War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (46 page)

“The refrigerator incident?” I asked.

Joel rubbed his hand over his face. Then he shook his head slightly.

Feeling like I was about to lose the opening, I said, “I’m not here for any reason except the shooting.
Everything else stays in this room.”

Joel moved his hand away from his face.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone whose skin was so white.
The veins were outlined in blue, like a river of little bruises running through
him.

“Promise?” he whispered.

“Promise,” I said.

He glanced at the door.
I did
,
too, but I didn’t see either of his parents. Still, I got up and closed the door just enough to give us a little more privacy.

“We were at Daniel’s girlfriend’s apartment, and we were talking — arguing maybe — me and Vic.
We’re so damn naïve.
We thought if we talked to Daniel, he might see reason.
But he wasn’t having any of it, although he gave a good argument.
He’s smart.”

“Yes,” I said, “he is.”

“Sometimes I think that’s part of the problem.
He’s so used to being the smart one. Then he went to Yale, and he wasn’t the smart one anymore, so he had to be the radical one.”
Joel gave a small laugh.
“Then I think I’m so full of it.
What do I know?”

“Something radicalized him,” I said, more to keep Joel talking than anything else.

“Anyway, we were having this argument, and I wanted a beer.
So I walk over to the fridge and pull it open.
It’s full.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full fridge outside of this place — you know. My folks don’t believe in ordering in. Which is beside the point.
The point is the fridge was full, but it didn’t have food.
It had boxes.
I crouch down and look at the side of them, and Daniel’s yelling at me to close the door, and Vic’s going ‘What’s going on?’ and he comes over and Daniel yanks him away, then grabs me and throws me back, but not before I see the
EXPLOSIVES
written on the side, and the name of a construction company.”

Had I looked inside the fridge at the row house? I wouldn’t have thought of it.
Keeping dynamite inside a fridge was a good idea, though, especially if the dynamite was older and the nitroglycerin unstable.

“Do you remember the name of the company?” I asked.

“Tucker,” Joel said.
“Tucker Construction.”

Had I seen that name in New Haven? I couldn’t remember.

“They’re doing a bunch of projects around town,” Joel was saying.
“I think they’re one of the crew working on World Trade, even.
I know they got part of the Washington Square job, and they want to do the State Office Building in Harlem, but you know how that’s going.”

“Is that the protest on 125
th
?”
I had seen it as I walked by.

“Yeah.
No one wants that building finished any more than they want all this other stuff built.
All we seem to be doing is tearing stuff down — important stuff — to build stupid stuff.”

I had gotten him onto his soapbox, and I hadn’t meant to.
But I had been thinking of Tucker Construction.
Maybe the name was familiar because I had seen its signs all over the city.

“The dynamite,” I prompted.

“Daniel tells me that he’s storing it for a friend.
Vic says ‘What friend?’ and Daniel says his dad, which sounded really fishy to me because I distinctly remember Daniel telling me he barely remembered his dad and hadn’t seen him since he was like three.”

“He said his dad worked at Tucker?”

“And he said that his dad was on the crew working in the Village, and they needed extra storage space for the dynamite so they put it in the fridge.
Which, I know, sounds really stupid, but Daniel was
saying
this, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when Daniel talks, things that are really stupid make a lot more sense.”

I had noticed that Daniel had a gift for lying.
I had fallen for some of his lies in New Haven, and I’d only heard them second-hand.

“What happened after you found the dynamite?” I asked.

“Vic and me, we hustle it out of there. I’m thinking we should call Tucker and ask for Daniel’s dad, but Vic reminded me that Daniel’s folks are divorced and his last name might be different. Then I got to thinking about it, and I wondered if maybe someone did ask Daniel to hold the stuff, but not his dad.
So I was going to ask June, but I never got the chance.
I had the Lower Manhattan Expressway
m
eeting first, and that’s it.”

“You weren’t going to call the police?” I asked.

“I should’ve.
I’ve been thinking that ever since the drugs started clearing out of my system.
I should’ve called.
I should’ve reported it.
I just hope Vic did.
But you say he was shot
,
too.”

“Do you think Daniel was involved in the shooting?”

“
Daniel
?” Joel slumped against his pillow.
“Two weeks ago, I’d’ve said no.
But with the
military pamphlet
and the dynamite, and me and Vic getting shot, I just don’t know.
What happened to Vic
exactly?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “He was shot last Friday night.
I’ve been trying to track him down
,
too.”

“Daniel didn’t like Ned either.” Joel sighed.
“But Daniel was sitting right there when Ned got shot.”

He looked at me as if I had answered. 
I shrugged.
“Do you have other enemies?”

“Other enemies,” he repeated.
“I wouldn’t’ve thought I had one.
Weird.
You know, my folks keep thinking that someone else fired the shot, you know, trying to hurt the meeting, not me.”

“What do you think?”

He shook his head.
His eyes were bright with tears.
“I think my life is all fucked up.
I think nothing’s ever going to be the same again.”

I couldn’t say much to that.
He was right.

I talked to him a little longer and got nothing more out of him.
I felt guilty for tiring him, and for bringing his mood down even farther.
I apologized, but he waved me off.

“What can I do?” he said. “What’s past is past.”

His words were
resigned
, but he wasn’t.
I told his parents on the way out that I had distressed him.

“We thought you might,” his mother said, “but he needs to get this resolved.”

“He’s a smart boy,” his father said as if his son were twelve.
“He just has to pick his friends more carefully.”

I wished it were as simple as that.

I thanked his parents for letting me disturb their day.
I had probably disturbed more than the day.
I wasn’t sure what Joel would do, but I had a hunch his time of lying quietly in that room had ended.

FORTY-SEVEN

When I left the building, I blinked in light.
The heat of the day had grown, but the air was filled with moisture, making everything look shimmery and vague.

Now I had more pieces than the police.
I had seen the map drawn in New Haven of New York targets.
I knew that Daniel and maybe a few others had stolen dynamite, probably from a construction company named Tucker Construction, around Memorial Day.
I knew that they had stored the dynamite in the refrigerator at the row house, and I guessed that the dynamite had been moved, or Daniel wouldn’t have let me search the apartment.

Maybe June knew, if she was awake.
Or maybe the other victim, McCleary, knew.
If I could talk to one of them
,
I might get the last piece of the puzzle.

They were in the Village, so that was where I went.

St. Vincent’s was filled with people, most of whom had suffered some sort of holiday injury.
Most of those injuries had involved fireworks.
I overheard one man at the information desk telling the woman behind the desk that it wasn’t his fault his son had nearly lost his hand; he wasn’t home when the boy had been lighting a cherry bomb to see how big a bang it made.

I shook my head, happy that Jimmy was content with sparklers.

This time no detectives haunted June’s floor.
Her room was dark and marked “private.”
I wasn’t able to see anyone inside.
I had to find a nurse, and have her check to see if June had been moved.

She hadn’t.
But she was still in a coma, and the doctors were beginning to get worried that this wasn’t a healing coma, so they had taken her to
X
-ray to see if they could find something they might have missed.

From the hospital, I walked to Perry Street.
My legs were getting tired and I had a blister on the side of one foot.
I didn’t walk this much in Chicago.

When I finally reached Perry Street, I found it filled with people.
Most of them sat on lawn chairs on the sidewalk, several of them beneath oversized umbrellas.
At the end of the block, several men wearing nothing more than tight swim trunks barbecued on five different grills.
Smoke covered that end of the block.
The smell of charred hamburger made my stomach growl.

An ice cream cooler filled with dry ice gave off more steam.
Several women, all of them wearing bikinis, poured lemonade into tall glasses.
A couple women another table over would add a dash of vodka if the drinker wanted some alcohol in his refreshment.

A hi-fi sat on top of a wide banister, and a small man sat beside it, his lap filled with albums.
He thumbed through them, looking for the next one.
The current album, blaring out of two cheap speakers, was some kind of salsa music, adding to the festive air.

The entire scene, which looked almost impromptu, made me smile.
I wandered in, then leaned next to one of the men, asking if he knew Victor McCleary.

The man pointed to a person sitting on one of the stoops.
He had long curly hair pulled back in a ponytail.
He wore cut-offs and a midriff top, and he was daintily eating corn on the cob, balancing a plate across his knees.

I thanked the man I’d been talking to and walked over to the stoop.
Several women moved so that I could climb the stairs.

I sat down next to McCleary.
He smiled at me, his mouth greasy with butter.
He grabbed a napkin and wiped his lips.

“Victor?” I asked.

His green eyes were clear, and framed by long
,
black lashes.
His nose was small and straight.

“Have we met?” His voice was soft.
He had a slight Carolina accent that I suspected
could become thick if he wanted it to.

“No,” I said, and stuck out my hand. “Bill Grimshaw.
I’m investigating some shootings.”

“What are you, IAD?” He set the half-eaten cob on his plate and wiped his fingers, pointedly ignoring my outstretched hand.

“No,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

He turned toward me and grinned.
“Well, why didn’t you say so straight off, sugar?
Someone finally gonna put up some money so we can get those cops where they live?”

“You were shot by the police?” I asked.

“Didn’t I just say that? Or was I merely thinking it?
Lord, I forget sometimes.
It’s been a long week.”
The accent
had
gotten thicker.
It felt like he was putting on some kind of performance for me.

He set the plate on the stone step beside him and stretched out his legs.
The thigh nearest to me had a rectangular bandage, slightly stained with new blood, and a bruise that was flowering outward, one that promised to engulf the entire side of his leg.

“Is that where you got hit?” I asked, nodding toward his thigh.

“Hurt like a son of a bitch,” McCleary said. Then his eyes twinkled as he looked up sideways at me.
“Well, maybe not like a son of a bitch, but you catch my drift.”

He was making me uncomfortable, and he was doing it on purpose.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Why don’t you tell me who you’re working for,” he said.