by Tim Bryant
Walter Bismuke lived in a bungalow at the north end of Gipsy Gulch, the kind of place I might call home if I were a more proper private eye. Night had fallen, and the whole place was lit up. A new green Plymouth Savoy sat parked just outside the door, lit up by the light spilling from a bay window.
“Nice wheels.”
“What does Mr. Bismuke do for a living?” Slant said.
“He’s an executive.”
We sat there and looked at the house. I wondered if the guy was married. It looked like the house of a married man. A married couple. Even so, there weren’t any flowers in the yard. No toys or tire swings.
“What exactly is an executive?” Slant Face said.
“I wish I knew.”
“I must’ve missed that day in school,” Slant said.
Slant Face grew up in a place called Salford, England. Half a world away. Talked a lot different but thought exactly the same as me. Sometimes it still amazed me.
We sat there for a few minutes, just taking it in. Nothing moved. No shadows across windows. The whole street seemed tucked in and ready for bed.
“Well, I don’t guess his valet is coming out to park the car,” I said.
I pulled halfway onto the curb, and we made our way to the door. Pudsey stood right behind me. Slant stepped to the side, just out of sight. His hand was on his broomhandle, which he kept holstered inside his jacket at his left hip. Bismuke wanted to make trouble. He answered the door looking half asleep.
“You Walter Bismuke?”
“What if I am?”
He wasn’t too asleep to catch sight of Slant. He squinted and backed up, hands clenched. He was either paranoid or had reason to believe three men might show up at his door for nefarious purposes.
“If you are, it means we found the right place,” I said.
He backed up again, making no signal for us to come in. We didn't wait for one.
The house was neatly-ordered and color-coordinated. Well-moneyed. Flowers in a vase on a table. Paintings on the walls. A saxophone propped in a corner, its case open and waiting. The living room had a television in it, and a line of women were parading back and forth on the screen.
“That’s not the Saturday Night Fights,” I said.
“Miss America,” he said.
It was the most interesting thing I’d ever seen on a television screen, like when Candy Barr and all of her girls would parade out on the stage at The Skyliner on Jacksboro.
Slant decided to come to Bismuke's rescue.
“We were sent here by Melvin Chambers. You know him?”
“Where are you from?”
“I'm from just this side of Richardson,” Slant said.
I know longer laughed at his joke, but his loyalty to it amused me.
“What does Melvin Chambers need from me?” he said.
“He would be obliged if you’d tell us anything you know about an old friend of his,” I said. “Guy named Patrick Cavanaugh.”
He stood so silent, I thought maybe my words hadn't yet reached his brain.
“Patrick Cavanaugh,” I said.
"I heard you twice the first time, buddy."
“You know him?” I said.
Walter glanced back down a darkened hall, and I wondered if he had a girl back there. Maybe even a wife. Could have even been an accomplice with a gun pointed right at my head, far as I knew. On the television screen, a man was asking one of the ladies something about her hometown.
“I don’t know Patrick Cavanaugh,” he said.
“Never heard of him,” I said.
“You heard me.”
“Now I don’t think Melvin would send us here on a fool’s errand,” Slant Face said. “Maybe it would do us well to all go pay him a visit."
On the screen, a lady was playing the piano. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded a little like “Beat Me Daddy, Eight To The Bar.” I was suppressing a desire to either move the conversation closer to the television or ask Bismuke to turn the volume up a notch.
When the first knock came at the door, I was mostly just peeved that it was interfering with the young lady's big finish. The pounding quickly accelerated, sounding like a Buick full of people trying to come through the door, Buick first. Pudsey almost jumped out of his skin.
“We having a Miss America party?” I said.
“I hope they brought drinks,” said Slant Face.
I looked at Bismuke, who seemed less than excited about this turn of events, and I felt just a little bit sorry for him. Relaxing with Miss America on a quiet Saturday night, and all of a sudden, the life of the party. I grabbed my .38 Colt, which I kept strapped beneath my coat and nodded to him. Bismuke flipped the latch and twisted the knob.
A man came staggering into the house in such a condition that I thought he’d been shot. Surely that's the sound we'd heard outside. He was sweating like a pregnant nun and looking like he was about to crap out, pushing his way past Bismuke, and not paying any mind to Slant or Pudsey or me. Bismuke looked defeated. Miss America was officially over.
“What in tarnation are you doing here?” he said.
“He's still in town, and I’m gonna kill him.”
The guy pulled a Model 28 Smith and Wesson from beneath his jacket. The Model 28 was a new model, and it was a policeman’s gun. I didn’t know everyone on the force. I certainly didn’t recognize this character.
“Kill who, for Pete’s sake?”
The guy waved the gun at each of us, trying to spread the menace around a little bit. I could see that his hand was a little shaky, maybe from nerves, probably from something else. He wasn't well.
“Don’t kill us,” Slant said. “We’re just three Bible salesmen.”
I thought it was nice of him to include Pudsey. I would have thought Pudsey would have felt touched by the gesture, but it didn't appear to be the case.
"We're going to hunt him down and kill the son of a bitch. We're going to bury him deep and then dig him back up and kill him all over again."
"That sounds like an awful lot of work to me," I said.
“God bless you,” said Slant Face.
By now, the guy was pointing the gun at the ceiling. I didn’t think he wanted to kill any Bible salesmen. I didn’t think he had any interest in killing Bismuke. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure if he even knew Bismuke. Slant Face, as he is want to do, read my mind.
“You two gentlemen know each other?” Slant said.
They looked at Slant and then at each other, probably taken aback at being called gentlemen.
“Who you want to kill, A?” said Bismuke.
A finally put his gun down. And he had a name. Or at least a letter. It was enough for me.
"Adolphus Merriweather," I said.
He looked like a boy who'd just been caught with his pecker in his hands.
"How do you know me?" he said.
"The Lord works in mysterious,“ Slant Face said.
Adolphus pulled the 28 up and put a single bullet through the vase on the table. Shards of glass and petals scattered off the table and into the floor and the roses fell into a quiet heap as the bullet bit into the sheetrock behind them.
Get your keys, Walt," he said. "If you can drive, I can ride.”
22
There were five of us in the Plymouth Savoy, and I was impressed with the room. Nice wide seats with more cushion than my bed and as much legroom in the back as the front. Slant, Pudsey and I took the backseat, Pudsey in the middle as if he was some convict being escorted to the lap of the gods.
Because our new friend Adolphus Merriweather had the best gun, I figured he pulled rank. I good-naturedly surrendered the front seat. There were a whole host of questions for Mr. Merriweather, but I was willing to ride them out for a spell. The only thing that really bothered me was the Smith and Wesson. I knew he'd taken it off a cop, which is generally not a wise move. Wiley King would be on his ass like a pair of BVDs.
Slant Face was a bit perplexed, especially when he realized th
e mission we were on.
“Did I hear him say we’re going to find Patrick?” he said.
“What I heard,” I said. “And then, we’re gonna kill him at least twice.”
Pudsey kept his eyes fixed straight ahead.
“Did he not hear the news?” Slant said.
Pudsey took off his hat and placed it in his lap.
“Search me,” I said.
Pudsey put his hat back on.
“Y’all actually know this guy?” he said.
I nodded.
“He know you?”
Slant shook his head.
"Not yet he doesn't."
One thing I've learned, mostly by being a big talker. You don’t learn much by talking. We didn’t have a damn thing to gain by introducing ourselves at that point. We didn't have a damn thing to gain by saying a damn thing. Slant understood what Pudsey didn’t.
“I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“We’re just going along for the ride,” I said. “Don’t tell me Pudsey Robinette’s out of his league.”
“I ain’t never killed nobody even once.”
We hadn’t got out of the neighborhood good before Adolphus started motioning for Bismuke to pull over. He was using the gun to do it, and he seemed antsy. He swung his door open, leaping from the car before it even came to a stop. Slant looked at me and shrugged.
“Don’t move an inch,” Merriweather said as he stepped into the shadows. “I’ll put a bullet in the damn engine block.”
“A lot of good that’ll do ya,” said Bismuke.
“Let’s scram,” said Pudsey.
Bismuke switched on the radio, KLIF out of Dallas, which was just coming out of the news.
“Hey,” he said, “did y’all hear about Pete the Python escaping from the zoo? God, I hope A is okay out there.”
Slant rolled down his window, and I thought for a minute he was going to ask, but he just lit a cig and stared off into the dark.
“They’re telling everyone to stay inside and keep their lights on,” he said.
I could see Bismuke’s eyes in the rearview. He seemed like an alright kind of guy, like he was taking this all in with an appropriate amount of amusement.
“I heard a full grown python like that will eat a kid whole,” he said.
I wondered how they would know that.
At that moment, Merriweather re-entered the car, yanking on the zipper of his trousers and looking only slightly less frantic than before.
“Can’t stop pissing,” he said. “Every goddamn minute I turn around.”
Pudsey laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of someone who was finally relaxing and taking it all in. It was more the laugh of someone who couldn’t believe this was where he was on a nice fall Saturday night. In a way, I could relate.
“You see Pete the python out there?” Bismuke said.
“Yeah, I sure enough did," Merriweather said. "I had one hand on it.”
Bismuke pulled back onto the road. On KLIF, the jockey was cuing up “Three Coins In The Fountain” by The Four Aces. God how I hated that song. “Make it mine.” “No, make it mine.” “Please make it goddamn mine, you bastard.”
Given a coin or two and a fountain— and nobody looking— I might well have tossed a few in myself, but I damn sure wouldn’t have written such a shitty song about it.
“Shut that goddamn song off right now, or I’ll shoot a hole through it,” I said.
Merriweather looked around like he’d forgotten he was the one with the steering wheel.
"You gonna shoot a hole through the song?" he said.
I hate a wise ass, unless it's me.
“That happens to be my all-time favorite record, motherfucker,” Merriweather said.
“That’s my mother’s favorite record,” Bismuke said.
“I’ll shoot a hole through your mother too,” I said.
Pudsey took his hat off and tossed it in the window behind us. He looked like he was throwing in the towel. I was afraid he was about to cry.
“I think I gotta take a leak too,” he said.
The song played on.
23
“I need a drink,” Merriweather said. “Anybody else need a drink?”
Of course, it entered my mind that if he was pissing like a polecat, another drink might not be the most logical move, but I kept the opinion to myself. I had selfish motives.
“Deal me in,” I said.
The radio had finally had enough of the Three Coins song and fearlessly moved on to "Who Hid The Halibut On The Poop Deck." I was starting to want out as bad as Pudsey.
“A, let’s say we get a drink and talk this all over.”
If Bismuke was reading his friend the way I was, it seemed that a couple of drinks and he might be out for the night, sleep it all off in some corner somewhere down on the rods and wake up to a whole new world in the morning. And Patrick would be just as dead as he could be anyway.
Merriweather didn’t fall for it. He was running on revenge, running out of time. Going down fast, and, dammit, he was taking Patrick Cavanaugh through the gates of hell with him. Patrick Cavanaugh would not live to piss on Adolphus Merriweather's grave.
“I wish y’all would quit talking about pissing,” Pudsey said. “I gots to go.”
Merriweather looked him in the eye. It was pretty clear that Pudsey was not trying to fit in.
“Who the hell is this guy?” he said. “This some friend of yours, Walter?”
Pudsey had Cuban blood, which gave him a skin shade just north of Billy Eckstine's. He wasn't most Fort Worthians would call a true Negro. He had, however, been called a nigger more than once. He knew the score. He was about to piss his pants for sure now.
“So what if he is,” Bismuke said.
I took the opportunity to change the scenery.
“Why you wanna go and kill Mr. Cavanaugh for, Mr. Merriweather,” I said. “Old man ain’t never hurt no one, far as I can see.”
I could feel Slant’s right hand cross over, brush against the car door and then drop into his lap. This wasn't a move toward his pecker. I knew this meant he didn’t particularly like the line of questioning.
“Well, you can’t see very far, can you, Mister Big Cheese?” he said. “Maybe you need to get your eyes checked. Patrick Cavanaugh is a liar and a cheat. Ain’t that right, Walter?”
“I don’t know the man.”
Walter was sticking to his story. Typically, I admired that, but things were starting to get atypical.
“You're a goddamn liar, and he’s a goddamn liar," said Merriweather. "He’s a murderer too because he poisoned me. He’s waiting around for me to kick off, so he can go to Mexico on my dime. Well, he’s gonna be in for a little surprise before this night’s over, ain’t that right?”
“Somebody sure is,” Slant Face said, loud enough for Pudsey and me to catch it.
“You wanna repeat that?” Merriweather said.
“I said this night has been full of surprises,” Slant said.
His shooting hand was in position, and I was hoping he wasn’t going to make a move. I'd seen him draw in a situation like this before. One time, he'd shot a Bible out of Tom Bennet's hand, just because Bennet claimed that it was a hiding place and a shield. I was ready, just in case.
We were traveling west on Lancaster Avenue, which meant we were making a beeline for my part of town. I was wanting a drink more than I wanted to continue this line of conversation, and I knew that if we proceeded at this clip, we’d be arriving at the Cut Rate within ten minutes.
“My friend Pudsey here has to go.”
Merriweather smiled and lowered his weapon. The Mills Brothers were singing “Glow Worm,” and the radio was glowing with a greenish light behind our fearless leader’s head. The car was speeding along just fine. No need to get our noses out of joint.
“Where you think you're going, Mr. Pudsey?” Merriweather said. “Got a big date on this beautiful Saturday night?”
Pudsey nodded
unenthusiastically.
“He’s gotta piss,” Slant said.
“Well, goddamn it, so do I,” said Merriweather, and he swung back around into his seat. “Turn that shit off. That’s a school kid song.”
There were a series of preset buttons along the bottom side of the radio, and he went to typing on them. Most hissed back at him with only static. A distant voice that might have been Mexican. And then, there he was, my man Lefty Frizzell singing “I Love You A Thousand Ways.”
I’ve never been the type to just have music on in the background. It always meant something. At its best, it spoke to the situation you were in. There were five of us in the Plymouth, barreling down Lancaster, and I felt like Lefty was singing straight at me.
“I think of you, of the past
and all our fun,
I love you, I’ll prove it
in days to come...
I looked out across the rooftops, above the treetops and up to the stars scattered across the northern skyline. It was no effort at all to follow my mind back to a time when Ruthie and I would be taking this road together, headed for Weatherford or back to Tremble after a day at the Brickyard in West Dallas. A year ago, two years ago even, were as close to me as Pudsey's right leg.
It brought all of the changes into focus. Patrick dead. Ruthie gone. Me riding in the back of a stranger’s car when I should be driving. The only thing that seemed right at all, there in that moment, was Lefty Frizzell.
24
Lefty Frizzell made it onto the national charts in 1950, but he’d already been playing for a few years by then and had even hosted a radio show in Paris, Texas. I’d never seen him but I’d heard the name when I walked into the Crystal Springs one evening in the spring of ‘50.
“Where’s your guitar?”
A young guy was sitting at the bar, giving me a sideways glance. I looked around to make sure he was talking to me.
“I leave that to the professionals,” I said.
He stood and gave me a look over.
“You dang sure look like Lefty Frizzell. You sure you ain’t him?”
Later that night, I asked Slant Face and Dandy O’Bannon if I looked like Lefty to them, but Slant had no more idea what Lefty Frizzell looked like than I did, and Dandy thought he was a baseball player with the Dallas Eagles.