Spirit Trap (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 3)

by Tim Bryant

  The line went dead. The three of us sat there in silence.

  "Found Werner alive," I said.

  I hadn't drawn any conclusions that he was dead, and yet, this statement seemed odd, unexpected. Hard to figure.

  "You buy it?" I said.

  Ruthie exhaled smoke and ashed her cigarette.

  "Why not. Why would somebody call like that and then tell a lie?"

  "Why would somebody call like that and tell the truth?" Slant Face said.

  That was the question, and it brought a laundry list of other ones with it. Why did the caller specify that Werner had been alive? Had he been injured by the same person who had killed his wife and daughters? Had he killed them and then tried to off himself? Where was he?

  "One other thing," Ruthie said. "It was a local call."

  There were other things.

  "How long were you on the line with him?" I said.

  "Maybe a minute. Not much more."

  "He have any kind of accent?"

  "He didn't sound like me, did he?" Slant Face said.

  "No drawl that I remember. He had kind of a low voice, but he was speaking quietly. And he stammered around a little."

  "White guy," I said.

  "Pretty sure, yeah."

  "Young? Old?"

  "Not young."

  If the guy didn't sound like Slant, he was beginning to sound a little like me. If, like Ruthie said, it was a local call, it meant he was very possibly someone I would either know or know of. Someone I might look at and not think twice about.

  "So how does this change plans?" Slant Face said.

  If Slant didn't consistently come up with answers, you could at least count on him for good questions. I looked at Ruthie, wondering what her answer might be.

  "I can't mention anything about it in the paper. I can't touch it. The same time, I couldn't just let it go. You were the only person I could think of."

  I couldn't decide if that sounded like a compliment or not.

  It was good to see her. It was easier than I thought it would be. I had wanted to carry a grudge, but it crumbled into paltriness, my mountain nothing but a molehill. We didn't leave together, go to the Pig Stand or take in a late movie, but she did make me promise to keep her in the know. And I heard myself promise that I would.

  Truth is, I needed her. She was a source for information, a professional contact. And it occurred on me, sitting there looking at her in Peechie's again, that if I could only solve this damn case and bring justice to bear, I might get a fairly nice write-up in the Star-Telegram. That had never happened before.

  13

  I don't know anybody who likes to start off a brand new year at a funeral, especially when you're burying a mother and her two young daughters. I dislike the damn things more than most. That's half the reason I make myself go to them. There's something about sitting there watching a family say goodbye to their loved ones that keeps me from growing complacent about catching the son of a bitch who caused it.

  Didn't matter that I didn't know who the particular son of a bitch was. That was the other half of the reason I went. Because you never could be sure that something wouldn't happen that would either change my way of thinking or reinforce it. I'd seen the guilty party show up, walk right to the casket and admire his own handiwork with a tear in his eye. I'd also heard a family member swear on a Bible that he knew who had pulled the trigger and was going to get vengeance if it was the last thing he ever did. In that particular case, he did and it was.

  Given a choice, I prefer a colored funeral to a white one. White folks tend to worry too much about messing their clothes up to do any proper grieving, whereas, at a colored one, they start loosening up their ties as soon as the organ player starts up. The music is almost always better, too.

  I noticed two or three things at the Athey funerals.

  First, you might think that having a funeral for three family members at once would mean three times the normal crowd, but it was one of the smallest turnouts I'd ever seen. A fact that made it all the more gloomy. Granted, the family was from Georgia and had left most of their kin behind when they came west, but I had seen as many mourners at the funeral of a smack dealer on Jacksboro Highway. Kind of thing that made me wonder if I was meeting out any real justice in this world at all.

  Another thing worth mentioning. I'm a confirmed agnostic when it comes to God and heaven and that whole bit, but I'm a big believer in church music. Even the white kind, which reminds me of going to church in Weatherford as a boy. I actually know plenty more hymns than just "Down Yonder," and I don't just know them from Luke the Drifter albums, either.

  Here is a list of things that were noticeable at the funeral.

  Werner Athey was not there. He didn't show up in disguise and stand at the back. He didn't show up with a gun and shoot people down in the pews. Both possibilities were raised by men in attendance, before the service began.

  The mother and the twelve-year-old had open caskets. The seven-year-old's casket was closed, most likely due to the mortician's difficulty in working with bullet holes to the face. Given that fact, it would have been better to close all three. Any tears I might have wept would have been for the smallest child, closed up and separated from the others.

  The preacher who spoke, a Reverend Featherstone, prayed for the souls of the three deceased family members, he prayed for Werner, wherever he was, and then he prayed for the man who had the blood of the innocent on his hands. I thought that was going one step too far and, against all instincts, petitioned the Lord that, if he was really there, he would take it as a prayer for the man's hasty death.

  One man, the brother of Mrs. Athey, showed up drunk as Cooter Brown and swore that he was going to raise a posse, go out, and hunt down the killer himself. He later passed out and missed most of the funeral.

  The funeral ended on a strange note. As there was no family to file past and pay respects to, the small congregation filed past Reverend Featherstone and told him what a fine job he had done, how they had never seen anyone do a finer one—especially under the circumstances—and how the dead threesome were surely looking down from heaven with pride for the job he had done. I wanted to suggest that they might have had more to be proud of if God had thought to smote down the bastard who killed them instead, but my momma did teach me to keep my mouth shut in church, and so I did.

  Finally, Junior Levett showed up with Frank Sifford right as the service got underway and sat on the back row. I introduced myself to him on the way out the door and told him that I was planning to drop by and have a talk with him. He looked skeptical.

  "He's cool," Frank said.

  "I'm a fan," I said. Half true. Junior wasn't a bad drummer. A bad drummer will bring a good band down faster than bad woman. He was just a slow drummer, always playing behind the beat, which works with some music but not with everything. There had even been a joke that The Jazzbillies always started their sets a little bit early, just to give Junior time to catch up.

  "I've got work to do this week," Junior said. "Why don't you ask me whatever you want to ask me right here."

  That suited me fine. I didn't know if Sifford had clued him in, so I went over everything for him. Who I was working for, what I was trying to find out. Junior had an interesting take on things.

  "I'll tell you what," he said. "If Samuel Cunningham had a lick of sense, he would have written that loss off as the price of business and never said a cotton picking word. The Musicians' Union come this close to cutting him out altogether not very long ago."

  I knew the story. The Union had complained because he was trying to keep from increasing payments to meet scale, saying he had the lion's share of his acts under contract and that the agreements were valid. When they threatened to support the acts in a walkout, Cunningham retaliated by threatening to install jukeboxes and do away with live music completely. Everyone knew he was blowing hot air, but it made for some tense months and more than a few nights with substandard acts who were de
sperate to get their shots at the big time.

  "The Jazzbillies were a part of that whole run-in, weren't they?" I said.

  I was pretty sure The Richland Scramblers had been one of the bands that had taken advantage of it. Their first two or three gigs had been during that time, because they hadn't yet become union members and were happy to play for less than scale.

  "You're damn right we were," Junior said. "I'm a union man. My daddy was a union man. Southern Tenant Farmers Union."

  I had never been in a union. To my knowledge, there was no union for private eyes with expired licenses, or I would have been.

  "You think Sam would try to get back at either y'all or the Scramblers for your part in that?"

  It didn't make much sense that I could see, There were loads of other, bigger bands that were union and proud of it. Even Bob Wills and his boys had stayed in Oklahoma for several years due to union issues. Of course, that might have been the reason Sam felt the compulsion to rob Bob, too.

  "I think if you spent as much time and energy poking around Sam Cunningham, you'd find a whole lot more going on than someone grabbing a handful of bills out of the till when no one was looking. That's all."

  And that was all. I didn't feel like a follow-up question would be appropriate there either. The secret to a good interrogation is knowing when to recognize an acceptable answer and quit. Junior hadn't even realized he was being interrogated, but he'd given me everything I needed from him.

  14

  I'm not the most popular guy around the Sheriff's Department. I was Deputy Curridge for a few years back in the forties. The ones there who remember me think I split because I thought I was too good for them. The ones that don't remember me get plenty of instruction. I was there during the Shelby Stubblefield years. Stub had run everything on fear. Believed that the best way to make bad guys afraid of him was to make his own deputies afraid of him. The best way to beat the enemy was by being a bigger enemy. Young kids learned to run from him.

  I didn't love Wiley King, but he was a big improvement. He tolerated me, mostly because he knew Stub hadn't. He hired on people like Dewey Mitchell, who wouldn't have lasted any longer under Stubblefield than I had. He even threatened to deputize me a time or two.

  I stopped by the department because it was a smart thing to do every once in a while. Even King was not above releasing some inside information to me if he thought I might be able to do something that would put his department in either legal or physical jeopardy. We had learned that, in accommodating each other, we could accomplish certain things that otherwise would never get done.

  "Deputy Curridge."

  I don't recall Stubblefield ever actually calling me that, but King occasionally did. It meant he was in a decent mood.

  "How's things, Sheriff?"

  He was walking fast and talking faster, as usual, on his way from his office to the holding room.

  "I haven't seen the inside of my own office since July. They could turn the damn thing into a pool hall, I wouldn't know for years."

  As my friend Dandy O'Bannon used to say, he was busy but not too busy to talk about it.

  "You got any leads on the Athey case?" I said.

  That stopped him in his tracks.

  "Athey. Yeah, let's talk."

  And we went back to his office which, unfortunately, turned out not to be a poolroom at all.

  "I have ten minutes, Curridge. That's five to talk and five to listen. You want to go first?"

  It occurred to me that if he wanted to hear me talk, he didn't have much to go on either.

  "I'm thinking maybe Athey's dead," I said.

  I wasn't really. Ruthie's phone caller had convinced me that Athey was maybe, just maybe, out there somewhere. I still hadn't been able to convince myself that he was guilty of the murders, but I was reasonably sure that he hadn't been among the body count.

  "Is that right?" he said. "Tell me more about that."

  He sat down at his desk, pulled out a cigar and kicked his feet up. He looked like a cartoon sheriff. I opted to stand.

  "I think it's likely there would have either been some sighting, some news of him by now."

  He fired up the cigar and watched it burn.

  "Likely, that is, if he didn't head straight for Mexico or Oklahoma."

  I conceded that it was a possibility.

  "Likely, if he wasn't injured and being held by somebody with a score to settle."

  I decided to take the seat.

  "You know something I don't."

  He nodded at the door, which I took as a request for me to push it to.

  "Listen," he said. "This is way off the record. The press doesn't know this, most of my boys don't even know it, so if it winds up in the paper, I'm coming after your ass. Comprende?"

  I understood what he was saying, but I wasn't sure why.

  "I'll tell you why," he said. "You're one of the good guys. I know that. And you've got something going for you, ain't none of us got."

  "My charming personality," I said. I couldn't resist.

  "Well, that too," he said, "but here's what it really boils down to. You don't have the damn uniform. The uniform is a hindrance, and you know it. People see it coming down the street, everything changes. People stop talking. They don't see anything else.

  "Other thing, it keeps me from getting into places you can walk right into."

  It was a good part of the reason I had walked away from the job in the first place. When I turned in my badge, my momma had grieved. She had taken it personally. I had let the family down. The only thing I could have done to make matters worse was go into private investigations.

  "So what's the story?" I said.

  "You been out to the house lately?"

  I knew it was a crime scene, but, far as I knew, there was nothing new going on. In fact, I had just seen a cleanup crew parked in front of it, getting things ready for the next family. I had wondered if the place would come with a substantial discount. I wondered if it would come with a discount now, or if the owners would even think to mention what had taken place to the last family who called it home.

  "Just in passing," I said.

  "Well, you live close by, so maybe just keep an eye on it. We had somebody go onto the property and take away some critical material sometime after the killing. It was there and then it was gone. I've put out a warrant on whoever took it, and I damn well aim to get it back."

  I wondered if they had found a gun or maybe his fiddle.

  "Anything in particular I need to be looking for?" I said.

  He stood up and stubbed his cigar out.

  "Yep. Believe it or not, it's a fucking animal trap," he said. "We think it was possibly used during the crime, and whoever came and got it doesn't want us getting our hands on it."

  I was surprised enough that I didn't need to act, although I guess I was lying, and that is pretty close to acting.

  "An animal trap? Are you serious?"

  In a way, I wasn't lying at all. I couldn't imagine that they had known about the trap or that it was anything of material consequence.

  "Bear trap, if you can believe that. They found some blood in the shed, and they don't think it's animal. Just be on the lookout. Surely there's not that many bastards walking around Fort Worth with a damn bear trap."

  I promised I would watch for traps and bears too, and left the department with a request to do a little off-the-books work for them and a warrant for my arrest. I was hitting five hundred, and that wasn't too bad.

  15

  The first live gig of 1956 at the Crystal Springs Dance hall was a double bill with Peck Touchton and The Sunset Wranglers and The York Brothers. George and Les York lived in Dallas and were regulars on the WFAA Shindig radio show. Kind of a Delmore Brothers type act. Touchton was from Houston and in the area to do the radio show and Crystal Springs. Touchton told a story about working the bars in Houston until he finally got a break and recorded two sides for a small label down there. When the big day ca
me, and they got the records in, the pressing plant had mistakenly printed the name of one of the label's other acts on them. I liked Touchton right off. He seemed like my kind of guy.

  I didn't see hide nor hair of Cunningham until halfway through the Yorks' set. There was a small crowd, so I waited until after the show was over and the bands were loading up to approach him. By then, even most of his workers had made a beeline for the door. He was in his customary post-show position. Stacks of bills rubberbanded together in front of him, a stack of tabs and a .38 Special Colt Cobra always in arm's length.

  Cunningham kept all of his money in a safe in the back of the pavilion. Said he'd lost too much money when his banks crashed back in the thirties, and he had never set foot in one since. Of course, that kind of thing just led to its own kind of trouble, and the Crystal Springs had been held up more than once over the years. The thieves, though, had seldom gotten away with much, usually including their own health.

  When I walked up, Sam instinctively went for his gun.

  "Don't shoot me, Sam," I said. "I just wanted to check in with you."

  He never looked particularly jovial, but he looked slightly more peeved than usual.

  "Dutch, I'm just about ticked off enough to plug you between the eyes and claim it was a hold up."

  I had never been Mister Popular, but it seemed like everyone was wanting to take a shot at me.

  "What the devil did I do now?" I said.

  There wasn't a doubt in my mind that, if Sam had gone for his gun, I could have drawn mine and stopped him dead in his tracks. Not that it was something I wanted to do.

  "You got every lawman in town on my back. That's what. How anybody could think that me firing Werner Athey had any damn thing to do with him going off and doing what he done, I'll never know. But I'm tired of answering questions, so I'd be awful wary of saying any goddamn thing right now."

  One of his muscle men, a lunkhead named Fench, gave me the evil eye, but I wasn't swayed.

  "You've got enough of a reputation in this town without me saying anything, Sam," I said. "You seriously think I'm out there talking about you firing a bunch of boys over that piddling little amount of money, you might need to think that through again."