War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (10 page)

I turned slightly, so that my right profile faced the door.
No sense in letting the manager find a large black man with a scarred face at his door.
Better to let him assemble the parts of me slowly.

Across the street, there were several long buildings and even more parking lots. Behind them, a football stadium rose against the night sky, dark and forbidding.

That had to be the Yale Bowl, and the buildings around it all those support facilities that big sports arenas usually had.

Down the road directly in front of me seemed to be some kind of dead
end.
Or maybe it was just darkness, no streetlights at all.

A lock turned.
The wooden door swung open, and it was my turn to be surprised.
A black face peered out at me.

The man was as tall as I was, but older, with red pockmarks from a skin condition.
His hair was silver and straight, which was a surprise given how dark his skin was.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Do you have a vacancy?” I kept my voice soft.
“I’m looking for a double for me and my sons.”

I had decided along this trip that most people would think of Malcolm as my child. It would be easier to explain than the real rationale behind what we were doing.

The man pushed open the screen door.
He wasn’t wearing a robe, like I expected.
He wore dark blue pants and a short-sleeved shirt.
The only thing that gave away the late night
was
the tan slippers on his feet.

He padded across a vinyl runner that led to the front desk.
The interior smelled like cigarettes, ammonia, and pine deodorizer.
The desk was long and blond, one end covered with brochures.

“How long you staying?” he asked as he went around the desk.

“That depends.” I glanced over his shoulder, saw the door to the back
was
closed.
“I plan to be here for several days, but level with me.
Should we stay in this neighborhood or is there someplace a little friendlier?”

He opened a register.
Several spidery signatures already filled the page.

“Checking out Yale?” he asked.

“How’d you guess?” I said.

He shrugged.
Obviously that’s what most people did with their kids when they came to New Haven.

“A room here’s nineteen dollars a night for a double. That’s the cheapest you’ll find within fifteen minutes of downtown.
You might be a bit cheaper heading out Whalley, but honestly, depending on the place, you might run into some trouble there.”

I nodded, not knowing where Whalley was, but figuring I could find it on a map.

“Otherwise, you’re gonna want to be either in the Hill or along Dixwell.
I don’t think there’s much on the Hill any more, but I know of a few places on Dixwell.
You can give ’em a look if you want.”

“But?”

This time it was his turn to glance over his shoulder.
And he looked behind me, as if he were checking for other paying customers.

“Ain’t none of those places black-owned, even if they’re in our neighborhood.
So you got smaller rooms, no real upkeep, and higher prices for less.
At least here, you got nice rooms because we do good business.”

“And we’re not going to have a problem if we stay here a week with, say, the day manager?” I asked.

The man smiled.
His teeth gleamed in the fl
u
orescent
light
.
“That day manager got canned.
You’ll be okay.”

It was my turn to smile.
“You said nineteen dollars for a double?”

Nineteen was expensive.
I had hoped for less.

“If you stay the week, I can bring it down to fifteen a night.”

He was doing me a favor, and I knew it.
Still, I wasn’t sure where my investigation would take me.

“I’d like to say I’m going to, but it depends on whether we can get all the meetings we’ve been planning, since the Fourth is coming up.” I let my smile ease into a grin.
“I promised the boys camping if we got done early.”

The manager nodded. “That last summer before college’s an important one.
I’ll make a note on your file.
We’ll charge fifteen if you’re here for six nights.”

He slid the register toward me, then grabbed an index card.

“Pay tonight’s up front, and you won’t owe nothing till you check out. We’ll settle then.”

“All right.” I took out a twenty and handed it to him as I pulled the register closer.
I picked up the pen and then paused.
I was tired.
I had nearly signed my real name.

I signed, put down my address and phone
number
, as well as Malcolm and Jimmy’s first names, and then slid the register back toward the manager.
Out of force of habit, I skimmed the other names before releasing the thick book.
I didn’t see any I recognized.

He had me sign the index card
,
too, after I saw him make the note about the possible lower rate.
Then he recorded that I paid $19 for the first night, and reached into a drawer to get me my dollar change.

“You’ll be in 1171,” he said.
“It’s in the back, away from the street and the noise.
There’s a good walking trail to the park
,
and in the summer, the park’s pretty nice.
If one of your kids is young, he might like it.
It’s got swings and a merry-go-round, some picnic tables.”

“Thanks,” I said.
“And thanks for letting us in so late.”

He nodded.
“You’re lucky I was on tonight.
Not many places in town open their doors after ten.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Best you do,” he said. “This ain’t Chicago.”

So he’d already looked at where I was from.
He was more watchful than I had expected.

“I’ll remember that
,
too,” I said.

NINE

Room 1171 was part of another building, tucked into the back.
This building was older than the one up front, and had been built to look like row houses, attached on each side.
The building was made of red brick and the doors had been painted a crisp white.
Each door had a light above the entrance, a nice touch that made the place feel secure.

The room itself was the same size as the one in Cleveland, but cleaner and with newer furnishings.
It also lacked the musty odor that underlay the cigarettes.
This room had a faint smell of fresh paint, and didn’t smell institutional at all.

“Cripes,” Malcolm said from the bathroom.
“They even put a paper banner around the toilet.”

“Sanitized for your protection,” Jimmy said from his spot on the bed.

“How’d you know?”

“Seen it before.”

And had been as astonished by it the first time as Malcolm now was.
I unpacked us, turned the window air
conditioner on low, and told the boys to prepare for bed.

They argued, but not strenuously.
The drive had tired them out as well.
It had exhausted me.
After I closed my eyes, I still saw headlights coming toward me.
We had been lucky; we hadn’t run into any small
-
town traffic cops or anyone trolling for unfamiliar faces.

I didn’t expect our luck to hold for the entire trip.

* * *

The next morning, after breakfast, I called Grace.
I told her where we were staying and asked her for permission to pose as her ex-husband.
His name had been all over the application and other documents that Daniel had filed with the university, mostly as a person who wouldn’t contribute to Daniel’s education.

“Why would you want to do that?” Grace asked.

“I figure the authorities here will accept me better as a member of Daniel’s family than as an investigator.”

“Darrel would never check up on Daniel,” Grace said.
“I’m not even sure Darrel remembers he has children.”

“That might work for me then,” I said.
“If anyone calls you and asks if you sent your ex-husband here, tell them you did.”

She agreed.
After we exchanged a few pleasantries, I hung up and called some of the names on the list she had given me before I left.
I never reached the people I wanted.
Instead I was informed that they were out of town, or in one case, decided “at the last minute” to spend his summer in Venice.

On my last call, I managed to reach Daniel’s college master.
I felt odd talking to someone called a “master,” even though I knew that the name came from the English university tradition and had nothing to do with slavery.

The master – or special master, as he called himself – would be in his office, and we set up a time to meet.
When I hung up, I told Jimmy and Malcolm that we were leaving.

Jimmy and I would
go to the meeting
.
Malcolm would explore, talk to anyone he met, and
hook up with
us at a designated spot.

The special master had given me instructions on how to get to his building.
He told me to find the New Haven Green, and his directions proceeded from there.

The Green wasn’t hard to find. It was the exact center of New Haven, a large square park filled with trees and sidewalks. Three churches dominated the east side of the square, their
spires
rising into the clear blue June sky.
On the west side, Yale University began, hidden behind an ivy-covered stone
wall
that looked as intimidating as it was supposed to.

I found a five-story block-long concrete parking structure on nearby Temple street, and left the van inside it.
Malcolm went off on an investigation of his own, promising to meet us on the Green in two hours.

Jimmy and I went in the other direction, through the big Tudor arch that led us onto Yale’s campus.
The great stone buildings behind us blocked the traffic noise from College Street, and it felt like we had entered a whole new world.

Ahead of us lay well
-
mowed grass and lovely pathways. To our left, a long Colonial building was dwarfed by the mock-Tudor buildings behind it.
A statue of Nathan Hale stood outside the Colonial, and it turned out that Mr. Give-Me-Liberty-Or-Give-Me-Death had lived in that Colonial building when he
had been
a student.

I wondered how Daniel had felt when he first came here.
Like Malcolm, he had never lived anywhere except Chicago’s South Side.
Knowing Daniel, he had probably researched Yale, but research wasn’t like reality.

This place had been designed to intimidate those who didn’t belong.

There weren’t a lot of students on the grounds.
The handful that we saw weren’t going from class to class but instead were lounging against the large trees that gave the area its character.
Obviously, there was summer school, but equally as obvious, not that many students attended.

It didn’t take us long to reach Daniel’s college.
Yale followed the Oxford and Cambridge model, dividing the students into
twelve
residential colleges.
The master lived on site, as did, apparently, the dean of that college and a handful of professors.

We had to ring a doorbell and get buzzed through yet another archway to enter the college.
The Gothic architecture and all the stone spoke of wealth to me.
It seemed exotic to Jimmy, who couldn’t stop touching the curved walls.

The archway opened into a wide quad. There were more students on this patch of green grass, many of them sunbathing as they read thick tomes.
A game of touch football went on along the far end, the boys laughing and jumping with ease.
Someone had hooked a bicycle rack to the stone courtyard in front of one of the doorways, ruining the medieval look.
Above us, a stereo blared the rhythms of the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper.”

Jimmy didn’t seem to notice that so far all of the students we had seen were white.
Usually this many white people made him nervous, but he was too intent on the university itself to pay much attention.

The masters’ quarters were in one of the Gothic Towers. We went to the thick wooden door as instructed, and I pounded the brass door knocker.
Jimmy had never seen one, and wanted to give it a try.
I let him do it once, and then we waited.