Atlanta Deathwatch

by Ralph Dennis

  Arch Campbell put the phone down and turned back to me. “Ask for Mrs. Peterson. She’s expecting you.”

  Now my question. “Do you know anybody named Eddie who might have been a friend of Emily’s?”

  “I don’t think so.” He spread his hands helplessly. “I didn’t know any of her Atlanta friends.”

  On the way out, I passed the waiter bringing in a tray of coffee.

  “Man on the hall!” Mrs. Peterson’s shout was followed by a few giggles and squeals. Her already sour mouth turned down more at the corners. Down the hall, a few heads popped out of doorways, looked at us, and then darted out of sight. I guess I wasn’t the man they were looking for.

  Mrs. Peterson unlocked the door with her master key and let me in. “The police have already been here.”

  “I’m not the police,” I said. “Just a friend of the family.”

  That didn’t completely satisfy her. While she searched for another approach, she opened the drapes and let in the pale December light.

  It was like a hundred thousand other college rooms. The standard impersonality softened somewhat by prints and posters and the drapes that mother had had especially made for it. There were two single beds, two desks with small bookcases above, and two straight-backed chairs. One bed was still covered with a bright red bedspread. The other bed had been stripped and the mattress folded.

  “Did Emily have the room to herself?”

  “Why, no.” The thin lashes blinked at me. “Marcia, her roommate, after we heard the news, moved in with another girl down the hall. She couldn’t bear to be alone in the room . . . after what happened.”

  “Is Marcia here now?”

  “She’s still in class.”

  “I’d like to talk to her.”

  She started for the door. “I’ll leave a note in her mailbox. They all check their mail this time of day.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Peterson.”

  As soon as she cleared the doorway I closed the door after her.

  I worked the closet first. It was just a habit of mine. One day, on a suicide investigation with Art Maloney, kidding, I’d said that you could tell a lot about a person from the trash and odds and ends that collect in his clothing. So far I hadn’t proven it, but I kept trying. This time wasn’t very different. I went through every piece of clothing in the closet and every pocket. When I was done, I had a half pack of stale Winstons, a stub to a Falcon game and a Hawk game, some graying wads of unused and slightly used Kleenex, seven jagged halves of movie tickets, a paper clip, a felt-tipped pen with a chewed cap and a note, probably passed in class, that asked Emily if she wanted to have lunch after class. The note was signed with a big M.

  From the closet I went to the dresser. The top drawer held stockings and socks. That stopped me, and I went back to the closet and opened the door again. There, hanging on the inside of the door, was one of those shoe bag affairs with about ten pairs of shoes in the pockets. I took out each shoe, felt inside it, and then felt down in the pocket. On the second row, four pockets over, I felt a lump and worked it out. It was a wad of tinfoil. When I unfolded the tinfoil I found about a quarter-ounce of grass and a lump of hash. I put that in my coat pocket and hoped I didn’t get arrested for a traffic violation on the way home. The other shoes and pockets added nothing else to my collection.

  When the dresser blanked me, too, I moved on to the bookcase. I took out each book and shook it over the desk. I found a lot of place markers and notes, but nothing else. I was picking through the single desk drawer when the door opened behind me.

  A dark-haired young girl stood in the doorway. She was around five-feet-two, and a bit on the chubby side. But the breasts must have been real, from the way she carried them—as if they were her best feature, with all the built-in arrows pointing their way. She held a piece of paper in one hand. She looked at it, and then at me.

  “You’re Mr. Hardman?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Marcia Trusdall.”

  I motioned to a chair on the bare side of the room. She sat down carefully and made a big gesture of making sure that her short skirt didn’t show me much. “I really don’t have much time.”

  “It won’t take long.” I offered her a cigarette, but she preferred her own, a menthol brand, and I played the gentleman and lit it for her. “How long have you known Emily?”

  “Since September, a year ago. We roomed together all last year and this year, until now.”

  “You get along pretty well?”

  “She was my best friend, but . . . ” She checked herself and looked at me, to see if I was going to help her through it. When I didn’t, she said, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this about her.”

  “Anything you say stops here.”

  “Well, the last few months, since we started this year, she hasn’t been the same.”

  “How?”

  “We didn’t spend any time together. She was like . . . well, always charging out at all hours, without telling me where she was going. The times I’ve had to lie for her, saying she was at the library when I didn’t know where she was!”

  “It sounds like a man, to me,” I said.

  “I thought so, too.” She’d tired of the cigarette. She stubbed it out in the ashtray on the bare desk behind her. “But it wasn’t a college boy.” That gave her an idea and she looked at me closely, but I could see I didn’t measure up very well. “I think it was an older man.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Maybe even a married man.”

  I gave her my best disbelieving stare. “No?”

  “It would have to be, to explain all that happened this year. We were such good friends, and then, for no reason at all, we were walking around each other, like we were just strangers.” She sighed. “To tell the truth, I was looking for a neat way of moving out on her. It was getting on my nerves.”

  I said I could certainly understand how she felt. That reassured her, and she smiled and arranged her skirt once more. “Did she ever talk to you about somebody named Eddie?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She hesitated. “Unless it was . . . ”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, a year ago, we were joking around one night, and we were talking about the first boy we’d been in love with. I’d told her about mine, a basketball player three years ahead of me in high school. Emily started to tell me about hers, a boy named Eddie she’d been in love with when she was sixteen, and then Cynthia, from down the hall, came in to borrow my typewriter, and I never heard the rest of it.”

  “It’s odd that you remember the name at all.”

  “I wouldn’t, not really, except for the fact that she got a phone call one night. That was last spring, and I was here alone. The man said he was just passing through town, and didn’t have a phone number to leave for her to return the call. I think he would have hung up, but I asked him what his name was.” She gave me a smile that seemed to apologize for being young. “You see, it’s almost a written law that, when somebody calls up, you just have to get his name. No matter what you have to do.” She laughed. “You wouldn’t believe how shy some of these boys are! They finally work up nerve enough to call you, and if you’re not there, they might not call back.”

  I said it wasn’t so different with older people.

  “He didn’t give me a last name. He said just to tell her Eddie, and that she’d know who he was, that he was an old, old friend.”

  “How did Emily act when you told her about the call?”

  “She didn’t say anything. She said, ‘Oh?’ and went off to take a shower.”

  “And that was while you were still talking to each other?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I thanked her, and walked to the door with her, and let her out. She went off to lunch, and I went back to my search. It didn’t take much longer. I was still drawing blanks. I spent a few minutes putting the mess back the way I’d found it. Done, enough, and almost nothing to show for it. The sky outside was getting
darker and darker. I knew I’d have to leave soon if I wanted to reach my car before the downpour came.

  There was a phone on the corner of Emily’s desk. I pulled it toward me and began dialing Hump’s number. About halfway through, I stopped and hung up. I wrote down the number from the dial and, just to be sure, I flipped through the Metropolitan Atlanta phone book. In the Campbell listings I found an “E. Campbell” with the dorm address and the correct phone number.

  One last look around the room, and I fixed the lock and went out into the hall. I pulled the door closed and it held. On the way down the hall, I startled a thin blonde girl in a slip and shower shoes. She didn’t scream, but she did the next best thing. She took a flying leap through the nearest open door.

  I guess I’d forgotten to yell there was a man on the hall.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hump was in the kitchen when I got to his apartment. He was having a lunch of Kentucky Fried Chicken and beer. I got a beer and sat down across from him. I snaked a leg from the bucket and chewed on it while I told him I’d spent my morning. Near the end of the account, I remembered the tinfoil wad and got it out of my coat pocket. I tossed it to him “I couldn’t leave it there for the aunt to find.”

  “Not much here,” Hump said.

  “About a quarter-ounce and a chip of hash.”

  He wiped his hands on a dish towel and stood up. “This chick I know screws like a madwoman with a bit of this in her.” He pulled out a drawer and lifted the plastic silver tray. He dropped the tinfoil wad under the tray and replaced it. “Now you know all my secrets.”

  When he was seated again, I showed him the number I’d copied from the dial in Emily Campbell’s dorm room. He finished off the last of the chicken. “This trim I used to do works at Southern Bell. She’s one of the blacks who sits by the door so you can’t miss her.” He belched and threw the last bone in the bucket. “Our problem is that the calls we’re interested in might not show up yet. I don’t know how the billing system works.”

  I said I was especially interested in any calls she’d made from the dorm room number on the night I’d been tailing her. If there were any long-distance calls, that might tell us where to look. If there weren’t any long-distance calls, we could assume that Eddie is in town. Whoever Eddie is.”

  After Hump left for the scouting trip at Southern Bell, I had a second beer and tried to decide upon the next step. The phone number check might turn out to be a blind end. If it was, I’d have to find another way of finding Eddie. Maybe The Man would know something. The problem was that I didn’t have his phone number. That way my fault. I’d had my ass in the air the whole time at his apartment, and after my to-do with Ferd, I’d stalked out because it made such a good scene.

  No help for it. I drove over to The Man’s place. I parked next to the black Ford that Ferd had been driving the day before. I went around to the back of the building and beat on the door for a couple of minutes before one of the blacks came down and let me in. I was a bit relieved that it wasn’t Ferd. I followed him up the stairs.

  “The Man’s busy. I’m not sure he can see you.”

  “Ask him.”

  I waited out on the landing until he returned a few minutes later and waved me inside. The Man was in the kitchen, closing and locking a small attaché case. He handed it to the black, and the black took it into the bedroom. The Man led me to the bar and I mixed myself a thin drink.

  “Hardman, you amaze me. You got it figured out already?”

  “Not yet. Just some questions.”

  The Man sat on the sofa and crossed his legs, careful of his creases. “Ask away.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Emily?”

  “The day before my boys ran into you.”

  “You didn’t see her that night? Or the next three days?”

  He shook his head. “She gave up on me that night she was at the Dew Drop In Cafe.”

  “You try to reach her?” I asked.

  “I never called her,” he said. “I didn’t want to make trouble for her.”

  I asked how that would make trouble for her.

  His mouth twisted. “Some nigger calls her up at the dorm, and her roommate takes the call. You don’t think that’d make trouble?”

  “You don’t sound . . . ”

  “On the phone I do. So I waited. I thought she’d call me the next day, and she didn’t. I thought she was a little mad with me, so I gave her another day to cool off. No call that day. And on the third day, she got killed.”

  “Did she ever mention somebody named Eddie?”

  “Is he the one who did it?”

  I said I didn’t know. It was just a name that had come up a time or two.

  “She never talked to me about other men,” he said, with hard-lipped pride.

  I decided that was enough for the moment. I asked for and got his phone number.

  “Unlisted,” he said.

  I folded the strip of paper and put it in my wallet. “How’s Ferd?”

  “He’s fine for now, but when you’re not working for me any longer, you’d better watch yourself.”

  “He around now?” It might not work, but a few words might patch things up. It was worth trying.

  “Out on an errand.” The Man said.

  “Walking?”

  “He took the Ford.”

  “The Ford’s in the lot downstairs.”

  “It can’t be.”

  When I insisted that it was, he and I went down the stairs together and around the side of the building. The black Ford was still there. “Now, where the shit . . .?” The Man began.

  He leaned against the window on the passenger side and looked inside. “Oh, God . . . ”

  Because he seemed frozen, stunned against that door, I walked around the car and opened the one on the driver’s side. Then I saw that Ferd was back, all right. He was stuffed down into the floorboards. His head was toward me, and I could see that someone had beaten him on the head and face until the bone was like mush. One look was enough. I slammed the door shut.

  The Man met me as I rounded the rear of the car. “You do this?” He was taking short gulps of air, as if trying to keep the sickness away.

  “No,” I said, “I got over my mad yesterday.”

  “I hope you’re not lying to me, Hardman,” he said.

  I followed him back around the building, and up the stairs to the apartment.

  A few seconds later, the other black man came out of the bedroom with a thick bundle of newspapers under one arm, and went down the stairs three at a time. The Man followed him to the landing and closed the door behind him.

  Remembering it suddenly, I said, “My prints are on the door handle.”

  “The car’s coming back. Ferd isn’t.” He mixed himself a drink and poured a fresh shot in mine. “The car’s in my name.”

  For the next ten minutes, The Man sat on the sofa and made a series of calls from a list he held on his knee. I didn’t learn much about the operation from the few words that got spoken. The Man would ask if Ferd had been by. Then he’d ask if the count was right. Each time, the same two questions. When he finished, he folded the list and put it in his pocket. “It wasn’t robbery—or if it was, they didn’t get anything.”

  “What was Ferd doing?”

  “Dropping off some goods. He made all the stops.”

  “When was his last stop?” I asked.

  “A bit after one.”

  I looked at my watch. It was two-twenty-five.

  Before I could ask the next question, he answered it for me. “After the drops, Ferd would stop off to see a girl or have a bit of lunch. I didn’t expect him back until two-thirty or three o’clock.”

  “You could have your boys ask around, and see if anybody saw Ferd or the car between one and two.”

  “I’ll do that,” The Man said.

  “Especially around this area. Somebody picked him up somewhere else, killed him, and then stuffed him in the car and drove the car right over t
o your parking lot. All in broad daylight. That’s a lot of risk for nothing. If it was for nothing.”

  “You think somebody is trying to tell me something?” The Man asked.

  “That’s one possibility.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe somebody wants your paper route,” I said.

  The Man made a phone call. Ferd’s replacement arrived within a quarter-hour. He was short and as broad as a door. He carried a canvas sheath, the kind that hunting rifles are carried in to protect them from bad weather and dirt. But when he pulled the sheath away, I saw that he’d brought a pump shotgun. He put a chair against the bar, facing the door, and sat down with the pump gun across his knees.

  I mixed another drink and waited. Before I left, I wanted to be certain that Ferd had been moved without a hitch. During that time, I kept trying to find a connection between the murders of Emily Campbell and Ferd. Emily was having an affair with The Man and Ferd worked for him. That was all. But there had to be more. There was some link I could not see, and that meant I wasn’t looking at it from the right angle. Looking at a crime was sometimes like walking around a piece of sculpture at a gallery. From every angle, it was a different piece of sculpture. So it was with a crime. You had to be standing in the right way, with your head in the right place, and then you understood the crime.

  So far, I could look at what we had from two angles. One: the death of Emily and Ferd were part of some war in which The Man and his racket had become involved. Kill his girl and kill his helper. Two: the death of the girl was only connected with The Man at a tangent, but there was enough anger and hatred so that it ran over and touched the Man and through him, Ferd. That is, the death of Emily was the real objective. Ferd was almost like an afterthought.

  Or, just for the hell of it, how was this for number three? There were usually around 260 or 270 violent deaths a year in Atlanta, shootings and knifings. Perhaps the murders of Emily and Ferd weren’t related at all, but just Atlanta keeping the average up for the year.

  The black who’d gone to dispose of Ferd’s body returned a minute or so after four. (I’d heard The Man refer to him as Horace.) He walked into the eye of the pump gun. That surprised him, but he handled it well. He handed The Man a brown paper sack. I followed The Man into the kitchen, and watched as he dumped the contents onto the kitchen table. One object, wrapped in a piece of newspaper, hit the table with a heavy thump. There was also a wallet, a watch, cuff links and some small change. The Man pushed these aside and unwrapped the heavy object. He pushed it toward me, and I could see that it was a slapjack. It looked like my slapjack.