War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (34 page)

“Rhondelle?” I said.

She jumped and faced me all in one movement.
A bruise ran from her left cheek to her jaw, distorting her face.
Her left eye was blackened.
But she was still recognizable from that scholarship picture.

I hadn’t expected the bruise.
I tried not to stare at it.

She clutched her toast as if it were a shield.
“Who are you?”

“My name’s Bill Grimshaw.
Your father hired me to find you.”
I kept my voice low so that I wouldn’t scare her further.

“Who let you in here?” She was still pressed against the wall.

“A girl,” I said. “She told me you were here, and then she went upstairs.”

“She just let you walk in?”

“It’s not her fault,” I said. “I told her I had some business with you and Daniel.”

“Daniel,” she said as if the name were unfamiliar.

“Is he here?” Now that I’d found Rhondelle, I wanted to talk to him.
I had a hunch she knew very little about his activities.

“Not at the moment.” She bit her lower lip and glanced over my shoulder, then back at me.

I resisted the urge to follow her gaze.
I hadn’t heard anyone come up behind me. “When do you expect him back?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m working for his mother
,
too. Grace is really worried about him.
She—”

“That’s bullshit.” The harshness of Rhondelle’s words startled me.
They seemed at odds with the fear she had shown a moment before.
“Danny’s mother doesn’t care about him.”

She seemed to believe that
,
and it seemed to matter to her.
It would do me no good to argue Daniel’s family dynamics with this girl.
I decided to focus instead on the one thing that concerned only Rhondelle.

“Your dad thinks that something’s happened to you,” I said quietly.
“He hired a detective in Poughkeepsie.
He thought you were kidnapped on the way to Vassar in January—”

“Yeah, my dad would think that.” She set the toast down.
The fear had disappeared.
Instead, her expression hardened.
“So you’re from Poughkeepsie?”

It wasn’t a polite question.

“No,” I said. “I’m from Chicago.
I was initially looking for Daniel, and I had gotten a lot of information about you in the process.”

“Really?” She looked away from me, picked up her coffee mug, and sipped from it.
Her hands trembled ever so slightly.
“What kind of information?”

“About the incident at Yale last fall,” I said, “and all the trouble it caused.”

Her shoulders relaxed.
I wondered if she had expected me to say something else.

“Trouble.”
She scooted her chair so that she faced me.
“Is that what my fascist father calls it?”

Her father didn’t strike me as a fascist. I made myself take a deep breath before I spoke.
“He was never sure what happened.
No one told him.”

She raised her eyebrows.
They weren’t plucked like they had been in that photograph.
“
I
told him.
I asked him how he could work there with all those bigots and fucking conforming Negroes, and he said that I didn’t understand.”

Her language didn’t sound Ivy League to me.
I was amazed that her father was as sympathetic to her as he had been.

“I’m not sure I understand either.” I swept a hand to indicate my surroundings, which must have been quite expensive and modern in their day.
“But it seems that your father came from a different tradition than I do.”

She let out a contemptuous noise.
“He thinks because he grew up in France, he’s special.
He never saw how the French treat us, like some kind of exotic animal.
Whenever I went to see Grand-mère and Grand-père in Paris, I was treated like a piece of art or a sculpture, not a person.
Something other, not human.
I hated it.”

“More than you hate it here?” I asked.

Her eyes narrowed.
“I’m an American, just like everybody else. We shouldn’t have to put up with the second-class citizen crap.
It was a great ideal, this country, but it’s fucked, you know?”

Of course I knew.
I knew better than she did, with her privileged background and her protected upbringing.
But I said nothing.

Instead, I took one step toward her.

She kept her back to the wall, watching me warily.

I touched my cheek.
“What happened?”

“Nothing.”
But a look crossed her face, a slight frown, a memory.
Something that showed she wasn’t as tough as she pretended to be.

“You know,” I said, “I met Daniel for the first time last summer.
And while I thought he was pretty committed politically, I never knew he was violent.”

She shrugged one shoulder and looked down.
Then she wiped toast crumbs off her lap, as if I weren’t even in the room.

“You can talk to me,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?” I didn’t expect the force of her anger or the fierce expression on her face as she raised her head.
“Why can I talk to you? Because you know my father? Or because you say so? Because I can see you’re a pretty crappy detective.
I thought you knew about the incident last fall, and then you come in here and say, ‘I never thought he was violent.’”

She did a fair mocking imitation of my voice.

“I know that he beat up that boy,” I said, “but if someone was attacking my girlfriend, I might get violent
,
too.”

“Danny nearly beat him to death,” she said.

I nodded.
“They were hurting you.”

She rolled her eyes.
“They were just trying to scare me. They did it to a bunch of the girls, trapped them in a room and told them all kinds of crazy stuff, most of which I knew wasn’t true because I’d been around Yale my whole life.
They weren’t even scaring me, and they never touched me.”

That was so different from the reports I’d heard that it took a moment for her words to register.
Yale wouldn’t have told me the story that she’d been attacked unless they believed it.
I had certainly believed it.

Why would she lie to me now?

“So what really did happen?” I asked.

“I just told you.” She glared at me defiantly.

“That boy did get hurt, right?”

“There you go,” she said.
“Expecting me to trust you.”

“What do you have to lose?” I asked.

She didn’t move for the longest time. Then she turned toward me, as if she were actually thinking about what I had to say. “Danny thought maybe the fight would start investigations into the way regular people were treated at Yale.
He thought it would be the beginning of the end.
It was just the beginning of
his
end.”

Such contempt in her voice.
She was still shaking, her hands clasped in her lap.
I felt slightly off
balance, uncertain
of
what I had walked into.

“So,” I said, “Daniel came in the room while these guys were crowded around you, right?”

“Him and a bunch of lower classmen.”
Her eyes lit up when she noted my surprise. “Danny said that these guys had tried to rape me, and it became a huge fight.
He didn’t take on four guys like everybody made it sound.
Just one, and he nearly kicked him to death.”

Then she looked at me. Her lips were upturned ever so slightly.
She was enjoying this conversation.

I felt a chill run down my back. “The others involved in the fight, they never spoke up.”

“They had a lot to lose,” she said.

“So did Daniel.”

“Daniel hates Yale.
He hates the Establishment.
He hates what the world has done to us, all of us.
He thinks everything has to change from the top down.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think things are pretty fucked,” she said.

“And everything has to change?” I asked.

“It would be nice,” she said, which wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of Daniel’s position.

“But you don’t believe change will happen,” I said.

“It’s like Yale,” she said.
“Daniel went head-to-head with it, brought a scandal, hoped to get public attention, and instead, he got tossed out on his ass, and no one would listen to him.”

“It sounds like the dean of his college listened to him.”

“I mean the press, the government, the important people.
No one listened.”

“Maybe because he nearly kicked someone to death?” I asked.

Her lips thinned.

“Violence doesn’t solve everything,” I said.

This time, she touched her cheek, and she wasn’t referring to her bruise.
She was referring to my scar.
“I suppose you got that in a nonviolent confrontation.”

“I didn’t duck fast enough when a white guy came after me with a knife.”

“And I suppose you diplomatically talked him down.”

It was my turn to smile, ever so slightly.
“No.
I defended myself.
Sometimes you have to.”

“Well,” she said, “if you look at the world as one big confrontation between the haves and the have-nots, then you’ll see that what we’re doing is really a matter of defending ourselves.”

With bombs?
How involved was Rhondelle?
“What are you doing?”

She blinked, as if she hadn’t realized what she had said.
She looked away, moved her plate, then leaned back in her chair.
“I guess you could say we’re trying to figure out the best course.”

“The best course for what?”

Her eyes met mine again.
Her eyes weren’t really brown.
They were more of a light brownish-green.

“What happened to the white guy who knifed you?” she asked, not answering my question.

“He’s in prison,” I said.

“What’d he do? Knife somebody else?”

She hit close to the truth, but I wasn’t going to let her know that.
“Sometimes the system works.”

“That’s the problem with you Establishment Negroes,” she said, putting an ironic emphasis on the last two words.
“You get one victory in the middle of a thousand defeats, and think you won the war.”

“We didn’t used to get any victories at all,” I said.
“Change takes time.”

“Time’s what we don’t have.” She was spouting the party line as if she believed it, which meant that she probably believed as deeply as Daniel did.

She stood, picked up her plate, and carried it to the sink.
As she brushed past me, I caught a faint scent of floral perfume.
The scent surprised me.
Unlike so many people I’d met in the past week, she still cared about herself and her appearance.

Which made that bruise seem all the more unusual.
Maybe she had been posturing a moment ago.
Testing me.
Maybe she was afraid not to contradict Daniel.

“You can come with me.” I said to her back.

She turned back toward me slowly.
For a moment, I thought I had her. Then she laughed.
“Oh, and go home? I could go back to my little girl’s school and learn how to be somebody’s really smart wife, and go to cocktail parties and smile nice and nod a lot, and raise
two-point-five
children—”

“Or you could go home, put your life back together, and figure out what you want to do,” I said.
“You’re what? Eighteen? Nineteen? You can do what
ever
you want.”

“I know,” she said.
“I want to stay here.”

“I’ll have to tell your dad I found you,” I said.

“Fine,” she snapped.

“He said you didn’t have a key to this place.”

“He’s more stupid than he looks.” She braced both hands on the countertop and leaned against it. “You know how easy it is to get keys made, especially when he leaves his key ring on the entry table every night when he gets home?”

I had suspected as much.
But Whickam would probably be shocked at the daughter who was speaking to me now.

“He’s not going to like the fact that you and your friends are here without his permission,” I said. “It doesn’t look like they’re taking good care of the place.”