Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  The men’s locker room was near the laundry, so the air smelled of dryers and lint, and was even more humid than it was anywhere else in Chicago. The floor shuddered from the vibration of dozens of industrial-strength dryers rotating all at once, and the walls were wet with condensation. The very unpleasantness of the area made it impossible to linger, even if I had been inclined, which I wasn’t.

  Every guard was assigned two uniforms. The uniforms had numbers on them and were hung in rows near the locker room doors. After completing a shift, we were supposed to give our uniforms to laundry and dry cleaning where they’d be cleaned and pressed and hung for the new day. The only thing we were responsible for was our shoes—expensive shoes that had to be polished perfectly or we’d be fired.

  There were many firing offenses at this job. So far, I’d managed to dodge all of them.

  I changed out of my street clothes, and went to the staff lounge—usually off limits for such lowly employees as me—for the meeting.

  The room was smaller than I expected it to be. Metal folding chairs, lined up in rows, didn’t help the impression of size. Someone had placed a portable chalkboard up front along with a podium that seemed too big for the room. Most of the chairs were full. I slipped into one in the back, crossed my arms, and waited.

  It didn’t take long. Promptly at three o’clock a group of men in suits entered. They all wore gold Hilton name badges, like I did. I sighed and settled in, and then froze.

  Following the Hilton employees were more men in suits, only these guys looked like official government employees, probably FBI. Althea was right—white or black, there was a look to these men that wasn’t quite the same as the rest of us, as if they wore armor under their clothes. Something in their faces brooked no questions, and their eyes seemed dead.

  Behind them were four Chicago cops in uniform. They were laughing and joking with each other, which didn’t make me any calmer.

  “This is a final formal training session for the Democratic National Convention,” said Walt Kotlarz. He was my overall supervisor, solid, decent in midwestern sort of way. He’d insulted me half a dozen times while I’d been working for him, but all of the insults were unintentional. In fact, if I had pointed them out to him, he would have been appalled.

  He was clinging to the podium as if it were his lifeline. Apparently Kotlarz wasn’t used to speaking before a group.

  “In previous meetings, we established behavior for the upcoming convention. Those plans will remain in place. However, due to the growing number of young people and agitators in Lincoln Park, the city has asked us to make other changes. And we’ve received some involvement from the federal government as well.”

  I stiffened.

  “Since many of the delegates and all of the candidates will be staying here, we’ve been assigned an extra contingent of Chicago police officers who will help with security—”

  I cursed silently.

  “—but we have expectations of the rest of you as well.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Let me let turn this over to Roy Gaines. He’s with the United States Secret Service.”

  Murmurs ran through the group. We had been warned that there would be Secret Service in the hotel, but we had been told that they would handle the candidates. We would be responsible for the rest of the guests.

  Apparently that plan had changed.

  Gaines, a slender, balding man, stepped up to the podium, but didn’t touch it. He wore a loose suit coat that probably hid a weapon and his dark gaze missed nothing. It met mine for a moment, and I had to will myself not to look away.

  “After the assassination of Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., the president asked Congress to authorize Secret Service protection for all presidential and vice-presidential candidates.” Gaines paused. “Congress did not take action until after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June. Senator Kennedy, if you’ll recall, was shot in the kitchen of Ambassador Hotel, an upscale establishment not unlike this one.”

  He had our attention. No one fidgeted, and the room was silent.

  “The kitchen was an unsecured area. A dozen kitchen employees stood around, waiting to see the famous man. Hotels are places where strangers gather. Not even hotel employees know each other. Sirhan Sirhan stood in that kitchen along with everyone else. No one knew him. No one checked him for weapons. And when he pulled a gun, everyone was surprised.”

  A chill ran through me.

  “The candidate went down instantly, and even though the gunman was subdued at the scene, the damage was done. Kennedy died the next day.”

  “Jeez,” murmured the guy next to me. Apparently he was having the same thought I was. We’d known how Kennedy died. We’d seen the photos, heard the recordings. We followed the press coverage in shock like everyone else.

  And while we knew it had happened in a hotel, we hadn’t understood what that meant for us. I hadn’t thought about it at all. I knew the Democrats were coming to Chicago, but I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention. I had other things on my mind.

  “The highest level of security will run through us,” Gaines said. “Most of your dealings will be with the Chicago Police Department. We are expecting a lot of trouble. There have been plans to disrupt this convention since December. Groups like the Yippies have made a national crusade of coming to Chicago at the end of August.”

  The man in front of me shifted in his chair, hands clenching. Two of the official men in suits stared at him. No one else seemed to notice the movement.

  “A young man was shot this afternoon near Lincoln Park. He was identified as a Yippie. He fired at police with a thirty-two. They returned fire. He died at the scene.”

  Gaines spoke of this as dispassionately as he spoke of Kennedy’s death. Behind me, someone exhaled loudly.

  “We do not expect more shootings, but we must be prepared for them. We’ve heard reports from various intelligence-gathering sources that weapons have been sent to Chicago to be used to assassinate presidential candidates. We’ve also heard that black militants plan to lay siege to the city. Hundreds of thousands of protestors are expected. They’ve been applying for marching permits, which have been and will continue to be denied by the city.”

  My own tension grew. I knew we were only hearing a miniscule amount of the information that the Secret Service had.

  “As I said, hotels are particularly vulnerable. We do not want to invade the privacy of guests, but we will need to keep a close watch on anyone suspicious, especially in the employee sections of the hotel, the out-of-the way byways, and the service elevators.”

  Finally he leaned on the podium as if he were trying to draw us closer to him.

  “Your job as hotel security will be to report anything out of the ordinary, escort unwelcome individuals out of the hotel, and to keep an eye out for things that seem abnormal.”

  I suppressed a sigh. In my short two months here, I’d noted nothing normal about day-to-day operations. Life at the hotel constantly shifted in response to the stream of guests that came through it.

  “We’ve already gone through your ranks and cleared out the questionable employees,” Gaines said.

  I felt another chill. I’d been investigated and I hadn’t even known it. Apparently they hadn’t investigated too deeply. Probably just double-checked references and addresses. And then they probably fired the troublemakers. It was a good thing I had lain low, and a good thing the management liked me. Otherwise I would have been one of the people dismissed.

  “The rest of you,” he said, “will be placed on twelve-hour shifts starting Sunday. In the interim, those of you who have not gone to the riot-training sessions must report tomorrow afternoon. We do expect crowd-control problems, and we will need your help handling that if it extends inside the hotel.”

  I let that last sentence reverberate through my brain. In other words, he expected protestors to charge the hotel and perhaps get inside. Now I was more relieved than ever that Jimmy was out of the apartment. I wouldn
’t have been able to spend time with him even if I wanted to—not and keep my precious job.

  At least I’d already gone to the riot-training session. It had been ridiculous. I could have done a better job. In fact, I had done better in Memphis—and even that hadn’t prevented surprises.

  One of the guards raised his hand. Gaines nodded at him.

  “Will we be assigned weapons?” he asked.

  A cop rolled his eyes, but Gaines didn’t seem surprised. “For the most part, you’ll follow standard hotel procedure, which means you will not have weapons. There are ways to subdue violent offenders quickly and efficiently. That’s part of what you’ll learn in your riot-training session.”

  Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as Gaines was making it sound. After all, it was his job to prepare us. There had been riots at the Republican convention in Miami, but they had been restricted to Libertyville, the black area. They never got closer than a mile away from the convention hall and never hit the hotels.

  Chicago was doing everything it could to prevent riots in the Black Belt. And I didn’t really see the same kind of black unrest focused at the Democrats. The Republicans were perceived as not only lily white but as unsympathetic to civil rights. The Party of Lincoln had stopped caring about the black man more than fifty years ago.

  The Democrats had become our party, and while we did need to make them aware of the problems within our communities, there didn’t seem to be the same sort of agitation about it as there was with the Republicans.

  No, Gaines and his companions were more afraid of the Yippies and the hippies, people who could get into this hotel easily because they were white and looked like they belonged—if, of course, they dressed the part.

  The problem was, because of my skin color, I’d have trouble stopping them. But I wasn’t about to say that to anyone.

  “We have a new work schedule posted in the break room,” Gaines said. “Anyone who has questions should see his immediate supervisor. Any questions?”

  The questions mostly reiterated the points Gaines had made earlier. If he had thought us the weak links in his little army before he came into the room, he had to be convinced of it now.

  * * *

  For the first half of my shift, I was assigned lobby detail. It consisted of standing in one spot and watching the arrivals. The hotel was beginning to take on its convention persona. The advance men had arrived a few days ago, but the rest of each candidate’s staff stood in line waiting to check in, their boxes of posters, buttons, and campaign hats kept near their feet.

  People greeted each other noisily, shook hands, and made false-sounding jibes about their opposition’s chances. The media had started to arrive as well—mostly the television support staff, gophers, research assistants, electricians. Daley had made it impossible for the TV crews to do live coverage throughout the city, so the three networks brought in vans, trailers, and large teams to coordinate coverage. Most stayed at the hotel, and most checked in that day.

  At the end of our meeting, we’d been briefed on the various kinds of passes—everyone from press to the delegates had to wear passes at all times—and we were assigned passes of our own. The garages and doors would be guarded. In order to enter, we had show that we had official reason. Since our uniforms were inside, the pass provided access.

  I hated the rules almost as much as I hated standing in one spot. The entrance to the hotel was grand and ornate—columns that went up three stories, stairs winding in two different directions, ballrooms off each, and a ten-foot-tall marble clock in the middle of the floor.

  But the lobby, which was inside double doors on the first floor, was square and low ceilinged. A bank of elevators stood on the west wall, and people gathered in front of them, carrying on long conversations before heading to the Haymarket Lounge, the hotel bar. By the end of my shift, the cigarette smoke was so thick, I could barely see the registration desk.

  I was happier to leave than I usually was. I grabbed a box with a Hilton label as I walked out the employee exit, and placed Jimmy’s clothes in it when I reached the car. If anyone looked, it would seem like I was making a late-night delivery for the hotel.

  No one followed me to Laura’s. I left the clothes at the security desk as I had promised, acting as if it were a delivery too. Until I knew what was going on, the less I stopped here, the safer Jimmy would be.

  And Laura as well.

  I returned to the apartment at one-thirty. Franklin was still awake. He wore a loose cotton robe over a pair of shorts, the robe open, revealing his no-longer-firm stomach. His hair was thinning on top. We were all getting older. Sometimes I didn’t notice it in myself, just in my friends.

  He sat at the kitchen table, law books open before him, a legal pad underneath the lamp he had moved from one of the end tables. A plate covered with the remains of raspberry pie teetered precariously off a three-ring binder.

  Being in air-conditioning all evening made the apartment seem even hotter than it was. The two big fans the Grimshaws owned were in the living room, one blowing the inside hot air out through the fire escape window, and the other trained on Franklin. They didn’t seem to be making much of a difference.

  “You shook up Althea real good,” Franklin said.

  I opened the refrigerator and took out the last of the lemonade. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I’ve never seen her pack and leave so fast.”

  There was no ice left in the trays. I took them out of the freezer and poured water on them, then put them back inside.

  “You want to tell me what this is all about?” Franklin asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Smokey, I knew you and the boy were in trouble. That was obvious when you called me from Wilmette. It would take a threat of death to get you out of Memphis. Which is what this is all about, right? Someone’s after you?”

  There was one piece of pie left, and even though I was hungry, I didn’t feel entitled to it. I sat down at the table.

  “This isn’t something you want to know, Franklin.”

  “I want to know why my family’s spending the next two weeks in Milwaukee.”

  I sipped. The lemonade was sweeter toward the bottom, where the sugar had settled in the pitcher. “If you want me to move, I will. I was just afraid that even if I vacated your apartment, you might still have problems.”

  “I’m not asking you to move, Smokey. I’m asking you to talk to me.”

  I sighed.

  “I’ll keep my own counsel,” he said. “I won’t tell Althea or anyone else if that’s what’s bothering you. And you know you can trust me.”

  Yes, I did. If I hadn’t known that, I wouldn’t have come to him in the first place.

  I got up and took that last piece of pie. Then I told him the entire story.

  * * *

  The night Martin died, I had been in my offices on Beale Street, cleaning up client files, doing final billings, and tending to work I had neglected the previous few weeks. Laura had just left, although I didn’t tell Franklin that. Jimmy was living with a foster family. His foster mother called to tell me that he was missing. He’d been disappearing a lot, searching for his older brother, who was mixed up in troubles of his own.

  I had a hunch I knew where Jimmy was—or at least the places he might be. I had made the mistake of telling him where I had last seen his brother. Jimmy had been known to trail after Joe. I told Jimmy’s foster mother I’d do what I could, when I heard shouts from the street below.

  The shouts had a strange quality to them. I told Jimmy’s foster mother I’d get back to her, then I hung up and went to the window.

  The street was full of people. It had been empty when I had watched Laura cross. Now crowds covered the sidewalks. Some people had run into the middle of the road. They were crying and shouting and holding each other.

  Something was very wrong.

  I hurried out of my office to the street below. I had to push my way through the crowd. When I asked what was goin
g on, a woman said, “They say Dr. King was shot down at the Lorraine.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody. They been running through the street, shouting it.”

  The Lorraine Motel was only a few blocks away, but I hadn’t heard anything. I had been preoccupied with my phone call.

  While Martin was being shot.

  I didn’t even thank her. I ran toward the Lorraine Motel. I wasn’t the only one running. Others were heading in the same direction, as if they were drawn by the news or as if their disbelief had forced them to see if what they had heard was true.

  Sirens filled the neighborhood and the closer I got the more police officers I saw. When I reached Mulberry Street, where the motel was, I was shocked to find it already blocked off.

  The ambulance was just leaving the motel as I arrived, yet there were dozens of police officers on the street. Firemen from the nearby station were hauling barricades and placing them on side roads.

  Cops were all over the hotel’s balcony, and I recognized some of Martin’s lieutenants, talking to them, looking stunned.

  That was when a white cop grabbed my arm.

  “This area’s restricted,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe what I had heard and there was too much chaos around me. I wanted to confirm the story.

  “Who was shot?” I asked.

  “King.” The cop said Martin’s name as if he’d found it offensive.

  “Did you get the shooter?”

  “You have to leave,” the officer said, his grip tightening.

  More cops had arrived. A lot of them were standing around. A few were removing bystanders.

  Two cops had hold of a little boy and were trying to force him into a squad car.

  The boy was black. He looked familiar.