by Ralph Dennis
“Sometimes I think you’re never going to grow up. I think you’re Huck Finn and Hump is your Nigger Jim and you’re going to spend the rest of your life floating down some kind of mythical Mississippi River.”
“I had a deprived childhood. I never read the book.”
“It’s not too late,” Marcy said.
“I’ll buy the book tomorrow.”
“No, I meant grow up.” Marcy’d finished with her underwear. She took the brown tweed skirt from a hanger and stepped into it.
“It looks like we have some kind of war every night before you go home,” I said.
“You’d rather we had them at the beginning of the evening and ruin it all?”
“I’d rather we didn’t have them at all,” I said.
“I think that can be arranged.”
Her tone of voice jolted me. “What do you mean by that?”
“I met a man two weeks ago. A new man in the office. My age. Cultured, well-educated. He likes classical music and ballet. He’s been asking me to go out with him and so far I’ve been putting him off.”
“He sounds dreamy,” I said. “Wonder why some girl hasn’t run off with him before now?”
She ignored the sarcasm. “I think I’ll get him to ask me again tomorrow and I’ll accept.”
“You’re a grown girl,” I said.
“You always say that.”
“I try to mean it too.”
I don’t know exactly what would have happened if we’d gone on. Maybe we’d have torn too much flesh or we’d have said things we couldn’t take back. We didn’t get to find out because, at that moment, I heard the dull ring of the front doorbell.
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know.” I got on a pair of trousers and a t-shirt and my slippers. The bell stopped. There had been one ring and that was all. On the way through the living room I tried to guess who it was. Might be Hump, but I didn’t think so. Might be Art if he’d found Harper and the kid. Still, most of the time he called before he came by.
I swung the door open. At first, with the porch light off, I thought whoever it was who’d rung the bell had given up and gone away. Then I heard a scratching noise and a shape swung from the shadows into the doorway and fell toward me. On reflex I stepped away. He hit the floor with a relaxed thud. I bent over him and turned him. He had red hair and a narrow face. Harper. There were blood bubbles on his lips but he wasn’t dead yet. I leaned closer. His lips moved a couple of times and nothing came out but more blood. I was about to straighten up when he said, “The bitch, the fucking bitch.”
I looked down at his hand and saw clutched there the message I’d left on his note pad at his office. I opened his hand and took it out. He or somebody else had written my address below the message with a pencil.
It was quiet out on the street. I could hear a car engine running and I looked out. The Impala was parked at a crazy angle in front of my house, the headlights still on.
Though I knew better, I tried to find a pulse. There wasn’t one. His chest was a mass of blood. It was hard to tell how many times he’d been shot or where he’d been shot … in the back or the front.
I went back into the bedroom and told Marcy to stay in the bedroom unless she wanted to see what violent death looked like. I sat on the edge of the bed and called the department number and asked for Art.
CHAPTER SEVEN
While I waited for the first cruiser to arrive I got Harper by the shoulders and pulled him the rest of the way into the living room so that I could close the door. I’d left him there while I’d finished dressing and when I came back out the temperature in the house seemed to have dropped about thirty degrees. Six or eight inches one way or the other wouldn’t matter to the investigation. It did matter to my old busted up and broken-backed furnace. I could hear it grumbling down in the basement.
The cruiser lights hit my front window not long after I’d moved the body and closed the door. I put on a jacket and went outside to meet them. They’d pulled up in my driveway behind my car and Marcy’s. I told the uniformed cops that the body was inside and that I’d left the car Harper had driven up in exactly as it was. We walked across the chill-brittle grass stubble and down to the road where the Impala was. It was parked with the nose-end against the lawn and the ass-end out in the road. It was a wonder nobody’d clipped it yet. One of the cops opened the door to the driver’s side and cut the ignition and turned the lights off. The other one went back to the cruiser and got a road flare that he placed at the rear of the Impala.
I stood behind the cop who’d cut the ignition and watched while he played his flashlight over the inside of the car. The seat back and bottom on the driver’s side was dark and blood-soaked. There were also splattering and small pools on the floorboards. He’d bled a lot and the real wonder was that he’d had enough life left in him to make it across my lawn and up the stairs to the porch.
He snapped off the flashlight. “I have it a second?” He handed it to me and I turned it on and ran the light slowly over the back seat. There was an old army blanket balled up in the corner away from us. Closer up, near the center of the backseat, there was a pair of knitted children’s gloves. White with a red trim around the wrist.
I returned the flashlight to him and we went into the house to wait for Art to arrive.
“Why you?” Art asked. “Why not a hospital?”
It was almost an hour later. The meat wagon had come and gone. The body and the Impala had been taken away. The cruiser that had been the first to arrive had gone back to its regular patrol. Art and Marcy and I were alone in the house.
“I’ll make a guess if you like.”
“Make it,” Art said.
“Maybe the shooting took place near here. Sometime between the time Hump and I left his office on Mitchell he dropped by there. He got my address out of the phone book. He was in the middle of something dangerous and maybe he wanted to check me out, wanted to see if what I wanted him for was involved or entirely separate. He might have intended to drop in on me. A surprise visit. After he got shot he remembered me and tried to make it here.”
“Why you? What could you do for him?”
“Lord knows what he was thinking. I’ve never been shot five or six times, so I might never understand what happens to your thinking process in that situation.”
Marcy called us from the kitchen. The coffee was ready. Before we sat down at the table I got the part of a bottle of Stock from the cabinet and put it in the center of the table along with three glasses. Art pushed his glass away and I poured for Marcy and myself.
“You seem to be very lucky with witnesses,” Art said. “Hump to back you at the garage apartment and Marcy this time.”
I sipped at the Stock and gave him my go-to-hell grin. “That’s true.”
“Next time try to have a witness along who’s not your drinking buddy or your girlfriend,” he said.
“If I have time to arrange it.”
“You don’t believe me?” Marcy asked.
“I believe you,” Art said. “You might be foolish enough to love the bastard but I don’t think you’d lie for him.”
I’d been watching her face. Because of the argument in the bedroom—the one Harper had been nice enough to interrupt by dying in my living room—I tried to read her face when Art said “love.” It didn’t tell me anything at all. If it meant anything at all to her she hid it well.
“That’s true,” Marcy said. “That is, I wouldn’t lie for him.”
For a moment I thought Art might ask the question I wanted to ask why she’d qualified it that way. The phone rang in the bedroom. If Art asked the question I wasn’t there to hear the answer. The call was for Art, one of the detectives over at the department wanting to talk to him. I called him and we passed each other in the living room.
I sat across the table from Marcy and sipped at the Stock. “Hope you have a good time at the ballet.”
“If there’s one in town,” she said.
“If they’re in town.”
“Or just talking about literature,” I said.
“If we’ve read the same books.”
“You could take turns reading to each other in French and German.”
“You are an ass,” Marcy said.
Art returned from the bedroom. “One new thing. When they got Harper over to the morgue and undressed him they found an $8 bag in his calf-length socks. It looks like fairly pure stuff. Better than the usual street crap.”
“Harper a user?”
“No needle marks,” Art said.
“When you say pure, how pure?”
“They’re not sure. Have to wait on the lab, but Henry thinks it’s fifty-fifty or better.”
“What’s usual on the street?”
“Maybe thirty percent,” Art said.
Marcy pushed back her chair. She put her coffee cup in the sink and went into the bedroom without looking at me. I watched her out of the corner of one eye and I noticed that Art looked puzzled.
“When the quality’s that high, what does it mean?” I reached across the table and got the remainder of Marcy’s Stock. I poured it into my glass.
“Hard to say. One thing it might mean is that the $8 bag came from somebody fairly close to the source. Usually, no matter how high the quality is at the beginning, it passes through a lot of hands. Each time it gets bought it’s cut again, more milk or sugar added as filler. When it hits the street for sale it’s thirty percent or less.”
“All that cutting equipment at Peggy Holt’s apartment. That suggest anything to you?”
“Could be,” Art said. “It’s the kind of unsupported jump I don’t like to make. But let’s make it anyway, just for the sake of argument.”
“Two bits of support for the argument, if you’re going to make the one I think you are. The lady next door to Harper’s apartment and the knit gloves in the back of the Impala.”
“We checked on that lady, whatever her name is. She’d been reporting prowlers, rapes in the parking lot and such the last year or so. All turned out to be nothing. No wonder the cops didn’t hurry over there. And the knit gloves. We don’t know they belonged to Maryann Simpson.”
“I’ll check the gloves out,” I said.
“Back to the argument. Peggy Holt’s got her hands on some high grade heroin. She cuts a small amount of it and starts passing it around to the middle men. She’s saying this is the kind of shit I’ve got for sale. Now somewhere along the way Harper gets his hands on one of the sample bags. Maybe along with the bag he gets himself an idea. He figures on a way of getting himself a chunk of the dope or some part of the cash it’ll bring. He snatches the kid. Peggy can have Maryann back for a price. And Peggy’s in no position to go running to the cops about the kidnapping. Could be she does the other thing. She gets herself a couple gun handlers and they go out and find Harper and shoot him and take the kid back.”
“Let’s muddy the water some. Think about the possibility that whoever killed Harper wasn’t working for the mother at all. Just somebody who picked up on Harper’s idea.”
“Who would that be?”
“A copycat,” I said. “The word is that some of the old established firms don’t like the competition.”
“A move in a drug war?”
“Maybe.”
I’d been watching the bedroom door. Marcy came out in her heavy coat and with a scarf over her hair. She paused in the kitchen doorway.
“Leaving?”
“Yes.” She said goodnight to Art.
“I’ll see you to your car,” I said.
“It’s not necessary.”
“Of course it isn’t.” I followed her out of the house and down the walk to the driveway. It was windy and cold with a trace of dampness. Marcy didn’t say anything on the way to the car and I didn’t either. I could feel the chest-tightening coming on. I opened the door to the car for her and held it while she got in and smoothed the coat around her legs.
“Have a good date with the cultured man,” I said.
“I ought to,” Marcy said. “I really ought to.”
“Do what you want to …”
“If you say that to me one more time, Jim …”
“You’ll do what?”
“I’ll go to some country-western bar and pick up the meanest looking red-neck there and let him screw my eyeballs out.”
“Is this conversation necessary?” I asked.
“Not the last part of it. We should have had the first part of it months ago.”
I edged the door in slowly. “I’ll call you and if you’re not busy with culture or red-necks we’ll have dinner.”
Marcy grabbed the door and jerked it closed. She kicked the engine over and threw it into reverse. Her front left tire rolled right over my right foot as she backed out of the driveway.
Art was still at the kitchen table. He watched me limp in and fought off a grin. “You and Marcy having a lovers’ spat?”
“I don’t have enough ambition to suit her.” I tossed down the rest of the Stock. I put my right foot in one of the chair bottoms and felt the bones. It didn’t seem to have any breaks.
“You’re making a better living than I am,” Art said. “Of course, I never ask how you do it.”
“I’d never tell anyway.” I took the foot out of the chair and put some weight on it. It was going to be stiff for a time. I poured a bit more Stock into my glass. “I’ve got to call Jack Smathers and wake him up. I don’t think he’s going to like it.”
“We’re going to want to talk to Peggy Holt’s ex, this guy Simpson.”
I nodded. I knew they would. In the bedroom I looked up Jack’s home number and dialed it. Jack’s wife, May, answered on-the fifth or sixth ring. I’d never met her. Once, after he’d prosecuted a case I’d worked on, he got in his cups and talked about her. She sounded like a hard-ass woman. She’d been an operating room nurse when he’d met her and married her. She’d supported him through University of Georgia Law School and now that he’d decided the marriage might be a mistake she wasn’t about to let him go without taking everything he had including the gold in his teeth.
“Jack has office hours,” she said, “and he can be seen there. He needs his sleep like everybody else.”
“Lady, I need my sleep too and if this wasn’t important I’d be in my bed. So, how about giving him a chance to decide if he wants to talk to me?”
Jack sounded groggy for the first minute or so. The death of Harper jolted the sleep out of him. “This is getting rough.”
I agreed and told him I thought we’d better get Edward Simpson back to Atlanta as soon as we could. The police would want to talk to him about his ex-wife and about how he’d spent the afternoon before he flew back to Chapel Hill.
“He says he just walked around town,” Jack said.
“He’ll have to convince the police of that.” I threw the next hard lick at him, that I thought Maryann had been kidnapped by Harper and taken back by the mother or re-kidnapped by somebody else. I described the knit gloves I’d seen in the back of Harper’s Impala.
“I’ll see if Simpson can identify them.”
“And we’ll need some recent pictures of Maryann if he’s got some.”
“The gloves and the pictures … got that.” He said, before he hung up, that he’d call Simpson right away and he’d ring me back in a few minutes.
I went back into the kitchen and gave myself a final knock from the bottle. Art eased down and helped himself to about half a shot. I knew him pretty well and I knew he was looking at me as if he had some question or other that he wanted an answer for. It was there, just in back of his teeth, trying to push its way out.
“So ask it,” I said.
“What?”
“The question,” I said.
“Okay. What’s in this one for you? The money’s not good. Fifty or so a day isn’t enough for you. I’ve got you and Hump figured some oth
er way. You do the jobs that always seem to have some kind of gold chamber pot at the end. Right?”
“Boredom,” I said. “Getting so I needed a job or I’d turn into an alcoholic.”
“At your age it’s a little late to worry about it. Now it’s a race between skid row and the grave.”
“I don’t like either of those choices,” I said.
“All the horseshit aside, it’s the little girl, isn’t it?”
“The kid’s nothing to me.”
“But it bothers you?”
I shrugged my shoulders at him. “She’s in a box.”
“A box?”
“The father’s an ass with a new wife who probably hates the kid. God knows what the mother’s like, but I’ve been getting some looks under the rocks. God bless the child with her as a mother. She’ll need it.”
“There’s something else,” Art said.
“You ever been in a tight spot where you were afraid?”
“A couple of times.”
“Think how that kid feels. We’re grown men but we pee in our pants under the gun. She’s six years old, six years old.”
“You trying to admit you’ve got a heart under all that shell?”
“No,” I said. “I’m trying to tell you I’ve had too much to drink and I’m emotionally disturbed.”
