Armadillos & Old Lace Read online

  CHAPTER 32

  The guy’s name was Willis Hoover. It was entirely possible that going after him would result in a futile, somewhat dangerous wild goose chase, but at this point every lead had to be followed up. I’d never had a rendezvous with a half-crazed, gun-loving survival-ist at his isolated command center before. I wasn’t even sure what to wear. Possibly an ancient suit of body armor might be appropriate. Bring an attack duck with me. But there had to be a first time for everything, I thought. Just as long as the first time didn’t turn out to be the last thing you ever did.

  So after waking up to “Wipe-Out” and feeding the cat and slurping three cups of hot black coffee I called Pat Knox’s office.

  “Hello, dollface,” she said when she got on the line.

  “That’s Mr. Dollface to you,” I said. “Look, Judge, I’m going out to follow up a tip from Boyd Elder, the guy at the flower shop. I’m going to see this weird survivalist type who lives way out Harper Road.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’d really be best foot forward. This will be kind of a male bonding experience. The guy is close to being a feral man. Probably hates all women, children, and green plants. Except roses. Loves roses. Raises roses, in fact.”

  “Except for the roses bit, the guy sounds a lot like you.”

  “Yeah. He could practically be my gay computer date. But I’d like you to find out what you can about him. Name’s Willis Hoover. Does that ring a bell?”

  “Not even a cuckoo.”

  “Well, check him out if you can. And if I don’t call you at home by ten o’clock tonight, send out the search party.”

  “You sure you want to do this alone?”

  “Your Honor, the guy doesn’t like groups and he doesn’t like anybody even faintly on the periphery of the law. He and I should get along perfectly.”

  “He may also be the break we’ve been waiting for. Now if you run into trouble, you call.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “And when he sews my lips shut I’ll send up smoke signals with my cigar and hum a few bars of 911.”

  • • •

  There was no way to call Willis Hoover and I had a distinct feeling that he was the kind of person who did not like surprises. So I got my security shotgun out of the back of the closet and loaded it up with eight shells. I made sure the safety was on. Didn’t want to blow my head off before I got out of the cattle guard. The gun wasn’t going to be much of a threat to a guy like Hoover. He probably had a walk-in closet full of AK Fuckhead Specials or whatever happened to be the most lethal illegal weapon of the moment.

  I leaned the shotgun up against the wall, poured another cup of coffee, and lit up a cigar. I sat down in the sunlit doorway of the trailer and sipped the coffee, smoked the cigar, and reflected upon the subject of loners in this world. There’ve been some very good loners down through the ages. Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Johnny Appleseed, the woman who worked with gorillas in Africa whatever the hell her name was, even Benny Hill in the last years of his life after they cancelled his television show. These people all knew that the majority is always wrong, and even if it isn’t, who gives a damn anyway. They knew that within is where it’s at, and if nothing’s happening within it doesn’t really matter if your co-dependent wife throws a black-tie surprise birthday party for you and hundreds of well-wishers show up who would just as soon wish you’d fallen down a well.

  I liked loners. The downside, of course, was that every serial killer who’d ever lived had also been a loner. Well, you can’t have everything. People just tend to drive you crazy after a while. That’s why penthouses, nunneries, sailboats, islands, and jail cells do such a booming business. And trailers.

  I took a solitary puff on the cigar, looked up through the blue haze, and realized that I wasn’t alone. Three little girls, Pia, Briana, and Tiffany, were standing under the cedar tree in front of the green trailer. I stared at them like a man waking up from a dream. They returned my gaze curiously. At last, they spoke.

  “Okay,” said Pia. “Pick a number between one and ten but it can’t be one or ten.”

  “Can’t be one or ten,” I said. Since I was going out soon to very likely get my balls blown off, another unlucky number to choose would be two.

  I picked seven and kept it to myself.

  “Don’t tell us the number,” said Briana.

  “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  “Now,” said Tiffany, “multiply your number by nine. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got it.” I now had sixty-three, and while I liked these three little girls I wished they had not chosen this particular time to visit my trailer and browbeat me with a mathematical puzzle I did not as yet enjoy.

  “Add the two digits together,” said Pia. “All right?”

  Adding the two digits together produced nine and also produced a slight degree of tedium on my part. I stoically smoked the cigar.

  “Have you added them together?” shouted Bri.

  “Yes!” I shouted back.

  “Okay,” said Pia. “Now subtract five.”

  “Okay. I’ve got it.” The number was four and, congenitally unable to keep a secret of any kind, I was having difficulty retaining this life-or-death information unto myself. At least, I felt, the exercise must be nearing its conclusion.

  I was wrong.

  “Now,” said Bri, jumping up and down, “find what letter of the alphabet goes with your number.” I stared at her in mute pain.

  “You know,” said Tiffany. “One is A. Two is B. Three is C. Four is D ..

  “All right,” I said grimly. “I’ve got it.” The corresponding letter was “D,” and if this didn’t cease very quickly I was going to clear my throat with a ceiling fan.

  I went back inside the trailer and poured another cup of coffee to try to stave off a headache that seemed to have come on rather suddenly. When I came back the girls were still there and all three of them appeared to be highly agitato.

  “Is that it?” I said. “Can I tell you the letter?”

  “No! No!” they shouted. “Don’t tell us the letter!”

  “Fine,” I said dismissively. “That was really a fun little game.”

  “Okay,” said Pia. “Now think of a country that begins with your letter.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” said Bri happily, “we’re not.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ve got a country.”

  “Don’t tell us what it is,” warned Tiffany.

  “All I’m going to tell you is I’m about ready to hang myself from the shower rod.” It was beyond my imagination that this puzzle could continue for so long and be so incredibly complex. It frazzled my remaining brain cells. But at least I had the country.

  “Okay,” said Pia. “Now think of an animal that begins with the last letter of the country.”

  I stared disbelievingly into some morbid middle distance halfway between Echo Hill and the Monkey’s Paw in New York. This game, if it was a game, was truly interminable.

  “Think of an animal that begins with the last letter of the country I” said Bri as if she were speaking to a two-year-old.

  “Okay,” I said grudgingly, “I’ve got it.”

  “Now,” said Tiffany, “think of a color that begins with the last letter of your animal.” I told myself this was the last time I’d ever have even a passing relationship with a child. Even if I lived to be a kindly old man I would never speak to a child again.

  “Do you have the color?” demanded Bri.

  “I’ve got it,” I said.

  The girls looked at me in a state of high delight. I looked back at them in a state of total ennui, which soon transformed itself to total dismay.

  “We didn’t know they had orange kangaroos in Denmark,” they all shouted together.

  I was stunned.

  “How did you do it?” I said.

  “A girl can’t reveal all her secrets,” said Bri. “What�
��s the gun for?”

  The girls all craned their necks and looked into the trailer at the shotgun leaning against the far wall.

  I turned and gazed at it, too. It made an ugly little still-life painting.

  “I may go on a little hunting trip later this evening.”

  “You’re not going to kill anything?” said Pia with a look of disgust.

  “Of course not,” I said. “It’s strictly for selfdefense.”

  “Self-defense against what?” asked Tiffany.

  “Orange kangaroos in Denmark,” I said. “Now go back to your activities.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Dusty and I wound our way up Harper Road with the shotgun in the trunk and the late afternoon sun hanging low like a stage prop in a summer-stock sky. I thought of an incident Dylan Ferrero had mentioned to me that had once occurred on Harper Road. Dylan had been driving by several years ago and saw what he thought was some kind of petting zoo by the side of the road. A number of wild animals were in caged enclosures and a group of people with young children were walking around looking at the animals, petting, and feeding them. Dylan stopped because he remembered seeing a large black water buffalo like the kind he and I plowed riee patties with in Peace Corps training in Borneo. Dylan communed with the buffalo for a while and then left just as a long black limousine was pulling up.

  Dylan had a few errands to run and when he came back down Harper Road about a half hour later he noticed that the water buffalo was gone. He stopped the car and looked around, and sure enough, no water buffalo. He and several stray children walked around to the back of the enclosures and there in the dust was the cleanly severed head of the water buffalo. The kids were in tears and Dylan was stunned as he asked the guy who ran the “menagerie” what in the hell was going on. The guy explained the buffalo had been sold to a customer in the limousine who only wanted the head for his trophy collection.

  “Why would he just want his head?” one little girl tearfully asked Dylan.

  Dylan didn’t have anything cued up in the old answer machine for that one. Indeed, it remains an adult riddle to this day.

  I rarely enjoy telling or hearing animal death stories and this one doesn’t shed any light or gloom on Harper Road particularly, nor does it tell us anything much about animals. The only reason I include the story here is because it tells us something about ourselves.

  “Why would he just want his head?” I asked Dusty as I followed Boyd Elder’s crude little map to what I expected would be Willis Hoover’s, crude little place.

  “Prompt service is required,” said Dusty, as we turned left and headed up a steep, rocky incline.

  I checked the rearview and saw nothing but road behind me. It was ironic that the one time the sheriff s department had decided not to shadow me might be the occasion on which I needed them the most. Ah well, as my old friend Slim used to say: “You’s born alone, you dies alone, you best as well get used to it.” Parts one and two of Slim’s credo, of course, were usually more easily accomplished than part three.

  We flew across three cattle guards down a lonely road with nothing to break our line of vision but scrub live oak and sinister cloud-shadows that seemed to palpably waver in the heat that enclosed us like a giant microwave. The only signs of life were the dark, peripheral flutterings of the buzzards as they watched from dead trees along the roadside. This definitely didn’t look like the way to grandmother’s house.

  “Men have been known to freeze to death on the equator,” I said to Dusty. “Especially when their washer fluid is low.”

  Dusty shuddered violently.

  We pulled off the gravel road near an old ramshackle log cabin that looked like the Beverly Hillbillies might’ve lived there before they moved. I cut the engine and carefully stepped out of the car to suss out the situation.

  “Don’t forget your keys,” said Dusty.

  “I didn’t forget them,” I said. “We may be departing rather quickly.”

  Nothing appeared to be moving around the vicinity of the cabin, so I walked a little closer. The cabin was atop a small rise, a good vantage point for Hoover to have if waves of Mexicans, communists, Martians, or pointy-headed intellectuals ever tried to capture his somewhat dilapidated command post. There was a deathly quiet about the place, broken only by what sounded like Dizzy Gillespie playing a rather large, mean kazoo. The noise seemed to be emanating from somewhere in the back of the cabin.

  I crept quietly along the little path that led up the small hill and discarded several possible cover identities as I went. Jehovah’s Witness didn’t really fit the bill. Sneeze-guard inspector for salad bars didn’t feel right either. Am Way representative had a reasonable ring to it.

  Then I saw the flowers.

  They literally took your breath away. Beds and beds of roses of all colors and sizes, in that lonely, godforsaken place looking for all the world as beautiful as the butterflies etched by children into the unforgiving walls of Auschwitz. Could a hand with such a remarkable green thumb have so much blood upon it? Could the same mind that created this beauty be capable of the premeditated murders of seven human beings?

  With the roses to my right and the cabin to my left I headed toward the Dizzy Gillespie area across the pathway of worn-down flagstones. It was hard to believe that I could very well be tracking a serial killer right into his lair. But that was part of the problem. A serial killer doesn’t usually look like a serial killer. In fact, the serial killer rarely resembles what we think of as a criminal or a monster. He does not radiate evil. More likely, he comes off in the manner of the genial host at the weekend suburban barbecue or that friendly, outgoing, nice-looking delivery man. Why would he just want his head?

  The kazoo-playing was getting louder. So was the intermittent pounding of my heart. This was either a ridiculous wild goose chase or, very possibly, I was about to get goosed by God. Suddenly, the feather in my cowboy hat was flying through the air with the cowboy hat still attached. I was, unfortunately, still attached to the cowboy hat. The roses were swirling like those in a painting by a minor French Impressionist. I was caught in some kind of old-fashioned snare trap swinging upside down like a human pendulum about six feet off the ground. The kazoo music, which I’d by this time deduced to be bees, had a nice little Doppler effect going for it each time I swung back and forth. Or it might’ve been the blood rushing to my head.

  This was it, I thought. I either should’ve been more considerate of others or less considerate of others during my lifetime. I definitely should’ve been something, because I was going to end up as a humorous little news story: MAN STUNG 7,000 TIMES BY BEES. Of course, the tabloid play would probably be quite a bit more sizable. That depended, naturally, on a number of other factors. How much weight Delta Burke gained this week. How much Magic Johnson lost. What particular peccadillo Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Teddy Kennedy, or the Virgin Mary had gotten involved in recently. Any little thing like that could blow me right out of the tub. I could almost hear the editor of the Globe shouting: “Hold the back pages!”

  It might make a good B movie, no pun intended, but it was always a shame when the peculiar mode of someone’s death held more interest for people than the tone and timbre of the person’s life. Greater men than myself had fallen victim to this unpleasant little foible of human nature. I wasn’t certain that Nelson Rockefeller was a greater man than myself, but it’d certainly happened to him. Bigger in death than in life. God gave him a wife named Happy. So what does he go and do? Checks out while he’s hosing his secretary. That didn’t make Happy very happy.

  It didn’t make me very happy, either, when I saw coming toward me a little man with a head that looked like a toadstool. His gloved hands were held strangely in front of him and seemed to be shaking like a crab. He took off some kind of pith helmet with a long bee screen attached that had previously hidden the upper part of his body. Now he just looked like a kindly, congenial, chuckling, everyday serial killer.

  “Glad you came by,�
� he said. “Why don’t you hang around for a while?”

  Then he disappeared around the corner of the little cabin.

  CHAPTER 34

  Now there was a problem. Hanging six feet off the ground upside down with one foot in a noose was just the kind of activity that could be hazardous to your health. You could learn a little more than you wished to about the birds and the bees, the birds in this case being the buzzards which were already slightly tightening their little circles overhead to get a better look at the catch of the day. Buzzards will eat anything that formerly moved and now doesn’t. To them everything tastes a little bit like dead armadillo.

  The prospect of a huge swarm of abandoned honeybees, moderately irritated by the sudden departure of their master and coming upon me like the sudden departure of their master and coming upon me like something out of Gullible’s Travels, was a most unpleasant alternative to the buzzard scenario. An equally tedious potentiality was that the animal kingdom would leave me alone and the beekeeper would return, possibly mistaking me for a large bee. And Willis Hoover’s congeniality worried me. He certainly seemed friendly enough to be a serial killer.

  My cowboy hat fell off and drifted and scalloped to the ground like an awkward mutant black snowflake. I continued to hang by one foot. With enormous effort I managed to reach into the right front pocket of my jeans and extract my Chinese version of the Swiss Army Knife, which had undoubtedly been made by Chinese prison labor because I’d bought it for three dollars on Canal Street. I’d bought several of them at the time, all from a large Negro with purple pantyhose on his head who was talking to an imaginary childhood friend. Guy like that you don’t want to Christian down too hard.

  I’d given one of the knives to my dad and I remembered him telling me: “My father once gave me a knife like this and now my son has.” Funny what you think about when you have a little time on your hands.