by Tim Bryant
Sam didn't like being talked to like that, especially on his own turf. I knew I was pushing him. It's exactly what I had come to do.
"If those guys are out badmouthing me, running down the Crystal Springs, they'd better watch themselves," he said.
I had led him right into it, like a boxer pinning his opponent in a corner of the ring.
"Anything happens to any of them boys, that's gonna look highly interesting to all those lawmen you were talking about."
Lights were clicking off, and the three of us were the only ones left in the building, which suddenly seemed cavernous.
"I thought you was working for me, Dutch. I thought we had an arrangement."
He could have killed me, buried me right under the dance floor, and people would have shimmied and foxtrotted over me for a thousand years and never had a clue.
"I work for myself, Sam. You know that."
I wanted to tell him that I worked for the truth, but I thought that was laying it on a little too thick. The truth was all I was really interested in, though. That much was true.
"Word is, you canned The Jazzbillies and The Richland Scramblers, but you never even mentioned the Scramblers to me. Don't you think you should have?"
He hemmed and hawed and said nothing.
"I need to know why you thought The Jazzbillies took the dough. The truth."
Sam told Fench to go check the parking lot, make sure there weren't any stragglers hanging around. From time to time they would catch people making out in cars or shooting smack or, more often, just passed out and sleeping off a good drunk. If Fench knew any other reason he was being sent away, he didn't let on.
"Look," Sam said. "Between you and me, Werner Athey had been asking around, saying he needed money. He'd already asked me to float him a few bones. When I pressed him on it, he said he needed a grand. A fucking grand. I told him I didn't have that kind of dough."
"But you did," I said.
"And he knew it. I just can't start handing out money to every musician who comes in here with a hard luck story, Dutch. I'd be out of business before summer."
I could understand that. Broke musicians came a dime a dozen. Still, I couldn't help thinking they'd be a little less commonplace if people like Sam paid them what they were worth.
"He say what he needed the money for?"
Sam started stacking the bills and sliding them into the safe on trays, one on top of the other. No telling how much money he had in that damn safe. I was beginning to see what one of the guys had said. Sam should have let it go. It wasn't worth the trouble to him or to me or to anybody.
"I didn't want to know. Believe me. The less I know the better."
We were opposites in that way. I hated not knowing something. If I didn't know it was there to know, I was fine. The minute I did, curiosity would get me. I guess that's what drove me toward being a private eye.
"I have a few more people to talk to," I said, "but it feels like I'm starting to run in circles."
Sam slammed the safe shut and wiped his hands. I guess, to get the feel of dirty money off.
"I heard Lefty Frizell say everybody's always running in circles. You just gotta mind what kind of circles you're running in."
Ain't that the truth. Always running in circles, always late with your kisses. I liked the circle I was running in just fine. It beat working on a farm in Weatherford, and it beat looking at four white walls every damn day in Terrell. It beat being Werner Athey, and I was pretty sure it even beat being Sam Cunningham, even if he did chum around with Lefty.
16
Penny Bob's was in the middle of a push to expand Peechie Keen's into more of a lunch stop. This meant that he was advertising his fine selection of pickled eggs, pigs’ knuckles and, new to the menu, pickled sausages, instead of just letting them sit there and collect dust as normal. It was a good move on his part, as it brought in a little extra cash as well as a somewhat different clientele.
I say somewhat. Anyone who will make plans to go out of his way for a pickled pig's knuckle lunch is not a remarkably different animal from the brutes who hung out at Peechie's on any given night. My more refined tastes preferred other parts of the pig, and so I opted for The Pig Stand on the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway.
The Pig Stand had the added bonus of being a drive-up restaurant. You made your order, they brought it out to you, and you ate in your truck. That made it easier to talk things over with Slant Face without feeling like stray ears were tuning in.
"Things have taken an unexpected turn," I said.
Slant was philosophical about it. "Unexpected turns are to be expected, Dutch. The only truly unexpected turn is no turn at all."
It was a version of a discussion we'd been having for years.
"There's a warrant out against me," I said.
Sometimes a good dose of reality can rock even the greatest philosopher.
"What did ya fucking go and do now?"
I could say I was expecting a more sympathetic ear, but I wasn't.
"I took a piece of evidence from a crime scene."
Slant Face didn't know everything about me, but he knew I knew better. If I wasn't completely professional, I was at least passably adequate.
"Who thinks you did that?" Slant Face said. "Wiley?"
It was a cockamamie notion.
"He doesn't know it was me," I said. "But yes, he's the one who told me."
Our pig sandwiches were delivered by a young girl with a smile so big she didn't know what to do with it, and, as we chewed, I caught Slant up to date on what all had transpired. He didn't say much but made enough faces that I knew it had caught him as unexpectedly as it had me.
"So how in the hell does this bear trap play into things?" he said, wiping his mouth on a napkin.
That's what I didn't know and wanted to find out. It was obvious that they knew it was there, so they knew something that I hadn't.
"I should have played dumb. Just come out and asked," I said. "Where did you find a trap? What was it used for? I'm starting to think I looked guilty for not saying anything."
The problem with thinking is it can lead to over thinking. I was an admitted habitual offender when it came to that.
"I have something to show you," I said.
Slant Face looked at me like he halfway expected me to haul the trap out right there in the truck. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of shoe I had pulled from the trap. He looked it over like it was a honest-to-goodness four-leaf clover.
"A nice loafer. Once upon a time."
I nodded.
"It came free with the trap."
He handed it back.
"Don't suppose Stacy Adams was the bloke's name."
"I'd say the bloke who made the shoe," I said. "I'd bet dimes to donuts it belonged to Werner Athey."
I hadn't worked out all of the details. In fact, that was exactly what I was there to do. Test a few theories based on what we did know and see how they held up. So far, I was totally underwhelmed.
"If Wiley King knew about the trap, he must have some idea what it was there for. Either Werner laid it to catch some thing or somebody...or somebody laid it to catch Werner."
"Or somebody set it to catch you," Slant Face said. "Somebody like Wiley King maybe."
I couldn't tell if he was being serious or what, so I paid him no mind.
"The trap was set," I said. "I don't know for sure if the shoe was caught in the trap or not, but it seems suspicious that it was just laying around."
"Maybe it was some kind of bait," Slant Face said.
I couldn't make heads or tails of that either.
I debated carting the thing to Wiley and leaving it on his doorstep. Maybe telling him I'd found it somewhere up Jacksboro Highway or something. That would make him think I was in hot pursuit of someone though, and I wasn't confident of my ability to follow through.
I wasn't totally confident he wouldn't arrest me and throw me in jail either.
"I don't think t
he band interrogations are getting us anywhere," I said, "but I don't have anything else to go on, and it'll give me time. I have four more people to talk to. Maybe something will come up somewhere."
Slant Face reminded me of my puzzle theory.
"The pieces you have will all fit, once you get a few more. You know how it works."
I did. There were people out there who had pieces I needed. They didn't know everything that I knew, but they knew other things. Maybe they had little pieces that made no sense to them. Maybe they didn't even realize they were carrying the pieces around. I decided to continue on with the Crystal Springs missing money case, if for no other reason than it gave me something to talk about while I looked for what I really wanted.
I had to resist the urge to guess what had happened. Real detective work is never a guessing game. You have to trust that the evidence will accumulate, and it will tell you the story. All stories want to be told. Even the bad ones.
17
Elias Groves played what they called a doghouse bass. The big upright acoustic thing that you had to wrestle around the stage. It took a big man to play it, and he was the man for the job. He drove a truck for Jepsen Milling, mostly going back and forth between Fort Worth and Denton. He was a close friend of Roosevelt Hughley and had worked with him at the Prescott sawmill for a long time. Groves was on a haul when we first arrived at his place in Quality Grove, but his wife told us that he would be back the next day, and so we told her we would do likewise.
"He ain't in no kind of trouble, is he?"
I assured her he wasn't, that I was only trying to get some information about Crystal Springs Dance Hall, and that I had already spoken with Hughley. That seemed to win her over, and when we returned the following day, she had baked a buttermilk pie for the occasion.
Elias Groves talked the way he played. Real low, but powerful. He was the lone colored man in the band, and he looked more like a Baptist preacher than a truck driver.
"I don't know what I can do for you fellas. I just wish you were out there hunting down Werner. I can't get my mind off what happened to him."
We were sitting around an oak table in a kitchen that reminded me of the home I grew up in. The pie was right in the middle, and each of us had a big enough slice that there wasn't much left for leftovers. I wasn't planning on blowing my own cover, but I did it quick and with no sweat.
"I'm doing what I can on that matter to, Mr. Groves, but we're here today to ask if you've ever seen anything inappropriate going on at the Crystal Springs Dance Hall."
Groves laughed.
"Some nights, it's just about all I see."
"Anything suspicious," I said. "You probably know that an amount of money came up missing. We're trying to find it."
He didn't get defensive. Didn't even seem to flinch.
"I wish you would," he said. "You know, Sam dropped us and The Richland Scramblers like a hot potato. I felt bad about that, because, you know, Roosevelt is a buddy of mine. I've been knowing him for a long time now. And it seemed to me Mr. Cunningham was picking on him, him being in both bands and all. Like he was trying to say he thought Roosevelt took that money. I don't know who did take it, but I know for damn sure who didn't."
The buttermilk pie was the best thing I'd eaten in years, it seemed like. Ever since I'd had pie at the Brickyard Hotel in West Dallas, where my old friend Big Rube ran the bar and occasionally the kitchen.
"Cunningham mentioned The Jazzbillies but didn't say anything to us about The Richland Scramblers. Any reason he would forget that?"
Slant was so busy working his pie over, I don't think he was even listening anymore.
"Most likely it's 'cause he knows none of them boys did it," Groves said.
"So he really thinks one of you boys did?"
If Mrs. Groves had been holding her tongue, she had finally had enough of it.
"That man don't care nothing about that money," she said. "Whatever it is, and I hope to God you find out, but it ain't got nothing to do with no money."
Elias nodded in agreement.
His wife asked if anybody wanted a second slice, and we all did, but we thought better of it and said no. I told her it was the best pie I'd had since I was too young to vote, and she offered to send the rest of it home with me. I didn't say no to that.
I asked Elias if he had any idea what the band's firing was really all about, if it wasn't the money. He took a long time getting around to an answer.
"I don't rightly know what I think. Here's what I know. I know every man has a boss man. Don't make no difference how big and important you think you are or try to be. So here's what I figure. Somebody told Mr. Cunningham he had to let somebody go. Maybe it was Roosevelt, but I don't think so. I think that wasn't nothing but...I don't know what you call it. Something to throw everybody off the trail."
"Misdirection," I said.
Elias offered to get out the dominoes and set up a game of Moon. Slant Face seemed to go for it, so Elias cut the deck and passed them to him to shuffle. Each of us drew and the games began. We each took turns winning, reshuffling and drawing again, and, every once in a while, the subject would turn to The Jazzbillies, some show they had played or a crazy backstage story or even some memory of Werner.
"So what do you think happened with Werner?" Slant Face said at one point, right after he'd shot the moon and missed.
Elias bid.
"Ain't nobody in the band knew Werner. You tried to get him to talk, he would just clam up. You learned to let him do his thing and you do yours. I never saw the man that he wasn't on a bandstand with that fiddle under his chin."
I raised the bid.
"You think he's capable of murder?"
Elias passed.
"You think anybody's incapable of killing you, mister, you better start sleeping with one eye open. I used to go to church every Sunday and listen to a preacher man named Vernell Tesky. You never heard a man could preach like that man. Made you want to walk out of church and give everybody you saw a hug. Made you just wanna shout.
"Then one day, a Texas Ranger showed up and took him off in handcuffs, half the women in the church following along behind. Some was crying, some was giving that Ranger a cussing that would make you blush. Come to find out, not only was Vernell Tusky not even a real preacher, he was wanted for killing two women in Kansas. And that's not a lie."
Elias told a few other stories that day. Even the bad ones were good. He said the first time he ever saw Roosevelt Hughley, Roosevelt was driving an empty log truck down in a place where they had been cutting timber. It had been rainy, and the place was a big mudhole, but they were getting behind on pulling some of the logs out, and Roosevelt said he could get the job done. He'd driven off down that muddy mess and got his truck stuck.
Elias said Roosevelt stood on the accelerator and stood that log truck straight up in that mud hole. Roosevelt was looking straight up into the clear blue. Said he'd never seen anything like it before or since, and he knew right then, this was a guy he needed to get to know.
"I don't know much about most of the guys in the band," Elias said. "I know they can make some pretty music sometimes. But I do know Roosevelt is as good a man as there is, black skin or white. I never did trust nobody much after they said that preacher killed them women. But I do trust Roosevelt."
I shot the moon that day before everything was over, and I left Quality Grove with a paper bag full of buttermilk pie. I also had one more piece of the puzzle, even if I hadn't figured out where it fit into the scheme of things.
18
If I was honest with myself, I enjoyed talking to each and every one of The Jazzbillies, but a couple of them, it felt like I could be friends with. The main one being Elias Groves. That and the buttermilk pie aside, I wasn't sure of what I had taken away from the meeting, but sometimes it's not as much a lead or a tip as it is a change in thinking. I woke up the next morning with the murdering preacher on my mind and knew I had been one of those blubbering women foll
owing along after the Texas Ranger.
I knew a guy who was a Texas Ranger. Guy named Mack Briscoe who also came from Weatherford. Briscoe had been a rookie during the years when the Rangers were tracking down Bonnie and Clyde, and, although he wasn't a part of the posse that took them down in Louisiana, he had helped to collect the information that led to it. He was never involved with anything that big, but it didn't matter. His career was made.
The thing I liked about the Texas Rangers was, they didn't wear uniforms. Mack had the badge, a star cut from a Mexican coin, and he didn't wear it all the time, but it was never far from him.
I first met Mack when I was working security for Top O' The Hill Terrace in Arlington. Top O' The Hill was the biggest illegal gambling hall between the Mississippi and Las Vegas, but he didn't care. I saw Mack at the blackjack table on more than one occasion, and he usually walked out with more money than he walked in with.
Some people say that Mack was part of the group that finally locked up the Top O' The Hill, that he was only there scoping out the place. They may be right. All I know is I saw him plenty on Jacksboro Highway after Top O' The Hill went down. In fact, I was there at the Skyliner on the night Mack lost his badge to Toes Malone in a poker game.
I doubt it was Mack Briscoe who brought Reverend Tesky in, but it could have been. And the whole thing served notice to me that I didn't want to be the crying woman in somebody else's story. Werner Athey could have been a cold-blooded murderer who had everybody fooled. I began to look at the evidence from that perspective and pieces began to make more sense. The only question that seemed to loom was why. It changed the whole thing from a who case to a why case. I got curious about a whole new set of questions.
I wanted to give Ruthie Nell a phone call. I wondered if she had heard anything new. Asked Miss Sarah if I had any more calls.
It made sense to me that the man who had placed the phone call to the Star-Telegram office had known well enough that Athey was guilty of the murders. I began to think maybe he had set the trap for someone else who might come along later. A warning not to follow. As I told Slant Face, it didn't not make sense.
