The Deadly Cotton Heart

by Ralph Dennis

I grinned at him. “You’re not going to get me in that neighborhood again.” One night, when he had me beered out, he took me to a black place far out Auburn Avenue. He’d enjoyed the hell out of himself. I’d thought I was going to have to donate a couple of my ribs just to get out of the place.

  “A honk cafe’s all right with me.”

  “Gene and Gabe’s?”

  I called Marcy and caught her before she checked out of the office for the day. She said Gene and Gabe’s was fine with her, that she’d meet us in the lounge in half an hour or so.

  Hump returned from the kitchen and tossed an envelope to me. “Amuse yourself with this while I get dressed.”

  The envelope was postmarked Nashville. There wasn’t a return address. From the postmark I could see that it had been mailed late the day before.

  “Who do you know in Nashville?”

  “Read the letter.”

  He went into the bedroom. I sat in an easy chair and slipped the letter out of the torn end of the envelope. The letter was written in smeared ballpoint pen. It began Dear Old Buddy.

  I flipped the single page over and read the signature. Turk.

  “How’d he know where to reach you?”

  “Cops have ways, I guess.”

  Dear Old Buddy:

  Here I am getting drunk in Nashville. It’s the vacation I’ve been promising myself for about ten years. Usually I spend time off hunting. I’m writing this at a booth at the Orchid Lounge, and there is a girl a couple of tables over that makes me think this might end up as bird hunting. She’s got red hair about down to her ass and it is some ass.

  Guess that is about all. If I can work it out, I am still going to make it to Atlanta this fall. That’ll be for the first Falcon game, whenever that is. You buy the tickets, and I’ll bring the booze. It ain’t that I miss the game. I just like to watch those dumbasses killing each other while I’m sitting up there in the cool with a drink in my fist.

  Say hello to your fat friend, Jim.

  I folded the letter and stuffed it back in the envelope. I dropped it on the coffee table and went and leaned in the doorway. “Sounds like he’s having fun.”

  “Odd thing about that letter,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much reason for writing it. That strike you?”

  “Drink getting to him,” I said. “You two really that close at Cleveland?”

  “No more than I was to five or six other guys.”

  I shook out a smoke and packed it against the door frame. “How long’s he been out of football?”

  He counted it back while he flipped his way through the jacket section of his closet. He selected a dark blue double-breasted and slipped it on. “I quit in 1968. Turk got retired the year before that. That would be 1967.”

  “Got retired?” I lit the smoke.

  “Turk was like a lot of the guys. Don’t know when to quit. Want to hang around another year or two. They haven’t socked much away and don’t seem to worry about it until it happens. In 1967 he must have been near thirty-four. That’s not old, but it’s not young either. Pre-season that year he was getting beat often. Coach took him aside and tried to talk him into retiring. He wouldn’t hear it. Did his best to catch on with another team, but the word was out. Too slow, too old.”

  “Rough,” I said.

  “Funny that we’re talking about this. It makes me remember. That dude owes me a hundred. I loaned it to him the day he left camp. He said he was heading back to Tennessee and needed some plane fare.”

  “Remind him the next time he’s in town.”

  “That won’t do any good,” Hump said. “He’s had eight years to forget about it.”

  Marcy tailed me home from Gene and Gabe’s. Hump left us during the coffee and cognac. He said something about a foxy lady he wanted to drop by and see.

  The wind had the feel of rain in it. Marcy changed into a pair of jeans and a shirt of mine, and we sat on the terrace wall and watched the stars get clouded over. When we couldn’t see the stars at all, I figured that we only had minutes before the rain.

  “You’re quiet tonight, Jim.”

  I felt a drop of rain hit my nose. A small one. Still some time. “It’s this booze-rotted head of mine. It’s like something is trying to push through and I keep yelling that it’s a wrong number.”

  “Trying too hard?” She leaned against me and I put an arm around her shoulders.

  The rain began feather soft. I stood up and steadied her when she slid off the edge of the wall. It got stronger, heavier, as we walked down the slope to the house.

  After midnight. The clock ticked. I could hear it played off against Marcy’s bubbling snore. Sifting it, sorting it, walking around it to see it from all sides.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  At four a.m. exactly, the phone rang. It was Emma Terry.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Why’d you change your mind?” I hooked my shoes with a couple of fingers on my free hand and pulled them toward the bed. The socks were stuffed inside. I lifted the left one and shook it and tried to put it on one-handed.

  “You could say it’s economics,” she said, “I’m tapped out, and I figure you owe me.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred’ll get me located somewhere else.”

  The sock went on twisted. I tugged at it until I got the heel straight. “You must think the banks open early in the big city.”

  “How much you got on you?”

  “Two-fifty,” I said. “But it’s not free. You’ve got to talk to me.”

  “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  I tried the right sock. I got it over my toes, but a nail caught and I had to start over. “If you’ll wait until later in the day, I can have the five bills.”

  “No way,” she said.

  “All right. One hour from now, and this better not be a box like the last one.”

  “It’s not. I swear it’s not. And you’re coming?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  She broke the connection. I straightened both socks and dialed Hump’s number.

  “Where?” Hump asked after he got his mind working.

  “The bandstand in Piedmont Park at five a.m.”

  “That’s a death trip,” Hump said. “The entrances are chained off from midnight until about seven in the morning. You’ll have to park outside and walk it. You’ll be a slow-moving target.”

  I said I knew that.

  “Meet you at the clubhouse in twenty-five.”

  I dressed in the dim light from the bathroom. The last stop was the shoebox in the back part of the shelf in the closet. I took the box into the bathroom. The .38 P.P. was on top of the cash. I stuffed it in my waistband and separated five fifties from the money stack. I didn’t think I’d need the cash. It wasn’t, I thought, going to be that kind of deal. A hundred to one it was a set-up, but I prepared for that slim chance that it was straight.

  Marcy awoke when I closed the closet door. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Something after four.”

  “Are you late dating on me, Jim?”

  “It’s that damned Webster thing.”

  “Be careful.”

  I leaned over and kissed her. Her morning mouth wasn’t as bad as some I’d tasted. She relaxed and turned her head into the pillow. After all this time, I guess she was used to it.

  I passed the Piedmont Park Golf Course clubhouse. There was no sign of Hump’s Buick. I checked my watch. Still ten minutes before he was due. I continued down 10th past the Charles Allen Drive entrance to the Park. The chain was up. I took it slow. I seemed to be the only car on the road that time of morning. At Piedmont I took the right turn. Four blocks down I passed another entrance. That one chained also. Speeding up and on my right the Piedmont Driving Club whipping by. One more entrance. That one chained too. One way so I couldn’t turn and head back the way I’d come. Faster and I reached Monroe and tu
rned right. Blowing straight down Monroe like it was a raceway.

  I reached 10th and found Hump’s Buick parked in the Thompson Air Conditioning lot beside the clubhouse. I pulled in next to him. He got out and waited.

  “I hope you’ve got some bright idea, Jim.”

  “I think I threw out all the dumb ones.”

  We walked down 10th past the clubhouse. To the left, across the street, there was the Grady High football field. Just beyond the clubhouse were the steps that led down to the greens. I touched Hump’s elbow and we turned and walked down the flight and reached the practice putting green.

  I angled toward the water treatment unit. A fetid smell blew from that direction. A concrete drainage ditch sliced across the course. We crossed the footbridge, and we were on the greens once more. It was an odd course. If I remembered right, the golfers had to play at least one shot across the road that handled a lot of the traffic that passed through the park.

  We reached the embankment that bordered the road. We followed the road, staying below it, until I was certain we were level with the made-made lake and the bandstand. “About right?”

  “I think so.”

  I climbed the embankment and dug my feet in to steady myself. I fell forward on my elbows. Across the road the lake was dark, and there were no lights at the bandstand. Hump crawled the bank on my right. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we stared across the road.

  “How long before first light?”

  “An hour, a bit more,” he said. “So that’s the move?”

  “I ain’t about to cross that road. The way I see it, if she really needs the cash she’ll wait. If she doesn’t it’s a set-up, and I’ve missed my chance to get dead.”

  I settled in for the damp wait. Next to me, Hump shivered.

  At six, the sky was lighter. I could see the gray outline of the bandstand near the lake. No movement that I could see. At six-fifteen, I said to hell with it and stood up. It was a slipping and sliding climb to the road. Hump followed me, and I turned and waved him twenty yards away from me.

  My legs were shaky. I was having trouble getting a deep breath. I didn’t like it much. I got the .38 from my waistband and carried it down by my leg.

  “Looks clear,” Hump said.

  “Somebody at the bandstand,” I said.

  Fifty yards. Half of that. “Emma?”

  I could see the shape of the heavy woman. She was seated on the top bandstand step, back braced against a side post, head down on her knees.

  “Emma.”

  On my right Hump ducked and sprinted for the bandstand. He stopped and looked down at her. One close look, and he whirled toward me. “Jim.”

  I reached past him and touched the side of her face. Cold. I squatted and peered at her from the side. Her neck was at a strange angle. Probably broken.

  Hump stepped back and began to circle the bandstand. There was a woman’s pocketbook on the step below the body. I picked it up and opened the clasp. Before I could dig about in it Hump said, “Here, Jim.” I snapped the clasp and, still carrying the purse, followed him. He pointed at a place where the damp ground had been stomped down into a sort of half-circle.

  “One stood here,” Hump said. He continued his loop around the back of the bandstand. “And here.” He toed the edge of another spot that showed the shoe prints and the signs of long and nervous waiting.

  “Two of them,” I said.

  “Gave up on you.”

  “Must have.” That was twice. How dumb did they think I was? I said, “No reason to stay here.”

  We reached the embankment before I realized that I was still carrying Emma Terry’s purse. I stopped, turned back, and then decided it was too much trouble. Hump went over the embankment like a skier and I followed him. Back the way we came.

  I’d tossed the purse into the front seat and said, “My place?” before I heard the first siren. It sounded like it was coming up 10th from Peachtree. That siren was joined by another one that I placed somewhere near Ponce de Leon and Charles Allen.

  I backed and turned in the lot so I could reach Monroe without turning onto 10th. Hump was a bumper behind me.

  The box hadn’t worked, so somebody had tried a frame.

  I didn’t know what to do with the purse. I dropped it on the kitchen table and patted Marcy on the butt while Hump was in the bathroom washing up. She turned, started to say something and saw the pocketbook.

  “What’s that?”

  “Some ex-hooker’s purse.”

  “You take up mugging, Jim?”

  “I might as well. Nothing else is working.” I got two more cups from the shelf. Marcy poured in the water and I spooned in instant coffee. I put the cups on the table and went into the bathroom and shooed Hump out.

  After I washed up, I returned to the kitchen and found that Marcy had dumped the purse on the table top. “I’ve always wondered,” she said, “what a hooker carried that other women didn’t.”

  I sipped my coffee and watched her. Lipstick, Rolaids, a compact, half a roll of candy mints, some used wads of Kleenex, a checkbook on the First National Bank of Smythtown, a plastic wheel of birth control pills.

  “Nothing unusual so far,” I said.

  A silver hairclip. A small purse bottle of perfume. Marcy spritzed a mist on the back of her hand and sniffed it. “Awful.”

  A pack and a half of Newports. A Bic lighter. A few hairpins. A handful of change. A Tennessee driver’s license in the name of Emma Terry.

  “Any folding money?”

  Marcy unzipped the compartment inside and brought out a thick fold of bills. I took them and ruffled them and dropped the wad in the center of the table. More than four hundred. She’d been lying. She hadn’t been tapped out.

  “What else?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “That by your elbow?”

  “This?” She tossed me a book of matches.

  “Jokers Wild?” I looked at Hump.

  “A bar in the back of the Peachtree Manor.”

  Marcy returned all of it to the purse except for the money and the book of matches. “That wasn’t as educational as I thought it would be.” She placed her cup in the sink.

  “Some days are that way.”

  She kissed me and left for her apartment. She’d have to change clothes and it would be a push to make work on time.

  A lighter and matches? Maybe and maybe not.

  It was a day for long shots. I carried my cup into the bedroom and looked up the Peachtree Manor Hotel. I dialed the number and asked my first question. It missed by a mile. There wasn’t a Emma Terry registered.

  Hump walked in and stood at the foot of the bed.

  The desk clerk said, “Is there anything else, sir?”

  What the hell. Why not? “Is there a Mr. Edwards staying there?” I saw the surprise on Hump’s face.

  Silence on the other end of the line, and then the clerk said, “Yes, there is a Mr. Edwin Edwards with us.”

  I put my hand over the phone. “First name Edwin?”

  Hump nodded.

  I thanked the clerk and hung up.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Hump said. “That man’s the law.”

  “And it’s not football season yet, and he’s supposed to be in Nashville.”

  I made two calls. The first one got Art out of bed. The second one was to the T.B.I. man, Barstow, at Stouffer’s Inn.

  “That dude,” Hump said with a kind of finality, “never was as smart as he thought he was.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It was a few minutes after ten. We were parked in the lot across the street from the Peachtree Manor Hotel. I was in the back seat with Hump, and Barstow was in the front passenger seat. It was Art’s car, an unmarked police one, and he was across the street in the hotel. He’d been there about ten minutes.

  “Tell me a funny story, Hardman.” Barstow put his arm on the seat back and turned to face me.

  “It’s got a lot of guesses in it,” I said.

>   “Go ahead, I like your guesses.”

  “That man in Huntsville prison …”

  “Martin,” Barstow said.

  “Martin said if he named one of the men involved in the Parker robbery-murder it would surprise you people. What’s more of a surprise than a police chief being involved in that about four years before he became a police chief?”

  “That might qualify,” he said.

  “Once upon a time there was this football player, and he got cut by the Cleveland Browns in the fall of 1967. He really had the shorts, so short he borrowed at least one hundred from a defensive end who didn’t know at the time it was his last year, too. Maybe he worked for a time in Tennessee. Maybe he fell right in with some tough guys and did some jobs. One job they did was in Gaptown, where they killed and robbed a retired dentist. Word always gets around about this doctor or that dentist who’s got it socked away. Maybe Parker did. Anyway, after that job this retired football player probably stayed in Nashville for a time. And I think he met Cora Abse there. The Abse broad was set up fine. Her man, Lippmann, had gone to the slammer and he’d left her set up well. All the money she needed and a car and an apartment. All she was supposed to do for that was keep her knees together until Lippmann got out. And her mouth closed, too. The only problem was that Cora liked men, and Turk was a man. I don’t know how long this lasted, but it was long enough for Turk to do some drunken bragging about his part in the Parker killing. It might have been his way of proving he was the equal of the man she was supposed to be waiting for.”

  Art came down the steps from the lobby of the Peachtree Manor. He stopped under the tunnel-like awning that ran out as far as the sidewalk. He looked both ways and then he jaywalked across Peachtree to the car. He slid behind the wheel. “Turk Edwards and some young guy named Ed Beuller have been registered here since late Monday night.”

  That fitted. Turk and Ed had driven from Smythtown to Nashville in the late afternoon Monday. On the way through town, he’d mailed the letter to Hump. It was a letter that was supposed to say, here I am in case anybody wonders where I am in the next few days.

  “Not in?” Barstow said.