“His name was Fred Mullidge.”
We were in Art’s office at the department. The shotgun was on the edge of the desk, between us. It was battered and scarred, like it had been through a number of hunting seasons. But it was well cared for and I couldn’t see any signs of rust. I looked down at the stock and saw the “F.M.” scratched there.
“No identification on the body. A car down the road, a ’55 Chevy, was registered to Mullidge, and the prints matched up with the ones in our records.” Art stopped and looked at me. “You know him?”
“No.”
“If you don’t know him, why was he trying to kill you?”
“Beyond me.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Art said. “A man tries to kill you, and you don’t know him?”
I nodded.
“You working on anything besides the Campbell girl’s death?”
“No.”
“You sure?” Art looked hard and mean as hell. Friendship was one thing, but a new death was something else.
“Art, I swear.”
“You messing around with any women in his family? His wife? His daughter?”
“Not unless Marcy is his wife or his daughter.”
“Goddamn it, Hardman. It was a cold night out there, and he wasn’t standing around in your front yard for no reason at all.”
“He was there for a reason,” I said. “He was there to kill me, and he went to the trouble of unscrewing the front porch light. He gave my house two barrels. But I still don’t know him.” I grinned at Art. “You think my mortgage insurance covers shotgun wounds the house receives when people shoot at me?”
“Only if they hit you,” Art said sourly.
“What else you have on Mullidge?”
“Army in the Korean. Did a tour there. Honorable discharge. Worked in a cigarette factory in Durham, North Carolina. Drifted down here in 1960 of so. A number of nothing jobs. Last listed job was with a big parking lot over by the Capitol. Since then, he’s been working through those day-by-day temporary labor contractors down around Whitehall. Also sold his blood now and then. Arrested two times for drunk and disorderly, one for driving under the influence, and one for assault.” Art looked up at me and shook his head. “Not with a gun. Hit somebody with a beer bottle, at one of the skid-row beer places.”
“Then somebody bought themselves some cheap labor.”
“Who wants you dead?”
“Not Eddie Spence. It must be somebody else.”
Art lit a cigarette and blew the smoke across the desk at me. “You messing in the rackets now?”
“This look like a racket try to you?” The question jolted me for a second. I began to wonder if he knew about the trips that Hump and I took to New York now and then. “If he was a racket hit man, I’d be in the morgue getting a chill now, instead of him.”
“So . . .?”
“I’ll do some legwork in the morning. Give me the names of the labor contractors and the parking lot he worked for. I’ll spend some time trying to find out who Fred Mullidge knew that I know.”
Art scribbled on a memo pad and passed the pad to me. 25 Hour Labor Force. Quik Labor. Capitol Parking Lot. I tore off the sheet and put it in my pocket.
“Can I go now?”
Art nodded. “Let me know what you find out.”
I said I would. When I got home I started to call Marcy, but I realized that the shooting wouldn’t be in the morning paper. I’d let her sleep and call her in the morning, before she left for work, before she could hear it on the radio.
All night long, alone in my double bed, I thought about the blood drying on the front lawn leaves. I’d killed before, but it never got easy. And then, toward morning light, it began to rain. I slept for a time, knowing the rain was washing the blood away from the lawn, down into the earth or into the storm gutters. I liked to think that it washed all the way down to the sea, but I knew that really wasn’t possible.
At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I got up and put on the water for the coffee. When it boiled, I made a cup of instant and dialed Hump’s number. He sounded grumpy for a few seconds, and then he said that I was one lucky white man. I agreed, and said for him to get himself together and I’d call him back later. We’d be making the rounds of the labor contractors.
“Marcy know yet?” Hump asked.
“I’m going to call her now.”
He hung up and I called Marcy. She sounded sleepy and warm, like she hadn’t been awake long. I tried to make a bit of small talk, but it didn’t come off well. So I went ahead and told her about the hit try, without any frills on it. Maybe I was too blunt, because I heard her suck in her breath.
“I’ll be right over,” she said.
“I’m not hurt.”
Twenty minutes later, we were standing in my living room, me holding her while she shook and shivered. She was crying, too, and I could hear, almost under her breath, “You . . . you . . . sonofabitch . . . if you . . . if you think . . . I spent . . . a good year . . . almost two years . . . getting . . . ready for you . . . and you’re . . . you’re going to . . . get killed . . . on me . . . then you’ve got . . . another thing coming.”
Holding her, I was looking at her face. She wasn’t wearing make-up, and I could see the milk blue veins in her eyelids and the crinkly tracks of wrinkles in the corners of her eyes. I tried to remember why I always thought of her as twenty-five, when she was probably thirty. There were fat drops of rain in her hair, and I suddenly felt a massive tenderness for her.
“This is some fucking courtship,” I said.
In time she stopped shivering and we were warm together, and I could feel the slight bony push of her pelvis.
We spent the rest of the morning in bed. Making love part of the time, and the rest of the time talking. Talking was easier without clothes, and she told me how she’d plotted the whole year and how she hadn’t been with a man the whole time.
“A waste,” I said.
“Think of it as a savings account, instead,” she said.
And, late in the morning, the rain changed to sleet, and we slept for a time, listening to the dry, brittle clack of rain on the bedroom window.
I’d called Hump after Marcy came by and told him the morning had been called because of rain. At twelve-thirty, I called him and told him it was on again. Marcy wanted to wait for me at my place, but I didn’t like the idea of leaving her there alone. There might be another try. I saw her off a few minutes before Hump drove up.
The sign in the window of the 25 Hour Labor Force read “Needed 105 Men” but the battered school desks held only dozing winos, and nobody seemed to be paying much attention to them. If they needed 105 men, it must have been much earlier in the day, or on some other day.
“I’m afraid that’s information I can’t give out.” The desk plaque gave his name as John C. Armour, Manager. He looked like he had dirt in the long creases of his face. His tie had been washed along with his underwear, and the tie’s small knot held together a white shirt that wasn’t white any more.
I dropped the early edition of The Journal, the afternoon paper, on his desk. One of the lead stories was about the death of Fred Mullidge, and I’d marked it with a thick black line. “That won’t cut it,” I said. “I was the one he was shooting at.”
“Oh, that Fred Mullidge.” He folded the paper and handed it back to me. “He did work through our company now and then.”
“I’d like to see his file.”
“That’s not possible.” But his face changed, and I knew why. Hump had shifted his feet and moved forward. I didn’t need to look at him. I knew that he looked mean and irritated, like he’d beat your ass for a nickel. So that set the pattern: I’d be reasonable and Hump would be near violence, and we’d catch Armour in the whipsaw. “The files are private,” Armour protested, but it was like a gasp.
“He’s dead now,” I said, “and that’s about as public as you can get.”
Armour wasn’t listening to me. He was looking past me, at Hump. “He didn’t work for us that much.” He turned in his swivel chair and rode it two or three feet to a file cabinet. “We kept files only when the person had some special job skill. That way, if he didn’t come by one day and we needed him, we could call him.” He pulled out one file drawer and walked his fingers over up to the “M” section. He took out a file and crabbed back to the desk. “In the case of Mullidge, he had some experience in trucking.”
When he opened the file I got out my pad and uncapped my pen. “Address?”
He gave me a number on Ponce De Leon. “I think that’s the last one he gave us. I think it’s a boarding house.”
“Did he give references?”
“We don’t usually need those. He did give us a partial listing.” He read off the tobacco company in Durham. “Drove a truck for them.” He ran his finger down the single sheet of paper. “Worked in a parking lot, but I don’t have the name of it. Also did custodial work for the state. That is, he was a janitor.”
“He say where he worked?”
“I think it was one of the buildings over by the State Capitol.” Armour closed the file. “That’s all I have.”
“No record of jobs he worked on for you?”
“That’s too much bookkeeping.”
On the way out, we passed the still-dozing winos, and the sign still said they needed 105 men.
The Quik Labor office didn’t add anything new. They had the same list of previous jobs and the same Ponce De Leon address. On the way out, I happened to look back and saw the manager dropping Mullidge’s file into the trash can. It seemed final somehow, like a funeral.
The Capitol Parking Lot is on Central, almost in the shadow of the state buildings. There’s room for forty or so cars, and there’s a cramped booth where the attendant sits next to a small electric heater in the fall and winter. The attendant was a young black who didn’t look more than sixteen. I turned the car over to him and watched him whip it into a narrow space that I’d have passed up.
“You try him,” I said to Hump, as the black kid walked back toward us. I walked away a few steps and lit a cigarette. They talked for a few minutes, with the kid cutting his eyes toward me a time or two. Hump patted him on the shoulder and came over to me.
“The owner’s a guy named George Herndon, and he’s due in an hour or so. The kid doesn’t know Mullidge but he’s heard about him. Herndon uses Mullidge in his pitch for honesty. It seems that Mullidge had a tendency toward a bit of stealing.”
“I’d like to hear Herndon’s sermon.”
Hump looked in both directions. “It’s lunchtime.”
We found a small diner and ordered. I got a dime from Hump and went back to the phone booth. Hugh Muffin answered on the second ring. “Hardman, I’ve been reading about you in the afternoon paper.”
“Lies,” I said.
“You been walking around in that fellow’s flower garden?”
“I never met his wife, if he had one.”
“Why was he after you?” Hugh asked.
“Maybe you can help me.” I gave him the information I had about Mullidge working for the state as a janitor, and asked if he’d find out where Mullidge had worked. I gave him the pay phone’s number and went back to the booth where Hump was. I was halfway through a tough hot roast beef sandwich when the phone rang. I beat the waiter to it by a step.
“Mullidge worked for the state for about six months. Quit around a year and a half ago. The girl I talked to said there was a note in his file that he wasn’t to be hired again. Something to do with some missing items in the offices he was cleaning. Nothing definite, but the stealing stopped as soon as he was gone.”
“Where’d he work?”
“In my building,” Hugh said.
“You know him?”
“Not that I know of. Of course, there are a lot of them on the cleaning detail, and most of it is done at night or early in the morning, when we’re not here.”
“You think this is tied to the Campbell case?”
“I don’t know, but it’s the only case I’m on right now.”
“Maybe it was a mistake,” Hugh said.
“It was for Mullidge.”
When the hour was up, we walked back toward the Capitol Parking Lot.
“That Hugh,” Hump said, “has got as many crooked sides as four snakes fucking.”
“Why?”
“Just a feeling I get around him. Like he’s got eight faces, and he can show you any of them with a split second’s warning.”
“He’s a political animal. He’s been at it a long time, so long he probably doesn’t know which one is the real one. If there’s a real one left.”
“Funny about Mullidge working in his building at one time, wasn’t it?”
“There must be five hundred offices in that building,” I said.
“The only one you know there is old Hugh.”
“No,” I said, “I know Arch Campbell, too.”
It was odd, but just that—nothing else that I could see. I couldn’t think of any connection between Mullidge and Hugh, or between Mullidge and Arch Campbell. I worried it around for a time, and then I let it drop. It didn’t make much sense that I could see, and the more I worried it around, the less it made.
The black kid got the car out of the tight place without losing a flake of paint. Hump sat in it and waited while I talked to Herndon. George Herndon was short and potbellied, and was like a lot of the rednecks you’d see on any weekend afternoon, out at the Braves games. He chewed tobacco and, when he talked, I could see the brown-black tongue worry the cud about.
“Fred Mullidge don’t work here anymore.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“That a fact?” He stopped the cud. “How?”
“Shot, early this morning.”
He turned away from me deliberately and spat a dark stream toward the gutter. “I knew he’d come to no good.”
“How long he work for you?”
“Oh, four months, more or less. Seemed hard-working enough. Never late opening that I could tell. But I started getting complaints.”
“Things missing out of the cars?”
“How’d you know?”
“It’s common knowledge,” I said. “What was he stealing?”
The shrewd eyes mocked me. “That’s not common knowledge, too?”
I laughed. “You got me there.”
“I thought so.” Herndon grinned at me. “It was just some tapes for those car tape players, at first. At least, I got some complaints that some were missing. I didn’t think much of it, at first. But when I got more and more complaints, I took a look in the trunk of Mullidge’s old car while he was at lunch one day. I found a whole cardboard box of stolen plunder in there.”
“Didn’t sound too bright, having the stuff right on the premises.”
“He was bright enough,” Herndon said. “He had pull of some kind, because he should have gone to jail for a year. Somebody must have fixed it, because he never served a day.”
“You know who fixed it?”
He spat again. “It’s just a guess. All I know is, he never served a day.”
The boarding house was one of those high, wood-frame houses set far back on the lot from the street, with a steep lawn in front. From the main entrance, when the storm door was open, the rank scent of turnip greens blew past me. Along with it, came the dry, dusty blast of air from the heating system.
“Yes, I read about it in the afternoon paper, and I’ve been expecting the police ever since.” Mrs. Burleson was around fifty, a hulk of a woman, with a greasy blue dress and a gravy-stained apron. Over the dress and the apron, she wore a man’s brown sweater that the moths must have been eating at over the last few summers.
“Did you call them?” I asked.
“Why should I? Me call them?”
“He wasn’t carrying any identification. They don’t know where he lived.”
“Is that right?”
I could see the gears begin to move slowly. I got out my wallet and handed her a five. “I’d like to look around his room.”
“Oh, I couldn’t let you do that.”
“The police’ll be over later.” I added another five. “I can call them now, but they won’t pay you ten for a look.”
“It’s still not right.”
I put out my hand. Mrs. Burleson jerked the money away and stuffed it down the front of her dress. “He was behind in his rent, anyway.” She dug a key from the apron pocket. “It’s on the second floor, the third door on the left.”
It was a neat room. That surprised me. The bed was made, and a couple of cheap Army surplus blankets were smoothed and stretched across it. A pair of low-cut black shoos, polished to a high gloss and stretched on shoe trees, were under the front edge of the bed. In the shallow, dark closet, I found a gray suit with a shiny seat to the trousers, two Robert Hall sport coats, one for winter and one for spring, and, four or five pairs of slacks. In the low, three-drawer dresser were the twins to the green twill work clothes Mullidge had died in, as well as shirts and underwear neatly folded and stacked and half a dozen pairs of white cotton socks.
Still no wallet. I looked around the room. I went to the bed and pushed the pillow aside. Not there. But, lifting the pillow to replace it, I felt the lump inside. I shook the pillow, and the wallet fell onto the tight blankets and bounced back at me.
It was an old leather wallet, sweat-darkened on the curved side that fitted his hip, cracking with dry rot along the edges. In the money compartment a ten and three ones. No blood money yet. I pulled out the mass of cards and yellowing scraps of paper, and found it in there: four fifty-dollar bills, folded and creased sharply so they wouldn’t bulk.
So that was what I was worth dead: two hundred dollars.
I jammed the cards, the scraps of paper and the money back into the wallet and dropped it into my topcoat pocket. Another walk around the room revealed nothing else worth noting. It was the room of a compulsively neat person. Taught by his mother to wash behind his ears, and taught by the Army to make a tight bed, shine his shoes, and keep his clothes ready for inspection. He’d been neat everywhere but in my front yard.
Hump was in the car drinking Crystal Shop coffee from a place a couple of blocks away. He handed me a cup. “Find anything?”
“The fee was two hundred dollars.”
“That’s cheap, for bloodletting.”
“Buy cheap, and you get shoddy work,” I said.
“It wasn’t that shoddy.”
Edna cleared away Art’s supper dishes and brought in coffee cups for Hump and me. She put a fresh pot of coffee on the table and stopped in the doorway, ready to go into another part of the house. “Mr. Evans, the boys are going to be sorry they weren’t here to meet you.”
“Tell them to call me and I’ll drop by sometime,” Hump said.
After she left, Art took the wallet and dumped the contents on the table. He put the four fifties aside. “You’re coming up in the world, Jim. When you were a cop, your life was worth about a ten-cent candy bar.”
“Or a nickel roll of Lifesavers.” It was true enough. In my time on the force, I’d seen policemen killed for a lot less.
We spent a few minutes going through the wad of paper scraps. We ended up with three piles. In one pile we put the ones with girls’ names and phone numbers. In another we separated the scraps with men’s names, with or without phone numbers. In the final pile we put the ones that had only phone numbers, no names and addresses.
“We’ll check a couple of the women, but I doubt that there’s anything there. I’ll start a check on the others as soon as I get to the office.”
“One thing more, Art,” I said.
“Yeah?” Art was putting the paper scraps from the wallet into envelopes.
“A little over a year ago, Mullidge was arrested for stealing from the cars at the parking lot where he worked. The owner thinks it was fixed, that Mullidge must have had some kind of clout higher up.”
Art made a note. “I’ll ask around”
“Maybe it’s somebody I know.”
Art put the pad in his shirt pocket. “Speaking of asking around for you, Ben Coleman was with Arch Campbell the night Emily was killed. They were in Arch’s room at the Regency, going over some investment plans. Room service took them ice and mixers around eight, and a pot of coffee a bit after eleven. The same hotel man took up both orders. One of my men showed him Coleman’s photo. He swears that Coleman was in the room both times he took stuff in.”
“The three hours and a bit between, that’s a lot of time,” Hump said.
“More than enough to go out, find and kill Emily, and make it back to Campbell’s room for coffee,” I said.
“Give me a reason Coleman’d kill Emily,” Art said.
“I don’t have one at the moment,” I admitted. “But he’s a pretty shifty guy.”
“And give me one reason why Campbell would cover for Coleman while he was out killing Campbell’s daughter.”
“When you put it that way,” I said, “it does sound silly, doesn’t it?”
Art nodded. “It makes you sound senile.”
“I don’t think so. Something’s not right with him. Hump was with me when I asked him how well he knew Emily.”
Hump nodded. “He got uptight. Blew up.”
“Just because Coleman might have had a thing for Emily . . . if he did . . . that doesn’t mean he’d kill her,” Art said.
“That’s funny.” I turned and winked at Hump.
“What’s funny?”
“Having a thing for Emily. That’s exactly why you think Eddie Spence killed her.”
“Oh, shit.”
The phone was ringing when I got home, a bit after midnight. On the way back from Marcy’s, I’d stopped off to borrow Hump’s shotgun and part of a box of shells. I put the shotgun on the sofa and made a run for the bedroom. I probably got it on the last ring.
“Hardman?” It was The Man.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day, ever since I read the Journal”
“I’ve been out most of the day, trying to find out who wants me dead.”
“Find anything?”
“So far, it’s dark and muddy.”
“I just thought I’d let you know that I didn’t send the gun after you,” The Man said.
“I figured as much. The day you send out cheap white labor, then I’ll be sure you’re slipping.”
“Of course, sending out a white ass after you, that would be a good smokescreen.”
“Only,” I said, “if you planned on him missing me and getting killed.”
“That’s true.” The Man laughed.
“You been doing any thinking?”
“About what?” The laugh died and he sounded withdrawn, as if he’d moved the receiver away from his mouth.
“About what Emily might have known that she wasn’t supposed to.”
“Nothing yet.” But he still sounded far away.
“Keep trying.”
He said he would, and then he lied and said he’d call me as soon as he had something. I pretended to believe him and said good-bye and hung up on him.
I slept that night with Hump’s shotgun on the bed beside me. At first it reassured me. But, during the night, I rolled over and found myself touching it several times. Near morning, when there was light beyond the drawn shades, I got up and put the shotgun on a chair at the foot of the bed. Maybe that turned the trick. I dropped off into a deep sleep that I thought I’d never come out of.