The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

by Ralph Dennis

  “All this stupid talk makes me hungry.”

  On our way out, passing the platform, Heddy squatted and did a bit of a farewell crotch-whip at us. Hump gave her the peace sign and we went outside, away from the smoke and the scent of all that green rank fantasy.

  That was two more. Add them to the list. Find the first one and the others fell into place. That was the first law. But he didn’t know their names. So he watched them as they passed the dance platform

  and passed within inches of the table where he sat. Get everything about them so he’d recognize them in the dark. The white one, forties, gone soft and slow, not a quick movement in him. Might have been different ten or fifteen years ago. Had lost it in the bars and the bedrooms and letting his birthdays sneak past him.

  The other one, the big shine, he might think he was big and hard. He tried to cover it but there was a slight limp. The left knee it looked like. That meant he couldn’t move that well either. And he hadn’t seen or felt the knife yet. That would make him small. When it touched him.

  When they were gone he sipped at an empty beer can for a few more minutes, letting the time run, waiting until the time felt right. Letting it build and grow.

  He hadn’t been in Atlanta eight hours yet and it was about time to cut off the head and watch the rest of the bodies twitch. Almost time. He ordered another beer by holding up his empty can.

  Hump was driving. About two blocks from Jake’s I noticed that Hump was watching the rearview mirror. He moved over into the right hand turning lane and hit the turn signal. “I thought we’d go the long way.” I shifted around and looked through the rear window. All I could see were the headlights. “I think we picked up a blue Impala outside Jake’s. Might as well see if he wants to go the long way, too.”

  We weren’t more than about six blocks from the Burger Shack but Hump made it a twelve-block tour of the back streets. The headlights stayed with us, close enough to see us if we got tricky, back far enough so it would be hard to trap him if we got on to him.

  “After all this driving,” I said, “I bet this guy would like a Biggie, too.”

  “If I remember right there’s a package store up ahead. Got to give this side trip a good reason. Don’t want to make that guy suspicious.” About half a block more and he turned into the parking lot in front of Arnold’s Package Store. “You need any booze?”

  “Might as well.” I went in and bought Hump a fifth of J&B and myself a fifth of Stock, an Italian brandy. So far we’d spent money that Annie Murton had given us to buy almost no information from a topless dancer and for two bottles of booze. At least you couldn’t call the booze a waste of money.

  I went back outside and got in the car and Hump got us going again. We hit Peachtree and did a right and in a block or so we were at the Burger Shack. Before we got out Hump cut his eyes toward the rear-view mirror. “He’s still with us. If I remember the layout in most of these places there’s a side entrance over by the john. We go in and have a Biggie and some coffee. You talk to the manager if you want to. About part way through I’m going to do my drunk black with a full bladder. You count ten minutes from then and you come out and walk straight over to the Impala. You see where it is?”

  I did. The blue Impala had coasted in and parked several spaces down and behind us to the left.

  “Maybe if we ask him right he’ll tell us why he’s stepping on our heels tonight.”

  We went inside and sat at the front counter with our backs to the parking lot. Whoever was in the Impala had a good view of us. That was the way we wanted it. I ordered us Biggies and coffee. When the pimply kid who waited on us brought the coffee I asked if the manager was around. That shook him some. Maybe people had been complaining about the service. He asked if something was wrong. I told him there wasn’t, that I just wanted to ask about a boy who’d worked here until a couple of days before.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “Edwin Robinson. You know him?”

  “Sure. He worked this shift.” But a thought had hit him and he tightened up. “You the police?”

  “Friends of his grandmother.”

  “You sure?” He still wasn’t convinced.

  I held up three fingers. “Boy Scout honor.”

  That tickled him. “Weren’t all cops Boy Scouts?”

  “Probably.” I gave him a grin and he moved down the counter to fill another order.

  “What do you want to know about Ed?” he asked when he came back.

  “You know his friends?”

  “You mean the ones who worked here or the ones he had off the job?”

  An idea hit me then. It was too simple and too easy, but I went along with it. “Anybody else quit about the same time Edwin did?”

  He grinned. “How’d you guess that? Almost the whole shift.” He nodded toward the grill where a balding flabby man was working up a sweat over fifty or so burger patties. “That’s why Chambers is working his ass off back there. It takes time to train a grillman.”

  “How many quit? Five altogether?”

  The kid looked puzzled. “Four off this shift and one off the shift right before this one. If you knew all the answers, why’d you ask me?”

  “It was a guess.” Next to me Hump was eating his Biggie and cocking one ear toward the talk. It was too easy. I could guess that he was thinking that along with me. But sometimes the luck went that way. It couldn’t be called a mistake they’d made, because five kids quitting their job at a burger joint wouldn’t cause much of a ripple in the world. It wasn’t going to make the newspapers or filter down into the underworld pipeline. “I need a favor,” I told the pimply boy. I got out a ten and creased it and put it on the counter. “I guess you’ve got some kind of list back in the office with the names and addresses of everybody who works here. It’s worth this ten to me if you can make me up a list of the four who quit with Edwin . . . names and addresses.”

  He eyed the ten. “I guess I could do it.”

  “I might go out for a few minutes but I’ll come back.”

  The kid nodded. “I get my break in ten minutes. I’ll make you the list then.”

  “That’s a deal.”

  The kid scooped up the ten and moved away.

  “So easy it scares me,” Hump said after the kid was out of eye range.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “We had a starting point, the kid, Edwin. Otherwise we’d still be chasing our tails.”

  Hump choked down the last of his Biggie and pushed the plate away. “Time to do my sneaky stuff.” He staggered a little as he got up and had to brace himself a time or two on the counter as he moved out of sight. I marked the time on my watch. I’d been talking too much and my Biggie was cold but I ate it anyway. I washed it down with lukewarm coffee. I could feel the time ticking off. I waited the full ten minutes and then I paid the check and went outside. I went straight to the Impala. When I got close I thought it hadn’t worked. I couldn’t see anyone in the front seat. I opened the door and looked in the back seat. Hump was there and he had a necklock on the dude. I didn’t get a good look at him. He had a screwed-up face and he was making sucking noises like trying to breathe.

  “Like stealing pussy,” Hump said. “Keys are still in. Drive us around the block.”

  I kicked the engine over and pulled out of the lot.

  “This bag of crap doesn’t know it yet but he’s going to tell me everything he knows and when he runs out of things he knows, that’s when he’s going to start telling lies.”

  “The truth first,” I said.

  “Pick a dark street, something quiet and residential.”

  I traced, backwards, the way we’d come. After I passed Arnold’s where I’d bought the booze, I saw a large apartment house ahead and to the right. I went just past it and parked under the shadow of a large oak. That blocked out the lights. I cut the engine and got out my lighter. I flipped it on and turned and looked at the dude Hump was holding. He looked to be in his early thirties, with a thin animal face
that wasn’t improved by a purplish birthmark that came up out of his collar and wrapped around his right cheek. He was still huffing and wheezing. I closed the lighter and it was dark in the car again.

  “Why were you following us?”

  “I wasn’t . . . ” He ended in a choked, muzzled grunt.

  “We said the truth first,” Hump said.

  I kept my voice even and almost kindly. “Normally we’d take a lot of time with you, friend, and we’d let you lie to us and we’d lie to you and we’d still end up with what we wanted to know. We don’t have that much time tonight. So I’m going to ask you one more time. Why?”

  Hump must have relaxed the chokehold a bit. “You can go to. . . .”

  “All right,” I said to Hump, “I believe in grown-up men making their own choices.” I got out a cigarette and took my time lighting it. I took a couple of drags, giving him time to think. “Hump, break one of his arms. Make it his left arm. Break it somewhere between the elbow and the shoulder. That’ll leave him an arm to eat with.”

  “I don’t care whether the mother starves.” Hump shifted his hold and now he had the guy’s left arm out and away from his body. “It’d be easier to break it at the elbow, Jim.”

  “Do it the easy way then.” I kept that even and understated.

  Hump began putting pressure on the elbow. The guy stood it for a few seconds, about as long as I’d have taken the pain, and then gave it up.

  “Stop it. Don’t break it.” It was a shade under a shriek.

  “Who put you onto us?”

  “Jake. Jake at the Headhunter Lounge.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He just wanted me to follow you around and see where you went and who you talked to. That’s all.”

  “You work for Jake?”

  “I’m the bouncer,” the guy said.

  Hump laughed. “That’s job placement for you.”

  “You believe him, Hump?”

  “I swear it’s the truth.”

  “If you don’t believe him,” I said, “go on and break the arm.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Pass me his wallet.”

  Hump shifted him around and got the wallet from his hip pocket. He passed it to me and I took the driver’s license out and returned it to him. Hump dropped it on the floor.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Fred Maxwell,” he said.

  “Where you live?”

  “Villa North Apartments, apartment 14.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Briarcliff.”

  I started the car and drove back to the Burger Shack. There was an empty space next to Hump’s car so I pulled in there and cut the engine. “All right, here’s what you do friend. You go straight home. Get into bed and pull the covers over your head. No phone calls and especially not to Jake. We’re going back to talk to him and if we have trouble finding him or if we get the idea he’s expecting us we’ll come looking for you. And we’ll find you if it takes a month. And I’ll let Hump break both your arms. You got me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do it too,” Hump said.

  “I won’t call him,” Maxwell said.

  “And don’t answer your phone in case he calls you,” I said.

  “I won’t.”

  Hump pushed him away and we got out. I left Hump at his car and I went inside. The pimply kid saw me coming and met me at the counter. He handed me a tightly folded piece of paper. I thanked him and went back outside. The blue Impala was gone.

  Hump headed for Jake’s. I unfolded the paper and read the names and addresses. The kid had been nice enough to print them out in a child-like block printing.

  Archie Winnson 244 Tindall Place

  Burt Chandler 244 Tindall Place

  Henry Harper 112 Talmadge Road

  Ike Turner 244 Tindall Place

  I folded the paper and put it away. It looked like at least three of the boys had shared a place. That made the hunting easier. Still, I had a feeling that we wouldn’t find much when we checked the addresses out. If they’d played it smart they would have kept their jobs and blended into the woodwork. Now something had flushed them and if they’d decided to leave town it would be hard to find them.

  Hump parked in the lot next to the Lounge and we went inside. The crowd was thicker now and the smoke and the smells worse than before. The businessmen were there in full force now and I guess the price of ass was getting discussed all over the place.

  Heddy looked up from one of the tables and gave us a question look. Did we want her to join us? I shook my head and we moved through the noise and the people and down the staircase to the office. As soon as you hit the lower level you could find the bathroom by the smell.

  I rapped on the office door. No answer. I tried it again.

  “Maybe the guy crossed us and called him.”

  “Maybe.” I knocked again. “Jake, it’s Jim Hardman.” Still no answer. I tried the door and found it unlocked. We went in and closed the door behind us. It was a junk kind of office. There was a desk and a chair straight ahead and a sofa over to the right where he auditioned his dancers. Once he’d offered to let me audition one but I’d passed it up. That was when I was first going with Marcy and it hadn’t seemed my kind of action at the time.

  The only light in the office came from a gooseneck lamp at the front corner of the desk and from the bathroom light that sliced across the room from the partly open door.

  “Jake? You here?”

  “Maybe he left for a while,” Hump said.

  I crossed to the bathroom and pulled the door open. He was in all right but he wasn’t about to answer. He was kneeling, propped up, with his head in the toilet bowl. His hands were cuffed behind him and his throat was cut. Somebody had cut his throat and held him face down into the toilet and bled him like a pig. The water in the bowl looked as thick as pudding.

  I left Hump staring down at Jake and went back into the office and called the police.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When I got the police switchboard, on a hunch, I asked for Art Maloney. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks but as far as I knew he still had the night shift. After the way I’d left the force, resigning under fire, it was bad enough having to call and report a murder. All I needed beyond that was some kind of hard-assed cop who didn’t like me handling the investigation.

  Luck was with me. Art came on the line and I laid it out for him.

  “That figures,” Art said. “The robbery last night and now a killing. I keep meaning to see if there’s a full moon or at least a moon that’s filling.”

  I said I hadn’t noticed either.

  Art said he’d be down as fast as he could. “Keep everybody out of the office and don’t let the word out. We’ll want to talk to the girls and the customers.”

  “Right.” Hump came out of the bathroom and looked at me, shaking his head.

  “And keep your hands out of everything, Jim.”

  “He’s got nothing I want,” I said.

  “A black and white will be there as soon as one can get there.”

  He rang off and I sent Hump out in the hall to watch the door for me. When he saw the cops coming he was to give the door a rap or two. After all, Art expected me to give the place a quick sweep and since he wouldn’t believe that I hadn’t, I figured I might as well go ahead. As soon as the door closed behind Hump, I cut on the overhead light and went to work on the desk. Either Jake kept a messy desk or somebody had been there before me. There wasn’t much worth looking at. All I learned about Jake was that he must have bought his Trojans by the gross. Well, he’d bought too big a shipment this time.

  The two uniformed cops from the black and white came a minute or two after I’d given up on the desk and the room in general. I showed them the body and one of the cops, the young one, turned a little gray around the mouth. But he kept his supper down and I guess that was all you could ask of a young cop until he got his blood legs.

/>   Art came rushing in a few minutes later. A police photographer was with him and a young plainclothes cop I didn’t know. Art nodded at him and said his name was Bill Matthews. Matthews got my name and nodded at me with a look that said he’d eaten something for supper that hadn’t agreed with him. Art took a look at the body and then sent Matthews and the two uniformed cops upstairs to close the place down for the night. More cops were on the way. He wanted all the names and addresses and he wanted the customers and the girls interviewed. Had they noticed anything strange the last hour or so? Anybody hanging around in front of the office, entering or leaving the office?

  I’d given him the hour framework. Maybe one of the girls could edge it closer if they’d seen him after Hump and I had left for the Burger Shack.

  Art spent only a few minutes in the bathroom and then he left it to the photographer. He came over to me and dipped into my shirt pocket for my cigarettes. His flat Irish face had a bit of a burn showing, like he was angry with me. “You find anything in the desk, Hardman?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. He tipped his head in the direction of the bathroom where the flashbulbs were cracking. “I thought hog-killing time was December.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “Isn’t that right, Hump?” he insisted.

  Hump gave him a lazy grin and flopped down on the sofa. “I wouldn’t know. I’m a city boy myself.”

  Art took a couple of short puffs on the cigarette and then asked his hard question. “You two do some shady shit now and then, but you haven’t taken up killing on contract, have you?”

  “That’s a hell of a question from somebody acts like a friend most of the time,” I said.

  His eyes stayed on me level and hard. “That’s a message killing in there. You got any idea what the message is?”

  I wasn’t about to lay out everything I knew, but Art had been a friend for a time and I could point him in the right direction without involving what we knew about Edwin and the other boys. “This is just a guess.” I told him about our visit, leaving Edwin out. And about the tail he’d put on us. “He was nervous for some reason. We came back to ask why. Too late, it seems.”