Down Among the Jocks Page 2

  “Not on the baddest day I ever had. Not that I wouldn’t have taken my shot and kicked his ass if I’d found him. I would have. For some reason, today he just wasn’t any of the places he was supposed to be. And I looked in all of them.” Hump turned in the booth and looked toward the rear of George’s, back toward the ladies’ room. “You think she’s all right?”

  Eartha got the full impact of it while she was sipping her beer. She’d left for the bathroom at a fast walk.

  “I think so,” I said. “I think all that blood edged in on her. After the shock she just remembered whose blood it was.”

  “There was enough of it,” Hump said.

  “A down-home country pig bleeding.” I leaned out of the booth and waved at Sam Najjar. When I caught his eye, I held up two fingers. He brought over two Buds.

  “What do you think of those Braves?” Sam asked.

  “One day they pitch and the next day they hit,” I said. Sam nodded and went back behind the bar to add the Buds to the tab sheet. I looked back at Hump. “How big would you say Cross was?”

  “6’ 1” and maybe 190.”

  “Dead weight,” I said. “It would take somebody pretty big to lug him out to the dumpster.”

  “Or two people,”

  Eartha, not too steady on her feet, came around the back end of the bar and walked toward our booth. She was a damned pretty woman and even a couple of the rednecks at the bowling machine stared at her with a kind of stunned admiration. Hump stood up and let her slide into the seat next to the wall.

  “You feel okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Even though she tried, the smile was brittle around the edges. “Really I am.”

  I said, “You mind if I ask you a few questions, Eartha?”

  Hump’s head jerked around at me. I think he knew what some of the questions were going to be and he didn’t like it. “Jim, you think you ought to?”

  “Don’t be fooled by the fact Martin let you go. You’re still his main man.”

  “I don’t mind,” Eartha said. She put a long slender hand on Hump’s huge forearm.

  “Martin’s going to ask the same questions tomorrow and you might as well know what they’re going to be.”

  “Ask your questions,” Hump said.

  “How long have you known Ed Cross?”

  “About a month.”

  “Intimate?” I asked. As soon as it was out I saw how she looked toward Hump and I tried to take it back. “I’ll withdraw that one. You don’t have to answer.”

  “I don’t mind. Yes, intimate, very intimate.”

  “You know why Cross was at your apartment?”

  “He had a key and sometimes he’d drop by and wait for me. The odd thing was that I didn’t expect him tonight. You see, when I saw him last night he said he was going out of town for a few days.”

  “You know where?”

  “I don’t think he said.” She leaned forward and put her face in her hand, the arm braced against the tabletop. “He went out of town several times to New York. I guess I just assumed he was going there again.”

  “You know his reasons for the trip?”

  “He was writing a book.”

  That jolted Hump. “Him write a book? He couldn’t spell his own name.”

  “He wasn’t exactly writing it himself. He had a tape recorder at his apartment and he’d spend a week or two talking into it and then he’d take the tapes up to New York. A writer in New York would polish them and put them into some kind of shape.”

  “You ever hear any of the tapes?”

  She shook her head. “He said they were pretty rough, not for little girls like me.”

  “Rough? How?”

  “He said he was naming names and giving the motel room numbers.”

  I got it. Another of those inside looks at some sport. The kind that the jock-sniffers like to read. “You know the name of the writer he was working with in New York?”

  “Ron. That’s all he told me.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked. “No last name?”

  “If he ever mentioned it, it didn’t mean anything to me.”

  “How about the publishing company? Was there a contract?”

  “I think it was something like Wayman or Wyman. One of those, and Brown.”

  That would be easy enough to find out. I could call the reference room at the library in the morning and they’d look it up for me. With that done, since I wasn’t working on it, it would be police business and I’d call Art Maloney even on his vacation and tell him what I knew about the New York trips.

  “One thing more,” Eartha said. “A section of the book is coming out in this week’s Sports Illustrated.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Hump.

  “Today’s Monday. I think they get delivered through the mails tomorrow and they’re on the stands on Wednesday.”

  “We ought to be able to get the writer’s name and the publishing company from that.”

  Hump took his other hand and placed it over the hand Eartha had left on his forearm. I was surprised by the gentleness of his touch. “Then he must have been through with the book.”

  “Almost. He was writing the last chapter. He said the chapter was about being a Northerner who’d moved South. About moving to Atlanta and starting his life over.”

  “That sounds tame.”

  “I don’t think it was. You see, I think he was writing about the sports establishment here, the people he’d met since he came to town.”

  “Names and motel room numbers?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “You have a key to Cross’s apartment?”

  “No, but I know the doorman.”

  “The police will be there, won’t they?” Hump’s eyes flicked up at me.

  “Maybe not.” I threw back the last of my beer. “You think you know the doorman well enough to get us in?”

  “I can try,” she said.

  While they walked out and stood looking down into the deli counter I waited until Sam added up the tab for the table. I had him add a pack of smokes and paid it. Then I joined Hump and Eartha and admired the huge wet feta cheese with them.

  I followed Hump’s car back across town. At one stop light I was close enough to see them through the rear window. They were close together and I think her head was on his shoulder.

  The apartment where Ed Cross had lived is one of those huge brick playing blocks on West Peachtree. This one was near 10th Street. From the parking lot across the street I could put the rent up somewhere near five hundred a month. That might not be much in New York or one of the other big cities but that’s high for Atlanta. It gave me a new look at Cross. He must have had some cash.

  Eartha and Hump reached the apartment entrance before I did. They were talking to the black doorman when I walked up on them.

  “Dead?” the doorman said. “Dead?”

  I’d seen the same stunned look on a lot of faces when John Kennedy had died. Another time on the face of a young black girl when she heard the news flash that Sam Cook had been shot.

  “I left some things in his apartment,” Eartha said. “The police will be coming by and I don’t want them to find …” She lowered her eyes and let it trail off and the young black understood.

  “I don’t see anything against it,” he said.

  He took a huge clip of keys from his pocket and we rode the elevator up to the sixth floor with him. The young black kept cutting his eyes toward Hump and I made a guess that Eartha, nervous as she was, hadn’t introduced them. I took care of that by giving my name and then giving Hump’s. If he’d had any misgivings about letting us into Cross’s apartment they vanished when he shook Hump’s hand. I never get over how much a jock or an ex-jock can get away with.

  He unlocked the door to 602 and stepped aside. “I can’t stay with you. I got to be back by the door.”

  I twisted the knob and pushed the door open. “We appreciate it,” I began and then I found the light switch and flipped it. One
look and I called him back. “You’d better take a look at this.”

  It looked like somebody had had a pillow fight, using the furniture. Pieces of furniture had been moved away from the wall and all the drawers had been pulled out and the contents dumped on the floor. And then, I thought, kicked around.

  I didn’t see a tape recorder anywhere. I walked through the mess and looked into the bedroom. The search had stretched into there, clothes thrown all about. I walked back to Eartha. “Where’d he do his taping?”

  “In the kitchen. He kept the recorder on the table in there. At least, that’s where it was every time I was here.”

  I pushed the kitchen door open and went in. The recorder was on the table, the cover off and thrown across the room. There was an empty take-up reel on the recorder. I walked around, stepping over the contents of several kitchen drawers. I saw a few empty tape boxes but no tapes.

  The doorman stood in the center of the living room and stared at the wreckage.

  “Anybody strange come in the building tonight?”

  “Not past me while I was here.”

  “Other ways into the building you know of?”

  “One,” he said. “It’s a freight entrance that leads to the basement. It’s the one people use when they move into the apartments or they move out.”

  “And a freight elevator comes all the way up to the apartments?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “You mind if we check it?”

  He nodded. On the way past Eartha and Hump, I told them to look around but not to touch anything.

  Hump said, “Looks like somebody’s hunting something.”

  “But what?”

  He shrugged.

  The doorman and I rode the freight elevator down to the basement stop. In one section there was the heating unit. The rest of the huge floor area was separated into wired-in cages. Through the mesh I could see luggage and packing cases and some pieces of furniture.

  I followed him through the narrow aisle between the rows of cages and we reached the rear entrance. The doors seemed locked but when he pushed at them they swung open. I took his flashlight and looked at the outside of the doors. I could see the scratch marks and dents where some kind of tool had been used to spring the lock.

  “Well,” I said, giving him back the flashlight, “they didn’t come past you.”

  “I know that.” He looked at me with a level, steady seriousness. “Wonder what they were looking for, to go to all this trouble.”

  I could have made a guess, but there wasn’t any percentage in that. It could be anything, from cash in the apartment right on down to medicine in the bathroom.

  On the elevator, headed back up to the sixth floor, I offered him a smoke and said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather the police didn’t know we’d been here.”

  “That might be possible,” he said.

  “Maybe you could find the rear doors broken open.”

  “On my next rounds,” he said. He looked at his watch. “In about ten minutes.”

  “After that, what’s the drill?”

  “I call all the apartments and ask if anybody’s been robbed. Then I check all the apartments where there’s no answer.”

  “Might take as much as an hour,” I said.

  “More or less.”

  Eartha and Hump were waiting in the hallway for us. Eartha had a rolled-up piece of clothing under her arm. It looked sheer and flimsy enough to be a nightgown.

  We split up in the parking lot. Hump drove Eartha out to her girlfriend’s apartment, where she’d be spending the next few days, and I drove home. I turned on the tube and got the bottle of gin out of the cabinet and a dusty bottle of Bitter Lemon from under the sink. I mixed myself a drink and watched a bit of a summer replacement. It was getting toward late news time when the headlights ran across my front window. I opened the door and found that it was Hump.

  As soon as he closed the door behind him, he turned and tossed a magazine to me.

  “Sports Illustrated.” He said.

  “How’d you get it this time of night?”

  “Back in high school we used to plunder the garbage cans in back of the post office. The cans used to be full of all kinds of mags with their address labels damaged.”

  “I can’t see you rooting around in garbage cans tonight.” I opened the magazine and looked for the table of contents.

  “You’d be right about that.” He looked at my gin and tonic. “You got any more of that?”

  “Just plain tonic,” I said. “But plenty of gin.”

  He brought back a glass of ice and a bottle of tonic. While he mixed himself a drink I flipped back to page 42. The excerpt was titled “But There Are Sundays Once a Week” and it was from a new book, All of It Ain’t on the Field. It was written by Ed Cross with Ron Hardee and it was to be published by Wyman and Brown, Inc.

  I creased the pages to hold the place and passed it to Hump.

  Hump said, “You never asked how I got the mag.”

  “All right. How?”

  “I went to the old post office on Marietta and knocked on this door and I told this guy I knew what I wanted and he damaged a label for me.”

  I added a bit of tonic and a shot of gin to my glass. “I don’t know why we’re going to all this trouble. We don’t even have a client.”

  “I might be the client,” Hump said.

  “Getting shaky?”

  “Some.”

  I stood up. “In that case maybe we’d better call this Hardee stud in New York and see what he knows, if anything.”

  “You or me?”

  “You,” I said. “He’s probably a jock-sniffer and if he is, then he’s heard of you.”

  We took out drinks into the bedroom. It took him three calls to get the right Hardee. He got some heated words from the wrong numbers. New Yorkers aren’t very friendly anyway but at night they seem to start looking for new and better curse words.

  When he had the right one I leaned in and put my ear close to the receiver.

  “You the guy writing the book with Ed Cross?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Hump Evans down in Atlanta.”

  “You the Hump Evans who was at Cleveland?”

  “I’m the one. Look, I’m calling for a reason. You might not have heard yet. Somebody killed Ed Cross tonight.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Not a bit. He got beat to death in a girl’s apartment.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  I tapped Hump on the shoulder and pointed at the receiver.

  “Look, Jim Hardman knows about this and he wants to talk to you.” He passed the phone to me.

  “Say it’s curiosity,” I said. “I used to be a cop and I can’t help hearing the sirens now and then. A girl told us Ed Cross was supposed to be out of town today. She thought he might be going to New York. Did you expect him up there?”

  “He was supposed to fly up. He called this morning to say that he thought the last chapter was dull and he wanted to add a few more things that might liven it up.”

  “That means you don’t have the last chapter?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Might be a problem,” I said. “The doorman over at Cross’s apartment says somebody broke in and searched the place into a mess.”

  “You know if there’s a tape?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Now you’ve got me worried.” He was silent for a long moment and I could hear a radio in the background. “It looks like I might have to fly down there on the first flight I can get in the morning.”

  “Is the tape that important?”

  “It might not be to Ed any more but it is to me. You see, there’s a big advance involved. We got half when we signed the contract and the other half gets paid when the book’s finished and accepted. And I need that tape to round out the book.”

  “It might be hard to find.”

  “Stop me if I’m wrong. You two seem in
volved for some reason. Can you meet me when I fly in?”

  I looked at Hump and he nodded.

  “We can meet you.” I gave him the area code and my phone number. He said he’d call back as soon as he had a flight booked and an arrival time.

  Hump stood in the bedroom doorway while I spiked my drink one more time. “I wonder what’s on that tape.”

  “You’re making a leap,” I said.

  “Screw that shit about leaps. He gets killed in Eartha’s apartment and not long after that or about the same time somebody tears up his place. You’re trying to say there’s no connection?”

  “No proven one,” I said. “And anyway, what’s on the tape?”

  “That’s my question. Maybe Eartha gave us the answer. Real names and motel room numbers.”

  “Here in Atlanta?”

  “Might be.”

  Hardee called a few minutes later and said he’d booked a seat on an Eastern flight that would arrive at Hartsfield at 10:10 the next morning.

  He was a little man, dwarfed by the other passengers. I put his height at about 5’ 1” at the most. A dandy in a light gray suit and a paisley tie with a swirl of dark colors on it, white shoes with a silver buckle, straight brown hair touching his collar, and a tan that might have been Fire Island.

  He walked straight up to Hump and held out his hand. “I’d know you anywhere.”

  I got his bag and we walked out of the terminal and across the street to the parking lot. Hardee waited until I was on the expressway headed back toward town.

  “You know Ed?” he asked from the back seat.

  I shook my head.

  “I knew him,” Hump said.

  “Like him?”

  “You got to be kidding.”

  “We agree on that,” Hardee said. “He was a bastard.”

  I looked at him in the rear-view mirror. “Why do the book with him, then?”

  “You’ve heard about eating, haven’t you?”

  “Somewhere,” I said.

  “The publisher came to me. Cross had started the book and there was a lot of vitality to it but it was almost illiterate. They needed somebody who’d shape the book without taking the vitality out of it. The money was right, even when it got split a couple of ways. And when we farmed out the section to Sports Illustrated, I thought we were off and running.”