The Deadly Cotton Heart

by Ralph Dennis

  CHAPTER NINE

  I passed the Lakeside Motel. Next to me I saw Hump turned and leaning in that direction. “Sleepy?”

  “Bloated.” He turned and looked straight ahead. “We got some more business I don’t know about?”

  “We came all this way under the pretense of hearing some bluegrass. Thought we might take in an hour or so.”

  “In case Marcy asks about it?”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  It was still misting when I found a parking space some three blocks from the square. I rolled down the window and felt the cool mist on my face and listened to the thinned-out string sounds from that distance. We finished off the Buds and dropped the bottles over the seat back.

  The whole three blocks we passed crowds of people heading away from the square. It didn’t make much sense until I saw the fork of lightning off in the northeast. And I could feel the oppressive stillness. Which meant we were the dumb ones. The smart money was on going home.

  We stepped over a barrier and we were in the square. Off to the right there was a tent with FELKER FUNERAL HOME on the top border. From under the tent came the smell of hot dogs grilling, hamburgers frying and the sweet scent of raw onions. Hump angled in that direction. I followed. I got a burger and something watery that was supposed to be a coke and walked out and stood with my back to a hardware store front. A five-piece band was doing “Rockytop.” It was a long, long version with everybody getting a chance to step out and show something. I finished the hamburger and tossed the napkin into a trash can. I was looking around for a ledge where I could place the coke and have my hands free for applauding when another bolt of lightning sliced through the sky. It seemed to be directly behind the courthouse.

  It was the signal for the heavy rain. Women screamed. People were kicking over the folding chairs. A big spotlight exploded at the side of the platform stage. The screaming got louder. And everybody ran for the awnings and the store fronts that lined the square. It was a wonder that a dozen kids didn’t get stomped flat into the street.

  I waited. Ten minutes and the rain didn’t slacken. The stage was dark now. The thousand or so chairs, some upended, appeared to float in two or three inches of water.

  Hump trotted over from the food tent. Under one arm he carried a candy box with half a dozen hot dogs stacked in it. He ate them one after another while I stared out at the rain.

  It didn’t look like anything was going to work out well for us in Tennessee.

  The Lakeside Motel office was empty. I dumped a handful of change on the counter next to the pay phone and separated it into stacks of nickels, dimes and quarters.

  I gave the long distance operator the Atlanta Police Department number and made it person-to-person to Art Maloney. I put in a dollar-twenty and listened to the call work its way up to Art’s desk.

  He came on, sounding hoarse and tired. “You back in town?”

  “Still in Tennessee.”

  “Nathan Webster’s been trying to reach you.”

  “Why?”

  “How the hell do I know?” Art sounded angry. “You ask him and, while you’re at it, give him a number where he can reach you. He’s been worrying the hell out of me.”

  “I will.”

  “Do that.”

  “Art, what do you know about the Parker murder?”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where? When?”

  I admitted I didn’t know.

  “You need to know a bit more. Otherwise I can’t do one of my miracles.”

  That made sense. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That lawyer, Carter Williams’ lawyer …”

  “Markman,” I said.

  “He’s been asking around about you,” Art said.

  “He find out anything?”

  “Nothing but the truth,” he said.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Art hung up on me.

  I replaced the receiver. I flipped pages in my notebook until I found Nathan Webster’s number. A quick change count and I was fairly certain there was enough left for a station-to-station call to his house.

  I poised a dime over the pay phone slot. I hesitated because I wasn’t quite sure what I’d say to Webster. I heard footsteps and looked around. It was the night clerk. He was a young kid who wore cowboy boots, jeans and a fringed leather shirt. All that and he still needed a shave and a haircut. He placed a mug of coffee on the counter and reached across it and brought up a slip of paper.

  “You Mr. Hardman?”

  I said I was.

  “I took a message for you. It came in about half an hour ago, while you were out.”

  I thanked him and turned the message toward me.

  Emma wants to see you.

  “Was it a woman’s voice?”

  “It sure was.” From the way he looked at me I had my guess that he thought he knew who Emma was. Horny little redneck.

  I winked at him and headed for the door. I was out in the breezeway before I changed my mind and went back into the office.

  “Watch that, Hump.”

  We were on the road headed back to Thelma’s. Hump had reached over and opened my jacket and felt in my waistband. It was empty. I hadn’t brought anything with me. No iron. Before I could tell him that, he’d checked the glove compartment. A rattle around in there and he knew for himself.

  “I’m not high on this,” he said.

  “A strange town and strange cops. If I’d known you were tight with the Chief, I’d have brought four or five pieces with me.”

  “I don’t like those ifs.”

  There was one more bit of puzzling news he didn’t know. I’d decided to keep that from him. It had hit me when I was on the breezeway.

  The note: Emma wants to see you.

  I’d walked into the motel office and leaned on the counter.

  “How was the message given?”

  “That way,” he said. “The way I wrote it down.”

  “Exactly?” I asked.

  “Word for word. She asked if Mr. Hardman was registered here and I said you were. She said she wanted to leave a message. That was after I tried your room and you weren’t there,” he told me.

  “And she said Emma … ?”

  “Emma wants to see you. I wrote it down the way she said it,” he repeated.

  My headlights swept over the front of Thelma’s. Two rednecks stood next to a pickup. They were passing a pint bottle of something back and forth. They turned their heads away from the light.

  I parked in a spot directly in front of the motel office. The neon light still wasn’t burning. There was a bright light inside and I could hear a radio playing country and western.

  Hump followed me to the door. I pushed it open and stepped in. The office was empty. The bedroom beyond was dark.

  “Emma?” No answer. I looked over my shoulder at Hump. “She must have stepped out for a minute.”

  So much for picking at words. I could feel the tightness leaving my neck and shoulders. Nobody’d tricked me into a box after all.

  “You want me to wait with you, Jim?”

  “Wait in the car. She doesn’t know you.”

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll see if I can scrounge up a couple of beers.”

  “Good thought.” I closed the door behind him. I put an elbow on the counter and waited. One minute. Two minutes. I pushed away and headed for the bedroom. I found the light switch and flooded the room with strong light. The bed still unmade. A bra with rusty brown stains next to the pillow. I walked through and looked in the bathroom. A damp towel thrown over the toilet seat. A leg razor clogged with hair on the ledge of the tub.

  I switched off that light and walked back into the bedroom. On the way past, I pulled open the closet door and stopped. There were a lot of empty wooden hangers. A white nightgown, the pink terrycloth robe.

  I squatted and looked at the closet floor. There was a dust mark where there’d been a couple of larg
e suitcases stored. Now gone.

  I stood up. The fat bird had flown.

  The rain had stopped, but the air was still damp and there was an early chill to it when I stepped out of the office and stopped under the awning.

  I saw Hump in the dim light, the big dark shadow of him. He saw me, too, and he held up both hands, a bottle in each hand. He was about twenty yards away when he shouted, “Down, Jim” and drew back his right arm and threw one of the beers. At first, I thought he was playing, faking a throw to me but the down got to me and I turned my head and saw the shape of a man about fifteen yards off to my left. He’d stepped out of a doorway and he whirled toward me with something in his hands. It could have been a stick or a rifle or a shotgun.

  I took a dive for the ground next to my Ford. I heard the loud pop of the beer bottle Hump had thrown and then the louder, deafening blast of a shotgun and I was rolling, rolling until the Ford shielded me. I kept my head down.

  Time. Slow time. Hump leaned over me and touched my shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Skinned up, I think.”

  He caught me under the arms and pulled me to my feet. He braced me until I got back the strength in my legs and moved away from him. I wobbled to the car and leaned against the wet hood.

  “You see him, Hump?”

  “Short look. He took off running.” Hump twisted the cap from the remaining bottle of Bud. He offered me a swallow. “I saved one of them.”

  After a swallow, I looked toward the motel office. From below I could see that a big chunk of the metal awning had been blown away. I leaned against the hood of the Ford and shook. I felt like I had a chill, a hell of a fever.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I was over shaking by the time Turk arrived at Thelma’s. I’d called the chief from the phone in the motel office and then we’d gone to Thelma’s to have a beer and wait for him. We had a Bud before Turk arrived. The counterman was ready to close for the night.

  He carried an old broom that was worn down to the strings when he met Turk at the front door. “Turk, I’m closing.”

  “Then close, dammit,” Turk said, “but bring me a cold one first.” Turk slumped into the chair across from me. His eyes looked red and watery. Maybe we’d awakened him while he was trying to catch some sleep at his desk. “Tell me this shit about somebody trying to kill you on my time.”

  “You can see the hole that got blasted …”

  “Later,” Turk said. “Tell me about it.”

  I amazed myself. I talked it to him, calm and easy. At the other side of the room, after he’d brought Turk a Bud, the counterman huffed and puffed a crazy punctuation into it while he stirred up the dust and the cigarette butts with his broom.

  The two cops arrived just as I finished. Turk sent them to have a look in the motel office and to verify the shotgun damage to the awning. Turk bummed one of my Pall Malls and coughed at the first puff. “You’ve been in this crap before, Hardman. I can almost hear you thinking.”

  “I was put in a box with a ribbon on it.”

  “More.” The second puff wasn’t as bad.

  I passed him the note the clerk at the Lakeside Motel had given me. Turk read it. His face didn’t change. “So what?”

  “Emma bothers me. You see, we didn’t get formally introduced. I didn’t know her name, and she didn’t know mine. At least, I didn’t know hers until you told me at the police station.”

  He was smart enough to see the direction I was heading. There wasn’t any way I was going to make him like it. “Go on.”

  “Somebody messed up Christmas. They knew I’d talked to Emma, and maybe they knew I hadn’t found out what I wanted to know. Just maybe on that.”

  “Emma?”

  “I doubt it. I think she’d have remembered. Even if she’d found out my name, she’d have said the manager of the motel behind Thelma’s or the woman you talked to this afternoon. Something like that.” I shook my head. “I don’t think she made the call. You scared the pee out of her. Or somebody did. She’s flown. She’s gone. And she probably won’t stop for a breath before she reaches the West Coast.”

  “Who then?” Turk asked.

  “Any woman could have made the call.” I took my time. I had his attention. He’d wait. “I’m not bothered so much by the question of who made the call. I’m more interested in who set me up. That could have been you, Turk.”

  “It wasn’t. If I’d set you up, you’d be dead. Make book on that.”

  The two boy cops stomped in. Ed led the way. “It’s true enough, Chief,” he said. “Somebody blew a hole in the sky over there.”

  Turk eased about in his chair and put an arm down the back of it. “Emma there?”

  “No.”

  “Any sign she bugged out?”

  That bounced back and forth between the two cops. Ed shook his head. Turk raised an eyebrow at me.

  “You look in her closet?”

  Ed said he hadn’t.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked away. “You’ll find the dust outlines where a couple of suitcases were for a long time. They’re not there anymore.”

  “Moved recently?”

  “Today, I think.” I dropped my hands from my eyes. The long day was getting to me.

  Turk tapped Hump on the shoulder. “Tell them about the man with the shotgun, buddy.”

  “White,” Hump said. “About six or six-one. I didn’t see his face, but there’s a streak of white hair that runs up the center of his head like a paint mark.”

  We looked at the two kid cops.

  “That fit anybody we know?” Turk said.

  “Might fit two or three,” Ed said.

  The other cop gave Ed a puzzled look. “That’s Billy Bennett.”

  “You get the cigar,” Turk said. “He’s got a shotgun?”

  “An old piece of junk his daddy had. A twelve gauge.”

  “It shoots?”

  “Last I heard. Got a deer last year.”

  “Where’s Billy living now?” Turk explained it to Hump and me. “He sold the piece of land his daddy left him. That was five-six months ago.”

  Ed shook his head at the question. That done, he scratched at the acne patch with a fingernail. His eyes closed. The other cop stepped closer to Turk. “What I heard is that Billy’s working shares on that north tract belongs to Mr. Ben Reed.”

  “The one they call Rock Farm?”

  “That’s what the ones that worked it call it.”

  “I think we ought to talk to Billy about shooting holes in motel awnings.” Turk pushed back his chair. He stood up and I noticed for the first time that he was armed. He wore a stained old leather service holster and there was a .45 automatic buttoned under the flap. “You want to come along, Hump? Hardman?”

  I said that we might as well.

  It was hardscrabble and poor dirt land. The cropper house that went with it belonged there. The exterior walls had been built out of what looked like the waste cuts of pine. The porch was high and narrow and, in daylight, you could probably see all the way under the house and beyond. That was so the breeze, if there was one, could cool it in the summer. The winters would be bad, the way the wind would whip around under there. I guess, for these people, the way they lived, one out of two wasn’t bad. It was almost a moral victory.

  The porch was dark. There were lights in the house. Some of it leaked past the dime store roll-up paper shades.

  The air was still damp and there was a wind blowing here and there, from this quarter and that, as if it couldn’t make up its mind. By the luminous dial on my watch face, it was ten of two.

  Hump and I stood, crouched over, in a four-foot ditch about forty yards from the front of the house. A thin river of water from the thunderstorm earlier in the night washed over our feet. Both my shoes were full. We’d been waiting for fifteen minutes. Off to my right, ten yards away, Turk wiped his nose on his black slicker. While the sleeves were back, he checked his watch.

  It was time for his two cowboys to be in posi
tion. Ed should be at the back door. The other young cop at the front right corner of the house near the porch.

  For the fifth or sixth time I looked at the .38 Police Special Turk had loaned me. He’d taken it from the trunk of the police car and casually checked the loads before he passed it to me. I didn’t know the gun, and I hoped it wasn’t rusted away or pitted and that the loads weren’t so old they’d misfire. Strange guns make me nervous.

  Hump had turned the iron down. He didn’t like killing. He’d shared his first kill with Art Maloney that time in the mountains, and he’d been sick over it for weeks.

  Sound at the cropper house. The front door opened and a man outlined himself in the lighted doorway. He was there long enough for us to get a slow, long look at him. He carried a shotgun with him, in the crook of his left arm. It looked long, wicked and double-barreled. Before he moved left, out of the light, I had time to check his hair. I saw the streak of gray or white hair that ran over the top of his head.

  “That’s the boy,” Hump whispered.

  Turk heard him. He dipped his head at me.

  It was go down time.

  I watched Turk. It was his move and I wasn’t quite sure how he planned to handle it. I’d heard him position the two cops. That and nothing else. Now it was gut-it-up time or heads-down-in-the-ditch time. I knew which one it was for me. And Hump would follow my lead.

  Turk reached forward, grabbed an exposed root, and pulled himself out of the ditch. He walked straight toward the porch. I could see the .45 in his hand, not pointed, loose and easy at his side.

  “Who’s that?”

  Turk stopped. I saw the .45 move upward. “It’s me, Turk. I’ve got to talk to you on some police business, Billy.”

  The cop at the right corner of the house did his part. He said, “I’m on your hip, Billy.”

  “Turk, you son of a bitch ….”

  None of it was classic. I guess you couldn’t expect Billy Bennett to follow a bad script either. Maybe it was the way the full moon affected people in Tennessee.

  “Billy, it’s just some talk we want,” Turk said.

  Billy made a running dive for the open, lighted doorway. He was in the light for a split second, rolling and twisted, and he kicked the door closed behind him. He’d kept the shotgun with him and I stepped out of the ditch, the .38 at the ready.