Hump's First Case

by Ralph Dennis

  After all, some dreams are private.

  The hook was in and I might as well try to swallow it. You fought it and it tore some guts out. I grinned at her and made her that cup of coffee.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “One mistake you made there,” I said. “If you’d told the police the truth the first time, there’s a good chance they’d have found Carl Culp and your daughter.”

  “I’ve made more than one mistake.” She’d settled into my easy chair. I was off to one side, watching her in profile most of the time. I’d always thought that women in their thirties who wore turtlenecks had something to hide. Not Rosemary. Her throat had a good clean line.

  “Hump told me.”

  “That Billie Joe was illegitimate?”

  I nodded.

  “I was seventeen. Buddy was twenty-two. He was an assistant buyer for one of the big tobacco companies. He said he loved me, he said a lot of interesting things, but he didn’t say he was already married.”

  It was the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter story. This time without the funny punchline.

  “Billie Joe was four when Charles was transferred from New York to manage the zipper factory. By then I’d been to business college and I was working in the shipping department office. He’d been divorced two or three years before and he didn’t trust women very much. It took him almost three months to work up the nerve to ask me out and it was another three or four months before he told me he loved me. I’m not sure whether I loved him or not. Still, he treated me well and he was good to Billie Joe.”

  “Until you told him the truth about Billie Joe.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s between the lines,” I said.

  “Charles believed I was divorced. That was what I’d told them when I applied for the job at the zipper factory. After he got interested in me, it was easy enough for him to look at the personnel records.”

  “You told him and he blew?”

  “It was a nightmare,” Rosemary said. “I’d never been through anything like it. He called me a whore, a rotten, stinking whore. It didn’t matter to him that I’d been seventeen at the time. Nothing mattered.”

  I felt the dryness slip in. “But he loved you enough to forgive you.”

  “He forgave me.”

  I did the math in my head. That had been thirteen or fourteen years ago and I could imagine that life. He gave her everything she wanted. All the material things. And perhaps in his own way he loved her. The trouble was that he couldn’t trust her. He watched her and waited for the mistake to be repeated. He waited for the seventeen-year-old girl to reappear. And when that didn’t happen he turned from her to the little girl. He looked for the seams and veins, the faults and cracks, for the evidence that the mother would be reborn in the child.

  “About a year ago there was an especially violent scene between Charles and Billie Joe. She was an hour late coming back from a Christmas dance. The violence of it stunned her. As soon as I could get her away from him, I had to do something. I tried to explain it to her. I told her about me and about her father. Oh, of course, she knew that Charles wasn’t her father but she didn’t know about Buddy.”

  She lifted her purse and placed it on her knees. She didn’t have to dig far. She brought out an envelope and passed it to me. I gave the outside of the envelope a look. The return address was that of Carl Culp with the Argonne address. The postmark, like most of them, was blurred, but I could read enough of it to see that the letter had been mailed in July. I opened the envelope and found a folded strip of newsprint. It had been clipped from the first part of the want ads. Down near the bottom of the strip, under Personal Interests, one item had been circled with a red ink.

  Wanted: any information about the whereabouts of Wallace (Buddy) James.

  Below that there was a box number at the Constitution.

  “I found that in her dresser after I gave up looking for Billie Joe here in Atlanta and returned to Kingstree.”

  “No letter with it?”

  “If there was,” Rosemary said, “she either destroyed it or brought it to Atlanta with her.”

  I folded the newsprint and shoved it back in the envelope. I returned it to her on the way past. I went into the kitchen and scattered eggshells and toast crumbs all over the floor, digging the morning paper out of the trash. I found the want ads section and checked the Personal Interests part of it. The ad wasn’t there. I hadn’t expected it to be. July to December was a long time to pay the rates. And my guess was that they’d received an answer or given up. I balled up the paper and stuffed it back in the can.

  “Any special reason for them to look for him here in Atlanta?” I returned to the living room.

  “The best,” she said. “The last time I heard from Buddy he was living here.”

  “When was that?” I got my smokes from the coffee table and lit one.

  “The year I moved to Kingstree and went to work at the zipper factory. Somehow, I don’t know how, he found out where I was. After that, it wasn’t hard. I’d taken James as a last name.”

  “Fifteen or sixteen years ago?”

  “About that.”

  “And when you met him, when you were seventeen?”

  “He lived in Durham.”

  “All right. He found you. When you saw him did he tell you what he was doing for a living?”

  “I didn’t see him. And I didn’t talk to him long. He called long distance. I told him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him.”

  I got the phone book from the bedroom, the white pages, and carried it into the living room. I flipped through it until I found the JAMES listings. There were about two solid pages of them. There wasn’t a Wallace James. Down near the bottom there was a W this and a W that. I creased the section with a fingernail and passed the book to her. “Any of those that might be the right one?”

  “His middle initial was A for Arnold.” She returned the book to me.

  I saw what she meant. There was no W. A. James in the book.

  Impasse. The roadblock was up.

  Hump returned a few minutes later. I’d expected him to be wearing a neck brace. He wasn’t. He looked about the same, though he did seem to have a bit more movement.

  “What’d the doc say?”

  “From now on, when I need a rubdown, I’d be better off going to one of those places on Houston Street.”

  “A comic,” I said.

  “And a pickpocket.”

  “Hit you good, huh?”

  “With X-rays and all? There went the booze money for the week.”

  “That reminds me.” I looked at Rosemary who’d picked up her suede coat.

  “You coming in?”

  “It looks that way.”

  Hump leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “I’ve already set the money deal with her.”

  “Good enough.” I passed him and helped her with her coat. The collar caught a few strands of her hair and I wanted to reach out and touch it and pull it free. I didn’t. I turned away. Her soft, “Thank you, James,” caught at me and I got the coffee cup and carried it into the kitchen. I came back and watched her and Hump. She’d started out the door when Hump laughed and handed her the car keys.

  “Might as well drive,” he said.

  She thanked him but her eyes weren’t on him. They burned the thirty feet or so from the front door to the kitchen doorway. I felt an itch on my forehead. Another few seconds and I knew I’d break out in a sweat.

  “Good-bye, James.”

  Hump closed the door behind her.

  “The neck all right?”

  “Bruised, no breaks or cracks.”

  “You up for a bit of work?”

  “After lunch?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You flunked a good part of the test …”

  “You never did grade me.”

  “… so let’s see how you handled the money matters.”

  “For the two of us a thousand a week. Five hundred eac
h.”

  “You get an advance?”

  “The first week.”

  “Then I think we ought to have lunch downtown, somewhere near the main library.” I got my topcoat from the bedroom closet. When I returned to the living room, he had his money roll in his hand. He fanned out five hundred for me. I took it and shoved it in my pocket.

  “Remember the doctor visit. That goes down on expenses.”

  “It’s written down.”

  We drove to the Plaza so he could pick up his Buick. Then I followed him to his apartment house. He left the Buick in the parking lot and we drove downtown and parked in the Davison’s parking deck.

  On the elevator headed down to the street level, I said, “Only four shopping days to Christmas.”

  “You just notice that?”

  “In the morning paper.”

  “What you giving Marcy?”

  “Unless I do some shopping in the next four days, only my poor tired body,” I said.

  He grinned. “That’s what every girl secretly wants for Christmas.”

  “Remember you said that. Remember the date. December twentieth.”

  We stepped out the elevator and pushed our way through a crowd of shoppers in the small lobby. It was windy and cold on the street and we were a block or two away from the main branch of the library. Research first, I decided. Lunch after that.

  I knew where the City Directories were. Thirteen or fourteen years ago: that was the last time Rosemary had heard from Buddy James. I started with the 1961 book. I found the listing.

  “Wallace, A. (Emily P.) commod, broker. 211 Meadow Way Drive.”

  I showed the listing to Hump. I took the 1962 and he took the 1963. Wallace James was in both. The same with 1964 and 1965; 1966 and 1967, still there.

  We didn’t find him in 1968. I went through 1975 before I gave it up.

  That was it. Somewhere between 1967 and 1968 Buddy James had left town. And he hadn’t returned.

  We split on the corner of Forsyth, outside the library. Hump headed up Forsyth toward Fairlie. Emile’s French Restaurant was on Fairlie. I walked down Peachtree the block or so to Davison’s Department Store.

  It was crowded. The main floor is devoted to women’s stuff, perfume and make-up and bags. Other things like that. I wandered about in the shopping hysteria for ten minutes or so. The new five hundred in my pocket and I thought I might buy the first of the five or six presents I’d get for Marcy.

  It didn’t happen that way. All around me people were trying to get waited on. Every time I stopped to look at some perfume or a leather handbag, two or three clerks would rush to me and offer to help me. The third time this happened, I realized that they’d tabbed me as a possible shoplifter.

  That bothered me. I left Davison’s and joined Hump at Emile’s. He was on his second drink and holding a table for us. I ordered a cognac to shake the cold wind and looked at the menu.

  “Buy anything?”

  “It was all I could do to get out of there without being arrested.”

  “It’s that season,” Hump said.

  “Saw two blacks in an argument with a salesgirl. One of the blacks had a fancy silk scarf wrapped around his neck. He was telling the girl all he was doing was taking the scarf back to the men’s section so that he could see himself in the big mirror.”

  “And the other one saying that that was right, man?”

  I nodded.

  We both ordered the lemon sole.

  Meadow Way Drive was one of those little streets that run off Twenty-sixth and Peachtree Road. Back there, off the main way, it is a mixture of small, exclusive apartment houses and homes that look like they might run in the high money. Lawns seem to take up most of the plot, the houses built almost against the back property line.

  I parked in front of 211 and turned to Hump. He was staring past me at the house. It was brick, that English-manor style. The front yard wasn’t exactly a lawn. It was a patch of ivy that ran from the sidewalk to the front steps. The way I felt about ivy it could have been kudzu for all I cared.

  “I’ll wait out here,” Hump said.

  “Some reason?”

  “Lots of snakes in ivy,” he said.

  I knew that wasn’t true. He’d had his look at the neighborhood and decided it was too all white. What one mayor had called “the city too busy to hate” still had some time on its hands in certain sections of town. If Hump knocked on the door in this part of town, he’d better be carrying a clipboard and saying he wanted to read the gas meter.

  “Whatever.” I walked up the stone path to the porch. I fumbled about, looking for a doorbell. Finally I decided the brass door knocker wasn’t just ornamental. I gave it a bang or two and stepped back. The door opened a couple of minutes later. A dumpy little black woman peered out at me. She wasn’t wearing a maid’s uniform, but there was an apron tied around her waist and she was wearing a hair net. Passing her, blowing on the warm air that rushed out to the cold, there was the smell of turnips or some other kind of greens.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’d like to see the lady of the house.” I reached into my coat pocket and brought out one of my new business cards. It was the same old scam. The card represented me as an agent for Nationwide Insurance. It was the new batch of cards. I’d used my last of the old ones back in the fall. This time I’d spent more cash and had raised black letters added. It was supposed to be twice as impressive.

  “She won’t want to buy any,” the black lady said.

  “I’m not selling insurance,” I said. “I’m trying to trace someone who owned this home some years back. A Mister Wallace James.”

  “What is it, Netta?”

  The black lady said, “Excuse me,” and closed the door on me. I waited. It was a shaded porch and the temperature seemed about ten degrees lower than it had been out on the walk. I turned and looked the length of the street. A frail old man was walking two poodles near the junction of Twenty-sixth. The poodles were trying to decide if it was too cold for their outdoor business or not.

  The door opened wider this time. “Miz Butler’ll see you for a minute.”

  I followed the black lady through a dark hallway and into a large living room. The smell of cooking was stronger now. Off to the left of the living room, I could see the dining room. There was one place set and lunch was just over. I decided that I’d interrupted Netta when she’d been clearing the table.

  A thin lady in her seventies sat in a straight-backed chair near the living room fireplace. A gas log burned on high. It wasn’t needed. The thermostat must have been sitting on eighty degrees.

  Her skin was pale, like new parchment. Her hair, that bluish tint, was loose and girlish. When I was a few feet away from her, she lifted my business card and strained to read it. “Please have a chair, Mr. Hardman.”

  I unbuttoned my topcoat but didn’t take it off. I sat in the chair she’d indicated with a nod of her head. I saw that, though she might be in her seventies, it hadn’t crooked her back yet. She sat very straight, in the proper posture, her small feet together, her knees touching.

  “Netta said you weren’t selling insurance.”

  “Not this time,” I said, “but I could send someone over next week if you’re interested in coverage.”

  “I believe my affairs are in order,” she said. Behind that tone there was a hint of lawyers and banks and trusts.

  “I’ll make this as brief as I can,” I said. “A Mrs. Ethel Turner, a widow with no dependents and no close family there, died recently in Durham, North Carolina. She has a brother but they have not been in touch with each other for a number of years. I think there must have been some kind of family dispute.”

  “That is sad, Mr. Hardman.”

  “Sometimes this is a sad business,” I said, matching her tone. “A bit over a year ago, Mrs. Turner had second thoughts about her brother. That came about with the death of her husband. The local office contacted her and she was informed that she had no living beneficia
ry. Her decision was that her brother was to be that beneficiary. I suppose she intended to reconcile herself with her brother. Of course, she was ill during this time and she didn’t realize she would pass away so soon. People never do.” It was all I could do not to smile. I knew I sounded like someone out of a Jane Austen novel. “People always believe they have more time left than they do.”

  Her smile was sly, earthy. “Are you certain you’re not selling insurance today?”

  “Boy Scout honor,” I said. “Our problem is that the last address, the one she gave on the form 2323, the change of beneficiary, had her brother living here.” I waved a hand at her living room.

  “I don’t know if I can help you. My late husband bought this home in 1967. I don’t even think I met the former owner …”

  “Mr. Wallace James,” I said.

  “… except that one time at the closing.”

  “There might be some way to trace him through the sale,” I said. “Did your husband pay cash for the home?”

  “I believe we assumed the mortgage. And, of course, when my husband passed away, the remainder of the mortgage was paid off by the insurance.”

  “Do you remember the mortgage company?”

  “It was Green Brothers,” she said. “It is one of the largest in the city.”

  I nodded and stood up. I was sweating from the heat in the room. It was time to get out where I could take a deep breath without steaming my lungs. “I appreciate you seeing me, Mrs. Butler.”

  “Was it a very large amount?” she asked, about the time I reached the hallway arch.

  “The insurance policy? It was twenty-five thousand.”

  “That won’t go far in these times,” she said.

  “Every bit helps,” I said.

  The black lady, Netta, sprinted from the dining room and reached the front door ahead of me. She was opening the door when I heard Mrs. Butler call me. “Mr. Hardman?”

  I returned to the living room doorway. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “After the closing I remember my husband saying that … what was his name?”

  “Mr. James.”

  “That Mr. James planned to move to the country and take up some kind of farming. I remember because my husband said that if Mr. James couldn’t get ahead in the city, he certainly wouldn’t in the country.”