War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (43 page)

I pulled out the list I had made of names and addresses, seeing which were near my location.
None of them were real close.
I’d either have to walk some distance in this heat or take an even hotter subway ride.

But I couldn’t stop now.
I had to finish this.

I had to find out what Daniel was planning, and I had to stop him.

FORTY-FOUR

The nearest victim, Joel Grossman,
lived
on Macdougal and
West
Eighth
, not far from Washington Square Park.
I had walked from the coffee shop, deciding to avoid the subway in the heat.
Even though the train cars were air-conditioned, the stations were not, and the hot air grew foul by midday.

When I reached
the
p
ark, I found more construction signs, all of them announcing that the western end of the park would be closed starting on July 15.
Graffiti covered the official words, mostly spray-painted swear words, although on one sign someone wrote:
Its about freakin’ time
.

Grossman’s address was in a group of brick houses that seemed quaintly Village to me.
They had been carved up into tiny apartments and had discreet buzzers near the door. I pushed the button next to Grossman’s name but got no answer.
I waited for some time, tried the main door once, and discovered it was locked.

A white woman with long brown hair poked her head out of a nearby window.
“You buzzing for Joel?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thought so,” she said. “I can hear the buzzer in my place.”

“Is he all right?” I asked.

“He was hurt a few weeks back,” she said.
“He couldn’t stay alone so he went up to stay with his folks in the West Nineties.”

“Do you know exactly where?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “but his dad’s Jerome, so I suppose you could look it up.”

I thanked her and headed down the block.
The West
Nineties
were a far cry from here.
The Village always prided itself on being bohemian.
If Grossman’s neighbor thought anything of my skin color, she
didn’t show
it.
In the West
Nineties
, I’d be as susp
ect
as I was on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive.

No one was home at the next address on my list either — Victor McCleary, the young man who’d been shot a week before.
He lived in an old tenement apartment on Perry Street.
The address wasn’t far from the Christopher Street shooting site.

None of McCleary’s neighbors had seen him, and none of them seemed interested in him either.
I gave up and took the train north.
The last address wasn’t far from mine.
The very first victim lived in Morningside Heights in a student apartment. Which made sense
,
since the paper said he had enrolled at Columbia University.

The apartment was in a drab white
stone building not too far from the park.
I trudged there, feeling grimy from the subway and a day in the heat.
I had forgotten how hot this city could get: it didn’t have the benefit of cooling breezes off the lake, the way Chicago did.

The doorbells for the apartments were inside the stone arch.
Someone had rigged the bells haphazardly.
A simple snip of the wires and I could have knocked out the entire system.

I pressed the button for Ned Jones.
To my surprise, someone yelled from above, “Whozzit?”

I backed out of the archway and looked up, shielding my eyes.
A shirtless redheaded white man, wearing a sling over his left arm, peered down at me from a landing on the fire escape.

“My name’s Bill Grimshaw,” I said.
“I’m investigating some shootings.
I’m looking for Ned Jones.”

“That’s me.”

“I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

“Sure,” he said.
“C’mon up.”

He slid the fire escape bars down toward me.
I stepped into the nearby alley, grabbed the ladder, and tugged it down. Then I climbed up, hand over hand, until I reached the landing with Jones on it.
A large window opened into his apartment.
He sat on the sill.
He was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and nothing else.
A lawn chair sat on the far end of the landing, its metal legs braced precariously on the landing’s iron bars.

“You want a beer?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” I said, “but water’d be nice.”

“You’re in luck,” he said. “We got that.”

He swung his legs inside the apartment and padded off.
I looked around. The landing had a good view of the alley and the apartments on the other side.
If I craned my neck to the right, I caught the edge of the Columbia campus. If I craned farther to the left, I saw only more apartments and the street beyond.

When he came back, Jones had a glass in his good hand.
I took the glass from him and extended an arm to help him onto the landing, but he shrugged me off.

“I’m getting used to this.
It’s healing slow. The bullet did a lot of damage.”
Jones tilted his head as if he were investigating me.
His eyes were a dark auburn, matching his hair.
His skin was pale, almost translucent, in the sunlight.
“It’s about time someone started looking into my shooting.”

He didn’t ask to see any identification, and I didn’t offer any.

“You know there’ve been others,” I said.

“In the park?”
He sounded surprised.

“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“I do know a number of young people have been shot in the city.
The most recent was June
D’Amato
.”

“Junie.” He swung onto the windowsill, and frowned. “She okay?”

“She had two emergency surgeries since yesterday,” I said.
“She’s not conscious yet.”

“Jeez,” Jones said. “When’d this happen?”

“Yesterday morning, at the Armed Forces Induction Center on Whitehall.”

“Idiots,” he mumbled.

“Who?” I asked.

“The gang, whatever the hell they’re calling themselves.
I suppose they went down there to show their might.”

“I was told they were planning something.”

Jones shook his head.
“These guys don’t know when to quit.”

“I thought you were part of the group.”

“
‘Were’ being the operative word,” Jones said. “I was planning to drop out when this happened.
In fact, the last thing I remember before the shooting was arguing about the direction of the movement.
I’m yelling something about nonviolence being the only way to fight, and whappo! I get zapped with a bullet, knocked to the ground, and I am out of it.
Next thing I know, I’m in Columbia Presbyterian with IVs in me and a doctor hovering over me, telling me not panic.”

“Sounds serious,” I said.

“Shock,” he said.
“That bullet went through my upper arm and destroyed some nerves.
For a week there, they thought I might not have use of the arm.
Now I will, but it’ll never be up to normal.
I don’t have feeling in three of my fingers, probably never will.”

I found myself looking at the arm in the sling.
His fingers looked thinner and paler than the others, almost bluish.

“What else do you know about the shooting?” I asked.

“The cops say it was random.
Someone was probably illegally firing off a gun in the Ramble.
Now you’re here telling me others have been shot, so I don’t know.
All I know is that I got hit.”

“Three others,” I said.
“Besides June
D’Amato
, Joel Grossman and Victor McCleary got shot.
All on separate occasions.
All lived through the initial shooting, although I haven’t been able to talk to any of them to see how they’re doing.”

“All at ‘actions’?” he asked, putting a sarcastic emphasis on the word.

“June and Grossman’s were,” I said.
“McCleary got shot after a riot down on Christopher Street last week.”

Jones rolled his eyes.
“That damn bar.
I told him to stay out of it.”

“So you were good friends with him?”

Jones shrugged.
“I don’t know about that.”

“But you were planning to leave the group.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jones said. “There was new blood, and I really hated the direction.
We were an offshoot of the SDS here on campus.
We moved away from the militant stuff when some of the students held some buildings on campus hostage last year.
Maybe you heard about that?”

Of course I had heard.
The Columbia takeover was often cited as the beginning of violent student unrest on campuses all over the United States.

“You didn’t participate in that?”

“I was at the early meetings,” he said, “and I thought it was stupid. We want to stop the war in Vietnam, so we shut down a building on campus? What does that mean?
So I gathered up some like-minded people, and we went our own way, publishing a newsletter, leafleting, giving speeches.”

“But that changed,” I said.

“Gradually.” He propped himself up on the sill. “Some of the guys got caught in the glamour.
They rejoined Mark Rudd and those guys — the true SDS they were calling themselves.
We were just the other guys for a while.
We didn’t really have a name.
I dropped out — we all did — and worked on stopping the war full
-
time.
I was writing for the
Voice
and for
Rat
and some of the other underground papers, going to marches, you know the drill.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“Everything,” he said. “Bobby got killed, then the Democratic National Convention, then Nixon got elected.
Some of our people began thinking nonviolence wasn’t the way — it sure wasn’t the way to get noticed any more — and we kept losing people. The new folks coming in had a different agenda.”

“Which was?”

“Fight the war at all costs.
That’s what we were arguing about that afternoon. They wanted to escalate — bring the war home, stop the exploitation of the third world, all that crap.
They wanted to work outside the system, and I said I believed in the system, even though it could get really fucked sometimes.
You gotta change things from within, you know?”

“Sometimes it takes a while,” I said.

“Everything
of value
is hard,” Jones said.
“But these new kids, they didn’t understand that. And to be fair, no one’s talking like that anymore.
You been hearing about the fires in Providence? I’m convinced that’s some student group, trying to make a point. I met a few of their people. They’re just as radical as everyone else.”

I hadn’t head about any fires in Rhode Island, but I didn’t want to admit it and get him off track.
“So you dropped out of the organization.”

“It’s not for me, man, and the gunshot proved it.
It was karma.”
He grinned at me as he said that last, and tipped his beer my way.
He took a long swallow.

“Do you know Daniel Kirkland?” I asked.

“Know him? Hell, I was arguing with him when I got shot.
Bastard.”

The strong negative reactions to Daniel no longer surprised me.

“He was one of the ones who wanted to move toward violence?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

Jones nodded.
“Said he had everything they needed.
They just needed a plan.”

“Everything?”

Jones shrugged.
“I didn’t ask him to explain.
I got out before I could be implicated.
But I’d check out his place.
You’ve gotta find something there.”

“What kind of violence was he talking about?”

“What does anyone talk about? Blowing stuff up, mostly.”

“Did he have any plans?”

“I don’t know.
I was stuck on the violence-nonviolence thing. The minute they started talking about bombs, I was outta there.”

“But you said that you left because you were shot.”

“No, I said I was thinking about leaving before I got shot.
In fact, I was telling Daniel I was going to leave.
I didn’t much like him.
And then he’s screaming about discrimination, when he came down from Yale
,
of all places.
He wanted to add black issues to the Vietnam stuff, and it just didn’t fit — no offense, man.”