Down Among the Jocks

  DOWN AMONG

  THE JOCKS

  RALPH DENNIS

  Copyright © 2019 Adventures in Television, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Afterword “My Friend Hardman”

  Copyright © 2019 by Ben Jones. All Rights Reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1-7324226-5-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7324226-5-0

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book was originally published in 1974 and reflects the cultural and sexual attitudes, language, and politics of the period.

  The Hardman Series

  Atlanta Deathwatch

  The Charleston Knife is Back in Town

  The Golden Girl And All

  Pimp For The Dead

  Down Among The Jocks

  Murder Is Not An Odd Job

  Working For The Man

  The Deadly Cotton Heart

  The One Dollar Rip-Off

  Hump’s First Case

  The Last Of The Armageddon Wars

  The Buy Back Blues

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was around lunch time and we were in the kitchen of Hump’s apartment. It was hot August outside, but in the apartment, with all the shades drawn, it was dark and cool. I was puzzled and trying to hold it back while I drank a bottle of Bud. Hump was the one doing the sweating.

  The card with its blocky printing was still attached to a scrap of the plastic wrapping. That was at my elbow and I looked down at it again. It read:

  EAT YOUR HEART OUT

  Just that, nothing else.

  I’d been there when Hump brought up the mail. And I’d stood at his elbow while he shucked the mailing envelope and pulled out the carton. At first, I’d thought it was a music tape. All that changed when Hump tore the wrapping away and shook out the narrow reel of 8mm film. Right afterwards Hump drove to a nearby camera shop and rented a projector.

  “You know what this is about?” I asked.

  “No idea in the world,” Hump said. He was bent over the projector, threading the film in.

  When Hump said he was ready, I flipped off the overhead light. The kitchen wall was a color between white and cream and we didn’t need a screen. The first shot was of a birthday cake. I didn’t have time to count the candles but I made a guess that there were around twenty-five or thirty. The title over the shot of the cake was in black type:

  Happy Birthday to Me.

  The next shot was of a slim, pale-skinned young man with a bright shock of red hair and eyes the color of slate. He was wearing a short terry cloth robe belted at the waist.

  “Now I’ve got it,” Hump said. “That’s Ed Cross.”

  “Cross?”

  “All-pro cornerback with Pittsburgh until he retired a couple of years back.”

  “But what the …?”

  On the wall-screen the man took off the robe and the camera did a slow tilt down across the hard-plated muscles of his chest and stomach. The camera tilt ended when it reached the groin. It was a shock and an absurdity. The man was hung like a stud horse.

  “That’s the why of it,” Hump said.

  The next shot used a wide-angle lens. The man Hump had called Ed Cross was in the foreground of the shot, off to the side. Behind him there was a bed on which two naked young girls, one black and one white, were stretched out. Ed Cross remained in profile for a few seconds and then he moved toward the bed. After taking a few steps he turned his head and grinned at the camera.

  “I still don’t understand,” I said.

  Hump flipped off the projector light and stopped the motor. “Get the lights.” He reversed the film and ran it until the end flapped against the reel. Head still down, not looking at me, he unclipped the reel and jammed it back in the carton.

  “Cross came to town three or four months ago. There was some talk about him going into some food franchise or other.”

  “I hadn’t heard.”

  Hump fitted the top over the projector and locked it into place. “There have been rumors about this film for the last four or five years. I think it even got a mention in the National Enquirer. The word is that Cross had it made on his twenty-sixth birthday as a present to himself. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it.”

  “Why’d he send it to you?”

  “You remember Eartha?”

  I did. She was hard to forget. A beautiful black model and actress with skin the color of coffee with real cream in it. Hump had met her back in the winter after one of the Falcon games. She made a little extra money being a cheerleader or sideline dancing girl or whatever they were. Somehow, they’d met after waiting out the traffic jam crunch, and it had been a strong affair for some months. He hadn’t said much about her for the last couple of months and I’d assumed it had died out.

  “About a month ago I ran into Eartha with Ed Cross at a Braves game.” He held up the carton with the film in it. “I guess this is his way of telling me something.”

  “He knows about you and Eartha?”

  “Well, I stopped by and said hello to her. There wasn’t any way around it,”

  “And what’s he supposed to be saying to you?” I thought I knew but I hoped he’d come up with a wrong answer.

  “He’s putting dirty pictures in my head,” Hump said. He put the film carton in his jacket pocket and lifted the projector. “I’ve got to take this back to the camera shop.”

  I walked out to the parking lot with him. I waited while he stowed the projector on the floorboards. “What now?”

  “If I find Ed Cross I’m going to stuff this film up his ass … sideways.”

  “Careful,” I said.

  He nodded and drove away.

  I got into my car and worked my way across town toward my house. On the way I put my mind to it and dredged up some fast read-outs on Ed Cross, things I’d been hearing about him over the last few years. He’d been a damned good cornerback in his day. Fast and mean. Some people even added dirty to that. And there’d been a final rumor about him. One version had it that his retirement hadn’t been voluntary. The whisper was that he’d been caught stealing money from the lockers of his teammates after a workout. And, faced with blackballing throughout the league, he’d retired.

  The film. Sending it to Hump was the kind of cheap shot he was known for. The knife out for everybody. But Hump was the wrong one to play that game with. I’d seen Hump in action and he could kick ass with the best of them. I was glad I wasn’t Ed Cross.

  I’m Jim Hardman and I used to be a cop here in Atlanta. That was before I quit under a cloud. For the last few years Hump and I have done odd jobs for a living. I guess you could call us partners. Hump used to be one of the best defensive ends in the business. At Cleveland they put him up there with Bubba and Claude and the Deacon. He was at the top of his game
when he tore up a knee. The doctors had put it back together but it wouldn’t take the strain and he’d lost a step. He’d retired and drifted down to Atlanta. After I quit the force we did some drinking together and we started doing the favors and odd jobs that paid pretty well and didn’t call for high morals.

  I guess we’re an odd pair. I’m over forty and overweight, balding and white. Hump is 6’ 7” and 270 and black. Greed and a lack of the usual ambition can make strange people into friends and partners. At least, it seems that way to me.

  It was late summer and muggy in Atlanta. The temperature wasn’t much over ninety but the humidity was hell. A few minutes away from air conditioning and you felt like you’d been wearing a plastic raincoat all day. Not that I mind the weather in Atlanta. The falls are great and the winters are usually a couple of months behind the rest of the country in arriving. The green haze that’s spring almost counterbalances the summers. Almost. But during the summers, I’d forget how nice the springs are.

  I reached my house around two. I stopped in the living room long enough to punch the air conditioner from low to high and close off all the doors except the one that leads into the bedroom. In the kitchen, I stared at the breakfast dishes for a moment and then shook my head at them and opened a bottle of beer and took it out into the backyard. It’s an odd backyard, level at first and then with an upward slope that butts into a stone wall that encloses a terrace where my vegetable garden was. There wasn’t not much left of it. The corn was done, the stalks turned brittle and dark, and the butterbeans had gone to seed. The Chinese cabbage was still going and my girl, Marcy, still hadn’t found much to do with it, except give it away. The tomatoes were still bearing some and they’d be the last to go.

  Still, it had been a good summer for vegetables, and I stood next to the terrace wall and drank the beer. There was a hint of a breeze back there and I felt it drying me. By the time I finished the beer, I’d noticed a flash or two of red among the tomatoes and I went up and did my lumbering dance among the plants and found four small ripe ones I’d missed a couple of days before. It was like finding gold.

  Hump called around nine. I was in front of the TV getting into a rerun I hadn’t seen back in the fall. Or trying to.

  “You busy, Jim?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’ve got a problem. You remember where Eartha lives?”

  I said I did. A couple of times Marcy and I had had drinks and dinner with Hump and Eartha back when they were first starting to date. It was an apartment on Piedmont near 8th.

  “Apartment 12, in case you forgot,” he said.

  “You parked in front of it?”

  “I am now but I won’t be by the time you get here,” he said.

  That was odd. “What’s this about?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” I said.

  It was closer to twenty minutes before I located apartment 12 and drove past and parked in a space a few doors down. The apartments were in the shape of two flat loaves of bread, facing each other. Apartment 12 was on the lower level and there was a light on above the doorway. I wasn’t quite sure what this was all about but if Hump couldn’t talk about it on the phone I didn’t feel too comfortable prancing up the walk and right under that bright light.

  Hump solved it for me. Hump was watching for me and as soon as I reached the head of the walk he switched the outside light off. And the door opened as soon as I touched the doorknob.

  “Come on in, Jim.”

  It was dark in the living room. I could see the large shape of Hump outlined by light from a partly closed doorway straight ahead. Then he reached a pole lamp in the corner and twisted the three-way switch until he got the lowest setting.

  “What is it?”

  “I wish I knew.” He nodded toward the partly closed door. “Suck it up. It’s in the bedroom.”

  I pushed the door open with a toe of a shoe and stepped in. Hump was right. It was a good thing he’d warned me to brace myself. It was a slaughterhouse. There was blood on the bed and all over part of the floor and even along the walls. But with all that blood I didn’t see a body anywhere. I backed out of the room.

  “Who?”

  “Lord knows.”

  “You look?”

  He nodded. From his face I knew he’d made the obvious guess that the blood was Eartha’s. “Not in the bathroom or the closets or anywhere else in the apartment.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “The door was open. I just walked in.”

  I gave him my hard look. “What did you expect to find?” The beast with two backs? I added to myself.

  He shook his head. “What do we do now?”

  “You have anything to do with this?”

  “No.”

  “Then we call the police,” I said.

  “It’ll look bad for me—I find this and I call you instead of the police.”

  “Can’t help that. At least we call them. It’s better than walking away from it and having somebody tell the police they saw this black dude enter and later he was joined by a white guy and they left. That way you’re really in trouble.”

  “I guess you’re right, but I don’t like it.”

  I located the phone on a table next to the sofa. “The bad thing is that Art’s still on vacation. I don’t know which cop who hates me will get the call.”

  “Call them,” Hump said.

  Rex Martin was small and ferret-like. I think they let him stand on his toes when they charted his height back some years when he joined the force. He wore his hair in a stiff brush cut and his wife bought all his clothes for him at Sears. I’d never worked with him. He’d come up from the ranks later. From the way he looked at me, I knew he’d heard about me, and the things he’d heard weren’t going to get me many breaks.

  “Where’s her body?” he asked.

  Hump and I were seated side by side on the sofa and Martin was pacing back and forth in front of us. He was smoking one of those little cigars, the ones with the artificial flavors in them. This one, from the smell of it, might be called Grape Soda. They probably called it Burgundy.

  “This is the way Hump found it,” I said. “And this is the way it was when I got here.”

  “Can’t he talk for himself?” Martin ended his circuit near the open doorway and looked into the bedroom where a lab crew was going over it inch by inch.

  “It was like this when I found it,” Hump said.

  “You and your girl have a spat, huh?”

  Hump shook his head. “I haven’t seen her in some time. There wasn’t any argument or any fight.”

  “But you were close with the girl?”

  “At one time but that was more than a month ago.”

  “She break it off or did you?”

  “Both of us did,” Hump said.

  “Hold out your hands,” Martin said. “Palms down.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let me see the backs of your hands.”

  Hump held out his hands. Martin stepped forward until his knees were against the edge of the coffee table. He took Hump’s fingertips in his hands and lifted them. He took his time over it and it was a long time before he released the hands and backed away. I leaned away with him. I’d done the same thing he had. Not a mark. Not a scratch.

  “You satisfied, Rex?” I asked.

  “Could have used something besides his hands.”

  “You got to have it both ways,” I said.

  “I’ll take it any way I can.”

  A man from the lab crew stopped in the doorway and waited until Martin noticed him. “We’ve got a handprint over by the dresser. It doesn’t look like a girl’s hand. It’s bigger. Probably a man’s. It’s in blood but I think we can use it.”

  Martin nodded at him and turned slowly to face the sofa. “Your handprint?” he asked Hump.

  “No.”

  “We’ll see about that. Hands like yours ought to be easy to match
up.”

  I heard the footsteps coming up the walk to the outside door. Neither Martin nor Hump seemed to be paying any attention. They were too busy trying to out-think each other and their eyes were in a stare-down that neither wanted to lose.

  I was facing the door when it opened and Eartha walked in. Finding us in her living room stunned her and she might have fainted if she hadn’t recognized me and looked past me and found Hump. Even with all that she dropped a huge stack of books she was carrying.

  Martin whirled around and blinked at her. “Who are you?”

  “She’s your body,” I said. I couldn’t resist grinning at him.

  About fifteen minutes later a policeman climbed into the huge trash garbage truck some distance from the back door of Eartha’s apartment. Mixed in with the newspapers and the egg shells and the coffee grounds he found the body of Ed Cross. He was wrapped in a shower curtain from Eartha’s bathroom and he’d been beaten to death. I didn’t look at him myself but I heard the policeman say Cross looked like he’d been run through a meat grinder. And turned into jelly.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Martin didn’t like it but after a time the logic of it all must have penetrated. It didn’t make sense for Hump to have killed Ed Cross, put him in the dumpster and then called me and the police. It would have been much easier to clean up the blood and let it go at that. In a day or two the truck would have backed up, dropped off an empty dumpster, and carted Cross away to the garbage pits to become part of a landfill somewhere.

  So with Martin’s warning that he’d want to talk to Hump in the next day or so, we’d left Eartha’s apartment, we’d driven through Piedmont Park and across to the Virginia-Highland junction. Just on impulse, we’d stopped at George’s for a beer. It’s a beer bar and deli that specializes in Middle Eastern foods.

  Eartha was along because she hadn’t decided yet exactly what she wanted to do. I’d offered to call Marcy and see if Marcy would put her up for a few days. Eartha seemed to appreciate it but I think she was wavering more toward a black girl friend.

  “You do it, Hump?” I asked.