War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  His eyes moved from my face to the refrigerator to my face again.

  “All right,” he whispered. “But you tell people you gave me twenty-four hour notice, okay?”

  “Just take me to the apartment,” I said.

  He nodded, then scuttled down the damaged hall of this apartment. He waited for me at the door. When I stepped out, he locked up, his hands shaking.

  “That way,” he said, nodding down the corridor.

  “You lead,” I said.

  He put his head down and trudged, as if I were making him go to prison. His keys jangled in his right hand.

  When he reached the apartment at the very end of the hall, he knocked. “Manager!” he shouted.

  We waited a minute. There was no movement inside.

  “Manager!” he shouted again.

  Then he glanced at me.

  “Open it,” I said.

  He took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and stepped back. A blast of cold air hit us. He gave me a surprised look.

  I stepped in first.

  “Manager!” he shouted again from behind me.

  I nearly hit him.

  “Don’t do that,” I whispered. I wanted to listen, to see if I heard anything besides the rattle of an overworked air conditioner.

  The rattle seemed too loud, and as I turned to the right, into the main room of the apartment, I saw why.

  Both windows had air conditioners, and both conditioners were set so high that they vibrated. Beneath them, someone had placed newspaper and big soup pots to catch the condensation as it dripped off the units.

  Both pots were nearly full.

  But that wasn’t what caught me. What got my attention were the boxes, stacked floor to ceiling in the half-kitchen off the main room. All of them had Tucker Construction stamped on the side. I knew if I turned them around, they would read “Explosives.”

  “Izzat it?” the manager asked from behind me.

  “You stay there,” I said, wishing for the first time on this trip that I had my gun. I had left it in Chicago, not wanting the trouble, not expecting it.

  I made my way through the kitchen, and into the back bedroom. There was only one, and it was dark. Light came in around the third air conditioner, also set on high. This place was as cold as a refrigerator.

  I flicked on the light with the back of my hand. A table was pushed against the back wall. Lined up on it were nails, thumbtacks, screws, and duct tape. Several squares of muslin were cut and resting next to those items. On the very edge of the table, someone had wrapped muslin around a package, and secured it with duct tape.

  I walked close, looked, but didn’t touch. Inside the muslin were the nails and screws and thumbtacks, held in place with what smelled ever so faintly like airplane glue.

  My stomach turned. I swallowed hard and scanned the rest of the room. More newspaper, another pot beneath the air conditioner, and on the far wall, two rows of alarm clocks, still in their packages. Electrician’s wire hung from a large nail someone had pounded into the wall.

  “Oh, shit,” the manager said from behind me.

  I just about jumped out of my skin.

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay in the living room?” I asked, barely controlling the urge to hit him.

  “I just had to see,” he said. “Goddamn, those little fuckers lied to me. They were such clean-cut white boys too.”

  “White boys?” I asked.

  “You expected colored?” he said, then put a hand to his mouth. “Colored’s okay, right?”

  I didn’t answer him. “What did these boys look like?”

  He shrugged. “Dark hair on the one. The other one had brown hair, long, and he was really thin. I only seen them a coupla times. I was starting to wonder if maybe they rented it out to that pretty ni—colored lady and her boyfriend, not that I woulda approved the sublet. But that happens a lot here. You know, kids think they got the money and they don’t, so they find a way to make a quick buck.”

  “These guys were young?” I asked.

  “Twenty, maybe. Maybe more. It’s hard to tell.”

  “And they had a black girl as a friend.”

  “And her kinda scary boyfriend. He had one of those….” The manager put his hands around his head, signifying a lot of hair.

  “An Afro,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he tied it back with a headband sometimes. He was real polite. Spoke like a normal person, too.”

  “Probably in better English than you use,” I said, the sarcasm hard to control.

  “Much better,” he agreed, without catching the sarcasm. “He had education, that kid, though he liked his speeches. Wanted me to come to some march.”

  I went back into the kitchen and used the back of my hand to turn on the light in there, too.

  And it was right there, on the table, a mimeograph machine, with the discarded masters in the garbage can beside it. I grabbed a paper towel off the counter, picked up one of the masters with the towel and looked.

  Written backward, in purple, on the back were the words “The genocidal war in Vietnam…”

  And they were in the same strange script I’d seen at the induction center.

  I knew it. I knew that all it would take was one more day.

  Finally, I had enough to put Daniel Kirkland away.

  FIFTY

  “Now what’re we gonna do?” the manager asked from behind me. This time, he didn’t startle me.

  I let the mimeograph master drop back into the garbage can, wiped off my hands, and stuck the paper towel in my pocket. Then I turned around to face him.

  His skin was blotchy with sweat. His eyes had sunken into his face. His T-shirt, which had looked somewhat clean, was now covered with big wet splotches that centered on his armpits.

  “I mean,” he said, “do we evacuate the building or what?”

  “We call for backup,” I said. “We’ll lock this place up and then we go downstairs and you won’t say a single word to anyone else, not even your wife, you got that?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  He looked at all the equipment, then back at me.

  “You sure it’s safe?”

  “It’s safe enough just sitting there,” I said, wondering if we’d missed any gasoline or motor oil. I didn’t see the makings for a Molotov cocktail, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here. “Let’s go.”

  The manager scurried out of the apartment as if he were being chased. I moved slower, taking in all the details.

  Daniel and his group had been smarter this time. They hadn’t left a lot of trace evidence of themselves here, probably because they weren’t living here.

  There hadn’t been any bombings to my knowledge in New York in the past two months, and none in New Haven that I had heard of. But people were mentioning a lot of activity in the East Coast Corridor. It wouldn’t take a lot to build some small bombs, like the one on that table, put it in a suitcase, and have someone take it to, say, Philadelphia on the train.

  Maybe Daniel and Rhondelle hadn’t been selling drugs. Maybe they’d been selling bombs.

  I felt colder than I ever had in my life, and it wasn’t just because of the three overworked air conditioners. I had stumbled onto something that I wanted no part of and that I had to stop right away.

  I got out of the apartment and rubbed my arms, feeling gooseflesh. The manager looked at me, apparently waiting for my approval to shut the door.

  “Lock it up,” I said.

  He sighed, his hands shaking so badly that he almost dropped the keys. He tried to find the right key twice, then finally had to go through the ring one by one, staring at the tiny numbers taped to the keys’ sides before finding the right one.

  I waited until I heard the deadbolt thunk into place. We hurried down the stairs, and he led me to his apartment.

  “Shirl,” he shouted as we got near it. “I’m baaack.”

  I had a hunch that wasn’t his normal greeting. “It doesn’t matter what she’s doi
ng. I need to use your phone.”

  He nodded, and pushed his door open. The apartment was filthy. Marijuana buds covered the coffee table, and a woman sat near it, her dirty feet crossed on the tabletop. She wore a loose housedress, her hair was tousled around her face, and she held a very fat joint in one hand. In the other, she had a lighter.

  She stared at me in surprise.

  “He a cop?” she asked the manager.

  “Don’t worry about it, Shirl. He’s gonna use the phone.”

  “Shit, man, you screw up. He’s—”

  “Ma’am,” I said with the firmest tone I had. “We have a much more serious problem than your little habit there. Be quiet, stay calm, don’t light that thing, and nothing will happen, all right?”

  She blinked at me. “Sure, I guess,” she said, then she set the joint on the table, knocking some buds off of it.

  The manager took the lighter out of her hand. His hands were still shaking. I wondered if he was afraid that tiny lighter would somehow ignite all the dynamite upstairs.

  “Where’s the phone?” I asked.

  The woman pointed toward her left. “We got one in the bed—”

  “In the kitchen,” the manager said, and gave her a pointed look. He nodded in the opposite direction. “Just down the hall.”

  I walked that way. He followed.

  The kitchen was U-shaped and small, with barely enough room for one person, let alone two. The phone sat on the edge of the counter, half buried in cellophane wrappers, aluminum containers for frozen dinners, and dirty cups.

  Apparently the manager didn’t get a lot of phone calls.

  I picked up the receiver, winced at its slimy texture, and dialed O’Connor’s precinct. When someone answered, I asked for O’Connor by name.

  The manager swallowed hard, then turned around and left. I had a hunch he had had run-ins with Detective O’Connor as well.

  The person I spoke to set the phone down for a minute, then came back. “Sorry,” he said. “O’Connor’s not here. Need to leave a message?”

  “No,” I said. “I need to talk to his captain.”

  “Ah,” the man at the other end said. “We don’t bother the captain unless it’s important.”

  “This is important,” I said. “I found where the War at Home Brigade keeps its dynamite.”

  “Shit,” the man said, and set the phone down again. This time, I could hear him as he made his way through the halls. “Captain! Hey, Captain…”

  It took a few minutes, but someone picked up another receiver. “Captain Donato,” an official sounding voice said.

  “Captain Donato,” I said, turning toward the wall so that my voice wouldn’t carry into the main room. “My name is Bill Grimshaw. I’m a private detective who met Detective O’Connor last week. We’re working on similar cases. I’ve been tracking Daniel Kirkland from Chicago through New Haven to here.”

  “I’m familiar with you,” Donato said. My heart started to pound. I hoped the familiarity was only through my contact with O’Connor.

  “I was tracking down a lead in June D’Amato’s old building, and I played a hunch. I asked the manager if there were any people who had been carrying small boxes in and out. He mentioned two boys who fit the description. He rented to them, and then told me a few stories about their friends that led me to believe Daniel Kirkland and his group had been in their apartment as well. The manager let me into their place—”

  “He had no right to do that,” the captain said.

  “Well, that’s just one reason you’ll have to operate as if you got an anonymous tip on this, all right?” I said.

  The captain sighed on the other end. “Go on.”

  “The apartment has at least twenty boxes of dynamite in the main room, equipment in the back, including electrician’s wire and some alarm clock works, one almost-completed bomb, and a mimeograph machine with discarded masters that ties it to the War at Home Brigade.”

  “And I can trust you didn’t plant any of this.”

  “Why would I?” I asked. “I work for Daniel’s mother. This is terrible news for me.”

  The captain grunted. “You’re sure this is dynamite?”

  “I’ve seen it before,” I said. “Even if I hadn’t, it’d be hard to miss. They left it in the original boxes.”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  I gave him the address. “I’d suggest sending someone right away, maybe even a beat cop to secure the site. I’m not sure how trustworthy this building manager is.”

  “I’ll see what we’ve got. You stay put. We’ll have to talk.”

  Then he hung up, promising to have someone here immediately. I set the receiver down, then frowned at it. Twenty small boxes was a lot less than Daniel had taken in New Haven. Twenty small boxes might not even have been noticed missing from a construction site.

  I rummaged around in the mess, looking for a phone book. Moving some of the cellophane wrappers discharged odors so foul I couldn’t even identify some of them. One made my eyes water.

  I finally found the book and looked up the number for Tucker Construction. There was a general contracting office in Manhattan and several smaller offices in the other boroughs. I dialed the Manhattan number, got a secretary, and asked for the owner of the company.

  I identified myself as a detective — that seemed to be working in this city, better than it had in Chicago — and said that I wanted to discuss the big dynamite theft of a few weeks ago.

  She put me right through.

  The owner of Tucker Construction was Albert Tucker. As he picked up the phone, his greeting was gruff. He asked right off if I was a regular detective or private. I told him that I was private, and he nearly hung up, but I managed to catch him by saying that I knew where some of his dynamite was.

  “We just located it,” I said, giving him the address. “The police’ll be here at any minute, and I had a hunch they probably wouldn’t tell you they recovered it.”

  “Probably not,” he said, but he didn’t sound as gruff as he had a few minutes earlier. “How come you’re telling me?”

  “Because I need some information they won’t tell me,” I said. “When was the theft?”

  “Memorial Day weekend,” he said.

  “And how many boxes did they steal?”

  “Boxes?” he asked. “They didn’t steal boxes. They stole cases. At least a pallet’s worth. I’m not sure how they got it out of here.”

  Just as I suspected. We’d only found a small amount of what had already been stolen.

  “Didn’t you have a security guard on your construction sites?”

  “This wasn’t one of my sites. It’s here, at the warehouse. And yeah, I had a guard. He was a great guy, too. Those kids, they had scouted the place. They knew when he made his rounds. They got him and I’m not sure how because he was military, you know? But they managed it. I think it was dumb luck. They knocked him out, tied him up, and fucked him over.”

  “What do you mean ‘fucked him over’?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, he was spouting crazy talk when we found him,” Tucker said. “Like he was seeing things. I think they drugged him.”

  “With what?”

  “Coffee, something. It’s just this guy’s big. You don’t tussle with him. So they had to’ve done something. They couldn’t’ve taken him on one-on-one.”

  “Can I speak to him?” I asked.

  “I wish,” Tucker said. “I gave him a few days off right after, and he never came back to work. Won’t answer his phone, won’t come to his door. Not that I blame him. He was in pretty rough shape when we found him that Tuesday. I never knew for sure, but I think he might’ve been lying near the guard shed since Sunday night, tied up and half out of his mind.”

  I frowned. I could hear sirens in the distance. “You said he was military? He was army then?”

  “I don’t know. Wounded three different times, so they finally sent him home.”

  “Vietnam?” I asked.
/>
  “Yep. Good guy, too. Smart. Never had a minute’s trouble in the year plus that he’d been working for me. I don’t even blame the theft on him. The cops said, and I agree, that those kids were not only determined, they were experienced. This break-in was clearly orchestrated by some pros.”

  Pros. Daniel had clearly taken that brilliant mind of his and turned it in the wrong direction. Which was a serious problem. The best thing about criminals was that most of them were stupid.

  Daniel’s brain made him one of the most dangerous people I’d ever encountered.

  “Do you have the name and address of the security guard handy?” I asked.

  “Actually, I do,” Tucker said. “The cops wanted it just this morning. Weird coincidence, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Did they say why?”

  “Nope, just that they were following up.” I heard paper rustling, then he said, “Here it is. Calvin Jervis. Just off Astor Place.”

  He gave me the address, and I wrote it down. The sirens stopped outside the building. The police were here.

  I thanked Tucker, told him he might want to come down here, and then hung up. I washed my hands in the sink — that slimy stuff from the receiver had gotten on my palms — and shook them dry as I walked back into the living room.

  It wasn’t the same place. Except for the buds still littering the floor, there was no sign of marijuana at all. The manager had opened his windows and stuck fans in them. The coffee table was cleaned and polished, and the mess throughout the room had been straightened. His wife had put on blue jeans and a tight shirt, and combed her hair. Her feet were still bare, though, but she looked a lot more presentable.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  It was time for my little tap dance to begin.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The first two cops on the scene were beat cops. The captain had taken my advice and brought in people to secure the building. The manager and I showed them to the dynamite, and while they were figuring out how to best handle the situation, I slipped out, relieved that the dynamite and the War at Home Brigade was now someone else’s problem. I had done my duty, maybe saved some lives. I couldn’t do anything more.