by Tim Bryant
I wasn’t worried that Thomas was drunker than I was. Drunk people have a tendency to tell the truth. And they remember more details, if only because they can’t discern which ones to skip. Mrs. Dearbohn, whom I discovered to be named Jenrose, brought on great bowls of Mulligan stew, which I downed almost as quickly as the whiskey, and Paul stood patiently by until he got his own bowl of the good stuff.
“Everybody in Cool Texas knows the name Lonnie Boy,” Thomas said. “Ain’t two people in any kind agreement over him though, except for the fact he got hisself killed in the old Mineral Wells Bank & Trust. I work with an old man who says his daddy knew Lonnie, but everybody knows somebody that was in the Lonnie Curridge gang. I’m sure you heard that story.”
I assured him that I hadn’t, and, even if I had, I wanted to hear his version, from his mouth.
“Back in the day, I’m talking back before our times. Back in the days of Jesse James, outlawing was seen as a noble pursuit. More noble than picking vegetables for pennies, I can tell you. Ain’t no white man would have been seen doing the things a white man will do today. And old Lonnie Boy was giving Jesse a real run for his money. They say he ran into Jesse up in Broken Bow, and Jesse invited him to join the James Gang. Lonnie Boy didn’t want to split no profits with the James boys though, so that’s why he took out on his own. He come back to Texas and started holding up banks. They say his downfall was that he held up the bank in Mineral Wells in May of 1909 and got away with more than fifty thousand dollars. That got the Texas Rangers’ noses all out of joint. So his downfall was, he come back and tried to rob the same fucking bank again the next damn month, and they was laying in wait for him.”
A lot of this was news to me.
“You know who else was in the Lonnie Curridge gang?” I said.
“Everybody, to hear them tell it,” he said. “Every goddamn body in Parker County.”
“Well then,” I said, “could I start off by talking to the guy who’s daddy was in it?”
I still couldn’t face the idea that momma could in any way be part of such a list. Mistaken identity. Faulty memories. Wishful thinking, maybe. Watchout girl, hiding with getaway horses? It was comical. I had never seen momma ride a horse. I had never seen her do anything that would indicate such a history. I’d surely never seen hide nor hair of the fifty thousand dollar loot.
As I sat there eating the soup, there was one thing eating at me though. I sure as hell couldn’t say that momma had never fooled me, never lied to my face, never put one over her son Alvis Jr. The very name itself mocked me. Who the hell was I really? Was I Lonnie Jr? At that moment, Lonnie Jr. seemed to fit better.
Thanks to Jenrose Dearbohn, I left that day with the name of a woman in Dallas who appeared to be my long-lost half sister. Born of Lonnie Curridge and some lady that Thomas had no knowledge of, some three or four years older than me, Starletta Curridge lived in South Dallas. I wondered if she knew I was out there. If she did, she couldn’t have had any idea that I was coming to see her.
17
I also had some questions for Sheriff Muncey in Weatherford. I couldn’t help noticing a change of attitude between my first and second visit. He had been the one to bring the disappearance of Maime Guzman to my attention. He wanted me to know she might be the missing girl in Fort Worth. Only hours later, he was quick to explain things away. She had gone out-of-state to visit family. She obviously couldn’t be the girl on the slab back in Cowtown. The more I thought about it, the more puzzled I became.
Sure, it was possible Maime was visiting family. Muncey was right. Pregnant or not, it wasn’t uncommon that a young lady would want to spend time away from Weatherford. If she had indeed found herself in the family way, being shipped off to have the baby and quickly and quietly put it up for adoption was also not unheard of. But if that had been the case, why would the sheriff have mentioned her as the possible dead girl in the first place?
There weren’t a whole lot of roads in Weatherford, but they were all leading back to Alice Muncey. I wasn’t sure I wanted to knock on her door, but it was one of the hazards of the job. I girded my loins, slipped the clutch and floated the gears all the way to Birchwood Street where I found the house where she rented a room. Just driving up into the yard made me feel dirty. I didn’t mind getting a little dirty when the job required it, but it had never before involved the niece of a sheriff. I felt like a schoolboy. I felt like I was playing out of my league.
“Mr. Curridge!”
Alice was on the porch, looking for all the world like she had been awaiting my arrival. I stepped out of the truck and took a few steps in the direction of the house.
“Carol, I told you he was coming to pick me up,” she said, and then a dark cloud of doubt crossed her. “You are coming to pick me up, aren’t ya, Mr. Curridge?”
Carol was on the opposite end of the big porch which leaned enough to the starboard side to almost look like a teeter-totter.
“We can stay right here if you’d like, ma’am,” I said. “I only have a few questions to go over with you.”
Alice shot me a look deadly enough to make my .38 jealous, and I had to suppress a laugh. It was extremely rare that I was the object of anyone’s games of jealousy. I tipped my hat to Carol and asked if I could borrow her playmate for a short spell. I may have thrown in a wink.
Alice and I drove to my usual spot on Clear Fork, just below momma’s house where the old cotton field opened up and made a parking space. It was just so configured that someone parked there could see the house but anyone in the house would have a hard time seeing back.
“You told Sheriff Muncey that your friend Maime Guzman was sent out-of-state to visit family, didn’t you?” I said.
I kept the truck idling, mostly so I wouldn’t appear to be making some kind of commitment, either professionally or romantically, and pulled a bottle of whiskey from under the seat. I offered her first swig, but she declined.
“You also probably insinuated that she might have been in the family way without ever really coming out and saying so.”
She bit at her lip, but any attempt to keep from spilling the beans was cursory at best.
“He’s my uncle, Dutch,” she said. “He’s also a little bit like my father. I don’t have one of those, you know. I tell him things when I think he can help. I thought he could help.”
I had figured out the answer to that question easy enough. I had asked it only because I wanted the answer to the next one.
“So why in hell did you tell him that she was missing, that she might be dead, just a few days earlier?” I said.
I didn’t know for sure she’d done that, but Muncey had got his information from somewhere, and it stood to reason it was from the same source he got the second report from. Way I saw it, she had to have known that he thought one thing if she took the trouble to find him and tell him different.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Uncle Hugh told me Maime Guzman might be the dead girl I’m trying to ID in Fort Worth. He told me that just a couple days ago. And if you didn’t make him think that, I don’t have a clue who would.”
Alice wasn’t giving up that easy.
“Maime’s dad talks to Uncle Hugh sometimes,” she said.
“Look, somebody’s trying to fool somebody here,” I said. “It’s either the sheriff or me being fooled, and I’m not sure which yet, and it’s either you or the Guzman family doing the fooling.”
I told her we weren’t going anywhere until I knew who was doing the fooling. Once I knew that, the other part would take care of itself.
“If I tell you, do you swear not to tell anybody else?” she said.
I told her I could do no such thing, but I would do my best to see that her name wasn’t involved.
“Will you turn off the engine?” she said.
I pulled the key from the ignition and laid it between us on the seat.
“Maime’s daddy think she’s in Ohio having a baby that’s his,” she said. �
��She ain’t having no baby and she ain’t in Ohio.”
That was a bit of a mouthful. Alice explained.
“Her momma caught him with his pants down, in Maime’s bed,” she said. “They hatched a plan where Maime would go live with family in Ohio or somewhere, and they would tell Mr. Guzman he had put a baby inside of her. Their thinking was, that would shut him up good and put him in his place.”
I had to admit it was a decent plan, even if shooting Mr. Guzman dead would have been a better one.
“But that’s not what happened?” I said.
“Well, Maime was sent to friends in Dallas, just to get her away from Mr. Guzman,” Alice said. “She was gonna go to school there for a couple years, then she wanted to get into nursing or something.”
A black Ford pulled by us real slow and then turned into momma’s house on the hill. I figured it was either bankers or funeral home people. Alvis Sr.’s funeral was scheduled for the following day. I still wasn’t sure if I was going.
“Who’s she staying with in Dallas?” I said.
Alice watched the car come to a stop on the hill, having no idea that my momma was inside, along with a long string of bad memories.
“She was staying with Farmer Clarkin and his family, but she went missing two months ago,” she said. “We thought she would show back up at home, but she hasn’t yet.”
“Farmer Clarkin?” I said.
I was almost out of drink, and I didn’t have a backup in the glove box.
“Farmer Clarkin is his name,” she said. “He’s in banking I think.”
What was the connection between the Clarkin family and the Guzmans? Alice wasn’t completely sure, but she was sure the mothers had known each other. Probably, they had grown up together, she said.
By that point, I wanted to pay Mr. Guzman a visit, if only to beat him with the grip-end of my .38. There was something else that really needed doing, and there was no time like the present, as far as I could see. I hit the clutch. cranked the International back to life, and made a u-turn in the road. I looked back to see the black car pulling out behind me.
18
The trip back into Fort Worth with Alice by my side seemed longer than it should have been. She didn’t have the nerve to side right up against me, but she was sitting closer than Slant Face or Alto would. Closer than Ruthie Nell would these days, although not as close as when Ruthie and I would go to the Deal Theater and catch a double feature, then grab a meal at Peechie’s or one of the other late-night diners in the Acre.
“So who is it that you work for?” she said.
I had a stock answer for that one.
“I don’t work for nobody,” I said. “I work for myself.”
That satisfied her curiosity for three or four miles. Then the hard questions started.
“Ever been married?”
“Yep, but don’t hold that against me.”
I knew as soon as I said it, it wasn’t the best choice of words. What can I say? I can flirt without even trying.
“You happen to be seeing anybody?” she said.
I had asked for it. Hell, maybe I wanted it. She wasn’t a bad looking chick. I could imagine Ruthie running into me at the Crystal Springs with Alice on my arm. Trouble is, that was the main reason having her on my arm appealed to me.
“That’s kind of a funny thing,” I said. “There’s this gal I was seeing for a while in Fort Worth, but she threatened to call the coppers if I came back around again.”
I was kind of being an asshole, and I was halfway doing it to keep her at a distance, but she was laughing.
“You love her?” she said.
I tried to pull a little more from an already dry whiskey bottle and cursed myself for not stocking up my supply.
“Know what? You’re the second damn person to bring that up in the past twenty-four hours,” I said. “Must be some kind of sign I’m hanging with the wrong crowd.”
I laughed. Nothing to lose, I was going out in a blaze of bad manners.
“I don’t believe in love,” she said.
It seemed like some kind of trick question. I decided to proceed with caution.
“Well, we may have finally found something to agree on then.”
That must have been seen as an invitation to get closer. She turned sideways so that she was facing me dead on, her left foot tucked under her and her arm extending to within a flick of my shoulder.
“Relationships are so much easier when you take love out of them,” she said. “And then, when all the pressure’s off, well, that’s when love’s bound to come up and sock ya right on the jaw. Don’t you think?”
When I had taken Ruthie Nell Parker as a partner, fresh off a Greyhound from Denton, Texas and ready to take on the big city, I had misjudged her. I took her can-do attitude to be charming, refreshing. Little did I know, she was more hardened than I was. She saw me as a tool and used me as one, tossing me away when I was no longer needed. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.
We got to the coroner’s office, where I passed the mentholatum over. Alice mimicked putting it on her lips and blew mentholatum kisses at herself in a compact mirror and then one last one at me.
I was secretly hoping for a suicide victim or a body pulled from the Trinity River, something that would put Miss Hard Heart to the test. We knocked on the door, right below the “Do Not Enter” sign and let ourselves in.
“How’s things, Dutch,” Bennie said. “I was hoping you’d show up. I got interesting news for you.”
A select few people knew that Bennie had moved into the coroner’s office, grabbing a few hours sleep here and there in the back office and cleaning up in the same area they cleaned off the bodies.
“You’re looking more and more like your clientele, Ben,” I said.
It wasn’t the first time I’d told him that.
“Whose company we got today?” he said, getting an eyeful of Alice.
Maybe just one or two of us knew he had been thrown out of the house by his wife. No, he hadn’t been cheating on her, he said. He wished he goddamn well had. Instead, his wife had been cheating on him. And she was still doing it too, right in his own house.
“This is Miss Alice Muncey,” I said. “She’s gonna take a quick peek at the body we’ve got here, just to cross one of our suspects off the list. Say hello to Bennie Enders, Alice, and yes, that is his real name.”
They shook hands, Bennie not even thinking to take his gloves off, and away we went to the examination room. The body in question was now in refrigeration, so we stood silently to the side while Bennie opened the refrigerator door and slid her out before us. You could feel the room get cold.
“Ever seen a dead body before, ma’am?” Bennie said.
Alice assured him that she had, a point that I wanted clarified, but I lost it in the flurry of a scream, a sheet seeming to fly up and then back down, and then, finally, the realization of what was going on around me.
“It’s her.”
I looked at Alice to be sure I hadn’t mistaken what I heard. The coloring had drained out of her face, and she had that thousand yard stare you get right before you go down.
“Maime Guzman?” I said.
She nodded. She didn’t crumple to the floor, but you could see her spirit do something similar. It took the color out of her cheeks and the spark from her eyes as it did. This was now a whole different sack of reality we were dealing with. And a whole different Alice.
“I didn’t think it would be her,” she said.
I had seen a few grown men vomit up their breakfast in that room. I wasn’t sure whether to offer her my handkerchief or something more serious. Bennie moved in with a rolling chair and a wet towel. I had taken enough jobs from jealous wives intent on catching their husbands in flagrante delicto that I could tell a guilty party from a sad sack workaholic. Bennie wasn’t working on the dead girl. I knew that much.
“Be careful with her there, Ben,” I said. “She might fall, but she don’t beli
eve in falling in love.”
I always had a pretty wide streak of asshole in me. I had always struck it up to my daddy’s bad genes. What could you expect? I was Alvis Jr. Now I was beginning to re-think some of that. If Alvis wasn’t my real father, I could no longer blame myself on him. Didn’t necessarily mean I was taking any responsibility, but it did mean I was taking a second look at Alvis.
Bennie led Alice back over to the table where Maime Guzman lay and motioned me over as well. Standing there looking at the girl, knowing she now had a name and a story, she looked sadder and maybe even younger.
“Her arm was so swollen, you couldn’t really see what it was,” Bennie said. “Now that the swelling’s gone, it’s easier.”
Nothing was easy about it, but you could plainly see the name Elvis Presley carved into her flesh.
“You knew her, Miss Muncey,” Bennie said. “You think she could do something like that herself?”
We all stood there and looked, and Alice told me later that she studied the letters, trying to find a letter or a curve that matched something in her memory.
“She was left handed,” she said. “I suppose it’s possible.”
“You know if she was a fan of Mr. Presley?” he said.
She was a fifteen year old white girl, I thought. Of course, she was, Bennie.
“Not that I know of,” Alice said, “but I didn’t know her that well.”
Bennie moved from Maime’s head area, around behind us and to her midsection. There he pulled out a pair of surgical scissors and poked her in the belly.
“She was between three, maybe four months pregnant,” he said.
I was expecting that.
“According to her father, that’s why she was sent away to live with family,” I said.
Alice pulled the sheet over the girl’s body.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Mr. Guzman had his way with Maime. At least one time, I think more. We told him she was pregnant so she could get away.”