The Ninth Man Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Ninth Man

  In memory of Ray, with love

  Acknowledgments

  Revenge is the act of passion,

  It’s hard to remember now there was a time not so long ago when all it took to do whatever you wanted was to find someone willing to do it with you, when the highest “wages of sin” you might have to pay was a case of clap. It was a different time, and a different world, and I miss it.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Author

  The Ninth Man

  A Dick Hardesty Mystery

  By Dorien Grey

  Copyright 2015 by Dorien Grey

  Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 2013.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  Also by Dorien Grey and Untreed Reads Publishing

  A World Ago: A Navy Man’s Letters Home (1954-1956)

  Short Circuits: A Life in Blogs (Volume 1)

  The Butcher’s Son: A Dick Hardesty Mystery

  www.untreedreads.com

  The Ninth Man

  A Dick Hardesty Mystery

  Dorien Grey

  In memory of Ray, with love

  Acknowledgments

  To all the people in my life who have lent parts of themselves to my characters.

  Revenge is the act of passion,

  vengeance is an act of justice.

  —Samuel Johnson

  It’s hard to remember now there was a time not so long ago when all it took to do whatever you wanted was to find someone willing to do it with you, when the highest “wages of sin” you might have to pay was a case of clap. It was a different time, and a different world, and I miss it.

  —Dick Hardesty

  Chapter 1

  It was hotter than hell—the air conditioner hadn’t worked since the Titanic went down. So, I was in no mood for the bleached-blond queen who came swishing across the room toward me after making an entrance that made me wonder whatever happened to Loretta Young.

  There were times when I almost wished I had a few straight clients, and this was one of those times. Still, I told myself, it isn’t the principle of the thing, it’s the money.

  I stood up and extended my hand. As I expected, the proffered appendage was limp and vaguely clammy.

  “Mr. Rholfing.” I made it a statement, not a question. Clients, I’ve found, expect you to be decisive. Authoritative. Butch. It’s bullshit, but it works.

  “Yes, Mr. Hardesty.” Jesus, he sounded as nelly as he looked. “I’m so glad you could see me.” I felt his eyes giving my entire body a radar scan. He was wearing one of those cloying perfumes/colognes that emanate an almost visible fog around the wearer.

  “Have a chair,” I said, indicating the one that would have been upwind if there’d been any movement of air through the open window, which there wasn’t.

  I sat down behind my desk and watched as Rholfing fluttered down, with considerable butt-wiggling, and immediately crossed his legs at the knee. He was dressed in perma-starched white with a flaming-yellow ascot that missed his hair color by about eight shades. He looked like a butter pecan ice cream cone with delusions of grandeur.

  After the talcum had settled, I sat back in my chair and forced myself to stare directly at my prospective client, mentally picturing a maraschino cherry and some chopped nuts atop the carefully coifed curls.

  Rholfing leaned forward, crossing his wrists on his crossed knees, and said, “Someone has killed my lover.”

  Why me, Lord? Why do I get all the cracked marbles?

  We stared at one another in silence for a moment or two until I finally managed to remind myself that that’s what I’m in business for: to solve other people’s mysteries.

  “Any idea who?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” he said, exasperated, his manicured hands fluttering up a short distance from his knees, only to settle back, studiedly.

  “Well, at the risk of sounding a bit like a B-movie,” I said, “isn’t this a matter for the police?”

  Rholfing stared at me as though I’d just farted in church.

  “The police all but said that he committed suicide. The police,” he said finally, “eat shit. Somebody killed him.”

  The thought flashed through my mind that anyone sharing an evening, let alone a life, with the character in front of me might well be a candidate for suicide. “Exactly what makes you think he was murdered?” I asked, choosing not to get into a long discussion of the merits and flaws of law enforcement.

  “Bobby was twenty-seven years old, healthy as a horse—hung like one, too—and never had a sick day in his life, unless you count hangovers. Personally, I don’t. And all of a sudden, he’s dead in some cheap, tacky hotel room without a mark on him and the police think it was suicide!”

  “I assume there was an autopsy,” I said. “What did they say about that?”

  “Oh, they said several things, none of which a lady cares to repeat. The gist of it was that while it was perfectly all right for a fruit like me to come down to the morgue to identify the body, since I was neither a blood relative nor his legal guardian, I had no right whatsoever to any information other than that he’s dead—which any fool could see, with him lying there on that fucking slab!”

  “And that was it?”

  Rholfing took a small white handkerchief from his shoulder bag and dabbed at the corners of his mouth. He then carefully folded it, returned it to the bag, zipped the bag shut, and re-creased the already razor-sharp crease in his trousers with thumb and forefinger before finally re-meeting my gaze.

  “Not quite,” he said. “Two of the burly cretins took me into a small room and subtly asked me what my experience had been with poisons. Poisons! Me! I was tempted to tell them to drop by some afternoon for tea and I’d see what I could do, but I’d just had the fumigators in. Me! Lucretia Borgia! Can you imagine?”

  As a matter of fact, I could.

  “Now, I may be a fairy,” he continued, smoothing down the back of his hair with one hand, “but I certainly am not stupid! Their refusing to tell me how he died in one breath and asking me about poisons in the next was about as subtle as a lighted match on the Hindenburg.

  “Bobby was murdered. There’s no question about it. And knowing how the police in this city feel about faggots, the only way anyone is going to find out who killed Bobby is for me to hire you. You come…” He gave me a smile I’m sure he meant to be disar
ming, but came across outright lecherous. “…very highly recommended.”

  “Thanks,” I said, awkwardly. I never did learn how to accept compliments very well—even those without hooks in them. “Have you spoken to Bobby’s parents about this?” I asked.

  “What parents?” Rholfing asked, haughtily. “He told me he had a grandfather back in Utah somewhere, but he never mentioned parents, if he ever had any.”

  “So can you tell me anything about Bobby that might help?” I asked.

  “Well, he was a tramp—that much I know. He’d go home with anything in pants. I told him I was going to get him his own portable glory hole and put it out in the street in front of the apartment. At least that way I’d know where he was all the time.”

  “Did the police say anything about drugs?”

  Rholfing thought a moment, lips pursed, nose wrinkled, brows knit, eyes looking upward at nothing.

  “I don’t think so. Just poisons.”

  “Did he use drugs?” I asked.

  Rholfing sighed.

  “No, thank God. That was one of his good points—about his only one, come to think of it: he never got mixed up with drugs. Oh, he’d smoke a joint now and then, but I guess we all do, don’t we?” He gave me a conspiratorial wink, the kind you can see from the top row of the balcony, and that coy/lecherous smile again.

  I didn’t say anything for a moment (that’s a bad habit I have; when I don’t have anything to say, I tend not to say anything—bugs the shit out of a lot of people), and Rholfing sat there looking increasingly uncomfortable as the seconds dragged on. He pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from God knows where and began waving it gently back and forth beneath his chin. A tiny droplet of perspiration crept from his hairline and meandered its way across his left temple.

  Finally, he couldn’t stand it.

  “Well? Will you take the case?”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I don’t have much to go on.” God! Where had I heard that line before?

  “Well, find something,” Rholfing blurted, revealing the rolled-steel interior behind that whipped-cream and lace facade. “You’re the big, strong detective. To the cops he’s just another dead fag, and good riddance—but nobody kills my lover and gets away with it.” He must have anticipated my next comment, because he hastened to add: “Don’t worry about the money. Daddy has five or six acres of downtown Fort Worth, and he’ll give me anything I want just for me to stay the hell away from there.”

  I found myself in something of a quandary. I had—clichés aside—very little to go on. Given Rholfing’s account of the circumstances of the death, however accurate or inaccurate they may have been, and despite his denial of his lover’s drug use, the obvious assumption was that it was very likely a routine drug overdose. But that’s why people hire me in the first place; if they knew all the answers, who’d need a detective? The police were notoriously uncooperative in anything that smacked of homosexuality. And I wasn’t exactly in a position to pass up a potential client—particularly one whose Daddy had five or six acres of downtown Fort Worth.

  I thought of Tim Jackson, a sometime-trick and pretty good friend of mine who worked in the county coroner’s office. I’d never had the occasion to use his professional services, but maybe now was the time.

  “Okay, Mr. Rholfing; I’ll check it out,” I said. “But don’t expect miracles.”

  I thought he was going to leap across the desk and kiss me. Fortunately, he didn’t.

  “Now, about my fee…” I began, but he cut me off by digging into his shoulder bag and coming up with a bunch of crisp, new $100 bills.

  “Will this be enough? For a retinue, or whatever in hell it is you call it?”

  “Retainer, and it’ll do just fine,” I said, making a conscious effort not to grab it out of his hand.

  “You will call me, won’t you?” he said, rising out of his chair as graceful as a hot-air balloon and again giving me the radar scan. “Even if you don’t have anything to report, I’d appreciate your keeping in…close…touch.” He used one hand to adjust his shoulder bag while the other made an inspection of the back of his shirt, pulling and tugging at imaginary wrinkles. “Perhaps you could stop by for a drink some evening?” He sounded like Delilah asking Samson to stop by for a haircut. “You do have my name and address, don’t you?”

  I assured him I had written them down when he called for the appointment, resisting the temptation to speculate that every tearoom wall in town had his number. I rose and he, eyes glued to my crotch, offered me a dead hand at the end of a limp wrist. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to kiss it or shake it, so I took the latter course, and he turned on his little ballerina feet and swished to the door.

  “Oh, there is one little thing,” I called after him as his hand reached for the knob. He turned quickly, eyes sparkling coquettishly.

  “Yes?”

  “About your lover.”

  “Who?”

  “Your lover. Bobby.”

  “Oh. Yes.” He looked disappointed.

  “It might help if I knew his last name.”

  “McDermott,” he said over his shoulder as he opened the door. “Bobby McDermott.” And with that, he was gone.

  I sat back down, leaned back in my chair, and put my thumbnail between my teeth—a dumb habit, I’ll admit, but that’s the kind of thing you do when you go from three packs of cigarettes a day to nothing. I stared at the door for a minute, then pulled my thumb out of my mouth, reached for a note pad, and wrote “Bobby McDermott.”

  Part of me felt slightly guilty for taking Rholfing’s money; one call to Tim Jackson should confirm that it was drugs and give me whatever other information I might need to wrap the whole matter up.

  It was five-thirty, too late to reach Tim at the office; but if I waited a few minutes, I could probably reach him at home. Suddenly, I was looking at my crotch, and it was reminding me of how long it had been since I’d seen Tim.

  It was too hot to wait in the office, so I decided to go down the street to Hughie’s and have a beer. I could call Tim from there. Thin wisps of Rholfing’s cologne still hung in the air so, cursing the broken air conditioner and hoping it wouldn’t rain, I left the window wide open as I closed the door behind me.

  *

  Hughie’s is a hustler bar about two blocks from the office. I like to stop in every now and then to watch the hustlers and johns go through their little mating dances, the hustlers preening and strutting, or just standing around trying to out-butch one another; the johns—middle class business executives, most of them—sidling up, pretending they’ve just wandered into the bar by accident.

  The “casual” opening remarks (“Sure is hot today, isn’t it?” “Say, that’s a nice-looking shirt you’ve got on.” “Can I buy you a drink?”). The john buying the hustler a drink, then two; the exit with the john looking nervous but trying to act cool, the hustler sauntering casually through the door as if he were just stepping outside to see if it was raining.

  The whole place has a sort of morbid fascination, if you like living vicariously, which I don’t. I go there mainly because it’s close and because you can often learn things at Hughie’s you couldn’t learn elsewhere without a lot of hassle.

  Out of curiosity, when I ordered my beer I asked Bud, the bartender, if he’d ever heard of a guy called Bobby McDermott.

  “Sorry, Dick,” he said, drawing a dark into a frosty glass (that’s another reason I go to Hughie’s—it’s a dive, but they frost their beer glasses, and it’s one of the few places that has dark beer on tap). “Nobody’s much on names around here, in case you hadn’t noticed. What’s the dude look like?”

  I had another slight pang of guilt when I realized I had no idea.

  “I dunno,” I said, trying to sound casual. “It’s not important; just thought you might know him.”

  “Huh-uh,” Bud said, taking my money. “I don’t think so. But if anybody’d know him, it’d be Tessie.” He looked around. “Not here right now. I
f he’s not here for happy hour, he’ll be in around ten or eleven.”

  “Thanks, Bud,” I called to his back as he moved off down the bar to serve another customer. I took a couple deep draughts, fought back a belch, and rummaged through my pocket for a coin. I waited until there was a lull on the jukebox and went to the phone to dial Tim.

  It rang four times and I was just about to hang up when Tim answered.

  “’Lo?”

  Jesus, even his voice was sexy. I kicked myself for not having kept in closer touch with him.

  “Hi, Tim,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t remember just how long it had been. “It’s Dick. Hardesty. Just get home?”

  “A while ago. I was just getting ready to hop into the shower. Care to join me?”

  “Only if you’ll agree to drop the soap,” I said.

  Tim laughed.

  “They don’t call me ‘Old Slippery Fingers’ for nothing. Where the hell have you been anyway? I thought you’d given me up for lost.”

  “No way. It’s just that I’ve been…ah…you know…” Always quick with an answer, that’s me.

  “That’s okay,” Tim said, laughing again. “I know how it is. So when are we going to get together?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, there was something I wanted to talk over with you. You going to be home for awhile?”

  “Sure; I’m in for the night. Come on over—it’ll be nice to see you again. We can talk over old times and…uh…see what comes up.”

  “Still World’s Champion Prickteaser, I see,” I said. “See you in ten minutes.” I hung up, went back to the bar to chug-a-lug the rest of my beer, waved goodbye to Bud, and sauntered out the door like a hustler checking to see if it was raining.

  *

  Tim’s apartment is a ten-minute walk from Hughie’s. I made it in seven. I rang the bell, and the door opened the length of the safety chain. Tim’s curly brown hair appeared first as he peered around the corner of the door, then his bright blue eyes and big, shit-eating grin.

  “Hi,” he said in a stage whisper, looking me over with mock seriousness. “What’s the password?”