War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (5 page)

She sighed, pulled her hands out of her pockets and threaded them together as she turned around.

“I guess I should thank you,” she said.
“I’ll just wait until he calls me.”

“There’s one other choice.” I heard the words come out of my mouth before I planned to say them.
“I can go to New Haven and see if I can track him down.”

Grace shook her head.
“I can’t afford to pay for that, Bill.
I wish I could, but I’m barely making it as it is.
All my extra money is going into Elijah’s school fund now.
I just hope he doesn’t follow his brother’s example—”

“We can trade, Grace,” I said.
“I know Franklin’s talked to you about teaching next year.
I’ll keep a ledger, like I do for regular clients.
I’ll bill you for expenses and my time, and you do the same.”

She teared up, then sank into her chair.
“Would you do that?”

I nodded.
I might never take advantage of the barter.
If Jimmy and I decided the East Coast was better for us, I would lose money on this deal.
But I was willing to take that risk.
I had a son to protect
,
too, just like Grace did.

“That means all of this would come out of your pocket,” she said. “You can’t afford that.”

“I’ve been working steadily for the past several months,” I said.
“I have some money saved up.
I should be fine.”

“You’re being too kind.”
Her gaze met mine.
It was steady, as if she could see through me.

“No, I’m not,” I said.
“I’m feeling restless.
I figure some time away from the city might be good for me.”

Her gaze didn’t waver.
“You don’t like it here.”

I shrugged.
“This isn’t my home.”

“Neither is the East.
I hear the South in your voice.”

I gave her a small smile.
“Just part of it.
I grew up in Atlanta, but I went to school in Boston.
I’m more familiar with the East than I am with the Midwest.”

“And you like it better.”

I took a bite from the snickerdoodle.
It was fresh and soft and tasted like childhood.
Then I chased it with some coffee, fighting the urge to tell her just how much I wanted to leave.

“I haven’t given this place much of a chance.
Jimmy and I were broke when we came here.
We haven’t had much, and our opportunities are limited.
I don’t like living like that.”

I regretted that last sentence the moment I spoke it.
Grace’s opportunities had been limited
,
too.

“You told me once that Jimmy spent a lot of time with his mother,” Grace said.
“You’re not used to having a child.”

“No, I’m not,” I said.

“It restricts you.” Her voice was soft.
“But it’s worth it.
Most of the time.”

I knew she was thinking about Daniel when she said that last.

“I don’t regret a thing I’ve done for Jimmy,” I said, “and I love raising him.
But—”

“What’re you going to do with him while you’re gone?” she asked.
“Is he going to spend the summer with your family?”

She meant the Grimshaws.

I hadn’t given it much thought.
But I knew that I couldn’t leave Jimmy in Chicago. “He’ll come with me.
See more of the world.”

“And who’ll take care of him while you’re looking for Daniel?”

I hadn’t even thought of that.

“I’d offer to come,” she said, “but I can’t.
Elijah might need to see the world, just like Jimmy, but I need the work.
If I left now—”

“I’m not asking you to, Grace.”

“But see, you’re not thinking of Jim.
There’ll be places an eleven-year-old shouldn’t see.
You know that.”
She sighed.
“I could watch him, if you want him to stay here.”

It was a generous offer.
Grace would be a strict guardian, but a good one.
Only I couldn’t take her up on it.
Last summer I had left Jimmy in Laura
Hathaway
’s care and had put them both in danger.

I couldn’t do that again.
Not to Laura — who would always be my first choice to care for him, not to the Grimshaws, and certainly not to Grace and Elijah.

“Thank you,” I said, “but I know a lot of people back east. We’ll find a way to cope.”

Grace gave me the same look she had given me in the basement of the church — as if I were an unrealistic, misguided man who didn’t understand his child.
At least this time, she was too polite to say anything, especially considering the offer I had just made her.

We talked a bit longer, and I asked for several things from her.
I needed a photograph of Daniel.
I also wanted a copy of Daniel’s application for Yale, copies of his scholarship questionnaires, and any other material he had sent the college.
Fortunately
,
Grace had those in a file in her desk; she had insisted that Daniel type his materials using carbon paper.
The copies were difficult to read, but legible.

Then I asked her for any letters he
had
sent home, not just to her but to Elijah as well.
She said it would take her a while to find those, and I knew she’d argue with me about taking them out of her apartment.

Finally, I asked her to sit down with Elijah and make notes about the conversations they’d had with Daniel since he left for school — any and all details, no matter how trite.
I wanted hints of where he would be and what he might be doing, leads that I could follow with or without finding someone in New Haven to talk with me.

I didn’t tell her that I still had the lists she’d made for me last summer when Elijah had gone to Lincoln Park looking for his brother.
Then Grace had given me the names of their local friends with a D, an E or a G beside the listings.
I had noted at the time that there were very few Es, but there were a number of Ds.
Daniel had known a lot of people in Chicago, and I wasn’t going to rule out that his local friends knew more about his life than his mother did.

Grace offered to let me talk to Elijah, but I wasn’t ready to yet.
I needed to put everything into a context.
I also needed to get my own affairs in order.
I had to either finish the cases I was working on for the various black insurance companies in town or give them back, and I had to talk to Laura, taking a leave from my work inspecting houses for Sturdy Investments.

All of that would take time.

As I walked back to my own apartment, I saw the kids sitting on the front lawn.
They were playing cards, which surprised me.
Jimmy was sitting sideways, concentrating as he set one card down and picked another up.

Gin
r
ummy.
That was why they looked guilty.
A month ago, I had to stop Jimmy from taking Keith Grimshaw’s lunch money in weekend poker games.

I sighed.
Grace was right.
I couldn’t take Jimmy with me on each visit I made in New Haven.
And missing persons cases, while difficult, often went in unexpected directions.
I needed the opportunity to follow each and every lead.

I was also heading into a college.
I would have to talk to young people.
I learned last summer that when I walked into a room filled with college students and war protesters under the age of
twenty-five
, I was immediately suspect.

If I was serious about leaving Chicago and doing a good job for Grace, I would need someone young to come with me.
Someone who could talk to college students and whom I could trust with Jimmy when I had to investigate.
Someone who had enough freedom to leave Chicago for a week, a month
,
or the entire summer if need be.

For that, I needed Malcolm Reyner.

FIVE

Malcolm
Reyner
was an eighteen-year-old orphan whom
Franklin Grimshaw and his family
had taken in last summer, initially at my request.
They treated him well.
In May, he had gotten his GED, and now he was working as a short-order cook at one of the local restaurants.
Sometimes he worked for me
,
too, helping me with a few of my cases, doing jobs that I needed a younger, more active person for.

Jimmy was happy to leave his gin game to go to the Grimshaws’ house.
As I suspected, he had been playing for money, but he was losing for once.
One of the older neighbor boys who usually didn’t play was taking Jimmy for all he was worth.

It was easy to get Jimmy to talk about his conquests on the way to the Grimshaw house.
He was proud of his card-playing ability.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
I did know, however, that by the end of summer I would have to find a way to convince him that preventing other kids from eating a healthy lunch by taking their funds was not a good thing.

That would take some diplomacy on my part.
Jimmy felt like he wasn’t good at most things. To take away one of the few things he did well would be a blow to his ego.

I pulled up in front of the house.
It was large and well
maintained, loved in that way that people who appreciated what they had gave their homes.
The Grimshaws didn’t own the house — Sturdy Investments did — but the place was a great improvement over the three-bedroom apartment the family had been living in last summer.

The woman I was seeing, Laura Hathaway, ran Sturdy.
It had been her father’s company, and she had taken it over
in January,
trying to cure the mismanagement and corruption her father and his cronies had built into the company.
One of her first acts had been to rent the Grimshaws this house at below-market rates.

Her investment was paying off.
The Grimshaws were making improvements to the home as if it were their own.

A large front porch encircled the place.
The lawn was mowed, and someone had trimmed the plants beside the sidewalk.
Peonies budded near the front porch, and someone had planted bleeding hearts beside it.
Pansies peeked out of pots that Althea had placed along the stairs.

As I got out of the car, I heard yells and screams and children’s laughter.
I couldn’t see the kids, so I assumed they were in the backyard.
So did Jimmy.
He immediately ran around the house to see what games the kids were playing.

Franklin’s wife
,
Althea
,
sat on the porch, shucking peas into a bowl.
I hadn’t seen anyone do that in years.
She looked like the matriarchs of my youth, sitting in her rocking chair, surveying the neighborhood as she worked.

“You growing your own peas now?” I asked.

“Franklin got them in trade from a downstater,” she said.
“Apparently he’s giving everyone advice these days.”

Franklin consulted with various black businesses and politicians.
He loved the work, and was quite successful at it, but he was also taking night classes for a law degree.

“Is Malcolm home?” I asked.

“Just got off shift,” she said.
“I’d say he’d be out of the shower by now.”

She didn’t ask me what I wanted Malcolm for, and I didn’t tell her.
Malcolm had assisted me in previous cases, and Althea had never approved.
But unlike Grace Kirkland, Althea didn’t repeatedly talk to me about her disapproval.
Nor did she try to change me.

I appreciated that.

I went inside the house.
It was warm, and smelled faintly of baking bread.
Unlike most of the women I knew, Althea didn’t work — not even when the Grimshaw family had been crammed in that tiny apartment.

She saw her job as raising children and saving the family money, from baking the bread to finding creative ways to use leftovers.
Last summer, I learned a lot from Althea about bargain shopping and raising a child on a budget.
I was good with money, but I couldn’t make a dollar stretch in six different directions the way Althea could.

Malcolm was coming out of the bathroom.
He wore only a pair of blue jeans.
His feet were bare and he was toweling off his hair.