War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (51 page)

“I’m familiar with you,” Donato said.
My heart started to pound.
I hoped the familiarity was only through my contact with O’Connor.

“I was tracking down a lead in June
D’Amato
’s old building, and I played a hunch.
I asked the manager if there were any people who had been carrying small boxes in and out.
He mentioned two boys who fit the description.
He rented to them, and then told me a few stories about their friends that led me to believe Daniel Kirkland and his group had been in their apartment as well.
The manager let me into their place—”

“He had no right to do that,” the captain said.

“Well, that’s just one reason you’ll have to operate as if you got an anonymous tip on this, all right?” I said.

The captain sighed on the other end.
“Go on.”

“The apartment has at least twenty boxes of dynamite in the main room, equipment in the back
,
including electrician’s wire and some alarm clock works, one almost-completed bomb, and a mimeograph machine with discarded masters that ties it to the War at Home Brigade.”

“And I can trust you didn’t plant any of this.”

“Why would I?” I asked. “I work for Daniel’s mother.
This is terrible news for me.”

The captain grunted.
“You’re sure this is dynamite?”

“I’ve seen it before,” I said. “Even if I hadn’t, it’d be hard to miss. They left it in the original boxes.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

I gave him the address.
“I’d suggest sending someone right away, maybe even a beat cop to secure the site.
I’m not sure how trustworthy this building manager is.”

“I’ll see what we’ve got.
You stay put.
We’ll have to talk.”

Then he hung up, promising to have someone here immediately.
I set the receiver down, then frowned at it.
Twenty small boxes was a lot less than Daniel had taken in New Haven.
Twenty small boxes might not even have been noticed
missing
from a construction site.

I rummaged around in the mess, looking for a phone book.
Moving some of the cellophane wrappers discharged odors so foul I couldn’t even identify some of them.
One made my eyes water.

I finally found the book and looked up the number for Tucker Construction.
There was a general contracting office in Manhattan and several smaller offices in the other boroughs.
I dialed the Manhattan number, got a secretary, and asked for the owner of the company.

I identified myself as a detective — that seemed to be working in this city, better than it had in Chicago — and said that I wanted to discuss the big dynamite theft of a few weeks ago.

She put me right through.

The owner of Tucker Construction was Albert Tucker.
As he picked up the phone, his greeting was gruff.
He asked right off if I was a regular detective or private.
I told him that I was private, and he nearly hung up, but I managed to catch him by saying that I knew where some of his dynamite was.

“We just located it,” I said, giving him the address. “The police’ll be here at any minute, and I had a hunch they probably wouldn’t tell you they recovered it.”

“Probably not,” he said, but he didn’t sound as gruff as he had a few minutes earlier.
“How come you’re telling me?”

“Because I need some information they won’t tell me,” I said.
“When was the theft?”

“Memorial Day weekend,” he said.

“And how many boxes did they steal?”

“Boxes?” he asked.
“They didn’t steal boxes.
They stole cases.
At least a pallet’s worth.
I’m not sure how they got it out of here.”

Just as I suspected.
We’d only found a small amount of what had already been stolen.

“Didn’t you have a security guard on your construction sites?”

“This wasn’t one of my sites.
It’s here, at the warehouse.
And yeah, I had a guard.
He was a great guy
,
too.
Those kids, they had scouted the place. They knew when he made his rounds.
They got him and I’m not sure how because he was military, you know? But they managed it.
I think it was dumb luck. They knocked him out, tied him up, and fucked him over.”

“What do you mean
‘
fucked him over
’
?” I asked.

“I don’t know, he was spouting crazy talk when we found him,” Tucker said.
“Like he was seeing things.
I think they drugged him.”

“With what?”

“Coffee, something. It’s just this guy’s big.
You don’t tussle with him.
So they had to’ve done something.
They couldn’t’ve taken him on one-on-one.”

“Can I speak to him?” I asked.

“I wish,” Tucker said.
“I gave him a few days off right after, and he never came back to work.
Won’t answer his phone, won’t come to his door.
Not that I blame him.
He was in pretty rough shape when we found him that Tuesday.
I never knew for sure, but I think he might’ve been lying near the guard shed since Sunday night, tied up and half out of his mind.”

I frowned.
I could hear sirens in the distance.
“You said he was military?
He was
a
rmy then?”

“I don’t know.
Wounded three different times, so they finally sent him home.”

“Vietnam?” I asked.

“Yep.
Good guy, too.
Smart.
Never had a minute’s trouble in the year plus
that
he’d been working for me. I don’t even blame the theft on him.
The cops said, and I agree, that those kids were not only determined, they were experienced. This break-in was clearly orchestrated by some pros.”

Pros.
Daniel had clearly taken that brilliant mind of his and turned it in the wrong direction.
Which was a serious problem.
The best thing about criminals was that most of them were stupid.

Daniel’s brain made him one of the most dangerous people I’d ever encountered.

“Do you have the name and address of the security guard handy?” I asked.

“Actually, I do,” Tucker said. “The cops wanted it just this morning.
Weird coincidence, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.
“Did they say why?”

“Nope, just that they were following up.”
I heard paper rustling, then he said, “Here it is.
Calvin Jervis.
Just off Astor Place.”

He gave me the address, and I wrote it down.
The sirens stopped outside the building.
The police were here.

I thanked Tucker, told him he might want to come down here, and then hung up.
I washed my hands in the sink — that slimy stuff from the receiver had gotten on my palms — and shook them dry as I walked back into the living room.

It wasn’t the same place.
Except for the buds still littering the floor, there was no sign of marijuana at all.
The man
a
ger had opened his windows and stuck fans in them. The coffee table was cleaned and polished, and the mess throughout the room had been straightened.
His wife had put on blue jeans and a tight shirt, and combed her hair.
Her feet were still bare, though, but she looked a lot more presentable.

Someone knocked on the door.

It was time for my little tap dance to begin.

FIFTY-ONE

The first two cops on the scene were beat cops.
The captain had taken my advice and brought in people to secure the building.
The manager and I showed them
to
the dynamite, and while they were figuring out how to best handle the situation, I slipped out, relieved that the dynamite and the War at Home Brigade was now someone else’s problem.
I had done my duty, maybe saved some lives.
I couldn’t do anything more.

My goal had simply been to get enough information to the right people to get Daniel arrested, and, I hoped, put away for life.
My conversation with the security guard might provide the very last piece of the puzzle, the thing that conclusively linked Daniel Kirkland and his gang to a very real act of violence as well as the dynamite itself.

I hurried to the address that Tucker had given me.
It was just a few blocks down on Third
Avenue
, a brownstone in terrible repair.
I had to step over some people sleeping on the sidewalk.
A few kids
hanging
out near the door of one of the buildings
disappeared inside as they saw me.

The street was remarkably empty, especially compared to Eleventh.
Eleventh had looked pretty quiet
, though,
when I left: the sirens must have scared people off.

I hurried up the steps and into the building.
The door was half off its hinges, and the names scrawled beside the mailboxes were fading.
I did see Jervis’s name, but someone had tried to write over it.

The apartment number placed it on the fourth floor.
I let myself in, overwhelmed by the stench of stale beer and vomit.
I stepped around the pile of goop that looked like it caused the smell.

Some of the lights were out in the hallway.
The main area was wide, with four apartments on either side.
Through an open door, the stairway loomed.

A white man in a police uniform stood at the base of the stairs with his arms crossed.
He looked at me suspiciously.

I played a hunch.

“Detective O’Connor’s on the fourth floor, right?
He told me to meet him at Jervis’s place, and I’ve been in three other buildings. This is the right one, right?”

The officer nodded.
“They just went up.”

“They?”

“Him and the manager.
Nobody’s answering the door.”

“Thanks,” I said, and walked past him.
I could hear footsteps on the wooden stairs above me, and the low grumble of voices.
I would let the two men open the door, and then I’d join them in Jervis’s apartment.

The stairs wound crazily, finally stopping on a landing just shy of the second floor.
There they widened, taking up most of the hallway.
I walked up, getting closer to the voice.
From this point, the steps were more traditional — about fifteen, then a landing with a window overlooking the street, a turn, and another fifteen steps, cross the main floor, and go up again.

This part of the building looked like it
had been
grafted on
to an earlier building
.
Or perhaps the first floor stairway wasn’t supposed to come up this far when the building had been built.
This part of the building was cleaner
,
too, but it was clear that no one who lived here had a lot of money.

I reached the third floor as the footsteps above me stopped.
I moved as quietly as I could, so that they wouldn’t think anyone was behind them.

“He added an extra deadbolt,” someone said.
I didn’t recognize the voice, so I assumed it was the manager.
“I know he gave me the key.
Give me a second.”

“Be quick about it.” O’Connor’s voice was low.

“Got it,” the manager said.

I could hear the key click against the lock, startlingly loud in the small space.
I started up the next flight of steps.
I figured I’d be on the landing by the time they got inside the apartment.

“He hasn’t been any trouble.
Just a nice guy, a little quiet—”

The explosion sent me backward.
I hit the wall on the third floor so hard that the breath left my body. Debris came flying at me, and I tried to cover myself, but I couldn’t move.

Something hit me in the head, and I closed my eyes — to protect them, I thought — but maybe I was closing them because I had gone unconscious.

Because I don’t remember part of that afternoon, still.
All I know is from the moment the explosion boomed outward to the moment I actually started to move again seemed like a very, very long time.

Hours, maybe days.

When, in fact, it was probably only minutes.