Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “Of course he is. Why?”

  “He’s the one you concentrate on now, Grace. Let Daniel be Daniel.” And then I hung up.

  “Aren’t you the wise one?” Franklin said, grinning at me.

  I shook my head. “It’s not my fight.”

  “Daniel would disagree.” This from Malcolm, who was still lying on the couch.

  “Daniel would be happy to know that I’m leaving him alone,” I said. Then I excused myself and went to the shower. I had had a bad night, and I had a hunch the day wasn’t going to be much better.

  * * *

  I drove to the West Side to investigate the tip that Sinkovich gave me. Along the way, I checked in with Jimmy and Laura from a pay phone near the University of Chicago. They seemed to be fine. Laura reported their first racist incident—she’d managed to avoid them up until that point by frequenting places where she was well known. She’d made the mistake of going to a restaurant she wasn’t familiar with and having the waiter refuse to serve Jimmy. Apparently Laura created enough of a scene that the owner promised her free meals for life.

  She told the story as if it amused her, but she was still angry. I was too tired to be angry, and too preoccupied. Besides, the incident wasn’t unexpected. I was amazed it had taken this long for something to happen.

  I hung up, and got in the car, refusing to dwell on impossibilities. The drive to the West Side took more time than I had planned because I had to detour several miles around the Amphitheater. When I finally reached the old Ramparts offices, I had lost an hour to traffic delays.

  Franklin had known where Ramparts had been, but he didn’t know where they had moved to. He said they were still publishing out of their Chicago branch (it was a California-based operation) and he gave me the special convention broadsheet for the day before. I hadn’t asked where he had gotten the protest newspaper or why he had held onto it.

  The neighborhood was on the fringes of the streets burned in the riots after Martin died. Several buildings a block north were charred, and many looked abandoned. Most were covered in graffiti. Burned-out and broken-down cars hugged the curb. In this area, the Impala fit right in.

  I parked in front of the address Franklin had given me and got out. The door to the former Ramparts building had been torn off its hinges, and inside there was a layer of dust.

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  The voice came from behind me. I turned. A man about twenty stood behind me. He was wearing a fringed vest with no shirt beneath, frayed blue jeans, and sandals. He wore his hair in an afro so large that it seemed to overpower his head.

  “I’m looking for Ramparts.”

  “Moved,” he said.

  “Where?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m also looking for a man who drives a blue Olds, New York plates. He’d be dressed something like you.”

  He grinned. “The Professor?”

  I felt a shiver run through me. “Yeah.”

  “I haven’t seen him in four or five days. I figure he’s in Lincoln Park.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  My informant shrugged again. “Not my scene, man.”

  “Is there anyone else around here who might know where he is?”

  The friendliness was leaving his face. I was asking too many questions. “The students he brought. You’d find them at the park, I’m sure.”

  “Students?”

  “He brought a carload from Columbia. For the protests.”

  “All black?”

  My informant looked at me as if I were crazy. “You think he’d bring white kids here?”

  “Ramparts has a white staff.”

  “And is Ramparts here anymore?” he asked.

  “Good point,” I said. “Who would I be looking for in Lincoln Park? Have any names?”

  “What’re you? A narc?”

  I shook my head. “I’m just looking for an old friend.”

  “Sure. And I’m Muhammad Ali.”

  I sighed. “Is the Professor staying nearby?”

  “Like I said, I ain’t seen him or his car in days.” The kid had started backing away from me. I only had a shot at one more question.

  “You ever hear anyone call him anything besides the Professor?”

  “Nope.” And his tone said he wouldn’t have told me even if he had. He turned away and headed down the street, his walk fast, his head down.

  I went inside the building, but found nothing except locked doors and dust. When I came back outside, no one was on the street. I wondered if the kid had warned people away from me.

  By then, it was time for work. Work, which felt like it was interfering more and more. The last thing I wanted to do was stand in corners and watch rich white people discuss the future of the country.

  I hadn’t gotten half of my chores done that day; I hadn’t managed to question any neighbors, not research the old cases or talk to Truman Johnson. I hadn’t found my shadow, although I had some more information about him.

  If this Professor was the man I was looking for, then he had come with a carload of ringers, people who would disrupt the demonstrations. Whether they were from New York or not was impossible to determine.

  But there would be no reason for a man from New York to hang out on street corners in our neighborhood.

  I resolved to come back here and see what else I could find.

  * * *

  I got to work at one, and by four I had caught three college-age women who had facial tissues dipped in butyric acid stuffed in their purses. The tissues made crude stink bombs that the women clearly planned to dump in the hotel. Butyric acid smelled like rotten eggs, and that was what clued me. As they walked past, the stench followed them.

  I took them to a cop who arrested them—on what charge, I didn’t know and didn’t care.

  Apparently the protestors were using women to get into the hotels because the cops usually didn’t stop them. The women had cleaned up nicely and looked as if they belonged. I caught another group outside of the downstairs ladies room, spray painting PIGS across the door.

  The message was lost on me, and I thought the entire incident rather silly.

  By five, my sense of absurdity had fled. Several hundred marchers had converged on the front entrance, chanting in question-and-answer style:

  What do we want?

  Revolution.

  When do we want it?

  Now!

  The delegates were at the convention, but the support staff and some of the press watched the entire thing from the Haymarket Lounge. To them, it was just something else to talk about, but it was beginning to anger the cops out front. I could tell from the way they fingered their nightstick and, the flushes that were building on their cheeks.

  I went to the other entrances to make sure they were secure. When I got back, the marchers had left the Hilton and were circling the Logan statue in Grant Park. Some idiot had draped the statue in a Viet Cong flag, and that was enough to set off the police.

  They started a northward sweep and beat any demonstrators who came near them. We watched all of this from the hotel windows, prepared to blockade the place if we had to. There were at least a thousand protestors in Grant Park, most of them listening to speeches and cheering.

  But when the police started their action, everything stopped until the streets were clear. It took about an hour to get everyone quieted down.

  My boss, Walt Kotlarz, watched from beside me. When the demonstrators started heading north, toward Lincoln Park, he sighed.

  “I hope to hell we can continue dodging these bullets,” he said.

  * * *

  The twelve-hour shifts cut into my time. I got home at two, went to bed, and was up by seven. By eight, I was back on the West Side. I spoke to an elderly man who didn’t remember anyone and some children who had seen the Professor. They believed they had heard someone call him Tim.

  Besides those people, though, no one else would talk to me. No one knew where the Professor had gone
and no one had seen him in last several days. No one knew who his companions were or where they had gone.

  It was a dead end.

  I still had some time before work, so I went to the library to search the newspapers for articles on the previous murders. The librarian, a dried-up little old white woman, frowned at me as I pawed through the newsprint—most of the issues I wanted weren’t yet on microfiche—but she didn’t interfere. I wasn’t the only black face in the research area, although mine was probably the oldest.

  The Defender covered the stories in depth, but told me nothing more about the murders than Johnson had. The paper’s stories did give me family names and addresses, though, and I wrote them down diligently, not sure how I was going to use them.

  The Tribune, and The Sun-Times both gave the deaths an inch in their city sections and then never returned to the stories. The neighborhood weeklies didn’t cover the murders at all.

  It took the rest of the morning to find all of that. Then I drove past the places where the other two bodies had been left. Both were public, both were open, about as different from Brian’s death site as they could possibly be.

  I wanted to talk to Johnson, but I didn’t have time. All I had time to do was check in with Jimmy and Laura before I went to work.

  The first thing that greeted me at the Hilton was the stench of rotten eggs. Apparently my colleagues hadn’t caught other protestors who brought in stink bombs. The smell pervaded the first three floors of the hotel.

  That day, I was just as busy as the day before. I caught a clean-cut white boy lighting campaign literature on fire at the top of a lobby stairwell. He’d been trying to burn down the hotel.

  Around midnight, I found a homemade bomb made of plastique in one of the elevators. Apparently the bomb hadn’t gone off as planned—a good thing, since the delegates had just returned.

  But the worst moment for me that day came shortly after my shift began. The remains of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign sponsored a mule train to draw the attention of the world to the plight of the impoverished.

  The train stopped outside the Hilton’s front entrance, and Kotlarz sent me to keep an eye on everything. I went through the main doors, and immediately melted back inside them. Ralph Abernathy had been standing near the entrance. Ralph had worked with Martin for years and was trying to keep Martin’s dream alive, by leading the Poor People’s Campaign. I’d known Ralph casually for years, and we had just seen each six months before at Martin’s disastrous last march.

  I didn’t dare let anyone notice me. They couldn’t know that I was here.

  Fortunately none of them were staying at the Hilton, but I didn’t know how long I could continue hiding.

  Only luck was keeping me from being found out.

  * * *

  Brian Richardson’s funeral was held on Wednesday morning at the First Presbyterian Church. I borrowed a suit from Franklin—his winter suit, made of black wool. The pants were too short and the coat too big, but I had nothing better. I wore my work shoes and resigned myself to being uncomfortable for the entire day.

  I drove alone, even though Franklin and Malcolm planned to attend. I wanted to talk to people, if possible, follow a few leads if I got them, and see what I could discover.

  Franklin and Malcolm left for the church before I did. I wanted to see if they were being followed, but no one tailed Franklin’s dusty sedan. I didn’t see anyone in my rear view mirror either as I drove into the heart of the Woodlawn neighborhood.

  The church was the most dominant feature in the triangle formed by Washington Park, Jackson Park and Oakwoods Cemetery. I’d driven past the church a number of times in my months in Chicago, but I’d never had occasion to stop.

  It was a grand stone building with a tall bell tower done in the Gothic tradition. I’d never seen a black church quite like this one—as large, yes, but not as classic. I parked in the spacious lot and followed a well-dressed family toward the church.

  As I got closer to the building, I realized some of the stained-glass windows were broken. Blocks of wood covered the damaged panels. The stone exterior had been riddled with bullet holes.

  A shiver ran down my back. In Memphis, people didn’t shoot at churches. Unlike other places in the South and, apparently, the North, the people of Memphis still believed that God’s house was sacred.

  As we went inside, a white woman wearing a shapeless black dress and small black hat with veil greeted us. She took our hands in her tiny gloved ones, and said, “The service will be in the chapel today. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  I must have given her a startled glance, for she responded by patting me and pointing down a hallway.

  I followed the family toward the swelling piano music playing hymns I didn’t recognize, all of them in minor keys, appropriately somber for an extremely somber day. The piano music was beautiful, but I would have expected a church like this to have a pipe organ.

  As I walked, I realized we weren’t heading to the sanctuary but to the chapel. The sanctuary was quite large. Apparently someone had thought a funeral for a child wouldn’t need that much room.

  But when we reached the chapel, it was clear that whoever had made the decision had miscalculated. The wooden chairs sitting on the stone floor were full, and people were standing in the back. A white minister in full black robes sat in a high-backed chair in front of the stained-glass windows.

  Brian’s coffin stood in front of the minister. The coffin was polished but clearly cheap, and it was closed. On top of it lay flower garlands that trailed to the floor. A picture of Brian sat on the wooden table beside the minister, right in front of a large white cross.

  The piano I had heard was a baby grand. It seemed dwarfed by the room, which was not small by anyone’s measure.

  An elderly white man in a black suit handed me a program and apologized that there were no chairs left. I gave him the same startled glance I had given the woman. I hadn’t expected to see any white faces here.

  But there were dozens of them, many of them seated on the wooden chairs. Brian’s mother was in the first row, surrounded by family. She wasn’t sobbing now. She was sitting with her back straight, her proud face staring at her son’s coffin. A man who must have been her estranged husband sat on the aisle, all alone. His face was blotchy with tears, and he held a crumpled program in his left hand.

  Malcolm and Franklin had both managed to get seats. I stood in the back left corner and leaned against the curtain-covered wall. A young black man, also carrying programs, approached me.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said softly, “but that wall’s not real sturdy there. You want I should find a chair?”

  I shook my head, the feeling of unreality still with me. The young man who had spoken to me was no older than Malcolm. This congregation was mixed and comfortable with it.

  I had never seen anything like it in my life.

  The piano music rose to a crescendo and then stopped. The minister stood and walked toward the small podium on the right side of the chapel. He was slender, and younger than I was. The podium looked like a portable lectern my professors had used in college.

  “Today,” he said, “the Lord has visited upon us unimaginable sorrow…”

  And that was the moment I turned my attention away from the service. Christian funerals, white or black, it seemed, were fundamentally the same, made up of platitudes that tried to make some sense of the horrible death of a ten-year-old boy.

  Instead of listening, I watched, and looked at faces, familiar and unfamiliar. The white faces were all unfamiliar. Some of them were elderly, clearly members of the church, but the rest belonged to young families.

  The whites mingled with the blacks. No one sat in a separate section. Often white parents and their children sat next to black parents and their children. It was a difficult day for all of them, I knew. It would be some of those children’s first experience with death.

  Grace Kirkland and Elijah sat toward the front. Dani
el was not with them. He had apparently not felt it important to come back from Lincoln Park. Marvella sat near them, and beside her was her cousin Truman Johnson. I didn’t see any of the white cops who’d been assigned to the case.

  I scanned for afros and found them, all in the same two rows. Teenage boys wearing leather jackets and, incongruously, ties sat shoulder to shoulder with each other. I recognized one boy. He lived upstairs with his grandmother, and he was a member of the Blackstone Rangers.

  The other boys had to belong to the same gang, but again, no one bothered them. Not even Detective Johnson gave them a sideways look. I watched as they stood to sing hymns, their heads down, their caps on the floor. They had no weapons and they seemed at ease.

  None of them fit the description Marvella had originally given me. As carefully as I could, I looked at the people surrounding me, but none of them fit the description either. Most of them were my age or older, all of them with care marks on their faces, and a look of sorrow in their eyes.

  Then I noticed something was different from the Baptist funerals I’d been to in Memphis. This funeral was subdued. Brian’s mother sobbed in the front row, but quietly. There was no wailing, no screaming, only sniffles and tear-streaked faces. The grief seemed more terrible for all that.

  No one stood up to speak except the minister, who gave a confused little sermon that tried to find meaning in senseless death. Brian’s father attempted to read a passage from Job, but couldn’t finish it. A white boy no older than Brian who identified himself as Brian’s best friend read the twenty-third Psalm.

  “‘Yea,’” he said in a forceful voice, as if the passage could give them all comfort, “‘though I walk through Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil for Thou art with me….’”

  The passage didn’t comfort me. I’d seen Brian’s face. As he had walked through that valley, he had feared the evil before him. And he had found no comforting rod or staff, no benign presence. He had died in a way no human should die, and certainly no child. As I stared at that small coffin, I felt my fingers clench into fists.