Just when he got back from the service, they started a phony clean-up wave in Tampa. I think poor Ray really believed it was on the up and up. Anyway, Mike Rafferty backed Ray for County prosecutor against Henry Nelson’s man, a fellow who’d been in there for years, and knew which way to look, what to say and when to say it. Rafferty worked hard and Ray won.
And then the fireworks really began. Ray brought in bills, warrants and accusations against half the big shots in the county. What had started out as a token clean up, really began to smoke and smell. I pleaded with Ray to ease up. Rafferty warned me that unless Ray was careful, he was going to withdraw any support he was still giving him. Ray didn’t even care. He had played along with Rafferty during the campaign. He went to fish fries and he did slap backs. But he had the shortest memory in the history of Tampa politics.
With witnesses, poor scared devils Ray’s office rounded up, Ray was ready to pounce on Henry Nelson. I never did know all he had against Nelson. But it was plenty. Maybe Rafferty even helped him on that, to keep Ray off Big Mike’s back.
I tried to talk to Ray, but finally it got so he wouldn’t even see me at his office, and he wouldn’t let Sally and Donnie speak to me. If I condoned a thing, I was for it. If I wasn’t with him a thousand percent I was against him. I knew what was coming, and I spent all the time I could staying as near him as I could.
I knew it was a wonderful, beautiful, crazy damned thing he was trying to do. He was trying to give all those people of Tampa a city they could live in in honor and decency. He was willing to fight by himself. He was willing to rage at crooked judges, and report bribe offers to the Governor of Florida. He demanded that unprejudiced judges be brought in to try the cases he brought to court. He didn’t ask help of anyone, if they wanted to give it, that was fine. If they were with him all the way, and willing to work twenty-four hours a day.
I tried to stay near him. But I had to do it without letting him know that I was trying to protect his very damned fool life. And I had to keep the police department from knowing what I was doing, because they had their orders straight from Nelson.
Then one night as he got off the bus out on Nebraska near Sulphur Springs, and he took the same bus, at the same hour every evening, they got him. I don’t know how many times they shot him. They had orders from somebody to be sure he was dead. Well they were sure of that. I think they got two innocent bystanders just for luck.
Well, I wasn’t any where around. But I knew Tampa. I knew all about it. I knew every back street and every dark alley. And I went through them all. It was just quiet. People who owed me their lives were afraid to speak.
The police department warned me to lay off. The death of the County Prosecutor was an unsolved crime, and they wanted it to stay that way.
They wanted it to stay that way. But I didn’t. I began to get breaks. The first time I was threatened, I took the hoods that threatened me, and I used scalding water enemas on them, and rubber hoses, and I didn’t learn much. But I learned the name of the man who hired them.
He was a bad egg I had known for a long time. He was hard to get to. He was mixed up with Henry Nelson, and he was mixed up with Big Mike Rafferty. He was playing both ends against the middle. He was protected, solid, by both crowds.
When it got around that I wanted to see this fellow, his name was Lucien Ellbeck, the Police Captain called me into his office. There was a lieutenant there with him. Payerhaus. Well, the Captain had coffee brought in. I had one cup. That was all I had to drink.
They warned me to lay off Ellbeck. They told me they knew it was tough about my brother Ray. But tough things happen. And if I knew what was good for me, and Ray’s wife and kid, I would drop the whole thing.
When I left there, I was scared up to here. Not about myself. Not any more. Now that Ray was dead, I figured he was right, and if he died fighting for what he thought was right, I could give my worthless carcass finding out who got him. No, I was scared for Sally and for Donnie. I couldn’t think anything else. I was speeding out to their trailer. I wanted to get ‘em, and get ‘em out of Tampa. I wanted to get them out fast. I felt a bump. But I know today it was no more than if someone had thrown a brick so that it glanced off my fender. I looked back, and didn’t see anything in the lighted street. I kept on going.
Well, they even knew where I was. Sure, they knew I’d run to Sally and Donnie. They wanted me to. They picked me up at the trailer, and hauled me back to jail.
The rest of it was speedy and sweet. They produced a body. A Ybor City tough who was hooked up with the Mike Rafferty clan in the numbers racket. This wop’s body had been run over, and they said I did it. Three police officers that had worked with me for years, swore in court that I was given tests in police station and that I couldn’t talk coherently, and that I was so drunk, I had to be held up while they booked me. Everybody swore to everything. Someone had seen me run over the tramp, they had taken down my license number.
They sent me up to the state pen at Raiford for manslaughter. I stayed there two long, eternal years. And then the way you snap your fingers, I was free. I hadn’t been back in Tampa a week before I heard that Henry Nelson wanted to see me. And if I knew what was good for me, I’d look him up, fast.
Well they’d done a lot to me in Raiford. Sally and Donnie were living in a little town upstate. But Ray hadn’t left them any money, and they were in a pretty desperate fix. Well, I was in a desperate fix myself. I tried to stay away from Nelson. But he must have gotten impatient.
Word came to me that I may have thought I was paroled for good behavior like the parole board said, but that Henry Nelson needed me, and when he sent for a man, he expected that man to come to him, especially when that man owed his very freedom to Henry Nelson.
I was whipped down to size by then. Inside, I’d always been afraid of Henry Nelson. I’d seen what he could do to poor unfortunates he didn’t like. I guess I didn’t have Ray’s guts. I couldn’t fight any more.
So I went looking for Henry Nelson.
• • •
THE LAS NOVEDADES was crowded, without seeming to be. It’s like that with Spanish restaurants out in Ybor City. There’s an air about them of intense quiet. There is no clatter of dishes like you hear in ordinary hash houses. Squat, dark little men sit around over coffee and cigarettes, speaking Spanish softly, with their eyes veiled and watchful.
The Las Novedades has a bar and a dining room. I went through the bar. The bartender spoke to me. I knew some of the men in the room, but none of them spoke to me. I was no longer Mister Henderson to any of them. I was the ex-con, the has-been.
Well, that’s the way I felt, too, when I went through the short corridor to the dining room where Nelson was eating with Lungs, Clark and Buster Eddington at a table for four.
None of them at Nelson’s table looked up when I came in. I took my hat off and held it in my hand. I hate my guts to this day when I think that I did that. It was what they wanted. They had me whipped down, and they knew it.
They let me stand there beside the table. I was just behind Lungs Garcia, his sleek oiled head, his close set ears were at my elbow. Across from him was the lawyer, Phillips Clark. The respectable attorney, in a nice suit, a conservative tie, an expensive white shirt. His hair was touched with gray at the temples, he looked well-fed and prosperous. He owned a home in Hyde Park, two of his kids were in college. He knew every angle Henry Nelson would ever need.
I stood there looking down at the empty left sleeve of Nelson’s gray suit. Nelson was heavy, his shoulders were wide, his neck thick. His hair was beginning to gray, too, and his face looked tortured, but I had no pity for whatever he suffered. I knew him too well.
Nelson went on talking while I stood there like a tramp with my hat in my hands. He was speaking quietly to Buster Eddington. But Buster wasn’t quiet. He was intense and nervous, and excitable. He didn’t sit still at the table, fidgeted with everything, turned over his water and didn’t even look at the glass as it rolled ov
er and smashed on the floor.
At last, when my shirt was wet across my shoulders with nervous sweat, and I’d have walked out if I’d had the guts to do it, Nelson turned and looked at me.
“So you came, boy.”
The rest of them saw me then. Buster ran his nervous hand through his crew cut hair.
“Hello, Dan. Let’s look at you, kid.”
Phillips Clark smiled slowly and nodded absently. “Glad you’re all right, Dan,” he said.
Lungs just turned a little in his chair. His gold tooth gleamed in his wide mouth. “Hello, copper.”
I nodded at them. “They said you wanted to see me, Nelson.”
Henry Nelson looked up at me sharply, was about to speak, and then he said nothing.
Eddington licked his lips, hunched his shirt up on his shoulders and leaned forward across the table.
“All right, Dan. If you got a beef, let’s hear it.”
“There’s no beef,” I said. “Only the same thing. I still feel the same way as I always did.”
“About your brother?” Eddington said.
I nodded.
“That beef has nothing to do with Mr. Nelson,” Eddington said. “Remember that when you talk to Mister Nelson.”
“All right,” I said. “Why’d you want to see me, Mr. Nelson?”
Nelson held up his right hand. “We’ll be through here in a minute, Dan. What say, boys? Want a drink before we go?”
Eddington smiled and nodded, but he said, “No. I can wait until we get up to your place. I don’t like to put things off. Let’s go up and get this thing over.”
The others agreed and got up from the unfinished meal. Phillips Clark and Nelson went out together, and Buster and Lungs walked beside me.
When we got in Nelson’s new Cadillac with an ex-boxer, Big Ben Grounds, at the wheel, Buster nodded at Henderson.
“Danny looks pretty good, boss. They feed you pretty good up at Raiford, Dan?”
“It’s the early hours,” Lungs Garcia said. “Plain food and early hours, eh Dan? I went through that school once.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t too bad for you, Dan,” Nelson said.
“It was plain hell — Mr. Nelson,” I said.
We didn’t say any more until we got up to the penthouse of the Lafayette Hotel on Florida. Lungs stayed with the car, and the rest of us went into a luxurious office that was furnished with low, wide lounges, featured expensive originals on the walls, and looked across Franklin and Tampa streets to the river.
Buster poured himself a drink, and flopped on one of the divans. Phillips Clark went behind the wide, furbished desk and sitting in the swivel chair, cut himself a handmade cigar. Nelson screwed his anguished face into a smile and finally invited me to sit down facing him in one of the deep chairs in the center of the room.
“I’ll come to it directly, Henderson,” he said. “I’ve hired a good many fine men in the past six months. There is a job that has to be done. None of these men has been able to do it. Both Mr. Eddington and Mr. Clark think you might be the man to succeed where others have failed. They have called to my attention a quality of yours that I too have had occasion to witness — doggedness, perseverance, persistence.”
“Sure,” I said. “I persisted myself right into the chain gang.”
Phillips Clark spoke then.
“Let’s face that issue first, Henderson. If you still think Mr. Nelson or any of his associates or employees had any part in the death of your brother, you are of no use to us. And I want to tell you that it was Mr. Nelson’s intervention that brought you out of Raiford where you might have rotted for ten long years. If he had hated your brother, he might have reason to fear you. He wouldn’t have tried to help you. Why don’t you clear your mind of this thing. We attorneys, all of us hate the loss of your brother Ray. The City of Tampa still mourns him. But you’re alive, man. You’ve got to go on living. If you’ll straighten up your thought processes, Mr. Nelson can offer you a good job, and a new chance.”
“Here’s a chance to make yourself five thousand dollars,” Buster Eddington said. “That’s clear. That’s yours, above expenses. You can do a lot with five thousand, Henderson. But you’ve got to straighten up and fly right.”
“Not even five thousand,” I said. “Is going to keep me from trying to find out who killed my brother.”
“You dumb jerk!” Eddington said. He leaped up from the couch and poured himself another drink.
“Wait a minute,” Nelson said. “You’ll get a lot further with five thousand than you will with your seat hanging out of your pants, and you broke. Isn’t that right? Here’s a chance to really find out who killed your brother. You’ve just to do a little job for me first.”
I looked at him. Was he willing to give me five thousand to spend seeking the murderer of my brother?
He must have read my mind. “I’ll go further than that, Dan. To show that I’m not afraid of what you’ll find out, to show I’m trying to be honest with you, do this job for me, and the day you get back to Tampa, I’ll help you — and I’ve got a lot of influence — I’ll help you find the murderer of Ray Henderson.”
Things were really confused for me then. It was like a dream. With all the wrong people, saying all the wrong lines. I know I felt gone inside, and giddy.
I leaned forward.
“There’s a man I want to see,” I said huskily through the pulse that pounded at the base of my throat, “a man I was trying to see when — they — stopped me two years ago.”
Nelson nodded. “Who is he, Dan?”
I took a deep breath. “Lucien Ellbeck.” I said.
The expression didn’t even change on Nelson’s face. “Is that all?” he inquired.
Buster came over and leaned toward me. “Give all your mind to the job we want you to do, Dan, and when you get back, I’ll bring Ellbeck to you, and I guarantee he’ll talk to you. If it turns out Ellbeck isn’t the man you want, we’ll find the right one, won’t we, Chief?”
Nelson nodded. I don’t know, I was all mixed up. They were giving, they were in there pitching. They wanted something. But they were promising me the moon to deliver it. I never had been anything but a Detective sergeant. I didn’t rate all this attention.
“What do you want me to do?” I said trying to joke, “assassinate somebody?”
“I want you to find my wife,” Nelson said evenly.
I looked at him. I wanted to laugh. So the beautiful Connice Nelson had run away from him! She’d been a beauty contest winner, a show girl with a beautiful singing voice when Nelson had married her. He showed her off like she was a prize animal, and she was miserable from the day he married her. That was what I’d heard about them, and I saw enough of them to know that was only part of the truth about them. She had been in love with somebody, way back then, but Nelson’s money and Nelson’s power had gotten her when she was a kid, her head already whirling with the adulation her singing voice and her out of this world blonde beauty was bringing her.
But she paid for everything she got as Mrs. Henry Nelson. Henry Nelson was as miserable and sick as his anguished face showed him to be. Until the baby was born, it had been whispered around town that the great man was impotent along with all his other woes, and that this added to his cruelty.
Anyway, believe me, Connice Nelson had been cheated, hurt, disillusioned, humbled and embittered in her nineteen years with Henry Nelson.
He stood up suddenly and towered above me.
“I want her back. I’m willing to pay you five thousand dollars and help you find the man you want just to have her back. Eddington, Garcia, Clark. They’re the three men closest to me. You know? They believe you can find her. They say that you’ve learned the ropes, the tricks of your trade, the pattern of fugitives, I suppose Eddington would call it, eh Buster?”
“There is a pattern, Chief. Or a maze, perhaps you want to call it. You have to get the combination, isn’t that right, Henderson?”
“I think I can fin
d her,” I said. “If you’ll pay me five thousand dollars and turn over Ellbeck to me, I’ll try to find her.”
I didn’t hear then what the bad thing was that Connice had done to her lord and master, Henry Nelson. We spent two days on all the details, and getting lined up on what had been accomplished by the men who had tried ahead of me, and failed.
I suppose I started out, sorry for Connice, and wishing I wouldn’t find her. But knowing that I would. For five thousand bucks and the chance at Ellbeck, I’d find her. I checked bus receipts in the Greyhound home office, and in the train company offices. I talked to porters, and conductors and bus drivers. I traveled hundreds of miles out of my way. But soon, I knew I was on her trail, and I knew I’d find her.
… . And so here I was, under a darkening sky, on a ship headed east across the Pacific to San Francisco. I was a wiser guy by now. I’d seen all the murder of decent people I could stand. I had seen Ray’s body riddled with bullets. I’d seen the way that powder had burned Connice’s soft cheek. That was enough. I knew now what a ride I’d been taken on, I knew what a sucker I’d been played for.
I knew now what Nelson’s promises meant, and his pledge of money he never meant to have to pay. I knew how far his influence reached. Well, I was on my way back now. I was going to try to get back to him, and he was going to try to stop me. I felt my nails biting into the palms of my hands as I clenched my sweaty fists.
“What had she done to him?” Dorothy said. “What could she have done to make Nelson hate her like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard while I was in Raiford that she had a lover. But I had heard that before. I don’t know what she could have done to Nelson. I hope to God it was good.”
Slay Ride for a Lady Page 9
