by Ralph Dennis
He handed me the mike. “Tell me about the other night.”
Between gulps I laid it out for him. All of it, from the time I’d picked up the note at the Blue House until I’d walked into whatever it was that tore up my nose and ruined my good looks. When he saw that I was finished, he hit the stop button and put the recorder away. He stood around and waited until I tipped the can to get the last of it. He tossed the empty can into the briefcase and closed it. “Can’t litter,” he said.
I burped. “The cold beer was the best thing about this screw up mess.”
“Bitch, bitch.” But he wasn’t smiling. I’d been breaking too many off in him.
After he left, I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I stared up at the ceiling for a time and talked to myself. I was acting like a baby. It was time to put all that behind and get my crap together. As soon as I’d decided that, I found I could sleep after all.
Sunday afternoon. I sat in the shade and drank gin and tonic and watched Hump and Marcy clear the terrace garden plot. It was hot, thirsty work and every half hour or so Hump would come down the slope and pass me on the way to the refrigerator. He’d bring out a beer and stand in the shade next to me and toss it back in three or four swallows. Each time he looked at me he’d laugh.
It was my nose. It had a hook in it like the one the male dancer has in the Toulouse-Lautrec print. To make it worse, the scab crust was turning black.
I laughed back at him. He was the one sweating.
By dark the garden plot was cleared. Marcy had a sunburn and Hump had blisters. I rubbed vinegar on Marcy’s sunburn. There wasn’t much I could do for Hump’s blisters.
I was up early Monday. I was reading the sports page when Art called. “Coming by to see you, Jim.”
“You’re up early.”
“I’m bringing company,” he said.
“Anybody I know?”
“Captain Wade.”
That one. He was one who really loved me. Like he’d love a sister who whored for a living. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but I knew he hadn’t changed. The last time I’d been near him was the day I turned in my resignation one step ahead of a review board. He’d stood in the doorway, without saying a word, while I cleared out my desk. From the way he stood, the burn on his face, I’d thought he was about to fast draw on me.
“Any special reason you’re coming by?”
“I told him you were still sick. Otherwise he’d have pulled you in.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” Art said. “Put on the coffee.”
“I’ll break the seal on a fresh jar.”
I put on the water and got out three clean cups. I leaned in the doorway and looked up at the terrace. It was cloudy and gray, but the sun would burn that away.
Captain Earl Wade was a strange mixture of impossible elements. He was a straight, honest cop and he was also a politician. That was as difficult as juggling six iron balls in one hand. During my time on the force, he’d been the only one who could manage it. The others didn’t have his balance. They ended up leaning too far one way or the other. Either so hard assed and honest they’d collar a crippled brother for littering, or so slick and careful they couldn’t move without spending half a day looking at all the angles.
He’d grayed some around the temples and a few pounds had settled about his middle since the last time I’d seen him. He was about six feet, with a ruddy complexion and arms that seemed too short for the rest of his body.
“What was your put-in in this?” he asked me.
They were seated at the kitchen table. I was at the stove. “I owed Art a favor. He called me on it.”
“That was some favor.” Wade didn’t look at Art, but the sourness was there.
“I wasn’t eager,” I said. I placed the sugar bowl and the milk carton in the center of the table. “Would you say I was eager, Art?”
Art said, “He kicked like a mule.”
“At least one of you had some sense, but not enough.”
I placed the cups of instant in front of them. Art added some milk and sugar. Wade drank his black. I doctored mine with a little sugar and stood with one hip braced against the kitchen counter. While I watched, Wade had a swallow or two. From his face I could see that he was cranking up for another bitch or two. I’d had about enough of it.
“There’s one funny part about this, Wade,” I said.
“Yeah?” He looked puzzled.
“I can understand why Art has to sit there and swallow this shit, but I don’t work there anymore.” I flashed my best take-it-or-leave-it smile at him. “You do remember that, don’t you? That I’m not a cop anymore?”
“That’s a funny attitude for you to take, Hardman.” Wade had recovered and he had the slick oil pumping and spreading. “Especially after the mess you got us into.”
“I didn’t get you into anything. It wasn’t my mess to start with and it still isn’t.”
“The body at the motel. …” Wade looked at Art.
Art said, “Price.”
“The murder of Price, it looks like you’d want to cooperate to get that straightened out.”
“Cooperate is one thing,” I said. “Having to eat a square yard of your crap is something else.”
“I never liked you, Hardman.”
“Come on now, Wade. You talk to me like that and I’m going to cry.”
Wade stared at Art. His look had in it the you-should-have-prepared-me-for-this accusation. Maybe Art was ready to join the revolution. He shrugged. It was as close to the revolution as he could get.
Wade backed off and made a run at it from another direction. “No matter how I feel about you or you feel about me, you’ve been a cop in your time and you know what we’re up against.” It was the frat handshake approach. “You might not be on the force now, but you know the situation. With Price dead, without information who he was working for in this, the conspiracy to murder case blew up. No way it can go to court. All we can do is nail it to the wall so it can’t go anywhere.”
It was so convincing I found myself nodding.
“So, there’s one more thing you can do for us.”
“If it’s something I feel like doing.” There it was, right on the table like a big hunk of rotten meat.
Art picked me up a few minutes after two in the afternoon. I’d been wrong about the weather. The sun hadn’t burned the haze away. Dark clouds blew after us as we drove out Ponce de Leon. By the time we turned off into the roads that twisted this way and that, there was a light sprinkle on the windshield. We didn’t have much trouble finding Fortune Road. You could almost locate it from the smell of the money. The houses back in there were in the two- and three-hundred-thousand range. And none of them appeared to be built on less than a ten acre plot of land.
Carter Williams’ house, when we found it after a half-mile drive up a tree-lined road, was bastard Spanish. It was white stucco with a wide veranda on the ground level and, what might have been an afterthought, with a sort of widow’s walk porch that ran the length of the second floor.
A light-skinned black in livery waited for us on the steps. As soon as Art pulled up in front, the black came around the front and opened the door on the driver’s side.
“I’ll park it for you, sir,” the black said.
“Just a minute.” Art took the keys and unlocked the trunk. I followed him and watched while he unloaded a tape recorder. He handed it to me and lifted out a portable video tape player and a small monitor. After he closed the trunk, he tossed the keys to the black.
“What is this?” I asked on the way up the steps.
“Show and tell time,” Art said.
CHAPTER FOUR
The meeting was in the library. Shelves and shelves of books surrounded us. About half of the books had leather bindings. The others, most of them, still had their dust jackets on. All of them looked dusted and sad and unread. I had the feeling they’d been bought by the yard at some bookstore out
in Buckhead.
Captain Wade had arrived some time before us. I supposed he’d planned it that way so he could get most of the groundwork talk out of the way. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to watch any more of his performance than I had to.
Carter Williams, in white linen slacks and a white tennis shirt, sat on the leather sofa that faced the desk where Art set up his electronic equipment. Williams was tanned and looked hard as a rock. There was, it seemed to me, a perpetual look of confusion on his face, the look a dog might give when he doesn’t quite understand a command. Watching him and listening to him, I decided that his body had kept growing while his mind had stopped when he was a teenager.
Seated on Carter’s right was his lawyer. I hadn’t caught his first name. The last name was Markman. He was a year or so over forty, but he dressed mod, like he was really twenty and about to set off for the beach where he’d meet a lot of college girls and get laid all he wanted to. His plaid pants probably came from Brooks Brothers and so, perhaps, did the red hopsack jacket. I hadn’t seen his shoes. Still I could make my guess they were the white leather ones that all the lawyers and young executives wore on Peachtree during the spring and summer. His dark hair didn’t show any gray. He wore it in the Kennedy, carefully tousled manner. Under that, the round face appeared to be watching a poker hand being dealt. It was that patient and that bland.
I sipped my drink and sat in the background and watched. Art and Wade had passed up the drink offer. I’d taken one and I’d watched the show of displeasure on Captain Wade’s face. Here I was, his big witness, and I was hitting the sauce. Not right, not proper, he’d thought. I was glad I’d taken the drink. It told me something about Carter Williams. I’d asked for scotch and rocks and I’d got what I’d ordered, but it was cheap bar scotch. It tasted more like shoe polish than J&B. Either there was a cheap side to Williams, or it said a few hundred words about the way he viewed us.
Art ran off the video tape first. It was what they’d shot from the panel truck parked out in front of the Blue House. It started with Billy Ray Price getting out of the big, shiny Chevrolet pickup truck. The camera panned with him and zoomed in on his face when he took a last look around before he entered the bar. Right after that, though it was after his meeting with me, the camera picked up Price as he walked back out. He stopped in the lighted entranceway. The shot was tight on his face and he was sweating. He remained there long enough to take out a Camel and light it. He had trouble touching the match to the cigarette. He’d been that shaken.
The camera panned with him to the truck. It zoomed back and waited while he backed the truck out and pulled away. It tilted down and moved in on the license plate. There was enough time for the tag numbers to be read through out loud a time or two before the truck moved out of frame.
Art hit the Stop button and the Rewind button.
Blocked by the bulk of Carter Williams at first, the lawyer, Markman, leaned forward and cleared his throat. “That’s very interesting, captain.” A thumbnail dug a narrow trench in his forehead. “Yes, I’d say that was really interesting.” He didn’t mean a word of it. It was green, lumpy, upper-class snot.
Carter Williams stretched. The muscles in his arms and shoulders roped and ridged. “That was Billy Ray all right,” he said.
“If this is all you have …” Markman said.
“It isn’t,” Wade said. He turned and dipped his head at Art.
The audio tape played. It didn’t have the clarity of the old private eye radio shows I’d heard in the 1940’s. The Blue House bar just wasn’t a radio studio. There was no way you could control the noise levels. The scrape of a chair leg on the floor threw the gain needle on the far end of the dial. It had the thunder of a major automobile accident.
Most of the conversation between Billy Ray Price and me came out sharp and clear. For a time, I didn’t recognize my own voice. It was southern, yes, but it appeared that a lot of the redneck had been washed out of it. You’d think I’d been taking speech lessons.
After I got over that amazement, I studied Carter Williams’ reaction to the tape. He didn’t show much. Not until near the end anyway. He flinched when he heard me dry fire the Colt Commander.
The tape ended. Williams, eyes closed, leaned back against the sofa. Markman took his time lighting a cigarette, composing himself it seemed to me, before he said, “That does change things.”
“I thought it might,” Captain Wade said.
“Carter.” Markman touched Williams on the shoulder. “You know Price’s voice.”
“It’s him,” Carter Williams said. “I’m pretty sure.”
Markman mashed out his cigarette and stood up. He moved around the coffee table. He was wearing the white shoes. “Even assuming that that was Billy Ray Price’s voice, if we concede that, I don’t quite understand why this involves Mr. Williams.”
“Price worked for Mr. Williams,” Wade said.
“We’ll concede that as well,” Markman said, “but that is about as far as we’ll go.” He walked over to the tape recorder and looked down at it. “I would hate to think that you believed that this strange conversation, this odd job search, was instigated on the behalf of Mr. Williams.”
“Of course not,” Captain Wade said. The hard line Markman took had Wade spreading the oil again. “That is the only connection we see. That Price worked for Mr. Williams. In the course of an investigation, we’ll question anyone who might know why Price would want to hire a killer. Along this same line, if you knew Price well, we might even ask you the same question.”
Markman nodded. It was the concession he wanted, not that it really mattered that much. It was game-playing time. You lie to me and I’ll lie to you and after a time maybe we’ll both begin to believe our own lies. And, with any luck, I might begin to believe yours.
“With that understood,” Markman stared down at Carter Williams, “since this is informal, since no notes are being taken, I see no reason why you shouldn’t answer his questions, Carter. With this proviso: if I don’t like the question, I’ll shake my head.” Markman smiled at Wade. “That will mean he isn’t to answer the question.”
“Taking the Fifth?”
“This isn’t a legally constituted court, Captain Wade.”
“I realize that.”
“But I will say that there is nothing wrong with the Fifth. It is the law of the land. It is not my fault or Mr. Williams’ that the Fifth has a bad reputation in police circles.”
Wade waited to see if the lecture was over. It was. He could ask his first question. “Was Billy Ray Price dealing on your behalf when he tried to contact a hit man?”
All of us watched Markman’s face. Perhaps we should have watched Carter Williams instead. Markman nodded at Williams.
“That wasn’t what I hired Billy Ray to do. He managed the farm for me and that was all. I swear I didn’t send him out to hire a murder done.”
“You don’t have to swear to anything,” Markman said. “You’re not under oath.”
I counted five beats before Carter Williams understood. He said, “Whatever you say, Bob.”
Captain Wade got out a Kool and bit into the filter. He showed white, even teeth. “Do you know Nathan Webster?”
“Sure, I know him. I’ve met him a few times. You know, his wife, Ellen, works for me.”
“Socially? Business?”
“Some of both,” Carter Williams said. “I’m not in business now, but there are times when I need to deal with someone in real estate. Unless there’s some reason why I shouldn’t deal with Bambridge … that’s the company Webster’s with … I’ve been willing to throw some business his way now and then.”
“Socially?”
“Well, they’re both nice people. I invite them to a party sometimes or to dinner.”
“Did Price know them?” Wade still hadn’t lit the Kool. It wagged and dipped as he spoke.
“He must have. Billy Ray wasn’t just an ordinary employee. He was more like a close friend
to me. So, the people I knew he’d know.”
“Can you think of any reason why Price would want Nathan Webster dead?”
“No. It’s all so crazy. If I hadn’t heard it on the tape, I don’t think I’d believe it.” He shifted on the sofa until he faced me. I thought I’d been forgotten. I’d been introduced and no one had mentioned me after that. Now I realized that his rather slow mind had been struggling with it. “You’re the other voice on the tape?”
I said I was.
“And it was Billy Ray?”
“It was the man on the video tape, if that was Price.”
I felt Markman staring at me. It was the look of someone with quite a bit of practice. He was judging me the way he would have in a court.
Wade felt it was time to explain. “Mr. Hardman is a former police officer we asked to help us. We needed someone who wasn’t recognizable as departmental personnel.”
The explanation had an undercurrent of disclaimer in it. Markman’s cool smile said he’d read me and he could see why I wasn’t police quality. I let the smile hang out in the wind for a time before I looked in his eyes and gave him my best E.S.P. screw you. His eyes flipped away. He’d got it, rank and with the thorns still on it. It didn’t stop him. “What is your full name, Mr. Hardman?”
“Jim,” I said.
“And what is your occupation now, Mr. Hardman?”
I didn’t answer him. I lit a smoke and waited. Behind Markman Captain Wade, with a grim look on his face, said, “Didn’t you say something about this not being a courtroom, Mr. Markman?”
“I think I deserve an answer.” Markman wouldn’t let it go. He wanted a kill. “If I were representing Mr. Price, instead of Carter, I might raise the question of entrapment.”
“That dog won’t hunt,” I said. “And you damn well know it.”
“Jim’s right.” Art fitted the cover over the tape recorder and slammed it shut. “You heard Price on the tape. Somebody might walk up to you on the street and offer to sell you a watch. Nobody walks up to you and offers to waste somebody for you.”
“That’s a rather simple explanation of entrapment,” Markman said.
