by Tim Bryant
I decided to start with Jesse Moyers, not strictly because he was at the top of my list. I knew where his office was and had spoken with him before. He seemed like a nice enough guy and had enough money that I couldn't see much incentive for him skimming any extra off the top. In fact, the one time I'd talked with him, sitting at the bar at Crystal Springs, he'd pretty much come out and said he didn't do it for the money. Not the music and not even the nine-to-five anymore. He'd given me an eye exam right there at the bar, reading signs on the wall, and told me to come by and he would fix me up with a pair of reading glasses.
I dropped by late in the afternoon, thinking that if he was still around, he wouldn't be too busy. I sat down in the colored section, as I have a habit of doing, and waited. There was one lady sitting there and no one on the white side.
"Mr. Curridge," his nurse said, "you're more than welcome to sit over here."
She motioned to the far side of the room as if it had some special feature that was lacking elsewhere.
"I like this side better," I said.
The colored lady avoided my eye but didn't avoid a look of satisfaction.
Dr. Moyers came out a minute or two later and handed her a case which presumably had a pair of glasses in it.
"So Mr. Curridge," he said, "you've come to take me up on that pair of reading glasses, I see."
For an eye doctor, I guess he couldn't see as good as he thought he could.
"Not this time," I said. "I'm on the job today."
I asked if we could speak in private, which, to the nurse's delight, led him to dismiss her and close down for the day. He sat down two chairs away from me in the colored section.
"Let me guess. You working for Sam Cunningham?"
I didn't want things to break down into personal vendettas and accusations, so I told a little lie. Some people call that artistic license, and it comes with any license to do P.I. work. Of course, my license had expired a year or two previous, but that's a different story.
"No, not Sam," I said. "I'm doing a little work for the insurance company. We've got to verify that it wasn't Sam's hand in the till."
Moyer seemed shocked at the mere suggestion.
"I wouldn't think it would be in his self-interest."
Anybody who tried to encourage the idea that Sam had done it would automatically draw my suspicion. Maybe Moyers was smart enough to know that. If he was, he was also probably smart enough not to have done it himself.
"I'm not interested in you as a suspect, just to make it clear," I said. "I'm just interested in anything you might know that would help wrap this all up."
Moyers didn't seem nervous. Didn't act like he had anything to hide. This made him unusual in my line of work. Almost everyone I know acts like they have something to hide, mostly because they do. My job comes down to figuring out what it is.
"I don't need the money, and I don't need the job," he said, echoing pretty much what he'd told me at the bar that night. "I do it because I love to play music. I know I'm not the best guitar player in the world. Hell, I'm not even the best at the dance hall. I do it to relax after a day's work."
He was by and large right. He wasn't the best guitarist in the world. He might have been the best at Crystal Springs on any given night, at least from the local pickers. He could take a pretty good stab at just about all of Les Paul's records, and not too many would even try.
"All the signs seem to be pointing at one of the Jazzbillies," I said. "Any reason I should be looking elsewhere?"
I think the question surprised him. It was supposed to. I let him mull it over for a minute.
"It could have been anyone," he said. "But..."
He hesitated. People do that when they feel like there's something in their way. That's fine, as long as they eventually go ahead and step across.
"I'm not sure I should say this."
I assured him that any information would not have his name attached to it. Another lie. I felt like he knew it wasn't true, even as I said it.
"You might take a hard look at Hughley."
"Roosevelt Hughley," I said.
We were the only two people sitting in his office on the slow end of Eighth Avenue. He was talking like he was passing secrets in church.
"He worked for Prescott, cruising timber for the saw mill. When they closed down, he had a good bit of money trouble. I gave him a loan or two myself."
Prescott had closed a good six months back. Left quite a few people out of work.
"He pay any of those loans back?" I said.
Of course, he hadn't. Not yet.
"To tell you the honest truth, Dutch," Dr. Moyers said, "if I had taken that money, I probably would've given it to Hughley."
Desperation will make a man do a lot of things that he wouldn't normally do. If he doesn't have the means to take care of things, he will look and find another way.
"I guess you heard about Werner's family," I said.
I stood up to go. It was the end of a workday, and I didn't have any right to keep the doctor past regular hours.
"I read it in the paper," he said. "I sure hope they find Werner soon. I'm afraid something terrible has happened to him. Nice guy. Lived for two things—his family and his music. Most of us, we enjoyed the music, but we could take it or leave it. Not Werner."
I told him that I'd spoken to Werner at the Crystal Springs bar, same as I had spoken to him. I agreed he seemed like a nice guy. No lie there at all.
"So you think maybe whoever did it took Werner with them?"
"That much seems pretty obvious, I'm afraid."
I thanked him for his time and promised that next visit, I would let him fix me up with some reading glasses.
"You'll be able to read back over your notes easier," he said.
"Don't know about that, Doc," I said. "Will they improve my handwriting?"
I liked Jesse Moyers. He might have lived a little higher on the hog than me, but he could see good enough at us poor folks beneath him. He sat down in the colored section with a poor white man and didn't act like anything was going to rub off on him.
And he was a damn good guitar player.
5
I went back to the Athey house because I wanted to poke around without Ruthie and Wiley King looking over my shoulder. It wasn't that I thought I'd overlooked anything. It wasn't necessarily about seeing. My friend James Alto had Tonkawa blood, and he believed you could pick up signals just from being in a sacred place. And any place where innocent human blood had been spilled was sacred.
I had been in places where people suffered unmercifully and died hard before, and I could vouch for a certain unction, as my mother used to say, that I never once felt in church. I was hoping for nothing so specific. I was looking for nothing more than a little time to walk around and get a feel for the lives that had been lived and snuffed out.
The kitchen looked smaller, like the walls had begun to close in. The icebox was still plugged in, full of eggs and meat, cheese and milk, a six-pack of beer. The counter top was wiped clean, sugar and flour containers, salt and pepper shakers, a spatula, a recipe book, a box of oatmeal all in order. None of it seeming any the worse for what had happened. The sink was empty and, unless you peered down into it and saw the blood stained into the copper piping, unremarkable. It was almost like I had woken from a bad dream to find everything normal.
The living area was a somewhat different story. While the kitchen floor was a cheap linoleum that could be torn up without much trouble, the rest of the floors were hardwood, and the blood had not been completely removed. The sofa where the older daughter had been discovered was gone, but even there, a good deal of blood had seeped through.
I stood in the middle of the room and closed my eyes. Not expecting to feel or hear anything. Just wanting to sense the room as it had been. To imagine voices, maybe even singing, and a fiddle playing. Why in the hell would anyone want to come into a house like it and do what had been done there. Was it possible that someone could h
old that kind of anger for a family like the Atheys.
I spent very little time in the bedroom shared by the two daughters. Enough to see a pile of school books. Magazines. A transistor radio. The other bedroom I checked for the fiddle. A fiddle case. A bow. I was sure that Wiley's boys had cased it, but I wanted to see for myself. Make sure there wasn't anything they might have overlooked. Everything looked the same as it had before. Nothing out of place. Nothing unusual. There was a hunting rifle in the bedroom closet. It surprised me that the Sheriff's Department hadn't confiscated it, just to get it off the street. I checked the chamber and found it empty, so I wiped it down and put it back where I found it. I was never a hunter. Not since I had gone deer hunting with my dad as a young boy and had spent the entire time praying that a deer would not walk out in front of us. That may have been the last time I had prayed as well.
I walked out onto the back porch. I was convinced that the killer had entered and exited by the back door. Less than six feet from the kitchen sink and, above it, the kitchen window, it was the quickest way to remove yourself from the scene. The fact that none of the three victims seemed to have tried to escape toward the front door, or even into the back of the house, certainly made it seem that they had known their killer. And that wasn't particularly comforting.
Looking out the kitchen window, I could see the backyard fall off down an incline and then stretch back past an old tool shed, a line of pecan trees unfolding to an abandoned well and then into a dense wooded area. I wondered if anyone had thought to check the well or the shed. Surely even Wiley's boys would think of that. And yet, I couldn't leave until I had done the same. Just to be sure. Just so I wouldn't lie in bed that night, staring at the ceiling and wondering.
There were still lots of parts of Fort Worth that weren't on city water in 1955, so wells, abandoned or not, weren't unusual. Hell, Tincy Eggleston had been found dead at the bottom of one just like it in north Forth Worth. I walked down the hill, under the pecan trees, shaded from the sun and obscured from the road and took a look. Nothing but a black hole, and I wasn't too sure Werner would have fit down it anyway, unless the killer had thrown him down a piece at a time. Likewise, there was nothing in the shed but a rusty old grass cutter, some gardening tools and a bicycle with one tire missing. A bunch of wooden boxes that seemed mostly empty.
As I was leaving the shed, I noticed a place in the door frame, right in the bottom corner, that looked like another blood stain. Bending down to take a closer look, I could see that someone had wiped at it, smearing it across the bottom. Maybe without realizing it, not even seeing it. There was no way of telling what it was from. Could have been an injured animal that dragged itself inside for protection. I looked around the darkened interior and half-heartedly kicked at one of the boxes, hoping to startle anything that might be holed up where I couldn't see it.
It might not have been enough to put a scare into anybody, but it started a chain reaction. Boxes falling like dominos until the last one came down against the back wall and exploded into shrapnel. I ducked, thinking I'd set off a bomb, and fell against the grass cutter. Against the wall, surrounded by the splintered remains of a wooden box, sat an old animal trap.
I had seen plenty of traps before. Even the Sheriff's Department had them for the occasional call to catch a wild animal, usually some skunk or raccoon or maybe a fox that showed signs of rabies. I had never seen a trap of that size or power.
I picked up a piece of wood from the destroyed box and poked at it a little bit. Like the trap was the wild animal and I was making sure it was good and dead. Satisfied that it was now harmless, I sat down and combed through the damage. What caught my eye was obviously not a part of the box, although I couldn't be sure that it hadn't been inside of it. I picked the thing up and held it close. A shoe. A man's shoe, or, at least, a small piece of it. It was clearly the heel and part of the sole. You could still see the insole with the name Stacy Adams inscribed, as well as the stitching which had once connected it to the rest of the shoe. A small tag assuring that it was made of genuine leather.
I scrounged around the entire shed looking for more of it and came up empty. I found more blood, which turned out to be my own, coming from a cut on the underside of my arm. I stuffed the piece of shoe in my jacket pocket, grabbed the sprung trap, and made my way out of the shed. I had no idea how long I had been there, but the moon shone through the trees at the back of the yard, so it had been a while. I was making my way back toward the house when I realized there was a car parked at the side. I recognized it right away. It was a Sheriff's Department car but too old to be Wiley King's. It looked like maybe Dewey Mitchell's.
I liked Dewey. At least, I preferred him to Wiley. And I thought Dewey liked me. All the same, I wasn't sure if he would be glad to see me show up right then and there. As I got closer, I could hear him talking.
I've said before, half of being a private eye comes down to a bad case of curiosity. What's in that well. What's in that shed. Who is he talking to. It was still dark enough that I could walk right up to the house without being seen, unless someone was looking hard for me. I slipped up to the space between the kitchen and living room windows and tried to tune in. I can't hear a damn thing out of my left ear on account of having encephalitis when I was seven years old, but, like Slant Face says, I can hear voices inside somebody else's head with my right ear.
"If you're still here, will you say something?"
I knew Dewey's voice all too well. I held my breath and waited.
"Do something to let me know you're here."
I walked to the far end of the house and smoked a couple cigarettes. I left a little while later with Dewey sitting on the back porch, staring off into the woods. That trap weighed about thirty pounds and took a little more work than I had bargained for. I thought about what I would say if someone were to see me trudging along with that damn thing.
"I'm going on a mountain lion hunt," maybe.
There had been mountain lions seen around the edges of town. I wasn't sure what good the trap would do, unless I threw it at one and knocked him out. I wasn't sure I had the energy.
6
A dead wife with her head in the sink. Two dead daughters. A missing husband and father. An eye doctor who hadn't seen a thing. A sheriff's lieutenant who was talking to the dark. And an animal trap with possibly a piece of a Stacy Adams shoe in it. What did it all add up to?
Slant Face and James Alto met me at Peechie Keen's Bar & Kanteen the following evening, and I marched all the contrary facts and figures out and tried to make them play together. Penny Bob Yoder was behind the bar and things were hopping. Bob had recently ordered a new white paint job for the interior, which went a long way toward making it look clean. There was also a new jukebox stocked with Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills and Gene Autrey and Kitty Wells and, at my request, the one and only Lefty Frizzell. I had dropped a dime in and punched up "Always Late With Your Kisses" and "Mom And Dad's Waltz" to show my appreciation.
"Anything jump out at you?" I said.
"It doesn't look good for Werner," Slant Face said.
That was stating the obvious. I mean, his whole family was being buried in a couple more days. Whether he had done it or not, whether he was alive or not, it wasn't a great week for the guy.
"I can't shake the feeling that he didn't do it," I said.
I liked Slant Face and Alto because they each brought their own methods to the table. Slant Face wanted to solve everything in his mind. He believed that if you could piece as many of the facts together as possible, they would provide a picture that would lead to the truth. I completely agreed. Alto, on the other hand, believed that there were other people who knew things that you didn't know, and if you went out and talked to each of these people, you could put all the little parts together and they would make a whole. Like building an engine that would work together to drive you toward the truth. I completely agreed with that, too.
It was fairly obvious that, p
uzzle or engine, we were too many pieces short to make anything work. Alto did have one interesting point to make.
"I think the trap is your most interesting piece. If we assume that your friend Werner set it out— and there's no reason to suspect anyone else— then it tells us that he was seriously trying to catch something or someone."
"And I think we can safely assume it wasn't Dutch he was going for," said Slant Face.
You can't buy good help like that.
The trap was out in the truck. Both of them had seen it. Alto had picked it up and toyed around with it. Both agreed that it was a bear trap.
"That thing's for catching a big old black bear. Maybe a grizzly," Alto said. "That's not your normal, everyday hunting trap."
Now, over a Jack Daniel and Dr Pepper, I was ready to see his five and raise him ten.
"I think maybe he was trying to catch a bad spirit."
Their silence seemed kind at best. I think Slant Face was thinking of things and trying to keep from saying them, while Alto was trying to think of things he could say.
"You saying the bad spirit is what killed them?" Alto said.
I wasn't sure what I was thinking, but I knew that wasn't it. I had seen the crime scene. Seen the woman's head pushed down into the sink, her hair dyed red with blood and clogging the drain. No bad spirit had managed that.
And yet Dewey Mitchell had been talking to someone. Or something. Had he thought Werner himself was hiding in the house? Maybe. It was one of those pieces of the engine that Alto talked about. Alto the Tonkawa talking about building an engine and me, Dutch Curridge, talking about trying to catch an evil spirit. Life is never as predictable as you think it is.
"I think you're on the right track, Dutch," Slant Face said. "I just don't think you're there yet. You need to go ahead and talk to these other fellas in the band. You need to talk to Dewey, see if you can find out what he was up to."
What was I going to do—walk up to Dewey and say, ‘Talked to any good ghosts lately?’
