War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (18 page)

The maid had already been inside the room.
The beds were made and the place smelled clean.
I liked this feature of motel living.
I often wished my apartment could get magically cleaned up while I was away.

“Nobody’s gonna tell you what happened, Bill,” Malcolm said.

“I’m not sure they’ll tell you, either,” I said.

“I meant the kids,” he said, sorting the clothes by owner.

“I did
,
too,” I said. “These are rich white kids, and if the controversy turned racial, they’re not going to tell a black kid.”

Malcolm looked at me sideways.
“But if it’s about a girl, they might.”

He obviously had an idea on how to handle this.
I’d let him.

“If I can have the van this afternoon,” he said
,
“I can check out both that place on Washington and some of the kids at Yale.”

“That’s fine.” I wanted to track down Professor Whickam, but I could do the preliminaries from the room.
“Let me pick up some lunch for me and Jimmy, and then you can have the van until supper.
If you get delayed, call here.
The desk clerk should take a message if we’re out.”

“There’s not a lot of out around here,” Malcolm said.

“There’s enough,” I said, remembering the park.
I could use some time in a peaceful setting.
Sidbury, Yale, and Robinson had shaken me up more than I wanted to admit.

* * *

The afternoon brought only frustration for me.
As the day progressed, I hoped Malcolm fared better.

Before Jimmy and I left for the park, I scanned the phonebook.
Only one Whickam was listed, a Ren
é
Whickam.
I thought Ren
é
was a woman until I got ahold of the Yale switchboard and asked for the first name of the Professor Whickam in the French department.

“
Wren
-ay,” the operator said, as if she had been instructed on the proper pronunciation.
Then she put me through to the department.

Professor Whickam wasn’t due in his office until the following week, which I thought odd, since the following week was the week of the Fourth of July.
No one answered at his home, either, and I got a bit worried.
I wanted to wrap this case up as quickly as possible, and I had a hunch I needed Whickam to do that.

After I tried Whickam, I tried all the phone numbers that Grace had given me again, and got no answers.
I would try again at odd hours, hoping to reach someone.

Then Jimmy and I went to the park, ate a bag lunch, and pretended to be indolent.
I had bought a cheap softball at an all-purpose drugstore next to the grocery store, and we played a game of catch until I tired of it.

When we got back to the room, we read until Malcolm returned — Jimmy starting one of the books Grace had sent with him, and me reading the morning paper.
The riot in Philadelphia sounded nasty.
Things in Vietnam were not going well either, but the paper felt the biggest news was actress Judy Garland’s death
from
a drug overdose.

I had finished the paper and was about to start another round of phone calls when Malcolm pulled up.
He came into the room, looking tired and discouraged.

Aside from a few details, he had learned nothing new.
He couldn’t even find out the names of the boys who had been involved in the fight over Rhondelle Whickam.
It seemed, as I predicted, that no one wanted to talk.
But Malcolm had found a couple of crumpled antiwar leaflets with some local addresses.

That would be tomorrow’s start.

FIFTEEN

M
orning arrived in an unexpected torrent of rain.
The weather was cool, and I found myself wishing that the rain had come the day before, when I had been trapped in
my
suit.
That morning, I wore a short-sleeved shirt and thin tan
slacks
more appropriate for summer.

The three of us spent the morning together, going to the various addresses on the flyers Malcolm had found. Depending on how the buildings looked when we arrived, either Malcolm or I would go in.

I got the reputable and clean buildings; Malcolm got the seedy, run-down ones. The theory was simple: A long-standing peace organization wouldn’t mind seeing a forty-year-old coming through the door.
A student-run organization wouldn’t talk to me and would be happier with Malcolm.

The flyers announced a vigil that had been held the day before to support a University of Connecticut student who had refused to be inducted in
to
the Armed Services. The vigil had been organized by a couple of groups who worked in tandem — a peace organization that had existed since World War II and catered to housewives
,
and a local branch of the Students for a Democratic Society.

The housewives were as alarmed by me as the SDS would have been, only the housewives were polite.
They gave me flyers for upcoming rallies and reminded me that there had been protests on the Green every weekend since the Vietnam War began.
Obviously, not a lot of people paid attention
,
and as one of the women told me, they didn’t even get press coverage anymore.

They had only been involved in the vigil the day before because it was nonviolent. The UConn student had wanted conscientious objector status, and the draft board had refused to grant it to him.
The women felt justified standing up for him. They had planned the vigil, they said; the SDS had simply been along for the ride.

Of course, Malcolm had gotten another story from the SDS. They claimed they had contacted the women’s group to get extra bodies at the induction center because there weren’t a lot of students on campus in the summer.
The vigil had gone off “without a hitch,” they said, even though it seemed to me that they had accomplished nothing.

Neither group had seen Daniel at the vigil.
The housewives hadn’t met him, and Malcolm got no direct information about Daniel from the SDS.
A few knew him, and didn’t much like him. Apparently his fascination with the organization waned after the Democratic National Convention.
The SDS, Malcolm told me when he came back to the van, didn’t seem as interested in civil rights issues as Daniel was.

Malcolm did get some information: a couple of addresses where students could stay for a week or so if they needed to get back on their feet.
Apparently
,
this happened from time to time, not because Yale expelled them, but because Mommy and Daddy cut them off.
A few of the scholarship students ran out of funds between terms and used these places as well if they couldn’t stay in their college room
s
.

The first safe house was in the Hill area, not too far from the Teen-Inn that I had discovered on Monday.
Malcolm went
there,
knocking on the door and asking for Daniel.

He was told that Daniel had never stayed there; Daniel had rented his own apartment on Dixwell.
No one had an address to give Malcolm, although a few people thought it had been near the Winchester Rifle Company.

The next few steps would require the kind of legwork I often did in Chicago — checking records, talking to landlords, knocking on doors.
I saw no reason to bring the boys with me on this part of the trip, so we went back to the motel to drop them off.

When we arrived, our room door was open.
A squad car was parked outside.
Jimmy clutched my arm, his fingers digging into my skin.
My own heart was pounding hard.

“What the hell?” Malcolm asked, opening his door before I even stopped the van.

“Let me handle this,” I said, blocking him with my arm.
“You’ve never dealt with the police in a strange town before.”

I got out of the van and walked to the room, breathing steadily to keep myself calm.
I didn’t want to seem too calm — I was supposed to be a middle-class father of two boys, presumably the kind of guy who didn’t have a lot of contact with the police.
But I also didn’t want to let the police run over me.
I had Jimmy to protect.

I got to the motel room door and leaned in.
Two policemen — both white — were in the middle of the room. They had scattered our clothes all over the floor, upended the suitcases, and pulled open the bureau drawers.
One of the policemen had just shoved a mattress off the box spring, and was looking underneath.

“Excuse me,” I said, letting a bit of tremble into my voice.
“You mind telling me what’s going on?”

Both policemen looked up as if I had caught them doing something wrong.

“You Bill Grimshaw?” the one closest to the door asked.
He was red
headed, balding, and as tall as I was.
The nameplate above his right breast pocket identified him as Officer Sanford.

“Yes,” I said deliberately staying near the door.
I wanted to be able to escape quickly if I had to.

“You’re here on—?”

“My eldest son wanted to see Yale.
He’s thinking of coming next year.
The only time I could get off was the two weeks around the Fourth. Why?” I was using my white-guy phone voice.
I needed to sound middle-class and educated, without any trace of the
S
outh in my tones.

“Where were you today?” The other officer came forward.
He was holding a battered white envelope and slapping it against one of his palms.

“We were driving around the city,” I said, “trying to get a sense of the place.”

“Driving around?” Officer Sanford made that sound like a crime.

I took a deep breath, as if I were trying to quell nervousness. Instead, I was trying to push down anger.

“I’ll be honest,” I said. “We’re from Chicago, and I’ve learned that there are some places that just aren’t amenable to blacks, no matter what the people who live there say. So I was being careful.
I was making sure my son would have a community if he came here.”

Officer Sanford blinked at me as if I had spoken a foreign language. The other officer came close enough that I could see his nameplate.
Prauss.
He was older, heavier, and obviously the one in charge.
His pale blue eyes were small and bloodshot.

“You in Wallingford today?”

“Is that one of the neighborhoods?” I asked.
I honestly didn’t know.

“It’s a town a little bit north of here,” Sanford said.

“Then no,” I said. “We didn’t leave New Haven.”

“Anyone verify that?” Prauss asked.

“Why would anyone have to verify that?” I let some of that anger into my voice.

The cops were crowding me, but I continued to hold my position just outside the door.

“How’d you get that scar?” Prauss asked, touching his left cheek.

“I got mugged,” I said, telling something close to the truth.

“Where are your sons?” Sanford asked.

“In the van.
You want to tell me what this is about?”

Sanford peered past me, looked at the van.
If these cops headed toward the van, I’d do everything I could to stop them.

“You take them everywhere?” Sanford asked.

“No,” I said. “Yesterday I went to a nearby grocery store without them. Why?”

“Mind if we take a look in the van?”
Prauss asked.

“Yes,” I snapped.
“I do.
I have no idea what this is about and I’m beginning to think I have to call my attorney.”

“You have an attorney?” Sanford asked, as if I had told him I had been to the moon.

“His name is Andrew McMillan.”
Drew’s firm had offices all over the country, and was particularly well known on the East Coast.

“You’re not rich enough to have a lawyer,” said Sanford.

“What are you basing this opinion on?” I asked.

“The fact you’re staying here, and driving that crummy van.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the van. Malcolm was leaning forward, looking alarmed.
He had his arm around Jimmy, who was so frightened that I could see him shaking from here.

“The van has camping gear in it.
I promised them that we’d stay somewhere fun over the Fourth.
And as for staying here, I’ve learned that ritzy hotels don’t really like my skin color, so I don’t push it much.”

The cops were staring at me as if I were a new breed of black.
Maybe I was to them.
From the standards I’d seen so far in New Haven, I was being pushy and outspoken.