Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6, June 1992

Mr. Banjo by Charles Boeckman

A murder trial brought me back to my home town. Whitaker. I would never have gone back there if a certain wealthy doctor’s wife and her boyfriend had not decided to knock off the good doctor in a “hunting accident.” Their clumsiness got them arrested for capital murder. They wanted, and could afford, the best criminal lawyer in the state. So they hired me, Roger Spencer. I come high, but I have a national reputation. Since they were guilty as hell, they were going to need the kind of courtroom miracles I could pull off.

Whitaker had changed little in the thirty-odd years since I left. I drove into town in my new car and turned slowly down Main Street, the setting of a thousand boyhood memories. Old Hester’s pharmacy was now a chain drugstore. The front of the Bijou had been remodeled and was now the Ciné, but for the most part, the store fronts had the same depressing, slightly seedy look as when I’d grown up here. It was as if the Great Depression had settled here and never left. I had the spooky feeling that if I walked into the barber shop, the calendar on the wall would read 1936.

Then I passed the corner where the First National Bank was still located, and suddenly I could hear a banjo plunking. It was a trick of memory, of course, because that was the corner where old Mr. Banjo used to sit on his apple box and play for nickels and dimes. After all these years, I could still see him clearly, a frail old man, his sightless eyes looking nowhere, his faithful old dog Rascal curled beside his box, and his banjo strumming merrily away.

Then the memories became chilling. I shivered and speeded up to get away from there, but the ghostly banjo music followed me down the street. I drove to the new motel where I had a reservation.

For the next twenty-four hours I was extremely busy, meeting with my clients and their local attorney, preparing for the first day of jury selection.

I was leaving the courthouse about four the next afternoon when a rather nondescript, gray, middle-aged man approached me. “Mr. Spencer — Roger... remember me?”

I put on my professional, public-relations smile. “Why yes, I think so. Let me see now...” (Actually, I hadn’t the vaguest idea who he was.)

“Dick Frazer. I... I guess we’ve all changed,” he said, apologizing for my not remembering him.

Again flashed a flood of memories — the banjo ringing faintly down the corridor of years — and a slight chill rippled down my spine. “Dick! Of course I remember,” I said with genuine warmth, shaking hands with him. “Why, we were good friends. We hunted squirrels and rabbits after school.”

“Had to,” he laughed. “Food came scarce in those days. Remember the rattlesnakes we used to trap and sell?”

I shuddered. “Don’t remind me! Like you said, though, money was hard to come by. So you’re still living here.”

“Yes. I’m running the town’s newspaper — still a weekly like it always was. I took it over after my father passed away. Listen, do you have a minute for a cup of coffee? You’re a celebrity now. I’d like to get a story about you for this Friday’s edition.”

I could do that much for my boyhood chum. Dick Frazer. He’d been the only person in this entire town I’d given a hang about. I hadn’t even come back for my old man’s funeral. His sister, my Aunt Cynthia, sent me a wire the night his booze-riddled liver finally gave out. The wire said, “Your father died at eleven P.M. tonight.” I had a strong urge to wire back, “So what?” but I guess we’re all slaves to our conscience. I wired several thousand dollars to the funeral home here, told them to plant the old man in their best casket. I made only one stipulation — that they put a quart of cheap bourbon beside the body.

Over coffee at the local cafe, Dick said, “Roger, I guess you know this story I’m going to write will have the old ‘local boy makes good’ angle. You were the only one in our school crowd who had the sense to get out of this town and make something of yourself. Remember Kate Lowery, the prettiest girl in our class? Everybody said she’d be a Broadway star one day. Well, she’s still here, running a dingy little dance studio for kids, supporting her no-good husband. Cecil Buford, our football captain — well, he’s running a service station. Some of them are dead now...”

I knew what he was thinking; me of all people — Roger Spencer, son of the town drunk — the least likely of us all to make it big. Life has some curious twists.

We had our coffee and chat and Dick made his notes for the story he was going to write about me — the story I told him, of course. Nobody knew the real story except me and a couple of other people who have been dead for a long time. That’s the one part of my life about which even my wife Ellen doesn’t know.

We left the cafe together and walked to the parking lot. On the way, we passed the First National Bank corner.

“Hey, Roger, remember that old tramp that played the banjo here on the corner?” Dick asked.

“Sure,” I said, hurrying a little to get to my car.

“Mr. Banjo, we used to call him. He was a fixture on that corner for years. Remember how somebody got the crazy story started that he was one of those eccentric misers who went around in ragged clothes while he was hoarding a bunch of money hidden somewhere in his shack?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Would you believe it, for years after he disappeared folks in this town rooted around that shack where he lived, hunting for his buried treasure. Of course they never found anything. Poor old guy never had more than the clothes on his back. But people like to dream. I often wondered what became of that old man. One day he just disappeared.”

“Not much telling. Well, I’ve got to get back to the motel, Dick. Have a lot of briefs to read. Sure nice talking to you again after all these years.”

“Same here.” He looked admiringly at my car as I slid behind the wheel. “So glad for your success, Roger. Again, congratulations.”

He said it a bit wistfully. I understood. He was one of many men who suddenly look around and find that middle age has arrived and they must face the fact that life is never going to deliver the promises it made when they were young.

“It’s all in the breaks, Dick,” I said, and that was true. I’d just been one of the lucky ones. We shook hands, and I drove out of the parking lot. Dick and I had been close, but that was more than thirty years ago. Now we had nothing in common, and I probably would never see him again. I preferred to leave the past where it belonged.

In my motel room the large vanity mirrored my reflection: a tanned, still handsome man, gray over the temples, but a body kept trim by the best-equipped gym in town plus regular golf at the country club. I took off my expensive suit, my imported Italian shoes, and the fancy wristwatch guaranteed not to lose over two seconds in two months. I put it on the dresser beside the picture of Ellen, my lovely wife, and Pam, our daughter, that I always carried with me.

I mixed a drink, then stretched out on the bed in my shorts. I’d brought along my banjo. I began idly strumming some chords. Playing the banjo was a hobby going back many years. I played for kicks and for charity shows back home. I’d found it an excellent therapy for unwinding the knots of tension that go with my profession.

Now the instrument brought the memories back again, this time in sharp focus.

Those had been hard times, growing up in Whitaker back in the thirties, but we kids made our own fun. My greatest treasure was a single-shot .22 squirrel rifle. Somehow my old man managed to stay sober enough one Christmas season to give it to me. Most of the time he spent in an alcoholic fog in some bar while I roamed around town and into the country pretty much as I pleased. As Dick said, we spent a lot of time on the river bottom hunting squirrels and rabbits, and I had developed a little business trapping and selling rattlesnakes to an outfit in Florida that canned the meat. That paid for my .22 cartridges and the clothes my old man never quite managed to get around to buying for me. School was a sketchy affair, but I’d inherited a high I.Q. from my mother, who died when I was four. I read a lot on my own and made good grades despite all the times I played hooky to hunt.

I picked up music from that old blind beggar we called “Mr. Banjo.” I’d once heard that his last name was Jones — Banjo Jones. I don’t know for sure if that was really his name. He never told me. He probably didn’t know himself.

He lived in a one room tarpaper shack out of town a way, between the city dump and the river. A familiar sight in our town was Mr. Banjo trudging in every morning to take his place on his apple box beside the bank. He’d be carrying his banjo and holding the leash of his dog Rascal. Rascal wasn’t one of those fancy seeing eye dogs. He was just a big old mongrel, but he sensed with some kind of canine intuition that Mr. Banjo was blind and did a pretty good job of leading him around.

Kids like Dick and myself were fascinated by Mr. Banjo. We’d stop by the bank on our way home from school to hear him whanging away on his banjo. All we had to do was drop a coin in his tin cup, and he’d start off like a jukebox. If we didn’t have a nickel or penny for his cup, we’d drop a steel washer in. He didn’t know the difference. He seemed to enjoy playing. He’d whang that old banjo like he was performing on a stage with a spotlight, showing his toothless gums in a grin and nodding his gray head to the time of the music.

I guess I made friends with old Banjo because we were both what you might call town outcasts. I was “that ragged Spencer kid,” son of the town drunk. Most of the nice kids in town — like that snooty Kate Lowery that I had a hopeless crush on because she was so pretty — wouldn’t have anything to do with me. The town just tolerated old Banjo because they felt sorry for him, I guess. In those days, every place had its town beggar. Mr. Banjo was ours.

My roaming around the countryside with my squirrel rifle sometimes took me down to the city dump and past old Banjo’s shack. Sometimes on Sundays (the only day he wasn’t in town), he’d be sitting in front, sunning himself, Rascal curled at his feet. I began stopping off to talk to him. He was a strange old guy. I don’t guess he had a full set of brains, but I liked to listen to him. He wouldn’t talk much to people in town, so everybody thought he was a halfwit. I think it was because he was suspicious of people, but he trusted me. I’d get him started and he could tell stories by the hour. According to him, he’d been all over the United States before he came to Whitaker. He talked about cities like San Francisco, New Orleans, Memphis. To a kid who’d never been out of his home county, that was exciting stuff, even if most of it was lies. I guess it was listening to Banjo tell those stories that gave me the itchy feet that wanted to shake the dust of Whitaker off forever.

Old Banjo taught me what I know about music. He’d put my fingers on the strings of his beatup old instrument, showing me the way chords were made. I guess I had a natural ear because it wasn’t long before I caught on. He must have liked me pretty much by then, because he hardly ever allowed anyone else to touch his battered old treasured banjo.

I don’t know who the idiot was that started the rumor about Banjo’s having a fortune hidden in his shack. I guess it was the hard times. People were so desperate for money, they liked to believe stories like that. It probably got started when somebody read about a ragged bum who died on skid row and the police found a bunch of money sewed up in his mattress. Things like that do happen all the time — misers who live in rags, with hardly enough to eat, accumulating a fortune, penny by penny, until they have hoarded a bunch of money they hide in their dwellings because they don’t trust banks.

Of course it was ridiculous to think poor old Banjo had anything besides his dog and his banjo and the shack he lived in, but I heard the rumors. Guys down at the barber shop who didn’t have anything better to do would speculate on how much Banjo had stashed away. It got to be a kind of game around town, guessing the amount. “See that old bum,” somebody would say when Banjo shuffled into town, holding Rascal’s leash. “He collects a lot of nickels and dimes and never spends a cent except for a few cans of beans every week. He’s a miser. Must have hoarded thousands of dollars. No telling how much he’s got hid.” Somebody added fire to the rumors by claiming they’d seen Banjo ride the bus into the county seat with a heavy tin box under his arm — and come back without the box.

It might have been a harmless game if Sheriff Buck Mayden hadn’t decided to get serious about it. You saw a lot of law officers like Buck in the small towns back in those days, men short on brains, but long on muscle. Buck was a big, sullen man with a mean streak. Everybody was afraid of him. His way of keeping law and order was to pack a big six-shooter on his hip and bully people into respecting him.

Buck got to be sheriff when old Sheriff Honer died. Well, Buck hadn’t been sheriff long before he started making life miserable for old Banjo. I saw him talking to Banjo in front of the bank. The next day, Banjo didn’t show up in his usual place. That was the first time in my entire life I could remember that I didn’t see Banjo with his dog, his cup, and his apple box on Main Street.

I went out to his shack, expecting to find him sick, but he was sitting out on his apple box, looking sad. “Sheriff says the city’s got a law against beggars,” he told me. “Sheriff says I got to buy a license. I ain’t no beggar. I play music for a living,” he said with a stirring of pride.

“How much does the license cost?” I asked.

“Sheriff says it’s twenty-five dollars to start and ten dollars a week after that. The old sheriff never told me nothin’ about a license like that when he was living.”

I whistled softly. That was a big sum of money in 1936. “You goin’ to pay it?”

“Where’m I goin’ to get money like that? Guess I’ll have to move along. Don’t much feel like it, though. I’m gettin’ too old to go driftin’ around the country. Always figured to spend the rest of my days here.”

The next several days, whenever I went down to Banjo’s shack, he was sitting in the same place out front, staring straight ahead, his blind eyes looking at nothing. I figured he didn’t have anything to eat, so I cooked up some rabbit stew and took it out to him.

One afternoon, when I was approaching the shack, I saw the sheriff’s car parked there. Buck drove one of those black 1934 Ford V-Eights that Clyde Barrow liked.

I sneaked closer to see what was going on. Buck was standing over Banjo, yelling at him. The old man looked scared. “You got that twenty-five dollars. I know you have. That and a lot more. Now where is it?”

Banjo made some kind of frightened, pleading sound, holding up his hands as if to protect himself. He kept shaking his head vigorously when Buck asked about money.

Buck uttered a scorching swear word and stomped into the shack. I heard him throwing things around in there. It sounded as if he were tearing the place apart, board by board. I hid behind a bush. My heart was thumping. Like everyone else in the county, I was afraid of Buck Mayden. Wasn’t a thing I could do but sit there and watch.

After a while, Buck came out, looking mad and frustrated. “Where is it, you old fool? Where you got that money hid?”

“Ain’t got no money hid,” Banjo whined.

“The hell you ain’t. You stingy old miser. You been hoarding them nickels and dimes for years. Where you got them hid?”

Banjo just kept shaking his head. Buck suddenly grabbed him and gave him a hard shaking. It was like shaking a sackful of rattling bones.

Rascal was growling fiercely. Then, to protect his master, he charged Buck. He sank his fangs in Buck’s leg. Buck let out a howl of pain and fury. He shook the dog loose, then drew his big old six-shooter and shot Rascal dead.

Poor old Banjo let out a cry of grief. He knelt on the ground beside the dog that had been his companion for so many years. Buck grabbed Banjo again and started giving him a terrible pistol whipping. He’d stop from time to time, sweating and panting, and demand to know where Banjo had his money hidden, but Banjo would only shake his bloody head and beg the sheriff to stop hitting him.

Finally Buck yelled, “Well, if you ain’t got no money, then you’re a vagrant and you’re goin’ to jail! Get in there!” and he threw Banjo into the back seat of his car.

I sat behind the bush a long time after they’d left, feeling sick. Finally I went down and dug a hole behind the shack and buried Rascal. I made the grave as nice as I could, and put a piece of broken concrete that I dragged over from the dumping grounds for a headstone and wrote “Rascal” on it with a pencil.

There wasn’t much left inside the shack. Buck had ripped the mattress apart, torn up the flooring, cut Banjo’s few clothes to shreds. I found the old banjo and tin cup in the wreckage and carried them home with me.

Next day, I went down to the jail. The sheriff’s office with its two cell jail was situated in a little brick building near the outskirts of town. Respectable people never went near the place. I knew where it was because my old man spent a lot of Saturday nights there, sleeping off drunks.

Buck was leaning back in his swivel chair, his boots crossed and propped on his scarred desk. He was chewing a match and reading the Police Gazette. When I came in, he glanced up. “What do you want, kid? I ain’t got your old man in here today.”

“I wonder if I could see Banjo,” I said.

He went back to reading. “Can’t nobody see him. He’s a dangerous prisoner. Got him in solitary confinement.”

I screwed up my courage to ask, “How come he’s in jail?”

“Attacking an officer, resisting arrest. Vagrancy. Mostly vagrancy.”

“How long’s he gonna be in jail?”

“Till he can pay his fine.”

“Where’s he gonna get the money?”

“Oh, he’s got it. He’s got a lot of money hidden somewhere, but he’s too tight-fisted to tell anybody. He’d rather rot in jail. Now go on, beat it, kid.”

I stood on one foot, then another, thinking fast. “Well,” I said, “me’n ol’ Banjo’s pretty good friends. I’d sure like to see him get out of jail. Maybe if I could talk to him, he’d tell me where his money is. He trusts me.”

Buck slowly lowered his Police Gazette, gave me a thoughtful look as he sucked on his match. Finally he spat out some frayed match pieces, got up, and took the cell key out of his pocket. “You find out where he keeps his money’s so’s he can pay his fine and we’ll let him go.”

“How much is his fine?”

“That depends. First you find out where his money is.”

Buck unlocked the cell door. I went in. Poor old Banjo was lying on a smelly bunk. He looked real bad. The blood was dried and crusted on his face and in his gray hair. It was plain to see he’d had no medical attention. Probably nothing to eat, either.

“Hi, Banjo,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “It’s me, Roger. I came to see you.”

He turned his sightless face slowly, painfully in my direction. “Hello, boy,” he whispered faintly.

I said, “I brought your banjo. Figured you’d like to have it. It wasn’t hurt none.”

For the first time he showed a little life. He reached out with shaking hands. I put the banjo in his hands and he hugged it close. Some tears rolled out of his eyes. That surprised me. I didn’t know blind people could cry.

I looked around to see if Buck was listening, but he’d gone back up front to his desk. “Here’s a candy bar,” I whispered, sneaking it out of my pocket. He thanked me, but he put it beside him without eating it. I guess he was too sick to eat.

“Buck said he’d let you go if you pay a fine,” I said.

He shook his head. “Ain’t got no money to pay a fine.” He turned his face to the wall. “I’m going to die here.”

He wouldn’t say anything else. I finally called Buck to let me out of the cell. I looked back once. The old man was lying there, hugging his banjo, his face turned to the wall.

“Well?” Buck demanded. “Did he tell you?”

I shook my head and Buck muttered some cuss words.

I went home, got my rifle and spent the rest of the day down on the river bottom plinking around and checking the rocks for rattlesnakes. I was feeling pretty low. I couldn’t sleep much that night, thinking about poor old Banjo. There wasn’t any use talking to anybody in town about him. Nobody was going to cross Buck Mayden over a worthless old beggar. Banjo was going to die in that jail, just like he said.

Sometime during the night I hit on a way I could save Banjo. I sat straight up in bed, sweating and scared, my heart pounding. I tried to stop thinking about it, but I couldn’t. Finally I knew I was going to do it.

The next day I skipped school and made a trip out to Banjo’s shack. Then I hiked back to town. It was early afternoon when I got to the jail. Buck scowled when I walked into his office. “You back again?”

I wet my lips and swallowed hard. “Could I please see Banjo one more time? I sure want to get him out of jail. Maybe he’ll tell me today about where the money’s hid.”

Buck was in a real mean, sullen mood. “Don’t know why he’d tell you when he won’t tell me. That’s the stubbornest old miser I ever saw. He’d rather lay there and die than tell me where his money’s hid.”

“Let me try,” I pleaded. “He came close to telling me yesterday.”

Buck gave me a hard, suspicious look. “How do I know if he tells you, you won’t run out there and dig the money up and keep it yourself?”

“Then how could I get Banjo out of jail?” I pointed out. “Please; he’s gonna die if I can’t get him out soon.”

I guess I did a good job of convincing him. He scowled at me hard but said, “Well, it won’t hurt to try. He’s sure not going to tell me. But let me warn you, you’re in big trouble, boy, if you try to make off with that money. I’ll throw both you and your old man in jail.”

He took me back to Banjo’s cell and left us alone for a while. Banjo was worse than the day before. He was only partly conscious. I leaned over his bunk, whispering to him.

When Buck came to get me out of the cell, I said, “Well, he told me.”

Buck’s eyes lit up like the electric sign in front of the Bijou. “You tollin’ the truth, kid?”

“Sure. I know where to find it.”

“Well, I’m not trusting you. Come on. We’ll go out there and you’ll show me where it is.”

Buck got his Stetson hat and buckled on his big six-shooter. We drove out of town fast in his V-Eight Ford. We went down the dirt road to Banjo’s shack in a cloud of dust. When we got there, I led the way around the shack in the direction of the dump grounds. Finally I pointed to the rusting remains of a Model T. “Under there. He’s got it buried there.”

“Whoopee!” yelled Buck. “You stay back here, kid,” he warned me. He ran to the wrecked car and started digging wildly, throwing trash and loose dirt aside. There were dark sweatstains around the arms and neck of his shirt. I heard him give a panting exclamation when he came to the can. He clawed the lid off and plunged his hand down for the money.

Then he let out a bellowing scream and leaped to his feet. Dangling from his arm was the big diamond-backed rattlesnake I’d put there earlier that day. The snake’s fangs were sunk in Buck’s wrist. He screamed again with pain and fright. He shook the snake off, yanked out his six-shooter, and blew its head off.

I’d stood there, petrified. Now I broke into a dead run, back to Buck’s car. I grabbed the keys out of the ignition and sprinted toward the woods. Behind me I heard Buck’s enraged bellow. “Come back here, you lousy kid!” I ran all the faster, zigzagging around the trash in the dump grounds. I heard the roar of his six-shooter. The buzz of .45 slugs were around me like angry hornets. Then I reached the woods and plunged into the brush. I heard him coming after me, crashing limbs. He was sobbing and bellowing with a mixture of pain, fright, and anger.

For a long time I ran through the brush along the riverbank with Buck floundering and crashing behind me. Luckily, I’d spent so much time down here I knew every trail and bush.

I don’t know how long Buck chased me, but at last I heard a final crash in the brush behind me, then silence. I crept back to make sure it wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t. Buck was sprawled out on his back, staring up at the sky with glassy, scared eyes. Sweat was pouring off him. His arm was swollen up like a balloon. It was turning purple.

It took a long time for Buck to die. I sat on the ground and watched. He got delirious. He’d cuss for a while, then he’d sing. Sometimes he’d try to get up, but he’d fall back down and lie there. Finally, at sundown, he died. I waited awhile, then went over and looked down at him. His bulging eyes were staring straight up at the sky like glass marbles about to pop out of the sockets. I forced myself to reach in the pockets of his sweat-soaked clothing for the jail keys. Then I ran back to his car.

It was dark when I drove up to the jail. I made sure no one was around; then I went inside, turned on a light, and unlocked Banjo’s cell. “It’s me, Roger. Come on. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Two things: I had to get us away from this town before people started looking for Buck, and I had to get Banjo to a doctor.

The old man was so weak I half-dragged him out to the car, but he wouldn’t leave his banjo behind. He lay down on the back seat, still hugging his banjo while I drove out of town.

I figured it might be several days before somebody found Sheriff Buck Mayden, but I drove all night to be on the safe side, crossing the state line about dawn. The first large town I came to, I asked how to find a hospital that had a charity ward. It wasn’t long before I had Banjo in the county hospital and a doctor was working on him. I went to get some breakfast and I ditched Buck’s car on the other side of town.

When I got back to the hospital, they’d cleaned Banjo up and he looked nice and peaceful in a hospital gown on a bed in the charity ward. He was sleeping. The awful look of pain was erased. A nurse told me they’d given him a shot to make him comfortable.

I hung around the hospital most of that day. I told them Banjo was my uncle and that he got all banged up when he fell off a horse. His foot was caught in the stirrup and the horse dragged him. I’d read about that happening to a guy in a pulp Western story.

That night I slept on a park bench. The next morning I went to see Banjo again at the hospital, but his bed was empty.

The doctor saw me and called me aside. He explained that Banjo had died peacefully in his sleep during the night. “We did what we could for him, but he was a very old man.” He asked if we had any money and I said we didn’t and he said that he’d arrange for the county to bury the old man.

They gave me a small bundle, the bloodstained rags he’d been wearing when I brought him in and his banjo. I went down to the park bench where I sat alone and cried a little.

I hit the road after that. I did what a lot of young guys were doing those Depression years. I worked the C.C.C. camps and roughnecked in the oil fields.

In 1938, I was roughnecking in an oil field near Seguin, Texas. Wherever I went, I always took Banjo’s beatup old instrument with me. I was in my rented room one night, plunking some chords, trying to learn a tune that was popular that year. The head on the banjo split. I took it apart to see if I could fix it. It was easy — a blind man could do it. When I removed the head, I found pasted inside the banjo five one thousand dollar bills. That was a lot of money in those days — enough to take a smart kid out of the C.C.C. camps and oil fields and put him through law school.

I’ve liked banjo music ever since.