Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  The apartment was too warm, the radiator cranking so hard it felt as if we had stepped into a sauna. I opened a window and sent Jimmy in search of the landlord. Of course, no one was in the building except us. I suppose I should have been grateful; the Defender was full of articles about renters who weren’t getting enough heat this winter.

  I cooked us an early dinner—I’d learned in September that Jimmy always came home hungry, even when I gave him extra lunch money—and left Jimmy with the dishes while I went into my office to make some phone calls. I tried Delevan first, but there was no answer at his Lake Forest home. I searched the phone book for his South Side phone number, found it, and learned that it had been disconnected.

  Next I tried Alice Foster. She answered on the second ring, her voice wary. She relaxed slightly when I introduced myself.

  “Are you making any progress, Mr. Grimshaw?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure yet, although I am covering ground that the police didn’t.”

  “That’s not a surprise,” she said.

  I wrapped the phone cord around my hand. “I have a few questions, Mrs. Foster. Things that have come up in the investigation. I was wondering if you could clarify them.”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  “Whatever happened to your husband’s car?”

  “It vanished,” she said. “The police found no trace of it near the park, and no abandoned vehicle was picked up anywhere. His receptionist said he’d taken it when he left the office, but no one’s seen it since. The police believe that’s confirmation of the mugging. They think the car was stripped and sold for parts when it was left in the Washington Park neighborhood.”

  “Washington Park isn’t usually that bad a neighborhood,” I said.

  “I told them that.” Frustration filled her voice. “I told them a lot of things.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “It was a brand-new Oldsmobile.”

  “What color was it?”

  “Brown.”

  “Let me know if the car turns up, will you?”

  “Of course, Mr. Grimshaw. You’ll be the first to know.”

  She sounded sincere. Part of me wished I had done this second interview in person, but I wanted to get the information that night. I felt it more important to stay home with Jimmy than to run all over the city chasing clues.

  “When was the last time you spoke to your husband?” I asked.

  “Shortly before he left the office, around noon. He said he’d be home by four.”

  I nodded. That was consistent with what she had told me before. “Finally, Mrs. Foster, when you were going through your husband’s things, did you find any stock certificates?”

  “A number of them,” she said. “They were in his desk at work. Why?”

  “Have you verified them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you checked with a broker to discover their current value?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I figured they were something to do with work and I’d get to them eventually. Louis handled the finances for the office, and I wasn’t ready to deal with all that paperwork until someone from there offered to help me. So far, no one has.”

  “Are you sure the certificates belong to the office? Or are they in your husband’s name?”

  “I’ll check the file,” she said. “I wasn’t really paying attention. I feel like I’ve been in a fog, Mr. Grimshaw.”

  “Where did he keep your personal finances?”

  “At the office,” she said. “Everything was locked in his desk.”

  “Where are the certificates now?”

  “In a box in our spare bedroom.”

  I shook my head, now glad that she couldn’t see me. “Mrs. Foster, stock certificates can be extremely valuable. I suggest you take care of them as soon as you possibly can.”

  “I doubt that we have anything of great value, Mr. Grimshaw. Only rich people have valuable stocks. Louis left me well off, but only because he was a frugal man. There were times he’d rather save a penny than he enjoy himself.”

  The kind of man who hoarded fortunes, and invested wisely. The kind of man I wished I was, but had never been. If I had been that kind of man, Jimmy and I wouldn’t be having the financial problems we were having now.

  “Do me a favor and check, Mrs. Foster. And do it quickly.”

  “How did you learn about the stock certificates, Mr. Grimshaw?”

  “One of your husband’s business associates mentioned it,” I said, not willing to tell her the whole thing until I knew that Jane Sarton had been telling the truth. I didn’t want to get Alice Foster’s hopes up only to have them dashed. “If you check this out for me, I’ll know whether I can believe that person or not.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Foster sounded a lot more interested. “I’ll do so first thing in the morning.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Let me know what you find out.”

  Then I hung up the phone and headed back into the living room. As I settled on the couch with Jimmy to watch television, I wondered why some husbands kept the family finances secret from their wives. I’d encountered it twice that day, implied in Jane Sarton’s annoyance at being left without enough money for her golden years, and directly from Alice Foster.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d run into this strange phenomenon. Somehow, I doubted it would be the last.

  * * *

  The next morning, our well-oiled routine collapsed. Jimmy was still in his pajamas, finishing his oatmeal, when Franklin arrived to take him to school, and I was lost in the mess that was Jimmy’s room, searching for a clean shirt. I abandoned the search and Jimmy abandoned his oatmeal. We managed to get him out the door only five minutes late, looking rumpled and food-stained, but presentable enough.

  I was left with a pile of laundry, a mass of dirty breakfast dishes, and an empty larder, realizing, not for the first time, why nature’s model for parenthood included both a mother and a father.

  The chores would have to wait until after school. Jimmy and I would tackle them together. Jimmy and Smokey’s big night out at the Laundromat. Maybe I could scramble enough cash together to buy us dinner at the nearby A&W as a treat.

  I closed the door on Jimmy’s room, put the dishes in the sink, and went into my office, the only neat room in the house. There I tried reached Delevan again, but had no luck. I even called the operator to make certain I had the right number. I did. I found it odd that he didn’t answer at night or in the morning, and hoped it only meant that he was out of town.

  I had a number of stops that day. I wanted to check out the house that Foster had visited on his last day, and investigate the neighborhood as well. Maybe if I timed everything right, I would be able to pick up much-needed groceries before moving on to my next stop.

  I also wanted to do some library research. Aspects of this case bothered me. I still hadn’t found what tied Foster to last summer’s two dead boys, aside from the circumstances of their deaths. What I was most afraid of was that they’d all been killed by a random stranger, like the victims of the Boston Strangler had been a few years before.

  But so far, this case didn’t seem like the Strangler. He seemed to have acted on impulse, going into women’s apartments and raping them late at night. The position of these three bodies suggested deliberation, which pointed to some kind of plan.

  Maybe I would find that plan when I learned why Foster was in Washington Park. His real estate broker, if I could believe her, said he was looking at a home several miles south of that location. His car was nowhere to be found, and no one had seen him there—at least no one had come forward to say so.

  The presence of the white man in the car bothered me—why would anyone drive away when a child started screaming?—and I wished I could get my hands on Epstein’s photographs. Maybe when he was out of the woods, I would ask Mrs. Weisman if she could find the pictures for me. Even pictures without Epstein’s descriptions and memories were better than nothing.<
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  I hated murder cases for just this reason. There were always too many questions and not enough answers.

  I was still chewing over the various possibilities when I grabbed my jacket and headed out the front door. I locked all three deadbolts, a habit I’d started again, and headed down the stairs, sticking my hand in my pocket to grab my gloves.

  Instead, my fingers brushed paper. The note. I had forgotten all about it. I had gotten threatening notes in the past, and they were often harmless, but I always did track them down.

  I headed back up the stairs and knocked on Marvella’s door. She was usually home during the day. She didn’t work much, thanks to a lump-sum alimony payment from one of her many ex-husbands.

  It took a moment for the door to open, and then it only opened partway. A chain held it in place.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, sounding sleepy. She closed the door and I heard the chain rattle. A moment later, the door opened all the way.

  She was wearing a loosely tied satin floor-length robe and obviously nothing underneath it. Her hair, usually styled, was frizzed around her face. She stifled a yawn.

  I couldn’t help myself. I smiled. “Sorry to wake you, Marvella.”

  “You could have at least brought coffee,” she said, holding the door open. “Come on in. I’ll make us some.”

  “I don’t have much time.” I didn’t want to go into that apartment with a beautiful, barely dressed woman. “I have a question for you.”

  She rubbed the sleep out of her right eye with her fist. “Shoot.”

  “Yesterday, before three, did you see anyone tack a note on my door?”

  “I don’t spy on your door, Bill,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just that there aren’t many people here during the day.”

  “You usually are.”

  “I’ve been working a job.” I was always careful not to use the word “case” even around Marvella, who had found me my first legitimate case in Chicago last August.

  “A real one?”

  “For me,” I said.

  She smiled. I liked her face without all the makeup. It didn’t seem so imposingly beautiful.

  “I didn’t see anyone in the hall yesterday,” she said. “Just a couple kids.”

  That didn’t surprise me. “Near my door?”

  “They were out here laughing. Must have been just before three or just after. I didn’t see them put a note on your door, but I did tell them to scram. I figured they were here to see Jimmy.”

  “Yet you told them to leave.”

  “Well, you weren’t here. He wasn’t here. They didn’t belong in the building, and they were noisy. I don’t like strangers here.”

  I didn’t either. “How old were they?”

  She shrugged. “How’m I supposed to know? They looked like they could be friends of Jim. Their voices hadn’t changed.”

  “Would you recognize them if you see them again?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “If they’re wearing the same jackets.”

  “Were any of them wearing red tams?”

  “Stones?” That woke her up. “No. At least not that I noticed. They weren’t wearing hats at all, and their jackets were unzipped. That I do remember.”

  So the hats could have been in their pockets. “Thanks, Marvella.”

  “You having some kid troubles?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Get their names if you see them again, will you?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Anything to help the most handsome single man in the building.”

  “The only single man in the building,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

  This time the invitation was unmistakable. “Next time, Marvella.”

  She pouted. “You always say that.”

  “And I always mean it,” I lied.

  * * *

  I drove south to the address Jane Sarton had given me. The neighborhood seemed to be a good one, filled with small, plain Chicago-style bungalows—sturdy but undemanding houses that could handle the city’s severe weather.

  Six blocks north of the address, on Eighty-ninth Street, was another park. Stoney Island Park, small by Chicago standards—only two blocks long—caught my attention. If someone had murdered a man down here and wanted to leave him in a park, why not Stoney Island? Why take him—or anyone—farther north?

  The drive took me deep into the heart of Chicago’s steel country. The address I had was significantly south of the U.S. Steelworks, although the company remained a dominant presence, its processing plant belching foul-smelling smoke that stayed beneath the clouds.

  But other tall chimneys rose just south of the neighborhood, also trailing smoke into the already thick air. I guessed they belonged to either Republic or Wisconsin Steel or maybe both, but I wasn’t about to drive down there to check.

  On my way, I passed an elementary school and a number of churches. A synagogue dominated a nearby corner, its façade shabby with age. There were several business districts, looking like downtowns of places that had once been miles from Chicago’s city limits.

  The nearby blocks were well-tended, the houses in good shape. Most had young trees out front and the remains of nice summer gardens. There was a lot of evidence of children, from basketball hoops on garage doors to swing sets in backyards.

  There was also a startling number of FOR SALE signs and a complete lack of people on the streets.

  I pulled in front of the house that Foster had wanted to buy. It was older than the others in the neighborhood, and larger. The house rested in the center of a short block. A low fence enclosed the yard. Two oak trees towered over the street and over the smaller, newly planted trees in front of the neighbors’ homes. What I could see of the yard was covered with brown leaves, and so was the sidewalk.

  The house was clearly empty.

  I got out of the car and shivered in the morning chill. The snow that had fallen the night before had only been a dusting. Traces remained on the leaves, but nowhere else.

  I started up the walk and then I saw the lockbox hanging from the front door. I wouldn’t be able to investigate this house without a real estate agent. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. I had just been curious about where Foster had spent his final day.

  The house seemed bigger than Jane Sarton had prepared me for, and she hadn’t told me about the large enclosed porch. The house had been remodeled in the last year or two, and I thought it odd that someone would put so much work into a place only to sell it a short time later.

  I turned around to return to my car, and shivered again. Someone was watching me. Elaine Young had been right. There was a sense a black person developed, especially when he was outside his community, a sense that kept him awake and alert.

  I didn’t move, hoping the person who watched would reveal himself, but I saw nothing. The windows of the houses across the street were covered with curtains, and no one moved in the houses nearby. I couldn’t hear the sound of a car’s engine, nor did I see anyone on the various lawns.

  Had Foster felt this? Had it made him nervous, or had he seen it as a challenge? In spite of all the digging I’d been doing into this man’s life, I had no real sense yet of him as a person. I had no idea how he’d react in a situation in which his life was threatened.

  I walked to my car slowly, giving whomever it was time to reveal himself. No one did. I got inside and sat in the remaining warmth from the heater, debating whether or not I wanted to go door-to-door.

  In the end, I decided against it. I would talk to Delevan first, see what he said about his afternoon with Foster, and then I’d see if I needed to speak to the neighbors. I wasn’t relishing the idea much.

  I started the car and drove north, back to a corner grocery store I had seen just a block away. I parked outside, plugged the last of my pennies into a nearby meter, and went in the store.

  If Foster had been investigating the neighborhood, he pro
bably would have stopped at this grocery store. It was close and large, although that wasn’t saying much.

  It was a full-service grocery. I pushed open the double doors and stepped inside. The place was warm and smelled of fresh bread. A row of carts was lined near the door and I grabbed one, heading down the closest aisle while I made a mental list of the things I needed.

  Right away, I knew I was outside my neighborhood. The prices were lower than they were in the groceries in the Black Belt. The produce—what there was of it this deep into winter—looked fresh. The apples weren’t bruised and the oranges were actually orange, not the sickly yellow color I’d been seeing since I arrived in Chicago. The onions were big and juicy, the potatoes all fresh.

  I resisted the urge to load up the cart—I had a small budget, after all—but I had a giddy sense of freedom as I went from aisle to aisle, looking at things that were as much as fifty cents cheaper than they were at home.

  It wasn’t until I reached the back, where the meat department was, that I realized I wasn’t welcome here. Behind the signs that advertised fresh-ground hamburger and sirloin steaks, a white man in a bloody butcher’s apron watched me.

  He was short and balding, with thick arms and a narrow mouth. He watched as I looked at the chicken. At thirty-nine cents a pound, it was almost twenty cents cheaper than it was in the Black Belt.

  He stared me as I browsed. Finally, I grabbed a pound of hamburger, enough to last me and Jimmy to the end of the week, and put it in my cart with the rest of my items. I didn’t buy anything else, even though the chicken was tempting. I didn’t want to stay beneath that stare a moment longer.

  “Excuse me,” the butcher said, “but you might want to rethink that.”

  I gripped the cart tighter. “Really?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level. “Why is that?”

  He nodded and leaned over the meat case, indicating that I should too. But I knew better.