by Ralph Dennis
“That’s a bruise or two,” Wash said. “Of course, there might be something we don’t know about. Harry had a pretty bad temper.”
“So you think it’s possible?” Hump asked.
“I’d hate to think it of him, but it might be possible.”
“And it would be neat, too.” Hump reached over and got one of my smokes.
“Huh?”
“He’s dead, and he can’t say otherwise.”
Art came back then. He was followed by the waitress with another round of drinks. “Give the ticket to Mr. Hardman,” Art said.
“I wish they’d give you cops a raise,” I said.
Art angled his chair so he was facing Wash. “You know what started us out on this line? The Barrow girl kept a diary. Day by day, every day.”
“Is that right?” Wash lowered his eyes, away from Barrow’s stare.
“Some real insights in there.”
“On a hooker’s life?”
“More than that. Seems she got involved. She wasn’t exactly chippying with the Ed Buddy stud, but she was close. She fingered him, and then she had second thoughts and unfingered him.”
“I always wondered about that girl,” Wash said. “Maybe she didn’t have what it takes.”
“You ever do any hunting, Wash?”
“Huh?” The abrupt shift unsettled him. “Hunting? Not since I was a kid.”
“You own a shotgun?”
“Me? No. I don’t believe in guns.”
“That’s odd,” Art said.
“What is?”
“The call was from a crew at your apartment. With a proper search warrant, of course. Served it on a girl who was at your place. Seems they found a pump gun in the cabinet under your sink. Another odd thing about that shotgun. It was stolen. Numbers match one stolen from a hock shop on Pryor the night before the girls were shot.”
“I don’t know anything about …” Wash began.
I reached under the table and tapped Mr. Barrow on the knee.
Barrow said, “He’s the one.”
“What?” Art canted his head and looked at Mr. Barrow.
“He’s the one. I was on the corner of Ponce de Leon and Peachtree, in front of the Georgian Terrace that night, and he was in the black Fury, and right before the light changed, he rolled down the back window. I saw the barrel of the …”
Wash pushed back his chair and started to get to his feet. Art opened his jacket and showed him his clip holster and the butt of the .38.
“The least we can do,” Art said, “is finish our drinks, since Jim there was nice enough to spring for them.”
It was silent around the table. The four of us stared at Wash and sipped our drinks. After a break, the girl with the long black hair returned for another set and began with a long guitar solo that must have been designed to warn the customers that the entertainment was starting.
“It wasn’t something I wanted to do,” Wash said.
“Why?” Art asked.
“The hit try failed, and Buddy was shaking the town apart. The Barrow girl knew, and it was her or me. It wasn’t going to be me.”
I looked down at the check. A rough estimate put the total at around fifteen dollars. I got out my roll and peeled off a twenty and dropped it on the check. “Too bad about that, Wash.”
“Huh?”
“It was for nothing. It was a waste. She didn’t know about you, and the only way Buddy could have got to you was through her pimp, Harry Falk. And she wasn’t about to finger him. She liked him too much. She might even have loved him.”
I nodded at Mr. Barrow. “Ready?”
He said he was, and we walked through 590 West and out to the elevators.
It was dark in my driveway. A slice of light from the front door cut across the lawn. Marcy was inside, playing with the kittens while the mama cat hovered on the edges, not quite sure what she was supposed to do under the circumstances.
Barrow was behind the wheel of his pickup, and I was leaning on the window frame.
“Well, one thing I can say about you, Hardman. You did what you said you’d do.”
“You helped,” I said.
“Those people … people like Wash … I don’t understand them.”
“It’s better you don’t. Not many people do.”
“Send me a bill,” he said.
“I owe you a refund.”
He shook his head. “I’m satisfied.”
“The diary … do you want it when the police are through with it?”
“I don’t think so. Tonight told me enough.” He turned the ignition key, and what he said then was half drowned in the rush of the engine. “You should have seen her when she was four and five and six.”
“I wish I’d had the chance,” I said.
I stepped away from the pickup and he backed out. It was going to be a long, lonely drive back to Anson, Georgia.
Art called me a couple of hours later. Marcy was out in the garage, putting the kittens back where they belonged and feeding the mama. It was the way I’d guess it. There was a pickup out on a James Benson, the pimp who’d driven the Fury for Wash.
Wash, after the failure of the try on Ed Buddy, knew he was in trouble. He guessed, as Art and I had when we’d looked over the circumstances of the shooting in the parking lot of the Executive, that Buddy had been warned. That meant Joy Lynn had done it. She was the logical one. The way he thought, it was just a matter of time before she fingered him. So he’d had the shotgun stolen, and he’d set it up with James Benson. The first time they drove by the corner that night, she hadn’t been there. That was when Hump and I were taking the two girls for a ride. The second time around she’d been there with the dwarf girl, and he’d taken his chance and got off several rounds. He didn’t have anything against Carol Spinks. She’d just been in the way.
“What about Harry Falk?” I asked.
“He says he didn’t. That leaves Ed Buddy. Maybe Buddy thought Harry had wasted her. We might never know for sure, unless the stud you broke up decides to tell us about it.”
I said I thought Bad Throat might be dumb, but I wasn’t sure he was that dumb.
“We’ll work on that possibility,” Art said.
“What happened to Hump?”
“Last time I saw him, he was edging up on the girl singer, the one with the hair down to her ass.”
“I didn’t know Hump liked plastic music,” I said.
Art laughed and said he’d see me and hung up. I decided I’d call Hump the next day. Late in the day, in case he convinced her his tin ear wasn’t really tin.
“I have a day off tomorrow,” Marcy said.
It was around midnight, and Marcy and I were out in the backyard, leaning on my terrace wall and looking over my garden. It was impressive, the slightly uneven rows where I’d planted the corn, the Chinese cabbage and the butter beans, and the humps where the hills of summer and zucchini squash were. So far, the only things above ground were the tomato plants, and they looked like they’d grown an inch or two in the last couple of days.
In the distance, there was a thin, wiggle of lightning.
“Those damned Chinese cabbages aren’t doing anything. I think they’re growing downward.”
“I thought we might pack a picnic lunch and drive up to Stone Mountain,” she said.
“Toward China,” I said.
There was another pale slice of lightning, this time closer, and a light rain began to fall.
The mama cat walked the terrace wall. She paused at Marcy’s gin and tonic and sniffed it, then stepped over it.
“Listen to those seeds opening,” I said.
Marcy came over and fitted herself into the hollow of my shoulder, and I blew into her ear, and the mama cat left us and crapped on one of the hills where the zucchini seeds were.
AFTERWORD
A Hardman is Good to Find
By Paul Bishop
In 1974, Atlanta Deathwatch, the first Hardman novel by Ralph Dennis, debuted as a pa
perback original from Popular Library. It was done an immediate and deliberate disservice by its publisher, who packaged the book as a low rent rip-off of The Executioner and the other men’s adventure paperback series that were popular at the time. It was branded Hardman #1 and given a crappy cover in keeping with the standard men’s adventure genre artwork established by Pinnacle, Manor Books, Zebra and other paperback original publishers (while this is true, there is something so bad about the original covers that they have become retro-cool and collectable).
But the Hardman series was different. It was closer in quality, tone, and style to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct books. It had little in common with The Destroyer, The Penetrator, and other paperback vigilantes. Hardman’s closest contemporary was the hardboiled cop series Razoni & Jackson written by Warren Murphy (and the acknowledged inspiration for the Lethal Weapon films).
Hardman is a tough guy, but he’s also middle-aged, overweight, out of shape, and on occasion not too smart. As readers, we know there is no way we could be The Executioner, but we could be Hardman.
So why were the Hardman books packaged like The Executioner when it clearly wasn’t? To find the answer, we have to look at the Hardman books in the context of their time. And to do that, I’m going to have to drag you down a rabbit hole with me.
Here we go …
Film and fiction have always reflected the cultural issues of the time in which they were produced. They are the pop culture prism through which we examine societal concerns. We use the images on screens and the text on pages to try out solutions, discard them, and try on another—like a bride searching for the perfect wedding dress. And like the bride, we sometimes have to settle for something that doesn’t make our butts look fat.
Being the redheaded stepchild of decades, the ’70s is a perfect example of how this works. On the losing end of an unpopular war, the ’70s was a dope-fueled mashup of political angst and discordant impossibilities, like peace, man. Not as original as the ’60s, and not as cool as the ’80s (when TV cops wore pastel colors and Italian loafers without socks), the ’70s were a generational placeholder.
The decade did offer a few scattered gems. There were no safe zones, cuddling clubs, or human flesh-bags looking for any reason to be offended or get mentioned on TMZ. You could eat beef and drink soda. Real men jogged. David Bowie released Diamond Dogs. Pineapple upside-down cake was a thing. And the Sex Pistols were dropped six days after signing with A&M records for being too outrageous to be kept on a leash.
But the dark side of the ’70s outweighed even pineapple upside-down cake. Sacrificed on the altar of politics and warmongering, hardened veterans returned to the Land of the Free with shrapnel scars, bullet wounds, missing limbs, thousand yard stares, and haunting memories of their many brothers who died violently in an inhospitable Asian jungle.
They expected a hero’s welcome, or at least, a display of gratitude. What they got was the chilling confusion of being scapegoated as baby killers. While they had been fighting and dying, the ’70s had been decoupaged with torn photos of disco, bell bottoms, leg warmers, leisure suits for men, and peace signs. Ten years after Timothy Leary chanted, turn on, tune in, and drop out, his mid-’60s rallying cry had become a reality for the directionless ’70s.
To rescue the decade from the Pit of Ennui, heroes were needed—heroes of the people, created by the people, for the people. As it had in another generation, film and fiction rose as Spartans to give us a testing zone where we could attempt to understand our turmoil, our angers, and our inadequacies.
To understand this phenomenon, we must digress to the end of another war. Like the ’70s Viet Nam era vets, American fighting men coming home from WWII also had trouble fitting back into a society they didn’t recognize.
Post World War II America was supposed to revert to the idyllic values of the traditional family. Rosie the Riveter would willingly give her job back to a man, get out of the factory, put on an apron, and go back into the kitchen. Men would come back from the war unfazed by their experiences to take up the responsibility of providing for their families without missing a beat. If the American family was not restored to the pinnacle of its idealized, mythological form, how could we justify everything we sacrificed while fighting for our freedom and the freedom of our allies?
However, much of America wasn’t buying it. We had been to the gates of Hell and beyond. We were warriors, and supporters of warriors. We had discovered our dark sides where we were selfish, driven, ambitious, strategic, and most importantly, we had discovered we were killers. To win a war on the largest scale imaginable, we had to go dark, black even, embracing the human wildness within.
But with peace came the expectation of normal. Everywhere we turned, we were being press-ganged into rigid conformity. Television, Madison Avenue, the stress of keeping up appearances, the responsibility for too many decisions in a world without orders to follow, created a human pressure cooker. There had to be an outlet for our wildness, our darkness, our pent up adrenaline, a way to understand the horror we had been through.
Movies gave us a conduit as film noir invaded cinemas everywhere. The genre pierced the pustules of our pain because the characters on the screen were visibly broken and jagged—they showed on the outside what we were feeling inside.
Film noir characters were desperate individuals gladly paving their own road to Hell rather than surrender to a lobotomized life in suburbia. There was something wrong with them, something the false sheen of domesticated bliss could not fix. War had released our demons and there was no stuffing them back in the jar.
Americans knew they were supposed to want things bright and shiny, yet they flocked in droves to the movie theaters to see the dark seamy sides of life. During the war, they had lived film noir and knew it felt cool to be legitimately bad. Film noir was a drug, and the cinematic justifications of our feelings could not be produced fast enough to keep up with demand.
The follow-up to film noir’s punch to the mouth of conformity, was that bastard of genre fiction, the Men’s Adventure Magazines. During their heydays from the ’40s through the ’50s, these slick-cover magazines catered to males with lurid true tales of adventure, of true wartime daring, exotic travel, and true attacks by wild animals of every ilk—as in Weasels Ripped My Flesh.
Most of the covers on the men’s adventure magazines featured scantily clad, tiny-waisted, big breasted women being rescued from peril by muscular male heroes toting big guns, spears, knives, and other phallic symbols. The covers also featured these same beautiful women about to be whipped, burned, fed to alligators, or sold into sexual slavery by leering Nazi officers, evil Nazi doctors, and horrendous Nazi torturers—who would eventually morph into outlaw bikers with the same twisted desires.
There was a need within us to confront such perversions—for men to know there was still a battle they could fight, still a damsel they could rescue (as they had rescued their wives, girlfriends, and families through the hell of battle). They needed a way to be an unquestioned hero, to forge an explanation for the terrors and revulsions heaped upon them in war. To feel something—anything—again.
Tawdry and salacious enough to be hidden down the sides of dad’s armchair or stacked in a dark corner of his garage, the men’s adventure magazines were a safe escape for men craving an existence beyond the world being forced upon, a world of societal expectations, disapproval, and repression.
Film and fiction provided a method to confront our fears by proxy until real solutions could catch up with society. When the public psyche was ready to move on, film noir and men’s adventure magazines disappeared from the mainstream, their mission accomplished.
Fast forward to the ’70s. Wars it appeared were not restricted to foreign soils. There was a war going on at home … a war on crime. A war we were losing—again. Our enemies were legion: Street criminals; shifty defense lawyers equipped with briefcases full of technicalities; delinquency; political and institutional corruption; the scourge of drugs; and
the resurgence of organized crime—the Mafia; the Mob; the Felons of Oz—hiding behind their vast criminal empire.
After Viet Nam, we were confused, angry, and disoriented. We wanted a stiff drink and a way to jump off the spinning teacups. We needed a cause to unite us. Casting about, the tattered American spirit latched on to the war on crime, naïvely believing it was a war we could win. However, we needed somebody to show us how to fight this new battle, so we resurrected our old warriors—film and fiction—dressed them in new armor and sent them into the fray.
Film struck the first blow. Its weapons were language, adult content, sexuality, and violence—all on the big screen. The loosening of restrictions on these cinematic elements reflected the counter-culture’s embrace of free love, edgy rock-n-roll, the civil rights movement, changing gender roles and drug use. Old style Hollywood moguls were dying out and a new generation of film makers was eager to take their place. Hollywood was stretching conventional boundaries as films began to aggressively expose the dark underbelly of the times.
Fiction joined the battle bringing a game changing big gun, the ultimate in ’70s darkness … Death Wish.
Brian Garfield’s 1972 novel, and the subsequent 1974 film starring Charles Bronson, spoke to the ’70s as nothing else could. It addressed the heart of our frustration. But Death Wish was a sheep in wolf’s clothing. It was a be-careful-what-you-wish-for warning hidden (perhaps too well) beneath a savage fable of wish fulfillment and revenge.
Caught between literary and genre fiction, Death Wish destroyed the ramparts of convention and loosed the dogs of war. Led by Don Pendleton, dirty dozens of hard-bitten, cynical, fast typing genre writers charged into the breech. With his novel, The Executioner #1: The War Against the Mafia, Pendleton spawned a whole new fiction genre of men’s adventure paperback original series.
The Executioner Mack Bolan’s deadly fighting skills and fearsome reputation were forged in the hell of Viet Nam. When he returned stateside to find his family destroyed by drugs and criminals, Bolan geared up to bring the hell of war down on the Medusa head of organized crime.
