by Ralph Dennis
“Good trim?”
“An A-minus.” If he’d been a cat he’d have purred. Satisfied was written on his forehead. “The one I’d picked out for you, she might have been an A-plus.”
“I don’t like the smell of meat markets.”
“Breast of beef, thigh of pig,” Hump said.
“Marcy gave me her sorority pin before she left town.”
“Morals, morals. Man, you’re growing old.”
Hump has a lot of trouble with my white cracker ways. It didn’t quite even out. I didn’t have any trouble understanding his point of view at all. Trim was trim and you didn’t pass up any of it. The years you had, that was a one-way trip on a fast train. What you passed up on the first time through you didn’t get a second chance at. Wave good-bye at it. Write it off.
In other ways we’re alike. Marcy says that we don’t have much ambition. That might be true. Might not. Hump is thinking of living long enough to draw his NFL pension. I don’t think I’ll make it to Social Security.
We do just enough to get by. Jobs and favors that pay cash. Jobs that can’t stand sunlight. We like this better than a nine-to-five. Still, income averaging is hard. Some months there’s no income at all.
About two in the afternoon I left Hump in the living room with one of the last beers in front of him. I shaved and took a long shower. It was going to be one of those days. A tour of the town. A drink here and a drink there until suppertime. Smashed by seven.
I dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and walked into the living room. I said, “Hey, how about Cognito’s for supper tonight?” One look and I backed away and slammed the door behind me. Rosemary Atkinson was seated on the sofa, facing the bedroom. When I did the dinner suggestion, she turned away from Hump and looked at me. I got a quick look at the smile she gave my hairy white legs.
I put on a pair of slacks and some shoes and returned to the living room. By the time I got there, Hump had fixed her a scotch-rocks and I sensed that they were waiting for me.
I noticed one thing right away. She looked younger. The night before I’d placed her age close to that of her husband. Today she looked ten years younger and that was probably the right year count. She dressed it too. She was wearing a pair of those recycled jeans sewn out of patches and squares, a black wool turtleneck and black kid boots. What looked like a thigh-length suede coat was at one end of the sofa.
The matter of age brought up an interesting possibility: was the way she looked the night before a concession to her husband? Was it a pretense that she was forty-five and only looked thirty-five?
“Mr. Evans seemed interested in my story about Billie Joe.”
“He’s got a big heart,” I said.
“At least a heart,” she said.
I shrugged and went into the kitchen. I looked into the refrigerator and saw that Hump had made another trip while I was showering. No beer. I got a couple of ice cubes, added a splash of scotch and a trickle of water and stirred it with a finger. I leaned in the doorway and looked at them.
“You remember the detective you talked to … Ellison?”
She nodded.
“He was my first visitor of the day. He told me, in no uncertain terms, to stay out of this.”
“Can he do that?”
“That’s not the question. What he can do is make my life miserable.”
“You never let that crap bother you before,” Hump said.
“That’s true.” I rounded the coffee table and sat on the sofa next to the suede coat. “This time I’m not sure it’s worth bucking it.”
“Go ahead and say it,” Rosemary said.
“Say what?”
“What’s really bothering you.”
“You got here a day late. You missed the body behind the counter. Maybe you ought to make a trip to the morgue. There’s a thirty-one-year-old woman over there. Somebody shot her a couple of times. I was there before the police. I didn’t see a gun in the place. I don’t think she was armed, so I don’t know why they shot her. And I bet they don’t even know why they shot her.”
“Give the rest of the lecture,” Hump said.
“Is it that obvious?” I nodded and shook out a smoke. I lit it and looked at Rosemary. “I don’t know what’s happening anymore. It’s like life’s not worth much. You know the take from that 7–11 robbery? Might have been three hundred dollars. How do you stack that against a life? Ain’t no way I know. But one of those kids or two of them—at least two rounds were fired—decided their need for money was more important than that woman’s life. That’s a shitty decision. It puts me on the other side of the fence from them. If I got involved in this, I’d be the hunter with a gun. I’d be saying stop the same time I was pulling trigger.”
“Then you’d be as bad as you say they are,” Rosemary said.
“Maybe. I don’t think so.”
Hump wagged a couple of fingers at me. I tossed him the pack of Pall Malls. “And if the girl is being coerced, Jim?”
“You believe that?”
He nodded toward Rosemary. “She believes it.”
“And all mothers believe their daughters are virgins.”
He lit a smoke and blew it toward the ceiling. “You’re rough today.”
That was a fair estimate. I couldn’t argue with him. I liked to think I had some balance. That I could look at most things straight on. Now I was out of sync. I had, since the night in the 7–11, what amounted to a permanent tilt. I wasn’t looking at the same world everybody else saw.
“Charles drove back to Kingstree this morning,” Rosemary said. “I stayed behind. I hope there’s something I can do. And I thought you might reconsider.”
“Why me? You act like I’m the only one in town. There’s probably a whole yellow page of P.I.’s. One of them would be glad to take this on.”
“You’ve seen her,” she said.
“That’s not enough.”
“It is for me.”
I shook my head. “Count me out.” I got up and carried my drink into the bedroom. I closed the door behind me. I found a clean shirt in the dresser and tore the wrappings away. I was putting it on when Hump came in.
“You’re wrong about this, Jim.”
“You ask her what happens if you find the girl?”
“No.”
“You ought to,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s about what money buys. It’ll buy you too and if you find that girl and she turns out to be Billie Joe, she’ll be back over the South Carolina border so fast you won’t believe it. And no matter what the truth is, they’ll buy a fancy lawyer and a fancy psychiatrist and they’ll say, yes, this poor little rich girl took part in those robberies but she was forced to do it. They brainwashed her; they threatened her.”
“What the hell do you want, Jim?”
I stuffed the shirttail in and fumbled with the buttons. We were about as close to a fight as we’d ever been in the years we’d been together, during the time we’d had our loose partnership. I took my time. I had a sip of the scotch. “All right, I want this much. People who believe in the law keep talking about everybody deserving their day in court. I don’t think that just means the living. It means the dead as well. That thirty-one-year-old woman deserves justice as much as that pretty blond daughter. Maybe more because everybody seems to be forgetting about her.”
“And if Billie Joe was coerced?”
“Prove it in court.”
“I believe that’s what she intends,” Hump said.
“Want a bet on that?”
He shook his head. “I don’t bet with close-in people.”
It was as close as he could come to saying friends.
“I’m going to help her if I can, Jim.”
“I figured as much.”
“Hard feelings?”
“Not a one.” I tapped him on the shoulder as he stepped away.
Five minutes later, when I returned to the living room, it was empty. They’d left.
I ran small circles in big circles all afternoon. I had a couple of late afternoon drinks at the 1776 on Luckie. Then I walked the two blocks to the Carnegie Way Library and read a couple of picture books on old firearms. Now that was a hobby that grabbed me more than matchbooks.
At six-thirty, I called Hump’s apartment from the pay phone in the library basement. There was a chance he’d still like to have dinner. There wasn’t any answer.
Around seven, I stopped at the Kroger’s at Ansley Mall and picked out a steak. At the nearby wine shop I bought a case of Bud and a bottle of a Beaujolais Villages.
I cooked the steak in my old cast-iron skillet and drank the whole bottle of wine with it. At ten-thirty, I wobbled off to bed.
I don’t know how long the phone had been ringing. As far under as I was, it could have been ten minutes or longer. I fumbled a hand across the table top until I found the phone.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Hump. I’m in a bind.”
With my free hand I continued to search the table top, looking for my watch. It was a few seconds before I realized it was still on my wrist. That was the wine. By the luminous dial it was six minutes after midnight. “Where are you?”
“At the Majestic eating pork chops and eggs.”
That was the all-night diner near the Plaza Drugs. “What’s the problem?”
“I’ve got a bunch of bikers after my ass.”
“That never bothered you before,” I said.
“One or two might not,” he said. “This is more like a dozen.”
“Fifteen minutes,” I said. “Sit tight. Don’t leave.”
“I ain’t about to. They’re outside.”
He broke the connection. I dressed and got the .38 P.P. from the shoebox in my closet. Maybe I’d need it. Maybe not. I hoped not.
CHAPTER FOUR
I turned off North Highland directly into a parking spot in front of the Plaza Drugs. From my car, turning and looking through the rear side window, I could see the front entrance of the Majestic Cafe. The door faced the far end of the large parking lot. Of the string of stores and shops that formed an “L,” only the Plaza and the Majestic were lit up at this hour.
I didn’t have any trouble finding the bikers. Two of them stood, mock casual, in the greenish neon light that flooded the sidewalk. The others hadn’t hidden either. At the last parking space, the one nearest the Cafe and fronting on Ponce de Leon, there was a swarm of them. I didn’t do a head count but I saw seven or eight of them standing and leaning around an old blue VW van. All of the bikers wore the uniform—leather jackets, boots and jean pants.
They had Hump in a box, just waiting for him to finish his pork chops and eggs and walk into the middle of it. I got out of my Ford and dug in my pocket for change. No dime. I went in the Plaza Drugs and bought a pack of smokes. I made certain I got a dime in the change.
“Pay phone?”
The dull-eyed lady cashier nodded toward the door. “Outside.”
I found the phone booth and dialed the police department number from memory. As soon as the switchboard answered I said, “I’m Ashley Phillips of 967 North Highland. I want to report some trouble.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I just left the Majestic Cafe, the one near the Plaza Drugs.”
“Yes.”
“A whole bunch of those bikers are outside. Two of them, on the walk, pushed me and said they were going to kick somebody’s butt and it might as well be mine. And there’s about eight or ten more standing by a van.”
“They pushed you?”
“Almost knocked me down. And those bikers and the others are shouting back and forth at each other like they’re about to start a fight or something.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m at the phone booth near the drugstore.”
“You stay there and when the police arrive you tell them who you are. They’ll need your full story.”
I said that I certainly would, that I was a good citizen, and I hung up and walked back to my car. I got in long enough to take the .38 out of my waistband and stash it away in the glove compartment. It wouldn’t do to be found carrying. With police on the way I didn’t think I’d need it.
I headed for the Majestic. I did a wide loop that kept me away from the van where the large group of bikers was. Even at that distance I could smell grass on the cold wind that blew toward me. Past the van I angled toward the Cafe door. When I reached the walk the two bikers gave me a slow, long look. One turned away and I read the back of his leather jacket. Atlanta Outlanders. Below that was a design that was either the widespread horns of some long-horn bull or the handles of a hog bike. Perhaps it was supposed to suggest both.
It wasn’t a biker outfit I’d heard about. Still, there was a lot of shifting around going on. One bunch of them coming to town and another leaving. The police hassled them when they could and that probably accounted for the departures. A couple of months back there’d been a big trial. A biker from another bunch had raped a girl while his buddies were beating up her boyfriend. Just before the trial, two of the accused bikers had tried to kill the girl to keep her from testifying. They’d blinded her in one eye and torn up her face with a shotgun blast in a high-speed chase on the highway. That incident fresh in their minds and the way the police felt about bikers anyway, that was what I was counting on.
I stopped near the cash register and looked down the counter. Hump was seated, head down, at a stool at the back. There was an empty seat on the other side of him. He didn’t look up when I sat down next to him. He had a pork chop bone in one hand, gnawing at it.
“See them?”
“They’re hard not to see.”
“What’s your count?” He cropped the bone on his plate and wiped his hands with a napkin.
“Too many.”
A waitress stopped in front of me. I ordered coffee.
“We going to camp here all night?”
I shook my head. “I’d say maybe five minutes more.”
“Huh?”
“Wait and see.”
My coffee came. I sipped at it. A couple of swallows and I turned on the stool and looked outside. I checked my watch. It was about time. And there wasn’t any doubt the cops would come. They wouldn’t miss a chance to hassle the bikers. It was one of their late-night sports.
I’d expected sirens. They didn’t come that way. I think they didn’t want to flush them. What I heard first was the squeal of tires and the slamming of car doors. It was loud enough so that heads turned in the Cafe. Two floor waitresses ran to the door and looked out.
“I said, “Now, Hump.”
I grabbed my check. He grabbed his. By the time we reached the cash register, the aisle was packed with people who were pushing and shoving to get a view of what was going on outside. I found change to cover my tab and dropped it on the counter. Hump fumbled with some bills and placed the checks and the bills next to mine. I followed in Hump’s wake as he spread the people. We reached the walk.
There were five squad cars out front. Two were on the Ponce de Leon side of the Cafe. Three others, at odd angles, blocked the VW van.
The two bikers who’d been watching the front of the Majestic were spread, leaning forward, hands on the wall. Two uniformed cops backed them. Another uniformed cop stood a couple of paces away. He held a length of heavy chain in one hand, a length of heavy pipe in the other.
One of the spread bikers turned his head and saw Hump. He said, “Hey, you …” and tried to push himself away from the wall. The cop behind him didn’t say anything. He stepped back about half a pace and hit the biker on the point of his shoulder with a billy. I don’t know if it broke anything. The biker’s knees gave under him and his face hit the wall. The cop backing the other biker stepped forward and hit the downed biker across the back with his billy. The whomp had the sound of somebody kicking a football.
I caught Hump at the elbow and pushed him toward a wide c
ircle away from the van. “My car,” he said.
“Later,” I said. “I’m by the drugstore.”
I got behind the wheel. Hump slid into the passenger seat. I turned and looked back toward the Majestic. It was getting rough around the van. Voices were rising and the shouting had “motherfucker” and “scumbag” laced in it. It looked like the ass-kicking and head-busting was about to begin. I’d seen all that before.
I backed out, turned onto North Highland, and headed home.
I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I ran cold water into the washbasin and dunked my face in it. I returned to the kitchen and found that Hump had made a couple of cups of coffee. I leaned over the cup and blinked into the steam. I was still shivering from the cold drive. And now, for some reason, the furnace was putting out more heat than it had for months.
“At this rate,” I said, “you’re never going to get that gold-plated Junior G-Man badge.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Your first job and you get run to ground by some bikers who want to beat on you with chains and pipes.”
“And that wasn’t the half of it,” he said.
“What did the bikers have against you?”
“All I did was ask some questions.”
“The right ones or the wrong ones?”
“Must have been the wrong ones for them,” he said.
“Start from the beginning.”
“At six, I dropped Rosemary at her hotel.”
Six? I did some simple math. There were three hours or so missing in there somewhere. “Is that the beginning?”
“We talked some at my place. There was a lot I didn’t know. In fact, if you hadn’t been so short with her, there were some things she’d have told you that she couldn’t in front of her husband.”
I sipped the coffee. “Such as?”
“The daughter, Billie Joe, is illegitimate.”
“And her husband doesn’t know?”
“He knows all right. That’s one of the problems. He’s been hard on the girl. Too hard. It’s like he thinks she’ll make the same mistakes her mother did. Hell, he wouldn’t let her date until last year. Her senior year in high school.”
“Why’s that important?”
