Hump's First Case

by Ralph Dennis

  I got to learn all that because they couldn’t decide exactly what to do with me. The drill they’d set was for two positions. Art in the duplex. Ellison outside in a car across the street. In the end they decided I could do less damage if I waited in the car with Ellison.

  It was a long afternoon. After they checked out the walkie-talkies there wasn’t much to do. I remembered there was a transistor radio in the glove compartment of my Ford. We listened to shit-kicker music until the batteries died around five. A time later, a 1973 blue Mustang with a dented right-rear fender pulled into the driveway behind Art’s car.

  “That’s Baker,” Ellison said.

  Art met Baker on the walk. After they talked a bit, Baker got back into the Mustang and drove away. Art returned to the duplex. Over the walkie-talkie he explained that he’d sent Baker to supper and a movie.

  It was that way, dull and slow, until almost seven. It was going toward full dark when the 1957 Mercury eased down the street toward us. Slowing, stopping. Starting up again. Even before it stopped in front of the duplex I tapped Ellison on the shoulder. “That’s it.”

  Ellison spoke into the walkie-talkie. “Incoming, Art.”

  Art said he’d seen it.

  Billie Joe opened the door on the driver’s side and stepped out. The inside overhead light flashed on her blond hair when she leaned into the backseat. The light also revealed that the passenger seat was empty.

  I grabbed the walkie-talkie. “It looks like she’s alone, Art.”

  “I’ll play it the best I can,” Art said. “I’ll call back.”

  Across the street, Billie Joe dragged out one suitcase and then a second one. Balancing them, struggling with them, she went up the walk. About the time she placed them on the single porch that served both halves of the duplex, the porch light flared on.

  I could see the girl better in the strong light. It was the girl I’d seen in the 7–11 a few nights before. The light didn’t bother her. She fumbled in her shoulder bag and brought out a key with a tag on it.

  Art joined her on the porch. They gestured and talked and then Art took the key from her and went to the other apartment. He opened the door and carried her bags in for her. The door closed behind them, Art came out two or three minutes later. He didn’t look toward us. He entered the Baker apartment. Within seconds he was on the walkie-talkie.

  “Bill? Jim?”

  Ellison took the walkie-talkie from me. “Here.”

  “That’s only one fish. I want the other one too.”

  “How?”

  “She says her husband will sign the lease when he gets here. She says she’s leaving to pick him up in a minute.”

  “Where’s he supposed to be?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  The door to the other apartment opened. Billie Joe stepped out and pulled the door closed behind her. “She’s outside now,” Ellison said.

  “You follow,” Art said. “I’ll be half a block behind.”

  “Dammit,” Ellison hissed at me. “I was supposed to call a backup and now I don’t know what to do.”

  “Best laid plans,” I said.

  Billie Joe pulled the Mercury into the driveway behind Art’s car. When she backed out again, turning, both Ellison and I ducked our heads. As soon as the headlights passed, Ellison started the engine. We gave her half a block and eased in behind her. Two blocks away from the duplex the car behind us hit his brights. It told us that Art was in position.

  We played leapfrog across town. It was drill in case she was watching her rearview mirror. We’d give way to Art and he’d play lead car for a few blocks and then give it back to us.

  “Where the hell is she going?” Ellison asked me.

  I shrugged.

  We were lead car, Art a distance behind us, when I saw her pump her brakes and slow. I didn’t know exactly where we were. It wasn’t a neighborhood I knew.

  The Mercury turned left off the street. “Slow,” I told Ellison. We passed a large building that housed an antique shop and then I saw the Mercury. It was parked in front of a Stop and Shop store. The headlights of the Mercury lit up a heavy-set man who stepped out of a pay-phone booth and walked toward the passenger side of the car. It was, I thought, the other young man we’d been looking for. Bob Buchner. The window on the passenger side had been rolled down. Buchner reached in. When he backed away, he held something wrapped in a dark piece of cloth.

  Just past the Stop and Shop store, a street forked to the left. Ellison made it without squealing the tires. “What’s going on?” He braked the car as soon as the building masked us.

  “You know how broke you are when you come back from a vacation?”

  He understood it.

  I hit the walkie-talkie button. “Art, these assholes are pulling a job.”

  “I’ll come from the antique shop side.”

  “Right.” I dropped the walkie-talkie on the seat and got out. Ellison met me at the rear of the car and caught my arm.

  “Where you going?”

  “I think I can take the girl out. Count to twenty slow.” I jerked my arm free. I moved away before he could argue.

  When I looked back, he was checking his piece for loads.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I passed the front of the store without looking in. I had my head down, like the wind and the sand blowing in it was bothering me. When I was level with the Mercury, I lifted the hem of my topcoat and fumbled with a handful of change. I separated a couple of quarters and left the rest in my pocket. I reached the phone booth, started in, and then turned and stared down at the quarters in my hand.

  The Mercury engine was running. It ran rough, as if there might be one cylinder missing. I listened to the engine and did my best parody of the poor cluck who didn’t have a dime. I was counting to myself. The count reached fifteen. I stepped to the window on the driver’s side and tapped the window with one of the quarters.

  She rolled the window down a couple of inches. I said, “Lady, you got change for a quarter?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?” I reached twenty. I looked to see if the lock button was down. It wasn’t. My right hand dropped and gripped the door handle.

  “Yes, I’m sure. How about leaving me …?”

  I looked over my shoulder. Art was coming up behind me. Then I saw Ellison. He’d been slower with his count. He rounded the far end of the store building and stopped to light a smoke.

  It was set. I backed away. The door came open. I stepped around the door and rammed myself into the car. The light was on and I could see her wide, surprised eyes before I fell on top of her. The wheel caught me on the shoulder. I twisted past that. She squirmed and raised a knee. There went one ball and the pain sliced up my side. But the turning she’d done had stretched her out beneath me, front to front. I almost laughed. It was like some grotesque teenage drive-in movie coupling.

  I felt her trying to slip from under me. She freed her right hand and seemed to be reaching for something. I realized she was groping for the horn. I caught that arm and pressed it down. But her left hand was free, digging past my shoulder. The hand became a claw. It missed my eye but raked my face.

  Behind me, at the door, Art said, “Move your feet.” I did. He closed the door and the overhead light went out.

  Beneath me, I could feel her filling her lungs. “Go ahead and scream. He’ll walk right into it.”

  The breath hissed away.

  “Keep her still,” Art said.

  “Damn you, damn you.” She gave it up. She relaxed and turned into jelly.

  “Here’s our boy,” Art whispered. Then he shouted: “Police, Buchner. Hands over your head and don’t move.”

  The silence. I thought it was over. Ellison, from a distance straight ahead, yelled, “Drop the piece, Buchner.”

  I lifted my head. I got my eyes to a level with the bottom of the passenger window. I saw Bob Buchner on the curb just outside the door to the store. The squarish, blocky piece in his right han
d looked like a .45 automatic. There was a wad of bills in the other hand. I saw him look toward the Mercury. Then he whirled and lunged for the door. He was going back inside.

  Art and Ellison fired within split seconds of each other. The slugs hit Buchner in the back and the side and drove him against the door. Glass shattered. Beneath me, Billie Joe screamed. It was a breathless scream, almost a whisper.

  Bob Buchner, dead or dying, became a doorstop.

  Art cuffed Billie Joe’s hands behind her. He looked past her shoulder. “I think she got you, Jim.”

  I ran a hand over the right side of my face. The fingers came away bloody.

  “It’s like that,” I said. “Some days you can’t make a penny.”

  Billie Joe braced her butt against the front fender of the Mercury. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I yanked her out of the car. “You fat turd,” she said.

  She tried to spit on me but the wind blew it back at her.

  I made the call from the payphone. I reached Hump at his apartment. He’d been waiting all day.

  “The girl’s not hurt. Buchner’s dead. They’ll be taking Billie Joe to the station and booking her. You deal with Rosemary. Call her and tell her. See if she knows a lawyer in Atlanta. If she doesn’t, call Rod Carswell at home. Tell him he owes us a favor and that the Atkinsons can pay his fee. It might be the Atkinsons will want their own lawyer later, but she ought to be represented by somebody now.”

  “You’ll be there?”

  “I’m out of it as of now.” I looked at the crowd of gawkers that were collecting at the storefront. “This goes to trial, I’ll be the number-one witness against the girl. It might be better if we do it this way. With everybody involved.”

  “Rosemary too?”

  “Especially her.” I opened the door to the phone booth. The cold wind sucked at me. “Hell, it’s your case anyway. You took it on, you get to tie up the loose ends.”

  “Where’ll you be?”

  “Around,” I said. “Christmas shopping.”

  The paddy wagon was on the way. It was due. I stopped near Art. He’d been talking to Billie Joe while I’d been on the phone. “She wants her lawyer,” Art said.

  “Your mother will be at the station by the time you get there. She’ll arrange for a lawyer.”

  “You know my mother?”

  “The Dragonlady?” I watched her face change. “I know her.”

  “I want my own lawyer,” Billie Joe said.

  “Fred Thompson? He won’t be available.”

  “He needs a lawyer himself,” Art said.

  I stepped closer to Billie Joe. “Answer me a question.”

  “You can ask it.”

  “How did Fred Thompson fit into this?”

  “He’s been helping me.”

  “Why?”

  “The usual reasons.” The tone was dry, bitter.

  “Which are?”

  “What reasons do repulsive old men have?”

  “Those?” I said.

  “Those. He was a nasty old man. A sickening old man.” Her head turned. She looked at Bill Ellison and at the uniformed cops who’d arrived minutes after the shooting and then at Art and me. “Just like you, all of you are pigs.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m an ex-pig.”

  I did my Christmas shopping in some out of the way, rat-suck bars. I didn’t see anything I wanted to buy for Marcy. Hump was easier to shop for. I saw a blonde that I wanted to gift wrap for him.

  Somewhere around two a.m. I was in a bar on West Peachtree, close in toward downtown. A slim girl with black hair and a northern accent was telling me all the wonderful, exotic things she’d do for me for “five-oh” dollars, all the time playing with my skinned knees. I said that I didn’t think that was very remarkable. If you put two snakes in a burlap bag … or two goats … or two monkeys …

  “Fat man?”

  I looked up and saw Hump. He looked cold sober. That told me that he hadn’t been checking all the bars searching for me. My guess was that he’d driven through a lot of parking lots near bars, until he found my Ford.

  “Ready to pack it in?”

  “Hey,” the girl with dark hair protested, “we’re having fun.”

  A slick hard-ass at the bar who’d been watching the girl and me for the last hour eased off the bar stool and said, “He’s old enough to vote, he’s old enough to decide if he wants to drink.”

  Hump put his left hand under my armpit and pulled me out of the chair. His eyes remained on the hard-ass. “No jackrolling tonight,” he said. “Maybe some other night.”

  I was walking better than I thought I could. Hump gave me a soft push that started me for the front door.

  The slick hard-ass said, “I don’t think I like that remark.”

  “Fuck what you like or don’t like,” Hump said.

  I looked over my shoulder and turned. Hump short-punched the guy. He went down with his head against the base of one of the bar stools. His heels jerked and squeaked on the tile floor.

  On the street the cold air revived me. I said, “That’s fun, Hump. Let’s do one more jackroller.”

  “Tomorrow.” Hump caught my arm and turned me toward the parking lot. “Tomorrow’s a better day for it.”

  We reached the car. He put me into the passenger side of his Buick and got behind the wheel. “I guess you’re wondering why I came looking for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  He started the engine and backed out of the lot. “I wanted to remind you there is one more shopping day until Christmas.”

  “One day?”

  “That’s right.”

  “One day.” I closed my eyes. He drove me home.

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  Jim Hardman, The First Truly

  Hardboiled Private Eye

  By Mel Odom

  I found my first Hardman novel, The Charleston Knife’s Back In Town, in a 7–11 spinner rack in the summer of 1974. It was the second in the series and I couldn’t find the first, so that bothered me some because I’m a completest with OCD tendencies.

  The cover was interesting enough that I picked the book up anyway. I wasn’t ready for it, and after I finished it and was suitably jarred by the jagged edges and violence, I didn’t get back to the series for a few years.

  I worked at the service station across the street with my dad. I was sixteen and impressionable, still trying to find out who I was as a person and struggling with how I was going to be a writer. I figured I had a lot of strikes against me: born in Oklahoma, worked at a service station to help the family, and wrangled pigs because my dad insisted on raising them. Probably because his father did when he was a kid. I didn’t have any of the interesting jobs writers seemed to have. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was collecting lots of interesting story material and getting to know folks who would come to people them.

  I was getting fifty cents an hour at the time. Since books were about a buck and comics had climbed to the ungodly price of twenty cents an issue!, I could work my shift and pick up a book or two or a fistful of comics. Summers were great because I worked six days a week from eight to five. That was four dollars a day I could spend on books and comics. It was a benchmark for me back in those days. My peers weren’t interested in those things.

  By that time I was reading nearly everything Pinnacle was doing. I picked up novels about the Executioner, the Destroyer, and every other –er that came out. The only things I knew at that age was that I wanted to be a writer and I wanted true love. I blame Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars books for the latter.

  I loved private eye fiction. At least, I thought I did. I’d read the Continental Op stories, The Maltese Falcon, and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels. I also perused old copies of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine I bought for fifteen cents a copy from the mom-and-pop grocery store on the corner diagonal from the 7–11.

&nbs
p; I wanted to grow up and write private eye fiction. Now, with over two hundred novels written under my name and various pseudonyms, I still haven’t written a private eye novel. I still want to.

  At the time I picked up that Hardman book, I thought I knew private eye and mystery stories.

  I didn’t.

  I thought the books were going to be another of those –er series where the violence was so over the top it all seemed like fantasy.

  They weren’t.

  Hardman lived in a meaner, more real, and more violent world than anything I’d ever known or imagined. I’d grown up on movies where bad guys got shot and fell down. Their heads didn’t explode. And good guys were good guys, men you could place money on to do the right thing no matter what. I hadn’t yet seen Clint Eastwood in action as Dirty Harry even though the first and second movies were out. The only Sam Peckinpah movies I’d seen had been cleaned up for television.

  Hardman was billed as “a great new private eye for the shockproof ’70s” on the back covers of several of the books and in interior advertisements.

  I wasn’t shockproof. I drowned in the coarse language, the graphic violence, and some of the decidedly unheroic qualities of the character.

  I finished the book, because I always did back in those days, and put it on the shelf. I didn’t return to the series until I was married and nineteen years old. Yep, older and wiser—and way less innocent. Those things made a difference.

  Working at a service station and raising pigs while maintaining an otherwise isolated existence left me feeling that Hardman and Hump Evans lived in a world I couldn’t hope to understand. I didn’t even want to be part of it as a reader.

  Getting married, going to college, and being forced into a larger worldview changed my understanding of how the world truly worked. By that year, 1977, we’d gone through the New York City Blackout, David Berkowitz—the Son of Sam—had been arrested as a serial killer, Rocky had said, “Cut me, Mick,” when his eyes were swollen shut and we saw the blood spurt on the big screen, and Elvis died.