Butcher said, “Ain’t there, though?”
Ogden said, “Well, you shoulda listened to those fellas, Mr. Carver. Been best all around.” He reached into his suitcoat and drew a fat white business envelope from an inside pocket. “Here’s the way we can do it,” he said. “There’s a lotta money in this envelope, and I’m gonna leave it down at the desk for you. Come morning, you and that envelope be gone. You understand?”
Carver said, “People don’t run other people out of town anymore. Not even very often in the movies.”
“Ain’t no movie,” Butcher said.
“If I reclaim that envelope tomorrow, you’ll wish you’d beat me to it,” Ogden said. “We clear on that?”
Still looking at Ogden, Carver pointed with his cane at Butcher. “Didn’t you just hear Butcher say this wasn’t a movie?”
“Think on it,” Ogden said. “Whatever it is, it’s up to you whether it has a happy ending.”
Courtney stood up from the bed. She was shorter than Carver had imagined. Nicely built but thick through the waist. She drawled, “You better listen and do, Mr. Carver.”
“He’s been given time to consider,” Ogden said. He started toward the door. Butcher followed. Then Courtney. Like ducks in a row.
As he passed Carver, Butcher reached into his pants pocket and held up what looked like a rawhide necklace strung with about half a dozen tiny misshapen beads of leather. Said, “I carry this here for luck, Carver.”
“They’re earlobes,” Ogden explained. “Real ones, you can be sure. He’s got him a little eccentricity and sorta collects them.”
Courtney looked bored but slightly ill.
Carver said, “They bring you luck, Butcher?”
“More luck than the folks I cut ’em from,” Butcher said logically, grinning and slipping the leather loop back into his pocket, He smoothly inserted the long-bladed knife into its sheath beneath his shirt.
Ogden smiled and said, “Don’t trust too much in your luck, Mr. Carver.” He held the door open as Courtney and Butcher slid past him into the hall. Shook his head and said in an amused, boys-will-be-boys tone, “Earlobes. Ain’t that something?”
“Something,” Carver agreed.
But the door had already closed.
Chapter 14
The next morning, as he limped through the Holiday Inn lobby, Carver tried not to look at the envelope stuffed in the box beneath his room number. A lot of money, Ogden had said. And, to Ogden, a lot would indeed be a lot. There was no telling how much was in the bulging white envelope. Maybe even six figures. Possibilities endless and shining.
Better not think about that.
But his mind kept returning to the knowledge of the envelope the way the tip of a tongue keeps returning to an aching tooth. And finding decay.
He got the Ford from the hotel garage and drove through iridescent streets damp from a dawn rain to the Atlanta Public Library, only about six blocks away on the corner of Carnegie Way and Forsyth.
The library was a gray stone building with dark-tinted windows. There was a wide concrete area out front that seemed to be home to half a dozen street people. This was a teeming corner, with lots of traffic, both car and pedestrian. Busy Atlantans rushing here and there, conducting the business of the New South.
Inside, the library was cool and spacious, with beige carpet and cream-colored walls. Carver pushed through a turnstile, and a woman at an information desk told him newspaper back issues were kept on microfilm on the fourth floor, then with a darting glance at his cane directed him to an elevator.
Same beige carpet on the fourth floor. Same cream-colored walls. Microfilm records were stored in rows of multicolored file drawers, while current newspapers were kept in racks in their original form.
After removing the appropriately dated small cardboard boxes from one of many gray drawers, he sat at one of half a dozen blue-and-gray viewers and got busy.
He had to sift through several microfilm spools before he found what he wanted in a July 12, 1970, edition of the Constitution. The moving of Wesley Slaughter and Rendering’s corporate headquarters to Atlanta from New Orleans, along with plans to construct a vast operation south of the city, was front-page news in the financial section. There was a separate item on Wesley himself, recounting how he’d been born in New Orleans into one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious families. His father had been a local political kingmaker, his father a two-term congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wesley had made a name for himself as a high-school halfback, but he hadn’t played college football because of a knee injury. He’d attended Washington and Lee University, graduating magna cum laude within three years. In a surprising move, he’d used family money to buy into Clark Rendering with a college friend, Keith Adkins. The two of them soon had corporate control. Within five years Adkins left the company, whose name was changed to Wesley Slaughter and Rendering. Under Wesley’s guidance, it soon became the largest operation of its kind in the South. Wesley was also a member of an organization called the Southern Christian Businessmen’s League, as well as several other civic groups.
Next to the news item was a photograph of Frank Wesley in his forties, dark hair worn long over the ears, drooping dark mustache, the sort of smile people associate with daredevil pilots and heartbreakers. Nice-looking guy in a suit and tie, posed with his arms crossed, a freshly slaughtered hog dangling upside-down on a meat hook in the background. Today’s carcass, tomorrow’s bacon.
It was a striking photograph for several reasons, but the reason it struck Carver was that he was sure the man in the 1970 newspaper photograph and the man who’d died in the car bombing in Florida were two different people.
He turned the knob that made the lens zoom in on the section of the newspaper page containing the Wesley story. Figured out the instructions printed on the side of the microfilm machine, fed a quarter into its plastic and metal guts, and in a slanted plastic tray received a copy of what was on the screen. Wesley’s photograph had reproduced beautifully.
Then he leaned back in his chair, holding the copy and the crook of his cane in the same hand, thinking.
The two gunmen in Wesley’s condo in Fort Lauderdale hadn’t seemed surprised when he’d walked in through the unlocked door. It was almost as if they’d been ahead of him in the game and were sitting there waiting for him. And if he was any judge, Ogden, Butcher, and Courtney had been genuinely surprised by his mention of the two in Florida. As if they actually had no connection with them. Maybe didn’t even know who they might be. Then he remembered Courtney’s sharp intake of breath at the mention of the Fort Lauderdale conversation. Wondered what, if anything, that might mean.
But the discussion of the two gunmen was the only even slight digression from their scare-Carver act. It was as if they’d talked over beforehand what might frighten him into leaving Atlanta, then gone through their routine in his room and sweetened fear with money. Powerful motivators, cold fear and cold cash.
Carver had been tempted, but he’d never considered asking the desk clerk for the envelope in his room slot. Not really. Not beyond toying with the idea. He knew better than to take the money. Knew what part of himself he’d be selling. Convinced himself of that, anyway.
But he couldn’t shake the fear.
Even if he did keep seeing Butcher’s tiny, intense eyes behind the thin-bladed boning knife, even if he did keep thinking about the photograph of a young Frank Wesley standing and smiling in front of a fresh-killed hog, Carver assured himself that he was leaving Atlanta because he had no more business here at the moment.
As he checked out of the hotel that afternoon, he saw that the envelope was no longer in his box. He asked the desk clerk, a tall, elderly man with gray hair and a crooked spine, if he knew what had happened to it.