by Ralph Dennis
They were shoulder to shoulder, turning, facing into the strong light. “That you, Walk?”
“Yeah,” I grunted.
The light one of them held angled toward the doorway. It was getting close when I placed the sawed-off shotgun against my shoulder and pulled trigger for both barrels.
It was a pig-killing, a slaughterhouse.
Within a few minutes Art and a squad arrived from the Department. I laid it out for him. He made notes while I walked through it with him. We were in the living room, where I’d killed the first man, when Cleland came steaming down the hall. He was being hassled all the way by a uniformed cop whom Art had left in the foyer.
Cleland saw me and said, “I am not going to take the responsibility for this … this.”
“You talk to your men?”
After I’d got over the last two killings, I’d gone out into the foyer and found the desk guard knocked out and taped up. The single guard who’d come up with them in the elevator was sprawled next to the open elevator doors. He’d been badly beaten and a lump on the back of his head was still bleeding.
That was as far as I went until Art called from below. By that time the desk guard was all right and I sent him down with the elevator to bring Art up. Art told me what he’d found downstairs. They’d found the two guards who’d been left at the main door to the lobby in the electronic control room. Those two, as well as the one operating the television board, had been taken like innocent children.
Cleland nodded. He had talked to his men.
“You hire them for their stupidity?”
“They were wearing police uniforms.”
“Sure they were,” I said.
“They said there’d been a report of a robbery on the ninth floor.” Cleland swallowed. “They seemed to be …”
“Of course they seemed. That’s what the whole operation was based on.”
“You police?” Cleland asked Art. I guess he’d had enough of me.
“Yeah,” Art said.
“Where’d they get those uniforms?”
Art shrugged. “We’re going to find that two or three cleaners got hit early this evening, ones that handle a lot of police uniforms. We’ll know which ones in a day or two, when the policemen go by to pick up their uniforms and the cleaners can’t find them.”
“I need to talk to someone in authority,” Cleland said.
“Foster’s back with Mrs. Fanzia,” I said.
Art watched him stalk away. “You know how to hurt a guy, don’t you?”
“That stupid shit. I told him there might be a try. The least he could have done was leave orders for them to call up here as soon as anything out of the ordinary happened.”
“If they had time. I don’t think they did.” Art looked at the peppered and blasted walls in the old man’s room. “You’ve got to admit it looked good.”
“Sure,” I said, “and all cops carry grease guns as standard issue.”
“They didn’t see a grease gun,” Art said.
I nodded toward the sawed-off shotgun on the floor where I’d left it. “That looks like a riot gun too, doesn’t it?”
The markings were chalked on the floor. The outlines of the body, and out in the hallway other markings. But the bodies were gone. It helped some, but I still wasn’t sure I was past losing my dinner. The charges of Double-O buck in the narrow hall, from a distance of only a few feet, had splattered them all over the walls. The splatterings were still there, looking like some child had thrown his spaghetti dinner against the white plaster.
A plainclothes cop I didn’t know called Art from the hallway. When Art came back, he held out a sheet of paper. “This was found on the body of the one you got first.”
It didn’t take long to figure it out. The page was divided into two parts. The bottom half was a scale drawing of the downstairs lobby, the main door, the control room, and the elevator. The top half of the page covered the floor we were on: the elevator, the foyer, the unused living rooms, and the hallway that led to the old man’s suite of rooms. There was a big X marked where the hospital-like room was.
“Somebody screwed it up,” Art said.
“It looks that way.” I handed the paper back to him.
“It won’t make the old man feel any better, but you’d better be glad they fucked up. Otherwise you and Hump and the Templeton guy might be dogmeat now.”
I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t have been with Hump and Edward. That I’d had my hands full of titty and a hard-on when the shooting started.
Maybe Art could guess I was holding back something. He flipped back to the first page of his notes. “You didn’t say exactly where you were when the war kicked off.”
“Down the hall.”
“With Hump?”
“Not that hall,” I said.
“Off duty?”
“Having a drink with a lady.”
Art laughed. If he’d known the rest of it, he’d have laughed even harder.
After Art left, I worked my way through the rooms and the halls until I found Hump and Edward. On the way I stopped off for another look at the bedroom where Hump and Edward had been. The door had been blown almost off its hinges.
Hump and Edward were in the small library where I’d left Beth. Foster was there also. Beth came in about the time I did. I could see the red eyes and the puffiness. Even though she’d been expecting the death of her father, she’d been unprepared for the sudden way it had happened.
I nodded at Foster and Edward and sat down next to Hump. There was a bandage on the back of his right hand. “Trouble?”
“A splinter from the door,” he said. “I kept my head down but my hand was up.”
Foster cleared his throat. He’d been waiting for me, I guess, and now he wanted me to end my conversation with Hump. I looked over at him.
“Mr. Hardman, I think we all know that you’ve done an excellent job.”
I stood up and headed for the bar. “I’m not so sure about that.” I found the bourbon decanter and poured myself about a fist of it. “If I’d done a good job Mr. Templeton wouldn’t be dead.”
“It could have been a lot worse.” He indicated Edward and Beth.
“I don’t think Cleland would agree with you.”
“I’ve talked with him. He’s angry, to say the least. He believes that by bringing Edward here you’ve made his air-tight security plan for the building look bad. You’ve hurt his reputation.”
“Cleland depends too much on television,” I said.
“I agree,” Foster said. “And as soon as his contract expires in the next couple of months, I will have something to say about the security arrangements.”
Too bad. But Cleland didn’t seem to be flexible enough for the business. Screw him.
“And as I was saying just before you entered, I feel that the death of Mr. Rufus Templeton has changed our aspect somewhat. There is no reason to continue this guard for Edward. The inheritance has passed on to Edward. There is now no reason for anyone to harm him.”
“That’s shortsighted,” I said.
“What?”
“We still don’t know that someone was trying to kill Edward to keep him from inheriting. It could be something else. Anything else.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
I didn’t. I shook my head. It wasn’t worth arguing. “Which means we’re out of work.”
Foster nodded. “If you’ll list your expenses and bring them by my office …”
“Monday,” I said. I stood up and nodded at Hump. “Ready?” I tossed back about two ounces of the bourbon and put the glass on the sideboard.
Beth came over to me. Since I’d left her, she’d put on a black dress and there was no memory on her face of what had almost happened. She took my hand. “We do appreciate what you’ve done for us.”
Killed three men.
“I tried,” I said, “and I’m sorry about your father.”
I let her hand go and Hump and I nodded at the others i
n the room. We went down the hall to the blasted-up bedroom. We hadn’t brought much with us and there wasn’t much to take away. I’d worn a light topcoat and the last time I’d seen it, it had been over the back of a chair. Now the chair was on the floor and the topcoat, when I lifted it, had a couple of bullet holes in the back. So much for what I’d brought with me. I’d add the coat to the expense list if I could remember what I’d paid for it about two years before at Davison’s.
Edward was waiting for us out in the hallway. “I didn’t want to talk in front of them.”
I could understand that. I didn’t much like talking in front of Foster, either.
“I think I owe both of you a lot.”
“A day’s work,” I said.
“I don’t believe that,” Edward said.
“I guess I’m down,” I said. I was. I was turning it back against myself, the cutting edge.
“The killings?”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry about those too,” Edward said. “No matter what kind of men they were, I don’t think my life is worth three of theirs.”
“Well, it’s done.”
Edward walked out to the foyer with us. A different security man called up the elevator for us. Just before we stepped into it, we shook hands, Hump and Edward and then Edward and me. Edward said for us to come and visit him, but I think all three of us knew that we wouldn’t. Edward had come into big money. He might not think it made any difference but it would. Money would close the doors around him. It always would.
We had a couple of hours in the bars before they closed at 3 a.m. Then we stopped at my place and drank some more. And we were still at it when the sun came up.
It was Saturday morning and I felt dead inside.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My girl, Marcy, got back from San Francisco late Sunday afternoon. I think, during the morning, I remembered that I was supposed to meet her flight. By the afternoon I didn’t remember much of anything except once when I tripped over a beer can and almost broke a leg. Or was it my hip?
She waited at Hartsfield for half an hour and then she called. She said later the phone was busy. I knew better. The phone had been off the hook for about a day. When she couldn’t reach me, she took a cab from the airport straight to my house. It must have cost a fortune. She’d never tell me how much. That was the anger that burned right through my offer to pay her back the cab fare.
I guess I got off easy after all. She gave me hell for about ten minutes and then she made me some coffee and spent an hour cleaning up the top layer of the mess I’d made since the Templeton job had cranked down late Friday night.
Deserving it, I took it and didn’t argue back. It was a good thing Hump wasn’t around to get his share of it. He’d been on the toot with me. Or maybe, since I knew him well, he’d gone along with me to keep me out of trouble and out of the slammer. It wasn’t what I set out to do, but I guess it was my way of salting down the ghosts of the three men I’d killed. If I ground myself down into fine enough powder, the three men didn’t matter. At least it seemed to work that way.
Around seven o’clock, when I passed through the bedroom on the way to the john, Marcy was on the phone. I didn’t know at the time, but she had called Hump and he’d told her about my two or three days of work. When I came out a couple of minutes later she was off the phone. She was standing at the foot of the bed, already undressed down to her half slip and bra.
I let her take me to bed, just holding me at first. And when the warmth rolled over me like hot oil, a violent, harsh love-making that didn’t last long. A brief fire that burned each of us and then the quiet afterwards. And still a little drunk, at some level near the feverish nightmare, I felt the dead things in me gush out, as if my pores had opened to let them out. Washed out, clean. And then we slept for a couple of hours.
By eleven we were up and in the kitchen. Marcy was fixing us omelets with mushrooms and a side dish of asparagus. I sat and watched her and worked at the expense sheet I’d have to turn in to Foster the next day. There were some problems. The going rate for killing a man or three men? The cost of the shells? Depreciation of my mental health?
In the end I threw all that out and did it straight.
GAS (ESTIMATED)
$ 30.00
TOPCOAT (DAMAGED BY GUNFIRE)
90.00
TWO PISTOLS (CONFISCATED BY POLICE)
275.00
MOTEL (ONE NIGHT)
17.50
HIDE-OUT RENT (PARTY ROOM)
50.00
FOOD (ESTIMATED)
$40.00
MISCELLANEOUS
00 00
TOTAL
$502.50
ADVANCE
$1000.00
EXPENSES
502.50
BALANCE ON HAND
$ 497.50
While we ate the omelets and the asparagus and drank white wine, Marcy turned the expense sheet and read it slowly. Once or twice she smiled. Then she looked across the table at me. “I think miscellaneous is cute.”
“I like it myself. I’m going to put it on all my expense sheets from now on.”
She touched the sheet with her head. “Do you have vouchers for all of this?”
“Are you kidding? I have an honest face.”
“Ha!”
I threw the stalky end of a piece of asparagus at her. And missed.
“Tell me about the men in Frisco.”
“What men?”
Early fall wind in the oak outside my window. If the tree hadn’t been there when I bought the house, I’d have had to plant it myself.
“All those stud social workers.”
Hand on her stomach, I could feel the laugh building, a quiver at first and then the hard explosion.
“Oh, those!”
“I thought so. Tell me about them.”
“All hung like mice,” she said. “Little white mice with pink eyes.”
“I thought you wouldn’t tell me.”
“White mice,” she said.
And then we slept.
Monday was a working day. I dropped her early at her apartment and then I drove downtown and loafed around for a time. I had breakfast and several cups of coffee. The main branch of the library opened at nine and I went in and looked at some librarian rear ends and read a few pages of a book on World War II airplanes.
At ten I drove straight down Peachtree to Colony Square. I didn’t want to bother with the underground parking so I drove on past and left my car on 15th near the High Museum and walked back.
In the lobby of the office building I ran into Roger, Foster’s black chauffeur. I shook his hand and started past him. He followed me to the elevator and said, “I’ve got to see you for a minute.”
“Right now?”
“No, after you see Foster.”
“The coffee shop downstairs?”
“There’s a sandwich shop across the street.”
I said I’d meet him there.
Foster’s office was about as big as a tennis court. Or maybe two courts. Deep carpets. A desk, free form, shaped like an egg that had broken and run in a couple of directions. Racks of law books around the walls, but I was sure Foster never used them. Not with all those law clerks the firm had to do their scut work.
“Good to see you, Mr. Hardman,” Foster said.
He leaned across the narrow part of the desk and gave me a limp handshake.
“It’s Monday,” I said.
“Yes, it is.” He sat down and motioned me to a chair.
I passed him my neatly printed expense sheet. He ran a finger down the column without a pause. If he noticed my game with miscellaneous, he didn’t show it. When he finished with the expense sheet, he drew a large circle around BALANCE ON HAND and put the sheet aside. “You have a balance of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars and some cents?”
I nodded. To be exact, that wasn’t true. Hump and I had spent a bit over a hundred dollars of it partying.
“You were employed roughly for two days?”
It was a statement, not a question. I nodded.
Foster reached across the desk and pressed down the intercom button. “Miss Willis, bring in the Templeton estate checkbook.” Leaning away, he said, “When we hired you, I’m not sure we were very exact on the subject of payment.”
“I’m reasonable,” I said.
“Of course, in the service there is what is called hazardous duty.”
“I’m not sure that applies.”
“I think it does.”
Miss Willis brought in a large check register and placed it, open, in front of him. Before he wrote the check, he did some figuring on a scratch pad. Then he wrote the check. Passing it to me, he said, “You have a balance on hand of almost five hundred dollars. My check is for one thousand five hundred and two dollars and fifty cents. That will give you a total of two thousand dollars. Is that satisfactory?”
I said it was. And that it was generous as well.
He saw me out the door and I got the hell out of there before he changed his mind.
At Stan’s Sandwich Shop across the street I got a cup of coffee and found Roger in the side room. He’d finished his coffee and now he was looking out at the street. I sat down across from him.
“You see Mr. Foster?”
“I saw him.”
“He hire you again?”
I added some sugar to my coffee and just looked at him. “Run that by me again, Roger.”
“He didn’t hire you again?”
“He paid me off.”
“The son of a bitch,” Roger said.
I sipped my coffee. “Tell me about it.”
“They buried Mr. Rufus Templeton yesterday. Somebody made another try at Edward after the funeral.”
“How?” I lit a smoke.
“Outside the Towers as he was getting out of a car. A shot from a passing car. Used a silencer, I guess.”
“Hit him at all?”
Roger shook his head. “Two shots, I think. One burned him on the arm. The other broke a glass in the car.”
