Atlanta Deathwatch

by Ralph Dennis

  I got the coffee pot and filled our cups. “How was last night?”

  “That Campbell girl had good taste in grass.”

  “And the girl?” I asked.

  “She’s my friend forever.”

  “Is that why they call you Hump?”

  He grinned. “That came later. My first year in the pros, we had this defensive end coach. When we’d do wind sprints, he’d yell, ‘Hump it! Hump it!’ and one day I got so wore down, I said I just couldn’t hump anymore.”

  “And the name stuck?”

  “Like the fat girl you always get introduced to at a party.”

  I spent the afternoon on the sofa snoozing, while Hump watched the soap operas. I got up around five and showered. I put in a call to Art’s home number but his wife, Edna, said he was still asleep after the double shift. I gave her Hump’s number, and she said she’d have him call when he got up.

  Art didn’t call until around seven. “You got anything, Jim?”

  “I ran out of miracles.”

  “You change your phone number?”

  “I’m at Hump’s, in hiding.”

  A pause. “From what?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe some crazy with a gun.”

  “With the whole force after him, he hasn’t got time to worry about you,” Art said.

  “Wish I could believe that.”

  “If he’s in Atlanta, he’s dug himself a deep hole.”

  “He might be in Millhouse,” I said.

  “Not as far as we can tell. We’ve got the Spence house staked out, and we’re watching the pool hall, too.”

  “Bet the redneck pool sharks like that.”

  “They don’t know about it,” Art said. “G.B.I. put a couple of working-stiff types in there, drinking beer and shooting eight-ball.” He paused. “Before I forget about it, it seems there’s some hard feeling about a white man who brought a spade in there last night.”

  “Just my bit for civil rights,” I said.

  “That’s the way they see it, too.”

  “Tough titty.”

  Art laughed and hung up.

  Around ten, while we were watching the Bulls gut the Hawks on the tube, Art called back. “Just got word from a patrol car. They think they saw Spence, or somebody damned near like him. They lost him on Trinity Avenue. We’re flooding the area.”

  When Art hung up, I dialed The Man’s number. Trinity Avenue was only a few blocks from his place. It could mean that Eddie was headed in his direction. On the third ring, The Man answered. He heard me out and thanked me.

  “If this shit doesn’t ease off,” he said, “I’m thinking about a long trip to Europe.”

  “Raise my pay and I’ll go with you.”

  He laughed and the line went dead.

  A bit after midnight Art called and said they’d given up the search around Trinity Avenue. If the man seen there had really been Eddie Spence, then he’d dropped out of sight again.

  Around one, we gave up on the Randolph Scott movie and called it a night. I slept on the sofa, with the Police Positive on the floor nearby in reaching distance. During the night I dreamed, and the odd part is that I remembered the dream afterwards. Usually I don’t. I guess it was a deal I made with myself years ago, that I wouldn’t remember the dreams. And now, some twenty years later, I’d forgotten why I’d ever decided to block the memory of the dreams. I guess it’s just habit now.

  It was too real, that dream. It was about betrayal, and it was a long time before I understood why. It was about a young boy and a young girl, and the final day of a summer, when the love went sour. I was that young boy, and the girl was Maryann, and it was late August of the year we graduated from high school. A summer spent at the lake or the tennis court. And the last day. The week before she was to leave for Agnes Scott. For me, there wasn’t anything ahead. A job, or maybe the service. No money for college. That day: seated on a bench in the fenced-in tennis court at the city park. Waiting. Cool shadows pacing across the court, so that it would soon be completely in shadows. Clocks and the shadow-time telling me that she was late. Then, when I’d just about given up on her, the little brother riding his bike down the dirt path around the court toward me. Note in hand. Not liking me and glad that he could deliver the note. A note from Maryann’s mother that said Maryann had left a week early so that she could visit an aunt in Little Rock. Regrets for not having reached me earlier. The dream ending with the little brother riding his bike away, like the final crane shot in some goddamn movie.

  And waking on Hump’s sofa, I wondered how dreams used to be before we had movies to structure our dreams out of single shots, and out of camera movement.

  And before I went to sleep again, I asked myself why I’d had that particular dream, and what the hell it meant, anyway.

  And then I knew. There was Eddie Spence and Emily Campbell, and maybe what had happened to them some two or three years ago. Maybe that triggered the dream. The betrayal that’s behind a lot of dreams.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1951. Maryann and that young love gone to Little Rock, and on to Agnes Scott. Me with a house painter for a father, and she with all the money. It wasn’t really big money, just big in that little town. And all the sick pretensions that went with it. That summer, I sat in her house one night while she got ready for Agnes Scott. A sewing kit on her knees, she was changing the labels in the clothing she was taking with her. Labels from her mother’s dresses and coats, sewn in so that when she got to college, they’d be seen and appreciated.

  Maryann off to Little Rock and Agnes Scott, while I caught the bus to Fort Jackson. Drafted. Maybe we reached our destinations about the same time. Tea parties or the rifle range. Dorm life or hand-to-hand combat. And then, when basic training was over, I was off to Japan to a Military Police company.

  And a couple of months later, I killed my first man.

  It was an early morning raid on a bar owned by three master-sergeants. The word was that the bar was dealing in the black market and paying for the goods in American Military currency. It was the dealing in the currency that bothered the Army. It was against regulations to take the military currency off the base. You were paid in it and you could use it on the base, but you were supposed to convert it to yen for use off base. From the rumors of the amounts being paid out, it sounded like they had quite a stockpile, and the Army wanted to know where it came from.

  My post was at the rear of the bar, in the shadow of a nearby building. It was a snow moon that night, with almost no light down on the street. On the dot by my watch, I heard the splintering of the front door and the shouting in Japanese and American voices. I was relaxed where I was, except for the cold, knowing it was over, when a window about fifty yards from me, at the rear of the bar, slid open. A dark shape hurdled out and landed facing me. I got the service .45 out of my holster.

  “Halt!” The man turned and started to run. I charged the pistol and shouted, “Halt or I’ll fire!”

  The man only sprinted harder. I got the .45 in line and aimed for the legs. Just before I fired the man bent forward, as if trying to make a smaller target. I shouted “Halt!” again and squeezed off a round. I didn’t see him bend, and the .45 slug raked his back and blew off the back of his head. At least, that’s the way we figured it out later.

  It was the only shot fired on the raid. The man I killed was a forty-year-old Japanese bartender who lived in a room in back of the bar. It came out later that he had nothing to do with the black market dealings or the use of the military currency.

  I was restricted to post for a week while there was an investigation. At the end of that time I was called into Major Bartlet’s office. The meeting was brief. “Your record’s been good. I don’t believe that punishment’s called for in the incident at the Half Moon Bar. Not your fault, really, but I think it’s time for your rotation to other duties.”

  The next morning, I was on a plane to Seoul.

  I was doing gate-guard duty at Fort McPherson when my di
scharge date came up. In my time there, I’d come to know and like Atlanta. So I took my discharge there and moved into Atlanta, to see how long my savings and my mustering-out pay would last. In a couple of months, I started looking around for something to do. There was college and the G.I. bill, but I wasn’t sure I could stand the poverty on $110 a month. In the bars around town and the guys I met there, I could see there were chances in the rackets. I was leaning that way, and I could see the offers shaping up. At the last minute I changed my mind and went as far as I could in the other direction. I joined the Atlanta Police Department. For the first few years promotion was slow, and I helped it along by taking night courses at several of the colleges around town.

  Art Maloney and I started at the same time, and we moved along at the same rate, taking some of the same night classes and being promoted on the same lists. We were friends, too, pretty close friends. But when the mess came and the reform blow hit the town, I got sucked into the middle of it and he didn’t.

  It was a woman, of course. It had to be.

  Her name was Marcy King, and she said she was an executive secretary at a big company, Marsh and Wheeler. All I knew was that it was an investment company, and that was all I wanted to know. It didn’t seem to matter at the time. I didn’t think Marcy would be working there much longer, anyway. I was in love, and I couldn’t see myself with a working wife. That was when I found that run-down house and put myself in hock to the mortgage company. I didn’t tell Marcy about the house. It was to be a surprise. Art was helping me with some repairs and general do-it-yourself, and I thought I’d just about put away enough money for a professional inside and outside paint job.

  And then the shit and piss hit the fan. The reform wind was blowing, and it blew the door off Marsh and Wheeler. It wasn’t just an investment company. It was a washing machine for racket money. It went into Marsh and Wheeler dirty, and it came out clean, with a profit. And, as a sideline, it functioned as a payoff center for all the guys on the take.

  The heads rolled up and down Peachtree Street. And mine was one. Not that they could prove I’d taken any money. They couldn’t. And nobody at the hearings said I’d given them protection. But my name dropped in, a time or two. Like television advertising, a lot more implied than stated outright. Yes, James Hardman was going with one of our secretaries, a Miss King. As far as I know, there was no payoff to Hardman, but then I didn’t handle all the payoffs. And just when I seemed to have weathered the blow, I got called into the Division Chief’s office and shown a copy of the statement Marcy had given the Grand Jury investigator. Most of it was about the operation of Marsh and Wheeler. Only one small section concerned me.

  QUESTION: Do you know a James Hardman of theAtlanta Police Department?

  ANSWER: Yes.

  QUESTION: Under what circumstances did you knowJames Hardman?

  ANSWER: I was told by Mr. Avery Marsh that I was to cultivate Mr. Hardman.

  I stopped reading there. In fifteen minutes they had my resignation, and in fifteen minutes more I’d cleaned out my desk and walked out the front door.

  To spend the time after that doing anything that wasn’t too much work, and paid fifty dollars or more a day. In time, Raymond Hutto came along with his propositions, and his dope flights from New York. The first time out I almost got hijacked, and after that I’d worked Hump in as a back-up man. But bringing dope back from New York wasn’t a regular job. It got risky if you made too many trips. The stain from a couple of years before marked me as a natural, and I knew the narco squad knew me. It was just a matter of time before I got outguessed.

  Marcy King was back in town. I’d heard it here and there. From Art and Edna, from Hump. I don’t know where she’d been, only that she hadn’t done time. Sometimes, late at night, I wanted to see her, and sometimes I wanted to kick out four or five of her teeth. But in the daylight, I knew I didn’t want to do either of those things. All that was past, and just shadow-fighting.

  Around six I got up and made a pot of coffee. I got the Constitution from out in the hall and read it from cover to cover, while I drank coffee and listened to Hump snoring away in the bedroom, with the snorting and wheezing of a man who’s had his nose broken a time or two.

  He woke up while I was under the shower. I came back through the bedroom and found his bed empty. He was in the kitchen, drinking milk straight from the half-gallon carton,

  “You got anything planned for today?” he asked.

  “I thought I’d stay alive.”

  He grinned at me and started breakfast.

  Late in the afternoon, Art called and said that he was going down to Millhouse to talk to Eddie Spence’s mother and father. I said I’d be happy and proud to go along.

  Art didn’t say much at first. The Friday afternoon traffic was thick and reckless, and he seemed preoccupied with the driving, keeping the unmarked cruiser’s fenders undented. Then, when the commuter traffic slackened and dropped away and the road was straight and level, he had time for me.

  “Who’s your client?”

  “I’m not a P.I. I don’t have a client.”

  “If you were a P.I.,. I could make you tell me,” Art said.

  “That’s a good reason not to be one.”

  That burned him some, and I could see the flush on his face that meant he was holding his Irish down. “All right, just between us, not for the record, who’re you working for?”

  “That’s almost as nice as saying please.” I kept him waiting while I looked out at the wintering trees and the frosted stubble of the farmland. “How does Hugh Muffin sound to you?”

  “Like a lot of clout. Why’d he pick you?”

  “I’ve done him a friendly favor or two in the past,” I said.

  “No,” Art said. “What’s his put in on the Campbell case?”

  “He’s tight friends with the Campbell girl’s father.”

  “Can I check this with him?” Art asked.

  “Only if you tell I said you could ask. Otherwise, he might deny it.”

  “To me,” Art said, “that sounds phony.”

  “Protects himself and me.”

  “It’s got a stink to it.”

  I lit a smoke and offered him one. “That’s the way I make my living now. In a couple of years I’ve gotten so that I don’t even notice any more.”

  “Marcy’s in town.”

  I didn’t say anything. Art had told me before, a time or two, and each time like it was news. Maybe he kept forgetting, but I doubted it. Art and his wife, Edna, had been out with Marcy and me a few times. They’d liked her, and they’d been as surprised as I was when it came out that the rackets had put her on to me.

  I put the hard in my voice. “See much of her down at the booking desk? She tricking for a living now?”

  “She’s four-oh clean.”

  “That’s great, and so am I.”

  “Edna’s seen her a few times and she really likes her, and you know how Edna believes in sin.”

  “She also believes in repentance,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I did, and maybe that was one of my faults, one of the cracks in my dry clay.

  “Edna went shopping with her last Saturday. Almost ruined me at Rich’s and Davidson’s.” He stopped and waited, letting it hang there so that I could ask questions if I wanted to. I wasn’t about to. I’d be damned if I was going to. “Rehabilitation got her started in social work. She spent almost a year in a short course up in North Carolina. Now she’s working with the state.”

  “Why in Atlanta? It looks like she’d have gone somewhere where she wasn’t known.”

  “Exactly,” Art said, and turned and looked at me.

  So Art had outplayed me after all, and the circle was closed, and for all my hard shell, I got the blow solid in the guts. I leaned back and closed my eyes against the slanting glare of the winter sun. I had nothing more to say until we reached Millhouse.

  The stakeout was still in place down the street from the wooden frame house where the Spenc
es lived. Two bored small-town cops, almost asleep in their patrol car. It was a hundred yards down the street, pointed toward the Spence house. When Art saw the marked car with the red light on top he began to steam. “That’s like announcing it in the papers.”

  We parked nose to nose with the Millhouse Police car and Art walked over and showed his I.D.

  “Chief Brunson said you were coming,” the cop in the driver’s seat said. “You can go on up.”

  Art kept his temper. “Maybe one of you ought to come along with me. I don’t have any jurisdiction here in Millhouse.”

  “Oh, sure.” The one in the driver’s seat got out quickly, and we crossed the street and angled toward the Spence house. The house needed paint, but it looked like it got the kind of care that costs only sweat and effort. There were flower boxes on the porch railings, neat and waiting for the spring. A porch swing creaked in the December wind. Two porch rockers were covered with sheets of plastic taped in place. From the height of the porch, I could look in all directions and see that the Spence lawn was raked clean of leaves, while the lawns in all directions looked yellow-brown with leaf clutter.

  The Millhouse cop reached past me and knocked on the door.

  Mrs. Spence was probably in her late forties, but she looked ten years older. She stood in the open doorway and wiped her hands on a damp apron. Her hands were big-boned and so red that I might have marked it down to the dishwater, if her face hadn’t had that same kind of weathered and mistreated look.

  When the Millhouse cop told her who we were, she hesitated just a moment before she asked us in. As she turned away, I saw that her hair was pulled back into a skin-tight bun, like the kind my grandmother used to wear. And then, as we went inside, I saw her husband seated in a rocker beside an old oil heater. Even seated, he looked tall and knob-boned, like all the spare flesh had been sliced off him.

  I thought I knew both well, even before they said their first words. They were farm people, out of place in town. They probably didn’t have a single friend on the street, or in the whole town. But stop by her door and she’d ask you in with warmth, and if you hadn’t eaten she’d feed you the best she had in her kitchen. Perhaps even better than she ate herself. But with Art and me it was different. We were hunting her son, and that put a cold wind in the house. We were going to get the country politeness that she gave people she didn’t like or approve of.