War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (23 page)

“Do you usually talk to your renters this much?” I asked.

“Well, he was unusual.
I remember that much.
And he was charming. So educated and funny.
I figured my boss wouldn’t ever see him, and wouldn’t know that I hadn’t gone the extra mile. What could it hurt?”

“Has he been paying you?” I asked.

“On time, every month on the
twenty-fifth
—so he was actually early.
It’s usually cash, because he doesn’t have a New Haven checking account and we don’t accept out-of-state checks.
We have a cash arrangement with a number of our students.”

“Aren’t they worried that the cash might not get credited to their account?”

She didn’t seem to take offense at the question.
“One of his friends drops it off and gets a receipt.
That was my idea, actually.
I figured if my boss didn’t see him, there wouldn’t be the wrong kinds of questions, you know?”

“I know,” I said, and hoped I didn’t sound too sarcastic.
“Is the friend a girl?”

“No,” she said. Then she gasped. “He’s not shacking up, is he? That’s all we need. I’d be fired for sure.”

Her voice remained low throughout all of that, but I could hear the panic in it.

“I know he has a girlfriend,” I said. “I just don’t know who his male friends are.”

“His friend seems like a nice young man,” she said.
“He’s here, like I said, at the end of every month.”

“But you don’t have a name,” I said.

“I didn’t think it
was
important.”

I made some kind of noncommittal noise because I didn’t know what else to say, then I asked her for the address.
She gave it to me, if I promised to call her back, let her know the condition of the apartment, and if there seemed to be evidence of a girl living with him “without benefit of marriage.”

I agreed, although I didn’t plan to fulfill that promise, and hung up. Then I gathered Freeman for lunch.
After we ate, I planned to go to Daniel Kirkland’s apartment and see why he hadn’t called home.

TWENTY

The address the agent gave me was in a neighborhood that she called the West Village.
At lunch, Freeman recommended that I park and walk, and when I arrived in the West Village, I was glad he had.
The Village wasn’t too far from his apartment, but it felt like a whole other world.

I walked by several students, and an old man sleeping on the sidewalk.
Another elderly man was leaning against a doorway, smoking, watching me as I passed.
His clothing suggested that he had once had wealthier days, now lost to time and his old age.

The apartment was in a block of row houses
on the right side of the street
that had seen better days.
The houses
had wooden stairs and few of the original doorways.
Most had replaced the windows.
Only the top floors seemed to retain the
intricate
cornices and loopy designs that marked these row
houses as a onetime upscale neighborhood.

The address was in the middle of the row, the building indistinguishable from its neighbors except for the wrought
-
iron railing and the brightly painted yellow door.
I walked up the steps, redone recently in concrete, and stared at the mailbox.
It listed two apartments inside, indicating that the narrow three-story house had been split in two.

I pushed on the main door, surprised to find it open, and stepped inside.
Stairs ran along the right-hand wall, just like they did in Freeman’s building, only these looked even more rickety.
Mud-covered shoes sat on a rug at the
foot
of the stairs, and even more shoes rested haphazardly in front of a door at the end of the hall.

I glanced at that door first.
It had a metal
number one
on the door.
I wanted apartment two.
Up the stairs I went.

These stairs also ended in a door, with the number two painted on it in white.
I stood on the nearest step, knocked, then stepped back down, not wanting to get hit
by
the door as it opened outward.
I also didn’t want Daniel to see me and bolt through the back window, disappearing down a fire
escape.

After a long minute, the door opened.
A young man stood there.
He was about twenty, with long blond hair and a wispy beard.
A petite, brown-haired white girl stood behind him, peering over his shoulder.

“I’m looking for Daniel Kirkland,” I said.
“I understand he lives here.”

“Not any more,” the boy said, and started to close the door.

I caught it, glad that it did open out.
“His family’s worried about him.
They haven’t heard from him in more than six months, and they just found out he hasn’t been in school.
I’ve been hired to find him.”

“Good luck,” the kid said.
“I haven’t seen him since February.”

February was a lot more recent than anyone else had seen him.

“Look,” I said, “you’re the first lead I’ve had in nearly a week.
I’d like to talk for just a minute, find out
what
he did between December and January, and see if this case is worth pursuing.”

“It isn’t,” the kid said, but he stepped away from the door as he did so. The girl scurried backward as well, looking at me as if I were the most dangerous thing she’d ever seen.

I climbed the remaining few steps and walked into the apartment. It smelled of vinegar and spoiled milk.
Clothes were draped all over a dumpy couch, and two wicker chairs with sagging seats were the focus of the room.
The room was big and square and seemed to go on forever, except for the stairs, going up the right side, just like they had below.

More clothes hung off the wooden balcony.
Blacklight posters covered the walls, and lava lamps sat on two tables fashioned out of boxes.

The young man took some of the clothes off the couch, tossing them onto another chair in the corner.
“We weren’t expecting company.”

“I wasn’t planning to stay long,” I said, not sure I wanted to sit on that couch.
It seemed to be the source of the sour milk smell.

“Who told you Daniel lived here?” The girl’s voice was quiet, but strong. I might have frightened her, but
her
fear hadn’t lasted long.

“A woman at your rental agency,” I said. “She seems to believe Daniel still lives here.”

“Crap,” the boy said.
“I forgot he signed the lease.”

“We can’t change it now,” the girl said.

The boy waved his hand at her, shushing her.
And I knew, just from that interchange, that I wouldn’t get their names without a struggle.

“You work for the agency?” the girl asked me.

I shook my head.
“I work for Daniel’s mother.
I’m from Chicago.”

“I thought his family was broke,” the boy said.

“It is,” I said. “I owe his mother a favor.”

The boy whistled. “Some favor.
But I guess you can go home now.
I’d tell Moms that Daniel isn’t worth her time.”

He was serious, which surprised me. I had initially thought the deprecating language was just the way he viewed the world.

“I take it you and Daniel weren’t friends,” I said.

“Shit, man, we were tight once,” he said.
“But he’s not the same guy I met last year.”

“You met him at Yale?” I asked.

“We were roomies freshman year.
He was one serious guy, always studying, trying to be the best at everything he did. Then he started to realize that being the best student didn’t mean as much here as it did at home, that he had to play all these games, and Danny wasn’t good at games.”

“Yes, he was,” the girl said with a touch of bitterness.

“Claire,” the boy said, warning her.

The girl made a face at the boy.
“Danny swallowed the revolutionary pill, you know?” she said to me.
“He is one wacko guy. We couldn’t keep him here, not with his stuff.”

“Claire,” the boy said. “We don’t know who this guy is.”

“Like I care,” she snapped.

“I don’t want us getting in trouble,” he said.

“You won’t.
I promise,” I said.
“I am from Chicago. I have ID if you’d like to see it.”

The boy started to ask for it, but Claire waved it away. I was beginning to get a sense of who was in charge in this relationship.

“If we get in trouble, Barry can say I told you so all he wants.” The girl crossed her thin arms.
“But I believe you. I think you just want to find Danny, although I’d be careful if I were you.”

“Careful? Why?” I asked.

“Because we kicked him and his weapons out of here.
The guns were creeping me out, but that stuff he had in his room — Barry said that you could make bombs from it.
And I don’t want a part of that.
None of us did. So we threw him out.”

I frowned.
That was the second time I’d heard of Daniel’s violence.
Perhaps Rhondelle’s beating had frightened him. “Bombs?”

The boy — Barry, apparently — shrugged.
“I might’ve been wrong.
I thought I saw some stuff that looked like C-4 and he had a lot of nails and stuff.
But I didn’t see a blaster or anything else you needed to make the things go off.
It was the rhetoric more than anything else.
I mean, you can only listen to so much about the honky-controlled system and how nobody gets a fair shake except the rich, and how the world has to explode to bring about a whole new reality. After time, it all sounds crazy, man.”

It sounded crazy to me.
“I met Daniel last summer.
He didn’t say anything of that.”

“The convention was like the last straw for him,” Claire said.
“All those kids getting beat up and nobody apologizing, then Nixon getting elected.
It was like Daniel saw on the national scale what he thought was going on here at Yale.
You know, the underclass getting trashed, and the administration not giving a shit.
Then there’s the whole war, man, and that’s just the same-old same-old.
A white colonizing nation destroying the homes and livelihoods of people of color.”

I shook my head a little, not certain if that was her rhetoric or his.
“Did you agree with him?”

“About what part?” she asked.
“That there’s discrimination? Yeah.
That it’s bad? Yeah.
That you need to destroy the system before you can rebuild it? Hell, I don’t know.
I just know I can’t kill anything.”

My frown grew.
When she referred to killing
,
did she mean the war or something Daniel proposed?

“I don’t think anybody in the house agreed with him except Rhondelle,” Barry said.

“Rhondelle was here
,
too?” I asked. “I thought she was missing. There was an article in the
New Haven Register
about it last May.”

Claire snorted.
“Like Rhondelle would tell her daddy what she was up to.
He wanted that girl to be whiter than all the debutantes on the social register.
Vassar education, marry someone rich, speak with that
Kath
arine
Hepburn
a
ccent that showed
Kult-chur
.
Rhondelle wasn’t having none of it.
She always thought her dad was jealous because she could pass and he couldn’t.”

I sighed.
Skin color was important even among my people. The paler the skin, the higher the social status.
It simply showed how infected we all were with the same disease.

“How many people lived in this apartment when Daniel and Rhondelle were here?” I asked.

“There’re three bedrooms upstairs,” Barry said. “All with couples, all Yale refugees.”

“Except the girls,” Claire said.
“We’re from everywhere.
Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Radcliffe.”

Yeah, everywhere, I thought, but didn’t say anything. “And you all dropped out?”

“Some of us not voluntarily,” Barry said.
“My dad switched jobs and my folks couldn’t afford Yale anymore. So they asked me to take a semester or two off while they looked for funding.
But if I live on my own for a few years, without their help, I qualify for aid on my own income
,
which is for shit, if you know what I mean.”