The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

by Ralph Dennis

  “I’m glad you did.” She looked past me and nodded at the black maid. That meant she could leave and that reminded me of Hump.

  “My black driver’s with me. If it’s all right with you I’d like for him to wait in the kitchen. And I said he could have two beers while he waits.”

  “Of course.” The charm was on. The driver gave me a tad more status. I could hear the adding machine chucker-chucker as she wrote off the two hundred dollar suit as an imperfect indication of what I was really worth. But there was a question mark left and I knew that as soon as she got the chance she’d look out to see what kind of car I had a driver for. Perhaps the Continental would satisfy her.

  “Now, not more than two beers for Horace,” I said to the maid as she left.

  The blonde smiled at that. “I’m Connie. I’m going to need some information about you.” She reached under the bar and brought out a 3 by 5 file card. “Your first name?”

  “Al.”

  “Your last name?”

  “Look,” I said with irritation in my voice, “I’m not asking to cash a check. What happens if the police raid this place and find my name and address in your files? How am I going to explain that to my wif. . . . to my company?”

  “We don’t, of course, plan to be raided.”

  “Well, my last initial is B and that’s as far as I’ll go this time.” I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out my wallet. I fanned some hundreds at her. “How much?”

  Connie tapped the edge of the uncompleted file card with a long polished nail. “That depends. You see, all of my girls are specialists and the price depends upon the kind of special pleasure.”

  “Well,” I lowered my eyes as if I couldn’t look at her, “there’s one thing my wife doesn’t like to do.” I let it trail off.

  “French then?”

  “I guess that’s what they call it.”

  “Seventy-five dollars.”

  I dug under the “show” hundreds and brought out four twenties. “Will that cover a drink for me and the beers for my driver?”

  “Of course.” She scooped the twenties from the bar. “Go to the top of the stairs. Room one. Introduce yourself to Melba. She’ll know what you want . . . and there’s a bar in her room.”

  I turned and started for the hallway.

  “Al?”

  I stopped.

  She gave me the big smile. “And later, when you’re not so nervous, perhaps we can finish filling out our file on you?”

  “Maybe.”

  When I came down the staircase a bit after forty minutes later I’d had two Scotches and the most fantastic demonstration of head that I’d ever encountered. It’d been staged like an exhibition, with mirrors on the side walls and the ceiling and the lights just bright enough to see myself in the middle of it all. At times, caught in the images there, I’d thought I was watching a blue movie rather than being a part of the action. And then, as if she knew, Melba would do something that reminded me that I was very much involved.

  I took a long tired breath. The things I go through for my profession. Whatever my profession is. A wry remark that. And then the triste hit me and I thought of Marcy and I washed my head of the mirrored images. It was time for business. I’d proven that I was what I seemed, a horny businessman, and now it was open for me to step through the door and find out what I could about the after-hours plans Connie had for the house today.

  It was close to day’s end. Connie was seated at the bar with her back to me, counting the day’s take. From what I could see it must be a profitable operation. When I was a few steps from her, she heard me. It wasn’t a hurried thing, but she closed the cashbox and pushed it to one side.

  “Was Melba all you expected?”

  “More,” I said.

  She indicated the bar stool beside her. “Are you ready to fill out the card now?”

  “If you’ll answer one question.”

  “If I can.” But she’d stiffened and it looked like she didn’t like questions.

  “What are the chances of renting the whole shebang one afternoon, after you close for the day?”

  “For just . . . you?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “For me and three of my poker friends.”

  “It might be worked out.”

  “How about tonight?” I asked.

  “You mean right now?”

  “An hour or so,” I said. “It’d take that long to get my friends over here.”

  “I’m not sure. Some of the girls might have other plans. You know, they do have personal lives of their own.” She pushed the file card toward me. “Normally we need a day or two’s warning before we can put together a special like that.”

  “How about tomorrow?” I asked.

  “I’ll have to talk to the girls. If you’ll call me tomorrow afternoon I’ll let you know. If tomorrow’s not a good day we can always find a day that suits all of us.”

  I filled out the card. Alfred Burns. Executive Manager. The Howard Company. 432 Marietta Street. Suite 428. And then I gave her the number of the Baptist Church out near me. Their number was close to mine and I was always getting their calls on hungover Sunday mornings. I handed her the file card and she handed me hers. It was a plain card with just a phone number on it. No name and no address. I put it in my card file and looked around.

  “So Melba was fine?”

  “Fantastic. Unbelievable.” I got up from the bar stool. “Now if I can get my driver, Horace. . . .”

  Connie pressed a buzzer on the other side of the bar. A few seconds later the black maid scurried into the hall and skidded to a stop. Her hands were behind her, struggling with the frilly white apron.

  So Hump hadn’t been bored at all.

  And Connie hadn’t asked about my war wound.

  Hump was standing beside the car, waiting for me. When he saw me come out of the front door he hurried to the passenger door nearest me and swung it open and held it. As he bowed me into the car, he said, “What kept you?”

  “Talk, talk, talk,” I said.

  Hump closed the door and went around to the driver’s seat. He kicked it over and pulled out of the driveway. “Who tells first, me or you?”

  “Might as well be me,” I said. “All that and I drew the blank.”

  “I did a bit better. The girl, calls herself Francine, got taken with me. Seemed eager to see me again. Even came right out and offered me some of her evenings . . . tonight especially.”

  I nodded on that.

  “Now, being somewhat interested in the whole week, I asked about tomorrow. Like tomorrow might be a better night for me. That girl almost cried. Seems she’d said she’d work tomorrow. A private party after regular hours.”

  “Is it Charleston?”

  “A good chance,” Hump said. “Without being obvious I got her talking about the place and about those private parties. Something new they just started. Two guys come in and tear up all the stuff in the house. At least one does. The other one does his part and then sits around and smokes and watches most of the time.”

  “From what The Man says I guess we can assume Charleston does the tearing and Beck does most of the watching?”

  “Probably. You see, the way Francine tells it, when these private parties are going on they don’t even notice her. She hands around drinks and a joint now and then and she does some cleaning up. Mostly she’s invisible. But this one guy wore out the whole damned crew one night, the madame included, and he made a grab for her. It took some running to get away from him. It’s not that she’s shy but she thinks black is better.”

  “A description?”

  “Same as the others. Slight, blond, five-ten or so. And the last time she saw him he was limping a bit and had a hell of a blue bruise on one thigh.”

  About a mile from the house we passed the unmarked car with Art and his pick-up crew in it. Hump slowed down and I gave Art the thumbs-down sign. His driver did a u-turn and followed us back into town.

  Hump’s accou
nt of what he’d learned from Francine set it for Art. He was a believer now. I could see him running his mind over the things that could be done to really set it up for tomorrow, now that he had time to do it in a professional way.

  “Jim, how are you spending your time until tomorrow?” Art asked.

  “The same way I bet Charleston is spending his,” I said. “Trying to trace those five kids.”

  “Where?”

  “Where the crap began. With Annie Murton.”

  “Want me along?” Art asked. “A solid, upright Irish cop might help.”

  “If you know one bring him along,” I said. “Hump?”

  “Francine’s meeting me a couple of blocks from the house in an hour or so. We’ll be at my place all evening. You get something, call me. Especially if Beck’s in it.”

  Before we split from Hump, Art asked, “How was it back there? Worth the money?”

  “Me do a thing like that? You know Marcy took my balls with her to Fort Myers in her small change purse.”

  Art grinned. Beyond him Hump gave me a curl of his lip. One thing about Hump. He knew a cover-up lie when he

  heard one.

  “The Trojan horse,” I said, “was really a piece of wet noodle.”

  “You’re holding back on me, Annie.” I’d let her do her half hour of back-country politeness and welcome, all I could take, the coffee and the homemade chocolate cake, now it was dark outside and time was running against me. “I know you are, Annie. That kid loves you too much to let you worry. He’s been in touch with you and you damn well know it.”

  “Don’t swear at me, Jimmy.”

  “That’s right, Jimmy,” Art said with a wry grin at me, “there’s no reason to swear at Annie that way.”

  Annie thanked him. “I guess Jimmy’s changed a lot since he was a young boy. At least from what Tippy told me about him he seemed like a nice boy.”

  “It’s not all his fault,” Art said. “Jimmy’s been under pressure. He took a job trying to help you because you were Tippy’s sister and when it looked like the kids had left town, he decided the way to help Edwin was to stop the contract man. That got him cut up and could have gotten him killed.”

  I looked down at the leather-covered hand, modestly. I’d tried to take the glove off but it had hurt so much that I knew I’d have to cut it off when I had more time.

  “Now it looks like the contract man has it figured out. He’s ahead of us. I’m not sure how he got there, but it looks like he got some answers out of his victims before he killed them. Anyway, I’ve got a feeling he’s a step behind Edwin and the others and we’re a mile behind with blinders on. And, to be as vulgar as Jimmy here, you’re not being a damn bit of help.”

  That got a gasp out of her. It was my turn to push her. “You remember you offered me the whole fifteen hundred as expense money and I only took a thousand. You ever wonder why, Annie?”

  “No, Jimmy.”

  I got out the rest of the roll, what was left from the thousand. It was down to about five hundred now. I put it on the kitchen table. “I figured if it went bad it would buy you a cheap funeral for Edwin. Now it’s gone this far, gone this sour, I’m going to turn what’s left back to you. You might as well give him a better funeral than the five-hundred-dollar one. Because as sure as we’re here drinking coffee and eating chocolate cake, if you know something and don’t tell me about it, you might just as well buy the black dress and tell the cemetery to dig the hole.”

  “I don’t want him to go to prison,” Annie said.

  “Prison’s not the worry right now,” Art said. “With him on a death list prison might be the safest place for him.” But I knew that Art didn’t believe that. If they wanted Edwin and the others dead an arm would reach into any prison in the country and get the killing done. But we couldn’t admit that to her. Right now we were buying time and worrying about the present death threat rather than worrying about one that might come up in a month or two months.

  “If the kids do any time it won’t be much,” I said. “Most of the money they took was gambling money and I doubt if any of the bookies or gamblers are going to get on a stand and say they were robbed. That’s why Charleston got called in. An honest man gets robbed, he calls the cops and the cops catch the robber and the honest man testifies in court and they put the robber away.”

  Art took it up. “These guys can’t work within the system. They can’t afford to. They get on the stand and say they were robbed of thousands, then Internal Revenue is going to step in and ask where the money came from.”

  “Hell, Annie, Art’ll tell you there aren’t any charges against Edwin or the others so far. For all we know there might never be. We’re after a killer and finding the five kids might be the best way of finding him. If we can get there in time.”

  “Can I believe you?” Annie asked.

  “If you can believe anybody,” I said.

  “My word I’ll try to get him the best break I can,” Art said.

  She still wasn’t quite ready. She left us at the table and went over to the sink. She stood there looking out of the window above the sink. It was dark and I knew she couldn’t see anything. I could hear it bouncing back and forth in her, moving her this way and then that. “I guess I’m going to have to trust you,” she said finally. “You might be trying to put him in jail but you’re not trying to kill him.”

  “Where is he, Annie?”

  “He’s at a place called the Dairy. He called me last night so I wouldn’t worry.”

  It turned out that the Dairy was a sort of co-op farm run by an old man who must have been a little out of his head. A group of hippie street kids lived on the farm and took care of a large dairy herd. They made butter and cheese and some of them did leatherwork and dipped candles.

  “I’ve heard of it,” Art said. The county police had reason to believe that some grass was grown out there. So far, on the raids they’d made, they hadn’t found even a grass seed. The stories, however, kept popping up from time to time.

  “Edwin said one of the boys, Henry Harper, knows a girl who lives out there.”

  I gathered up the roll of expense money and said I’d call her as soon as we knew something. We left her standing at the kitchen table, looking down at the partly-eaten cake and the half-cups of coffee.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On the outskirts, the fringes of town, the last things we passed were some auto dealerships and some used car lots and then the mobile home places all strung with light. We were going south and it didn’t take long to put those behind us. If the moon had been brighter or we’d done the drive in the daylight, it might have been beautiful scenery. All the leaves hadn’t fallen yet. The stubborn ones were waiting for the first snap freeze. And all around us as far as we could see was the farmland, enduring fall, getting ready for winter and sensing that spring was a long time away.

  Hump was in the back seat, eyes closed, not far from snoring, off the far edge asleep. When I’d called him and asked him to meet us at the department, I’d felt his reluctance. We might have called at a bad time. He’d had little to say, only some brief answers to our questions, and he’d said nothing during the drive.

  Another half hour driving and Art pulled into a small country gas station and grocery store. I waited in the car while Art went in to try to get some more exact directions now that we were close to the Dairy. The light must have bothered Hump. He sat up and blinked into it.

  “We there?”

  “Close,” I said.

  “Wake me when we’re closer.” He curled on his side and put his head on the seat.

  After another mile or so down the highway, Art turned right onto an unpaved clay road. We seemed lost and alone then, with no houses on either side and no lights. Just the silent dark woods. And then there was a white rail fence that just seemed to appear on our right, not there one moment and then looming up out of the ground the next. We hit a dogleg in the road and followed it and the rail fence was still there, the uneven
lines looking like children’s chalk lines in the headlights. Up ahead there was a break in the rail fence and when we reached it Art swung left onto a rutted single-car-width road.

  I thought I could see lights ahead. I couldn’t be sure. We were in thick woods, trashy woods, woods that needed the dead trees cleaned out and some replanting. It was like going into a wood where nobody had been in a long time. And then, in the distance, a dog began to bark.

  We broke through the wood and almost before we knew it we were in a compound of some kind. Up ahead we could see the main house, a large farmhouse that might have been the class of the neighborhood some years back, with a wide lower porch and a widow’s walk above. Even in the dark I could see that the house had experienced the same kind of neglect that the stand of wood had. Beyond the house and at a distance there was a barn and past those a scattering of small cottages, ones that reminded me of the kind I’d lived in at a boys’ summer camp when I’d been eight or nine. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the cottages. They just seemed to be built as the need came up, using the existing land here and there.

  There were lights burning in the lower floor of the farmhouse, though the old-type paper roll shades had been drawn down. As far as I could tell there weren’t any lights in the cottages. Perhaps it was the religious hour.

  “Your move,” Art said.

  In the back seat, behind us, Hump stirred and sat up.

  “How?”

  “Talk. I don’t have any jurisdiction over the county line. If this goes bad and there’s any shooting or trouble, you two are going to have to back me in a lie.”

  “Hot pursuit,” I said.

  “Right. That we chased them right over the county line.”

  “Who?” Hump asked.

  “Whoever we have the trouble with.” Art looked at me. “You know his grandmother. You’ve got to talk Edwin, and through him, all of the group into coming back across the county line into Atlanta.”

  “Talk might not be enough,” Hump said. “I’ve seen the guns.”