Stone Cribs: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I left the kitchen and headed toward the bedroom to finish my cursory search of the first apartment. The bedroom’s door was a thin plywood, the kind that was made in the fifties. The remodel of this building had happened when Laura’s father was alive. Perhaps he had even ordered it.

  I grabbed the doorknob, and turned. It was stuck. But these doors were easy to open, no matter what. I shoved, hoping to force the latch, and the door moved inward slightly.

  It should have moved all the way, given the force I had put on it. Something was blocking the door. Apparently all the damage was in the bedroom. I had encountered that before.

  I shoved again, and this time, the door flew open. I staggered forward as someone screamed.

  A small form wrapped itself around my waist, pushing its head into my stomach and pushing me back.

  I was already off-balance because of the door. The momentum of the small body, shoving me, propelled me backward. I tried to clutch the doorframe but wasn’t able to get my hands around it in time. My legs came out from underneath me, and I hung suspended in midair for what seemed like an eternity.

  As I did, I saw a skinny girl, her hand over her mouth, clutching a young child, holding her away from the door.

  Then I fell, landing with a whomp that reverberated through the entire building. The whomp reverberated through me, too. The air left my body in a painful rush.

  I lay on my back, gasping as that same small form started pounding me in the stomach.

  I managed to grab one thin wrist, and then the other, holding them above me until I was able to catch my breath again. A young boy no older than Jimmy tried to squirm out of my grip.

  “Lemme go!” the boy yelled. “You lemme go!”

  I shook my head, still too breathless to talk.

  He managed to get his knees underneath him. It would only be a matter of seconds before he got to his feet. Then he would probably use those feet as weapons. I would have, in his place.

  I twisted him sideways and sat up, even though it hurt my back and my oxygen-starved lungs. I wrapped his arms around him, and pulled him close, holding him in place against my chest.

  “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.

  “This’s our house. You get out. Get out.” The boy started slamming his head against my already aching chest.

  “Doug, that’s enough,” said the girl, and as she spoke, I realized she was older than I had initially thought. She was small and too thin. I could see the bones in her arms.

  She bent over, picked up my flashlight, and held it out to me. Her cotton shirt and denim pants were so thin I could see her skin through the material.

  “If you let my son go, Mister, we’ll get out of here.”

  The boy slammed me in the chest again. I slid one hand over both of his arms and held them tightly. Then I put the other hand over his forehead and pushed it against my ribcage.

  “Please, Mister,” the girl said. I couldn’t quite think of her as a woman, even though she had two children. She didn’t look much older than Lacey, although that was probably due to the fact that she was small-boned and starving. “We won’t bother you if you just let him go.”

  If I let him go, they would run from here and I wouldn’t see them again.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Please. We didn’t mean nothing. We just needed a place to stay and somebody said this place was open. We ain’t took nothing, and we didn’t do no damage.”

  In fact, she had probably cleaned the apartment up as best she could. That was why the pillows on the window seat looked so bright. Either they had been in the apartment and she cleaned them up, or she had scavenged them from somewhere to provide one of her children a place to sleep.

  “You gonna stop pounding on me, Doug?” I asked.

  He tried to nod under my hand. I let go of his head, but kept him wrapped up and against me.

  “Please let him go,” his mother said. “Please. We’ll just disappear and you won’t have to worry about us again.”

  I studied her arms for needle tracks. I didn’t see any. In fact, I saw no evidence of drug use.

  “How long have you been squatting here?” I asked.

  “Just a few hours.” Her dark cheeks, already flushed with fear, grew even darker. She was as bad a liar as Marvella was. “It was a mistake. We’re really sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I work for the building’s owner, and we have a policy about squatters—”

  Doug slammed that sharp little head of his against my ribs, making me gasp. I grabbed his forehead and held him in place again.

  “As I was saying,” I said, sounding a lot more breathless than I had before. “We have a policy about squatters—”

  “I know,” the woman said, “and I’ll do anything, just don’t take me to the police. Please. They’ll call welfare and that’ll be the end. They’ll take my babies. Please. Don’t call anyone.”

  I sighed. I had run into this before. Apparently Sturdy—the old Sturdy—had been vicious when it found squatters. The company wanted people to stay out of their buildings if they couldn’t afford the rent.

  The reputation had gotten around. But that didn’t stop desperate people, like this woman, from squatting anyway.

  “That’s the old management,” I said. “Now what we do is take people to a place on the South Side that’ll give you some food, a shower, and a bed while we find you a place to live.”

  She put a thin hand over her mouth, then shook her head. “I can’t afford nothing.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’re not asking you to pay right away. We try to help people get back on their feet.”

  This was not another branch of Sturdy, but a private shelter Laura, Franklin and I had set up through one of the community organizations.

  After I had found nearly a dozen squatters in one ruined building with no heat in January, I had called every social service in town. The Salvation Army hadn’t had an open bed since the cold weather set in during November, and the missions had filled up at the same time. A lot of the other War on Poverty organizations—little branches of philanthropy run with government grant money—had had to close when Nixon cut off their funding as one of his first acts in office.

  I went to the churches next, only to discover they were as stumped as I was. Most of them had desperate people sleeping in their basements or on the floors of the church-run soup kitchens. The churches apologized and told me to contact the organizations I had already contacted, leaving me with a dozen homeless people and no place to put them.

  So I had called Franklin, hoping he could use his connections, and he had suggested having Laura rent a space for these people until he could find a way to help them. Franklin knew everyone of import in Bronzeville and he was able to set up a small organization, which we called Helping Hands Incorporated. We staffed it mostly with female volunteers, who took in the squatters I found every month, found them homes or jobs or medical help, whatever they needed to get back on their feet.

  Drew McMillan, Laura’s attorney, had set up a nonprofit corporation to handle everything, and did the fund-raising himself, so that Laura’s involvement would remain quiet.

  It was a way, she later told me, of taking care of her conscience while moving so slowly on reforming Sturdy.

  But I couldn’t tell this poor family that history, and I wasn’t sure they would believe me if I even tried.

  The woman was looking at me as if I were crazy, and the boy was struggling in my arms. The little girl, who wasn’t much more than a toddler, clutched her mother’s leg, looking terrified.

  “If you can promise me that your son won’t hurt me any more, I’ll hand him over to you,” I said.

  “I can promise that,” the woman said.

  “And,” I said, “if you can promise that you’ll stay, I’ll prove that I can help you.”

  Her gaze flicked to the door. She was measuring the distance, whether or not she would be a
ble to get past me.

  “I can promise that too,” she lied.

  I didn’t let him go. Instead, I said, “I’m quick. You won’t make it to the door before me, not with a toddler in tow.”

  “She’s three,” the woman said softly.

  I looked at the little girl again. She was so small, it was almost impossible to believe she was older than eighteen months. She wore what had once been a pink dress. The dress had been taken in, but was still too big for her. She had large blue eyes and skin as dark as her mother’s. She would be beautiful one day—if she lived long enough.

  “How long have you been on your own?” I asked the woman.

  She shrugged. “I dunno. Always, I guess.”

  She sounded so sad. The boy kept squirming in my arms. I released him and he almost fell off my lap. He caught himself with one hand, started to run toward his mother, and apparently decided against it.

  He turned toward me. “You don’t hurt her.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” I said.

  I stayed on the ground so that I wouldn’t intimidate them, but I drew up my legs so that I could get to my feet quickly if I had to.

  “Let me tell you what we do now when we find people staying in our vacant apartments.” I avoided the word “squatter” with its negative connotations. I didn’t want the woman to feel any more uncomfortable than she already did.

  I explained to her the system we had devised, how I would take her and the children to the South Side office, and how the women there would find them a place to stay, and help her find work.

  “I can’t work,” the woman said. “I don’t got no diploma, and I can’t leave my babies.”

  “Your son should be in school,” I said, “and they’ll figure out a way for you to work and take care of your daughter.”

  “I’m not going to school,” Doug said. He was rubbing his forearm where I had held him. I could see the imprint of my fingers in his skin.

  “What do you say?” I asked the woman.

  She studied me for a moment. “What if I say no?”

  “Then I’m authorized to give you twenty dollars and the address of the Salvation Army. They might be able to help you. They might not.”

  “Twenty bucks?” she asked, and the way she said it, she made it sound like a fortune.

  I leaned forward and pulled my wallet out of my back pocket. I reached inside, found the petty cash I carried for various needs around the building—including this kind of thing—and handed her a twenty.

  She stared at it as if it were ten times that much.

  “You can have it anyway,” I said. “But if you come with me, it’ll last longer.”

  “How do I know you ain’t gonna hurt us?” she asked.

  I didn’t blame her for asking. She didn’t know me at all. I could have been anyone, and I could have been making up this story to get her into my car, and into some kind of trouble.

  “I’ll give you a dime,” I said. “There’s a pay phone on Madison. You can call the police station and ask for a Detective Sinkovich. You don’t have to tell him your name. Just tell him mine, which happens to be Bill Grimshaw, and ask him if he’ll vouch for me.”

  Usually I had Truman Johnson do that, but I doubted Johnson was in. Jack Sinkovich had been on desk duty off and on for the past three months, so I was pretty sure he would be in to answer the phone. He was going through a nasty divorce, and his volatile temper made him almost impossible to work with. But he had also made some spectacular arrests during this time, and the department couldn’t just shove him aside.

  The woman was still staring at the twenty.

  “Honestly,” I said, “with two kids to protect, I don’t know if I would trust me, either. Take them with you, make the call, and come on back if you want my help. Otherwise, you have your twenty, and you can find another place to stay.”

  She shoved the twenty in the pocket of her jeans. “What are you going to do?”

  “Rest for a minute.” I looked at Doug. “That’s one powerful tackle you have.”

  He nodded, but he didn’t trust me enough to smile at me.

  “Then I’m going to finish inspecting the building. That’s what I was hired for. I’m supposed to figure out whether this place is livable or not.”

  “People been living here,” the woman said. “The last official ones moved out last week.”

  “Are there other unofficial people?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, and it didn’t seem this time like she was lying.

  “Because,” I said, just to make the point, “I really am not sure I can take another tackle like that.”

  “We got the good place,” Doug said, apparently taking my tackling remark seriously. “Nobody knows the other apartment’s empty, and everybody hates upstairs. Downstairs is cold and wet most of the time, so it’s not much better than being outside.”

  His mother gave me a defeated look. His answer proved that they had been here quite a while.

  I flicked her a dime. “Go check. You’ll feel better.”

  She caught it with her free hand. Then she nodded at me. “How long’re you gonna be here?”

  “For a couple of hours at least. So you have plenty of time.”

  She nodded, and hugged her little girl closer. Then she put her fist, still clutching that dime, against Doug’s back. She led her little troop out of the apartment without another word.

  I stayed on the floor until I heard the front door close. Then I eased myself up. I was sore from the fall, and I would be bruised. I wasn’t lying to that boy. He had a stupendous tackle—and he had been lucky. Most adults couldn’t get me off my feet, but I had been so unprepared that his momentum and his height had worked in his favor.

  I turned in time to see them through the bay window as they crossed Monroe, heading toward Madison. I hadn’t even gotten her name.

  She disappeared between the buildings across the street. I sighed and returned to my work, hoping she would come back, knowing that she probably wouldn’t.

  NINE

  EVEN THOUGH I wasn’t finished, I moved from the family’s apartment to the newly vacated apartment in the back for reasons I didn’t entirely understand. I almost felt as if I didn’t belong in their living quarters, although they hadn’t paid rent, and technically the quarters belonged to Laura.

  I left the apartment door open, so that the family could find me if they returned, and so that I could hear if anyone else entered the building.

  The second apartment on the first floor was dark and dingy, and I couldn’t imagine anyone living in it for a week, let alone years like the previous tenant. That faint odor of decay was present here, along with the smells of garlic and mildew. There was only one window in the living room, and it had a view of the building next door. There was almost no natural light in here, even on a sunny day like this one.

  I found empty apartments in buildings like this depressing. They spoke of failed dreams and loss, of lives lived with no hope at all, of desperation made all that much worse by the loneliness that surrounded it.

  I was in the apartment’s only bedroom, looking at the white mildew on the carpet beneath the window, when I heard voices. I made my way back to the door.

  “…see? Told you he was gone.” That was Doug, with all the confidence of a ten-year-old.

  “You talking about me?” I asked as I stepped into the hallway. The little family was inside their living room, the woman holding her daughter on her hip.

  The little girl smiled at me, a tentative, worried smile, as if she was afraid she was doing something wrong.

  “Did you get ahold of Detective Sinkovich?” I asked.

  The woman looked at me, and shook her head. I felt my shoulders tighten.

  “I thought it was kinda weird, you know, having me call a cop. But it’s pretty effective. I mean, you can’t set up all those official voices and all those people talking in the background.” She spoke rapidly. Apparently she had been shaking her head at m
y methodology, rather than answering my question.

  “That’s why we did it that way,” I said. “I knew a few people wouldn’t want to call the police, but I figured it was a lot safer than having them not believe me, especially if I gave them some random number.”

  She nodded. “He says you’re a stand-up guy, even if you are a royal pain in the butt.”

  I smiled. That sounded like Sinkovich.

  “And he wanted to know who I was, and why I was asking about you.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “I hung up.” She gave me the same fear-filled, wide-eyed expression that her daughter had had a moment ago.

  “Good for you,” I said. “Are you going to come with me, then?”

  “We gotta get our stuff first.” She looked at Doug. He huddled next to her, and I realized he was small, too. He frowned at me, as if to warn me away from them, then went into the bedroom I hadn’t gotten to yet.

  I wouldn’t get to it that afternoon, either. Taking care of this small group would use up the rest of my work time. But I didn’t mind. I was pleased that I had somewhere to take them. I wouldn’t have kept doing this work if I had to constantly turn out squatters who then had nowhere else to go.

  The woman walked to the bedroom door, keeping the little girl on her hip.

  “Need help?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Can you get the pillows?”

  I knew which ones she meant, the ones on the window seat. I picked them up. They smelled of child-sweat, sunlight, and dust. I turned around to find Doug behind me, spreading out an army blanket.

  “Put them on there,” he said.

  I did. He then grabbed a pile of neatly folded clothing and put that on top of the pillows.

  “You just gonna stand there?” he asked.

  “What else do you need?”

  “Tie it up,” he said.

  “Say please,” his mother yelled from the bedroom.

  “Please,” he growled, and then ran back to the bedroom door.

  I tied the blanket into a makeshift duffel. I had done this a few times in my own life, mostly as a young man, and the movement was a familiar one. I even left a bit of material so that there was something to hold on to.