Hump's First Case

by Ralph Dennis

  HUMP’S FIRST

  CASE

  RALPH DENNIS

  Copyright © 2019 Adventures in Television, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Afterword “Jim Hardman, The First Truly Hardboiled Private Eye”

  Copyright © 2019 by Mel Odom. All Rights Reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1941298834

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941298-83-1

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Also by Ralph Dennis

  The War Heist

  The Hardman Series

  Atlanta Deathwatch

  The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

  The Golden Girl And All

  Pimp For The Dead

  Down Among The Jocks

  Murder Is Not An Odd Job

  Working For The Man

  The Deadly Cotton Heart

  The One Dollar Rip-Off

  Hump’s First Case

  The Last Of The Armageddon Wars

  The Buy Back Blues

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book was originally published in 1977 and reflects the cultural and sexual attitudes, language, and politics of the period.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was bitter-ass cold. It was a week before Christmas and the early-morning temperatures the last three days had been down in the teens. It wasn’t much better in the sunlight. It wasn’t the usual Atlanta weather.

  I’d just had dinner at my girlfriend’s apartment. Marcy had done a couple of pounds of veal some Italian way, with garlic and lemon and olive oil. I’d taken a good bottle of a Graves with me and we’d had the last glass of it in the bedroom. It was a good-bye-for-now party. Early the next morning she was flying up to Washington to spend a few days with an uncle and aunt, the last of her family. She wouldn’t be back until Christmas Eve. I’d left about ten-thirty so that she could do the rest of her packing and get a few hours’ sleep. Driving home I could feel the just-before-Christmas depression settling in. It would be worse with her out of town.

  I was almost home when I remembered that I didn’t have anything for breakfast. Not even eggs, not even bread. I made a turn and headed for the nearest 7–11 store. I got there about ten minutes before closing time. There were two cars parked out front, a battered white VW and a cream-colored convertible, a Mercury that was probably a 1957.

  Inside I went straight for the bread rack. It was all that puffed-air stuff, the kind of bread I hate. But I picked out a loaf and held it carefully by the tied end. A few ounces of pressure and it would compress into a ball about the size of a biscuit. I got a dozen eggs from the dairy shelf and I was leaning over, staring down at the packages of bacon, when I realized that something was wrong.

  I guess it was the old habits. The trained feelings that came from the time I’d been a cop. That had been years ago but I still had those instincts. Without turning around, I ran it through my head one more time.

  There’d been a young girl behind the counter near the cash register. Long blond hair and blue eyes. Wrong thing number one: she’d been wearing a sheepskin jacket. Behind the counter? Unless, of course, she was ready to close for the night, waiting out those last ten minutes.

  And the two young men. One stood with an elbow on top of the cash register. He was tall and thin, hair worn in a neat and short white afro. The other young man stood to his right, at the counter where you placed the items you were buying. He’d had a stack of six or seven cans of cat food. A heavy young man. Dark hair in what used to be called a ducktail. A denim jacket with a huge Budweiser patch on the back of it.

  I’d seen that and I’d lost myself in trying to find a package of bacon that wasn’t green around the edges.

  And then the rest of it went wrong. I heard the bell on the front door. I stood and turned. The girl and the two men were going out the door. The two men were a few steps ahead, the girl trailing them. I yelled, “Hey, who do I pay for this?”

  The girl whirled and I saw the paper bag in her hand. She stared at me with wide eyes and shook her head. The headshaking looked like a warning. She sprinted toward the Mercury convertible. The passenger-side door was open. She got in and pulled it closed. The driver burned rubber getting out of the parking lot.

  I walked to the counter and placed the eggs and the bread next to the cash register. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the cash-register drawer was open.

  Then I got the smell. The smell of dead.

  A woman about thirty sprawled on the floor behind the counter. She’d been shot at least twice, once in the head and once in the chest. I knew better but I circled the counter and tried for a pulse. There wasn’t one.

  “And you just stood there?”

  That was the young detective from Robbery. I didn’t know him. He’d come up after I’d left. His last name was Ellison and I hadn’t caught his first name.

  I gave him a tired look. “You know who I am?”

  “I know who you are,” he said. The way he said it was like spitting out something that had been trapped between your teeth for a couple of days.

  Those years gone and I guess they still used me as a scare story, one they could point out to the young cops and say, If you don’t watch out you’ll end up like Jim Hardman. “You know that much,” I said; “you know I don’t work as a cop anymore.”

  He broke the stare first. He looked down at what he’d written. Cream-colored Mercury, maybe a 1957. “You get the tag numbers?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a lot of help.”

  “I called you,” I said. “I’ve given you a description of the three of them. That’s about all I can do as a citizen who’s not licensed to carry iron. You get me a gun permit and the next time I walk into a situation like this I’ll blow the scumbags away.”

  “You talk rough,” Ellison said.

  “I feel rough. Somebody just spoiled my night’s sleep.”

  He closed his notebook. “I might need you to look at some mug shots.”

  “That would be a big waste of time. Those three were about one step past being juveniles. If they’ve got records, they’ve been sealed by the court.”

  “A lineup if I find them?”

  I nodded. He wheeled away. I stood at the counter and looked at the loaf of bread and the carton of eggs. No change in the register and the executive from 7–11, the one the police had called, didn’t seem interested in sales. I dropped the bread on the shelf and returned the eggs to the refrigerator case. There went breakfast.

  Passing the counter, on the way out, I heard Ellison ask the 7–11 man if he knew how much was missing from the register. He answered that he’d have to close out the register after the print man was done with it, but they’d started with a hundred in change and …

  “One of the guys took some cans of cat food,” I sa
id.

  They looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Six or eight cans of it,” I said.

  I knew better. I wasn’t crazy. Screw them. I made the longer drive to Ansley Mall and did my shopping at the Kroger’s that remained open all night. I got everything I needed. The bread was Arnold’s Brick Oven and the bacon wasn’t green.

  The next day the afternoon paper, The Journal, carried a write-up on the robbery on an inside page of the front section. It said the dead woman had been Emma Jean Peters and she’d been thirty-one years old. There wasn’t any mention of me. That was the way I liked it. Low profile and all that.

  That evening, depressed by all the Christmas advertising and all that Jingle Bells crap on the radio, I did a lowlife tour with Hump Evans. We started in some strip joints and ended up at the singles bars far out Peachtree Road.

  Hump draws a lot of attention wherever he goes. He’s six-six or seven and weighs in at 270 or so. He’s midnight black and he used to play a hell of a defensive end at Cleveland before he tore up a knee in a pileup and lost a step of quickness. Right now he’s still seven times quicker than I am.

  The singles bars were meat on the table and all out front. Not an ounce of coy to it. A lot of the women had their eyes on Hump. Most of the women looked at me like I carried plague germs. I guess I’m their old-age nightmare. Pudgy and mid-forties, reflecting what they are or what they’ll be in a few years.

  Midnight, with drink sloshing in me, I left Hump to choose his meat from the buffet and drove home. I showered and brushed my teeth. The shower was to wash off all the perfume and the stench of men’s cologne that I felt I’d sucked up in those bars. The teeth brushing to erase the taste of one more rejection.

  I was ready for bed when the doorbell rang. I put on a pair of khaki slacks and a clean T-shirt and went to the door barefooted. The board parts of the floor were like ice-skating without shoes.

  Probably Hump. But you couldn’t be sure. Not sure enough to go to the door in boxer shorts. I unlocked the door and swung it open. The porch was dark. Waves of condensed breath swirled past me. With that came the delicate scent of some perfume and the harshness of some no-nonsense men’s aftershave.

  I flipped on the porch light. A couple stood there. They were around my age. The man was short and bull-chested, with a jaw like a rock and a thin mouth. He had dark hair with a band of gray that ran up his sideburns and into the hair over his ears.

  The woman on his right was three or four inches taller than he was. Maybe five-ten or eleven. She’d been a beauty in her time and that time wasn’t too many years past. She had a model’s lean and almost bony face. Green innocent eyes. Dark hair with the beauty-shop-gray streaking.

  “Yeah?” The doorway was like a wind tunnel.

  “You’re James Hardman?” I heard the accent and I knew right away that he wasn’t a redneck. It was northern, New York or somewhere like that.

  “That’s me.” My eyes slid from him to the woman. She was staring down at my bare feet. At the toenails that needed clipping and the soap yellowing that formed on the nails. Once a month Marcy would get after me about showering so hurriedly.

  The woman said, “We’re Billie Joe’s parents.”

  I’d expected the same accent from her. Hers wasn’t northern. It was southern and soft and musical. Not Tidewater or Charleston. Not the fancy ones. This was small-town country with a pinch of polish tossed in. “I don’t know him.”

  “It’s not a him,” the woman said.

  “Her,” the man corrected me.

  “Billie Joe’s the girl at the 7–11 store,” the woman said.

  “I know it’s late,” the man said. “We’ll apologize for that ahead of time. But we’ve just arrived in Atlanta today and we’ve tried to call you all evening.”

  “The blond girl?” I backed from the doorway and waved them inside. The woman passed first. The perfume rubbed against me and replaced what I’d just washed off. He followed and, along with the shaving lotion, there was the smell of tweed and pipe tobacco.

  I closed the door and switched off the porch light. “Have a seat. I’ll put on my shoes.” On the way past the thermostat I pushed and slapped at it until I heard the furnace cut in. The bedroom door shut behind me, I put on socks, shoes and a shirt. When I returned to the living room they were still standing, coats on, looking at each other. “I feel better in the kitchen. How about some coffee or a drink or coffee and a drink?”

  “The kitchen sounds good,” she said. I caught a look of gentle amusement. Yes, there was some backwoods in that girl or maybe it was a memory from a long time ago. From a time when, if there was a living room, it was for show. The kitchen was the center of the house.

  I led the way. I filled the kettle and placed it on the burner. I got down three shot glasses and an unopened bottle of Courvoisier that I’d bought myself as an early Christmas present. While I used a knife to cut the foil away, I looked at them. They’d removed their coats and left them in the living room. He wore Harris tweed, about two hundred dollars worth of jacket. She wore a gray knit dress. Her body looked real, heated, a burn to the touch.

  “What makes you think it’s your daughter?”

  “Actually she’s my stepdaughter,” he said. He’d pulled out a chair for her. Now he eased it in. “Do you have the picture, Rosemary?”

  “Yes, Charles.” She was about to place her bag on the floor next to the chair legs. Now she lifted it, opened the clasp, and took out a photo that looked about four by six. She passed the picture to him and he looked at it and turned to hand it to me. I shook my head. I was pouring the cognac. He waited until I finished that. I gave it a brief look and dropped it on the table so that I could pass the brandy around.

  “Mister …” I stopped.

  He gave a flustered laugh. “That’s not like me. We’ve barged in on you and we haven’t even introduced ourselves.”

  “It’s been a bad time for you, Charles.”

  “That’s true. I’m Charles Atkinson and this is Rosemary.”

  “I don’t know what it is …” I broke it off and shook my head. I didn’t know what the hell was going on and I wasn’t sure I could say that it was a pleasure to meet them.

  “This is an imposition,” Charles said.

  I watched him. There was a kind of hesitation. I had the feeling he was about to pick up the photo, get their coats and leave.

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not being reasonable. We’ve gone this far. Let’s go the rest of the way.” I had a sip of the cognac and picked up the picture. It had the graininess of a blowup and parts of the original had been sliced away.

  The girl in the photo wore a ball gown. It was white and lacy and low cut, with the cleavage and the upward roundness of young breasts. On both sides of her there was the suggestion of a dark arm or shoulder. Her hair was blond and short, barely to her chin. I stared at the face, the shape of it, and closed my eyes. I tried to hold that shape and add the longer hair I’d seen in the 7–11 store. It wasn’t entirely a success. The face the night before had been thinner. Still, just before it faded, there was enough of a fuzzy match to make me think it might be a possibility.

  “When was the picture taken?”

  “This summer,” Charles Atkinson said.

  “At the Cotillion,” Rosemary said.

  “It’s a debutante ball,” he said.

  That explained what had been cut away. The arms and shoulders had been those of her escorts for the evening. “Do you have a photo of her with longer hair?”

  “No.” Rosemary looked at her husband. “She never wore her hair long … until now.”

  Charles had a sip of the brandy. He held it on his tongue for a long time before he swallowed. “Do you think it was Billie Joe in that store last night?”

  “I’m not sure. It could be. If she’s wearing her hair longer now, if she’s lost some of the baby fat from her face.”

  “I knew it,” Rosemary said. “I just knew it.”

&nbs
p; “Look,” I said. “I didn’t say that at all. What I said was that it could have been.”

  “But you didn’t say that it definitely wasn’t her.” Charles looked at me above the rim of the glass.

  “It’s not the same thing.” I was getting irritated and frustrated. “I know what I meant. I meant maybe yes and at the same time maybe no.”

  “I’m sure,” Rosemary said.

  I could feel myself chipping around the edges. “How about telling what this is all about?”

  “They kidnapped her,” Charles said.

  “That’s what we think,” Rosemary added.

  “Kidnapped her?” I looked from one face to the other. I could see the almost religious belief there.

  “Like they did Patty Hearst,” Rosemary said.

  “Why,” her husband said, “it’s a classic copy of that case.”

  The kettle began a rolling boil. I turned off the flame and got down three cups. I kept my back to them while I made the instant coffee.

  The nuts, the crazies, the strange ones. I seemed to get all of them. I drew them like a lodestone draws iron filings.

  CHAPTER TWO

  All right, it looked like I was going to lose an hour or two of sleep. That and I’d have to listen to God knows how much crap in the process. But it was my mistake. I always made that distinction between what I did to myself and what other people did to me. This one belonged about sixty–forty to me.

  I placed the coffee on the table and checked the sugar dish before I sat down. “What do the police believe?”

  “You’ve been talking to them?” It was almost an accusation from Charles.

  “Listening to you,” I said. “And, anyway, what police are we talking about?”

  “The one investigating last night’s robbery, the one who gave us your name as a witness.”

  “Ellison,” I said.

  “He didn’t believe us,” Rosemary said.

  “Tell me about the kidnapping.” That was the easy way, agree with them, hear them out and, as soon as I could, get them out the door and lock it behind them.

  “That was in late August,” Charles said.