by Ralph Dennis
We sat at our table and finished our beers. I didn’t have much trouble finding the blonde who fitted Martin’s crude metaphor. She was a big horse woman. The waitress danced over to us again and reached us about the time the record ended. There was a silent space about long enough for me to get a few words in. I ordered two more beers and put an extra dollar on her tray. “The big blonde there. I’d like to talk to her. It’s business. Five in it for her.”
“I’ll talk to you for five,” the waitress said.
“This is business,” I said. “Talking to you would be pleasure.”
“If she wants to come, she’ll be over when her set’s finished.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ellen.”
The sound blast of music started up again. The waitress brought us our beers and we sat and watched the blonde dance. Her breasts were somewhat like fried eggs. And that gave it a strange effect. All the dancing and bouncing around kept the nipples erect. Erect nipples on fried eggs? The rest of her was more like Minnesota farm girl. Big milky hide without a tan. A band of pale stretch marks around her waist that meant she’d really been fat at one time or she’d had a hell of a large baby. She’d used body powder but in the right light, as she turned this way and that, the pebbled and streaky grain of the skin showed like the texture of a piece of woven cloth.
We were about through with the second beer when the girls changed on the stage. The big blonde, Ellen, got down and the waitress went over to her and said a few words and nodded in our direction. Ellen nodded and slipped a short red poncho over her head and came over to our table.
“You want to talk to me?” I was wrong. It wasn’t Minnesota. It was more like south Georgia or northern Florida.
“Sit down and have a drink,” I said.
“Thanks.” Hump got a chair from a nearby table and she sat between us with her back to the stage. She turned long enough to get the waitress’ attention and made a drinking motion with her cupped hand. “She also said you had some money for me.”
I got out a five and put it on the table next to my beer can. She reached for it but I put a palm on it and covered it. “I want to get in touch with Peggy Holt.”
“Cop?”
“Friends of her family back in North Carolina. They haven’t heard from her in a long time. They knew I was here in town and they asked me to look her up. The only thing is the address they gave me isn’t good anymore.”
“How’d you get to me?”
“Dumb luck. Somebody said she worked as a waitress here for a time.”
Ellen turned and nodded in the direction of the office. “Martin could have told you.”
“He said he couldn’t care less,” I said.
“That’s his version of it,” Ellen said. “He’s had her followed for the last few weeks.”
“Jealous?”
“Yes.” A new thought seemed to strike her. “Now, take you …”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m a bit too old to be one of her jealous lovers.”
“I don’t know about that.” Her eyes still appraised me. “I don’t think Peggy ever thought about how old a man was.” Without turning her body she eased her head around and faced Hump. “You must be the strong and silent type.”
“I talk when the business is over.” Hump gave her a grin that told her he’d eat her up and chew on the bones if he wanted to.
“How do you know Martin was having Peggy followed?”
“She told me,” Ellen said.
“When?”
“A few days ago … the last time I saw her.”
“Where was that?”
“I ran into her at the Colonial store, the one down near the corner of Eleventh street. We got to the check-out counter at the same time. On the way out she said Martin was still bothering her. I told her I thought that was silly. So she said she’d show me. She offered me a ride home and as we were going out of the parking lot she went out of her way to pass a blue 1970 Impala. She said the man in the car had been following her for almost two weeks. And she was sure that Martin had hired him to do it.”
“You get a look at him?”
“He saw us and turned his face away. I couldn’t tell how tall he was but he had reddish hair cut in a flat-top and a narrow face.”
“He follow you?”
She nodded. “He stayed about a block back, but it was him all right.”
“How was Peggy taking this … being tailed?”
“She tried to make jokes about it, but I could tell she was afraid. You know how some men are. They just hang on and hang on, even after it’s over. Martin’s that way.” It was getting to be a pattern with her, talking to me and then turning to Hump. I think Hump’s silence bothered her. “I bet you throw away more than you keep,” she said to him.
“I keep the quiet ones,” Hump said.
“Look,” Ellen said, “I don’t want to do anything to hurt Peggy. She doesn’t make friends easily and I don’t think she has many. I don’t even know if she considers me a friend. But whatever we are, I don’t think I can stab her in the back for five dollars.”
“That’s melodrama,” I said. “Nobody’s asking you to stab anybody in the back. The five’s for your time.”
“And even if I don’t tell you where Peggy is, the five’s mine?”
“Sure.” It might be a con but I’d been conning her up to now and maybe turnabout is fair play. I pushed the five over to her and Hump and I watched while she creased the bill and lifted her poncho. She stuffed the five into her swim suit bottom. I got a flash of pubic hair. Maybe that was supposed to be worth the five. I didn’t think so, but I guess most of the men who came into Eve’s Place would.
“And you’re not going to ask me again?”
“If you’re going to tell me I guess you’ll do it. If not …” I shrugged. “You wouldn’t want us to twist your arm, would you?”
“You do that kind of thing?”
“Not as a rule,” I said.
“Not to pretty girls,” Hump said.
“All right then.” Ellen scooped up her drink and pushed back her chair. “It’s been good meeting you.”
If we hadn’t been so close to getting the information I think I’d have laughed. There she was prancing away with my five and Hump was about to break up over it. He liked to see me beaten by a con that I’d started myself. Hump leaned over the table toward me. “Hot damn, that girl just faked you out of your underwear.”
And then, as if it had been a game the whole time, Ellen whirled around and came back to our table. She leaned toward me and said, “You know the High Museum down between Fifteenth and Sixteenth?”
I said I did.
“On Fifteenth street, facing the side of the Museum, there’s a large yellow house with a lot of stairs going up to the front door.”
“Five or six houses from the corner?”
“That’s it. She lives behind the yellow house, in a garage apartment.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Ellen.”
But she was through with me. Her attention was on Hump. “You come back by yourself sometime.”
“I’ll do it,” Hump said. From the sour look that passed over his face as soon as her back was turned I wouldn’t book bets that he would. Not in twenty years.
The driveway beside the yellow house was steep and narrow and Hump passed it up and parked along the curb out front. We followed the driveway and passed the side of the house. There the driveway curved and led us to the garage. There was room for two cars but both spaces were empty. At the rear right corner of the garage there was an old gas floor furnace and as we passed it cut in with a whomp-whomp.
The stairs were around on the left side. I stopped at the foot of the stairs.
“You sure you want to go up there?” Hump asked. “Might scare her away?”
“Don’t like it myself,” I said, “but I’ve got to be sure Ellen didn’t send us out to hunt snipe while she called Peggy and warned her about us.”
&nb
sp; We clomped up the stairs. On the landing we stopped and I could hear the faint sound of rock music coming from inside. I didn’t see a door bell so I rapped on the door frame. I waited a minute and tried again. Still no sound from inside but the faint rock music. I pulled the screen door open and tried the door. It came open and I pushed it the rest of the way.
“Watch the road,” I said over my shoulder to Hump.
I went inside. I was in a narrow living room, at least I thought that was what it was. Flush against the wall to my right was a waterbed with a spread over it. The transistor radio was on the waterbed. The battery was low but it was still trying. Facing the waterbed were a couple of bean-bag chairs. Between the chairs and the waterbed was a low coffee table.
The bedroom was straight ahead. The door was open and there didn’t seem to be anyone in there. To my left there was a partly open door. I went in that direction. From what I could see through the partly open door it was a kitchen-dining room combination. I reached the doorway and swung the door open the rest of the way.
Even as I pushed the door I could see the drops of blood on the floor. That prepared me and I wasn’t surprised when I saw the man face down at the kitchen table. There was an overturned cereal bowl on the floor next to the table. The man was face down in a mess of cornflakes and milk. Careful to avoid the blood I moved closer and looked at him. He wasn’t anybody I knew. At least he wasn’t from what I could see of the part of his face that wasn’t in the soggy cornflakes.
He’d been shot in the back several times. His right hand, pushed out to the side, was clenched, full of cornflakes.
CHAPTER FOUR
Of all the detectives over at the department I had to draw the one who liked me the least and wanted my hide the most. He was Bear Hodge and the dislike went back even before I’d left the force under the cloud. It went back to everything we’d ever been involved in. Everything from a pick-up game of touch football on Saturdays in Piedmont Park to playing poker with some of the guys. If it was football I could always plan on him seeking me out a few times each afternoon with an elbow or a knee. If it was poker I knew that he and one of his buddies would try to whip-saw me when a big hand came along.
The name fitted him. He looked like one of those friendly cartoon bears. The same dumb look too. That was misleading because, if anything, he was animal sly. Nothing much got past him. And under what looked like summer bear fat he was hard and mean and tough. He’d been a college wrestler before the World War II, and there was a story about him that right after Japan surrendered he’d been stationed in Tokyo and he’d taken up judo just for the hell of it. He’d passed his black belt examination by humiliating one of the hometown Japanese boys in a match and he’d done it with such contempt that he’d almost caused a riot and a new outbreak of the war.
Now I was the one on the mat with him. He gave Hump one look and motioned him over to the bean-bag chair that was furthest away from us. “You know who that is in there?”
“No,” I said.
“His name is trouble and your ass is on the wood stove,” Bear said.
“I didn’t kill him and I don’t know him. How am I in trouble?”
“His name is Randy King. The name King mean anything to you?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe Ben King means something to you?”
It did. He was the last legitimate hero the force had. He was the kind of cop who lived his life like he thought there was some kind of shield around him, like he believed he had a charmed life. In the end it turned out he didn’t. Not that he got killed. Nothing like that. He hadn’t been killed when maybe he should have. He’d gone after two men who’d been surprised in the act of robbing a motel. They’d been holed up in the motel with the night clerk as a hostage when Ben King made his try. He got the night clerk out safely and he killed one of the small timers and wounded the other. But a slug damaged his spine and he was off the force now and crippled pretty badly. The word was that he could still get around some. He’d never been one of my favorites. I didn’t like showy cops.
He and Bear, I remembered, were pretty close, like brothers.
“His brother?” I asked.
Bear grinned at me, a wicked grin, like a teacher encouraging a slow learner. “His kid brother. His favorite and only brother.”
That broke it. I glanced over at Hump and shook my head. Without an invitation from Bear I went over to the other bean-bag chair and sat down. It didn’t happen often but my legs didn’t seem to want to hold me up anymore.
Bear followed me and leaned over me. “All right, now,” he said, “tell me that horseshit story again.” He shook out a cigarette and wet the end and rolled it into the corner of his mouth. “I think it started with you looking for a girl named Peggy Holt whose real name is Margaret Simpson.”
I told the story three more times. Then Hump told his version of it and I was in the middle of re-telling it a fourth time when I heard the slow clomp-clomp coming up the outside stairs toward the landing. Bear heard it too and he broke off in the process of needling me and rushed to the outside door.
From where I was sitting I’d been watching the crew work their way slowly through everything in the bedroom and in the bathroom beyond. The police photographer had finished with the body of Randy King in the kitchen and, although the meat wagon was outside and the stretcher was in the kitchen, they’d made no move to take the body away. As soon as I heard the clomp-clomp I knew why. They’d been waiting for Ben King and now he’d arrived. I guess if finding the body of Ben King’s brother got me in trouble I was about nose deep in it.
“Ben, come in,” Bear said at the door. He pushed the screen door away and flattened himself against the door frame to make room for Ben to pass. I hadn’t seen Ben since before the shoot-out. Still, I guess I should have known how he’d look. The huge shape that staggered through the doorway wasn’t the Ben King I remembered. The arms and the shoulders were the same, but the rest of him wasn’t. His body had gone soft and bloated and he looked like a rubber casing filled with liquid. There was agony and sweat on his face as he moved, legs half dangling, half dragging. His hair’d been black the last time I saw him. Now it was gray and shaggy. I’d never liked Ben or his grandstand cop work, but it hurt a little watching him. Bear wasn’t quite sure what to do. He wanted to help but Ben wasn’t having any of that. He got through the doorway alone. Once he was inside he took his eyes off the floor long enough to look at me briefly.
“Where’s Randy?”
Bear pointed toward the kitchen door. Ben made a slow turn on his metal crutches and headed that way. Bear jumped in front of him and swung the door open. The two attendants who’d come with the meat wagon were in there, lounging around the kitchen counter and smoking. One look at Ben King and they scurried out of the room. Bear slammed the door closed behind them.
The two attendants stood around the living room looking at us while we looked at them. They didn’t have anything to say and neither did we. It seemed a long time, that silence in the kitchen, but it wasn’t more than two or three minutes at the most. Bear came out first and held the door open for Ben. On his way past the two attendants Bear nodded and they went into the kitchen and eased the door closed behind them.
Ben made his slow and painful way toward us. Before he reached us Bear went into the bedroom and came back with a chair. He placed it opposite me, just a few feet from where I sat. Ben eased down into the chair and just looked at me. He gave a long throaty sigh and I could see that his hands were sweaty and red from the strain of dragging himself around. He waited until his breathing was even and then he said, “All right, Hardman, tell me about this.”
“I’ve told it to Bear God knows how many times,” I said.
“Tell it again,” Ben said.
“You’re not a cop anymore, either. I’m going to tell it one more time but that’ll be when they’re taking it down. You want to know my story, you ask Bear.”
Ben’s hand jerked on one of the met
al crutches and I thought, for just a second, that I was going to get the bottom end of it across my face. I don’t know what stopped him. In the old days nothing in the world would have stopped Ben from putting a fist against the side of my head. Maybe the time on his back and the pain had taught him patience.
The hand relaxed on the crutch and he turned to Bear. “How do you see it?”
“From the blood I’d say he was shot as he stood in the doorway, probably from the living room. I’d say small caliber slugs, maybe something like a lady’s gun. Might be a .22. He probably fell down, got up and staggered over to the table. Made it to the chair and that was all.”
“No phone in the kitchen?” Ben said.
“In the bedroom,” Bear said.
“I wonder he didn’t try to make it to the phone.”
“He might of known he couldn’t make it,” Bear said. “It happens like that.”
Slowly, painfully, Ben King’s head turned toward me. “This girl you were looking for … Ben said her name was Peggy Holt.”
I nodded.
“Dark-haired, long hair, a sort of older hippie girl?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“Who’re you working for?”
“You know I’m not a private investigator.” I said. “A lawyer named Jack Smathers asked me to do him a favor. I do favors for friends.” It was the question that had to be asked. It was the one I’d have asked first. Bear was walking around it, like it had never occurred to him. There wasn’t any reason for me to tiptoe past it. “You got any idea why Randy was here, Ben?”
It hurt him to say it. I could see that in his face and the way his lips trembled. “The stupid kid, he was living with her. Moved out on his wife, Betty, and his boy. I did everything I could to break them up, but he wouldn’t listen to me. And now this happens.”
I think he would have broken it off at this point if he could have. He didn’t like saying all this in front of me and in front of Hump. But it had to be said and it was too much pain and trouble to return to the kitchen and tell it to Bear in there.
