I DROVE HOME, feeling more frustrated than I had when I left. I had actually been counting on Loring’s anger. I had wanted to use it to manipulate him and some of his friends into helping me.
I would probably have to abandon my plans after all. It broke my heart. With Laura’s help, I could get Jimmy and the Grimshaw kids away from Starlite Hotel, but their friends and their friends’ friends were stuck.
Dozens of girls had already disappeared into that place, and so many more would go as well.
And as everyone pointed out to me, day after day, I couldn’t go up against the mob or their police protectors all by myself. I had already narrowed my focus to that damn hotel.
Now I had to narrow it further, to the kids I loved.
That was what made these messes in the first place. Everyone ignored the neighborhood or thought action was too hard or too risky.
But, I had to admit to myself as I parked the van in its usual spot, in this case, action was both hard and risky and not
something the average person could do.
Hell, it was looking like it wasn’t something I could do either.
I pulled the parka close and hurried inside. Theoretically it had gotten warmer—at least that was what the radio told me on the drive back—but “warmer” was a relative term. The cold in this city was nightmarish, the kind that could kill you in less than an hour.
I had lived in Boston: I should have known about this kind of cold when I brought Jimmy to Chicago. I just hadn’t thought it through.
And now we were entrenched.
I walked up the stairs to my apartment, feeling twenty times older than I had when I left. Marvella had taped an envelope to my door.
I unlocked the door before carefully peeling off the tape and taking the envelope inside. Then I shut the door with my foot, opened the envelope’s flap, and pulled out a slip of paper.
Had to move the meet to 3. I hope you can still make it. We’ll be at the ballroom at the Wabash YMCA (3763). Be there until at least 3:30. Thanks!
M.
Her note managed to provoke a reluctant smile out of me, although had anyone been in the apartment, they probably would have considered my expression a grimace. I didn’t need
the address. I’d investigated the Wabash Avenue YMCA when Franklin and I were looking for a site for the after-school program.
The Y wanted to control our classes, and I didn’t blame them. They wanted to make sure we didn’t let gang kids inside. Besides, there was a membership fee. That, plus the money we were paying our teacher, made the Y unaffordable for us. The church gave us its basement for free.
And then, abruptly, the Y canceled its programs at the end of the year. Lately, there’d been talk of shutting the Wabash Y down. Apparently, the much bigger, more modern Washington Park Y had taken most of its members.
I glanced at the kitchen clock. I had more than enough time to get to the Y. In fact, I had time to have a leisurely lunch before I left. I hung up my parka and paced the apartment.
I would go to the Y. Marvella had gone to the trouble of getting these women there. But I wouldn’t do anything else. My plans were pipe dreams. Maybe later, when I had people who could actually help me, maybe then we could solve the problem of the Starlite Hotel.
I had just wanted to move quickly. I wanted this hotel off the street, away from the school, away from easy pickings. I would tell Decker, of course, and get parents to monitor, but it wouldn’t be enough.
By waiting, I was dooming at least half a dozen girls to life inside that hellhole and a fate similar to Donna Loring’s.
I took out a couple of pieces of fried chicken and ate them cold, along with one of the biscuits Marvella had made. I
organized a few things, and made some calls to line up next week’s work. I would have to figure out how I could call Memphis as well and get the information I needed on my savings account back there.
I dithered until 2:30, then grabbed the parka and started out the door. At the last minute, I went back into my apartment, grabbed the folder with the flyers, and shoved my drawings inside. Maybe the women would have some ideas on what we could do down the road.
I was out of ideas. What I did know was that I needed backup. Malcolm was gone, and Sinkovich couldn’t help without losing his job. I had no idea how to bring someone else into my little operation.
Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I would just have to do jobs for Sturdy and for Bronzeville Home, Health, Life, and Burial Insurance. Safe jobs.
As if that had worked. I’d been working for Laura when I discovered that damn house last fall. It had nearly cost two good men their lives.
I hurried down the stairs and back to the van. The drive to the Y took less time than I expected. The traffic was light. Finding a parking place near the Y was hard, however. The plows had pushed snow up against the curb in gigantic mounds, so there was no street parking. I spent ten minutes circling until I finally decided to park in a liquor store’s lot two blocks away.
I hated walking in this cold. I shoved my hands in my parka’s pockets and realized I hadn’t removed the gun. I debated going back to the van and putting the gun inside the
glove box, then decided the neighborhood was too dicey for that. Someone could have been watching. One tire iron to my passenger-side window, and some kid would have easy access to a gun.
The Y dominated this part of South Wabash. The five-story red-brick building towered above its neighbors, and look like nothing short of a nuclear bomb could knock it down.
A nuclear bomb and neglect. As I got close, I noted that some bricks were missing and the white concrete first level had turned brown with age and dirt. The red doors, which seemed so cheerful just last spring, had soap across their windows.
This place was obviously going to shut down. The only question was when.
I pushed the doors opened and stepped inside. The building smelled dusty and abandoned, even though a man sat behind the sign-in desk. He was reading the Defender. He lowered it and peered at me warily.
“You’re meeting them?” he asked.
I didn’t have to ask who “them” was. “Yeah,” I said.
“Ballroom, right?”
“It’s your funeral,” he said, and shook the Defender back into position. It covered his face, as if he didn’t want to see what was about to happen to me.
The first floor of the Y showed decades of use. Elevators hugged one wall, but the stairs were more dramatic because they were original to the building. It had been built at least fifty years ago, and had that solid permanent sense that most
public buildings from the time had. Signs mentioning the second floor areas were falling off the wall, and another sign, older, maybe from the 1930s, mentioned guest rooms upstairs.
Like so many Ys, this one doubled as a hotel, a home for the nearly homeless. I wondered what would happen to them if this building closed for good.
The ballroom was a remnant from a better time. This Y had been one of Chicago’s major Negro hotels. Booker T. Washington had stayed here. This place provided everything for displaced Southerners who had come to Chicago for work during the Great Migration. There had been job training courses, famous dining rooms, and of course, that ballroom.
Franklin had told me a lot of the history last year, when he had been trying to convince me (and himself) to use the Y for the after-school classes. Once we had looked at the fee structure and the rundown condition of the Y, we had looked elsewhere.
Besides, at the time, this neighborhood seemed worse to me than the neighborhood around the school.
I pushed open the doors to the ballroom. Dust rose around me. Someone had turned on the chandeliers, but they hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. The light was as thin as the sunlight had been all week.
Still, the William Edouard Scott mural caught me, just like it always did. The thing covered one entire wall, which made it at least thirty feet long and about nine feet high. I’d thought it was a WPA project because its strong figures clearly had a 1930s look to them, but Franklin said he’d heard that the YMCA had hired Scott on their own.
The mural was beautiful. It hadn’t been kept up, though, so parts were faded or two dark. Still, the message always took my breath away. The mural was titled Body, Mind, and Spirit, and it had several distinct sections, all of them pertaining to the Y—kids in athletic clothes, young men singing, a nurse helping an elderly man stand.
The very center took the “Christian” in the Young Men’s Christian Association seriously, by placing the Y’s old symbol in the middle of some clouds, illuminated by sunlight, just like those church basement portraits of Jesus, surrounded by his flock.
My eye always went to the sunlit symbol first, and then wandered to parts of the mural so dark and dirty that it was almost impossible to see the illustrations. The last time I was alone in this room, I’d spent half an hour studying the mural and felt like I still hadn’t seen it all.
“Impressive, huh?” a woman said beside me.
I looked next to me, then down. A short, square woman stood beside me. She wore overalls with a turtleneck underneath.
“It’s falling apart,” I said. “I think that’s a shame.”
“It’s old and out of date,” another woman said. She was sitting at a table, her legs crossed in front of her. She was gaunt, her hair cropped so short that she was nearly bald. “All the women are in helping roles.”
“What women there are,” Marvella said. She had been standing toward the back, in the gloom that the chandeliers didn’t penetrate.
I turned. Someone had set up a dozen tables, but only three had people sitting at them. Women sitting at them.
Marvella wore a white angora sweater over black pants. Somehow she managed keep the sweater fibers off those pants, which was a trick not many women could pull off. Around her neck, she wore a long necklace made up of wooden mismatched black and orange beads.
“Come and join us, Bill,” she said, sweeping a hand toward the tables.
Somehow I felt like I was auditioning for a job, rather than talking to them about helping me.
My eyes were slowly adjusting to the dimness. There were ten women at the tables. Marvella and the short woman beside me made twelve.
I sat down on a metal folding chair that one of the woman pushed at me. It creaked under my weight.
The women pulled their chairs closer, looking at me like they’d never seen a man before. I set the folder on the table.
“I think I’ve wasted your time,” I said to them. “I went over everything this morning, and what I want to do is just not possible—”
“What is this?” The gaunt woman took the folder and opened it. I started to snatch it back, but Marvella, who was just inside my line of sight, shook her head.
I reminded myself that the folder held nothing proprietary, not even the diagram of the Starlite Hotel.
Two other women leaned in as the gaunt woman turned the pages.
An older woman, her hair graying, her face lined, said, “Marvella already told us about your niece, and she told us about the girls they have imprisoned in that hotel.”
“I don’t know how many are there,” I said.
“Well, you can’t give up on them,” the woman snapped at me, as if it were my fault that they had been taken in the first place.
“Everyone I’ve contacted for help can’t help me for some reason, and I can’t do this alone,” I said.
“You haven’t asked us yet,” the short woman said.
I gave Marvella a sideways glance. “I had hoped to have you ladies—”
And someone snorted at that word. I ignored her.
“—get the girls out while a group of us made sure the men who were there didn’t interfere.”
“A group of you men,” corrected a woman I couldn’t quite see in the dimness. “And the men aren’t going to help, are they?”
I sighed, disliking her tone. “Honestly, the men I know
can’t help. And the people I usually rely on aren’t available.”
I didn’t want to tell these women any more details than that.
The gaunt woman slapped her hand on the back of the folder, then closed it and slid it across the table. The women on the other side opened it and started through it.
“You can’t abandon this idea,” the gaunt woman said. “There’s a hundred girls in that folder, all from the school.”
“Spread over years,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” the gaunt woman said. “We can find them.”
I looked at her. Her black eyes glinted in the half light. Her face was long. I would have thought her a teenage boy who had just started into his growth if I hadn’t known I was meeting only women.
“I already found one of them on the flyers. She’d been working as a prostitute for two years, and she was beaten to death last fall.” I said that in as flat a tone as I could manage. “They found her in a vacant lot off West Madison. I expect we’re going to hear the same story about a lot of the girls in that folder.”
“So that’s reason to give up?” The short woman leaned into toward me. “The girls imprisoned in that hotel, that’s their fate, right? They’re going to end up in a ditch somewhere, and no one’s going to care, and everyone’s going to say there’s nothing we can do.”
I gave Marvella a helpless glance. She smiled at me, and her smile told me that I was on my own.
I stood up. “I’m not taking a bunch of women into a whorehouse run by the Chicago mob. No offense, ladies, but I need people who can fight—”
My leg went out from underneath me, and I fell, landing so hard on the wooden floor that I grunted. Pain jilted up my tailbone.
A woman half my height and maybe a third my weight stood over me, her hands on her hips. “We can handle ourselves.”
I had to unclench my teeth. I felt that blow through my entire body. She was good, and I was impressed, just not as impressed as she wanted me to be.
“Maybe you can handle yourself,” I said, pleased that I didn’t sound breathless. “When you have time to think about the attack and there’s an element of surprise.”
“There’s always an element of surprise,” she said.
“Especially with sexist assholes like you.”
“Kim,” Marvella said in a warning tone.
“Oh, don’t get all high and mighty on me, Marvella,” Kim said. “He’s not taking us in because of our gender, not because of our abilities.”
“I don’t know what your abilities are,” I said as I stood up.
My body ached from the hard landing. I brushed off my pants.
“I had six brothers,” said the gaunt woman. “I know how to fight.”
“You don’t know how to fight a man who runs security for the mob,” I said. “Those men have fought hand-to-hand all their lives.”
“And,” she added, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I can shoot better than all of them.”
That was just what I needed. A group of armed, angry, trigger-happy women heading into the Starlite with me.
I was shaking my head before I realized it. “I’m glad you want to help. But this isn’t the way. I’m thinking I’ll have to wait until I can get a team together, and yes, I mean men, and I’ll bring you in to get the girls out.”
“How long will that take?” I recognized that voice too. Paulette Shipley stood up. She had been sitting in one of the chairs in the back. She was Marvella’s sister. They shared height, build, and those amazing cheekbones. The last time I had seen her, she had been pregnant. She was no longer and didn’t seem to be carrying any baby weight either.
“It’ll take me a couple months, maybe,” I said.
“A couple months?” asked the gaunt woman. “More girls will disappear. More will die. Can you live with that?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets, bumping against the gun. I couldn’t live with it, but I saw no other choice.
“I’m going to talk to the school’s principal on Monday, and I’ll see what I can do through the school board,” I said. “We’ll try to bide time. Maybe we can go through the system—”
“You already tried going through the system, Bill,” Marvella snapped, “and you know that hotel is bought and paid for with the complicity of a lot of city officials. Don’t lie to these women.”
“It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “Getting rid of this hotel is just a Band-Aid on top of a gushing stomach wound.”
I sounded like Sinkovich. I sounded like every bastard who looked the other way because the problem was too big.
The older woman stood up. She was almost as tall as I was. She wore a man’s business suit, and it made her look fine. She
walked over to me, and everyone watched.
She slipped her arm through mine. “Tell you what, Mr. Grimshaw,” she said in a honey voice. “Why don’t you sit down and tell us how this would have worked if you had found some men to help you. We’ll figure out if there are modifications we can make or if we have some friends who might be able to be your backup.”
I almost missed the look she gave the gaunt woman, which was a look of shut-up-and-let-me-deal-with-this-idiot. She was humoring me.
But she also had a point.
“All right,” I said, letting her lead me to the table. “I’ll tell you what I wanted to do.”