by Tim Bryant
Spirit Trap
Dutch Curridge series, Volume 3
Tim Bryant
Published by Behooven Press, 2014.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
SPIRIT TRAP
First edition. May 25, 2014.
Copyright © 2014 Tim Bryant.
Written by Tim Bryant.
Also by Tim Bryant
Dutch Curridge series
Spirit Trap
Watch for more at Tim Bryant’s site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Tim Bryant
Dedication
Spirit Trap (Dutch Curridge series, #3)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
About the Author
For Joe R. Lansdale in exchange for much friendship and sushi.
Much thanks to Jen J. Moody for editing and encouraging in equal measure. I love you more than peanut butter burgers. To Elaine Ash and Joseph J. Patchen for helping to spread the words. To Stephen Graham Jones and George Wier for the warm welcome and cool company.
SPIRIT TRAP
Tim Bryant
1
When Werner Athey's family was discovered in their farmhouse on the west side of Fort Worth on December 28, 1955, the authorities were quick to point out a suspect in the press. His wife Albertine was found slumped over the kitchen counter with her head in the sink, like she was washing her hair. Or maybe like someone was trying to shove her down the drain. There was a matching pair of bullet holes in her head, so it did prove helpful in keeping the kitchen floor tidy. Not so lucky with the living room.
It would be really cheap and easy to call it death in the living room, but I've never been known for my expensive tastes or for being terribly complicated. I like things cheap and easy. And it was hard not to notice the two dead children, one draped across the back of the sofa and the other face down on the floor, halfway to the kitchen, like she had been going for one last cup of water, or maybe to help her mother with the hair washing.
The house was quiet. That was the other thing you noticed. Quiet enough that when I walked from the sofa to the front door and accidentally stepped into a pool of blood, it made a sound that you could hear all the way to the back porch.
"Careful in there, Curridge. That's a crime scene, in case you haven't noticed."
Goddamn Sheriff's Department. Wiley King had yet to appear, but his boys were all over the house like maggots. And they were already yapping to Ruthie Nell.
Me and Ruthie Nell Parker had history. When she worked for the Fort Worth Press, we had almost been a team. She was one of us little guys fighting the system. I gave her access to a side of town that she might have gotten close to but never would have gotten into. She gave me a companion at the Crystal Palace Dance Hall on Friday nights and the Deal Theater matinees on Saturdays.
Then the Anthony Cavanaugh case came along, and Ruthie went undercover with help from a D.A. I didn't much care for. I broke the case, but come to find out, the main tip had been delivered by none other than Ruthie herself. I got a mention in the Star-Telegram, the big paper in town. She got a brand new job on its reporter staff. As Lefty Frizzell says, that's the way love goes.
Lieutenant Dewey Mitchell was on the back porch explaining to Ruthie Nell that Werner Athey had not been found anywhere on the property and was thus a considered a primary suspect in the crime. I knew he was wanting to impress, but it was far too early to throw such statements out there. The call had come in to headquarters two hours earlier, and no one even knew who made it yet.
Except for two fortuitous reasons, I wouldn't have been on the scene at all. One, I was staying at a boarding house on Sharon Road, which was three blocks away. Close enough to have heard the sirens screaming down Camp Bowie. One siren might not have torn me away from an afternoon with Jack Daniels and WBAP's Western Jamboree, but when the one became two and then three, I figured I had best put my boots on and my teeth in and head over to take a look-see.
The other reason I found myself trying to pick my way through the living room without putting my prints into evidence was regrettable. I knew the house. I knew the people in it. Most of all, I knew Werner Athey. They may or may not have known me. I was a fan of Werner Athey. Athey was a fiddle player, and one of the regulars at the Crystal Springs Dance Hall on White Settlement Road. I had watched him play Milton Brown almost as good as Milton, Bob Wills songs almost like Bob. I had talked to him at the bar and told him so. I'd even bought the guy a drink or two.
Werner could have been a great one, and he knew it. Could have hit the road. Played a different town, kissed a different girl every night. He could have made records in California and been on the TV. The only thing that ever held him back was the love he had for his family.
"I'm much obliged, but I'm not really a music man, Mr. Curridge," he said to me on that first, particularly memorable night at the Crystal Springs. "I'm a family man."
The two lifestyles were like beer and vodka, he said. Good on their own, but you couldn't mix them together. He was happy where he was.
I looked out the screen door into his backyard and saw Ruthie with her notebook, talking to another of the deputies. I wondered where Werner was now. I wondered about that happiness of his. They say nothing lasts, and looking around the room there, that was pretty plain to see. Happiness don't last. Maybe sadness does. Something about that son of a bitch never seems to go out of style.
I checked out the rest of the house, but nothing seemed out of place. A bathroom where you do the things you do there. Two bedrooms with beds all made for the last time.
I left through the front door, careful to circle around any evidence that hadn't been photographed and collected. I was halfway out to the pick-up, a red '48 International, when I was apprehended.
"Sneaking away from the scene of the crime, huh?"
For a moment, I considered putting my hands up.
"I wouldn't print anything Dewey told you, if I were you," I said.
I turned around and tried to look as calm and cool as I had always tried to look when we were accomplices. Conspirators. She was wearing a dark blue dress and a white hat with a matching blue print. A nice uniform.
"Trying to be my editor now, I see."
She was smiling. Her words didn't sound hateful or angry, but they didn't sound particularly sad or wanting either.
"I don't think there's a reason in the world to think Werner had anything to do with this," I said. "And you can quote me on that if you want to."
She didn't pull her notebook out. "So I take it you're working the case," she said.
Sheriff King had pulled his Nash Airflyte into the driveway and was looking across the yard in our direction. I could hear Dewey shouting his name around the corner of the house.
"You're damn right I am," I said.
>
Most of the cases I worked, I was never asked. They just kind of fell into my lap. One thing I had learned in my forty-five years: When something falls into your lap, it's usually because, one reason or another, it's supposed to. The least you can do is catch it and be grateful.
2
The next morning's edition of the Star-Telegram had the Athey murders front page. I scanned the article and found what I was hoping not to at the end of the third paragraph.
Sheriff's Lieutenant Dewey Mitchell says that patriarch Werner Paul Athey has not been located and may be considered a suspect in the case.
My friend Slant Face Sanders was sitting across the table from me in Tootie's Hot Plate, scooting an egg around and looking like someone was paying him not to eat it. Slant Face lived up toward Richardson where he worked in a sewage treatment plant. It was dirty work, and it didn't pay well. Shift work. That meant I saw him on off days.
"How's things, Dutch?"
I laid the paper on the table. "Better than some, worse than others," I said.
He scanned the article.
"Blimey. Ruthie's writing for the Startle-Gram?"
That's what we called the Star-Telegram. It's what almost everyone called it. They liked their headlines. The bigger and bolder the better, no matter if they weren't backed up by the facts or even the story that followed. There was a reason they were the big guys on the block, and it wasn't their honor code.
It should also be known that Slant Face is a Limey. Born and bred in Manchester, England, he came to America years ago with the Merchant Marines. Some of that English has rubbed off over time, but not enough to wipe out the occasional bloody hell or blimey. Which I personally found adorable.
Slant read the whole article and noticed the byline. That's why we were friends.
"Werner Athey," I said. "The fiddle player."
He glanced back over it again.
"A suspect in the case," Slant Face said. "No shit."
Okay. It wasn't exactly the response I was going for.
"I was at the house yesterday while the Sheriff's Department was there," I said. "Something didn't feel right."
My favorite waitress, Geneva, came over and took my regular order. Two eggs over hard. No yolks. Side of bacon. Order of the bread which they fried in the bacon fat. She was my favorite waitress because she didn't give me grief for supplying my own drink.
"So, three dead bodies in a house," Slant Face said. "What exactly didn't feel right about it?"
As much as I appreciated the stab at humor, I ignored it. I took a drink from a too-warm can of Dixie beer and folded the paper in half.
"I checked out the house," I said. "His fiddle wasn't there."
Geneva came by and grabbed Slant Face's plate, one last piece of egg still holding on.
"Makes sense he would take it with him," Slant said. "I mean, if he did it."
It might have made sense, but I didn't like it. I had seen the fiddle. It was just a fiddle. Nothing spectacular about it, except for the player. I certainly couldn't see a reason anyone would kill for it.
"I don't think robbery was the motive. Far as I could see, nobody even entered the bedrooms."
Nothing of value seemed to have been taken. Except, of course, for the three lives.
We sat there thinking. It was a well-developed part of the process. It involved one part thinking to ourselves, one part thinking out loud and then a third part talking about what we thought about what we were thinking. It sounds complicated, but we knew the drill.
"Any way you look at it, doesn't look good for Werner Athey," Slant said.
Geneva came by with my plate. She probably knew the drill about as well as we did.
"So you heard about the Atheys," she said.
I told her I had been over at the house with the Sheriff's Department. We both agreed that it was a real shame what the neighborhood was coming to.
"I wasn't exactly friends with them, but I know somebody who used to keep the two kids," Geneva said. "Two good kids. Della Gail and Addie Jean, I think."
I didn't care to know the names. They had just been ‘the family,’ and that was enough. Enough to keep Werner playing at the Crystal Springs. Enough to keep him happy where he was.
I knew if Werner had gone off, if he'd finally had enough, if he'd faced his worst fears and decided he was no longer happy enough there in the little community known as Tremble, even if he had done the most unthinkable thing I could imagine, he would have taken the fiddle with him when he walked out the door. I still hoped things were not as they appeared. I wasn't a hopeful kind of guy, but it was about all I had.
3
Werner Athey played with an outfit called The Cowtown Jazzbillies. A pretty standard collection of local musicians, most of whom thought they were better than they were. The steel guitar player was good, his claim to fame being that he'd learned from Deacon Evans, who played with Cliff Bruner and Shelly Alley. And then there was Werner.
The Cowtown Jazzbillies played every first Friday at the Crystal Springs Dance Hall. The first Friday of the month— and of the New Year— would be coming up in exactly one week. I thought it might be worth my time to pay the place a visit, see if anyone had heard anything from him.
The big New Year's Eve dance was planned for Saturday night, so I knew it would be easier to go out the night before and see how things were going. The manager, a nice enough fellow named Samuel Cunningham, was going over weekend plans, and you could tell right off that it wasn't the normal Friday night. Everybody was already thinking Saturday. There wasn't even a band.
"Curridge, you're usually a day late, not early," he said.
I ordered a Jack and Dr Pepper from one of the guys behind the bar. "I'm on the job today."
Cunningham called an end to his meeting and joined me at the bar.
"I guess you heard about Werner Athey," he said.
I told him that is just so happened that that was the job I was on.
"You ever hear him say anybody was threatening him?" I said. "Any reason to think his life was in danger?"
Sam took a gin and tonic and circled the glass with his finger. "So you don't think Athey done it?"
I took a swallow. It was more Dr Pepper than I liked, but I knew Sam was saving up for the big night so I let it pass. "You got reason to think he did?"
The finger turned to a fist.
"I fired his whole goddamn band last month and told them if I saw any of their faces back around here, they could consider it cause for arrest."
He brought his hand down hard enough to shake his glass up a little. I wasn't so moved.
"They don't play that bad, Sam. I wouldn't have gone that far."
He didn't laugh.
"The last two times those shitasses played here, I wound up short on the drawer. First time, I didn't know if it was the band or one of my guys. November, it came up even more out of balance, and I knew the mistake wasn't on my end."
Sam was always handing out free drinks to the band. No telling how much he lost on that. I wasn't sure what we were talking about, money-wise.
"Three hundred bones the first time, twice that the second," he said. "Hell, that's more than I pay them, and I pay above standard. My old man used to always say, pee on me one time, shame on you. Pee on me again, I'll cut your goddamn dick off."
I had always heard it, pee on me one time, shame on you. Pee on my twice, shame on me. Then again, I never met Sam's old man.
"Well, even pilfering funds from the kitty doesn't quite equal up to murdering your wife and two kids," I said.
I threw a dollar down for my drink and told him to keep the change.
"You're right, Dutch," he said. "Werner might not have done it, like you say. But it was a Jazzbilly. You can mark my word on that. And I figure if he didn't do it, he knew who did."
I pulled out the little notebook that I always keep in my jacket pocket.
"Who else is in the band?"
Sam looked up at the ceiling like t
heir names were all written on it.
"Let's see. Dr. Moyers played the guitar. Jesse Moyers. Werner was fiddle. Ralph Kirkland on steel. Elias Groves played bass. Ballard Runion, banjo. Junior Levett, drums. And sometimes Roosevelt Hughley got up and sang."
I knew about half of them by name. Of course, I'd seen them all play at the Crystal Springs. It was a little sad to think I wouldn't again.
"Roosevelt Hughley banned too?" I said.
I knew Hughley sang with two or three different groups.
"Every goddamn one of 'em, least until I either hear which one done it or get my money back," Sam said. "They oughta count their damn blessings I'm not making 'em play it off for the next six months."
I was pretty sure he couldn't do that, but I didn't mention it.
"I'm trying to track Werner down, so I'll keep this all in mind and see what I can find out," I said. "I locate that money, you gonna split it up with me, right?"
He finally laughed a little.
"I think we could manage a finder's fee, Dutch. What I'd really like is for you to bring their sorry asses back in here with that money in their hands and some old fashioned Jesus-style repentance in their nasty little hearts."
He turned to continue with his work. The man in the beer truck jumped down and stood around while the Crystal Springs crew jumped into action, unloading their order. Beer truck driver might be a nice job, I though. At least for a little while.
"All the same," Sam said, "I hope Werner didn't kill his family like that."
4
Samuel Cunningham gave me more than just a handful of names to start my investigation; he unknowingly gave me an idea. People are quick to clam up when you start poking around and asking questions. They don't like to squeal on friends and associates. Even if someone deserves to be ratted out, no one wants to be the rat. However, if I approached each of the Jazzbillies about the missing money, if I made them think I was working on one thing, maybe I could find out what I really wanted to know about what I really wanted to know. It's called misdirection.
