Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “No, ma’am,” I said, and we both laughed.

  She smiled at me. “I like you, Mr. Grimshaw. You can come back here any time. You don’t need my Saul as an excuse.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “He’s at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. You know where that is?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t know what building. Sometimes these speeches, they happen outside. But it’s cold for that. You’ll have to look for signs.”

  “Advertising a young man making a ruckus?” I asked, unable to resist.

  “A bit of the devil in you, Mr. Grimshaw,” she said, smiling. Then her smile faded. “The speech is on civil rights. The speaker belongs to one of the splinter groups that I can’t keep track of. The ones in berets.”

  “The Black Panthers?” I asked, feeling cold. The last time I’d had any contact with the Panthers, it had been in Memphis.

  “That’s the group.” Those sharp eyes must have caught something in my expression. “I take it you don’t approve.”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes people go too far.”

  “That they do,” Mrs. Weisman said. “But my Saul is quite taken with them. Says they’re not what they seem. And I trust him. He’s a good boy who thinks about things.”

  I made myself smile and nod, since I couldn’t disagree with her about a boy I’d never met. But I knew that sometimes people thought too much about things and rationalized experiences that only served to harm someone else.

  Everything I’d heard about the Panthers I disliked, from their fake military bearing to their off-the-pigs attitude. I didn’t want to go into a Panther enclave searching for a nice Jewish boy, but I would.

  I’d been in worse places. Just not voluntarily.

  * * *

  The University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus stood just west of the Loop. The campus was only three years old, the result of years of campaigning to get a University of Illinois branch in Chicago proper.

  To make way for the university, the Daley regime had destroyed one of the city’s most racially mixed—and renowned—neighborhoods, the place where famous Chicagoan Jane Addams had defeated one of the city’s worst slums with her innovative Hull House. Hull House itself had to be razed to make way for the new university, and only the building’s façade remained.

  I had learned all of this from Franklin, who had taken one of his night classes there—under protest because he had fought the destruction of the neighborhood.

  The university and the expressways formed a sterile barrier between the Loop and the black neighborhoods to the west. Fences and walls rose all around the campus, making it look more like a modern prison than a place of learning. All that was missing were barbed wire and the guard tower.

  I parked near the thirty-three story concrete monolith called University Hall and walked into the center of campus. Someone had planted young trees that weren’t thriving well in the Illinois climate. Raised sidewalks, flanked by chain-link fences designed to keep undesirables from getting in and students from falling to the ground below, led to newly constructed buildings, done in a modern and somewhat tasteless steel-and-concrete design.

  Except for a few students hurrying toward the physical plant, the campus seemed empty.

  There were no signs anywhere, no street lamps with posters stapled to them, no wallboards with papers fluttering in the breeze. I’d never been in such an empty and unscholarly atmosphere. In the distance, the buildings of the Loop rose like ghosts in the morning’s gray light.

  It had gotten colder, or maybe it just seemed that way. I shoved my hands in my pockets, wishing I had taken my coat out of the car, and hurried down the sidewalk, looking for signs of life.

  I finally caught it—two young men with afros, standing outside a large, curiously flat building that seemed to go on forever. They stood near a concrete column, smoking cigarettes and having a serious discussion.

  “Panthers still here?” I asked as I hurried toward them, pretending I was late.

  “Yeah,” one of the men said, cigarette bobbing with the movement of his lips. He inclined his head toward the door and I nodded my thanks.

  The door had been propped open, a piece of wood jammed beneath the steel bottom. Even the floor was concrete, purposefully bare and ugly. A carpet might have improved the look, but a carpet would get dirty over time. Concrete looked dirty from the beginning.

  A male voice echoed in the hallway, faint but insistent, speaking with the rhythm of the best Baptist ministers. I recognized the cadence, but couldn’t make out the words. I followed the sound around a corner and into a room with double blond-wood doors, a sliver of glass running down the center of each.

  These doors were closed. I pushed on one, and slipped inside as applause and shouting erupted, and found myself in a whole new world. The room was full of people on their feet, some shouting, “Panther Power!” Others were just cheering.

  There had to be a hundred people or more in a room designed for far fewer. Most were black, but some whites were scattered throughout, surprising me. A number of men were wearing black leather jackets and black berets, but those who didn’t had bushy afros.

  A lot of women were scattered throughout, most wearing scarves over afros that matched the men’s. It seemed, from my vantage, that I was the oldest person there.

  “So we say,” an amplified male voice shouted over the cheers. The cheering faded and the crowd sat back down, and I found myself staring at someone I didn’t expect. A young man, dressed like I was—white shirt, expensive sweater, and dark pants—clutched a microphone and paced.

  Behind him, men wearing black leather jackets and berets stood with their arms crossed, guns strapped ostentatiously over their shoulders.

  “So we say,” the young man said again. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a clean-shaven face and shorter hair than any other black male in the room. “We’ve always said at the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to us.”

  He had the thick accent particular to this region of Illinois and he spoke fast, like most Northerners. But something in that deep voice was compelling, pulling me forward.

  “We might not be back.”

  “Right on!” someone yelled, just as if they were in church.

  “I might not be back.”

  There were mumbles.

  “I might be in jail.”

  Moans.

  “I might be anywhere.”

  Sudden silence. The crowd looked worried.

  “But when I leave, you can remember I said with the last words on my lips, ‘I’m a revolutionary.’ And you’re going to have to keep saying that.”

  The crowd murmured, “I’m a revolutionary.”

  His voice rose. “You’re going to have to say, ‘I am the proletariat. I am the people. I am not the pig.’”

  Voices repeated his words, softly, and people swayed like they were at a revival meeting.

  “You’re going to have to make a distinction.” He leaned toward the crowd. I leaned toward him, as everyone else did. “And the people are going to have to attack the pigs.”

  I found myself nodding even though I disagreed.

  “The people are going to have to stand up against the pigs.”

  “Amen!” someone shouted.

  “That’s what the Panthers are doing. That’s what the Panthers are doing all over the world.”

  His presence seemed to fill the room, and it seemed like he was talking directly to me. I’d had that experience with only a few other speakers before, and only once with a speaker that young.

  Martin, when he gave a sermon at Boston University. I’d gone and listened to him speak just before I left for Korea, and I knew he had a gift. An amazing gift to rally and unite people behind whatever cause he wanted them to hear.

  This young man, this teenager, had the same gift. And he was using it for a completely different purpose.

  “Now,” he said, lowering his voice, br
inging down the level of emotion. “We got to talk about the main man. The main man in the Black Panther Party. Your Minister of Defense and mine, Huey P. Newton.”

  I made myself turn away and study the crowd, looking at the whites. Most of them sat in groups of two and three, as enthralled as everyone else. Only one sat alone.

  He was leaning against the back wall. Instead of guns strapped around his shoulders, he had cameras—two of them that looked as if they weighed more than he did. His hair was as bushy as some of the afros in the room, but his curls exploded from his head as if he were a cartoon character who had put his finger in a light socket. He was wearing a blue sweater and a white turtleneck, and on the floor, tangled around his feet, was a thick jacket—the kind that a guy carried with him only because his grandmother had nagged him to do so.

  “…we say let him go. Let him free…”

  I made my way around others sitting on the floor and leaning against the back wall. Most of them were so focused on the speaker that they didn’t seem to notice me. A few glared because I had interrupted their enjoyment of the speech.

  “…this is our relentless demand…”

  I made it to the photographer’s side. He and I were probably the only people in the room not looking at the speaker. The photographer’s head was bowed and he was writing furiously on a pocket-sized spiral notebook. I was half a head taller than he was and able to look down at his cramped handwriting, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  “…as the vanguard leader, he took us down the correct road of revolution…”

  “You Saul Epstein?” I whispered.

  The photographer whipped his head up so fast I thought he was going to hurt himself. “Who wants to know?”

  “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes outside if I could.”

  He frowned at me, give me a once-over that made it clear he didn’t think I belonged. “About what?”

  “Some of your photographs.”

  “Shhh,” a woman beside me hissed.

  Epstein’s pale cheeks flushed bright red. He glanced at the stage as if the speaker had heard her. But the young man was on the other side of the room, using the microphone to punctuate his point.

  “…Marxist-Leninist theory. We put it into practice…”

  “What pictures?” Epstein whispered.

  “Some you took in November. You left them at the Defender offices.”

  “Shhh!” the woman said again, louder this time.

  “…that’s what the Black Panther Party is all about…”

  Epstein flipped his notebook closed and tucked it in his back pocket. He bent down to grab his coat, his cameras swinging perilously close to the floor. Then he wove his way out of the room, looking over his shoulder every few seconds to make certain I was following.

  “…we say All Power to the People. Black Power to Black People. Brown Power to Brown People, and Red Power to Red People, Yellow Power to Yellow People…”

  We reached the door. He pushed it open and we slipped through.

  “…and even White Power to White People…”

  The door closed and the voice became indistinct. I could still feel the effects of it tingling through me, the way that it drew me toward an argument I didn’t want to hear.

  “Who was that?” I asked Epstein as we headed down the hall to the main doors.

  He looked at me as if I hadn’t recognized Muhammad Ali. “That’s Fred Hampton. You don’t know who Fred Hampton is, man?”

  I did know. I just had never seen him before. The newspapers didn’t cover the Panthers if they could avoid it, and no one had given him airtime. I’d only heard some of my neighbors talking about him, and I’d thought he was much older.

  “So that’s the chairman of the Illinois Panthers,” I said. “Is he even out of high school?”

  “Don’t mock, man. He’s cool and smart. You should listen to him sometime.”

  “I just did,” I said. “He was talking about killing cops.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Epstein said. “If you’d really paid attention, you’d know he was talking about self-defense. That was the original name of the party, don’t you know? The Black Panther Party for Self-defense.”

  I hadn’t, and I really didn’t care. I wasn’t interested in militant politics. I wanted to know more about Louis Foster’s death.

  “Let’s talk here,” I said, stopping beside a built-in alcove. A long seat, made of wood, topped the shortened brick wall. Behind it, more wood hung in a decorative pattern. Dying plants clung to the dirt behind the wooden seat—obviously placed there as decoration and then forgotten. A cylindrical ashtray, filled with sand and cigarette butts, had been placed within easy arm’s reach of the alcove.

  We sat down. Epstein dumped his coat beside him, not caring that it trailed in the dirt. “So you’re with the Defender?”

  He didn’t look at me as he spoke, but I could sense the eagerness. He was looking for a break, any kind of break, and he had come with me because he thought I would provide it.

  “No,” I said.

  He raised his shadowed gray eyes toward me. “Then how did you know about my photographs?”

  “I’m working with Mrs. Louis Foster.”

  It took a moment for the name to register. When it did, his skin grew even paler. He shook his head. “I’m so sorry, man.”

  I didn’t know if he thought I was a relative or a friend. I didn’t care. I wanted the information from him and that was all. “I need you to tell me about that day.”

  He fiddled with one of the cameras. It was expensive, high-end, a professional’s camera. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “Your grandmother.”

  For the first time, he looked fierce. “You didn’t bother her, did you?”

  “No,” I said. “Why would you think that?”

  A flush rose from beneath his turtleneck. He shrugged. “How’d you find her?”

  “You put an address on the back of your photographs. I assumed that’s where you lived. Turned out I was right.” I didn’t try to keep the sarcasm from my voice.

  Shouts, whistles, and the stomping of feet came from the room we’d just left, followed by applause.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “If you don’t work for the Defender, how’d you see my photographs?”

  “Mrs. Foster can be very persuasive.”

  “And how are you involved?” His questions were perceptive and cautious. I realized then that he was older than he seemed.

  “I’m looking into her husband’s death, since no one else is.”

  “You’re some kind of private eye?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

  “That’s because I didn’t throw it.” I extended my right hand, willing to make this a meeting of equals. “Bill Grimshaw.”

  “Saul Epstein,” he said as he took my hand, his innate politeness reiterating what we’d already established. “What do you need to know?”

  “When did you get to the park?”

  He frowned. “Just before dawn.”

  “Why?”

  “The park’s busy that time of day. It’s amazing what you can record with a telephoto lens.”

  He said this last so softly I could barely hear him. People were pouring into the hallway, gesturing, talking about the speech, seeming excited.

  “What are you trying to record, Mr. Epstein?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a photographer. I get what I can.”

  “Your grandmother says you’re looking for a big story.”

  “Every reporter does.”

  “I thought you were a photographer.”

  His gaze met mine, held it for a moment, and then he said, “What do you want, Grimshaw?”

  No “Mister” and the tone had changed, as if he could push me away just by being rude.

  “I told you,” I said. “I need to know about that day. I’m trying to find out what happened to L
ouis Foster.”

  “Then you don’t need to know about me, do you?”

  “It would help,” I said.

  Most of the crowd from the speech was filling the hallway. We were speaking louder and louder just so we could hear each other. No one seemed to notice us. One young man flicked a cigarette butt into the ashtray without even looking our way.

  “I’m freelance,” he said.

  “I gathered that.”

  He ignored my comment, watching the crowd as if he were searching for a face. “I got some nibbles from some major New York magazines for pieces on Chicago.”

  “Pieces that require you to go to the South Side?”

  “A few.” He ran a hand over his camera. “They want profiles of Chicago during the year after the Convention, to see if it made permanent changes.”

  The Democratic National Convention had made an impact nationwide in a year that had had a dozen amazing events. The Walker Report, an official government study that called the Convention a “police riot,” had been issued on the first of December. In Chicago, Daley dismissed the entire report, but the rest of the country was using it as a spearhead for debate.

  “You must have some credentials to get a gig like that,” I said.

  “I do.” He sat up straighter. “Real credentials, not hippy-dippy ones. I’ve been a stringer for Reuters, had some pieces in the New York Times, sold some photographs to Life. I was offered a job at Look, but I like picking my own stories. That way, you have a chance to stumble on something no one else has.”

  “What have you stumbled on here?”

  He shook his head slightly. “Nice try, but I’m not convinced you are who you say you are. You got I.D.?”

  “I don’t have press credentials. I’m not a reporter. I told you that. Whatever your great story is, it’s safe with me.”

  The crowd had thinned. A few stragglers passed us, some looking our way as if searching for someone.

  “That morning,” he said firmly, making sure I knew he wasn’t going to tell me what he was working on, “the park was pretty quiet. It was cold—the beginning of that damp cold that lets you know winter is getting serious.”

  I nodded, encouraging him, and at the same time, wondering if he was quoting from something he’d written.