by Tim Bryant
"Guy's supposed to be a piece of work," I said, reminding Slant Face to be on his toes.
The door swung open.
"Dutch Curridge. What are you doing here?"
Sometimes I play along and buy time, thinking my way through a situation. Sometimes I think out loud without realizing it.
"How do you know me?" I said.
He motioned for us to come in, and we did. His house was warm, a fire in the fireplace and an upright piano crowded with framed photographs of people in different arrangements.
"I've seen you around, heard stories about you," he said. "We have a mutual friend or two."
He sat down in a chair and invited Slant Face and me to take the sofa.
"Mutual friend," I said.
"Dandy O'Bannon," he said.
My old buddy now serving out a life sentence at Terrell State Hospital. A psychiatric ward for people who could no longer function in a fucked up world. Who had had their gears stripped by hard times and bad decisions and things they had no way of avoiding. People who needed protection from people like us. I loved Dandy like a brother.
"Dandy and me weren't in the war together," Sifford said. "He was somewhere in France, and I was in Belgium. Both of us born not ten miles apart here in Fort Worth, and we didn't meet up 'til we were on the train coming back home."
My stock in Roosevelt Hughley was quickly tumbling. I liked Sifford and not just because he liked Dandy. He could also play "Down Yonder" like nobody's business. I was afraid that when he discovered the reason for me showing up on his doorstep, his stock in me might tumble as well.
"We're working for the company that insures the Crystal Springs Dance Hall," I said, "and we're trying to find anybody who either has information concerning a theft of about a grand from the till or who might have suspicions, might have seen something that didn't add up."
Sifford looked more than a little agitated.
"That bastard Sam Cunningham," he said. "He tried to get word out that he had fired the Richland Scramblers over that whole damn thing. I told him if he kept it up, my lawyer would be sending him a subpoena. I'm retired from the Armed Sevices. Music is my livelihood now, as much as I have one. He's not still saying that he fired us, is he?"
I told him that I hadn't heard him say anything about that.
"It's The Jazzbillies that we're looking at," I said. "I just thought you might have seen or heard something."
"Oh, I've heard plenty," he said. "It's probably not just The Jazzbillies you need to be looking at. I'm not sure if I should say anything. Who did you say you're working for?"
Slant Face had been studying the photographs on the piano intently, to the point I was wondering if he had discovered a clue there. "It's an independent investigation," he said. "We're not working for Samuel Cunningham or the Crystal Springs Dance Hall."
I liked his answer. Vague and specific all at the same time. Enough to make Frank think but hopefully not enough to provoke more questions. If he thought we were working for the Sheriff's Department, that was fine with me too.
"Well, while you're looking, I just hope you're not forgetting to look into Sam Cunningham himself," Sifford said.
I assured him we wouldn't leave that rock unturned.
"Anything in particular you think we should be looking for with Sam?" I said.
It was beginning to resemble one of those scenes in a movie where the bad guys and the good guys all end up in the same place and everybody has a gun pointed at somebody else. In the movies, people point guns like they're pointing fingers.
"Sam is what we used to call a confidence man," Sifford said. "He can't resist the opportunity to swindle you out of something, even if it don't amount to a hill of beans. I saw him swipe part of the door for a Bob Wills package show back about seven, eight years ago, just so he could say he did it to Bob. And you know, the sad thing about it is, he couldn't tell it to nobody anyhow."
I had been at that Bob Wills show. A fact I remembered because it had been my first time to see him.
"If he couldn't tell anyone, how did you come to know about it?"
Sifford grinned and shifted in his chair.
"I was bouncing for him back in those days. That was before I ever played a lick on a stage. I was playing in church, here at the house. Anyway, I threw one of Bob's people out that night for making the accusation. Sent him back to his bus and told him not to set foot off of it unless he was looking to take a whipping."
Slant Face stood up and walked over to the piano. I wondered if he was going to sit down and play a tune.
"I'm surprised Bob ever came back," he said.
I knew he had come back, not once but twice. In fact, he had played the 1952 New Year's Eve party. The first night I ever danced with Ruthie Nell, with her talking into my bad ear half the night.
"The next time Bob came back, they had to pay him double scale. Sam would have never gone for it, but he knew Bob brought in the real money. He made more on one night with Bob Wills than he'd make in a lifetime with The Jazzbillies and my band."
Slant Face pointed at one of the photographs on the piano, a picture of several men piled around a station wagon.
"When was this taken?"
Sifford got up and crossed the room, picking up the photograph in question.
"That's Sam there on with his foot on the bumper," he said. "That's not the dance hall. That was taken at the Fourth of July show at the Casino Ballroom on Lake Worth. Sam helped put that bill together for the city. Quite a night."
By this time, I was standing right over Frank Sifford's shoulder, staring at the man who was smiling through the window on the passenger side of the car, a Ford Woody station wagon.
"That looks like Werner Athey right there."
Slant Face and Sifford almost knocked heads trying to focus in better.
"Yep, I believe you're right," Sifford said.
"Shame what happened to him," Slant Face said.
Sifford wiped the dust off the picture with the arm of his jacket.
"Well, like I say, some folks get hit by a bolt of lightning and some get hit by a train. Only difference, the guy ought to see the train coming and have enough sense to get off the damn track."
I guess he was saying that Werner had it coming. I didn't ask a follow-up question, so I don't know for sure. I was starting to see a lot more of the picture though, and, as with most things, the more you saw, the more complicated it got. I wasn't too worried. I had a pretty strong belief that, when anything gets so complicated that you can't make sense of it, that's when the truth, the simple truth, starts to stand out.
11
Ralph Kirkland played steel guitar. He not only played it, he played it with Cliff Bruner, who I considered the best of them all. Bruner had given Moon Mullican his start in the business. Bruner had shared a stage with the one and only Milton Brown. The King of Western Swing. That made Kirkand a little more bonafide than the rest.
I wanted to ask Ralph about the Richland Scramblers. I wanted to ask him about Sam Cunningham. I wanted to ask about Frank Sifford. With all of these things circling through my brain, I had almost forgotten about Ruthie Nell.
I turned on the radio. "Yonder Comes A Sucker" by Jim Reeves, fiddles sawing away.
"I got a message from Ruthie," I said.
It was a short drive to Crump Street, so I wouldn't have time to say much.
"She wants to meet me at Peechie's this evening."
Slant Face looked at me like I'd just announced that it was I who bumped off the Atheys and had just forgotten to mention it.
"Good God, Dutch, what's the story?"
Telling lies may be part of my job, but it's not a part of my everyday life. I may not kiss and tell, but I don't kiss and lie either. At least not to Slant Face.
"She says Werner Athey has been found. I'm not sure why she felt the need to bring me in on it. I thought maybe we should swing by the Sheriff's Department and see what they know, but I decided it would be smarter to do that
after I talked to her."
Slant Face, less a fan of Jim Reeves than I am, turned the radio down.
"He's alive," he said. "I can't wait to hear about this."
I made a left turn onto Crump and slowed to a crawl, looking for the right address.
"You're coming with me to Peechie's," I said. "This isn't a date."
Kirkland lived in a nice house. Not Pennsylvania Avenue nice, but a two-story brick that looked to be considerably younger than Kirkland himself. I parked in the drive, behind a new Chevy Sedan.
"Looks like Kirkland's more bona fide than I realized," I said.
I was more uncomfortable parking in front of a house like his than in Battercake Flats.
"He retired from Consolidated," Slant Face said.
Otherwise known as the bomber plant, Consolidated was one of the better employers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They had done well for themselves building the big B-24 Liberators and B-32 Dominators during World War II, sending them west to the Pacific and east to Europe. After the war, they continued right on. Probably made half the planes that flew over the southern United States.
I had signed on with the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department during the war, and as much as it made my mother happy that I had landed a respectable position, I knew she had been hoping I would sign on to work with Consolidated. Looking at Ralph Kirkland's place on Crump Street, I couldn't help hearing my mother's voice telling me to look at what I could have had. If only.
I found Kirkland to be a polite man. A little too polite. He understood what I was needing, but he wasn't willing to say anything bad about anybody with one exception. Going down the list, he admired Deacon Evans and Cliff Bruner greatly.
"I wouldn't be the man I am today if it weren't for Deacon and his family. They made me feel like one of their own when I didn't know a soul for a thousand miles."
About Bruner, he said, "Just being around the man made me realize two separate things, and it may seem like they couldn't both be true, but they are. One, the man had something that set him apart. Sure, you could tell it when he was playing on stage, but you could even get a sense of it when he was sitting around on a bus or in some little diner. It wasn't that he thought he was different from everybody else, because he didn't. But anybody that worked with him could tell you that he just was. Everybody wanted to be like him. Oh, how they tried. That's the whole thing. Cliff Bruner didn't have to try."
He said the other thing he learned from being around Bruner was that a musician worked just as hard as any man he ever saw on the conveyer belt at Consolidate.
"Playing music was work, and if you didn't raise a sweat at it, you weren't putting enough of yourself into it. I remember one time Cliff said they called it playing because people who didn't know better thought it looked like child's play. But he said, if they called it like it was, they wouldn't call it playing a fiddle. They would call it working the fiddle. Working the steel."
We talked for a while about different shows we had seen. We both agreed that Milton Brown was superior to Bob Wills in every way except for dumb luck and staying alive. And we both agreed that Bob Wills was better than just about anybody else left.
Far as our list of suspects went, Kirkland wasn't quite as talkative. He had great respect for Samuel Cunningham. Fort Worth wouldn't be the same without him. On a good night, Roosevelt Hughley was the best singer he'd ever played with, and that included the great Bill Boyd who had sung with everybody. He loved Frank Sifford like a brother and said that anybody who said he wasn't worth shooting must have had an ax to grind. And Dr. Moyers had given him the very glasses that he had on his face, refusing to accept a penny of payment in return for them.
As much as I enjoyed talking to him, Ralph Kirkland wasn't making my job any damn easier at all. There was one man who he admitted to not being a fan of.
"Sometimes, two people just don't quite hit it off, you know. I'm not saying it's his fault any more than it's mine. But I just never did really feel like everything was on the up-and-up with Athey."
I saw a crack in his armor and took a stab.
"You think Athey could have committed such a crime?"
Kirkland immediately looked flustered.
"Oh no, I don't," he said. "Not at all. I just hope to God he didn't get caught up in something too big to get out of. Athey seemed like the kind of guy who was always in over his head. Like that was the way he liked it. But he loved his music. That fiddle was like an extra arm, wasn't it. Like it was part of him."
I noticed he was talking in the past tense just moments before he did.
"I don't mean to be talking in the past tense. I hope and pray that he'll be alright."
Slant Face uncrossed his legs and then re-crossed them the other way. A sign that he was getting fidgety. "Some fellas get hit by a bolt of lightning, some get hit by a train," he said. "Werner seems like the kind to get hit by the railroad train. Something he should have seen coming down the track."
Kirkland did a double-take. The real kind, where you're not trying to be funny, you just can't quite believe what you just heard. "You've already talked to my friend Frank Sifford, I see."
Slant Face kept his cool, as usual. "That something you would agree with or not?"
Kirkland clasped his hands together like he was about to say his prayers.
"Frank said that exact thing about Athey at the December Crystal Springs gig. He was the one was the most upset when Sam let us go. I guess maybe he needed that job more than the rest of us did."
That made a certain kind of sense. In little more than a month since the band had been fired, most of the guys seemed to be making out as usual. Some still bitching, some still working, some still trying to make the best of whatever came their way. And then there was Werner. God only knew what had happened to him in the last few weeks, and, being that I'm a true blue confirmed agnostic, that meant I really wasn't sure if anyone at all knew. The more I talked to the people who had been around him, the more agnostic I was getting.
12
We were late to Peechie Keen's Bar & Kanteen. Not because we were doing anything other than riding up and down Main Street discussing the facts of the case. We were late because I didn't want to be sitting there waiting for Ruthie Nell when she walked through the door.
It was an unsettling feeling, like stepping into H.G. Wells' time machine and returning to a past that didn't especially want to be revisited.
"It's like digging up a dead body," I said.
Ruthie Nell did look good, though. Her new job had afforded her a wardrobe that was oblivious to our days living at the old Stockyards Hotel on Exchange. In fact, it would have been downright embarrassed by them. She had become the person I'd always told her she would be.
Penny Bob poured two drinks and we joined her at the table, our old corner spot, where she was already stirring a whiskey sour and looking impatient.
"I'm so glad to see you too, Slant Face," she said.
This was the first thing she said. Later, Slant and I would argue whether it implied that she was glad to see me or just happy to see that he had come along as well.
"You look well, Miss Ruthie," Slant said.
I couldn't remember him calling her that before.
I slid the business card across the table, like it was the start of a card game. Like I was reminding everyone why we were there.
"Dutch, have you been talking with Wiley King about the Athey investigation?"
I had to admit that I hadn't been.
"I saw him at the house, day of discovery. I'm planning to meet with him or Dewey tomorrow."
The time machine faded away, and so did the months since we had last sat at the same table discussing people, cases, and newspaper articles.
"I have to keep in close contact, just to keep up with the latest information," she said, "but this is something I don't dare go to them with. To be honest, I didn't know who I could mention it to besides you."
I picked her card up.
"I need to have me some of these printed up to say 'Alvis Dutch Curridge: When There's Nobody Else To Go To.'"
Slant thought it was funny. "You don't have a telephone, Dutch."
I shrugged. "We could just have 'em say 'Look for him at the corner table in Peechie Keen's.'"
Even Ruthie had to smile a little, although it might have been Slant Faces doing.
"Speaking of phone calls," she said, "I got an interesting one at the office yesterday morning."
"You talk, I'll listen," I said.
We might have been getting to the bottom of the biggest mystery since time began, but the few customers in Peechie's were too concerned with getting to the bottom of their glasses to pay us any mind. It was like we had the whole place to ourselves.
"Yesterday morning, 9:30, the secretary puts a call through to me. Says it's a man who asked for me by name. Not unusual. I pick up. 'This is Ruthie Nell Parker. How may I help you?' Nothing. Well, I shouldn't say nothing. I can hear somebody on the other end, but they're not saying anything.
"I say hello again—twice, I think—and this man says, 'You're reporting on that Werner Athey case, right?' I say yes, the newspaper is following the story. He says, 'I have some news that I think maybe I should report. Trouble is, I don't want to go to no cops. You understand?'
"I said, of course, we would be interested to hear any information concerning the case. Standard procedure. It's pretty much a script.
"He stammers around, like he's working up the nerve to spit it out or wrestling with the thought of hanging up. I'm busy filing another story about the water department, so I wait. Just when I think I've lost him, he says, 'I found Werner Athey alive.' That got my attention. I said, 'Can you tell us where he is?' He waits for a minute, like he's weighing his options. 'I know where he is. I can't go to the cops. You understand. I don't think you should go to the cops.’
"I asked him why. Why I shouldn't go to the cops. It's my duty as a reporter, I tell him, to pass on information if I think it's reliable. He says, 'Oh, it's reliable, all right. I just need a little time.' He waited, then repeated, 'I need a little time.'"
