Working for the Man

by Ralph Dennis

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why go to the trouble?”

  “Must be some reason,” Hump said.

  “A couple of things. He doesn’t know about the tape recorder. No way he could guess I’d hear his voice during the calls. One possibility is that The Man knows him and might recognize his voice. Two: I heard his voice over at the Omni. It didn’t even sound familiar. So this crap where he acts like he knows so much about me. It’s just to send us down some wrong alleys.”

  The Man came up from the kitchen-dining room and leaned against the bar. “I talked to a security man at the hotel I stay at when I’m out there. He knew Ronny. He’ll start on it right now and he might have something for us by morning.”

  “Call me soon as you hear anything.” I stood up and stretched and tossed down the J&B. “I’m bushed and it’s still early.”

  “You’re staking a lot on finding the girl. What if it doesn’t work out?”

  “Then I’ve made a bad guess and the police have too.”

  Hard eyes sliced at me. “And it’ll cost me another hundred thousand?”

  “I’ll quit right now.”

  He looked away. “I hope you’ve made the right choice, Hardman.”

  “You don’t like it, you give me another one.” I gave him time to answer but he didn’t. “Tell me another way to go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Thanks for your confidence.” I started for the door and turned back. “Hump and I are wondering why that guy on the phone is going to all that trouble to disguise his voice, if that’s what he’s doing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That he knows you. That you might know him.”

  “The way he sounds, how the hell am I supposed to know?”

  “Think about it.” I nodded at Hump.

  We went down the stairs past the shotgun soldier. I guess he was getting tired of spending time on the landing every time we dropped by. It was cold out there and I could see the condensation of his breath blowing at us as we passed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Marcy called a few minutes before eight the next morning. She did that now and then when she hadn’t heard from me for a couple of days. She’d be ready for work, ready to leave her apartment and she’d get the impulse.

  “Has the other girl left?”

  “An hour ago. Couldn’t stand the daylight.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “If you like the type,” I said.

  “What type is that?”

  Like most of the conversations we had when I wasn’t fully awake, I didn’t know how serious she was. “A fat girl who smelled of feta cheese and olive oil.”

  “A Greek girl?”

  “That’s how she talked me into it. Came over and whispered in my ear. Asked me if I’d ever had a fat Greek girl who smelled of feta cheese and fresh pressed olive oil.”

  “What part of her smelled like feta cheese?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “That answer is a lawyer’s way around perjury.”

  Enough. “Marcy,” I said, “the bed is empty.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Mine.” There wasn’t anything else I could say.

  “I’ll stop by at five. You be there.”

  I said I’d try.

  “Do better than that, buster.”

  She slammed the receiver down. I got out of bed and made coffee and cooked up a couple of boiled eggs. I spent the rest of the morning bumping into myself all around the house. It was that kind of morning.

  About noon, The Man called. “We had some luck.”

  “Not one minute too soon.”

  “Her name is Regina Clark. She goes back a ways with Ronny. Back before the picture was taken.”

  “How far back?”

  “Five or six years. A lot of people remember Ronny out there. It’s that way with the high rollers. Sometimes it’s friendly watching and sometimes it isn’t. One place my man showed the photo around, they remember Ronny and they remember the girl. You know how it is at the good hotels. Hookers hang around the bar until the dot of six. Then if they’re not escorted they’ve got to get into their pumpkins and disappear. It’s the rule.”

  I didn’t know that but I said yeah like I did.

  “One afternoon Ronny was in the bar. Got to talking with this young girl. Word is she looked old enough. The girl hustled him out of a few chips to play blackjack with. She was playing and it got past six p.m. and these two big security men come in, grab her hands and cuff them behind her. Ronny got pissed. Stormed over and said she was with him. He was raising all kinds of hell when they told him the girl was being hauled off for being underage. She was seventeen.”

  It sounded like Ronny. He could bellow and he was a sucker for lost people.

  “Ronny got her released. He tried to help her.”

  “His kind of thing,” I said.

  “The girl was hard up and she didn’t want to sell it and she didn’t want to work at one of those pig ranches outside of town. Ronny staked her until she found a job. Used to see her when he was in town. Nobody cares about anybody’s morals out there. Still, the word was that it was like a father and daughter thing.”

  “And she disappeared from Vegas a few months back.”

  “You know this already?”

  “Guessed some of it.”

  “Girls float in and out of Vegas. Nobody keeps tabs. Close as my man could figure, it was anywhere from two to six months ago that she dropped out of sight. My man said he’d check closer if I thought it was worthwhile.”

  “Call him back. Find where she was staying. See if there’s a forwarding address.”

  “I’m ahead of you. He’s doing that now. He’ll call me back in a couple of hours.”

  “It’s opening up.”

  “How?” He didn’t sound as sure as I did.

  I wasn’t sure and I didn’t feel like bluffing. “After we find her I’ll know.”

  Before I closed off the call, I said I’d be gone for an hour or so. If he didn’t reach me, I’d call him.

  At Cloudt’s, the fancy food store on Peachtree, I had the butcher cut me a couple of sirloin steaks. Before I headed for the wine store next door, I wandered up and down the aisles looking at the exotic stuff on the shelves. In one section I found a jar with about four or five black ugly truffles in it. The price on it was $40. Since I’d never had a truffle before and didn’t know what kind of taste it had, I passed it up, good bargain that it was.

  I did buy a crusty wedge of Stilton and some ripe Anjou pears.

  The Man called at three. No word from Vegas yet.

  A few minutes before five, I unwrapped the meat and put the two steaks on a platter. I ground some fresh pepper on both sides of the meat and pressed the coarse pepper in.

  Marcy charged in exactly at five. She gave the steaks only a glance in passing. “I want to talk to you, buster.” She threw her purse on the sofa, kicked off her shoes and headed for the bedroom. I don’t like pushy women, but I said, what the hell, and followed her.

  It was short and violent, that lovemaking. Maybe it was what both of us needed. At the end of it she perched on an elbow and looked at me. “Feta cheese, huh?”

  “Don’t forget the olive oil.”

  By six-thirty, she’d made the salad and heated up the old black cast iron skillet. She dropped in half a stick of butter and one of the steaks. Just a minute or two on each side. I opened a bottle of Saint Julian and poured out two glasses. As soon as the first steak was done, I started on it while she seared hers.

  We finished the last of the wine with the Stilton and the pears. When the call came, I took another pear with me and ate it while The Man talked.

  “It was a lot of trouble. The Clark girl lived in three or four places those years in Vegas. When he reached the last one, he found she hadn’t left a forwarding address with the super. There hadn’t been any mail for her at the apartment. He took
it to mean she’d filled out a forwarding address at the post office.”

  He was good, that man out in Vegas.

  “He tried to work it with a clerk at the post office. No help there. The clubs might run Vegas but the clerk got scared and backed off.”

  Maybe he hadn’t offered enough money.

  “He had to start over. Back to the super. The super called the rental agency and got her bank reference. By the time he had that the banks had closed for the day. He knew I was pressing for the information so he went looking for someone with clout enough to call one of the bank vice-presidents. He hit it good this time. When Regina Clark closed out her checking account there were a couple of outstanding checks. She left enough in the account to cover the checks and she gave an address in Atlanta where the last statement could be mailed.”

  “Where?”

  “An apartment on Briarcliff.” He gave me the street number and the apartment number.

  “I’ll check it tonight.”

  “Call me.”

  I said I would. I dropped the pear stem in an ash tray and started getting dressed. Back in the kitchen I could hear the excessive, angry clatter of dishes in the sink. Marcy knew what the call meant. Damn. Before I left the bedroom, I called Hump.

  “Busy?”

  “This sweetmeat trim has been working on my bruises.”

  “I’ve got an address for the girl.”

  “Pick me up.”

  I leaned over the kitchen table and cut myself another crumbled wedge of Stilton. Marcy, her hands in the suds, looked over her shoulder at me. “That what I think it was?”

  “Sorry.”

  “At least you won’t be running around town all night, all horny.”

  I choked on the cheese. Marcy was learning how to talk bad.

  I found the apartment without too much trouble. After we parked, we split up. A minute or so later Hump whistled. He’d found #23. There was light in the breezeway. No name tag in the metal frame on the door. I gave the doorbell a push or two and waited. No answer, so I walked down the stairs and looked at the windows to the apartment. The drapes were open and no light showed.

  I was ready to head back to the car. At the top of the stairs, from the breezeway, Hump waved at me. I climbed the stairs. “Yeah?”

  “Hear it?”

  I could. The muffled beat of hard rock. I circled Hump and leaned against the door of apartment #24. It was coming from inside. I hit the doorbell a long burst.

  As soon as the door opened, I got nostrils and a mouthful of the grass smoke. A tanned young man in a pair of tennis shorts, his chest bare, swayed in the doorway. “If you’re fuzz, I give up.”

  “Don’t surrender yet. We’re not.”

  “Oh, shit.” He twisted around and yelled over the music, “Betty, don’t light the fucking incense. It’s not the cops.”

  “The girl next door, do you know where she is?”

  “Her?” His mouth drooped. “Way she acted you’d have thought it was gold and encrusted with jewels.” He yelled into the apartment once more. “Betty, you remember me telling you about that stuck-up girl next door?”

  “Fuck her,” the girl inside said.

  “You know where she is?”

  “Gone. Moved out. Must have been scared I’d grab hold of that sweet little body of hers.”

  “When?”

  “What’s today?” He blinked at me.

  “Thursday.”

  “Must have been Monday then.”

  “You here when she moved out? You see what moving company hauled her stuff?”

  “Not me. It was during the day. I was off working. Have to keep Atlanta booming.”

  “Bob,” the girl in the apartment shouted, “come back to bed.”

  He smiled. “Listen to my fans.” He fumbled for the doorknob and pushed at the door. “Nice talking but I’ve got to go.”

  I wedged a shoe in the door opening. “You got a resident manager here?”

  “Apartment 1.”

  I moved my shoe and he closed the door with a wham. I had another question. It floated up at me. I pushed the bell and braced myself.

  The door opened only inches that time. “Look, it’s been nice talking to you but I’ve got better—”

  “One question and I’ll leave you to it. The way you talk you tried to get close to the girl next door, right?”

  “I tried to borrow a cup of gin from her.” He laughed. “It’s something I saw a guy do on TV one night.”

  “No luck, huh?”

  “Frosty.”

  “But you didn’t give up?” I could guess that. He was the type you’d have to use a bat on.

  “I tried a time or two more.”

  “You find out what she did for a living?”

  “Sure. I found out. Got to know enough to do the small talk.”

  “What?”

  “She was a dance instructor. One of those places where people learn to dance. It wasn’t Arthur Murray but it was one like that.”

  It meshed. It fitted. I backed away. “Have a good walk in the woods.”

  “What else.” This time, after the slam died down, I heard the lock slip into place.

  I dropped Hump off and drove home. I got the yellow pages and used the kitchen table as a desk. “Dance Instruction” covered a bit more than two pages. After a glancing down the listings, I used a felt-tipped pen to strike out the ones I thought we could bypass. Ballet and tap, belly dancing. From the look at Regina Clark, she didn’t have the belly for the Mid-eastern.

  Marcy mixed me a drink and watched while I assembled the list. All the downtown ones in the first group. The others according to the sections of town. When I’d written down the last one and pushed the pad aside, she came around the table and nibbled at my ear lobe. “Bedtime, Jim?”

  “You staying?”

  A whisper. “Yes.”

  “Bedtime.”

  We started with the downtown group. It might have been easier to split the list with Hump. Maybe, maybe not. I’d seen Regina Clark and he hadn’t. And the trimmed-down photos didn’t do the real, live woman justice. Not the way that brief look at her in the church entranceway had.

  By noon, we’d run through the downtown group. Blanks all the way. We stopped for lunch and a couple of beers. Then grunting it up and starting over again.

  It wasn’t luck. It was footwork, touching the bases. Around three, at Broadview Plaza, we got the right one, The Buddy Parks Studio. It might have been in the second division, located as it was above an oriental supermarket, but they’d gone to a lot of expense and trouble to dress it up. Black wrought iron railing on the stairs that might have come from Charleston. A reception room that had about ten thousand dollars’ worth of antiques. Just the desk, the sideboard and the love seat would have cost that much.

  And a knockout of a receptionist. No way to price her. Five-two or so. A dark tan, light brown hair with a bit of frost in it and a body that made me think she’d robbed a couple of other girls and left them flat and fleshless to get what she had.

  Must be businesslike. Mustn’t look like I’m a bill collector. “I’d like to see Miss Regina Clark.”

  At the other places I’d gotten blank looks. Not here. The look read me, layer through layer down to my brand of underwear. “Do you have an appointment with Miss Clark?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I don’t understand.” But I think she did. I think she’d marked us down as trouble and drawn a line under us.

  “We’d like to talk to Miss Clark about taking lessons.”

  “Both of you?” She tilted her head and looked at Hump.

  “Just me,” I said. “He can dance already.”

  “Miss Clark is busy right now. She is giving private instructions and the session won’t be over for some time.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  I backed away from the desk. The plaque on the front edge of the desk gave me her name. Miss Winters. Hump turned with me and we headed for the love sea
t. Just before we got there, I looked over my shoulder at Miss Winters. I could read the alarm on her face. Together we’d weigh almost five hundred pounds. Enough to shatter the fragile piece of furniture into stove wood.

  I touched Hump on the arm and we walked over to a couple of molded plastic chairs. We smoked and waited. Ten minutes passed. Miss Winters stared at us. I met her eyes and blew smoke at her. Screw all that good-looking meat. Turn it over and it’s all gray on the back.

  Five minutes more. It got to her. She got up and rounded the desk. From the side, as she approached me, Hump looked over the merchandise.

  “I’m sure Miss Clark won’t be able to see you today. She’s late now and she had another appointment in ten minutes.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  “I can fill out a form with you and set up an appointment for the first of next week.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “But I’m telling you—”

  “We’ll wait.”

  Hump stood up and stretched. “I’ll fill out a form with you. Might be I could use some brush-up.”

  Miss Winters read that for what it really was and ignored Hump. “It won’t do any good.” She returned to the desk. When she was seated, to her left, there were a series of buttons. A call system. Eyes on us she pressed one down and said, “Miss Clark, there are two men out here to see you. I don’t know who they are.”

  When she released the button and looked away, one eyelid twitched, like an involuntary wink. I stood up. I didn’t like that last move.

  “I’ll walk back and meet her.”

  “You can’t go back there.”

  “Watch me.” I turned back to Hump. “Jolly this lady for me.”

  “Don’t throw me in that briar patch,” Hump said.

  “And call Art at home. He won’t be at the police department yet.” I added that for Miss Winters. It would nail her to the floor for a few minutes.

  Past the door with “STUDIOS” printed on it, I was in a wide hall. I could see four doorways, two to each side, and a doorway at the end with a red “EXIT” sign above it. The first door to the right was open. Empty. The door to the left was cracked slightly. A tall girl with platinum blonde hair was dancing groin to groin with a gray-haired business type. It was cool but he was sweating. What we used to call in the army a dry-hump.