by Ralph Dennis
“Oh, shut up, Ethel,” I said. Shaking the change in my pockets, I walked back to the jukebox and dropped a couple of quarters in. I played some Merle Haggard and Tom T. Hall. When I turned away from the jukebox, Merle was singing about being a branded man. I looked at Willie Whitman. “Women,” I said, loud enough to be heard all the way down the bar.
“Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em,” Willie said.
“Damn right.” I put an elbow on the bar next to him. I saw Willie was drinking a Bud. I waved at the bartender and he came down. “Give my friend here a beer.” The bartender, just like he would have at a better place, looked at Willie and Willie nodded. I got out my roll and paid for it with a single. But I worked it until a twenty was on top. Willie saw the twenty.
“Hardman, how are you?” he said under his breath.
“Working,” I said.
“I’m not. I’m down on it, right now.”
“I heard.”
The bartender brought the Bud and I waved the change away. Willie waited until the bartender moved away. “What are you working on?”
“The two hookers who got shot last night on Peachtree and Ponce de Leon.”
“That’s a bad one,” Willie said.
Marcy decided to try out her acting again. “Jim,” she yelled, “you going to leave me by myself all night?”
“Shut up, Ethel,” I said back to her. “I’ll be there when I get there.” And just to show I wasn’t about to be bossed around by a woman, I lifted Willie’s beer bottle and pointed to myself. The bartender brought me a Bud and a glass. After he took my money, he leaned toward me.
“She’s not going to make trouble, is she?”
“Not a chance,” I said, “but I’ll make sure.” I swaggered down the aisle to the booth. Marcy looked up at me. “I’m talking to a friend back there. If you’re hungry, go over to Eng’s and order yourself a chow mein sandwich. I’ll be there as soon as I’m ready.”
“I’ll wait,” she said.
“Then hold it down. You’re bothering the bartender.” I walked back down to Willie. I lifted the bottle and drank from it. The bartender winked at me and moved away. As far as he was concerned, I was just showing a cunt where she stood. He could understand that. And now he would think that any conversation with the old wino was my way of twisting the knife a little.
“You know anything about the two girls last night?”
“Just what I read in the paper,” Willie said.
“I’ve got a twenty.”
“I could use the twenty. I just don’t know anything worth it.”
“I’ll settle for the names of a couple of white pimps whose girls work this area.”
“That’s easier.”
I reached in my pocket and worked the twenty free. I folded it a couple of times and brought it out. Willie looked down at it and nodded.
“Know one. Big white dude. A mean-ass. Name’s Wash Johnson.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Most nights, he’s at 590 West,” Willie said.
“The top of the new Stouffer’s? That high up?”
“He doesn’t work it. It’s where he hangs out. Mainly at the bar. It’s his stop, so his girls can reach him if they need to.”
“How’ll I know him?”
“Like I said, big dude, blond hair, shoulders like a linebacker.”
“How old?”
“About 25 or 26.”
“Thanks, Willie.” I dropped the hand and tapped the twenty against his knee. His hand closed over it like a claw. I patted his shoulder and walked back to my booth. I sat across the table from Marcy and winked. Even dressed for the acting job, she looked damned good for a woman past thirty.
“Act one’s over, and you’re not in act two,” I said. “How about some Chinese?”
“Ethel?” she said when we were out on the street. “Did it have to be Ethel?”
“You looked like an Ethel,” I said.
After supper at Eng’s she didn’t want to go back to her apartment. I gave her my house key and put her in a cab. I kept a tie in the glove compartment of my car. I put that on, and hoped I’d get past the hostess at the elevator. Without the tie, I looked a little seedy. With it, I didn’t look much better.
I picked Wash Johnson out from a distance. He matched the description Willie had given me. He did have the shoulders, and a blocky, squarish face. Tonight he was wearing a red hopsack jacket and gray flared trousers. There was a Bloody Mary in front of him. Seats on both sides of him were empty. I walked over and took the seat on his right.
I ordered a Bloody Mary, too. It came dressed with a celery stirrer, and I chewed at the celery and tried to think of some way of starting a conversation with Wash. He hadn’t taken any notice of me when I first sat down or when I’d ordered. Wash was at the end of the bar that was nearest the huge windows. He was watching the cars on the street, some twenty-five or twenty-six floors down.
It turned out that I didn’t have to do anything elaborate, like spilling my drink on him. He swung his shoulders around and stared at me. “I know you from somewhere.” The way he said it didn’t sound like what he might know would make us friends.
“Jim Hardman,” I said.
“Used to be a cop.”
“Until a few years ago,” I said.
“You here for any reason?”
“I’m drinking a Bloody Mary.”
I spent the silence that brought on by looking over 590 West. I’d brought Marcy up here right after it opened. It was a little too plastic and new for our tastes. I guess I like the old bars better. It was a wide room with a good many tables near the window, so you could look down on absolutely nothing. Until the skyline changed in Atlanta, it probably wasn’t worth the tab.
“You were on the street last night when the two girls got it,” Wash said.
“My bad luck,” I said.
“You don’t look as bad as they do.”
“Skinned a knee,” I said.
“I think you came up here to ask me something. Right?”
“I wondered if the girls were out of your stable.”
That got his shoulders tight. “What makes you think I’ve got a stable?”
“It’s the word on the street.”
“The word on the street’s full of shit,” Wash said.
“If you say so,” I said, giving it my best bored pitch. “It’s nothing to me. A friend from the old days on the force is handling the case. He can ask you the questions. I’ll pass your name on to him, and he’ll be at your house tonight before the sheets get warm.”
“That sounds like a threat to me.”
“Me threaten you? Shit, what’s the percentage in that?”
“I wouldn’t like to be pulled in,” Wash said. “That could piss me off a bit.”
I could see the muscle working under the coat. If he kept up the demonstration, he was going to pop a seam or two.
“It’s like this. The Barrow girl’s old country daddy wants to know what his daughter was doing out there, whoring on the street. I’d like to talk to the guy who turned her out … that’s all.”
“It wasn’t me.”
I nodded. “But you didn’t say you don’t know who he is.”
“I don’t know,” Wash said.
“You know.”
He took the celery stirrer from his Bloody Mary and chewed on it angrily. When he reached the nub, he dropped it in the ash tray in front of him. “You mess around on the street out there, you could end up trying to grin at that shotgun.”
“Now it sounds like you’re threatening me.”
“Not from me.” He lowered his voice. “It’s getting bad out there. Somebody wants to start a pimp’s union and charge dues.”
“You been approached?”
“No comment, like they say on the TV.”
“So you have?”
He ignored it. “You just want her pimp?”
“That’s all.”
“Harr
y Falk,” Wash said.
“Where can I find him?”
“Got a place on 11th.” He thought a moment and gave me a house number. “He’s a hippie stud. Attracts a certain kind of girl.”
“And both the Barrow girl and the dwarf girl were in his stable?”
He threw a short laugh at me that didn’t have any amusement in it. “They were his stable. All of it.”
“And now he’s out of business.”
“Unless he’s out trying to find somebody to turn out. That takes time. You don’t turn a girl out in a weekend.”
I sipped at the Bloody Mary. “Why not burn the pimp? Why kill the girls?”
He looked at me like I might be the village idiot. “Shit, a good pimp’s hard to find. Cunt’s easy.”
“So it’s just a temporary inconvenience?”
“That’s a hard thing to say about those two girls, and I don’t intend that. But those are the facts, the hard facts, the economic facts. It’s a job of work, turning a girl out right. He’s got time and money invested in his girls. And sometimes you miss, and have to write it all off. It turns out the girl’s not suited to the life. Time and money down the drain.”
“Did you know the Barrow girl?” I’d had my limit of pimp philosophy, and I wasn’t sure I could take much more. If he kept talking, he was going to convince me they ought to let him in the Junior Chamber of Commerce.
“I talked to her once or twice.”
“How’d she seem? Suited to it?”
“Give me a farm girl, any day,” Wash said.
“She seem happy?”
“Happy’s not a word you use with these girls. Contented might be a better one. Harry took good care of her.”
“She ever say anything about her family?”
“That’s what threw me a while ago. What you said about her old country daddy.” He shrugged his shoulders. “She said she was an orphan.”
I nodded at him and pushed my drink away. I got up and walked over to the elevator, and rode down the twenty-five or twenty-six floors to the lobby.
Marcy answered on the third ring.
“Is Hump there?”
“He called a few minutes ago. He said he had a lead.”
“He say where?”
“Down on the Strip, I think,” Marcy said.
“He give an address?”
“No.”
I told her I’d see her later.
“Thank God for TV late movies,” she said.
I had trouble finding the address on 11th. It was on the narrow part of 11th, on that side of Peachtree. On that part of the street, I always have a feeling there’s some dealing going on. It’s almost always blocked by a double-parked car or two, and some stud is always leaning out of his ear to try to start something with a girl who’s just walking past.
It was a duplex, red brick with white trim around the windows and a white door with the paint chipped. The porch light was off so, I fumbled around the edge of the door, looking for a bell. When I didn’t find one, I used my knuckles.
“He’s not here.” It was a girl’s thin, reedy voice.
“What?”
“Harry’s not here.”
“What?”
The door opened a crack, limited by a chain lock. “You deaf or something?”
“Something,” I said. “Where’s Harry?”
“He’s out.”
With the back-lighting, I couldn’t get a good look at her, but I saw enough. She needed a wash, or at least a dusting off. I put her age at around fifteen or sixteen. The kind of runaway girl the Strip filled up with during the spring and summer. I guess Harry wasn’t heartbroken enough to let his business suffer.
“Where?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Where does he hang out?”
“He didn’t tell me,” the girl said.
“Which street corner, which bar?”
“Oh, shit,” the girl said. “Try the Lighthouse.”
The door edged toward me, closing. I put out a hand and held it open a moment longer. “You tell that to the other guy?”
“The big black dude?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“I told him the Pizza House on 10th.”
“Which one’s the truth?”
“I don’t know. He just said he was going out.”
I released the door and stepped back. The door slammed and the lock thucked into place.
So much for that. I still didn’t know what Harry Falk looked like, and I didn’t know his usual hangout. There was the whole Strip out there, the topless joints, the wino places and the hippie taverns. It was three hours or so of hide-and-seek, and I didn’t feel like doing it. If Hump hadn’t been out there ahead of me, I’d have packed it in for the night and come back in the morning. I couldn’t do that now, so I drove over to the Lighthouse and made a slow circuit through the parking lot. No sign of Hump’s car. I drove on down to 10th and, as soon as I made the turn, I saw Hump’s car parked in one of the spaces next to the corner liquor store. There was a space next to Hump’s car. I pulled in and was getting out of the car, when an old man ran out of the liquor store, yelling at me. “You see that sign? Parking’s for customers only. I can have you towed.”
“Who said I wasn’t a customer?” I went into the store with him and bought a fifth of gin and a six-pack of bitter lemon. The old man apologized to me all the way back out to my car. After I locked the gin and the tonic away in the trunk, I asked if it was all right if I parked there for a few minutes while I looked for a friend down the street. He said, “Sure,” and that I could take my time. He was just uptight about the street freaks. I guess that made me an upright citizen.
I found Hump at a front booth, just inside the entrance to the Pizza House. He was watching the door and just starting on a pizza that must have been the giant size. Mouth full, he nodded at me and I walked over and sat down across from him.
“We seem to be running in the same track,” he said after he swallowed.
“Seems so.”
“You looking for Harry, too?”
I said I was.
“He was in earlier. Waitress says he’ll come by again.”
“We could cruise around and look for him,” I said.
“That would be a waste of my charm and a five-dollar bill. She’s going to nod him out when he comes in.”
The waitress came over and I ordered a beer.
“No beer without ordering food,” she said.
“I’m going to eat part of his,” I said.
I got the beer and a plate and a fork. While I drank it and worried a slice of the pizza around on the plate, Hump told me about his evening among the black pimps. What kept him out of trouble was that two of them remembered him from the days when he’d been playing defensive end at Cleveland. Still, they hadn’t liked the questions about the two girls who’d been killed. All he’d been able to find out from them was the name of the pimp who’d turned them out. Beyond that, it was dead air, and all the talk about sports he wanted to make.
I threw in Wash Johnson’s hint that somebody might be trying to put the racket on a protection basis.
“That might explain it. I didn’t see any iron, but I had a feel for it, like they were carrying it or it was close by.”
“Nothing sacred any more. Not even free enterprise.”
“And the cost of living is going up all the time.”
“Oh, shit, yes,” I said.
“Never saw so many Eldorados in my life.” Hump broke off a chunk of crust and chewed on it. “Reminded me of something I read about Wilt Chamberlain. Seems he bought a Bentley, didn’t want an Eldorado. Says he liked to pick up a girl now and then. Said a girl looked at an Eldorado and always assumed you were a pimp.”
Hump looked up. A young hippie guy had just entered. He was standing there, just looking around. He was wearing tan jeans and a fringed buckskin jacket. The beard was neat, trimmed. The hair wasn’t. It was long and red, and it was
in a kind of electric frizz-out, a white version of an Afro.
The waitress leaned in, as if to take the pizza pan away. “That’s Harry,” she said in a whisper.
Hump stood up. At that moment, Harry Falk saw Hump. He turned and was out of the door in a leap. Hump got slowed down because he had to get past the waitress. He finally got free and made the door in about two jumps. I stayed behind and settled the check.
Hump was out on the sidewalk, looking in both directions and shaking his head. “I don’t know how he did it. He just disappeared.”
We wasted half an hour looking around. We tried the Society Page, the topless place across the street, and we looked in a lot of doorways. No sign of him. “I think he must have called home,” I said. “Got told two guys were looking for him.”
Hump tail-gated me over to the duplex on 11th. Nobody answered the door this time, and there weren’t any lights showing. It looked like Harry Falk and his new girl had gone to ground.
We called it a night. Atlanta’s a big city, and it wouldn’t do much good running in circles.
I told Hump we’d try again in the morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
The problem with having a girl who slept over some nights during the week was that I’d have to get up around seven and drive her over to her apartment. The weekends were different, and the morning after the hide-and-seek with Harry Falk was a Sunday, one of those times when I won’t even get up to piss unless it hurts. Those mornings I’d get up around eleven, and I’d have a cup of coffee and read the sports page while Marcy made light, crisp biscuits from scratch. While the biscuits were baking, she would fry country ham, that dark and heavily-salted kind that you had to be a Southerner to appreciate. I’d seen Northerners try, and they’d looked like they’d just bitten into a salt tablet.
I never tasted country ham without remembering an uncle who cured his own. I’d been a kid then, and I remembered how he’d put those fresh-killed hams in the salt box and cover them with salt. The hams stayed in the salt box two days for each pound … a twenty-pound ham for forty days. At the end of that time, he’d wipe the hams off and hang them. He coated them with molasses and coarse-ground black pepper, and he’d wait for the molasses to dry. Then he’d fill some large bags with clean hay, and he’d put the bags over the hams, careful so that there was a layer of hay between the ham and the outside of the bag. That was so the flies couldn’t get to the hams and lay their eggs in them. After that, he’d leave them hanging and forget about them until at least the Fourth of July. Since he salted the hams in December, those were long months when the hams dried and aged. After the Fourth of July, it was all right to cut one, and he’d take the bag away. The ham would be green and moldy on the outside. He’d scrub this off with a wire brush and dry it off, and then he’d make the first cut. It would be dark and hard, beautiful inside, and with that salty taste you got just from the smell of it.