War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (8 page)

“This doesn’t sound like a good idea, Smokey,” she said.
“Your cases aren’t always safe.”

“The case is an excuse.” Jimmy reached for another bun.
He hadn’t touched his salad.
I shoved the bowl toward him, and he wrinkled his nose.
But he took a bite, just to show me he understood.

“An excuse?” Laura set her hamburger down.
She frowned, then her shoulders sagged.
“You’re leaving Chicago.”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said.

“I wondered if that was going to happen.
You’ve been so restless since April.”

Everyone seemed to have noticed my discontent.

“Chicago’s getting worse,” I said.
“Twenty-eight murders in the last six months, most of them only a mile or so from here.
Kids, adults, cops, it doesn’t matter.”

She glanced at me on that last.
She knew about my role in one of the deaths last spring.
She also knew that it haunted me.

“You can both move in with me,” she said.
“It’s safer at my place, you know that.
The neighborhood’s better.”

“Not for us,” I said.
Laura lived in Chicago’s Gold Coast.
Most of the inhabitants of that section of Chicago were wealthy and white.
They’d always reacted with suspicion when they saw me going into the front door of Laura’s Lake Shore Drive condominium complex.
I couldn’t imagine the reaction if we lived there.

“Smokey,” she said.
“If you’re willing to leave Chicago, why don’t you consider this first?”

“You know why,” I said.
“Even if we decided to live up there, I’d still have to come down here to work.”

“You would only have to work for Sturdy,” she said. “You wouldn’t have to take all the other jobs—”

“The other jobs are the ones I enjoy.” I spoke softly.

“But if you’re thinking of Jimmy, a new place can’t be good for him.
He’d have a new community to learn, new friends, new relationships.”

“Maybe a better school and a nicer house, a safer community – for blacks as well as whites.
Chicago is the murder capit
a
l of America, Laura.
I’m sure we can do better than that.”

Jimmy was watching us as if we were participating in a tennis match, and it was clear from his expression that he wanted to Laura to win.
“Maybe Laura could hire a detective for Mrs. Kirkland.
I mean, in trade for me going to school with her and all.”

“In the same neighborhood we’re trying to leave,” I said. “You’d come back for school?”

“I couldn’t leave my friends or Mrs. Kirkland.” Jimmy spoke simply.
I looked at Laura as he said the words, and for the first time, it was clear she understood.

No matter what part of the city we lived in, we were tied to the
S
outh
S
ide of Chicago. I couldn’t forbid Jimmy to come here; he wouldn’t listen to me even if I felt I had grounds to stand on.
We would be better off remaining in our apartment, in our little neighborhood, th
a
n going to Laura’s fancy uptown location and having Jimmy sneak El rides south to visit his friends.

Jimmy set aside half of his second hamburger.
To my surprise, however, he reached out and put his hand on Laura’s.

“Smoke says you can come see us no matter where we are.
He says you gots enough money that it doesn’t matter where we live, you can find us.
So it won’t be like leaving Memphis and never seeing nobody again.”

She put her hand over his, then smiled.
He didn’t seem to notice that the smile didn’t reach her eyes.
“Smokey’s right about that.
I can come see you no matter where you are.
I’d just miss seeing you every day.”

“You don’t see us every day now,” Jimmy said.
“It’ll be okay, Laura, really.
If Smoke says we gots to, then we gots to.”

He was defending me.
I hadn’t expected it.
I knew how much he wanted to stay.

She squared her shoulders.
“I take it Mrs. Kirkland is paying you?”

“No,” I said.
“I have enough saved.”

“Then let me pay your fees,” Laura said. “Or at least your expenses.
You can fly out
e
ast, rent a car, stay in nice hotels—”

“Laura,” I said.

“You have to be comfortable, Smokey,” she said.

“We will be.
But we’re driving.
I don’t want to rent a car, and Grace and I have already handled the fees.
I’m not taking charity.”

She rolled her eyes.
“I hate it when you use that word. Technically
,
the charity wouldn’t be for you, it would be for Grace Kirkland.”

“It would be for me.
You wouldn’t offer if I weren’t involved.”

Laura sighed.
“You’re not going to let me help in this at all, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“So if you do decide to move out of Chicago, do you have enough for the trip and for a security deposit?”

“You’re getting way ahead of the program, Laura.”

“No, I’m not,” she said.
“You have to be ready for all contingencies.
You have—”

“As it stands right now,” I said, “we’re going to be gone until we find Daniel Kirkland.
Then we’re coming home.
If we decide to stay in Connecticut or Indiana or Pennsylvania, then we’ll worry about the other details.
We certainly didn’t have any money when we came here, and it worked out.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away.
Jimmy tightened his grip on her hand.
His knuckles were turning white.

“Don’t cry,” he whispered.
“We won’t like no place better.
You’ll see.”

She slipped her hand from his, grabbed his face, and kissed him on the top of the head.
Then she stood and looked at me.

“I don’t make these offers to patronize you, Smokey.
I make them because I love you and I worry about you and I want you to be okay.
But you don’t seem to understand that.”

“I understand it,” I said.
“I just don’t like the inequality in this relationship.”

“Which inequality?” she asked. “The financial one? You don’t like me to have more money than you? Or the racial one?”

“They’re both factors, Laura.”

“Because you make them factors,” she said.

“I’m not the only one,” I said.

“I
don’t
,” she said. “I never have.
I’ve stood beside you.
I don’t care what color you are or whether you have money.
I’m in love with you.
I have been since Memphis and you don’t understand that.”

“I do understand that,” I said.
“And I’m not saying you’re the one who makes them factors.
Society makes them factors.
Other people—”

“Other people have no place in our business,” she said.

“No, they don’t,” I said.
“But that doesn’t stop them from looking or commenting or getting in the way.
I’m in more danger when I walk the streets of Chicago holding your hand than when I’m chasing down some criminal on the
S
outh
S
ide.
And you’ve never really understood that.”

She was shaking.
One tear fell down her cheek, leaving a light mascara trail on her skin.
“I understood it.
I always thought you had the courage to face anything.
Guess I was wrong.”

She chucked Jimmy under the chin, gave him a watery smile, and then let herself out the front door.

I wasn’t breathing, and my hands were clenched together.

“You go apologize,” Jimmy said.

“For what?” I asked.
“For telling her the truth?”

His mouth got small and his eyes narrowed.
For a minute, I thought he was going to cry
,
too.

Instead, he stood up.

“You’re really stupid sometimes,” he said, as he let himself out of the apartment.
I could hear him run down the stairs, calling Laura’s name.

But I didn’t go after them.
I ate the last bite of my cold hamburger, washed it down with my warm Coke, and then stood, putting the dishes beside the small sink.

Sometimes being courageous wasn’t about walking into the middle of a fight.
Sometimes it took courage to retreat, to look for safe ground.

Sometimes being courageous meant turning your back on everything you knew, and starting over.

Jimmy and I had done it once before.

We could do it again.

EIGHT

We left on Saturday afternoon, June twenty-first.

I had chosen my route carefully.  I used Franklin’s
Chicago Negro Almanac
to look for the largest black communities on the way east.  That way, I could eyeball them as a prospective new home.

On that first afternoon, we drove from Chicago to Cleveland, taking our time along the way.
I had been to a number of the places in Indiana, and knew that I had no interest in that state.
I also didn’t want to go to Detroit which, news reports told me, had as many problems as Chicago did.

Before we left, I had set my sights on Cleveland.
I hadn’t heard anything bad about the city.
I knew it was the first major American city to elect a black mayor, having done so two years before.
And
Cleveland had the largest black population in Ohio
.  T
hose three facts made it my first stop.

I had also decided, before we left, that we’d stay in a hotel the first few nights.
I wanted Malcolm and Jimmy to be comfortable and to enjoy the trip.
The ride in the van was more difficult than I expected.
The back got hot in the middle of the day, and we’d overpacked it.
I had thought Jimmy could ride back there, but as it turned out, he was more comfortable up front.

It took us a while to find a place to stay.
I wasn’t familiar with Cleveland, and I had to drive a bit before I saw a neighborhood with some black faces.
I had to drive even more before I found a hotel that looked like a place we could afford and be
safe
staying in
it
.

The hotel was on the corner of Central and
Fifty-fifth.
It was a five-story monstrosity that anchored the entire block. The neighborhood was rundown, but not alarmingly so.

Our room was on the third floor.
The elevator was cranky, and once we got off, we had to carry our bags the length of the floor.
The room itself was square with one square window overlook
ing
the street.
The two double beds sagged in identical places, and the room smelled strongly of cigar.

The beds were covered in thin chenille, and separated by a small end table with a bubble lamp.
A table and two chairs stood beside the door, and across from that was a low-riding dresser with a television on top of it.

Jimmy had the television on before I could set my suitcase on the metal luggage rack.

“Not yet,” I said. “We need dinner first.”

I set the suitcase down and turned around.
Malcolm was still standing by the door, staring at the room.
He looked like he had never seen anything like it before.
It wasn’t that remarkable, except that it was cleaner than most and had a little more space.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He gave me a small grin.
“Just didn’t expect it to be so…normal.
You know?”

I blinked, thought, then realized that Malcolm had never been outside of Chicago.
He hadn’t acted like someone seeing the flat Indiana
and
Ohio countryside for the first time. When we’d hit the Ohio turnpike, he hadn’t seemed too surprised by the tolls, even though the tolls were cheaper and the toll booths less intrusive than the ones around Chicago.

I smiled at him.
“Well, these rooms are designed to make you comfortable.”

“I guess,” he said, and set his suitcase down.
He pushed on one of the beds, as if testing it to see if it was real.
Then he sat down, bounced, and his grin widened.