by Ralph Dennis
He wasn’t sure but he thought that Randy had met Peggy about two years before. That was when there’d been a storefront police station down on the Strip between Eighth and Tenth. At the time there were rumors that some of the hippie chicks were making themselves available to the cops. They called it “screwing the pigs toward friendly.” Maybe that was how Peggy and Randy had met. It must have been casual at the time. Most of those affairs down there at the time had been. In time there was so much of the mixing between the cops and the young hippie chicks that it probably brought about the closing of the storefront station. Many of the wives of the cops working the area began to complain that their husbands were bringing home cases of clap. That hadn’t happened with Randy. He’d remained on foot patrol down there and he’d done good work. Several good arrests on his record. But two months ago he’d started staying away some nights, as many as two or three nights a week. His wife, Betty, had called Ben and he had gone down to the Strip and talked with some of the men who worked with Randy. That was when the girl came up. It looked like the affair had bloomed again. Ben knew it wasn’t any good trying to reason with Randy, so he’d used his influence to have him transferred off the Strip. He was sent back downtown to a desk job in the records and evidence storeroom. It hadn’t helped much and a week ago Randy’d moved out on Betty. The word down on the Strip was that he’d moved in with the tramp and set up house. Ben had seen him a time or two over at the department. Randy wouldn’t listen to him. He’d said Ben was talking old, out of date, morality. He, Randy, was going to do damned well what he wanted to and if Ben didn’t like that he could look the other way and walk on the other side of the street. Ben had made one more try. He’d called at the department and tried to reach Randy. He was told that Randy had taken two weeks of leave and they didn’t know how to get in touch with him.
“If I could have seen him maybe this wouldn’t have happened,” Ben said.
Bear nodded along with him. “Well, you did all you could, Ben.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“It was all you or anybody else could have done,” Bear said.
Ben gave a slow jerk of his head which meant that he accepted it the way Bear meant it. But it didn’t satisfy him. Now he was done with his telling and it was my turn. “Hardman, we never got along.”
“That’s true. I never liked you and you never liked me.”
The bellow, when it came, shouldn’t have stunned me the way it did. The quiet way just wasn’t Ben’s style. “But goddam it, Hardman, that’s my only brother in there dead and if you think that I’m going to let you or anybody else cover up or hide. …”
“I’ve told it straight. I don’t have anybody to protect. Call Jack Smathers at his office. Go by Eve’s Place and talk to a blonde named Ellen. Call Edward Simpson in Chapel Hill. Do all this or any part of it you want to, but stop yelling at me.”
It got thick and still. Even the noise in the other room where the search crew was working stopped for a time. I braced myself. I saw it two ways. Ben would swing the crutch at me or Bear would do his heavy work for him. I was about to place my bet on Bear when Ben relaxed and shook his head slowly, again and again.
“I guess that’s fair. I wouldn’t be yelling if it wasn’t my brother in there.”
I shook my head. That wasn’t true but I didn’t think it was worth arguing about. “I’m sorry about your brother, Ben. I didn’t know him but I think I know how you feel. If I knew who’d killed him I’d be glad to hold him for you while you beat the shit out of him. But I don’t and that’s all there is to it.”
“It must have been the girl,” Bear said. He held out a huge hand toward me. “I’ll take that picture.”
I handed him the snapshot of Peggy Holt. Or Simpson or whatever.
“Is that her? Let me see it.” Ben took the picture and stared down at it for a long time. “So that’s what she looks like.”
“I understand her hair’s longer now.”
A young cop, one of the two I’d seen working through the bedroom and the bathroom, came into the living room carrying a small cardboard box.
“Found this in the back of the closet. I thought you’d want to see it.” He emptied the box onto the low coffee table. It was a bundle that looked like a plastic tablecloth. He unrolled it and spread out the articles that had been inside. A bundle of glassine bags, a box of powdered milk and a container of strychnine.
“Dope,” Bear said, “somebody’s been cutting and packaging that crap here.”
“Why the strychnine?” Ben asked.
“Something they do sometimes. The stuff gets cut too much and the user doesn’t get the jolt he expects. The strychnine puts the jolt in. It’s kind of a booster.”
That was the part I’d left out. The visit to the Wildwood Connector and the story he’d heard about Peggy Holt doing some dealing in hard stuff now.
“That’s it,” Ben said. “Randy must have found out what she was doing, that she was dealing in drugs, and she killed him to keep it quiet. Damn her to hell.”
That was a bit too simple for me. It skirted around too much. I let it pass. It was easier for him that way.
After a time, Bear let us go. It was tied up neatly and had a ribbon on it and he didn’t need us anymore.
CHAPTER FIVE
I caught the secretary between a whereas and a therefore and while she tried to remember where she’d seen me before I said, “He might be expecting me” and rammed the inner office door open. The door hit a bookcase of law reference works with a good thunk and Jack lost his place in the volume of Georgia Appeals that he had braced on his knee.
“Do I get free legal services when I work for you?”
“What? Look, Jim, I don’t …”
“Bear hasn’t called you yet?”
“No. Why would …”
“You’ll get your call or maybe a personal visit,” I said. “It seems you sent me out to find a body.”
It stunned him and I got a look inside him. The barbed hooks, flesh grown over them until they’re almost forgotten, working their way out of the protective pockets. I’d seen a man have a heart attack one afternoon on Broad street and he’d looked like Jack the moment he’d made the grab for the lamp post.
“Not her,” I said. “Not the golden crotch.”
Jack kept a bottle of cheap scotch in the bottom desk drawer. He got it out and we had a taste right from the bottle. It was so raw it made me regret, right away, even the token courtesy drink. It went down smoother with Jack. He passed the bottle back toward me and I shook my head. “But I’ll take an ounce or so of it home with me to remove a couple of corns on my little toes.”
“It’s not for me,” Jack said. “I keep it around for divorce settlement conferences. When the husband finds out what it’s going to cost him to get rid of his wife he usually needs a bracer.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I’d given him the fifty words or less rundown on what Hump and I had found at the garage apartment on Fifteenth. Now he was calm enough to put his lawyer’s mind to picking at it.
“Then they’re looking for Peggy?”
“Unless somebody walked in and confessed in the last twenty minutes or so. You’ve got to admit it looks strange. Randy killed in his breakfast and no sign of her anywhere.”
“Or of the child, Maryann,” he said.
“That too,” I said.
The door to the outer office opened and Hump walked in. “Had trouble finding a parking spot” he said. “How’s our lawyer doing?”
“Recovering,” I said. I pushed it back at Jack: “Now we know two people who didn’t kill Randy King. I didn’t and Hump didn’t. That leaves about a million and a half who could have. That includes residents and visitors.”
“Jack here’s a resident,” Hump said.
“That’s true enough,” I said. “I hope you can account for all the time since I left your office this morning.”
“Up to maybe an hour and a half ago,” Hump said.
“That’s late to be having breakfast,” Jack said.
“I looked around the kitchen before the police came. Wasn’t much choice. I think even the mice were hungry there. Trash was full of take-out boxes and chicken bones.”
“Too busy screwing and cutting and bagging dope,” Hump said.
Jack flushed a bit and held himself down. “I can account for the whole afternoon, except for five minutes here and there.” He spread his hand in a hopeless gesture. “All right, that girl tore me up. Right down to the bone marrow. But I wouldn’t kill over her. If I’d killed anyone it would be her, not some short-time lover of hers.”
“That leaves at least one out-of-towner,” I said.
“I guess we’d better touch the bases,” Jack said. He pushed down the intercom lever and told the secretary to put in a call to Edward Simpson in Chapel Hill. He flipped the lever back to “closed” and said, “Simpson was with me from 9 a.m. until he left us here at the office.
“That would be 11:15 or 11:20,” I said.
“Could it have happened before 11:15?” Jack asked.
“Not likely,” I said.
“Any way of finding out what the police thinking is?”
“I can put in a call to Art Maloney when he comes on his shift,” I said. “He probably won’t be there for another hour or two.”
The intercom sputtered. “Your call to Chapel Hill, Mr. Smathers.”
Jack picked up the phone. “I’d like to speak to Edward Simpson, please. This is Jack Smathers in Atlanta.” He listened and pulled a pad toward him. “Did he say what flight that was?” He made a note on the pad. “And what time it’ll arrive?” He wrote that down below the flight number and turned the pad so that I could read it. The flight number didn’t mean anything. The time did: 5:42. That meant he was probably just leaving Atlanta while we were making the call up there. Even though the ride out to Hartsfield took some time, there was still a matter of about four hours that Simpson would have to account for. And they were in the red area, the time when the killing had probably taken place. Say he was lying to us and knew where his ex-wife was. He’d have all the time in the world to beat us there. It had taken us time to work our way to the garage apartment. The lunch at the Fisherman’s Inn, the visit to the Wildwood Connector, the blonde at Eve’s Place.
The blonde at Eve’s Place. That stopped me. It hadn’t meant much to me then and now it did. The man in the Impala, the one with red hair that had been following Peggy Holt around for a couple of weeks. If he was still tailing her around he might know some of the answers the cops wanted. And he might know where Peggy Holt was now.
Jack was winding up his conversation. I made my guess that the person on the other end of the line was probably Simpson’s second wife. “Have Edward call me as soon as he arrives. Either here at the office or at my home phone. I think he has both of the numbers.” He made his goodbye and put the phone back on its cradle.
I got up and nodded toward Hump. “I just had a thought, Jack. If we’re still working I’d like to follow through on it.”
“Might as well,” he said.
As we were heading out the door I heard him call the blonde secretary in to take a few notes. More than likely, I thought, a rundown of how he’s spent the late morning and the afternoon.
“A red-haired guy in a 1970 Impala. You got any idea how we run him to ground?”
“You’re the ex-cop,” Hump said. “I always depend on you in situations like this.”
We’d picked up Hump’s car at a lot down the street and we were fighting our way into the late afternoon traffic. It was hell this time of day. Peachtree Street seemed like a narrow bottleneck that all the traffic had to work its way through. I guess it was our day in the barrel and we could look forward to about a thirty-minute stop and start the drive back down to the Strip.
“We could always ask Martin,” Hump said.
“And, of course, he’d be happy to tell us.”
“If we asked him the right way.”
“I ever talk to you about leaping over gaps?” I asked.
“Not while I was sober enough to remember.”
“It goes like this. We know a red-haired guy in a 1970 Impala was following Peggy Holt. We know that for sure because the blonde, Ellen, saw him. Then comes the gap. Peggy’s just pissed off Martin so she figures that he’s the one pasted the tail on her. That’s natural enough. And she tells Ellen and she believes it because it seems natural enough to her also. And then Ellen tells us. …”
“Who else?”
“That girl’s been busy. Pissing off dudes and now up to her ass in dope. Could be Raymond who put the tail on her. Could be Federal. Could be State narcs. And any one of the old boyfriends.”
“Sounds strange to me,” Hump said. “You notice something? They start out hard. Like they’d like to stuff a broken beer bottle up her and then it changes and they act like it wasn’t really so bad.”
“I noticed.”
“Like to meet that girl myself,” Hump said.
“Think on the red-haired guy then.”
“I am. I am.”
It didn’t make sense going around in circles so we decided to have a beer. Hump parked on the old part of Ninth … Peachtree Place, where it didn’t cross Peachtree and we walked down toward Eighth and into the Stein Club.
At one time the Stein Club had been a favorite watering place down in that part of town. The customers ran from professional people in their twenties and thirties to a select group of interesting alcoholics. It had been a place where the talk could be interesting on a good day and only mildly dull on a bad day.
Back in July of 1972 the 18-year-old vote-and-drink laws went into effect and the Stein changed. Some of the old regulars moved on to other places. Some of the old customers still came in, refusing to give it up as lost. It was a kind of silent war between the street kids and the middle class. And I had a feeling that the street people would win. They understood hassle better than the up and coming middle class did and they’d learned to endure it better.
Hump got a pitcher and glasses while I dug out a dime and went over to the single pay phone. A long haired girl who wasn’t wearing much underwear was on the phone. From what I overheard she was talking to her mother. She kept saying things like “You don’t even try to understand me” and every now and then she’d whine, “Oh, mother …” It was a good act. She really sounded unhappy. From the way she was eyeing a street guy back at the big round table I was pretty sure she was just staging an argument with her mother so she could stay out all night if she got an offer. Finally, just when I’d about decided to come back later, she said, “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it …” and hung up.
I leaned in after her and put in my dime. I dialed Art Maloney’s home number. He answered on about the sixth ring and that meant he was probably dripping shower water all over the bedroom. “Art? Jim here.”
“Yeah?”
“Found a body today. Randy King’s body.”
“I heard,” he said. “Bear woke me up to ask what I thought of you.”
“And you said?”
“I told him you weren’t dumb enough to commit a murder and then stand around and try to play word games with the police.”
“Is that all you told them?”
“Not really,” Art said. “I told them you lied sometimes to save your own neck, but if your neck wasn’t involved he could believe you.”
“Did Bear seem to buy that?”
“I think so.” He barked a dry, harsh cough into the phone. “You call me for any special reason?”
I told him about the tail we thought had been on Peggy Holt.
“Bear’s not going to like this. He’s going to think you were holding out on him.”
I ignored the warning in that. “On th
e chance he might be a P.I. maybe you could get a make on him over at licensing. Somebody there might know a P.I. who fits the description.”
He said he’d check it out and call me back. I gave him the number of the Stein.
He called back twenty minutes later. “Too easy,” he said. “There’s a guy named Harry Harper, seems to specialize in divorce work and skip-tracing. Has an office in the old Fraser Building on Mitchell. Just to be sure it was the right one I had it checked in Motor Vehicles. He does own a 1970 Impala.”
“Thanks, Art.”
“Don’t just thank me,” he said. “Let me know if it leads you anywhere.”
Before going back to the table I got the city phone directory and the yellow pages from behind the counter. I gave Hump the white pages and told him to see if he could find a Harry Harper listed. I looked in the yellow pages under Investigators. He hadn’t taken one of the block ads. He’d settled for a single line listing.
“He got a middle initial?” Hump asked.
I looked at the single line listing. “An R,” I said.
“Apartment 2D, Kingsbridge Apartments on Peachtree Road.”
“You know where that is?”
“Not exactly,” Hump said.
I returned the books to the bar. When I was back at the table across from Hump I asked him if he’d ever met a P.I.
“Not to speak to,” he said. “But I think one was following me around one time when I was doing this married woman. At least, when the divorce trial was going on he testified he’d followed me and the girl around some nights and he’d seen us go into my apartment and right after that the lights went off.”
“You didn’t see him?”
“I’m not even sure the dude was around at all. The shit that makes me wonder is that stuff about the lights going off. You see, that girl and I had a thing about doing it with the lights on and watching it happen.” He drained the last of his beer and grinned at me. “Of course, I didn’t think it would do any good to get up there and say the dude was lying, that we only did it with the lights on. Somebody might have misunderstood that.”
It was after six and getting dark. We got on West Peachtree and headed back downtown. I had some doubts that Harper would still be in his office. Unless he kept night hours. Still, if he didn’t want to be found, we might be hunting for a day or two. I decided we might as well locate the office in case we might have to stake it out later.