The Deadly Cotton Heart

by Ralph Dennis

  “These recent?”

  “Last summer,” Webster said. “We were sailing at the lake with friends.”

  “I’ll need one of these.”

  “Take all three if you like. I have the negatives.”

  I stacked the photos in front of me. The one on top was the head and shoulders shot. It was the one that would probably help most in the search. The shot of her in the white shorts, that one would give me a toothache. It was a body that had all the arrows built in. Look here. Look there. The legs were short for the rest of the frame, but slim and well-shaped. The breasts were a bit large and she carried them proudly, shoulders back and squared.

  Just from the photograph I could feel the heat she gave off. If the pictures didn’t lie, a bedroom with her in it would need more than an air conditioner. It would need a sprinkler system.

  I opened my pad and uncapped a pen. “Height?”

  “About five-six,” he said.

  I wrote that down. “She still wear her hair long?”

  “Unless she’s had it cut in the last couple of days.”

  I put down hair and a question mark. “Any chance for a drink or a beer?”

  “I thought you wouldn’t …” He seemed puzzled. “Not while you’re working.”

  “That’s regular police,” I said, “and some of them don’t hold with that either.”

  “I have some beer.”

  “Fine.”

  While he was out of the room, I had a good look around. It was probably a two-bedroom house and it was in a good section of Ansley. It wasn’t the top money part, but still it was a hell of a jump from the slums. From what I could see in the living room, they’d spent a lot of time and money on the furnishings. Except for the sofa and the brass coffee table, all the furniture was antique or damned good imitations. Not that I knew that much about it. Marcy, if she’d been along, would have known.

  The room had the smell of money to it and the patina of old family. It was a part of what I’d caught in the accent Nathan Webster carried around with him. What he hugged to himself like it was part of his heritage.

  Webster brought me a Carta Blanca and a stein. I poured off half a glass. “You’re not having one?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not my drink. Ellen liked it, this brand anyway. We were in Mexico City three years ago and she acquired a taste for it.”

  It figured. How the up-and-coming executive saw himself. There’d been that survey that said only losers and rednecks drank beer. The winners liked scotch. And only the best brands of that.

  I had a swallow of the Carta Blanca. It was ice cold and had the strong flavor of the hops. “A couple of questions. You have any way of knowing how much cash she had with her when she left?”

  “That was part of what I did today. I checked by the bank. There wasn’t much in our joint checking, so she drew $800 out of savings the day she left.” He paused. “I deposited enough to make your check good.”

  “Nice to know. She have charge cards?”

  “The usual ones. BankAmericard, an Amoco oil card, Rich’s and one or two more.”

  “That’s one possibility.” I wrote down the BankAmericard and the Amoco card. “If she uses them, we might be able to trace her. That usually takes a bit of time.”

  “I don’t want to wait that long.”

  On to the next step. “Often when a wife leaves, she goes home to her family. You been in touch with them yet?”

  “She didn’t have any.”

  “None at all?”

  “Her mother and father are dead and she was an only child. I suppose there might be uncles and aunts and such, but I didn’t know any of them.”

  Another slammed door.

  “She didn’t talk much about her past,” he said.

  “Know where she was from? Where she was born?”

  “I know that from the wedding license. Smythtown, Tennessee.”

  I had him spell it out for me. “Where’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He didn’t seem to know much. A hell of a lot less than a man who’d lived with a woman for five years ought to. There were too many dark places. I’d always thought that a good marriage was one where each one held back about ten percent. The Websters appeared to be hiding about ninety percent of themselves.

  “You meet her in Tennessee?”

  “No. Here in Atlanta. She worked as a secretary at Bambridge. Later, after we were married, she took the job with the Foundation. Bambridge has a policy against husbands and wives working for the company at the same time.”

  “Any friends of hers come to the wedding?”

  “Just people we both knew at the office,” he said.

  I put the three photos in my jacket pocket and stood up. I still had the open pad in my hand. “You said this afternoon your wife didn’t have any girlfriends. That’s hard to believe. At the Foundation there must have been someone she had lunch with now and then or a drink after work.”

  “There weren’t any close ones, but there was a girl Ellen mentioned now and then. Karen Fisk.”

  I added that and closed my pad. “You said you have the information on her car.”

  He handed me a scrap of paper. It was a blue VW with the tag numbers YAG 341. I placed that in my pocket with the photos. I lifted the stein and had the last swallow. There was still half a bottle of Carta Blanca left. I picked it up and waved it at him. “I’ll take this with me.”

  I drove the winding road to where it touched upon Peachtree a couple of blocks past Pershing Point. The beer bottle made a damp circle on my trouser knee. The sour taste in my mouth wasn’t from the beer. It was the whole damned job. It didn’t make much sense. I didn’t need the cash and I didn’t need the job. Odd how the need for some cash made a crappy job seem interesting. But this one, this one had me confused, lost, like I was driving through a thick fog.

  Out there, God knows where, was a woman who seemed to have created herself as she went along. She didn’t have a past and not much of a present. For all I knew, she didn’t even exist at all. The only proof I had that she did was in my pocket. The three photographs taken about a year ago. It wasn’t enough.

  By morning, I’d thought better of it. I made a call to Nathan Webster at Bambridge and asked him to call Karen Fisk. A few minutes later, after I’d put on a suit and a tie, he called back to say that he’d talked to Karen Fisk and she’d be glad to have lunch with me. She’d meet me in the lobby of the Foundation building on Forsyth at noon. I was supposed to recognize her by her long blonde hair and her gray pants suit.

  An hour or so later, Hump called as I was starting out the door. “We working today?”

  I said I thought we might. I asked if he’d like to meet a blonde with long hair and a gray pants suit. The invitation had dinner and a drink in it.

  “If you’re paying.”

  “You short?”

  “I could use a couple of hundred,” he said.

  I told him to meet us at Clarence Foster’s. After he hung up, I went back to the bedroom, took down my shoebox, and added a couple of hundred to my roll.

  The rear part of Clarence Foster’s is a greenhouse. It’s glassed in on all sides and there are potted plants around the tables and baskets of other hanging plants above. I keep expecting a leaf to fall in my soup. It hasn’t happened yet.

  Hump walked in from the bar with a drink a couple of minutes after we’d been seated. I waved at him and he arrived about the time our drinks did. A vodka martini for her and a gin and tonic for me. I introduced Hump to Karen as my associate and he sat down on her left. I’d taken a place directly across the table from her.

  She was a tiny doll of a woman. I was having trouble figuring her age. I kept sliding back and forth between thirty and thirty-five. She had a lamp tan or she’d had a late winter vacation down south. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but she wore three other rings that had a lot of flash to them.

  All the way out Peachtree Road, that long drive against th
e heavy noon traffic, she’d seemed pleasant enough. In the beginning I’d felt a bit of disappointment in her, that I hadn’t been younger. I guess she’d adjusted to that and told herself it really was business and she’d get a couple of drinks and a decent lunch out of it.

  I floated with it for a time. Karen and Hump made their small talk. It would have gone on all afternoon if I’d let it. I didn’t. The object of the lunch was to find out something about Ellen Webster, not to get Hump laid. And it looked like it was going in that direction. I said, “I understand you’re close to Ellen Webster.”

  “Me?” She laughed. “Nobody was close to her. And I’ll tell you something else. Nobody at the office liked her.”

  “Nobody?”

  “She acted like she didn’t want friends. She could be distant, hard to reach.”

  The waiter handed out the lunch menus. I hid myself behind mine for a few seconds. All right. This one would answer the hard and nasty questions. She’d scratch dirt with the best of them. My problem would be to sift it. I’d have to decide how much of it was truth and how much of it was the distortion that grew out of the envy and dislike.

  I decided on the London broil and closed the menu and put it aside. “Drink all right, Karen?”

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “The story going around is that Ellen had a thing going with Carter Williams. You believe that?”

  She nodded. “And so did the other people in the office.”

  “Any hard facts to back that?”

  “They had lunch together once or twice a week.”

  I shook my head at her slowly. That meant I didn’t feel that was strong proof.

  “She was the only girl at the office he took to lunch.”

  “Still not enough,” I said.

  “You don’t know her, do you?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “But you know Nathan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Ellen is a certain kind of woman. She’s got an itch that needs regular scratching. Do you think Nathan could scratch any woman’s itch?”

  I shrugged. That meant maybe yes, maybe no.

  Karen felt that she’d won a point. She dipped her head and studied the menu. Watching her I could see that the lunch menu didn’t interest her that much. By the time the waiter returned, she’d decided on some crab dish or other. I knew, without looking at the prices, that it was probably the most expensive item on the menu.

  “And there were other strange things,” Karen said after the waiter left.

  “Such as?”

  “She received letters at the office. Personal letters.”

  “Often?”

  “Once or twice a week,” Karen said.

  “From town or out of town?”

  “Out of town,” she said. “One day the mail was placed on her desk while she was in the ladies. I just happened to pass her desk and saw the return address.”

  “And … ?”

  “It was from some town in Tennessee.”

  “Could have been family,” I said.

  “You think so?” She leaned across the table toward me. “Let me tell you something. I’ve worked in a lot of offices in my time, and when you start getting phone calls at the office and personal mail there you can be sure there’s more going on than meets the eye. Things you don’t want your husband to know about.”

  “You remember the town on the return address?”

  “No, I just had a quick glimpse out of the corner of my eye. It wasn’t one of the big cities you hear about all the time like Nashville or Knoxville.”

  “It have a name on the return address?”

  “Just a street and a town. No name.”

  “You remember the street?”

  “It was something like River Road or Lake Road.”

  Before lunch arrived, she excused herself and Hump and I watched her walk into the bar part of the place where the rest rooms were. I drained my gin and tonic. “What do you think?”

  “If anybody’d know what phone calls at the office and personal mail means it would be that girl.”

  “How do you figure her?”

  “About a three-time loser,” Hump said. He tapped the ring finger on his left hand. “You see that dinner ring?”

  I had.

  “Knew a girl once. Kept all her engagement rings. After her fourth marriage she had a ring made with the diamonds from all four rings. It would blind you.”

  I grinned at him. “Why only three for her?”

  “I counted three big stones. Not as much dazzle to it.”

  “A tough woman?”

  Hump shook his head. “That’s smokescreen. Talk nice to her and she’ll fuck like a goat.”

  I leaned away. “Then I’m done talking.”

  “I said nice. Not like a courtroom.”

  “Show me.”

  “Watch my number one jolly.”

  Karen returned. Hump helped her with her chair and grinned at her. “You been with the Williams Foundation long, Karen?”

  “Three years, more or less.”

  “Ellen was already there when you came to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those letters she got … she getting them the whole three years you knew her?”

  “No.”

  “How long?”

  “The last three weeks,” Karen said.

  “So,” Hump said, “if something was going on, it had just started.”

  “I suppose so.” Her mouth soured. It bothered her to have to correct the other impression. She’d wanted us to believe that Ellen Webster had a continual barrage of letters and a hell of a secret love life.

  The waiter brought lunch. I backed away into myself and left the charm and the conversation to Karen and Hump. All the sparks flying around had blinded me, and I put my head down over my plate and listened. Hump must have passed Indirect Conversation 21 in college. He’d veer away from Ellen Webster and he’d talk about office politics. He’d talk about the godawful coffee in the snack rooms and then, as if by sleight of hand, he’d be talking about Ellen Webster once more. It took the central part of the lunch time and it didn’t seem to accomplish that much. What Hump established was that Karen had never seen Ellen Webster with another man, that she’d never seen Ellen meet anyone after hours. All Karen knew was that, once or twice a week, Carter Williams took the girl to lunch and that the letters from Tennessee had been arriving the last two or three weeks.

  Over coffee Hump gave her his soft, easy, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-be-naked-in-my-bed look. “What bothers me is that, in these same terms, you’ve just lost your reputation too.”

  “Me?” Karen waited.

  “Take us. Here we are out in the open, drinking, eating, laughing and talking. A sweet young thing like you and a fat old man and a handsome black dude like me. You know what some girl at your office might make of this? That right after lunch this old man and I were going to take you off somewhere and make a white meat sandwich out of you.”

  It backfired on Hump. Watching her I decided that it wasn’t an idea with a lot of horror in it.

  Hump turned and looked over his shoulder at me. The look asked me what he’d done wrong.

  I dropped Karen in front of the Foundation building about one-forty or so. The drinks and the meal had mellowed her some. And I could hear the little wheels turning in her head. She had hopes for the big black nightmare that a lot of southern women had. I’d seen her pass Hump her phone number while I was settling the bill. I hadn’t seen the look on Hump’s face.

  On the way home, I stopped by Peeples Liquor Store. It was a hole in the wall place. I wandered around the narrow aisles and picked out a couple of bottles of wine and a fifth of vodka. I waited while Fred Peeples argued price with a couple of winos over a pint of white port. After the door closed behind them, I let Fred total me up and paid the tab. He’d bagged the bottles and pushed them toward me before I took out Nathan Webster’s check. He studied it and nodded and I put my signature o
n the back.

  “You need any of it now?”

  I shook my head. “How long?”

  “An in-town bank. A week.”

  I said that was fine and left. So much for cash flow through my bank account. So much for the I.R.S. and their access to bank accounts. For the action, Fred would take $50. That was a hell of a lot less than the I.R.S. would.

  It was close to three when I got home. Hump was waiting in the backyard. I unlocked the back door and waved at the refrigerator. I went into the bedroom and dialed Art Maloney’s number.

  Art’s wife, Edna, answered on the first ring. Her voice was at a whisper. “He’s sleeping, Jim. I don’t want to wake him.”

  “It’s not that important,” I said. “Have him call me when he’s up.”

  “About four?”

  I told her that would be fine.

  From the doorway I could see that Hump didn’t have a beer yet. I opened two and carried them up the slope to the terrace wall. While we sipped the beer, I looked here and there to see if anything they’d planted had broken ground yet.

  All I could find were a few blades of grass. Some spring garden.

  “You took your time telling me about it,” Art said. He sounded hoarse and stuffed up when he’d called.

  I waited out a long, hacking cough from him. “I thought you people were off it. Captain Wade said you were doing preventative medicine.”

  “Bull.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, “and if I learn anything else, I won’t hesitate to bring it straight to you.”

  “You got some interest in this, Jim?”

  “Nathan Webster asked me to do him a favor,” I said.

  “That crap again? When’re you going to get a new routine?”

  “When this one wears out.” I said. I got the piece of paper from the night table and read off the make and color of Ellen Webster’s VW. I read him the tag numbers and he repeated them back to me.

  “That’s a lot of help. All she has to do is report it stolen or have an accident.”

  “She’s got cash but she’s also got an Amoco charge card.”

  “Might be too smart to use it,” Art said.

  “Why? She’s not wanted for anything.”