Contents

  THE LONG GOODNIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  INTERLUDE: MISS MAISEY AND CARO

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE LONG GOODNIGHT

  A Bill Travis Mystery

  GEORGE WIER

  Copyright © 2020 by George Wier

  Published by

  Flagstone Books

  Austin, Texas

  The Long Goodnight—A Bill Travis Mystery

  First Ebook Edition

  July 2020

  Cover design by Elizabeth Mackey

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.

  The Bill Travis Mysteries

  (in chronological order):

  The Last Call

  Capitol Offense

  Longnecks and Twisted Hearts

  The Devil to Pay

  Death On the Pedernales

  Slow Falling

  Caddo Cold

  Arrowmoon

  After the Fire

  Ghost of the Karankawa

  Desperate Crimes

  Mexico Fever

  The Lone Star Express

  Trinity Trio

  Buffalo Bayou Blues

  Reveille In Red

  Bexar County Line

  The Long Goodnight

  Amarillo Waltz (forthcoming)

  DEDICATION

  For Sallie—for love and life and the deep waters of our communion together.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I hadn’t seen her in seventeen years, and she had been no more than about seven at the time. I recognized her instantly.

  “Keesha?” I asked.

  “Hello, Bill,” she said, smiling, and came to me. I stood up and moved around my desk and she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. She was twenty-four, drop-dead gorgeous and dressed to the nines. Also, as she had done so many years ago, she instantly stole my heart away.

  I released her, but she still kept her arms around me. She looked up at me. “You haven’t changed, Bill Travis.”

  “I have. I’m much older now, or didn’t the silver in my hair give it away?”

  “It did, a little. But you’ll always be exactly the way you were to me then.”

  Then she released me and stepped back.

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s quite true about you, as far as I’m concerned. You’re a beautiful woman now. And, if what I’ve heard is true, a professional.”

  “A lawyer. Did my undergrad at UT, got my Jurisprudence Doctorate at Texas Tech up in Lubbock.”

  “My my,” I sat on the edge of my desk and let one leg dangle into space, “an attorney. Did Ms. Coleeta put you through law school?”

  “Not really. But we can talk about that later. They’re both gone now.”

  I frowned and looked at the floor. So many people lost over the years. “Yeah. I wanted to go to Ms. Coleeta’s funeral, but I was...”

  “You were in the middle of trouble at the time,” she said.

  “How did you know?”

  “You’re always in some kind of trouble. How is Miss Julie?”

  “She married me, that’s how she is. I don’t know how I managed to convince her. We’ve got more kids than...we’ve got a lot of kids. Some of them are almost grown now. Jessica is grown. She’s married now to a guy named Driesel.”

  “I had heard. I follow your exploits.”

  She shifted on one foot.

  “Oh, shoot. Where are my manners? Won’t you have a seat?”

  She smiled again, and it was as if the heavens opened up. Mild milk-chocolate brown skin, teeth as bright and white as headlights, and little crinkles at the corners of her eyes that spoke of much experience in life and a long-suffering and abiding acceptance. “Yes, I think I will.”

  She took the chair closest and looked up at me, the smile never leaving her face. And then I realized there was some slight strain behind that smile. She was holding something in check. Something rather large.

  “Keesha, this isn’t just a social call.”

  “You always could see people. That’s what I liked about you from the beginning, all those years ago. You know, I could have been one of those black kids who grew up hating white people, but if it wasn’t for you and Hank and Julie, my life...”

  “I can see that,” I said. “We don’t always understand what we’re doing when we’re doing it. Most people just live by their guts, is all, forgetting while the tornado is whirling everything around that there are consequences to each decision, each action. Yeah. I can see who you’ve become, Keesha, but I can take no credit for it. Everything you’ve done, it’s been through your own efforts. I’m willing to bet law school was tough. In fact, I’m willing to bet it was the toughest thing you’ve ever done.”

  She laughed, briefly, and a smile stole across my own face. “You’re right about that. It was tough. And I came through it, and now I’m practicing law.”

  “Let me guess. Are you a patent attorney? Something that makes a lot of money like that?”

  “No way. Civil rights law. There’s not much money in it, they say, but I’m only starting out. I’ve got a practice over on the East Side in the old neighborhood. I teamed up with one of the original civil rights lawyers in Austin. In fact, he’s now the last one. Most of the black families have moved away from over there, though.”

  “Gentrification. I understand.”

  “Right. But that’s not why I came to see you.”

  “No? Got a special case you need my help with? A little future financial planning, maybe?”

  The smile was gone. She looked down at her lap for a moment where long, thin fingers had come to rest against the hem of her skirt.

  I waited.

  “I have a client. He’s an old, old man now. He’s got a civil rights case that is probably going nowhere because of the prevailing attitude with regard to civil rights these days, but mostly because there’s not enough evidence in his favor.”

  “I don’t do much private investigation stuff anymore. I was never licensed for that anyway.”

  “You’re a Special Texas Ranger.”

  I chuckled. “I don’t know about the ‘special’ part, but yes, I still have a badge, even though I rarely carry a gun. So what’s your client’s problem? Who does he want me to beat up?”

  “It’s not like that. It’s...”

  “What then?”

  “In my investigation into his past, I uncovered something. It’s something that...it’s pretty bad.”

  “What did you uncover?”

  “He’s an old baseball player for the Negro League, back in the day. I mean, from the 1950s.”

  “Well hell, he’s got to be like a hundred years old, then. There can’t be anything that he’s done that could come back on him from those days, surely.”

  She sighed, and then looked up at me again. “I’m not so sure.”

  “What?” I asked. “Keesha. What’s he done?”

  “I think he may have been a serial killer.”

  *****

  That’s usually how it begins. There will be a little something, and usually from a client: a tidbit of information like an odd death, or a favor that only someone such as myself with my “unique abilities”—which factually don’t exist—can do for an old friend, or a business partner, or hell, for that matter just about anybody; a little something that lights the fuse to what turns out to be a whole row of roman candles, and usually with an unforseen ammunition dump at the end of the line just waiting to go off like the Fourth of July. And sometimes, there are casualties.

  I reflected on this as I gazed down at a lovely and young Keesha White sitting in front of my desk. And that feeling, that little prickle that usually begins somewhere in the neighborhood of my stomach, began in earnest. Or, as Julie would say, it was “one of those cases.”

  Then, on the heels of this, came my objection to the whole thing. There was simply no reason that I could dream up that I needed to go and actually do anything brash. My fifty-sixth birthday loomed a few months in the future, if I dared to make it that far along. Also, I no longer had to advertise my services to the general public; they came to me, mostly by way of referral from former clients and friends, so consequently my partner, Penny, and I had far more business than we would be able to handle for the foreseeable future without having to put in loads of overtime. Mentally adding to this the fact that the kids were growing up—and growing up fast!—and a grandchild was coming, and soon, I had no illusions that I was the young and foolish guy who dared to hang from dirigibles, or leap from moving trains, or fly headlong into a veritable hail of bullets.

  No sir. Bill Travis was an investment counselor, a stock broker, a husband, a father, and a friend to Man, or at least I liked to think of myself in those terms.

  And then back into my life walks Keesha White from the ancient of days, possibly asking me to call up Sancho Panza in the form of Hank Sterling, and have me climb atop Seńor Burro and go charging at her windmills for her.

  “Keesha.” I sighed, rubbed at my eyes.

  “What?”

  “Keesha. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything. Not yet. Bill, if you’ll sit down, I’ll tell you the story. Then, when I’m done, you can say anything you like.”

  It took me a moment to respond as I considered the vast universe of possibilities that lay before me. Ultimately, as we both knew I would do, I sat back down at my desk, leaned back, held an open palm out parallel between us, as if to say, “Go right ahead,” and waited.

  Keesha began.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Keesha White was a very old friend from the same time period when I met Julie, and as such she held a certain degree of altitude in my mind.

  We come to rely upon certain people and landmarks as time moves on by: this building here is still standing after all these intervening years; that person there still recycles aluminum cans and puffs old cigars. In the final analysis, I believe we’re all looking for some measure of stability in our affairs. The sun comes up and eventually goes down, the drought comes with its fires and then is followed by the rainy season—always slightly too late to save life and property. And, indeed, we get older. But it is the exterior world that seems to matter to us more and more as time passes, and our attention shifts as both the objects and people we once relied upon are struck down one by one.

  Stability.

  All this forgetting at the same time that we all live upon a mud-caked cinder orbiting a minor star on the fringe of a vast galaxy.

  But for my own part and at that exact moment, there existed one person that mattered more than all the Sturm and Drang of the vast emptiness: the fact that there was a Keesha White, alive and doing well in the world, that somehow made the world a much better place. It made it more palatable.

  These were the things that I ruminated over after she left my office that day, and went back out into the bright, sun-shiny world with its traffic, exhaust fumes, the babble of noise and the blur of motion. I sat in my quiet office and stared at the center of my desk, looking back through the years—a thing that is often dangerous to do, and in memory I struck upon the rancid odor that Hank Sterling and I encountered in Keesha’s all-but-abandoned apartment. Her mother had disappeared into the nebulous and dark underworld of crack addiction, leaving behind a lonely and frail child to survive on her own with no income, no support, and a world that strongly desired to swallow her whole.

  And then, of course, I remembered her smile as that child, and the wonder with which she looked at all things which to her seemed new and amusing. A simple kind deed or an even simpler kind word had evoked such a dramatic change in her countenance, as if in confirmation of something she always knew and secretly harbored—that things would somehow come out all right. That there would be food, somehow, and a safe place to sleep and good people to share the passing moments with.

  It was her smile as she had looked at Julie, or as she had regarded Hank that made up my mind for me.

  How could I possibly refuse her?

  So I made a phone call.

  The number was in my Rolodex. The line rang and rang and was finally picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Tim. Bill Travis.”

  “Well hey. What kind of trouble are you in?”

  “No trouble. No trouble at all. I simply wanted to pick your brain about something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Tim Bryant was an up-and-coming author who lived in Nacogdoches in what I call Deep East Texas. He ran a bookstore in the old downtown area, and since his divorce a few years back I had wondered whether he was sleeping in the back room, where he also wrote his novels. Wondered, that is, until I saw that back room during a trip to East Texas. The place had been far too small for so much as an old army cot. Tim only came to town when he had a book signing down at the BookPeople bookstore, or perhaps the local Barnes & Noble. He had gone from writing crime novels—a genre I rarely bothered with because they are usually ridiculous—to writing westerns. And he was damned good at both.

  So I told him about Caro Wallace and his run-in with the law, but I omitted Keesha’s suspicions about his past. I had thought that Tim being Tim, he might recognize the name of an old blues musician and Negro League baseball player from the ancient of days. I was crestfallen when he didn’t.

  Now Tim Bryant is as white—skin-wise—as an un-baked flour cracker, but he happens to be an expert on black history, and particularly the blues musicians from a bygone age. I thought there was an off-chance that he would know something about black baseball players, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that he did.

  “From the 1950s? And he’s still alive?”

  “Yeah. He’s ninety-three, or thereabouts.”

  “What kind of law trouble is it?”

  “A bad arrest and possibly a little abuse of police power. But this isn’t so much the current murder as it is about the murders from a long time ago.”

  “Crap. Murder you say?”

  “Exactly. There’s one recently, but then there are several from the late 40s, early 50s. Somewhere around in there.”

  “Well, let’s see. I think Truman may have still been President. There had been a little cover-up over in Roswell, New Mexico back in 1947.”

  “Blues music and baseball, sir. Blues music and baseball.”

  “Well, I only know a few things incidentally about blues musicians, but mainly from Fort Worth. I almost next to nothing about Negro League baseball.”

  “Yeah, I knew that about you and the musicians. I read your Dutch Curridge books, remember?”

  “Oh. You actually read them. I thought you just wanted my books as collectibles with my autograph, in case...you know.”

  “In case you died they might be worth something?” I chuckled. “Naw, I knew you were going to become famous when I first met you, and I wanted to spectate the whole way through. Excellent reading material, by the way.”

  “Uh, thank you. So, what are you talking about here? Serial killings?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Hmm. Tell you what, I’ve got nothing better to do and you’ve intrigued me. Why don’t I come over that way. I can drive tonight and see you in the morning.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to drive all night, Tim. It’s not that pressing.”

  “I like driving at night.”

  “Okay. Suit yourself.”

  “Thank you. I suit myself just fine. Same old office, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right, Bill. I’ll be at your office waiting for you when you open up in the morning.”

  In my mind’s eye, I consulted the spectacle of coming to work and seeing Tim Bryant sitting in his old truck watching for me and looking at his watch every two minutes.

  “Mighty fine. See you then.”

  Tim hung up.

  I regarded the small box of newspaper clippings, old black and white photos, and baseball flyers sitting at the corner of my desk that Keesha had retrieved from her car before she left. I thought about going through it. The prospect of that was enough to prompt me to call Julie, and so I did.

  *****

  “Oh my God. Keesha? Came to see you?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Oh Bill, I wish I could have been there. What a reunion it must have been.”

  “It was all that and more.”

  “Social call, right? An old, old friend dropping by to see you, right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Uh oh. You’d better tell me.”

  So I spilled the beans. First, I told her that Tim Bryant was coming to Austin to lend a hand, particularly with regard to his knowledge of blues music and musicians, and Julie seemed to accept this in passing. I gave her Keesha’s suspicion that there was something not right about Caro Wallace, her client, but not the why behind it. In other words, I didn’t mention that Keesha thought the old man could be a serial murderer.

  “Well, this doesn’t sound quite so dangerous. Are you going to look into this officially? I mean, as a Texas Ranger?”

  “I’m just planning to poke around, see if anything turns up. Honey, chances are this is a big nothing burger, or at least I’m hoping it is.”

 

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