War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (55 page)

“I called Alex from the pay phone,” Gwen said.
“He told me not to get involved.
He never really forgave you, you know.”

“For that night?” I asked, still remembering how his small hand felt in mine.

“For leaving, I think,” Gwen said.
“He liked you, Smokey.”

“I scared him,” I said.
“I scared him a lot.”

“He would have understood.”

I shook my head.
“It took me a long time to understand.
Drinking didn’t help. Nothing helped, except time and a little less pressure.
The nightmares will never entirely go away, and I’m not good at intimate relationships.”

“Yet you have a son,” Gwen said.

“Jimmy and I are about as similar as two people
can
get,” I said.

Jimmy glanced at me in surprise.

“And a fiancé
e
,” Gwen added, with a touch of bitterness.

“A fiancé
e
?” I asked.

“A woman named Laura,” Gwen said.

My eyes met Jimmy’s.
He was looking at me defiantly.
He had told a lie, and he wanted me to support it.

“Laura’s a special woman,” I said, “but we’re not engaged.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes and gave me a disgusted look.

“You’re not?” Gwen asked, with hope in her voice.

“Our lives are very different,” I said. “If I
could
figure out how to mesh them, I would. But there’s that intimacy thing, at least for me.”

“And Jimmy,” Gwen said.

“Laura loves me,” Jimmy said.

“She does,” I said.
“If this were just about Jimmy, I’d marry Laura in a heartbeat.
But there are a lot of other issues involved.”

I waited for Gwen to make a derogatory comment about a white woman in my life.
But apparently Jimmy and Malcolm
hadn’t seen
fit to tell her, which was good. They also hadn’t told her that Laura was rich, which was also good.

“Issues,” Gwen said.

“What about you?” I asked.
“You’re single again?”

She said yes, and told me what happened to her last two relationships.
I ate slowly, only half listening, trying to see if that feeling would return — the memory that had eluded me so far.

The headache was fading as I ate something and had some juice.
Part of the headache remained: the part that came from the blow to the head. But the rest slowly eased, making me feel somewhat human.

Malcolm returned partway through Gwen’s recital.
He glanced at her, then at me, and didn’t say anything.
I think he understood what I had done.

He set the newspaper on the counter, then dished up the last of the eggs, and sat down.

“You did all the work to cook them,” I said, “and you only get cold.”

“A cook’s life,” Malcolm said.
“I put the other stuff in the bathroom.”

I thanked him, then bid Gwen to continue. She told us about her boyfriends and her job as a secretary, but no one really paid a lot of attention until she got to Alex.

“He’s heading out on his second tour,” she said.
“I worry about him.”

“He’s in Vietnam?” Malcolm asked.

She nodded.

“He was just a boy when I saw him last,” I said. “I can’t believe he’s full grown.”

“Full grown and promoted.
A sergeant.
He’s good at what he does,” Gwen said with pride.

“What does he think of being over there?” Malcolm asked.

“He doesn’t talk about it much,” Gwen said. “You could ask him.”

I glanced at Malcolm.
“If you
want
to,” I said. “It might be good to get an outside perspective.”

“Are you thinking of volunteering?” Gwen asked.

“Something like that,” Malcolm said.

They continued the conversation while I ate the last of the toast.
I got up from the table, poured myself a cup of coffee, and looked at the newspaper.

The bombing
had
made the front page because a policeman had died.
My name was not mentioned.
I was apparently included in the handful of people injured, none of whom were identified.

So far so good.
But that didn’t mean the television or radio news hadn’t identified me.
Or that the cops hadn’t started to investigate me.

My hands shook so much the paper rattled.
I braced them on the countertop and kept reading.

O’Connor got his own article, a full
-
dress uniform picture, and a lot of coverage. He’d been an impressive man.
He’d been doing a lot of work tracking down “dangerous militant groups,” and had
had
a lot of success at it.

“Even on the day of his death,” the article’s anonymous writer said, “he still completed his work.
The arrests of the War at Home Brigade in their Harlem apartment [see article page 25] occurred because of his tireless efforts.”

I turned to page 25.
Under the headline
“
Militant Group Captured
”
was a photograph of Daniel and Rhondelle being led from the row house in handcuffs.
The article said that ten members of the group had been arrested, with more arrests to follow.
The arraignment would be held on Wednesday morning at the Federal Court House.

The article mentioned nothing about the bomb-making equipment, although it did mention the group’s threats to various organizations, including the Armed Services Induction Center.
The only note to any of the things I had discovered yesterday was this:
“Evidence seized yesterday strongly suggests that the group would have carried out its threats against these organizations within the week.”

Somehow I had managed to stop Daniel just in time.

“Smokey?”

I turned.
Jimmy, Gwen, and Malcolm were looking at me.

“Are you all right?” Gwen asked in that tone people used when they’d asked a question more than once.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just looking at the write-ups about yesterday.”

“Are you in them?” Jimmy asked. I heard fear in his voice.

He was as worried as I was.

“Not so far,” I said, “but I think it’s time to leave the city.”

“Are you in trouble?” Gwen asked.

“I haven’t made friends,” I said.

She studied me for a moment.
Then, to my surprise, she said, “What can I do to help?”

“Nothing,” Malcolm said.
“You’ve already done too much.”

And in his voice I heard impatience.

“Actually,” I said, “we can use your help.”

She frowned.

“Can you return the keys to this place for us?
Let your friend know that it didn’t work out after all?
I don’t want him to see me like this.”

The disappointment she always felt in me showed in her face.
“The name you’re using, it’s Grimshaw, right?”

“Just tell him the apartment number,” I said. “That’s enough.”

“And your deposit?”

“It’ll cover the extra time,” I lied.
I didn’t want her to know that he had my address in Chicago.

“All right,” she said.
“When should I go?”

“This afternoon,” I said.

“You can’t leave now.
You’re hurt.”

“We have another place to stay in New Jersey,” I said, not willing to tell her more.
“We’ll be all right.”

Her lips thinned.

“We will,” Malcolm said.
I could hear the relief in his voice.

“I don’t like this,” Gwen said.

“I know,” I said, and turned back to the spread-out paper.

Only two people died in the bombing — O’Connor and the building manager, whose name was Roy Wallace.
Seven other people were wounded, including the woman who lived across the hall.
She had lost her right eye.

The rest of the article focused on Jervis.
He had served in Vietnam, received an honorable discharge after getting a Purple Heart.
He also received a Bronze Star for bravery, for heroics in an action that remained classified.
There was no photograph of him beside the article, and the paper noted that the military had yet to release one.

Upon his return to the States, he started work at Tucker Construction. He worked there for nearly a year before failing to show up for work at the beginning of June.

The article made no mention of the attack on Jervis at the warehouse or his tenuous connection to the War at Home Brigade.
According to the article, no one knew what Jervis had been doing for the past month or why he hadn’t shown up for work.

Some anonymous source speculated that he had been storing military equipment in the apartment illegally, and it had accidentally gone off when Wallace opened the door.

“That’s it,” I said.

The memory came back: the homemade bomb — designed to explode outward, protecting the person inside.
The blacked-out window, the spyhole.

It was a modified sniper’s nest inside a makeshift bunker.
The breeze coming in the hall from the apartment meant that an window on the far side of the building
was open
.

Jervis had escaped from his bunker when the bomb went off, just like he planned.

He wasn’t operating like a man returned from service. He was operating like a man still at war.

Something — the attack, maybe, or something else — triggered him, the way that the nightmares sometimes triggered me.
In his mind, he probably wasn’t even in New York, but some city in Vietnam, some place he’d been sent to get a particular enemy.

He’d probably made Daniel that enemy, Daniel and the War at Home Brigade.
After they had attacked him, after they had put a drug in his coffee.

The difference between me and him was that I snapped out of those memory
delusions after a minute or two.
He had been in his for more than a month.

It wasn’t unusual.
I knew some guys who never came home, not in the mental sense.
In World War
I
, they were called shell-shock victims.
In
World War
II they
called them victims of battle fatigue.
Korean veterans didn’t get a label, and who knew what was going on with Vietnam, except that some of these guys were experiencing it
,
too.

“What’s it?” Malcolm asked.

“I just remembered something,” I said.
“It’s not important.”

But it was important.
I stared at the paper, so that the others thought I was reading.

I was actually thinking.
McCleary’s shooting had nothing to do with Jervis.
But Jervis had clearly shot Jones, June, and Grossman.
When Jervis shot Jones, Jones had been arguing with Daniel.
When Jervis shot June, she and Daniel had been standing close together.

Judging by that bomb, Jervis probably hadn’t received sniper training.
He probably worked with munitions.
Only someone with experience could have modified a claymore design like that.

His sniper skills were minimal.
He had probably been aiming for Daniel when he shot Jones.
Daniel had been the one
who
hurt Jervis at the construction site, and Jervis had probably seen him.

Jervis must have tracked Daniel all over the city, shooting at him twice — the first time hitting Jones, the second time hitting June.

Which left only Grossman unexplained, and I figured I had a handle on that as well.
Grossman fit the description of one of the Castro brothers.
He and someone else had rented that apartment for Daniel.
Once Grossman found out what it was being used for, he left the group — which didn’t matter, because his real name wasn’t on that lease.

Maybe Grossman had been involved with the robbery.
He had certainly been reluctant to speak to me about the dynamite.
Maybe he was in deeper than he said.

That would explain his shooting
,
which happened at a time when Daniel wasn’t present.

If I had the energy, I would have investigated.
But I didn’t.
The case no longer belonged to me.
I had to get the boys out of New York.
We had to disappear as suddenly as we had arrived.