by Tim Bryant
She looked at me like we were too dumb to get it. Until that moment, I guess we were.
“It wasn’t true,” she said.
Bennie pulled his gloves off and tucked them in his pocket.
“Well, it is now,” he said.
19
Donnatella Silvestri lived in a nice house. All the houses were nice in East Kessler. I occasionally parked the International in front of nice houses. You’d be surprised how many of my cases involved people on Summit and Pennsylvania Avenue. Sure, people in Battercake might have had more real problems, but they usually didn’t have the means to do anything about them.
“She doesn’t have a husband?” James Alto said.
Slant Face was my usual shotgun rider, but he was playing hard to get, telling me he was working extra shifts when I knew he wasn’t. According to James Alto, who took the trip to south Dallas with me, Ruthie Nell had whispered enough not-so-sweet nothings in Slant Face’s ear to make him think twice about our company.
“Is she screwing Slant Face?” I said.
The mere thought of it was worth a quick hard laugh, which was followed by an even harder recognition. Women loved Slant’s accent. All of a sudden, it seemed obvious to me.
“She is,” I said. “She’s stripping his goddamn gears.”
Alto riding shotgun was both more comfortable and less provocative than Alice Muncey. It also gave us plenty to talk about, both good and bad, real and highly speculative, on the trip over.
“Just watch yourself with Mrs. Silvestri,” I said. “Her husband threatened to give her a knuckle sandwich and got the damn boot for his troubles.”
“Ain’t that a kick in the teeth,” Alto said.
We got out and walked up the long drive. The house was one of those single-story ranch style houses that were going up in the better parts of Fort Worth, but, like Dallas itself, it seemed to sprawl out a little more than the ones in Cowtown.
“Also remember, she’s got a daughter named Ginny who’s missing in action,” I said.
“No need to remind,” Alto said.
“Well, just don’t be cracking wise the whole time we’re here.”
I rang the bell, which sounded like somebody hit one of those Chinese gongs like before a play me and Ruthie saw one time uptown. I figured one gong was plenty, so we stood and waited for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time. Finally, we could hear the latch springing from the other side and presented ourselves as well as me and James Alto are able.
I think she thought we were Bible salesmen.
“Mrs. Silvestri, you may not remember me...”
Her expression either said as much or said she had just awakened from a nap or maybe both.
“...we met at the coroner’s office in Fort Worth,” I said.
She opened the door a little wider and, with that, also her eyes.
“Oh, forgive me,” she said.
“May we step inside and speak to you.”
It did hit me that letting two strange men into her house must have been twice as intimidating as one. Oh but for want of someone to bullshit with along the way, I would have made the trip alone.
“Of course,” she said.
The interior of her house looked like a library. Dark wood bookcases from mid-wall to ceiling against two walls and books filling each shelf. Little statuettes and globes and things positioned this way and that. I loved libraries. One question bubbled up in my mind, and I couldn’t stop myself asking.
“Have you read all of these?”
“No,” she said. “This was my father’s house and, believe it or not, the books came with the house. Someday, I hope to read some of them. Quite a few are in Russian though, so I don’t expect I’ll read those. Unless I get bored and decide to learn Russian, I guess.”
Donnatella Silvestri didn’t seem like the kind of dame that would lead a boring life. If a humdrum day came along, she would kick it in the balls and send it packing.
“Heard anything at all from Ginny, ma’am?”
I knew better than ask anything else before I covered that base. Her house seemed desperately childless at a glance. I was hoping she had something new to go on.
“Cops here have quit looking,” she said.
James Alto, like me, had never been a father, and it was probably a good thing for both of us. The few times I had been called on to give some kind of guiding hand to a kid had been uncomfortable at best. Alto had come from the Tonkawa Indian culture, which values family sure enough, but he was taken away from his real mother at a young age and raised by a white woman who tried her best to turn him as white as she was. If anything, it resulted in the opposite outcome. He didn’t trust white people. I don’t think he even trusted me, when it got right down to it. I didn’t take it personal. I wasn’t very trustworthy.
Ginny’s story bore some resemblance to Maime Guzman’s so I was hoping they would end differently. Ginny was sixteen and left, seemingly, because things were rough at home. In Ginny’s case, though, it had been the leaving of the father that caused her trouble. I could surely identify with that.
“I’d like to see what I can do, if you’d allow it, Mrs. Silvestri,” I said.
“I’ll take any help I can get,” she said. “And you may call me Donna.”
You could tell Donnatella was not the kind to need somebody’s help very often. She wasn’t flirty like Alice Muncey. She was flying high above me and James Alto. Like Slant Face had said before, maybe those kinds of folks know it’s low down scoundrels like us that can help them best.
If Ginny was anything like her momma, she might be smart enough to survive on the street for longer than Maime had. But it had been a while, and the fact that she hadn’t shown up with friends or family this time was worrisome.
“I found a more recent photograph to give you,” Donna said. “She’s at that age where she changes month to month. I guess that means even I don’t know what she looks like now.”
I thought about Maime laying there on that cold table back in Fort Worth, nothing but a sheet to cover her.
“I can trade the one I have for it,” I said.
That one was still in my pocket. It had rubbed up against a bottle there at one point and got a little wet but had thankfully dried out in about the same time I did. The new one was less posed, catching her laughing with a friend. They were in a darkened room. A window was open to her right and sunlight poured across the photograph, lighting her face almost perfectly. It was startling.
“Who is the other girl?” I said.
“Her name is Delores. Delores Cooley. That’s the girl that Ginny ran to the first time she ran off.”
Ginny was what momma always called a dishwater blonde, and, although the sunlight washed out her freckles, it made her hair shine like some kind of celestial body. Her gap-toothed smile was easily identified. I looked at Delores, sitting cross-legged next to Ginny and looking at her as if she was well aware that it was Ginny who stood out. Delores looked like a thousand other girls to me.
“Delores Cooley any kin to Spade Cooley?” I said.
I would have bet nickels to dimes Donnatella didn’t have a clue who Spade Cooley, a Texas Swing recording artist from Oklahoma, was.
“He’s her father’s second cousin, if I’m not mistaken,” she said. “You actually know who Spade Cooley is?”
James Alto got a kick out of that. I know more about Spade Cooley than Mrs. Cooley does, and I know more about Milton Brown and Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzell than I know about Spade Cooley. If I could either sing or play a note, I would be a human jukebox. Alto might only know ten songs, but he can pick a six-string like nobody’s business and sing almost like Lefty.
“I’ll definitely want to check the girl’s story out,” I said.
The other item of business concerned Maime Guzman. A minor item but one I wanted to touch base on while we were in East Kessler. There were a couple of other people I aimed to run down in the Dallas area, but I couldn’t see myself hanging around in an area li
ke East Kessler. It had a way of making me feel bad about myself, like I hadn’t measured up. Even worse, like I just didn’t have the motivation to measure up. That Donnatella, though, she made me think about it some. She made me think about quite a few things.
20
“Mrs. Silvestri, do you ever recall hearing the name Maime Guzman? G-U-Z-M-A-N?”
Donnatella Silvestri took a long draw from a skinny cigarette and sent it out through her nose. I reminded her of the girl on the table in Fort Worth. I reminded her that she had looked familiar. That she had seen the girl’s face somewhere before. I told her I had photographs if she needed reminding. She said no, the face was still there in her mind. I was glad because I didn’t really have the photographs.
“No, and please, it’s Donna. Or Donnatella, if you must.”
I was running on a good hunch. Hunches are a lot like blind dates. Sometimes even the most promising ones will let you down. Every once in a while, as Slant Face would say, you get lucky and get lucky.
“You may not have seen or heard her name,” I said. “Is it possible you saw her at the hospital?”
Donnatella stood there and studied the face in her mind while her cigarette ashed on the floor.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “I think that is where I saw her.”
I knew the hospital records would be a treasure trove of information, whatever a trove is. Who knows? I also knew Dallas Methodist wasn’t going to turn them over to a Fort Worth private eye with a hunch.
“Somebody drove her there and checked her in,” James Alto said.
He was looking at the ashes on the floor, and I could tell he was having a hard time not stepping on them.
“She might have been pregnant,” Donnatella said. “You’d be surprised how many come in like that.”
“Possible,” I said, “but I’d bet it was something else. You ever see patients in the psych ward?”
“Every day,” she said. “Doctors only see the patients in their ward. Cleaning is every room, every ward.”
Donnatella didn’t look like any cleaning lady I’d ever seen, and I liked that about her. She made a good librarian, but all the books may have been swaying me on that. She looked maybe not tough, but strong.
“If we can place her in Dallas Methodist in the fall, we can just about assume she’d been staying here,” I said. “We should check with Sheriff Muncey, see if there’s family or friends here.”
I explained the situation to Donnatella. I knew she would be sympathetic when it came to the shitass of a dad and the poor girl, but I was also aware that the girl in this case was dead as a doornail, so I tried to tread light on that fact. I was reasonably convinced we would find her daughter Ginny alive and well. At least, I was hoping.
We left by the back door, getting a look at a backyard pool that had been abandoned too long ago and also getting a better idea why she’d chosen the digs over Mr. Silvestri.
James Alto saw the truck before I did. It was sitting just a little low, but low enough to tell.
“Dutch, I think we got us a problem.”
The two tires on the shotgun side of the International had been sliced right through.
“Goddamn,” I said.
Tires could be replaced easy enough and those tires had had a good long life. In fact, they were on the truck the day I drove it off Fast Mike’s lot a year and a half earlier, and Mike swore then they were original. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about the damn tires, even if I am now. It was the thought that I could park in front of the nicest house on a very nice street and still trouble would find me. And it was the big X painted in black across the International’s hood. It was beyond the pale.
“You think it’s that pipsqueak Sly Scarbrough?” James Alto said.
I kicked a tire on the driver’s side. Both were as flat as their companions on the other side. All had gone down together to a madman with a knife and a big paintbrush. And maybe a dead madman at that.
“We’ll have to see about this,” I said.
What I was really saying was “we’re gonna have to hunt this fucker down and we’re gonna have to kill him, and, if he’s already dead, we’re gonna have to kill him again. Maybe even kill him over and over until we’re sure the job is good and done.”
Donnatella called up somebody with a winch to come and tow the pickup to the pickup hospital. James Alto and me ended up helping them put the new tires on for a little rebate. The head mechanic, whose name was Kentucky and he actually came from a place called Tyewhoppety, Kentucky and the other guys called him Ken for short. I wanted to know why they didn’t name him Tyewhoppety and call him Ty for short, like Ty Cobb. They were a hospitable bunch of guys and even played WRR on the garage radio for us, with “The Cool Fool” playing Little Willie John and Elmore James. That’s where I heard Elmore James was coming to the Skyliner in Fort Worth. I liked Reed a lot, and I liked the Skyliner alright too.
We were back on the road to Fort Worth within a couple of hours. We didn’t do much talking. I turned on WRR, but the magic had worn off, so I switched it off before we got to Arlington. I have never been a big fan of Dallas. Even in the good parts of the city, something bad was always happening. Now we had somebody coming after us, and the list of suspects was a short one. Way I counted, it just about had to be the guy who previously claimed to be Bret Masterson’s brother. Sly Scarbrough. The newly rebirthed Dead John.
Driving into Fort Worth in a truck with a great big X written across it, I felt like someone had put the mark on me. It wasn’t meant for the truck.
“Dead Dutch Curridge don’t have much ring to it at all, does it?” I said.
Maybe I was Dead Wrong Dutch Curridge, I didn’t know. I was positive about one thing though. There was somebody coming after me.
21
I was living in a boarding house on Sharon Road, in a neighborhood known as Tremble. A nice old lady named Sarah ran the place. She liked me because I had a gun and a badge, even if it was just a PI badge. I had a room and shared a bathroom with an old man who spent so much time in bed asleep, Sarah was instructed by his daughter to go in every day to make sure he was still breathing. The daughter seemed to bring him most of his food and occasional mail. He had a TV set in his room, where he watched Highway Patrol and Cheyenne and Gunsmoke. I would go in and talk with the man every so often, admittedly hoping to get a look at Marshall Dillon. I had listened to the radio show for so long, it seemed inconceivable that he was now on the screen and in the flesh. He didn’t sound the same, didn’t look anything like what I’d imagined. And still I couldn’t keep from going back.
I had barely got back and sat down good in the old red kitchen chair, the only chair I had. I was reading After Dark, My Sweet, for the second time when Sarah came knocking at my door. I always knew when it was Sarah, because she knocked like she was simultaneously trying to summon you and keep from waking you up. Usually, Sarah’s knocks meant that someone had telephoned looking for me, and this was the usual.
“Mr. Curridge, a woman called from Dallas Methodist Hospital. She said she knew you and needed to talk to you. I have the number, if you’d like to dial her back.”
I put my boots on and trudged around the corner and into the main living room of the boarding house. The old man with the TV was sitting up at a table playing cards with himself right there in the main room. A sight I had never seen. I didn’t know whether to ask if he was okay or whether his TV was okay, so I said nothing.
I dialed a bunch of numbers. First time, I got a couple of them out of place and got a really mean old lady on the other end. I tried it again slower and they put me right through. I told the nurse I needed to speak with one of the employees and spelled out her name. She went away and called out for Donnatella.
“Sweetie, there ain’t nobody working here by that name,” she said. “You sure you got that name right?”
“The name is right,” I said. “She works cleaning up all the messes you make.”
It seemed
like she was high hatting me, and I don’t cotton to that. She passed the telephone off to another lady who asked me to spell Donnatella three times and Silvestri four times. I was just about to hang the phone up.
“Silvestri,” she finally said. “Why didn’t you say so?”
I looked at Sarah and gave her the international search-me sign.
“Donna Silvestri is a patient here, dear.”
That hadn’t entered my mind. All of a sudden, I was wide awake, my heart pounding fast enough to feel it in my temples. The lady said she could patch me through to her wing, and, half a minute later, she did just that.
“Mr. Curridge, are you okay?”
She sounded shaky and weak, not at all like the strong woman I had just seen.
“I’m fine, ma’am,” I said. “What are you doing in the hospital?”
While James Alto and me were dancing to “All Around The World” by Little Willie John at Hudley’s Garage in South Dallas, Donnatella was answering her front door, thinking maybe we had come back for some reason.
“Who the hell was parked outside, Donna?” he said.
Donna didn’t have time to answer. William Silvestri pushed her back into the house and came after her. For the next ten minutes, he came after her the way Archie “The Mongoose” Moore came after Nino Valdez. It was damn ugly and cowardly to boot. He left her with one black eye, a broken nose, and assorted bruises along with a promise to do all of that and much worse to whoever was driving the old red International with the X painted on the hood.
“I told him you were only there about Ginny,” she said, “but he’s mad crazy, Mr. Curridge. He gets something in his head, and there’s no talking to him. I just know he’ll come after you.”
I told her not to worry, that I knew how to handle people like William Silvestri.
She managed a laugh, even though I could hear the hurt through it.
“I wouldn’t put anything past him, Mr. Curridge.”
As for the X across the International’s hood, it could be erased with some effort, but I decided to keep it. It gave the old buggy some needed character. Like a scar or a missing toe. It was also a signal. A signal to someone out there that separated that one truck from all others, but also a signal that I knew he was coming, and I was good with it.