The Sweet and the Dead

by Milton T. Burton

  Named Clarence Hopewell at birth, he was the youngest child of a freed slave’s second marriage, born on a small cotton farm near Marshall, in East Texas. Yet there must have been a wandering Irishman somewhere in his ancestry because in his youth his hair had been a fierce reddish orange and his skin was the color of rust. When he first went up to St. Louis in the late teen years, his odd appearance earned him the nickname Red. Eventually he became known as Texas Red, and by all accounts he had been a cheerfully irresponsible reprobate his whole life, a man sublimely content if he had a few dollars in his pocket, a willing woman by his side, and someplace to play and sing and drink a little whiskey. Evidently there had been no shortage of willing women; if the stories were true he’d scattered his seed from Houston to Chicago and sired over a dozen children. What is a matter of historical record is that he came to Dallas shortly after the end of the First World War and soon began playing in the dives and shanties of Deep Ellum and Freedmans’ Town. A few years later he went north to Chicago and began to record on one of the “race” labels that specialized in black music. In his career he cut over a hundred records, some of which sold well, but always bored by the details of commerce, he’d allowed himself to be swindled out of most of his royalties.

  I met Red and befriended him in a small matter not long after I came to Dallas, and quickly found myself adopted by the whole clan. Mingo had been his oldest son, but he’d died of a heart attack five years earlier, leaving his daughter, a sexy midthirties mulatto named Latoya Steele, to run the old club.

  Latoya saw us when we came in the door. As soon as I’d introduced her to Nell, she led us through the club to a table near the back of the room. “Hey, Red,” she said. “Here he is just like I said he’d be.”

  The old man looked up and peered at me with watery eyes, and said, “Well, as I live and breathe! It is you! I thought you’d done left town for good.”

  “Nahhh…I’m not about to let them run me off.”

  “I should have knowed better,” he said with a cackle. “Who’s this fine-lookin’ girl you got with you? She’s quality if I ever seen it.”

  I introduced Nell, and the old man offered her a chair. “You all set down here and talk to me,” he said. “Ah loves company.”

  “Would you all like something? A beer maybe?” Latoya asked.

  “I’d like somethin’,” Red said peevishly, giving her an annoyed glare. “My supper! Where’bouts is it, girl? I can’t enjoy my friend’s visit on no empty stomach.”

  “They just now brought it over,” she answered. “Don’t you be so impatient. It’ll be here in a minute.”

  “ ‘Bout time. Besides, what else I got to do but be impatient?”

  Latoya glanced toward the other people at the table and motioned for them to clear out and give us privacy. A few moments later one of the barmaids scurried over and set a steaming platter before the old man. It held a pile of barbecued link sausage that must have weighed a couple of pounds. And that was all—not a crust of bread, not a single baked bean, not an ounce of potato salad—nothing else. Just the sausage, hot and juicy and still smoky from the grill. Apparently Texas Red had not yet heard of the wisdom of a balanced diet.

  He poured his glass half-full of Crown Royal from the quart bottle that sat by his elbow, and then deftly plucked one of the links off the platter with his thumb and forefinger. Biting off a big chunk, he chewed with obvious relish. “I likes to eat my bah-be-cue slow-like,” he informed us after he’d washed the mouthful of sausage down with a few sips of straight whiskey. “This here plate will last me all night.”

  He wiped his fingers on his pants and reached for the old guitar that had been leaning against the wall beside his table. It was battered and worn and even when new probably hadn’t sold for more than five dollars in the 1906 Sears Roebuck catalogue, but the music he wrung from it was worth a king’s ransom. His style was virtuosity without polish, raw and driving. In a high-pitched voice that was almost a wail, he sang,

  “Harlem has its high yellers,

  Its sealskin mamas in black

  But it ain’t got nothin’ on Dallas…

  Deep Ellum and Central Track.”

  He stopped playing and smiled at us. “Blind Lemon Jefferson made up that song back in 1923. He’s talkin’ about them fine-lookin’ little ho’s used to be down there to Freedmans’ Town. You recollect them little ho’s, Hog?”

  I shook my head. “That was way before my time, Red.” “Me and Lemon, we had us some good times back then,” the old man said with a grin. “Me and him and them little ho’s.”

  He began to pick again, and when he finished the song there wasn’t another sound to be heard in the club.

  “You like the blues, young lady?” he asked Nell.

  “I love the blues,” she replied.

  “You a sweet chile,” he said, and patted her hand. “How about you, Hog? Like the blues?”

  “Pretty well. I’m really more of a Bob Wills man, though.”

  Red nodded with enthusiasm. “I knowed him well, and he made some damn fine music. Ah likes ‘Faded Love,’ myself.” He hit a few notes of the song and grinned. “Really need a fiddle for that one.”

  “Yes, you do,” I agreed.

  “One time I made up my mind I was goin’ to learn to play the fiddle,” the old man said. “Got me a nice one in a hock shop, had it all restrung and fixed up, then got a friend to tune it for me. And I am yet to get the first lick of music out of that damn thing.” He cackled at his own ineptitude.

  “How long you been in town, Red?” I asked.

  “ ‘Bout a month.”

  “What you been hearing?”

  “Heard you shot Danny Boy Sheffield and took his jools,” he replied bluntly.

  “I didn’t,” I said with a laugh.

  “Didn’t figure you did. Didn’t seem like your style, but I don’t care no way. That man was a hood. I mean a stone gangster! ‘Bout time somebody shot him. He done scared me bad.”

  “What? When was that?” I asked in surprise.

  “ ‘Bout this time last year.”

  “Well, he sure as hell won’t be bothering you anymore. But what did he do to scare you? Did he threaten you?”

  “No, but a man like that don’t have to threaten to be scary.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “He come to the house where I was staying and wanted to talk about rereleasin’ some of my old records. Said old-timey blues was hot and we both could make some money off ‘em.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothin’. You don’t say no outright to folks like him. I said I’d think on it. But shit! What’s a man like him know about the music bidness, anyhow?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said. “But he sure knew how to screw people.”

  “That’s what I know, and that’s why I didn’t fool with him. See, this fellow from that college over at Nacogdoches…What did you call him?” he asked Latoya.

  “A folklorist.”

  “Yeah. He wanted to help me get hooked up with that museum deal up there at Washington—”

  “The Smithsonian,” Latoya said.

  “That’s it! They’re collecting up a library of old-timey music and he wanted me to be in it. They handle all the rereleases, and they are on the up-and-up for sure.”

  “Damn!” I said. “That’s great, Red. The Smithsonian. It looks like you’re going to be in the history books.”

  “Yeah,” he said with obvious satisfaction. “That’s why I decided to sign up with the scholars. But I didn’t tell Danny Boy that. Oh, hell no! Didn’t tell him or that other fellow either.”

  “What other fellow?” I asked.

  “Culpepper. Bobby Culpepper,” Latoya said.

  “And he was with Sheffield?”

  Texas Red nodded. “Yeah, they was thick as thieves. Both of them come to the place and talked up that record deal. Little Danny, he was a finger-poppin’ and jive-talkin’ to beat the band. Gonna make us
both a pile of money, he said. But sheeet, folks like them two don’t know nothing about nothing except scammin’ people. That’s all they do. Just scam and scam. They’d ruther scam than eat. White trash peckerwoods—”

  “How about my old partner, Benny Weiss?” I asked. “Heard anything about him?”

  Texas Red let out a long sigh. “Now, don’t hold this again’ me, Hog,” he said reluctantly, “but I heard the same thing there that I did about you and Danny Boy. But I knew it wasn’t so.”

  “Thanks, Red.”

  “But I worry if I might not have had something to do with Benny gettin’ killed, though.”

  “What?” I asked in amazement.

  The old man nodded sadly. “Yeah, after Danny Boy and that other fella come out here, Benny dropped by to see me. He done it ever’ year when I come down.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “But Benny had a bad habit of keeping too much to himself.”

  “Yeah,” Red said, shaking his head with the memory. “That Benny, he was one crazy rascal, but I sho liked him.”

  “Me too, Red. ...”

  “Anyhow, I tole him about Danny Boy puttin’ the pressure on me about them recordings, and he just laughed and told me to put it out of my mind. Said he had Danny Boy’s pecker in his pocket.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what he said. And I been around long enough to know that meant he had something heavy on the man and had done made him a snitch.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “But I didn’t know anything about it.” It wasn’t too much of a surprise to me that I didn’t know about it, though. Benny didn’t know who most of my snitches were, either. A cop has a curious relationship with his informants, one that often takes on some of the tone of a shaky marriage that hasn’t soured quite far enough to hit divorce court. And it’s very personal. My snitches were mine. I’d share the information I got from them, but not the informants themselves. And if a cop is smart he never puts them at risk. The fewer people who know, the better things are.

  “Anyhow, Benny come back and said that him and Danny had a friendly talk and the man wouldn’t be messin’ with me no more. But still—”

  “When did you say this happened?”

  “ ‘Bout a year ago. But when Benny turned up dead not long after Danny got killed, I thought that maybe—”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Red. That was at least nine months before Benny was killed.”

  “I sho hope I didn’t get him hurt. I’ve just had this feeling.”

  “Forget it. Besides, this record deal wasn’t that big a thing with Danny Boy. I can promise you that. Mostly he was a highjacker, and he didn’t really have the self-discipline to organize something like that. When Benny got after him, then Danny just blew it off.”

  “I hope you right,” the old man said.

  We stayed at Mingo’s for another hour and heard a couple of younger artists. Both were good, but they lacked the raw, driving power of Texas Red and the old-timers. A lull followed the performances, then some of the customers began to hoot for Red to do another song. “We better be going,” I told Red. “I’ll come see you the next time I’m in town.”

  “Until then, Hog,” he said. “And you treat this sweet chile right, you hear me?”

  “You got it,” I told him firmly. When Nell shook the old man’s hand she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, bringing a big smile to his face. As we crossed the room he hit a few notes on his battered old guitar and I heard that high-pitched, wailing voice once again.

  “I am a poor wayfaring stranger, While traveling through this world of woe, There is no sickness, toil nor danger, In that bright Land to which I go….”

  Twelve

  Later that night Nell and I lay in bed talking. “How old are you?” she asked me.

  “Forty-four.”

  “Hey, that’s only nine years older than I am. But it seems awfully young to be retired.”

  “Not really,” I said, and reached for the bottle of burgundy that sat on the nightstand. “With my time in the army I’d done my twenty years.”

  “Somebody told me your partner got killed,” she said, and held out her glass for more wine.

  “That’s right,” I replied, wondering who it had been. “Benny was the best friend I ever had.”

  “Benny who?” she asked.

  “Benny Weiss.”

  “Weiss? Was he Jewish?”

  “Sorta,” I replied with a grin.

  “Damn it, Manfred, how can you be sorta Jewish?”

  I laughed with the memory of it. “Benny’s parents were semiobservant Reform Jews. His father ran one of the best mens’ stores in Dallas. It was really famous all over north Texas, big on English tweeds, Dunhill pipes, fine imported tobaccos, Irish walking sticks. That sort of thing. Benny’s folks wanted him to become a rabbi, but all he was interested in was wearing jeans and boots and riding horses. And being a Texas lawman.”

  “He must have made it,” she said.

  I nodded. “He made it with the horses, too. The guy was still competing in amateur rodeos when he died. A great calf roper.”

  “Where did the two of you meet?”

  “In the army.”

  “And you were really close?”

  “Oh, God, yes. I really don’t think I’d have made it through Korea without him. He didn’t actually save my life, but a couple of times he kept me from doing stupid things that would have probably gotten me killed. Plus when you lie in the same frozen foxholes together for months, piss in the same soup can and all, that makes you as close as brothers ever get.”

  “So you decided to stay together after the war?”

  “Yeah. Benny had contacts in Dallas, and he talked me into settling down there after we finished our hitch. We mustered out in 1953 and Sheriff Bill Decker hired us both.” I sighed and drained my glass. “That seems like a million years ago.”

  She reached over and ran her fingers gently through my hair. “Not that long, surely ...”

  “Maybe not,” I said with a smile. “Benny married a Creole girl from down in southern Louisiana, and their kids were raised Catholic. That’s what I meant about him being sorta Jewish. Neither of us cared about religion one way or another.”

  “How did his parents handle it?”

  “Pretty good, actually. Benny was an only child and they wanted to be involved in their grandkids’ lives. Anyhow, we worked together on and off for ten years, then when Sheriff Decker formed the Organized Crimes Unit and picked me to head it, I asked for Benny as my second in command. But I never thought of him as a subaltern. We were a team, like Lee and Jackson. Our ways of thinking complemented one another.”

  “How did he get killed?” she asked.

  “He had a bad habit of operating alone late at night. He’d go out at all hours to meet his snitches and not let anybody know where he was. I chewed his butt about it a million times, but he’d just laugh, and say, ‘That’s me, Lone Wolf Weiss.’ About two A.M. back in the middle of September some woman called in saying she’d heard three gunshots in the parking lot behind a bar in Oak Cliff. When the cops got there they found him dead with two thirty-eight bullets in his chest. His own weapon had been fired once. And that was it. No witnesses, no match on the bullets, no nothing. And nobody in that part of Oak Cliff ever knows anything, anyway.”

  “Were you friends away from work too?” she asked.

  “Oh, hell yes. We took our kids to stuff together, went to Cowboys games together. Backyard barbecues, the whole suburban scene. And our wives were friends. Or at least they were until mine developed a yen for the meter man.”

  “And the milkman,” she said, and held her glass over for more wine. “Let’s not forget him.” I filled both our glasses and put the cork in the bottle. “Didn’t they have any suspects at all?” she asked.

  “Everybody and nobody. It had to be somebody either from the past, somebody paying off an old grudge, or somebody from one
of his current cases. But who? He had about a dozen hot cases at the time.”

  “What would you do if you found out?”

  “Do you really want an honest answer to that question?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “If I knew for certain, and I mean if I was a hundred percent sure who did it or who was behind it, I’d do my best to make the case on him and get a conviction. But if that wasn’t possible, I’d hold court on him myself.”

  She looked at my face searchingly for a few moments, but said nothing.

  “Does that shock you?” I asked.

  “Not in the least,” she said with a rueful smile and a shake of her head.

  We finished our wine and turned out the light, then drifted off spooned together with Nell holding my hand pressed tightly against her breast.

  The next morning I left her asleep in the room and went to meet Bob Wallace for breakfast at a small coffee shop just down the street. There was no worry about blowing my cover; Jasper and his friends wouldn’t expect me to completely cut myself off from all my past law-enforcement contacts.

  It took me five minutes to get to the place we’d arranged to meet, and I found him standing on the sidewalk, just where he’d promised to be. As we started in the café door, Bob decided that he wanted a newspaper. That’s when we saw a man who’d once been well known on the streets of Dallas.

  Two decades earlier Timothy Woodward had been called Terrible Tim, but now he was old and frail and near the end of his days—a palsied shadow of the arrogant, strutting hood he’d been back in the ‘40s and early ‘50s. After his last trip to the joint he dropped out of the character world, returned home to Dallas, and from then on managed to scratch out a thin living with a small newsstand. Some people said that he’d gotten religion, but I was more inclined to think he’d gotten the effects of fifteen years spent in the maximum-security Ramsey Unit of the Texas prison system where inmates worked twelve hours a day in the broiling sun, and where even the most minor infraction of the rules could earn a man a fifty-lash flogging with a four-foot section of heavy harness leather attached to a wooden handle.