Children—and Jimmy in particular—were why my second gun was in the bank and why I usually kept my primary weapon locked in the glove box of the van. Hard to get to, but there if I needed it.
And I had needed it.
Thank heavens Jimmy had listened to me. Thank heavens he hadn’t touched it the day before.
We might have had a very different discussion at the hospital. If things had gone as well.
It took me longer than expected at the bank. I hadn’t expected lines first thing in the morning. But I went to the safe-deposit box, trying not to look nervous or suspicious, and took out my gun. It was a Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless. Even though they stopped making these things about twenty years ago, Chicago was littered with them. They’d been the gun of choice for the bootleggers, gangsters, and thugs that had dominated this town thirty years ago.
They weren’t cheap, though; everyone wanted a gun that could fit into the pocket and not fire accidentally. I’d been lucky to score two of them. Now I would have to find another, without seeming like I was looking for it.
I took this gun out and hefted it in my palm. Small and sleek. It looked like it had when I put it here last fall. I slipped the gun into the pocket of my parka, a move which felt strangely uncomfortable after yesterday.
Then I returned to the van and drove home. Before I got out of the van, I placed the gun in the van’s glove box next to the extra magazines, where the previous gun had been.
It felt good to get the gun off my person.
I wanted to change before I saw Laura. Besides, it would take me at least forty minutes to get downtown in the middle of the morning and at least fifteen to find a place to park.
I had just peeled off the sweater when the phone rang. Busy day. I hurried into my office to answer.
“Investigations,” I said, sounding as curt as I felt.
“Mr. Grimshaw?” A woman’s voice that sounded vaguely familiar.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t need another complication today. “Yes?”
“It’s Darlene Pellman. You know, we talked yesterday about the Model Cities job?”
That seemed like three weeks ago. I made myself sound warm. “Mrs. Pellman. I’m sorry I had to get off the phone so quickly.”
“Oh, that was no problem,” she said. “It’s actually why I called. I was concerned and then your son wasn’t at the after-school program, and I wondered. Well, I figured rather than ask around, I would simply ask you.”
I felt a spurt of irritation. She probably had asked around and hadn’t gotten the answers she wanted.
And then I realized the thought was uncharitable. She thought we were friends. She probably was concerned.
“As you could probably tell, we had a family emergency,” I said, not really knowing what to say to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope everything has worked out all right?”
“We don’t know yet,” I said. “It’ll take a while for things to resolve. But the urgent part of the emergency is over.”
“That’s a blessing at least.” She paused as if she was going to ask more and then decided against it. “I suppose you won’t go after the Model City’s job then?”
“It wasn’t for me, Mrs. Pellman. I was going to encourage you. Did I? I don’t really remember.”
“You did,” she said. “I spoke to my husband. He thinks that I should try.”
“He’s right,” I said. “I will put in a good word if you need it.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll let you know when I see the application.”
She sounded like she was about to hang up when I realized she was one of those people who kept track of everyone else. Such people could be useful if handled well.
“Mrs. Pellman,” I said slowly, picking my words carefully. “I—um—am working on a case, and when we were starting up the after-school program, you mentioned how much you appreciated it because it kept kids out of trouble.”
“I still feel that way, Mr. Grimshaw,” she said primly.
“Me, too,” I said, “but it got me to wondering about the trouble you were referring to. I had assumed you were talking about the gangs. Was I right?”
“Oh, that and other things.” She sounded a bit relieved, as if I had hit on a topic she was used to discussing. “Some of the kids, they end up dealing drugs. And the girls get in trouble, you know, and drop out, and that’s no good for anyone either. They lapse into poverty or worse, and their children grow up to become new gang members.”
I wasn’t going to jump on the girls immediately, particularly if Mrs. Pellman had heard gossip about Lacey. I would work my way back to that.
“I figured the drug dealing was connected to the gangs,” I said.
“Mostly,” Mrs. Pellman said. “Although there are a lot of other sources for drugs in this city.”
“That there are,” I said. “Girls getting in trouble, though, that happens in the best of schools, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose,” she said. “But so many, you know, find an older boy and just run off, thinking it’s true love, when we both know what it is.”
“I guess we do.” I worked at sounding rueful. “Lots of kids go missing these days.”
“They do,” she said. “It’s those hippies and that drug culture. They run away and think they’re going to change the world. The police won’t even look for teenagers any more.”
“They won’t?” I asked. I didn’t know that. “Black children?”
“All children,” she said. “Teenagers. I know white people who are getting very frustrated with the police over this.”
I noted she didn’t say “some of my white friends.” I didn’t doubt her story’s veracity, though. It sounded true, particularly with what I’d been hearing on the local news.
“I would have thought the police would at least have searched for missing white children,” I said.
“They do when the children are under twelve. But if they’re teens and they have any contact with that so-called counterculture, the police want nothing to do with them. Too many runaways going off to rock concerts or San Francisco or something.” She actually tut-tutted. “It’s enough to drive you crazy.”
It was enough to make me even tenser. Maybe I was reading something into her assumptions, but Marvella’s words ran through my mind.
How do you know it was instead of?
If she had been right, if Voss had gone after other girls, then it stood to reason that some of them would go missing, like Mrs. Pellman said.
A shiver ran through me. I hoped I was making all of this up.
“Well,” I said, not sure how to ask her more without making her curious about Lacey, “let me know if you need that recommendation.”
“Oh, I will, Mr. Grimshaw. Thank you for that and for the suggestion.”
“No problem,” I said, and hung up.
I stood with my hand on the receiver for a long time, just letting the conversation replay in my mind. My reaction was pure paranoia, nothing more. She hadn’t said that she personally knew anyone who had gone missing, only that it happened.
Anyone who read the news knew that.
And she had called to get gossip on yesterday’s events. So she liked to spread stories, liked to make things sound more dramatic than they were.
But the back of that hotel had no fire escapes and the windows were boarded off. And Voss had said he took drugged, pliable girls to a back room where he kept them for days until the fight went out of them.
Girls who wouldn’t want to go home after that.
Girls who might not feel like they could.
Surely, this sort of thing didn’t happen to girls with an actual loving family, like Lacey. Surely, she would have gone home the moment she was freed from that back room.
Wouldn’t she?
I honestly didn’t know.
And I wasn’t sure how I could find out.
EIGHTEEN
THE LOOP AT LUNCH was busier than the Loo
p at any other time of day. All of the downtown offices emptied between noon and two, and that included the courthouse in the Chicago Civic Center. Because Mayor Daley had testified at the Chicago Seven trial the day before and the celebrities of the so-called New Left were on this week’s witness list, the national media had sent their most important reporters.
Print reporters got bored and tried to find stories outside of the normal press updates. The print reporters were the major reason I tried to stay away from the Loop for the duration of the trial.
But as more and more celebrities appeared at the trial and as those appearances showed up on national broadcasts, I had also started to worry about the TV people. The people in front of the cameras rarely did much investigating, but they always brought a team with them, and that team’s job was to find the side story that the other channels didn’t have.
Most of the side stories would be about the trial itself and the mostly-white protest movement that it centered around. But I didn’t want to get caught on camera and have someone recognize me.
I parked near the library and walked to Sturdy’s offices, my stocking cap tight around my head and my scarf pulled up against the cold. I had glanced in a mirror before leaving home and confirmed what I had hoped: No one would recognize me, especially if I kept my head down.
I clutched a greasy bag filled with the best Southern-fried chicken I’d found in Chicago along with mashed potatoes, some iffy-looking collard greens, and two pieces of chocolate cake. I needed comfort food, and hoped Laura did too.
Sturdy’s offices on Randall and Dearborn were right across from the Civic Center. Eight stories of grandeur covered in grime and filth, like every other Chicago building in the winter. Laura hadn’t spent a lot of time and attention on Sturdy’s headquarters. Her entire focus had been on changing the nature of her father’s business.
She had become chairman of the board a year ago, and she had made it her business to run the company as well. She was determined to take a corporation built on whispered mob connections, slum housing, and profiteering, and make it profitable but honest.
I applauded her efforts, but wasn’t sure she would be make the company as profitable as she believed. The previous management had raked in millions on the backs of the poor, charging three times the going rate for places that hadn’t seen a repair in decades.
Laura had hired me to inspect her properties one by one. I worked directly for her, even though I often told tenants I was working for Sturdy Investments. The fact that she bankrolled me took care of a lot of problems. It allowed me to work off the books on projects like that death house, which had taken most of my time since late September. Because Laura paid me directly, I would never have to answer shareholder questions about my activities. As far as Sturdy Investments was concerned, I hadn’t done any work for them at all.
Some people inside the corporation knew I did odd jobs for Laura. Judith Clement, her secretary, put me through whenever I called, because Judith knew my calls were important. Others knew I had some connection to the company, but they didn’t know what that connection was.
Television trucks had parked on the plaza and some local reporters were shivering in the outside chill, giving their noon update. No protestors surrounded them, although I had heard there had been a gaggle of them yesterday. It was probably too cold; besides, as far as I could tell, no one with Daley’s level of fame testified today.
I turned my back on the circus and pulled open the heavy glass doors that opened into Sturdy’s two-story lobby. Harried employees headed outside, wearing thick winter coats and fur-lined hats that always made me think of the movie Doctor Zhivago. The employees held briefcases against their sides, and their entire manner spoke of great stress.
Every time I came here during the business day, I remembered why I worked for myself. Right now, I needed the reminder. Yes, my job had been exceptionally stressful for the past six months, but it was a stress I had chosen and, more importantly, I felt like I was doing good work, instead of pushing paper around.
I loosened the scarf, revealing my face so that I didn’t look like a mugger. My black skin was unusual in this part of town, and the long scar along the left side of my face probably didn’t reassure anyone. A lot of people averted their eyes as I passed them.
I got into the elevator and nodded at Abe Fenton, the elderly attendant. He smiled when he saw me, a step forward for us. It had taken him months to acknowledge me.
Some of that might have been my attitude. His very presence had offended me the first time I had arrived at the office. I didn’t like to think of black elevator attendants yes-sirring and no-sirring white corporate employees, like house slaves of old.
But Laura had offered Fenton the opportunity to retire with great benefits. Apparently, he had gotten angry. He thought she was dismissing him for cause. He liked his job, liked greeting people, and liking being the center of everyone’s business day.
So she had given him a considerable raise, and told him he could work as long as he wanted. He told her he wanted to “die with his boots on,” which she assumed meant that one day, she’d get into the elevator, and Fenton would be gone.
He shoved the lever in the ancient elevator toward the seventh floor. As the door closed and the elevator filled with the mouth-watering odor of fried chicken, he nodded at the greasy white bag.
“You get that in the Loop?” he asked.
I shook my head and smiled. “Just off Martin Luther King Boulevard.”
“Now, that makes sense. Some day, they might actually get real food in this part of town, but I ain’t holding my breath.”
“Why do you think I brought my own?” I asked, wishing I had a little extra.
“That pretty white girl what run this place, she ain’t gonna appreciate real Southern fried chicken.” Over the last year, Fenton had figured out my relationship with Laura.
“I don’t know,” I said, “she appreciates me.”
He chuckled as the door started to open. I nodded to him and stepped into the hallway. Directly in front of me, the glass doors with STURDY INVESTMENTS, INC., written on them in gold stood wide open.
A receptionist I didn’t recognize sat behind the blond wood desk. Sturdy had gotten a lot of new employees in the past year as Laura cleaned house. She slowly learned who remained loyal to the previous management and who hadn’t. She let most of the employees who preferred the previous management retire with full benefits, if they were old enough. If not, she gently asked them to leave and paid a generous severance while they looked for work. She also gave them good recommendations, which I didn’t like. But she believed that would keep them quiet and not allow them to say anything bad about Sturdy.
She was probably right.
The receptionist had a pencil behind her ear. She had long black hair that flipped upward at the ends and was covered in so much hairspray that it all moved as a unit. She frowned when she realized I was about to walk past her.
“Sir, you need to check in.” She was very young. She wore pale lipstick that didn’t suit her and fake eyelashes that covered half of her cheeks.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Ms. Hathaway is expecting me.”
“She didn’t inform me, sir.” The receptionist stood as if she could officially block me.
“You can check with Ms. Hathaway, but I’m still going back,” I said, as I continued.
The receptionist almost hopped aside as I got too close to her. She tried to look stern, but her blue eyes were wide. I scared her, just like I scared most white people. She lunged for the phone, looking over her shoulder as I started down the narrow hallway that led to Laura’s office.
I wondered if the poor receptionist was calling security or calling Laura. I figured I would eventually find out.
I got my answer as Judith grinned up at me from her desk outside Laura’s office.
“You’re mean, Mr. Grimshaw,” she said, patting her brown curls. “You’ve scared our new receptionist, and I think
you did so on purpose.”
“You should’ve left my name up front,” I said, grinning back at her.
“Not that it would have done any good,” she said. “You didn’t even bother to tell her who you were.”
I shrugged. “You have to test the new employees every now and then.”
She raised her painted eyebrows playfully. “Next time, I promise. I’ll leave your name and description.”
“I’m not sure that’ll work,” I said. “I’m sure that half of Sturdy’s staff will fit my description.”
“That is a problem,” she said. “You blend in so well.”
Then she laughed, and so did I. No one could ever accuse me of blending in, not in the Loop.
I liked Judith, and I suddenly felt guilty again for not bringing enough food. “Don’t you get lunch?”
Her smile faded. “I already had lunch. I’m supposed to guard the door while you’re inside, and to strictly monitor your appointment.”
“Which means?”
“You have an hour and you’re wasting it by flirting with me,” she said.
“I never waste time when I’m flirting with you,” I said. Then I nodded at the door. “Can I go in?”
She took a deep breath. “If you dare.”
“That kind of day, huh?”
“The morning hasn’t been pretty. I don’t have high hopes for the afternoon, either.”
Great. Just what I needed. Laura in a bad mood already, and then I had to tell her about Lacey.
I glanced at the door. I still loved the plaque Laura had affixed to the pale wood:
LAURA HATHAWAY
STURDY INVESTMENTS, INC.
Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 10
