by Tim Bryant
“Not exactly,” Alto said. “I think it’s temporary, while they investigate further, according to what we heard. But Ruthie is one of the two.”
Knowing Ruthie, you couldn’t put it past her. She was willing to work harder, go farther than anyone for a good story, and, if paying somebody for the right information was the only way to get it, she probably wasn’t above doing that.
“Well, ain’t that some karma,” Slant Face said.
I agreed it was, but unsettling is also what it was. I hated to think it could torpedo her career. And either way, it might cause her to pack up and move to more fertile grounds. I was glad, once again, that I worked for no one but me.
“Anybody talked to her?” I said.
It was understood that, by anybody, I meant Slant Face and James Alto.
“Haven’t seen her,” Alto said. “All the interesting things happen when I’m not around. I just hear about them.”
I told them I had a dream that I was crawling around under the Dearbohns’ house, trying to find that $50,000 bank haul from Lonnie Curridge’s Bank & Trust hold-up. The way I saw it, that had been the one solid positive that had come from having the Curridge family skeletons all come dancing out of their closets. If you looked at it a certain way, Lonnie had taken that haul for me. His son. If things hadn’t gone the way they had on that August day in 1909, he and momma might have got married. Momma might be living in that house in Cool instead of the deaf lady. I would have never been Alvis Jr. I would have been Lonnie Jr. James Alto sometimes talked about losing his real Tonkawa name when the government came and took him away from his family and gave him to a white family to be raised. Now I knew just a little what it felt like.
“You really think the loot’s under the house?” Slant Face said.
I wondered if Slant Face felt bad for the loss of his real name. What was it? I had already forgotten again. Did it start with an F? A V maybe?
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “The dream came up empty.”
“You’re basing it on a dream?” Alto said.
I thought that was funny, an Indian doubting the veracity of a vision. He had talked about having them before. He was a believer when it was his vision.
“It seemed almost like a warning,” I said.
I’d left the part out about my finger getting caught in the floorboards. It didn’t seem important for them to know, even though it concerned me a great deal. It was an image I had returned to numerous times during the day, try as I might to evade it.
“What kind of warning?” Slant Face said.
That I didn’t know. I’d thought about the treasure being buried beneath the outhouse somewhere. It seemed like a place you’d put something if you wanted to keep it away from others. That didn’t add up though. Lonnie hadn’t had any idea he was hiding the loot for any extended period of time. He was planning to come back to it and take it. Of that I was sure. He wouldn’t have wanted to dig around an outhouse any more than I did almost fifty years later.
“You know, I don’t like thinking this, but I can’t help but come back to Hoot Castrie,” I said. “He was staying pretty close to Alvis. Maybe Alvis really was onto something. Maybe Alvis found the money.”
Slant Face was captivated by the stories of Hoot Castrie, but his first response surprised me a little.
“He does seem to be a bit the treasure hunter type, doesn’t he?”
He also had the requisite dodgy background.
“Might be Hoot Castrie’s house we should be digging around in,” Alto said.
I couldn’t help think of the irony. I had been dreaming that I was crawling around under Thomas Dearbohn’s dirty old house, and I might have been sound asleep in the right house all along.
“How are we going to pull that one off?” Slant Face said.
It was a good question. We would have to do it at night. We would need the cover. If we hit the house at one-thirty in the morning, we would have three solid hours. It would take all three of us working. Maybe take turns with one keeping lookout. There was one major issue to be ironed out.
“What the hell do we do with Mr. Castrie?” Alto said.
We all looked at each other, waiting.
“Bumping him off is not an option,” I said.
If Hoot had double-crossed Alvis Sr, if he’d taken his money, I saw it as defending the family to go and get it back. But even if Hoot killed Alvis to get it, I didn’t want to go that far.
“Maybe he’s a deep sleeper,” Alto said.
We sat there for the next two hours perfecting our plan. Was it a perfect plan? Of course not. But I’d rather have an imperfect plan executed perfectly than a perfect one executed imperfectly anytime. If it worked to plan, we would be $50,000 richer, and I would have redeemed Alvis Sr.’s name.
That was an interesting notion. Sitting there, three hours into more Jack Daniels and Dr Peppers than I could keep up with, I had forgotten a good deal of the animosity I held for Alvis. He was family. Part of a connection back to Lonnie Boy. We Curridges were all members of the Lonnie Curridge Gang. And there was still one job to do before the story was over.
37
Donnatella looked good. Better than she had before. Better than I wanted her to look. I hadn’t seen her since my visit with Hilly Driskell, and I decided to play it cool. Not let on that I knew where Ginny was, much less that I had gone looking for her. Not let on that I knew Donnatella wasn’t Ginny’s real mother. I might mention that I had beat William like a rented mule. I didn’t want to lie about everything.
“You got anything new since I saw you last?”
She was fast and strong, right out of the gate.
“I found out it’s not such a good thing to pay for your sources,” I said.
She wanted to show she could run with me.
“Pay for ‘em, they’re liable to say just about anything, I suspect.”
It was a fair point, and one I hadn’t contemplated. If I paid Thomas Dearbohn, it was a fair bet he would swear in a court of law that he’d seen Hoot Castrie rise up behind Alvis Sr. and strike him down with a single blow. On the other hand, if things had progressed as I feared, Hoot would certainly do the exact same to Mr. Dearbohn.
“I didn’t find Ginny, but I found reason to believe she’s alive and well.”
To be honest, the fact that I found a man living in her downtown apartment without her there also meant I found at least some reason to suspect foul play. There was no reason to go there yet.
“Oh my God,” Donnatella said.
I didn’t see any signs that would indicate it was an insincere reaction, and I was looking close. What I couldn’t tell was why. Was she relieved that Ginny might still be alive or shocked that I hadn’t gotten close to her? Donnatella held her cards close to her chest. She had a great poker face.
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
It was a force play I used when we played poker and when we played Cheat. It made her look up, look me in the eye. That was something I could read. It almost never led me wrong, unless I had been drinking too much whiskey.
“What do you mean?”
What I meant was Donnatella Silvestri had used me. Not in the sense of using me to help find her missing daughter. Hell, she had no missing daughter. What she had was a husband who’d left her, who’d taken none of their possessions because possessions didn’t matter to him, who’d taken the one thing that was his and not hers, and she was using me to get her back, but she was mostly using me to get back at him.
“She lives downtown with a blues musician named Hilly Driskell,” I said. “But I suspect you already knew that.”
Donnatella was good. Where Ruthie might have dissolved into tears, making me feel like a big patsy, she blinked it away.
“William tells me nothing,” she said. “He shows up and beats me.”
That gave me a little opening, and I took it.
“What exactly is it that he’s trying to beat out of you, Donna?”
I couldn’t resist wanting to help her. I could empathize with her. I had never lost a kid, but I had had family stripped away from me. I had gone at least as far trying to get Lizabeth back, and there wasn’t any way that was happening. I knew what Donnatella didn’t yet know.
“He’s not trying to beat anything out of me, Dutch,” she said. “He’s trying to beat it into me. He’s trying to make me quit loving her, quit caring that she even exists.”
She was getting close to admitting something.
“Why would he do that?” I said.
The worst thing that a detective can do is come in between two lovers. A husband and a wife, a husband and a cheating girlfriend, a wife and her secret lover. It’s a no-win situation for any detective, and if he’s screwing the wife, he’s probably asking for whatever he gets.
“Donna, you’ve got to be honest with me,” I said.
If I had been completely honest with her, I might have also told her that I liked her an awful lot and thought she was too good for that palooka of a husband, but I wasn’t ready to chop my own dick off and hand it to her on a plate. I would have been satisfied with an honest appraisal of the job at hand.
“What do you mean, honest?” she said.
“You know.”
I resisted the urge to be a smart ass and define it.
“Know what?”
“You know what.”
“I know?”
“You know.”
She stood there for what seemed a long time. Might have only been ten seconds.
“So what do you know, Mr. Alvis Jr?”
That was a lower blow than I was expecting.
“I know Ginny isn’t really yours,” I said.
Never let it be said that I don’t give as good as I get.
“You know what you’ve been told to believe,” she said.
She had me there. That fell right in line with a whole lot of things I had been told and things I had been thinking about those things I had been told.
“That’s all any of us know,” I said.
I lit a cig. It might have been the second one. I lose track of cigarettes. They seem to fall along behind me as I go through life. Some might be only halfway smoked. My doctor says I need to cut back, but he’s older than I am and he smokes. I offered Donnatella the last one in my pack.
“You know William had a wife before me?” she said.
She was stepping out onto a highwire with a cigarette in her hand, and I had to show her that I was meeting her in the middle. It wasn’t an easy thing to do.
“He said something about that,” I said.
I wanted to reach out, but she was still too far away.
“Her name was Rose. I knew her. She was William’s wife, but, no. William wants to change what happened, but Rose was never Ginny’s mother.”
She was getting closer. I knew if she looked down, if something broke her concentration, it would be over.
“He tells a different story,” I said.
We all tell different stories, I guess. Some of them are true, some aren’t. I know this much. Some of the made-up stories are truer than the real ones. The ones I tell you, some of them I made up out of whole cloth. Some have pieces of stories I heard long ago, and I don’t remember if those pieces are true or not. I can tell you that what happened between me and Donnatella Silvestri is ninety-five percent true. The parts I added on, you would never guess if you tried.
“Dutch, you’re looking at the reason Rose killed herself.”
You meet in the middle, not because the other person can’t eventually work their way to you. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the human thing. If William and Rose were married, but they couldn’t have any children, and Donnatella came along, and a secret relationship came out of that, and, as a result, Donnatella got pregnant and Ginny was born, and then Rose, trapped in a darkness she couldn’t see her way out of, killed herself, and then William and Donnatella were torn apart by the grief, Ginny raised to be both a pawn and her own person, who was I to take a side? What side was I to take? It was all history. Different stories all coming together. And yes, whether you like it or not, you meet in the middle.
38
I got to Hoot’s house some time after the sun went down, because I watched it fall below the treeline on the way, and then the darkness slowly descended. Couldn’t find anything worth listening to on the radio, so I did a lot of thinking. The plan had been that I would pick Alto and Slant up at Peechie’s, and we would go together. I would go in first. At some point, after Hoot had his belly full of moonshine, I would give Alto and Slant Face the sign. They would come in with faces covered and rob the place. Maybe they would knock Hoot unconscious first. If they could get him into a back room and secure him, they could even make him think I was tied up in another room. Either way, they would find the loot and leave with it.
As plans go, I had seen worse ones work beautifully, and I’d seen better ones fail. I had been ready to sign off on it the night before. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Slant was out. He claimed it was because of work. Maybe it was because of good sense. It made me think. If Hoot had taken the money from Alvis, if he had even killed him for it, maybe it was on me to do whatever had to be done.
It was probably my conscience at work, but Hoot seemed to know something was up right from the start.
“What you doing in this neck of the woods, Mr. Curridge?”
Felt like I was on the defense before I even set foot on the porch. He was sitting there looking at a shiny new cherry-red GMC pick-up. Where had he come up with the money for that?
“That’s a beaut,” I said.
My ‘48 International, an old farm truck, had once been that red. Now it had faded away, much like its driver. It had character, and it got me where I wanted to go. That was about it.
I told Hoot I had been over at Starletta’s place, which wasn’t a lie. I had stopped by long enough to drop off a copy of Alvis’ will, because she wanted to see it, and exchanged it for some turnip greens and salt pork.
“First new truck I’ve ever had, Mr. Curridge,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d ever drive a new truck off the lot.”
$1750 with the trade in of his old truck. A swell enough deal but where did he come up with that kind of dough? Hoot was making things easy for me.
“Must’ve had a good night at the poker table.”
He added some black-eyed peas and ham hocks to my greens and salt pork, and we had a nice meal in the small kitchen of his house, his furnace and oven both doing their best to fight the outside cold. The greens were the best I’d ever had. The moonshine was smooth. The heat intoxicating in its own way. I had an old familiar feeling that some kind of storm was coming. There was an electricity in the air that you couldn’t quite place but couldn’t ignore. I’d felt it before. Nights at the Top O’ The Hill before the last raid had gone down.
“So it’s true you worked out there?”
I mentioned it in passing. Any time I did, people got interested. Always the same questions. What was the place really like? Were there really secret tunnels? Did the owners get away with money?
“I worked out there for a while after I quit the Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I was there when it all came down.”
“You tunneled out through one of them secret passageways, I expect,” he said.
“You’ve heard about those huh?”
We ate, we talked. He passed more shine. I chewed slow and deliberate. We both agreed that times had been more exciting in our younger days. He talked about living in Manila in the Philippines where he could buy food and cigarettes and even American beer for pennies.
“I could have lived like a king there, and I almost stayed. If it hadn’t been for my wife being back here, I sure as hell would have.”
He said he wanted to go back. Wasn’t anything keeping him from doing it except for himself.
“How is that?” I asked.
“I worked the gristmill here when I wasn’t b
uilding houses,” he said. “I worked over at Millsap when I wasn’t doing that. I still have Spanish money they gave me for going down into Mexico. That’s when I was chasing Villa and his gang. I always planned to go back to Manila. I really did.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I guess I just ran out of time,” he said. “I bought that pick-up instead.”
We both agreed about running out of time. We agreed that running out of money had never been the problem. We both came from a time when there was seldom enough money to worry about running out.
“You gotta understand, my momma and daddy was both slaves, Mister Curridge,” he said. “They lived to see their own freedom, but once you belong to somebody else, once you told you aren’t a full human being, you ain’t never truly free. You can’t ever truly belong to yourself.”
He had seen that. Had known it.
Later on, we both agreed there was no telling how much money was left buried out there at Top O’ The Hill and that we should go out there sometime and do some digging around.
“What you need more money for, Hoot?” I said. “I had your life, I would sit right here til kingdom come and just live it.”
“Shitting in high cotton, huh, Mr. Curridge?”
He didn’t know what he was trying to buy his way to. If it wasn’t Manila Bay, maybe it was another new automobile. Maybe he was just buying time. A thing that gets more and more expensive with every year that passes.
“Ain’t got no people to leave any of it to,” he said.
I stood up to stretch myself toward the jar of shine, to refill myself one more time. There was a loud bang, and at first, I thought I had fallen through the floor. Was I drunk enough for it to slide out for under me?
I turned to the front door in time to see James Alto come bursting in, enough force to make the door splinter against its hinges. Joseph Bowlegs was right behind him. Bowlegs had a 30.06 pointed right at me. That pissed me off to no end. My instinct was to pull and shoot. I could’ve done it. Hoot saw Bowlegs draw on me and went for his snubnose. I don’t know if he knew the jig was up or not. He managed to get off two quick rounds. The first one was wild, the second caught Bowlegs right in the side. Bowlegs went down baying like a hound dog.
