Armadillos & Old Lace Read online

  I entered the historic old hotel with some trepidation, for as well as Richard King, the owner of the King Ranch, dying there and Oscar Wilde and O. Henry living there, it had been one of the two places on earth that I’d ever truly seen a ghost. I didn’t know it as I walked in the door, but damned if I wasn’t about to see one again.

  Fortunately, my friend Ernie was manning the front desk and, it being a rather light day, he was more than happy to guide me himself to the old ballroom.

  “It hasn’t been used for many years except to store things,” said Ernie. “The room’s on the second floor in the older section—not too far from where you say you saw your ghost—”

  “I did see that ghost,” I said, as Ernie led me down an old corridor that would’ve felt right at home in The Shining.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised how many of our guests have reported seeing ghosts,” said Ernie.

  “Yes,” I said, “but how many of your ghosts have reported seeing guests?”

  I remembered the night quite well, actually. It’d been about ten years ago, when Ratso was down from New York on one of his famous visits to the ranch. Ratso, Dylan, and I had gone out to see Jim and Nee-sie Beal’s band, Ear Food, and I’d gotten to bed rather early without drinking alcoholic beverages. I was definitely not flying on eleven different herbs and spices when I saw the ghost. She looked like a gypsy girl or a Mexican dancer and she came to me in a state of semiconsciousness from which I leaped sideways rather quickly.

  First I was sitting up in bed, then I was standing, and the vision of the girl still wouldn’t go away. She seemed to be a beautiful young person from an earlier time. She was wearing silver earrings and a belt that resembled the latent homosexual silver concho belts that the great Bill Bell of Fredericksburg had made for Willie Nelson, myself, and other Americans who unconsciously wanted to separate their bodies into two parts. I doubt if Bill Bell had been alive when the ghost’s jewelry had been made. The conchos looked like pieces of stars.

  Dylan was snoring through the whole thing in the other bed and later suggested, rather insensitively, I thought, that the whole experience had probably been the result of gas. At any rate, I’d become convinced after the vision refused to disappear that Ratso, who was inhabiting the other room of our suite, had played a prank upon the Kinkster. It was the only explanation I could come up with for my having gazed into the dark eyes of this vision for over two minutes while standing on my feet fully awake thinking I was going to Jesus or Jupiter at any moment.

  I had frantically followed this vision into Ratso’s room, where she finally disappeared, and I was totally prepared to upbraid Ratso for running in a girl or prostitute or whoever the hell she was while I was asleep. But Ratso himself was out like a beached flounder and his outer door was chained and doublelocked as was his custom in New York. After I’d awakened him, with some little effort, his suggestion was that I call Ghostbusters.

  “Did you or the ghost say anything?” Ratso asked.

  “The ghost didn’t say anything, but at one point I did.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I believe it was ‘Fuck me dead.’ ”

  “Couldn’t have been a real ghost,” said Ratso. “It never would’ve missed an opportunity like that.” While I’d been reliving my earlier, otherworldly experience at the Menger, Ernie had been opening a set of massive wooden doors and now he was handing me a key.

  “The light switch is on the wall,” he said. “Don’t touch or move anything. Lock these doors when you’re through and bring the key back to me at the desk.”

  “Fine,” I said, as I gazed into the dusty, mildly primeval darkness. “If I’m not back in about fifty years, send Richard King after me.”

  Ernie left and I hit the light switch.

  It looked like the Make-Believe Ballroom might’ve looked once you’d grown up and forgotten how to pretend. Dust covered the floor, sheets and tarps covered most of the furniture, and spiderwebs covered the rows of old framed photographs on the wall. The photos could’ve been right out of Violet Crabb’s dream. I liked old, dusty ballrooms as much as anybody but I did not share my friend McGovern’s devotion to them and all they once had represented. I especially did not want to see my ghost again or hear barely audible rustlings of old silk dresses as they moved gracefully across the dance floor. I just wanted to check out a crazy little notion I had and then get the hell out of there.

  I didn’t know at what age young women used to “come out” in the old days. Today it was about nine. But I was betting that in those early days eighteen to twenty-one was about right for a self-respecting debutante, if that wasn’t somewhat of a contradiction in terms. So it was the late 1930s that I wanted, and I just hoped to hell I was right or a lot of dust would’ve been stirred up for nothing. Not to mention some pretty unhappy spiders.

  1936. 1937. 1938 ... that was about right. I took out my Kinky Honor America Bandanna and wiped away the dust and cobwebs from the 1938 photograph on the wall. There were two rows of girls—ten in all. They wore formal white cotillion gowns and their hair had been coiffed in the latest fashions of the day. Their eyes looked into me as only the eyes of old photographs can. They were trying their damnedest to pull my soul into a better world that I wasn’t quite ready to discover yet. Not quite ready, but almost.

  Their names printed along the bottom were quite familiar to me now: Virginia, Myrtle, Amaryllis, Prudence, Nellie (evidently Pat Knox’s newly discovered victim that we’d missed the first time), Octavia, and dear Gertrude (the latest victim). There were two names that I didn’t know: Hattie Blocker and Dossie Tolson. I jotted the two new names down in my notebook and then I counted all the names on the photograph again.

  Something was wrong here. There were ten girls but only nine names. I looked carefully at each girl, matching her with her name. The last girl in the back row was the one whose name had been deleted. So had something else. I’d only seen the phenomenon before in early revisionist Russian photographs where certain political figures had fallen from favor. Seeing it here and now in this old attic of a ballroom sent a cold, timeless, unforgiving chill of half-remembered history through my very being.

  Not only was the young girl’s name missing.

  So was her face.

  CHAPTER 41

  “Mule barn,” said Earl Buckelew, as he habitually answered the phone.

  “Earl!” I shouted from the pay phone in the lobby of the Menger Hotel.

  “Kinky Dick!” he shouted back.

  “Earl, I’ve got a problem. It involves two women—”

  “That’s always a problem.”

  “The problem is that I don’t know them and I’m hoping you do.” I lit a cigar in the enclosed phone booth and it soon filled up with the very pleasant aroma of good Honduran tobacco.

  “Just a minute,” said Earl. “Let me turn down the television.” I heard the sound of Earl’s cane clumping across the floor to the television, then I heard it again, quite distinctly this time, on the return trip to the phone.

  “Damned A-rabs and Jews goin’ at it again,” he said.

  “We just can’t help ourselves, Earl.”

  “Cowboys and Indians,” he said.

  “Anyway, you ever heard of Hattie Blocker or Dossie Tolson?”

  “I never heard of that last one, but Hattie—if that’s the same damn one I remember ...”

  “How many Hatties can there be?”

  “Oh, you go back a ways, you’d be surprised. There’d be a Hattie poppin’ outta every rumble seat.”

  “This one’s about seventy-six years old, Earl, and she’s not likely to be poppin’ out of rumble seats anymore, and I’ve got to find her to try to get some evidence about a man we believe has already murdered seven women.”

  “Yeah, she was a fine little filly.”

  “Well, the question is where is she now?”

  “Back in the thirties I used to take her out in my ol’ blue Model A roadster. It was the first car in th
e Hill Country to have a radio put in it, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t, Earl. But do you know where this woman is now?”

  “Hell, it’s been a while—I’ve lost touch with her—but it seems like I heard ... if it’s the same one ... she’s over at Purple Hills, that place in Bandera. Some people call ’em old folks’ homes.”

  “Earl, one more question. This Hattie Blocker— this young girl you used to drive around in your Model A ...”

  “Fine young filly.”

  “Yes, I know. But just tell me one thing: Was she ever a debutante?”

  “Not when she was with me,” he said.

  Dusty and I flew out of San Antonio like a Texas blue norther heading east with a vengeance. We took I-10 to the 46 cutoff, then blew through Pipe Creek on the road to Bandera. All along the way the girl with no name or face haunted me, her fearful featureless countenance rising up like a violated vision on the dim tie-dyed horizon of American history.

  I’d called ahead to the Purple Hills Nursing Home and learned that Hattie Blocker was indeed a patient there. No, it would not be a problem for her godson, Oswald T. Wombat, to pay her a visit later this afternoon. I asked the nurse how Hattie’s memory was and she said her short-term memory was almost nonexistent. I said that was a blessing and asked somewhat trepidatiously about her long-term memory. If Hattie was cookin’ on another planet she wasn’t going to be much good helping to nail Hoover.

  “The old days are about all the poor dear has left,” the nurse had said.

  “Can she remember over fifty years ago?”

  “Like it was yesterday.”

  “That’s a blessing, too,” I’d said.

  Everything was a blessing, I thought. It’s just that none of us knew it yet. Most people today didn’t even realize that daddy’d taken the T-bird away until they tried backing out of their driveway and got skidmarks on their ass.

  As I drove through the blazing streets of Bandera, the image of the young woman’s body without a face began to get to me and I became somewhat garrulous with Dusty.

  “I have this really spooky feeling that she’s trying to tell me something,” I said. “I’ve known a name without a face and a face without a name, but this poor child appears to be redlining in both departments. Yet I can hear her voice clear as a loudspeaker across a used car lot. ‘Help me!’ she’s saying. ‘Help me!’ If we can’t delve into the past and arrange this case in its accurate historical framework, Willis Hoover, even though he may be guilty as sin, is surely going to walk.”

  “There is a problem in the electrical system,” said Dusty. “Prompt service is required.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Hattie Blocker looked like Barbara Fritchie on a bad hair day. I’d been to Barbara Fritchie’s house in Frederick, Maryland. I’d been to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. Now I was at Hattie Blocker’s house.

  There’s no place like home, I always say.

  The reason there’s no place like home is that home is not a place. It’s a time in your life when maybe you thought you were happy, a time you think back to long after your three minutes are up. I didn’t have to look back. I just had to look around Hattie’s empty, antiseptic little room at Purple Hills. It could’ve easily been Doc Phelps’s last little room at the state hospital in New Mexico. There was nothing here but Hattie and her memories. And Hattie wasn’t talking.

  Hell, I probably wouldn’t’ve been talking either if I’d had one of those oxygen things plugged into my nose, everyone I knew was dead, and a strange-looking cowboy was sitting at my bedside acting like he was dying to light that cigar any minute.

  “Hattie,” I said softly.

  Nothing.

  “Hattie,” I said, turning up my vocal mike, “I really need your help with this. I just saw a beautiful picture of you with your friends at the 1938 Cotillion Ball of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. You looked grand.”

  Hattie said nothing but her eyes were shining. I pulled my chair a little closer to the bed.

  “Hattie, this is very serious. I wouldn’t even tell you this, but we need you to help us convict a criminal. He’s already killed seven of the debutantes at the cotillion, Hattie.”

  I reeled off the list as if I were reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and noticed that Hattie seemed to be trembling slightly. This was a hell of a way to make a living.

  “Virginia ... Myrtle .. . Amaryllis . .. Prudence ... Octavia ... Nellie ... Gertrude ...”

  Hattie Blocker said nothing.

  I got up from the chair and walked over to the little window. Hopeless. Hopeless and undeniably cruel. Of all the times in my life when I may have taken advantage of people and situations, this had to be the lowest. Terrifying an old lady who was already walking the garden path to heaven’s door. It did not make me proud to be an American.

  I looked back to where Hattie lay propped up on the bed. Still motionless. Eyes straight ahead. She looked like a little bundle of twigs. I gazed out the window again.

  Then a little twig snapped in my head. I had to go ahead with this inquisition. It was too late to ask the Baby Jesus what other flavors you got? Dossie Tolson could be in worse shape than Hattie Blocker, if indeed she was even still alive. The girl with no face and no name was trying to get through but I was having trouble adjusting my set. I had to keep walking down Yesterday Street and hope I could get wherever the hell I was going before today became tomorrow and yesterday was lost forever to a country funeral, a hotel fire, or a cat pissing on a telephone number.

  “Look, Hattie,” I said with some excitement. “Look what’s cornin’ up the road. It’s Earl Buckelew in his blue Model A roadster. And you’re sittin’ right next to him. My, you look fine. And he’s got that cute little rumble seat back there. Wait. I can hear his radio playin’. What’s the song? Oh, I hear it now. ‘Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone else but me ...’ ”

  I stood perfectly still, continued staring out the window. A moment passed, I suppose. What Hollywood screenwriters are fond of calling a beat. In truth, just another step down that garden path that all of us unconsciously tread every day of our lives. Hattie was just a little ahead of us in the line.

  “She was a cute little thing,” she said, in a surprisingly clear voice. “A saucy little redhead. The boys all liked her and some of the girls were jealous.”

  I gazed out the window and held my breath.

  “I told that Octavia. I said, ‘Octavia, you got a big mouth, honey. Don’t you go spreadin’ scandal. You could ruin that poor girl.’ ”

  Octavia, I thought. Octavia. Oh, my fucking god. Octavia with her lips sewn together.

  I waited. There was nothing for a while.

  Then she said, “Don’t remember her last name anymore. The little redhead. But her first name was Susannah. Like ‘O Susannah, don’t you cry for me.’ ”

  “Try hard, Hattie,” I said. “Can you remember Susannah’s last name?”

  She was trying but I could see that it was useless.

  “I want to sleep now,” she said finally.

  Her face looked like a well-loved, well-worn human road map and I suspected that Robert Frost was right. She had miles to go before she slept.

  “You’ve been very helpful, Hattie,” I said. “God bless you.”

  I squeezed her hand and walked to the door. At the door I looked back at the old woman and the little room.

  “You really looked beautiful in that Model A,” I said.

  Her face was still turned to the window when I left.

  CHAPTER 43

  Dusty was waiting for me right where I’d left her under a large Spanish oak tree in the front circular driveway of Purple Hills. I’d just climbed in and put the key in the ignition when I saw a florist’s van pull up to the side entrance. Boyd Elder got out, opened the back of the van, and, moments later, entered the side entrance of the building carrying a bouquet of yellow roses.

  Maybe it was
something Hattie Blocker had told me or maybe it was something I’d been unconsciously worried about all along, but the noose that had seemed to be tightening nicely around Willis Hoover’s neck now appeared to be whirling wildly and wickedly like a lasso out of control in the hand of a very sick cowboy. I jumped out of the car and dashed across the driveway.

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

  The peaceful green lawns of the nursing home belied the dark thoughts fairly zimming through my brain as I scuttled across the side entrance like a crab on cruise control. Was it possible that we all could’ve missed the boat so completely? Was it possible that I’d soon be staring dumbstruck at what used to be Hattie Blocker?

  The side door was locked now.

  I raced around again to the front of the building and my mind was racing right along with me. Of course Willis Hoover was the wrong guy. It would have been virtually impossible to have sewn Octavia’s lips together with a nervous hand disorder. And if he grew yellow roses, why order them from a store? And what about Boyd Elder? Last seen owning a little flower shop. Easy access to all kinds of flowers. Last seen helping with the investigation. Pointing us in the direction of Willis Hoover. Last seen carrying yellow roses into Purple Hills. Last seen locking the goddamn door behind him.

  I bolted through the main entrance and shot down the nearly deserted corridor like a runaway bowling ball past a geezer in a wheelchair wearing a Houston Oilers cap. The Oilers were having their troubles and so was I.

  “Where’s the fire?” he said.

  I hooked a left at the far end of the hall and slowed down halfway along the side corridor. The place was all pretty quiet and peaceful, like an old library where somebody’d checked out all the books and just never brought them back. I ankled it carefully over to the vicinity of Hattie’s room. I listened with dread and was mildly relieved to hear the two voices in conversation.