Hump's First Case

by Ralph Dennis

  Oh, shit. I kept running. Ahead of me, the tall man swerved and sprinted into the street, heading for the other side. Behind me, the cop yelled, “Stop or I’ll fire.”

  I couldn’t stop. My head was telling me to but my legs kept moving. The man in front of me was running smoothly, almost gliding. As he ran the leather hat flopped in his left hand. He reached the other sidewalk and his right hand was digging at his waistband. His hand came out holding iron. Something short-barreled.

  The fat cop was chasing me. Heavy feet pounding right behind me. I ran into the street. He was close. I shouted over my shoulder. “Him … him … he’s one of them.”

  “One of who?” His face was chalk-white. He looked about a breath away from a heart attack.

  “Them.”

  He was close enough to swing the butt of the riot gun at me. I dodged away from it.

  “Stop that, goddammit.”

  I looked for the tall man. He was standing at the base of a driveway. He brought the gun up, aiming. A battered white van was parked next to the other curb. I put my hands over my head and made a dive for it as cover. I heard the skin tearing from my elbows and knees. I skidded until I was against the rear left tire. The fat cop finally understood. He saw the gun and made his dive. He landed half on me and half on the riot gun.

  The tall boy fired. The round broke the rear window of the van. I gave the fat cop a shove and pushed him off me.

  More running and shouting. Art, Ellison and the young cop were running toward us. I had my look past the tire and saw that the driveway was empty. I stood and looked at the fat cop. He was holding his ribs, pain on his face. I leaned over him and picked up the riot gun.

  I was winded. The four of us reached the base of the drive at the same time. Ellison waved an arm at the young cop. “Take the cruiser. Cover the back side of this street.”

  The young cop sprinted away. He passed the fat cop who was leaning against the van, holding on to a luggage rack on top. He shouted something at the young cop. The cop ignored him and sprinted past.

  Ellison looked at the riot gun. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Your man dropped it.”

  He jerked it out of my hands.

  “There’s a round in the chamber.”

  Art gestured up the drive. “He the other one?”

  “White afro,” I said.

  A distance apart, they moved up the driveway abreast. I tagged behind. At the head of it, blocking the way, was an old wooden garage with high double doors. To the right there was a backyard and a low fence. Beyond that there was another yard and the back of a house that fronted one street over. To the left, bordering the drive, was a high brick wall that closed off the yard to the next-door house. The wall was about seven feet high.

  The wall was on Ellison’s side. He placed the riot gun on the top of the wall and pulled himself up to peer over it. Art swung to the right and checked the yard. He went as far as the low fence before he turned and came back.

  I watched them. I moved up the middle of the drive until I was a couple of feet from the garage front. Both doors were pulled in tight. I stopped and looked down. In front of the right hand door there was a fanlike scrape in the patch of ice. I backed away.

  Art backed his way to the drive. I met him and put a finger to my mouth. I pointed to the scrape in the ice. He edged toward it, squatted and backed away.

  Ellison lowered himself from the wall. “Nothing over there.”

  Art pointed at the garage.

  “Put a round in there,” I said.

  “Who the hell do you think you’re …?”

  “Do it,” Art said.

  “It’s on your head.” Ellison put the riot gun to his shoulder. I could see from the angle that he was aiming high. When the round hit the doors it blew off the top right corner of the left door.

  “Throw the iron out.” I’d waited until I could hear again before I yelled. I wanted to be certain he’d hear me.

  “Do it,” Art said. “You’re boxed.”

  “Another round,” I said. “This time knee-high.”

  “Wait.” The boy’s voice sounded muffled.

  The right door moved outward. The ice patch squeaked. A few seconds later he tossed out the gun. It skidded down the slope of the drive and stopped at my feet.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The apartment was on the second floor of the three-story building. Three was a narrow dark hallway with an exit at the rear. Number seven was near the exit, at the back of the floor. The two windows looked out on to the driveway and into the shuttered windows of the house next door. As soon as I had my look out the windows, I left Art and Ellison questioning the kid and walked down the hall to the exit. There was a straight-down flight of wooden stairs that led to the backyard. Against the back wall of the building, numbers painted on the top covers, were the green garbage carts. The cart for number seven was missing.

  I could smell the apartment even before I entered it. The smell of cooking grease, dirty socks and sweat and a couple of other bad odors that I couldn’t separate from the mixture.

  It was essentially one big room. An unmade queen-sized bed was placed to the right, the length of it against the wall. Beyond the bed there was a door that led into a bathroom. Straight ahead, through a narrow doorway, there was a closet of a kitchen and dining room.

  Hands cuffed behind him, the kid sat on the edge of the bed. He still had the leather hat on. He’d been wearing it when he came out of the garage across the street. Art was next to the window, warming his hands on the old steam radiator. Ellison stood in front of the boy, wide-legged and menacing.

  “… fat man places you at the 7–11 on the seventeenth. That’s murder one whether you pulled the trigger or not.”

  “What fat man?”

  Art rubbed his hands together and shook his head at me. That meant, stay out of it.

  Ellison ignored me. “You going to take the whole rap yourself, Brian?”

  That was his name. Brian Case. We’d gotten it from the driver’s license in his wallet. He’d turned eighteen back in the summer. Just past being a juvenile. Old enough to burn if they still burned people.

  Brian looked past Ellison. He was either bored or disinterested.

  I settled my rump on the radiator. “He’s a tough one,” I said. “Or a smart one.”

  Ellison spun on me. I had the edge on him. I’d already started. It would take the sting out of it if we argued among ourselves. I went on with it. “He knows there’s no capital punishment anymore. Even if the slug matches the one that killed the woman clerk, all he’ll do is time.” I turned to Art. “How much?”

  “Fifteen years before he see his first parole board.”

  “That’s not bad. If he makes it past the board his first time, he won’t even be forty by the time he’s on the street again.”

  “He’s smart all right,” Art said.

  “Of course, by then, the hard-asses in there’ll have him wearing lipstick and eye shadow and perfume.”

  “Perfume’s hard to get in there,” Art said. “Some of the chicks have to make do with vanilla extract.”

  “Not Brian here. He’ll have friends outside. They’ll ship him Max Factor sets on Christmas and his birthday.”

  “Good to have friends you can depend on,” Ellison said. He’d joined in, I thought, because he saw that we were getting to the boy. Most men had their own special nightmares. The one that many of the straight ones have about prison is homosexual rape. That aspect hadn’t been a part of the prison atmosphere we got from the Cagney or the Bogart films. Lately the papers and the television reports were full of it.

  “Those friends?” I shook my head.

  “Bob Buchner and Billie Joe? You think they wouldn’t take care of a friend?” Ellison stared down at Brian. “That’s right. We know their names.”

  “I never heard of either of them,” the boy said.

  I pushed away from the radiator before I got burn stripes. There was a close
t to the left of the bed. I opened the door and found a pull cord for the light. There wasn’t much inside. Some shirts, a couple of sweaters, an old leather flight jacket with the leather peeling away. Some jeans. I pushed those aside and found a blue granny dress in a flower print. “All three of you live here together?”

  “Share the same bed?” Art asked.

  “That must be fun and games.” Ellison leaned past the boy and had a look at the dress.

  “I don’t live here,” Brian said.

  “When’s garbage pickup over here?”

  Ellison stared at me like he thought I’d gone crazy.

  “Tomorrow morning,” the boy said.

  I heard a scratching under the bed. An orange tabby with one cropped ear strolled from under the bed. It looked at us and didn’t seem to be bothered at all. It stretched and yawned.

  That was one of the smells I hadn’t been able to isolate from the others. I closed the closet and went into the kitchen. There was a plastic dishpan on the kitchen floor with kitty litter in it that needed changing. Near it was a dish of dry food and a water saucer. Another saucer held the remainder of a freshly opened can of cat food.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Brian’s doing his friendly. He’s feeding the cat for Bob and Billie Joe.” While I stood in the kitchen door, the tabby brushed against my leg and swaggered to the dry food. The crunch-crunch started. “Let me make another guess. Bob and Billie Joe went out of town and didn’t ask Brian along. Every day he comes over here and feeds the cat. And today he put out the garbage cart because he won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon and the trucks will have gone by then.” That also explained something that I hadn’t understood. How the boy could have known that we were coming after him. He couldn’t have seen us from the window. It was, instead, a matter of bad timing. He’d fed the cat and was on his way out when he saw me and the fat cop in front.

  “Fuck you, fat man,” the boy said.

  “See? He can talk.”

  “Robbers take vacations just like everybody else,” Art said. “Especially at Christmas.”

  Ellison gave the apartment a last long look. “We done here?”

  Art said he was.

  Art switched off the lights. Ellison closed the door and checked to see that it locked. Brian wagged his head toward the door. “What about Charlie?”

  “Charlie’s the cat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll send somebody over to feed him.” Ellison took Brian by the elbow and turned him toward the stairs. “He won’t be lonely.”

  The wagon was on the way. Ellison stopped Brian on the front stairs and seated him on the bottom step. The boy tilted his head back. The brim of the leather hat flopped over his eyes.

  “I want to call my lawyer.”

  “You got a lawyer?” Ellison unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit, rolled it up and popped it into his mouth.

  “I know the name of one.”

  “You make your call from the station,” Ellison said.

  Art and I walked a few paces away from the steps. Art was relaxed now and pleasant enough. It was a good collar. The first of three wanted for murder and Lord knows how many robberies. Not that the collar would do Art much good. There were too many years of not playing politics right. He’d broken a few balls here and there and I thought he was probably red-lined, about as far as he could go. But there wasn’t a better cop on the force and even the people he gave the red-ass knew it.

  “How many browns did I pick up?”

  “I haven’t done a count yet, Jim.”

  “You think Ellison will thank me before he leaves?”

  “You trying to hustle a bet with me?”

  At the steps, Ellison tapped the boy on the shoulder. “Don’t move. You run and I’ll put a hole in you that you couldn’t plug with a roll of paper towels.”

  “I ain’t going anywhere.”

  Ellison walked over to us and turned, his eyes on the boy. “I guess we can assume that this was a positive ID, Hardman.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “That clown of yours almost put a hole in me.”

  “A mistake,” Ellison said.

  “That’s easy enough for you to say. It wasn’t your hide he was aiming at.”

  “What’s that got to do with whether you’ll do a positive ID on the boy?”

  “Not much,” I said. “But I’ve got to consider my reputation.”

  “What reputation?”

  “That’s it. The one I’ve got with you people. The one that people buy and sell my ass for small change.”

  “It’s that one you earned yourself,” he said.

  “In that case, since that’s supposed to be true, maybe I ought to wait and talk to the kid’s lawyer. Maybe I can sell him my memory.”

  “Goddammit, you two.” It was about as loud as I’ve ever heard Art shout. “You two shut up.”

  “The hell I will.” I got out a smoke, but my hand was shaking so much with the anger that I knew I’d never get it lit. I broke the cigarette shoving it back in the pack. “I pointed this one for you. And I ran him down while you two were upstairs checking the sheets for sperm tracks. And I almost got shot in the butt by one of Atlanta’s fat finest while doing it. All that, I think, makes me a pretty damned good bird dog.”

  “What is it you want, Jim?”

  The paddy wagon was a block away, heading in from Ponce de Leon.

  “I want what every good bird dog gets. A pat on the head.”

  “Oh, hell.” Art leaned toward me and tapped me on the top of my head with an open palm. It was as much a slap as a pat.

  I looked at Ellison. He’d almost swallowed his stick of gum. “Is that all you want, Hardman? I thought it was something important.”

  Eyeball to eyeball with him. “It is.”

  “All right.” It was given grudgingly. “Good work, Mr. Hardman. And thanks a lot.”

  I grinned at both of them. “You just made my day. I’m so happy I might pee on myself.”

  Art dropped me at my place. He had little to say during the drive. He parked on the street and waited until I was halfway out of the car before he threw his head back and laughed. It was a real belly laugh; something had been bottled and shook, waiting for the cap to come off.

  “Jim,” he sputtered at me, “that was the most outrageous shit I’ve ever seen.”

  “What?” I gave him my bland face.

  “The shit you pulled on Ellison.”

  “Just on Ellison?” I laughed with him. “Wasn’t it fun, though?”

  I limped into the house. Now that I’d cooled I could feel the scratches and scrapes. It was hell to get old and still find yourself playing cowboys and Indians.

  Hump was in the kitchen. I asked him to bring me a beer. I undressed down to my underwear and took the beer when he came to the doorway. I sat on the bed and inspected my knees. One looked bad enough so that it would probably scab up. Both elbows were missing skin.

  The elbows caught Hump’s attention. “I wasn’t sure you still had it, old man.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Like this girl said to me once, a gentleman rests on his elbows.”

  “Huh?”

  “Balling.”

  “Oh.” I got up and limped toward the bathroom. “This wasn’t any rest. I was ass saving.” I washed my knees and elbows with soap and water and took the bottle of iodine from the medicine cabinet. When I returned to the bedroom, I had red elbows and knees.

  “All that interest in how your night went almost made me forget.”

  “What?”

  “That lawyer, Fred Thompson, called. He said he was ready to talk to you. I told him to drop by.” He glanced at his watch. “He said he’d come by at one. Twenty minutes from now.”

  “I’m not sure we need to see him. We might have gone past that.”

  I dressed. By the time we’d moved to the kitchen and I’d made myself a cheese
sandwich, I’d told him about the morning.

  “Rosemary will want to know about this.”

  “You call her,” I said.

  “Some problem?”

  “Might be. My guess is, when Bob Buchner and Billie Joe come back from their vacation, they’re going to find that house staked out. Guns enough there to start a banana war or two. That girl don’t play it right, she might get her butt blown away.”

  “Now that I understand, boss man, you make the call.”

  “Flip you for it.”

  The phone rang in the bedroom. Hump said, “I don’t hear any phone.”

  I had to take the call. It was a woman but it wasn’t Rosemary. “This is Mr. Thompson’s secretary.”

  “Jim Hardman,” I said.

  “Mr. Thompson asked me to tell you that he has been called out of the office on business. He will call you later and reschedule your appointment with him.”

  A hunch, a lowdown, far-out hunch. “Maybe I could reach him at the police station.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say …” She broke off, paused and tried again. “I don’t know where you can reach him, Mr. Hardman.”

  Good try but no cigar, lady. “Thanks, anyway.”

  I hung up and went back into the kitchen. Hell, I told myself, there’s nothing to hang that on. No peg, no nail. With the crime rate what it is, maybe twenty people might have been arrested in the last few hours. And there must be others in there who hadn’t made bail over the weekend and were just finding themselves a lawyer.

  It nagged at me. Still, it was too stupid to mention to Hump. I walked around it, circling it like a tired fighter, and then I went back to the phone and called Ellison.

  Ellison said, yes, the kid had called his lawyer. No, he hadn’t listened to the call and he didn’t know which lawyer the kid had contacted.

  I said, “How about trusting me for a minute and finding out what lawyer shows up to see Brian.”

  He said he would.

  He called back in fifteen minutes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Fred Thompson’s law office was in a low glass-fronted building that had been a florist shop a few years back. I think I remember having stopped there once to buy yellow roses for Marcy. Now they’d put up some kind of metallic brown drapes and installed an ornate heavy wooden door. It was located on West Peachtree between Twelfth and Thirteenth.