Pimp for the Dead

by Ralph Dennis

  “Why not?” Art said.

  “It won’t hold up,” Wright said. “I’ll be out in twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours might be enough.” Art watched Hump go into the bedroom. “Keep your hands off her.”

  “I don’t see why. I paid for the whole hog.” Hump went in and closed the door behind him.

  Wright watched the door close and licked at his lips. “I am engaged to Elaine.”

  “Sure,” I said, “the two-week engagement, before you buy her some walking shoes.”

  From beyond the bedroom door, there was a choked scream and Hump’s deep laughter. The scream bothered Art and he turned to me. I shook my head. I knew Hump better than that, but Wright didn’t.

  “Look, are you going to let that black ape …?”

  “It won’t wear out,” I said.

  Another choked scream. Wright flinched. “That girl is my …”

  “You shouldn’t chippy with your own girls,” I said.

  “All right.” The sand and grit poured out of him and made an invisible pile at his feet. “I called Ed Buddy after Crystal called me.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Out of town. Chicago, I think.”

  “He the one doing the organizing?”

  Wright nodded. “I already paid my dues.”

  “How much?”

  He turned and looked at the closed bedroom door. It was quiet in there. “A hundred a week for each girl in the stable.”

  “That’s high,” I said.

  “It’s better than having to bury them.”

  “Or getting buried.”

  “That too,” he said.

  “What’s the phone number?”

  He rattled it off from memory. Art had him repeat it, so he could write it down.

  “How do we reach him?”

  “That’s all I know. The phone number.”

  I stepped away from them and threw the bedroom door open. “She dressed?”

  Hump pushed her into the living room. She was fully dressed and, if she’d been a cat, she’d have been hissing.

  “Didn’t mind dressing,” Hump said. “But she’s not much of a screamer.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Pinched her ass blue.”

  Art went into the bedroom with Wright while he got dressed. He gave the bedroom a frisk. In the night table next to the bed he found a gold coke spoon and a film can with a couple of tablespoons of cocaine in it. He called me into the bedroom. “Now it’s a drug bust.”

  “Then you won’t need the other evidence.” I held out my hand.

  He stared at me blankly. “Huh?”

  “The hundred.”

  He shook his head and passed it back to me.

  The paddy wagon came a few minutes later. He was trying out some ideas on me, wanting some way he could make the charges without admitting that he’d violated Wright’s rights. I think he finally decided that the pandering thing had led to the search that uncovered the cocaine. It might get by, and then again it might not.

  “When did they move out?” I asked.

  The night security guard, an old man who walked with the pain of bad joints, led the three of us down the hall to suite 17, in the old building on Mitchell. It was an office building for companies on the way up or the way down.

  “They didn’t exactly move out,” the old man said. “Not officially, anyway.” He unlocked the door to suite 17 and went in. He fumbled to the right of the door and switched on the overhead lights. “They went out for a coffee break this morning and didn’t come back.”

  The main piece of furniture in the room was a long table with about twenty telephones on it, each phone bracketed on the sides by soundproof partitions. At one end of the table there was a huge stack of Atlanta phone book pages. I stepped past the old man and picked up one of the phones. The line was dead. “What was it?”

  “What they call a boiler room.”

  I looked at Art.

  “Used for telephone selling. Sell you anything from a carpet to a magazine.”

  There was a closed door to the right and an open one straight ahead. Art and Hump, followed by the old man, went to the open door. I rounded the table and pushed the other door open. It was a bathroom, with a fetid scent locked in there. A toilet, a roll of paper, some paper towels and a thin wedge of soap. And a single turd floating in the toilet bowl.

  The other room in the suite was the office. A battered old desk filled most of the room. There was a swivel chair behind it and a metal cabinet in the rear left corner. The file drawers were pulled out, sagging. Art turned from the file cabinet and shook his head. “Empty.”

  The desk was clean, too. From behind the desk, Hump nudged the metal trash can with his toe and I went over and looked into it. Nothing but some cigarette ashes. I turned back to the desk and, being careful not to touch the phone grip, I lifted the receiver by the ends and heard the dial tone.

  “This is the working phone.”

  At the doorway, Art was talking to the security guard.

  “… said they were going to do a telephone survey,” the old man said.

  “They say what kind?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  “They take a long lease?” Art asked.

  “The regular year one,” he said. He shook his head and looked around. “A lot of good that lease’ll do anybody. I came on tonight and found the place cleaned out, like it is. You don’t work a place like this without getting some hunches. I called the day man. He said they’d been in early and left, and didn’t come back. Downstairs, I got this list of home phone numbers for the lease holders. We keep them in case of an emergency.”

  “And you called the number?”

  “It was a church … the Baptist one near 5th and Peachtree.”

  “That’s a new one on me,” Hump said, “giving a church number.”

  We were out on the sidewalk in front of the building. The old man was seated in a folding chair reading the evening paper. Now and then he’d lower the paper and look out the doorway at us.

  “Maybe they planned it that way, maybe they didn’t.”

  “And if they had had to call the number? Say some time last week?”

  “Easy enough,” I said. “A smart hustler just asks to see the list, and he says something about no wonder they didn’t reach him. This digit or that digit is wrong, and he corrects it.”

  “And the number is good until the next time,” Art said.

  “And we’re no closer to Ed Buddy, if that’s his real name.” I got out my smokes and offered them around.

  “You could expect it,” Art said. “The four studs didn’t report back last night when they were supposed to. That meant something had gone sour. They really cleared out last night, probably just dropped by today to give it a fast once-over, to make sure it was clean.”

  “It worked for them for the wrong reason,” I said. “Those four last night … they call anybody from the jail?”

  Art shook his head. “That was probably built into the deal. No calls. No strings that go back to the men who hired them. So they must have made their own bail.”

  “They’re out?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked up at the old building. “And we’re dead-ended.”

  I drove Hump over to my place to get his car. Then I left him and wheeled across town to Marcy’s apartment. It’s in one of those sprawling apartment complexes. Since she moved in, this will be the first spring there’ll be grass to cover the red clay that used to blow all over the place. Maybe this spring the water in the swimming pool won’t look like orange soda pop.

  I found Marcy back in the kitchen, seated at the table with the diary propped open in front of her, a can of tuna and a can of beef stew at the top corners.

  “How’s it going?” I blew in her ear, and then went over to the refrigerator and got a can of beer.

  “It’s ruining my life. I do some decoding before I leave for work, during my breaks and durin
g lunch, and I start again as soon as I get back home in the evening.”

  “Any progress?”

  She pushed a sheaf of pages toward me. I sipped my beer and read through the entries. Marcy must have gotten into the spirit of the thing. The translation seemed to go a lot faster now. I guess it became drill after a time: moving the final letter up to the front of the word, and not having to think which numeral stood for which vowel.

  In the pages she’d decoded since the night before, Crystal Hanner’s story checked out. Joy Lynn almost crowed when Crystal moved out. She saw it as a victory for herself in her relationship with Harry. And a few days later she welcomed the arrival of Carol, the dwarf girl. She didn’t see Carol as a threat, and she found herself really liking the doll-like girl. It was better working the streets with her. Carol didn’t count tricks on her, and she didn’t keep tabs on Carol, either. Now the stash money jumped back up to between $60 and $90 a night, and continued to grow. In one entry Harry bitched about the income falling, and she made herself a promise to use some of the put-by money on nights when the tricks didn’t come, or when the weather was bad.

  I pushed the pages back across the table to Marcy. “Work’s going damn good,” I said.

  She mimicked it back to me. “Why don’t you do some of it?”

  “I will. Where’s the address book?”

  “That’ll be a big help,” Marcy said. “It’ll save me about twenty minutes, if that.”

  “If you don’t want me to …?”

  She passed the address book to me. I got a clean sheet of paper and began. It was slow going for me. I had to write the vowels and the numbers that represented them on the top of the page. Each time I got to a numeral, I had to stop and look at my key. Even with that trouble, I got through most of them in a bit more than half an hour. I was on the next to the last one on the list, when it hit me.

  d2 5ddyb

  I got up and walked around the table. I put the address book in front of Marcy, a thumb under the two words. “Is this what I think?”

  “Ed Buddy,” she said.

  “The rest of it?”

  She read it off with hardly a pause. “New in town. Address when settled.”

  I straightened up. “The problem just changed.” I returned to my seat and wrote it out in big letters on a sheet of paper: d2 5ddyb. “From now on I want you to skim the entries and decode only those that have to do with an Ed or an Ed Buddy.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.” Then I softened it “This is the first real break. The diary might give us a hunch, a way of reaching this Buddy guy.”

  “So far, she’s never named any of the johns,” Marcy said.

  “That might be before she started her list.”

  “All right.” She didn’t sound convinced. “I’m stopping for the night now. I’ll start again in the morning.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “This is important, Marcy. I want you to go on, even if you have to call in sick in the morning.”

  “Slave driver.”

  “Sorry.” I walked around the table and kissed her. “I hate to ask it of you.”

  “You going to stay with me?”

  “I’d be a distraction,” I said.

  “So you’re going to bed, and I’m going to stay up all night?”

  “I hope it doesn’t take that long.” I eased toward the door.

  “On the shelf over there.”

  “What?”

  “The seeds you wanted,” she said.

  It was a bundle of seed packages with a rubber band holding them together. I scooped them off the shelf and left, before she had time to come after me swinging, or started throwing things.

  At home, I sat down in my kitchen and drank a nightcap. While drinking, I slipped the rubber band and fanned out the seed packages. Corn, summer squash, zucchini, speckled butter beans and Chinese cabbage. Chinese cabbage? I flipped the package and looked at the picture on the front. It didn’t look like any vegetable I’d ever eaten. I thought about calling Marcy and asking her what the hell we wanted with Chinese cabbage, but I fought the urge. I didn’t want to bother her until she’d finished her surface skimming of the diary.

  And maybe, just maybe, the Chinese cabbage was her idea of a joke.

  I thought I’d been asleep only about ten minutes. The clock on the night table put it at three hours. I was gunning up to be pissed, when I realized that it was probably Marcy. I answered the phone on about the fifth ring.

  It wasn’t Marcy. It was Hump. I didn’t recognize his voice at first. It was distorted by hard breathing and an edge of pain.

  “Hardman …?”

  “What’s wrong? You sound …”

  “Just listen. Four studs just left my place. Did some working me over. Might be coming to your place next.”

  “Who?”

  “I think it was the same four from that bar.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’ve got some lumps, and I think a broken wrist.”

  “I’ll be there soon as I can,” I said.

  “Watch yourself.”

  As soon as the line went dead, I made a run for the closet. I got down the cigar box from the top shelf, from behind a number of other boxes. It was where I kept my cash and my .38 Police Positive. I put the box back and kept the .38. I dressed quickly. Slacks, sport shirt and loafers without socks. I struggled into a jacket and stuck the .38 in my waistband.

  I went out the back door, low and bent over and eyes sweeping the yard, knowing every shape there and looking for the one that didn’t belong. The shapes and shadows appeared to fit, and I moved around the corner of the house toward the garage. I stopped there and stared down the driveway out to the street. The mama cat came out of the darkness and rubbed against my leg. I used a foot to push her away as gently as I could.

  Nothing. Nothing moved. It was twenty minutes or so by car from Hump’s apartment to mine, and if Hump had called me right away there was no way they could have reached my place yet. And every minute I wasted being careful and foxy put them closer. If they were coming at all.

  I sucked it up and walked over to my car. I stood by the hood and remained still, reading the yard and the road and the hedge on the far side of the yard. Nothing. I got into the car, kicked over the engine and backed out.

  I made it to Hump’s apartment in fifteen minutes. That included three or four red lights I ran on the way. And one red light I had to wait out when a police cruiser began to tail me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Art Maloney arrived about the time the ambulance did. Hump hadn’t wanted the ambulance, but I insisted. Besides the broken left wrist, he’d taken some bad licks about the head. One eye, his right one, was swollen closed, and there was a cut in his lip and, past that, when he talked, I could see a chipped tooth.

  “How’d it happen?”

  I stepped in and told it for Hump. It saved Hump some breath and some energy. Hump had been out having a few drinks. He got back to his apartment a bit after two a.m. He hadn’t been expecting trouble, and he’d been boxed easily. He’d been about halfway up the outside stairs when the first two stepped out of the darkness of the landing. He was trying to move back and set himself, when the other two—he hadn’t heard them approaching from behind—came up from the street and boxed him in. His first awareness of those two was a hard shot he took in the back. The two from the dark doorway moved in then. His left wrist got broken early. He’d seen the club coming down, and he put up an arm to ward it off. That put him at a disadvantage, and he’d taken a lot of punishment until he used a shoulder and his good arm to wrest a club away from one of the attackers. When he started swinging the club around, they’d left in a hurry.

  “What kind of club?” Art asked.

  I walked over to the telephone table. I picked up the club and brought it back to Art. It was about three feet long, one end rounded and the other sawed off unevenly. I slapped it in the palm of my h
and.

  “Oak, I think.”

  Art took it. He nodded. “From a hoe or a rake handle.”

  The ambulance attendants were ready to go. They’d considered bringing up a stretcher, but Hump hadn’t wanted that, and the attendants took a long look at Hump’s 270 pounds and went along with him. It wouldn’t have been much of a pleasure, carting that weight down a couple of flights of stairs.

  I went out into the hallway with Hump. “I’ll be over in a few minutes,” I said. “Art and I want to check something out.”

  “See you then,” he said and went down the stairs, partly supported by the attendants.

  Art was on the phone when I got back to the apartment. “Let it go, then. We’ll have to try it from another angle.” He hung up and shook his head. “That was the cruiser I sent over to check the address the four gave when they put up bail.”

  “No luck?”

  “A deserted house on King’s Court Road.”

  “So they jumped bail.”

  “It looks that way.”

  I looked around the apartment. I picked up the club and cut out the lights. I locked the door and we went down the stairs. Art nodded at the club.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Hump might want to return it to the owner, if he gets a chance.”

  I waited out in the hall at Grady while they set Hump’s wrist and cleaned up his cuts and bruises. At one point, an intern came out of the emergency room and lit a cigarette. He leaned on the desk and smiled at the nurse. He said, in a voice with a touch of Mississippi or Alabama in it, “That jig in there must have a head that’s solid bone.” The nurse shook her head and frowned, nodding in my direction, as if to shut him up.

  “Oh.” He pranced over to me. “You with Mr. Evans?”

  I said I was.

  “I think he ought to stay here a day or two, for observation. He won’t hear of it. I think he’s making a mistake.”

  “It’s his own mistake,” I said.

  “He’ll have to sign a release.”

  “Take it to him then,” I said.

  After he left, I went over to the nurse and told her where she could bill me. She seemed reluctant, so I got out a wad of cash and paid the charges. The fact of payment turned her sweet again, and she smiled at me several times while I leaned up against the wall and waited.