Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story (2 page)

“Since when am I getting calls at your
place?” I asked.

“Since I can’t talk sense into Val,” she
said.

I peered at her. I hadn’t heard from
Valentina since that day in September when she’d delivered the white woman to
Helping Hands. After she had completed her mission, she had taken me, Marvella,
and Marvella’s sister Paulette to dinner. She told us about her life in
Madison, which sounded a bit bleak to me, and then drove the three hours back
so she wouldn’t miss the university extension class that she taught the
following morning.

Marvella’s apartment had the same layout
as mine, but was decorated much differently. Hers was filled with dark,
contemporary furniture, and African art. The sculptures covered every surface,
faces carved from mahogany and other dark woods. The sculptures were so
life-like they seemed to be staring at me.

The phone hung on the wall in Marvella’s
half kitchen. The receiver rested next to the toaster.

“There she is. You tell her our policy.” Marvella
waved a hand at the phone. “I have to finish getting dressed.”

She vanished down the hallway and slammed
her bedroom door, as if I was the one who had made her angry instead of
Valentina.

I picked up the receiver. “Valentina?”

“Smokey?” She was one of the few people
who called me by my real name. Most people in Chicago knew me as Bill Grimshaw,
a cousin to Franklin Grimshaw, one of the co-founders of Helping Hands. My real
name is Smokey Dalton, and I’m from Memphis. A case four years ago put me on
the run and brought me here, forcing both me and Jimmy to live under an assumed
name.

On the night she almost died, Valentina
overheard Laura call me Smokey, and she never forgot it. She once told me that
Bill didn’t suit me and Smokey did. Since Jimmy, Laura, and Franklin all called
me Smokey, I never felt the need to correct Valentina.

“Marvella said I’m supposed to talk sense
into you,” I said, “only she won’t tell me what this is about.”

“Linda Krag disappeared,” Valentina said.

The name didn’t ring a bell with me. “Linda
Krag?”

“The white woman I took to Helping Hands
in September,” Valentina said. “I’m sure you remember.”

“I do now,” I said, and then realizing
that sounded a little too harsh, added, “She had that pretty little daughter.”

“Yeah,” Valentina said. “They’ve both
been gone a week now.”

“I thought they were in Chicago,” I said.

“They were,” she said.

“And you’re still in Madison?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s why I’m talking
to you. No one told me she was missing until they sent my targeted donation
back.”

Valentina sent money every month to
Helping Hands earmarked only for Linda Krag and her daughter. If the money
couldn’t be used for Linda Krag, then Helping Hands was duty-bound to return
it. The policy was Laura’s. She believed that everyone who donated money had a
right to say how it would be used.

“So you called to find out what was up,”
I said.

“And discovered that she had left her
apartment a week before. No one will tell me where she went.”

“Did she take her daughter with her?” I
asked.

“Of course,” Valentina said. “She won’t
go anywhere without Annie.”

I sighed. I knew the arguments Marvella
had already made because they were the ones I had to make. Helping Hands
followed its name exactly: It provided helping hands. If a client no longer
wanted help, we couldn’t force it on her.

Besides, we had rules. The client
received her living expenses for the first month. We paid her rent and
utilities and gave her a food budget. In return, we asked that she either apply
for work or go to school.

If the client refused to do either, we
stopped the support. If she couldn’t hold a job, we got her more job training,
but if she lost the job because of anger, discipline or a drug problem — and
the client wouldn’t get help curbing that problem—then we stopped
providing assistance.

Linda Krag had been difficult from the
start. She almost refused to go into Helping Hands, even though we had found a
white volunteer to take her application. Chicago’s South Side, filled with
black faces, terrified her. Eventually, Valentina talked her into the building.
Once there, she agreed to all Helping Hands’ terms and actually went to classes
to get her GED.

But she hated the apartment that she was
assigned. Not because it was bad or in a bad neighborhood, but because she and
her daughter were the only whites on the block. She claimed to be terrified,
and wanted an apartment in a “normal” neighborhood.

Since we knew of no programs to combat
innate bigotry, we searched for — and found — her an apartment in a
transitional neighborhood near the University of Chicago. She liked that. She
had gotten her GED, applied for college, and found a part-time job, one that
didn’t tax her still-healing hand. Her daughter went to Head Start half the
day.

Last I heard, everyone was happy.

But clients who started as roughly as
Linda Krag often didn’t make it through the program. They had too many other
problems.

I said all of this, and more to
Valentina, and as I spoke, she sighed heavily.

“Has anyone thought about her husband?”
Valentina asked when I had finished.

I leaned against the wall. A wave of
spicy perfume blew toward me from the bedroom. Marvella was not just getting
dressed. She was getting dressed up.

“What about her husband?” I asked.

“Maybe he found her.”

“Or maybe,” I said gently, “she just
left.”

“She wouldn’t,” Valentina said. “Her
family is dead. She has no friends. That loser isolated her from everyone she
knew when he took her to Madison. She wouldn’t know how to start a new life.”

“Actually,” I said, making sure I kept
the same tone, “Helping Hands was teaching her how to make a life for herself
and her daughter.”

“Exactly,” Valentina said. “I got a
postcard from her daughter Annie two weeks ago. She sounded happy. Linda added
a sentence thanking me. She wouldn’t just give up. Not now.”

“You spoke to her about this?” I asked.

“No,” Valentina said. “But leaving now
just isn’t logical.”

Neither was staying with a man who nearly
beat her to death, but I wasn’t going to argue that point with Valentina.

“Val,” I said, “a lot of women do things
that aren’t logical.”

I winced as the words came out of my
mouth. I should have said “people,” but it was too late to correct myself.

“Women are not illogical creatures,”
Valentina snapped.

Marvella had come out of the bedroom. She
was wearing an orange dress with a matching orange and red scarf tied around
her hair. She had heard the last part of this conversation, and she was
grinning now.

She knew the mistake I made.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “I
just meant that people can be irrational.”

“Linda’s not irrational,” Valentina said.

I was already tired of this fight. “You
mean the woman who wouldn’t get into the car with me and Marvella because she
was afraid of black people? That Linda?”

Valentina made a sound halfway between a
sigh and a growl. “Smokey, look. You have to trust me on this. I got a real
sense of her. It took her a lot of guts to run away from Duane. It took even
more to go to Chicago. But she knew it was right for Annie. Linda wasn’t going
to go back to him. Not ever.”

“I didn’t say she would,” I said. “Maybe
she thought she could do better on her own.”

“She knew she couldn’t,” Valentina said. “She
was terrified of being on her own. That’s why she didn’t get into the car with
you. She knew she couldn’t defend herself and Annie, and you — I’m sorry,
Smokey — but you look like every white person’s nightmare. I don’t think
she’d ever spoken to a black person until she spoke to me. Asking her to go
with you and Marvella was one step too many for her. But she did go to Chicago,
she did get her GED, she did start over.”

“Yeah.”

I must have sounded as skeptical as I
felt because Valentina added, “You have no idea how hard all of that was for
her. She wouldn’t be the kind of woman who would do it all over again all on
her own. Especially not with Annie.”

I sighed. Marvella crossed her arms and
raised her eyebrows, as if asking if I was going to finish soon.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s say I grant
you that she wouldn’t run off. What then, in your mind, could have happened?”

Marvella rolled her eyes.

“I think the husband found her,”
Valentina said. “I think she’s in trouble, Smokey. Both her and Annie.”

“And this is a gut sense,” I said.

“Stop patronizing me!”

I almost denied that I was, but then I
realized that I would have been lying.

“I need to know if you have facts to back
up this assumption,” I said.

Valentina didn’t answer for nearly a
minute. Finally she said, “No.”

“So,” I said. “It begs the question. How
could the husband have found her? Is he particularly bright?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Did you tell anyone where she went?”

“Not even the folks here at the hot line.
Only one of the women knew what I was doing, and all she knew was that I was
going to take Linda to some of my friends in Chicago.”

“So,” I said, then winced again. I was
even sounding patronizing. “Would she have called this man for any reason?”

“I don’t think so,” Valentina said. “No.”

“Then how could he have found her?”

“I don’t know,” Valentina said. “I just
want you to check on her. You and Marvella have made it really, really clear
that Helping Hands doesn’t track people who vanish. So how about this? How
about I hire you to find her, Smokey. Does that work for you? I have a lot of
money. I’ll pay your standard rates plus expenses. I can put a check in the
mail today.”

I almost told her that it wasn’t
necessary, that I would do this one for free. But I was a little annoyed at her
stubbornness, and besides, Jimmy was growing so fast that I couldn’t keep him
in shoes. My regular work for local black insurance companies and for Sturdy
paid the bills, but couldn’t cover the added expenses of a growing teenage boy.

“All right,” I said, and quoted her my
rates. “I’m going to need a few things from you, too. I need some basic things.
I need the husband’s full name. I need to know where he lives and, if possible,
where he works. I need to know where he lived with Linda and Annie.”

“Okay,” Valentina said.

“But — and this is very important —
I don’t want you investigating or talking to him. If you can’t do the work by
phone, using a fake name, I don’t want you doing it. Is that clear?”

“I know how to investigate, Smokey,” she
said with some amusement in her voice.

“Good,” I said. “Because the last thing I
want is for this nutball to go after you.”

“He won’t,” she said.

But I got the sense, as I hung up the
phone, that Valentina Wilson — the new version, the muscular woman I’d
seen three months ago — would welcome his attack. She’d welcome it, and
happily put him out of commission.

“Well?” Marvella asked.

“Well,” I said, “it looks like I have a
missing persons case.”

She rolled her eyes again. “And I thought
you were a tough guy.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “it’s just easier to
do what the client wants than it is to convince them they’re wrong.”

“Is she wrong?” Marvella asked.

“Probably,” I said with a sigh. “Probably.”

***

Linda Krag’s new apartment was in student
housing near the University of Chicago. The neighborhood had once been filled
with middle class professors’ homes, but now those homes were divided up into
apartments, with bicycles parked on the porch and beer cans lying in the lawn.

Those lawns were brown. Winter hadn’t
arrived yet, despite the chill.

In the early fall, when Linda Krag had
seen this place, it had probably looked inviting. Now, with the naked trees
stark against the gray skyline, the leaves piled in the street, the battered
cars parked haphazardly against the curb, the block looked impoverished and
just a little bit dangerous.

Or maybe I was projecting. Linda Krag,
white and young, might have felt comfortable here, but I felt out of place,
despite the University neighborhood’s known color-blindness and vaunted
liberalism.

I had the skeleton keys from Helping
Hands. Linda’s stuff had not been removed from the apartment — she had
until the end of the month before her belongings would become part of the
charity’s donation pile. I doubted anyone had visited this place once everyone
realized she was gone.