Armadillos & Old Lace Read online

  “Everybody in the creek!” shouted Floyd.

  As the bees began swarming in a slow, low, dangerous circle, twelve kids, two counselors, Floyd, and myself all hit the creek with one mighty splash. Sambo did not like to swim but I noticed him crawling under Dusty for protection. Jewish shepherds are pretty smart.

  “As long as they don’t start stinging anybody we’re okay,” said Floyd. “If someone gets stung a number of times the mind of the swarm may take over. Then the bees may go into an attack mode.”

  “What happens then?” I asked, with only my mouth and one ear above the surface of the water.

  “We’re fucked,” said Floyd.

  CHAPTER 38

  “So what happened next?” asked Marcie some time later, as she rocked in Aunt Joan’s favorite old rocking chair in the white trailer.

  “Well, the bees circled for a while like a giant black lariat and then some kind of group consciousness thing happened like Floyd was telling me about. The mind of the swarm told them they’d scared the shit out of us enough and it was time to go home to the hive.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “We all ran like hell out of there.. Floyd and Danny took the boys back to the bunk to change out of their wet clothes, and they were all last seen heading down Armadillo Canyon with Bucky to a new campsite at Three Rivers.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t even get a bee in your bonnet.”

  “I am, too. The Lord protects middle-aged over-the-hill country singers.”

  “He didn’t do too good a job with Johnny Horton,” said Marcie. Johnny Horton had recorded such hits as “North to Alaska” and “Sink the Bismarck” before dying in a head-on collision near the Texas-Louisiana border back when today’s country singers were still spermatozoa swimming around in little black cowboy hats.

  “When do you think you’ll solve this murder case?”

  “Probably on a cold day in Jerusalem. I have a nagging feeling there’s something we’re all missing but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. It’s something to do with the victims. I just feel that those seven old ladies were kind of like the swarm mentality of the bees. I’ve got no evidence to prove it, but I’d swear that they knew each other.”

  “If they did, it could’ve been a very long time ago.”

  “That’s what’s so difficult and so spooky about this case. If something happened so long ago, what kind of person would care after all that time? Who would still hold that sort of grudge? And why wait all those years?”

  “What you’ve got to do,” said Marcie, “is operate like the jewfish. I’ve got his picture here in this old fish book from the fifties.”

  I glanced at the picture of the large, scaly, bloated-looking creature.

  “Attractive,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Marcie, “here’s what it says: ‘With the cunning of its race, the jewfish—’ ”

  “It doesn’t say that!”

  “It sure as hell does. ‘With the cunning of its race, the jewfish sucks up everything around it and then spits out what it can’t digest.’ ”

  “Jesus Christ. Talk about the ‘warlike Apache.’ The fuckin’ jewfish. It’s kind of like Sherlock Holmes, who sucked up everything around him and spit out the impossible, thereby leaving him—improbable as it might’ve seemed—with the truth.”

  “Then you ought to be able to solve this case with what you already know. You’ve been investigating the damn thing for half the summer. Now go ahead and figure it out. Let the jewfish be your guide.”

  I went back to the green trailer and got out my Big Chief tablet and a fresh cigar. With the cat sitting under the desk lamp watching, I reviewed my early notes on the victims like a demon in the night. What social interaction could’ve occurred long ago and had such impact that the victims might’ve still known each other later in life, as I suspected? Garden club? Bridge club? Senior square dancers? All were fairly geriatric pastimes.

  Okay, starting with Amaryllis Davis. Lifelong member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. What did I know about the DRT? Nothing except that they were a group of old ladies who protected and kept up the Alamo as a state shrine. I’d seen them there. Tour guides. Caretakers. Lots of plaques.

  Plaques. Where’d I seen a plaque recently? Ah, yes. The Garden of Memories Cemetery.

  Octavia. The one we thought was the killer’s fifth victim until we saw the six yellow roses on her grave. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that we’d been thinking “garden club” when it came to Octavia. Garden club and her lips having been sewn together. We hadn’t computed that little stand with the plaque on it beside her grave that proclaimed her membership in the DRT. That made two—that we knew about—in a universe of six which quickly became a universe of seven.

  But what about the dream that old lady had about her sister? I was frantically flipping pages in the Big Chief tablet when there came a knock on my trailer door.

  “Come in,” I said, still flipping pages.

  Pam Stoner walked in with her light blue shorts and dark green eyes. “I’m taking a short break from watching the kiln,” she said. “There’s a lot of pieces in there tonight and if it gets too hot something might explode.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. She sat down on the bed and the cat immediately jumped in her lap, which was kind of a blessing because I had to concentrate tonight and it might be distracting watching her cross her legs. She was a world-class leg-crosser.

  “Pam,” I said, “ever heard of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas?”

  “No,” she said. “They’re not big in Oklahoma. What do they do?”

  “I don’t know. They sort of protect the Alamo.”

  “They’re a little late for that, aren’t they?”

  “Well, you know, they keep it from becoming a parking lot or a Bennigan’s.”

  Pam thought about it for a moment, then glanced around briefly. “Another couple years they might consider protecting your trailer,” she said with a smile.

  I smiled back at those big green eyes.

  “Pam,” I said, “do you know what a cotillion is?”

  “Sure. It’s a formal ball.”

  “You mean it’s not a long-necked lizard from West Texas?”

  “Your Daughters of the Republic of Texas probably held cotillions when they weren’t busy protecting the Alamo. Those blue-blooded society groups always had their debutantes and coming-out parties and cotillions and secret ceremonies and stuff like that. They usually trace their family trees back to the Bible, study their coats of arms, keep a lot of secrets among themselves that nobody else really wants to know—”

  “I want to know!”

  “They damn sure aren’t going to tell you”

  “No, they’re probably not.”

  But they’d already told me something. At least Violet Crabb had. Her sister Myrtle, the second murder victim, had come to her in a dream wearing a white formal dress and speaking the word “cotillion.” That, if I didn’t miss my guess, was three in a universe of seven. Three of the victims had probably at some time been involved with the DRT. As the cat leaped off Pam Stoner’s lovely lap, I made a leap in my mind. I’d now bet anything that at one time all of the victims had been in the DRT. The DRT was how they’d known each other. The DRT held the secret to why they were murdered.

  “In the morning I’m going to the Alamo,” I announced.

  “Congratulations,” said Pam. “In the morning I’m teaching handicrafts. Can I ask you something?” She crossed her legs.

  “Anything,” I said.

  “Do you have any regrets about this summer? I mean, other than not solving this case you’re investigating?”

  “Of course I have regrets. Everybody has regrets. Ringo Starr, the drummer for the Beatles, said his main regret was that he never got to see the Beatles. My main regret this summer is that I’ve been so involved with this murder investigation and you’ve been so busy guarding the kiln that the two
of us haven’t had any real chance to be together much.”

  Pam laughed, somewhat ruefully, I thought, and got up and went to the door.

  “I have a regret, too,” she said, stepping out into the moonlight and heading back toward the Crafts Corral.

  I walked over and stood in the doorway and watched the moonbeams bouncing lightly off her beautiful backside.

  “What’s your regret?” I said.

  She stopped and turned around and stood there for a moment. Her tennis shoes and Echo Hill T-shirt as impeccably white and pure as the snow on a postcard mountain. Her blue shorts as challenging and defiant as a battle flag in the heat of sacred war. Her eyes as proud and deep and mischievous as Ireland.

  “I haven’t seen a long-necked lizard yet,” she said. “I understand they only come out at night.”

  CHAPTER 39

  In most criminal investigations things will slog along interminably like slow dancers in a rather humid dream until suddenly everything seems to be coming unwrapped at once. So it was that, instead of heading off to San Antonio the first thing that morning to pursue the DRT connection at the Alamo, I found myself picking up the blower and listening very foggily to the stentorian voice of Sheriff Frances Kaiser.

  “Well, we brought him in last night,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the Christ on the cross or the duck in the hailstorm, but it worked for me.

  “Who’d you bring in?” I said, as I fumbled with the many moving parts of the percolator.

  “Willis Hoover,” she said. “The beekeeper that buzzed off when you made your little unannounced visit to him.”

  “Sheriff—”

  “Well, I’m callin’ a meetin’ this mornin’. Just you, Judge Knox, and myself in my office at nine o’clock. Can you make it?”

  I looked at my watch. It was 8:07. “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Good,” said the sheriff. “Now that we’ve caught this bird, we want to be sure we can clean him and cook him.” She hung up while I was still holding the blower.

  “I’ll be there,” I repeated to the cat.

  I arrived at the courthouse punctually and had almost got in the front door before some officious bureaucrat wagged her finger at me for smoking in the hallway. When a bureaucrat’s officious it’s rarely auspicious, I thought. But the sheriff proved me wrong. The meeting was brief, harmonious, and almost what is referred to in political circles as cordial. All three of us felt that Hoover was our man. None of us felt very comfortable with what we had on him, which was very damn little other than circumstantial evidence and our gut feelings.

  I mentioned that I’d like to follow up on a possible DRT connection to the case, and I received affirmative head nods from both the sheriff and the judge. The judge said she was looking further into Hoover’s background, and the sheriff and I expressed our approval. The sheriff said it was time for all of us to work together and do whatever it takes to nail this monster and put the fears of the community to rest. We all heartily agreed. In fact, the only thing about the meeting that was even mildly disconcerting was how much in agreement we all were and how well we seemed to get along with each other. It felt good but it didn’t quite feel right.

  At the end of the little meeting the sheriff said there was something she wanted to show the two of us. She led us down the hall and down another corridor and stopped outside a small courtroom.

  “There he is,” she said.

  The little judge and I peered around the body of the sheriff and saw Willis Hoover standing in the dock. A small man who seemed nervous and somewhat overawed with the perpetual legal peregrinations he was experiencing. His hands were shaking in their cuffs and his eyes were on his shoes.

  “Don’t look like a serial killer, does he?” said the sheriff.

  “They never do,” I said.

  “You ain’t gonna let in the Boston Strangler,” said the judge, “if he looks like the Boston Strangler.”

  “You can stitch that one on a pillow,” I said.

  A short time later Dusty and I pulled up onto I-10, set our ears back, and headed for the Alamo. It was going to be a hot day, yet I still detected a trace of residual chill from peeping in upon the human refuse that was Willis Hoover. It was even now hard to separate the little, harmless-looking man from what he had allegedly done. There must be another soul within him somewhere. Of course, he hadn’t been proven guilty yet, but that might now be just a matter of time. Circumstantial evidence from all three of our investigations pointed clearly at Hoover, who had the classic profile of someone who’d fallen through the cracks of society and in that way evaded detection. He’d run from me, he’d run from the law, he’d raised yellow roses, he’d served time for raping an older woman, and, according to the sheriff, he’d refused to profess guilt or innocence. Now that I thought back to him standing in that room, I could almost see the evil radiating outward in sympathetic ripples, yet I also felt a somewhat grudging pity for the pathetic little creature.

  The Alamo was still there, of course. I’d often said that if the state of Texas were ever engulfed in nuclear attack, the only two institutions left standing would be the Alamo and former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry’s hat. Of the two, the Alamo was the one I chose to always wear with pride.

  With the morning burning off and the pigeons and tourists fluttering around, the sight of the Alamo caught my heart again as it nearly always did. It was a small, poignant, pockmarked little mission, standing blindly in the sunlight as if it might not survive the coming night. It was not full of itself, nor was it distinguished by the bigness that Texans often brag about, yet it was by any consensus our state’s most cherished possession. But we did not really possess the Alamo; it possessed us, as it possessed free people the world over who saw it or read its story. The Alamo was not a Texas brag, I thought. It was just the opposite. The humble heart of Texas. One of the few shrines I’d ever attended worthy of a prayer.

  On the battle-scarred door is a plaque—the DRT is very big on plaques—that reads:

  Be silent, friend.

  Here heroes died

  To blaze a trail

  For other men.

  To the right of the door is another plaque. This one reads:

  QUIET

  NO SMOKING

  GENTLEMEN REMOVE HATS

  NO PICTURES

  NO REFRESHMENTS

  As my friend Dr. Jim Bone says: “A lot of rules for a small company.”

  I killed my cigar and took off my hat, rubbing my hair carefully so my head wouldn’t look like a Lyle Lovett starter kit. That certainly wouldn’t go over well with the Daughters.

  Then I went inside.

  Davy Crockett’s beaded vest has always been like a Shroud of Turin for me. I stare silently at it and its hundreds of beady little eyes stare silently back at me. The vest was worn by a true American hero—a man who died not for home, for land, for country. In truth, he was just passing through. He died because he was in the right place at the wrong time. He died with a hell of a lot of dead Mexicans lying all around him like a bloody funeral wreath. He died before he ever saw a car or a computer or a video. He wasn’t even a Texan. But he was everybody’s kind of man. In a world bereft of heroes, Davy still stands tall.

  These were roughly my thoughts when I noticed another figure standing rather tall beside me. It was one of the younger DRT women who’d become somewhat agitato about the unlit cigar that I’d unconsciously placed in my mouth.

  “Don’t light that,” she whispered.

  “Don’t be silly,” I whispered back. “Do I look to you like a person who’d smoke a cigar in the Alamo?”

  The young woman directed a hostile gaze at me and didn’t say a word.

  “Do I look to you like a person who fought in the Alamo?” I whispered.

  Moments later she was navigating me firmly back into the sunlight into the gravitational pull of an older Daughter.

  “Maybe you can help this gentleman,” sh
e said.

  “I’m Lydia McNutt,” said the older lady matter-of-factly.

  “I’m Phil Bender,” I said. “I’m a graduate student in anthropological choreography and I’d—”

  “Well, I’ll be happy to tell you about the Daughters of the Republic of Texas,” she said, obviously operating on some kind of clinical recall. “The organization was founded in 1903 by Clara Driscoll to honor early Texas men and women who blazed the way before statehood, to honor Texas with various holidays, and to preserve and protect the shrine of the Alamo. You do remember when it was that Texas became a state, don’t you, Mr. Fender?”

  “Uh, Bender. And I guess I’m not really too sure about—”

  “Come, come, come! Surely you remember your high school history lessons. It was ten years after the Alamo, in 1846, that Texas became a state. To join our organization one must clearly establish through birth and death certificates that at least one ancestor lived in Texas before it became a part of the United States of America.”

  “My field, anthropological choreography, is a very specialized one, Mrs. McButt, and we—”

  “McNutt,” she said, in an oblivious, almost mindless singsong. “Lydia McNutt.”

  “The field is so specialized,” I continued, “that we eschew all things of a political or patriotic nature—”

  “You poor dears.”

  “Yes, well. .. and my special area of interest is ‘Cotillions of the Late Thirties.’ ”

  CHAPTER 40

  We’d talked for a while longer as Mrs. McNutt told me just a little more than I wished to know about the current situation of the Daughters. But, of some passing significance, she did reveal that in the early days the blueblood, upper-class traditions of the DRT were far more dominant and ingrained than they were today. And almost as an afterthought, she’d pointed across the street to the Menger Hotel, in which she believed resided an old disused ballroom furnished with archival materials. This, for once, was exactly what I wanted to happen.