War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (2 page)

So far, my meeting with her wasn’t going as well as I had hoped.

“Jimmy is perhaps the brightest student I have ever come across.” Her voice was soft, but there was a frown line between her eyes.
“On a good day, I might even characterize him as brilliant.”

“But?” I asked, trying not to shift in that too-small chair. I felt young and at the mercy of my teacher, instead of like the person who had hired her.

“But,” she said, “he doesn’t apply himself, and he drifts in class.
I get the feeling that I’m not even reaching him.
I try to catch his interest, but he does what he does to please me, not himself.”

That sounded about right.
With authority figures, Jimmy was eager to please — most of the time.
That was how he got in trouble in the first place.
He had been on Mulberry Street in Memphis on the day Martin Luther King, Jr.
,
was shot.
Jimmy had seen the shooter, and it
hadn’t been
James Earl Ray.

So Jimmy, like a good citizen, reported what he saw to the nearby police.
They tried to shove him into a cop car as if he were the criminal, and probably would have helped him disappear if I hadn’t happened along at that moment.

Jimmy and I had been on the run ever since.

“He’s had a rough year,” I said.

Grace nodded.
“Moving is always traumatic on children.
But I have a sense that something else is going on. I know your job is dangerous, Mr. Grimshaw.
Have you ever considered going back to the hotel work you were doing, for nothing more than Jimmy’s peace of mind?”

I suppressed a sigh.
Franklin Grimshaw had been after me to do the same thing ever since I had quit my job working security at the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
But I wasn’t set up to work for other people.
I preferred being my own boss.

“I have some regular clients now,” I said.
“I’ve only had a few dangerous cases.”

“A few might be too many.” She touched her left cheek, obviously referring to the still-fresh scar on my face.
I had gotten it during an attack in December.
The scar was a visible reminder of my unconventional life, my unconventional work.

“My job is my job, Grace,” I said quietly.

Something in my tone must have reached her, for she leaned her head to one side and sighed.
Then she pushed away from the desk, walked across the dirty linoleum floor, and sat in the desk next to mine, turning it toward me the way she probably would with a student.

“I’m just at my wit’s end with Jimmy,” she said.
“I don’t know how to engage him
,
and he seems so sad.
He has so much potential, Bill.
I feel like I’m failing him.”

I shook my head.
“You’re not failing him.
We read together every night now instead of watching television.
He devours the newspaper, and he helps me with the bills.
His math skills have improved a lot, thanks to you.
He’s not the same boy he was in December.”

She gave me a small smile, then twirled her finger on the kidney-shaped desktop.
“It looks like we’ll have a summer program.
If you let Jimmy come, I’d like your help in developing a curriculum for him.”

I didn’t move.
I wasn’t ready to commit to summer school.
I wasn’t ready to commit to anything.
I had been restless since Easter — the first anniversary of Martin’s death — although the anniversary had less to do with my restlessness than Chicago itself.

The city had become a war zone.
On the South Side, where I lived, 250 people had been shot and 28 had been killed since January in gang-related incidents.
Some of the dead were police, and many of the dead were children.

I had made a devil’s bargain with the gangs to help me avenge a friend and to keep them away from Jimmy.
The Blackstone Rangers knew me, considered me one of their own, and were happy with me.

The minute that happiness ended, Jimmy or I could end up among the dead.

“Bill?” Grace asked, her head still tilted sideways.
“Did Jimmy learn that habit from you?”

“What habit?” I asked.

“You faded out for a second.
I asked you about the summer session.”

I sighed.
“My summer plans aren’t finalized yet.”

“It would do him good,” she said.
“The two of us together might be able to come up with something that would make Jimmy a participant in rather than a recipient of his own education.”

“At this moment, I’m just happy he’s getting an education.” When I had met him, Jimmy lived on the street part-time.
His mother had disappeared — which was not unusual for her — and his older brother would later abandon Jimmy in favor of drugs and a local gang.

“I think with Jim we should strive for more.” She pushed herself out of the desk.
“But it’s not my call.”

Her words sounded conciliatory, but her tone wasn’t.
I understood why the kids — even the big teenage boys — listened to her.
She didn’t brook disagreement.

But she didn’t intimidate me.
I was used to strong women and, although I knew her heart was in the right place, I was privy to information that she wasn’t.
Jimmy had been increasingly fragile all spring.
M
y injury around Christmas time
had shaken him up, and so had
t
he anniversary of Martin’s death
. 
The world was still a difficult and frightening place for Jimmy, and all I could do was give him a little safety in the middle of the chaos.

I stood
,
too, struggling a little to get out of that tiny seat.
Grace smiled just a bit as she watched me, then her smile faded.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” The toughness was gone from her voice now.

I had thought the discussion was already personal, but I didn’t say that.
Instead, I said, “Sure.”

“I — ah — I’m having some more trouble with Daniel.”

Daniel was her oldest son, the one who attended Yale.
I had met him just before the Democratic National Convention last summer.
He had come to Chicago with a group of protestors and hadn’t told his mother.
But his younger brother Elijah found out and ran away to be with him.
Grace hired me to find Elijah, which I did.
I brought both boys back to her, and she had never again hinted that there were any more problems.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“It’s not something I’m….” Her voice trailed off.
“I’m sorry.
Here I go chiding you about your work and then I ask you for help.”

She noticed the irony; I appreciated that.
“One conversation was about Jimmy.
This one’s about you.
And I have an expertise that it seems you need.”

She nodded, then looked down. She rubbed her hands together.
They showed her age.
The skin was tough, darker than the rest of her, and slightly wrinkled.

“Daniel’s missing.”
Her voice was soft.
Color rose in her cheeks and I understood that one
,
too.
She’d been lecturing me on how to raise my child, then turned around and asked for help with hers.

“Another protest?” I asked.

“No.” She kept her head bowed.

I waited.
Sometimes silence worked better than twenty questions.

“I got a letter last week,” she said.
“They’re
withdrawing
his scholarship.”

That startled me.
“Why?”

“Seems he enrolled in the fall, but didn’t finish his classes.
Seems he didn’t even bother to enroll in the spring term.”

“What does the school say?”

She raised her head.
Her eyes blazed, but her voice remained soft, almost emotionless.
“They said such things aren’t unusual.
They said Yale is a cultural experience, and some boys — no matter how bright — don’t adapt well to the culture.”

Tears lined her eyes
,
but only for a moment.
She blinked them away.

“They didn’t even say they were sorry.” Her voice was nearly a whisper now. “And when I asked them why they hadn’t notified me when he had gone missing, they said that he was an adult and they weren’t required to.
I said that I bet they notified white parents, and they got all hissy on me, like I was the one at fault.
‘We make accommodations for scholarship students, Mrs. Kirkland, but sometimes they just don’t fit in.’”

I could almost hear the male voice with its upper East Coast WASP accent, calmly informing Grace Kirkland that her son was missing and it was her fault.

I walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder, leading her to her desk.
She leaned on me for just a moment, then smiled and moved away.

“Did you call his friends?” I asked.

“And his roommate, for what good that did.
The boy was just about to leave for Greece and couldn’t have cared less what happened to Daniel.”

“Did the roommate know?”

“I don’t think so.
I got the sense they didn’t get along.” She sighed.
“The thing is that they are right and he is an adult.
But it’s not like him to just disappear.”

Actually, it was just like him. The boy I met, with his oversized
A
fro and antiwar rhetoric, hadn’t even noticed the sacrifices his mother had made to keep him in such a prestigious school.
He had taken a protest bus last summer without letting her know he would be in Chicago.
The fact that he had dropped out during the school year and hadn’t told her didn’t surprise me at all.

But I didn’t challenge her.
I didn’t see the point.
“What did you want to ask me?”

She took a deep breath, then glanced at the row of desks as if they were full of students.
“I called the New Haven police.
They couldn’t help me. They said the same thing the school did, that he was an adult and what he did was his business.
So I called a private detective in New Haven.
I got his name from the operator.
He wanted to charge me half a year’s salary, and he made no guarantees. When I told him I couldn’t afford that, he suggested I look myself.
Only I don’t know how, Bill.
I’ve done everything I can think of.
I was wondering if you would mind — I mean, I’m taking advantage here, but I thought maybe you could tell me what to do next.”

She surprised me.
I had expected her to hire me like she had done before.

“Let me make a few calls,” I said.

She put a hand on my arm as if she were going to physically hold me back.
“No, really.
I’ll do this.
He’s probably on some bus going to some rally.
I just need to know.”

“When will they
take away
his scholarship?” I asked.

“September first if they don’t hear from him,” she said. “And he needs a good reason for not going to class last year.”

She had less than three months to find him.
America was a large country.
People could easily disappear inside its borders.
Jimmy and I had proven that.

“That’s not a lot of time,” I said.

“I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.
I keep thinking that maybe Elijah knows, but I worry about losing him
,
too.
I don’t want him to go searching for Daniel all on his own.
Not again.”

I nodded.
I didn’t want that either.
If anything, the country had become more dangerous since last summer.

“Let me make some calls,” I said again.

She licked her lower lip.
“I’ll pay you for your time.”

She sounded relieved that I had made the offer. Relieved and a little embarrassed.

“Let’s see what I come up with first,” I said.
“Then we’ll decide if payment is even necessary.”

“I believe in compensating people for their work,” she said.

“You are.” I smiled as warmly as I could, trying to reassure her.
“You’re worrying about my son.
That’s compensation enough.”

THREE

By the time I got home, all of the Yale business offices were closed.
New Haven was an hour ahead of us, and obviously, Yale had summer hours.