by Ralph Dennis
“I’ve been calling you everywhere,” he said. He sounded mean and sleepy.
“We’ve been watching Atlanta’s death rate go up. You got the call, huh?”
“Right after you left here.”
“You stall?”
“As much as I could,” The Man said. “Like you told me to I had him read off a page.”
“And?” I turned and looked at the bar. Some hustler trim was talking to Hump.
“He seemed amused. He read me a page and he acted like he’d be glad to read the whole ledger to me.”
Broken thumbs. Punishment for pushing the button a few too many times on a xerox machine? “How much of a stall?”
“Until Monday night. I told him I’d have to bring in the money from out of town.”
“How and where?”
“He didn’t say. He’s careful. He’ll call back here Monday evening early, he said.”
That left me Sunday and a good part of Monday. It wasn’t much.
“Hardman, I get the feeling I have made a mistake hiring you.”
“Fire me. I need a Sunday off.”
The hustler trim leaned against Hump and said something in his ear. Warm breath quoting the price. Five-oh for a lot of fun.
“It’s too late. He wants you to make the delivery.”
I said, “I’m close.”
“That a firm promise?”
“No.”
“Goddam it, Hardman.”
“It’s your fault. Who said you had to keep books as good as General Motors?”
After he called me a few names he hung up and I dialed Marcy’s number.
“What are you doing?”
“Reggie and I are watching a movie. I think Audie Murphy is going to win in half an hour or so.”
“Got anything to drink?”
“Remy Martin tempt you?”
“Hump and I’ll be there for the final shoot-out.”
Strong smell of coffee in the apartment. Marcy met me at the door and gave me a one-armed hug. Regina was seated on the sofa, dressed in dark slacks and a frilly white blouse. I said hello to her on the way past while I walked Marcy toward the kitchen. Hump stopped in the living room and I heard him say, “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“We weren’t that close,” Regina said. “Of course, I’m sorry about …”
I lost the rest of it. Lost it in Marcy’s breathing when I kissed her long and hard. “Everything all right here? She get moved in?”
“Yes to both questions.”
I reached past her and got down the Remy Martin. The bottle was about two thirds full. I drew the cork and got down four glasses. After putting three of them aside I poured myself a stiff shot in the other one. “What do you think of her?”
“Kind of distant. I don’t feel like I’m getting close to her.”
“That might be a problem. She might think that’s why I put her here.”
“She’d think that?” Marcy was shocked.
“Could be.” I lifted the glass and took a sip and rolled it around in my mouth. When I swallowed it hit my stomach like a red hot coal. “The kind of people she’d know, even when they play cards with their mother, they check the cards to make sure she didn’t bring in a shaved deck.”
“You the only one drinking around here?” Hump leaned a shoulder against the kitchen doorway.
“Not now that you’ve caught me.” I tipped the bottle and poured shots for him and for Regina. Marcy got down cups and began to pour the coffee.
While Hump poured second shots, I got my topcoat and dug out the list of names I’d gotten from Heppler by way of his hard assed bodyguard. I passed the list to Regina. “Know any of these?”
It was dim light or it was too dim for her. She carried the list to the kitchen doorway. Standing there, back to us, while she read the names and addresses. The time it took her I figured she went through the list more than once.
“No.” She turned back to us. “None of them. Are they supposed to?”
“Maybe not.” I met her and took the list. “It was just a thought.”
“Who are they?” She took her seat and lifted the cognac.
“People who played in the Wednesday games with Ronny.”
“Oh.” She sipped the cognac and made a little face at the burn from it.
“I thought you might have heard Ronny mention one or two of them.”
“No, I don’t think so. You know, he might have, but the names didn’t mean anything to me at the time.”
“Too bad.” I folded the list and put it away. “It could have helped.”
“How?” Regina asked.
I shrugged.
Hump leaned in. “It might have pared the list down for us.”
“Well, since I don’t know any of the five …” Regina began.
Hump finished it for her. “Then we have to check all five out, from the ground up.”
I picked up my empty cup. “More coffee in the pot?”
“About half a cup.” Marcy led me into the kitchen. After she poured me the dregs she started past me. I shook my head at her and she edged around and moved close to me.
I leaned in and put my mouth close to her ear. “Anything happen here last night?” Last night? It seemed more like a week ago.
“Like what?”
“She leave? She make a phone call?”
“I don’t know.”
I read the hesitation. “Come on, Marcy. I didn’t put her here so you’d have to inform on her, but I need to know.”
“I can’t be sure. I have a sort of half-awake memory. It must have been around midnight and I could hear her talking.”
“In her sleep?”
“It might have been.”
“But she slept on the sofa and the phone’s in here.” I gulped the coffee and got some sludge. “You ask her about it?”
“I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed it and, if I hadn’t it still didn’t seem important.”
I reached past her and placed the cup on the kitchen counter. “After we leave, you find out. Do it any way you can.”
I took her hand and we joined Hump and Regina in the living room. Hump was telling her some wild-assed story about a week he and a couple of friends spent in Mexico City a few years ago. I’d heard the story about five times. He always seemed to tell it while I was still sober.
After Hump drove off I turned down my bed clothes and brushed my teeth. Before I stretched out, I got the list of five names and read it through a final time.
J. B. Stark
Suite 7, The Hudson House Annex
Whoever Stark was he was in the money. It was a fancy hotel with a special annex for people who lived there year around. I’d hate to have to pay his rent.
James Falco
5 Winston Place, N.E.
It took me some time to place the address. I was fairly certain it was one of those one-block lanes off Argonne. It was the section being taken over to some degree by the hippie element that was being run out of the tight squeeze area around the Strip. It wasn’t the high rent district. I could mark hungry by his name.
Randy Bass
No. 22 Riveredge Apartments
Half one way, half the other. It was the kind of place that made a bit of a thing about singles activity. Advertised in the Sunday paper with pictures of girls in brief bathing suits lounging around a pool. Probably for the young single executive who liked to drink and party and get laid on a regular basis. It might mean that Randy wasn’t a full-time nightcrawler. A question mark by him.
Dusty Roads or Rhodes
344 Dogwood Lane
Decatur
I’d never known anybody with the last name Roads or Rhodes who didn’t get nicknamed Dusty. Even girls. I wasn’t sure about Dogwood Lane. Out in Decatur there was a wide range, from low rent to $150,000 homes and all the steps in between. It was a waste of time trying to figure this one in economic terms.
Conway Burris
Elgin Hotel
It was
an easy one. The far extreme from the Hudson House. The Elgin was pure fly-by-night. It was a short money place. Where you lived on the way up or the way down, if you were a gambler or some other kind of hustler. Back in the 1920’s it was a respectable family hotel. A visitor to Atlanta might stay there with his wife and kids. Not anymore. He’d get mugged on the way from his room to the creaky elevator. So Burris rated a star rather than a question mark.
Screw the list. I put it under the alarm clock after I set the alarm for eight o’clock.
It was dark in the room. I thought the alarm had gone off. I kept fumbling at the back of the clock, trying to push in the switch, but it was already in and the ringing went on and on. So I dropped the clock on the bed next to me and lifted the telephone receiver.
It was Marcy. “She’s gone.”
“Who? What?”
“Regina’s gone.”
“Went out for breakfast,” I said.
“All her things are gone.”
I kicked the covers away and sat up. “She leave a note?”
“Nothing.”
“You ask her about that call you thought you heard her make?”
“Yes. She said she was calling the man who lived in the apartment next to hers, the one she had on Briarcliff.”
I dug back for the name. “Bob something. Harris, I think.”
“I guess that’s it.”
“When did she leave?”
“I don’t know. Whenever it was, she was awful quiet about it.”
I felt around the bed covers until I found the clock. Seven-ten. “She say why she called Harris?”
“To see if there was any mail there for her.”
I stared at the clock again. It still showed seven-ten. “You always wake up this early?”
“The cognac gave me a stomach burn. I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk and I found she’d—”
“Go back to bed, Marcy. I’ll call you later.”
“Bye.”
I found the Atlanta white pages under the bed. Cotton candy dust floated out with it. I blew that away and plopped the book on the bed. I found a Robert Harris on Briarcliff. I couldn’t remember the number over there but the one listed for him seemed close enough, in the right part of the street. I dialed the number and let it ring. It rang for about two minutes before he answered it.
“Yeah? What the fuck—?”
“Police,” I said. “This is Wilson.”
“Oh.” I could almost feel the strain of Harris trying to pull the parts of his head back together. “Look, if it’s about that noise last night—?”
“It’s not. It’s about the girl who lived next door to you for a couple of months.”
“Sure,” he said. “Regina Clark.”
“She moved out last Monday, right?”
“Yeah.”
“The Friday before that you had tickets to a Hawks game. You dropped by somewhere around eight-thirty or so and invited her to the game.”
“No, you’ve got it mixed up. It wasn’t that Friday. It was a week before that. Maybe two weeks before that.”
Check and double check. “You hear from her since she moved out?”
“Not a peep,” he said.
“No phone call from her a couple of nights before?”
“No.”
“No call to see if she’d received any mail?”
“No. Like I said not a peep. Look, is she in any trouble?”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Harris.”
“About that noise last night—”
I hung up on him.
Before I went in to shower, I pulled the curtains aside and had a look at the weather outside. Cold and gray, a bad day to try to recoup a screw-up. If any day ever was. If any day ever wasn’t.
I stayed under the shower until my eyeballs fogged.
CHAPTER EIGHT
All down the hallway the Sunday editions of the Journal-Constitution were stacked in front of the doors. Here and there, placed on top of the local papers, an early edition of the New York Times. Oh, that is status in the South. People who lived in the annex to the Hudson House could afford it.
No Times in front of No. 7. I bent over and picked up the couple of pounds of Journal-Constitution and nodded at Hump. He reached past me and gave the buzzer a push. I counted up to about sixty and nodded again. Hump gave it a longer ride this time.
I didn’t so much hear the angry stomping as I felt it. It was barefooted, without the hard edges, and it stopped on the other side of the door.
“Who is it?”
“Jim Hardman.”
“Who?”
“Heppler sent me.”
The door swung open. “What does Mort want this time of day?”
I looked down the hall. “We come in? I don’t like talking in halls.”
He waved us in. I looked around for a place to unload the paper. He dipped his head toward an easy chair next to a brocaded sofa. The apartment, what I could see of it, had that temporary look. He’d spent a bit of money furnishing it but not more than half an hour trying to decide how he wanted it to look.
From a slightly cracked door to the right, a girl asked, “Who is it, Harry?”
“It’s not your daddy,” he yelled back. He looked at me and let his eyes brush across Hump. “That dumb cunt thinks my name is Harry.”
Stark wasn’t more than about five-three. Wide blocky shoulders and a chest like a tree trunk. I put his age at about forty-two or three. A peppering of gray along his temples, a coarse-skinned face, maybe Greek.
“What does Mort want?”
“He didn’t call you?”
“Was he supposed to?”
I’d thought he’d delayed so he could ask around. So he could get permission. “I thought he would.”
“Get on with it,” he said.
“We’re poking around in Ronny’s murder.”
“Cops?” His laugh didn’t have a speck of humor in it. “I let cops in my house?”
“Not cops,” I said.
“That’s better.” But he still had the wary look.
“The Friday Ronny was killed we think he might have been playing cards with some people at his place. He ask you?”
Stark looked around the living room. It was a slow, unhurried look. He located a pack of cigarettes and walked over and shook one out. He lit it and coughed. “Let me tell you something about myself.”
“All right.”
“When I was a kid, I was a dumb kid. What do you expect from a kid who comes over on a boat and can’t even speak the language? But I learned fast. I took the crash course. I learned to speak the language and everything else I needed to know. The last thirty years or so I haven’t done one dumb thing. You got that?” I nodded. “Knowing that, you think I’m going to waste an evening playing penny, nickel and dime with Ronny?”
“You knew he was flat?”
“Flat? No, just chicken. He didn’t have the nerve to bet what he had.”
“But you played with him on Wednesdays.”
“He was Mort’s friend. Mort can do social work if he wants to.”
“Social work?”
“You know, trying to pump him up, trying to give him his nerve back.” Another puff at the cigarette and another cough. “And it won’t work. You play cards, you play the same way for a dollar that you do for a thousand. You don’t shift gears between Wednesday and Friday.”
“Harry?” It was the girl calling from the bedroom.
“Yeah?”
“Bring me some juice when you come.”
“Sure, baby.”
“The others who played on Wednesdays, you know which ones might have played with Ronny on a Friday?”
“Any of them. All of them. How the shit should I know?”
He led us to the door and swung it open. “Sorry to hear about Ronny. That was a hard way to go.”
I stopped in the doorway. “Twenty years ago he was the match of anybody in town.”
Dull hard eyes look
ing out at me. “I wasn’t in town then.”
The Elgin Hotel hadn’t changed. The smell of dust, of rusty steam heat and garbage blew down the halls in waves. Several of the tenants had put their trash cans outside their doors to be emptied by the hotel help. The help hadn’t made the rounds yet. Just walking by I could see chicken bones, sandwich wrappers, outside edges of pizza crusts.
We were on the third floor outside of room 303. Hump knocked. No answer. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked. That was foolishness at the Elgin. I’d known people to get killed for a couple of dollars or over a bottle of booze.
We went on in. Conway Burris was stretched out on the narrow bed. He was face down, wearing a dingy gray t-shirt and ragged red silk shorts. The smell of something sour like vomit was in the room. Hump walked around the bed and looked down at him. I passed up the look and gave the top of the dresser a look through. A five and a couple of singles, a bowl of change. Four unbroken decks of cards and next to them a catalog from the Windy City Gaming Company. I flipped through the catalog. There was a bit of wordage in there about doing card tricks on your friends but the main product offered for sale was the line of marked cards, readers, cards with minor changes in the designs on the backs. Across the table you could read the values of the high cards in the deck. The catalog gave me the idea that the four decks of sealed cards were probably marked.
I circled the bed and looked down at Burris. Head and face almost buried under his shoulder. A couple of days of stubble on his face. Hair thinning. Old before his time. On the floor beside the bed an empty pint gin bottle. Next to the bottle a drying sticky stain that might have been vomit the evening before.
I shook my head at Hump and we backed out of the room. Out in the hall, the door closed behind us. Hump said, “Not sure that stud could tell us much.”
I nodded.
“He’s not the master criminal type.”
“Hardly.” We stopped at the elevator. “Fifty thousand paid and another hundred on the way and he’s learning to play readers? Not a chance.”
Two down and three to go.
The Riveredge Apartments and not a river in sight in any direction. Hastily built junk apartments. When the spring came grass would probably grow up between the tiles in the living rooms.
