By Hook or By Crook Page 6

  I understood that, just like I understood the toughness with which she armored herself. But I also missed the delicate woman in the oversized dress, the one who smiled easily and had a strong sense of the ridiculous.

  “You know,” Marvella said, leaning against the driver’s side window, “as much of a fuss as that woman’s putting up, I don’t think we should take her out of here at all.”

  I agreed. We were supposed to take her to a charity a group of us had started on the South Side of Chicago. Called Helping Hands, the charity assisted families — mostly women and children — who had no money, no job skills, and no place to go. I found a lot of them squatting in houses that I inspected for Sturdy Investments. Rather than turning them out, I went to Sturdy’s CEO and the daughter of its founder, Laura Hathaway — who, not by coincidence, had an onagain, off-again relationship with me.

  Laura agreed that we couldn’t throw children onto the street, so she put up the initial money and got her rich white society friends to put up even more. Without Laura’s society connections, Helping Hands wouldn’t exist.

  It wasn’t designed for people from Wisconsin. We had devised it only for Chicagoans, and mostly for those on the South Side. We had a few white families go through our doors over the years, but not many. We only had a few white volunteers. The white face that most of our clients saw — if they saw one at all — was Laura’s, and then only because she liked to periodically drop in on the business and check up on everything herself.

  “I mean,” Marvella said, “what happens if she changes her mind again halfway between here and Chicago? If she starts screaming from the back seat of your car, the cops will pull us over in no time.”

  I winced. If the woman claimed she was being taken to Chicago against her will, then there were all kinds of laws we could be accused of breaking, not the least of which was kidnapping.

  “Tell Valentina this isn’t going to work,” I said.

  “I’m not going to tell her. She has her heart set on saving that little girl.”

  That little girl kept looking at me from the safety of her mother’s thigh. I could see why Valentina wanted to save her. The little girl’s eyes shone with intelligence, not to mention the fact that she was the only calm one in the trio.

  Her mother was crying and shaking her head. Valentina was still talking, but it didn’t look like she was going to get anywhere.

  “You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved,” I said.

  “You tell Val that,” Marvella said.

  “Bring her over here and I will,” I said. “Because in no way am I getting near that woman with the diner crowd watching.”

  Marvella glanced up at them and frowned. I couldn’t quite tell, but it seemed like more bodies were pressed against the glass around the door. One huge white man was now standing beside his pick-up truck, twirling his key ring on his right index finger.

  “Crap,” Marvella said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She walked back to the women. She put a hand on Valentina’s shoulder and led her, not gently, away from the woman.

  Marvella and Valentina talked for a few minutes. Marvella nodded toward the diner.

  Valentina looked up for the first time. Her lips thinned. Then she nodded, just once.

  She walked back to the woman and her daughter.

  Marvella walked back to me and got in the passenger side.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Marvella said. “We need to call Helping Hands and tell them to put a white volunteer at the front desk, not that I think that’s going to work.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because Val’s convinced she can drive the woman to Chicago all by herself,” Marvella said.

  I looked at the three of them, still standing in the parking lot. The woman wiped her good hand over her eyes.

  “Why would she go with Valentina and not with us?” I asked.

  Marvella rolled her eyes. “Valentina has apparently reached honorary white person status. She nearly lost it when seen in the company of her black cousin and the mean-looking black driver. You should have heard the crap that woman spouted about niggers come to kidnap her daughter — ”

  “I don’t need to hear it,” I said, waving my hand.

  “Me either,” Marvella said. “I nearly told the bitch to shove it up her bony little ass, but Val wouldn’t let me. She said she’s just scared and out of her depth and had we forgotten that Madison is ninety percent white? I’m thinking maybe she forgot or she should have at least told us so we could’ve brought your society girlfriend along to make little Miss Holier-Than-Thou over there a lot more comfortable.”

  I let the dig at my society girlfriend go by. Marvella and Laura got along, now, after a lot of wrangling and harsh words over the years. This was just Marvella’s way of letting her anger out without aiming it at the woman we had driven an hour and a half to help.

  “So let’s just go,” Marvella said. “We’ll pull over somewhere with a pay phone and call Helping Hands, and then our job here is done.”

  I hesitated for just a moment. The little girl was still watching us. Valentina turned slightly, waved her hand in a shoo motion, and I nodded.

  I started the car, turned the wheel, and pulled out of the parking lot, glancing into my rear view mirror to make sure no pick-up truck followed us.

  None did.

  After twenty minutes, I let out a breath.

  After thirty, I knew we were in the clear.

  After we had made the call to Helping Hands, I figured we were done with this job.

  Of course, I was wrong.

  • • •

  Three months later, Marvella pounded on my apartment door. We lived just across the hall from each other.

  “I have a phone call you need to take,” she said.

  I yelled to my fourteen-year-old son Jim that I would be right back, then crossed the hall. Even though it was December and the landlord had forgotten to turn on the heat in the hallway, Marvella was barefoot. She wore a towel around her hair, and a brown caftan that she clearly used as a robe.

  “Since when am I getting calls at your place?” I asked.

  “Since I can’t talk sense into Val,” she said.

  I peered at her. I hadn’t heard from Valentina since that day in September when she’d delivered the white woman to Helping Hands. Afterward she had completed her mission, she had taken me, Marvella, and Marvella’s sister Paulette to dinner. She told us about her life in Madison, which sounded a bit bleak to me, and then drove the three hours back so she wouldn’t miss the university extension class that she taught the following morning.

  Marvella’s apartment had the same layout as mine, but was decorated much differently. Hers was filled with dark, contemporary furniture, and African art. The sculptures covered every surface, faces carved from mahogany and other dark woods. The sculptures were so lifelike they seemed to be staring at me.

  The phone hung on the wall in Marvella’s half kitchen. The receiver rested next to the toaster.

  “There she is. You tell her our policy.” Marvella waved a hand at the phone. “I have to finish getting dressed.”

  She vanished down the hallway and slammed her bedroom door, as if I was the one who had made her angry instead of Valentina.

  I picked up the receiver. “Valentina?”

  “Smokey?” She was one of the few people who called me by my real name. Most people in Chicago knew me as Bill Grimshaw, a cousin to Franklin Grimshaw, one of the co-founders of Helping Hands. My real name is Smokey Dalton, and I’m from Memphis. A case four years ago put me on the run and brought me here, forcing both me and Jimmy to live under an assumed name.

  On the night she almost died, Valentina overheard Laura call me Smokey, and she never forgot it. She once told me that Bill didn’t suit me and Smokey did. Since Jimmy, Laura, and Franklin all called me Smokey, I never felt the need to correct V
alentina.

  “Marvella said I’m supposed to talk sense into you,” I said, “only she won’t tell me what this is about.”

  “Linda Krag disappeared,” Valentina said.

  The name didn’t ring a bell with me. “Linda Krag?”

  “The white woman I took to Helping Hands in September,” Valentina said. “I’m sure you remember.”

  “I do now,” I said, and then realizing that sounded a little too harsh, added, “She had that pretty little daughter.”

  “Yeah,” Valentina said. “They’ve both been gone a week now.”

  “I thought they were in Chicago,” I said.

  “They were,” she said.

  “And you’re still in Madison?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s why I’m talking to you. No one told me she was missing until they sent my targeted donation back.”

  Valentina sent money every month to Helping Hands earmarked only for Linda Krag and her daughter. If the money couldn’t be used for Linda Krag, then Helping Hands was duty-bound to return it. The policy was Laura’s. She believed that everyone who donated money had a right to say how it would be used.

  “So you called to find out what was up,” I said.

  “And discovered that she had left her apartment a week before. No one will tell me where she went.”

  “Did she take her daughter with her?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Valentina said. “She won’t go anywhere without Annie.”

  I sighed. I knew the arguments Marvella had already made because they were the ones I had to make. Helping Hands followed its name exactly: it provided helping hands. If a client no longer wanted help, we couldn’t force it on her.

  Besides, we had rules. The client received her living expenses for the first month. We paid her rent and utilities and gave her a food budget. In return, we asked that she either apply for work or go to school.

  If the client refused to do either, we stopped the support. If she couldn’t hold a job, we got her more job training, but if she lost the job because of anger, discipline or drug problem — and the client wouldn’t get help curbing that problem — then we stopped providing assistance.

  Linda Krag had been difficult from the start. She almost refused to go into Helping Hands, even though we had found a white volunteer to take her application. Chicago’s South Side, filled with black faces, terrified her. Eventually, Valentina talked her into the building. Once there, she agreed to all Helping Hands’ terms and actually went to classes to get her GED.

  But she hated the apartment that she was assigned. Not because it was bad or in a bad neighborhood, but because she and her daughter were the only whites on the block. She claimed to be terrified, and wanted an apartment in a “normal” neighborhood.

  Since we knew of no programs to combat innate bigotry, we searched for — and found — her an apartment in a transitional neighborhood near the University of Chicago. She liked that. She had gotten her GED, applied for college, and found a part-time job, one that didn’t tax her still-healing hand. Her daughter went to Head Start half the day.

  Last I heard, everyone was happy.

  But clients who started as roughly as Linda Krag often didn’t make it through the program. They had too many other problems.

  I said all of this, and more to Valentina, and as I spoke, she sighed heavily.

  “Has anyone thought about her husband?” Valentina asked when I had finished.

  I leaned against the wall. A wave of spicy perfume blew toward me from the bedroom. Marvella was not just getting dressed. She was getting dressed up.

  “What about her husband?” I asked.

  “Maybe he found her.”

  “Or maybe,” I said gently, “she just left.”

  “She wouldn’t,” Valentina said. “Her family is dead. She has no friends. That loser isolated her from everyone she knew when he took her to Madison. She wouldn’t know how to start a new life.”

  “Actually,” I said, making sure I kept the same tone, “Helping Hands was teaching her how to make a life for herself and her daughter.”

  “Exactly,” Valentina said. “I got a postcard from her daughter Annie two weeks ago. She sounded happy. Linda added a sentence thanking me. She wouldn’t just give up. Not now.”

  “You spoke to her about this?” I asked.

  “No,” Valentina said. “But leaving now just isn’t logical.”

  Neither was staying with a man who nearly beat her to death, but I wasn’t going to argue that point with Valentina.

  “Val,” I said, “a lot of women do things that aren’t logical.”

  I winced as the words came out of my mouth. I should have said “people,” but it was too late to correct myself.

  “Women are not illogical creatures,” Valentina snapped.

  Marvella had come out of the bedroom. She was wearing an orange dress with a matching orange and red scarf tied around her hair. She had heard the last part of this conversation, and she was grinning now.

  She knew the mistake I made.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “I just meant that people can be irrational.”

  “Linda’s not irrational,” Valentina said.

  I was already tired of this fight. “You mean the woman who wouldn’t get into the car with me and Marvella because she was afraid of black people? That Linda?”

  Valentina made a sound halfway between a sigh and a growl. “Smokey, look. You have to trust me on this. I got a real sense of her. It took her a lot of guts to run away from Duane. It took even more to go to Chicago. But she knew it was right for Annie. Linda wasn’t going to go back to him. Not ever.”

  “I didn’t say she would,” I said. “Maybe she thought she could do better on her own.”

  “She knew she couldn’t,” Valentina said. “She was terrified of being on her own. That’s why she didn’t get into the car with you. She knew she couldn’t defend herself and Annie, and you — I’m sorry, Smokey — but you look like every white person’s nightmare. I don’t think she’d ever spoken to a black person until she spoke to me. Asking her to go with you and Marvella was one step too many for her. But she did go to Chicago, she did get her GED, she did start over.”

  “Yeah.”

  I must have sounded as skeptical as I felt because Valentina added, “You have no idea how hard all of that was for her. She wouldn’t be the kind of woman who would do it all over again all on her own. Especially not with Annie.”

  I sighed. Marvella crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows, as if asking if I was going to finish soon.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s say I grant you that she wouldn’t run off. What then, in your mind, could have happened?”

  Marvella rolled her eyes.

  “I think the husband found her,” Valentina said. “I think she’s in trouble, Smokey. Both her and Annie.”

  “And this is a gut sense,” I said.

  “Stop patronizing me!”

  I almost denied that I was, but then I realized that I would have been lying.

  “I need to know if you have facts to back up this assumption,” I said.

  Valentina didn’t answer for nearly a minute. Finally she said, “No.”

  “So,” I said. “It begs the question. How could the husband have found her? Is he particularly bright?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Did you tell anyone where she went?”

  “Not even the folks here at the hotline. Only one of the women knew what I was doing, and all she knew was that I was going to take Linda to some of my friends in Chicago.”

  “So,” I said, then winced again. I was even sounding patronizing. “Would she have called this man for any reason?”

  “I don’t think so,” Valentina said. “No.”

  “Then how could he have found her?”

  “I don’t know,” Valentina said. “I just want you to check on her. You and Marvella have made it really, really clear that H
elping Hands doesn’t track people who vanish. So how about this? How about I hire you to find her, Smokey. Does that work for you? I have a lot of money. I’ll pay your standard rates plus expenses. I can put a check in the mail today.”

  I almost told her that it wasn’t necessary, that I would do this one for free. But I was a little annoyed at her stubbornness, and besides, Jimmy was growing so fast that I couldn’t keep him in shoes. My regular work for local black insurance companies and for Sturdy paid the bills, but couldn’t cover the added expenses of a growing teenage boy.

  “All right,” I said, and quoted her my rates. “I’m going to need a few things from you, too. I need some basic things. I need the husband’s full name. I need to know where he lives and, if possible, where he works. I need to know where he lived with Linda and Annie.”

  “Okay,” Valentina said.

  “But — and this is very important — I don’t want you investigating or talking to him. If you can’t do the work by phone, using a fake name, I don’t want you doing it. Is that clear?”

  “I know how to investigate, Smokey,” she said with some amusement in her voice.

  “Good,” I said. “Because the last thing I want is for this nutball to go after you.”

  “He won’t,” she said.

  But I got the sense, as I hung up the phone, that Valentina Wilson — the new version, the muscular woman I’d seen three months ago — would welcome his attack. She’d welcome it, and happily put him out of commission.

  “Well?” Marvella asked.

  “Well,” I said, “it looks like I have a missing persons case.”

  She rolled her eyes again. “And I thought you were a tough guy.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “it’s just easier to do what the client wants than it is to convince them they’re wrong.”

  “Is she wrong?” Marvella asked.

  “Probably,” I said with a sigh. “Probably.”

  • • •

  Linda Krag’s new apartment was in student housing near the University of Chicago. The neighborhood had once been filled with middle class professors’ homes, but now those homes were divided up into apartments, with bicycles parked on the porch and beer cans lying in the lawn.