Atlanta Deathwatch

by Ralph Dennis

  “I was in the area when I heard about your call,” Art said.

  I poured us each a good shot of J&B and gave him a brief account of the trip to Millhouse. “There’s some connection between this Eddie Spence and the Campbell girl. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there.”

  “He might be able to tell us something,” Art said. He got out his notebook and went into the bedroom, where my phone was. I heard him talking to somebody named Frank for a few minutes, and then he came back. “Frank Ransome,” he explained. “Those local policemen jump a bit faster for the G.B.I. than they do for us.” He looked at his empty glass. “After the Millhouse police talk to the parents, he’ll call me back here”

  I put a few ice cubes in his glass and brought the bottle into the living room. “How’s the murder business?”

  “Funny you should ask.” He gave me a tight look. “The call just came in that a couple looking for necking space found the body of a naked black male, no identification, head popped open like a watermelon.”

  “Nobody I know,” I said. “Where’d they find him?”

  “In the woods over near that new Executive Suite apartment complex.” He sipped the scotch. “We’re checking his prints now.”

  “Atlanta’s unsolved murder for the day,” I said.

  “That’s likely.”

  Forty minutes later, the man from the G.B.I. called back. I followed Art into the bedroom and watched over his shoulder as he wrote down Clearview Hotel, off Houston. I left him talking to Ransome and got my topcoat from the closet, careful so that he didn’t see the weight of the gun, and put it on.

  Out in the driveway, Art stopped beside the door of his unmarked car. “You planning on coming along?”

  “If it’s all right. I’m queer for cop work.”

  He nodded, and I went around the car and got into the passenger seat. “The Millhouse police called from the Spence house. Ransome told them to stay there until we call back. That’s so they can’t try to warn Eddie Spence . . . if they haven’t already.” That was aimed at me for the phone call I’d made in Millhouse.

  “He might be armed,” I said, remembering what the kid, Benny, had said about Eddie Spence shooting at somebody at a drive-in.

  Art called in and asked that a patrol car meet us at the Clearview.

  The entrance to the Clearview Hotel is just a narrow doorway leading into a stairwell. There’s an old neon sign over the doorway, but it’s broken and doesn’t light up. I’d been in the place once before, a couple of years earlier, when I’d been looking for a wino who’d cut up another one over a pint of muscatel. It was a rat’s nest for the one- or two-day trade, the drifters.

  Before we went up, Art sent the two uniformed cops from the patrol car around the block, to cover the rear exit and the fire escape. He gave them a couple of minutes by his watch to get into position, and then we went up the stairs. The night clerk, a fat, oily man in a dirty blue sport shirt, stood up when he heard us crossing the lobby. He pushed a registration card and a ballpoint pen at us. From the nasty smile, I guessed that he thought we were a couple of queers looking for a door we could lock. Art flipped open his wallet and showed his I.D. The clerk took his time reading it.

  “Eddie Spence,” Art said.

  “Spence.” The clerk reached under the counter and brought up his metal box of file cards. He slowly worked his way back to the “S” divider. When he found the right card he kept a finger in the space and lifted out the card. He held it out to Art.

  “312,” Art said. “Is he in?”

  The clerk turned and looked at the pegboard where the keys were hanging. “He’s here. His key’s not here.”

  I leaned past Art. “He have any calls tonight?”

  “Not tonight,” the clerk said.

  Art looked at the battered switchboard behind the desk. “No call now either,” he said.

  The clerk nodded.

  “Does the room face the street or the back?”

  “The street.”

  Art and I started up the stairs at a run. When we reached the landing and saw the “3” on the door, Art unbuttoned his topcoat and suit jacket. Just at that moment, we heard a door slam in the distance. We hit the hall at a run, going in the direction of the slamming sound. I hesitated at the open doorway about halfway down the hall on the left, just long enough to see the “312” painted there and to be sure that the room was empty. Then I sprinted after Art. I reached the fire-escape door just a step behind him. As Art’s hands touched the push bar, we heard the shots. The shots were very close together, but it sounded like three or four.

  The light was out at the top of the fire escape. We had to go down a step at a time, a lot slower than we wanted to. When we reached the dark alleyway, we could hear footsteps running toward us but nothing running away from us. A few feet from the bottom of the fire escape, we found the dark shape slumped and tilted against the wall. The running steps toward us slowed and faltered as a flashlight swept across us and then down at the shape at our feet. It was one of the uniformed policeman. Art squatted beside him in the wavering light. Past Art’s shoulder, I could see that the cop had been hit in the neck and the chest. His gun was still in his holster.

  Art straightened up. “He’s dead.” He pounded the butt of his pistol against the brick wall, and a thin powder of brick dust showered down upon the dead man. We left the dead cop with his buddy, and went down the alley to the street. We circled the block, looking, but we didn’t know what Spence looked like. We had to give it up. Art placed a call from his car and we went back down the alley.

  It was cold in the dark there. The wind swirled around in its tight confinement. The cop we’d left there was still on guard over his buddy, but he’d turned off his flashlight, as if he’d seen more than he wanted to. I offered him a cigarette and, in the windy flare of my lighter, I saw that he was still in shock.

  I patted him on the shoulder, and Art and I went up the fire escape to room 312, to see what the junk in the room could tell us about Eddie Spence.

  Art went to the window first. There was an ashtray on the ledge and the single chair was nearby. I moved around Art and looked down into the street. I could see Art’s unmarked car and the patrol car. Eddie Spence had been at the window. He’d seen us, and that was how he’d gotten the jump on us.

  Leaving the window, Art pulled an open suitcase from under the bed. He poked around in it with his pen, not because he was afraid of disturbing anything important, but because it seemed to contain mainly dirty underwear. I left him at that and went into the bathroom. There was nothing in there except for shaving gear and a damp towel.

  Behind me, Art said, “Look at this, Jim.”

  I returned from the bathroom and did a knee bend beside him. He’d worked the dirty clothes around until he’d uncovered a framed photo. It was a shot of a young boy and girl standing in front of a swimming pool. The girl was in a brief two-piece suit. The boy was wearing a cut-off pair of jeans. He had a crew cut and the heavily-muscled torso of an athlete. I leaned closer and looked at the girl. She’d been three or four years younger then, but it looked like Emily Campbell, the girl I’d seen twice, once in the dorm parking lot and again in the Dew Drop In Cafe.

  “I think it’s Emily Campbell,” I said.

  “And I’d give odds the boy is Eddie Spence.”

  “No bet,” I said.

  When the rest of the police crew showed up, Art and I went back down to the lobby. The clerk was upset, and he was more cooperative now. From the back of the card, he gave us the information that Eddie Spence had checked into the hotel on the 11th, the day after I’d tailed Emily Campbell and two days before she was murdered.

  That, and the death of the young cop downstairs, made him dog meat as far as Art was concerned.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The background bits and pieces came in on Eddie Spence all through the morning hours. Art didn’t leave his office while the manhunt got mounted, and he was still there when I dropped
by at nine a.m. after a few hours sleep. He was red-eyed, and cigarettes had soured his tongue, and he walked like he had a hundred-pound pack on his back. I brought him a pint of coffee and he looked at it like he might throw up. But for all that, he’d pieced together a pretty good background on Eddie Spence. I sat down across from him, lit my first cigarette of the day, and listened to it.

  Up until a year ago, the Spences had lived in Mason, Georgia, the small farming town where Arch Campbell and his family were the rich and powerful planters and landowners. Eddie Spence and Emily Campbell were in the same class in high school, and they’d gone together until late in the first semester of their senior year, when Arch Campbell had somehow contrived to put pressure on the Spence family. That pressure had probably been economic, and the end result had been the breakup of the romance between Emily and Eddie. Eddie Spence was an all-state halfback with scholarship offers from the big schools up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and he’d been leaning toward Dooley and Georgia until the breakup. Not long after that he’d disappeared from Mason, and the next time his family heard from him he was in boot camp in San Diego. From San Diego, after boot camp, he came East again, to aviation electrician school at Jacksonville. At the end of the twenty weeks, he ranked high enough in his class to be allowed to pick the billet he wanted, a VU squadron based at the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville. His work with the squadron had been excellent, and he’d been in no trouble until the spring before, when he’d gone AWOL. A routine check of liberty cards and leave papers in the Jacksonville bus station had sent him back to the base for a Captain’s Mast and a sentence of restriction to base and extra duty. As soon as he was free to leave the base, on his first liberty, he took off again. This time he reached Atlanta, and was there for a whole day before he was caught.

  “That must have been the day he called Emily at her dorm and her roommate took the call,” I said.

  “We don’t know whether he saw her that time or not.”

  I said I was fairly certain that he hadn’t.

  This time when Eddie was returned to Jacksonville there’d been a court-martial, and he’d been given an undesirable discharge. He joined his family at Mason and told them a story about receiving a medical discharge because of an old football injury. Not long after that, the Spence family moved from Mason to Millhouse. Eddie had taken night courses to finish high school and had worked as a mechanic at one of the body shops in town but, according to his family, he kept talking about moving to Atlanta and went there several times to look for a job. Then, two days before the death of Emily Campbell, he’d packed a suitcase and moved to Atlanta. He checked into the Clearview Hotel and paid a week in advance. In his five days in the hotel, the clerks said, he’d seldom gone out. Just for breakfast, lunch and supper.

  “I doubt that,” Art said. “You keep the key, go out the back way, and the clerks would swear you were still in.”

  The night clerk remembered that Eddie Spence had gone out for supper the night the girl had been murdered and had been back by seven. He hadn’t gone out again that night.

  “But he admits he didn’t see Eddie again that night,” Art said. “All he knows is that Spence didn’t pass through the lobby again that night.”

  “Hard to prove,” I said.

  Art shook his head. That meant, I thought, that he wasn’t sure that Eddie would ever get to trial. The slip between the cup and the lip was to be a cop bullet or two. I’d seen it happen once that way. The pimp who’d shot old Johnny Freeman, one of the department favorites, had been standing with his hands coming up empty when Ben Evert shot him twice. Then Ben had jammed a “clean” gun in the waistband of the pimp’s trousers, and that was that. Shot while resisting arrest.

  “We’re looking at him for a couple of other jobs, too,” Art said.

  That was the police mind at work. Eddie Spence had a gun and he’d used it, and that meant he was a “possible” for every crime committed in the area since he’d moved to town. There was a cabbie murder-robbery in Sandy Springs, the shooting of a service station attendant in Northeast Atlanta, and the holdup of a fried chicken hut out on Ponce De Leon. It would clean up a lot of paperwork if he measured up for one or all of those. The only crime that they didn’t have him tabbed as a “possible” for was the murder of “that spade” who’d been found out near the new housing development. That was Ferd, and there just wasn’t any way I could let Art know there was a chance that Eddie Spence might really have had a hand in that one.

  I was getting ready to leave, when a man from the photo lab brought in a stack of prints and put them on Art’s desk. They were dupes they’d made from a recent photo of Eddie Spence that the Millhouse Police had found somewhere. I pocketed twenty or so. I got as far as the door before Art stopped me.

  “You keep acting like you’re a private investigator without being one, and you’re going to get into trouble.”

  I gave him my best go-to-hell grin. “Nothing in the law that says I can’t ask a few questions, or a do a favor or two for a friend.”

  “On that fire escape last night, I thought I saw you carrying a shooter.”

  “Made out of soap,” I said, “just like the one that John D. used in his jailbreak.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Art said.

  “Sorry. I showered with it and it all went down the drain, but I’ll carve you another one.”

  “Just don’t let me find you with a gun,” Art said.

  “You won’t find me.”

  Once I was out on the street, I found a pay phone and called the number The Man had given me.

  The Man looked up from the photo of Eddie Spence. “So this is the one?”

  I said it seemed that way at the moment. “He and Emily had a thing back in high school. Maybe he never gave up on it and didn’t like it when she did.”

  “And Ferd?”

  I shook my head. “That’s the hard one, unless he’d been watching Emily and saw Ferd with her.”

  “It’s possible,” The Man said. “He picked her up a few times for me . . . not out at Tech, but from some places around town.”

  “That might be it. He’s from redneck country. Maybe he thought Ferd was a boyfriend.”

  “That would take some imagination.”

  “He might just have one.” I got up from the sofa and crossed in front of the guard with the pump gun. His eyes were closed, but his finger was curled around the outside of the trigger guard. “But he’s got trouble. He killed a cop, and the holes are going to close up. If he had any sense, he’d get the hell out of town and head for the boondocks. The only thing is that he might be too crazy-mad to do that.”

  The Man lit one of his special-blend cigarettes. I watched the hand with the lighter, and there wasn’t a tremor.

  “If he’s still in town,” I went on, “then he’s got a reason to be here.”

  “What reason?”

  “If he knows about you, then you’re probably his reason.”

  “You’re saying I’m the target?”

  “Or I am.”

  “Why you?” The Man asked.

  “If he’s watching this place, he’s seen me coming and going. And last night, at the hotel, he got away because he was watching the street. I think he knows what I look like, and he might want some of my hide for bringing the trouble down on him.”

  “You can move in with me, Hardman.” There was a wry curl to his lip.

  “I’ve still got some moving around to do.” I got out a scrap of paper and wrote down Hump’s phone number and his address. “You can reach me here.”

  He raised his eyebrows in a question.

  “Hump Evans’ place.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Pass the photos around. Anybody sees him, calls you.”

  “If anybody sees him,” The Man said, “he’s blood meat.”

  “No. You call me, and I’ll get a few carloads of cops with riot guns, and we’ll get him.”

  “I want him dead.”
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  I let that hang in the air for a moment or two. “The cops just might want him dead, too.”

  He understood that.

  “He’s got a shooter, and he’s good with it. You try to take him by yourself, and it’s going to be a bloody mess. You’ll lose a couple of people, and the cops’ll end up there anyway.”

  “They call me, and I call you.”

  “Right.”

  He nodded. “Done.”

  “I miss all the fun.” Hump was padding around the kitchen in his big, wide bare feet. He was frying up half a dozen eggs and half a pound of bacon. That was his breakfast. I’d already eaten.

  I opened the paper bag and got out a couple of changes of underwear and socks and three new shirts. I’d picked them up downtown at Davidson’s. “You might not miss the next fun. Your uncle has come to visit for a few days.”

  “Why has my uncle come to visit?”

  “He’s too scared shitless to go home,” I said.

  “And you think this Eddie might come visiting, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Watch my eggs.”

  Hump went into the bedroom and I could hear him rooting around in some junk, probably in the closet. I scooped the eggs onto a plate and put them on the table. Hump came out of the bedroom a few seconds later with an ornately-worked double-barreled shotgun. He’d broken it open and was thumbing shells into it.

  “Had a Day for me the year after I got hurt. Hump Evans Day. Got given some silly things, but the silliest was this Austrian hunting gun. Liked to laughed my ass off when they gave it to me.” The shotgun loaded and closed, he leaned it against the living room wall, behind the easy chair. “Be my guest, if you happen to get to it before me.”

  He sat down at the table across from me and began eating. Between mouthfuls, he said, “Never fired it but once . . . went out in the wood one morning . . . gave a tree both barrels from about ten feet . . . damned near blew that tree down . . . damned near tore my shoulder off.”