by Ralph Dennis
“Sure you do,” Hump said. “This is one who likes to do his own rough work.” He took a couple of steps toward the two of them, the pickup man and the one I guessed was Ed Buddy. Both had their hands cuffed behind them, and they were watching me with a casual disinterest. “The other night, at the Book Store Bar, he squared off against Art.”
Click. That was the one. The stud who looked like a TV insurance pitchman until you saw the eyes. The dead man behind the face. “Ed Buddy? Is that your name?”
“One of them,” he said.
I looked past him, around the bakery. An ambulance had carted the driver and Bad Throat away a few minutes before. They’d wanted to take me, too, but I said I’d come later, after I’d talked to Art.
It had been a hairy few minutes. The police cruiser had pulled up next to the black Buick about five minutes after I shot out the windshield. They’d come to investigate reports of gunfire. For a time, it had been a standoff. They’d wanted me to throw out my guns, and I said I wasn’t going to. It looked like I might get shot or have to shoot a cop. But one of them had a cool head, and I convinced him to call the department and talk to Art. Art must have burned some hide off them, because right after that they came in nice as could be, and handcuffed the pickup man and the man I now knew to be Ed Buddy. They said nothing about me giving my guns up.
One of the young policemen was still in the room, standing over next to the handcuffed men. The other one rushed in while I was getting my head together enough to recognize Ed Buddy from the brawl. He’d been sent down the street to get me some kind of shirt and a couple of wet towels. Hump took the shirt from him, ripped off the plastic cover, and began unbuttoning it. I took the wet towels, barely warm, and scrubbed off my face and neck and hair. It helped some, but I could still smell the vomit. Either there was some still in my hair, or I had the scent of it caught far back in my nostrils and it would take time for it to wear away.
I stood up and stripped off my shirt and t-shirt. There was blood and vomit and beer on both of them. I turned the towels inside out and washed again, head to waist.
Ed Buddy watched me, eyes dull and glazed. “Any reason why we have to stay here and watch his topless show? I’d rather be in jail.”
“What’s your rush?” Art asked.
“I want to make my one call,” Buddy said.
Hump helped me with the shirt. It was a tight fit. I had to suck in my gut to get it buttoned. But it had the new smell, and that warred with the vomit.
“I’ve got a question for you,” I said. “Why’d you kill Joy Lynn Barrow and the dwarf girl? Because she fingered you?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Believe what you want to. You cops and ex-cops do that anyway. Anything to tie it up all neat.” He dipped his head and spat, about an inch or so away from the young cop’s shiny black shoe. “I liked that girl and she liked me, and I wouldn’t have killed her.”
“How about the two hit men in the motel parking lot? You like them, too?”
Ed Buddy shook his head and looked away.
“How about Harry Falk, and the hippie girl with him?”
He shrugged.
“How about Willie Whitman?”
“Who’s he?”
“An old con man down on his luck. Sold information for a living.”
Ed Buddy looked over at Art. “I don’t want to answer any questions. I want to call my lawyer.”
“Anybody we know?”
“Denton Hughes.”
“That’s what I figured.”
The two young cops took them out to the paddy wagon. Hump walked over and lifted the dough hook from beneath one of the mixing machines. “This the tool?”
“Jawbone of an ass,” I said.
I spent the night and all of the next day at Grady Hospital. It rained sometime during the night, or all the night. I wasn’t sure. I was sedated part of the time, and I kept waking up and hearing it on the window. Hump was with me part of the time, and once I woke up and Marcy was leaning over me, crying and wetting my pillow. And there were some vague moments when I thought that Art was in the room. He was trying to explain how they’d lost me on Spring Street. It had something to do with a street that was blocked when they started to do their little box step around to pick us up. I think he said it was the gas company putting in a new gas line. They’d been blocked, not able to move forward, but not able to back out, either. And by the time they’d located Hump they couldn’t find me, and they knew I’d been tailing too close and had been grabbed. Sorry, but they’d done the best they could.
Confused, the memories warped. But the dough hook was real.
Art came by the next afternoon. He was still dizzy from lack of sleep, and he slumped into a chair next to my hospital bed.
“How you feel?”
I forgot and tried to shrug. I decided that talking didn’t hurt that much. “I’ll be all right after the black and blue goes away.” I put out two fingers and he put a smoke in them and lit it for me. “How’re you doing with Ed Buddy?”
“Putting it together, bit by bit.”
“How does it look?”
“The .45 you took off the guy you almost killed … slugs from it match the ones we took out of the hit man who died half in his car and half out of it. That gives us a lever on him, and he’s beginning to chip around the edges.” He shook his head at me. “I wish you hadn’t come so close to killing him.”
“It seemed the thing to do at the time,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Well, he’s tough, and alive enough to be scared. I’ve got a man out at an apartment on Peachtree Road that he told us about. There’s supposed to be a .45 caliber submachine gun out there, also used in the same brushfire war with the two hit men.”
“That doesn’t touch Ed Buddy.”
“Funny thing about him. Has a big-time lawyer who tried to spring him. Seemed surprised that the judge wouldn’t set bail.”
“What you got him for?”
“So far, kidnapping you off the streets of Atlanta.”
“Me?”
“Sure. And that ought to keep him around until we tie some of the rest of this mess to him.”
“Kidnapping? Me?” I forgot myself again and laughed. Art stayed just long enough to watch my eyes water from the pain. Then he grinned at me and left.
Hump and Marcy checked me out of the hospital that evening, and I was still so shaky that they put me to bed at my house and fed the mama cat and left me alone. During the night I woke up sweating and shivering, and I got out of bed and went into the kitchen and got down the half-bottle of armagnac that I had left over from the winter. I had a good belt, and opened the large brown envelope that was on the kitchen table with my name on it. There was also a note on it in Marcy’s handwriting. Art said you could have this back. I opened the clasp and shook the diary, the address book, and the sheets of paper with the decoding on them out on the table. I had another drink, and then I put Joy Lynn’s personal life aside without looking at it again. I drank about half the armagnac, and then I fell into bed and slept like a drunk.
The phone rang about nine the next morning. I was in the bathroom, trying to tear the foil from a pack of Alka-Seltzer. I let the phone ring on until I dropped the tablets into the half-glass of water. I carried the glass with me, sat on the edge of the bed, and picked up the receiver.
“Mr. Hardman, this is John Barrow.”
I gulped some of the fizz and said good morning.
“Mr. Maloney from the Atlanta police called me yesterday.”
I said I was glad he had, because I hadn’t been in much shape to do anything the day before.
“I’m coming to Atlanta this afternoon, and I thought I’d drop by to see you, if it’s all right with you. I want to know exactly what happened.”
I said I’d be glad to see him.
“And I want a favor from you. The sheriff … Hubie King … said you might be able to arrange it
so I could see the man who killed Joy Lynn.”
“I don’t know about that.” I held the phone aside and drank the rest of the Alka-Seltzer. “I won’t do it if you’ve got any idea of starting trouble.”
“I just want to look at him,” Barrow said. “I’m not even sure I have anything I want to say to him.”
“With those ground rules, I might be able to do something.”
He thanked me, and said he’d be in Atlanta about four in the afternoon.
Around two in the afternoon, I was heating a can of soup when it came to me. I saw the diary and the address book in the center of the kitchen table, and I remembered that I had to make a decision. I had to decide whether I was going to show the diary to Mr. Barrow. Whether I could give them to him would depend on whether Art might need them. I didn’t think so. If they got Ed Buddy with anything, I doubted it would be the killing of Joy Lynn and the dwarf girl, Carol.
While I ate the bean with bacon soup, I read the pages Marcy had decoded. I went through them slowly, trying to gauge the effect they’d have on Mr. Barrow. I kept in front of me all I knew about him, the love and all the painful doubts he had had about her. And I tried to put myself in his place and feel the pain he’d experience when he read about Joy Lynn and Harry Falk, and all those tricks she’d turned with all those blank-faced strangers on the streets.
By the time I was chasing the last bean around the bowl, I’d reached the last entry, the one that covered the events of the day before she was killed. It had probably been written the next morning, the morning of the day she died. I got all the way through the entry, and then I stopped and went back. It jumped out at me this time.
… He was shaking and he said the attempt to teach Ed a lesson had not worked. Some people had been hurt and he thought Ed Buddy would try to find out who had sent the men after him. He said we ought to stay put and act like we didn’t know anything. I said that would be easy because I didn’t know anything. He said yes I did and that I had fingered Ed Buddy for them. And if he knew he was not going to like me for that reason. But I knew better.
I ran that around on my tongue. But I knew better. Why should she know better? It didn’t make sense. Or did it?
I opened the diary and worked my way over to the last entry. That was it. I’d been in too much of a hurry. I’d told Marcy to decode only those entries where an Ed or an Ed Buddy were mentioned. Marcy had translated the entries for April 7 and April 12. There were four entries between those that she hadn’t touched, because there’d been no Ed or Ed Buddy there. Stupid shit, dumb shit. I found a pad and a pencil and began with the entry for April 8. It took me a bit more than an hour to find what I was looking for. It was in the entry for April 11.
… I don’t know if I am doing the right thing. Maybe I have made a mistake. But I like him and he has always been nice to me and I do not want him hurt Tonight after a trick I had the john drop me at the motel and I went to his suite. He was alone and he laughed and said are you doing deliveries now? I told him I was. And then I told him I had heard out on the street that some people were out to get him and they knew about the suite somehow and that was where they were going to beat him up. He wanted to know who they were and I said I had not heard any names. I could not tell him about Harry. He wanted to know when it was to happen and I said I wasn’t sure but I thought it would be soon. He wanted to give me some money but I didn’t feel right about that. I wouldn’t take it. And he gave me a hug and thanked me. When I left the suite he was on the phone, dialing.
Now I am worried about Harry. Maybe I have done the wrong thing and got him in trouble. But I did not give Harry’s name and there is no way he can trace it back to Harry.
I closed the diary and pushed it away. The dumb woman had chippied on her pimp and got herself and her pimp killed. If she’d stayed out of it, she might still be alive.
I went into the bedroom and called Hump. I told him I wanted him to drop by and see some of his black pimp friends and find out two things for me, even if he had to beat it out of them with a stick.
“What’s that?”
“Who organized the try on Ed Buddy. And who put the funds together and brought the two hit men in.”
“You don’t want much, do you?”
“You do it?”
He said he would.
Barrow came exactly at four. I heard the pickup out in the driveway and met him at the door. He looked older, pale and drained, like he’d been giving blood. He stood on my little porch and looked at the grass that needed cutting and the long hedge that needed pruning.
“You can tell me about it on the way to the jail,” he said.
I shook my head. “How about some coffee? I’m expecting a call.”
“You said you’d set it up so that …”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll put you face to face with him. That’s why I’m waiting for the call.”
He gave me a blank, puzzled look.
“Coffee or a beer? It’s good beer weather.”
He surprised me by opting for the beer.
About an hour later, Hump called. “I’m not going to be welcome around one of those bars any more.”
But what he told me put the last piece in the puzzle.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The hostess wanted to seat us near the low bandstand, where the girl with the long black hair that reached her waist was singing the top forty in the same voice she probably sang 1930’s labor movement songs in some college coffee house a couple of years before. I shook my head at her and said we’d take a table toward the front window, the one that over looked West Peachtree.
Art and Barrow ordered beer. Hump and I told her J&B on the rocks. When she brought our orders a few minutes later, Art got out his ID and showed it to her.
“I’m expecting a call, but I don’t want to be paged.”
She wrote down his name on the back of a pad and carried it to the reservation clerk at the counter near the bar. Barrow leaned toward me. “Is he here?”
“Not yet.” I peeled back my cuff and checked the time. It was five after eight. “Any minute now.”
“I don’t know if I can do it, Mr. Hardman,” Barrow said.
“Sure you can.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Think of it as a job of acting where you just have one line. The big thing is to give the line at the right time.”
“I’ll try.”
“You’ll do fine,” I said.
I’d taken the table nearest the wall aisle. I turned my chair and watched the alcove where the elevators were. At eight-twenty-five, Wash Johnson, wearing a gray silk-blend suit and a blood-red tie, came out of the alcove and waved at the hostess. He headed for his spot at the bar. “Our boy,” I said to Art.
Before I left the table with Art, I winked at Barrow.
The bartender placed the Bloody Mary in front of him about the time Art and I reached the bar. I tapped Wash on the shoulder and grinned at the irritation and anger that clouded his face when he saw me. “Christ, Hardman, I thought I was through with you.”
Art stepped in and showed his ID. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Oh.” Wash looked at me. “Is it about Ed Buddy? I heard about it out on the street.”
“About that, yes.” He closed the ID case and dropped it in his coat pocket. “We’ve got a table.”
“Sure.” He scooped up his Bloody Mary and followed us the length of the room to our table. Before he sat down, while Art got another chair from an empty table nearby, he said, “I didn’t mean to act that way. I really appreciate what you did.”
“Appreciate your help,” I said.
Hump and Wash nodded at each other. I didn’t introduce Mr. Barrow. I hoped it would look like an oversight in the beginning. When we were all seated, Art said, “I think we’ve broken the racket.”
“To the police,” Wash said, lifting his Bloody Mary and sipping it.
“But we’ve got a few loose ends. I thought you might help us with them.”
“If I can,” Wash said. He was loose and easy. Then he looked across the table and saw that Barrow was staring at him, hardly blinking.
“I think we can put Buddy and his boys away, one charge or another. But it doesn’t look like we can tie the killings of the two girls on him.”
“Maybe it averages out,” Wash said.
“My feelings, usually,” Art said. “But this time, that won’t wash with me. It looks now like Buddy and his friends didn’t have anything to do with the deaths of Joy Lynn Barrow and the dwarf girl.”
“That’s crazy. Nobody else had a reason.”
Barrow took that moment to lean over and whisper in my ear. It was just an act, anyway, so it didn’t matter what he said. I think, through the mumble, I heard him ask how my garden was doing.
Wash saw the charade. It worried him, and he looked over at Barrow. “I don’t think I got your name,” he said.
Hump leaned in and cut him off. “I’m not a cop, but I’ve learned a few things from Hardman here. The big mistake you make sometimes with an investigation is getting locked in too early. You’ve got seven killings, and you want to tie all seven in a gift box and stuff them in one stud’s hip pocket. Ed Buddy’s, for example.” He leaned back. “Maybe it’s just American efficiency, not wanting to leave some of the files open.”
The waitress stopped next to Art. “Phone call, Mr. Maloney.”
“Excuse me.” Art left the table and followed her down the aisle. Wash jerked his eyes away from Art and back to us.
“But those killings were a warning.” He tapped me on the arm. “You said they were.”
I shook my head. “You suggested it, Wash, and I bought it, for the time. I didn’t have anything better to offer in its place.”
“You got any other ideas?”
“Some,” I said. “It could have been Harry Falk.”
“Maybe.” I could see him about ready to jump at it. He’d like for us to accept that, but he couldn’t come up with a good reason to back it. “I can’t see him doing it, though.”
“She might have been chippying on him,” I said.
