Armadillos & Old Lace Page 10

  “Even worse,” I said, “is if I hang around here, lead two-hour nature hikes up Echo Hill to the crystal beds, become active in the garden club, sing songs around the campfire, and, as a result, more people die. There’s certain leads, weird hunches I’m working on that the sheriff would never follow up even if I could explain them to her. It takes a not quite normal mind to solve a case like this.”

  “Sounds like they need you, my boy,” said Tom jovially.

  “Of course they do. They just don’t know it. And I don’t know whether it’s worth risking my health, my happiness, and my personal freedom, such as they are.”

  “That, my son, depends on you,” said Tom, and he turned back to the sports page of the Austin American-Statesman.

  “Is there an echo on this ranch? All I need now is a moral dilemma. Hell, I didn’t get where I am letting others tell me what to do and what not to do. I’ve walked my own road. I’ve worked hard. I’m the laundry man! I’m the hummingbird man!”

  Tom put down his newspaper.

  “I’m the hummingbird man,” he said, and he gave another sweet roll to Sambo.

  CHAPTER 26

  It is not usually considered normal for a grown man to look forward each night to sleeping with a cat. But the early hours of the laundryman job and the additional stress of investigating the handiwork of a particularly talented serial killer were wearing me out. I was dimly aware that Pam Stoner, in her faded, perfectly fitting, sinuously crotched cutoffs, was staying up in the Crafts Corral to watch the kiln. I had all I could handle cuddling up with the cat and counting yellow roses. I had decided long before the campfire embers were cold that I was never going to squeeze my fist and kill the small bird. I was always going to open my hand and let it fly away. In a strange way I knew that what happened with this case did depend on me.

  If you ever have a choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There’s always time to be humble later, once you’ve been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong. By then, of course, it’s too late to be cocky.

  “It may seem arrogant,” I said to the cat, “but if I don’t get to the bottom of this—find out why somebody’s croaking these old ladies—I doubt if anybody ever will. Is that terribly immodest?”

  The cat, who was by nature, of course, wholly self-absorbed, did not seem to particularly care.

  “As Golda Meir once remarked: ‘Don’t act so humble—you’re not that great.’ ”

  The cat affected no reaction whatsoever to this statement. The politics and culture of the Middle East had never held much interest for her. Her idea of a fascinating place was probably Sardinia.

  Around eleven-thirty I poured a shot of Jameson’s down my neck a little too quickly and almost needed a Heimlich maneuver. Hell of a way to go. Hank Williams, Gandhi, and the cat all hanging around watching you choke to death. By about the time Cinderella met the guy with the shoe fetish I’d managed to recover enough to put on my sarong and go to bed. But I didn’t sleep.

  I was thinking of a recurring motif in this case. Something besides the obvious—the yellow roses, the victims being old ladies all of an age. It was a little detail, I was sure—unimportant, inconsequential, just barely pricking my consciousness. Just a feeling I’d seen or heard something several times that I should’ve paid more attention to.

  I thought of a conversation I’d had with Tom a few weeks back about baseball. I’d asked him who, in the history of baseball, was the all-time rbi leader by the all-star break.

  “Jimmy Foxx,” he’d said.

  “Wrong.”

  “Not Jimmy Foxx?”

  “Not Jimmy Foxx. Not Jimmie Rodgers. Not Jimi Hendrix.”

  “Who’s Jimi Hendrix?”

  “Played in the Negro leagues. You give up? Okay, I’ll tell you. Hank Greenberg, in 1935—103 rbi’s at the all-star break and they didn’t even pick him for the all-star team.”

  We both shook our heads in dismay.

  “That’s right,” said Tom, “I remember. The manager was Mickey Cochran, a vicious anti-Semite.”

  “It’s still a pretty good piece of trivia.”

  Tom looked at me for a moment, then seemed to stare off into the long ago.

  “There is no trivia,” he said.

  As I played the conversation back, in the wide open spaces between my ears I realized that Tom’s last sentence was a great truth. There is no trivia. The principle applied to life, to love, to baseball, to murder investigations. Even to trivia.

  I was thinking these trivial thoughts and jimmying with the door of dreamland when I heard a loud clanging sound echoing in the darkness somewhere near my head. The cat and I both leaped sideways. To my relief, it was only someone knocking on the door of the trailer. A trailer, particularly an older model like mine that isn’t ever going anywhere again, has a submarine-like metallic skin that can turn a normal knock in the darkness into almost a psychedelic auditory experience.

  I opened the door of the green trailer and saw two green eyes staring into my own. It had to be either a nuclear jackrabbit or else Pam Stoner had decided to take a break from watching ceramic leaf ashtrays glowing in the kiln.

  “Come in,” I said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I have that effect on some men,” she said.

  I walked over to the bottle of Jameson’s on the little counter beside the sink and poured out two stiff shots. Pam lifted her glass in a toast.

  “Here’s to the big private dick,” she said. “I hope you find out who’s killing all the little old ladies.”

  “How did you hear about that?”

  “Oh, you know what they say. The ranch is a rumor factory. A girl hears things.”

  “And all the time I thought I was successfully disguised as the lonely laundryman of life.”

  “Don’t worry. All your secrets will be safe with me. And I’ll bet you’ve got a bunch.”

  We clinked glasses, killed the shots, and I felt my hand move softly through Pam’s boyish hair and down her woman’s body. She had that rare ability some women possess of looking stunning and sensual even by bug-light. I kissed her once gently. Then longer and harder until her lips took on the familiar feel of the well-worked webbing of a kid’s first baseball glove.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” I said.

  “You already have.”

  CHAPTER 27

  When Chuck Berry made his one and only trip to Disneyland and saw all the inflated figures of Disney characters there to greet him at the entrance, his first words reportedly were: “Fuck you, Mickey Mouse.” That was pretty much the way I felt about the sheriff and her minions, one of which, I noticed, was waiting the next morning in a plain-wrapped squad car as Dusty and I flew over the cattle guard and drifted down Highway 16 toward Kerrville. A guy with a big head and a big cowboy hat began following us at a respectable distance.

  “We seem to have picked up a tail,” I said.

  “Your washer fluid is low,” said Dusty.

  “After last night,” I said, somewhat confidentially, “your washer fluid would be low, too.”

  Dusty coughed politely. The sheriffs deputy stayed there like a flyspeck in the rearview mirror. It was as good a place as any for a sheriff s deputy. The dance cards they’d been dealt in life were rarely very full. Not that I myself lead a bustling, industrious existence; I just had better things to do and places to be than a flyspeck on somebody’s rearview. So I decided to proceed with the investigation until I was forcibly restrained from pursuing the truth. And pursuing the truth, I knew from experience, was almost as difficult and dangerous as pursuing happiness. I also had observed in my travels that the two pursuits were somewhat star-crossed, for just when you finally found one of them you always seemed to have mysteriously misplaced the other.

  I pulled Dusty into the parking lot of the little flower shop by the Veterans Cemetery, with the flyspeck still in the rearview and a sense of foreboding clouding the horizon. The guy had just opened the place and was moving pots
of flowers around hither and thither when I walked in the door. I did not receive the reception I’d been expecting. The guy, who before had seemed almost ready to give me ether on a piece of Kleenex, now, quite inexplicably, seemed thrilled to see me.

  “Kinkster!” he shouted. “Let me introduce myself. Boyd Elder’s the name. Why didn’t you tell me you were the Kinkster?”

  “I’m not the Kinkster,” I said, stalling for time to figure out what the hell was going on. “I’m a Kinky impersonator.”

  Boyd Elder laughed. He was friendlier but he still had that dangerous, high-pitched, redneck laugh going for him. Laughter’s a signature that’s hard to forge.

  “I’ve been readin’ all about you,” he said. “Right here in the Kerrville Mountain Sun.” He waved the newspaper before my disbelieving eyes.

  “Yep,” said Elder, “that’s a right interesting case you’re workin’ on. How many little old ladies been killed? Is it five or six?”

  “Let me see that.”

  Elder forked over the paper and I skimmed the front-page story. It was today’s paper, the byline was J. Tom Graham, and just about everything, including my involvement in the case, was pretty much public knowledge now. This would change the river for sure. Kick the investigation into overdrive. And, much worse, possibly create a dangerous sea change in the killer’s mind, not to mention spreading sheer terror amongst the geriatric multitudes in the Hill Country. On the other hand, the case was not exactly galloping to a conclusion. Maybe if we got everything out in the open, the killer would die of exposure.

  “Anything I can do,” Boyd Elder was saying, “I’ll be happy to help. Boy, can you imagine that. Comin’ all the way down here from New York to tackle this murder case here in Kerrville. Once a Texan, always a Texan. Right, Kinkster? I can call you Kinkster?” Boyd Elder laughed again. Same laugh. He was probably going to die laughing. If he wasn’t careful I was going to speed the plow a bit and strangle him with my own hands.

  “You want to help,” I said, “here’s how you can do it. Those flowers you sent to Gert McLane last week. The lady at the old folks’ home on Water Street. Could you find out who ordered them?”

  “They were ordered by phone. Let me check out the credit card stub. Be right back.”

  He went into his office and I could hear him riffling through files and drawers and generally being busy as a little bee helping the big private dick who’d come all the way from New York just to solve the case. That hadn’t been, of course, my reason for coming down to Texas, but I had to admit, it looked good in print. I scanned the story again and wondered what the hell was going to happen now. Any one of a million things. The killer could take a sabbatical till things cooled off. He could become more brazen. Try to contact the newspaper, the sheriff, or even the Kinkster. He could thrive in the media attention and increase his killing pace. Anything was possible. All bets were off now.

  “Here we go,” Elder was hollering. “Good bookkeeping always pays off.” I took the little slip of paper from the florist.

  The name on the slip was V. Finnegan. There was also a phone number and credit card number. Elder very obligingly let me take the credit card stub and the newspaper. We swapped phone numbers and hobbies and I told him I’d be in touch if I thought of anything else.

  “You’ve been a big help,” I said. “This may bring us a lot closer to identifying him.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Elder.

  “Why not?” I said, putting the stub in my pocket and lighting up a cigar.

  “Cherchez la femme” he said, in an accent hideous enough to make any self-respecting frog hop for the nearest puddle. But I wasn’t a frog and I wasn’t a prince. I just wanted the story to be over.

  “Spit it, Boyd,” I said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The caller,” he said, “was a woman.”

  Elder didn’t laugh.

  Neither did I.

  CHAPTER 28

  I popped into Pampell’s to have a cup of coffee, settle my nerves, and see if Jimmie Rodgers’s ghost was still hanging around the old opera house. After the third vaguely familiar person asked me how the case was going, I got a little nervous in the service and bugged out for the dugout. I drove Dusty past the ranch cutoff and over to Earl Buckelew’s place. I needed to get away from people for a while and Earl’s was perfect for that. Just Earl and his six-toed black tomcat. Neither of them asked too many hard questions. I knew the sheriff would not be happy with the Mountain Sun story. I doubted if my father would be overly pleased with it either, since it clearly was a giant step toward the destruction of the separation between ranch and state. Not only was I prominently mentioned in the piece, but so was Echo Hill. It wasn’t precisely best foot forward to base your murder investigation out of a summer camp for children.

  “So now,” said Earl Buckelew, gesturing with his cane toward his own copy of the Mountain Sun, “he knows who you are and you don’t know who he is.”

  “I don’t even know for sure if he’s a he,” I said. “It was a woman who ordered the flowers sent to the last victim. Also, it’d take a pretty fair seamstress to sew somebody’s lips together. You don’t sew, do you?”

  “I don’t sew, I don’t chew, and I don’t play with girls that do.”

  I showed Earl the credit card stub with the phone number. “Looks like a local number, doesn’t it?”

  “That’d be Bandera.”

  “Mind if I make a call or two on your phone?”

  “Long’s you don’t call Australia,” he said. I noticed he was wearing his “I Climbed Ayers Rock” cap. In 1985, about six months after my mother died, Earl, Tom, McGovern, and I—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—had visited Piers Akerman and his family in the land down under. Our adventures, no doubt, will be chronicled on another occasion, but it is not entirely inconsequential to note that Earl enjoyed himself immensely on the trip and developed somewhat of a clinical recall whenever Australia is mentioned. I was determined to head him off before he got out the photo albums.

  “Let’s see what happens when I dial the number of this V. Finnegan lady who ordered the flowers.”

  “It’ll be disconnected,” said Earl, leaning back in his grandfather’s old green rocking chair.

  “We don’t know that,” I said, getting up and walking over to Earl’s old phone on the wall. “Here we go—555-8826.... It’s been disconnected. How could you be so sure of that?”

  “No killer that’s worth a shit is gonna give you his phone number that easily.”

  “You’d make a good detective.”

  “Beginner’s luck,” said Earl, and he winked. Very few people know how to wink and fewer still know when to wink, but Earl Buckelew knew both along with a lot of other human talents and that’s just one little reason why I’ve known him forever and it still seems like the wink of an eye.

  “Okay, so it’s disconnected. Let’s try the credit card company. It’s a 1-800 number.”

  “Sure you’re not callin’ New Zealand?”

  “More likely New Jersey.”

  When McGovern and I left Australia, Earl and Tom had stayed on and traveled to the outback and to New Zealand. Earl, having once been a champion sheepshearer, loved New Zealand, where there are more sheep than people. I’ve long suspected there may be more sheep than people in America, too, these days. It’s just harder to gather the statistics or, for that matter, the wool, because it’s harder to tell them apart. Having left Tom and Earl to their own adventures, McGovern and I had traversed to Tahiti, where we encountered a highly disproportionate number of transvestites and hon-eymooners, and from where McGovern set sail for Rarotonga and I returned for a gig I couldn’t get out of in the States, thereby becoming the first white man to ever fly from Australia to the Jewish Community Center in Houston, Texas.

  I dialed the 1-800 number and listened while some automated nerd ran down the whole menu of buttons to push if you wanted to hang yourself from a shower rod and finally got arou
nd to telling you what to do if you had a rotary phone. Earl, of course, had a rotary phone. For Earl it was still a rotary world and maybe, considering the frantic, mindless, unhappy nature of modem times, it was the best of all possible worlds. The recorded voice told me to wait.

  I waited.

  Then a real live, bright, chirpy, young woman’s voice came on the line and said: “This is Debbie Ahasuerus. How can I help you?”

  “I’m just checking a recent billing on my card. I don’t recall making the purchase.” I gave her the account number on the stub.

  Debbie Ahasuerus had the information right at her fingertips. I hardly had time to light my cigar.

  “The card member’s responsibility for this account has been terminated,” she said. “And we have a note. Our security department’s been cooperating with the Kerr County Sheriff s Office on this matter. We’ll just continue to leave the account open. Is that all right?” It looked like the sheriff was indeed on the case.

  I took a rather unsteady puff on the cigar. “Yes, that’s fine.”

  “And the corporation extends its condolences, sir, on the passing of your wife, Virginia.”

  I mumbled a few appreciative words to Debbie Ahasuerus and hung up the phone. There was a ringing in my head and I turned to Earl, who was rocking in his old chair and staring thoughtfully off into the middle distance at something that probably had happened before I was born. Then the sudden reminder occurred to me, accompanied by a slight shiver, that the solution to this mystery might very well lie in something that had happened before I was born. Back when the rotary phone was the coming thing.

  “Earl, you got a phone book around here?”

  “Over on the table somewhere there’s an old one.”

  “That’d be perfect.”

  I sorted through barbecue, cookies, donuts, and cakes that his kids and admirers had brought him. With gout and high blood pressure, Earl’s doctors had decided that he shouldn’t eat anything and Earl had decided the hell with them. The phone book was there, all right. About the size of a comic book. The year was 1989. Close enough for line dancing.