A Talent for Killing Read online

  A TALENT FOR

  KILLING

  RALPH DENNIS

  Copyright © 2019 Adventures in Television, Inc. 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: 1-7324226-3-X

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7324226-3-6

  Published by

  Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Also by Ralph Dennis

  The War Heist

  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

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  A Talent for Killing combines and interweaves two Ralph Dennis manuscripts — the novel Deadman’s Game, which was published in paperback in 1976, and Kane #2, the unpublished, long-lost sequel. Both manuscripts were significantly revised to create this new, standalone novel.

  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

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THIS BOOK

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kane waited. Waiting was a part of a hardfist job. The light was dim, his eyes were watering from the cold, and he knew that he might have to identify Pepper Franklin by the square shape of his shoulders and his swagger-walk when he came.

  If he came.

  It was almost three a.m. and Kane was in his sheltered position, coat collar up, hands flexing in his pockets, bending his knees now and then so they wouldn’t lock up on him. He was so deep in the shadow cast by the porch of the old mansion that he was part of the darkness.

  At exactly midnight, he’d watched the light go out in the front, bedroom window. That meant Pepper Franklin’s wife Esther had given up the waiting and gone to bed. A few minutes later, at a distance in the windy silence, Kane heard the back door close. The cook and the chauffeur — man and wife — scurried down the back steps and did their middle-aged sprint for the servants’ cottage a hundred yards behind the mansion house. It was a routine Kane had noted over the last three nights.

  Pepper Franklin was the unpredictable factor. He wouldn’t return until the last drink was out of the bottle and the last bounce out of the bed. It was his way.

  The spot where Kane stood now, near the high, white columns and the slave-made bricks, had once been the exact center of the old Mack Foster estate. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the Foster mansion and the lands around it had been the showplace of Aiken and the whole South. The Foster Cup had been run the second Sunday of each May on the track near the southeast boundary line. There were polo matches in the field in the center of the track. And in the fall, wealthy men from all over the world hunted dove in Mack Foster’s private preserve while they murmured about wheat and steel and copper.

  But Mack Foster was long dead and his only son, Virgil, had died with a bottle clamped between his knees on a highway outside of Charlotte. Esther, the old man’s daughter, was the last of the family and there wasn’t much of her father in her. Only the hungers and the appetites. She liked young men and she liked to marry them and that and her other follies had brought the estate down to 200 acres and the last fifteen million dollars.

  Esther was a vain woman in her late forties, pale and slender, her hair the color of soot. Her clothes were too young and her makeup was suited for a girl in her twenties. She was a woman who would not let herself grew old. She fought the clock and the years from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night. If she was careful, Kane thought, there would be time enough and money enough for two or three more husbands.

  This time, there would be no large financial settlement for Pepper Franklin. No half a million tax-paid gift. This time she would be free and clear.

  A car came. When the headlights swept across the porch, Kane didn’t move. He was so much a part of the shadow that the lights didn’t touch him. But he closed his eyes and held them that way until he felt the headlights’ brightness and heat fade. Seconds later, eyes open now, Kane watched Pepper Franklin slam the door to the blue Continental and stagger toward the porch steps.

  Franklin was a big man, six-five or so and nearly two-hundred and forty pounds. Even drunk, he carried himself with the swagger of the athlete he’d been a few years back. He’d been a forward on a couple of good North Carolina teams back in the mid-sixties and he’d gone on to play pro ball before he’d met and married Emily. He’d been a man with a kind of heavy grace, a soft touch from fifteen feet in, and stone elbows when the rebounding began.

  Now he was thirty and drunk and bed-tired and there was a beginning sag to his stomach and a puffiness arounds his jowls. He played tennis and handball and spent hours in the steam bath but the mark was on him. Not even the club sunlamp could cover it.

  At the foot of the brick steps, level with Kane, he stopped and fumbled in his pocket for his keys. He’d separated the keys from the thick wad of bills when Kane stepped out of the center of the shadow.

  “Hold still,” Kane said.

  “What?” Franklin blinked at Kane. “A mugging? I’m being mugged right on my front steps?” He laughed and held out the wad of money toward Kane. “Take it. Leave me alone.”

  Kane took the money. He held it in his left hand without looking at it.

  “May Lovell,” he said.

  “What? What did you say?” Franklin’s eyes narrowed and for a brief moment, he almost seemed sober.

  “May Lovell,” Kane said again.

  “Yeah? What about her?”

  Kane shot him twice in the chest.

  The Woodsman Sport .22 made its noise but it might have been limbs breaking off in the high wind. It might have been car doors slamming in the distance.

  Franklin fell back across the brick steps. Kane leaned over him a
nd held the Woodsman Sport about a foot away from him and shot him four more times. All four struck him in the face. Two slugs hit bone and remained in the skull. The other two passed through soft tissue and splattered against the bricks.

  By sunrise Kane had left Aiken behind him. Driving well below the speed limit, he crossed the line into Georgia and headed for Atlanta.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jackson Carter. Certified Public Accountant, that was in raised brass lettering on the door, and there was a fulltime secretary, a Miss Sarah Timmers, who sat behind an almost empty desk in the reception room and answered the phone. In the two years she’d worked for Carter, she’d done no billing and she’d written no letters. The late model IBM Selectric on the typewriter wing of the desk had not had its ribbon changed since its purchase from the Peachtree Business Company. What Miss Timmers did not know was that she’d been hired on the basis of the single call when she’d phoned for an interview. Her interview. Her voice had a flat, unpleasant, nasal quality. Carter, hearing it for the first time, drew a child’s version of a five-pointed star beside her name.

  Sarah Timmers had one real duty. She answered the phone. If the caller asked for an appointment so that he could discuss with Mr. Carter some tax work or consultation over his company’s books, her answer was always the same: “Mr. Carter is not taking any new accounts this year.” The caller, without being able to place it exactly, would always turn away from his phone with the definite sense that he’d been insulted.

  The reception room where Miss Timmers spent her lonely mornings and afternoons might have been created by a film designer on instructions from a producer: “No ostentation, a feeling of bedrock honesty and reliability.” The walls were cream colored with a slightly darker molding. The carpet was dark green and the desk heavy and traditional. And finally, there was Miss Timmers: plump and appetizing as a wax grape.

  Jackson Carter’s office was quite different. There was a large window spread across the rear of the office so that during the day, when the drapes were open, no artificial light was needed. Light poured across the desk and illuminated a huge painting on the wall facing the desk. It was an abstract, about four feet by four feet, a massive brawl of a painting in which the muddy reds and blacks struggled with the slant of the sun.

  The desk was oak, shaped like a diseased kidney. It had a dull natural finish without a gleam to it. Like props on a stage set, there were usually a few file folders on the blotter. From time -to-time, those folders were dusted and moved about. Along one whole wall, to Jackson’s left when he sat behind his desk, was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled to capacity with a collection of books on business, on Federal and state tax laws, and accounting procedures.

  To his right, there was an antique cabinet. The top three shelves were lined with decanters of whiskey, brandy and gin. The bottom shelf was shared by an ice bucket and a set of Swedish crystal.

  There was a door beside the cabinet. The door led into a bathroom and it was never left open. Near this door, on the desk side of the doorway, a mirror with a discolored pewter frame was embedded in the wall. The mirror seemed a bit out of place. Occasionally, Carter paused before the mirror to brush his thin hair back or straighten his tie. To any guest in the office when he did this, it seemed to hint at some secret vanity in him.

  It was eight thirty at night. The drape covered the window. The painting was only a blob and a shadow. A wreath of indirect light defined Carter and the woman who sat across the desk from him. She was an attractive woman, a woman just past forty. The mink coat she wore into the office had been thrown carelessly over the back of the chair, which matched the one she sat in. Her dress was black wool, with long sleeves and a hemline that barely reached her knees. They were plump knees and Carter stared at them with a bland, undisguised interest. Her face, while sagging a bit, still had some good years left, her ash blonde hair had each strand in place, and her makeup was the proper blend of taste and recent fashion.

  Jackson Carter was forty-three, a game rooster of a little man with more than a touch of the dandy in him. He was five-six in his tailored lift shoes and his suits were made for him, six a year, from the patterns kept in the J. Press shop in New Haven. His face was lined and grooved and his eyes bulged, as if the top lids were deformed or the result of some comic operation. His face was as composed as that of an undertaker.

  “I think,” Carter said, “that you will find this of some interest.” He leaned forward and placed the folded newspaper on the front edge of the desk. The paper was the Blue Streak edition of the Atlanta Journal, opened to page 6A.

  The woman hesitated for a count of four to five, vanity struggling with the truth of age. In the end, she opened her purse and brought out a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses.

  Kane watched them through the two-way mirror. The room where he sat, beyond the pewter framed mirror, was little more than an enlarged closet. The molded plastic chair was comfortable enough and the air flow from the ventilator kept him warm in the winter and cool enough in the muggy Atlanta summers. A brass ashtray and a plastic glass of water were on the low shelf in front of him. A cigarette burned in the ashtray notch, forgotten by him, as he watched Jackson Carter and the woman begin the terminal interview.

  From the sparse details in the newspaper article, it was obvious that the news had reached the paper too late for much to be made of the killing.

  Robbery-Murder Of Aiken Sportsman

  The woman read the two-paragraph news story once and, without looking up from the paper, read it a second time. When she lowered the newspaper and placed it on the desk, she said, “I don’t know I’m supposed to feel.”

  “Relieved, perhaps, Mrs. Lovell. Or satisfied.”

  “I suppose I am.” She’d forgotten to remove her glasses and now she blinked behind them. And then, in a small voice, she added. “It was justice, wasn’t it?”

  “For me, there is no doubt at all,” Carter said. He unlocked the center desk drawer and lifted out a file folder. He placed the file on toy of me newspaper. “This is the full report. It is fully documented. You may read it here in this office or not at all. As soon as you have read it, it will be burned.”

  “I understand.” She picked up the folder and held it in both hands. “I would like to meet Mr. Kane and thank him.”

  “That isn’t possible.” Carter pushed back his chair and stood up. “Mr. Kane is out of town.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jackson Carter rounded the desk and stopped beside her. His eyes rubbed across her knees while he said, “At any rate, I believe you can understand why that would not be good business.”

  She opened the file and began to read the first page.

  “I’ll be in the outer office,” Carter said, “if you have any questions.” He stopped, half turned away. “And, of course, there is the matter of the final half of the payment.”

  Kane stubbed out the cigarette when the smoke began to irritate his eyes. That done, he leaned forward and watched Mrs. Lovell read the report he’d written, night by night, over the last two weeks. There were no gaps and no blanks in his investigation.

  Mrs. Lovell was reading the deposition of the abortionist when Kane stood up and walked to the door. Hand on the knob, he pivoted and looked at her once more. He burned the image of her into the secret places of his inner eye. She was crying now, hardly aware that she was, as she read the old doctor’s admission of the bungling he’d committed on the body of seventeen-year-old May Lovell. How May Lovell had died on the table in his office that night because Pepper Franklin would not let him, when the massive bleeding began, take the girl to the hospital. How he and Pepper Franklin had taken the dead girl, nude and without identification, from the office and left her on a trash dump.

  Kane left his little room before she finished reading the report and went down a flight of stairs to the parking lot.

  At a bar far out Peachtree Road, Kane ordered Bisquit and a cup of black coffee. While he sipped the cognac and fol
lowed it with gulps of coffee, a young girl down the bar watched him.

  She wasn’t a hooker, just a girl who hadn’t found herself that right man since she moved to Atlanta from Charlotte a year ago. What she saw was an athletic-looking man in his mid-thirties. A man in an expensive, hard-finish gray tweed jacket and dark slacks. Black hair worn shorter than most of the young men she knew wore theirs. Slate-gray eyes and a thin mouth that she knew, with a brush of chill, had the promise of some kind of cruelty behind it. And though the man interested her, though she knew how empty her bed was, she decided against smiling at him. She left most of a drink and walked out, heading for another bar down the road, a place where all the young men were liars and talked over their heads about this deal and that one and told dirty jokes that she didn’t think were that funny. And usually, even before the first hour had passed, they made their play. It was the bitterness of reality: long-term things like love would have to wait.

  Kane saw the girl. He read the strong interest in her face and he felt the stirring in himself. Still there after she passed, the soft traces of perfume circled him long after the door closed behind her.

  He told himself that it didn’t matter. But the honest part of himself knew that it did. Sourness and ashes were in him. And he knew that somehow she’d read that part of him. He tossed back the last of the Bisquit and shook his head at the bartender as he moved toward him.

  He left the bar and drove home. A sadness in him like a single flute note.

  It would be a few days before he’d be ready for people.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The room was dark. On one wall, the hands of a lighted clock placed the time at five after ten. It could have been morning or night. There were no windows in the room, no way for the light or the darkness to give their clues.

  When the buzzer sounded, the man with his head down on the desk stretched out his right hand and pressed two buttons on the metal strip that ran down the right side of the desk.

  “Yes?”

  By the time he spoke, the band of lights above him had lost their flutter and he’d pushed himself upright. His name was Whistler. He was a blocky man in his early fifties. His hair was light brown, tending toward red. It was thinning and in time he’d have to consider a hairpiece. He was five-ten. Not a tall man by many standards but tall enough so that he didn’t have to struggle against the small man’s pride and acrid temper.