Working for the Man

by Ralph Dennis

  WORKING FOR THE MAN

  RALPH DENNIS

  Copyright © 2019 Adventures in Television, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Afterword “Ralph is the Man!” Copyright © 2019 by Hank Wagner. All Rights Reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1-7324226-7-2

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7324226-7-2

  Published by

  Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Also by Ralph Dennis

  The War Heist

  The Hardman Series

  Atlanta Deathwatch

  The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

  The Golden Girl And All

  Pimp For The Dead

  Down Among The Jocks

  Murder Is Not An Odd Job

  Working For The Man

  The Deadly Cotton Heart

  The One Dollar Rip-Off

  Hump’s First Case

  The Last Of The Armageddon Wars

  The Buy Back Blues

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book was originally published in 1974 and reflects the cultural and sexual attitudes, language, and politics of the period.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was Sunday morning and I didn’t want to get out of bed. That’s not remarkable. I’m that way most Sundays, but this time there was a better reason. Beyond my bedroom window, I could hear the icy wind making those old radio serial sound effects like ghosts howling in the attic. It was almost enough to convince me to put my head under the covers and not come out until Monday.

  Even in Atlanta Saturday night is a big night. Marcy and I had planned on an early dinner at The Abbey and a flick later, if we felt like it. We didn’t even get out of my house. What had been a slow winter rain turned into an ice storm when the temperature dropped after dark. The trees became coated with sheets of ice and when the wind blew through the limbs they creaked, and now and then there was a popping explosion when a tree split somewhere off in the distance. A couple of times during the night I awakened to a blue-red flash on the skyline that meant a transformer had gone up.

  The second hand on the electric clock still moved. That told me the electricity hadn’t gone out during the night. Below, in the basement, the furnace chugged along with that “I can’t make it, I can’t make it” kind of rumble. And I believed it.

  Up against me, blowing warm air in my face, Marcy said, “I’ve got two friends coming for lunch.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Nobody is going anywhere today.”

  “But …”

  “I just hope there’s something to eat in the house.” I knew there was. It was just my way of confusing her mind.

  “But … they’ll be there at one o’clock.”

  “Don’t whine.”

  “After I make breakfast, you’ll have to drive me. I can’t drive in this ice.”

  “Call them. I’ll bet they’ve been trying to reach you for an hour to cancel out.”

  “You think so, Jim?”

  “Sure, and I know one thing more. Your reputation is ruined. Any girl who’s not home on Sunday morning must be out screwing.” I rolled toward the night table and grabbed the phone. I lifted it over me and dropped it in her hands. “Call them.”

  I was asleep by the time she’d dialed the first number.

  The bed was empty when I came out of the dark deep, drawn, I guess, by the smell of frying salty country ham and the flour-butter scent of homemade biscuits. And floating over all that, waves of perking coffee.

  “You were right.” Marcy, wearing jeans and one of my old shirts, dumped a pan of biscuits into a bread basket and pushed it toward me. “Ethel Ann said she’d been trying to reach me.”

  “She giggle about your love life?” I broke open a biscuit, buttered it, and placed a hunk of ham in the middle. It was the real country ham. Dark and hard and salty as sea water.

  “And Ruth said her electricity is off and she’d have to stay at her mother’s until it comes back on.”

  I chewed on the ham biscuit. After I choked it down, I said, “Glad you didn’t go charging out?”

  “Of course.”

  She brought the coffee pot around the table and refilled my cup. I put up an arm and wrapped it around her hips. She’s a tall girl. Close to her, I could smell the warm bed scent of her. It was better than any perfume.

  It had worked out the way I’d wanted it to. I didn’t much like driving on ice either.

  It was almost one in the afternoon before the Sunday paper got delivered. I was thawing it out in the living room when the phone rang in the bedroom. Marcy was changing the sheets and making the bed. I waited until she called me.

  “It’s for you, Jim.”

  “It ought to be. It’s my house.” I patted her on the rump on the way past her. “Yeah?” I said into the receiver.

  “The Man wants to see you.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It don’t matter.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and turned and got a disapproving look from Marcy. “Let me talk to him.”

  “He can’t come right now. He’s in his bath.”

  “What does he want to see me about?”

  There was a hesitation. The caller wasn’t used to that kind of question. The Man was a black ex-pimp who worked his way up to become the top man in the rackets in Atlanta. A lot of clout and power. When he spoke and when he hooked a finger at you, your a-hole tightened and you were supposed to come running. “You get the morning paper, Hardman?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “Read it yet?”

  “Just the headlines on the front page.”

  “I’ll hold. You read about the killing on page 5A.”

  I put the receiver aside and found the A section in the living room. I flipped over to page 5 on my way back into the bedroom. There was a small piece on the bottom left of the page, next to a big ad for Davison’s Department Store.

  Torture Murder of Gambler Probed

  I read it through once. A known gambler named John B. Kent had been found in his apartment at the Starlight Estates by the resident manager. He’d been tortured and killed. Kent had a number of arrests in his past, all related to gambling activities. He was 60 and unmarried. The police had no leads but they were questioning tenants at the Starlight Estates.

  I put the paper aside. “So what? I’ve read it and I don’t know anything about him.”

  “But you know old Ronny?”

  “Sure.” I felt the first brush of a chill.

  “Kent was old Ronny.”

  “How—?”

  “He fought under that name when he was young. Ronny Gellin. And he used his real name after that.”

  I remembered. When he’d been fighting it had been the time of the fast, young Jewish welters and lightweights. A good reason for taking the name.

  “I knew him then,” I said. And I could remember the lumpy scar tissue around his
eyes and the way both ears were.

  “The Man wants to talk to you about him. You willing?”

  “I don’t want to drive in this crap.”

  At the foot of the bed, tucking in the blankets, Marcy laughed at me.

  “You alone?”

  “No.”

  “A driver will pick you up in twenty minutes.”

  He hung up. I walked around the bed to the closet and started dressing. “I’ve got to go out.”

  “Why, Jim?”

  “It’s important.” I picked warm clothing. A pair of heavy tweed slacks and a wool shirt I wore when the weather got bad. When I got that far, I found a pair of wool socks and unclipped the shoetrees from the heavy English shoes I’d bought a few months back. “I’ll call you in an hour if it looks like I can’t come right back home.”

  “What is it, Jim?”

  “A man I knew is dead and I owed him. Now somebody wants to talk to me about him and I think I’d better listen.”

  “I might not be here when you get back. I might call a cab.”

  “I can’t help it.” I buttoned up a cardigan and unzipped the bag that covered my heavy topcoat.

  “But I thought we were just going to loaf around all day.”

  “I thought so too.” I didn’t even look at the shoebox in the back of the closet. That was where I kept my spare cash and my .38 Police Positive. I wouldn’t need it and The Man might not appreciate it if I came over carrying iron.

  On the way back into the living room I stopped and put an arm around her. I could feel her back stiffen. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “If I’m here.”

  “Come on, Marcy. I wouldn’t go out if I could help it.” I backed away from her and put on the topcoat. It smelled of a summer in the closet. “Look, there’s stuff to make a jambalaya in the refrigerator. You stew up the sauce and cook the rice and the shrimp. I’ll be back to help you put it together.”

  “And you’ll tell me what it’s about?”

  “As soon as I know myself.”

  Fifteen minutes later I heard the tire chains on the road. It was the only car moving out there. I stood by the driveway and waited until the black LTD slowed to a stop. There were two young blacks in the front seat. Hard dudes I didn’t know. It didn’t mean anything. There was always a big turnover among the soldiers who worked for The Man. Either you made it or you got culled.

  They didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t feel like talking anyway. I opened the back door and got in. On the drive back into town I could see the damage from the storm. Some trees were down and the overpasses were slick. It was hard driving for the black behind the wheel. He handled the ice well, like he’d lived a time up north or had lessons.

  After a few minutes I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes.

  About twenty years had passed since I first met Ronny. It had been right after the Korean War and I’d been mustered out in Atlanta. I had some cash put aside and I was full of piss and pickle juice. It was before I decided to go on the Force. I was drinking and chasing tail and hanging around the fringes of the dark side of the town. Where the nightcrawlers and the meat-eaters were.

  One night I got into a poker game. Ronny was one of the six in the game but I didn’t know him then. He was about forty, a dapper little man, not more than a hundred and forty pounds. Trim, not like he was later when the fat settled on him. Dressed in a dark brown suit with a vest and a red tie with the knot tight and square under his Adam’s apple. Clean French cuffs showing about a half inch beyond his jacket sleeve. The dull wink of small gold nuggets on his cuff links. His trademark, I learned later. He’d won them off a tapped-out gambler in a game that ran coast to coast, three days on a train.

  I didn’t belong in the game. I should have known that. Still, I thought I was hard ass of the year and hadn’t I learned to play cards with the sharp guys in Japan and Korea? As it turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  If I’d known as much about cards as I thought I did, it wouldn’t have taken two hours to figure out what was going on. I’d have noticed how Ronny was playing it. Tight, never in unless he had the cards.

  Six of us in the game. Ronny and me and two other small-timers who didn’t belong either and the two who were working the game for all it was worth. Those two, the way they acted toward each other, you’d have thought they’d just met.

  I was about four hundred down before I got the feeling I was being had. I was getting good cards and betting them and I’d take a pot now and then, the small ones. When the pot was big and I had some of the right cards, enough to stay in, either Frank, the hard dark guy, or Ernie, the small pale dude with red hair, kept bumping the bet up and up. And usually one or the other edged me by a red hair or two. It was the same with the two other small-timers. Looking back on it, I’ve always wondered why Ronny stayed in the game at all. Unless, after he understood what was going on, he decided to see how it would end up.

  Frank and Ernie were damned good mechanics, up with the best of them, and I might have written it off as a bad run of cards if I hadn’t lost on two straight pots. Ernie won the first one and when he put down his cards and said, “Three aces,” Frank reached out and spread the bunched cards. The next hand Frank won with a full house and when he placed his cards they were packed and Ernie leaned over to spread them out and show them. It was all very casual, without a bad beat to it, but it finally got past the thick part of my skull.

  Young then, I didn’t have a lot of cool in the way I handled it. I cleared my throat, feeling the choking anger there, and said, “From now on, unless you’re a cripple, spread your own hand.”

  The table got quiet. Across from me, Ronny pushed his cards toward the center of the table and edged his chair away. The two small-timers did the same. Frank and Ernie didn’t move. Frank looked at me, level and hard, and said, “Close it out for the night, kid. No use getting a rep as a bad loser.”

  “I lose well,” I told him, “when I really lose.”

  Ernie was on my left. He was small and I thought I could handle him if it went that far. I watched him from the corner of my eye. My real attention was on Frank. If there was any danger it would come from him.

  Ronny stood up slowly. He got a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it with a match from a book beside it. He blew a long stream of smoke toward me.

  Ernie said, “You saying something about the game?”

  I didn’t look directly at him. “The game is rank and you know it.”

  I heard the click then. Frank had one hand under the table. I didn’t have to see it to know what he was holding. A switchblade knife, the cutting edge out now.

  Sweating. I was a few seconds from having to hold my guts in with both hands. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Knives aren’t kind to most people and I wasn’t any different.

  Ronny drew on his cigarette. It wasn’t a steady puff-puff but enough so that the coal on the end of the cigarette looked hard and red.

  “I guess you’re just a born loser.” Frank eased his chair back. He leaned forward slightly and got his feet under him. He was going to get to his feet and then come around the table after me. He didn’t get that far. Ronny took the cigarette out of his mouth, flicked the ash away, and rammed the hot coal into the back of Frank’s neck. It must have hurt like hell.

  Frank yelled, “God dammit,” and turned on Ronny. The knife was coming up above the table when Ronny one-punched him. It was a short right that didn’t travel more than about five or six inches. Frank went down backwards, taking the chair with him.

  That left Ernie. Just to be sure there were no more surprises, any rabbit-in-the-hat knives, I leaned in and hit Ernie on the side of the neck as hard as I could.

  After that, we wrote end on the game. While the two small-timers beat and kicked Frank and Ernie in one corner of the room, Ronny and I split up the money. I got back my four hundred and Ronny was about a hundred ahead for the night.

  “They were H-O-ing
you,” Ronny said at the bar down the street from the hotel. He was drinking Jack Daniels with water on the side. I sipped a draft.

  “Good at it?”

  Ronny smiled. “Good enough. I think they might have gotten away with it if they hadn’t been greedy.”

  “You mean, showing it to me two times in a row?”

  “That was it.” He lifted a hand from under the table and reached out toward me. The back of his hand was to me and I couldn’t see anything. He touched the table top and moved the hand away. There was a Queen lying on the table.

  “You too?”

  “I know the game.” He tossed back the shot of Daniels and followed it with a swallow of water. “That last game you had what?”

  “Trip fours.”

  “After the draw Frank had two pairs. Jacks and tens.” He lifted a hand and rubbed four fingers across his eyes. “You see that?”

  “What?”

  He did it again. The same gesture like he was rubbing smoke out of his eyes. “That’s how Frank asked the question. Do you have a Jack?” Ronny rapped the table top with a balled fist. “That was Ernie’s answer. Yes.”

  “Got it.” I felt young and stupid.

  “Frank drops his fifth card on the discards while seeming to be pushing them away. Now he’s got just four cards, the Jacks and the tens. They whipsaw you some with the raises. And when it’s show time, Frank calls his hand and places it on the table bunched.” Ronny, casual and easy, the way Ernie had done it, reached out and made the gesture that would spread the cards. I didn’t see him do it, but when he moved his hand away there was a card on the table. It wasn’t a Jack but I could see how Ernie had supplied Frank with the third Jack that tied up his full house.

  We had another drink and Ronny was ready to leave. I don’t remember much of what we talked about over that second drink. Just the last thing he said. “One thing about calling somebody in a game like that. You ought to be standing up when you do it and you ought to have something in your hand.”

  Now he was dead and for some reason The Man had an interest in it. It was odd. As far as I knew they hadn’t known each other.