War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (48 page)

“June doesn’t live at the Harlem house, does she?” I asked.

“She’s got her own place not far from here,” McCleary said. “Or she did.
I traded that little tidbit for freedom last Saturday.”

“You told the police about the dynamite in the refrigerator.”

“Yep,” McCleary said.
“They were happy to hear it, even though when they got there, the entire place’d been cleared out.
It gave them enough evidence, though, to keep an eye on Daniel’s little parade.”

He stopped, then looked at me, his face going very pale.

“I didn’t lead them to Junie, did I?
I didn’t make them shoot her.
Jesus, what if it was the police? What if they shot her, like they shot me, and if she dies—”

“Stop,” I said.
“First of all, they would have arrested her if they found anything, not shot her.
And secondly, I’m not sure what’s going on.
Three of you were no longer friends with Daniel.
Maybe June had a falling out with him.”

“Or maybe Rhondi went all Whatever-Happened-to-Baby-Jane on him and decided to take out everyone who hurt him?”
McCleary put the heel of his hands against his forehead.
“Oh, this is giving me a sick headache.”

I hadn’t thought of Rhondelle, but I didn’t believe it.
Of course, I was having trouble believing that she was their chemist as well.

“Or maybe it was all random,” I said.
“Your shooting was clearly unrelated.
Maybe the others are
,
too.”

“It’s a dangerous city,” McCleary said. “But do you think it’s that dangerous? Three people in such a small group getting shot like that?”

“No,” I said.
“I don’t.”

I sighed.
The party had evolved along the street. Now some people were dancing — men dancing with each other, and the women in the bikinis had their arms around each other’s waists and were swaying with the music.

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?” McCleary said to me, very softly.
I almost didn’t hear him.

“The shootings?” I asked. “Yeah—”

“No,” he said.
“Us.”

He nodded toward the street.
Delores had gone down the steps.
He had his hand on another man’s neck, resting it there possessively, the way a man would do to a woman.

“I’m — not comfortable,” I said.
“That’s true.”

“And you probably think it was okay for the cops to bust up a bunch of queers.” The humor had left McCleary’s face.

“I didn’t say that.” I looked at him.
“The police often go overboard, especially in situations they don’t understand.”

“So you been in a few police riots,” he said.

“More than my share,” I said.

“You understand
,
then, how it is when they go after you for being different.”

“Yes,” I said cautiously.
I wasn’t sure where this part of the conversation was going.

“I just wanted you to understand,” McCleary said. “As you investigate all this stuff going on. I want you to know the reason I got shot is just because I’m different.
That threatens people.
You know that.”

I still felt uncomfortable. I wasn’t breathing very deeply, and I did want to move back up the steps so that I wasn’t sitting so close to McCleary.

“You and me,” he was saying, “we got a lot in common.
We get attacked just for being who we are.”

I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
“Yes, but I can’t dye my skin.
You can change how you live.”

The look he gave me was both triumphant and sad, as if he knew that an opinion he didn’t like had lurked within me.
“You think I can just change? You think I like being called names and being treated this way? You think I do it because I want to?”

I didn’t answer him.

He leaned close to me.
I remembered what he had said about kissing the cop and hoped he didn’t try it with me.

“Being gay is as fundamental to who I am as being black is to you,” he said. “And treating me as anything less than fully human is just as much discrimination as treating you the same way.
I trust you’ll remember that while you’re looking into the various crimes around here.”

I didn’t move away, even though I wanted to.
“I was brought up to believe something different.”

His eyes glittered.
“And I was brought up to believe that niggers were inferior.
I got over my prejudice.
When you are gonna get past yours?”

He tapped me once on the chest, lightly, not quite threateningly.
Then he leaned back, and the moment faded.

“Thanks for telling me about Junie,” he said. “She’s a good girl in the wrong crowd.
I’ll go see her tomorrow.”

And with that, I had been dismissed.

FORTY-EIGHT

I staggered out of the block party slightly ill.
I wasn’t sure
whether
my light-headedness came from the heat, the information that McCleary had given me, or the discomfort I’d been trying to suppress through the entire meeting.
I walked as far from the neighborhood as I could before I found a café that advertised air-conditioning in the window.

I went inside, ordered a burger, a milkshake, and water.
Then I asked the waitress for extra napkins, and I made notes.

Daniel was tied to all of the victims.
But his attachment to June explained why he had panicked so badly when she got shot.

Had Rhondelle hired the shooter?
I didn’t know.
It didn’t seem likely, but I had underestimated her from the start.

The police? Possible.
I wasn’t going to rule it out. But Detective O’Connor didn’t look like IAD and he seemed to be investigating the
D’Amato
shooting.
However, he had given me Victor McCleary’s name with the others, and he had to know that McCleary’s shooting wasn’t connected.
I didn’t dare underestimate the New York police.

After I had eaten and had a chance to think things through, I felt better.
I was calmer.
I still hadn’t come up with the identity of the shooter, but I did have confirmation that Daniel, Rhondelle, and their little group had been collecting dynamite.
The police knew it, and had acted on it once.

But that didn’t mean they had found everything.

A refrigerator full of dynamite wasn’t one-tenth the amount we had found in New Haven — at least based on the empty boxes.
(And why were those boxes empty? What had happened to that dynamite?)
If Daniel felt he needed a lot — and why would he? — then he needed some other place to store it.

Some place that wouldn’t have been as easy to find.

I got up, left a five on the table to cover my tab and tip, and went to the back, carrying one of the napkins and a pen.
Near the restrooms
was
a bank of pay phones.
Someone had scratched names and phone numbers into the wall beside them, and the entire area smelled like urine.
If I hadn’t already eaten, I would have left without touching my food.

Still, I grabbed one of the phones, plugged a dime into it, and had the operator hook me up with St. Vincent’s main line.
Once I got the hospital’s operator, I asked for the accounting department.

“You mean Billing?” she asked.
“Or do you want Records?”

“Are they in tonight?” I asked.

“Billing is,” she said.

“Then hook me up,” I said.

She did.
I heard the double
click
as
s
he transferred me
, and then I hung up.

I redialed the hospital, got the operator, disguised my voice slightly, and asked for the nurse’s station on June’s floor.
When the nurse answered, I introduced myself as John from Billing.

“We need to confirm June
D’Amato
’s address.
We have
One
W
est Twelth
Street, but that address looks wrong to me.
Do you think this kid could’ve faked her address when she came in?
I don’t want to send information to the wrong place.”

“What are you billing for now anyway?” the nurse asked.
“The girl’s in a coma.”

“It’s policy,” I said. “We get the file ready, send the preliminary information, just in case someone else is at the house and needs notification.”

The nurse harrumphed at me.
“Sounds like typical bureaucratic foolishness.”

“I don’t make the rules,” I said with a verbal shrug.

“Just a minute.” She put me on hold, and I crossed my fingers.
A cook came out of the kitchen, pushed past me, and headed into the men
’
s room,
trailing
the odor of cooking grease behind him.

“Got it,” she said as she got back on the line.
“And your address is wrong, or maybe mine is.
I know she didn’t fill out the paperwork because she’s been unconscious from the moment she arrived.”

“Give me the second address anyway,” I said. “Between us, we might have the right one.”

The nurse gave me a reluctant chuckle, and then she recited an address.
I wrote it down, then repeated it back to her.

“You ask me,” she said, “that sounds as suspect as your
One
W
est
Twelth
                                        
Street.”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “You know how many of these kids give us fake addresses? What is she, an overdose?”

“No.
Poor thing was shot on the Fourth of July.
Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“Wow,” I said, sounding as surprised as I could.
“What was she doing?”

“Just standing on the sidewalk, minding her own business.” The nurse sighed.
“Sure hope she lives through this.
She’s a pretty little thing.”

I thanked her for her time, and hung up, then stared at the address.
It might have been the one the police raided, but it might not.

Daniel had been pretty shaken up when he carried June to that car.
There was a chance he was even more
upset
at the hospital.
There was also a chance that he wasn’t the one who had filled out the paperwork — that someone else in his group, someone less devious than he was — had done so.

I needed to check out the apartment, but I didn’t want to stay in the city, not now that O’Connor had told me about the surveillance.

I figured, however, that I could give it one more day.

FORTY-NINE

Early
Monday
morning, I took a train to the Village.
Jimmy and Malcolm had one more day at the library.
They weren’t happy about the library, but they were pleased to learn that we’d be leaving the following morning.

The subway was filled with commuters holding coffee in
S
tyrofoam cups, reading newspapers while standing, sitting with their briefcases shoved tightly between their legs.
I pushed my
way in and rattled
along
with everyone else as the train headed downtown.

Most of the commuters got off in
m
idtown. I rode the train down to Washington Square.
I wanted to see how far the park was from June
D’Amato
’s apartment.
The day was nice; the short walk from Washington Square Park to the address the nurse had given me on East
Eleventh
would be pleasant.

In this part of town, the commuters gave way to street people, hippies, and card sharks, all of whom sat at makeshift tables and tried to catch unsuspecting people.
Graffiti covered many of the buildings.
Transistor radios blared conflicting styles of rock music along the block, and near the intersection with Second
Avenue
, a teenage boy who looked like he hadn’t had a bath in three months had another boy against the wall, a knife at his throat.
Five other boys stood around them, egging them on, before a policeman walked through the group, slapping his truncheon against his hand, and shouting, “Break it up, break it up.”

Two different hulks of burned-out cars sat near the curb, but no one seemed to notice them, which made me realize car burning had to be pretty common around here.
The address the nurse had given me led me to an old tenement, its brick walls rough with time and neglect.