by Tim Bryant
I sat down in the only other chair available. Alto stood just inside the door.
"Ballard, if I disguised my voice, would you still know it was me?"
He had taken the carbine from the stock and then separated the trigger assembly. To the other side lay the slide and the magazine tube. It was an old gun, but it didn't look like it was in that bad a shape.
"It would sound like you trying to disguise your voice, Dutch," he said.
I didn't care if he knew Alto was there or could identify him. I had lost all interest in small talk. I wanted to know why anyone would pay to have their rifle torn apart and put back together.
"Well, usually it's to clean 'em," Ballard said. "With this one, it's a little different. We bought it from the Sheriff's Department after it went to trial and got spared the chair. Got a Mexican ranchero in here who wanted to buy it if we'd clean it and change out the trigger assembly."
Enough of a story to make me curious.
"Did the guy who pulled the trigger get spared the chair?"
Ballard grinned and pointed at the trigger sitting there in front of us.
"The finger that squeezed that trigger killed two coppers and a prison guard and injured two or three more. I guess you could say it spared him the chair, because they shot him to pieces in the prison yard instead."
A prison escape gone bad, as they often do. And so the ranchero wanted the gun, probably so he could tell the story to his amigos out on the plains, but he wanted that unlucky trigger changed out, and he wanted it tested for any possible booby traps. In his mind, if it had been taken into the prison in pieces and assembled there, there was no telling what might be hiding inside of it.
"So the question is, does the ranchero think the trigger is unlucky because it killed somebody or because the escape didn't succeed?" James Alto said.
Ballard nodded.
"The Indian."
I was suitably impressed.
"You can tell Injun by the way him talk," I said.
Alto hated it when I did that, but he hated it in a way that he secretly loved.
"Only if I've met him before, Dutch. I'm not a magician."
All pleasantries aside, I got down to business. I told Ballard as much as I could remember about the Colt Trooper .357. The ebony grip, even though Ballard couldn't have seen it. The nickel-plated finish. I didn't have to say much.
"Nice gun," he said. "We've sold a couple here in the store. You looking to sell it?"
I told him it had been picked up out in the sticks behind the Athey house. That it hadn't been there long.
"You could either bring it in or get us the serial number off the Sheriff," Ballard said. "Usually Wiley's pretty good to provide whatever details he's got. I don't know that we could trace it, but if it was purchased here or somewhere close by, we might could."
I didn't want King involved with what I was doing. That was out of the question.
"You say you've sold a few like it."
Ballard kicked his chair back and stood up, walking across the room with as much ease as Alto or I could have, and probably considerably quicker than the old man could have.
"Bobert, did we sell both of them Colt Troopers we had in the case?"
Alto picked up the trigger from the rifle and tried it against his finger.
"Did he just say Bobert?"
I said that I believed he did.
"The .357?"
"We had two different ones in the case," Ballard said.
I knew there were none in the case at that point, because I had looked on my way through, thinking that if they had one like it, I could point it out to them. They had a few Colts, but none of the .357 variety.
"We're plum out of the Trooper model," Bobert said. "I got a Smith & Wesson .357. And we've got a couple of .38 Specials. We can probably get some of the Troopers back in, but it may be end of the month."
Old Bobert was fast on the draw when it came to his mental facilities.
"You have any memory of when you sold those Troopers?" I said.
There were two hunters still waiting to buy their boxes of shells or whatever it was, and they were starting to look agitated at me.
"That was the second order we got," Bobert said. "That old feller came in here and said he needed one. Day after we put 'em out. I can't rightly say I know him."
I wondered what kind of a person Old Bobert would refer to as an old fella.
"I think the other one was Harold Lumpkin with City Vending."
I knew Lumpkin. He was crooked as a barrel of snakes—everybody with City Vending was—but he didn't interest me.
"The other guy," I said, "he that fiddle player named Werner Athey?"
Ballard looked like he was biting his tongue to keep from saying something.
"That could be," said Bobert. "I'd have to go back and check my receipts."
I asked him to do that and said I would be back in a day or two. I think he was disappointed when he realized we weren't buying anything. I liked the looks of several of the .38s he had there, but I was pretty partial to the one in my holster. It had gotten me out of a tight scrape or two, and I wasn't going to forget that easily.
"Your name really Bobert?"
James Alto couldn't leave with that great mystery hanging over his head. The old man pointed to a sign hanging over the front entrance.
"Bob Peck. Roberts Guns & Ammo is the name of the store."
He didn't seem half as amused as Ballard Runion did.
31
The news was all over town the next day. Claude Griner was being held at the County Jail on suspicion of murder. The Star-Telegram said charges appeared to be imminent in at least three counts, for the murders of Albertine Athey and her daughters. Other people were already whispering that a fourth charge, for the murder of Werner himself, was coming.
When Miss Sarah met me in the front yard, I assumed it was just to mention this latest bit of gossip and maybe fish for more information. I was wrong.
"Mr. Curridge, you're hard to get a hold of."
She had a message from Ruthie Nell and had been trying to get it to me for almost twenty-four hours.
"She called for you yesterday and again this morning. I don't want her thinking I'm not doing my job."
I took the piece of paper and reminded Miss Sarah that being my secretary was not her job, at least as long as she wasn't getting a paycheck for it. She told me I was welcome to come inside and use her phone, and she would even throw in some free buttermilk biscuits and what she called sawmill gravy. I didn't have a hard time passing up the telephone. I preferred to do my talking face to face, especially if the other face was Ruthie's. My stomach had a bit of an issue with me passing up the biscuits and gravy, but I bargained with it and promised a stop at Rockyfeller's for a hamburger later on.
I swung around Throck so I could drop off two Jim Thompson books at the library. A Swell-Looking Babe I enjoyed, if mostly for the fact that it seemed to be based on the years he spent working at the Texas Hotel on Ellis. In it, his name had been Dusty Rhodes, a name I found to be humorous if slightly improbable. The other, The Nothing Man, I loved so much, I read it twice and then made Slant Face read it. The lead guy was a newspaper writer, but, believe me, this was nobody Ruthie would have appreciated. Back from the war, where he'd had his man parts blown off, he began to kill off a series of women. Only thing is, I don't think he really did. A cause for several deliberations with Slant over the Christmas holiday.
I identified with this guy. It seemed like something I would have done. As I read it, it seemed to call up old memories I'd kept submerged. I tried to put the book down, but I fell asleep with it night after night and woke up the next morning still clutching it.
When I got to the Startlegram office, I was whisked back to Miss Parker's office by a girl who looked she would just as soon be dismantling a car bomb.
"I didn't go to hell, Dutch. I just came back to the Star-Telegram."
I hadn't forgotten that our last me
eting had been adjourned on a less than shining note, but I had forgotten where I'd told her to go before my exit. I was somewhat relieved that she was smiling like she had just walked onto the dance floor at the Crystal Springs. She was asking me to dance.
"Just two blocks over," I said. "Close enough."
She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a folder marked ATHEY in red block letters.
"There's a man from Stop Six named Moody Harbaugh who's willing to swear in a court of law that you know him."
Moody Harbaugh. I knew Moody as well as I cared to. He hung out on Ninth Street, playing pool and getting into fistfights with Joe Dolly and LeRoy Yancy. Running the roads with Noble and Verbal Whitaker.
"I do know Moody," I said. "What's he gone and done?"
Ruthie pulled out a pair of spectacles and opened the folder. I'd never seen her in spectacles before, but they took to her just fine.
"Moody Harbaugh and somebody else you may remember, Verbal Whitaker, met with me two days ago," she said. "It would seem Moody is the man who placed the telephone call about seeing Werner Athey. I thought you might take an interest in what he had to say."
I'll tell you, if it had been Joe Dolly, I would have dismissed the whole thing right there on the spot. Joe Dolly would say just about anything, and I doubt even he knew the truth from the bullshit. The Whitakers weren't a whole lot better. Moody, though. Despite his name, he was a levelheaded and sober guy compared to most that strolled Ninth. He drank a little bit, but he wasn't partial to overdoing anything. I'd heard tell that they called him Moody because, in his youth, he was sullen and prone to being melancholy. Then again, I'd also heard they called him that because he was so unmoody. Like calling somebody Einstein when they're dumb as a stick. Either way could have been right, but he wasn't a hothead or a good-for-nothing.
"Okay, you got me," I said.
I sat down, put my hat in my lap and lit a cig.
"You want me to just start at the beginning?" she said.
For all the changes around her, Ruthie was still very much the young kid from Denton. Hard to resist.
"Either that or you could start at the end and read it backward," I said.
"That way you could put it together like a car engine."
It wasn't going to be like that.
"Like a puzzle."
"I agreed to meet with Mr. Moody Harbaugh at the train yards on the northwest end of Ninth Street, in the area that has been called the Bowery."
She was so busy reading that at first she didn't notice my objections.
"No no no," I said.
She didn't take it well.
"I can take care of myself just fine, thank you very much."
No doubt she could.
"No," I said. "Don't read it. Just tell me what happened."
"Oh."
She put the paper down, backed up a little bit to get a running start, and off she went. It was like we were back in the old Austin Chummy, only she was at the wheel and I was along for the ride.
32
"Moody Harbaugh called me two days ago. The new girl, Helen, took the call. She said he sounded strange, but he knew my name, so she went ahead and transferred him back. I recognized him almost right away. I mean, I didn't know him, but I knew the voice. I tried to sound calm, so I wouldn't scare him off, but he could probably hear my surprise."
"Moody has a stutter," I said. "You gotta be patient."
I had two parallel tracks going in my mind. I was listening to what Ruthie was saying, but I was also drawing up diagrams and charts. I was Clinton Brown. Jim Thompson's nothing man. I hadn't been in a war, but I'd fought my way through a battle or two, from polio-encephalitis to a divorce to a near-deadly shootout at Top O' The Hill terrace.
"He didn't hang up this time," she said. "I talked to him for five or six minutes and arranged to meet him at the Texas and Pacific train yard. You know where it is."
I did. The property backed up to Ninth Street, a situation that allowed easy access to Ninth Streets joints and pool halls for all the hobos who rode the rails into town. It was a given that, at any moment, more than half the men knocking around on that end of Ninth were not locals. They were rough characters because they had to be. The world they lived in made Battercake Flats look good.
"If you follow the train tracks back south, they follow Mary's Creek for a bit before they make a westward turn. The creek gets a little bigger as it gets into the wooded area, but it never does amount to much. But do you know that it back right up to the Athey property?"
I hadn't thought about it, but the creek did run through those parts, maybe an eighth of a mile from Athey's place.
"Yeah it does."
I hadn't got my balls shot off, although I'd come close enough at Top O' The Hill, and I did manage to shoot the little toe off my left foot. Still, I had acted like a man with no balls, especially around Ruthie Nell. I think that's why I had implicitly understood Clinton Brown's anger. Of course, I could never kill Ruthie, but I had dreamed her dead more than once. And had Clinton really killed any of those women? Slant Face said yes, but I wasn't so sure, and I was the private eye. I knew when I was looking at a murderer. I wasn't one. I didn't think Clinton Brown was one. I didn't think Werner Athey was either. I hoped that wasn't what she was leading to.
"Moody Harbaugh says he saw Werner Athey walking along the tracks down there on two different occasions," Ruthie said. "He even spoke with him on one of them. He said to tell you, he would stand up in a court of law and swear that it was him."
Ruthie looked like she expected me to have a hard time swallowing it. I didn't.
"I never did think Werner was dead. I never thought he shot his family either."
"Verbal Whitaker says he saw Werner once himself, farther down Mary's Creek, and he wasn't with Moody when it happened."
I didn't say anything, but my face must have been a question.
"They walk down and fish from the train bridge," she said. "They have a camp down there where they cook and everything."
So Werner was hiding out in the Mary's Creek area. Not a bad place to do it, except for the occasional wild boar or something. Then again, maybe they killed and cooked them up too.
"Anybody mention if he had a gun on him?" I said.
She looked over her notes, but not like she didn't already know the answer.
"Um," she said. "I think not."
"I'd be way more afraid of wild animals out in those woods than of any of the rail riders down there. It wasn't like Werner didn't know what all was out there."
I had been in danger of being a nothing man. My ex-wife Noreen had all but accused me of it in County Court. Judge Lynch had sided with her. My own momma did, too, far as that goes.
"Werner's been seen at least three times. The last of those was five nights ago. So far, all three times were at night. Makes sense, I guess, if he thinks there are less people around that would possibly confront him."
I felt bad for him. I wasn't sure I wanted any part in hunting him down. Not for the law, not for a news story.
"Any of these guys actually spoken to him?" I said. "He said anything to any of 'em?"
"Verbal Whitaker said he looked up at him but kept walking. Verbal didn't follow him."
"Verbal doesn't talk much, for a person named Verbal," I said.
I'd heard that his brother Noble had suffered some kind of stroke a few months back, but I knew he was back on the street because I'd seen him sitting in the parking lot of The Rose Room right before Christmas. I wondered if the stroke had slowed him down. Maybe it had given Verbal a little more chance to get a word or two in. Not likely, but maybe.
"Look, Dutch," Ruthie Nell said, "I'd really like to go down to the train yard again and have a look around. Just see what we can see. But it would have to be done at night."
I noticed how she said we.
"I'd probably do that, especially if we could top it off with a movie at the Deal," I said.
If I had expected her
to leap to her feet with joy, I'd have been slightly discouraged. In fact, she looked more excited the night Bloody Bert Donahue offered to pay her ticket back home to Denton so she wouldn't have to tell the folks at the Stockyard Hotel she was short on rent money. But that was so far away it seemed like another lifetime, and any satisfaction I got that night was long gone.
"You're something else, Dutch," she said.
It wasn't the worst thing she could've said. Not by miles.
"Beats nothing," I said.
We got our coats and left, each of us driving our own set of wheels, but both of us going in the same direction. The sun was already far enough down that you couldn't see it, and the dark was sliding across the sky from the east. There was a deep chill in the air, and it made it feel like the kind of night you just might see something you didn't want to see. I didn't want to see Werner Athey. That much I was sure of. If I saw him, I was likely to shoo him off and tell him to stay gone for a while, like I had done those deer so many years before.
The train yard played tricks on you. In the busiest part of the day, it would get so loud, you couldn't hear yourself scream. At night, when most of the activity came to a standstill, it got quiet enough to hear rats scurrying along the tracks, heading for the creek. At the same time, the little sounds would magnify. Sometimes your own footsteps would echo like thunder, and the railroad cars would creak and pop like they could hardly wait to get back in motion. Maybe that was the just the men inside of them. If Werner was anywhere in the area, I hoped he was with them, and I hoped he was getting ready to move on along.
33
The train yard, in an area known by cops as the Bowery, wasn't lit up at night. On the night that Ruthie Nell and I parked just off the fifth block of Ninth and walked in from the south, following the alley to the west of the storefronts, the only light to speak of was starlight and a vague haze that hung behind us. Leftovers from the day and a little weak help from town. The lack of streetlights on that end of Ninth left the stars to pull most of the weight.
I'd followed Ruthie's green Ford Sedan, and I'd noticed one of Wiley's squad cars about a block behind me. I couldn't make out who it was, and he stayed on Houston, traveling in the direction of the station, when we turned on Ninth, so I thought no more of it. We parked on a side street, out of view, and walked. My idea was to walk into the main train yard, have a look across and into the woods, then follow the creek back down.
