The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

by Ralph Dennis

  “The why,” Art said, impatient with me.

  “Hump was at the robbery party last night,” I said.

  Art grinned at Hump. “Take you for much.”

  “Fifty dollars and a few credit cards,” Hump said.

  “I heard a story today. I can’t say where I heard it. Some very big people got pissed last night. A kitty’s made up. So much a head for the ones who pulled it. The contract’s given and the work is supposed to be very messy.” I jerked a thumb at the bathroom. “That might be the message. Nobody rips us off and gets away with it or something like that.”

  Art ran that through his mind for the better part of a minute. It interested him but he wasn’t about to buy it whole without picking at it some. “Jake was a whore-master and a pimp and a few other things but I can’t see him having that kind of balls.”

  “I doubt he was there. More than likely he had about twenty people who saw him at the bar all night. And he probably made a big thing of being out where he could be seen. But this kind of thing needs connections, somebody to plan it, somebody to get the equipment, the guns. All that. Maybe he slipped up somewhere, didn’t cover his tracks as well as he should. Or if the information money’s good enough, some friend might have sold his ass, so much per pound.”

  Art shook his head. “I still can’t buy it whole. The robbery was late last night. How do you get a contract man here so quick?”

  “Local talent?”

  “One I know here in town, but that’s not his kind of work. If he’d done that there’d also be a pool of vomit in there. Couldn’t stand that kind of butcher work. There’s one in Jacksonville but I understand he got shaky and retired.”

  “Charleston,” I said, dragging that up from some conversation a few years before.

  “Knife’s his tool,” Art said. “It might be. It takes less than an hour to get here from Charleston. I’ll put in a call to the Charleston police as soon as I get back to the department.”

  “What do you know about this guy? I never heard of him.” Hump was alert now, as if the other talk had put him to sleep but this had interested him.

  “Almost nothing. Just rumors. As far as I know he’s never been arrested, no pictures, no descriptions. No file on him at all.”

  The photographer came out of the bathroom. He dumped a handful of flashbulbs in the waste can. “I’m through here. Meat wagon’s on the way.”

  Art nodded and waved him out of the door. After the door closed Art went on. “All we know is that somebody gets cut up and dead and the word on the street, a sort of whisper, is that the Charleston knife’s passed through town. Been there and gone.”

  “I’ll make you a bet,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling whoever it was was sitting right up there, at the bar or at one of the tables. Probably there when Hump and I were talking to Jake. Waited until we left, got up like he was going to the john and nipped right into Jake’s office.”

  Hump stretched and yawned. “Those girls work the tables pretty hard. Private dancing on the tables for a buck. Maybe one of them noticed one guy who didn’t quite fit in.”

  “The bastard’s too smart. He fitted in.”

  “You think it might be Charleston?” I asked.

  “Him or somebody who works like him,” Art said.

  I nodded at Hump and he got up.

  “You’re not going to stay around?” Art said before we reached the door.

  “We’ve got a couple of things to do. I’ll call you in an hour or so.”

  He still wasn’t done with us. “One part bothers me, Jim. What’s your mix in this?”

  “I don’t have one,” I said, “but I’ve got a nervous feeling.”

  “About what?”

  “Let’s assume that whoever it was is sitting up there, drinking a beer and waiting for his chance at Jake. Now he sees Hump and me come in and start talking to Jake. I wonder what he thinks about that? Has he put us down as being tied in with Jake? The thought of that makes me pretty damned close to scared.”

  “Watch your back,” Art said.

  “That and everybody around me,” I said.

  We reached the car and Hump looked in the back seat. “That was some joke you made back there with Art. That was a joke, wasn’t it?”

  “I wish it was,” I said.

  “So much for asking.”

  There was one question that neither of us bothered to ask. We knew the answer. Did we still have a lead on the contract people . . . Charleston or whoever it was? Not bloody likely. We had to assume that if the killer didn’t know all the names when he went into Jake’s office, that he damned well knew them when he came out. And there went the two or three day head start we’d planned on. So much for that kind of optimism.

  We had trouble finding 244 Tindall Place. Hump had been sure he knew where it was but it turned out he didn’t and we spent some important time trying to read street signs on dark corners. Finally Hump gave it up and found a pay phone. He called a dispatcher he knew at one of the cab companies. It turned out we’d gone past it a couple of times. It was one of those little two-block streets off Highland, mainly with those old wooden frame houses that had once been one-family dwellings when families had been larger some years back. Now they’d been cut up and partitioned into apartments.

  We got our bearings from a lighted porch that had a big 230 over the door. Hump parked near that and we got out. I still felt a little shaky. I’d have felt a lot better if I’d been carrying iron or at least the slapjack. But at the time it hadn’t seemed at all that way. Just a chase after a dumb-assed kid we didn’t expect to find for a day or two.

  “This is it,” Hump said.

  We crossed the yard. The porch light was out. I burned a finger trying to read the names on the mail boxes. At last I found the names and tapped the number. “Apartment 3.”

  Inside we crossed an old carpet, so old that you couldn’t tell what the original color had been. The hallway had a smell of cooking grease and fish.

  “Back there,” Hump said.

  There was a low-watt bulb in the hall and we could read the 3 on the door. I reached around Hump and tapped on the door. Hump put his ear to the door and listened. He stepped away and shook his head. I knocked again. Hump tried the door but it was locked.

  “I can try to spring it,” Hump said.

  “It won’t do you any good.” I hadn’t heard the door open behind us, but now I got the full force of the grease and fish stench. “They left. Moved out.”

  He was a little man, thin as a rail, with longish hair carefully combed back over his ears into a kind of ducktail. His teeth, probably false, looked as bright and regular as piano keys. I tagged his age at somewhere the other side of fifty.

  “You the manager?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no,” he said. “Do I look like an apartment manager?” He preened himself a bit then, as if giving us the good side of his profile. “No, I just live here. I’m an actor, a professional actor.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I reached in my wallet and got one of the Nationwide Insurance cards. I gave it to him and watched him back up some so that he could read it by the brighter light from inside his apartment. When he finished reading my con card, he held it by the edges, as if trying not to smear it.

  “It’s about the insurance on their car,” I said.

  “The van?”

  I nodded. “It’s some trouble about the rate. He didn’t tell me the whole truth about his driving record.”

  “Been caught a few times, I guess.”

  “One D.U.I. on his records,” I said. “When did they leave?”

  “They left around ten this morning.”

  “Did they say where they were going? You see, until we get this rate thing straight they’re not really insured.”

  “Just where the road took them. That’s how Archie said it.”

  “That must be nice,” Hump said. “Now if I could just work out a way of not having to make a living.”

  “Any chance of loo
king around the apartment?” I asked.

  “There’s no reason to,” the old guy said. “They did leave.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “A friend who drinks beer with me is looking for an apartment. Just separated from his wife.” I gave him a smile and a tired movement of the shoulders. “It’s been a wasted night so far. If I come up with an apartment he might like it won’t be as much of a loss.”

  “I’m not the manager,” he said. “I’m not supposed to open up apartments for people I don’t know.”

  I got out the wad and peeled off a ten. “Call this a deposit on the key.”

  “Well, when you put it that way.” He went into the apartment and came back with a tag with a 3 on it and three keys on the string. “Look around all you want but bring the keys back to me before you leave.”

  “A deal,” I said.

  The living room looked like a whirlwind had blown through it, lifting everything, stirring it up and then dumping it in the middle of the floor. The pile was up to my hips. I kicked around in it and decided that somebody’s had a hell of a potlatch in the last day or two. There were balled and knotted-up trousers, shirts with the sleeves ripped off, parts from some busted-up kitchen chairs, pots and pans, newspapers, a few beaver magazines, pillows with the stuffing pulled out . . . all that and a lot more, all mixed together like a huge tossed salad of cast-offs.

  “Traveling light,” Hump said. He stepped away from the pile and sat down on the sofa.

  “Not really,” I said. “All that money and jewelry and those furs, that makes for traveling heavy.”

  “Next stop, new threads for everybody.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Looks like these weren’t worth carrying with them.”

  Hump reached into the pile and brought up one of the beaver magazines. “And they outgrew these fur magazines and doing it all in their heads.” He opened the magazine and leafed through it. “Which way’d you head? South toward all that Florida meat? North toward New York and all that variety? West toward the Bay or L.A.”

  “What’s out West worth the trip?”

  “Lord knows,” Hump said. “All the women I used to know out there are all washing diapers in laundromats.”

  I stepped around the pile and went into the kitchen. Somebody had turned the kitchen table upside down and torn the legs off. I guess the legs were somewhere in the pile in the living room. “I wish I knew more about these kids. Where they’re from? How much they’ve been around? What cities they’ve got their fantasies about? With some of that we might be able to come up with where they’re headed.”

  “Big city,” Hump said. “They could smell it, couldn’t wait another minute for it. Had the best cover in the world and blew it.”

  “Or got flushed,” I said.

  Hump threw the magazine back on the pile. “No matter why they went or which way they went they’ve got better than a twelve-hour jump on us. Now you take New York. I’d hate to look for anybody in New York even if I knew for sure they were there. Not being sure and looking there, that’s worthless crap.”

  No argument about that. Ditto every big city in the country. I left it unsaid and checked the rest of the kitchen. The sink was about a quarter full of broken dishes and glasses. They’d had a good time clearing out the cabinets. It wasn’t neat but it saved a lot of time packing.

  When I left the kitchen and started down the hall toward the bedrooms and the bath I got a whiff of smoke, old smoke. It was stronger in the bedroom on the right and I followed it there. There was a metal trash can in the center of the rug. I lifted the can and uncovered a brown burnt core of rug underneath. It’s a wonder they hadn’t burned the house down. The can was empty but there was a fine white ash in the bottom seams. On a thought I put the can back and went into the bathroom. I was right. There was a blackish ring in the toilet up around the water level. That’s where the ashes had gone.

  They’d thought ahead. Maybe they knew somebody would be coming by. They’d burned everything in the house that might tell anybody the smallest thing about them. I checked that out by looking in the dresser drawers and the closets. Clean, not a scrap of paper, a letter, a bill or a phone number. All they’d left behind with their mark on it was the wreckage in the living room.

  They’d put up a wall and called it a dead end.

  From out in the hallway we watched the old actor do a scene for us. He had a worn old playbook in one hand and he was gesturing with the other and mouthing the words. But for all the mouthing there weren’t any words except in his mind, so there wasn’t any way of knowing whether he was doing Hamlet or Willy Loman. We watched him for a time and then looked beyond him at the room. One whole wall was covered with old photos and playbills, all tacked there in a sort of target design. Memories. I guess that’s what you got down to in time. I just hoped it would be a long time before anybody stood out in my hall and watched me fast draw or do karate kicks.

  When I thought we’d given him a fair hearing as an audience, I said, “Excuse me,” and when he turned I tossed him the keys. He caught them after a chest bounce. Careful to keep his finger in his place in the playbook, he came over to the door.

  “You interested in the apartment?”

  “No,” I said. “It looks like somebody took an axe to it.”

  His hand inched toward his pocket where the ten was. “Well. . . .”

  I shook my head. “Thanks.”

  We left him in the doorway, with the smell of fried fish blowing out past him. Out in the street the air was better. The wind was up and it felt like it might get down into the 30’s by morning.

  “Two things,” Art said when I called him at the department. “The bad news first. It seems the Charleston knife’s as much a rumor in Charleston as he is here. Oh, sure, they think he might exist but they don’t know anything about him. No make on him at all.”

  “Give me the good news then,” I said.

  “Your idea about the girls checked out.”

  “Hump’s idea,” I said.

  “Whichever. One of the girls remembered a man, probably in his mid-thirties. Slight. Two or three inches under six feet. Fair skin, fair hair. No facial scars. Nothing else that she took notice of. She said he was in the place maybe two hours. Drank six or eight beers. Sat alone at one of the tables near the platform. Let the girls cadge quarters off him but didn’t want them to dance on his table for him, seemed distant. Oh, he was interested enough in the titty but he didn’t make any bids. About fifteen or twenty minutes after you left the place . . . yes, she remembers you . . . not so much you as Hump . . . he ordered another beer and asked where the men’s room was. She gave him the directions and the last she saw of him he was going down the stairs.”

  “She keep an eye out for him?”

  “You know how things are over there. Some guy wanted her to dance on his table and then it was time to do a set on the platform and after that some other guy had a few words with her. The next time she thought about him might have been fifteen or twenty minutes later. She looked around for him and saw the table was empty. Went over to clear the table and found the beer can full, as far as she could tell untouched.”

  “Not much to go on,” I said.

  “The window in Jake’s bathroom leads out to the alley. That means nobody had to see him after he ducked into Jake’s office.”

  “He could be our boy.”

  “My thought, too.” There was a pause. I could tell Art was working up to something. “Jim, this is the word from the mountain. I don’t know your mix in this but if I were you I’d pack it in and call it a bad week. If I find you tiptoeing around me. . . .”

  I interrupted him and said I was out of it.

  “Stay out then.”

  In my kitchen Hump had cracked his bottle of J&B and was having a shot. I got the top off my Italian brandy, the Stock, and took down a glass. While I sipped a shot I told Hump about the man in Jake’s place. Hump heard me out and then capped his J&B and stood up.

  �
��What’s your hurry?”

  “I thought I’d go home and melt down a couple of pre-war silver dollars.” He was grinning so I wasn’t sure whether he was putting me on or not.

  “What for?”

  “You ever hear about silver bullets?” Hump asked.

  “Only one I knew used them was the Lone Ranger.”

  “Go on and laugh,” he said, “but with that spook around, later on don’t come to me and ask to borrow any of my silver bullets.”

  He was still grinning when I saw him out. I didn’t know how to take him. I waited while he checked the back seat and saw him pull away before I closed the door and locked it. Before I went to bed I made a tour of the house, making sure all the windows were blocked down tight.

  Maybe silver bullets weren’t such a bad idea after all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Marcy called around one a.m. and woke me up. I’d barely dropped off. “Do I hear naked women running around in your house, Jim?”

  “Not women,” I said. “Just one woman. You know I’m a one-woman man.”

  “Ha!” Then after twenty seconds of silence. “Ha!”

  “Some long-distance conversation,” I said.

  It happened just about every time. We’d had a rough beginning and we’d worked that out. For the last eight or nine months I’d been thinking about marrying her. Even at my age, the rocky bad side of forty. I kept jumping from one side of the fence to the other. When she was in town I wasn’t sure it would work. Only when she was gone did it seem like what I wanted most in my life. I guess I don’t have the kind of optimism that it took to hire the minister and decide on the music I wanted the organist to play. But she’d been gone a week this time and the sad blues were on me.

  “How much longer?” I asked.

  “Three or four days. Four at the most.” An aunt had died in Fort Myers and Marcy had gone down to help settle the estate. It was a small one and most of what she seemed to be doing was mediating. The old aunt had left a few good pieces of furniture, antiques, and all the relatives were in-fighting over them. If I knew Marcy she’d work it out so that everybody was satisfied and come home empty-handed. “What have you been up to, Jim?”