War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (50 page)

“I don’t got no real proof that you are a cop,” he said.

“You gonna risk making me mad now?” I asked.

Small beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
His body odor, which hadn’t been light before, was getting stronger.

“Shit, man,” he said, “if I lose this job, I’m sunk.
I can’t get nothing else.”

“You’re gonna lose it,” I said, “if you don’t cooperate with me.
In fact, you’re gonna lose a lot more.
You’re gonna lose your freedom.
Vice isn’t really happy about any kind of drug these days, and I have a hunch the joint I saw in your place was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.”

His eyes moved from my face to the refrigerator to my face again.

“All right,” he whispered.
“But you tell people you gave me twenty-four hour notice, okay?”

“Just take me to the apartment,” I said.

He nodded, then scuttled down the damaged hall of this apartment.
He waited for me at the door.
When I stepped out, he locked up, his hands shaking.

“That way,” he said, nodding down the corridor.

“You lead,” I said.

He put his head down and trudged, as if I were making him go to prison.
His keys jangled in his right hand.

When he reached the apartment at the very end of the hall, he knocked.
“Manager!” he shouted.

We waited a minute.
There was no movement inside.

“Manager!” he shouted again.

Then he glanced at me.

“Open it,” I said.

He took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and stepped back.
A blast of cold air hit us.
He gave me a surprised look.

I stepped in first.

“Manager!” he shouted again from behind me.

I nearly hit him.

“Don’t do that,” I whispered.
I wanted to listen, to see if I heard anything besides the rattle of an overworked air
conditioner.

The rattle seemed too loud, and as I turned to the right, into the main room of the apartment, I saw why.

Both windows had air
conditioners, and both conditioners were set so high that they vibrated.
Beneath them, someone had placed newspaper and big soup pots to catch the condensation as it dripped off the units.

Both pots were nearly full.

But that wasn’t what caught me.
What got my attention were the boxes, stacked floor to ceiling in the half
-
kitchen off the main room.
All of them had Tucker Construction stamped on the side.
I knew if I turned them around, they would read “Explosives.”

“Izzat it?” the manager asked from behind me.

“You stay there,” I said, wishing for the first time on this trip that I had my gun.
I had left it in Chicago, not wanting the trouble, not expecting it.

I made my way through the kitchen, and into the back bedroom.
There was only one, and it was dark.
Light came in around the third air
conditioner, also set on high.
This place was as cold as a refrigerator.

I flicked on the light with the back of my hand.
A table was pushed against the back wall.
Lined up on it were nails, thumbtacks, screws, and duct tape.
Several squares of muslin were cut and resting next to those items.
On the very edge of the table, someone had wrapped muslin around a package, and secured it with duct tape.

I walked close, looked, but didn’t touch.
Inside the muslin were the nails and screws and thumbtacks, held in place with what smelled ever so faintly like airplane glue.

My stomach turned.
I swallowed hard and scanned the rest of the room.
More newspaper, another pot beneath the air conditioner, and on the far wall, two rows of alarm clocks, still in their packages.
Electrician’s wire hung from a large nail someone had pounded into the wall.

“Oh, shit,” the manager said from behind me.

I just about jumped out of my skin.

“Didn’t I tell you to stay in the living room?” I asked, barely controlling the urge to hit him.

“I just had to see,” he said.
“Goddamn, those little fuckers lied to me.
They were such clean-cut white boys too.”

“White boys?” I asked.

“You expected colored?” he said, then put a hand to his mouth.
“Colored’s okay, right?”

I didn’t answer him.
“What did these boys look like?”

He shrugged.
“Dark hair on the one.
The other one had brown hair, long, and he was really thin. I only seen them a coupla times. I was starting to wonder if maybe they rented it out to that pretty ni—colored lady and her boyfriend, not that I woulda approved the sublet.
But that happens a lot here.
You know, kids think they got the money and they don’t, so they find a way to make a quick buck.”

“These guys were young?” I asked.

“Twenty, maybe.
Maybe more.
It’s hard to tell.”

“And they had a black girl as a friend.”

“And her kinda scary boyfriend.
He had one of those….” The manager put his hands around his head, signifying a lot of hair.

“An
A
fro,” I said.

“Yeah, but he tied it back with a headband sometimes.
He was real polite.
Spoke like a normal person, too.”

“Probably in better English than you use,” I said, th
e
sarcasm hard to control.

“Much better,” he agreed, without catching the sarcasm.
“He had education, that kid, though he liked his speeches.
Wanted me to come to some march.”

I went back into the kitchen and used the back of my hand to turn on the light in there
,
too.

And it was right there, on the table, a mimeograph machine, with the discarded masters in the garbage can beside it.
I grabbed a paper towel off the counter, picked up one of the masters with the towel and looked.

Written backward, in purple, on the back were the words “The genocidal war in Vietnam…”

And they were in the same strange script I’d seen at the
i
nduction
c
enter
.

I knew it.
I knew that all it would take was one more day.

Finally, I had enough to put Daniel Kirkland away.

FIFTY

“Now what’re we gonna do?” the manager asked from behind me.
This time, he didn’t startle me.

I let the mimeograph master drop back into the garbage can, wiped off my hands
,
and stuck the paper towel in my pocket.
Then I turned around to face him.

His skin was blotchy with sweat.
His eyes had sunken into his face.
His
T
-shirt, which had looked somewhat clean, was now covered with big wet splotches that centered on his armpits.

“I mean,” he said, “do we evacuate the building or what?”

“We call for backup,” I said.
“We’ll lock this place up and then we go downstairs and you won’t say a single word to anyone else, not even your wife, you got that?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

He looked at all the equipment, then back at me.

“You sure it’s safe?”

“It’s safe enough
just sitting there
,” I said, wondering if we’d missed any gasoline or motor oil.
I didn’t see the makings for a Molotov cocktail, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here.
“Let’s go.”

The manager scurried out of the apartment as if he were being chased.
I moved slower, taking in all the details.

Daniel and his group had been smarter this time. They hadn’t left a lot of trace evidence of themselves here, probably because they weren’t living here.

There hadn’t been any bombings to my knowledge in New York in the past two months, and none in New Haven that I had heard of.
But people were mentioning a lot of activity in the East Coast Corridor.
It wouldn’t take a lot to build some small bombs, like the one on that table, put it in a suitcase, and have someone take it to, say, Philadelphia on the train.

Maybe Daniel and Rhondelle hadn’t been selling drugs.
Maybe they’d been selling bombs.

I felt colder than I ever had in my life, and it wasn’t just because of the three overworked air
conditioners.
I had stumbled on
to
something that I wanted no part of and that I had to stop right away.

I got out of the apartment and rubbed my arms, feeling gooseflesh.
The manager looked at me, apparently waiting for my approval to shut the door.

“Lock it up,” I said.

He sighed, his hands shaking so badly that he almost dropped the keys.
He tried to find the right key twice, then finally had to go through the ring one by one, staring at the tiny numbers taped to the keys’ sides before finding the right one.

I waited until I heard the deadbolt thunk into place.
We hurried down the stairs, and he led me to his apartment.

“Shirl,” he shouted as we got near it.
“I’m baaack.”

I had a hunch that wasn’t his normal greeting.
“It doesn’t matter what she’s doing.
I need to use your phone.”

He nodded, and pushed his door open.
The apartment was filthy.
Marijuana buds covered the coffee table, and a woman sat near it, her dirty feet crossed on the tabletop.
She wore a loose housedress, her hair was tousled around her face, and she held a very fat joint in one hand.
In the other, she had a lighter.

She stared at me in surprise.

“He a cop?” she asked the man
a
ger.

“Don’t worry about it, Shirl.
He’s gonna use the phone.”

“Shit, man, you screw up.
He’s—”

“Ma’am,” I said with the firmest tone I had.
“We have a much more serious problem than your little habit there.
Be quiet, stay calm, don’t light that thing, and nothing will happen, all right?”

She blinked at me.
“Sure, I guess,” she said, then she set the joint on the table, knocking some buds off of it.

The manager took the lighter out of her hand.
His hands were still shaking.
I wondered if he was afraid that tiny lighter would somehow ignite all the dynamite upstairs.

“Where’s the phone?” I asked.

The woman pointed toward her left.
“We got one in the bed—”

“In the kitchen,” the manager said, and gave her a pointed look.
He nodded in the opposite direction.
“Just down the hall.”

I walked that way. He followed.

The kitchen was U-shaped and small, with barely enough room for one person, let alone two. The phone sat on the edge of the counter, half buried in cellophane wrappers, aluminum containers for frozen dinners
,
and dirty cups.

Apparently the manager didn’t get a lot of phone calls.

I picked up the receiver, winced at its slimy texture, and dialed O’Connor’s precinct. When someone answered, I asked for O’Connor by name.

The manager swallowed hard, then turned around and left.
I had a hunch he had had run-ins with Detective O’Connor as well.

The person I spoke to set the phone down for a minute, then came back.
“Sorry,” he said.
“O’Connor’s not here.
Need to leave a message
?
”

“No,” I said. “I need to talk to his captain.”

“Ah,” the man at the other end said. “We don’t bother the captain unless it’s important.”

“This is important,” I said. “I found where the War at Home Brigade keeps its dynamite.”

“Shit,” the man said, and set the phone down again. This time, I could hear him as he made his way through the halls.
“Captain!
Hey, Captain…”

It took a few minutes, but someone picked up another receiver.
“Captain Donato,” an official sounding voice said.

“Captain Donato,” I said
,
turning toward the wall so that my voice wouldn’t carry into the main room.
“My name is Bill Grimshaw.
I’m a private detective who met Detective O’Connor last week. We’re working on similar cases.
I’ve been tracking Daniel Kirkland from Chicago through New Haven to here.”