by Ralph Dennis
“I’ll buy both of those.”
The phone rang in the bedroom. It was Jack. He’d talked to Simpson and Simpson would be taking an early flight in from Chapel Hill. Jack was going to pick him up at Hartsfield. He wanted me to meet him at his office around ten-fifteen.
“The gloves?”
“He thinks they’re Maryann’s. He says they go with a red coat she was wearing the morning her mother took her from in front of the school.”
I told Art about Simpson coming in and he said there’d be somebody from the department at Jack’s office the next morning. And just to be sure he’d have the gloves brought along so that an exact identification could be made.
After he left it took me a long time to get to sleep. My right foot had a dull, faraway ache to it. If that wasn’t enough Marcy seemed to have written me off completely. After loving me so long, so hard.
And nearer the surface the question that everybody wanted me to answer. Why I was willing to pick through all that dirty linen of wasted lives for fifty a day and expenses.
Goddamn the grown-ups anyway. I couldn’t get that poor scared child out of my mind. In a few hours she’d seen as much of the dirty underside as most adults saw in a lifetime. The drugs, the greed and maybe even death. Somehow it didn’t seem fair. And just before I fell over the edge something in me asked the hard question: whoever promised anybody that it was going to be fair?
When I entered Jack’s office a bit after ten the next morning I didn’t so much see Bear Hodge as smell him. I got a whiff of those two-for-a-quarters he smoked now and then and did a quick pivot to my right. He was sitting out of the sight line of the door, topcoat folded across his knees, chewing the last inch or so of the cigar.
“You got some business here, Hardman?”
“Maybe,” I said. I ignored him for the next fifteen or twenty minutes. It was easy. The magazines were only three or four months old and now and then Jack’s secretary would prance by. That was enough to perk up the dead and I didn’t consider myself dead yet.
Jack didn’t so much walk into the office as he erupted into it. He didn’t see Bear at first. “That son of a bitch didn’t show,” he shouted at me.
“Who didn’t show?” Bear was on his feet, the topcoat trailing to the side, forgotten.
“My client, that ass Simpson. You know what he had the gall to do?”
“No, tell me,” Bear said in that deceptively easy way.
“He called at the airport and had me paged. Gave me this cock and bull story about having some school work that just came up.”
“He say when he would come?” Bear asked.
“As soon as he could.”
Bear seemed to remember his topcoat. He reached down and picked it up and pushed his huge arms and shoulders into it. “I hope you’re not playing games with me, Smathers.”
“What do you mean by that?” The heat from Jack’s anger with Simpson carried over and lashed at Bear.
“I mean we mean to ask this Simpson some questions. I don’t want you to think you can get around me by advising him not to show up for the questioning.”
“Just a fucking minute.” Jack was moving toward Bear and that could be a bad mistake. Bear wasn’t happy with the waste of a morning and if Jack pushed at him he’d get some lumps.
I edged over close, close but just out of the range of some wayward swing. “Keep it civilized, you two.”
“Civilized, shit,” Jack said. “If he wants to make that a formal charge, let him go ahead. I’ll be glad to start a countersuit for damages.”
“Call in a few more witnesses,” Bear said. “I’ll be glad to.”
“Come on, you two,” I said. “If this is a charade Jack’s acting out, he went to a hell of a lot more trouble than he’d have had to. Bear, if you know Jack at all from his time with the D.A., you know this isn’t his way of doing things.”
Bear seemed to relax a bit so I decided to give him equal time. I turned the same kind of crap on Jack. “No matter what you think of Bear he’s an honest cop and you know it. You’ve got to admit he’s under bad pressure investigating the murder of his best friend’s brother.”
Jack nodded.
“Both of you have said some things you didn’t mean. Right, Jack? Right, Bear?”
Grudgingly, still the hair up on their necks, they accepted my role as peacemaker. Jack turned to the blonde secretary who’d watched the near encounter with wide eyes and almost no breath and said, “Get me on a flight to Chapel Hill. Something around one o’clock.”
“Make that two,” I said.
“You paying your own way?” Jack asked.
“Yeah.”
“Two then,” Jack said, “and cancel all my appointments for the rest of the day.” Jack gave Bear one more hard look before he went into the inner office and closed the door behind him.
Bear looked at me. “What’s he going up there for?”
“My guess is he wants a deposition from Simpson.”
“A lot of good that’d do,” Bear said.
“It’s the same thing you’d get out of him. A man wants to lie he can lie in Atlanta as well as Chapel Hill.”
Bear was ready to leave but he was working on his exit line. The brush with Jack hadn’t worked out the way he might have liked it to and he needed to add a few more points to his score.
“I hear you’re finding a lot of bodies these days,” he said.
“Just one,” I said. “The one last night came and found me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chapel Hill’s a town that hasn’t really decided what it really wants to be. It’s caught on the horns and can’t decide which horn to be gored by. Around twenty years ago, when the student population at the University of North Carolina was down around seven or eight thousand, the town seemed to be offering itself as a kind of charming little village that never changes. The city ordinances perpetuated the small town charm by its emphasis upon the kinds of store fronts that could be constructed in the main central part of town and the size and type of signs.
In the last twenty years the student enrollment has gone over the twenty thousand mark and the small village charm just isn’t there anymore. Swarms of real estate dealers are mucking around the fringes and it looks like the rest of the battle is just a delaying action.
The limousine from the airport dropped us off at the Carolina Inn a little before two-thirty. On directions from the driver we walked the long block down to Franklin and Columbia and found an outside phone booth. I waited outside while Jack called Simpson’s home number. He talked with Simpson’s wife. She said that he was either back in the stacks at the library or at the graduate instructors’ office at Bingham Hall. She gave Jack a set of directions that were supposed to lead us across campus. The step by step instructions didn’t work. They were given in terms of other buildings we didn’t know either. And couldn’t find.
It took us about twenty minutes. Finally one of the students turned and pointed. “Bingham’s right there.”
It was a large office with perhaps two dozen desks in it. Each desk had its low partition, but you could stand at the entrance and look across the room and see the faces of the instructors. Edward Simpson was at a desk in the far left corner. His head was down and he appeared to be grading papers.
Jack and I made our way past some startled and curious students and instructors. I guess we looked too old to be enrolled in freshman English. Simpson didn’t see us until we stopped in front of his desk.
“We thought we’d better have a talk with you,” Jack said.
“Look,” Simpson began, “I’m sorry about this morning, but …”
“I need two things from you and neither of them is an apology,” Jack said. “You’ve got me in an awkward position with the Atlanta police and you’re going to get me out of it, willingly or unwillingly. I don’t like being accused of advising a client not to appear for a police questioning.”
“What do you want?”
“A depositio
n that covers yesterday’s routine, what you did and where you went.”
“Okay,” Simpson said, “what do I do?”
“First,” Jack said, “we find a poor lawyer who needs some work.”
The office in the rear of a second floor of a building on Rosemary Street was old but the furnishings and the law books were new and so was the lawyer, Arnold Hopkins. He’d just passed the North Carolina Bar exam a year or so before and it looked like nobody knew about it yet. Hopkins acted like we’d given him his birthday present a few months early and hurried down the hall to find the secretary he and a couple of other young lawyers shared. She was thin as a rake handle and homely so that threw out one way of killing the dull time.
Simpson was about three minutes into his recitation of how he’d spent the afternoon of Monday, January 15th when Jack interrupted him. “Let’s start over,” he said. “I never liked sightseeing on Peachtree. It’s worth shit as an alibi.” He turned to the secretary who was blushing over her steno pad. “Tear those notes up.” He whirled on Simpson and snarled at him. “I didn’t come up here to hear fairy tales. I didn’t cancel four appointments to hear you get creative with me.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Simpson said.
“You believe him, Hardman?” Jack asked me.
“About as much as I believe in Santa Claus. Maybe a bit less.”
“Start with around 11:15. You left my office where you’d been talking with me and Jim Hardman.” He nodded at the secretary. “And this time tell the fucking truth.”
“I can’t tell the truth,” Simpson said. “If it got back to my wife …”
“It won’t leave this room here in Chapel Hill. Mr. Hopkins and his secretary are officers of the court and they know the penalties for divulging information.”
Hopkins didn’t like the tone of that, the threat in it, but he nodded at Simpson.
“And the police in Atlanta will just check it out. If it checks out that’ll be the end of it.”
“If it got in the papers it would ruin my marriage.”
“I’ll make sure it doesn’t.”
I felt I’d better encourage him. “I’ll check it out first myself. If you’re telling the truth I’ll prove it and pass it on to a cop on the force who’s a friend of mine.”
The secretary poised her pencil over the steno pad and waited. Jack put his back to Simpson and lowered one eyelid at me, his way of thanking me for jumping in and helping.
It wasn’t a thing he usually did, Simpson said. He’d never done it before, even when the P.M.L.A. met in New York. Atlanta was different. It had a kind of boom town feeling to it, almost a lusty quality. As soon as he left Jack’s office he decided that he wanted a woman. It just hit him standing out on Forsyth. Here he was in a big city, sensing the excitement, and he wanted a woman. Oh, he knew that usually happened at night. Even the driver of the cab he flagged down hadn’t believed it at first. It wasn’t even noon yet. Simpson convinced the driver and the driver parked at the service station and made a few calls. When he returned he drove Simpson to a duplex on Howell Mill Road. Simpson didn’t know the number. It was sort of brown stucco with white trim and quite a bit of shrubbery in the front yard. The girl there didn’t believe Simpson either. She was hardly awake when he arrived. He’d stayed with the woman until an hour before plane time and he’d caught a cab and picked up his luggage at the Sheraton and barely reached Hartsfield in time for his flight to Raleigh-Durham.
And that, according to Simpson, was the whole truth.
Jack was satisfied. He told the secretary to type it up and we’d be back in thirty or forty minutes to get Simpson’s signature on it and get it witnessed.
“What now?” Simpson asked when we were out on Rosemary Street.
“Where’s the police station?” I asked.
Simpson looked stunned. “I told the truth back there.”
“Hear him out,” Jack said to Simpson.
“Where’s the police station?”
“Down there. Rosemary and North Columbia.”
I turned toward Simpson and we walked in the direction of the police station. I spread it out for him hard and simple. Maybe it had been the right thing not to report that Maryann had been kidnapped when it was fairly certain that his ex-wife had the child. Now it wasn’t that simple. It looked like Maryann was a pawn in a drug war. She’d been kidnapped once and then taken away from that kidnapper. While we thought there was a chance that his ex-wife had Maryann now we weren’t sure of that. The kidnappers believed they had a kind of immunity. The ex-wife couldn’t bring charges. If Maryann was being held by somebody else they probably felt very safe. It was time to take the safety away from them. I wanted Simpson, along with Jack as his lawyer, to go in and report the kidnapping. He was to tell it the way it was and then explain that he’d decided to report it because there was a chance that someone other than his ex-wife had taken the child.
“I don’t see what good that does,” Simpson said.
“The police don’t investigate rumors of a kidnapping, but they do look for kidnapped children. And the F.B.I, comes into it too.”
“Hardman convinced me on the flight up,” Jack said.
“If you think it’s what I ought to do.”
Jack said it was.
I got directions from Simpson to a beer place, The Shack, about a third of a block from the police station. I watched them go into the police station and then I went down to The Shack and had a few beers and a sandwich while I waited for them.
An hour later we went back to Hopkins’ office and Simpson read the deposition and signed it and Hopkins and one of the lawyers from down the hall signed it as witnesses. While Simpson and I waited out in the hall Jack wrote a check to cover Hopkins’ time and his fee.
“I’ve got to go back to Bingham,” Simpson said when Jack joined us.
“We’ll walk that way with you,” Jack said.
“Both of you have been very hard on me today,” Simpson said as we turned off North Columbia onto Franklin Street.
Jack didn’t say anything right away. He was looking into windows and at Jeff’s Campus Confectionery he caught Simpson by the elbow and guided him through the door. “I can use a beer. How about you, Jim?”
“I can stand another.”
We stood around the beer counter in back and sipped at our beer while Simpson drank a coke. “What did you mean back there?” Jack asked.
“Well,” he said, almost stuttering, “you two are acting like this is all my fault. And it’s not.” He turned to me. “I thought you were going to find Maryann. That’s what I was paying you to do.”
“I found her,” I said evenly. “And I found her a lot faster than I thought I could. Rather, I found where she should have been. I hadn’t planned on being right in the middle of two murders. Your ex-wife isn’t very neat with other people’s lives.”
“Are you still working for me?”
“Until I find Maryann. After that, I don’t think so.”
Simpson dipped into his inside jacket pocket and brought out his check book. While Jack and I looked at each other and drank our beer Simpson wrote out a check and passed it to Jack. On its way past me I saw that it was for a thousand dollars. Jack folded it and put it in his wallet.
“That’s for Mr. Hardman, his fee and his expenses.” He showed us an embarrassed grin. “I’m going to have a hell of a time just trying to explain these expenses to my wife. I don’t think she approves of what I’m doing.”
“I didn’t tell you,” Jack said, “but Hardman here has a friend working on this with him.”
“I don’t care,” Simpson said. “Hire half the city if you have to. All I want is for you to find Maryann.”
“I’ll find her,” I said.
“Maybe you think, from the way I’ve been acting, that I don’t love Maryann. That’s not true. She’s the only good thing that came out of a bad marriage. It’s just that my new wife resents her. That makes it bad around the house. Maybe ju
st for a few hours I tried to tell myself that it might be better if Maryann stayed with her mother. I don’t think so now.”
“At least that’s honest,” Jack said.
“I guess I don’t like to face a problem. I think I believe that if I don’t it’ll just go away.”
We drank our beer in an easier silence. I still couldn’t say that I liked Simpson, but now I thought I understood him better.
An hour later we were on a flight back to Atlanta.
It wasn’t a hard house to find. I drove slowly up Howell Mill Road, watching both sides of the street, and then, there it was just like Simpson had described it. A brown stucco duplex with white trim and some hedges and what he hadn’t remembered, a mock orange tree. I parked behind a white ’72 Ventura and took my time getting out. I wrote down the license plate numbers and left them in the glove box.
One more thing to check. He’d said, when I’d questioned him, that the woman, or girl, had red hair and a beauty mark on her left cheek. And she’d been about five-ten. My job was just to check that part of Simpson’s story. If that matched, the rest of it was up to Art or Bear or one of the other detectives.
I didn’t like putting the girl out of work. Still, she’d only miss a night or two and she might have to move. That didn’t seem to be much of a problem with the prosties. It seemed to be part of the drill. Every new girl in town was old in some other town.
I pressed the lighted door bell I didn’t have to wait long. The woman who came to the door answered the description exactly. The red hair, the beauty mark, real or false, and the height. She wore a short white linen dress that didn’t hide much. And, watching her sway slightly in the doorway, I decided she’d been in the booze or some grass or hash.
“Come in,” she said. “I’m not doing a thing for the next hour or so.”
I didn’t. The play for pay had dulled some for me. From her point of view I guess I looked like I was hesitating from shyness.
“Didn’t Frankie send you?”