Pimp for the Dead

by Ralph Dennis

  Hump called about a quarter to twelve, when Marcy was taking the biscuits out of the oven. The chunks of fried ham were on a plate, draining on paper towels.

  “We working today, Jim?”

  “Right now, I’m starting a third cup of coffee and about to have myself a country ham and homemade biscuit.”

  “That an invitation?”

  “Come on over. We’ll worry about earning our money this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen,” he said.

  I got back to the kitchen, broke open a biscuit and selected a thin chunk of ham. “Hump’s coming over.”

  “When?”

  “Be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes?” There was panic in Marcy’s voice, and then I realized why. She was bare-assed under one of my long-sleeved shirts.

  “Put on some clothes. I can throw some more ham in the skillet.”

  “Damn you.”

  After she went in the bedroom, I got out the package of ham and trimmed off the rind and threw another dozen chunks into the skillet. I set those to cooking. Marcy returned a few minutes later, looking polished and shiny, wearing last night’s clothes, the ones she’d worn to the Hollywood Bar. She hadn’t bothered with make-up, and I could see the wrinkles around her eyes that usually got covered up.

  While I ate a few ham-and-biscuits, she made up another dozen or so scratch biscuits and ran them into the oven. She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat across from me and glowered at me. “The next time you invite Hump over, you’d better warn me.”

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “I do, but I’m not doing any bare-assed exhibitions for him or anybody else.”

  “Just for me, huh? That’s nice.”

  “And sometimes I even worry about you,” she said.

  But by the time Hump arrived she was over it, and we ate all the biscuits, and all the ham, and almost everything else in the kitchen except the paper towels the ham had drained on. At the end of it, Hump stretched his six-foot-six or seven and smiled at Marcy. “Mighty fine,” he said.

  Marcy couldn’t resist a girlish curtsy in return.

  We used Hump’s car and dropped Marcy off at her apartment. We angled back over to the Strip. It’s slow and dead there on Sundays, no bars open, and not much hustling and buying and selling going on. The few people we passed out on the street seemed to be drifting, just looking for a good patch of sun.

  Hump parked in the driveway next to the duplex, and we tried the door. No answer. I left him there and went over and tried the door to the other apartment. No one there either, it seemed. I returned to Hump and spent a couple of minutes looking around, seeing if anybody in the nearby houses or apartments were showing any interest in us. I didn’t see anybody at the windows or out on the street.

  “Can you spring the lock?” I asked Hump.

  “I’ll try.” Hump grabbed the knob with both hands, leaned a shoulder against the door, and then threw a hip into it. The wood was probably rotten. The screws gave, and the lock swung loose. We stepped inside quickly and closed the door behind us.

  It smelled of cat shit. That hit us right away. I didn’t realize why it seemed so concentrated, until I saw that all the windows were closed tight and the thermostat was set around 68 or 70. I turned the thermostat down to 60 and opened one of the windows a few inches. While I was doing that, Hump left me and opened the door to the bedroom.

  A gray mama cat, sagging belly flapping, darted out of the bedroom and skidded to a stop. She looked at me and yowled. She followed me, still fussing at me, to the kitchen, and rubbed against my leg while I opened a can of cheap cat food and spooned some of it out for her. I left her purring away, and went through the living room and into the bedroom.

  “Three new kittens in the closet back here,” Hump said. “Maybe a day or two old.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Furniture. Must have come with the apartment, or it was too much trouble moving it on short notice.”

  It was obvious that the move had been made in a hurry. They hadn’t bothered with the dirty sheets on the bed and, in one corner of the room, there was a pile of clothes they’d decided not to take with them. In the bathroom there were a couple of dirty towels, dried hard and stiff.

  I looked in the closet. Hump had counted right. Three kittens, eyes not open yet. “Nice people,” I said. “Just left the cats to starve to death.”

  “Looks that way.” Hump sat on the edge of the bed and emptied out the metal trash can. He poked around in it with the toe of his shoe. From under the Kleenexes and nearly empty bottles of hand lotion and skin cream, he dug out the two halves of the lease form. The rental agency was Charter and Gross, the rent was $110 a month, and there’d been a security deposit of another $110. I put the lease in my pocket and looked around.

  “What are we going to do with the cats?” Hump asked.

  “Take them home with me, I guess. Until they’re weaned, and then it’s the Humane Society.”

  I carried the mama and Hump carried the box with the kittens. Hump put the box in the back seat and I tossed the mama in after them. The mama didn’t like the ride much. Nearing my place, I had Hump make a detour and stop by a 7-11 store. I bought half a dozen cans of cat food and a big bag of the dry kind.

  I set the cats up in my garage. I left one of the doors cracked, so the mama could come and go as she liked. I found a couple of old bowls and filled one with water and the other with dry food.

  Hump met me at the back steps with a bottle of beer. “Big Daddy done all his work?”

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  While we were drinking the beer, the mama came out of the garage and found us. She bypassed Hump and came straight for me. After sniffing at it, she stretched out on my right shoe and purred.

  I called Art Maloney later in the afternoon. “I should have told you,” I said, “I’m still working on the girl murder thing.” I told him about Harry Falk. “Looks like we might have scared him into hiding.”

  “Why should he be afraid of you?”

  “Some rumors say a protection racket’s starting up. Don’t know the details yet, but it might be the pimps are being shook down.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “A pimp told me.”

  “Which pimp?” Art demanded.

  “A pimp who doesn’t want his name known.” Then, to shift ground, I told him that Hump had gotten the same nervous feeling talking to some of the black pimps.

  “That’s a good story, if it’s true. I’ll check it out.”

  “Thought you might,” I said. “I’d hate to think I knew things that police intelligence didn’t.”

  “And according to the version you’re pushing, the killing of the two girls is a warning?”

  “That’s the way I heard it.”

  “That could change it,” Art said.

  “Sorry. Now it can’t be swept under the rug and forgotten.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Art said.

  I hung up on him.

  After Hump left, I spent the twilight breaking up the rest of the ground in my garden plot. I finished it about the time it went full dark. I checked on the mama when I put the spade and the rake away, and then I had a shower and a couple of stiff gin-and-bitter-lemons. I turned in early and slept nine hours, and was still out of bed and moving around while the cool chill was in the morning air.

  A bit after nine, Art called. “You in a better temper today?”

  “Like I always am.”

  “I’m unwinding.” That meant Art had come off his shift and was getting ready for bed. “I asked around, and nobody believes that dogshit story of yours about the protection racket.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody with any sense.” He paused. “The reason I called. The letter we found in the dwarf girl’s purse with the A.P.O. number and the name. Turns out he’s her brother. He’s in the Army, stationed in Berlin. He’ll be flying in today to see
about the funeral. His name is Edwin Spinks.”

  “Where can I reach him?”

  “I don’t know where he’ll be staying. He’s coming in on an Eastern flight from New York. Arrives at ten-oh-three.”

  “I’ll meet him.”

  “Let me hear from you,” Art said.

  I put on a tie and a light jacket. On the way out, I checked on the mama. It was chow time for the kittens. The mama looked at me like she wanted to come out and play, but couldn’t I see she was busy?

  I reached Hartsfield International a few minutes before ten. I stopped by the passenger service desk and asked them to page Spinks after the flight arrived. I went into the coffee shop and spent the rest of my waiting time trying to get the attention of a waitress. I gave it up and went back to the passenger service desk. At five after, the flight came in, and a few minutes later they paged Edwin Spinks.

  He showed up a couple of minutes later, wearing a rumpled Army uniform with corporal’s stripes. I put his age just on the other side of twenty. Dark haircut, regulation length, a pasty complexion with a rash of acne on his chin. Up close, I could read the name tag he wore, and I turned and nodded at the girl at the desk.

  “Edwin Spinks?”

  “Yeah.” He lowered the blue suitcase and looked at me.

  I explained that the father of the other girl who’d been killed had asked me to look into it.

  “You know Carol?”

  “I met her one time … that night.”

  “I haven’t seen her in six months, since I went overseas.”

  “Anybody meeting you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let me give you a ride into town.”

  He picked up his suitcase and followed me out of the terminal and into the parking lot.

  On the expressway headed back into town, he lit up a smoke and looked me over. “I don’t see how you’re involved. You’re not a cop, and you’re not a private detective.”

  “It’s a favor for a friend.”

  “And meeting me at the airport?”

  “I thought we might talk on the way in,” I said.

  “Talk about what?”

  “You know what Carol was doing for a living?”

  His eyes slid away from me and fastened on the road straight ahead. “I knew, and I didn’t like it one fucking bit.”

  “You know Joy Lynn Barrow?”

  “The girl she lived with? I met her a time or two. She seemed nice enough, considering the kind of work she was doing.”

  “You meet Harry Falk?”

  “One time. After that, he stayed out of my way.”

  “You have trouble?” I asked.

  “I wanted to kill him, that’s what I wanted to do.”

  “You try?”

  “I got him one time, before he got out of the door,” Edwin said.

  He didn’t look the type to push anybody around. “Why? Because he turned your sister out?”

  “That, and something else. You saw Carol? You saw how she was?”

  I nodded. “You mean … little … like she was?”

  “A dwarf,” he said harshly. “I didn’t like Carol being the freak in his string of girls.”

  I considered that, but I waited on him, not saying anything.

  “What kind of guy would want to … sleep with her? It had to be some kind of sex freak.” He snorted. “A man like that, next it would be girls with one leg.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Maybe it still would have bothered me if she whored and if she’d been normal. I don’t know. But I think I could have accepted it. But being used to cater to freaks, that makes me sick.”

  I didn’t quite believe him, but if that was the way he wanted to try to deal with it, it wasn’t my business to argue with him. “You from Atlanta?”

  “Richmond, Virginia,” he said.

  “When did Carol move down?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “What did Carol do at first?”

  “She said she was doing office work, but she never said where. I came down about six months ago, to see her before I shipped out, and she was already selling it on the street.”

  “You know how she met Harry Falk?”

  “She never said.”

  The skyline was in front of us. It was time to worry about selecting an exit ramp. “You want me to drop you at a hotel? You got a reservation?”

  “I thought I’d stay at Carol’s apartment.”

  “The one on 11th?”

  “I don’t know anything about an apartment on 11th,” he said. “I’m talking about the one Carol shared with Joy Lynn.”

  Bingo. That was Bingo. And score one against me for thinking that both the girls shared a one-bedroom duplex with Harry Falk. Write idiot on my grade sheet.

  “It’s on St. Charles,” he said.

  It has a shrub and plant-filled courtyard, this U-shaped apartment building on St. Charles, in northeast Atlanta. It had been built back in the old days, when Ponce de Leon had been one of the better residential areas. St. Charles had probably evolved out of that. Now, in the years since, it had become a hybrid street. Old homes, new apartment houses, and wood frame houses that have been cut up into five or six apartments. It’s a quiet street, and the huge old trees that line it give it a small-town feeling.

  I parked out on the street, and we went through the stone arch and up the garden-like walk. Some of the plants were blooming, but I never was very strong on knowing which flower was which. Along the U-shaped front of the building were a series of indentations which were entrances to blocks of apartments. Abreast of the third indentation on the right, Edwin nodded and we turned in. After a low flight of stairs, there were mail boxes and two doors facing each other across a box-like hall, and another set of stairs going up to the second level.

  “Got a key?”

  “They used to leave one out.” He leaned his suitcase against the wall and squatted in front of the doormat in front of apartment #10. There was no name card on the door. He turned over the mat. On the back was a kind of sewed-on pocket made of old denim. He stuck a finger in the pocket and brought out a key.

  He unlocked the door and put the key in his pocket. We went in. It was an ass-backwards kind of an entrance. We seemed to be coming in from the rear of the apartment. We were in a flat and narrow room that was the dining room. To the left and out of sight was the kitchen. Ahead, down a hallway, there was the living room. Midway in the hall, branching off to the right, were the bedrooms and the bath. I looked in the living room first. A big-component hi-fi and a big-screen color TV. A white sectional sofa and a matching shag carpet. A couple of basket chairs and a small bookcase with novels in it that probably came from the Book of the Month Club.

  I went into the bedroom nearest the living room. One look in the closet and I knew I was in the wrong one. The dresses wouldn’t fit Joy Lynn. Unless they’d have fitted her when she was nine or ten years old.

  I passed Edwin, who was standing in the dining room. He’d opened his suitcase on the table. I knew right away I was in the right bedroom this time. There were a couple of framed photos on the dresser. I recognized John Barrow in both of them. Once standing alone, next to a tractor. In the other one he was seated on the porch of a house, next to a pleasant but plain woman with a bony face and large hands. I guess it was just routine, but I always check the closet first. I was backing out of it a few minutes later, having found nothing there but the faint perfume-scent of Joy Lynn, meshed in the dresses and pants suits, when I found Edwin in the doorway. He’d stripped down to his t-shirt and trousers and was carrying a toilet kit.

  “If it’s all right, I’m going to shave and shower.”

  “Go ahead.” After he left, I went back to the search. Like the closet, the dresser threw me a blank, too. It didn’t seem worth the time. I made the first find in the make-up table. It was mainly mirror, but there were two small drawers on each side. In the bottom drawer on the right I found a diary and a small leathe
r address book. I put the address book aside and opened the diary. It fell open to the page entry for February 6, 1973. The date was the only part of it I could read. The top line looked like nonsense to me:

  t1y2ds 4m2h 4d1yt 3thw ym 2r34dp.

  Crap and horseshit. A code. I closed the diary and dropped it on the table. I opened the address book to the first page. It was the same. The heading on the first page was underlined.

  4hnj 3stl

  So much for that. I checked the drawers on the other side of the make-up table and found a checkbook and a savings account passbook. If Joy Lynn kept her books well, there was $312.67 in the checking account and a balance of exactly $2,500 in savings. That gave me a second thought. $2,500 wasn’t much for a girl in the street trade to have saved. Unless she was a high spender. But there was always I.R.S., and their ways of pinning down how much you’d earned. Savings was one way. So it was pretty likely that no street girl would bank most of her income.

  I returned to the closet and checked it again, looking for some kind of hiding place where she could have stored cash. Nothing. I did the same with the dresser, and drew the same blank. The bed was next. I checked between the mattress and the springs, all the way around. I patted the pillows and started away. On a second thought, I went back to the pillows. In the second one, the one nearest the wall, I found a bulky object and shook it out. It was a brown clasp envelope. I opened the clasp and shook the contents out. They were fifties and hundreds only. With just a rough count, I put the total up somewhere between nine and ten thousand dollars. I bunched the bills up and shoved them back into the envelope. I closed the clasp and, taking up the diary and the address book, I went into the living room. I’d seen the telephone over by the sofa. I sat down and dialed Art’s number.