by Ralph Dennis
Art gave up. It was probably just as well. Hump talked him into a lift over to the Villa North so he could pick up my old Ford for me. He still had his back pretty far up when I closed the door on him.
Hump left around ten. He saw I really didn’t need company that bad, just some pain-killer and some sleep. I got out my .38 P.P. and put it on the table near my right hand and watched TV. After the news I watched an old Dick Powell movie where he was a private eye. The hand felt about as big as a balloon and it throbbed and Alka-Seltzer and aspirin didn’t help. So I moved on to the calvados and I had a few shots of that and hoped that it would deaden the pain enough so I could drop off when I finally decided to try the bed.
Around one a.m. somebody rang the doorbell. I wasn’t about to be taken that way. I turned the TV down and yelled “Just a second” and picked up the .38 and made a run through the kitchen and out the back door. It was in the mid-thirties and dark out there and I made it around the house in short time and lined up on the figure on my dark doorstep.
As I moved closer I saw that it was Heddy, the red-haired girl from Jake’s Headhunter Lounge.
“You looking for me?” I lowered the .38 and held it against my leg out of sight.
Even without the gun showing I still scared her. She gasped and dropped her purse. When it hit the porch steps it sounded like she was carrying a junkyard in it. I made a mental note to take a look in there as soon as I had a chance.
“You always meet your friends this way?”
“You may be a lot of things, Heddy, but you’re not a friend of mine. So we can cut the manure.” I put the .38 in my pocket and dug out my house key. I got the door open and stepped aside. “You did come to see me for some reason, didn’t you?” I said when she hesitated in the doorway.
Heddy shivered and went inside. I followed her and closed the door. In the heat of the house, moving behind her, her perfume had the smell of urine.
“So tell me,” I said. We were at the kitchen and I’d poured each of us a couple of knuckles of the calvados.
“What happened to your hand?”
I’d seen her eyes widen at the mass of bandage while I poured the drinks.
“A dog bit me. Now, come on, let’s not have all this small talk. It’s late at night and I’ve got to go down for my rabies shot early in the morning.”
She still wouldn’t say anything. The hand that held the juice glass clenched white with the strain. I was glad I hadn’t given her something thinner like a snifter.
“If I don’t get my shot in the morning, I might start biting people.”
“It’s hard to talk about,” she said.
“I might even start biting people tonight if I get bored.”
“It’s about Fred Maxwell. I think you know who he is.”
“We met.”
“He’s disappeared.”
“That might be the best thing for him right now,” I said.
“No,” she said, shaking the long red hair, “you don’t understand.”
“Tell me then and I will.”
“I was just over at his apartment and there was a lot of blood all over the floor. Big drops and it was dried.”
I sipped at the calvados and felt it burn all the way down. I decided it was better to let her believe that it was Maxwell’s blood she’d seen. It might be the lever I needed. “And the blood was dry? You sure of that?”
“Yes, it was.” She shuddered. “I touched . . . it.”
“It sounds hopeless to me. It must have happened some time ago. Probably the same guy who did Jake.” I reached across the table and pried her fingers from around the glass. The glass might not be thick enough after all and she might end up with a hand like mine. “What was Maxwell to you?”
“A friend.”
“And what else?”
“He helped me . . . at times,” Heddy said.
“He kept you in the stuff . . . right?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“You hurting now?”
“No, I’ve got . . . enough.”
“All right then. Now how about some straight talk. Did Jake and Maxwell think they could rip off half the underworld and get away with it?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Sure you do. Why do you think Jake’s dead and Maxwell’s missing? You need a few more bodies to convince you?”
“They didn’t think . . . anybody would find out.”
“Only one way they could have,” I said. “Somebody sold them for bloodmeat.”
“I don’t know who did that.”
“Sure you do. Where’d they get the guns?” I pushed at her hard. “Come on, you know.”
“They didn’t tell me. I swear they didn’t.”
I reached across the table and pulled her purse toward me. She made a late grab for it but I got it beyond her reach. I flipped the catch and dumped the contents on the table. Right in the center of it all was a little pearl-handled .32. “You scared of something, Heddy?”
“It’s Fred’s. I thought if I found him he might need it.”
“So much for that thought.” I scooped everything but the gun back into the purse and fumbled with the catch one-handed. I shoved the purse back to her. “Let me tell you something about a pro job like this. You never plan on using a gun. Iron’s just for the threat, but if it goes bad and you have to use one you want to be damned sure that it’s a clean gun. A gun that hasn’t been used, new ones that disappeared during shipment or a sports store break-in. You want a gun nobody can trace to you. So if you’re going to do it right you go to the man who furnishes them. He charges you an arm and a leg for them. Part of the price you pay covers his silence. As soon as he gets the money and you get the guns he goes blind and deaf and loses his memory.” I took a slow sip of the calvados and let that work on her for a few seconds. “I’ve got a feeling about this one. They tumbled to it too fast. I think the seller didn’t keep his part of the bargain.” I yawned and got up, stretching. “I guess Maxwell didn’t mean much to you. Your supply, your fix man. Somebody you screwed now and then as a way of paying off a favor. Is that . . .?”
“They said his name was Middleton . . . Walt Middleton.”
“That’s better.” I knew Middleton. He’d been around the edges of trouble for a long time. He ran a pawnshop down on Pryor. It was a cover for anything that he could do where he had better than a fifty-fifty chance of not getting caught. “Stay here.” I went into the bedroom and called Art.
“What now, Hardman?”
“A bird told me that Walt Middleton furnished the guns for the rip-off party.”
“Anything we can use in court?”
I thought about Heddy as a witness. It seemed hopeless. “I don’t think so. The bird’s too shaky. But I’ve got a feeling he probably sold out Jake. If so, maybe we can find out from him who bought.”
“He’d laugh at us.”
“Don’t ask him. Just have some people go over and make him nervous. Hump and I’ll pay a call on him.”
“Right.”
I poured myself a bit more of the calvados and I topped off her glass. “I called a cop friend. Your name’s not in it anywhere. We’ll see what we can do with Middleton. It might be the worst sale he ever made.” I pushed her glass toward her. “Now I’ve got a confession to make. Hold onto yourself. That was my blood over at Maxwell’s. As far as I know he’s still alive.”
Heddy shook the calvados all over me and the table top. She dropped the glass and put her head down on the table. She was crying and each sob sounded like a strip torn out of her lungs. I felt like shit and I wasn’t sure why. People had been ripping her ass off for a long time. Why shouldn’t I? Of course, there was no reason. But it took a bit of my humanity away from me and I needed all I could muster.
When she was done crying, when the sobs turned to a whimper, I got her coat and brought it into the kitchen. She couldn’t speak at first. All she could do was look at the coat and shake her head. I put the
coat over the back of a chair and waited until she’d calmed down some.
“I can’t go home,” she said then. “That man, whoever he is, he might be looking for me. He might think I know where Fred is and I don’t. He might kill me because I wouldn’t . . . couldn’t tell him.”
I went into the bedroom and got two sheets and a blanket and as an afterthought one of the pillows. I opened the sofa and did a sloppy job at one-handed bed-making. I went back into the kitchen.
“The sofa’s made. Stay the night. Maybe it’ll look better in the daylight.” I handed her the .32 she’d brought with her. “You know how to use this?”
“No.”
“In the morning I’ll give you the two-dollar lesson.”
I left her and went into the bedroom and undressed. In the bed, with the covers pulled up, I could hear her prowling around in the living room and the kitchen. Perhaps having another drink, perhaps a smoke, perhaps remaking the bed. And then, just about the time I fell off the edge I heard the creak of the old sofa springs as she settled into it.
Then over the dark edge, the hand forgotten in the burn and haze of the calvados, but trying to tell myself just before I fell, don’t swing the hand out during the night, don’t hit the bed frame. Until I didn’t care anymore.
Awake. Not sure where I am. Confused in the darkness and in the dregs of the calvados. Maybe it was partly the wind rattling the windows in their old frames that made me think I was back in Japan that winter. Just before I killed my first man, an innocent Japanese barman, on a raid on a bar owned by some army men. In a bed a few streets over, behind the sliding paper doors, on a beanbag bed, waking with Kazuko hunched over me, tongue on my groin and moving.
Like that. Only it wasn’t Kazuko. It was Heddy. Lost child’s voice that seemed to come from a deep well: “I was afraid and I thought if I did this you wouldn’t mind if I got in your bed.”
Glad it hadn’t gone past the point where I could stop her. I wanted her but not as part of a commercial transaction, not because she thought she only had one kind of coin to pay me with. Not that way. If it would happen it would be on some better day. “Forget it,” I said. “There’s no room rent.”
Heddy moved up until her head was against my collarbone. “I saw how you looked at me that night in the Lounge. I thought you’d like it.”
“Not the way you audition for a job at Jake’s.”
“It wasn’t just that,” she said.
“Go to sleep, Heddy.”
Several times during the night I awoke and found her pressed against me, clutching at me in her dreams. All the brass and the crust that I’d seen at Jake’s stripped away. But I didn’t play with dreams: she’d grow it all back when she wasn’t afraid anymore and the needle tracks wouldn’t vanish so that I could run her for Cinderella. No, when it was all done, it would be the same.
And in the morning when I finally awoke to the gray morning sky, she was gone. All she left me was a burnt-bottom tablespoon where she’d cooked her morning pick-me-up.
Three hours later she was dead.
Art hunched over in his light fall topcoat. “You sure it’s her?”
We were on the banks of the little trashed-up stream that runs through Orme Park. A little earlier an elderly lady had gone there to walk her dog. That was around noon. Crossing the little footbridge she’d looked down and seen Heddy’s body.
Heddy was sprawled there, legs grotesque as a cotton doll’s, head down in the shallow water. The moving water had washed the blood away from the cut on her throat. Now the wound almost looked natural, like gills on a fish.
“It’s Heddy.”
“Think her boyfriend, Maxwell, did it?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t likely. Art knew that as well as I did. I guess he was just setting it up so I went along with it. “You could always use that as a reason for pushing a hunt. Wanted for questioning.” I stepped back. I’d seen death a lot. Too many times. Maybe Heddy wasn’t any great loss the way the world figures great losses. But maybe she deserved better than this. If death was obscene, then Charleston knew how to make it even more so, how to rip the last bit of dignity away.
A uniformed cop directed the meat wagon over the curb and down toward the stream. I didn’t want to watch that so I went over and sat on the semi-circular concrete seat that ran around the water fountain. Art followed me. He shook out a couple of cigarettes and offered me one. He lit both and shook the match out in the wind.
“You weren’t involved with her, were you, Jim?”
“Not with her. She wasn’t my type, but goddammit, I think. . . . ” I gave that up. An ex-cop talking about the value of human life? But I had to give some reason Art would understand. “I guess I feel guilty about some of it. I conned her and fucked her over to get Walt Middleton’s name out of her. That’s nothing to be proud of. I guess I could have taken the time to say I was sorry about it.”
“Come on, Jim,” Art said, “you sound like senility just hit you a lick.”
I just looked at him. He read me and backed away from it.
“All right, Jim, strike that.”
I nodded.
“That pissed, huh?” He stepped away and yelled to one of the other cops to stay around until it was closed out. When he returned he said, “Even without an expense account I’m going to buy you a drink.”
We got into his unmarked car and made the circle and headed back toward Monroe Drive. I looked back once and saw the meat wagon grunting and snorting its way back over the curb and onto Brookridge Drive.
Goodbye, Heddy, you with the beautiful breasts, the pincushion legs, and the hot liquid mouth. In the next life come back as a tree.
After the first drink I got up and dialed Annie Murton’s number. She answered on the fifth ring. She sounded a little out of breath, like she’d had to run to reach the phone.
“Annie, this is Jim.”
“Jim?”
“You know.” I didn’t like saying it but I did. “Jimmy Hardman.”
“Yes, Jimmy.”
“Any word from Edwin yet?”
“No,” she said.
“I think they left town.” I told her about the murders of Jake and Heddy and that I thought they were tied in with the contract on the people who pulled the robbery.
“Then Edwin is in danger?”
“It looks that way. But if I can’t trace them, neither can the contract man.” That was just to make her feel bettor. With all that money working out there the underworld could put together a better network than the police or the feds had. It was a money pie and everybody wanted a slice of it. “You’ve got my number, Annie. If you get a letter or a phone call from him let me know. We need some hint to get our search going again.”
“I will.”
I went back to the bar and sat down next to Art. I wagged a finger at the bartender and he brought over the bottle of Bushmill’s and poured two more shots. Irish was Art’s drink and I could go along with that for two or three drinks. After the bartender took my money and moved away, Art curved his stool a quarter circle toward me.
“I’ve been trying to put all this together, Jim. I keep running head-on into one thing—you’re not telling me the whole truth.”
“Not all of it,” I admitted.
“If you’d been straight with me, those two people might not be dead.”
“Don’t try to pull that con on me. When I went to Jake’s that night it was for another reason. Didn’t realize until I saw how he died that he must have been involved. And Heddy, if I’d turned her over to you, would you have made sure she got her fixes every day while you protected her? Not bloody likely and you know it.” I sipped at the Irish. “Maybe I ran her away. I don’t know. But if she’d stayed I think I’d have tried to find a way of protecting her. I don’t think it would have worked. Scared as she was, I think she’d have been out looking for Maxwell. That got her killed sooner than later, that’s all.”
“Without all the dressing, what do you know you h
aven’t told me?”
“More than I’m going to tell you right now.” He started to say something but I headed him off. “And don’t tell me to stay out of this. I couldn’t if I wanted to. That Charleston bastard wants to cut me and I’m pretty sure why.”
“You’re in his way,” Art said.
“More than that. I think he saw Hump and me with Jake. That gave him the first thought. When I showed up at Maxwell’s apartment that locked us into the rip-off party.”
“And you weren’t?”
“Sure I was. And I sent Hump to the party so he could get his roll taken and get his head beaten in.”
“All right, all right.” He put his head back and threw down the last half shot of Irish. “But you’re going to have to talk to me before the week’s out. I can’t swim in this sewer blind.” He got up and struggled into his topcoat. “You want me to drop you somewhere?”
“I’ll get Hump to pick me up.” I stopped him before he started for the door. “Is the pressure on Middleton?”
Art checked his watch. “It’s been going on the last hour or so. A squad’s down there taking the place apart brick by brick. All I hope is that we find one thing that’s been stolen, just one. Something to pry at him with. But he’s too slick. The shop’ll be clean.”
“When’s the hunt over?”
“Maybe another hour.”
“Hump and I’ll drop in on Walt after that.”
“Nothing rough,” Art said.
“Nothing he’ll tell the cops about.”
Art nodded. “Better that way.”
Hump came over about forty-five minutes later. We had a couple of beers and waited out the time margin that Art had given us. We wanted the cops gone for a time before we showed. I didn’t want Walt to make any kind of connection between the squad’s business and our visit. I just wanted it to look like one of those bad days when the roof falls in.
“How do we work it?” Hump wanted to know.
“Whipsaw,” I said. I held up the bandaged left hand. “This got me my part.”
“Someday,” Hump sighed, “just someday I want the pissed-off part. Reasonable crap tires me.”
