by Ralph Dennis
Wade cleared his throat and looked at his watch. “I think we’ve taken enough of your time, gentlemen. I have only one more question.”
Wade was trying to shut it off. But the last look Markman gave me meant that he wasn’t satisfied. His interest was up and it wouldn’t take him long to get his answer if he knew anybody over at the department. They’d be only too happy to dump that sludge over me one more time.
“Is there any possibility that Price might have had some romantic interest in Ellen Webster?”
“That’s hard to believe,” Carter Williams said. “Billy Ray liked his women, that’s for sure. But Ellen, that’s hard to believe about her. She just isn’t that type.”
Markman said, “I guess that’s all you want to know.” It was final. There wasn’t a question mark within a mile of it.
Captain Wade looked over his shoulder at Art. The electronic gear was packed and ready to be carted away. From where I sat, I could read Wade’s message. It was in foot-high letters.
The hot Irish in Art wouldn’t let him accept it. He didn’t like the slammed door, the toe-crush put on the one question that hadn’t been asked. He rode right past the STOP sign. “I’ve got a blank in here somewhere. What is your real relationship with Ellen Webster?”
Markman probably had expected that approach at the beginning. He’d relaxed when he saw that Captain Wade wasn’t going to put a stick in that muddy water. Now he gave Art a hard stare before he whirled on Carter Williams. “Don’t answer that.”
“It’s all right,” Williams said. “I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing to hide. It’s just a business relationship. I suppose you could say we’re friends. You don’t work with somebody for a long time without liking them.”
“You sleeping with her?”
“That question is an insult,” Markman shouted. “You will not answer it.”
Wade gestured toward Art. It was the cut-off sign. Art ignored it and said, “All it takes is a yes or a no.”
Markman shook his head at Williams.
“A yes or a no?” Art insisted.
“Then a no.” Williams was on his feet. For a moment it looked like all that brute power leaned toward Art.
Captain Wade stepped between them. “Now, let’s calm down. You asked your question, Art, and you got your answer. That ends it.”
“There was nothing wrong with the question,” Art said.
“Or the answer.” Captain Wade waved a hand toward the electronic equipment. “It’s time we were going.” After Art picked up the video player and the monitor, Wade guided him to the door. At the doorway Wade stopped and nodded, “Thank you, gentlemen, for your time.”
I’d stayed off on the fringes. I was slow leaving. I put my glass on the table and picked up the tape recorder. When I turned toward the door, Markman was blocking it.
“You didn’t answer my question, Hardman.”
“Don’t break your mouth asking it.” I used a shoulder to push past him. He reached out and grabbed my free arm. I tried to jerk it free, but he held on.
“What’s your occupation now, Mr. Hardman?”
I lifted the tape recorder and pointed it toward him. “How would you like this, case and all, stuffed up your ass?”
He dropped his hand and backed away.
I went outside and stood on the steps with Art and Captain Wade. It was an angry quiet out there. The young black brought Wade’s car around first. Wade flipped the keys in his hand a few times while he watched the black walk away. “We’ll have a word about this later, Art.”
He drove away. We waited for Art’s car.
“You hear those easy questions in there?”
I nodded. “Not a hard pitch in the whole lot.”
Art hawked and spat a glob on the bottom step. That said it all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Later that same afternoon I made myself a gin and tonic and went and sat on the back steps. It was sunny and cool at the same time, that one poised moment before spring fell off the shelf. Halfway down the glass, I walked around the side of the house and inspected the fig tree outside the kitchen window. It had been sick about a year before and I’d spent part of a morning cutting away the rotten limbs. Like all surgery, it took time for the patient to recover. Now, I thought it had. The tree was putting out pale, delicate leaves and it didn’t smell like cat piss anymore.
Back at the steps, I was congratulating myself on my first successful major operation when I heard the car pull up in the driveway. I waited. Hump poked his head around the side of the house. “You didn’t call,” he said.
“Had nothing worth talking about.” I waved the glass at him and he nodded and went inside and mixed himself one. He returned and sat on the step next to me.
“How are things with the top police undercover man and superspy?”
“Crappy.” He sipped the gin and tonic while I told him how delicate Wade had been around big money.
“It figures,” he said at the end of it.
“You or me,” I said, “and they wouldn’t have been tap dancing around it.”
“I can hear it now.” Hump deepened his voice and put some redneck in it. “You been plugging that girl, Hump? Snigger, giggle.”
“No, sir, not me.”
“You been getting enough of it? Hell, everybody knows you’ve been slicing and sawing away at it all year. Chortle, chortle.”
“On my mother’s grave …”
“There too? Snigger. Lord knows we’re all men here and we know no matter how much it gets used it don’t wear out.”
“Not me, boss.”
We were making so much noise we didn’t hear the car pull up out front. And I didn’t know we had an audience until I looked up with that stupid grin on my face and saw the man standing at the corner of the house.
Hump didn’t see him. “Would you say it is more like a peacoat sleeve or a rubber glove? Snigger.”
I turned and put an elbow in Hump’s ribs. Hard.
Our visitor stood there, patient and indulgent. I put his age at thirty-five or six. Somewhere in there. His hair was straw-colored and cut close. None of that long hair for him. He wore an off-the-rack gray suit. It probably cost, at one of the late summer sales, about a hundred or so. His low-cut black shoes, dusty now from the walk up my driveway, had had a mirror shine earlier in the day. With all those impressions, I knew that his nails were probably neatly trimmed and cleaned. Like me, like all of us who’d grown up in the South, we’d had it drummed into our heads as children that the first thing a person noticed about us when they met us was whether we had shined shoes and clean fingernails.
I looked at my nails. I could have planted a garden under there. I guess you could say I’d outgrown that shit.
“You’re Mr. Hardman?” His voice was soft and southern. It wasn’t the usual mass southern accent. It was Charleston or Virginia, one of those places.
I nodded. His patience had changed to hesitation. I could feel him leaning toward me and leaning away at the same time. I was having trouble fixing him in my head. As far as I could remember, all the bills were paid. There was, of course, the possibility that he was I.R.S. From all that homeless money that passed through my hands, I only reported enough of it to appear on this side of poverty. And I’d had a visit once or twice.
“I’m Nathan Webster.”
I stood up. Webster moved over a few steps and looked past me at Hump. I said, “This is my friend, Hump Evans.”
“The Hump Evans?”
“As far as I know,” Hump said.
“I’ve seen you play,” Webster said. “It was several years ago.”
“I’m retired.”
That was enough of the Fan Night and Old Timers Game. “Unless you’re lost and need my map or some directions, I assume you want to see me about something.”
“I’m not lost.” He continued to look at Hump. “I need to talk to you.”
“If it’s about the other night you can talk in front of Hump. He was backing m
e that night at the Blue House.”
“It’s about the other night.”
“You want to talk inside?”
“It’s pleasant out here,” Webster said. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“That?” I tried to laugh. “A routine we’re working up for a Rotary Club smoker.”
I left him nodding like he believed me. I went into the house and got a chair from the kitchen table. By the time I’d returned, Hump had asked if he wanted a drink. From the doorway I heard Webster settle for a glass of plain tonic water. I placed the chair for Webster and sat on the steps. A few seconds later, Hump brought out a tall glass of ice cubes and tonic. Hump sat down next to me and passed the glass to Webster.
“I don’t know how to start this, Mr. Hardman.”
“You can call me Jim.” I waited. When he still couldn’t get it out, I said, “Have the police talked to you yet?”
“Three or four days ago. They came to my office.”
“And …?”
“It seemed like science fiction. I didn’t believe it. Not then, anyway.”
“And now … ?”
“I still don’t believe it. But Ellen … my wife … she’s been acting strange.”
“Did the police talk to her?”
“They must have,” Webster said. “Perhaps the same day they talked to me.”
“You two talk about it?”
“I couldn’t,” Webster said. “It would have been like I was accusing her and I didn’t want to do that.”
That was the all-American marriage for you. Here it looked like the wife might be having an affair with her boss and the boss might have sent his odd jobs man off to find a killer who’d waste the husband, and they still couldn’t talk about it.
“Something must have happened,” I said.
“Two days ago, she moved out while I was at work.”
“No explanation, no letter?”
He shook his head. “She didn’t take much with her. As far as I can tell, she took only a couple of dresses and a suit.”
“You tell the police?”
“No.” He chewed for a moment on his lower lip. “I thought she’d be back, if for no other reason than to get the rest of her things.”
“And you’d talk her into staying?”
He nodded. “Something like that. I guess it sounds silly.”
It did, but I’d done my share of silly things in the past. It didn’t seem fair to jump on his. “Have you tried to find her?”
“All day. I’ve been looking all day. None of our friends have seen her or heard from her.”
“You said our. She have any girlfriends? Women she knew from work, ones she had lunch with or played tennis with?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “It’s odd but I don’t remember her ever being close to another woman, not really close.”
Hump reached across me and hooked my pack of smokes from my shirt pocket. He lit one and placed the pack on the step between us. He was reading Nathan Webster, blowing the dust off every inflection. It might be worth the few minutes later to see how he saw the inside man.
“I understand this up to a point,” I said.
The puzzled look settled upon his face. “I don’t think I quite …”
I’d gone too fast. I’d left him considering the fact that she didn’t have any girlfriends and I’d jumped over some gaps, the questions that had been bothering me since he’d appeared at the back corner of my house. “Maybe it’s not as simple as I thought it was. Look, why come to me? I’m the one who dumped this thing in your lap.”
“Why, you saved my life.”
That might be true, but I’d probably ruined his marriage. “What exactly do you want out of me, Webster?”
“You know Mark Hannah, don’t you?”
I did. He’d been a good cop until one evening, off duty, he’d walked into the middle of a holdup at one of those 7-11 stores. He’d been carrying and he’d tried for it. What he got was a messed-up hip and a plastic hip joint that didn’t meet departmental medical standards. The last I’d heard of him, he wasn’t working.
“I know him,” I said.
“He handles security at the Tyler building … that’s where we have our offices.”
“I’d wondered what happened to him.”
“Your name came up when the police talked to me. What you’d done. I knew Mark had been on the police once, and I asked him about you. He said you’d been honest once, but he’d been hearing rumors about you the last few years.”
“People kiss and tell,” I said.
“Mark said people hired you now and then.”
“That’s another one of those rumors,” I said. “I don’t have the state’s approval for that kind of work.”
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
“All right.” I lifted my glass and got a noseful of ice. And a small sip of watered-down drink. “What do you want?”
“I want to hire you.”
“Both of us?”
He looked at Hump. “He works with you?”
“He’s the brains,” I said. “I do the rough work.”
He could smile. At least he tried to show us that he could. “I have a thousand dollars.”
“That might buy both of us for a week.” I turned a shoulder and put it between Webster and Hump. Hump knew what my question was. He nodded. That meant he wanted the job. I’d have to remember to ask him why later. Whether something in the situation interested him or because he was broke and bored. We’d taken some jobs for the wrong reasons now and then, and we’d been sick sorry later. “What do you want for your thousand dollars?”
“I want you to find Ellen.”
I dipped my head. That might be possible.
“And I want you to find out what this is all about, why Price wanted me killed.”
“That might be stretching the thousand dollars a bit thin,” I said.
“If it takes longer, I’ll get another thousand, two if I need it.”
“You’ve got that kind of money?”
“My mother does,” he said.
I stood up and dumped the ice cubes on the ground. “I’ll need pictures of her.”
“I have some.”
“She have her own car?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need the make, model, color and tag numbers.”
“I don’t have the tag numbers with me, but …”
“I’ll drop by your place later.”
“Seven o’clock?”
I nodded. I watched as he braced a checkbook on his knee and wrote a check for me. After he handed it over, I dropped it on the step at Hump’s feet and walked around the house with Webster. I stopped next to the blue 1973 Capri.
“Two things,” I said.
“Huh?”
“If I find your wife, I can’t promise to bring her back to you. That’s kidnapping.”
“You find her, Mr. Hardman, and I’ll do the rest.”
“The second thing. I’ve got to pass on the word that she’s left. The police’ll have my hide if I don’t.”
“I don’t like that.”
“Look at it this way. The police can put a trace on a car a hell of a lot better than I can. And if they haven’t written this off completely, they’ll find out in a day or two anyway.”
“All right then.”
He was closing the car door when I said, “I’ll need your address.”
“It’s on the check.”
He drove away.
At the back steps Hump had mixed both of us a fresh drink. The check was on the steps. Webster had written it in some dark blue ink. The handwriting was oddly delicate and feminine.
I sipped at my drink. “Tell me about him, Hump.”
“I have a feeling that his mother kept one of his balls.”
“The southern mama bit?”
“The all mamas bit. What a lot of them try.”
“But he’s not fey?”
“Not yet,” Hu
mp said. “Maybe never. It might just be that thin-blood in the southern upper classes, but I’m not pissing at any urinals next to him.”
“Why this job?”
“I want to see that woman. It’s a fish hook in me. I think that woman probably saved him from Gay Liberation. I’d like to know why.”
I found I was staring down at the check. Some freak thought had me thinking that the ink was going to disappear, just like in some WWII spy movie.
By the time I’d finished my drink the ink was still showing. For better or worse, we were hired.
CHAPTER SIX
Nathan Webster pointed me toward the hammered brass coffee table off to one side in the living room. About the time I slumped down on the sofa he switched on the overhead light. There were three color photographs lined up on the table top. I picked up the first of the photos. “This the whole lot?”
“That’s all.” He leaned across the coffee table. “I knew that Ellen didn’t like to have her picture taken but, until I started looking through the envelopes, I didn’t realize how few there are of her.”
“You’ve been married how long?”
“Almost five years,” he said.
“She give any reason for being camera-shy?”
“She joked about it. She said it was a woman’s vanity and that she didn’t want me to look back and see how much she’d aged since this photograph or that one had been taken.”
“Possible,” I said.
The woman in the photographs was in her late twenties, I guessed, and she wore her soft red hair shoulder length. She had the kind of skin that goes with red hair. It wouldn’t tan well, and there was a butterfly sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks. It was a long, delicate face with green, distrustful eyes. If you stopped this girl on the street and asked for the time, she’d know you had other things on your mind. That kind of look.
My guess was that all three photographs had been taken on the same day, maybe one right after the other. She wore the same green blouse in all three. In two of the photos, the waist shot and the full-length shot, I could see woods and a lake or a river in the background. In the full-length photo, she wore tight white shorts that had a defined crotch crease to them. There was a blur of a sailboat off in the distance.