Red Dog Saloon

by R. D. Sherrill

  The weather wasn’t about to detour the determined lawman from his pilgrimage. He was going to speak with Bob Smith even if he had to walk to Harvest Lake.

  The snow would prove a minor hindrance as he motored north to his destination. The early afternoon kept a major accumulation at bay. He figured he wouldn’t be so lucky once the sun went down.

  Sam spent most of his drive trying to think of questions he would ask the man. He also replayed the man’s short message in his mind, realizing the mysterious Mr. Smith mentioned there were four victims. While rumors of the discoveries of the bodies that morning was spreading around Castle County, Sam was a bit surprised the man up on Harvest Lake had already learned about them. Perhaps he had a local source feeding him updated information.

  The sheriff’s thoughts were interrupted by a call from Kendal Parks.

  “We have the preliminaries on our victims from this morning,” Kendal announced. “No surprise on Stevie Grissom. His cause of death was loss of blood. He bled to death from a knife wound that sliced the carotid and jugular.”

  Sam involuntarily rubbed his throat hearing the detective’s description of Stevie’s horrible end. Something about a throat-slashing always made the veteran lawman’s skin crawl.

  “The doc said it was almost like his blood had been drained out,” Kendal continued. “He was pretty well empty.”

  It had taken a lot of blood to paint the foreboding words on Bart’s car. Sam expected the blood used for the ghastly work of perverse art was donated by Stevie Grissom. If it wasn’t him, then there was another body out there still to be discovered since just a flesh wound couldn’t account for that much crimson paint.

  “What about Rhody Turner?” Sam asked.

  “Are you ready for this?” Kendal asked. “The official cause of death for Rhody Turner is drowning. They found water in his lungs. He was alive when the car went into the water.”

  “Were there any signs of trauma?” Sam asked.

  “Other than some minor injuries, there was nothing,” Kendal responded. “It was like he was perfectly healthy until he drowned.”

  “It’s almost like he was stuffed into that trunk,” Sam noted. “I can’t see Rhody getting put in a trunk without a fight.”

  “Maybe he got in the trunk voluntarily, sheriff,” Kendal speculated. "That would explain the lack of trauma."

  If Kendal’s suggestion were true then that meant Rhody likely knew his killer, trusting the person enough to put his life in their hands by crawling into a trunk. Did Rhody Turner know the killer? Did his killer have something to do with his escape?

  The questions continued to swirl around in Sam’s mind like the swirling snow that pelted his windshield as he entered the small town of Harvest Lake.

  The remote vacation village was already taking on the look of a Norman Rockwell painting. The snow topped the roofs of the cabins that ringed the large lake around which the town was situated. The beauty was wasted on Sam who was focused on his goal, that being his meeting with Bob Smith.

  Sam made the turn onto Robertson Lane and began rounding a hill which overlooked the lake. His tires slipped on the slick incline. Topping the hill moments later, he caught sight of his destination – Harvest Lake Assisted Living Facility. He was at a retirement home.

  This time Sam concealed his badge under his jacket before walking inside. He didn’t have time for legal wrangling should administration want to get clearance or a warrant. Today he would be a regular visitor for Bob Smith.

  Sam was motioned on to Bob Smith’s room without a second look from the receptionist. That was a far cry from the panic he started at SMHI the day before. He walked at a fast pace down the hall toward the room. His anticipation built as he nodded to an elderly man working his way down the hall in a wheelchair. Would this be the break in the case he needed or another of the seemingly endless dead ends?

  He found the room at the end of hall. The door was partially ajar. The room was dark except for the afternoon light shining through the window which overlooked the lake. A man sat in front of the window, gazing out, apparently watching the snow fall.

  “The snow’s beautiful isn’t it?” Sam began as he stepped in the room.

  The elderly man was dressed in a dark house coat pulled up to his chin. He continued looking out the window without responding to the sheriff.

  Was he in the wrong room? Had he been lured on a wild goose chase? Why wasn’t the man responding if he was the one who invited him? Perhaps he was hard of hearing.

  “Are you Bob Smith?” Sam said in a loud voice as he took a couple of steps closer to the elderly man.

  “It’s a name as good as any,” the man responded.

  It was the same voice the sheriff heard earlier on the answering machine. He was in the right place.

  “I had a message to come see you,” Sam continued, still talking in a loud voice. “Do you mind if I come in and talk?”

  The man, summoning his voice with some irritation, took exception with Sam’s tone.

  “I’m not deaf,” Smith declared. “I can hear just fine. Give a man a second to answer next time. At my age it takes a while to catch up.”

  Sam apologized as Smith gestured for him to take a seat. The mysterious host still faced out the window as he talked.

  “I trust you had a pleasant drive up,” Smith began. “The lake is really something this time of year. I hear we’re going to be getting some snow.”

  “Um, yes, we’re getting it now,” Sam agreed. “You said you had some information.”

  Smith laughed at the lawman’s eagerness and his underestimation of the information he was about to reveal. The weak laugh turned into a cough, the mere act of laughing choking the elderly man.

  “I don’t have just some information, sheriff. I have it all,” Smith replied. “I know about your murders and I know why they’re happening.”

  “Do you know who the killer is?” Sam excitedly asked.

  “Patience sheriff, patience. All in due time,” Smith replied as he turned his wheelchair to face his guest. “I’ve met the killer.”

  Smith’s revelation had Sam chomping at the bit. If Smith had really met the killer as he claimed, his information could blow the case wide open.

  “Who is it?” Sam asked. “Who is doing this?”

  Smith grinned, the lines in his face suggesting he had spent a lifetime in the sun from his weather-beaten appearance.

  “I said I met your killer. I didn’t say I knew who he was,” Smith clarified. “However, I know for a fact why the murders are happening.”

  “And how do you know with such certainty?” Sam countered. “You seem to say that with conviction.”

  Smith furled his brow as he shot the lawman a serious look.

  “How else would I know, sheriff? Because I was there!” Smith snapped.

  “You were where?” Sam asked.

  “The Red Dog,” Smith responded. “I was there when it happened. I saw everything. I saw what those pigs did to that little girl.”

  Sam leaned in toward Smith. He realized that before him was an eyewitness to the two decade old crime.

  “Why are you just telling now?” Sam asked. “It’s been more than twenty years.”

  Smith dropped his head and looked down at his feet in shame.

  “Because I was a coward,” Smith replied. “I’ve been a coward for twenty years but now my days are coming to an end. I figure I owe it to the girl to let someone know. I don’t want to take it to my grave. If I do, I’m afraid I’ll never rest.”

  Smith’s candor intrigued the sheriff. The old man was baring his soul after two decades, perhaps making what some would call a deathbed confession.

  “Tell me what happened,” Sam urged.

  His tale would prove to be the most captivating story Sam ever heard. The look on Smith’s face told the lawman he was reliving the events of twenty years ago with every word.

  Smith’s story began at the Red Dog only days before it burned to
the ground. The old man recalled that Bart’s group was there, being even more rowdy than normal.

  “The whole bunch of them was drunk, but then that wasn’t anything unusual. That's what they did every Saturday night,” Smith said. “They were getting loud and they’d already been in one fight that night. They were looking for trouble, that’s for sure.”

  The whole gang, Smith explained, were in their early twenties back then. Bart was the worst of the group.

  “If there was any trouble out there involving his boy, then Sheriff Foster would sweep it under the rug,” Smith pointed out. “Bart knew that, so he had no limits. He knew he could do what he wanted and so could his boys. That made them dangerous. They were above the law.”

  Smith recalled seeing them nearly beat a man to death one evening a few weeks before the incident. No charges ever came of the beating, despite the serious injuries sustained by the patron.

  “They were like a pack of dogs,” Smith recalled. “If you took on one, you took on all of them. And even then you couldn’t win because Sheriff Foster would see nothing bad happened to his son.”

  Smith walked ahead to the night of the incident. The pain on his wrinkled face revealed the sincerity of his remorse.

  “That night Gina Porter was there with a slightly older girl,” Smith revealed. “It was Gina’s eighteenth birthday so she decided it’d be fun to go to the Red Dog. She’d never been, and like most kids, they thought it was dangerous, kind of a forbidden place good folks weren’t supposed to go.”

  Smith said Gina stayed at the bar deep into the night, drinking with some other patrons despite being underage for alcohol. He couldn’t recall if the drinks were bought for her or if she was passing a fake identification. Either way, as the evening progressed so did her buzz as did that of her friend.

  “At some point in the evening she became friendly with Stevie Grissom,” Smith said. “They sat around talking for probably an hour before her friend decided to leave. That’s when Stevie offered to give her a lift home so the other girl could leave with a guy. Accepting that ride was the biggest mistake of her life.”

  Smith paused to catch his breath. The elderly man strained for air as he progressed through his story.

  “An hour later, the bar was empty except for Stevie, the rest of the crew and the girl,” Smith recalled. “They were all drunk and one of them, I don’t recall which one, began touching the girl. First it was just playing around but then it started getting serious.”

  Smith again lowered his head in shame.

  “She tried to resist but that just made him want it more,” Smith recalled, noting Andy walked over and locked the door to make sure no one would walk in on them. “Then they were all on her like a bunch of animals. She tried to fight but they held her down and covered her mouth. She was crying and begging but they didn’t care. They were out of control.”

  Smith’s voice took a tone of anger. His false teeth ground together as he continued.

  “They raped her, all of them,” Smith said with a look of disgust. “It was horrible. I can still hear her screams like it was yesterday.”

  Moved by the old man’s recollection, the sheriff wondered why Smith didn’t do something to help the girl. It was obvious Smith was an eyewitness to the crime so he had to be in the bar when it happened.

  “Why didn’t you do anything?” Sam questioned. “I mean, what were you doing there in the first place?”

  Raising his head back up, a sober look on his face, Smith floored the veteran lawman.

  “What was I doing there?” Smith asked. “It was my bar.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Sam interjected. "Earl Cutts owned the bar at the time."

  “Not at all, sheriff,” the man responded. “I haven’t been Bob Smith all my life. In this case the names were changed to protect the guilty. You know me better by my given name - Earl Cutts.”

  The revelation was too much for Sam to believe. Earl Cutts had burned up with the Red Dog over twenty years ago. Or had he? The words of Cliff Chapman crossed his mind at that incident. The reporter specifically said that Cutts was “believed dead” given the fact no remains had been found in the ashes of the Red Dog.

  “But Earl Cutts is dead,” Sam said with a hint of uncertainty in his voice. “Everybody knows he went up in flames with the bar.”

  Sam's statement brought a smile to the old man’s face.

  “Yes. That's exactly what I wanted everybody to believe,” the man said. “When you don’t want someone to find you, what better way to avoid them than being dead?

  Sam was confused by the twist. How could Earl Cutts convince the world he was dead for the past twenty years? Better yet, why would he want people to believe he was dead?

  “The only way I could avoid being dead was by making people think I was already dead,” he explained. “They would have come back and finished the job if they realized I survived.”

  “They, I assume, being Bart and his gang?” Sam asked as he slowly clued in to the story.

  “Exactly, sheriff. You catch on fast,” the man said. “They left me for dead and figured they‘d burn up the evidence. They just missed one little detail - they left me breathing.”

  Could it be? Was this the long-dead owner of Red Dog Saloon sitting before him recounting events of twenty years ago like they just happened?

  “Why?” Sam asked as he began to believe he was talking to Earl Cutts.

  “I couldn’t live with myself,” Earl confessed. “I held my tongue that night because I was scared, not just of Bart but his father. The sheriff turned his head to things that went on at the Red Dog so I was beholden to him. And frankly, I couldn’t have done anything that night if I’d tried. I was an old man even back then. Sixty-five to be exact.”

  By the sheriff’s quick math that would make the man before him eighty-six or eight-seven. And, by the looks of him, he was every bit of it.

  “I couldn’t sleep after that, not a wink,” Earl admitted. “I’d done a lot of bad things in my life but standing by and watching that, well, I was ashamed of myself.”

  Earl explained he was not sure what happened to the girl after the incident that night. All he knew is she disappeared from town at some point. He was also unsure if she reported the rape to anyone. He wasn’t even sure how she got home that night as she escaped from the bar after the deed was done and the gang went back to drinking. However, about a sleepless week after witnessing the atrocity in his bar, Earl decided to come forward and reveal what he had seen to the district attorney.

  “There was a mole in the DA’s office,” Earl said. “Bart and his boys found out what I was doing and paid a call on me at the Red Dog.”

  Earl said that much like the night of the rape, the gang came in and locked the front door behind them.

  “I told them they would burn in Hell for what they did and I’d see to it even if I had to come back from the grave and drag them there with me,” Earl said. “That didn’t sit well with Bart. He had his boys hold me while he and Rhody beat me.”

  Earl said while they held him, blood pouring from his mouth from the merciless beating, he spit in Bart’s face. The act of defiance infuriated the gang’s leader, prompting him to crack him in the head with the butt of a pistol he pulled from his waistband. The impact knocked the elderly bar owner out cold for a few seconds. However, his head was hard from years of bar brawls and that was what kept the blow from proving fatal.

  “When I woke up, I could smell gas and heard the whoosh of flames coming at me,” Earl recalled, saying he scrambled away from the heat of the approaching wall of fire. “I was able to crawl to the back door through the flames.”

  Earl pulled up the sleeve of his night coat. There were scars on his right arm and hand. The scars, he explained, were left by burns he suffered from the fire.

  “I got out the back door without being seen,” Earl said, noting he threw his false teeth back into the burning building as he formulated a plan to disappear forever. “
I knew that if they realized I survived they would hunt me down and finish the job. I knew at that moment I had to stay dead.”

  Earl revealed he made his way back to his nearby house and gathered up part of his belongings. He then paused to watch the flames from the old Red Dog spire high into the night sky while waiting for his girlfriend. She then helped spirit him away.

  “I’d done pretty well for myself,” Earl revealed.

  He owned a vacation house on Harvest Lake which he had put in his girlfriend’s name for legal purposes in case the revenuers came calling about his illegal enterprises at the tavern.

  “I was already retirement age so I figured it was time to enjoy my golden years,” he said.

  The elderly man grinned with pride as he revealed his girlfriend was listed as beneficiary on both the bar and on his life insurance. The settlements were quite lucrative.

  “That was more than enough to live on for the rest of our lives,” Earl said.

  He recalled that he and his girlfriend went on to get married a short time later and that he had taken her last name.

  “I didn’t even have to get a new name really," he grinned. "My full name is Robert Earl Cutts. Her name was Rachel Smith. So, when we got married, I just rolled over into being Bob Smith.”

  Earl explained that Rachel died about five years ago and that he fell into ill health shortly thereafter and was moved into the assisted living facility.

  “There hasn’t been a day I haven’t thought about what happened,” Earl confessed. “But I knew that if I came forward, that would be the end of me.”