  “What, don’t you guys at the force talk to each other? I just told some official types this a coupla days ago.”

  “A
pparently they left it off the report,” I said.

  “Apparently. Jeez, for all the work you guys are supposed to do, it don’t make sense for you to repeat each other’s work.”

  “When did June move out?” I asked, not willing to hear the complaints. The hallway was close and hot, and he stank of sweat and marijuana.

  “I don’t got the slightest. First I know about it is when I’m taking your buddies up there to see the place, it’s been cleaned out. Not cleaned, mind you — her and those friendsa hers wouldn’t know cleaned — but it was emptied, you know? Even took a couch belonging to us. So I’m not paying back the deposit no matter what her old man says.”

  “You talked with her father?”

  “No, but I will. Whenever there was a problem with the rent, the old man sent a check. You know he’s the kind who’ll probably spit blood if he don’t get his due.”

  “You’ve met him?” I asked.

  “Just by phone. That’s plenty.” The manager hitched his pants up. “If that’s all —”

  “Actually, no, it’s not,” I said. “Do you have a forwarding address?”

  “Jeez you guys are all the same. If I knew she was moving, I woulda got it, but I didn’t, so I don’t. Now are we done?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d like to see the apartment.”

  “It’s empty,” he said. “There ain’t nothing to see.”

  “Humor me,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes, then pushed the door to his own apartment open. “I gotta get my keys.”

  He disappeared inside. I heard his voice, faint, chastising someone — “for crissake, there’s a cop out there!” — and then the door opened again. He clutched a gigantic ring of keys in one hand. They clanged against each other. He slid his fist through the ring and led me up the steps.

  Cockroaches scuttled across the molding, and a spiderweb caught my hair. I stopped and wiped at it, making an inadvertent sound of disgust.

  The manager didn’t seem to notice. He walked ahead of me, passing the landing and making a lot of noise as he went up the second flight of steps.

  I wondered who he was warning.

  I followed him. The steps were steep. I could only see his legs as I started up them. I heard a key turn in the lock and him shout, “Manager!” as he stepped inside.

  Did he allow squatters? I had no idea, and I wasn’t about to get into the middle of anything. I slowed, peering up as I walked, hoping that I wouldn’t see anything too far out of the ordinary.

  The hallway was as narrow as the one downstairs. Someone had put a fist through the wall, revealing wires and plaster. The overhead light had been pulled off the ceiling and dangled there like a forgotten kite.

  The manager stood just inside the apartment. He had his arms crossed. “There ain’t nothing else to see here,” he said, which was enough to tell me that if I had been working Vice I might have found a lot to see.

  I gave him a nod, then walked deeper into the apartment. Once it had been two railroad flats, but someone had converted it into one by tearing out a wall. Whoever had done the conversion hadn’t tried to make transition between the two apartments look like part of the design. If I peered carefully enough, I could see bits of wallboard still trapped in the floor.

  There wasn’t any furniture, but there were a lot of dust bunnies. The walls were covered with scraps and leftover bits of yellowed tape. Footprints showed in the dust — some of the prints bare, and others long and official, like cop shoes.

  I wandered through, saw the converted kitchen, and, holding my breath, opened the refrigerator door. Nothing except the stale smell of old food. I looked inside the cupboards, the stove, and under the kitchen sink, but found nothing.

  “You looking for something in particular?” the manager asked.

  I shook my head, then glanced at the fridge again. It was small, even by apartment standards. An old 1930s Frigidaire, with a rounded top, it barely came up to my chest. If it had held boxes of dynamite, it couldn’t have held more than three.

  I walked through the remaining rooms, saw nothing of interest, checked out all four fireplaces, which seemed like an odd feature of an odd apartment, and then returned to the manager.

  “Told you they were gone,” he said.

  That was the second time he’d referred to others in the apartment. “These friends of hers,” I said, “did they live in the building or in the apartment with her?”

  “She swore to me she lived alone, but she had a guy up there a lot, and they seemed to know everybody. It was like one big party. But it sometimes is like a party around here. We ain’t far from St. Marks Place, and it’s been crazy for the past two, maybe three years. That crazy spills this way.”

  “Crazy?” I asked.

  “Hippies, freaks, druggies. You name it, they come around here. Now we got the Spics — pardon my French — and it’s all going to hell.”

  “Since you don’t seem to like your neighbors,” I said, “why don’t you just move?”

  “Where else would I find a job that gives me free rent and pays me? Hmmm? I get janitorial pay.”

  “And you do a fine job for it,” I said sarcastically.

  He crossed his thick arms. “Hey, if you had to deal with what I got to deal with — all them junkies coming in here wanting a place to bed down, trashing the place — you wouldn’t be so quick to judge.”

  “So it’s their fault this place is falling apart.”

  “Damn right,” he said, then blinked at me. He couldn’t tell if I was making fun of him.

  “Did any of her friends live in the building?” I asked.

  “How should I know? I didn’t keep a list.”

  “I was just wondering if you saw anything that made you a little suspicious.”

  He shook his head. “That’s impossible to answer. All the stuff around here, it’s suspicious from a cop’s perspective.”

  “Do you ever report any of it?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “When it gets bad.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know his definition of bad. “In the last two months,” I said, trying one last time, “did you have any tenants who moved in with a pile of same-size boxes and very little else? Maybe they brought some coolers or a table or some equipment—”

  “Why do you ask?” He frowned at me in such a way that my heart skipped a beat. He knew something. He just wanted to know what was in it for him.

  “Because if I’m right, everyone in this building could be in danger.”

  “Yeah, sure, from what?”

  “Explosives,” I said.

  He went pale. “You’re shitting me.”

  I shook my head.

  “You think little Junie was doing stuff like that?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “I understand she kept boxes of dynamite in that refrigerator.”

  I nodded toward it. The manager looked at it like it might explode at any minute.

  “You gotta be kidding,” he said.

  “I wish I were.”

  “Christ on a crutch,” he said. “The only people who fit your description are the Castro brothers. But they’ve never been no trouble. They pay their rent on time and they never complain about nothing.”

  “The Castro brothers?” I asked, unable to keep the disbelief from my voice. “Ché and Fidel?”

  “I’m not dumb,” the manager said. “Michael and John. They had ID You know, I do check driver’s licenses.”

  “Do you see these guys a lot?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Sometimes they came by with this beautiful nigra chick. She was just…”

  His voice ran down as he realized what he said.

  “Tell me about this beautiful girl,” I said.

  “She had real delicate features, you know. She seemed kinda breakable. Last week, she tripped on the way out, fell against the step. I heard her fall, and helped her up. I have a hunch she had a mother of a shiner. She really walloped herself.”

  Rhondelle.
<
br />   “I told her we could put some ice on it,” he said, “but she laughed and told me she’d just blame it on her shit-ass boyfriend. Her word ‘shit-ass.’ Don’t sound like she liked him much.”

  “If she’s the same girl I’m thinking of,” I said, “she doesn’t have much reason to like him.”

  “You know her?”

  “I know a beautiful black girl with an incredible shiner. She’s also a friend of June’s and is known as the group’s chemist.”

  “Well, she was on something that day she tripped down the steps, but you know, if I had to guess, I woulda thought it was glue. She had that whiffer smell, you know? Like she was sniffing airplane glue like we did when we were kids.”

  I must have been a dull child. It never crossed my mind to sniff glue. “Can you let me into their apartment?”

  “Not without twenty-four hours’ warning,” he said.

  “And if they do have dynamite in there like I think they do, it’ll be gone in twenty-four hours. You know it, and so do I.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t violate code without the owner’s permission.”

  I smiled at him, crossed my arms, and took a step toward him. I was nearly half a foot taller than he was, and although he outweighed me, his extra weight was fat.

  “If you let me in there, I’ll overlook the marijuana in your apartment. I’ll also fail to report all the building code violations when I get back to the office.”

  He swallowed once, and looked up at me nervously. “The other cops didn’t threaten me,” he said, his voice shaking.

  “But you didn’t tell them about the Castro brothers, did you?”

  “I don’t got no real proof that you are a cop,” he said.

  “You gonna risk making me mad now?” I asked.

  Small beads of sweat formed on his forehead. His body odor, which hadn’t been light before, was getting stronger.

  “Shit, man,” he said, “if I lose this job, I’m sunk. I can’t get nothing else.”

  “You’re gonna lose it,” I said, “if you don’t cooperate with me. In fact, you’re gonna lose a lot more. You’re gonna lose your freedom. Vice isn’t really happy about any kind of drug these days, and I have a hunch the joint I saw in your place was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.”