The Golden Girl and All

by Ralph Dennis

  “And if I can’t set it up?”

  “Feel around. Keep the lie up that we’ve got Maryann. See how they react to that. Do they seem to know better? Things like that.”

  “You’ll be at Marcy’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call you back,” he said.

  “I don’t understand this,” Marcy said, after I put the phone aside.

  “I’m not sure I do either. There’s Harper. He’s freelance, probably working for himself. The couple we got the child from. Not sure but I think they’re hired help. Given time maybe Art can find out who they’re covering for. I don’t see either of them with the guts to kill Harper.”

  “What happened to the letter?” Marcy asked.

  “I don’t know.” It hadn’t seemed important at the time and I wasn’t sure that it was now. It lost its importance as soon as we had the child. “Why?”

  “It’s a loose end.”

  “There are always loose ends,” I said. It would be easy enough to find out. A call to Art would settle it. I’d been putting off any kind of call to Art. It wasn’t going to make him happy that we’d blown a half day’s work. “You really want to know, Marcy?”

  She shrugged and covered half her face with the wadded towel of ice cubes.

  I dialed Art at the department. He listened me out, holding the outburst until I’d finished talking.

  “Jesus, Jim, can’t you do anything right?”

  “You want to come say that to Marcy’s fat lip and bruises?”

  “No.” He softened it. “She all right?”

  “Yes, but she’d like to know what happened to the letter we followed from the Journal-Constitution building.”

  “It wasn’t on them when we searched them,” he said.

  “Ideas?”

  “One. Probably made a call, read the letter over the phone. Tore the letter up, burned it, flushed it, something like that.”

  “Before we got there,” I said.

  “There was time.”

  I said Hump and I were still working.

  “Great,” Art said, “call me in about a week and tell me how you’re doing.”

  “You serious?”

  “I need the sleep,” he said.

  Hump called at quarter to eight. “No trouble. She seems to want to meet with you. The same place you talked the other night. Nine on the dot.”

  “Any reaction?”

  “You know the one we talked to at the Crystal the other night? The one who didn’t even know anybody named Peggy Holt? They all seem that way, don’t show anything.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “A phone booth near Eighth and Peachtree,” he said.

  “Come over to Marcy’s. I don’t want to leave her alone.”

  “Be there in fifteen,” he said.

  At night you couldn’t see much of the damage that the ice storm a week and a half back had done. Crossing the old bridge at the west end of the park my headlights played across a tree that had been uprooted and had fallen against the embankment. The top half had been cut away to clear the approach to the bridge. The rest of it remained.

  I parked on the Brookridge Drive side of the park. Down in its center Orme Park was pitch black in shadows. The outer edges were lit by the street lights and the overflow cast by porch lights. I sat in the car and watched for a few minutes. An old man entered the park from the other side and came down the long flight of steps. I didn’t get a good look at him but I could tell he was old by the way he moved, the stiffness in the hip joints, the cautious downward movement. He got lost in the shadows but I found him again when he lit a cigarette. From the location, the flare of the match, I guess that he’d taken a seat in the double swing to the left of the steps.

  Ten of nine. A young girl bundled in a heavy coat and scarf came down the street from the direction of Amsterdam. She was walking a huge Dalmatian. Under one of the street lights I got a good look at her. It wasn’t Peggy Holt. This one was a girl in her teens. They went into the area by the bridge and the Dalmatian romped and the girl called to him, her young voice hanging in the wind like a leaf. The voice thin and weightless. At five of nine the romp ended. The girl and the Dalmatian went over the slight incline and onto Brookridge Drive. I watched them into the shadows, moving toward Amsterdam.

  I got out and walked to the double swing that Peggy Holt and I had shared the night before. I lit a cigarette and felt the cold slats warm under me and I swung a little back and forth, waiting. I wasn’t sure she’d be on time. She was getting foxy, careful. Being on the run did that to you. Not trusting anybody. Afraid to believe, afraid of strangers and friends alike. Not sure but that your weaknesses would betray you. Careful of your strengths too, because those could be used against you.

  Nine o’clock. I flipped the cigarette away and stood up. I stretched and tried to get the heat flowing. Then, as my arms came down, I caught movement in the corner of my left eye. At the footbridge that crossed the narrow stream. I settled into the double swing and put my hand into my right hand coat pocket, felt the butt of my gun, and angled the coat so that the barrel pointed toward the footbridge.

  As he moved out of the shadows I saw that it was the old man. He paused at the water fountain and sucked up a mouthful, then twisted to the side and spat it out. He saw me when he turned away from the fountain. He walked toward me, that same stiff, jolting walk. He was a few feet away from me, in more light now, when I decided that he didn’t belong in Orme Park anymore than I did. He looked like one of the winos from down on Whitehall or Mitchell. The clothes that had been slept in, the glint of stubble beard. Even closer the fuzz on what must have been a castoff overcoat. He stopped and grinned at me and the grin showed the gap where the five or six front upper teeth were missing.

  It amused me. I was about to be spare-changed a few minutes after nine at night in Orme Park. If not that, it was going to cost me a few smokes to get rid of him. I didn’t want Peggy to find me with someone. It might blow the whole thing. They might not wait to see that the one with me was a wine-head. I took my hand off the butt of the .38 and stood up. I reached under the topcoat into my trouser pocket and felt for some change.

  “You Hardman?” the old man asked.

  “Why?”

  “Let’s go to your car,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “She sent me for you,” he said.

  The directions he gave me didn’t make much sense. First we went completely around Orme Park a couple of times and then he pointed me toward Los Angeles at the east end of the park and we followed that until it touched on Highland. At Highland we made a right and crossed Virginia. A couple of blocks down Highland, before we reached Ponce De Leon, he had me pull into the parking lot in front of the Superior Food Store. He reached over and cut the headlights.

  The whole time he’d been watching the traffic behind us.

  “I came alone,” I said.

  “Had to be sure,” he said.

  “If you’re sure, where now?”

  “The parking lot at Arlen’s.”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” he said.

  Aden’s, the big discount store, had closed down most of its operation a few months back. All that remained was the food store. It was open twenty-four hours a day. The parking lot spread out for what appeared to be acres and acres. It was empty now except for thirty or forty cars bunched near the entrance to the food store. The old man pointed me toward the cluster of cars.

  “What now?”

  “Park,” he said.

  I eased into a spot on the edge and cut the ignition and the lights. I got out my smokes and lit one. “We wait, huh?”

  “I’ll take one of those,” he said.

  I lit one for him and put my head back and relaxed. It had been a long day and it wasn’t over yet.

  I think I almost dozed. What shook me out of it was the old man’s sudden movement on the other side of me. He opened the door and slid off the seat. He stepped aside and
a girl got in and pulled the door closed behind her. I blinked at first, but I put it together without stuttering. It was Peggy Holt, now in a blonde wig. Or she’d cut her hair and bleached it.

  “We talk here or drive around?”

  “Talk here,” she said. “Did you get Maryann?”

  I told it one more time. I was getting tired of admitting how I’d blown it. Next time I’d send telegrams. Or singing messengers.

  “That was a royal fuck-up,” she said at the end of it.

  “The people who want what you have increase by the day,” I said.

  “It was Raymond the whole time.”

  “You sure of that?” I could check on Raymond. It wouldn’t be fun. I knew him because Hump and I did a dope run to New York now and then for him. It was living and eating money.

  “It has to be.”

  “Proof?”

  “No,” she said impatiently, “but who else could it be?”

  “It’s not his style,” I said.

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Not yours. Not your husband’s. Nobody’s.” I paused. “That’s not true. I’m on Maryann’s side.”

  “How was she?”

  “Getting over the crap the last time I saw her. Scared to death again I guess. My girl got beat up because I thought Maryann needed somebody around who wouldn’t frighten her with muscles and man talk.”

  “I’m sorry about your girl … what’s her name?”

  “Marcy.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” She faced straight ahead and took a long breath and let it out slowly. “Now I think we’ll have to pay the stuff to get her back.”

  “The others agree to that?”

  “Not all of them, not yet anyway. But they will. It’ll be hard because it’s so much money. More than any of us have ever seen before.”

  “How much stuff?”

  “More than two pounds,” she said.

  “How much more?”

  “It’s close to three.”

  “And your deal … what you suggested in your letter?”

  “Half of it for Maryann,” she said.

  Three pounds. That was a stunner. I’d been thinking in terms of a lot less. A half pound or a pound. It was hard to figure the street value exactly. It depended upon how it was cut. But I could figure their part of it, before the other middle men got involved, at least three to four hundred thousand.

  “That’s a lot to give up,” I said. “And Randy’s dead now and the pipe’s gone dry.”

  “Yes.”

  “How’ll you hear if they accept the deal?”

  She shook her head. “It won’t be in the newspapers. It’ll be another way.”

  “How?”

  She slid a few inches toward me. Close enough so that the scent of her got into my skin. “You’ve tried to help, Hardman, and I appreciate it even if you weren’t trying to do it for my sake.”

  It was a good scene. I clawed at myself to keep my distance.

  “But now,” she continued, “we’re going to buy her back. I want you to quit now, for Maryann’s sake. You can’t help and you can get in the way. I don’t want anything to happen to her. I don’t know you well but the way you talk you must want her safe too.”

  “You want it that way? Me out of it?”

  “Yes.” She reached behind her and fumbled for the door handle. She found it and pushed the door open. She was turning, sliding across the seat when I stopped her.

  “Getting Maryann back doesn’t close it out. Randy King’s dead and the police won’t drop it. They’ll keep coming until they’ve found you. After that it’s a matter of how much they want to burn you.”

  “I won’t be in town that long,” she said.

  I drove straight from Arlen’s parking lot to the Schooner Bar on West Peachtree. The Schooner was Raymond’s front, his legit business. It covered him like a security blanket. He bought his city and state licenses and paid his taxes and he gave to charities like any Chamber of Commerce member. He kept straight books and he kept the whores and the pimps out of his place. As far as I know there’d never been a disturbance at the Schooner he hadn’t handled himself.

  The sign out front reached to the edge of the sidewalk. It was a kind of two masted schooner with neon rigging that kept changing colors while the outline of the ship remained steady, the same blue neon.

  The sign sputtered at me as I ducked under it and went inside. I pointed toward the inside room of the bar when Fred Epps, a bartender I knew, moved down the bar toward me. He nodded and waved and I went through the doorway and into the nautical setting. Captain’s chairs at the tables, netting all around, ship models on the tables, and paintings of ships on the walls.

  I skirted a stage where a stripper was working and almost made it to Raymond’s office before one of the waitresses caught up with me. “Raymond in?” I asked.

  “He’s not seeing anybody right now.”

  “He’ll see me. Tell him Jim Hardman wants to see him.”

  She was gone less than a minute. She waved me toward the doorway that had Dancers Lounge on it. I pushed through the door and found myself in a small room. There were a few chairs peppered around the room and a table with a deck of greasy cards dealt for a hand nobody was playing. There was a sofa too, along the wall to the right. A girl in a g-string and a narrow bra was stretched out on the sofa with a towel over her face. She didn’t move as I crossed the room and went through the doorway to the left. There was a bathroom to the right on the hall and straight ahead a closed door with nothing on it. I knocked on the door.

  “Come in.”

  Raymond was seated behind the desk. He was a small man, very sleek, very neat. His size bothered him. He wore elevator shoes and he was still shorter than he wanted to be.

  There were two large ledgers on the desk and he marked his place by putting one open ledger face down on the other one. He nodded me toward a chair. “What can I do for you, Jim? As I told you over the phone there’s no need for a run to New York right now.”

  I didn’t take the chair. Any way I did it, it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew Raymond well enough to know that he wouldn’t let it be. Small talk wouldn’t change it. I jumped right into the middle of it.

  “It’s something else. Two guys worked me over last night. This afternoon late somebody worked my girl over. I have trouble believing this but somebody’s been trying to tell me the wrecking crews come from you.”

  “Why would I want to rough you?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  He accepted that. A man’s business was his own. “I can cut this short. I didn’t send anybody after you.”

  “Your word?”

  “My word.” He met my eyes straight and level.

  “You kidnap any six-year-old girls lately?”

  He wasn’t that good an actor. It flew right past him. “You been drinking or something, Jim?”

  “Or something,” I said.

  “I’ll say it one more time. I didn’t rough you or your girl and I never did a kidnap in my life.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’ll take it this time.” The hard edge, the blood edge was in his voice. “This time. Never again.”

  “I needed to know. It narrows the field.”

  Raymond looked past me. “Close the door behind you, Mr. Hardman.”

  I did. I closed it so there was hardly a sound. And let a shuddering breath out.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hump left the bedroom door cracked and tiptoed across the rug toward me. “Marcy’s still sleeping.”

  “What did Janice say?”

  Hump looked at the roast beef sandwich I was eating. “Any left?”

  “Plenty,” I said.

  “Janice said she’d take a cab and be here in ten minutes.” He went into the kitchen and came back with a huge chunk of beef and one slice of bread wrapped around it. “You know all those girls of mine jump when I ask a favor of them.”

  “I was af
raid she might be busy.”

  “Waiting for my call,” Hump said. “What else?”

  “What else?” I grinned at him.

  “We going somewhere?”

  “Like good citizens we’re going to see the police. That’s the first stop.”

  “They way they love you there, that’ll be a short visit,” Hump said. “You’ve got my curiosity up. What do we do after that?”

  “Maybe we kick ass,” I said.

  “If this doesn’t check out,” Art said, “I’m in big, big trouble and you know it.”

  “If it doesn’t check out I’m going to die of surprise and a heart attack,” I said.

  We were deep in the guts of the building, going down a long windowless tunnel that led to the Records and Evidence Storeroom. It was going toward midnight and Art had had to work his way up through channels. As reluctant as he’d been I was surprised at how hard he pushed for it. How he argued and raised hell and said that it was important if they were going to break the Randy King killing wide open. In the end that was the argument that overcame the hesitation at each level.

  And yet, I felt some strong regrets that Art had to be the one to do the pushing. It wasn’t going to do his career any good. It would hurt him. Cops were clannish and however it worked out they weren’t going to like him for turning the rock over.

  I knew that nothing I’d said could push him anywhere he didn’t want to go. He was, at heart, just a damned good cop and he wanted to know what the truth was. Once he knew, the department could do their own clean-up or cover-up. Hump and I had agreed to that. No matter what the result we’d swallow it and choke it down and let the department handle it any way they wanted to.

  So there we were, making a hell of a racket in a deserted tunnel. Art and Hump and me and two young cops from the narcotics squad. Art insisted on that. Two men to do the check who weren’t from his division.

  It was inventory day. Unannounced.

  The uniformed cop behind the desk in the Records and Evidence Storeroom did what he was supposed to under the circumstances. He called the watch captain upstairs and talked to him. He said, “Yes, sir” a couple of times and then he hung up. He then got his inventory clipboard and the ring of keys. He handed them to Art without another word.