by Ralph Dennis
“A block of six checks,” I said. “And there are more out there somewhere.”
“You sure?”
I nodded at Hump. He’d been closer to Joe Bottoms that night in the apartment. He gave his estimate of the envelope that night and the way it was now. “It might have been four or five times as many that night,” Hump said.
Near the end of it, Temple lifted his drink. He looked out the window. We were reflected in the mirror-like panels of the Coastal States Building. Hump finished and lifted an eyebrow at me. I waited.
“You could have told me this earlier,” Temple said.
“And disappointed you if I didn’t find anything?”
“It might have changed my thinking.”
“No,” I said, “nothing would have changed that.”
I watched the corners of his mouth relax. “Was I that overbearing?”
“Enough,” I said. “Enough so that I fell back on something an old scam man told me once.”
“Which was?”
“That you don’t tell anybody everything you know.”
Temple laughed. It was shocking. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh. Maybe, without thinking about it on any conscious level, I’d decided that he couldn’t.
“Another drink?” Temple nodded at his empty.
I said, “Why not?”
One of the waitresses with the long lean legs the Polaris management seemed to prefer passed. I turned and watched her. After she’d gone by, I found myself staring into the eyes of a man seated at one of the inside tier of tables. His table was parallel to ours. A tulip glass of white wine was on the table in front of him. Then I remembered him. He’d been near us when we’d met Temple in the Regency lobby and he’d drifted onto the same elevator, just two steps behind us the whole way. While I stared at him his eyes edged past me and centered on Frank Temple.
I touched Temple on the arm and tilted my head toward the man. “He yours?”
Temple didn’t look around. “He’s my associate.”
I gave the man another hard look. He looked hard-ass. A bodyguard. He had a lean hard body under a blue Brooks Brothers suit that would blend into any crowd or any kind of woodwork. A square jaw with a deep cleft in it. A lightning bolt of a scar with its point buried in his left eyebrow.
“A gun?”
“Not exactly.” He spread his hands. “You don’t know the construction business up north, out in the Midwest. Rackets have a way of wanting a finger in everything. Sometimes it gets rough. Tip makes sure that nobody gets rough with me.”
The man he’d called Tip must have known we were talking about him. He placed an elbow on the chair back and turned until we’d locked eyes. His had a kind of high fever burn to them. Without looking away, he brought the glass to his mouth and let about half a teaspoon of the wine wet his tongue. At that rate, in an hour, he still wouldn’t finish a single glass. That was part of the business.
“He carrying?”
“When he needs to,” Temple said.
Tip’s coat was loose but I thought I could detect a bulge at his right hip. “How’d he get it past the X-ray machines?”
“You have a lot of questions, Mr. Hardman.”
“Call it a natural need to know,” I said.
“You don’t,” he said. “You make a call. Someone here in Atlanta meets the flight. You make an exchange in the airport restroom. And on the way out the exchange is made the other way.”
“You know a lot about how it’s done. Things an ordinary businessman wouldn’t know.”
“It’s not that complex. What I do is hire the best man I can find for a job. He makes his own arrangements. I merely observe them.” He picked up the envelope with the checks in it. He stored it away in his inside breast pocket. “I haven’t asked about your methods either. I’ve assumed you know what you’re doing.”
Hump grinned at me. “That’s some assumption.”
“You mean he doesn’t?”
“He don’t tap-dance good,” Hump said. “But he seems to stumble in the right direction most of the time.”
“That is a special talent,” Temple said. He opened his menu. I swung my head around just in time to see that Tip had received the message. He’d opened his menu a split second after Temple had. Yes, we were having lunch.
Over lunch I made my argument one more time: that he close the Bay City National account. He heard me out, his head tipped over some kind of crab meat on English muffins dish. When I let it sputter to an end, he lifted his head and wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“In one week,” he said.
“In a week,” I said, “two or three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of those checks could …”
“Not if you find them first,” he said.
“That’s a weight to put on my back.”
His nod meant, yes, that is true. And his face was so bleak that I began to wonder if he’d be understanding if I failed. It wasn’t a nice thought.
We rode the open glass elevator down to the lobby. We crossed from the express elevator to the ones that would take him up to his room. He’d said he would be checking out within the hour.
“I’ll leave it in your hands then,” he said.
“I’ll need a way to reach you.”
Temple dug out a leather card case and slid out one of the cards. He turned it and wrote an area code and a phone number. He passed the card to me. “You can reach me at that number any hour of the day or night.”
I placed the card in my pocket without looking at it.
“I won’t be there. It is a kind of answering service. You leave a number and I’ll call you back within the hour.”
One of the elevators opened. Temple and Tip started for it with a crowd of other guests. Temple stopped and came back. Tip followed him. The elevator closed and moved upward.
“I don’t think I’ve said how pleased I am with the work so far. I’m even considering another way of paying you. We could call it an incentive plan. I may pay you a percentage of the face value of the checks you recover.”
“Ten per cent?”
He shook that off. “Perhaps five.”
Another elevator opened. Temple and Tip were the only people waiting. Temple stepped on first and Tip followed. Tip turned and blocked him from view. Temple leaned around him and waved as the glassed-in unit swung up and out of sight.
“Ten per cent would be something,” Hump said. We’d left the lobby and walked outside. The heavy rain had stopped. It was only mist now but there was a coming chill to the afternoon. The wind down Peachtree had the smell of fall in it.
“But five is better than nothing.”
All the pretty ladies on Peachtree were wearing their raincoats. It was a disappointing walk to the Davison parking deck. Downtown Atlanta spoiled you.
It got so you expected wonderful girl sights every time you passed Peachtree Center.
CHAPTER SIX
“In a vegetable crisper?”
I nodded. Marcy and I were having dinner at the Peking Taste at Peachtree and Sixth. It was northern Chinese food and the sour and hot soup, the slow burn of that, hadn’t prepared me for the sauce that came with the pork dumplings. That sauce, sesame oil with fresh-ground red pepper stirred in, was liquid fire. One taste and I grabbed the water glass and sucked on ice.
“Why there?”
I woo-wooed a couple of times. The burn didn’t go away. “Just a guess. Our man, Bottoms, was in trouble. He couldn’t account for the one check Hump had taken from him. Maybe he decided to tell whoever it was that Hump had taken six checks. It gave him a nest egg and, if he got caught, he couldn’t be any more dead. Though I don’t think he thought it would go that far. And if Hump denied that he had the other five checks, who’d believe him?”
“But a vegetable crisper?”
“Best hiding place in the world,” I said. “Who looks in the rotten lettuce?”
“You did,” Marcy said.
“An accident,” I said. “It’s
part of some research I’m doing. It’s for a book I’m going to do someday.”
“About what?”
“Strange things I have found in refrigerators in furnished apartments.”
Before the main course, I headed for the bathroom. The Peking Taste is in the front corner of the Peachtree Manor Hotel. To get to the bathroom you have to cross the lobby and take the elevator down to the underground level where there are a couple of bars. As soon as I got out of the elevator, just as the doors opened, a blond hooker bumped into me getting on. She said she was sorry and the elevator doors closed on her. I went on to the bathroom. Out in the hallway I buzzed for the elevator. When it arrived, the same blond hooker bumped into me getting off. Again, an apology and this time a money look.
Well, all days don’t work out one hundred per cent. The morning and the afternoon had been fairly good. The evening had to be mixed.
After midnight. I couldn’t sleep. I tried not to roll around. On the pillow next to me, Marcy bubble snored away. Loose and relaxed and all the things I wasn’t.
My head was too full.
All that had happened, bright and clear, and every time I tried to decide what came next, the fog and the dark and the cold wind. Black tunnels and mazes and brick walls that didn’t have gates or archways.
At one-thirty, I eased out of bed and headed for the kitchen. The floor was cold. That was because of the cold snap that followed the heavy rain. It would last two or three days and then the false spring would return. Sometimes, in Atlanta, the lasting cold weather didn’t come in until late in December.
I got down the dusty bottle of Armagnac. It was about half full, and I hadn’t thought about it since the winter before. I had one slow shot and I found a box of tea bags and made myself a cup of hot tea to sip along with the second shot.
Another hour, and about two inches gone from the Armagnac bottle, and I’d had one decent thought. At least, if it didn’t lead anywhere, it would fill up the better part of an afternoon.
I licked the edge of the glass, cut off the lights in the kitchen, and crawled back into the bed. One touch from my cold feet and Marcy opened her eyes and blinked at me. “You bastard.”
“Cold feet, warm heart,” I said.
She tucked her feet away from me and closed her eyes again. The Armagnac worked on me and the warmth rocked me and I reached out and caught Marcy’s hand and leaped over the dark edge about one step behind her.
Bad morning. Sand and grit in the corners of my eyes. An Armagnac belch caught halfway down my throat. The first swallow of coffee dislodged it. There.
A note from Marcy pinned to the table by the Armagnac bottle: Is that what cold feet mean? I thought it was poor circulation in old men.
At one, Hump came by for me and we went on a search for Bill Heffner. It was two-thirty before we found him. It was walk around and ask and buy a drink or two. Finally, a bone and skin woman in a red wig In Pete’s Place looked up from her draft long enough to say, “That mouse dick son of a bitch is where he belongs.”
“Where’s that?”
“Union Mission and you can tell him hello from Martha.”
I said that I would and I dropped a couple of ones on the bartender to fill her glass a few times.
The Union Mission is just off Peachtree, a scar on the landscape, a place where the winos and the lost ones live. Maybe we should have looked there first. All the stories we’d heard pointed him in that direction. I guess I had to believe he had too much pride to fall quite that far. If he’d gone down the rung then there must have been some straight truth in the words we’d picked up. Word that Bill had broken down the middle.
Ten years ago, he’d been one of the best scam men in the southeast. He ran a lot of the old scams but when he ran one there was always one new touch that put some shine on it. And, in his time, he’d invented ones that younger men, not half as good as he was, were still polishing up for one new score. When I’d first met him, he was on his way up. He was doing a diamond ring version of the old pigeon drop. Instead of the envelope you “found” stuffed with money in the middle of three or four greedy witnesses Bill used a five-carat diamond. And he’d done the bank examiner for a lot of little old ladies and a hundred others. It was high living and the best of times.
Until he lost his nerve. It was a matter of stolen securities and he’d set up the deal well and he was loose and easy until he realized he’d sandwiched himself between the Dixie Mafia and a ruthless man whose weapons company in Florida was in trouble with the Feds. Either way he worked it, somebody was going to be mad with him and when the money was ready to be counted he backed away. He didn’t make the meet. After that he couldn’t take candy from children.
Hump parked at the lot on the corner of Peachtree and Ellis. We walked the block over to the Mission. It was windy downtown but there weren’t any high buildings to channel the wind where we were going and the sun seemed to perch right over us. That accounted for the row of tired men on the walk in front of the Mission. Winos, like houseplants, always turn to face the sun.
I recognized Bill with the first look. Maybe the wine had him now, and maybe he’d lost his nerve, but there was a hopeful neatness about him. His shoes, cracked uppers and all, had been given some kind of polish and his trousers and his windbreaker had been clean a day or two before. And he’d shaved earlier in the day. There was a cut on his chin. Either the razor had been dull or he’d been shaky.
He’d been heavier the last time I’d seen him. Six feet tall and he’d weighed about two-ten then. Now he might have weighed one-seventy soaking wet. Hard living on the street had taken that high-living double chin away. He was fifty now and he looked every day of it.
I looked past him after I saw him read me. I gave each man a brief Stare. While I was doing this, Hump stood at a distance and puffed at a smoke. Finally, as though I’d decided something, I moved close to Bill.
“You want a couple of hours of work?”
He stood up slowly, careful with old muscles. “Doing what?”
“Yard work,” I said. “Two an hour.”
He hesitated. He weighed it as if he wasn’t sure. A black off to his left stood up.
“If he don’t want the work, I do.”
“He asked me first,” Bill said. It was easy. It wasn’t angry. Just a fact.
“If he don’t want it,” the black said.
“I’m your man,” Bill said.
We walked back toward the parking lot. Bill was in the middle. We were half a block from the Mission before Bill lifted his head and winked at me. “Hardman, I hope you don’t really think I’m going to rake your fucking leaves for you.”
“No way,” I said.
“But it’s a job?”
“Money in it,” I said. “My time’s worth something. So’s yours.”
Bill got into the back seat. Hump drove. I turned and put an elbow on the seat back. Bill wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was looking down at his hands and watching them shake.
“You need a drink, Bill?”
He nodded, eyes closed. I told Hump to find the closest wine and beer store.
Bill said, “It’s easy enough to fight it when you know you don’t have the chance of a drink, but when it’s possible …”
Hump did a few turns. We ended up at a liquor store near Georgia Baptist Hospital. I pushed open the door. “What are you drinking, Bill?”
“White port.”
In the store, I headed straight for the cooler. I found a quart of white port and carried it over to the counter. The clerk behind the register looked at the port and back at me. I guess I didn’t quite fit the image yet.
Bill’s hands were shaking. I tore off the seal and uncapped it for him. After I passed it back to him, Hump pulled away and headed for my house. I looked straight ahead while Bill had his first three or four drags at the bottle. I counted them off in my mind. When I turned, he was smiling.
“It didn’t have to be chilled,” he said.
“Whit
e wine’s always chilled,” I said.
“Not on the street.”
By the time we were seated at my kitchen table, Bill had poured back two thirds of the quart of wine. I realized my estimate had been a bottle or two short. If the mind picking took more than five minutes, he’d be looking at an empty.
While Hump opened a couple of beers, I had a look in my pantry. I found three bottles I’d put away. One was a Marquisat white burgundy I was saving for the next time I boiled a few pounds of shrimp. The other two were American wines. In my rating scale, I liked the Almadén chablis less than the Inglenook burgundy so I dusted that one off and put it in the refrigerator. If Bill didn’t get that far, I could always have it with supper.
Bill had lost the shakes. And he didn’t show the drunk that almost a quart of wine would put on me. “What’s it all about, Hardman?”
“It’s some kind of check swindle.” I took a big swallow of the Bud. “Big company up north. Lot of cash flow. Somebody on the inside ran some checks through the computer. Checks on two different accounts at two banks. Ran the checks through a check writer and got the authorizing signature on them.”
“That’s halfway home,” Bill said. He lifted the quart bottle and let a cupful run down his throat. I knew then he’d been watching when I put the chablis in the refrigerator. “You want to know how you could turn that paper into spending cash?”
“That’s it. You hear anything on the street?”
“If it’s going on right now, it wouldn’t be on the street. That could be dangerous. And, anyway, I don’t walk around in the right circles now.” He gripped the neck of the bottle and tilted it back until the last drop ran out. When he tapped the bottle on the table, I put my beer aside and got the chablis and the corkscrew. He watched patiently while I worked the cork free. “The amount. Five or six figures?”
“Six and rising,” I said. “It might go as high as seven.”
He held the bottle away from him and read the label. He didn’t taste it right away. “Say I was running this, I see it two ways.”
