by Tim Bryant
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
SOUTHERN SELECT
First edition. March 23, 2016.
Copyright © 2016 Tim Bryant.
Written by Tim Bryant.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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19
20
21
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Spirit Trap | (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 3) | Kindle Edition | by Tim Bryant | 1
About the Author
This book is dedicated to John A. McDermott.
1
On September 1, 1954, Pete the Python escaped from the Fort Worth Zoo. Eighteen foot long and five hundred pounds, Pete slithered into town and into the dark corners of Fort Worth's psyche like no one since the days of the Sam Bass Gang. Children were told to go straight home from school and stay indoors. Parents were warned to keep an eye on family pets. Even grownups slept with the lights on. The whole city was beside itself.
Not as many people remember that it was also the day Patrick the barkeep at Peechie Keen's Bar & Canteen, showed up dead for work. He was stretched out right beneath the “Drink Southern Select” window sign, looking for the most part like he’d had one too many. He was wearing the same wrinkled charcoal coat and the gray slacks he wore when the navy ones were being cleaned. A white shirt with a torn collar and a note pinned to it, like a kid on his way home from school. Only difference was, the note said "consider this a goddamn warning," a message even the teachers on the south side of town had likely never written. And then there was the matter of the two bullet holes in his face.
Peechie Keen's ran a fairly clean business, if you didn’t hold the pickled eggs and pig’s feet against them. That made the place somewhat unusual, considering it operated in an area of Fort Worth known as Hell's Half Acre. Peechie’s was on Thirteenth and Jones, which put it right on the edge of the Acre. As a result, it got a good amount of service from cops and lawmen, who typically didn’t want to go any deeper into the area than was absolutely necessary.
The Acre wasn’t as bad as it had been back in the day when scoundrels like Bass and Longhair Jim Courtright and Butch Cassidy hid out among all the bawdy houses, and all kinds of illicit activity brought rough characters from far and wide. Still, it wasn’t the land of milk and honey. Trouble might lurk around any corner. Nobody had any idea who was behind the warning on Patrick’s collar, who was being warned or what they were being warned about.
My name is Alvis Curridge. Only one person called me that, though, and it wasn't my mama. Everybody else called me Dutch. I earned the name fair and square, and it was as much a part of me as the missing toe on my left foot or my bad left ear.
I lived on the west side of Fort Worth, in a neighborhood called Tremble. It wasn’t the scariest neighborhood in town, but one could easily imagine how it got its name. I lived in a boarding house on Sharon Road, right off the end of White Settlement, sharing the two story clapboard building with a Bible salesman, a retired mechanic and a family from Oklahoma. I had been a licensed private eye going back to the late forties, using a combination of skills I honed during a four year career with the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department and what my mama had once referred to as natural born sagacity. The Sheriff’s Department and I didn’t see eye to eye, so I struck out on my own. Maybe I just didn't play well with others. I never went long without work though, even if I did get too busy somewhere along the way and let my license expire.
I was never formally given the job of tracking down Patrick’s killer. He had no family to do the giving. If I hadn’t done it, though, it would have been the same as not getting dressed in the morning. I would have been the detective with no clothes. People wouldn’t have taken it as a good sign. Beyond that, I could certainly trust no one else to do it. Sheriff Wiley King, while a better fit for his job than Shelby “Stub” Stubblefield had once been, had his hands full. Patrick would be one of the folders in an ever-growing stack, his name the only detail to mark his from the rest.
Ruthie had stopped hanging at Peechie’s. Of course, she had. She didn’t go to the Deal Theater or the Pig Stand on the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway anymore either. She hadn’t spoken with Patrick or Slant Face or anyone in months. My first instinct was to look her up and tell her the bad news. Invite her to the memorial service we had a week later at Peechie’s, where we kept looking around at the new barkeep— a guy from Cleburne named Hick Hinson— expecting him to be someone he couldn’t be.
Ruthie Nell and I had never spoken of our relationship. We had just found ourselves in each other’s company and liked it enough that four years had gone by with neither realizing it. She was from Denton where she’d gone to school at Texas State College for Women. She’d arrived in Fort Worth in 1949, straight off the bus with the promise of a job on the small Fort Worth Press newspaper. It turned out to be part time work, so she was poor as a sparrow but better at making ends meet than I was. When she moved into the same boarding house as me, we struck up a friendship in much the way that prisoners on death row will bond together.
I don’t know why she hung around as long as she did. Maybe it was just poor judgment on her part. Be that as it may, she was my perfect idea of what a woman ought to be. With the possible exception of working part time for a dump like the Press. That worked to my advantage too though because when I needed some sort of official information or maybe a contact or a name, I could go to her. And I did, as much as possible.
Even so, we came apart in much the same manner as how we came together; that is to say, before I recognized it. With her gone, I stopped taking cases I normally would have, afraid that I might suddenly need the dope on somebody. If I went to the Press, it would look like I needed to see her face. If I went to the big guys across town, the hated Star-Telegram, I’d be just about the biggest loser that ever came wandering down the Viaduct.
I was hanging out in the usual nightspots. Peechie Keen’s, the Crystal Springs Dance Hall, the Skyliner and the Green Parrot. Slant Face Sanders and James Alto might have taken a look at me and written me off as the same sad-ass yuck they’d been hitting the town with for years. But I wasn't playing "I Want To Be With You Always" on the juke anymore. I was playing "How Long Will It Take To Stop Loving You," or, on a good day, "This Is The Thanks I Get For Loving You."
I had been the second person to see the body, after the city cops and the coroner. A guy named Ansel that owned a watch shop next door to Peechie’s had shown up to identify the body, pleading with the cops to keep a closer eye on his place and, by extension, on him. Ansel wore an officer’s raincoat, a holdover from his Army days, every day whether there was rain in the forecast or not. As a result, he had more of a Philip Marlowe-type look than I did. He scuffled when he walked, so I heard him before he came through the doorway.
“Hard to believe, Dutch,” he said. “It's hard to believe.
”
It didn’t take much to see he had been shot twice. The first bullet entered the back left side of his head and exited his right cheek. The second, the one that did him in, went in right behind his left ear and demolished his forehead. His right eyeball was missing in action. His left one turned in, as if trying to take stock of what remained.
From the neck down, he looked as if he’d just stepped out of the bath. Clean as a whistle, unmarked except for three tattoos, one of which I had never seen before.
“MOM,” I said. I was almost embarrassed at its personal nature. It felt as if I were spying on a friend.
“I don’t know anything about his family,” I said to the coroner’s assistant, a young lady in a cheerfully yellow dress, who was busy jotting something down in a little brown notebook. “Don’t think he had any left.”
She looked up from her work, glanced at Patrick on the table and then at me.
“I don’t think the tattoo refers to his mother,” she said.
“He was in the Navy,” I said. “Somewhere in Europe.”
“The letters stand for something, I think,” she said, moving across the room in a way that made her dress spin just slightly. It brought back a memory of watching Ruthie walk across Brown’s Mule Square from the courthouse on a warm spring day. Brown’s Mule Square, just one block away.
“Man of mystery maybe,” I said.
Ansel was right. It was hard to believe. I looked back up in what was left of his face, looked at the girl and said, "this is not Patrick Cavanaugh."
She stopped what she was doing.
"They fingerprinted him. The personal information in his wallet says it is."
She was steady, kind. With that tone that the teach them to have when someone is in shock or just denial.
"Can I see that?" I said.
"You may have to give me time," she said. "I can get it for you."
"Well, I don't need any time to tell you, it's not him." And that’s how I began to solve the murder of the man who claimed to be Patrick Cavanaugh, barkeep at Peechie Keen’s. Man with no known family, no known enemies. Always ready to pour a drink and listen to your tale, everyone was a friend. Everyone, it seemed, except maybe one.
2
Patrick Cavanaugh— or whoever he was— was still above ground when I set to work on finding whatever trouble he’d met up with. I spent a good amount of time outside Peechie’s, more time than I’d ever spent before. I was looking at signs and features on the old brick and stone storefront that I’d never stopped to notice in all of my years haunting the place. Two rotten old benches that looked like they might collapse if your shadow fell across them just right. An old gas lamp that looked like it might still work if it had the gas. An Owl Cigar sign that was fading into the brick, still proclaiming five cent cigars even though I was pretty sure they were now at least double that. A set of French doors that had been nailed shut and converted into a window, to make for extra table space on the inside, and a faded sign over them that still faintly read “Family Entrance.” Imagine, a time when Peechie's was considered fun for the family. I carefully went over every inch of the area where he’d been found.
I’d gotten hold of a handful of photographs taken by a beat reporter at the Star-Telegram, who probably didn’t know the name Ruthie Nell Parker and wouldn't be impressed that she worked for his competition.
His photographs proved no help anyway. I poured over them in more detail, nudging at every doubt I could find, trying to make it be Patrick. Maybe it did look like him from an angle. Was I mistaken?
The lack of any sign of struggle, anything but a small trace of blood, combined with the note pinned to the collar, told me that the man had been killed elsewhere and dumped here. Which, if it were Patrick, would have told me that the killer knew him from his job barkeeping at Peechie’s. In a city of 300,000 people, that would already cut my work down sizably.
I returned to the coroner’s office who, because the body hadn't been claimed, was preparing to bury him in the paupers’ section of Mount Olivet. I decided before I went in that I would try to assume that it was him. I would look at the personal effects. I would get a closer look. I wouldn't rock the boat.
While I hated the idea of Patrick Cavanaugh ending up in a pauper’s plot, there were worse places to be than Mount Olivet. It was at least well kept and easy to get to.
The coroner’s assistant, a man with the unlikely name Bennie Enders, knew me and paused his work to let me do mine. It took less than five minutes to go through his things and examine his clothes. I walked out with a receipt from Peters Brothers Hat Store on Houston Street, just four blocks from Peechie’s, a book of Viceroy cigarette matches with two broke off, an unused trolley ticket. I felt bad about taking his wallet, but it didn’t make any sense, putting it in a six foot hole at Mount Olivet, so I kept it. Its thinness saddened me, though, its sides rubbing together like an empty stomach. It wasn’t just the lack of money— there was a five dollar bill and a one folded up in a corner, along with an old Illinois driver's license— but the lack of photographs or country club membership cards or anything that would indicate that a life had been lived.
The license, expired longer than my detective's license, had been made out to Patrick Joseph Cavanaugh. No picture. Just a piece of paper.
When I got back to my room in Tremble, I considered transferring the six dollars to my own pocket, then decided the dead man’s wallet, for all it lacked, was a better fit than my own and moved my stuff into it. This meant I was confronted with a couple of other decisions, mainly whether to take the opportunity to ditch a photograph of Ruthie, snapped at the Fort Worth Press luncheon in 1953 when she picked up an award for best new string reporter. In fact, she had been one of only two new reporters, and the man who lost out to her had quit the next morning in protest.
I told myself, if it did turn out to be Patrick, keeping something that was close to him would give me an edge in finding his killer. I remembered my friend James Alto, a card carrying member of the Tonkawa tribe, saying that old Indian warriors would hold onto items that they believed gave them protection or good fortune. Based on what had happened in front of Peechie's, I wasn’t at all sure of the wallet's protective powers, but it felt like a token of faith or something, and I wasn’t inclined to toss that aside.
It was standard procedure that I would go to the court house and pick up any files on a person. I’d learned over the years that even marriage certificates and property deeds could sometimes yield surprising clues. And although I wasn’t digging for dirt on Patrick, I knew that any incidental information might give me something to go on. Had he ever been married? I didn’t think so, but he might have thought the same about me. Solving at least a bit of the mystery that was the man, I decided, might be the best way to start.
I walked into the courthouse, situated just off Brown’s Mule Square, past the judge’s quarters and the main courtroom, around the corner to the County Clerk’s office, where a little lady named Catherine Baker looked like she’d been waiting all morning for me.
I said I was looking for any information they might have on Patrick Cavanaugh, barkeep at Peechie Keen’s, and that he wasn’t suspected of anything but had been the victim of an as-yet unsolved murder.
“If he don’t have a record or a driver’s license or something, I can’t promise much,” she said.
"I have a driver's license," I said.
I pushed it across to her, and she gave it some study.
"You think he would have fingerprints on file?" I said.
Almost everybody had a fingerprint on file by the time they were his age, she said. There was bound to be one somewhere.
A cursory look didn't turn up anything else, but turns out, Catherine Baker wasn't one to give up so easily after all.
"It's unusual that someone your friend's age would die and leave nothing behind but an expired license," she said. "Give me a longer shovel, and I'll dig deeper."
Longer turned out to be an
hour and a half, and deeper turned up some tax records, which told us a little more. He'd been born on Christmas Day, 1892, which made him sixty-one at the time of his death. He'd been living on Franklin Street in 1953, in an area of town called Battercake Flats, out by the Viaduct. It was an area I knew well enough, although not the kind of place I would have expected to run into Patrick.
"I don't guess there's a picture license on file anywhere," I said.
She pushed it back across the counter to me.
"Not likely. They used to just send paper copies out by mail."
There wasn't a whole lot more to say. We could have kept pushing the paper back and forth to each other, but the thrill was wearing off. I thanked her for her trouble and wrote down the Franklin Street address. I figured I could drive up there and poke around a little bit. There were mean people in the Flats, certainly people who wouldn't think twice about putting a few bullets in somebody. With a little luck, I'd run into someone there who remembered Patrick and knew more than I did.
3
Battercake Flats was one of those places that never changed. As the rest of Fort Worth tore down and rebuilt, working to plaster over as much of its bad reputation as possible, the Flats remained the Flats. The poorest of the poor lived there, negroes and Mexicans and whites all connected by a deep unease with anyone from the outside. Those from outside Battercake Flats held even less trust in its inhabitants, and for fair enough reason. Nothing good ever happened there and not much good came out of it. Which made Patrick’s case intriguing to say the least.
I pulled up outside Loretta Pickett’s house. I had recently traded in my green ‘32 Austin Chummy for a red ‘48 International B2 pickup, a farm truck that had been relieved of duty on a dairy farm out west of Weatherford. At times like these, I was especially pleased with the upgrade. If the International didn’t induce fear on a street like Franklin, it also didn’t provoke laughter. Loretta Pickett was outside her house in her housecoat talking to a Mexican man wearing a slick suit. I tipped my hat to him.