The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

by Ralph Dennis

  “That knot on your head?” I said. “You get that from somebody’s elbow or knee?”

  Hump opened his mouth to answer and then slapped his hand over his mouth and made a run for the kitchen sink. I braced him there until it passed and he’d emptied out. Then, while he was in the bathroom washing up and trying my brand of mouthwash, I got out the jug of all-purpose cleaner and worked on the sink.

  By the time I’d given it up, Hump came back and stood in the doorway looking like a lot of the iron had gone out of him. I guess that was when I understood it. It was that hard-assed pride of his. He’d been done in and almost finished before he reached my place, but he’d be damned if he’d admit it. If he was going to get my help, it wasn’t because he’d asked for it. Not even me and I guess I was his best friend and drinking buddy in the world. Of course, I might be wrong about that.

  Before I left the sink I cracked the window above it an inch or so to let in some of the chill November morning air. That didn’t help much with the vomit smell. Instead of that, now I had the rank urine scent of a rotting old fig tree outside. So, not better, but different.

  I got Hump by the arm and turned him toward the bedroom. He saw what I was doing and kept saying that the sofa was fine. “I don’t want your bed.”

  “I’m awake,” I told him. “You’re the second shift and if any of the black rubs off on the sheets I can always add bleach at the laundromat.”

  “Shit. . . .”

  But the protest went out of him and I helped him strip down to his underwear and I rolled him into the bed. I pulled the covers up around him and went into the bathroom and got a roll of gauze and a few scraps of adhesive tape. I didn’t mind the black rubbing off but I didn’t want to have to explain blood on the linen to Marcy. While I shaped up a bandage his eyes were closed but he wasn’t asleep.

  “You still want to know how I got this hickey on my head?”

  “If you can make it short,” I said.

  “You know me, Hardman, and this is the part you’re really going to believe,” Hump said.

  It was like being a worm in a large bucket of worms and every few minutes somebody’d throw in another handful. In time Hump worked his way around into a comer of the room. If it was going to last all night, he decided that it might be better to try to find a place away from the action and try to sleep if he could. To get to that corner he’d had to crawl over and push aside a few pissed people and just when he’d almost made it, it happened very suddenly. At about the same moment he got a whiff of expensive perfume . . . and his lower body seemed sucked forward until it fitted like a glove, his belly to her back, against the hard, rounded rear end of a girl.

  “Too bad about that,” I said. I fitted the crude bandage over the lump with as little pressure as I had to use.

  “That’s the half of it,” Hump said. “You heard me talk about the bad moments that animal of mine gives me now and then? Well, this was one of them. He just couldn’t seem to understand why I wasn’t doing something about that girl. I kept trying to talk him down and he wasn’t listening much. Like a snake on a hot day he felt the heat and he came crawling out.”

  “How’d the girl feel about that?”

  “Huffy at first. Like she was shocked or something. Then it must have got to her and we spent a lot of time just making a crease in her silky underwear and not getting much of anywhere. I think we could have if she’d been really sure that was what she wanted. Maybe not.”

  “Get back to how you got the lump on your head.”

  “That was how,” Hump said.

  Not much later, while Hump was devoting all his energy and thought to trying to find a way of getting past that thin wisp of underwear, a pair of unlikely rescuers arrived. If Hump had been paying attention he’d have noticed that the door hadn’t opened for some time, that no new victims had been added to the room. But he couldn’t be blamed for not noticing.

  Two minor hangers-on, fringe racket blacks, got an invitation by mistake and by the time they’d borrowed a car and found Rosewood Circle they’d missed the party and the chance to be robbed of the thirty-odd dollars they had between them. Along with them, in their wake, was a police patrol car that had been following them for a mile or so and wondered what two blacks in a 1955 Chevy were doing turning into that residential area. Otherwise, given a choice, it was very unlikely that anyone would have called the police.

  The lights went on and the two small-timers blinked at what they’d uncovered. Hump, turning and rolling away from the girl and trying to hide that animal, had his first look at the other people who’d shared the time with him. He saw several of the biggest gamblers in the country and those were just the ones that he recognized.

  “It was a riot. All those dudes and their women, half-dressed, rooting around in the piles of clothing and the women screaming and crying when they realized they’d lost their minks or leopards and the police were trying to find out what the hell was going on. And the police had called some more cops and suddenly the grounds and the house were swarming with cops.”

  “Back to the lump,” I said.

  “That was when it happened. I sort of kept my eye on the girl while they were taking the tape off so I’d know her later.” He reached up and doubled the pillow behind his head. “Now, Lord, that was sweetmeat hide. Five-ten, all the right hard and soft places. Just prime pelt. So I did it cool and marked time. We were in the living room and I’d found everything but my tie. I got dressed and I just strolled over to her, shaking the wrinkles out of my pants as I went.”

  She was standing there, skin like creamed coffee, looking sad. She had a blouse in one hand and one of those heavy sort of platform shoes in the other. Not having a ready good line for such a situation, Hump decided that he’d do the obvious.

  “Can I help you, lady?”

  The eyes came up and sized him out. She read the price tag on the clothing and saw him as just another hunk of big black man who couldn’t afford her.

  It was short and hard. “No thank you. There’s nothing you can do for me.”

  Hump leaned toward her, savoring it and taking his time. “That wasn’t the way you acted in there.” His head tilting toward the game room.

  Her eyes flew open then, showing the whites. “Oooooh . . . I thought you were Roy!” And before Hump knew what had happened to him, before she even knew what she intended to do, she drew the shoe back like a club and hit Hump on the head with the heavy heel. He didn’t go down but it staggered him. And as he tried to reach for the shoe she hit him a few more times.

  And then he started bleeding and he could feel the knot rising like a cake baking.

  At 8:25, a young blond man, slim and two or three inches below six feet tall, sat on the small balcony of the townhouse at 18 Ardan’s Wharf. To his left in the far distance he could see the blackish-silver that was the Cooper River. Straight ahead, but hidden from his sight, was the Carolina Yacht Club and High Battery. It was a mild November for Charleston, for being that close to the ocean.

  In his movements, the way he carried himself and to some degree his face, there was more than a slight resemblance to the Alan Ladd of the early and late 1940’s. In fact, from time to time, a stranger he’d meet while flying here and there or at a bar would note that remarkable likeness. At first he was pleased and he’d even spent some late hours watching Ladd’s old movies on the T.V. Then around a year ago he’d read that Alan Ladd was so short that he’d had to stand on platforms to do his scenes and, one story went, Sophia Loren had to stand in a hole to kiss him in a scene. That was when he decided that he really didn’t look at all like Ladd. Like a lot of short men he felt somehow cheated that he’d stopped growing before he reached six-two or six-three.

  At 8:26 the closet phone rang. The man put his cup of coffee on the small wrought-iron table and moved quickly from the balcony into the bedroom. As he crossed the bedroom, passing the oversized bed, he paused just long enough to look at last night’s girl, a sixteen-year-old runaway
he’d picked up on a street corner in North Charleston. Her face in the morning light didn’t show any of the night before. The slight pout to her mouth almost stopped him, stirring at him, but the dull, faraway sound of the phone drew him past the bed.

  He unlocked the door with a key from a chain around his neck. The phone had been ringing about a minute when he lifted the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  The caller at the other end of the line gave his first name. He didn’t ask to speak to anyone in particular and he didn’t ask who the man who’d answered was. “Have you heard the news from Atlanta yet?”

  “Not yet,” the blond man said.

  “A big thing happened here last night. Got a job for you. Five or six to deal with.”

  “The money?”

  “High. A big pot put together. So much each head.”

  “Who?” the blond man asked.

  “Don’t know yet. Some soldiers are out looking. Read the morning paper . . . no, it might not be in there. Try the radio. You’ll understand then.”

  “Nothing funny to this?”

  “My word,” the caller said. “How soon can you come?”

  “This afternoon. Depends on the plane schedule, but by one or two. Two at the latest.”

  The caller gave him a phone number and the blond man wrote it down on a pad beside the phone.

  “Done,” the caller said and hung up.

  He stood for a time looking down at the girl. He stretched, his eyes still on the girl, and the hard body of a dancer rippled under the robe. When his arms came down to his sides again he pulled at the loop in the belt and the robe fell apart. He dipped his shoulders and the robe fell on the floor.

  Now that he knew that there was death in Atlanta waiting for him, he could feel the power surging in him. Even with the stop at Augusta or Columbia the flight wasn’t more than an hour. There was time, plenty of time.

  I had to wait until late in the afternoon to get the rest of the story from Hump. He’d been one of the last to be questioned by the police because he’d spent some time in the bathroom trying to stop the bleeding.

  “Never heard so much poormouth in my life,” he said. “Here was the biggest mess of big-time gamblers and bookies ever seen in one room . . . maybe in the whole history of America . . . and they kept saying, well, they weren’t quite sure how much cash they were carrying, but it couldn’t have been more than a hundred dollars. One after the other, the same shit.” Hump laughed. “You heard me talk about Rance Carter, the guy from Cleveland? I just about choked when he said he never carried much cash. Maybe twenty dollars or so. That mostly he lost a lot of credit cards.”

  “He’s the big roller?” I asked.

  Hump nodded. “I never knew Rance to carry less than ten grand on him. Most of the time more than that.”

  “So, what was the take?”

  “After the police add it up it might come to somewhere between ten and twenty thou,” Hump said.

  “The real take,” I said.

  “It might have been a quarter of a million and that doesn’t count the jewelry and the furs.”

  “That’s some evening’s work.”

  “And my seven hundred,” Hump said. “That’s the ass-breaker.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Around five that afternoon I left Hump soaking and steaming in the tub. I spent part of an hour picking up a couple of six-packs of Beck’s beer and a barrel of Kentucky Fried Chicken. As an afterthought I stopped by a 7-11 and got a big tube of Alka-Seltzer. If Hump was back in right shape it might be a long night. There was always the chance that we’d cruise a few bars so that Hump could tell his story a few times and blow in a few girls’ ears to make up for what he thought he’d missed the night before. Not me, of course. I’d locked it up for Marcy since we’d straightened it out about a year before, just before Christmas. Not that the urge didn’t touch me hard now and then.

  As I turned the corner and headed for my house I saw a Buffalo Bill cab in my driveway. You could tell one of those without going to the trouble of reading the lettering on the side. It had the head and horns on the top. I’d always thought that was a little silly. When I got over the surprise I slowed down and tried to get a look at the driver or the passenger . . . if there was a passenger. The engine was still running and the windows were fogged.

  I parked on the street and got the sack of Beck’s and the barrel of Kentucky Fried out and walked back down the road to my house. I cut across the god-awfully kept lawn where the blanket of leaves from last fall had killed off most of the grass. I put the sack of beer and the barrel on the front steps and turned and headed toward the cab. I was still a few steps away when the driver got out. He opened the rear door nearest to me and gave a little bow as a tiny little lady stepped out. It was hard to tell exactly how old she really was. There’s a point after which old women don’t so much seem to age as dry out and harden, until they’re like those apple-head dolls they still make up in the mountains. Her hair was blue-gray and twisted into a kind of painful knot in the back. Above the hair rode one of those shiny black straw pillbox hats that you hardly see anymore unless you go fairly far into the country on a Sunday near the church hour.

  “Jimmy? Young man, are you Jimmy Hardman?”

  It’s been a long time since anyone has called me Jimmy, unless you count a whore now and then who did that to pretend a friendship she didn’t feel. And it was almost that far in the past since anybody had called me a young man. I’m forty, going on forty-one, and pudgy and neither seems to fit me.

  “Are you or aren’t you?” she insisted. It was the kind of tone and voice that a stern grandmother might use on a child. My grandmother had, and like any awed child I guess I was speechless. All I could do was nod.

  “Surprised you, huh?”

  I could almost swear that I heard her chuckle then.

  The driver, a young black who needed a shave and didn’t need the sunglasses, stepped in and held out his hand. “That’s four dollars and ten cents. She said you’d pay.”

  I looked over at the little lady. She didn’t seem anxious, just a bit impatient with me. “I’m not sure I know you, ma’am,” I said.

  “Of course you do, because I’m Annie Murton.”

  I shook my head. It didn’t mean anything to me.

  “I’m Tippy’s sister.” She paused to see the recognition-touch my face. “And I want to talk to you unless you intend to keep me out here in this cold yard all night.”

  I dug out a five and passed it to the driver. I took her arm and led her into the house and then went back out for the Beck’s and the Kentucky Fried.

  Tippy Farmer. I hadn’t seen him in five years or so and I hadn’t even thought about him since then. That last time he’d been in a booth in the Bluefish Bar out on Ponce de Leon and I hadn’t known him then. But he’d known me. Maybe I hadn’t recognized him because he’d lost the last of his teeth and seemed to be gumming his beer glass.

  That hurt some, seeing him that way. I guess every boy has some kind of local sports hero when he’s young and Tippy Farmer had been mine. It might be that time had made the image stronger, that it exaggerated it, but I’d been in a lot of major league cities and I’d seen most of the name pitchers, but I’d never seen one with an arm like Tippy’s. I remembered those late afternoons in the summer (before the park had lights for night baseball) when he was playing for a local semi-pro team. That left arm that cut through the air like the whip of a length of rubber hose and the crack of the ball hitting the mitt, the crack of a limb breaking off a tree. But the failure was there, too. Tippy did two things well. He could rear back and throw as hard as anybody and he could drink as much white whiskey as any three men. In the end the white whiskey did him in. The Phillies brought him up for a tryout in 1940. He pitched two games in exhibition and it looked like he’d made it. But in the third game he started off wild and he’d been pulled, too soon he thought. So instead of taking a shower (he never was much on bathing) he sat on the be
nch in the dressing room and drank about a quart of good white whiskey while another pitcher finished the game. He got madder and madder and when the pitching coach came in after the game was over, Tippy cornered him in the shower room and beat the crap out of him. It took four men and a fungo bat to get Tippy off the coach. And that ended Tippy’s major league days. Nobody wanted him and the blackball was out. He spent a few more years in semi-pro and then there was less baseball and more white whiskey. And then I saw him in the Bluefish that day. I started to slip him a few dollars, and I had a feeling he expected me to, but I couldn’t. It seemed a little shameful. Instead I bought a large pitcher and had half a glass with him and got away as soon as I could.

  Annie Murton sat on the sofa with her knees properly together and her hands in her lap while I put the Beck’s in the refrigerator and left the barrel on the kitchen table. Before I went back to her I looked in the bedroom. Hump was sleeping again.

  I sat down in the chair across from Annie Murton. “What can I do for you? Is it something about Tippy?”

  “Have you seen the afternoon paper?”

  “Not yet.”

  Her purse was patent leather, old and cracking along the edge near the clasp. She opened it and took out a newspaper clipping. She smoothed it out before she passed it to me. It was an account of the robbery that followed the J.C. Cartway fight. I read it quickly, not really concentrating. I’d heard Hump’s version and I probably knew more about it than the writer who’d done his dreamed-up reporting. But I took my time over it, pretending that it interested me more than it really did. Finally, when I thought I’d faked it long enough, I folded it and passed it back to Annie.

  “I’ve heard about it,” I said.

  “No, the last paragraph, Jimmy.”

  I took the clipping back and read the last paragraph. It still didn’t make any sense as far as Annie was concerned.