Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “Nope,” said the second. “You’re not supposed to lose concentration.”

  “Boys,” the woman said.

  Gus looked at me. His eyes were as pale as his mother’s, and I realized with a start that they were blue. They gave his face an artificial cast, his dark skin making his eyes seem almost pure white in the right light.

  “Who’re you?” he asked, a question his mother had neglected. She remained on the middle step, watching, as if she weren’t allowed in the basement.

  I walked toward him. The basement smelled of mildew and unwashed clothes. “Bill Grimshaw. I work for the family of Louis Foster.”

  “The dead guy.” The other boy breathed the words, almost reverently.

  I glanced at him, gave him what I hoped was a reassuring look. “Yes.”

  “What do you do for them?” Gus had crossed his arms, his eyes narrowed. He stood straighter, as if he were prepared to defend his home against me.

  “I’m investigating Mr. Foster’s death.”

  “You a cop?” the second boy asked.

  “No.”

  “Why’d you come here?” Gus asked.

  “Because the police haven’t,” I said.

  “How’d you know?” the second boy asked.

  “Are you Van?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Hey, you’re, like, Mannix, only black, right?”

  I smiled at the way he was trying to put me in context. “Something like that.”

  “There’s no such thing as a private eye in real life,” Gus said. “That’s just TV.”

  “Actually,” I said, “there are a lot of private eyes in Chicago.”

  “Really? Neato.” Van squeezed his way between the Ping-Pong table and the wall so that he could come close to me. “You got like a gun and everything?”

  “I don’t carry a gun,” I said, and I heard Gus’s mother let out a small breath.

  “If you’re not a cop, we don’t got to talk to you,” Gus said.

  “No, you don’t have to,” I said, “but it would be nice if you did.”

  “Why?” He raised his chin. I got the sense he didn’t like looking up at me.

  “Because no one is investigating his death except me.” I glanced at Van, keeping him in the conversation. “His family would like to know what happened to him.”

  “We just found him,” Gus said. “We had nothing to do with it.”

  “I know that,” I said. “All I want to do is find out what you remember.”

  Gus turned his head toward Van and studied him a moment. I was tempted to look too, but didn’t. I didn’t want to seem too eager.

  “Mom,” Gus said after a moment. “Can we have some of that cider?”

  “Whatever you have to say to Mr. Grimshaw, you can say in front of me.” She had one hand on the railing, but she had come no farther down the stairs. “He’s a stranger, and your father would be upset if I left you alone with him.”

  I bit back irritation. Too bad her caution had finally arrived.

  “He’s not my father,” Gus said.

  “It’s okay,” Van said. “We weren’t supposed to be in the park. We already got grounded for it. We can’t get into more trouble.”

  I frowned. “I thought you lived across the street.”

  “He does,” Gus’s mother said. “We grounded them together. The friendship’s a good one, and we want to encourage it, even if they do make mistakes.”

  I understood what she meant, but probably wouldn’t have before Jimmy. The memory of that red tam locked in my desk floated through my mind, and I pushed the thought away.

  “When did you get to the park?” I felt awkward, still standing at the bottom of the stairs. Van was six inches too close to me, and Gus was too far away. All of us stood, like people posing for a portrait.

  “About eight,” Gus said.

  “Early on a Saturday.”

  He shrugged.

  “What were you doing there?” I asked.

  “Hanging out,” Gus said.

  “There’s this girl Gus likes,” Van said. “She lives across the park. We were—”

  “Shut up,” Gus snapped.

  “August,” his mother said, her tone warning.

  “It’s all right,” I said. The vehemence of Gus’s response was confirmation of everything Van had said. “Tell me what happened when you got to the park.”

  “Nothing,” Gus said. “We were just crossing it.”

  “Then I saw this foot,” Van said. “The shoe, actually, hanging there. I thought it was weird, so we go around and—”

  “There’s the dead guy.” Gus’s pale gaze caught mine. “Van starts screaming like a baby—”

  “You screamed too,” Van said.

  “—and we take off running until we see this guy, the photographer. He’s the one who told you about us, isn’t he? Asshole.”

  “August,” his mother said again.

  “He is, Mom. He said he wouldn’t tell anyone who we were.”

  “He said he wouldn’t tell the cops who we were,” Van said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Cops like white people better,” Gus said. “Or haven’t you noticed?”

  I didn’t answer that. “Then what?”

  “Van takes him over to the dead guy.”

  “You didn’t want to go?”

  “He was dead,” Gus said. “There was nothing we could do.”

  “You didn’t know that,” Van said, with the indignation of a thousand arguments.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I seen a dead guy before.”

  His mother sat down on the stairs and rested her elbows on her knees, her hands covering her mouth.

  “Really?” I asked. “Where?”

  “Woodlawn,” he said. “Near the Castle Church. We used to go there.”

  The First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn. “The Castle Church” was the Blackstone Rangers’ nickname for it.

  “You saw the dead guy at a funeral?” I asked, being deliberately naïve.

  “No.” Gus’s voice remained the same but his eyes were bleak. “This kid I went to school with. Someone shot him. They stuck his tam in his mouth. It was weird, all that yellow cloth poking out.”

  “Yellow?” I asked, expecting to hear red.

  “The Vice Lords.” Gus’s mother sounded tired. “The boy wore his hat in the wrong neighborhood.”

  “Yeah.” Gus spit out the word. “That’s what all the grownups think.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he was carrying a message. Then they left him on the Gaza Strip as a warning.”

  “The Gaza Strip?” I looked at Gus’s mother.

  “Sixty-fifth and Woodlawn,” she said. “It’s the dividing line between the Disciples and the Stones. Or it used to be.”

  There was history here, in this family, that was just below the surface. Van was looking down at his feet.

  “We got out of there just in time, I think.” Her gaze met her son’s.

  He ignored her. “Skin looks different when you’re dead. Like it’s not real. That’s what this Foster guy looked like, even though there was no blood.”

  “So you wanted to leave.”

  He nodded. “But Van didn’t believe he was dead. So he gets this white guy—”

  “His name was Saul.” Van still sounded defensive.

  “—and takes him over. The guy looks like he’s gonna puke. Then he tells us to call the cops. Like it’ll do any good.”

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Twice. I gave the white guy’s address the second time, like I was from that neighborhood and just stumbled on the body, and they showed up right after that.”

  Van twirled his paddle. Gus’s mother watched her son.

  “What did the police do?” I asked.

  “Looked around. Asked stupid questions.”

  “They wanted to know what gang we were in,” Van said. />
  “Like we would’ve told them that,” Gus said.

  “They’re not in a gang,” his mother said.

  “I know.” My tone was gentle, but dismissive. I didn’t look at her. I continued to concentrate on the boys. “What else did the cops want to know?”

  “If we knew the guy. If we’d seen the mugging. I don’t know how they knew it was a mugging. I mean, you couldn’t even see any blood. I think if a guy got shot in a mugging, there’d be blood.”

  “He wasn’t shot,” I said. “He was knifed.”

  I had Gus’s attention for the first time. “Then there should have been more blood.”

  “I didn’t say he was in a knife fight.”

  “Was he still alive, Mister?” Van asked, his voice small. “I mean, should we have got him to the hospital? I thought maybe we should.”

  I shook my head. “He’d been dead for hours.”

  “The skin,” Gus said to Van.

  “What else did the cops do?”

  “Made us go home,” Van said.

  “They said they were going to come talk to us, but they never did.” Gus looked angriest about that. He probably was. In anticipation of a police visit that had never come, he’d probably confessed to his parents that he’d gone to the park.

  “Anything else about that morning stand out?”

  “What do you mean?” Van asked.

  “Besides the body, was there anything unusual in the park?”

  “The white guy,” Van said.

  “The photographer,” I said.

  “No.” Gus rolled his eyes. “He’s there all the time. He’s seeing some girl. She’s got an apartment near the park.”

  “They spent the whole summer necking near that tree.” Van sounded both embarrassed and fascinated.

  Gus’s mother looked appalled. I had a hunch her son was going to have another upsetting conversation after I left.

  “There was another white man in the park?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation focused.

  “Yeah,” Van said.

  “I thought a lot of white folk used the park,” I said.

  “They do,” Gus said, “but this guy was just sitting in his car at the curb, like he was waiting for something.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Not far from the dead guy,” Van said.

  “He peeled out when Van started screaming,” Gus said.

  I frowned. The man’s behavior might be not mean anything, but it was odd to drive away the moment someone started screaming. “What kind of car was he driving?”

  “I dunno,” Van said.

  “An old guy’s car,” Gus said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I can tell you what it’s not,” Gus’s mother said. “It’s not a sports car or a rich man’s car. The boys know everything to know about those.”

  Which left sedans, station wagons, and a dozen others. “What color was it?” I asked the boys.

  “Dark blue,” Van said.

  “Kind of a green,” Gus said at the same time.

  “Station wagon?” I asked.

  “Naw,” Gus said. “It was a boat.”

  A big car, then.

  “Fins?”

  “Newer,” Van said.

  “Can you remember anything else about it?” I asked, not sure if what they did remember helped me.

  Gus looked at Van. Then they shrugged together.

  “It was really clean,” Van said.

  “Clean?”

  “Yeah.” Gus sounded excited. “You know. Most cars got stuff on them by now.”

  After the rains started, cars in Chicago were usually covered with a thin layer of dirt and grime. Most folks didn’t wash their cars again until the weather warmed up.

  “Shiny clean,” Van said.

  “Like it was new?”

  “No,” Gus said. “Tires looked used.”

  “You got a good look at it, then,” I said.

  “I don’t like being watched by white guys,” Gus said.

  I understood that sentiment. “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “The white guy? Not really. He was inside the whole time.”

  “Was he old, young? Fat, thin?”

  Van shrugged. “He was just a white guy.”

  “Like the photographer, then,” I said, hoping for a basis of comparison.

  “No. They were different,” Gus said. “The guy in the car didn’t have as much hair.”

  “And he looked meaner,” Van said.

  “Meaner?”

  He nodded. “I wouldn’t want to mess with him, you know?”

  I didn’t know. That wasn’t a picture. “Was he older than the photographer?”

  “He never got out of his car,” Gus said with emphasis in an attempt to end this part of the conversation.

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” I asked.

  “If he was parked in the same place,” Van said.

  So the man and the car were one package to them. That might be helpful, if Epstein got a picture of the car before the boys found the body.

  “Is that all?” Gus asked. “Because we got stuff to do.”

  “August,” his mother said.

  “I have only a few more questions,” I said. “The dead guy. Had you seen him before?”

  “In the park?” Van asked.

  “Anywhere.”

  Both boys thought. After a long moment, they shook their heads.

  “Never,” Van said.

  “Nope. Not in the park, not around here,” Gus said.

  “Would you have remembered him if you had seen him?” I asked.

  “He was a big guy,” Gus said. “Nice clothes, expensive shoes. I’d’ve noticed him.”

  “We would have,” Van said. “Like maybe he was Gayle Sayers or something.”

  In other words, even in this neighborhood, they weren’t used to seeing a man like Foster dressed so nicely unless he was a famous football player.

  “I had heard,” I said, moving in a different direction, “that there was gang activity in the park that morning.”

  Gus’s mother raised her head. I had caught her attention at least.

  “No,” Gus said too quickly.

  Van had opened his mouth to answer, but stopped when Gus spoke.

  “I know you weren’t involved,” I said, even though I didn’t know that. I was trying to cover for them so that they would answer me. “I just need to know the entire picture.”

  Neither boy answered me.

  Gus’s mother studied me for a moment, as if she were measuring my character, and then she stood up. “I think I hear the phone,” she said, and went up the stairs.

  We all watched her go. I think the boys were more surprised at her sudden departure than I was. I was grateful. She gave me a chance to ask some questions they might not want to answer in front of her.

  “I won’t tell anyone else what you say to me,” I said. “This will be between us.”

  Van watched Gus. Gus’s pale eyes held mine. “My mom worries,” he said. “She thinks I’m stupid enough to join the Stones.”

  “You know a lot about them,” I said.

  “Hard not to, growing up where I did. A lot of my friends….” His words trailed off.

  I nodded. “Was it a girl that brought you to the park?”

  “Mostly,” Gus said.

  “It was my fault,” Van said, his voice little more than a whisper. “I brought him.”

  That surprised me. “Why?”

  “I missed my stop on the El. I got off in Woodlawn thinking I could catch a train back. Some guys—” His eyes filled with tears—“they took my money and my grandpa’s watch. As a lesson, they said. My mom didn’t know I had it. The watch.”

  Now the morning was beginning to make sense.

  “Gus, he said he knew some guys who could maybe get it back.”

  I looked at Gus. His gaze no longer met mine. “I told you. A lot of the kids I grew up w
ith are in the Stones.”

  “Did you get the watch?” I asked.

  He shook his head, a small movement, speaking of a great failure. “They wanted too much money.”

  “Or to join,” Van said, so softly I had to strain to hear him. “They’d give it back if we joined.”

  “Like we’d do that,” Gus said bringing his head up. “I’m not going to end up like those guys. I seen one friend shot. That’s enough.”

  Van was watching him with the same kind of awe he had shown when he realized I worked as a detective. Van would do whatever Gus did. Fortunately, Gus was making the right choice.

  “Does your mom know the watch is missing?” I asked Van.

  “Not yet.” His small frame rose and fell in a great sigh. “I just took it the once. She wasn’t supposed to know.”

  “They probably wouldn’t have gotten it back for you anyway,” I said. “Whoever took it probably pawned it the same day.”

  “You think the pawnshop still has it?” Gus seemed interested for the first time since we started the conversation.

  “It might,” I said. “It’ll still cost money to get it back.”

  “But only money,” Gus said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell you what. Give me a description of the watch and I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “You’d do that?” Van asked.

  “For nothing?” Gus said.

  “You’ve already given me information That’s something.” I tried to pay attention to both boys, but it was Gus I was really speaking to. “All I ask in return is that if you remember something else, you tell me.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “The watch,” Van said. “It’s a pocket watch. All silver. My grandfather got it when this guy he worked for on the Gold Coast died.”

  The Gold Coast. Where Laura lived.

  “Anything distinctive about it?” I asked.

  “It’s got a E and a G twisted together on the back, and it’s old.”

  I wanted to ask what Van was doing with something like that, but I suspected I knew. He had had someone he wanted to impress—and it had backfired on him. “It doesn’t sound like something like that would move too quickly around here. I’ll see if I can find it.”

  “Thanks, Mister,” Van said.

  “Mr. Grimshaw,” I said. “I’ll write my number down and leave it upstairs. Call me if you remember any more.”

  “We will,” Gus said, and since the promise came from him, I knew they would.

  I mounted the stairs, half expecting to find Gus’s mother at the top, listening. But she sat on an upholstered bench near the door, her hands clutched together and her head bowed. She had taken off the heavy sweater, revealing a body that was cigarette-smoker thin.