by Tim Bryant
"Did you purchase the gun for Mrs. Athey?" Sheriff King said.
Griner shook his head and wiped his face.
"No, she asked if she could borrow it. She just wanted to borrow it for a day or two."
The words came out in bunches, along with the most awful racket I'd heard since Ruthie Nell took me to hear the symphony orchestra at Lake Worth. Screeching and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
"Did she tell you why she wanted it?" I said.
I gave him time to compose himself. He didn't seem to think anything he was saying would be held against him later. That made me think he was on the up and up. If he'd had other ideas, I was pretty sure we would still be waiting for his lawyer.
He started and stopped and started the answer a time or two, trying to get it the way he wanted it.
"She was afraid. She said there was a big old wild hog that was getting up in their yard. Up in their garden. She said she'd asked Werner to kill it, and he was taking too long. Wasn't getting the job done."
I saw something in his eye. An opening, like when someone leaves the door ajar, just enough to get your foot in.
"Did you think, just maybe, she wanted to kill Werner himself?"
He tried to start bawling again, but it came up like a dry wretch. Like the well had gone dry, at least for the moment.
"Werner wasn't treating them right. I had tried to help all I could. I even threatened not to renew the lease if he didn't shape up and leave them alone."
The worst thing in the world is being right when you wish you weren't. I had asked enough.
"Goddamn it all," I said.
For me, and I guess for Damned old Griner. Maybe for Werner Athey. More for his wife and kids.
"Goddamn it all to hell."
I turned and left without a goodbye or a thank you. It seemed like too much.
36
That Saturday night, the Crystal Springs Dance Hall, Faron Young was headlining. The first time he'd ever played there. Faron was originally out of Shreveport, and I liked his song "If You Ain't Loving You Ain't Living" enough to consider it one of my theme songs, even though I was doing none of the first and damn little of the second. I was in need of a little relaxation, though, so out I went. I didn't invite Ruthie Nell or Slant Face or anybody. Didn't matter. Slant was the first person I saw when I walked in. Frank Sifford and Roosevelt Hughley were there too. So were Junior Levett and Ralph Kirkland. Jerry Paul Crum.
Johnnie and Jack, a duo who had also come out of the Shreveport area, was on stage when I arrived. They were singing a song called "I'm A Tomcat's Kitten On My Grandma's Side," and the crowd was already eating it up. I had seen them before and liked them a lot. I got a Jack and Dr Pepper and took it to Slant's table, up against the wall and out of the way of the dancers.
"Word's out that Griner's been let go," he said. "I'm surprised he's not out here celebrating."
Slant Face had his usual Scotch and milk, a combination I had always assumed he ordered just to punish me.
"I sprung him," I said.
"Oh, I'll bet the sheriff loves you now," Slant Face said.
Between songs, one of the girls Cunningham paid to work the crowd came by with a platter of empty glasses and gave me a look. I knew what it meant, and it wasn't good. Just as I expected, Cunningham showed up a few minutes later, acting like he was surprised to see me sitting right where he knew I would be.
"Dutch Curridge," he said, "I thought the Indians had got you."
On one hand, I had hoped that I could put Sam off until much later in the night. After a few more drinks. One the other, I was perfectly happy to say what had to be said and get it out of the way. I had been thinking on it for a day or two.
"Sam, I talked to all the guys in The Jazzbillies. Even talked to The Richland Scramblers. You didn't tell me they'd been blacklisted too."
I'm almost completely deaf in my left ear, so I tend to talk loud, especially when there's a band to compete with. I could tell it made Cunningham antsy. He moved in close enough for me to identify the booze on his breath. That made me a little antsy.
"Roosevelt claims to be in both bands," he said. "I didn't want him to kick him out one door just to have him come right back in another."
I wondered if he had seen Roosevelt in the hall that night. If he hadn't, I sure wasn't going to bring it up.
"So you think Hughley was the one with his hand in the jar?"
Sam shrugged his shoulders.
"If I knew, I wouldn't have put you on the job."
He looked like a bellboy, standing around waiting for a tip. I finally fished around and found one for him.
"I think, if I had to put money on it, it was John Wolfshaut," I said. "Although, if he did it, he probably did it to help out Werner."
Sam looked surprised. I'm not sure why.
"You do seem to have a real mess with your books, though," I said. "I talked to Sheriff King about it, and he said he would send somebody in to look over everything, see if he can spot what went wrong."
Slant Face smiled one of those smiles that reminded me why some people also called him Horizontal Head. For the most part, there were two camps. People who liked him called him Slant Face. Those who didn't called him the other. He accepted one, about as much as you can accept something that's completely out of your control. About how I accepted being called Dutch. Even I didn't know what Slant Face's real name was. According to him, it had said Slant F. Sanders on his birth certificate, although what the F stood for was in some doubt.
Anyway, Slant Face knew I was lying, and Sam might have wondered, too, but he wasn't a good enough gambler to stake everything on it.
"The sheriff got no damn right to look at my books," he said. "I never asked for anything of the like."
That was pretty much the end of that conversation. Later, during the break between Jack and Johnnie and Faron Young, I saw Sam over at Roosevelt Hughley's table. He and Frank Sifford and two other guys were playing cards. Cunningham was looking over Sifford's shoulder and laughing. Hughley was fanning himself.
A couple of songs into Faron Young's set, Ruthie Nell Parker came in. Jerry Paul Crum left right after. I'm not sure if there was a connection. I kind of hope there was. I started to go over and say hello but decided against it. Faron was putting on a hell of a show. Much better than I had expected.
He played a brand new song that night, saying when he first heard it, he didn't like it at all, but had changed his mind and was going to put it out as his next record. It was "Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young," and it immediately replaced "If You Ain't Loving, You Ain't Living" as my theme song, even though it was probably even further from the truth as I knew it. The crowd loved him enough to bring him back for two encores, and he ended up playing "If You Ain't Loving" twice.
It gave me enough courage to tip my hat, smile at Ruthie Nell on the way out and not say a solitary word. I felt like a loving man that night. I loved my job. My city. My friends. I even loved Sam Cunningham and his Crystal Springs Dance Hall. If I kept on going with it, I loved Ruthie Nell Parker, too, even if she didn't give a damn. Maybe that was enough. On that night, at least, it seemed like it was.
37
After looking into that hogs eyes, after slipping into that opening in Griner's eyes, after sitting in that darkened living room which had become a death room, I felt like I had gotten outside myself enough to see the truth of the situation. A lot of people think they want to be private investigators. They like the idea of solving a mystery. But not many who do it last very long, and even if they do it for the joy of putting the puzzle together, they quickly learn that the picture may not be something they care to see. People think they want to know what happened, but they don't.
I don't know for sure what she had in mind when Albertine Athey asked Claude Griner for the Colt Trooper. I think life had become pretty bleak in that little house, and maybe she thought she could shoot her way out of it. Maybe she had every intention of emptying the chamber into Werner. Mayb
e she did indeed plan to go hog hunting. Pictures only show so much.
When I looked at the way that house had been laid out, I could see what eventually played out as well as if I had seen it on a screen at the Deal Theater. Albertine had been standing in the kitchen. Maybe she had looked out into the back yard and saw that wild boar hog coming. Maybe she had seen Werner. But the way she chose to shoot her way out was by turning and killing her older daughter as she lay on the couch, maybe sleeping, dreaming of something far away. Startled by the gunshot, the little one had come running for Momma, only to be gunned down just as she was getting close.
Albertine must not have taken any time between that shot and the one that left her head down in the kitchen sink. Thoughtful in the last moment for making sure that most of the blood would clean itself by flowing down the drain and away.
Someone had come in and found them there. Someone had taken the gun and gone down into the woods. Hunting for something. The single bullet carved out of that devil's walking stick is the only indication that the Colt Trooper was ever fired behind the house on the day that so much took place inside. When you take the little information that we do know and add it to the circumstantial evidence, a picture does begin to unfold. A picture of Werner Athey returning home as or right after Albertine Athey killed her two daughters and then turned the gun on herself. Most likely, the gun still in her hand or very close by.
If Werner had thought for one second that Claude Griner killed his family, he surely would have taken the gun and gone after him. Either that, or he would have lured him into that goddamn bear trap that he had in his shed. But Werner knew what had happened. And so, he took the gun and went down into the backyard. Maybe he had every intention of going after the hog. He had to have known that it had come to symbolize everything that had gone wrong in the house. A problem that he hadn't taken care of, and so his wife had taken matters into her own hands.
More than likely, the reality of the situation hit Athey down at the edge of the woods. Maybe he doubted his ability to kill the hog. Maybe he lacked the heart to do it. Or the reason. It's just as likely that he got that far and found out the gun only had one bullet left in the chamber. For whichever reason or for none at all, Werner Athey fired his last bullet into one tree and then chained himself to another not far from it. And he waited.
It's also unlikely that he was unconscious when the hog showed up. There's really no other way to put it. No way to pretty it up. Werner Athey became a living sacrifice for something or somebody. I'm just not sure what or who. Maybe, in his mind, it redeemed him. Whatever he was thinking, the hog tore him away from the tree and then away from the world, leaving little for vultures or rats or coroners alike to pick over.
I'm not sure what to make of the people who saw Werner playing on Jacksboro highway in the days that followed. I'm fairly certain he was dead and gone and doing his traveling in the belly of the pig. I know some of the folks who saw him, at the Skyliner and at the 2222 Club, and I know they think they saw what they think they saw. I never believed in ghosts, but my momma did. She might have been right. Maybe somewhere on the other side of the curtain, Werner asked for a few more songs, the way he had done with The Richland Scramblers.
Enough people continued to say they saw him trudging along the railroad tracks down by Mary's Creek that several nights, I went by down there. Just to look. I didn't see anything much. Verbal and Noble were down there about half the time.
But then, one night I stopped by on the way back from a trip to Weatherford. I saw a movement out in the area just north of the train trestle, and I thought it might be another wild boar hog. It was a man. I followed him from the truck as he walked past the train yard and up into the woods. He was carrying a case that looked like it might have been for a fiddle. He was wearing a long coat that looked like Werner's. His hat looked similar. I turned off the engine and listened but heard nothing. I called out his name, but not too loud. If he heard me, he paid me no attention. He walked on out of sight, and I sat there for another half hour, drinking beer and thinking.
Maybe there are ghosts and maybe there aren't. I do know I came to one realization. There ain't no such thing as a nothing man. Werner might have thought of himself as a nothing man, but he was something else. Something else all together.
38
There's another way real detective work isn't like the books I read. I have never worked The Mystery of The Secret Tunnel, then closed that one to start The Case of The Boy Who Vanished Into Thin Air. For one, they don't come with nice little names, and two, you rarely know when you're on the last page until, weeks or sometimes months later, you realize you don't even have that particular book any longer. It doesn't end when you get paid, if you do get paid. It doesn't end when the next one starts.
This particular case—which might have been called The Mystery Of The Vanishing Fiddler if Arthur Conan Doyle had written it, or In A Pig's Eye if Jim Thompson had—added another chapter to itself almost a month later when I was down on Ninth Street. I was looking for a possible witness to a murder in the area, and I had stopped in a place called Cooley's Pawn and Loan. I was talking to Cooley himself. The subject got around to Werner Athey, which wasn't a great surprise, as more and more people were talking about the ghost that had been seen in the area.
"I never told no cops this, 'cause I didn't need the hassle," Cooley said, "but that man was in all kinds of trouble. He'd come in here and pawned just about everything that wasn't nailed down in that house of his."
I mentioned that Werner had some medical issues that might have needed paying.
"Only medical issue I knowed of was the palsy in that gambling hand."
He shook his hand like there were imaginary dice in it.
"He must have owed two, three thousand dollars."
It had to have been a factor in the situation. How could it not have been?
Cooley came around the end of the counter and motioned for me to follow him. The store was empty except for the two of us, and I followed him back into an area that was marked Do Not Enter.
"I've kept these off the table," he said.
Laid out on a black cloth were two silver rings, one with a small diamond in it. They reminded me of some sort of funeral, one representing Werner and the other Albertine. Something about that hit me hard. Maybe I'd got far enough away from everything to finally take it all in.
"Mr. Athey asked me to take these not a week before everything happened," Cooley said. "I told him I couldn't do it. I never did put them out. I paid up some little bit of money I'd got from him selling something else, and he walked out and left them."
I was curious what kind of things Werner had been selling.
"That last payment was for his a little old gun," he said. "Little .22 pocket revolver. I couldn't give him much for it, but it was like the rings and everything else. He was just in a hurry to get rid of it."
Of course, Cooley didn't ask any questions. People in that line of business, especially those down on Ninth Street, don't want to know. Still, he had known enough to keep the rings set aside.
"He even brought that woman and two little girls in here a time or two," Cooley said. "We don't see many families."
He said they looked like a normal family to him. The scary thing is, they probably were.
"He never pawned his fiddle?"
Cooley shook his head. Where the fiddle went was still a mystery.
When I left, I ran into Verbal and Noble. They were on the corner of Ninth and Davis, and they were playing. I walked over and listened for a spell. They played a song called "Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday On Saturday Night," which I had never heard before. Then they played "What You Gonna Do When The Rent Comes Down" by special request.
You can go to the Red Room or the 2222 or Crystal Springs, but you don't have to. The music in Fort Worth is sneaking and snaking down all of its alleys and backways. You could put the Whitaker Brothers on the stage at Crystal Springs and move The Cowtown Jaz
zbillies to a corner on Ninth, and everything would still go on just the same.
If I didn't love this town, I wouldn't be in my line of work. That's the solution to that little mystery right there. I don't care about puzzles. I don't really even care about the truth. I just like my town the way it is on a good day. I pay my bill when the rent comes down, and I move on. Long as it keeps working, I'll have a job.
39
Ruthie wrote up a real good article for the Sunday edition of the Star-Telegram. It told about Werner and Albertine moving into town from Jesup, Georgia when the older child, Della, was five and the younger, Addie, was an infant. How Werner had played with The Jazzbillies for almost three years, rising in the ranks until he was one of the best musicians in Fort Worth and maybe the best fiddle player.
There were quotes from Roosevelt Hughley and Dr. Moyers. Nice quotes that sounded better than any I had got from them. It was a well-written article. The second half of it, tucked away on a page inside the paper, named me and said I had turned the case by determining that the gunshot wounds to Albertine Walker were self-inflicted. As Ruthie wrote, "While all other authorities were trying to avoid the sad truth in front of them, Curridge followed his hunches and some open-eyed investigative work and came to the sobering conclusions with which all parties are now agreeing."
I cut the article out and put it away for safekeeping, and, a day later, paid a visit to thank her in person. She was on break, so I found her in the lunchroom eating an apple and cheese sandwich and drinking a Coke. She didn't act surprised when I came through the door.
"Nice work," I said.
There was another lady sitting in the corner, reading a book. She didn't seem to be paying us any attention.
"Nice work yourself," she said.
She pushed a chair in my direction, which was all the invitation I needed.
