Murder is Not an Odd Job

by Ralph Dennis

  When he woke me, I felt like I’d been in a sandstorm and caught most of it under my eyelids. I had him wait a few more minutes. I had a hot shower and then a cold shower and dressed in clean underwear. There wasn’t much I could do about the whiskers. At home it wouldn’t have bothered me. Here, without a razor, it became a part of the crappy feeling of roughing it.

  I had a ham and cheese sandwich and a warm beer while I listened to Hump shifting around in the bed, trying to find the comfortable part of it. Within a few minutes his deep snore joined Edward’s thinner, breathier one.

  I had the long part of the watch. I let them sleep until I saw the first slice of sunrise.

  I shook each of them by the shoulder. “Up. It’s time to move on.”

  “We could have stayed another day,” Hump said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like the accommodations.”

  The impulse to move on had come on me during the long night watch. I’d started trying to think like them, trying to figure how I’d go about searching for some men who didn’t want to leave town and couldn’t stay at their homes. And I knew I’d start checking the motels, the ones that were out of the way, off the main track. And I’d been right. I couldn’t tell him in front of Edward but when I’d gone to drop off the key the old blonde had said, “I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but your brother called.”

  “Huh?”

  “If you want to see your brother you ought to wait.”

  “How long ago did he call?”

  “About half an hour.”

  “He say anything else?”

  “He said your wife wasn’t mad anymore and you could come home.”

  “Bugger her,” I said.

  So we were taking a box step now. South down 85 to Newman. Highway 16 through Raymond, Sharpsburg, Senoia, and Digby, now swinging east. At Griffin, I bought a bag of ham biscuits and coffee to go. A toilet stop in Conyers before we took the state road to Loganville. Next Snellville and onto the Stone Mountain Expressway. Scott Boulevard to Decatur. An hour’s layover in Decatur for lunch in a cafeteria where it seemed only auto mechanics ate. And from Decatur back into Atlanta on Ponce de Leon.

  It was early afternoon and it was time to find us a hole deep in Atlanta and pull the edges in over us.

  I stopped at a pay phone and while Hump and Edward stretched their legs, I put in a call to Beth Fanzia.

  “Is Edward all right? I want to see him.”

  “Actually, that’s why I called,” I said.

  After we talked, I went back to the car. Hump drove now. He dropped us on a corner out on Whitehall. It was near a bar, one of the early ones that opened about seven in the morning, and we went in and sat at the bar and drank a couple of drafts. I watched the street. Twenty minutes later Hump was back. It had been a fairly easy drill: a couple of circuits of the block where his apartment was, and when he was sure it wasn’t being watched, a one-for-one trade, my car for his. Mine was getting too well known.

  “What now?” Hump asked as he pulled away from the curb.

  “What time’s dark?”

  “Something after seven o’clock.”

  “We’ve got to get lost,” I said.

  “I know a place.”

  I’d have thought it was a service station that had gone out of business. It wasn’t. In back there were a couple of large rooms, in each room a half-dozen tables with chairs. Against one wall was an old drink box that might have been in a service station before the coin machines came in, and next to that an old juke box that must have gone back to the early fifties.

  The fat black man watched Hump park so that the car was hidden from the road. When we reached him, he pushed the door to one of the rooms open. “Hump, there’s a tall six in the drink box.”

  “The food?”

  “Buckets of chicken on the table.”

  Hand on the roll of bills in my pocket, I leaned in close to Hump. “How much?”

  “Fifty.”

  I peeled it off and handed it to him. Hump passed it to the black. “You haven’t seen us, Oakly.”

  “That goes with it.”

  “I mean it,” Hump said.

  The black had been moving away. Now he came back. “I won’t cross you, Hump.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Slap the lock on your way out.”

  Hump found a light switch near the door. When he flipped that, the lights of the juke box went on too. Edward left us and sat down at the table with the two buckets of chicken. Hump lifted the lid of the drink box and got out three tall Buds.

  I checked the room. The windows had been painted black. There wasn’t a back door, just the one we’d entered through. I didn’t like that. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. I sat down at the table and dug a chicken breast out of the open bucket. “An after-hours place?”

  “Private parties.”

  “Kids?”

  Hump wiped chicken grease off the rim of his beer can. “Kids who can’t drink in the bars and clubs. That’s anybody under eighteen.”

  “Good business?”

  “A hundred a night. That includes a free juke box. It’s weekends mostly.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Oakly? Not much, but I sandbagged him some.”

  Edward stood up. He carried his beer over to the juke box. He pressed a button. The first record that played was the Bette Midler version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” After about half of the song had played, he turned to me. “You remember this one?”

  “Barely,” I said.

  “The Andrews Sisters did it.”

  “You in the service back then?”

  “A bit,” he said. He swung around and leaned into the juke box light. I waited for him to add something to that but he’d closed us out.

  Around seven, I went outside and looked around. There were no cars but ours in the lot, nobody hidden along the sides of the building. I whistled and Edward and Hump came out. Edward was withdrawn now. He’d been that way since I’d asked him the question about time in the service. I couldn’t bitch with that. He didn’t have to like us. All he had to do was stay alive.

  When we reached the Melton Towers, I pulled into the driveway. As soon as I braked, Hump had the door open. He was out, an arm around Edward’s shoulders, running him into the lobby. Beyond them, in the lobby, I could see the strained face of Beth Fanzia.

  As soon as Edward was inside, Hump ran back out to the car. So far so good. Edward would be in the elevator, on his way up to the kind of security that only a few million dollars can buy.

  I parked in a lot down the street. “You think we’re clear?”

  “So far.”

  “Odd.” It was goose-pimple time. “This is one place I’d watch.”

  “Too many places,” Hump said. “Plus all that chasing around on the back roads.”

  We left the parking lot and stopped at the curb, waiting for a couple of cars to pass so that we could cross. When the alley opened up, we trotted across the street, angling so that we approached the Towers. I was in the driveway when I turned and looked back. I’d intended to check the other side of the street. But a black Buick passed close to us, and the man in the passenger seat was illuminated for just a brief moment. I didn’t get a good look but I got a flash of something white on his face, adhesive tape showing below a hat or a small bandage.

  The knife man I’d hit with the ash tray? I couldn’t be sure.

  “Something wrong?”

  I told him. “I think we’ve blown it.”

  The goose pimples didn’t leave me for almost an hour.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Fifteen minutes later, Hump and I were in the Elizabeth Barrett Browning living room. Beth entered from a bedroom beyond about the time we arrived. She was dressed in black now, and it might have been a harsh judgment on my part, but I had the feeling she was rehearsing for a funeral. The old man couldn’t have much life left in him.

  Even in
black she looked good. All that prime, aged meat. It was getting to me even though I knew that young was better and that she probably hadn’t noticed that I had a fly or a zipper.

  She asked if I’d make the drinks and I did the best I could. Scotch on the rocks for Hump and me, and gin with a drop of vermouth and a lemon twist for her. I’d lost track of the time but I guessed that it must be the cocktail hour.

  “Edward looks terrible,” she said when I handed her the drink.

  “He’s alive. The hard fact is that he’d look a lot worse dead.”

  “You can be crude.” It wasn’t a knock the way she said it. It was more like a realization.

  “Can’t change my lifestyle now,” I said.

  Hump asked where Edward was now.

  “He’s in with Daddy.”

  I should have known that. A death scene out of some Russian novel, that was natural enough. I sipped the Glenlivet and looked around the room. There wasn’t a phone in sight.

  “I need to make a call.”

  “There’s one in my bedroom.” She tipped her head toward the doorway through which she’d entered.

  “And I’ll need to talk to the head of security here at the Towers. I want him to bring the personnel folders on all the men who will be working the shifts here for the next two or three days.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “I don’t know. He might not like it. Have Foster do it. He knows how to throw the power around.”

  “Yes, Mr. Hardman.”

  I winked at her and went into the bedroom. It was in blues, lights and darks played off against each other. And through a doorway beyond I could see a bathroom in black tile. I sat on the edge of the double bed and dialed the Department number and asked for Art.

  “You?”

  “It’s me. You check out Count Fanzia for me?”

  “Three days ago he landed at Kennedy. He was in New York for a day and a half and flew out late yesterday, back to Rome.”

  “He could have been talking killing with somebody up there.”

  “Maybe,” Art said. “Here’s something else for your scrapbook. How much do you know about Edward Templeton?”

  “Not much.”

  “Then I’m one ahead of you. He’s a deserter.”

  “A what?”

  “Thirty years ago, 1943, he was an ensign in the navy. He was supposed to ship out from Treasure Island near San Francisco. He missed the ship.”

  “You sure of this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re working on,” I said.

  “Statute of limitations would have run out anyway.”

  “It doesn’t sound like something he’d do. Of course, I don’t know him that well.”

  “Hard to say what somebody’d do.” I heard a noise on the line like the flick of a lighter. “Where are you now?”

  “Melton Towers.”

  “You going to hole up there?”

  “As long as it’s safe.”

  “You might have a day or so before they know you’re there,” Art said.

  “Maybe not. We might have been seen going in.”

  “That’s tough. The best security in the world can’t protect him if somebody wants to run the money up.”

  That was true. It was the kind of truth I didn’t want to think about.

  We started dinner without Edward. Hump and Beth sat on one side of the table, facing Foster and me. A soup with the tang of lemon and slivers of chicken in it was followed by a grilled sole and then roast veal. Edward came in during the meat course and passed up everything else. He looked tired and red-eyed.

  I couldn’t look at him in quite the same way. The knowledge I had about the desertion thirty years before shaded the way I saw him. I suppose that was because World War II had been the last of the popular wars. It was easy to understand why some kid in the late 1960’s didn’t want to show up for the Nam one. But No. 2 had been a different matter. We’d been the good guys in that one. Staying out of it, deserting, was like putting yourself on the side of the gas ovens and the worldwide bloodbath.

  I knew I’d have to deal with this feeling somehow. Protecting him would be hard enough. If I let myself start thinking he wasn’t worth protecting, we could end up with a funeral or two.

  After coffee and Benedictine, Hump and Foster and I left Edward and Beth still over their coffee and walked through the maze of hallways into the living room that opened out into the foyer where the elevators were. It was the one I thought didn’t look lived in. A man in a dark suit waited there for us. He stood at a kind of relaxed attention, a lean man, tanned, with a brush cut to his sun-bleached hair and the pale shadow of a scar on the right side of his neck. Gun burn, I decided.

  “Mr. Cleland,” Foster said, introducing him.

  His handshake had a few hours of repressed anger in it. Even after I wanted to pull my hand away, he held it, grinding the knuckles together. I didn’t show that it hurt. Still, Hump noticed and when I introduced them, they held hands so long it looked like they might be falling in love. It was, from the way both acted as they stepped apart, at least a draw.

  “Did you bring the personnel records?”

  “I did,” Cleland said to Foster. Turning, he lifted a thin stack of file folders from a chair seat behind him. He handed them to Foster and Foster passed them to me.

  “Thank you,” Foster said.

  Cleland couldn’t let it go. Since he was probably an honest man, with a good reputation in security, I could understand his position. “I’m afraid someone here owes me an explanation. I’ve been in charge of security here at Melton Towers since it opened about eight years ago. In that time there has been no incident that …”

  “It’s a special case,” I said. “As far as I know there’s been no doubt about the security here.”

  Foster said, “This time it’s a matter of life or death. At least, Mr. Hardman has convinced me of that.”

  “I still want an explanation,” Cleland said.

  “And I’ll be glad to give you one.” I handed the file folders to Hump. “Put these in the bedroom. I’ll look through these after I’ve had the tour with Mr. Cleland.”

  “You don’t need me?”

  “Stay close to Edward.”

  He nodded and Cleland and I left Foster and Hump in the living room and entered the foyer. A young guard sat at the desk there. There was a phone on one corner of the desk and a Thermos bottle on the floor near his feet.

  Cleland started the tour. He stopped next to the desk. “Anyone coming up from the lobby has to be okayed from below.” He leaned over the desk and withdrew a large ledger from the right-hand desk drawer. “Each day the ledger is filled in. Who is expected and when. Any visitors who try to get to this floor who aren’t on the ledger would be referred to Mrs. Fanzia or to Mr. Foster, if he’s here. Only after the visitor is cleared is he allowed into the elevator, accompanied by one of the main-door guards. That guard has a key that will open the elevator doors at this floor.”

  “A master key?”

  He said yes.

  “What’s to keep someone from getting clearance to the eighth floor, and then, once they’re on the elevator, drawing a gun and forcing the guard to go beyond that and open the doors to the twelfth?”

  “Only the security procedures below.”

  “Single keys would be better, a key for each floor. The guard, when he brings a man up to the eighth floor, couldn’t be forced to open some other door.”

  “Perhaps. On the other hand, that many keys would be confusing.”

  I let it go for the time. I could see that he was going to reject any suggestion I made. I nodded at the young guard at the desk. “What if he has to piss or something?”

  “He calls downstairs and says he’ll be off the desk for a minute or two. When he returns he calls back in.”

  “Is there a stairwell?”

  “Over there.” Cleland pointed toward a door to the right
of the foyer. “It can be operated either by a buzzer here at the desk or a key the guard keeps on a ring.”

  “What’s to keep someone from getting off on the floor above or below this one and reaching that stairwell door?”

  “Nothing, but they wouldn’t be able to get in.”

  “They might pick the lock.”

  Cleland grinned at me, a grin without warmth or amusement in it. “There’s no lock to pick on that kind of door.”

  I followed him to the elevator. He inserted a key. While we waited for the elevator I asked, “Is that a master too?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that means there are two masters.”

  “Three,” he said. “One is locked in my safe, back at the office.”

  We rode the elevator down to the lobby. As soon as we stepped out, the two main door guards straightened up a red hair or two. Cleland nodded at them and unlocked a door just to the side of the main entrance. A uniformed guard looked up at us as we walked in. He was seated in front of a control board. In the panel in front of him there was a single TV monitor. We stood behind him and watched while he turned a selector knob. It was like changing channels on a home TV set. Only this time he was checking the entrance foyers of floors one through twenty. He hesitated a few seconds at each floor, just long enough to make a notation in the log. On the fourteenth floor the guard was smoking a cigarette. Cleland grunted and touched the guard on the shoulder before he turned the selector knob.

  “Make a note for him.”

  “Elliot,” the guard said.

  “If I catch him smoking at the desk one more time, he’s out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As we left the control room, the guard was making a note on a pad. Out in the lobby, Cleland said, “With any coordination at all, Elliot should be able to piss and smoke at the same time. Smoking on duty looks sloppy.”

  I nodded. He seemed to have it running like a military outfit. “Is there a back entrance?”

  “What they call the trade entrance. It’s open from nine to four. While it’s open, there’s a guard on duty and all deliveries are checked before they’re received. No deliverymen are allowed beyond the checkpoint. Every hour deliveries are made to the floors by a guard using the trade elevator.”