Spirit Trap (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 3)

by Tim Bryant

  The kid said his harmonica was in natural C.

  "We ain't changing no keys for you, understand," Miles said. "I do it the way I do it. You just have to grab a hold and hang on. If we're in C and you're in C, we'll be all right."

  I started to remind them that blues harp played across keys. A C harp was only good for the key of G. I decided if they didn't know it, who was I to tell them different.

  The kid drifted away, and Miles passed the bottle to the man at his right. A man who looked to be on good terms with him.

  "Long Gone, can I have a quick word with you before you start playing again?"

  The whole circle tensed up and closed in a little. All but two of them were colored fellas and didn't trust a strange white man breaking in, for good reason.

  "Ain't nobody causing no trouble," the man to Miles' right said.

  I liked having that effect on people except when I didn't like it.

  "No," I said. "I just wanted to ask about the man who sat in with you on Thursday night."

  Miles asked for the bottle back and took a drink.

  "I don't remember nobody sitting in."

  The other man did.

  "You mean the old white dude with the fiddle," he said.

  That jogged Long Gone's memory.

  "Oh, yeah. That T-Bone Walker tune. Dude just came up and started playing."

  "What about it?" said his friend.

  The circle fell apart, the rest of the guys even less interested in old white dudes with fiddles than they were with me. I'd have felt bad for breaking up the party if they hadn't been immediately taken in by surrounding circles.

  "Did you talk to him? What did he say to you?" I said.

  Long Gone looked at his friend.

  "I didn't hardly see the motherfucker. I looked back there about half way through and seen him standing next to Roy. I didn't know who he was."

  The friend agreed.

  "That happens sometimes. People just come up out of nowhere."

  "He wasn't on a mic, so ain't nobody could hear him," Long Gone said. "He didn't act like he cared."

  I apologized for interrupting their break and thanked them for their help, saying I had to be moving. Long Gone looked at his pocket watch and said something about getting back inside before Mr. Kirkwood came calling.

  "You still play with Lightnin'?" I said.

  A couple of other guys snapped to attention at hearing the name. Lightnin' was, I guess, one of the most popular blues performers going, so Long Gone Miles was probably used to it.

  "We play down in Houston some," he said. "It's hard to get Sam to leave town anymore, unless it's Los Angeles and they're either paying him to record a few sides or putting him on the television."

  I had never been to Houston and didn't expect I ever would, so Lightnin' Hopkins would have to do without me as best he could. Turned out that Long Gone Miles would, too. Just a year or so later, he picked up and moved off to California himself. Maybe they promised him a record contract or a television show, I don't know.

  That night I went home with the idea of calling Ruthie Nell and seeing if she'd heard anything new. Her informant seemed to be onto something. If he had known that Werner was still alive, maybe we could hunt him down and see what else he knew. Then again, with him showing up at the 2222, it was likely to be only a matter of time before all kinds of calls started coming in.

  22

  I had established a working routine back at the house on Sharon Street. Each night, I would sit in my chair with my notebook laid out before me and the bear trap sitting in the middle of the room. I would look at the trap and go over everything in my mind. If I went over it one way on one night, I would make myself take a different view on the next. Sometimes I would talk to the trap, sounding a little bit like Dewey talking to the dark in the Werner house.

  I had studied the trap from every angle, and still came up with two questions which held the key to everything. Who set it out, and what were they hoping to catch. I'd narrowed the suspects down to three. One, Werner Athey himself. Two, somebody else who had most likely also murdered his wife and kids. And three, the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department.

  If Werner had set the trap, it was possible that he had only been trying to catch some wild vermin that had been causing problems. It was also possible that the problems were considerably larger in scope, and he had set it to catch somebody who meant harm. If somebody else had murdered his family, they would have set the trap to catch either Werner or any law that showed up. And, if the Sheriff's Department set the trap, they were probably hoping to lure the guilty party back into it. I was going to assume they hadn't been looking to catch me.

  Now, this was the page that was laid out in my notebook, and I would sit and go over everything else I knew, including the new information that Werner had been seen and reported alive. I started to eliminate Athey as a suspect in setting the bear trap. Why would he have gone to the trouble? It was then that I added a third question.

  When had the trap been set.

  It stood to reason Werner could have put it out before the murders had even taken place.

  The fact that King knew about the trap—the fact that he seemed to be taking a special interest in it—led me to consider that he had set it up himself. This, taken with Dewey Mitchells' appearance back at the house a couple of nights later, seemed to indicate that something was going on that I didn't know about. A visit with Dewey seemed to be in line.

  I left word for him to meet me at Peechie's. It was one of the few places around the old Hell's Half Acre area where the law would congregate. Any deeper in was like going to Jacksboro. You didn't do it unless you were looking for trouble. Most of the time, they had their hands full without asking for more.

  I lowered my standards enough to try one of Penny Bob's new pickled sausages for lunch and decided it wasn't half bad. High compliments for Peechie's. Dewey came in just as I was getting to my last bite and ordered a drink. Knowing Dewey was one of the few who wouldn't drink while he was on duty, I congratulated him on surviving one more shift with Wiley.

  "Wiley's not so bad, Dutch," he said. "At least, he doesn't usually shoot at me."

  I finished up my lunch while he caught me up on his morning, which included bringing in a suspect in several downtown burglaries and arresting a seventy-year-old man who shot at him just because he wanted to say he'd shot at a cop.

  "This guy had lived for seventy years without so much as a traffic ticket. Then he decides he needs to take a shot at me."

  It's the uniform. I started to tell him it was one of the reasons I left the force long ago, but I didn't want to encourage him. I needed him where he was for at least a little while longer.

  "I need some information on the Werner Athey case," I said.

  He rolled his eyes as if to say 'doesn't everybody.'

  "There are some things I can't tell you because I don't know," he said. "And there are some things I just can't tell you."

  I took a calculated gamble.

  "You know Werner's still out there."

  He didn't look shocked at the news, but I thought I caught a look of surprise. Like he was either surprised that I knew or that I would bring it up so casually.

  "You still have that girlfriend at the paper?"

  I told him I didn't work for anybody but myself and he knew it.

  He took a drink and glanced around the room.

  "We've known it from the get-go."

  Wiley would have never admitted such a thing. Not until he had broken the case, brought in the guilty party and had a front page deal with the Star-Telegram.

  "What do you know about the trap?" I said.

  By that time, word was all over town that an arrest warrant had been put out for the theft of items from the crime scene. King wasn't keeping much secret.

  "Some of the blood in the shed almost had to be human. It was too high up. There was at least one fingerprint. Also, the trap had been used at least once. We know it wasn'
t used on the wife or kids, but we don't know who it was used on."

  I was flying by the seat of my pants, but it didn't matter. If I got something wrong, he would either correct me or let me know, one way or another.

  "And you reset it."

  He shook his head.

  "The trap? No. It was set. We just hid it. Whoever took it set it off, either on purpose or accidentally."

  "You were hoping to lure somebody back?" I said.

  "We didn't know what it was set for. Or who it was set for," he said. "We stacked boxes around it, partially for protection and partially so we could see if someone had set it off. We figured they'd have a lot harder time cleaning up the evidence. Plus, if it had been an animal, it would have been trapped in one of the boxes."

  I thought about telling him that I had the trap. I wondered what his reaction would be. I knew that he wouldn't arrest me. He would afford me that courtesy. I decided to hold out.

  "So you know he's alive," I said.

  "Werner? Oh yeah. He's out there. We've put him in two or three different places on Thursday and Friday night. He seems to be laying low now though. He probably knows we're getting close."

  Every time the idea of him hiding out on Jacksboro while the town buried and mourned his family got to me, I thought about Reverend Featherstone.

  "I heard he was out at the 2222 Club," I said.

  "No, not the 2222. The Skyliner," he said. "Although I'm afraid he may have left town now."

  I wondered if Ballard Runion knew more than he was letting on.

  I left Peechie's knowing a little more than I had when I walked in. That was standard operations for Peechie's. I had said before, if you could accumulate just the information known by the customers in that one place on Thirteenth and Jones, you could solve most of the crimes and problems in Fort Worth. That might have been true with lots of places in town, although some of them were too full of people causing problems.

  23

  Next day, Slant Face was back in action and wanting to get back to our list of suspects. We only had two people left on it, and I wasn't sure it was worth our time. But my curiosity had been stirred again by the Werner sighting at the 2222 Club, and I was anxious to pursue that angle. And I was also interested in checking out this John Wolfshaut character.

  Wolfshaut had a room in the Stockyard Hotel on Exchange, a place with sentimental value to me. I had lived there for most of the two years I had seeing Ruthie Nell. In fact, I had first run into her when she had a room just down the hall from me. It was a great old dump with history. My kind of place. Bonnie and Clyde had once stayed there, a fact that, looking back, seemed to have portended bad things for Ruthie and me. Slant Face showed up at my place and, soon as I wolfed down a two-beer breakfast, we hit the road.

  The Stockyard Hotel didn't look a day older than when I'd moved out, and, on the way to John's room, I swore I passed a couple of faces I remembered. The smell was exactly the same. I knew it like I knew my own face. His room was on the second floor, like mine, but on the opposite side of the building. We bounced around in it like balls in a pinball machine until we found the number we were looking for.

  Wolfshaut worked for Millers Mutual Fire Insurance, but we had been told that he was off work for a week or so and that it would be a fine time to drop by. We weren't told why he was off work, and so we were a bit worried when we heard what sounded like John dragging a dead body across the floor in his room.

  We knocked once and then twice, and I wasn't sure if he was not hearing us above his own noise or if he was trying to hold us off until he could hide the evidence. Slant patted down his .44 Special and I slipped my hand under my jacket and brushed the handle of the .38. You might not think a fire insurance salesman is trouble, and that might just be your undoing, especially in a place like the Stockyard Hotel.

  I knocked a third time and reached to click the gun's safety off. The dragging noise was getting louder as it neared the other side of the door.

  "Just a minute."

  When the door opened, there stood John Wolfshaut in his underpants and shirt, a dress jacket thrown haphazardly over one shoulder, one boot on and one foot in a cast as big as a tree trunk.

  "Excuse me, gentlemen," he said. "I've had a slight injury recently, and, as with so many things, I believe the remedy is going to finish me off but good."

  He invited us in to his room, which looked identical to the one I had lived in, right down to the rusty old radiator sticking out of the wall.

  "You must be Mr. Curridge," he said, sticking his hand out to Slant Face.

  I thought about letting him be me for a while, but I was afraid he might like it.

  "How'd you hurt your foot?" I said.

  Wolfshaut motioned us toward to kitchen table chairs and fell sideways onto a sofa that looked in worse shape than he did.

  "You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he said.

  He didn't look Indian in the least. Maybe German Indian, if there was such a thing.

  "You'd be surprised what we'll believe," Slant Face said.

  He hoisted his leg up on the sofa beside him.

  "So can you believe what happened to Werner Athey and his family?" he said.

  Of course, he knew that's why we were there, but he seemed nervous. Like he wasn't completely sure that's really why we were there. Some people get nervous around cops and investigators and such. And some just get nervous being around people.

  "What exactly is it that you do for a living, Mr. Wolfshaut?" I said.

  It seemed odd that someone in the insurance business would take a room at the Stockyard. I was guessing he must have been a bad salesman.

  "For the most part, I sit in a room even smaller than this one and process insurance claims. I also play drums in a local band, but that's not going so well either. You wouldn't have heard of us."

  "The Richland Scramblers," I said.

  I wondered where he kept his drum kit.

  "Oh no, I got kicked out of the Scramblers, but it's just as well," he said. "We never made any money. I started my own band. The Calhoun Jones String Ensemble."

  Calhoun and Jones weren't people but streets that went through Hell's Half Acre. I knew the streets well, but he was right. I had never heard of the band.

  "Where do you play?" I said.

  I was thinking I might check them out sometime.

  "We played one night, a Wednesday night, at the Menefee Lounge," Wolfshaut said, "but it's all up in the air now with what happened to Werner and all."

  The Menefee Lounge was the biggest dump on the whole strip, but that's not what caught my attention.

  "You mean Werner was in The Calhoun Jones Band," Slant Face said.

  It was the first I'd ever heard of it.

  "Well, he was," he said. "I've known Werner ever since he came to town. Knew his family too. Thought the world of 'em."

  At this point, Slant Face and I were both thinking the same thing.

  "So why don't you tell us how you got that foot injury."

  He looked more embarrassed than guilty.

  "You won't believe me, but I was re-building an old bear trap— one of those big iron monstrosities— and I accidentally sprung the pan."

  He looked at me, then at Slant Face and then back at me.

  "I told you you wouldn't believe me."

  I reached around in the pocket of my jacket.

  "I think I might have your shoe."

  You stick with anything long enough, things will happen that don't expect. The reason I solve most of my cases is I'm just too stubborn to give up. That, and I'll believe just about anything.

  24

  Slant Face went out for food and drinks and our late morning visit turned into a working lunch. John loosened up a little when he saw that we weren't trying to tie him to the Athey crime scene and gave us more information.

  "Werner was sick, and he was getting worse, almost by the day," he said. "His family knew about it. He didn't have many friends, but a few
people at his job knew."

  I didn't even know where he worked.

  "He worked for the U.S. Mail. They were good. They gave him time off. Then they gave him more time when he was supposed to go to Harris and get it checked out. Albertine said he would never go. He was scared. Said he'd rather not even know."

  Slant Face had tried at one point to get a job with the U.S. Mail but had been turned down because he wasn't a U.S. citizen. He then went to Richardson and signed on at the waste treatment plant, where they were just happy to have somebody who wanted to work.

  "When you say he was getting sicker, getting worse, what do you mean by that?"

  I think Wolfshaut knew what I was getting at.

  "Not like he would have killed anybody," he said. "Especially not Albertine and the kids. Nobody will ever make me believe he did that. He was just getting bothered. Worried that someone was coming after him. I don't think he ever thought about it hurting the family. He thought they was coming after him."

  "But you have no idea who it might have been," I said.

  "Werner doesn't know a lot of people. If he ever was in trouble of any kind like that, maybe he owed somebody some money or something.

  There were more illegal gambling dens in Fort Worth than there were Methodist churches, and the majority were as wild and violent as Hell's Half Acre ever thought of being. A lot of bad things went on inside them, and a lot of bad things that went on outside them were planned in them.

  "That what the trap was for," Slant Face said. "For whoever was after him?"

  Every once in a while, Wolfshaut would pick his leg up like he was picking up a sack of flour and move it into another position.

  "We never got that trap into reliable working order, so I made him promise he would keep it out in the shed. The two girls knew not to go in there, anyway, on account of the grass cutter, a couple of saws, things like that. But no, sir. There was a big old boar hog that had been coming up in the yard, and he was scared to death it was gonna get after one of those girls."