by Ralph Dennis
“This is Mr. Hardman and his partner didn’t give his name.” Mitchell remained at the doorway behind us.
“For good reason,” I said. “The frisk was cheap shit. We came here with good words on us.”
I watched his hands. He was dealing seconds, doing it slowly at first, and then after I was sure what he was up to, speeding it so that I lost him. “A frisk, Tony?”
“There wasn’t anything said about a second man, Mr. Heppler. I thought that was reason enough.”
“Find anything on us?” I asked it without looking around at him.
“No.”
“That’s all, Tony,” Heppler said.
The door closed behind us. I waited a beat or two before I looked over my shoulder. He’d gone into the reception room.
“He’s something of a hot-head,” Heppler said.
“So am I,” I said.
Heppler sized Hump up. “Maybe you could introduce me to your partner.”
“Hump Evans,” I said.
“I’ve heard about you.” Heppler scooped up the cards, tapped them on the desk and put them aside. “Our mutual friend said you’re looking into what happened to Ronny.”
“That’s right.”
“Have a chair.” He waited until we were seated. “You know Ronny long?”
“Twenty years off and on.”
“Play cards with him?”
“A few times.”
“Win much?”
I laughed. “Not as much as I lost.”
“In his time, he had it all. Nerves, the instincts, and a head like a machine.”
“I heard he lost it.”
“He did. Lost his nerve. After that the rest of it wasn’t worth two sheets of shit paper.”
“How?”
“He used to go to Vegas a few times a year. One time, a couple of years ago, he got into a big game. The way I heard it from out there, he ran into a man who had better cards. Ronny’s instincts said one thing and his head said another. He trusted his instincts and got his guts ripped out and spread on the card table.”
“Bad,” I said.
“It happens. It’s the business risk.”
“You see much of him the last few months, Mr. Heppler?”
“One night every week. Usually Wednesdays. A low stakes game between friends.”
“He win?”
“Food and beer money,” Heppler said. “That is, when he had the cards.”
There’d been a beat, a breath too much in there. I read it the other way. They’d been friends for a long time. A friend couldn’t offer a tapped-out man cash unless he asked for it. But a friend could play a few stupid hands of cards once a week. “Ronny didn’t see through it?”
“See through what?”
I let it drop. “He talk to you much about his personal life?”
“That would have been a ten-second conversation. You know he never got married? Well, he liked women, but he liked cards more. His good years he had a way with the girls.”
“He didn’t talk to you about a girl he was spending time with the last two or three months?”
“No.” He smiled a tired smile. “If there was one, I’m happy for him. And grateful to the girl.”
“How’d he spend his time? He tell you?”
“Only what he wanted to. And it wasn’t much.”
That matched what I knew of him. He was friendly but he didn’t talk a lot about himself. It was like that was a part of him that wasn’t any of your business.
“I’ve run out of questions. Except for one.”
“Which question is that?” He lifted the cards and began to toy with them.
“Who killed him?”
“If I knew that, I’d tell you where to find the body.”
The reception room was empty. So Mitchell hadn’t waited around to kiss us good-by after all. His kiss would have left a hickey anyway.
Hump said, “That didn’t tell us much.”
“A couple of things. Now we know what he did on Wednesdays and we know he didn’t talk about the girl, Regina, even to his best friends.”
“The first part of that scares me,” Hump said.
“Huh?”
“It means we’re going to have to find out what he did the other six days of the week? Is it that long a job?”
“Now you’ve got it.”
Out in the Lounge the Cuban-looking piano player had drawn a few more butterflies. It was flutter-flutter, snap your fingers, while he played “Green Dolphin Street.”
We stepped out into the windy cold. The doorman wasn’t in sight. I stopped and looked in both directions. “You think Heppler might have been telling us something?”
“About Mitchell being a hot-head?”
“Maybe.”
“Fuck him,” Hump said.
We rounded the corner of the building and stepped off the walk onto the asphalt parking lot. My car was away from the building, to the right near a border of young trees. It was dark there, and we were a few feet away, when the doorman eased into the light. He’d been waiting in the tree border.
“You stealing hubcaps?” I said.
He let that slide off him. He opened his jacket so that I could see the butt of his iron. Footsteps behind us now that we were fronted. I turned and looked. It was Tony Mitchell. I guessed he’d been waiting against the side of the building.
“You people got a script for this?” I said.
The doorman said, “Tony doesn’t like spades with big mouths.”
“But both of you love me?”
“You and me,” the doorman said, “we don’t have to dance unless you really want to.”
“That’s what the iron’s for? So I won’t ask you to dance?”
“I don’t need the piece.” But the doorman didn’t make a move to take the iron out and put it aside.
Hump took off his coat and handed it to me. “All this asshole wants is his introduction to me. Let it go at that.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” He shucked off the tie. As he passed it to me, he said, in a whisper, “Keep the other one off my back.”
“If you say so.” I walked toward the doorman. He backed away until he was in the space between two cars, mine and a dark blue Mustang. His hand touched the butt of the piece.
“Relax,” I said. “He wants me out of it.”
“We watch?”
“That’s it.” He kept his distance. I wasn’t as close as I wanted to be. I’d have to wait until the fight started, until he got distracted.
“Come on, cunt,” Hump said, “tell me where you get your hair curled.” He had his hands up and ready.
At first it was a dance, Mitchell circling him, his shoes making the scuff-scuff and his left flicking out, not coming within inches of Hump. And Mitchell was doing the snort-snort that was supposed to tell us that he’d trained some for the ring.
Hump watched him. He wasn’t dancing. He was turning slowly, keeping Tony in front of him. “This one of those new dances where you don’t touch?” Hump said.
Mitchell moved in. He was a lot faster than I’d thought. He used the left jab and Hump brushed that aside with a forearm. He hardly saw the right that hit him about cheek high. It rocked him some. It was a good punch and it was the first time I’d seen Hump hit that hard.
Mitchell rasped at him, “That better?”
The doorman was about to pee in his pants he was so happy. I took a step toward him. He didn’t even notice. “Cut him up, Tony.”
Another step. I was at arm length.
Hump hadn’t thrown a punch. It wasn’t his style against a boxer anyway. He wanted to get in close where he could use his strength. The way Mitchell could use that right, he’d have to take some punishment to get past it.
Slap. Slap. Mitchell used the left on him. Jabbing at him. About one in three got past the forearm. The lefts didn’t have the steam of the right but they were bruising. In the long run, handling it that way, Mitchell could damage an eye or
cut Hump’s face up into little strips. It was a good thing Mitchell didn’t have the patience. The success he’d had with the one right he’d thrown spoiled him. He wanted to use it again. Hump must have seen it the way I did. He waited him out.
When it came it ,was a good solid right. It hit Hump in the throat, but he’d taken most of the steam by ducking his head under his shoulder. Now, instead of dancing away, putting distance between them, he stepped in to Mitchell. He took one more right in the chest getting there. But he had Mitchell by the back of the neck and his left hand had Mitchell’s right arm, pushing it out and away. This didn’t stop Mitchell. He kept ramming his left into Hump’s kidney. I could almost feel that left. From the way Hump jerked after each blow I knew they were hurting him.
The hand was behind Mitchell’s head for a reason. Hump took the bad punishment while he steadied Mitchell’s head. He leaned forward and butted Mitchell across the bridge of the nose. The crunch of Mitchell’s nose getting spread across his face buried itself in the grunt that came out of Mitchell’s mouth. The left quit digging into Hump’s kidney. Hump released Mitchell’s neck and grabbed the right arm high, about at the elbow. He turned and put a hip check on him and threw him. They were about twenty or thirty feet from the nearest car. Mitchell started out high but by the time he reached the car the arc had flattened out. He hit the car about bumper high. He grabbed at the bumper and tried to pull himself up. Hump didn’t give him the time. He crossed the twenty or thirty feet in about three steps. His left pushed at Mitchell, straightening him up. He hit Mitchell about belly high with the right. The breath went out of him, part grunt and part fart.
Next to me the doorman started his move. He was level with me when his hand reached into his waistband and grabbed the butt of the iron. He thought I was giving way, making room. Instead I swung an elbow at him and caught him across the throat. He fell away and I jumped at him. My left hand grabbed him at the throat and bent him back over the tail end of the Mustang. My right hand pushed at the gun hand, shoving it downward so he could free it from his waistband.
“Turn it loose,” I said. “It goes off and you’ll need a new set of balls.”
He kicked at me. I moved my leg and felt the rough edge of the shoe scrape the calf. I put more pressure on his throat. I heard another blow Hump threw into Mitchell. Mitchell didn’t even grunt with this one. I didn’t have time to look around. Footsteps and hard breathing behind me. Hump leaned across me.
“Get it,” I said.
“Get what?”
“The gun hand—”
Hump caught the doorman by the bicep of his gun arm and squeezed. Just a few seconds and the arm went slack and dead. Hump pushed the arm aside. I reached in and grabbed the butt of the iron and jerked it out. I turned and threw it over the border of trees.
Hump leaned away. “Move him,” he said to the doorman.
I let him pass. The doorman walked over and stood staring down at Mitchell. He was sprawled out on his face right behind my car. He didn’t even twitch.
“Move him,” Hump said, “or I’ll back right over him.”
The doorman squatted and caught Mitchell under the arms. He turned him and then, straightening up, dragged him a few feet to the side.
At a stop light a few blocks away, after I’d caught a red, I shifted around in my seat and had my look at the damage. His right eye was puffed and there was a thin line of blood dripping out of the cut on the left corner of his mouth. I dug out a handkerchief and passed it to him and he pressed it against the cut.
“That was a waste of time,” I said.
“Did seem silly, didn’t it?”
“You think that was what it had written on the face of it? All that for some hurt feelings?”
He nodded. He’d taken the handkerchief to answer me and the shake of his head splattered some blood down across his shirt front. “Muscle has to prove itself now and then. In fact, he had to prove it to Heppler. Heppler might have expected it.”
I dropped him in front of his apartment house and told him to sleep late the next morning. I’d be at the memorial service for Ronny.
He waved and got out and walked up the steps on shaky legs.
I waited until I saw him unlock the door and go inside before I started the long drive home.
All the way home I was bothered by the fight. It didn’t make any sense. At the same time telling myself that out there among the meat-eaters, reason didn’t have a lot to do with anything anyway.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was a strange ceremony. There were hothouse flowers on both sides of the pulpit and the minister, a young man who might have been a student chaplain, talked about Ronny as if he didn’t know him. Of course, by mistake, he said some of the right things. It might have come out of some form sheet that the minister was handed in Bible college. All there but you had to fill in the dead man’s name now and then. He talked about fairness and honesty and how John Kent had been a good man and the world was going to be the poorer because of his passing. Ronny ended up sounding like a Rotarian, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and a high ranking dues payer from the Fraternal Order of Elks.
I arrived early. There was an usher and he wanted to seat me down front. I shook him off and took the rear, left corner of the back pew. It was close enough to hear as much of the service as I wanted to and I had a good seat where I could study the arrivals and tag them as they entered.
The brother was easy. He was wearing a dark gray suit with an armband attached to the sleeve. He looked a little like Ronny and he even carried himself like him, a walk that was a cross between a jerk and a strut.
Mort Heppler came in a few minutes before the ceremony started. He was flanked by a new hard ass. When Mort saw me, he nodded once, very slowly, so that it seemed to take about a minute for the head to go down and bob back up. I couldn’t read anything in his face. And I did want to know how he felt about the job Hump had done on his bodyguard. I made a note to call The Man later and find out. It wouldn’t do to cross Heppler’s path again until I was sure he’d accepted the bad beating as something that Mitchell had asked for.
And the others came. I didn’t know them by name. There was the blind ex-boxer, a black who’d been good back in the early 1940’s, who could be seen any day selling brooms and brushes down on Five Points. I’d heard Ronny’d helped him now and then. And there was the big blonde waitress who worked in the coffee shop where Ronny’d eaten breakfast or lunch when he was downtown. The rumor was that Ronny liked to play Santa Claus for her two little girls.
The rest were the hustlers and the corner people. Wearing their best even if it was a little colorful. Uncomfortable in the church. I watched some of them during the service. They didn’t know when to stand up or when to sit down. And no matter how bravely they sang, and no matter what the hymn was, it sounded like they were whistling “Stardust.”
I got too involved. I was carrying on an under the breath dialogue with the young minister. I wasn’t arguing with him, just correcting him when he slipped over the edge and made Ronny sound pure enough to run a Boy Scout troop. At the same time, I watched those sad old friends. There were some tears and the big blonde waitress gulped and sighed for her breath. Once, by craning my neck, I saw Mort Heppler rubbing at his nose like it itched.
A short prayer and it was over. By my watch, it had been twenty-five minutes. Like the hustlers and corner people, I hadn’t known what to expect either.
I stood up. I decided it might be a good time to have a word with Heppler and find out how he felt about the fight the night before. When he was moved, touched, might be the best time. The outside aisle was empty. I went down it about halfway and cut across a pew, heading for the center aisle. I reached that aisle and found myself waiting for a slot in the traffic when I looked back toward the entranceway.
A girl was there. I had no way of knowing how long she’d been at the church. Dark-haired, small and pretty. And she didn’t fit. Not with the other hustlers. I made my g
uess she was probably the Reggie or Regina we’d been looking for.
I made my own slot in the traffic and plowed toward the entranceway. I didn’t get far. I had the bad luck to brush up against a big bruiser who must have been a bouncer at one time or another. He whirled on me and gave me a shocked look.
I said, “Excuse me,” and tried to edge past him.
He caught my shoulder and the strength of that one hand numbed my arm right down to the tips of my fingers. “Mister, you show some respect for the dead.”
“I’ve got to see somebody.”
“Respect,” he said. And he held my shoulder until I nodded. He released me then and I passed him at a slow walk. It took me a couple of minutes to reach the entranceway. The girl wasn’t there anymore. I hurried out to the church steps and stood there, looking in both directions. Nothing. I remained there for another ten minutes, tagging each person and the car they got into, just in case she’d reached a car and hadn’t driven off yet. It didn’t work. She’d vanished. And I made the mistake of staying too long. The young minister came out and saw me and thought I’d stayed behind to talk to him. I had to shake his hand and say I liked what he had said about John Kent.
He was grave and modest and he wanted to comfort me in my time of grief. I lied and said I was comforted, very much so, and then I backed down the steps and got away before he made a reach for my soul. I could see he was leaning in that direction.
The eye wasn’t as bad as I’d expected it to be. The cut on his lip was scabbing and there was a swelling on his left cheek where Hump had taken his best shot.
I unloaded the Care package I brought with me. Two half quart cartons of coffee and a dozen sausage biscuits wrapped in foil bags. I ate a couple of the sausage biscuits and drank my coffee while Hump stood under the shower for about twenty minutes.
Dressed and seated across from me, Hump took one bite from one of the biscuits and made a face. “You should have brought a milkshake.”
