Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  I had forgotten that Laura had been married before. But of course she had. And it must have been quite a scandal on the society pages when she insisted on returning to her maiden name.

  “She and my dad are best friends,” Jimmy was saying.

  “That’s enough, Jim,” I said.

  Sinkovich shook his head. “You know, just when I think I got you figured, Grimshaw, you throw some kind of weird curve at me. Laura Hathaway. Next thing you know, you’re gonna tell me you play cards with Mayor Daley.”

  “Daley and I aren’t on the same page,” I said.

  “Now that makes sense.” Sinkovich slapped his hand on the table. In that moment, all his bravado seemed to leave him. He looked smaller, as if in a matter of seconds he shrank. “I’m sorry to put you out. I just didn’t have nowhere else to go and I don’t got enough money for a hotel. Even the guys at the precinct, you know, they think I should’ve handled it different. I get the next few days off so that ‘emotions can cool down.’”

  Jimmy yawned. “Can I go back to bed?”

  I nodded and he padded his way down the hall. Sinkovich didn’t seem to notice.

  “So I think Grimshaw’ll take me in. He knows what it’s like. He calls it like he sees it. He’ll maybe—”

  “You need to get some sleep, Jack,” I said, interrupting him. He was beginning to repeat himself, like drunks usually did.

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He stood up and wiped his face. Then his eyes met mine. His were bloodshot. “You know what was hardest for me today, Grimshaw?”

  “What?” I asked.

  He gave me a confused little smile. “Knowing that the mother of my kid ain’t a woman I like much. I think maybe I knew that, but it come real clear tonight, the stuff she said. I got to wondering how I could’ve even thought she was something, you know? I can’t even blame it on my dick. I’m kinda afraid that I used to be—ah, hell.”

  He shook his head and sank onto the couch.

  “I don’t know nothing any more,” he said.

  I recognized that feeling, too. I put a hand on his shoulder. It was thinner and bonier than I expected. “There’s aspirin and Alka-Seltzer in the medicine cabinet.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Think I’ll need that, huh?”

  “You just might,” I said and headed toward my room. I finally felt like I could sleep without dreaming. Instead of being annoyed by Sinkovich’s arrival, I was grateful. He had distracted me just enough to let me relax.

  * * *

  In the morning, however, Jimmy and I felt as if we’d been invaded. Sinkovich’s snoring dominated the entire living room. I made breakfast, trying to be quiet, but it made no difference. If a brass band had been playing in front of Sinkovich, I doubted he would have awakened.

  As Jimmy and I shared some cold cereal and toast, Jimmy said, “You know, Smoke, I forgot to tell you that some guy named Johnson called last night.”

  “Truman Johnson?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “I was wondering why he hadn’t called back.”

  I would try to reach him again after I took the kids to school. Getting them there on time was turning out to be something I wasn’t as good at as I thought I’d be. And I found that irritating. I’d always thought I’d been punctual, but apparently it had never mattered like it did now.

  The kids were subdued, and as we drove, I realized I hadn’t asked Jimmy about the day before. The fact that I was letting things drop was a sign of how overwhelmed I’d been feeling. The thought made me think of Elaine, and brought my mood even lower.

  Even though there were a lot of young kids with tams in the playground when I arrived, no one gave us any trouble as we walked inside. When I came out, I noticed that the Gang Intelligence Unit van was gone, and I wondered if whatever they were looking for had happened or if another crisis was occurring elsewhere.

  The silence on the playground was unnerving. I hadn’t seen the street this empty all week. Part of the change might have been the weather. It was still gray, and the air’s damp bite seemed even chillier than it had before. The wind had come up, slicing through my coat.

  I felt like we were caught in a twilight between fall and winter. A part of me, a less rational part, felt that if it would only snow, everything would improve—and not just the occasional dusting of flakes we’d been having, but a good, heavy storm, the kind Chicago was famous for.

  But there were no storms forecast, and the radio station was bemoaning the fact that there wouldn’t be a white Christmas this year. There wouldn’t be a black one either, at least in our house, unless I got busy.

  When I turned onto our street, I noted a squad car parked across from my apartment building. Sinkovich’s white Ford was still in front, so I knew the squad didn’t belong to him. I supposed someone had finally tracked him down, or that the squad was here investigating something completely unrelated to me or my friends.

  As I parked behind the Ford, the squad car’s door opened. A cop in plainclothes got out.

  I recognized his shape before I recognized him—big, burly, the beginnings of fat. A lot of height and an athlete’s grace. Truman Johnson shoved his hands in the pockets of his great-coat and crossed the street.

  I got out of my car, the bits of moisture in the wind stinging my cheeks like miniature needles. “I was just getting ready to call you again.”

  “Like minds, I guess.” He turned up the collar of his coat to protect his nonexistent neck. Like most former football players, his shoulders seemed to blend into his chin. He didn’t wear a hat, and his ears were tipped red with the cold. “I figured since you didn’t call me back, I’d come see you. They said it was urgent.”

  “It is.” I led him down the sidewalk. It was slick. The temperature had gone down in just the last hour. If things didn’t change soon, ice would coat every damp surface.

  As we crossed the threshold to the main door, Johnson looked at the steps. I knew he was remembering the boy’s body that had been dumped on those steps the night we met, and the way that the case—for him—had never really been solved.

  He let me lead him up the steps and waited patiently while I unlocked the deadbolts. The sounds echoed in the hallway. The building felt nearly deserted. Everyone but me—and maybe Marvella, who was probably still asleep—was at work.

  I opened the apartment door and was assailed by the smell of coffee and burnt toast. Sinkovich sat at my kitchen table, looking like death. His eyes were red-rimmed, his skin grayish green, and his clothes wrinkled from having been slept in. He had wrapped both hands around a brown coffee cup he’d taken from the top shelf. A plate covered with blackened crumbs sat in the middle of the table.

  Johnson stopped beside me. The door slowly closed behind him. When it clicked shut, he looked at me and said softly, “I can’t believe you’re associating with him.”

  Sinkovich raised his head as if he hadn’t noticed us before. He raised his eyebrows, probably in an attempt at irony, but the look only managed to accent his miserable condition.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said to Johnson. “You think I did something wrong, too?”

  “No.” Johnson didn’t move. “I think you were remarkably heroic. Amazingly so.”

  Sinkovich stared at him. “Didn’t expect it of me, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Johnson said.

  Sinkovich snorted, then sipped his coffee and shook his head. “I suppose you two got some kind of meeting. I’ll leave you to it.”

  But he didn’t move. I unzipped my coat, pulled it off, and hung it on the coatrack. “Want something?” I asked Johnson.

  “Coffee would be nice.” He took my words as indication to take off his coat.

  “It’s cold out there, Jack,” I said as I walked into the half-kitchen. “You don’t have the clothes for this weather.”

  “I’ll live,” he said.

  “You might as well stay.” As the words came out of my mouth, I realized I’d been toying with tellin
g Sinkovich about the case all morning. “This concerns you, too.”

  He frowned, and so did Johnson. Their expressions were so similar that it was almost comical.

  I set milk and sugar on the table, along with cups for me and Johnson. Then I took the percolator off the stove and poured. I offered to refill Sinkovich’s cup, but he put his hand over the rim.

  Johnson gave Sinkovich a wary look, then sat down. “What’s this about, Bill?”

  Someday, I realized, I would tell him my real name. I wanted to trust him more than I already did. But I knew it wasn’t wise.

  Before I sat down, I went into my office and grabbed the photographs that Saul Epstein had taken of Louis Foster’s body. I brought them out as the radiator clanked on. The apartment was about to enter its warm phase.

  “Last Friday,” I said, “I got hired on to investigate a murder case. Take a look at these pictures.”

  I tossed them onto the table. Johnson took them first, looking at each one. His expression revealed nothing, but his intensity did. He saw exactly what I had seen.

  Without a word, he passed the photographs to Sinkovich. Sinkovich looked at the first, then set it faceup on the table. He patted his T-shirt pocket, but failed to find cigarettes. His hands shook. Then he got up, poured himself more coffee, and sat back down.

  For a long time, neither man said anything. They studied the photos. I drank my coffee, wincing at the bitter, burned taste.

  When I got up to make fresh, Johnson said, “Last Friday?”

  “Yeah,” I said, knowing what was coming.

  “And you didn’t contact me?”

  “There’s already a police file on it,” I said as I poured out the remains of the coffee that Sinkovich had made. He was still staring at the photos as if no one had spoken.

  “So?” Johnson said.

  “The investigating officers thought it was robbery. Gang-related.” I rinsed the percolator, then filled it with water.

  “White cops,” Johnson said with contempt.

  “Hey!” Sinkovich said.

  “I don’t know if they were white,” I said, hoping to keep peace between the two. “I didn’t talk to them.”

  “You found this and you didn’t talk to anyone?” Johnson asked.

  “What, you think you can do better than we can?” Sinkovich asked, suddenly all cop.

  “Who noticed the connection, Jack?” I put the metal filter and its holder into the percolator, then filled the top with coffee grounds. The rich scent of the grounds was like a balm. “It wasn’t the Chicago PD.”

  “Not everyone knows what’s going on there,” he said sullenly.

  “You’d think they’d know about cases that are so important they’ve been sent to the FBI.” I was referring to the murders of the first two boys.

  “I told you,” Johnson said. “Those cases were ignored.”

  “Except by our copycat.”

  “What copycat?” Sinkovich asked.

  I waited for Johnson to answer. He didn’t say anything, probably hoping I would. But I wasn’t going to talk about the case. I’d made that clear in August. Not even Johnson knew what I had done and I meant to keep it that way. He had his suspicions, and he knew that sometimes we had to operate outside of the law.

  Ironic, then, that Sinkovich was in trouble for preventing that very thing. His unit believed that he should have ignored what his neighbors were doing; his conscience hadn’t let him.

  “What copycat?” Sinkovich asked again.

  Finally Johnson answered him. “The boy we found last August was killed by a copycat.”

  “You know that for a fact?” Sinkovich asked.

  Johnson nodded.

  “You catch the son of a bitch?”

  I could feel the silence. I knew that Johnson was looking at me. I put the percolator on the burner and turned on the gas, then kept busy so that I wouldn’t have to turn around and face him.

  “I think so,” Johnson said after a moment.

  I turned around then. Both men were looking at me.

  “That true, Grimshaw?” Sinkovich asked.

  “If Truman says so.” I sat down.

  A small smile touched the corner of Johnson’s lips. This was a game we’d play for the rest of our lives, and we both knew it.

  “Let me get this straight,” Sinkovich said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the table. “We got two little boys who died this way, and one grown man.”

  “No,” I said. “We have seven others.”

  “Seven!” Johnson looked stunned.

  I nodded. “That’s why I called you. I’ve found possible victims that go back to February of sixty-seven, maybe farther. The M.O. seems to be the same in all of them, but I can’t tell just from the newspaper records.”

  “Seven?” Sinkovich frowned. “How’s that possible?”

  I slipped a piece of paper with the pertinent facts of the cases to Johnson. “I’d like to see the police files on these cases.”

  “Civilians can’t—”

  “Stop,” I said, my fingers still on the piece of paper. “You wouldn’t have these names without me. You wouldn’t have anything except those two boys, whose cases are getting colder by the second. You can share this.”

  “Hell, I’d share it,” Sinkovich said, “except I can’t even get into the precinct right now.”

  Johnson was staring at me.

  “Your choice,” I said to him.

  “You’d let a creep get away because of your pride?” Johnson said.

  I pulled the paper back. “I didn’t say he’d get away. It’ll just take me longer to catch him, that’s all.”

  “How do you know these cases are connected?” Sinkovich had the same look on his face that he’d had when I had talked to him about the Richardson case last summer—a look of great curiosity mixed with fear.

  “All of them were found in cemeteries or parks or other public places,” I said. “All of them appeared to be out of context. Most were thought to be victims of robberies, yet their most valuable possessions remained on their bodies. All of them had been stabbed.”

  “That’s it?” Sinkovich asked. “What about the shoe? What about the position of the bodies? You can’t make a connection like that without some kind of confirming evidence.”

  “I know.” I kept my voice calm. “That’s why I want to see the police files. The newspaper didn’t have any of that information.”

  “Why don’t you just let me handle it from here?” Johnson asked. “You got us going. You’ll get credit.”

  “Handle it like you’ve been handling the other two cases?” I asked. “All you managed to do was leak enough information for a copycat to hear about them. You’re the one who told me that those cases would be ignored.”

  Sinkovich turned his head toward Johnson. “You said that?”

  “Two little black boys dying near the ghetto,” Johnson said. “What do you think?”

  “Why’d you give up the cases then?” Sinkovich asked.

  “My superior sent them to the FBI, just like they’re supposed to when there are multiple homicides with the same M.O.”

  “So that’s where these are going?” Sinkovich asked.

  Johnson didn’t answer.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “You think with nine possibles behind this guy that the cops will continue to ignore him? I mean, stuff like this, it’s like the Strangler case. Nine possibles and we got some nut running around the city killing people at random.” Sinkovich was looking back and forth between me and Johnson as he spoke. “Shit, Richard Speck went on a spree here two summers ago and the whole city was living in terror. We caught him pretty damn fast, but I remember those days. Everyone was scared. And Speck did all his killings on one night. I can’t imagine how this city’ll react when it learns there’s been nine victims over the space of years.”

  “It probably won’t react at all,” I said.

  “What?” Sinkovich turned so fast he almost
knocked over his coffee cup. It wobbled and he stopped it with one hand.

  “Speck’s victims were white,” I said.

  Johnson raised his head slightly. I had his attention now.

  “There’s so much killing down here that no one really pays attention. How many murders go unsolved or are attributed to gang violence?” I looked at both of them.

  Neither answered me. Their silence was answer enough.

  “I’ll wager that the only reason those two boys’ cases got sent to the feebies was because Truman here pushed for help, saying that these didn’t look like typical gang killings.”

  “I didn’t push for help.” Johnson’s voice was soft. “I just wanted to combine the cases. My commander looked at the files, realized that these weren’t typical gang killings, and sent them on. It was a smart way to make sure I wouldn’t waste my time on unimportant homicides.”

  He managed to say the last with only a minimum of bitterness.

  “They can’t ignore this many cases,” Sinkovich said.

  “Why not?” Johnson put one elbow on the back of his chair so he could see Sinkovich clearly.

  “Because if Grimshaw’s right, we got some kind of mass murderer working the streets of Chicago.”

  “Killing black people.” Johnson seemed perfectly relaxed. I was beginning to realize that when he seemed relaxed, he was the most dangerous. “Didn’t you just say that you can’t go to work today? Is that because you betrayed your neighbors for doing the right thing, even though it was against the law?”

  Sinkovich flushed. “I never said they did the right thing.”

  “I know you didn’t,” Johnson said. “But I heard a rumor this morning that a judge chastised you for handling the case improperly. And there’s talk all through the city that you’re going to be given a desk because you’re not fit to be on the street.”

  “What?” Sinkovich’s eyes widened. “Is that true?”

  Johnson nodded.

  “Oh, shit.” Sinkovich bowed his head and ran his hands through his hair. It was too long to be called a crewcut now, and his fingers made it stick out in tufts. “They’re going to try to chase me out.”

  “You don’t play nice anymore,” Johnson said.