Four Panthers came out of their headquarters and stared at me. I pretended not to notice.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, “and I’m not going to make any assumptions. I just want me to be the one to tell Sinkovich about Helping Hands Incorporated and about that family, all right?”
“You think I’ll be talking to him?”
“I know you will,” I said. “Let me take care of that part of it. Jack Sinkovich is a good cop, but he isn’t always the most sympathetic person. I don’t want him to take action because he got information at the wrong time in his investigation.”
“I’m not sure what you’re worried about,” Laura said, “but I promise, I won’t say anything unless you tell me otherwise.”
“Thanks,” I said, and hung up.
The six Panthers crossed the street in one big lump. They were all younger than me by at least twenty years, but none of them were as big. As if that mattered. They had me outnumbered, and definitely outgunned. I wanted to walk away from them and get back to the house, but I knew that was the worst thing I could do.
I remained in my position against the wall, watching them approach.
The short one in the front wore thick black glasses. He wore his hair in the fashion most barbers were calling natural, cut short with no grease or pomade to pull it straight. He was the only one not wearing a beret.
“Hey, Daddy-O,” he said, stopping in front of me. “You got business with Madison Liquors?”
“Just using the phone,” I said.
The Panther pushed his glasses up his nose with his forefinger. “We don’t like Uncle Toms.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I’m not real fond of them, either.”
“You sayin’ you ain’t one, with that camera and clipboard?”
I hadn’t realized I had carried the clipboard with me. I had it tucked under my left arm. The camera was still around my neck.
“I work as a building inspector for Sturdy Investments.”
“You mean you work for the Man,” the Panther said.
“No, I work for Sturdy.”
“That who you be callin’?” one of the other Panthers asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“And who you call before that?” Glasses asked.
“A guy I work with sometimes,” I said.
They looked at each other, and I wondered what they heard.
“Why you call him from here?” the other Panther asked.
I had had enough. I stood up straight, so that I could move quickly if I had to. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“Anything happens here is our business,” Glasses said.
“Do you harass everyone who comes to this neighborhood or just black men with cameras?” I asked.
“We bother you, Tom?” Glasses asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “At the moment, you’re acting like a bunch of thugs instead of the revolutionary leaders Fred Hampton makes you out to be.”
“You know Chairman Hampton?” That surprised the tall Panther, the one with the gun.
“I’ve met him,” I said. “I heard him speak at the Circle Campus last December and I was impressed.”
That wasn’t a lie. I had been impressed. Hampton had a gift for leadership. I didn’t agree with most of what he said, but he had a charisma that I hadn’t seen since I first saw Martin speak at Boston College.
“You don’t look like a revolutionary, Brother,” said Glasses, but he sounded doubtful.
“I have a kid,” I said. “I need a job. So I do what I can, and I keep my politics to myself most of the time.”
I wasn’t agreeing with them. I couldn’t, in good conscience, do so. But I wanted them to think I did.
“You get fired for listening to Chairman Hampton?” Glasses asked.
“I wouldn’t get fired for listening,” I said. “But if I wore the uniform, sure, I’d get fired.”
“We don’t like Toms coming down here with cameras and lies,” Glasses said.
“I need the camera for my job. The clipboard, too. You want to see what I’m doing?”
I handed him the clipboard, and was happy to see that the photographs were still attached.
“Pictures of the foundation to the house. Sturdy thinks it’s time to fix up this place, now that it’s empty.”
“Sure, and pigs fly, man.”
They were flying. Sinkovich had said that he would arrive within thirty minutes. My internal clock was ticking, telling me that time was running out.
I had to get past these guys, and make sure they didn’t follow me. I didn’t want them to think I had called the police. The only way I could avoid that was to make sure these six stayed here.
“I just do what they tell me,” I said.
Glasses was reading the clipboard. It was my checklist, and I had it turned to the second page.
“What is this crap?” He shoved the clipboard at me, pointing to the list.
The second page started with the words:
Roaches or mice?
“You guys plant this crap?”
I smiled. “As if we have to in a building like that. You know better than to ask stupid questions.”
He thumbed through the rest of the pages, reading some of the reminders out loud.
“Does the toilet flush and empty completely? Is the toilet bowl chipped or cracked? Does the shower drain?” He handed the clipboard back to me. “Man, you got a shit job.”
The others laughed, apparently at his terrible pun.
“It feeds my kid,” I said.
“You should be bringing him to our program,” the second Panther said. The antagonism was gone now. “He could be learning about Black Power with his Wheaties.”
“You bring your kid,” Glasses said, giving my arm a friendly slap. “We’ll make sure he gets treated right.”
I didn’t know how I had gone from a suspicious Uncle Tom to a guy whose kid needed indoctrination along with his cereal, but I wasn’t going to argue. I had a hunch once the police showed up, I’d be back to my Tom status.
The others punched me lightly or winked as they walked past. They crossed Madison in the center, stopping traffic, and headed back to their headquarters.
I adjusted the pictures on my clipboard, and made myself look as nerdy and nervous as possible. I stalled for a moment longer, giving them a chance to go inside, before I turned the corner and walked back to Monroe.
Someone had called the Panthers—or had gone to get them when I drove up. They were protecting the neighborhood, and they had seen me as a threat.
I hoped they decided to stay on Madison. The last thing I needed to do was initiate a clash between the Panthers and the police.
FOURTEEN
SINKOVICH WAS already there when I reached the house. He had shown up in an unmarked car, and he wasn’t wearing a uniform. Despite the muggy day, he wore a raincoat with the collar turned up, and a wide brimmed hat. His hands were in his pockets, and from the back, I couldn’t see a shred of white skin.
Sometimes he was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.
“Jack,” I said, as I walked up the cracked sidewalk.
“Grimshaw.” He turned toward me. He was even thinner than he’d been when I met him eight months ago. He had shaved off his mustache and, even though it hadn’t flattered him, its loss made him look naked. “I was just getting ready to give you what for. I woulda thought this was some kinda set up if it weren’t for that mess down there.”
He nodded toward the body.
It was just as I had left it. Some of the smaller bones were scattered, and the rest lay in the dirt, looking frail and vulnerable.
“I got sidetracked by some Panthers,” I said. “I hoped I convinced them not to come over this way. Didn’t you tell anyone else to come?”
“You think I can snap my fingers and make the coroner appear at my beck and call? I had to come out here, see if you knew what you was talking about, and call it in from here. You
know the drill, Grimshaw, I know you do.”
I did. I was just hoping he could circumvent it. But now that he was here, I didn’t have to worry so much about the Panthers. They wouldn’t think that I had called the police. They would assume that Sinkovich was from Sturdy Investments and, when they realized he was white, they would think he had called the police.
I wasn’t sure if Sinkovich had done this to save my butt, but I was glad he had.
He crouched near the hole, hands on his thighs. He leaned forward and peered around the corpse, but didn’t touch anything.
“I’m thinking this kid’s been in the ground a while,” he said, “but I ain’t no expert.”
He wasn’t. When I met Sinkovich last summer, he had been working in Vice. After a spectacular, newsworthy arrest this winter, he was promoted to Homicide, but mostly for show. His supervisors kept him on the desk most of the time.
“And,” he said, still peering, “we had one hell of a flaky winter. No snow till January, then that awful cold, and the March from hell. Don’t know how that would affect decomposition.”
“Well,” I said, crouching beside him, “the ground froze in late November. Burying the child, even this shallowly, would have been hard after that.”
“Cept they didn’t have to bury him.” Sinkovich pointed at the stone window well. “They coulda just poured dirt in here, then put the kid in the dirt, and put more dirt on top.”
“You’re right.” I hadn’t thought that through. I had been so disturbed by finding the body that I hadn’t looked closely at all the details. “We’re going to have to check out the basement apartment, see how much dirt is on the floor and if it can tell us anything.”
“You called me, Grimshaw, which makes this a police matter now. This ain’t one of your special cases. I already put the coroner’s office on notice that I might need them. There’s gonna be an official inquiry.”
“I know,” I said. “I wanted it that way.”
Sinkovich gave me a sideways glance. “Since when do you want white cops involved in your life?”
“First,” I said, “this isn’t my life. Secondly, I called you, not some generic white cop. Third—”
“Shit,” Sinkovich said. “I wasn’t looking for some weird speech. I just meant you’re not normally an official guy. I was just wondering why this time you decided to be. And in such a nice neighborhood, too.”
I found it hard to swallow. There was something in my throat. “The body.” My voice sounded odd, even to me. “I couldn’t leave it. This isn’t right.”
Sinkovich nodded. “Never did understand folks who can do crap like this—not, mind you, that it’s unusual. They found some kid in an abandoned garage on Forty-second this morning. Took it over to Michael Reese Hospital. Little girl, not even a day old.”
“Christ,” I said.
“And we get, you know, one of those a month, sometimes more. Dead, mostly. This little one, she was lucky. Had good lungs from what I heard. I was listening to the radio in my car when it come through dispatch. Guys sounded shook.”
I recognized that feeling. It hadn’t left me. I tried not to look at the tiny white jumper, because that disturbed me most of all.
“And it ain’t just you people,” Sinkovich said. “White folks do the same damn thing. I don’t get it.”
I bit back an angry response. In the past few months, Sinkovich had come along way toward changing his attitudes toward “my” people. But the words like that still came out of his mouth, always making me worry about how much I could trust him.
I stood and surveyed the area. The teenagers still sat on the stoop, watching us, but I saw no sign of the Panthers.
“What we need to do,” I said, “is make sure no one tampers with this area—at least until the coroner arrives.”
“I’m thinkin’ it’s way too late for that,” Sinkovich said. “I mean, you said there was a dog in here, mucking things up—”
“And we don’t want it to come back.”
“I’m just sayin’ the chance of finding evidence here is between slim and none.” He stood, his knees cracking. He wiped off the bottom of his pants legs.
“The reason I asked you here, Sinkovich, rather than just calling an emergency number and leaving, is because I thought you would have a decent chance of figuring out what happened here. This child deserved better—”
“Hey!” Sinkovich said. “I didn’t do nothing. I’m just sayin’ that the scene’s already compromised. If it wasn’t, I woulda made you stay back. That’s all.”
He studied me for a moment. He wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but he didn’t have to look up at me, like most people did. His pale gray eyes were serious and, it seemed, filled with a compassion I’d never seen before.
“I’m not gonna let this little guy stay here too long, and I’m gonna make sure there’s justice if we can have it,” he said. “I’m just sayin’ that we’re already at a disadvantage. Abandoned building, buried baby—God knows how long it’s been here—and this fuckin’ neighborhood. You shoulda waited for Johnson, you know. Ain’t nobody gonna tell me nothing.”
“I doubt they’d tell him anything, either,” I said. “Or me, for that matter.”
“But you got ways of findin’ things out,” Sinkovich said. “And you got that kid who sometimes helps you—what’s his name? The one that was in the gang?”
“Malcolm,” I said. “And he never really was that involved in the Black Machine.”
Sinkovich rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I was watching them, Grimshaw. He was involved, least for a while. Good thing you pulled him out, too. They hooked up with the Stones a month or so back. If I was you, I’d be getting the hell out of the South Side. I been hearing rumors of some kinda gang war heating up.”
I looked at him in surprise. Sinkovich wasn’t that tied into the black community. The only community he knew well was the Polish Catholic neighborhood where he grew up—and they certainly weren’t tied to the black community, either.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked, trying not to let him see how disturbed I was.
He shrugged. “It’s been the word for a while. That’s why they’re trying to get Conlisk to lift his ban on automatic weapons.”
Conlisk was the Police Superintendent. Last fall, he had recently banned not just automatic weapons, but blackjacks—the long black nightsticks that the police had used so viciously against demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention.
“Who’s asking?” I tried to keep my voice level.
“Haven’t been paying that much attention,” Sinkovich said, “but you know how you hear stuff. Me, I don’t want that crap no more. I’m still having nightmares—.”
He stopped himself, but I knew the end of the sentence. He had been a part of that police riot at the Democratic National Convention, and he had beaten students with bird pellet inside his gloves.
Ever since, he had had nightmares, about the sound, he said, of those gloves hitting a teenager’s head.
I had been the first person to challenge him on his behavior that night, and ever since, he had come to me as if I were a father-confessor, embarrassed by what he had done and, at the same time, extremely defensive about it.
But it had changed him. The reason his wife left him was because he had returned to his original sense of right and wrong. He had made a choice that hurt his status in the neighborhood, but saved the life of a young black family.
“Who’s asking?” I repeated.
“Jesus, Grimshaw, I don’t know.”
We stood there for a minute, letting the silence surround us. This neighborhood was too quiet for my tastes.
I looked down at the window well. From this angle, I couldn’t see anything except a hint of bone and a bit of jumper.
Sinkovich put a hand on my arm, startling me. “When I was working Vice, we found stuff like this all the time. Babies born addicted, babies born dead. Babies neglected in ways you don’t wanna think about. The thin
gs people do when they’re on something—sometimes they don’t even think of the babies as living at all.”
“I know,” I said, resisting the urge to stare at his hand on my sleeve.
“Then you gotta know that this baby might not be from here. Some hopped-up freak might’ve thought she was putting her kid to bed, not covering it in dirt, you know? And she might’ve just been passing through.”
I shivered, and wished I hadn’t. Sinkovich felt it through my sleeve. He squeezed my arm, then let his hand drop.
“If that happened, someone would have seen it,” I said. “You can’t bury someone in the front yard of a building and not get noticed.”
“Yeah, but here?” Sinkovich looked around.
I did too. The neighborhood wasn’t bad. There were worse not far from me on the South Side. “People live here. Good people. They’d notice.”
“I suppose.” Sinkovich didn’t sound convinced.
“I can get you a list of the former tenants in the building,” I said. “I’m not sure how accurate it’ll be, but it’ll be a place to start.”
“I’m gonna be starting by hearing what the coroner says. There’s a lotta criteria before we even start an investigation.”
“Criteria?”
“Cause of death. That’s a biggie. If this kid ever took a real breath.”
“It’s wearing a jumper,” I said.
“Yeah, and I’ve seen heroin addicts dress up ice-cold corpses like dolls.”
I winced.
“Sorry, Grimshaw, but this happens enough we got procedure on it, and believe it or not, the procedure ain’t half bad.”
He glanced at his watch. I looked at the teenagers, still smoking on that stoop. They didn’t seem that interested in the two of us at the moment.
“I gotta call this in, get the coroner here,” Sinkovich muttered, almost to himself. “Tell you what, Grimshaw. I’m thinkin’ it’d be better if you vacate now. I mean, you can stay and represent the property owner, but if you do, I got a feelin’ you ain’t gonna be able to ask nobody about nothing. They’re gonna know you called us.”
Stone Cribs: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 18
