Pimp for the Dead Page 7

  “Not asleep yet?”

  “Working toward it,” he said. “I might make it, if people stopped calling me.”

  “I found the apartment where the two girls lived. Also found an envelope with a few thousand dollars in it. Probably unreported crotch money.”

  “Let me have the address,” Art said.

  I gave it to him and said I’d wait until he arrived before I left. I hung up and, still hearing the shower running in the bathroom, I left the apartment, the door cracked slightly, and hurried out to my car. I locked the diary and the address book in the glove compartment. The shower was still running when I eased my way back into the apartment. I took the brown envelope into the kitchen with me and found a jar of instant. I put on a saucepan of water. Edwin came in a few minutes later, while I was making a cup. I got a second cup and made him one, too.

  “It seems … well … odd being in Carol’s apartment, the way things are now.”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  “I’m not sure I want to stay here.”

  “You might not be able to, anyway. The police are on their way over here now, and they might not let you.”

  “It’s just as well.”

  “The time you stayed here before, did the girls use this apartment for business?”

  “No. Carol said this was their hideaway. They didn’t want anything here to tie them to the street.”

  Art showed up a few minutes later. He had red eyes, and there were dark pouches under them. I passed him the envelope, and he looked in to make sure it was money, after all.

  “You check the other bedroom?”

  I shook my head. I put my cup in the sink and got ready to leave.

  “Where now?” Art asked.

  “Hump and I are going to look for Harry Falk.”

  I left him asking Edwin Spinks some of the same questions I’d already asked. In the living room, I called Hump. He said he’d been trying to reach me for an hour or so. I lowered my voice, in case Art might be listening, and said I’d be by his place in a hour.

  Part way out to Emory University, I stopped off to make a call at a service station. The call was to Dr. Fred Clemson at the English department. The secretary said Dr. Clemson wasn’t expected at his office until about two-thirty. The seminar in early English drama wasn’t until three-thirty, and he’d arrive his usual one hour early to drink coffee with the students in his office. She seemed defensive, like she thought I might be a textbook salesman who’d bother Fred. He had that way with women, and I guess I must be the only man in Atlanta who knew what a bad-ass Clemson had been in his youth, back in the World War Two days.

  Bridgewater Drive is just a few blocks past the Emory campus. It’s a kind of faculty row, the houses not exactly alike, but nothing radical, either. I turned onto it and followed it for a couple of blocks. I coasted to a stop in front of 722. The house was sort of Irish cottage by way of a Hollywood designer’s daydreams.

  I unlocked the glove compartment and got out the diary and address book. I didn’t bother with the front door. I walked up the driveway instead, and reached the left rear corner of his house. His study was there. The drapes were drawn, but I could see light past a break in the center seam. I reached up and rapped on the window.

  The irritation faded from his face when he recognized me. He grinned and pointed toward the back of the house, where the rear entrance was. By the time I got there, the door was open and he was waving me inside.

  “Jim, dammit, come on in here.”

  “Don’t mean to interrupt,” I said. “The secretary said you have a seminar this afternoon.”

  “I have plenty of time.” He led me down a narrow hallway to his study. “I assume you have some problem.”

  The way he said it, I knew if I hadn’t had a problem it would have ruined his day. Fred’s tall and thin and graying now, and scholarly to the nth degree, but back in the 1940’s he’d been a real hotshot in Naval intelligence with a specialty in codes. Somehow, after those days, the picky shit with scholarship must be a bit of a comedown.

  “A small one,” I said. I passed the diary to him. It was probably the way the book was bound or the back was broken. Anyway, it opened to the same entry I’d puzzled over when I’d first found it, the one for February 6.

  “Ah …” Holding the diary in one hand, he used the other hand to clear a space on his overloaded desk. He sat down and I stood behind him and looked over his shoulder. He stared down at the diary entry for a few moments, then turned and grinned at me. “It’s a cipher that a child might have made up. You remember the coded messages on the wrapper ends of Merita Bread, back in the 1940’s?”

  I did. Merita Bread had sponsored the Lone Ranger on radio back then, and after you sent off for the decoding ring, you could work out the secret messages hidden on the wrapper. It always turned out to be something on the moral side. “Obey your mother” or “Cross the street only with the green light.”

  “There are two things you can do with the plain text … the message. You can work out some way of transposing the letters, jumbling them so they don’t seem to mean anything, or you can devise some method of substitution. That is, a certain letter or number stands for another letter.”

  “Which is it?”

  “It’s a simple combination of both,” he said. He drew a legal pad toward him and flipped over a few pages to find a clean sheet. He wrote down the top line of the February 6 entry.

  t1y2ds 4m2h 4d1yt 3thw ym 2r34dp.

  “Notice the fifth word over … the ym? It’s a dead giveaway. It shows how the transposition works. If the person who wrote this was a bit brighter, he or she would have devised some way of eliminating two-letter words. Just left them out completely. As it is, the fifth word is my, and it shows us that we’re working with a code where the first letter of each word is moved to the end of the word.” He dug under a pile of papers and found a pack of smokes. He lit one and blew the smoke up at me. “The person who wrote this diary … would you say they hoped it would stand up against some kind of professional scrutiny? Or is it just to keep the casual peeper away?”

  “The casual peeper, I’d think.” I took a minute and filled him in on Joy Lynn, and how she’d died.

  “So it’s just to keep a pimp or a roommate from getting their curiosity satisfied?”

  “My guess.”

  “There are no vowels showing. We do have numbers … in this line 1, 2, 3 and 4.” He pointed to a line below. “And a 5 here. Five vowels and five numerals used. There are ways they could be shifted around, or they could be used straight. These look straight to me. Just a straight substitution. And that makes sense. With something like this, she’d want to write it out with as little trouble as possible. She wouldn’t want to have to keep referring to a code sheet. That’s why the transposition is so simple. Now, let’s try the straight-down-the-line numeral-for-vowel substitution.”

  He wrote down t1y2ds. “Let’s shift the s back to the beginning of the word, let’s assume the 1 is a substitution for the first vowel, a, the 2 for the vowel e, and we have the first word, stayed.”

  His pen darted over the page. He translated the first line in a matter of seconds. Stayed home today with my period.

  “The hooker’s day off,” I said.

  “You want me to translate some more?”

  “A waste of your time.” But on second thought, I reached in my coat pocket and got out the address book. “Does this use the same code?”

  He opened it to the first page. “The same.” He wrote down the heading, which was underlined. 4hnj 3stl. “John List. What does that mean?”

  “You are an innocent,” I said. “It’s how the hooker gets off the street. She puts together a list of steady customers. And when the list is long enough, she just puts her ass in the chair next to the phone and services the ones from the list and any new ones who get recommended to her. No more being hassled by cops, or hanging around street corners.”

  Fred put the diary and
the address book together and handed them to me. “Next time, I hope it’ll be a more complex code.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He followed me to the back door. “Of course, if you think there are going to be some juicy parts, I’ll run off a decoding for you.”

  “I think it’ll be dull, dull, dull,” I said.

  He was shaking his head sadly while I thanked him. He was still in the doorway when I rounded the corner of the house and headed down the driveway to my car.

  Hump and I spent the afternoon on the Strip. If Harry Falk was still around he was well hidden, or nobody wanted to make a few bucks telling us where he was. Around five, we called it an afternoon and decided we’d try again later, when the nightcrawlers came out.

  After I dropped Hump, I stopped by a Kroger’s and bought some salad things, some charcoal and lighter, a couple of steaks, and a few cans of cat food. At a wine store down the street, I bought a reasonable bottle of Beaujolais.

  I drove over to Marcy’s apartment and sat in the car, in the parking lot, until Marcy drove up. I kidnapped her right on the spot and drove straight over to my house. Marcy played with the gray mama cat and the kittens, and then she went in and started making the salad. I was out in the yard, sweeping the spider webs from the grill and trying not to step on the mama cat, who was underfoot when the phone rang.

  Marcy took the call and yelled at me from the back door.

  Art was on the line. “You have any luck with Harry Falk today?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “I might have something,” he said. “A crew from the city parks department was working over at the lake in Piedmont Park. They were out in a boat, putting out the ropes that mark off the area where the little kids swim. They think they sighted a body on the bottom. I’m headed that way now. You know what Falk looks like. It might be worth a look.”

  I said I’d be there about the time he was.

  Before I left, I got out the diary and told Marcy that de-coding it was a lot more educational than watching TV. She was working over the first entry when I left and headed for Piedmont Park.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Piedmont Park lake is artificial. It was created for the 1895 Cotton States Exposition, which had a bit of everything, including President Cleveland and Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show. After the Exposition there was some serious haggling about the value of the land, but in the end, quite a bit of it was set aside as a park. Now there are baseball fields, tennis courts, greenhouses, a golf course and the lake.

  I found Art seated on a bench at the edge of the lake. He nodded and patted the empty half of the bench to his right. “The envelope from the Barrow girl’s room had $8,950 in it.”

  “You find one in the dwarf girl’s room?”

  “It had $6,400 in it.”

  I looked out toward the lake. There was a rowboat out in the middle of it. One swimmer in trunks and a tank-suit top manned it, leaning over the side of the boat and staring down into the water. Now and then a face, masked by scuba gear, would pop up, remain on the surface for a few moments, and then tip over and dive out of sight. All around the fringes of the lake, back from the roadblocks the police had set up, people were watching the drama in the center of the lake. It was probably better than going home and getting ready for an evening of reruns on the TV.

  “What happens to the money?” I asked.

  “I.R.S. will be interested. So will the state. What’s left might end up in the estates.” Art cut his eyes toward me. “You help yourself to any of it?”

  “Wish I had.” I shook my head. “I’m being paid.”

  “But tempted?”

  “A bit.” I nodded out in the direction of the rowboat and the divers. “What makes you think this might be Falk?”

  “A guess. He dropped out of sight a little too well.”

  “And a day or so after his stable got butchered. It figures.”

  “Still, it’s a long shot,” Art said. He stood up. “I think the divers have it.”

  Near the rowboat, two heads were out of the water now. Between them they appeared to be supporting something large and awkward. In the next five minutes, they tried a couple of times to get the object into the rowboat. Each time, the boat came close to capsizing. After the second attempt, one of the divers waved the rowboat away. The oars biting in deep, the boat moved ahead of the divers toward the lake’s edge, where we were. The two divers followed and, as they got closer, I could hear their grunts of exertion. The boat arrived at the grassy ledge first, and Art walked over and talked to the swimmer who manned it. From my position at the bench, I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  Art came back to the bench, shaking his head. “It might not be Falk, after all. He says it’s two bodies, a guy and a girl.”

  “How …?”

  “Tied together.”

  As the divers neared the shore, Art moved toward them, and this time I followed. The two attendants from the meat wagon hurried over and motioned me out of the way, so they could spread the tarp. The divers, breath rasping now, pulled the bodies to the front edge of the tarp and stood there, bent over and gagging. The meat wagon attendants took over then and pulled the bodies the rest of the way.

  It was Shakespeare’s beast with the two backs. Both bodies were naked. They’d been tied together face to face and groin to groin, using a heavy nylon cord. I could see the water-washed and puckered bullet holes in both of them. It looked like somebody had used about half a box of shells on them. I couldn’t believe they’d been that hard to kill.

  “Jim,” Art said.

  I stepped onto the tarp. It crackled under my feet. The way they were positioned, the girl on top, I couldn’t get a good look at the man. I leaned this way and that. Finally, an impatient attendant grabbed the girl by the hair and pulled her head to the side. I got my long look then, and at the same time I had a few moments to peer at the girl.

  I straightened up. “I think it’s Falk,” I said, “but that’s on the basis of a short look at him at the Pizza House.”

  Art met me at the edge of the tarp. “And the girl?”

  “That makes it more than a guess. I had a longer look at her. I think she’s the girl who was at Falk’s place Saturday night. Probably going to be part of his new stable.”

  Flash bulbs cracked behind me. I didn’t look around.

  “Getting rough,” Art said. “Two hookers, one pimp and one possible apprentice.”

  “The rumor making more sense now?”

  “I’m still fighting it,” Art said.

  I looked back, out at the lake. “How’d they get out there?”

  “The rowboat. The people from Parks found the chain cut. At first, they just assumed some freaks did it, so they could joy ride on the lake when the park was closed.”

  “But no way to know whether they were dropped in early Sunday morning or early this morning?”

  “Not until the medical examiner does his work.”

  I forced myself to turn and look at the bodies on the tarp. The photographer had finished, and now they were cutting the nylon cord and prying the bodies apart. “It’s obscene,” I said. “Especially if it’s just a warning. Pay your union dues, or this happens.”

  “If it’s that,” Art said. “I’ve got a stop to make. You want to tag along?”

  “Where?”

  “I found out Falk has a wife … a widow now. Might as well see if she knows anything.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve seen enough of the Falks for one day.”

  “Is that all of it?”

  “I’ve got two steaks, and the charcoal’s not even lit yet.”

  “Marcy?”

  I nodded. “Getting hungry and mean.”

  I got the charcoal lit and went into the kitchen. From inside the kitchen, I tried the light over the back steps. It was still working. That meant I wouldn’t have to do the cooking in the dark. Marcy was at the kitchen table, bent over the diary and a pad of writing paper she’d found
somewhere.

  “How’s it going?”

  “It’s getting easier.” Marcy looked up. “But I don’t think I’d want to do this for a living.”

  I got out the cork puller and eased the cork out of the Beaujolais. “When does the diary start?”

  “July of last year.”

  I found the two wine glasses where she’d put them, and poured us each a half glass. I sat down at the table across from her and read what she’d decoded so far:

  July 7, 1972:I didn’t want to go tonight and Harry got mad with me. He says he loves me but he is not going to put up with the way I am acting. First we had a big fight and screamed and yelled and then we made love. He told me no matter what I thought I was his bottom woman and after a few more months we would have enough money to go to Spain and live there for two or three years just like rich people.

  I want to believe him but it is hard. Afterwards I got dressed and he dropped me on the corner of North Avenue and Peachtree. I tricked ten times and made three hundred but I told him seven times and held back ninety dollars. That is just in case he is lying to me.

  It was after three when I got home.

  When I turned the page over, I looked up and saw Marcy watching me. She took the page and looked at it. “Jim? What’s a bottom woman?”

  “It means the main woman. A pimp might have three or four or five girls working for him, and he might be screwing all of them to keep them happy. But usually he’s got his strongest tie with one of them. That’s his bottom woman.”

  “So it’s part of the con?”

  “It could be the truth.” But I wasn’t really thinking about the conversation about a bottom woman. I was thinking about the almost $9,000 in the envelope in Joy Lynn’s pillow. If she was putting aside $90 a night, and had been for nine or ten months, $9,000 sounded a little light. Of course, maybe it wasn’t that much each working night. But I made a note to myself to run a total of the. amounts she’d squirreled away. And I realized that this squirreling away and writing it down was one good reason for keeping the diary in code. I’d heard of some pretty nasty things that pimps had done when they’d found out one of their girls was holding back on them.