Atlanta Deathwatch

by Ralph Dennis

  “Exactly on time.”

  “But the wrong place,” I said.

  “Let’s ride around while we talk.” He motioned with the .45, and I got in. “I called you from the service station a block away. I trust you about as much as I trust anybody, and that’s not much.”

  “I didn’t call the cops.”

  “We’ll see.” He’d dyed his hair a sort of reddish-brown, and he was trying to grow a mustache. It was just a wispy thing, a few days’ growth so far. He was wearing my blue raincoat and the Harris tweed jacket I liked.

  I backed out and turned. “Any special scenery you want to see?”

  “Just drive.” The gun was resting on his thigh, partly covered by a fold of the raincoat, but it was still pointed at me about stomach high. “I don’t have a lot of time, Hardman.”

  “Talk then.”

  “I didn’t kill Emily.”

  “Who did?” At the fork in the road, I selected the one going away from town.

  “I don’t know yet,” Eddie said, “but she was afraid that somebody was going to.”

  “She tell you who it was?”

  “No, and I asked her several times. But she was scared to death. She said it was because she knew something she wasn’t supposed to.”

  “When was this?”

  “The Friday before she was killed. I said I was coming to Atlanta to see if I could help her, but she said she didn’t want me to.”

  That would be one of the calls from The Dew Drop In. And the “No, Eddie, no” that the stud with the big Afro heard. “And you came to Atlanta the next day?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t see her that weekend. I talked to her a couple of times on the phone, but she wouldn’t see me. I even tried going out to Tech and trying to surprise her. That didn’t work either. So the last time I talked to her I gave her the number at the hotel, and told her to call me if I could help her.”

  “Where were you Monday evening, the night she was killed?”

  “At the hotel,” Eddie said. “You see, if she was really in danger, I wanted to be there to get the call. I got so I didn’t want to stay out any time at all. I kept thinking she’d call and need my help, and I might be out.”

  “If this is true, you ought to turn yourself in.”

  “No. I killed that policeman behind the hotel. I can’t change that.”

  “You kill anybody else?” I asked. “A little black guy named Ferd?”

  “No,” he said. “Who’s he?”

  “Just another killing.”

  “The policeman was more killing than I wanted.”

  We were driving out past all those god-awful apartment complexes with their nine-hole golf courses and man-made lakes. Eddie wasn’t watching the scenery at all. He watched me and the road ahead.

  “Why are you still in town?”

  “I don’t care if I die doing it, but I’m going to kill whoever killed Emily.”

  “We might never find out who did it. You know how many unsolved murders there are every year in Atlanta?”

  “I’ve heard about you, Hardman. You can find out.”

  “I’m not working for you. If I find him, the police get him.”

  “I couldn’t hire you, anyway. I don’t have any money.” He pointed toward a cutoff we were approaching. “Turn around and head back to town.”

  I got into the lane and got turned around. The traffic was light. I guess everybody was at home, enjoying their central heating. It was where I thought I ought to be. The temperature was dropping pretty fast, and it was going to be a bitchy night out when the sun went down.

  “Give it up, Eddie. You don’t have a chance.”

  “No.” His lips were trembling, but the .45 on his thigh was steady. “They’re going to have to kill me. I mean it.”

  Maybe I should have done something tricky and had a try at taking him. Maybe. But I’d seen the holes in the cop behind the hotel, and I didn’t think of myself as suicidal. I drove back to town and we didn’t talk much. When we reached Baker and Peachtree he told me to pull over, and I did. He tucked the .45 into the raincoat pocket but it was still pointed at me.

  “Find him for me, Hardman.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You see, I loved Emily, and I can’t stand to have people thinking I killed her. I wouldn’t have done that . . . not in a thousand years.” He pushed the door open. “Drive straight on. Don’t turn or stop.” He was out of the car in one quick movement and on the curb, watching me. He slammed the door and I drove on. I looked back once and saw him still there, watching me. Then he set out at a fast walk in the opposite direction. I lost sight of him, and I knew it wouldn’t do any good to turn around and circle the block. He’d be gone by then.

  He’d probably pick up a cab at the Regency or one cruising. And, to tell the truth, I had mixed feelings about Eddie. I didn’t like the killing of the cop, but I could understand how he felt about Emily . . . if he was telling the truth. I wanted him caught, but I didn’t want it badly enough to do it myself. On the drive home, I went over what he’d said and how he’d said it, and I started believing him. He’d killed the cop, but he hadn’t killed Emily or Ferd. Now Hump and I could make another list, and it would be a leaner one. And we’d look around in the life of Emily Campbell, to see what she knew that could get her killed.

  It wasn’t until I’d called three French restaurants for reservations and got no answer to my calls that I realized that the good restaurants weren’t open on Sunday. Atlanta’s a blue-law city, and I guess without the wine and the drinks, it’s just not worth the trouble to open the doors. When I called Marcy, she said the French restaurant could wait. She’d fix some kind of supper for me.

  I went over around eight and began my courtship.

  Hump went along when I dropped by to see The Man the next morning. A cold gray rain that was almost ice fell around us with the rustle of a glass bead curtain. It rattled on the windshield and plinked on the roof. It wasn’t a day for walking, so I said screw it and went around the block near The Man’s place a time or two, while Hump watched to see if we had any interested followers. He didn’t think so, and I broke off the second circle tight and parked in the lot next to the building where The Man’s apartment was. As a last thought, because it might cause trouble, I shucked my .38 and left it in the glove box. Hump grinned and said he wasn’t carrying any today because he knew I’d protect him.

  The black with the pump gun met us at the bottom of the stairs and followed us up the flight with the pump gun over his shoulder. “He’ll be out in a minute,” he said when we were in the apartment. Without another look at us, he sat in the chair facing the door, with the pump gun across his knees.

  The Man came out of the bedroom about ten minutes later. He was wearing one of those bright yellow mod jump suits with matching cloth shoes and a kelly green scarf around his neck. “Coffee, gentlemen, before we talk?”

  It was time to push the crap aside. “We want to talk to you alone.”

  “I’m alone.” His mouth thinned and hardened. He didn’t like the way I’d talked to him. He wasn’t used to it.

  “Without him.” I nodded at the black with the pump gun.

  The black with the pump gun moved his head slowly and showed me his rock-hard eyes. He didn’t move the pump gun, but it was in his face that he could and he would.

  “I don’t know if I trust you that much, Hardman.”

  “It’s late in the day for that,” I said. “If I was a headhunter I’d already have yours.”

  Hump saw the standoff balance still there and he stepped into it. “Hardman’s straight. It’s shit-or-get-off-the-pot time.”

  The Man looked up at Hump. He didn’t like looking up at anybody, and his face showed it. “You’ve been turning white for a long time, Hump. You get a shade whiter every day.”

  Hump’s voice was a cold whisper. “Talk one more string of shit like that to me, and I’m going to teach you country manners.” He was talking to The Man but when
he moved, his quickness almost a blur, it was toward the black with the shotgun. When he stopped, he was a step away from the black, and the gun hadn’t moved from its position. The black was stunned, and he gave up on it. He might get a round off, but it would end up in the wall across from us. If he’d been larger and stronger, he’d have tried to use the butt, swinging it upward and away from his hip. The massiveness of Hump told him that that wouldn’t work either.

  It was still a kind of standoff, but Hump had swung the balance. The Man looked at the black and said, “Wait out on the steps.” The Man didn’t like being beaten. It was going to be a long day for the black after we left.

  The black eased out of the chair, not making a sudden movement. When he was halfway up, a little off balance, Hump reached out and jerked the pump gun from his hands.

  “You can leave this,” Hump said.

  The black went outside and closed the door behind him. Hump placed the pump gun on the bar counter, muzzle away from us. He stepped away from it, showing that it wasn’t a factor any more.

  The Man took all this in before he eased himself down on the sofa. “I don’t approve of your methods, but talk if you want to.”

  “I saw the kid, Eddie Spence, yesterday. He said he didn’t kill Emily and he didn’t kill Ferd.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Close to it,” I said. “He admits killing the cop. I don’t see why he’d lie about the other two. Three killings don’t make you any deader than one, especially if that one is a cop.”

  “Does he know about me?” The Man asked.

  “I don’t think so. The poor dumb sonofabitch is just running around in circles. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He’s waiting for somebody to find Emily’s killer so he can take a crack at him.”

  The Man nodded. He seemed to relax. “Then who killed Emily and Ferd?”

  “That’s my question,” I said. I looked at Hump.

  Hump stepped in smoothly “We thought you might know.”

  “I didn’t kill them.”

  “You might know who did,” Hump said.

  “Without knowing you know,” I added.

  “If I knew . . . ” The Man broke off and shook his head.

  It was my turn again. “Three nights before she died, Emily called Eddie Spence at a pool hall in Millhouse. She was afraid. She said she’d found out something that could get her killed.”

  Amazement showed on The Man’s face. “Why didn’t she come to me? I would have protected her. She knew that.”

  “Maybe the thing that could get her killed she got from you. That meant you were blocked out. She couldn’t come to you without letting you know that she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know.”

  He wouldn’t accept that. “We didn’t do that kind of pillow talk.”

  “It didn’t have to be something you told her. It could have been something she found out by accident.”

  His eyes were closed and he was trying to think. Frustration was all across his face. The idea was too new for him, and he was drawing a blank. “It doesn’t make sense. I always kept her away on nights when I had business here. I always made a check through the apartment when she was coming over, to make sure I’d left nothing out of the safe.”

  “Shit, get off it,” I said angrily. “It has to be something from over here. Say she’s got three parts to her life: home, Tech and here. Her family hasn’t seen her in a long time and it’s not likely they’d kill her, right? At Tech, who’s going to kill her? Betty Lou down the hall, because Emily knows that Betty Lou blew a basketball player? That’s silly. But over here, this is where the dirty money is, the big dirty money. People kill for it over here. It’s a fact of this kind of life. And think about Ferd. Maybe Ferd knew what Emily knew. He might have been slow in the head, but he might have figured it out. Maybe that’s why somebody killed him.”

  “There are a lot of maybes in that,” The Man said. “I’ll have to think on it. It might come to me.”

  “And you’ll call me when it does?” I nodded at Hump and we started out.

  “I will,” The Man said.

  With his hand on the door, Hump turned back to him. “We still working for you? It might be good to know.”

  The Man jerked his head a couple of times. He hadn’t liked us before and now he liked us even less. But he still had a use for us.

  On the steps, going in, the black passed us without a word.

  I drove through the cold rain back to Hump’s apartment. The traffic was slow and cautious. “The Man doesn’t like us any more,” I said.

  “He’ll get over it, given time. But that poor black stud with the shotgun won’t . . . ever. He’ll be headed north with a bus ticket before the afternoon’s over. He saw The Man lose some face, and he won’t be around to talk about it.”

  “You think The Man told us all he knew?”

  Hump nodded. “The surprise had him good. If he knew, it would have slipped out. Now he’s going to worry his head sore.”

  “And when he figures it out?”

  “He won’t call us. He’ll handle it himself.”

  I believed that, too. It was what I’d been afraid of. It was a risk, a chance I’d taken. But he hadn’t come up with a name, and it had slipped out of my hands. There was no way of knowing how bloody it would get before it was all over.

  I stopped by Hump’s long enough to pack up the gear I’d left at his apartment. Now that I knew Eddie Spence wasn’t gunning for me, there wasn’t any reason to impose on him any longer. I had the feeling I’d been getting in the way of his happy love life. On the way home, I stopped by Cloudt’s and stocked up on groceries and meat. At a nearby wine shop I got a couple of cases of beer and a bottle of Chateau Latour ’53 that I’d been eying for a month or so. It was too damned expensive, but it was supposed to be a good year, and I’d bought a couple of beautiful steaks. It was time to ask Marcy over to cook for me. The Chateau Latour ’53 was just the kind of extra that might make the whole evening. Anyway, it was only money.

  “I don’t think I know you well enough to cook and sew for you,” Marcy said when I finally reached her.

  I said I was sorry she felt that way. I was so tired after all the shopping and cleaning that I couldn’t stand high-life dining. Still, I could understand her point of view, and I hoped she’d see mine. I wasn’t about to waste those two steaks or the bottle of Latour ’53.

  “Chateau Latour 1953? Wait while I look that up in my wine book.”

  “Too late,” I said. “I’ll call the go-go dancer. She’s kind of ugly, but she cooks well.”

  Marcy said I could pick her up around six-thirty. And she wanted to hear a bit more about my friend, the go-go dancer.

  On the way to pick up Marcy, I stopped off to see Art. Edna let me in and said that Art was in the bathroom, shaving. “Go on in.”

  “That was some blind date you fixed me up with,” I said.

  “Like her, did you?”

  “Not as bad as most of the blind dates I get.”

  I left her in the center of the living room, smiling, and went through the bedroom and stopped in the bathroom doorway.

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re not going to like this . . . ”

  The razor stopped in mid-stroke. “You talked to Eddie Spence?”

  While he finished shaving, I told him about the meeting and what had been said. I added the dyed hair and the mustache and the blue raincoat and the tweed jacket.

  He came up blubbering from the face rinse in the sink. “You wait a whole day. Why tell me now? Why not wait until you write your memoirs?”

  “You catch the right man and you’re going to have the makings of a Ruby-Oswald on your hands. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  “Okay, I’m warned.”

  “I’m not after Eddie any more. That’s your job.”

  “Now you can tell me who you’re really working for,” Art said.

  “T
he twenty thousand dollar reward.”

  “Changed clients, huh?”

  “I’ve got a question.” I lit a cigarette and reached past Art to drop the match in the john. “Where was Ben Coleman when Emily Campbell got killed?”

  “Coleman?”

  “Campbell’s business manager,” I said.

  “Oh, him. He was with Campbell all evening at the Regency. They were going over some investments.”

  I blew smoke at the ceiling. “Anybody else with them?”

  “No.”

  “Any waiters bringing up coffee or booze, and at what time?”

  “We didn’t check.” Art pushed past me and into the bedroom. “You know anything I don’t about Coleman?”

  “No, but I’d appreciate it if you’d have this checked out. Might as well touch all the bases.”

  “As long as you don’t have to do the legwork,” Art said.

  “I don’t have time,” I said. “Have to pick up Marcy.” I got away while he was struggling into a t-shirt.

  The try for me, when it came, almost worked.

  The evening and the courtship had gone well. Marcy had tossed a salad of green peppers, lettuce and artichoke hearts, and we’d had that with the steaks and the wine. The wine was like they said it’d be, and I decided that if I got a part of the twenty thousand dollars, I was going to buy a couple of cases of it. After dinner, with the coffee, I broke out a bottle of five-star Metaxa I’d been saving for an occasion.

  Around midnight, I left my place to drive Marcy home. I was feeling a little foolish, like the courtship had made me around sixteen years old, going back to when I didn’t know the facts. But it was a good foolish, and I knew that if we ever grew up, we’d be the better for it. During the drive, Marcy opened the glove box while looking for a Kleenex. She found the tissue, but she also found my .38 where I’d put it that morning, when Hump and I had gone to see The Man.

  “I didn’t know you still played with guns, Jim.”

  “Sometimes.”