The little man clucked and shook his head. "George has just plain gone to hell the last year or so. He and Timmy had a pretty good setup too. Couple of good businesses. But then George's wife left him. Then he got word Timmy was dead. It took the heart out of him, I guess. He's got about one tenth the business he used to have, and he won't have that long if he keeps hitting the bottle. Buck Stamm's girl has been trying to straighten him out, but she's wasting her time. But that Ruthie is stubborn. I tell you, if Timmy had made it back and if he'd waited until now, he'd have a long uphill fight. George has been selling stuff off and piddling away the money he gets. Lives in a room at White's Hotel. Gets drunk enough to be picked up every now and then. For a while there they'd just take him home because he used to be an important man in this town. Now they let him sober up in the can."
One of the old men playing checkers said, "Stump, you talk too damn much."
"Watch your game," Stump said. "Get some kings. Let smart people talk in peace, Willy."
He turned back to me and said, "How do you figure on writing up Timmy?"
"Oh, just the way he lived. Where he was born. Interview his schoolteachers. Talk to the girls he dated."
Stump glanced at the checker players and then hunched himself over the bar and spoke in a tone so low they couldn't hear him. Stump wore a sly smirk as he talked. "Now I wouldn't stand back of this, and it isn't anything you could put in your book, but I heard it from a pretty good source that before Timmy took off into the army, he and that Eloise Warden were a little better than just plain friends. Know what I mean? She was a good-looking piece, and you can hardly blame the kid, if she was right there asking for it. She was no good, anyway. She took off with a salesman and nobody's seen or heard from her since."
He backed away and gave me a conspiratorial smile. "Of course, George wouldn't know anything about it. Like they say, he'd be the last to know."
"Are there any other relatives in town, beside George?"
"Not a one. Their daddy died six or seven years ago. George got married right after that. Then the three of them, George, Timmy, and Eloise stayed right on in the old Warden place. George sold that this year. Man named Syler bought it. He chopped it up into apartments, I hear."
I talked with him for another half hour, but he didn't have very much to add. He asked me to stop around again. I liked the atmosphere of his bar, but I didn't like him. He was a little too eager to prove he knew everything, particularly the unsavory details.