War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (4 page)

“Our conversations began before midterms,” St. James said.
“Mr. Kirkland was skipping many of his classes and encouraging others to do so.
He flunked two of his courses because he did not believe the ‘garbage’ the professors were teaching.”

“And the other fall courses?”

“Much to the irritation of his professors, he succeeded in getting Bs without attending the last month of classes.
He said it was proof that Yale’s vaunted academic difficulty was a myth.”

“Too bad a mind like that is being wasted,” I said, more to myself than to St. James.

“My point exactly,” St. James said.
“If you believe the University of Chicago can get him off this path and make him a reliable citizen, more power to you.”

“Thank you for your candor,” I said.

“Believe me, I wouldn’t have spoken up unless it were an extreme case.”

I did believe him, and I knew he was dancing around the edges of something, something that he couldn’t tell me from the file.
Taken together, Daniel Kirkland’s violations at Yale were a lot less than other students had done in the past few years at Columbia, Harvard, and other Ivy League schools.
Many of the students who closed down buildings hadn’t been expelled from their campuses.
I couldn’t believe that Daniel Kirkland would be tossed out for speaking plainly — if rudely — to the administration.

“May I ask one more question?” St. James’s round-about way of speak
ing
was rubbing off on me.

“Certainly,” he said.

“Did you inform Daniel’s mother of your decision?”

“Our view is that our students are adults.
We inform the parents if they foot the bill for the education, but for the most part we let the students themselves handle their own affairs.”

At least the scholarship students, the “colored” students, and the “Hebrews.”
All of the undesirables to WASPy Yale.

“So no one outside of Yale and Mr. Kirkland know that he is
persona non grata
?”

“Unless they specifically ask, as you have, Mr. Grimshaw, we have no need to tell them.”

“Not even his scholarship administrators?”

“They received a copy of the file,” St. James said with a hint of satisfaction.

No wonder Daniel’s scholarship was being revoked.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can get a copy of the file,” I said.

“I’m sorry.” St. James sounded prim again.
“Only the university and the financial aid providers are entitled to this information.”

There was nothing left to ask him, so I thanked him for his time and hung up.

I had no idea how I would tell Grace all of this.
She knew Daniel was involved in the antiwar movement, and she didn’t appreciate it, but I doubted she had ever thought of him as a troublemaker.

I hadn’t liked his attitude last summer, his unwillingness to let his family know he was home, his assumption of ignorance by all of us who weren’t involved in his cause, but he didn’t seem like a young man who would get thrown out of a prestigious college.
If anything, I would have expected him to disappear, to fade away as if he hadn’t been there at all.

Apparently, I had misjudged him as well.

FOUR

After I hung up the phone, I sat at my desk for a long moment, staring out the window at the building next door.
Judging from St. James’s comments, Daniel had had to deal with incredible bigotry at Yale, not just based on skin color, but also on the poverty in his background.
Had Daniel been afraid to contact his mother? And if so, what had he done with his time since he left Yale?

This case couldn’t be resolved with simple phone calls and, as Grace said, she couldn’t afford an out-of-state investigator.
Even if she could afford it, I doubted one would take the case when he found out that Daniel was black.

I leaned back in my chair and templed my fingers, a bit startled at my own reaction.
I wanted to take the case, not so much for the work, but as an excuse to leave Chicago.

The thought of leaving Chicago had been floating around my mind since I became involved in a shooting in the worst part of the city, a section known as the Gaza Strip.
Chicago hadn’t been the haven I had hoped for.
The schools were crumbling, riots had become common, and the violence in the south and west sides made this city one of the most dangerous places in the nation.

I had come here initially because I had nowhere else to go.
Laura Hathaway lived here, and even though we had not been seeing each other at the time, I had subconsciously picked Chicago as my destination because of her.

But Chicago wasn’t fulfilling
my hopes for it
.
Jimmy still had nightmares.
If anything, they had grown worse.
I had developed community ties, but Grace was right: my cases often led me deeper into danger, something I couldn’t afford with an eleven-year-old child as a dependent.

I had saved quite a bit of money from my work with Sturdy and the cases I had taken for various black insurance agencies.
Part of me had been subconsciously planning to leave for a while now.

And Jimmy and I weren’t in as much danger from the authorities as we had been. Even though the FBI had issued an APB describing us, that APB was over a year old.
Other fugitives took priority.
Jimmy and I had solidly established identities.
I could portray Bill Grimshaw for the rest of my life, if need be.

We could see if other cities, other places, suited us better.

This case might provide an excuse to explore.

First, though, I had to talk to Grace.
She might know more than she realized.

Grace Kirkland lived only a block away from me, and when she wasn’t teaching, she was at home.
I left the apartment and hurried down the stairs.
Jimmy sat on the stoop outside, talking to some of his friends.

They moved furtively when they saw me.
I wondered what they were up to.

“Jim,” I said.
“Everything okay?”

He glanced up at me.
His face was lightly coated with sweat, and the back of his
T
-shirt was damp.
He wore a pair of hand-me-down shorts from the Grimshaws.

“Yeah,” he said.

His friends, two boys who lived across the street, watched me with big eyes.

I couldn’t see anything out of place except their guilty attitude.
I decided not to push my luck.
“I’m heading to Grace’s.
Please be here when I come back.”

Jimmy nodded.
The other boys didn’t move.

I stepped past them, and walked quickly down the block. Grace’s apartment building, like mine,
had been
built before World War II.
Unlike my building, however, hers hadn’t been maintained.
The white brick was a musty gray, the grass out front was overgrown with weeds, and the main door had nearly come off its hinges.

Grace’s apartment was at the end of the hall.
She had lived there for years, maintaining a garden in the back, surrounded by a fence that she had built herself.
Even though the building was run
-
down, her apartment wasn’t — showing a pride that I always associated with Grace, an ability to make the best out of anything that life had given her.

I knocked.
After a moment, I heard rustling behind the door.

It opened, revealing not Grace, but her youngest son, Elijah.

He had grown since the previous summer, looking more like a teenager than a young boy.
A wispy mustache graced his upper lip, and stubble covered his chin.
However, his cheeks were still as smooth as Jimmy’s.

“You come for Mom?” he asked, and his voice was deep and startling — a baritone in a tenor’s body.

I nodded as he shouted for her.

Grace came into the narrow hallway. She was wearing an apron over a white sleeveless dress, and she was carrying a towel.
When she saw me, she smiled.

“C’mon in,” she said, gesturing with the hand holding the towel.

I stepped inside.
The apartment was cooler than the hallway and smelled faintly of cinnamon.

“Don’t tell me you’re baking on a day like today,” I said.

She shrugged.
“I learned a secret from my momma.
Bake before the sun comes up, and you’ll have sweets for the heat of the day.
Want a cookie?”

She had chocolate chip and snickerdoodles and good old-fashioned sugar cookies.
I took one of each, and a cup of coffee, which sounded good despite the heat.

Elijah grabbed a chocolate chip, then disappeared down the hall, probably heading to his bedroom.

“He’s become a teenager,” I said.

“Overnight.” She sighed, and untied her apron, hanging it on a peg in the half
-
kitchen.
Then she led me to the table, which she had placed in front of the glass patio doors, one of the few features of her apartment that I liked better than mine.

“I made those calls,” I said as I sat down on the nearest wooden kitchen chair, “and I was wondering if I could see that letter about Daniel’s scholarship.”

A slight frown creased Grace’s forehead, but to her credit, she didn’t ask me any questions as she went to the small desk pushed up against the wall.
She thumbed through a pile of open envelopes until she found the one she was looking for.

Then she handed it to me.

It was exactly as Grace had reported to me: because Daniel hadn’t completed his fall semester and hadn’t enrolled for the spring semester, he would lose his scholarship if he didn’t enroll in the upcoming semester, which was Fall of 1969.

“That’s odd,” I said.

“What is?” Grace sat down across from me.
She had poured herself some coffee, but now she pushed the cup away from her, as if she couldn’t bear to drink it.

“I spoke to a man in the registrar’s office who told me that Daniel had completed the fall semester.
He even mentioned the grades.”

I would have thought that St. James was looking at the wrong file if he hadn’t mentioned where Daniel had grown up and the color of his skin.

“He did?” The news brightened Grace considerably.
“That sounds more like Daniel.
He always completes what he starts.”

“But he still didn’t register for the spring semester,” I said.
“He’s not at Yale.”

Her lips thinned, and that brightness faded just as quickly as it had come.
“How come they never contacted me?
Aren’t they supposed to?”

“I don’t know,” I said.
“Everyone I spoke to made a point of reminding me that Daniel is an adult.
And he is, Grace.
He has the right to make his own choices.
Even the police had no record of him, at least in the last few months.”

Grace sighed.
“I can’t imagine him dropping out without telling me.”

I could.
But I wasn’t his parent.
I wondered if I would become this blind about Jimmy — or if I already had.

She stood. “I can’t believe he would give up all that we worked for. That scholarship was everything.
He knew that.”

She shoved her hands in the pockets of her dress, pulling it across her back.

“What kind of example is this for Elijah?
How am I supposed to make something of other people’s children when I can’t even control my own?”

“You got him there,” I said.
“What he did after that is his business.”

She shook her head. “College wasn’t the end.
He knew that.
He had proven that a black boy from a bad high school could get into one of the best schools in the world with his smarts, his willingness to work outside of class, and his stick-to-
it
iveness.
I used to tell him that if he could get into a college, he’d fought part of the battle.
That would show the world that he was good enough for all the perks a college like that provided. He could be a lawyer or a doctor or anything white folks could be, only he could be better.”

She spoke with so much force that her body shook with each word.
Yet she still didn’t face me as she talked.

I was glad that she didn’t.
Her words echoed St. James’s.
Daniel had taken the view she had expressed and twisted it, trying to mold the university into a place that would be his ideal school.
He had been following Grace’s plan, only in a more militant fashion.