The Deadly Cotton Heart

by Ralph Dennis

  He moved closer. A step and then another one. “It’s just … not like … anything I know about her.”

  The anger was deep in the bone, part of the marrow. “Who the shit ever really knows anybody anyway?”

  It was three a.m. talk before midnight. To my left, Hump fidgeted and cleared his throat. I waited, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I want to talk to her before those men do,” Webster said.

  “It won’t do any good,” I said. “Write it off, piss on it.”

  “I can’t do that. I just can’t.”

  “That’s the best advice you’re going to get this year,” Hump said.

  “I don’t want advice.”

  Clouds moved between us and the moon. The chill wind had me shivering again. Or the words did. I rubbed my bare arms and felt the hair up, like wire.

  “You know what my mother said about Ellen?”

  I waited. I knew he’d tell us.

  “She said Ellen was a tramp, that she was cheap and tacky, that she would use me and leave me.”

  “Your mother always right?” Hump planted his feet solidly and stretched.

  “She thinks she is. This time, I don’t want her to be.”

  It wasn’t going anywhere. Round and round and round like a squirrel I’d seen dying in the street just seconds after it had been hit by a car. I didn’t want any more of it.

  “I’ve cashed your check. I’ll do some figuring tomorrow and see what the trip to Tennessee cost. I’ll return what’s left of the thousand. If your wife’s in town, Art will find her. That’s free. You don’t want any advice. I’ve got one piece more. Take the money, and make a down payment on a lawyer. I’ve got a feeling your wife’s going to need one.”

  “I don’t want you to quit. That’s not what I want. I still want you to find Ellen. I have to talk to her.”

  He couldn’t say it, but I knew. All the past had hit him, the hooking, the possible involvement in a murder, that whole black life before he had met her. That hurt him, stunned him, chipped parts of him away. I had one more look at him. Maybe I’d misread him. Maybe he had more guts than I’d thought. And I knew what he wanted to ask Cora Abse-Ellen Carver-Ellen Webster. Smack in the face, right out front. Were the five years of the marriage a complete lie?

  “All right,” I said. “I can’t speak for Hump, but I’ll give it a day or two more.”

  “What’s another day or two out of a lifetime?” Hump said.

  He thanked us and left. We left the glasses and the ice bucket on the wall. Morning would be soon enough for that. Hump carried what was left of the bottle. I slumped into a kitchen chair. Hump put on some water for coffee.

  “That’s one miserable bastard there,” he said.

  “It’s like one time I smoked dope.”

  “You? Straight you?”

  “I was trying to impress this girl. Going to get a little high with her and say all kinds of sweet candy things to her. There were five or six of us, and the joints started passing around and it must have been the world’s strongest shit. Suddenly, no warning, and I was numb and stoned. I couldn’t even talk. I couldn’t even blink. I just sat there with that dumb look on my face, and I knew that the way I felt was from the first two or three tokes. And I thought I was going to die, because there were still about three more tokes that hadn’t hit me yet.”

  “That confession means … ?”

  “It’s a metaphor,” I said. “Webster doesn’t know it yet, but there’s a damned good chance there are about three or four more licks he’s going to get hit with that he doesn’t expect.”

  “You do any good with that girl?”

  I said I hadn’t. He grinned at me and made the coffee.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  At three, I gave up and got out of bed and had a couple of Alka-Seltzers. I sat on the edge of the bed for a time and waited to see if the aspirin in it would relax me any. Not that I could tell. I was still wide awake. I put on my slippers and checked the front yard for the morning paper. It hadn’t been delivered yet.

  Still, desolate time. I sat at the kitchen table and blinked at the overhead light.

  All those loose ends fluttering in my mind. The gaps and the blank places.

  One. Start with someone trying to have Nathan Webster killed and getting killed himself. Was Cora-Ellen involved in that? If not, who was?

  Two. The Smythtown and Gaptown visits that opened up that spoiled can of peas. The try on me. Was any of that, the past and the present, tied to the conspiracy to murder in Atlanta?

  Three. Was it one big ball of wax or two balls? All wrapped together or separate, not touching and not supposed to touch?

  I had a glass of milk and blinked and yawned.

  Loose ends and gaps and blanks.

  I rinsed the glass and tried the bed again. Just as I dropped off to sleep, I heard the newspaper hit the front steps.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I slept late Sunday morning. Ragged nerve ends from the J&B. I thought about how much worse I’d have felt if I hadn’t dosed myself with Alka-Seltzer at three a.m. Coughing and hacking from the cigarettes and watching the brown phlegm washed down the wash basin.

  Better by noon. A coating of milk soothed my stomach. I was risking all that comfort with a cup of coffee when my first visitor for the day arrived.

  Marcy used her key to let herself in the front door. She tiptoed to the bedroom, saw the rumpled bed and drifted back to the kitchen. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back yet, Jim.”

  “Checking my bed for fat ladies?”

  “Of course.” The coffee water was still hot. Marcy found a cup and stirred some of the instant powder in. “How was the bluegrass?”

  “It was called on account of rain and terror and double-zero buckshot.”

  “All of it?” She sat down across from me.

  “I heard ‘Rockytop’ once,” I said. “It was great.”

  Her eyes searched my face. “You don’t look well.”

  “It’s just another Sunday. Like any other Sunday.”

  “That explains it all. How were the girls in Tennessee?”

  “The one I got interested in almost got me killed.”

  The curiosity dripped toward the edge of her tongue. Before she could ask her question, Art rapped the back door a couple of times and let himself in. He looked at Marcy and at me. Marcy gave him a brief hug and pointed him toward the end chair. “Coffee, Art?”

  “Thanks.”

  “She just got here,” I said. “Stop seeing sin everywhere.”

  Marcy said, “Shut up, Jim.”

  “You’re up early, Art.” I grinned at Marcy. That would show her.

  “I haven’t been to bed yet. I started to call you last night.”

  “Glad you didn’t.”

  “You’d have been interested if your brains weren’t scrambled. Something came in. An abandoned blue VW.”

  “Right tag numbers?”

  “YAG 341,” Art said.

  “Where?”

  “On Morningside.”

  “That was fast.”

  “It was a fluke,” Art said. He thanked Marcy with a nod when she placed a cup of instant in front of him. He had a sip. “Might not have located it so soon except for one thing. You know how it is with abandoned cars. Mainly there’s a three or four day wait to see if it’s moved before we have it towed. This one, the dumbass, parked it next to a fire hydrant. The patrolman who found it called in the tag numbers. I’d put them on a sheet. They matched. The report was on my desk when I got back to the department from here last night.”

  “So she’s back in town?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. After they towed it in, I had a look at it.” He shrugged. “It was a slow night.”

  At the stove, Marcy dropped half a package of bacon into the skillet. Good for her. She was starting breakfast. “You had breakfast yet, Art?”

  “Not yet,” Art said. Then back to me. “Found a spent shotgun casing rolled under the seat. T
hat started me thinking.”

  “And?”

  “On a hunch, I had the dash and the steering wheel dusted. Some of the prints were Ellen Webster’s. That’s usual. Some others weren’t. Had enough prints to check them through the network. I put a hurry on it. Just got the word back. The prints, most of them off the steering wheel, belong to a woman named Betty Franklin, also known as Betsy Frank, also known as Emma Terry, also known as …”

  I stopped him. “Emma Terry? Mainly arrests for hooking, things involved with that?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Give me a minute.” I carried my coffee into the bedroom. I worked my way through information and got the police station in Smythtown. He wasn’t there and the call passed on to his house.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jim Hardman in Atlanta.”

  “I said I might call you,” he said.

  “It’s not that. Emma, the madam at the Castel Motel … she have a last name?”

  “She’s had a lot of them.”

  “The latest one?”

  “Terry. Why?”

  “Later.” I said I’d get back to him and hung up.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and let it sift through. Some of it fitted and some of it didn’t. The parts that didn’t fit probably meant that I didn’t know enough yet.

  Back across the table from Art, I said, “Terry’s the last name of the madam at the motel where the try was made.”

  “But what the hell …”

  I closed my eyes. My head didn’t want to work. “Anything else in the VW?”

  “Some clothes. Atlanta store labels.”

  I shook my head.

  “Somebody’d been messy in the back seat. Had tracked in some clay. Big clumps that might have been on shoe soles.”

  That was the nail in the box. I think I knew then and the bottom of my stomach dropped out. “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  Marcy placed plates of scrambled eggs and bacon on the table. Art didn’t wait for my answer. He started eating. But his eyes remained fixed on me.

  “You know how to get in touch with the T.B.I. men, Vincent and Barstow?”

  “They’re at Stouffer’s on West Peachtree.”

  “When you finish eating, give them a call,” I said. I pulled the plate closer and looked down at it.

  “And say what?”

  “That I know where Ellen Webster is.”

  “You mean you’ve got a guess?”

  I shook my head. “I’m dead sure.”

  I forked a small dab of egg and swallowed it. There. Stay down.

  Rock Farm was even uglier and bleaker in daylight. It was late afternoon. There were four of us and the heavy equipment operator and his digger. The operator lounged on his high seat, hat pulled down over his eyes, a cigarette drooping in the corner of his mouth. He was waiting until we called for him.

  Turk, Vincent, Barstow and I, a couple of paces between us, lined up at the front steps in a file. We moved around the house like the second hand on a watch. The first time past the back steps I looked down at the place where Billy Bennett had sprawled, blown away and dead. Each circle it widened. It looped. Fifty yards from the house, then a hundred and a second hundred.

  Deep in a patch of land that hadn’t been cleared for planting. Clumps of brush. Barstow, in the line on my right, spotted it first. He stopped and squatted. His hand swept like a blade under one side of a low, wide clump. He brought out a scattering of clay. Vincent leaned past him, grabbed that piece of brush, and pulled it out of the ground. It came out easily and showed fresh clay where the roots had been.

  I tested the place with my weight. The earth gave. It felt spongy. Turk, off at a distance, saw my nod and put two fingers to his mouth. He blew an eardrum breaker. At the other side of the house, the digger engine coughed and started up. It crawled around the house and bug-walked its way toward us.

  It was a forty-five minute flight from Atlanta to Nashville. Vincent had rented a car. It was an hour-and-a-half drive to Smythtown. It had been handled the usual way. No Bureau, state or F.B.I., trusted the local law. All Turk knew was that we were on the way. The digger, on a flatbed truck, was waiting for us at a parking lot a block or so from the police station. Vincent had requisitioned it from the highway department. The operator had seemed happy to see us. It was, I think, double time for Sunday work. What Turk thought about it, he’d kept to himself.

  We could have done it with shovels. Three feet down and I saw the foot and the leg up to the knee. I waved the digger away. I got a shovel and crabbed my way down the side of the hole. It wasn’t so much digging as scraping. Five minutes of work and the outline was there.

  I held up the shovel handle. Turk grabbed it and pulled me out. By that time, Barstow was back from Turk’s car. He toed the edge of the hole and took a dozen or so photos with a Polaroid.

  I leaned against the digger and got my breath. Eyes closed, I could see her open mouth packed with dirt.

  “That’s Ellen Webster.”

  I threw the shovel down and walked away. I sat in the back of the rented car and waited. The rest of the shit belonged to them.

  Turk’s house looked like a used sporting goods store. Fishing tackle and rifles and shotguns all about the house. There was even a fishing creel under the sink in the bathroom. I’d stubbed a toe on it after I’d finished a shower.

  I dressed again, except for my shoes and socks. I walked barefooted into the living room and found Turk and the two T.B.I. men spaced around the cluttered room, waiting for me.

  “Tell us about it,” Vincent said.

  I brushed off my feet and put on one sock. “About what?” I’d explained most of the reasoning behind the trip before Vincent and Barstow agreed to it.

  “The why of it?”

  I tugged on the other sock. “I wish the fuck I knew.”

  Turk passed me a glass and an open bottle of J.W. Dant. “But you took us straight to the body.”

  A sip of the Dant. “That was an educated guess. The pieces seemed to fit.”

  “Make another guess,” Vincent said.

  “This is a bastard one,” I said. “I think somebody doesn’t want the Parker murder opened up again.”

  “That simple?”

  “Or it’s that complex.” I slipped on my shoes and buckled them. “Your people have any guess about when it happened to Ellen Webster?”

  “Hard to say.” Vincent pointed at the bottle, and I passed it to him. “We’ll know more later, but the early guess is sometime Thursday.”

  I had a question for Turk. “Emma Terry back in town yet?”

  “No sign of her.”

  “Somebody better find her soon.” I stood up and looked around for my jacket. “Or she’ll be in a hole too.”

  The young cop without the acne drove me to Nashville so I could catch an 11:23 to Atlanta. I found out his name was Fergusson McCrea. It was a fairly long drive to make with somebody you didn’t know. To pass the time, we talked sports. He was a Reds fan, and I said that was like pulling for God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

  The Falcons didn’t interest him, and he didn’t understand hockey. Hunting was his real sport. He had his own dogs. He talked about one blue tick hound he had like he was married to it.

  Hunting led us to Turk Edwards. I said I thought that Turk did a bit of hunting now and then.

  “Lord, don’t he,” Fergusson said. “I think he’d live out of doors if he didn’t need a phone.”

  “Must be hard getting the time,” I said. “The job he’s got and all.”

  “Naw. Most of the time the place takes care of itself. Of course, there are times like the festival when he’s got to be there.” He laughed and slapped the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “And tricky? Let me tell you about it. He’s got Mayor Brett in his pocket. Like this festival. He goes over to the mayor and says … that was the first of the month … that he wasn’t hired to handle all those tourists. He makes such a ca
se out of it that the mayor gives him a week off, to rest up, before the festival begins.”

  “He take it?”

  “Just got back Monday,” Fergusson said.

  “Get anything?”

  “Not a smell,” Fergusson said. “Boy, was he hot.”

  We made the Nashville airport with time to spare. There was no problem with booking a seat. There were only five passengers on the flight.

  Darkness below. Some lights now and then.

  In a few days, after the T.B.I. released it, the body of Ellen Webster would be making the same trip.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I leaned against the doorbell for a minute or two before I saw the first light go on near the back of the house. By my watch it was three-ten a.m. There was a warm, damp breeze blowing, and I could almost smell the green part of spring coming in. It was June 2nd, and it wouldn’t be long before Atlanta was a city of green leaves and lawns and parks full of kids and dogs and birds.

  Hump stayed in the car. I could see the wig-wag of the coal on his cigarette. From the low position of the glow, I was sure he’d scrunched down in the seat. He didn’t like being parked in front of a house in Ansley this dark part of the morning.

  Another minute or two and the overhead light in the living room went on. I could hear the footsteps coming closer to the door, and then the porch light flared at me. I blinked into the light and realized that I hadn’t, even with the time I’d had during the flight and the drive in from Hartsfield Airport, decided how I was going to say it. There just wasn’t any easy way.

  Nathan Webster cracked the door a couple of inches, saw that it was me, and swung the door wide. “Mr. Hardman, it must be important if …”

  I broke in on him. I didn’t feel like doing the southern social thing, the apologies and such. “Can I come in?”

  He stepped aside and let me past. He closed the door and stood looking at me. In the closed-in room, I thought I could smell something like the scent of some old perfume, one with verbena or jasmine in it

  “Maybe we’d better sit down,” I said.

  Docile, child-like with sleep, he sat on the sofa. I took the soft armchair near that end of the sofa. I cleared my throat and I’d about decided how to start it when I got a rush of that same perfume. I looked over the back of the chair and saw the woman. She was tall and stately and slim, in her mid-fifties, and her hair was that silver-blue color that older women seem to like. The woman had the same eyes and the same thin mouth that Nathan had, and I knew, without the introduction, that this was Nathan’s mother.