by Ralph Dennis
Hump took up the last two oysters, one in each hand, and sucked them from the half-shell. He chewed for a moment. “Your problem, Jim, is that you got to get rid of that white middle-class work ethic shit before it’s too late.”
“Boredom,” I said.
“You could come down to the Spa and work out with me.”
“I’d drop dead in the steam room.”
“Why this job?” Hump asked.
“It’s the only one offered me.”
“We could do a trip to New York,” Hump said. “Some real sweetmeat trim up there.”
I shook my head. “I called Raymond a few days ago and checked. No need for one right now. Seems, from the code he was talking, that the street’s overflowing with the shit now. Raymond doesn’t know where it’s coming from. And the quality’s high.”
“That could be blood in the street.”
“Maybe,” I said, “or just some ass kicking.”
Hump pushed the plate of shells away and put his elbows on the table. “This job’s small shit. Two days work. Maybe not even that.” He gave me a hard-eyed look. “You care one way or the other about the little girl? About whether the father or the mother gets her?”
“Not really. I’m just guessing but I think both of them are losers. The kid stays with the mother and she’ll have clap at sixteen and a coke-sniffing spoon of her own. The father’s that bad, but in the other direction. The right schools and a big coming-out and the good marriage. That makes me as sick as the clap at sixteen and the coke spoon.”
“A stand-off,” Hump said. He waved past me at the waiter and the waiter brought over two more beers and huge bowl of boiled shrimp in the shells. “You keep talking like that, Hardman, and I’m going to make you an honorary nigger.”
“I might accept,” I said. I got the first reach into the bowl and brought out a big one. I peeled it and dipped it in the Fishermen’s Inn’s special fiery sauce. “It’s the usual. Fifty a day and some expenses. You’re on the payroll today if you’re interested.”
Hump popped a shrimp into his mouth and gave me that easy grin. “To tell the truth, I’m a little bored myself. Could wish there was more loot in it, but I guess we can’t change that.”
“You’re a sly fucker,” I said. “You were just waiting to be asked to the dance.”
“Now you got it, Hardman. Now you got it.”
I paid the tab and followed Hump to the pay phone over by the front entrance. I watched over his shoulder as he dialed. “Ernie, this is Hump.” He listened for a few seconds. “Look, can I stop by for a few minutes?” He swung his head and looked at me. “Just need a favor, Ernie. I’m going to bring a friend with me. Name’s Jim Hardman.” Hump dipped one eyelid at me. “Sure, he’s cool, no problem there. Fifteen or twenty minutes then.”
He hung up and we went outside. We walked over to his car. “Who’s Ernie?”
“The Wildwood connector,” he said.
“The what?”
“The Wildwood connector. Sells high grade grass and hash. No hard stuff.” He nodded over at my car. “Lock it and we’ll pick it up after our visit.”
“It’s locked.” I went around and got in. It was a cold bleak day, not the best kind of day to begin anything. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. I just felt like it did.
“That call back there,” Hump said, “is part of the routine for a buy from Ernie.” He worked his way out of the lot and pushed himself into the early afternoon traffic. “You call and ask if you can stop by. If Ernie says yes, the buy’s possible. If he says he’s going out or something like that it means he thinks a narc might be around or he doesn’t have the stuff.”
“He owe you for anything?”
“Not a thing. If he knows anything it might cost you twenty or so of that expense money.”
“As long as it’s good information.”
“If the Simpson broad is still in dope he’ll know her or he’ll know somebody who does.”
It was an old white frame house on Eleventh between Piedmont and Peachtree. There was one odd thing about it: somebody’d poured concrete where the lawn should have been. Now the “lawn” was a parking lot. Hump swung in and parked next to the only car there, a ’72 Pinto. I started to get out but Hump stopped me.
“I better talk to him a minute or two. I’ve got a feeling he might have heard you were a cop once. If he’s still nervous I’ll have him call Raymond for an okay on you.”
I smoked a cigarette and waited. Hump was inside about five minutes before he came out on the porch and waved me inside. I followed Hump up a long flight of stairs to the second floor. At the top of the stairs, the landing led to a single door. Hump was in front and he pushed the door open. On the way past the door I turned and looked at it. It was about three inches thick and looked solid. There were some steel brackets on it about waist high and I made my guess they were designed to hold an iron cross-bar. It was, I thought, one way of making his place rip-off proof.
It was a large living room. The furniture was mismatched and old, like it had been ordered by phone from a Goodwill store. Still, it had a good feel to it. The walls had been given a new coat of white paint recently and the framed prints, mostly the Impressionists, had been selected with some care.
Ernie was a black with a neat goatee and long sideburns that ran all the way down his face and joined the goatee. I put his age at around thirty, give or take a year or two. He was wearing a pair of navy bells and a flowing white silk shirt with wide sleeves.
That was the first impression. Then Ernie nodded at us and got up from the sofa. As he walked toward the kitchen, off to the right, I saw that he was dragging his right leg. I looked over at Hump but he didn’t say anything. The leg didn’t mean anything to him, but it did to me. I’d been around narcotics enough to know a dirty-needle-fucked-up leg when I saw one. If it was that I gave him about a year before they’d have to take it off.
Ernie came back from the kitchen with a quart of Dud and some plastic cups. He saw me looking at the leg. “Made your guess, huh, Hardman?”
I shook my head.
“You’d be wrong,” he said. “Nam about six years ago.”
“I did the Korean one,” I said. “That one didn’t make much sense either.”
He nodded. His face didn’t change. I felt a little foolish for throwing the Korean one into it. It didn’t give us any rapport and there was always the chance that he’d think I was sucking up to him. I hoped that he wouldn’t, but if he did there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“You call Raymond?” Hump asked.
Ernie split the quart of beer three ways. He handed two of them to Hump and Hump passed me one. “Wouldn’t call anybody on my home phone. Wouldn’t trust those pigs out there not to have a tap on it.” Ernie tongued at the foam and eyed me. “I’ve known Hump for two or three years. I guess I can trust him not to set me up.” He winked at Hump. “Anyway there’s not a flake of smoke in the place.”
Ernie’d taken his seat back on the sofa and Hump was sitting next to him. I’d taken the stuffed chair at the end of the sofa nearest Ernie.
“Who’s this cunt you two are asking about?”
“Margaret Simpson. Been in Atlanta about three years. One drug bust two years ago. Got a year’s probation on that. Still living here we think and might be somewhere down here on the Strip.”
“Name’s nothing to me,” Ernie said.
I got out the photo I’d gotten from Jack Smathers. I passed it to him. “The picture goes back a few years. Her hair’s probably longer now.”
He nodded a couple of times as he studied the photo. “I know this fuck. Did her a few times myself.” He passed the picture back to me. “She doesn’t go by that name anymore.” He looked away from me, toward Hump. “You said something about expense money. You got twenty-five on you?”
Hump dipped his head toward me. I got out a ten and three fives. He didn’t put out a hand for the money so I placed it on the table next to the empty quart bottle.
His eyes flicked down at the cash but he didn’t touch it.
“Why do you want to find her. Is she in any trouble with the law?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a custody suit over a six-year-old child. I’m working for a lawyer who wants to find her so he can serve her with notice of the suit.”
“A child?”
“A little girl,” I said.
“She needs a kid like she needs another A-hole.”
“It’s just hunt and find and the court does the rest,” I said.
“Just wanted to be sure,” Ernie said. “I sell grass and hash, but I don’t usually sell people.”
“What’s the name now?” Hump asked.
“Peggy’s short for Margaret, ain’t it? She goes by that front name now. Last name’s Holt. Don’t know where that comes from.”
“How can we find her?”
“I haven’t seen her in three months or so. I had my thing with her about a year and a half ago. She’s one crazy fuck. Like a lot of that white meat, needs a lot of dope to turn it all loose.” He cut his eyes toward me to see how I reacted to all that, but I just shrugged. “About three months ago I went into one of those topless places between Tenth and Eleventh. A joint called Eve’s Place. Just went in to see if titty still looked the same. There she was working as a waitress. Not dancing, just waiting the tables. I heard later she and the manager, a guy named Martin, had a thing going. Seems she had been doing some dancing, caught Martin’s eye, and he retired her from dancing. Didn’t want everybody looking at his property, I guess. I didn’t hear this from Peggy. She brought me a beer and looked right through me.”
“Think she’s still there?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“You find out where she was living then?”
He gave me a fuck-you grin. “Didn’t ask. But assumed it was with this Martin guy. Of course, with the itch Peggy’s got she might have moved on by now.”
“What itch is that?”
“Man itch. Money itch. You take your choice. It might sound funny but fucking and money are tied together for that girl.”
“She selling it?” Hump asked.
“Not out front,” Ernie said. “Not that way. All the same it’s got a price tag on it. One you might not read from close up. It’s there, though.”
I finished my beer and nodded at Hump. Hump tapped his plastic cup on the coffee table top and stood up. “Appreciate it, Ernie.”
“Come by again. Got some real good Georgia mountain stuff coming in the next few days. It’s got a mule’s kick.”
“I’ll do it,” Hump said.
Before I reached the door Ernie called after me. “Hardman?”
“Yeah.”
“The reason I went to so much trouble to find out why you wanted to find Peggy … you wonder about that?”
“I noticed it,” I said.
“Heard a story a week or so ago. A rumor about that cunt. Heard she’s dealing in hard stuff now. Good shit and lots of it. Raymond’s boys are asking around. I wanted to make sure you weren’t working for him.”
“You didn’t tell Raymond?”
“All that hard talking shit about Peggy. Part of that’s a lie. I might have got ripped off by her, but I don’t hate her enough to turn her into dogmeat.”
“Raymond won’t hear it from me.”
He gestured down at the money I’d put on the table. “You wonder why I settled on twenty-five?”
“I thought you needed a new shirt,” I said.
“If it was blood money I didn’t want it to be thirty,” he said.
“You think Raymond’s after blood?”
“Doubt it,” he said. “Think he’s more interested in where she got it. The purity’s high.”
“How much of it is there?”
“No way to know without asking Peggy.”
“Thanks, Ernie,” I said.
“For what, man? Selling her ass out?”
Going out the door I took one more look at him. He was looking down at the cash. He still hadn’t touched it. The Judas metaphor of his hadn’t worked too well with me. Still, I guess that was the way he felt. He wanted to sell her ass out and at the same time he didn’t want her hurt. It was a confusion of sorts but then love usually is.
On the way down the stairs I thought about Peggy Holt. I’d talked to two men who’d been in her bed, not counting the ex-husband, and they both sounded like the barbed fish hooks were still in.
Peggy Holt, more than anything else, sounded like yellow fever with a crotch.
CHAPTER THREE
I hadn’t admitted it back at Ernie’s house, but I knew very well where Eve’s Place was. Back in a dreary time, when the Marcy thing hadn’t been going well, I’d gone in there a few times. Like Ernie had said, just to see what a breast and a butt looked like. It turned out to be a bit more than that. I got a little foolish and found myself attracted to one of the girls who danced there. A little blonde child named Fay. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d have known better. I finally realized that she’d been measuring my bankroll and trying to guess how much of it she could make off with without having to go to bed with me. And about the same time I got that realization I saw her talking to a scraggly-bearded kid at the door and I knew that the kid was probably her husband or the guy she was living with and supporting. That seemed to be one of the hard facts down there: most of the topless dancers seemed to be hustling money for some guy. And getting it from some forty-year-old fish like me.
As far as I could discover, there wasn’t anybody named Eve connected with the place. It was just a way of explaining the concept, the design, of the bar. It was an almost square room. In the center of it was an apple-shaped raised platform where the girls danced. All around the apple-shaped platform were barstools where the customers who wanted to get close would sit. The stem of the apple was a runway that ran to a window at the rear of the bar where the dancers would get beers or drinks for the customers. The outer edges of the room were dotted with small two-person tables: A customer sat there if he didn’t want to smell the powder and the sweat.
Hump and I took a table on the left side of the apple stage. It was early yet but there were thirty or so men in the place watching the four girls do their all-night shuffle to rock music that was set about one decibel below ear-ripping.
A waitress found us before the chair bottoms were warm. A young girl with long black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, a dancer whose turn it was to wait the tables, danced over to us. She didn’t stop wiggling the whole time. I guess she’d become good at lip-reading because she nodded when I said, “Two Buds,” and she danced all the way to the bar.
“Is Martin in?” I asked her when I paid her for the beers.
“He’s in back,” she said.
“I’d like to see him.”
“Go on back,” she said and she pointed to a hallway at the end of the aisle on the right side of the stage. She danced away and Hump and I got up and went down the aisle past the juke box. At the end of the short hall there was an open door. The man behind the desk watched us the whole way. He looked more like his name had been Martinez or something like that—Cuban or Spanish blood in him. He was seated but from what I could see of him he looked slim and hard.
“What can I do for you?” He spoke as soon as we were through the doorway.
“Mind if we close the door? I’m already half deaf and I’ve only been here five minutes.”
He nodded and I closed the door. I gave him my name and introduced Hump to him. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He had a large sheaf of file cards in his hands and he kept fanning them out and closing them into a stack.
“There was a Jim Hardman who was a cop once. That you?”
“That’s me.”
“You busted a friend of mine for armed robbery. He was innocent.”
“So many innocent people in the slam I wonder why they keep building prisons,” I said. He hadn’t offered us a chair but I went over and sat in the one over
to the left of the desk. “What was your innocent friend’s name?”
“Art Conway.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about Conway.” Of course I did remember Art Conway. It was hard not to. “You ought to pick your innocent friends better. Conway’s the worst fuck-up thief in Atlanta. Can’t even rob a poor box without tripping an alarm.”
Martin didn’t like that. “He’s getting out a month or so from now. He’ll probably come looking for you.”
I grinned at him. “That’s nothing to worry about. Conway couldn’t find me even with a road map.”
Hump hooted at that and I guess Martin decided that he wasn’t winning the word game. “You come here just to waste my time?”
“I’m doing a skip-trace on a girl used to work here for you,” I said.
“That’s a comedown from being a big cop,” Martin said.
I let that float by. “Her real name’s Margaret Simpson.”
“I don’t know any Margaret Simpson.”
“I think you knew her as Peggy Holt.” I’d been watching his face. He hadn’t reacted to Margaret Simpson, but Peggy Holt drew a hard line across his mouth.
“That dog.”
“That’s the one,” I said. “She still working for you?”
“I fired her a few weeks ago. Got so she was missing her shift and coming in late.”
“You know where she’s living now?”
“I don’t keep books on that dog,” he said.
“Make a guess,” I said.
“Not me. You might ask the blonde with the fried egg tits. They were close at one time. She might know.”
I didn’t remember a blonde that fitted that description. “She on now?”
He checked his watch. “She’s due now.” He gave me a bored look. “Is that all you want?”
I got up and swung the chair back into place with the toe of my shoe. “You’ve been just great.”
“Hardman, you really get far down on your luck, I could use a bouncer here.”
It was an insult but not a very good one. “If I ever get that hard up I’ll stop by.”
