The Deadly Cotton Heart

by Ralph Dennis

  The parts fall together. Ben Lipmann has a recent scar on his right arm. He argues that the scar is from a swimming accident, that he’d cut the arm on a submerged can. He has no proof of this.

  It is a long trial. The prosecution’s whole case is Cora Abse. Her testimony lasts three days. She tells about living with Ben Lipmann, about how she left Smythtown. She recounts a number of other jobs that she’d participated in with Lipmann, Schmidt and Morton. And she breaks down and weeps on the stand when she tells about being forced to fire the kill shot into the back of Asa Parker’s head. It was, she says, their way of insuring that she’d never fink on them.

  The defense cross-examination lasts four days. They can not shake her basic story.

  The trial is over by the spring of 1969. The three men are sentenced to life imprisonment. Cora Abse, released, disappears in some direction or other.

  “Jim?”

  I opened my eyes and straightened up. The right side of my face was numb from the pressure against the car window. “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got a feeling.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “That’s a black Capri back of us. It’s been with us since we left Gaptown.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  A blue pickup wagged tail around us. I looked at the dash. Hump was doing about forty. The black Capri kept the distance.

  “I’ve been dogging it,” Hump said. “I’ve given them every chance to pass and they won’t.”

  Light traffic on the road. I saw a sign coming up. REST STOP 1 MILE.

  “We out of Tennessee yet?”

  “Ten miles from the line,” Hump said.

  I pointed at the sign. “Let’s take a break.”

  There was only one car in the parking lot next to the rest center. A family had spread a picnic lunch on a grassy rise some distance away from the main building.

  I led the way to the men’s room. At the door, I looked around and saw the black Capri swing into the space to the left of my Ford. Two men stepped out. I pushed the door in and we were in the otherwise empty rest room.

  “The wall by the door,” I said to Hump.

  Hump moved there and flattened himself against the tile wall.

  I turned on the water at the nearest wash basin. I was about three steps from the door. I didn’t bother to wet my hands. I pulled out a wad of paper towels and waited.

  They came in fast and together. The first one through the door had a pale blondish mustache and wore a plaid summer jacket. It was unbuttoned and he was reaching for his hip when Hump saw my nod and swung away from the wall. He hit that one against the side of the head. He fell to the floor and slid across the tile floor until he was halfway under the door to one of the enclosed booths.

  The second man was older. He wore a blue blazer and I noticed the salt sprinkling of dandruff on his shoulders when I swung a right at him. He said, “Wait, we’re …”

  It was too late. I hit him belly-high. His breath whoosed at me. He was falling when Hump hit him against the ear and flipped him.

  Both were down and out. I leaned over the older one, the one in the blue blazer, and turned him over on his back. As I’d figured, he was carrying a short barrel .38 in a belt holster. I dug into the inside jacket pocket and pulled out a wallet. Along with that came the flat leather ID case.

  I held the case in my hand for a few seconds. There were a number of possibilities, and none of them were good. And some of them were less good than others.

  I opened the case. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I stuffed the wallet and the ID case back in the coat pocket. I straightened up. Hump stood by the door. He was rubbing the knuckles on his right hand.

  “What is it?”

  “We just beat up a couple of cops.”

  “What now?”

  “You kidding?” I headed for the door.

  Ten minutes later we crossed the border into Georgia.

  With the Atlanta skyline ahead Hump said, “I feel like I’m back in Paradise. Smell that pollution, smell those bars with real booze in them.”

  I nodded. But I didn’t quite agree. If it was Paradise, it was Eden a few hours after the snake came to town.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “You did what?”

  “You heard me,” I said. “I don’t stutter.”

  Art jacked himself out of his seat on the sofa, stepped over the coffee table and gave the on-off switch of the TV a jerk that almost broke the knob. “You know … you know they’re going to …” He sputtered. I could see the spray of spit bubble over his bottom lip. “God dammit, Jim.”

  “Hear me out.” I shook out a smoke and lit it and blew the smoke at him. “Let me tell you how Hump and I spent our spring vacation.”

  “Is it a short story?” He looked at his watch. “Is it a short, short story?”

  I said it wasn’t.

  “I’d better check in.”

  I heard him call in. He said he was going off for supper, and he gave my number if anything important came up in the next half hour or so.

  It was Saturday night. We’d been in town, back from Tennessee, for two or three hours. Hump had gone home to shower and nap for a time. Marcy was out, and I didn’t know how to reach her. I’d decided I’d better try to cover my rear end. Dumb idea. It was like Art, even before he knew all the facts, to get upset because we’d left two T.B.I. cops banged up in that john just over the state line.

  “From the beginning,” Art said, “and don’t leave out the bad parts.”

  “They were all bad.” I stubbed out the smoke and passed him on the way to the kitchen. “You drinking?”

  “If a sandwich comes with it. You’re wasting my supper time.”

  I waved him into the kitchen. I nodded at the refrigerator and sat down at the kitchen table. I talked my way through the first part of the story, the time in Smythtown, while Art chewed a path through about half my package of deli corned beef. By the time I’d reached the Gaptown episode and the bribing of the newspaper editor, he was digging in the refrigerator again.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Dessert,” he said.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “No pie? No cake?”

  “Nothing.” I watched him settle into his chair once more. He picked at a thick wad of swiss cheese. He chipped away at it while I gave him a rundown on the Parker murder.

  “That Parker murder,” Art said. “I remember some of it.” He closed the foil wrap over the cheese and pushed it away from him. “You sure it’s the same girl?”

  “Yeah.” There’d been pictures in the papers. She’d been younger then, and she’d had dirty blonde hair. Maybe the beauty operators in that part of the world didn’t have much taste, but you couldn’t change the basic facial features. “Cora Abse is Ellen Carver is Ellen Webster.”

  “Go on with it.”

  I took my time over the run-in with the T.B.I. cops.

  “You thought they were reaching, you say?”

  “It looked that way to me. Look, if they were cops and they wanted to talk to us, why didn’t they just pull us to the side of the road and get it done?”

  “Good question.” Art drained the foam from the bottle of Bud and tapped it on the table top thoughtfully. “If they didn’t pull you, they must have had a reason.”

  “Give me one.”

  He shrugged. “You couldn’t have been a bit slower?”

  “After the shotgun try in Smythtown?”

  “You hurt them bad?” Art stood up and belched.

  “Lumps and bruises.”

  Art stopped in the doorway. “You got mouthwash?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  I cleared the table and dropped the plate and the silverware in the sink. It was taking Art a long time to lose his beer breath. I soft-stepped to the bedroom doorway and leaned in. Art was on the phone.

  “They’ve been here how long? How do they look?”

  Art lifted his head
and found me listening. He shook his head slowly from side-to-side.

  “Look, have them hold off on that crap until I’ve talked to them. I know a bit about the circumstances. We talk some and it might not be necessary. Might be we can work out something.”

  I made my guess. I circled the bed and got a jacket from the closet.

  “Get them a cup of coffee and tell them I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He replaced the receiver. “Your trouble is in town, Jim.”

  “I figured.”

  “They’ve been threatening extradition to Captain Wade.”

  “Wade would give me to them as a Crackerjack prize if it was on his say.” I put on the jacket. “I’ll go down with you.”

  “Not yet. I’ll talk to them alone first and see if I can’t do some stroking.”

  “If you can … ?” left it hanging for him.

  “If I can or if I can’t, it’s all the same. You’re going to have to talk to them.”

  “That the only choice I’ve got?”

  “It ain’t no choice at all,” Art said. “You be here.”

  I phoned Hump. He arrived fifteen minutes later. He brought a fifth of J&B. We had half an hour to forty minutes to numb the worry away.

  The young cop, the one with the thin pale mustache, had a scrape on the left side of his face. I guess you could call it tile burn from the slide he’d taken. The right side of his jaw was puffy and swollen. Hump had one-punched him pretty well. He was going to be doing a lot of left-jawed chewing the next week or two.

  The older cop had changed his coat. The dandruff didn’t show as much against the tan material, but I knew it was still there. His right ear looked like a thick slice of ripe beefsteak tomato.

  Neither of the two, seated stiffly shoulder-to-shoulder on my sofa, showed much of a friendly attitude. They’d passed up the offer of the scotch, and they’d taken a beer only after Art had. One swallow and they’d pushed the bottles toward the far side of the coffee table.

  The older cop, Vincent, said, “I’ve been in touch with the Governor’s office, and the request for extradition can be hand-carried here to Atlanta by noon tomorrow. We can start action on it Monday.”

  “At the least you’ll do a year,” the young cop, Barstow, said.

  I listened to them, but I was watching Art’s face. It was too Irish to hide much. The concern wasn’t there. The T.B.I. cops could have been talking sports or cars from the reaction Art gave. So, I read it this way: Art was saying, these Tennessee boys are going to sound mean and tough, they’re going to show you the cards they have, but under all that they think they need you, and if they think that, then it’s a trade-off.

  I decided if that was my choice, I’d better accept it. “What is it you want?”

  “We want Cora Abse or Ellen Carver or whatever her name is now.”

  “Maybe you can tell me what you want with her.”

  At first, I thought I’d pushed it too hard without giving anything in return. I saw Art’s motion, a slight shake of his head. But the T.B.I. men crossed eyeballs for a few seconds before the older cop, Vincent, said, “Tell him about it.”

  Barstow, picking at his mustache now and then, spread it out for us.

  Three months before, in late February, a man named Jim Martin, who was doing two life terms for the rape-murder of a waitress in Dothan, Alabama, passed the word from his cell in Huntsville Prison. He said he’d taken part in the Asa Parker murder. The T.B.I. crossed over into Alabama to talk to him. It wasn’t that Martin had found religion or anything like that. He had a mad on against the two men who’d been with him that Sunday morning in Gaptown. He believed he hadn’t been treated right in the split, and he was upset because he was doing hard time while the others were out on the pavement. So far, the T.B.I, didn’t have the names of the two men or the woman who’d been involved. Jim Martin wanted an impossible deal before he’d name them. It was impossible because he wanted the same kind of immunity that had been given Cora Abse. And Alabama wasn’t so interested in solving Tennessee murders that they’d make any deal about the two life terms he was serving. It was a standoff.

  Martin hinted that the identity of one of the men would surprise them. And he had a jagged scar on his left forearm that could have been from the Doberman bite, and he knew some of the details of the murder that hadn’t been given publicity. Check points, the T.B.I. man called them.

  So, Tennessee was between a brick wall and some hard places. Three men had done about six years in prison. Whatever these three men deserved for their other crimes, there was the chance that they’d done time for a crime they hadn’t committed. The State was thinking of re-opening the case. Before that, they needed to talk to the star witness, Cora Abse or Ellen Carver. If Jim Martin was telling the truth, if he wasn’t trying to lie his ex-friends into jail, then the witness had perjured herself. Or Martin was lying and the witness had told the truth.

  “You lost track of her?” I said.

  “We didn’t have a rope on her,” Vincent said. “It was complete immunity. And six years, that’s a long time to backtrack. Hell, she could have left the country for all we knew. We’d about decided that we’d never find her until you two blundered into Smythtown and started asking questions.”

  “You knew about the name change?”

  He nodded. “That was part of the deal. A new name and a new identity.”

  “Turk Edwards called you?”

  “This morning early. He said he thought you were headed for Gaptown. And he gave us your tag numbers.”

  “Good buddy, Turk,” I said to Hump.

  Hump said, “He’s changed.”

  “We got to Gaptown while you were having breakfast. We were set to follow you to Maine if we had to.”

  “But you changed your mind?”

  “You got cute,” Barstow said. “That slowing down to see if we were a tail. It made sense to collar you before you got over the state line.”

  “When you talked to Turk, he told you about the try on me?”

  “He told me,” Vincent said.

  “Maybe you can understand why we got nervous.”

  Vincent raised a hand and cupped the swollen ear. He wasn’t going to be that understanding. “Maloney told us how you felt.” That was as far as he’d go.

  “Just a minute.” I returned from the bedroom with the three photos of Ellen Webster. I dropped them, one by one, on the coffee table. “This is how she looks now.”

  “Changed her hair color and wears it longer,” Vincent said.

  “Lost her baby fat,” Barstow said.

  While they studied the pictures, I went back into the bedroom and closed the door behind me. I dialed Nathan Webster’s number.

  He had a burn on. He said, “Where have to been? You were supposed to call … ?”

  I cut him off. “Can you come over to my place?”

  “Right now?”

  “Soon as you can.”

  “You’ve found her?”

  “It’s something else,” I said. “It’s out of my hands.”

  He didn’t understand that. I could feel the confusion. I broke the connection. More talk wouldn’t help.

  Hump and I sat on the stone wall that shores up the terrace garden. We’d taken a bucket of ice, glasses and the rest of the J&B along for company.

  It was a clear spring night. Dogs barked off in the distance. One to the east, another in the south. Then silence. It was chilly. I’d shivered some, but I’d suffered it rather than going in the house for a sweater. In there, in that living room, I knew there were guts and tripe all over the floor. Webster’s insides and all the tender inner parts stomped on. It wasn’t something I wanted to see. No matter how I felt about Webster.

  We drank the J&B and watched the lights down below. We talked Braves for a time, and there was the quarterback the Falcons had picked up in the draft the year before. And the Flames, the last time we’d seen them, still weren’t skating the whole match.

  All that so we wouldn
’t hear, deep in our guts, what was being said. Or the silent screams, the ones that wouldn’t draw a crowd on a street. The ones that had the death grunt at the end of them.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Fuck it.”

  “What?

  “All of it.”

  “All of what?”

  I shook my head and drank from the bottle.

  By my watch, they’d been at it fifty-one minutes. I heard car doors slam, and the dog off in the south barked, and the car engine roared in front of my house, and I knew it was over for the time.

  “Looks like those good old boys from Tennessee left,” Hump said.

  “They’ll be back.” I edged off the wall and touched ground with my feet. I stood there, letting the dizziness pass, and the back door opened, and Art came out. Nathan Webster was a step behind him.

  Art reached us first and leaned a hip against the wall. “They’ll be in town a few days.”

  “Figured it,” I said.

  “And they accepted your apology. There won’t be any try at extradition.”

  “What apology?”

  “The implied one,” Art said.

  “Oh, that one?”

  Maybe there was something in my voice. I didn’t hear the slur, but Art must have. He leaned close to me and looked into my face. “You’d better get to bed, Jim.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Art looked over his shoulder at Hump. “Hump?”

  “If the man says he’s fine then it is a fact that the man is fine.”

  “You two.” Art said goodnight and stumbled down the slope and around the side of the house toward the driveway. Nathan Webster stood a few feet down the slope from us, and he said a soft goodnight to Art. I couldn’t see Webster’s face. His chin was pressed down into his breastbone.

  It was quiet and still again, and I could hear some small animal rattling around in the wood on the other side of the terrace. Headlights streaked up the drive as Art started up his car. The light curled away as he backed out.

  “Do you believe those things?”

  I didn’t need to see his face. I didn’t want to see his face. I said, yes, I believed most of it. There were blank spots in there, gaps, but there seemed to be a base of fact in what we’d learned in the last couple of days.