Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Nelscott, Kris

  Franklin had told me a lot of the history last year, when he had been trying to convince me (and himself) to use the Y for the after-school classes. Once we had looked at the fee structure and the rundown condition of the Y, we had looked elsewhere.

  Besides, at the time, this neighborhood seemed worse to me than the neighborhood around the school.

  I pushed open the doors to the ballroom. Dust rose around me. Someone had turned on the chandeliers, but they hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. The light was as thin as the sunlight had been all week.

  Still, the William Edouard Scott mural caught me, just like it always did. The thing covered one entire wall, which made it at least thirty feet long and about nine feet high. I’d thought it was a WPA project because its strong figures clearly had a 1930s look to them, but Franklin said he’d heard that the YMCA had hired Scott on their own.

  The mural was beautiful. It hadn’t been kept up, though, so parts were faded or two dark. Still, the message always took my breath away. The mural was titled Body, Mind, and Spirit, and it had several distinct sections, all of them pertaining to the Y—kids in athletic clothes, young men singing, a nurse helping an elderly man stand.

  The very center took the “Christian” in the Young Men’s Christian Association seriously, by placing the Y’s old symbol in the middle of some clouds, illuminated by sunlight, just like those church basement portraits of Jesus, surrounded by his flock.

  My eye always went to the sunlit symbol first, and then wandered to parts of the mural so dark and dirty that it was almost impossible to see the illustrations. The last time I was alone in this room, I’d spent half an hour studying the mural and felt like I still hadn’t seen it all.

  “Impressive, huh?” a woman said beside me.

  I looked next to me, then down. A short, square woman stood beside me. She wore overalls with a turtleneck underneath.

  “It’s falling apart,” I said. “I think that’s a shame.”

  “It’s old and out of date,” another woman said. She was sitting at a table, her legs crossed in front of her. She was gaunt, her hair cropped so short that she was nearly bald. “All the women are in helping roles.”

  “What women there are,” Marvella said. She had been standing toward the back, in the gloom that the chandeliers didn’t penetrate.

  I turned. Someone had set up a dozen tables, but only three had people sitting at them. Women sitting at them.

  Marvella wore a white angora sweater over black pants. Somehow she managed keep the sweater fibers off those pants, which was a trick not many women could pull off. Around her neck, she wore a long necklace made up of wooden mismatched black and orange beads.

  “Come and join us, Bill,” she said, sweeping a hand toward the tables.

  Somehow I felt like I was auditioning for a job, rather than talking to them about helping me.

  My eyes were slowly adjusting to the dimness. There were ten women at the tables. Marvella and the short woman beside me made twelve.

  I sat down on a metal folding chair that one of the woman pushed at me. It creaked under my weight.

  The women pulled their chairs closer, looking at me like they’d never seen a man before. I set the folder on the table.

  “I think I’ve wasted your time,” I said to them. “I went over everything this morning, and what I want to do is just not possible—”

  “What is this?” The gaunt woman took the folder and opened it. I started to snatch it back, but Marvella, who was just inside my line of sight, shook her head.

  I reminded myself that the folder held nothing proprietary, not even the diagram of the Starlite Hotel.

  Two other women leaned in as the gaunt woman turned the pages.

  An older woman, her hair graying, her face lined, said, “Marvella already told us about your niece, and she told us about the girls they have imprisoned in that hotel.”

  “I don’t know how many are there,” I said.

  “Well, you can’t give up on them,” the woman snapped at me, as if it were my fault that they had been taken in the first place.

  “Everyone I’ve contacted for help can’t help me for some reason, and I can’t do this alone,” I said.

  “You haven’t asked us yet,” the short woman said.

  I gave Marvella a sideways glance. “I had hoped to have you ladies—”

  And someone snorted at that word. I ignored her.

  “—get the girls out while a group of us made sure the men who were there didn’t interfere.”

  “A group of you men,” corrected a woman I couldn’t quite see in the dimness. “And the men aren’t going to help, are they?”

  I sighed, disliking her tone. “Honestly, the men I know can’t help. And the people I usually rely on aren’t available.”

  I didn’t want to tell these women any more details than that.

  The gaunt woman slapped her hand on the back of the folder, then closed it and slid it across the table. The women on the other side opened it and started through it.

  “You can’t abandon this idea,” the gaunt woman said. “There’s a hundred girls in that folder, all from the school.”

  “Spread over years,” I said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” the gaunt woman said. “We can find them.”

  I looked at her. Her black eyes glinted in the half light. Her face was long. I would have thought her a teenage boy who had just started into his growth if I hadn’t known I was meeting only women.

  “I already found one of them on the flyers. She’d been working as a prostitute for two years, and she was beaten to death last fall.” I said that in as flat a tone as I could manage. “They found her in a vacant lot off West Madison. I expect we’re going to hear the same story about a lot of the girls in that folder.”

  “So that’s reason to give up?” The short woman leaned into toward me. “The girls imprisoned in that hotel, that’s their fate, right? They’re going to end up in a ditch somewhere, and no one’s going to care, and everyone’s going to say there’s nothing we can do.”

  I gave Marvella a helpless glance. She smiled at me, and her smile told me that I was on my own.

  I stood up. “I’m not taking a bunch of women into a whorehouse run by the Chicago mob. No offense, ladies, but I need people who can fight—”

  My leg went out from underneath me, and I fell, landing so hard on the wooden floor that I grunted. Pain jilted up my tailbone.

  A woman half my height and maybe a third my weight stood over me, her hands on her hips. “We can handle ourselves.”

  I had to unclench my teeth. I felt that blow through my entire body. She was good, and I was impressed, just not as impressed as she wanted me to be.

  “Maybe you can handle yourself,” I said, pleased that I didn’t sound breathless. “When you have time to think about the attack and there’s an element of surprise.”

  “There’s always an element of surprise,” she said. “Especially with sexist assholes like you.”

  “Kim,” Marvella said in a warning tone.

  “Oh, don’t get all high and mighty on me, Marvella,” Kim said. “He’s not taking us in because of our gender, not because of our abilities.”

  “I don’t know what your abilities are,” I said as I stood up. My body ached from the hard landing. I brushed off my pants.

  “I had six brothers,” said the gaunt woman. “I know how to fight.”

  “You don’t know how to fight a man who runs security for the mob,” I said. “Those men have fought hand-to-hand all their lives.”

  “And,” she added, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I can shoot better than all of them.”

  That was just what I needed. A group of armed, angry, trigger-happy women heading into the Starlite with me.

  I was shaking my head before I realized it. “I’m glad you want to help. But this isn’t the way. I’m thinking I’ll have to wait until I can get a team together, and yes, I mean men, and I’ll bring you in to get the
girls out.”

  “How long will that take?” I recognized that voice too. Paulette Shipley stood up. She had been sitting in one of the chairs in the back. She was Marvella’s sister. They shared height, build, and those amazing cheekbones. The last time I had seen her, she had been pregnant. She was no longer and didn’t seem to be carrying any baby weight either.

  “It’ll take me a couple months, maybe,” I said.

  “A couple months?” asked the gaunt woman. “More girls will disappear. More will die. Can you live with that?”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets, bumping against the gun. I couldn’t live with it, but I saw no other choice.

  “I’m going to talk to the school’s principal on Monday, and I’ll see what I can do through the school board,” I said. “We’ll try to bide time. Maybe we can go through the system—”

  “You already tried going through the system, Bill,” Marvella snapped, “and you know that hotel is bought and paid for with the complicity of a lot of city officials. Don’t lie to these women.”

  “It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “Getting rid of this hotel is just a Band-Aid on top of a gushing stomach wound.”

  I sounded like Sinkovich. I sounded like every bastard who looked the other way because the problem was too big.

  The older woman stood up. She was almost as tall as I was. She wore a man’s business suit, and it made her look fine. She walked over to me, and everyone watched.

  She slipped her arm through mine. “Tell you what, Mr. Grimshaw,” she said in a honey voice. “Why don’t you sit down and tell us how this would have worked if you had found some men to help you. We’ll figure out if there are modifications we can make or if we have some friends who might be able to be your backup.”

  I almost missed the look she gave the gaunt woman, which was a look of shut-up-and-let-me-deal-with-this-idiot. She was humoring me.

  But she also had a point.

  “All right,” I said, letting her lead me to the table. “I’ll tell you what I wanted to do.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I GRABBED the hotel diagram and spread it on the table. It took several sheets because I had drawn each floor separately so that I could see how many stairs I would have to run, how much ground I would have to cover.

  “The prostitutes do not spend the night in the hotel,” I said. “No john can pay for an entire night. Apparently the mob has different hotels for different purposes. This isn’t a high-end hotel, but it’s not the bottom either.”

  I almost told the women that there were other, specialty hotels, and then I decided that the less they knew the better. Besides, I didn’t want to go into detail if I could at all avoid it.

  “The entire hotel is empty of clients and prostitutes by 5 a.m. By seven-fifteen, the first buses arrive in the back of the school. That’s a two-hour window. I planned to use the first hour, and have the second hour as my cushion.”

  The women had gathered around me. They were leaning over the diagrams too, blocking what little light there was.

  I hesitated for just a moment: I was going to confess to planning a major crime here. However, if I could believe Marvella, these women were committing crimes themselves, mostly by providing illegal abortions. But Marvella had implied that they had done other things as well, things that would make them as unwilling to report me as I was to report them.

  “First,” I said, “I would cut the phone lines.”

  “You know how to do that?” the short woman asked.

  “You’d get them all?” the woman named Kim asked at the same time.

  “Yes,” I said to both of them. “I wouldn’t want any security in the hotel to call for backup, and I doubt they would be on the phone at that hour.”

  “If there are no prostitutes in the hotel,” Paulette said, “why would there be security?”

  “You forget the imprisoned girls,” I said. “Plus the man in the penthouse. Apparently he lives there.”

  “You mean Eddie Turner,” the older woman said.

  My gaze met hers across the table. Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, I know him,” she said. “I always thought he was a snake, but he has half of Bronzeville buffaloed. You’re after him.”

  “He owns the hotel,” I said.

  “And he lives above all of that sin,” another woman said.

  I hated that word. I looked at her, but she didn’t look at me. Her head was bowed. She was studying the diagrams.

  “He knows what’s going on inside,” I said. “He profits from it.”

  “Including girls like Lacey,” Marvella said softly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure he knows exactly how those girls get brought into the life.”

  I had switched to the euphemism midway through, and the gaunt woman shook her head just a little. She knew what I meant. I suspected they all did.

  “There will be security for Eddie,” I said, “and I think the girls are locked in. I wanted to go into the hotel, yell Police Raid!, and then we would all split up. You ladies would go with someone to the sixth floor and get those girls out. Another group of men would start searching the hotel, rousting people out of the rooms, if, indeed, they were in rooms. Another small group would make sure the restaurant was empty.”

  “Where would you be?” the short woman asked me.

  “He’d be going after Turner, wouldn’t you?” Kim asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d deal with Turner. He also has favorites that he tends to keep for the night. I’d make sure there were no girls inside.”

  “You’d take care of him,” Kim said.

  I didn’t answer that.

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “I’d make sure you were all out,” I said. “And then I would burn down the hotel.”

  Gasps all around me.

  “Bill,” Marvella said. “You’re not serious.”

  “I’m perfectly serious,” I said. “If we did all of that and left the building alone, they’d just set up with better security two nights later. The police would be looking for us, and so would the mob, and the operation would start all over again. Girls would get taken from the school, and nothing would have changed.”

  They were all staring at me. No one was looking at the diagrams.

  “But with hotel burned to the ground, they wouldn’t rebuild next to the school. That would be too expensive. The operation would be down too long, not to mention all the money to contractors and zoning officials and bribing all sorts of city government types. Plus there are Federal government employees on the South Side these days trying to see how Model Cities money gets spent, so they might see something untoward, and report it. They’re harder to bribe than Chicago officials.”

  No one smiled. I half-thought that would get a grin or two. I think they were all still shocked that I wanted to burn down the hotel.

  “The police would know it was arson,” Paulette said. The cousin of a cop, she knew how police methods worked. So did Marvella.

  “They would know anyway,” I said. “We would have conducted a fake police raid, remember? Someone would have seen us. The girls would certainly know that we had gotten them out, and a few might be angry about it.”

  “They wouldn’t,” the short woman said.

  “Sure, they would,” the older woman said. “Sometimes people can get co-opted fast. You know that.”

  “What were you going to use to burn it down?” the gaunt woman asked. “Gasoline?”

  “Too dangerous,” I said. “I’d lose control of the fire. I was going to do something really simple. I was going to go through the hotel room by room. After I made sure no one was hiding in the room, I’d light two books of matches. I’d leave one under the curtains, and the other on the bed. Not every fire would catch, but enough would. The hotel would smolder. No one would return right away. Even if someone saw the smoke by seven thirty or so, and the hotel didn’t burn down all the way, the damage to the interior would be too much for them to rebuild. The
mob would move to a different location.”

  “Maybe only a block or two away,” Paulette said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But at least they can’t watch the school girls stand outside and gossip every day. At least they can’t spy on their targets and figure out how to wheedle their way into the girls’ lives. It would be harder to compromise girls from the school. And that’s all I was trying to do. I wanted to save the ones who could be saved, and get that damn hotel out of the neighborhood.”

  They stared at me. My heart started pounding and my mouth was dry. Had I trusted the wrong people? Not even Marvella said anything.

  Finally, the older woman stuck out her hand. “I’m Beatrice.”

  I took it. “Bill.”

  “Bill, I think we can do this with you.”

  I shook my head. “I told you, I don’t have enough people.”

  She grinned at me. She had to be in her fifties, maybe more. She had laugh lines around her eyes.

  “You have plenty of people,” she said. “You just don’t have enough men to make you comfortable.”

  My cheeks grew warm.

  “As I see it,” she said, before I could defend myself, “your plan requires a lot of stealth, a lot of room-searching, and very little muscle. If you run into security, then you do something, but first you try to chase them all out of the hotel.”

  “By telling them it’s a police raid.” I tried to keep my tone level. I didn’t want her to think I was patronizing her, although part of me felt like I was patronizing her. “They’re not going to believe a police force filled with women.”

  “They don’t have to,” Beatrice said. “Because you send in someone—me, for example—to warn them there’s a police raid coming.”

  I shook my head. “They wouldn’t believe a woman like you would want to warn them.”

  Her grin widened. “Then you warn them. Marvella’s told us you already made some deal with the gangs to protect your kids. The people in the hotel would trust you to tell them the truth. You get them out, and you’ll still be someone they trust, because they won’t know you were the one to torch the hotel.”

  The word “torch” sounded odd coming from her.