The One Dollar Rip-Off

by Ralph Dennis

  “No way.” I tilted my head toward Tip. “He might be a professional. You’re not. And I’m not sure we want the same things out of this. So, it’s my way or not at all. You have fun. See the city.” I stood up and nudged the chair against the table. “That’s my last offer.”

  Temple didn’t say anything. After a long wait he nodded. Next to him Tip looked at me over the rim of his glass of white wine. The fever burn was in his eyes.

  “All right. That’s our deal. And if I see either of you until I call you, I’ll back right out of it. No matter how close we are.”

  I reached the elevator before I knew that Tip had followed me. I hit the button about the time Tip tapped me on the shoulder. “Yeah? What is it?” It was said harsh, hard. I didn’t feel like playing.

  “Your mouth is getting your ass in trouble,” he said. His voice, now that I’d heard him speak, was soft, almost delicate and feminine.

  “Get it on. Right now.” Getting your ass beat isn’t the worst disaster can happen to you. “You got something against this location?”

  He was a pro. Words didn’t cut him. He shook his head. “It’s not the right time.”

  The elevator doors opened. I waited. He shook his head and backed away. I stepped into the elevator and hit the lobby button.

  The doors closed and I rode the elevator down to the lobby. The heat was on in the hotel but all I could feel was the chill. It matched the cold wind that blew the length of Peachtree Street.

  Hump and I started nursemaid shifts the next morning. Twelve hours on and twelve off. Hump called the quarter and took the first turn, the 8 a.m to 8 p.m.

  The first stage, the way we figured it, would be in-house watching. We’d guard the warm body close up until the call came in. After that we’d change it to four-hour shifts and do our watching from a car parked across the street. Nighttime would be bad. A cold snap was heading in. And there were other dangers. A tenant in one of the nearby apartments might see us and call the police. Or the police, or routine patrols, might roust us.

  It was the fifth day. Hump’s shift drew nothing. Out of boredom Hump and Bill played two-handed poker for pennies. Bill won the lot and loaned Hump enough to keep him playing. By the time I relieved Hump, he’d lost about twenty dollars to Bill.

  I followed Hump into the hallway and closed the door behind us. “How’s Bill holding up?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Hump said. “But if he sucks you into playing cards with him, watch out I think the old bastard cheats.”

  Bill appeared to be satisfied with his twenty dollars in winnings. He didn’t even mention cards. We sat in the living room and watched the flickering picture on the old set that came with the apartment. The new season had started but all the shows might have been left over from the year before. At ten-thirty I left him to the TV and stretched out on the bed. There wasn’t any possibility of sleep. Every time I breathed or moved, the plastic mattress cover cracked and popped.

  The phone rang a bit after eleven. I made it to the phone half a step behind Bill. He lifted the receiver and held it just far enough from his ear so that I could lean in and listen with him.

  Bill said, “Hello.”

  The voice was flat, without much inflection. “This Bill Heffner?”

  “It is. Who’re you?”

  “Which aka do you want?”

  “The last one on the list,” Bill said.

  “Edmund Frost,” the man said.

  “That’s the right one.”

  “I’ve asked around about you,” the man said. “Small-time but good small-time. What I heard doesn’t dovetail with this.”

  “It wasn’t that small-time,” Bill said. He was going off in the wrong direction. Here we were pulling a scam and he wanted to protest his ranking. I put a hand on his shoulder and when he looked at me, I shook my head.

  “It’s relative anyway,” the man said. “What is it you want, Bill?”

  “I’ve been down a few months. I need a stake.”

  “Down? One word I got was that you were in the bottle with the cork on tight.”

  “That’s past,” Bill said.

  “Speaking of past,” the man said, “blackmail is not supposed to be your best game.”

  “That’s a strong word for it. I’d like to think of it as a loan from somebody in the same business. The first scam I run, I’ll cut you in fifty-fifty on the score.”

  “I am not a banker.” A pause. “Which reminds me. It is a fanciful idea you have. I am fairly certain that I have never been in a town named Tiflon. What part of the state … ?”

  “The Feds and the bonding company know where it is.”

  “That’s the threat?”

  “Think of it as collateral for the loan,” Bill said.

  “I don’t think an amount was mentioned.”

  “Fifty thousand will bank a new scam I’ve developed.”

  “I don’t care what you want it for. I don’t care if you’re about to donate it to one-legged orphans. That is a lot of money you are talking about.”

  “It’s a bare minimum I can get by on.”

  “I haven’t seen the material you mailed. It was read to me. I understand that there is a picture involved.”

  “A clear one,” Bill said. “You hair’s black but I think the real estate dealer, the interior decorator, the man who sold office furniture … all of them could identify you from it.”

  “Could?” The man waited. “I don’t remember a picture.”

  “I have my sources.”

  “And the location of the drop?”

  “The same,” Bill said.

  “One aspect of this bothers me. This could be a setup.”

  “I don’t need that sort of reputation. I do need fifty thousand.”

  “All the same I smell a setup.”

  “If I sold you, who’d buy? The way you tell it no one has any link that ties you to Tiflon.”

  “That’s true. I must say I am interested in what leads you to believe I might be involved.”

  “A fact here. A fact there. All well documented.”

  “It’s all very vague,” the man said.

  “It should be,” Bill said. “I don’t believe in doing much open talking on phone lines. I understand that bored operators sometimes listen in.”

  “I see. You want a face-to-face with me?”

  “Not at all. That’s not necessary. All I want is the money.”

  “No,” the man said. “I don’t think that will work. I believe we ought to talk.”

  “You can’t jawbone me down. Fifty is my bottom figure.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “A meeting would be a mistake,” Bill said. “Just send the cash. No check, please.”

  “I’ll fly in tomorrow,” the man said. “We’ll have our talk and I’ll decide then.”

  “I’m not much for talking,” Bill said.

  It was the way we’d plotted it. Maybe he was overplaying that part of it. But I’d told him to act as though he didn’t want to try on the glass slipper. That only as a last resort would he agree to a meet.

  “And I am not much for paying out fifty big ones on the basis of rumors.”

  “A standoff,” Bill said.

  “Precisely. I will need your address.”

  I touched Bill’s shoulder. I mouthed, not that easy.

  “You have the number,” Bill said. “Call me when you get here. Or would you rather I met your plane?”

  “It’s an amusing idea,” the man said.

  “I thought it might be.”

  “You must take me for a fool. If I see you—and there is quite a bit of if in this—I will see you at a time and in a way that does not put me in a box. I will need your address.”

  Bill looked over his shoulder at me. I nodded. Bill gave him the Charles Allen address.

  “If I know Atlanta your part of town is no Sandy Springs or West Paces Ferry.”

  “It’s fine for now,” Bill said.

  The con
nection was broken.

  Bill leaned in the kitchen doorway while I made us a couple of cups of coffee. He should have been happy. The scam had worked. It was under way. But I could read his face. He looked as if he’d just been told he had herpes simplex 2.

  “Something bothering you?”

  “It was too easy,” he said.

  “I think you handled that part of it well. It was just hard enough.”

  He wanted to believe me. He tried it out. “Any way for us to check if the call came from out of town?”

  “Hump might work something tomorrow with the black beauty at Ma Bell’s.”

  “Not before tomorrow?”

  “If then,” I said.

  He took the cup I offered him and we sat in the living room and sipped the coffee. The silence and his gloom were getting to me. “Tell me what bothers you about it, Bill.”

  “If you dropped a hook in the water and the fish not only bit but he swam over and walked up on the ground and jumped in the creel, wouldn’t that bother you?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “Ben Pride ain’t that kind of fish.”

  I had trouble sleeping. After the coffee I needed a drink but Hump and I had decided not to keep any at Bill’s apartment. If the tension got to him, if he fell off the wagon, he’d have to brew and distill his own.

  All that rolling around confused the time. I’d taken the sofa and the springs were so near the surface. I moved to avoid one and ran into two more.

  Except for my movement it was still and quiet in the apartment. Now and then there’d be a feather snore from Bill. Nothing else. Then I heard the door to the hallway open and close. No, I sensed it. I didn’t really hear the door at all. It was done that smoothly. I did notice a change in the sound. The texture altered. I could hear street noise for that brief time and then it was gone, chopped off.

  I let the springs dig at me. Still. Not hearing the footsteps approaching the door. Rather feeling them like a shifting of weight, a changed pressure.

  Someone tried the door. It was done with care. Only a faint metallic scrape. No way, buster. I’d locked the door myself and I’d threaded the slide bolt and attached the door chain. So much protection that I’d decided a sour, musty virgin had lived in the apartment at one time.

  Knocking at the door. Firm and loud. I counted the raps and got to five before it stopped. In the bedroom the plastic sheet cracked and Bill said, “What?” and I heard his bare feet hit the floor. I reached under the sofa and grabbed the .38 P P and jackknited off the side of the bedding. A spring clawed at me. I jerked it free and reached the bedroom doorway in time to meet Bill head on. I caught his arm and whispered, “Company.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ben Pride?”

  Rapping at the door. Again five times.

  “I know it’s him. He said …” Bill pulled away from me.

  I reached for him and missed. He stumbled toward the door.

  “Is that you, Ben?”

  I ran toward him. One of his hands touched the doorknob. The other worked the slide bolt. I made my low dive at him. My knees hit the floor but I reached up and caught Bill around the waist and spun him. He fell over me, sprawling, belly down.

  The blast of rounds above me, so close together that I couldn’t count them. Wood splinters fell on me. That was close. Close to dead. I put an arm over my face and waited. The ringing in my ears went away.

  This time I heard the front door slam.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The police arrived in five minutes. I hadn’t called them.

  The hallway jammed with curious tenants from the other apartments and I could only guess that one of them had done the telephoning. One woman in curlers and a robe kept sniffing the gunpowder air and saying, “Disgraceful, just disgraceful.”

  One of the patrolmen ran them back to bed while the other listened to our story. I could see that he didn’t believe it. It was, though, the only tale I’d been able to come up with in the short time I’d had.

  I said that Bill and I had been drinking coffee and talking when somebody knocked at the door. We wouldn’t open it and somebody had fired some shots through the door. “Some dope-crazed kid, I guess,” I said.

  “Robbery?”

  I said I thought that was it, right on the head. Of course, all I knew about dope-crazed kids was what I read in the newspapers. On the other hand, I said, Bill had just moved in less than twenty-four hours ago and maybe somebody thought they were shooting at whoever had lived there before. It was enough to confuse their minds. The patrolmen gave it up. Nobody’d been hurt and there was still some of the dark morning left to cruise through. After telling us that a detective would be by in the next day or two to follow up, they left.

  I closed the door behind them and locked it. I stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked back. Bill was measuring himself against the jagged bullet holes. They were in a line. The first one, chest high on him, was right above the doorknob. The others, inches apart, wag-walked toward the center of the door. I’d counted four holes in all.

  “You were right, Jim.”

  “Luck,” I said.

  He followed me into the kitchen. “There’s a lot I don’t know about this kind of business.”

  “The fish story of yours spooked me.”

  “We’re even then. You almost convinced me there wasn’t anything to worry about.”

  I put the coffee water on.

  “I’m not sleepy anymore,” Bill said.

  I wasn’t either. But coffee wasn’t what I needed. I needed a stiff drink about five knuckles high.

  The phone rang exactly at seven. It was three and a half hours since the try on Bill. It was three hours since the police had left. Bill and I had spent the time nodding off sitting up. It hadn’t been a comfortable night.

  I figured it was Hump checking in. I took the call with visions of my bed in the back of my mind. I grunted into the phone.

  I knew the voice right away. The flatness, the lack of inflection. “Heffner?”

  I waved the phone at Bill. He trotted over and took the receiver. “Yeah?”

  I leaned in and listened.

  “I understand you had some excitement this morning.”

  “You can call it that if you want to,” Bill said. Bill looked at me. I mouthed, be tough.

  “That solution was not my idea. The rashness of my associates …”

  “Bullshit,” Bill said. “The only reason I’m here right now is that the federal building downtown isn’t open yet.”

  “That could be a mistake.”

  “You made the mistake, buster.”

  “The stake you need …”

  “I might get it this way,” Bill said. “Maybe the Feds have a finder’s fee. If they don’t, the bonding company might.”

  “That would be bad faith. We have a deal.”

  “Some deal.”

  “After I spoke to you, I asked … my associates … to do some checking on you. I did not ask … for what happened.”

  “Easy enough to say now, when it didn’t come off.”

  “I think I can convince you.”

  “That would take some doing,” Bill said.

  “Do you know where the Plaza drug store is?”

  “I know.”

  “In the lot behind it, really behind the Plaza Theater … there is a yellow 1974 Cadillac.”

  “The money in it?”

  “Nothing that neat,” the man said. “This is rather messy.”

  I understood it. Bill gave me a puzzled look. I nodded. Go on. Bill said, “You were afraid of a setup. I am too.”

  I knew what we’d find in the yellow Cadillac. Somebody as dogmeat. That was Ben Pride’s show of good faith. And if he was willing to go to that extreme, I knew the hook was in gut-deep.

  “There should be some way you can verify this without risking a setup.”

  I nodded at Bill.

  “All right,” Bill said.r />
  “I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

  He broke the connection.

  I got the phone from Bill and dialed the police station. I worked my way through the switchboard until I reached Art Maloney. “I’ve got a question. You alone?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Anything happen behind the Plaza Theater tonight?”

  “Nothing I know of. Wait a second.” He was gone for a minute or so. “A blank on that.”

  “Had a call,” I said. “Somebody said there was a mess in a yellow 1974 Caddy parked back there.”

  “What kind of mess?”

  “I don’t want to guess,” I said.

  “So, this call is in the nature of an anonymous tip?”

  I said that was close.

  “Where’ll you be?”

  “The Plaza drugstore still open twenty-four hours a day?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “I’ll be at the fountain counter having breakfast.”

  “Be there.” He hung up.

  I called Hump. He said he’d be leaving in a minute or two. I told him to hurry right over. I was leaving and I’d be back soon as I could.

  I didn’t have to do scare stories for Bill. I stood in the hall and heard every lock put in place.

  The guard had changed at the Plaza drugstore. The nightcrawlers had gone to bed or wherever they went when the sun came up. Replacing them were the blue and white collars on the way to work. I found a space at the counter and ordered eggs and bacon and toast. I had coffee shakes so I settled for a glass of milk.

  I finished eating and paid my way through the turnstile. I was at the magazine shelf flipping through sports mags when Art came in. He said, “Just a second,” and got himself a coffee to go. I followed him outside and stood on the walk next to the display windows.

  Art had a sip of the steaming coffee. “You were right. It was a mess.”

  “Who?”

  “We don’t know yet. No identification on them.”

  “Them?”

  “Two. One black and one white. You know them?”

  A bubble broke on the top of my dull mind. “One of them wearing a hat?”

  Art nodded. “A checkered Bear Bryant type. He wasn’t exactly wearing it. Part of his head was in it.”