by Ralph Dennis
“Billie Joe had been accepted at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.”
I nodded. It had been Women’s College some years back.
“I was out of town at the time,” Charles said. It was given like a fact, but I had a sense that it also meant that he couldn’t be blamed. That if he’d been in town, it might not have happened. It might have been a chipping away at his wife. But done carefully so that he could always argue that he hadn’t meant it that way at all. It was, he could say, just her defensiveness.
Rosemary told the rest of it. The stores in Kingstree, South Carolina, were fine up to a point. When you really wanted to shop you came to Atlanta. Everybody did. Either that or Charlotte. So she and Billie Joe drove down from Kingstree and they had reservations at the Regency downtown. That was on a Friday. Late that afternoon they’d shopped at Rich’s and Davison’s. Just the essentials. In some ways the same kinds of things they might have bought in Kingstree, except that there was more choice in Atlanta. The next day, Saturday, they were going to do the real shopping. At Saks Fifth Avenue at Lenox, that sort of place. It was, Rosemary said, important that Billie Joe go off to college with the right clothes.
That night she disappeared.
“How did it happen?” I could see that they didn’t like the instant coffee. They were drinking the cognac. Maybe that was because, after a good beginning, the furnace seemed to be putting out cold air. I poured myself another shot and topped off their glasses.
“It was a mistake in judgment,” Rosemary said. “I really didn’t know how dangerous Atlanta is.”
“After an early dinner, Billie Joe said she wanted to see a movie.” Charles nodded at the refilled glass, his thanks, and had a small sip.
“I was tired from driving,” Rosemary said. “I wanted to rest. Billie Joe promised she’d be careful. She’d take a cab from the hotel to the theater and a cab back. It was early. It should have been safe, even in a city as large as Atlanta.”
“What movie was it?” Not that it mattered. Not that I cared. It was time-fill until I could ease them out.
“I don’t remember the film but it was showing at the Weis Cinema. That’s on …”
I said I knew where the Weis was. It was near Peachtree and Twelfth, at the far end of what had been the Strip back in the street people days. Now it was a changing area. The building of Colony Square had caused that. And the word was that a number of torches had found work in the area around Tenth Street. People were selling a lot of buildings to the insurance companies.
“The movie should have been over at ten. I waited until eleven before I began to worry. At twelve I called the police.”
“And they weren’t much help?” That was standard. People expected the police to ride herd on all kids who stayed out late. The law didn’t have that kind of manpower.
“They said maybe she’d stopped off for a late snack,” Rosemary said.
The phone rang in the bedroom. I said, “Sorry,” and left them in the kitchen. On the way through the living room I hit the thermostat another lick. The furnace didn’t even grunt at me.
Hump said, “Why’d you run off?”
I said I hadn’t exactly run off. I’d been made to feel like somebody’s old uncle.
“I’ve moved on,” he said. “I’m at this English-pub-type place. Dart boards and Watney’s Red Barrel on tap.”
“Have one on me.”
“No, look, there’s a lot of trim here and some of it is in your age bracket.”
“I’m busy.”
“You mean … with business?”
I said I didn’t think so. I told him about the Atkinsons and the part of the story I’d heard about Billie Joe.
“We could use a job,” Hump said. That was Hump for you. A couple of lean months and job choice went out with the garbage. He was ready for anything that paid real money. And I knew he needed the cash. He threw it around like a drunk pimp sometimes.
I told him I’d wait and see but I didn’t think I was much interested in this one. People who killed clerks at 7–11 stores when they didn’t have to weren’t the kind of people I wanted to know close up.
“Call me in the morning.”
I said I would. Late in the morning.
Back in the kitchen I had my look at the Atkinsons. His face was flushed, dark, angry. Hers was ice-white. I had the feeling they’d had an argument while I was on the phone. I gave them time to settle down. I had a sip of cognac and looked at the kitchen clock. It was thirteen minutes of two. Their crippled story, the way it limped, it might be five a.m. before they finished with it.
I leaned back in my chair and nodded at Rosemary Atkinson.
“Finally I went to the police station and I argued with them for a long time. They sent a detective with me and we went to the theater and we rode around the area for more than an hour. We looked in the eating places and we walked through the bars. We didn’t find her.”
“And the detective said that Billie Joe was probably at the hotel wondering where you were?”
“But she wasn’t.”
“I flew in the next day,” Charles said. “You won’t believe how unresponsive the police were.”
“I believe,” I said.
“It seems that Atlanta is the primary destination for most of the runaways in the Southeast.”
“Billie Joe didn’t run away.” Rosemary was talking to me. I guess she thought she had to convince me. “She was happy. She was looking forward so much to going away to college.”
I could figure the rest of it. The police didn’t have a body and there wasn’t any evidence of a kidnapping and the girl was young and the police decided she was just another runaway. And they’d listed her that way and gone on to other business.
I knew it all. I’d heard it all. I decided I’d do the question-and-answer approach and try to cut down the time it was taking. The his-and-her storytelling would take until breakfast.
“Was there a ransom demand?”
“No,” he said.
“Any word from her at all?”
“Nothing.”
Rosemary said, “We ran notices in the personal sections of all the local papers.”
I knew those too. Come home, Billie Joe. Mother and father forgive. No questions asked.
“And we offered a $500 reward for information about her.”
“How?”
“On those advertising cards on the insides of Marta buses.”
It was a new approach. I didn’t ride the buses much but they seemed to advertise everything else. Why not a lost child? “Nothing from that either?”
“Some crank calls,” Charles said. “Others seemed promising.” He shook his head. “In each case it turned out the person only wanted a chance at the $500 and didn’t know a thing about Billie Joe.”
“Charles stayed with me for a week.”
“I have a business to run,” Charles said.
“I know that,” she said. Then to me: “I stayed for another week. I spent whole evenings in places like The Lighthouse and the Stein Club. I don’t know what they thought of me in places like that.”
“At the end of the second week, I told her to come home.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“It was hopeless. I don’t know what I really thought. Maybe I began to believe the police. That Billie Joe was a runaway.”
“I hated to give up,” Rosemary said.
“I convinced her that if Billie Joe wanted to get in touch with us, she knew we’d be in Kingstree.”
That took us up to the second week in September. I looked at the clock. We still had the rest of September, October, November and part of December to go. It didn’t look promising. The question-and-answer method hadn’t worked. Maybe they’d told their story too many times, to the police or to friends. Now it was almost scripted for them: you say this and I say that.
“The robbery last night … is that the first time you’ve heard of her? If the girl I saw last night was Billie J
oe.”
“No,” Rosemary said, “there was one other time.”
“That was in late October,” Charles said.
Two young men and a girl held up a small supermarket off Peachtree Road. There’d been a couple of robberies before that and the owner had put in a security system that included a movie camera that could be activated by the cashier. A detective on robbery detail had a look at the film. He remembered the woman from out of town who’d been raising hell about her daughter being kidnapped. He thought enough of his hunch to check back on the pictures of Billie Joe. He wasn’t entirely sure he had a match, but it was close enough so that he’d contacted the Atkinsons in Kingstree.
“I’m sure it was Billie Joe,” Rosemary said.
“They weren’t very nice about it,” Charles said.
That was to be expected. The Atkinsons had been tearing strips of hide off the Atlanta police. Two months of taking that and now the police could say, See, see, see, this daughter you say was kidnapped is a criminal.
“In the film, was she armed?”
“No.”
“But the guys were?”
“Both carried guns,” Rosemary said.
“Handguns?”
She nodded.
It wasn’t a thing most people wanted to believe. The truth: if you pointed a gun at people enough times, sooner or later you pulled the trigger. And most of the time the one with the gun wouldn’t be able to say why. Or if there was an answer, it was some kind of Billy the Kid crap. The crazy reasoning: I wanted to see what would happen.
“And if the girl last night was Billie Joe, that’s the second job they’ve pulled?”
“There might be others,” Charles said. “The police have four or five more where two young men carried out the actual robberies while someone waited in the car. The police seem to think that Billie Joe might have been the person who remained in the car.”
“Well, that’s that.” I collected the cups and rinsed them and left them in the sink. “I can’t say the girl was your daughter and I can’t say she wasn’t.” I tapped the cork into the cognac and looked at them. As far as I was concerned the talk was over. That was it. “I don’t mean to be rude but I have to get up early in the morning.”
“You’re not rude at all,” Rosemary said. “You’ve been kind to listen to us.” That wasn’t all. I could see that she was looking at her husband. It was his shot.
“Mr. Hardman, I understand you do jobs now and then.”
“If you mean P.I. work, I’m not licensed.”
“I understand that,” Charles said.
“But it’s just as well. If I was licensed, this isn’t a job I’d take on. It stinks like rotten meat.”
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Hardman.” Her eyes begged at me. “Billie Joe is just a child.”
“Then she’s not the girl I saw in the 7–11 last night. The girl I saw had just seen a woman killed, maybe a few seconds before, and it didn’t seem to bother her at all. Or maybe she pulled the trigger. Whatever. It’s a police matter now. Killing is. Robbery is. They’ll find your daughter for you … if that was your daughter. And if it was, you’d do better to save your money and make a down payment on the best lawyer in the country. Foreman or Bailey, somebody like that.”
He accepted it. I’d known he would. That was his businessman’s sensibilities. If you accepted the profits, you learned to live with the losses too.
Rosemary said, “But if nobody will help her …”
Charles put a hand on her arm and stopped her. I saw a slight shake of his head that silenced her. In the living room he thanked me for the coffee and the brandy while he helped her with her coat. He struggled into his topcoat and waited while I switched on the porch light and opened the door.
“If you change your mind …” she said.
“I won’t.”
“Rosemary, stop it.” It was an order and it was as if he’d hit her between the eyes.
I closed the door and went into the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time. I felt like a number-one bastard. I’d taken worse jobs in my years away from the force. Those favors I did for people with the cash under the table.
I returned to the kitchen and had another shot of the cognac before I put it in the cabinet. The smell of her perfume was in all the rooms. It was gut-grabbing and groin-clawing.
It was an hour or two before I could sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
Of course, I’d lied to the Atkinsons. There wasn’t any reason to get up early. I could remain in the blanket womb the rest of the day if I wanted to. It was one of the dull times, days when I thought I needed a hobby like matchbook collecting. Days when I woke up feeling strong and half-convinced myself that I ought to do something about the front yard. By the time I’d had breakfast and read the Constitution all that puffed-up energy had vanished. Matchbooks weren’t that interesting and the yard could wait another week or two.
Or it could wait until spring.
The dry, burnt taste of cognac outlasted toothpaste and mouthwash. A dull headache reminded me that the brandy had been only six or seven years old. That was raw when you thought of the blends that were fifteen or twenty years in the barrel.
All those cigarettes and that frustrating talk hadn’t helped either.
And during the night, almost every hour on the hour, I’d awakened with the nightmarish feeling that the walls and floor of the bedroom were covered with frost. Each time I’d waited for the sound of the furnace cutting in before I dropped back into sleep.
Yes, Jim Hardman has his winter problems.
One more problem rang my doorbell a few minutes before eleven. I opened the door and looked at the young detective who’d been at the 7–11 store a couple of nights before. I remembered that his name was Ellison.
He flipped a cigarette over his shoulder onto my brown winter lawn. “You going to ask me in, Hardman?”
“This business or social?”
“Business,” he said.
I backed away. “As long as it’s not social.”
On the way past me he gave me a slit-eyed stare. “You got something against the police?”
“You don’t invite me to your parties anymore.”
“If you’re not on the list, then there’s good reason.”
I slammed the door. “So I hear.”
He followed me into the kitchen. I got my cup from the table and mixed myself another cup of instant. I returned to the table, sat down and opened the sports page. I’d already read the parts that interested me but he didn’t know that.
“You got some coffee you can spare?”
I pointed at the kettle. “Help yourself. Like you said, it’s not social.”
He selected a cup from the dish rack and rinsed it. He ran a finger around the inside rim of it. That was his way of knocking my lifestyle. I didn’t let it bother me. I pretended interest in an article about Georgia Tech basketball.
After he’d made himself some coffee he stood across the table from me. “I figure the Atkinsons stopped by to see you.”
“Is that a question?”
There was a beat while he found a spoon and added sugar. “Yes, it’s a question.”
“They wanted to know if I could identify their daughter as the girl in the store that night.”
“Could you?”
“Not really,” I said. “Might be and might not be.”
“That all?” He gulped the coffee and made a face. “This is awful, you know.”
“That’s because it’s free.”
“And that was all of it?”
“As far as I was concerned.” I turned the page and creased it carefully. I’d have done the subway fold but I didn’t think it would impress him. He was too small town.
“No favors this time, Hardman?”
I kept the paper between us. I tried reading about the Hawks. It was the usual article about their need for a big league center. I’d agreed with the writer the first time he’d wr
itten the piece.
“No favors this time?”
“That sounds like a question?”
“No,” Ellison said, “that’s an order.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know.”
I was running out of sports pages. If he stayed much longer, I’d have to read the financial page. While I was thinking about that he solved it for me. He leaned across the table and rammed an open hand down the center of the paper. It tore down the middle and left me holding the corners.
“I’m talking to you.”
“No doubt about that.” I gathered together the parts of the sports section, wadded it up, and tossed it toward the trash can. It hit the front rim and bounced back. “If I’d hadn’t already finished the paper, you’d owe me fifteen cents.”
“Try and collect it.”
I stood up. I watched him place his cup on the table and straighten up. He was ready. No, that wasn’t the way it was going to be. I held it in. I scooped up the ball of newspaper and jammed it into the trash can. “You done, Ellison?”
“For the time.” He relaxed.
“The door’s not locked.”
“I spelled it out for you. No favors. You mix in this and being asshole buddies with Art Maloney won’t get you a thing. Not even a half step.”
“That’s clear enough.” I passed him and crossed the living room. I swung the door open and waited.
“I’ll see you again,” he said on his way out.
“Next time bring a piece of paper that says I’ve got to talk to you. Be businesslike about it.”
He turned on the porch. He had something he wanted to say. I didn’t want to hear it. I slammed the door and hit the lock. He shouted. Part of it got lost in the door slam, the rest when I turned and walked back into the kitchen.
It was a dumb move on my part. There were too many ways they could hassle you if they wanted to. Nit-picking shit. Not that it made that much difference with me. They’d already marked me in the black book. Rotten, bad ex-cop. What else could they do to me?
“You should have stayed around last night.” Hump slouched in my easy chair. A beer in one hand, a ham sandwich in the other.
