War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (49 page)

I walked up the steps to the stoop, past two kids who swore at me in Spanish.
I answered them in the same language, telling them it wasn’t polite to make fun of other people.

They ran away.

The door to the building was closed, but not locked. I pushed it open.
The on-site manager’s apartment was listed as apartment one.
As I walked past the open wiring and the flaking paint, I found the apartment.
Beneath the crooked number was a hand-scrawled sign that read
MANAGER
.

I knocked.

After a moment, the door opened, releasing a waft of tobacco and marijuana smoke.
I could almost get high standing there.
A middle-aged white man, his naked gut hanging over a pair of filthy blue jeans, peered at me.

“You don’t live here,” he said.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“We don’t got nothing,” he said and started to close the door.

I put my hand on it.
“I’m a detective.
I’m here on a case.”

“Oh.” He gave me a greasy smile.
“Why didn’t you say so?
Just a minute.
Lemme get a shirt.”

He closed the door, and I knew he was doing more than putting on a shirt.
He was getting rid of the joint that had been smoldering on the table behind him, and probably hiding a few other things as well.

Then he opened the door again.
He was wearing a
T
-shirt that was too big.
It floated around him like a nightdress.

“Sorry,” he said, as he slid in front of the door, not letting me inside.
“The wife’s not decent.”

I bet, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

“Whatcha need?”

“I suppose you heard that one of your tenants is in the hospital?”

“If you mean little Junie
D’Amato
, she ain’t my tenant no more.”

“She isn’t?” I asked.

“What, don’t you guys at the force talk to each other?
I just told some official types this a coupla days ago.”

“Apparently they left it off the report,” I said.

“Apparently.
Jeez, for all the work you guys are supposed to do, it don’t make sense for you to repeat each other’s work.”

“When did June move out?” I asked, not willing to hear the complaints.
The hallway was close and hot, and he stank of sweat and marijuana.

“I don’t got the slightest.
First I know about it is when I’m taking your buddies up there to see the place
, i
t’s been cleaned out.
Not cleaned, mind you — her and those friendsa hers wouldn’t know cleaned — but it was emptied, you know? Even took a couch belonging to us.
So I’m not paying back the deposit no matter what her old man says.”

“You talked with her father?”

“No, but I will.
Whenever there was a problem with the rent, the old man sent a check.
You know he’s the kind who’ll probably spit blood if he don’t get his due.”

“You’ve met him?” I asked.

“Just by phone.
That’s plenty.” The manager hitched his pants up.
“If that’s all —”

“Actually, no, it’s not,” I said.
“Do you have a forwarding address?”

“Jeez you guys are all the same.
If I knew she was moving, I woulda got it, but I didn’t
,
so I don’t.
Now are we done?”

“No,” I said.
“I’d like to see the apartment.”

“It’s empty,” he said.
“There ain’t nothing to see.”

“Humor me,” I said.

He rolled his eyes, then pushed the door to his own apartment open.
“I gotta get my keys.”

He disappeared inside.
I heard his voice, faint, chastising someone
—
“for crissake, there’s a cop out there!”
—
and then the door opened again.
He clutched a gigantic ring of keys
in
one hand.
They clanged against each other.
He slid his fist through the ring and led me up the steps.

Cockroaches scuttled across the molding, and a spiderweb caught my hair.
I stopped and wiped at it, making an inadvertent sound of disgust.

The manager didn’t seem to notice. He walked ahead of me, passing the landing and making a lot of noise as he went up the second flight of steps.

I wondered who he was warning.

I followed him. The steps were steep.
I could only see his legs as I started up them.
I heard a key turn in the lock and him shout, “Manager!” as he stepped inside.

Did he allow squatters?
I had no idea, and I wasn’t about to get into the middle of anything.
I slowed, peering up as I walked, hoping that I wouldn’t see anything too far out of the ordinary.

The hallway was as narrow as the one downstairs. Someone had put a fist through the wall, revealing wires and plaster.
The overhead light had been pulled off the ceiling and dangled there like a forgotten kite.

The manager stood just inside the apartment.
He had his arms crossed.
“There ain’t nothing else to see here,” he said, which was enough to tell me that if I had been working Vice I might have found a lot to see.

I gave him a nod, then walked deeper into the apartment.
Once it had been two railroad flats, but someone had converted it into one by tearing out a wall. Whoever had done the conversion hadn’t tried to make transition between the two apartments look like part of the design.
If I peered carefully enough, I could see bits of wallboard still trapped in the floor.

There wasn’t any furniture, but there were a lot of dust bunnies.
The walls were covered with scraps and leftover bits of yellowed tape.
Footprints showed in the dust — some of the prints bare, and others long and official, like cop shoes.

I wandered through, saw the converted kitchen, and, holding my breath, opened the refrigerator door.
Nothing except the stale smell of old food.
I looked inside the cupboards, the stove, and under the kitchen sink, but found nothing.

“You looking for something in particular?” the manager asked.

I shook my head, then glanced at the fridge again.
It was small, even by apartment standards.
An old 1930s Frigidaire, with
a
rounded top, it barely came up to my chest.
If
it
had held boxes of dynamite, it couldn’t have held more than three.

I walked through the remaining rooms, saw nothing of interest, checked out all four fireplaces, which seemed like an odd feature of an odd apartment, and then returned to the manager.

“Told you they were gone,” he said.

That was the second time he’d referred to others in the apartment.
“These friends of hers,” I said, “did they live in the building or in the apartment with her?”

“She swore to me she lived alone, but she had a guy up there a lot, and they seemed to know everybody.
It was like one big party.
But it sometimes is like a party around here.
We ain’t far from St. Marks Place, and it’s been crazy for the past two, maybe three years. That crazy spills this way.”

“Crazy?” I asked.

“Hippies, freaks, druggies.
You name it, they come around here.
Now we got the
S
pics — pardon my French — and it’s all going to hell.”

“Since you don’t seem to like your neighbors,” I said, “why don’t you just move?”

“Where else would I find a job that gives me free rent and pays me?
Hmmm?
I get janitorial pay.”

“And you do a fine job for it,” I said sarcastically.

He crossed his thick arms.
“Hey, if you had to deal with what I got to deal with — all them junkies coming in here wanting a place to bed down, trashing the place — you wouldn’t be so quick to judge.”

“So it’s their fault this place is falling apart.”

“Damn right,” he said, then blinked at me.
He couldn’t tell if I was making fun of him.

“Did any of her friends live in the building?” I asked.

“How should I know? I didn’t keep a list.”

“I was just wondering if you saw anything that made you a little suspicious.”

He shook his head.
“That’s impossible to answer.
All the stuff around here, it’s suspicious from a cop’s perspective.”

“Do you ever report any of it?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “When it gets bad.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know his definition of bad.
“In the last two months,” I said, trying one last time, “did you have any tenants who moved in with a pile of same-size boxes and very little else?
Maybe they brought some coolers or a table or some equipment—”

“Why do you ask?” He frowned at me in such a way that my heart skipped a beat.
He knew something.
He just wanted to know what was in it for him.

“Because if I’m right, everyone in this building could be in danger.”

“Yeah, sure, from what?”

“Explosives,” I said.

He went pale.
“You’re shitting me.”

I shook my head.

“You think little Junie was doing stuff like that?”

“Yes, I do,” I said.
“I understand she kept boxes of dynamite in that refrigerator.”

I nodded toward it.
The manager looked at it like it might explode at any minute.

“You gotta be kidding,” he said.

“I wish I were.”

“Christ on a crutch,” he said.
“The only people who fit your description are the Castro brothers. But they’ve never been no trouble.
They pay their rent on time and they never complain about nothing.”

“The
Castro
brothers?” I asked, unable to keep the disbelief from my voice.
“Ché and Fidel?”

“I’m not dumb,” the manager said.
“Michael and John.
They had ID
You know, I do check driver’s licenses.”

“Do you see these guys a lot?” I asked.

He shook his head.
“Sometimes they came by with this beautiful nigra chick.
She was just…”

His voice ran down as he realized what he said.

“Tell me about this beautiful girl,” I said.

“She had real delicate features, you know. She seemed kinda breakable.
Last week, she tripped on the way out, fell against the step.
I heard her fall, and helped her up.
I have a hunch she had a mother of a shiner.
She really walloped herself.”

Rhondelle.

“I told her we could put some ice on it,” he said, “but she laughed and told me she’d just blame it on her shit-ass boyfriend.
Her word ‘shit-ass.’
Don’t sound like she liked him much.”

“If she’s the same girl I’m thinking of,” I said, “she doesn’t have much reason to like him.”

“You know her?”

“I know a beautiful black girl with an incredible shiner. She’s also a friend of June’s and is known as the group’s chemist.”

“Well, she was on something that day she tripped down the steps, but you know, if I had to guess, I woulda thought it was glue.
She had that whiffer smell, you know?
Like she was sniffing airplane glue like we did when we were kids.”

I must have been a dull child.
It never crossed my mind to sniff glue.
“Can you let me into their apartment?”

“Not without twenty-four hours
’
warning,” he said.

“And if they do have dynamite in there like I think they do, it’ll be gone in twenty-four hours.
You know it, and so do I.”

He shrugged. “I can’t violate code without the owner’s permission.”

I smiled at him, crossed my arms, and took a step toward him.
I was nearly half a foot taller than he was, and although he outweighed me, his extra weight was fat.

“If you let me in there, I’ll overlook the marijuana in your apartment.
I’ll also fail to report all the building code violations when I get back to the office.”

He swallowed once, and looked up at me nervously.
“The other cops didn’t threaten me,” he said, his voice shaking.

“But you didn’t tell them about the Castro brothers, did you?”