The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

by Ralph Dennis

  Detective Lt. Ernest Franklin said there were no definite leads at the moment, but he expected a break at any time. “At least I hope so,” he said. “You see, there were a lot of mad people here last night and I’ve got a hunch if we don’t find the people did this in the next day or two we might never find them alive. It’s not a pretty thought but those are the facts . . . ”

  I looked across at Annie. She seemed to be watching my face, as if trying to see if anything in the paragraph meant anything to me. I still didn’t understand what she expected. I couldn’t see what Annie or Tippy had to do with the robbery the night before. “I don’t get this,” I said.

  “It’s my grandson . . . you don’t know him . . . I think he was one of the people who did this.”

  I guess I was too stunned to think. “Did what?”

  “I think he robbed those people.”

  The blond young man, to the waitress who served him and the bar man who mixed his Scotch and water, looked like any of the hundreds of businessmen and conventioneers who came to the Polaris Room high above the Regency and rode the turning barroom while the Atlanta skyline seemed to move past. At the end of forty-five minutes, when the Room had turned almost its full circuit, he left a dollar tip and-left. He rode the special elevator down to the lobby and went out through the front entrance. The doorman, in his green uniform and odd-looking brown derby hat, waved to a waiting cab and he got inside. He gave the driver the name and address of a bar. The driver, looking at him in the rear-view mirror as he swung out into the afternoon traffic, sized him up as another visiting businessman who’d finished his business for the day and now was out to get laid. Sometimes, the driver thought, Atlanta seems like the pussy capital of the world.

  The blond young man met the driver’s eye in the mirror and looked away. He knew what the driver was thinking and he went along with it. On the long drive he asked a few questions about other bars and the driver gave him a card with his name and cab number, just in case the blond young man wanted to tour some other places.

  Before the blond young man got out of the cab he , bent over and tugged at his socks, as if pulling them up, adjusting them at his knees. At the same time he adjusted the thin sheath on his left leg which held the knife.

  It was time to begin.

  I put the coffee water on while she sat at the kitchen table and started to tell me about it. Maybe I was wrong, but I felt she seemed much more comfortable at the table than she’d been in the living room. She watched as I spooned instant coffee into both cups and I saw a flicker that wasn’t quite approval. I put the cups on the table and sat across from her, waiting for the water to boil.

  “What makes you think so?” I asked.

  I should have known better. I ended up with the whole story. It was like one of those Sunday afternoons when I was a kid, when we’d drive down to the country and visit Aunt or Uncle so and so. Everything would be fine until after the heavy meal. I’d be ready to go home and my mother and father weren’t. The talk would start then, winding, circular, droning on and on and never seeming to go anywhere. Always seeming to be about to limp to some definite ending, but always gaining new life and spurting on.

  That was how Annie Murton told her story. From the beginning, never in a straight line, important facts clustered together with the trivial. The beginning: her favorite daughter, Agnes, ran away at eighteen with the married man from the drugstore. She was gone for over a year and when she did return she was alone except for the boy and a dime-store wedding ring. She had a new married name, Robinson. She’d named the baby Edwin A. Robinson from a book on the library cart at the hospital. (Robinson was not the name of the man from the drugstore, Annie said; his name was Fergunson.) In a couple of years Annie and Agnes decided to move to Atlanta. It was their way of trying to protect the boy from the kinds of names he’d have to grow up with. Nobody in their hometown believed the ring or the story about the marriage.

  Everything went well for the first five years or so. Agnes seemed to have a way with men but she worked hard and it was only on the weekends that Annie had to worry about her. But Annie understood that. Agnes was young and she needed a man just like a man needed women. It went along well until she met that Candyman, the one that Annie knew right away was a pimp. (And sure enough one night Agnes came home crying, crying so hard you knew her heart was broken and she said that Artie wanted her to do the same things with other men that she did with him. Annie tried to tell her there were other men, decent men, but she knew inside herself all the time that Agnes would go back to him.)

  And sure enough, not one whole week later Annie came home from work and found the boy, Edwin, waiting for her. He said that Uncle Artie had come by for his mother and they were going out of town for the weekend but they would bring him back a nice present. It almost broke her heart, that small boy watching her to see how. she’d react, so she’d shown no reaction at all. She’d fixed his supper, fried pork chops and new potatoes and home-canned green beans cooked together and fried cornbread and it wasn’t until she’d put Edwin to bed that she went into Agnes’s room and looked in the clothes closet. All she found there were the few rags that Agnes didn’t wear anymore and the two white waitress uniforms. And it was like lead in her stomach because she knew at the age of fifty-five that she’d become a mother again. Lord knows she tried hard enough. She worked all day at the dress factory on Pryor and the boy was in school and she was too tired at night to do much more than cook the boy a good supper. (“Maybe that is why God made only young women fertile to the seed, instead of old women like me.”)

  The years that followed were good times and bad. And then when Edwin was sixteen he quit high school and got himself a job at the Burger Shack way out West Peachtree. Still, he was a good boy. Each week he gave Annie part of his pay for his keep and to help with the rent. But she never gave up trying to talk him into going back to school and finishing up. But he’d had the experience of having a few dollars in his pocket. . . .

  “When did the real trouble start?” The story was true enough but I’d heard some like it before.

  “Back in July when the state said that eighteen-year-olds could drink and go into bars,” Annie said.

  “Some people handle it and some don’t,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s not that. Any man worth his grits takes a drink now and then. No, it was the friends he must have met in those places.”

  I didn’t like myself for it, but I was getting impatient. I didn’t want to be rude to an old lady, my Southern upbringing made that a no-no, but I felt I’d heard enough of it and none of it added up to a robbery.

  “Two weeks ago he came home with a shotgun and said he was thinking of doing some hunting,” she said.

  “Maybe he is.”

  “With most all of the barrels sawed off?”

  “What?” That woke me up.

  “He didn’t want me to know about the shotgun but I found it in the closet when I was looking for some shirts to wash for him.”

  It was interesting but I hadn’t bought it all. “What else, Annie?”

  “He left last night without eating his supper, went right out the window in his bedroom. He was gone all night and the shotgun’s gone too.”

  “Maybe it’s a girl,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a girl.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “No, but I found this inside the screen door when I left for work this morning around seven o’clock.” She unclasped the old purse again and brought out an envelope. It had some bulk to it, the shape about the length and width of money. It had her name on it in smeared pencil. It was money and I did a rough count of the twenties and tens and figured it at around fifteen hundred dollars. I put the money aside and looked into the envelope.

  “No letter, no note?” I asked.

  “Nothing but the money.”

  I put the money back into the envelope and put it on the table in front of her. She didn’t touch it and her hands didn’t even move toward
it. It was a lot of money to her but it wasn’t what she was interested in. “What do you want from me, Annie?”

  She wasn’t ready to say yet. “What that detective said in the paper, do you think that’s true?”

  “It could be. Whoever pulled that job got a lot of racket people mad at them. That can be rough and dangerous.”

  “Tippy said you could find him.”

  “Tippy’s got a good imagination,” I said.

  “He said you wouldn’t want to.” She watched my face, intent, searching for something there.

  “He’s right. It’s a needle in an acre of hay. If Edwin pulled this like you think, then he and the others in it with him have a lot of cash. Cash can buy a lot of cover. And the fact that he left you the money probably means that he’s left town. That makes it hard. He’s got the whole country to hide in. I wouldn’t know where to start.” I looked at the cup of coffee I’d handed her some time ago. She’d taken a polite sip and that was all. I got up and took it to the sink and poured it out. “Would you rather have a beer?”

  “Beer’s fine, Jimmy.”

  I got her a Beck’s. “Best beer in the world,” I told her.

  “It’s wasted on me then,” Annie said. “I’m more used to Tudor or Red Fox.”

  The fifteen hundred was expense money. That was as high as she could go unless she touched her burial money. But if she had to, if the money didn’t last long enough, she’d spend the burial money. It didn’t matter to her what happened after she died. The city could take her out to the dump and throw her on a trash pile for all she cared. “You see, Jimmy, Edwin might not be much. I’m not fooling myself about that, anymore than I fooled myself about his mother. But he’s all I’ve got left.”

  I understood that and it touched me in a way that I didn’t like to admit. To cover it I opened the Kentucky Fried and gave her a plate and a napkin. I left her to that and went in and awoke Hump.

  “You’re crazy,” Hump said. “For fifteen hundred dollars you’re going to put yourself in the middle? Right between the people who pulled the job and won’t want to be found and the paid killers who’ll think you’re in the way? You had your head checked lately? Now, me, I wouldn’t. . . . ” He stopped and looked at me with narrowing eyes. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Hardman?”

  “You’d have got there sooner,” I said, “except for that lump on your head.”

  “It’s a foot race then,” Hump said. “We try to get there first, save the kid if we can. That’s the first objective. Then we get our hands on as much of that beautiful untaxpaid and untaxable bookie and gambler money as we can. Is that the way you figure it?”

  I nodded. “As far as I know it doesn’t belong to anyone. From what you said those dudes at the party didn’t lose more than a hundred or so each and some credit cards.”

  “Count me in.” He sat up and kicked the covers aside. “Where’s that nice old lady?”

  “In the kitchen eating your supper and drinking my Beck’s.”

  Actually Annie had some of those old country manners. She’d eaten one drumstick and one breast and it took a lot of talking to convince her that I knew she hadn’t come over just to eat my supper. With that done, it was everybody for himself and the kitchen table got lumpy with chicken bones.

  Annie seemed to get along well with Hump. That might be because Hump had been at the party-robbery and that made him something special. Or maybe Annie had a better soul than most old Southern women do. While we ate and drank the Beck’s, Hump questioned her about Edwin. He was trying for some feeling of Edwin’s shape, how he walked, how he carried his shoulders, what kind of voice he had. When he’d satisfied himself, he turned to me. “There’s a chance he might have been the one with the shotgun. No way of knowing for sure, but physically he sounds like he might be a fit.”

  “I was sure,” Annie said, “but I was hoping I was wrong.”

  “The money nails it to the wall,” I said. “How else does an eighteen-year old get that much money?”

  After supper we gave Annie a lift home. Home for Annie was in southwest Atlanta in a neighborhood that had been working class white for a long time but now it was mainly black. Annie said she’d been living there for over fifteen years and she wasn’t about to move. It was a square little house, like a child’s alphabet block with a narrow screened porch and well-kept lawn.

  We went inside. The house smelled like the warring struggle between boiled cabbage and Airwick. Annie showed Hump to Edwin’s room and I stayed in the living room long enough to give Annie back five hundred dollars from the envelope. That would cover us for a week or so. If we hadn’t found Edwin by then we might as well pack it up and give him a farewell wave. Of course, I didn’t tell Annie all of that. She was upset enough as it was.

  “If we don’t find him in a week, then. . . .”

  Annie didn’t like my use of “if.” I guess Tippy had built me up a little too large for real life. “But I thought. . . .”

  “I can’t make a guarantee, Annie. This is not like buying a set of pots and pans. But we’ve got a head start. Maybe even several days. We know or we’re pretty sure that Edwin was in on it. That’s something it’s going to take the contract men days to find out. From what Hump said they covered themselves pretty well at the robbery. Now, if they’ve watched themselves as well the rest of the way, it’s going to be a hard job for the contract people.”

  “What do you mean—the rest of the way?”

  “Let’s assume nobody got a look at any of them at the party. Let’s also assume there weren’t any prints left at the place on Rosewood Circle. That means the contract people don’t have much to go on. They have to start somewhere else. They could start with the printing shop, the place where the invitations were made up, try to trace whoever put in the order. Or they can try to work back from whoever handed out the invitations at the Omni. Or they can try to work out who would know the house on Rosewood would be empty last night.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “We’ve got to hope that the rest of the robbery was planned as well as the job itself.” I ticked it off on my fingers. “That the invitations were printed out of town or even out of state. That they found some way of hiring somebody to hand out the invitations without revealing their own identities or even get looks at them. That none of the people who pulled the job has any kind of traceable connection with the people who own the house or any of the houses around there.”

  That cheered her some. “And if they did?”

  “Then Hump and I have some time.”

  I left her and went back to Edwin’s room.

  It was a neat room but still a slum. A single bed with a homemade patchwork quilt instead of a bedspread. A closet with a few pairs of summer pants and a couple of cheap jackets. A scarred night table beside the bed held a Radio Shack kit radio. Nothing on the walls. Hump had been through the chest of drawers and the closet. I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled out the single drawer of the night table. I dumped it on the bed and worked through it, putting it back in the drawer as I went. A pack of cherry-flavored little cigars. Several stubs from paychecks he’d received from the Burger Shack. After taxes and retirement he cleared $53.27. A copy of Sports Illustrated with the cover showing J.C. Cartway coming out of prison. I showed it to Hump and he nodded. That was another spoke in the wheel. A savings account book that showed, if he’d done his deductions, that he had $60 at First Georgia. A checkbook at the same bank that showed a balance of $24.56. A dirty book called Blaze of Passion. I thumbed through it. No pictures. That was about all, except for four books of matches. I scooped them up and started to drop them in the drawer. But I stopped. They were all from the same bar. Jake’s Headhunter Lounge. On the back of each book there was a photo of a nude kneeling girl. And below the photo, Topless Dancing.

  Hump came over and leaned past me to look at the match books. “It doesn’t mean anything. Those matches are in about every hotel in town that handles the convention types.�
��

  “Maybe.” I opened each book. In the third book there was a name written in ballpoint ink. Heddy, it looked like. I passed it to Hump and he nodded.

  “It might be worth a try.”

  “You know Jake?” I asked.

  “Don’t think so,” he said.

  “We can try it. It’s a flesh market, but Jake seems to keep his head above the shit.”

  “It’s that or the Burger Shack.”

  “Both,” I said, “but let’s look at the titties first.”

  On the way out I laid down the ground rules for Annie. She wasn’t to try to get in touch with me or in touch with the police. Hump and I would be covering some of the same ground as the contract men . . . if there were contract men . . . and we’d probably draw some attention sooner or later. Anybody who contacted us would draw some attention, too. I patted her shoulder and told her I’d rather she didn’t have to talk with the contract people. They really weren’t very nice people to know.

  “But you’ll call me?”

  “Every day or so,” I said. At the door I had one more thought. “And make sure Tippy keeps his mouth shut about Edwin. That could blow it.”

  She said she would. She’d dry him out or she’d put him on a bus and ship him off to visit family in the country.

  Out on the street, standing beside the car, Hump lit a cigarette. “Something just occurred to me.”

  “What?

  “If you were pulling a rip-off like this and you were recruiting, what would you use a kid like Edwin for?”

  “For bagging the coats or maybe driving if his nerves were good enough,” I said.

  “And there he was being the shotgun man. That seem strange to you?”

  “Somewhat,” I said.

  “My history’s not too good. When was the Children’s Crusade—1212 or somewhere around there?” He grinned at me and got into the driver’s seat. “The more I think about the ones who pulled that thing, the more I’m sure they were all kids who’d just had their voices change on them.”