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.
I gave the cop back his riot gun. “Go arrest him, or something.”
When Art came down a few seconds later, Hump was looking up into the circle of riot guns and saying, “Ease up, this mother ain’t going anywhere.”
“Where’s Eddie Spence?”
“I don’t know any Eddie Spence.” Clinton Stubbs, hands cuffed behind him, was sitting on the edge of one of the kitchen chairs and glaring at us. His face was dirt-streaked and he was wearing a t-shirt, an oil-stained pair of jeans, and loafers without socks. He was smaller and thinner than he’d seemed out in the dark yard.
“That’s not what Chief Brunson says.”
“Chief Branson’s a sack of shit.”
I left Art and the other detective in the kitchen with Stubbs and went into the bedroom. Off to the right, in the bathroom, Hump was trying to get the dirt stains off the knees of his trousers. “Anything in there, Hump?”
“Two wet towels. Either two people took showers, or he took two showers.”
I looked around the bedroom. The blankets were kicked back in a heap, and the sheet was dirty brown. In one corner of the room there was a pile of dirty shirts and underwear. I opened the dresser drawers. In one drawer there was a neat stack of starched shorts and t-shirts. In another there were three starched sport shirts and a mass of white cotton socks. That didn’t tell me much.
I prowled around the rest of the room and reached the wastebasket beside the bed. Among the other odds and ends I found a large, balled-up piece of brown wrapping paper. It had strips of wrapping tape on it, and it looked like it had come from a bundle of laundry. When I spread out the paper, a large piece of white paper fell out. It was a sales ticket from Bill’s Salvage Store:
| 6 s. @ .20 | 1.20 |
| 6 t. @ .20 | 1.20 |
| 4 s.s. @ .50 | 2.00 |
| ____ | |
| Total | 4.40 |
The sale was dated the day before, on the sixteenth. While I was studying the ticket, Hump came in from the bathroom. He was drying his hands on a large wad of toilet paper.
“You know a Bill’s Salvage Store?”
“It’s a store in the wino district. Sells laundry and cleaning that doesn’t get picked up after three or four months.” He took the ticket and looked down at it. “It looks like somebody bought six shorts, six t-shirts and four sport shirts.”
I went back to the dresser. The starched shorts were size 34 and the t-shirts were 40’s. The sport shirts in the other drawer were all marked large. I returned to the pile of dirty laundry and dug around in it with the toe of my shoe. I speared a pair of shorts size 30 and a dress shirt with a 14 neck.
I called Art in from the kitchen. I showed him the ticket and told him what I’d found. “Eddie left the hotel in a hurry. No time to pack spares.”
Art nodded. I followed him into the kitchen and watched as he circled Stubbs. He grabbed the neck of Stubbs’ t-shirt and pulled it away. “A 36,” Art said to me.
Hump and I stood around and watched while Art went to work on Stubbs. He started out on neck sizes and shirt sizes, and when Stubbs insisted that all the shirts were his, Art made fun of him for swelling up and shrinking from day to day. The topper came when Art had the cuffs taken off him. He asked Stubbs to try on one of the large sport shirts I’d found. He didn’t want to, but two of the cops put one of the sport shirts on him. He stood around and laughed at him, at the way the oversized shirt hung on him.
After a few minutes of that, Stubbs was ready to talk. Eddie Spence had shown up at his apartment the morning after the shooting at the hotel. Stubbs said he hadn’t known about the shooting until he got to work and heard two of the other mechanics talking about it. That evening, when he asked Eddie about it, Eddie had said that one of the other cops had shot that patrolman by mistake in the dark, and they were trying to pin it on him. Stubbs had believed him, and Eddie had stayed on. And he’d bought some stuff from the salvage store because the only clothes he had were getting a little ripe.
The last time he’d seen Eddie? This morning, when he left for work at the body shop. And that was the Lord’s truth.
Art left one policeman in the apartment and two others in an unmarked car in a driveway across the street. Hump and I waited around while Art made the arrangements, and then we followed them down to Eighth Street, where the cars were parked. After they put Stubbs in the back of a patrol car and before they closed the door on him, I leaned in.
“Did Spence say why he was staying in town?”
“I told him he ought to leave,” Stubbs said.
“Did he say?”
“He said he had to get even with some people.”
“Did he say which people?” I asked.
“No, just some people.” He leaned back and crossed his legs at the knee. “What’s your name?”
“Hardman.”
Stubbs nodded. “I think he’s looking for you.”