Atlanta Deathwatch

by Ralph Dennis

  Mr. Spence got up from his rocker, and habit almost got the better of him. For a moment I thought he was going to offer us his hand. Instead, catching himself, he rubbed the palm against his thigh, as if trying to scrape something from it, something sticky that didn’t want to be rubbed away.

  I opened my topcoat to the oil heater and warmed myself. Art did his questioning. No, they hadn’t heard from Eddie since Chief Brunson came by on Wednesday night. The last time they’d heard from him was the day after he moved to Atlanta. He’d called that afternoon and talked to her, and had given her the name of the hotel and the phone number there. He said he was all right, and he had some leads on jobs. No, they’d never been to Atlanta in their whole lives, and they certainly hadn’t met any friends he might have there. Yes, Eddie had talked about having one friend there, but he didn’t say his name, and he didn’t say what the friend did for a living.

  Then, with obvious pain at saying something they knew would hurt Eddie: Yes, he did have a pistol, one he brought back from his time in the service. He said the Navy let him keep it. She had seen it in his dresser drawer and had asked him about it. It was kind of square-looking and blocky.

  Art got out his pad and drew a quick sketch of a .45. He showed the sketch to Mrs. Spence and then to her husband. Yes, that was what it looked like. It certainly did. Yes, he’d fired it a few times. He said it was just for target practice, anyway. One time, Eddie and some of his friends had chipped in and bought a box of bullets, and they’d done some target shooting out behind the pool hall. Eddie said he won ten dollars at it from that Sharp boy, the one whose daddy ran the pool hall. Well, he had been in trouble once for firing the gun at the drive-in movie, but the other man had started it by talking smart to Eddie and to the girl he was with. Chief Brunson had asked Eddie about the gun, but Eddie had lied and said he threw the gun in the lake after he left the drive-in.

  I could see that Art had just about finished his questioning. I backed away from the oil heater and went over to stand beside Art. It was my turn. Yes, Eddie had gone with Emily Campbell all through high school, up to his senior year. That was back in Mason, before Eddie went into the service and they had moved to Millhouse. They had stopped going together because her father, Mr. Arch Campbell, didn’t like it one bit.

  Eyes curving their signal past me when I asked what Arch Campbell had done to break up Eddie and Emily. Came to them out on the piece of land he owned that they were working on shares for him, and he said that if Eddie didn’t stop seeing his daughter right away, he was going to put his lawyer to work to break the lease. He could get a court order so they’d have to stop working the land until the judge made his decision, and if the crop rotted in the ground it didn’t matter to him. It didn’t matter to him how much it cost him in crop loss, or lawyers’ fees, or court costs, he’d do it.

  The poor man’s sense of pride and outrage spitting out. So they talked to Eddie the first chance they got, and he would have stopped seeing that Campbell girl, but she kept after him, wouldn’t obey her father and wouldn’t let him obey his mother and father. Eddie was seeing her in secret until Mr. Arch Campbell found out about it and did his next dirty trick. He waited his time and had Eddie arrested for drunk and disorderly, when Eddie never in his life had as much as one beer. And they said he resisted arrest, and they beat him on the chest and stomach until he was more blue than he was white. It wasn’t long after that when Eddie dropped out of school and went into the service, all the way out in California. If he ever saw that girl again, then he was the Lord’s biggest fool.

  I nodded at Art that I was through. Art thanked the Spences for their time, and we started for the door. Even as I went with him, I knew that it wasn’t going to be that easy. It wasn’t. Mrs. Spence scurried around us and blocked the doorway.

  “What are you going to do with Eddie?”

  Behind us, Mr. Spence was trying to shush her.

  “No, I want to know. I’m his mother, and I’ve got a right to know, if anybody has.”

  “It’s up to him,” Art said. His face was flushed, and he was having trouble getting the words out. “If he’ll give himself up, he’ll get a fair trial.”

  “And if he won’t?”

  Art shook his head. There wasn’t any way he could tell her, but she already knew. It was there in her face for us to see, in the same way that she could read our faces and know. She stepped out of the doorway a lot slower than she moved there, and Art and I and the Millhouse cop walked out of the dry heat into the cold wind. Behind us, after the door closed, we could hear her voice rising, rising, and his low, muffled voice, and it wasn’t until we crossed the road and reached the Millhouse patrol car that we had it blotted out, and I could take a deep breath again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chief Branson, fat and grotesque, wheezing like he was seconds away from a heart attack, met us at Sharp’s pool hall with the sheriff and one of his deputies. We’d had the stakeout cop call him from the patrol car, and the chief had said it would take him the better part of an hour to work it out with the sheriff, but he’d meet us there. Art and I took that hour to have supper in one of the greasy spoons downtown. Even taking our time, we got there a few minutes before the chief’s car led the sheriff’s into the parking lot. Sheriff Dawson wore a pearl-handled pistol on his right side, butt forward. He got out of his car and swaggered over to us like he could outdraw the whole lot of us.

  Art introduced himself and showed his I.D. He told the sheriff what he wanted, and the sheriff went inside the pool hall and came out a minute later with Marshall Sharp, the pimply kid that Hump and I had talked with two nights before. The kid remembered me but didn’t speak. The deputy came over carrying a Coleman lamp and a couple of flashlights. Then the sheriff. Art and the deputy followed the kid around the building and into the woods beyond.

  Chief Brunson and I had decided not to go. The chief said all this area was out of his jurisdiction, and I said it looked a little warmer inside the pool hall. We nodded at each other and went inside.

  The same bartender was there. He’d been working over things to say to me, but when he saw I was with the chief, all he said, in a friendly voice, was, “Didn’t bring any niggers with you tonight?”

  In an equally friendly voice, I said that all the black players from the Falcons, the Hawks, the Braves and the Chiefs would be dropping by in the next fifteen minutes or so. Hump’d told them all how nice and friendly the pool hall was. “I hope you’ve got enough cold beer for about a hundred mean and thirsty black men.”

  “We got other things for ’em, too,” the bartender said, moving away to leave Chief Brunson and me to drink our beers.

  “The Spence boy’s got himself in a lot of trouble, huh?” the chief asked.

  “As bad as there is.”

  “You can’t tell about these kids, nowadays,” the chief said, mock-sadly. “I knew he was a mite wild, but I thought I’d straightened him out.”

  I asked him how well he knew Eddie.

  “Well enough to let him work on my car. He had the makings of a damned good mechanic.”

  When we finished the first beer, the chief nodded at the bartender and he brought two more. He pushed my hand away from my wallet and said. “It’s on my tab.” I let it go, seeing that it was part of his small-town graft.

  “Eddie have many friends here in Millhouse?”

  “Not many. He didn’t grow up around here, you know. There was just Marshall Sharp and two others that he ran around with most of the time.”

  “The other two still in town?” I asked.

  “Come to think of it, they aren’t,” the chief said. “The Eaton boy, he got drafted back in October. Last heard from, he was out in Oklahoma. The other boy, named Clinton Stubbs, he just drifted off a month or two ago, and I never heard where he went.”

  I got out my pad and wrote down Clinton Stubbs. “What’d he do for a living?”

  “He was a mechanic, just like Eddie Spence. Worked at the same shop here
in town, Allgood’s.”

  I added that to my pad. Mechanic.

  We were on our fifth beer when Marshall Sharp came in looking chilled and put out. The chief and I gulped down what was left in our glasses and went outside. The sheriff and his deputy were backing out of the lot when we reached Art. Art thanked Chief Brunson and said he’d buy him a drink when he came to Atlanta. I waved at the chief and belched politely, and Art and I got into his cruiser and headed back to Atlanta.

  “We got four pretty good slugs out of a tree,” Art said. “We’ll see if they match up with the ones we took out of the patrolman in the alley behind the hotel.”

  That made sense. That was in case Eddie got rid of the gun.

  I wrote down Clinton Stubbs—Mechanic on another sheet of paper and passed it to Art. “This is one of Eddie’s two friends. He left town about a month or so before Eddie did.”

  “From the chief?”

  I said yes.

  “Shit, we asked him and he didn’t know anything.”

  “You weren’t drinking with the rank old bastard,” I said.

  “Thank god.”

  While I dialed Information, Hump brought me a beer from the refrigerator. After a few seconds of searching, the operator said there wasn’t a number listed for a Clinton Stubbs. I marked that off. One down.

  Hump slouched in front of the TV. “You look on the rag.”

  “I am, and it’s hard flow.” I sat next to Hump and watched part of a war movie while I gave Art time to drive to his office at the department. I was jumpy and pissed off, and I’d been thinking about Marcy all evening, ever since Art had tossed her back at me. It hadn’t been easy, but I thought I’d weeded her out for good.

  Art answered on the second ring. “Jim, I thought I got rid of you for the night.”

  “Nothing on Clinton Stubbs at Information,” I said.

  “I didn’t think it would be that easy.”

  “Gas, water and electricity . . . that might be the way,” I said. “You can do without a phone, but not lights, heat or water.”

  “I’ll check it first thing in the morning, when the offices open.”

  “I could do that myself, if I wanted to wait that long.” I let that hang a moment. “Look, twelve hours might be the difference between catching Eddie and letting him slip away.”

  “If he’s in town in the first place,” Art said. “If Clinton Stubbs is even in town. If Eddie’s staying with Clinton Stubbs.”

  “He’s got to be staying somewhere. You got a better guess?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “There must be somebody at the emergency numbers. Use your cop clout.”

  I heard him suck in a deep breath. “All right. You going to be at Hump’s?”

  I turned to Hump. “We going to be here?”

  Hump made the cupped hand motion for a drink.

  “No, we’ll be at the Hut.”

  The Hut is an old warehouse-turned-into-a-bar, out in the direction of Emory University. It was an “in” place for Emory students for a year or so, and when they stayed away in droves at another, new “in” place, the owner decided to angle it toward the pleasures of the middle thirties . . . drinking and chasing. There were usually ten or twelve unescorted women around most nights, office girls looking for love without romance, and the drinks as far as we could tell weren’t watered.

  Now and then, when the pressure gets to me and I’m past feeling like a hawk or a scavenger, I walk off with one of the girls and we grunt and roll around like a ballet for large, awkward fish, and then I put on my pants and go home, weakened and a little bit sad.

  I took a booth away from the front door and out of the occasional blast of outside air. Hump walked to the bar, looked over the rest of the sparse crowd, and came back to the booth. “Nobody here I know.”

  “Or want to know?”

  “There’s one horse over there, a blonde with a winter tan that makes her almost as dark as I am.”

  “Alone?”

  A waitress brought over our drinks, double scotches.

  “Some college-looking kid with her,” Hump said.

  “Too bad.” I gulped at my drink and looked up, and saw Hump staring at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re drinking it like it was poisoned.”

  I thought about it a second and nodded. “That might be. Eddie Spence’s mother and father got to me. Good people who worked themselves humpbacked making a living. Now it turns out they’ve got a son who thought he was going to be Cinderella-boy. Going to marry the rich boss’s daughter. Going to live in a big house, and screw and eat ice cream all day.”

  “Then something’s missing in that boy,” Hump said.

  “Huh?”

  “ . . . if he killed that girl?”

  “Don’t people kill people they love?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a feeling you’re not talking about that Spence boy at all.”

  “You know too much.” I tried the drink again, tasting it this time. He did know too much. He’d been around when the Marcy King thing broke open. I’d been in pretty bad shape, and it was about that time that I started to think of Hump as a friend. He always seemed to be around when I was about to get my ass whipped by four rednecks, or about to do my drunken pratfall in front of a car.

  “Enough,” Hump said, “I know enough.”

  “Marcy call you lately?”

  “Who? Me?”

  “You,” I said.

  “Just to ask how you were. How your soul was.”

  “What’d you say about my soul?”

  “Dark. Dark and full of ashes.”

  While I was worrying that around in my mind, the waitress came over and said I had a call at the bar phone.

  “Right the first time,” Art said. “Everybody needs electricity.” He gave me an address on Monroe Drive. They were putting together a raiding party, and I was invited if I got there in time.

  Hump drove. He knew ways through the town that I didn’t. With some of the dark streets looking alike, I was lost until we reached Virginia-Highland. We followed Virginia until it ran into Monroe Drive. There, where Virginia petered out, we faced Grady High School. Hump took a left and headed in the direction of Ponce De Leon.

  “There.”

  He took a sharp right onto Eighth, and pulled up behind a patrol car and two unmarked cars. As I got out of the car I could look past a tear in the canvas cover on the fence and see one end-zone on Grady field. A nervous-looking uniformed cop with a riot gun met us on the sidewalk. “You want something?

  Art detached himself from a small group and came over to us. He waved the cop away. The cop moved out of hearing. “You’re not carrying anything, are you? Either of you?”

  Hump and I lied and said we weren’t.

  “Stay out of it then.” He gave me the layout. Clinton Stubbs had a small apartment just a few doors down from Eighth and Monroe. It was the gray frame house with green trim and the APARTMENT FOR RENT sign out on the lawn. The whole block was sealed off. One car was back on Charles Allen Drive, the street one block over and parallel to Monroe. Another car was stationed on the Circle on the block side facing Ponce De Leon. Two cops would stay with the cars on Eighth and close off that side. That left only the Monroe Drive side, and we would be going in from that direction.

  “The problem is,” Art said, “that we don’t have any real worthwhile description of Stubbs.” He’d called Chief Brunson, and the one he gave would fit half the guys in the raiding party.

  “So you’ve got to catch him in the apartment, or run the chance of missing him.”

  “That’s it,” he said.

  Counting Hump and me, there were eight in the party. No matter how quiet we tried to be as we walked down Monroe, it sounded like a company of soldiers breaking step on a wooden bridge.

  At the house the party broke up into their assigned positions, one uniformed cop covering the back and one on each side. The nervous young cop who’d met Hump and me earlier was
out on the sidewalk facing the front of the house, a riot gun at the ready. Hump and I stood with him and watched as Art and another plainclothes detective worked their way up the front steps to the porch. They crossed the porch and went through a screen door, then another door, and then probably into a hallway. There would be steps there that led up to the second floor and the Stubbs’ apartment, which was on the front right-hand corner of the building. The windows were dark there, and I hoped that everyone in there had had a few drinks and was deep under. As soon as they’d gone past the screen door, I started counting. When I’d reached three minutes and thirty-four seconds, it went bad. The lights went on in the Stubbs apartment. At that, the cop next to me clicked off the safety on his riot gun.

  “Steady,” I said to him, “I’ll tell you when.”

  “Look, mister . . . ” The anger was there, but so was about a hundred-pound lump of fear.

  “When I say so,” I said, as firm as I could be under the circumstances.

  The window toward us rasped open, and the shape of a man blotted out the lighted square for just a moment. And then he was gone, and the light was whole again. The man, whoever he was, was coming down the corner drain pipe. About halfway down, the pipe pulled away from the house, bending with a rusty creak, and the man fell into the yard. He landed on his side, and then he was up and running toward us.

  “Stop and put up your hands!” I shouted at him. For a split second he did exactly that, just long enough for me to see that he wasn’t armed. Then he changed his mind and angled away. Beside me, the riot gun was moving down from its skyward position. “Don’t shoot! He’s not armed!” But the riot gun was still moving down, and I gave Hump a shove toward the fleeing man. “Get him.” Then I turned on the young cop and caught the barrel of the riot gun and pushed it upward. At the same time I moved close to him and gave him a hip check that shook him and the gun apart. When I looked back around, Hump was bearing down on the man. He hit the man about neck high, and they bounced once on the dirt and rolled over, and Hump was on top, sitting on him and holding his head down into the dirt.