Southern Select (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 2)

by Tim Bryant

  “Miss Pickett,” I said. “You may remember me coming out here last spring when your boy shot at that cop.”

  Her boy, Royce Pickett, was now buried in the graveyard at Huntsville State Prison, a detail I decided to glance over.

  Miss Pickett looked concerned for a moment.

  “You the one talked Roy into giving his self up?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. "I'm the one who tried to talk the cop into giving up."

  This news seemed to satisfy her. She turned back to her Mexican friend who seemed to have no interest at all in the conversation at hand. I couldn't make out many of the words, but she pointed at me and said something about me being a hombre and then something about a hijo. He nodded appreciatively, reached out and shook my hand.

  I told her I was looking for information on someone who used to live a few doors down from her. I pointed out the house in question. She’d never heard of anyone by the name of Cavanaugh. and when she told her Mexican friend who I was looking for, he smiled and shrugged.

  "He says the only Patrick who comes to mind is Saint Patrick, and there aren't any saints that he knows of around here," she said.

  I said that he probably showed up a little after her boy had his run-in with the Sheriff's Department. And he might not have hung around long.

  “People do come and go down here,” she said. “I’ve only been staying here since 1950 myself. That address is the old Boon house. Mr. Boon's daughter grew up on this street.”

  I drove down to Douglass Park, alongside the Trinity and turned around. There were people down there, fishing and drinking and carrying on, but I turned around and headed back for the address in my hand. It was a bigger house than most on the street, but older. Built before the area had turned into itself.

  “Dulcie Boon,” I said.

  I knew of Dulcie Boon. Dulcie Boon had been brought into the Sheriff's Department for prostitution on a handful of times, the man involved sometimes getting the worst end of the stick. There were prostitutes on every corner of Battercake Flats, and nobody lost much sleep over it. Dulcie, on the other hand, got arrested in places she wasn’t supposed to be. In uptown houses with people she wasn’t supposed to be with. A city councilman. A sheriff’s deputy. A well-known white Methodist preacher. Reputations were ruined; hers was just reinforced.

  I soon found cause to be standing on her cinderblock porch, knocking on a metal door and being completely drowned out by two hound dogs tied to a stake in the yard. I couldn’t hear a damn thing except the yapping. Dulcie finally came to the door to see what the dogs were fussing about.

  I found out two things about Dulcie Boon real quick. First, she carried herself like she lived on Summit Avenue. Nice, smooth, golden brown skin and hair pulled back, she looked like a Battercake Flats version of Billie Holiday, which is to say, she didn't look like Battercake Flats in the least. Dulcie stuck out on Franklin Street almost as much as I did.

  Second, and more important to the scheme of things, she remembered Patrick.

  “Mr. Cavanaugh,” she said. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  And she slammed the door.

  I stood there on the porch for a little bit, letting the moment sink in. Dulcie's presence in the doorway had calmed the dogs, but now they were tearing into it again. I knocked around a little bit and called out as if maybe the whole thing had been a big misunderstanding, and then I worked the doorknob, but it was sure enough locked. I walked around and shouted in the kitchen window, which was in the halfway-up position. Soon enough, a hand appeared in the window, lowered it and disappeared again.

  I drove to the park again, just to make sure it was still there, then turned around and made my way back up Franklin one more time, taking a left onto Vickery and then onto Brown Street.

  I turned on the radio, but Kitty Wells was singing “Release Me,” a song that didn't do it for me. I switched it off and tried to hum a Billie Holiday song, but I couldn't bring one to mind. I decided there needed to be a song called "Battercake Blues," so I tried to work on that for a while. Billie Holiday would sing a song called "Battercake Blues." Kitty Wells didn’t know the blues. Not like we did.

  4

  Fleck’s was an old-time negro juke joint on the back side of Quality Grove. John Fleck didn’t run a bar. He didn’t serve kid drinks or lady drinks and he didn’t offer pigs’ feet or pigs’ tails or pigs’ anything. He didn’t have live music; there wasn’t room for a dance floor, much less a bandstand. He did have an old jukebox in the corner, which was filled with blues and Louis Jordan, but I was the only person who ever put a nickel in it.

  When I pulled up in the lot, it was obvious that something unusual was going on. An old truck with a wooden bed was pulled into the yard on the south side of the building, and a band was set up in it. A drummer was tapping on a silver WFL drum set that looked like it was held together with baling wire, and a young guy stood next to him strumming on a Gibson hollow body guitar almost big as he was. He had it running through an amplifier that was sitting up on a soda water case. Down in front of the truck, a guy about my age in a three piece suit and a porkpie hat was pacing back and forth and singing into a megaphone. A sign propped up against the truck advertised “Issaquah Johnson & The Lo Down Shames.” If Issaquah looked like a backwoods preacher, the Lo Down Shames were there to assure you otherwise.

  There were at least fifty or sixty people standing around in front of the stage, and almost as many women as men, something you never saw at Fleck’s. A few of them were partnered up and cutting a rug right out there on the dirt. Standing in the doorway and watching from a distance was John Fleck. When he saw me, he smiled and motioned me over.

  “My invite must’ve got lost in the mail,” I said.

  “I’ve run plum out of juice.”

  Almost everything Fleck said was delivered with a laugh. Even bad news came with an unbelieving shake of the head and a what-are-ya-gonna-do grin. I would normally have said when the bar runs dry, it’s time to go home. In this case, I was willing to consider an exception.

  “I give you some money, will you go and get me some more, and maybe some sweet wine too?” he said.

  I looked out across the yard. Issaquah was launching into Jimmy Liggins’ song “I Ain’t Drunk,” which I knew the words to. He wasn’t doing a half bad job.

  “I thought you didn’t serve no women’s drinks, Fletch.”

  “Ain’t normal I have any women to serve drinks to,” he said.

  True, I had never seen a woman in Fleck's or even waiting out in the lot before.

  “Where did you scrounge these folks up at, anyway?”

  “They all from the neighborhood,” he said.

  “No, I mean Issaquah Johnson and the Lo Down Shames.”

  “The just showed up. Same as you did.”

  I took a quick trip to the nearest Cut Rate and stocked up on supplies. Fleck traded in whiskey, vodka and beer only, but he wanted bourbon whiskey, corn whiskey, rye whiskey and malt whiskey. I threw in an extra bottle of Jack Daniels for the trouble. It was the most I'd ever spent on spirits, and if the man behind the counter looked at me like he wondered if I was stocking up to get through Christmas or what, his eyes lit up like the holidays when I peeled off Fleck's roll of bills.

  I almost didn’t make it back to the party. As I walked out to the truck with two cardboard boxes of booze carefully balanced and blocking out my line of sight, I was nearly accosted by Sheriff Wiley King and one of his deputies. He leaned out of his squad car and hollered.

  “What kind of no good are you up to, Dutch Curridge?”

  I knew his voice before I saw his face, but I knew his car too. It was a ‘54 Nash Airflyte Police Cruiser, and all the deputies drove older models, some as old as my truck.

  “I’m on official business, Wiley.”

  “What a stroke of luck,” he said. “So am I. Want to tell me where you’re taking this business to?”

  “John Fleck’s.”

  “John Fle
ck? What in the Sam Hill does John Fleck want with white people’s alcohol?”

  I was standing at the truck, holding enough booze to float a Spanish galleon, and I was looking to put it down as soon as possible.

  “It all drinks the same, Sheriff.”

  King’s deputy laughed at that, which didn’t make King happy. He just sat there and looked at me. I took the silence as an invitation to unload.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, making deliveries to a man like John Fleck,” he said. “I’m liable to keep an eye on you, for your own damn good.”

  The last thing I needed was Wiley King following me back to Brown Street and seeing the carousing going on there. I walked toward his squad car, leaned down close to his window and whispered.

  “I’m on my way over to see Dulcie Boon.”

  King played cool, but the look on the poor deputy's face gave me satisfaction.

  “She told me not to tell you.”

  The sheriff stepped on the gas and took off down the street like he was off to a hold-up. Suited me fine, as it got me back on my way to the party.

  An hour or so later, after someone had wheeled up a barbecue and started cooking, after several drinks had been had and some damn good blues tunes dished out, I looked over at John Fleck who was busy counting money and re-restocking the ice box.

  In between having a good old time, I had been busy crossing things off my list. Was there someone out there knocking off barkeeps? I couldn’t see any reason to think so. Was someone going down my list of friends and acquaintances? I was paranoid, but not enough to think anyone was out to get me.

  “Fleck,” I said. “You know a lot of people. Tell me what you know about a woman named Dulcie Boon.”

  “What you want with a woman like Dulcie Boon?”

  “She’s got connections somewhere,” I said.

  “Dulcie Boon got connections everywhere,” Fleck said. “And most of 'em ain't connected to anything good. That woman will get your ass in a sling you'll never get out of.”

  Issaquah Johnson and the Lo Down Shames had the whole joint shaking with “Baby, Let’s Go Down To The Woods.” Issaquah had taken up position in the bed of the truck, and the crowd had completely surrounded the vehicle. It seemed like they were shaking it back and forth on its chassis, in time with the beat. Issaquah was smiling from ear to ear. I was too.

  5

  Slant Face wanted to meet me at The Pig Stand because he was hungry, but I wanted to talk about things that had gone down at Peechie Keen’s, and it seemed wrong to talk about it behind its back. Plus, I wasn’t hungry, I wanted a drink.

  Slant Face was my sidekick. My drinking partner. He was originally from Manchester, England, but had shipped out with the Merchant Marines and wound up, somehow, disembarking at the port in Galveston and never looking back. He lived up toward Richardson, where he worked at a waste treatment plant. His accent made him stick out from the crowd, but I liked him because he thought like me. That made him stick out too.

  Hick Hinson was trying hard, bless him. He came out from behind the bar and took our orders and tried to remember our usuals. He got Slant’s right, but how could anyone forget Scotch and milk.

  There were only a couple of other people in the place. One of the young new Sheriff’s deputies sat at the front, but not the one I'd seen at the Cut Rate. He was trying to look like he'd been coming there all his life, but he seemed as out of place as a rubber in a collection plate. Two tables over, an old man who looked like he'd walked in from the train yard was cutting into a pickled egg like it was a bona fide steak meal.

  “There was a receipt from Peters Brothers in his wallet,” I said. “We could go over there and talk to them.”

  “You could stand a new hat,” Slant said. I was wearing an old black fedora with a single gray feather tucked under the band, and Slant had been itching for me to ditch it for years. The main reason I had grown attached to it.

  “Where's the matchbook from?” he asked.

  I tossed it onto the table. It was black with a red border. Nothing printed on it. He picked it up and gave it a look over.

  “I think your best bet is looking at the Castlemans.”

  The Castlemans were the family who owned Peechie’s, and while I had given it some thought, I couldn’t see much sense in it. George Castleman had died in the early forties and left the business to his wife and son. The old lady lived somewhere in Georgia and the son ran things from Galveston, showing up on the premises only once that anyone could recall. There were plenty of rumors that the son was hooked up with the Galveston Mafia or the Dixie Mafia or someone, but those kinds of rumors were as common as the clap in the Acre. And if the murderer had wanted to send a warning to him, he’d sure picked a vague way to do it.

  Other than that, day to day operations were managed by an old man named Penny Bob Yoder who had spent his whole life within a six block area of the Acre, and could usually be found playing cards or dominos in back of one store or another.

  Finally, we hashed out the whole body thing. It was the most puzzling piece of a very confusing puzzle. I couldn't swear that the man wasn't Patrick. Certainly, the personal affects seemed to suggest it was him. Something just seemed amiss.

  “You ought to just suck it up, walk into the Press like everything’s perfectly hunky dory, see if Ruthie Nell can smoke something out. She's done it before.”

  Slant knew that wasn’t likely to happen. I picked up the match book, folded it back and lit a cigarette. I looked around the room and tried to see it through Patrick’s eyes. The deputy got up from his table, walked to the front door and looked out. I wondered what he was looking for. Were Wiley King and his men onto something?

  “Wiley got you on a stakeout?” I said.

  The deputy looked at me and then around the room. “How are things, Mr. Curridge.”

  Slant Face laughed, and I knew why.

  “You’re jealous because people know me,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s watching you.”

  “Well, I feel sorry for him then.”

  The more we talked about it, the more we liked the idea of checking out Peters Brothers, so we paid up and took a walk over to their store, taking a detour past the small upstairs apartment on Sixth that Patrick had moved into when he started at Peechie's. From the looks of things, a young kid was already moving into the place, completely unaware and probably totally uninterested in the life he was replacing.

  The man behind the counter at Peters Brothers didn’t recall anyone by the name of Patrick Cavanaugh, but when Slant described him, with the old coat and the dagger tattoo on his left hand, the guy’s memory came around.

  “Older gentleman, gray headed, mustache.”

  “Sounds like him,” I said.

  Patrick had evidently come in within a week of his death, but it wasn’t the tattoo that left the impression on our salesman.

  “He specifically asked for a Stetson Bantam with the Mode Edge. He wouldn’t take anything else. I had two back in the stockroom, and we had the devil of a time getting them down.”

  “What’s so unusual about that particular hat?” Slant said.

  “Nothing really,” the man said. “It’s a fine hat. Stetson makes the best.”

  Bantam, he said, meant that it was a lightweight hat, good for Texas heat, and the Mode Edge was a popular stitching on the brim that made the hat just a little more refined.

  “Stetson calls it the Mode Edge. It’s also called the Guild Edge or the Cavanagh edge.”

  “Cavanagh?” said Slant.

  “Yes sir.”

  “You have any more of these hats?” I said, looking around the store at the mountains of hat boxes.

  “I have the one left, just like your friend’s.”

  “How much?” I said.

  Ten minutes and twelve dollars later, I walked out of Peters Brothers Hat Store with the best hat I’d ever put on my head. As we approached the corner of Sixth, Slant Face nudged me in the ribs and nodd
ed in the distance ahead of us. A figure crossed the street one block north, too far down to identify but close enough to recognize the uniform.

  “The guy at Peechie’s,” Slant said.

  Was he following us?

  “Think he’s walking his beat?”

  Nobody walked a beat in the Acre.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  The figure slipped silently into shadows. I could’ve given chase, but I decided to play cool. Chasing an armed man through Hell’s Half Acre at dusk wasn’t the smartest line of action. It was much smarter, I told myself, to make him think he was fooling someone besides himself.

  6

  Dulcie Boon should have had a record as long as the Paddock Viaduct, so when Catherine Baker told me there was nothing in the system, I laughed.

  "You need to dig with a longer shovel again?" I said.

  “I’m serious, Mr. Curridge,” she said. “Nothing comes up.”

  In Fort Worth, during that time, it wasn't unheard of for records to come up missing. Sometimes, if you had the right connections, and if you had the ability to make a sizeable donation to your favorite arm of the law, reports and their carbon copies could be torn up and tossed right out of existence. Still, we weren't talking about a case of public intox here and a case of petty shoplifting there. Careers had been sacrificed.

  “As far as I can see, Mrs. Boon has never been arrested by anyone in Tarrant County,” Mrs. Baker said. "If you want to pursue it beyond Tarrant County, you'll have to take it up elsewhere."

  Most all of Dulcie's legal wrangling had come up during Sheriff Stubblefield’s years, and it didn’t seem likely that the old coot had developed a soft spot for her. One of his boys had been caught with his pants down in her near vicinity, and he was now mopping floors at Leonard Brothers.

  The one piece of information that Mrs. Baker was able to give me came from early in the year, when the deed to the house on Franklin was transferred to her. Those indicated that Dulcie had been sharing her Franklin Street residence with two gentlemen. Neither, unfortunately, was Patrick. One was named William Boon.