Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “That protest must not have gone well this morning,” I said.

  “Another one?” he asked.

  “We’re going to be treated to four days of them,” I said. “And that’s if these Weatherpeople do what they promise.”

  “You don’t think they will.”

  “I think they’ll do whatever they believe they need to do.”

  He shifted in his seat. “I want to stay somewhere else.”

  “I’ll talk to Laura,” I said.

  “How about I call Miss Hathaway?” He sounded as if he didn’t believe I could handle something that simple.

  Or maybe I was overreacting. I turned left on Balboa, made myself concentrate on driving. This time, instead of going to the Hilton’s lot, I pulled up behind the Blackstone Hotel.

  “I’ll pick you up in the morning,” I said. “Same time, same place.”

  “See you then.” He got out of the van as if he couldn’t wait to be shed of me. He hurried along the sidewalk, looking both ways like he expected an attack.

  I sighed and kept driving down Balboa to State. The traffic wasn’t quite as bad here, and as I got away from downtown, the traffic got lighter.

  I turned on the radio and turned the dial until I found news. The newscaster played tape from the morning rally.

  Apparently the group that held the rally in the park was all female, all a part of the Weathermen. I heard snippets of a woman’s speech — something about the martyrdom of Che Guevara in Bolivia two years ago, and comparing that with the sacrifices of the Chicago Eight now on trial. The woman called for violence, to remind the “pigs” of the pain they’d caused, and then her voice faded out to be replaced with chanting and the sound of nightsticks against gloves.

  The entire thing sounded awful, but the reporter who covered it claimed the marchers were just scared little girls who didn’t know what to do when faced with a police line.

  That speech didn’t sound like something a scared little girl would say, but what did I know? I didn’t understand any of this.

  By the time I reached the church, I had turned the radio back to WVON, letting Ruth Brown’s sultry voice and racy lyrics ease my frayed soul.

  The kids poured out of the church, Jimmy first with his best friend, Keith Grimshaw, beside him. Jonathan Grimshaw, the oldest at fifteen, held the hands of his sisters Mikie and Norene. Lacey brought up the rear, wiping the makeup off her face with a Kleenex as if she thought I didn’t see her.

  “You’re late,” Jimmy said as he pulled open the back door.

  “I’ve got five minutes according to my very nice watch,” I said.

  “Mrs. Armitage was fretting,” Keith said, sounding more like his mother than the eleven-year-old imp he usually was.

  The boys crawled in, followed by Jonathan and the girls.

  “Tell Lacey she’s sitting up front,” I said.

  “Forget it!” Lacey was thirteen going on trouble.

  “Up front or you’re walking, Lace,” I said, making a threat I knew I couldn’t live up to.

  She sighed so theatrically I could hear her over the engine and Ike Turner. Then she stomped around the van, pulled open the passenger door, and glared at the coveralls on the floorboards.

  “What’s that?” she asked, as if it were a live thing.

  “Just some clothes,” I said. “Throw them in the back if they bother you.”

  She wrinkled her nose, shoved at the clothes with her high-heeled foot, then got in. As she pulled the door closed she said to me, “You look weird.”

  “I’ve been working.”

  “You don’t usually dress like that.”

  “I will be for the next week or two,” I said. “You missed a beauty mark on your left cheek.”

  Her hand came up before she realized what she’d done. Then she looked at me as I started the drive home.

  “You’re not going to tell my dad, are you, Uncle Bill?”

  “That you’ve decided to ignore his wishes? Why would I do that, Lace?”

  She rolled her eyes at my sarcasm. “You don’t understand.”

  “Surprisingly, I do,” I said. “You just don’t know the kind of men who go after little girls like you.”

  “I’m not little.” She was right; she wasn’t little any more. Her body had filled out.

  I sighed, wondering how deep to get into this. “Has your mom talked to you?”

  Her cheeks flushed redder than any rouge could ever make them. “Uncle Bill,” she breathed.

  “About boys and girls,” I added, realizing she was thinking of the other mother-daughter talk.

  “I know all I need to know.”

  I bit my lower lip, then leaned back just a little. Behind me, Norene was holding court, telling everyone about the importance of second grade. Mikie was trying to stop her by reminding her that everyone else had gone through second grade.

  Keith and Jimmy were egging the girls on, and Jonathan wasn’t saying a word. I wondered if he was listening to Lacey and me.

  “Lace,” I said, “if you continue to ignore your dad, you could get into real trouble.”

  “I don’t get into trouble, Uncle Bill,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  At thirteen. Sure she did. But what could I say? I hoped that Althea had told her about condoms, but I doubted that she had. And I couldn’t figure out a way to do so.

  The voices behind me continued. I turned onto the Grimshaws’ street.

  “Lace, listen. I know you think you’ll be all right—”

  “Uncle Bill, I will. Honest.”

  “But,” I said, “if something should happen, if some guy hurts you or wants you to do something you don’t want to do, you come see me, okay?”

  She looked at me, surprised. Apparently no one had ever said anything like that to her before.

  “Okay,” she said, sounding confused.

  I pulled up in front of the house. She had the door open before the van had fully stopped. She was slipping off her high heels and hurrying, barefoot, across the sidewalk toward the porch.

  The back doors opened and the remaining Grimshaw children spilled out, chorusing their good-byes. Only Norene took the time to wave at me — her braids askew, like they always were this late in the day — before she ran toward the house.

  “Come up front, Jim,” I said. “I’m not chauffeuring you home.”

  He liked riding in the back of the van, able to lie flat and read or sit with his back against the wall. We’d had arguments about that before.

  This afternoon, however, he didn’t argue. He slammed the back doors closed and slid into the seat Lacey had just vacated.

  “How come you’re so worried about Lace?” Jimmy asked. “She just wants to dress the way she likes, not the way Aunt Althea thinks is right.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” I said. “Things Lacey doesn’t understand yet.”

  “You mean like my mom?” Jimmy asked.

  I looked at him, glad I hadn’t started the van. He was looking at his hands.

  His mother had been a prostitute. She hadn’t known who Jimmy’s father was. For a while she had tried to raise her sons alone, but she was never reliable. I remembered seeing Jimmy on the street when he was as young as three, begging for food. I used to take him to nearby restaurants for warm meals. That was when I learned that his mother would take off for weeks at a time, leaving him in the care of his older brother, Joe.

  Joe eventually joined a gang and started dealing drugs, abandoning Jimmy too. And when he got evicted from his apartment for lack of payment, I helped him find a foster home.

  That might have worked, if it weren’t for Martin’s assassination. Jimmy had been across the street, and he’d seen the shooter, a man who wasn’t James Earl Ray.

  That’s when I took Jimmy, left Memphis, and came here. From that moment on Jimmy was my son, and he’d remain mine until the end of my life.

  But we’d never talked much about his mother. He hadn’t said much
and I hadn’t asked, thinking he’d talk to me when he wanted to.

  “What do you mean, like your mother?” I asked gently, glad I hadn’t started to drive away yet, so that I could pay attention to Jim.

  “My mom, she used to dress like Lace when she went to work.” He said that so matter-of-factly. “I been wanting to tell Lace, but I can’t, since you said we can’t say nothing about Memphis.”

  I nodded. So that was Jimmy’s dilemma. Of all the children I’d just had in the car, he was the only one who understood why Lacey’s path was dangerous, and he had no way to talk to her about it.

  “She wouldn’t understand,” I said. “She thinks you’re my biological son. We’ve always said your mother is gone, which is true, but most people think that means she died. Lacey can’t imagine a woman like your mother.”

  “I know.” Jimmy was still looking at his hands. “You don’t think Lace’ll end up like my mom, do you?”

  I put a hand on his shoulder, suddenly understanding his fear. My fears for Lacey were bad, but his were worse.

  “She won’t end up like your mom,” I said. “She has too many friends and family for that. But she could get hurt.”

  Jimmy raised his head and looked at me, his eyes wide. “Some trick’ll hurt her?”

  The word stopped me, but only for a moment. “Some boy’ll hurt her. He’ll think that she wants to do what your mom used to do. Lacey won’t understand and—”

  “He’ll just do her. I know.” Jimmy sighed.

  I felt out of my depth. Sometimes I couldn’t even imagine what this boy had seen.

  “We can’t talk her out of dressing like this,” I said. “We’ve been trying for nearly a year.”

  “Uncle Franklin took her makeup away, but she just borrows it from the girls at school,” Jimmy said. “Even Jonathan says she looks awful.”

  “She’ll do what she wants,” I said, hoping my tone at least would reassure him. I was trying to keep my voice as steady as possible. “But if she does get into trouble — if she starts crying a lot, or acting really angry for no reason, tell me, okay?”

  “What if she don’t want me to?” he asked.

  “Tell me that too.”

  “Feels like tattling,” he said.

  “If someone just — does her — ” I hated that phrase, but he obviously understood it from his past “then she’s not going to want to tell her parents. Maybe she’ll tell me. We can make sure it won’t happen again. We’d be protecting her, Jim, not tattling on her.”

  He nodded. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. “Even my mom said it was nasty when some guy didn’t listen. And she said she usually liked nasty.”

  I clenched a fist against my thigh. She had no right to say things like that to her son. To her nine-year-old son. She hadn’t even been around for Jim’s tenth birthday.

  But she had a point. And for the first time, her words were helping me with Jim. I wasn’t going to take that understanding away.

  “I’m sure Lacey’s parents will keep trying to talk to her,” I said. “But keep an eye out, Jim. If the talking doesn’t work, she’s going to need all the help she can get.”

  SIXTEEN

  The conversation with Jimmy left me shaken up. I remained awake long after he went to sleep, wishing I could wipe that hideous childhood from his mind.

  I had no idea how it would affect him in his teen years. I hadn’t wanted to think about how his mother’s behavior would influence his own when his hormones took over his body.

  I often mentally criticized Althea for not having the right talk with Lacey, but I hadn’t talked to Jimmy either, and I wondered if I was running out of time.

  At ten o’clock, I turned on the local news, hoping to distract myself with the weather. I settled onto the couch, noting that the springs were nearly gone, and put my feet on our scarred coffee table.

  The lead story was about the rally in Grant Park. I was startled to learn that less than one hundred women had gathered there. On film, the entire thing looked ridiculous: a group of young women wearing crash helmets and biker suits carried clubs over their shoulders like they were cave women. Apparently their mission had been to go to the Army Induction Center and “free” the poor draftees, but no one made it out of the park.

  The phalanx of police officers along the edges of the park reminded me of the groups I had seen a year ago during the convention — police in their riot gear, lined up like they expected trouble — and if it didn’t start, they might help it along.

  It was only a matter of time before more people got hurt. After the melee the night before, Governor Ogilvie had called out the National Guard. Shades of Memphis during my last few weeks there. I never did get used to the Guard patrolling the streets in tanks, guns slung over their arms like they intended to use them.

  I’d learned there — and it had been repeated all over after Martin was assassinated — that young men with guns always looked for an excuse to use them.

  A shiver ran down my back just as the report switched. The anchor segued away from the Weathermen, talking about the groups of young people who did not support them, including a whole other branch of the SDS called the Revolutionary Youth Movement Two. I was beginning to think I would need a scorecard when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton appeared on my television screen.

  Hampton was standing in front of the Panther headquarters on the West Side, wearing some dark glasses that made him seem older than a young man barely out of his teens. He also looked burlier than I remembered, or maybe that was just what the cameras did to him.

  The anchor sounded surprised in his voice-over as he informed Chicagoland that the Black Panthers did not support the Weathermen. In fact, the anchor said, the Weathermen’s actions were too violent for the Panthers.

  “We believe that the Weathermen’s action is anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic,” Hampton said, in the church rhythms that made Martin so easy to listen to. “It’s chauvinistic, it’s custeristic, and that’s the bad part about it. It’s custeristic in that its leaders take people into situations where the people can be massacred. And they call it revolution. It’s nothing but child’s play. It’s folly. We think these people may be sincere, but they’re misguided, they’re muddleheaded, and scatterbrained.”

  He sounded scared to me, and I remembered what someone had said, that Hampton believed the police (and now the National Guard) would take out their frustrations on the black community, not on the suburban white kids who were starting it all.

  I wondered if he’d considered the effect of having the Black Panther leader say that the Weathermen were custeristic gave the Weathermen even more power. They suddenly had a validation that they hadn’t had before.

  They even scared the Black Panthers.

  I was certain Hampton had continued with his speech, maybe even discussing the effects of the Weathermen “actions” on the black community, but of course the local newscasts didn’t air the rest of his comments.

  The news segued into a story about four society women getting Judge Hoffman to let them into the gallery of the Conspiracy Trial.

  I sighed, got up, and turned the damn thing off before the weather, just as the announcer told me that Joe DiMaggio was going to Vietnam.

  As if a baseball player could stop a war.

  Or society women could view the trial of the century as if it were a show put on just for them.

  Or a black man could say something sensible and expect fair press coverage.

  I wandered off to bed, knowing I would lay there for a long time, wide awake, worrying about all the things I couldn’t change.

  SEVENTEEN

  That morning, LeDoux was the one who added to our wardrobes. He came out of the hotel carrying a box under his arm. When he got to the van, he motioned me toward the back.

  The box was full of cheap cotton gloves.

  “I special-order them,” he said. “They become essential in my line of work.”

  He preferred the la
tex gloves that some hospitals used, but those were expensive, so he hadn’t brought any to Chicago. But his office in New York had shipped these, and they had arrived yesterday.

  He handed me several, urging me to stuff extras into my coveralls so that I could touch things without worrying too much about destroying the evidence.

  He gave me specific instructions on how to use the gloves, and then gave me some plastic sandwich bags to store each pair in when I was done.

  “Don’t wear the same pair in different apartments,” he said. “Mark each bag with the apartment number, so that I know where the gloves came from. You might acquire trace evidence that we don’t get any other way, and I’ll need that. I might also have to eliminate some cloth from the gloves in the fiber evidence, should I collect any, and I’ll want to see if your gloves are ripped or torn.”

  As we changed into our coveralls and then got into the van, he continued to explain the importance of gloves to crime-scene work. I tuned him out at some point. While I realized his efforts were extremely important and his attention to the most minute detail critical to any case that we might build down the road, I really didn’t care about dust layers and grease smudges, and the importance of matching dirt to dirt marks.

  The day was cooler than the day before, and the promise of rain held. Only it didn’t feel like the sky was dripping humidity. The air had an autumn chill which I welcomed.

  We drove through the Loop, avoiding the worst of the traffic. When we hit Bronzeville, LeDoux switched topics. He wanted to know if I had spoken to Laura.

  In all the turmoil of the night before, I had forgotten to call her. LeDoux nodded, as if he had expected that of me, and proceeded to tell me about his conversation with her.

  Apparently, Sturdy kept a few furnished apartments in their high-end complexes for visiting businessmen. It was less expensive for the company to do this than rent hotel rooms for a month or more.

  According to LeDoux, McMillan had often made use of these apartments when he was in Chicago, before he actually bought one of his own.

  LeDoux would be staying on the Gold Coast. Laura would meet him after we finished work this evening and take him to his new place.