Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 3, August 1973

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.”

“But teacher, Johnny One-Arm is the best around,” said Roy Thatcher, a red-headed, fiesty kid my own age. “Why, I betcha he could take on John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, any of them guys, and whip ’em with his one arm tied behind him!”

“Now that’s just what I mean!” Billie Bob said. “Dillinger, Floyd, they’re all outlaws, vicious killers, not somebody kids your age, or any age, should be looking up to.”

Billie Bob boarded at Sheriff Jason’s, in the spare room in back. The past term had been his first at our school. Sheriff Jason was a member of the school board and had a hand in hiring him. Always before we’d had women teachers, and we were a little in awe of Billie Bob.

He was a good teacher, quiet, soft-spoken, but he would take no sass. He wasn’t a great deal older than some of his pupils. He was slender, not very tall. Some of the older boys were bigger and easily outweighed him. But he was quick and strong, as a couple of the older boys found out when they defied him. After that, Billie Bob had little trouble keeping order.

Naturally rumors followed him into our town. He had been a big football star with the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and it was said that he had been a high school teacher afterward for a couple of years. Nobody seemed to know why he took a job teaching at a little school like ours.

I asked Sheriff Jason once about that, and he said, “It’s the depression, Kyle. Jobs of any kind are hard to find. He’s a good teacher, ain’t he?”

I agreed that he was.

“Then be grateful he’s here instead of somewhere else.”

I liked Billie Bob. For one thing, he treated me like a grownup, didn’t talk down to me. And he did talk to me.

Of course, after school was out for summer, he didn’t have much else to do. Like Sheriff Jason said, there were no jobs to be had, much less summer jobs, so Billie Bob stayed pretty much to his room. He ate with us, and most of those hot summer nights, he’d sit on the front porch with Sheriff Jason and me, talking football, politics and the hard times, while Aunt Beth cleaned the kitchen. She was Sheriff Jason’s sister and kept house for us. She wasn’t really my aunt. Sheriff Jason had taken me in to raise following my mother’s death.

After sitting for an hour or so, Billie Bob would go round the house to his room and read awhile. Many nights, when I got up long after midnight to stumble put to the outhouse in back, I’d see his light still off.

That evening after he’d given us the dickens on the playground, Billie Bob picked a time when Sheriff Jason had stepped, inside to say to me, “About this afternoon, Kyle. We live in hard times, dreary times. I know, it’s something to do, brag on our local badmen. So long as it doesn’t go beyond that, I guess it can’t do much harm. But people like John Dilligner, Johnny One-Arm — they’re not people to be admired. They’re killers, thieves, lawbreakers. Just because we hate and blame banks for the Depression, we shouldn’t admire people because they rob banks. And just because we don’t agree with liquor laws, we shouldn’t brag on men who break those laws, who operate honky tonks where men fight over women.”

The first honky tonk killing didn’t take place at Johnny One-Arm’s. It happened at the other one on the highway east of town and on a Saturday night. The girl’s first name was Betty Sue — we never knew her last name. She was found early Sunday morning on the creek bottom two hundred yards behind the honky tonk, strangled, tongue protruding hideously, eyes starting for her head.

The details, of course, I got secondhand, mostly from other kids passing on what their parents had told them. Sheriff Jason was kept on the run all week, with so many people over from the Sheriff’s office at the county seat. There had been killings in our little town before, and Sheriff Jason had handled them. This time, the county seat people buzzed about like nesting hornets. Not that it did them much good. At the end of the week, they hadn’t the least idea who the killer was.

And by that time interest in town had died down somewhat. Who cared all that much about the death of a honky tonk girl? Nobody had even stepped forward to claim the body.

Then the second one was killed, on the very next Saturday night.

Sheriff Jason had one of the few telephones in our town. It rang shortly before eleven. By the time I got awake enough to go out into the hall, Sheriff Jason’s Model A was already driving off, and Aunt Beth was back in bed.

I went out toward the outhouse. A light was on in Billie Bob’s room.

Halfway to the privy, a voice spoke behind me. “That’s a terrible thing, this second killing, isn’t it, Kyle?”

I jumped about a foot, wheeling around. It was Billie Bob.

He nodded. “That’s what the phone call was all about. I couldn’t sleep and was sitting on the porch. I caught the drift of the call to Sheriff Jason.” He looked tired and very, very sad. “I know folks are always saying this, but I don’t know what the world is coming to. Lechery, dishonesty, thievery, murder, all everyday occurrences. Awful, Kyle, just awful. I hope you’ll help make a better world when you grow up. It’s too late for my generation.”

The reaction of the townspeople this time was shock, outrage and undertones of fear. Two violent deaths within seven days. A honky tonk girl, sure, but who could be certain it would remain that way? It could be some maniac loose. Who could sleep easy in their bed?

People began locking their doors for the first time within memory.

In addition, the second girl was known, a member of family right there in town. Ethel Thompson. True, Ethel had the name of a tramp long before she went to work at Johnny One-Arm’s place. But she was one of our own.

Ethel was found in one of the cabins out back, strangled just like the first one. She lived there, getting free rent as part of her wages. There was some evidence that a man had been in the cabin, but nothing to point to what man. Somebody passing the cabin saw the door open, peeked in and saw Ethel. She had only been dead a short while. That was how Sheriff Jason got called in so quickly on the case.

Newspapers in Dallas and Fort Worth picked up the story. It was a natural for headlines: HONKY TONK. KILLER STRIKES AGAIN

Talk in town became ugly. Folks began sniping at Sheriff Jason, demanding he find the killer.

“They’re getting mean,” he said one night on the front porch. He wiped sweat from his brow. “And this heat and the dry spell ain’t helping.”

“Any idea at all as to the killer?” Billie Bob asked.

“Plenty of ideas, but they go off in all directions, like chickens caught out in the rain.”

“If you ask me, it’s that Johnny One-Arm,” Aunt Beth said from the doorway.

“Now Beth,” Sheriff Jason said uncomfortably, “nobody’s asked you.”

“Maybe somebody should,” she said defiantly, hands folded over her stomach. “That man should have been run out of the county long since.”

“But just because a man has a bad reputation doesn’t mean he’s a murderer,” Billie Bob said.

“It’s the best reason I know,” Aunt Beth said, plump face obstinate. “Can you think of anyone else around who’d kill them poor girls?”

There was a brief silence which Sheriff Jason broke with a sigh. “That’s just it, sis. We can’t. Still, that doesn’t mean it has to be Johnny One-Arm.”

“You just wait, you’ll see.” With a loud sniff she went back inside.

“Awhile ago it was honky tonk tramps,” Sheriff Jason said dryly. “Now it’s them poor girls.”

Aunt Beth wasn’t the only one who thought that about Johnny One-Arm, I soon found. Yet there were some folks who refused to believe he was the Honky Tonk Killer. How could a man with only one arm have strangled those two girls?

Naturally all the kids wanted a look inside Johnny One-Arm’s place.

One afternoon Roy Thatcher said, “Kyle, let’s sneak out there tonight for a peek.”

I knew what Sheriff Jason would do if he learned of it, but I was eager to go. “If they catch us, we’re in hot water.”

“Shoot, we can run faster than any old grown-up, even Johnny One-Arm. We’ll just look in the window. Maybe we’ll get a gander at the Honky Tonk Killer.”

I don’t know how he thought we’d know him, if we saw him. Maybe he just liked the sound of it, the thrill of fear it gave him.

Of course, I agreed to go. It was on a week night. We knew we couldn’t get away with it on a Saturday, there’d be too many people around. We waited until after nine, the time we were supposed to be in bed. It was easy enough to slip into my clothes and tiptoe out of the house. I’d done it before on possum-hunting expeditions and such. We met down at the corner, about a mile from the honky tonk.

We said hardly a word on the way, almost tiptoeing alongside the road, as though going past a graveyard at midnight. At the edge of the parking lot Roy nudged me and jerked his head. We slipped into the shadows of the live oaks, circling around until we were behind the honky tonk. Only three cars stood in the parking lot. Although the front blazed with light, there was but a single yellow bulb in back, on a stringer stretching between the main building and the cabins. None of the cabins showed a light.

We started toward the main building. Roy touched my arm again and whispered in my ear, “Wonder which one was where the honky tonk gal was killed?” I whispered back, “I don’t know.”

“I thought, seeing’s you live with Sheriff Jason, he might have told you.”

“Well, he didn’t!”

The thought of being that close to where someone was choked to death gave me a creepy feeling. We reached the building and moved at a crouch down to the corner, to the one grimy window, then slowly raised our eyes above the sill. The window was up a few inches, letting sound escape.

Two couples were dancing to music from the juke box, and two girls were sitting alone in a booth. The only other person in the place was Johnny One-Arm, leaning on the counter reading a newspaper. I wasn’t much of a judge of female beauty in those days, but even I realized the four girls inside wouldn’t have won any prizes. Two had acne-scarred faces. All were powdered and rouged to an excess. Their dresses were ill-fitting, sweat-stained. All were old before their time.

The record came to an end, and the dancers straggled back to the booths without anyone dropping another coin in the juke box. In the sudden silence I heard a car drive up out front with a rattle of gravel. A man came in alone. He was a slender individual, red-face, swaying slightly, apparently already drunk.

Johnny One-Arm glanced up incuriously, then returned his attention to the paper.

The newcomer hitched up his pants, swaggered over to the bar and smacked it with the flat of his hand. “Gimme a drink!”

Without even looking up from the paper, Johnny One-Arm dipped his hand below the counter for a bottle of 3.2.

“Not that slop! I want something stronger!”

“You won’t get it here, friend.” Johnny One-Arm finally glanced up. “Even if I sold something else, I wouldn’t sell it to you. You’ve had too many snortsalready.”

“Now don’t hand me that!” the man said belligerently. “You peddle the good stuff here. I know!”

Johnny One-Arm drawled, “Do you? What do you know?”

“I know you’re the one they call Johnny One-Arm. Ain’t that right?”

“Reckon you’re right there.”

“And I know you’re supposed to have killed them girls...”

A change came over Johnny One-Arm. All humor left his face as he said coldly, “You’d better explain that, friend.”

“What’s to explain? Two tonk girls died, you killed them.”　

Evidently the man wasn’t too drunk to read danger in Johnny One-Arm’s face, for he suddenly began back-pedaling.

He was too late.

Using his one arm like a pole, Johnny One-Arm vaulted over the counter and had the that most of the anger had man by the throat, the five fingers of his hand tightening around the other’s neck like a vise. He squeezed and squeezed, and his captive began to thrash wildly, fists, knees, feet, all flailing at Johnny One-Arm. It was wasted effort; he might as well have been pounding away at a stone wall.

The fingers tightened and tightened. The man was now pinned against the wall like an insect. After a stunned moment, the other two men in the place were now trying to pull Johnny One-Arm off.

One shouted, “Johnny, let go! You’re goin’ to kill him!”

I somehow had the feeling drained out of Johnny One-Arm, or they would never have been able to manage it. But they did pull him loose, and his victim finally escaped, scuttling away, massaging his throat. As the man disappeared through the door, Johnny One-Arm threw his head back, laughter rumbling from him.

At the window Roy Thatcher tugged at my arm, pulling me down below the windowsill. He whispered triumphantly, “You see, Kyle, I told you we’d see the Honky Tonk Killer!”

Naturally it was all over town before you could turn around twice.

I found that out the next afternoon. Sheriff Jason often sat on an upturned Nehi box at the filling station down at the corner, pipe fuming, yarning to the men gathered around him, sometimes settling disputes. He did a lot of sheriff business there.

But the men collected around on this day weren’t there for swapping yarns. They were openly hostile; the air crackled with it.

“I tell you, Jason Little, that Johnny One-Arm is the killer of them gals!”

“When that temper of his blows, he’ll kill anything in his way!”

“Sure, some folks said a one-armed man couldn’t do it. But not after last night.”

“You don’t believe us, ask Kyle yonder.”

Roy Thatcher and I were hunkered down against the station wall. Sheriff Jason glanced over at us.

Before I could speak, Roy said eagerly, “That’s right, Sheriff Jason! Roy and me was there, we saw it all!”

Sheriff Jason’s glance rested on me in mild reproof, but he didn’t say anything, which had to be a measure of how upset he was.

“You can’t arrest a man just because he could do something,” he said. “There’s no proof that Johnny’s the man we want.”

“Did you know, Jason,” a man said, “that this last one killed, Ethel Thompson, was the one told on him about peddling Wild mustang?”

“That don’t explain the first one.”

“Could be he killed her to cover up for killing Ethel. Ever think of that?”

The third honky tonk girl was found strangled that Saturday night.

The phone rang shortly before midnight. This time. Sheriff Jason was just hanging up the receiver when I shot out of my room. Aunt Beth was standing sleepily in the hall doorway.

I don’t think he even saw me as he spoke to her. “Another gal was just found strangled to death back in one of Johnny’s cabins. They likely wouldn’t have found her until morning, but some drunk stumbled into the cabin by mistake.”

“I told you about that man, Jason,” Aunt Beth said darkly.

He shrugged. “I’d better get over there; sounds like there may be trouble.”

I said excitedly, “I’m going with you!”

He ignored me, starting down the hall for his room, tails of his nightshirt flapping. As I started toward my room, Aunt Beth caught me by the arm.

“You’re not going anywhere, young man, much less to that den of sin.” She gave my arm a pinch. “You march right back to bed.”

I got dressed in the dark. I heard the Model A start up and drive off, and waited awhile longer before I eased the door open and listened. The house was quiet and still. Aunt Beth always went to sleep the minute her head hit the pillow. I tiptoed down the hall, going out the back instead of the front. I thought maybe Billie Bob would like to go with me. That way Sheriff Jason might not be so mad if he saw me there with the teacher.

His light was still on. I knocked. There was no answer. The door was unlatched. I hesitated a moment, then stepped inside, calling, “Teacher?”

The parking lot before Johnny One-Arm’s place was clogged with cars, arid people milled all around, men arid a few boys, no women. Voices were loud, angry. There was a cleared space before one of the cabins out back, the open door spilling yellow light outside. I saw Sheriff Jason and Johnny One-Arm inside. I could just see part of a still figure on the bed. The night was hot, even hotter than it had been before sundown. The men pressed around me were soaked with sweat, and a rank odor came from them. Billie Bob Hudson was just down the line from me, staring intently at the cabin door.

Now Sheriff Jason and Johnny One-Arm came out together to stand on the cabin steps. A mutter went up from the men around me.

“How about it, Jason? You going to arrest him now?”

“Yeah, or you going to wait until he kills another one?”

“You don’t do something, we will!”

“All right, folks! Just settle down now!” Sheriff Jason waved his hands for quiet, then turned to Johnny One-Arm. “Reckon you see how it is, Johnny. I’m going to have to arrest you.”

Johnny One-Arm’s rumble of laughter sounded. Then an ominous silence fell. Johnny One-Arm sobered and let his glance roam over the scowling faces.

“Maybe you’re right at that. Looks like I’d be safer in jail,” he said. He held out his arm. “Put the cuffs on me, Sheriff.”

“Now Johnny,” Sheriff Jason said uncomfortably, “you know I don’t tote handcuffs around with me. Just give me your word you’ll come along peaceful.”

“My word, Sheriff Sure, you’ve got my word, if it’s any good to you.”

I stepped forward. “He ain’t the Honky Tonk Killer!” My voice was embarrassingly high. But it continued to climb. “It’s not Johnny One-Arm!”

Sheriff Jason frowned down at me. “Kyle, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be home in bed.”

“Ask the teacher why he wasn’t in his room tonight.” I swung around to face Billie Bob. “And he wasn’t in his room but the light was on, when the last honky-tonk girl was killed!”

Everybody seemed to draw back as much as possible, leaving a few inches of cleared space between themselves and Billie Bob.

He stared at me in reproach. “Kyle, what are you saying?”

“I don’t care,” I said stubbornly. “You weren’t there both times, I don’t know about the first. And tonight I found this letter in your room?” I pulled a sheet of paper from my pocket and waved it.

“Give me that!” Billie Bob lunged at me.

“All right now.” Sheriff Jason stepped between us. “Let me have the letter, Kyle.”

The men closed in tightly around Billie Bob now as I handed over the single sheet of paper. Sheriff Jason ran his glance over it once, then read aloud:

“Sincerely,” Billie Bob said bitterly. “She was anything but that. She is one of the devil’s own, pretty as a doll, but evil to the depths of her soul!”

“Were the others evil, Billie Bob? Betty Sue? Ethel Thompson? The one...” Sheriff Jason jerked his thumb. “...in there?”

“Yes!”

“The one in Fort Worth, she cost you your job, your good name. That’s why you’re down to teaching here. And this letter—” Sheriff Jason glanced down at it. “It’s dated the week Betty Sue was strangled. It was the last straw. Something went out of whack.”

Billie Bob’s hands jumped, one crawling up his shirt front, fingers plucking at the buttons. “I’m not crazy!”

“No, you’re not crazy.” Sheriff Jason’s voice was gentle. “But you killed those girls, didn’t you, Billie Bob?”

There was a long silence, not even a cough breaking it. The only sound was made by bugs splattering against the light bulb dangling almost over my head.

Then Billie Bob made a choking sound. “A man tries to be decent and then makes one mistake with some slut. They were all no good, worthless, good for nothing but to drink with men and take their money!”

“Maybe they were all of that, Billie Bob, but that’s hardly a reason to—”

Sheriff Jason stepped forward to take Billie Bob’s arm. “Come along. I’ll take you over to the county seat.” he looked over at me. “You go along home now, Kyle, it’s late.”

As Sheriff Jason led him away, Billie Bob glanced back over his shoulder. “You all have to understand. I didn’t want to kill them. It just seemed I had to, that I was meant to!”

The crowd was still silent, although feet shuffled now, and throats were cleared noisily. A few began edging away.

The silence was broken by Johnny One-Arm’s laughter. “Well! Since the excitement seems to be over, men, why don’t you all step inside, and I’ll sort of set ’em up on the house?”

The men, hot looking at each other and not looking at Johnny One-Arm, drifted away one by one.

Within a very short time, the last car had pulled away. They were all gone.

I looked up at Johnny One-Arm. He hadn’t moved from the steps.

Now he laughed again, but it was a muted, harsh sound, not his usual booming mirth. “Like Sheriff Jason said, kid, you’d better go along home.” Johnny One-Arm’s lips had a bitter curl. “It’s rather late, and you’re just a little young for honky tonking.”