Stone Cribs: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “And knowing who he is won’t stop that,” I said, “not if he’s paying protection.”

  “I’m going to give his name to Rothstein,” Marvella said. “Maybe that high-and-mighty doctor can shut him down.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. “You’re not going to go after this guy yourself, are you?”

  “If I wanted him dead,” Marvella said, “I’d tell Truman.”

  She got up, put her cup and plate in the sink, and then turned to face me. Her perfectly made-up face was ruined, and there was a mascara stain on her blue dress.

  “You’ll take the job?” she asked.

  “I can’t promise anything,” I said.

  “But you’ll try,” she said.

  I nodded. “I’ll try.”

  EIGHT

  MARVELLA’S REQUEST did seem like a lot of work for very little payoff, but part of me was happy to do it. I didn’t like the helpless feeling I’d had since we found Valentina lying on Marvella’s floor.

  However, I wanted time to think about how I wanted to approach the people on Marvella’s lists. I wasn’t sure if Marvella’s plan was the best method. I also wanted to see what I could find out on my own. Marvella might trust the people on her “good” list, but I didn’t.

  I knew also that I would have to fit this search in around my other work. I couldn’t stomach charging Marvella much for this, if anything. She was right, after all. Getting this butcher off the street would be a community service.

  Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t devote all of my time to finding the person who hurt Valentina. I had work to do for Laura as well, work that would benefit a lot of other people over time. The more buildings we cleaned up for Sturdy Investments, the more available and affordable housing there would be.

  So I would have to balance my desire to search for Valentina’s butcher with all of my other work.

  That morning, I was supposed to check an apartment building on the West Side. It took me a half an hour through minor traffic to make it from my apartment to West Monroe Street.

  By midday, Easter Monday had blossomed into one of those glorious spring days found only up north. Just ten days before we had had a surprise spring snowstorm, and remnants of it still huddled against buildings and in dark corners of alleyways—bits of dirty snow that had iced over and looked like filthy smoked glass.

  What hadn’t melted yesterday was melting today. The jacket I had worn out of the house was useless. I flung it in the backseat, and drove with the windows open.

  The radio told me we were one degree off seventy, and I wasn’t the only one enjoying the weather. People ate lunch outside, sharing benches or even curbs, their own coats thrown down to protect their workday clothing from winter’s dirt that still covered the sidewalks.

  Sturdy Investments had a lot of holdings all over the city, but the ones it held in the ghettos on the South and West sides were in terrible shape. The rents that Sturdy charged, however, were three times what they were in better areas. Because most of the tenants were poor and black, they were usually denied housing in other neighborhoods. These tenants became captives of their own poverty, and companies like Sturdy took advantage of that. Often they didn’t fix complaints until the buildings literally collapsed around the tenants’ ears.

  In the past five years, tenants had been burned out of their buildings because of faulty wiring, had fallen through floors because the boards had rotted, and had lived without heat through most of a Chicago winter. These were facts documented not by Sturdy but by reporters for the black papers or by the tenants themselves using Polaroids.

  Laura and I had uncovered some of this before she angled to take over Sturdy. The rest we had discovered in the past three months. And, we knew, we were just beginning this quest. Sturdy Investments, as run by her father and then by his cronies, was one of the biggest slumlords in a city filled with slumlords.

  Perhaps the biggest frustration for Laura was that the people who were supposed to act as watchdogs in these cases did not. City building inspectors were easily bought. She had reported two in January who had been receiving the bulk of the payoffs from Sturdy. To her disgust, neither man had been fired. They had just been moved to other parts of Chicago.

  By February, she realized that exposing these people wouldn’t stop the corruption. Instead, she quietly took the remaining building inspectors off the payroll by handling all inspections herself. No more bribes, no more payoffs.

  Now the money went to me for my reports. I was supposed to be as accurate as possible. Laura’s goal was to fix each dilapidated building, charge reasonable rents, and slowly make an honest profit. I wasn’t sure her plan would work, but I was willing to try.

  I turned onto West Monroe and entered a different world. The Loop had been filled with workers trying to enjoy the day off. Monroe, which ran through the Loop, changed from a business street to residential, eventually becoming the part of Chicago everyone pointed to when they talked about slums, urban decay, and inner cities out of control.

  The city fathers considered the South Side, where I lived, the oldest ghetto in Chicago. The description wasn’t really accurate; there were people of various income levels living there. While certain neighborhoods were in decay, others were being rebuilt—or had never decayed in the first place.

  But the West Side was different. Franklin called it the place where dislocated families went, people without connections, and people without a lot of hope. The anger here was palpable, as well as the frustration. It seemed like every time this part of the city made some progress, something happened to make that progress go away.

  Since I had moved to Chicago, there had been a number of incidents here—incidents the city didn’t want to call riots. A real riot started last Thursday night, but the city had been prepared for it. Hundreds of police in riot gear had flooded the area but, remembering the bad press from the Democratic National Convention, had not beaten people senseless—at least not in front of the cameras.

  Thursday’s riot, a reaction to the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, was nothing like the riot a year ago that erupted the night Martin died. More than two square miles of the West Side burned. Fire didn’t cause all the damage: there was looting and fighting as well.

  Hundreds of buildings were destroyed. Even more had been looted and nine people had died. Those statistics had been raised again in the past few weeks in the white press as the anniversary of Martin’s death loomed, and I practically had them memorized.

  In the white press, it seemed, that was all Martin’s death signified: destruction blacks wreaked on themselves. As if a black man had murdered Martin. As if blacks were responsible for all the bad things that happened to them.

  Sturdy Investments had lost fifteen buildings to the fires. Many of the remaining buildings in the riot area that the company still owned had been damaged, and Laura couldn’t find any evidence that the buildings had been repaired.

  I was supposed to inspect those, but I hadn’t gotten to most of them. Going through a building properly took time, and since these buildings were so run-down, some of them took days instead of hours.

  The 2300 block of West Monroe looked, at a distance, like the solid old middle-class neighborhood it had once been. The apartment buildings, some of which had started as single-family dwellings, extended as far as the eye could see. Large trees which had clearly stood in the same place for generations still looked imposing, despite their winter barrenness.

  The cars parked along the street, however, were the first clue that the neighborhood had fallen on hard times. Here, my rusted Impala was one of the more expensive vehicles. It ran and it was semi-clean. The other cars were older and rustier, looking like they might fall apart in a good wind. One or two brand-new sports cars sat among the others, untouched, clear signs that they had been stolen, and that their new owners were people that no one wanted to mess with.

  Another block north, on West Madison, the Black Panthers
had their headquarters in an old storefront. It was easily recognizable. On the main level, someone had painted two black panthers, facing each other as if they were about to begin a fight.

  I had, so far, been able to avoid that building. I figured a group like the Panthers had to have at least one FBI informant hidden in their midst. The last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself, and bring the FBI down on Jimmy and me again.

  The apartment building I was supposed to inspect had lost its last tenant at the end of March. I would have gotten to the building anyway, just not as quickly. Laura put a priority on the empty buildings, hoping that we could take care of them first, without disturbing any tenants.

  The buildings on this block were close together, and it took me a moment to find the one I was supposed to inspect. It was only two stories high and quite narrow, nearly disappearing between its larger neighbors.

  Its size made me relax a little. Perhaps I would get through the inspection in half the normal time. That would allow me to move to the building I had been planning to inspect on Division for the past month now. Maybe I might even be able to get more than two buildings completed this week.

  The street was remarkably empty, considering what a warm, sunny day it was. No one sat on the stoops, and no one was on the sidewalks. No young children played in the front yards, even though there had to be children who were too young to go to school on this block.

  However, I knew I was being watched, and probably from several of the buildings. There had to be some Black Panther Party members living here, since it was so close to the headquarters, but there also had to be a goodly number of families.

  As I got out of the car, I thought I saw movement in one of the apartment buildings across the street. A large bay window on the top story had curtains that were still twitching.

  Whoever had been watching probably didn’t consider me a threat, probably didn’t even know if I was a resident of the neighborhood or not. When that person realized I was black, he probably relaxed.

  I had a hunch others still watched me, however, trying to figure out what my business was. I debated getting my gun out of the glove compartment, and then changed my mind. I wasn’t being threatened by anyone, and the neighborhood, while obviously full of caution, wasn’t as bad as some that I had been in.

  I generally used a clipboard for notes, but in some neighborhoods did not carry it. The worst thing I could do here was look official. I slipped a small notepad in my shirt pocket along with the pen, so that I could make notes while inside. Then I’d transfer everything to the form when I got back home. I also picked up my industrial size flashlight, and clipped it onto my belt.

  I got out of the car, closed the door, and locked it. Anyone with determination and a coat hanger could get into this car, but it would take some doing. And often, simple barriers like a lock and a rolled up window were enough to keep a casual thief out.

  People had stapled flyers to the large streetlamp near my car. A few of the flyers advertised the Black Panther Party. One of them showed a giant white rat wearing a hat decorated with the Stars and Stripes running out of an alley, a giant black panther in pursuit. Below the image were the words, “Defend the Ghetto.”

  As I walked up the cracked sidewalk, I pulled the keys Laura had given me out of my pocket. I doubted I would need them. The front door hung crookedly in its frame. Even if it wasn’t unlocked, one good kick would open it.

  Before I went inside, I inspected the foundation. The building had initially been built as a three-flat with one of the apartments in the basement. The basement windows were grimy and cracked, certainly not enough to keep the cold out in the winter. If any kind of storm brought wind from the north, I was pretty certain that snow or rain fell through those cracks into the apartment below.

  No one had stuffed the windows with rags or tried to board them up, so I assumed that apartment had been empty at least through the winter.

  The windows were surrounded by large bucket gutters, also made of stone, which had to make the water problem worse any time those gutters got clogged. One of them was filled with dirt, and someone had actually tried to plant flowers in it. All that remained of the flowers were hard brown stalks and some trailing leaves.

  I walked around the building. The foundation itself appeared pretty solid. It had very few cracks, and most of those had been caused by time, not by any structural flaws. The place was made of stone and had been painted brown some time in the last ten years. The paint was flaking away near the ground, revealing other generations of paint, one of them a very bright blue.

  The alley in the back was littered with garbage. The buildings facing Adams Street appeared to be the same kind as the ones on Monroe, and from the same generation. Only two of them were badly scorched, and one was only a foundation filled with charred beams of wood.

  I couldn’t tell if the fire had been an isolated one, or had happened during last year’s riots. The ruins had no smoke smell, though, so the fire hadn’t happened too recently.

  I scooted across the alley and gazed up at Sturdy’s building. The back stairs on the upper floor had rotted away, and the window that opened onto them was gone. Only shards of glass remained. The stairs leading to the main floor apartment—which was nearly six feet off the ground back here—were pulling away from the building.

  There were no drain pipes, and the overhanging roof had holes in it that were visible from below. The foundation might have been solid, but the rest of the building was a mess.

  I slipped through the other side, stepping through last summer’s dried weeds, piles of unmelted snow, and a lot of broken glass. When I reached the front of the building, I mounted the stone steps and tried the door.

  As I suspected, it opened easily. I stepped inside and caught the faint odor of rot and decay. The floorboards were soft, and covered with more garbage.

  There was no light in the hallway, but that could have been because the bulb was broken. I unhooked my flashlight and turned it on, shining the beam along the ruined floor.

  Wooden stairs, which had once been grand, swept up toward the second floor. The stairs shared a wide design and ornate banisters with the stairs in my apartment building, but here, no one had kept the wood polished. It was gray with age, and most of the spindles attaching the banister to the stairs were broken or gone.

  I trained the beam upward. The landing had a large hole in the center, as if someone had fallen through, and the wallboard had a corresponding hole about arm-height.

  I shook my head, thinking about the poor souls who had lived here until a week ago, wondering how they had put up with all of this filth. They had given notice on the first of March, like responsible tenants, but the notice hadn’t included a forwarding address. Had they had enough of Chicago? Or had the rent, even for a dump like this one, proven too much for them?

  Moving the beam away from the stairs, I trained it down the hall, revealing two doors. The building had a three-flat design, but someone had converted the original apartments into two apartments, making this into the six-flat my documentation said it was. The apartments had to be very small and cramped.

  I tried the first door, startled to find it locked. According to my records, the last tenants had been in the apartment at the end of the hall, not in this one. Apparently people were a lot more responsible than I expected them to be. Whoever had been here last made sure that the apartment was locked.

  It took me a few minutes to find the right key. When I finally found it, it turned the deadbolt easily, and the door swung open.

  Sunlight filled the main room. The light’s brightness startled me. Even though the bay window was filthy, it still let in enough light to make this room attractive.

  A thin carpet covered the floor, and the walls were painted white. Bookcases, made of oak, lined the sides of a bricked up fireplace. An ancient radiator stood in front of the fireplace as if, decades ago, someone had failed to get the message about not making fires.

 
The window seat built into the bay window still had pillows on it. The pillows were clean enough that I could discern their color—a bright orange that had probably been offensive before dust and sunlight had faded it back to cheerful.

  The odor wasn’t bad in here. The apartment smelled of garlic, mildew, and cigarette smoke. I closed the door behind me and stepped farther inside, releasing a horde of dust motes which caught and reflected the sunlight.

  This had been a very pleasant place in its day, and probably could be pleasant again, given enough time and work. No one had destroyed the main room. The wallboard was solid, and so were the floors. The ceiling had a water stain above the window, but other than that, I saw no damage.

  I would come back to this room and do a more thorough search. But first, I wanted to get a sense of the rest of the apartment.

  The original railroad design would have put everything else behind me, but I wasn’t sure how they had cut up the space. I turned around.

  What would have been the dining room had been divided into two parts—the kitchen, which opened onto the living room, and a closed door that had to lead into the apartment’s only bedroom. A small bathroom was probably off the kitchen, sharing its pipes.

  I went into the kitchen first, found the light switch and tried it. To my surprise, the lights came on. So the electricity to the building hadn’t been shut off, or someone had jury-rigged it to pull power off of someone else’s meter. Yet one more thing for me to check.

  The kitchen was unexpectedly clean. The stove had grime on its surface, but no real dust, and the sink was marred only by a giant rust stain near the drain. The refrigerator—a Frigidaire older than I was—kicked on behind me, startling me.

  Something scuttled in the cabinets near the sink, probably mice, even though I couldn’t smell them. That wasn’t a surprise. They were probably nesting upstairs, where no one had lived since last summer, and were used to coming downstairs for their food.