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 to 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.
“Mine,” I said. “Ferd took it from me outside the Dew Drop In.”
Horace backed me up. Ferd had taken a liking to the slapjack and had started carrying it around in his topcoat pocket. In fact, he’d seen Ferd playing around with it earlier in the day, before he left on his run.
I took the slapjack into the bathroom and ran some water on it until the water dissolved the blood and the paper came free. I tore the bloody paper into small pieces and flushed it down the john. Then I washed the slapjack as well as I could and rolled it in a wad of toilet paper. Back in the living room, I dropped it into my topcoat pocket and left. As soon as I reached my house, I got out an old can of saddle soap and worked over the slapjack until it was clean. Then I put it in an out-of-sight corner of the closet to dry out.
I called Hump a couple of times and finally reached him at five-fifteen. He said the Southern Bell trim had a list of calls made from Emily’s dorm room. He expected her in a minute or two. “If you’ll come by in an hour, we’ll go over them with her.”
“Why an hour?”
“Got to pay my dues with her,” he said.
I wasted part of the hour with a call to Art Maloney, at his home number. He said there wasn’t anything new. To save myself some legwork, I asked if they’d run into anybody named Eddie who was tied to Emily in any way. He perked up and wanted details. I told him that all I knew was that the name had cropped up a couple of times. He might be an ex-boyfriend. Art said he’d have that checked out. And then, surprisingly, he thanked me for the tip. That had to mean that the police were drawing blanks all the way, and were willing to follow up any kind of lead, no matter how vague it was.
Being thanked by a policeman always made my day.
Before I left for Hump’s apartment I got the .38 Police Positive out of hiding and put it in my topcoat. I didn’t like the way people who had connections with The Man were dropping by the wayside. I didn’t want to be the third on that list. Or even the fourth or fifth.
Hump and the Southern Bell trim were in the living room having a drink when I let myself in after knocking. The Southern Bell trim was not really very trim: she weighed about two hundred pounds. In fact, she looked like a busted bale of hay. Her name was Emma Jane Green.
“This sweet young lady did us a lot of good,” Hump said.
“It wasn’t anything,” Emma Jane said. “But don’t tell anyone I gave you the numbers.”
I said we wouldn’t. It was private business.
Hump handed me the penciled list of numbers and destinations. The calls included the tenth of December, the day I’d followed Emily Campbell to the Dew Drop In. “They don’t go as far as we’d like,” Hump said.
“It might be enough,” I said.
“Four of the calls are to the same number in Millhouse,” Hump said.
Emma Jane corrected him. “Three are, but the fourth is a collect call from Millhouse.”
“From the same number,” I said. There was also a call to Athens, Georgia, and one to Spartenburg, South Carolina. I decided to ignore these two for the moment and concentrate on the Millhouse calls. Three of the Millhouse calls were dated the tenth. Two of the calls looked like some kind of bare-minimum charge, as if the call had been completed but the party hadn’t been in, or the conversation had been rather short. The final call on the twelfth had run up a tab of $4.25.
“Any way of knowing who these calls were made to?”
“I didn’t have time,” Emma Jane said.
When Emma Jane got ready to leave, I looked at Hump to see if I should put out some money. He read my mind and shook his head. After a bit of small-talk, Hump walked her downstairs to her car. As soon as the door closed behind them, I direct-dailed the number in Millhouse. The phone rang five times before it was answered.
“Hello.” It was a surly, go-to-hell greeting.
“I want to speak to Ed.”
“Ed who?”
“Isn’t this the fire station?” I asked.
“You kidding?” He laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“This isn’t the fire station?” I insisted.
“It’s Ben Sharp’s Pool Hall.”
I said I was sorry and hung up. Hump came in, puffing from the climb up the stairs. I looked at him and then at the closed bedroom door. He grinned. “That girl’s been eating boxes of cornstarch.”
“But she seems to have a good heart,” I said.
“And good moral character,” Hump said. Then he dismissed it. “You try the number yet?”
“Ben Sharp’s Pool Hall.”
“We going to play some pool?” Hump asked.
“Looks like it.”
I had a small drink while he showered. While he dressed I stood in the doorway and told him about the death of Ferd, and that it had been done with my slapjack. Hump stopped in mid-stride at that, dug down into the bottom of the clothes closet, and brought out a battered gym bag. He unzipped it and took out a rolled-up sweat suit. Inside, there was the .38 I’d given him a year-and-a-half before, one I’d taken off a drunk one night.
“I don’t like the way this one is heading,” he said. He put on a knee-length black leather coat and dropped the gun in his pocket. “There’s blood in the soup already.”
We arrived in Millhouse at eight o’clock, give or take a minute or two.