by Ralph Dennis
Hump looked at the briefcase. “It’s already high enough.”
I looked at Hump then, to see if he was taking some of that high moral tone that the anti-drug workers had. He wasn’t. It was just a flat statement on the price of smack. He’d gone past that now, and he was grinning to himself, as if remembering something that had happened during the day between him and his New York City trim.
It was a slow morning at Hartsfield International. The cleanup crews were working their way through the coffee cups, Kleenex, and candy wrappers when we passed through. I got my car from the parking lot, and Hump drove back into town and out West Peachtree until we reached the Southern Peachtree Arms. It was still early, and the security man at the door didn’t want to bother Mr. Hutto. I kept pushing him until he did. Raymond sounded sleepy and a little pissed when he told the security man to send us on up. He opened the door as soon as we touched the buzzer.
Raymond Hutto was swarthy and very short. It wasn’t until I saw him in his robe and slippers that I realized he probably wore elevator shoes. The other times I’d seen him he’d looked about two inches taller. I guess they don’t make bedroom slippers that give the same kind of illusion.
He nodded at us, and we followed him back into the kitchen. A kettle of water was just beginning to stir over the gas burner. I put the briefcase on the kitchen table and Raymond brought out a key from the pocket of his robe. Hump and I stood around and watched while he opened one of the flat plastic bags and tasted a pinch of the smack. He made a face and looked over at me.
“You’re not due for a couple of days.”
“I know when I’m due,” I said.
“Any trouble?”
“Some, but none that mattered.” I indicated Hump. “That’s why he’s with me.”
He closed the briefcase and locked it. “Wait here.” He took the briefcase into the bedroom and closed the door behind him.
“Some place,” Hump said.
I agreed. The kettle began to whistle, and I found the right knob and turned off the flame under it.
Raymond returned a few minutes later with a sheaf of bills. He counted them out to me. Then, while Raymond watched, I counted the money into two equal shares.
“Equal split?” Raymond asked.
I nodded and handed Hump his share. Raymond followed us to the door. At the door I turned back to him. “Somebody tried to hijack us half a block from the pickup point where I made the buy. No proof, but I think it was the bastard who passed the stuff to me.”
“I’ll send the word up to New York,” Raymond said.
“Right or wrong, if I see that shit again I’m going to break his head.”
“We have ways of finding out.” Raymond opened the door for us.
We went out into the hallway and he closed the door behind us.
I stopped in front of the building where Hump’s apartment is. He hesitated, with his hand on the door. “What was that shit about the equal shares?”
I kept my face straight and shook my head. “Don’t know.”
“Come on, you know.”
“Raymond just found out you’re not my spade flunky.”
“Does it matter to him?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Hump grinned. “It might mean you don’t show the proper leadership qualities.” He opened the door and got out.
“Get some sleep.”
“Let’s get piss-assed later,” he said.
I told him to call me when he woke up.
I drove on home. Home is a falling-down old house about twenty minutes or so out of the city. It needs a new paint job, and half the time there’s trouble with the plumbing. For all that, it belongs to me and the mortgage man. I’d started buying it a year and a half ago, when I’d first got the bright idea to marry Marcy. When that blew up, I’d kept on making the payments because it wasn’t much more expensive than making rent payments. There’s a front lawn I don’t keep up, and a big backyard where I can sit in the spring and summer and drink beer and watch the seasons pass. Liking nature is one way of numbing the mind against all the other things it wants to worry about.
I got the Constitution from the bushes beside the front steps and the quart of milk from next to the door and went inside. As soon as I was inside, I knew something was wrong. I wanted to step back, but it was too late. Ferd, from in front of the Dew Drop In a few nights before, stepped from behind the door and placed the Saturday Night Special on a line with my nose.
“The Man wants to see you.”
“Look,” I said, “I quit working that job.”
Another black, perhaps the one from the back seat, came out of the kitchen with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. He took the milk from me and carried it into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and slam shut. He returned and stood on the other side of me.
“My car or yours?” I asked.
“Mine,” Ferd said.
I tossed the newspaper on the sofa, and the other black patted me down while Ferd kept the gun on me. Then we went outside and got into a black Ford that was parked half a block down the road.
CHAPTER THREE
The boarded-up building was just off Whitehall, only a few blocks from the service station where Emily Campbell had stopped for gas and made her phone calls. The building looked like it was about half a step from Urban Renewal. The chipping paint above the boarded windows advertised auto parts for cars, trucks and buses. That must have been a long time ago. Ferd parked in the dirt lot next to it, and we got out. They led me around to the back of the building. The other black unlocked a door there, and Ferd motioned me inside.
The stairs we went up were old and creaky, but they’d been swept and scrubbed recently. Before I reached the door at the top of the stairs, Ferd pushed me to one side. He tapped lightly on the door with the butt of his Saturday Night Special. The door swung open.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. After the bleak ugliness of the outside, it looked like a palace. But it was a palace designed by someone who couldn’t see the colors, or didn’t care. There were deep red carpets and silver walls and a flat black ceiling. There was a polished round brass bar in the center of the room, with enough booze on the tiered shelves to open for business at lunch time downtown. Over to the right, the sofa and chairs picked up the brass tone. Straight ahead, beyond this room, I could see a kitchen with enough gleaming gadgets to satisfy almost any housewife.
The black who opened the door motioned me inside. From behind, Ferd gave me a push. I took a couple of steps into the room, turned, and faced him. Ferd indicated the bar. “Want a drink, Hardman?”
“It’s a little early,” I said.
Ferd played it up for the other two. “That’s not what I heard. Heard drinking was why you ain’t on the force any more.”
“That was some other vice,” I said.
“Fat little boys?” Ferd laughed and the other two joined him, and then the door beside the sofa opened and all the laughing broke off.
The man who entered was around thirty. His skin was coal black and had the hard shine and glisten of agate. He looked as lean and hard as a rake handle. He wore a pair of trousers, shirt and tie and a quilted smoking jacket. As soon as I saw him, I thought, Oh, God! He didn’t see enough Westerns when he was a little boy. His mother took him to those godawful English drawing room comedies instead. And when he spoke it was with a precision that I felt he’d learned from records played on a turntable that was a few revolutions too slow.
“Mr. Hardman, won’t you have a seat?”
I stepped past him and sat on the sofa.
“Have you been offered something to drink?”
Before I could answer, Ferd said, “He said it was too early for him.”
“Then a cup of coffee perhaps?”
I nodded. “Coffee’s fine.”
“The Kenya coffee,” he said to Ferd. “The new shipment.”
Ferd went into the kitchen and, a few seconds later, I heard the electric co
ffee grinder going.
“I prefer African coffee to South American.”
“I’m used to instant,” I said.
“Then you will notice the difference.” He offered me a cigarette from a box on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and I took one. “My own blend,” he said. One of the other blacks leaned forward and lit them for us.
I took a couple of puffs and said they were very good, very different. I could see that we were running out of social things to do. Sooner or later, we’d have to get down to the business that had brought me here.
“I assume you’re wondering why I asked you to drop by?”
“I don’t remember being asked,” I said.
He laughed, like a good host trying to make me feel at home. “I think Ferd was afraid you might decline, after your long trip up North.”
So he knew about that. “Since I’m here I don’t mind talking, but I’d like to know who I’m talking to.”
“They call me The Man. My own name isn’t that impressive.” He looked at me questioningly. “I thought in your years with the police, you might have heard of me.”
“I guess I did. But I didn’t know there was just one The Man in town.” I could remember the times when someone we’d arrest would say something about The Man, but I’d just assumed it was a black way of saying The Boss, or The Man I Work For.
“Have you seen today’s paper?”
“Not yet.”
“I thought you hadn’t. Otherwise you might have been more reluctant to drop by.” He held out his hand and one of the blacks put the front section of the Constitution in it. He passed it over to me.
It was hard to miss. It was the big cover story with a picture. Tech Co-ed Murdered. The story below the picture and headline said that Emily Campbell, a sophomore at Georgia Tech, had been found with her neck broken in her Toyota in a downtown parking lot. The rest of the story was vague, as if they didn’t have many facts because the body had been found not long before the paper had to go to press.
I folded the paper and handed it back to him. I waited, trying to show an outward calm I didn’t feel.
“Of course,” The Man said, “I know where you were.” He dropped the paper on the floor. “You were the first one I looked for when I heard about it.”
That sounded reasonable. “I quit the job the night I met your friends. I try to take good advice.”
“Raymond and I do business now and then. My information said that you’d been seen with him. He was kind enough to tell me you were out of town and where you’d gone. And he was kind enough to call me when he knew you were back.”
I thought back over the meeting with Raymond. I remembered that he’d been in the bedroom long enough to call The Man and say I was back from New York.
The Man was reading my mind. “I told him it was important. I wanted you for a job.”
Raymond hadn’t said anything about it to me because it was business between The Man and me. It wasn’t his concern at all. Raymond never liked to hang around the fringes of other people’s business. It got you noticed if the business went bad for some reason or other.
Ferd came in with the coffee pot and two cups on a tray. He put the tray on the copper bar and poured it there. He brought it to us black. The Man waited until I sipped at mine, watching me.
“It’s excellent.” The coffee had a delicate quality that I’d never tasted in coffee before.
“I thought you’d appreciate it. I have a few pounds flown in every month or so.” The Man sipped at his coffee and put it aside. “I think we can talk business now.”
“I’m not sure what business we have.”
“Let me be honest with you. I have to admit a mistake. If I hadn’t forced you off the job, Emily might still be alive. And even if she were dead, we might know who had done it.”
I kept my face as bland and hard as I could. “What was Emily Campbell to you?” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ferd leaning away from the bar toward me.
The Man noticed him also. He shook his head at Ferd and then faced me once more. “I loved her.” It came out as if he hadn’t been thinking when he answered, almost like a reflex.
“That would make you the number-one boy, if the police knew about it.”
“You know and my associates know.” His voice flattened out. “My associates won’t talk.”
“There might be letters in her room, notes from you,” I said.
“No letters, no notes.”
“A diary?”
“Not that I know of.”
That wasn’t going anywhere. I asked how he’d met her.
Just a few months before, during the summer, Emily Campbell had been working with one of the social action groups that was trying to increase black voter registration. One afternoon she’d stopped The Man and asked if he was registered to vote. The Man had said he wasn’t, and he wasn’t interested. She’d pursued him down the street.
“How will you get your rights if you don’t vote?”
“I don’t need that kind of rights,” he’d answered.
She wouldn’t give up and, to prove his point, he’d taken her to the apartment and shown her how he lived. That had stunned her for a time, but it hadn’t stopped her. Very well, so he did have the creature comforts (yes, she’d used those words) but what about the rest of his race? Didn’t he want the rest of his people to enjoy the same things?
“Let them scratch for it,” he’d said.
When she left after an hour, he thought he was through with her, but he wasn’t. She came back the next day and the day after that. Finally, to get rid of her, he’d registered. But that wasn’t all she wanted; now she wanted him to use his influence to convince other blacks to register. As the days went by, something else was happening to the two of them. It was something he didn’t want to happen, and some hard part of him told him to go ahead and do her white ass, if that was what she was offering him. It might be a way of burning off the fever she’d put in him. But it hadn’t been that way at all. Instead, the fever had increased. And, because he was an honest man with himself, he had to admit that he loved her, and that was all there was to that. It had been great, it had been wonderful, until the night he found out that Hardman was watching her. And now, four days later, she was dead in a parking lot.
“I don’t see where I fit into this,” I said.
“I asked around about you. Here and there. I’ve heard the good and the bad. I don’t mind the kind of bad I heard. It’s the kind that I understand. The good I’ve heard is the kind of good that I understand.” He stood up and reached into the front pocket of his trousers. He brought out a thick wad of money and counted off five hundred-dollar bills. “I want you to poke around in it and find out the truth.”
I didn’t touch the money. “The police might find the killer, and then you’re out money.”
He shook his head. “You know how many killings there were in Atlanta this year? Almost one a day. And a hell of a lot of them are not solved.”
“If I work for you, I work without any help from your boys.”
“That’s agreed.”
“You know Hump Evans. He works with me.”
The Man spread the wad of cash and put down two more hundreds. When he stopped I shook my head. “Hump costs the same as I do.” The Man put down three more bills and stuck the wad away. I folded the bills and put them in my shirt pocket. “That buys you eight or ten day’s work. If I don’t have something by then, I probably never will.”
“If you need more, stop by.”
I drained off the last of my coffee and stood up. “I have a friend left on the force. I’ll start with what the police have.” I moved toward Ferd with the cup and saucer in my left hand.
“Your methods are left up to you,” The Man said.
I moved a step closer to the bar. I was between The Man and Ferd. “There is just one thing more. Since I’m working for you, I don’t have to take any more shit off the other help, do I?”
The Man blinked, as if he didn’t understand what I was asking.
“I mean, I can have my balls back, can’t I?”
“Certainly, Hardman, I don’t see. . . . ”
Without looking at Ferd, as if there was still one more thing I wanted to get straight with The Man, I handed Ferd the cup and saucer. He was listening, as if he wasn’t sure where all this was going either. Taking the cup and saucer from me was just a reflex. But as soon as he had it, I whirled toward him, ducked one shoulder, and hit him in the balls as hard as I could. The cup and saucer went flying over the bar. Ferd let out a scream and fell against the bar. The glasses and bottles rattled, and he turned in his fall and curled up, clutching his groin. I leaned over him and jerked the .32 out of his waistband. I tossed it on the sofa next to The Man. Then I turned back to him and kicked him in the stomach as hard as I could. In the heat of it, I considered one more kick, this time to the ribs, but I held up. I backed away, watching The Man and the other two blacks.
“My car smells like vomit.” I took a deep breath. “Now I’m even.”
The Man nodded. He could understand that.
I went outside and down the steps before I remembered that I didn’t have my car with me. I wasn’t about to go back up those stairs and ask for a lift. I walked over to Whitehall, caught a cruising cab and gave him Hump’s address
CHAPTER FOUR
The sofa wasn’t that comfortable. Around four that afternoon, I gave up and wrote off last night’s sleep as a total loss. I rattled around in the kitchen until Hump heard me. It took half an hour of really trying before Hump came out of the bedroom, looking mean and puffy around the eyes.
“You ever spend any time at home?”
“Not lately,” I said.
“Maybe you ought to consider it.” He got a beer out of the refrigerator and opened it. He went into the bathroom, and the shower ran a long time. When he came back into the kitchen he was still puffy, but the bad mood was gone. He dropped the empty beer bottle into a trash bag and got down the J&B and a glass. As he poured he said, “That’s some job you picked for us.”
