She started to get angry too. “I’m saying it because your plot stinks! Your murder scheme simply isn’t workable.”
At that moment I hated her more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life, including her mother. Jumping to my feet, I screamed at her, “I’ll prove to you it’s workable, you jinx!”
I did, too. The only trouble was that Ellen’s mother didn’t sit at home and wait for me to call on her, as the mother-in-law of the murderer in the book had. She walked in the back door without knocking as I was withdrawing the tube from Ellen’s throat, before I could untie her.
I still might have wriggled out of it by somehow disposing of Mother Bellman, but unfortunately the old bat is a judo expert.
I have the satisfaction of knowing that Ellen was totally wrong in her critical judgment, though, which ought to kill the jinx. A KILLER ANONYMOUS was accepted by my original publisher at the usual $3,000 advance, sold foreign rights in seventeen countries, and was picked up by the Detective Book Club.
In addition the warden just delivered a letter from my agent containing the news that movie rights had sold for $75,000.
The Legend
by Clayton Matthews
They were only tawdry honky tonk doxies, old and tired and no better than they should be. But now they were ravaged corpses — and some one among us must pay for their dying.
I was fifteen the summer the Honky Tonk Killer struck our town with the shocking suddenness of a tornado.
We didn’t call them B-girls then, at least not in our little East Texas town. I’m not sure the word was even in usage, in the depression thirties. They were called waitresses, but not cocktail waitresses.
Prohibition had been voted out, but Texas was still dry. The only place liquor could be bought in our county was at drugstores, and then only with a doctor’s prescription, which cost twenty-five cents. Only 3.2 beer could be served legally.
Of course, the honky tonk girls performed the same general function B-girls do today. They served 3.2 beer and setups to the customers, danced with them to the accompaniment of raucous country western music on the huge juke boxes, flirted with them, as well as other things, I suppose.
It goes without saying that the customers were predominantly male. No unescorted girl would dare enter a honky tonk. Sometimes a man would take his girl, or his wife, but even that wasn’t considered quite proper.
There was plenty of the hard stuff around to go with the setups. Aside from the drugstore whiskey, there was always a fruit jar of moon, as colorless as nitro and just as deadly, or a jug of wild mustang grape wine, a Texas product many times more potent than today’s wines.
There were two honky tonks near our town, one to the south, the other on the highway going east. Both were located by the side of the highway, low colorless buildings, drowsy and sullen by day, exploding with blaring sound and garish light by night. Both squatted like malignant growths beyond the help of surgery, like areas of blight piously avoided by decent folks.
Of the two the one operated by Johnny One-Arm was by all odds the most popular. Two reasons were advanced for this. First, there was a row of cabins out back of Johnny One-Arm’s place. The second reason, and likely the most important, was Johnny One-Arm himself.
Every small town in those days had its legendary character, usually a little on the outlaw side, and Johnny One-Arm was ours. He was a bear of a man in his forties, a prodigious drinker, a fabled womanizer with laughter like the sound of thunder. And he had only one arm, the left one sheared off at the shoulder socket.
The reason for the loss of the arm was obscured in myth. Some tales had it that the arm was lost in the war, others that he got it snared in a bear trap while trying to raid a still and remained captive for almost a week before being discovered. But the tale having the most currency was that he had been caught with another man’s wife, and the man had come at him with an axe.
I was over at the county seat with Sheriff Jason — actually he was only a deputy, but our town called him sheriff — when I saw Johnny One-Arm for the first time. Sheriff Jason had come business in the courthouse which he had just finished, and we were getting into his Model A at the curb when these two men came boiling out of the small jail behind the courthouse. They seemed to be running side by side as they came through the door. Then, after a few steps, they fell to the ground, rolling over and over, and I realized they were handcuffed together, and one of them had only one arm.
Then I heard the deep, rumbling sound of Johnny One-Arm’s laughter. They were fighting, how I don’t know to this day, since Johnny One-Arm’s only arm was cuffed. But he was giving a good account of himself.
All of a sudden the sun glinted off metal as a gun barrel rose and fell, rose and fell again. Johnny One-Arm finally lay still. The other man, in sheriff’s khaki, came grunting to his feet, hauling Johnny One-Arm up with him. His prisoner could still walk but just barely. He stumbled along toward the courthouse, blood dripping bright red from his hanging head.
As they disappeared inside, I asked, “Who was that man?”
Sheriff Jason put the Model A into gear and started off with a jerk. “Nobody you should know about, Kyle.”
“It was Johnny One-Arm, wasn’t it?”
“How come you know about him?”
“Everybody knows about Johnny One-Arm.”
“I reckon they do?” He took out his old, blackened pipe and filled it, driving with one hand, gravel from the roadway spitting against the underside of the fenders like buckshot.
“What did they arrest him for?”
He held a kitchen match to the pipe and got it going before he said musingly, “I guess you’re old enough—”
“I’m plenty old enough!”
He slanted a look at me, round red face faintly shocked as though he’d just counted the years himself. Then he grinned his Scattergood Baines grin. “Yep, I can see the gray hairs already.” He sobered. “Johnny One-Arm was brought in on the same old charge, peddling mustang wine. He’ll pay a fine and be right back with us again. But that bad temper of his is going to get him into real trouble one of these days. The madder he gets, the louder he laughs.” He glanced over at me. “And fifteen or not, Kyle, if I catch you even near his place, I’ll paddle your britches for you!”
That summer was the driest, the hottest on record. It hadn’t rained for four months, and the temperature hadn’t dropped below ninety for a month, day or night. The sandy soil glittered like bone-dust under a scalding sun. It nurtured nothing, it grew almost nothing. The river was reduced to a mere trickle. Lean catfish, white bellies slimy with mud, lurked among the brown roots of the elms that arched out over the ever-receding water like the ribs of starving giants.
Such weather always increased the honky tonk business. The 3.2 beer was kept on ice, and the crowds provided a release for tempers made explosive by the heat. Hardly a night passed without a fist fight or two, and every. Saturday night saw at least one knife cutting. Johnny One-Arm kept things pretty well under control at his place and almost never called the law in.
Naturally everybody knew about the ruckus at the county seat, and it only added to the Johnny One-Arm legend.
Several of us were playing soft ball on the school grounds and got to swapping tales we’d heard about Johnny One-Arm, each story more improbable than the other.
Billie Bob Hudson happened by and overheard us. He gave us a good talking to. “It’s a good thing to have heroes to worship, especially when you’re growing up, but be sure and pick on the right kind. Johnny One-Arm has all the wrong qualities.”