Old Mother Curridge (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 4)

by Tim Bryant

  “There’s several places just like this along Dry Creek,” Star said. “You can still see ‘em if you know where to look. You’re just as likely to step off into one.”

  Best I could tell, Cuneytown had been built in the last year of the War Between the States. Still time, surely to be sending slaves north to freedom, but I doubted the ability to build these tunnels, as poor as they appeared to be, so quickly. I wanted to say so, but I wasn’t sure this was the time.

  “When were these tunnels discovered?” I said.

  Starletta marched off down the creek bed, looking for another hole to stare down into.

  “Not that long ago,” Starletta said. “That’s why not many people know about ‘em.”

  I was pretty sure by that point that I knew what I was looking at. They weren’t tunnels. They were holes. Almost assuredly dug by Alvis Sr. His white ass wasn’t looking for freedom. He was looking for money. He had been camped out on the creek looking for the $50,000 and had steadily worked his way down to where he had been found dead in his camp.

  On the way back home that day, I asked Slant Face— Virgil Sanders— if he had given Alto that bruised up face. Slant Face laughed so hard he couldn’t talk, and I took his body language as a yes. I wanted to feel bad for Alto. I couldn’t remember for certain if it was really him who had put that idea of Slant Face and Ruthie Nell being together in my head. I knew that’s what he’d taken the blow for. Poor Alto. Slant Face’s laughter made it hard to feel too sorry for him though.

  29

  I took Donnatella Silvestri to the Pig Stand on the Arlington Highway. It was one of my favorite stops, and not too far from her place. I was surprised when she agreed. We got two Pig Stand specials, a beer and a lime rickey and sat on the tailgate of the International. We were early, so there weren’t a lot of other customers yet.

  “Ginny is sixteen years old,” I said.

  I was trying to get Donnatella to see her as a person and not a child. I was softening the blow the only way I knew how.

  “She will always be my child, Dutch.”

  I put my sandwich aside, mostly for its own good.

  “I saw Ginny.”

  She might have had a hard time swallowing the news, but she kept on chewing.

  “Where?”

  I know her first thought was of Maime Guzman laying on that cold table.

  “She’s living with a boy in a town not that far from here,” I said. “A colored boy.”

  See, here’s what happened. That morning, I met a girl in Arlington named Rose Hennis. Eighteen years old, Rose was the head of the Dallas-Fort Worth Elvis Presley Fan Club. As such, she knew her Elvis Presley as well as anyone in Texas.

  “Yes,” Rose told me, “there have been numerous girls that cut Mr. Presley’s name into their skin.”

  It was a ritual, an initiation into a circle of fanatics, for which having the records and magazine articles wasn’t enough. And yes, she said, she had heard stories of girls having trouble with their homemade tattoos. Infections, bad reactions, angry fathers.

  “We’d heard that some girl died,” Rose said, “but I thought it was just a story somebody made up.”

  I reminded her that sometimes stories that are made up become true. She offered up the one about the girl who faked her own death in the Trinity River so she could be with her colored boyfriend in Oklahoma.

  “I haven’t heard that one,” I said.

  “Oh, you will,” she said, “because it’s actually true.”

  I wanted to find out how many bodies had been pulled from the Trinity over the past year, and if any had looked at all like Ginny Silvestri. I wondered if the Fort Worth Press would be privy to any such records.

  I told Donnatella Silvestri that her daughter might have been seen in that yellow Studebaker in a little town between Fort Worth and Mineral Wells. It wasn’t just because I wanted it to be true. I thought it might be. And I wanted to study her reaction. I was beginning to wonder if there was more going on than she was willing to admit, perhaps even to herself.

  Times were changing in Dallas and Fort Worth. People were crossing lines that had been thought uncrossable. Maybe places like Cuneytown were ahead of us. They were the places where white kids were finding freedom and acceptance. No, not literally, but, in their minds, in their music. Elvis Presley had helped to open the door. Come on in, he said. This is for you, too.

  That is the greatest gift of Elvis Presley. I finally recognized it as a gift instead of something thieved. It wasn’t the music. I had heard the same damn music in the colored clubs, places like the Rose Room on Ninth. I had seen the dancing, years before Mr. Presley copied it. Presley was the one who saw that, even if it might take a few more generations to get the white side of town ready to share their white world with colored folks, if he could get the white kids to cross the tracks and accept the colored side of town, the battle would be half-won. He was an escort into a brave new world. Not all who heard would know it, and not all who knew would follow. But a few would. And then a few more. It was a beginning.

  “Try to give her some time,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling about it.”

  What I meant was try to give me some time. I needed to run this story down and see where it led, maybe across the tracks, maybe not. See how much truth I could find in it. I felt like shit, but I wanted Donnatella to feel hopeful. She didn’t need to lose that, no matter what.

  I had a guy at the Star-Telegram that had helped me out before, and I knew he could get what I needed. A full list of all bodies dragged up from the Trinity, any reports of suicides in the area. I was grasping, not at straws, but at rumors whispered between teenyboppers. Straws might have had more substance.

  Truth is, I thought I had seen a yellow Studebaker parked next to a house down the block from Starletta’s. I was driving around the area, pointing out Hoot’s place, showing him the field that led back to the part of Dry Creek where Alvis had been found.

  I saw the car and didn’t think anything of it. There were yellow houses. It was just a color. A block away, I started to question. Had it been a Studebaker? Yes, I think it had.

  “I’m circling back around one more time,” I said. Not willing to put myself on the line.

  Slant Face was along for the ride. By the time we’d turned the furthest corner in Cuneytown and started up to the house on the far end, closest to the creek, the house stood bare of anything remotely yellow, remotely Studebakerish. There was a rusted old Ford pickup sitting on blocks, not going anywhere. I wasn’t sure enough to mention it to Slant Face, but I aimed to ask Starletta on the next trip out. I was sure there would be more trips down the little dirt trail. The thing I was convinced about was that Alvis had been looking for that old bank money. And I was beginning to wonder if Hoot’s violent past hadn’t circled back around too. Maybe, just maybe, Hoot found Alvis with the money and decided it was time for the old man to die. I had seen worse in my line of work. I couldn’t help seeing the worst in people. It’s what I was paid to do.

  30

  I was telling Slant Face and James Alto that it was almost exactly three years to the very day that I had first met Ruthie Nell. She was looking for a detective to show her the seedy side of Cowtown, and I fit the bill. Three years on, the bill had come due, and I wasn’t so sure of anything anymore.

  “I was Mr. Cool, Daddy-o,” I said. “I don’t feel like the same man.”

  Alto was still sporting a bruised face, but, unless you looked close, it looked like he’d forgotten to shave that side. As usual, he had a different view of things.

  “Remember, Dutch, it is always three years ago at all points in time. Today you’re the cool Daddy-o for 1959.”

  That gave me food for thought for the rest of the day, in between thinking about Ginny Silvestri and the yellow Studebaker and the $50,000. Today, I’m the cool Daddy-o for 1959. That gave me more cause to hold my head up and walk the walk than anything I had tried in weeks.

  In fact, it gave me reason enou
gh to decide I was completely within my right to drive to the Star-Telegram office and ask for files on missing people. There was no need going to the Press. They had few resources that would be of any help. And Sheriff King would have even less. Dallas County was out of jurisdiction, out of mind.

  As it turns out, I should have gone straight to the Sheriff’s Department, because that’s where I wound up. I parked the truck in the lot next to the newspaper office, the lot in front of the warehouse where Alto worked deliveries. I walked all the way up to the front door, opened it and let someone else out, stepped up to the front desk and asked if I could see someone in records and research, just the way I had done it before. I was directed to a chair where I sat down and waited.

  For Deputy Dewey Mitchell.

  “Mr. Curridge, what in tarnation are you doing up here?” he said.

  I thought maybe he was there to deliver the daily crime report. I stood up and shook his hand.

  “Just doing my job, Deputy,” I said.

  There was a look in his eye that I had seen before. The Mr. Curridge look, as opposed to the Dutch look. I didn’t like it.

  “Well, I’m glad you look at it that way,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’m just here doing my job.”

  I looked at the lady at the front desk, who was busy avoiding any eye contact. I had been called in. All I wanted was a list of missing persons, and I got called in. I told Mitchell, who I knew well from past cases, and, more importantly, who knew me enough to know better, what I was up to.

  “Doesn’t matter what you’re up to,” he said. “What matters is there’s somebody here who would rather you not be here. Now, since it’s their workplace, we’ve got to give credence to their wishes. I’m sure if the shoe was on the other foot, you would understand.”

  I wanted to say if the shoe was on my foot, I would kick somebody’s ass, but I sensed it was the right comeback at the wrong time.

  “So you’re arresting me?” I said.

  I noticed there was another deputy waiting just inside the front door. A deputy I couldn’t name. I could only assume that Dewey had offered to take the job.

  “Not unless you want it to work out that way,” he said.

  I didn’t like the way anything was working out at that moment. Bret Masterson had been no work at all. As usual, I was more than willing to be my own worst enemy.

  “If this is going to happen, we might as well make it look good,” I said.

  A look crossed Dewey’s face, but I was ahead of him. I grabbed the edge of the front desk in both hands and flipped it over, splashing a wave of papers, paper clips, folders and pens across the floor. I saw the second deputy come running at me from the corner of my eye. He hit those pens and papers about halfway across and went down hard. A gun discharged loud in my good ear, and I momentarily thought Dewey had shot me.

  “Goddamn it all,” the second deputy said.

  He had his finger on the trigger of his piece and was shaking it at the wall behind us. There was a single bullet hole right above a painting of a cattle drive. I was fairly sure it hadn’t been there before.

  “Don’t move,” Deputy Mitchell said.

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or his fellow officer, but I decided not to push things. I put my hands behind my back, and he slapped the cuffs on me good and tight. I was thinking I should have brought Slant Face with me. Not that he could have talked me out of making an ass of myself, but he could’ve driven my truck home for me.

  31

  It seemed like the whole city was starting to smoulder, and I was locked up and unable to do squat about it. Wiley King put me in a cell next to Leroy Palmer, a blues musician known, if he was known at all, as Big Eyes. Big Eyes was singing a song called “Long Expected Jesus” that he said he had come up with that very morning, and he was adding new verses as he went along. Before he was sung out, I was in one or two verses, and I was beginning to think the slow Savior himself might have to come back and shut him up.

  Being locked up in Wiley King’s drunk tank, which was pretty much where he put you when he knew he couldn’t keep you for long or didn’t want to keep you for long, was not the worst thing in the world. It gave me time to think. Something I hadn’t given myself time for. Partly it was because I still hadn’t processed everything that had happened. The death of Alvis, the still-unbelievable news that he wasn’t my real father, the news that a small-time bandit named Lonnie Boy was, and, maybe more than anything, the news that momma had been his damn sidekick. It had been an eventful week, and I had kept myself busier than usual, partly just to keep from dealing with it.

  I knew I needed to talk to momma soon. If she had been involved with Lonnie Boy during the time between the first hold-up of Mineral Wells Bank & Trust and the one where the Texas Rangers had got him, she was more likely to know something about that $50,000 than anyone. I tried to think of her hording it there on the farm all these years. I couldn’t imagine it, but all bets were now off when it came to my imagination.

  I wasn’t sure I put much stock in Starletta’s tunnels either. They may have been the remains of a tunnel system, but, even if they were, I couldn’t see them leading anywhere. Surely they had been reduced to unusable portals to nowhere, glorified crawdad holes, even before Lonnie Boy’s time. And if they were only signs of Alvis digging for the treasure himself, well, that didn’t appear to have worked out so well either.

  I wondered more about Hoot Castrie. Hoot seemed to hide things. Was it possible that he’d walked up on Alvis while he was running trotlines, only to find a much bigger prize at the end of the line? I wasn’t sure what to believe about him anymore, but I aimed to find out.

  It seemed to me that the Maime Guzman case had been satisfactorily solved. We would never know the details, unless one of the Elvis Presley fan club girls decided to come forward, but we knew from hospital records that she’d checked herself in, that she’d been treated for encephalitis and a venereal disease. That she had, at some point, innocently carved something into her arm, and that something turned out to be sepsis. Which killed her from the inside out.

  Maime’s body had been released to her parents, and White’s Funeral Home was probably a whir of activity, doing what they do over and over and over again.

  Ginny. That yellow Studebaker. I was beginning to doubt I had ever seen it in Cuneytown. Surely my eyes had deceived me. But even if they had, they had helped to put one thing front and center in my mind. Ginny was a sixteen year old girl with a Studebaker. She most likely hadn’t been abducted, murdered, tied to the railroad track. She was a girl with a yellow car. It was likely that the yellow car now had a boy in it. She may have abducted him.

  Sheriff King came by late that night, long after I thought he would be at home in his loafers, smoking a cigar and watching Gunsmoke on TV. He pulled a chair up to my cell, sat down and eyed me. He looked tired. Too tired to put up with a smart ass for long.

  “Dutch,” he said, “what pray-tell are you doing?”

  I wasn’t trying to talk wise. Honest.

  “I’m sitting here working on a case.”

  He breathed out so hard, I could almost feel the wind on my arm.

  “No, Dutch, what in the hell are you doing, showing up at the Star-Telegram when you know as well as I do what’s gonna happen?”

  He took his hat off which made him look more human. I’d never noticed how much we looked alike. Like Ruthie had said, the uniform makes the man.

  “I wasn’t there to see Ruthie if that’s what you mean,” I said. “I was trying to pick up information on un-ID’d bodies in Dallas County. Believe me, she has nothing to do with that.”

  He thought that over for a long time. Long enough for me to come up with at least two other backup reasons in case that one fell short.

  “You know you could have just come here for that,” he said.

  Sometimes I think one thing and say another. Most of the time, that gets me into trouble. I really thought I would say that, yes, I k
new I could come there, but the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department didn’t have jurisdiction in Dallas County. That’s not what came out at all.

  “Can you help me?”

  It didn’t come out as me asking the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department. It was just one tired man to another. King sprung me from my cell and led me past Big Eyes, who had finally sung himself to sleep and was snoring in the corner of his cell. Down the hall we went, into the front office, which was now deserted except for a cleanup crew. King picked up a telephone and dialed in a bunch of numbers.

  “Loretta, Wiley King in Fort Worth here. Can you put Miss Rella on the phone?”

  A moment later, he thanked her and handed the phone to me.

  “Hello, this is Rella White with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. How may I help you, sir?”

  That’s how I was able to get a full report on all active cases of un-ID’d bodies in Dallas County. Rella White went over the whole list, one at a time, and what stunned me was how long a list it was. Old men found in back alleys, women found on the shoulders of highways, in parks. I wondered if I needed to move east instead of west. The amount of work seemed endless.

  We were able to eliminate most of the people immediately, due to the fact that they weren’t teenage girls. That left two bodies. One had been on ice for almost a month, the other had just come into the morgue the day before.

  “You looking for a specific person?” Rella said.

  I said yes, I was trying to track down a sixteen year old who had gone missing.

  “I don’t think we have any Jane Does that would fit the age of the girl you’re looking for, honey. Most of them wouldn’t fit the time frame either.”

  I almost sat the phone back on its cradle, one more trail that played out before it got anywhere.