Armadillos & Old Lace Read online

  The ranch was eerily silent with the kids all out at the campfire. The cat was sitting on top of the trailer watching the horses grazing on the latest project by the Echo Hill Garden Club. The Echo Hill Garden Club didn’t usually have a lot of luck. If the horses didn’t eat their latest project, the deer invariably would. Not only did we not get the opportunity to reap what we sowed, we rarely got a chance to even see it.

  I’d put my guitar up and was just lighting a cigar and pouring a little shot when the phone rang.

  “Start talkin’,” I said.

  “This is Pat.” I didn’t have to ask, Pat who? I was currently a one-Pat man.

  “Yes, Pat,” I said patiently.

  “There’s been another one.”

  I took a couple of paternalistic puffs on the cigar.

  “Pat, there’s always going to be another one. These are little old ladies. Little old ladies are mortal. When their time comes they fall through the trapdoor just like everybody else, no matter how hard they’ve crammed for the final exam.”

  With the hand that wasn’t holding the blower, I lifted the shot of Jack Daniel’s from my faithful old bullhorn and discharged it into my mouth. The little judge was really starting to get up my sleeve. I poured another small shot.

  “She was murdered,” said Pat stubbornly.

  “How do you know that?” I fairly shouted. “Did she come back and appear to you in a seance and tell you that?”

  “She couldn’t have done that,” said the judge. “Her lips were sewn shut.”

  CHAPTER 12

  As I entered the old courthouse the next morning I thought of the only time I’d ever seen anybody’s lips sewn shut. It’d been many years ago and the lips had belonged to the shrunken head in the Bandera museum. The sight hadn’t been pleasant on a head the size of a tennis ball, and I could only too well imagine the nightmare vision of an actual-size human face mutilated in the same macabre fashion. It was enough to put you right off your huevos rancheros.

  The old courthouse hadn’t really come to life yet, if it ever did. The old lady who’d been spliced the

  night before wouldn’t be coming to life again either, unless it was to haunt my dreams someday when I was tucked away in the Shalom Retirement Village.

  The halls seemed empty as my heart. I walked past some old wooden doors that looked like they’d been closed for a hundred years, some pebbled glass, and about seven spittoons. Before I knew it I was sitting in a big office in front of a big desk behind which sat a big woman. Everything was big in Texas, I thought. Even the small towns.

  “The old lady who died last night,” I said. “The one with her lips sewn shut. That one definitely goes down as murder, right?”

  “Of course it was murder,” said Sheriff Frances Kaiser, looking fairly murderous herself. “Can you think of anything else you could call it?”

  “There’s always the possibility,” I said, “that she might’ve had a nearsighted tailor?”

  I chuckled a brief, good-natured chuckle. A large vein throbbed in the sheriffs neck.

  “What in the dickens would lead you to believe it wasn't murder?” she said. “Poor old thing was strangled and her lips sewn shut. Doesn’t that sound like murder to you? Maybe you’ve been in New York too long.”

  “This kind of wanton violence never happens in New York,” I said. “We’re all good, God-fearin’ little church workers up there. Mind if I smoke?”

  The sheriff gave an expansive, almost papal, wave as if she were shooing away an extremely large gnat. I fished around for a cigar in the many pockets of my beaded Indian vest. This created an awkward moment and, by the time I found the cigar and started setting fire to it, I could see that the sheriff was fresh out of charm.

  Sheriff Frances Kaiser was no one to putz around with. She was a big, tall, no-nonsense type who’d grown up on a ranch near Medina. As a kid, she’d done chores around the ranch and driven the tractor. Now, in her first term in office, she was one hell of a mean-looking sheriff. I could tell she was past wondering what I was doing in her office. Through the blue cigar smoke I heard her speaking to me.

  “We’ve heard tales of your exploits in New York. Any truth to them?”

  “There’s a little. You know how those New Yorkers like to brag. I was just wondering whether you had any leads in this latest case.”

  “Are you offerin’ us your expert help?”

  “Hell, no. I figure you’d probably have things just about wrapped up by now.”

  “And you’d be right,” said the sheriff, her eyes straying to a gun on her desk. “We’ve already apprehended a prime suspect and the D.A.’s convening the grand jury to get the indictment.”

  “Jesus. I thought the mills of justice were supposed to grind slowly but exceedingly fine.”

  “Those’re the mills of the Lord,” she corrected. “The mills of justice grind just about as fast as I tell ’em to. Don’t you know about the mills of the Lord? It’s in the Bible. Your people wrote it.”

  “Sure, we wrote it. But we didn’t like it all that much. We loved the movie.”

  The room was rapidly beginning to fill up with cigar smoke and unpleasant vibes. It was difficult to pry any information from Sheriff Kaiser without mentioning Pat Knox and, from what I’d already gleaned, mentioning Pat Knox to the sheriff could be lethal. It would totally disseminate what rancid crust of credibility I’d managed to attain. Apparently, my “exploits in New York” had impressed Kaiser about as much as my cowboy hat impressed Sergeant Mort Cooperman in the city. Well, you can’t please ’em all. The only one who seemed to believe in my talents was Pat Knox, and she barely came up to Sheriff Kaiser’s kneecap.

  “Who’s the suspect?” I said.

  “I can’t tell you that,” she snapped.

  “Is there anything you can tell me besides get the hell out of your office?”

  Sheriff Kaiser looked at me stonily. I was glad I wasn’t being hauled up here for stealing my neighbor’s goat. I waited.

  “We’re really very busy,” said the sheriff, as she studied her fingernails. She performed this gesture, I noticed, not with her palm outward as a woman might, but palm inward with fingers curled toward her, as somebody who drove a tractor might.

  “I guess I’ll wait till another time,” I said, “to ask you to quash my parking tickets.”

  “Cut the bullshit,” she said. “I’m late for my Rotary luncheon.” She stood up. She looked bigger than God, even if you happened to be an agnostic.

  “Just tell me. Do you think this murder could be related to the other deaths?”

  “What other deaths?” said Kaiser irritably.

  “You know, Sheriff. The little old ladies.”

  “Goddamnit, you been talkin’ to Pat Knox,” said

  the sheriff, moving toward me like an angry tractor. “Sure you have! That’s how you knew about that old lady’s lips sewn shut. What else did our wonderfully imaginative justice of the peace tell you?”

  “Well, she just thinks there might be some possible connection—”

  “There ain’t no connection,” shouted the sheriff. “Her brain ain’t even connected! Her job is to identify the victim—not to run her own investigation! This is a retirement community. There’s lots of elderly people here and sooner or later they die. We got a prime suspect right over there in the jail. But we ain’t accusin’ him of killin’ every old person that kicks the bucket. Now you stay the hell out of this! And stop listenin’ to Pat Knox!”

  Like a kid following behind a fast-moving plow I followed Sheriff Kaiser out of the office.

  “I always suspected she was crazy as a betsy-bug,” I said.

  CHAPTER 13

  Dark thoughts were line dancing through my mind as I hustled my butt over to the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library. Somebody was right and somebody was wrong, and damned if I needed to get myself square in the middle of an Old West shoot-out between the female sheriff and the female justice of the peace. I longed for the day
s when men were men and chickens were highly agitato.

  My library card had expired back when Christ was a cowboy but I didn’t intend to check out any books. All I needed was information about some people who’d checked out. If this had been New York I’d just call McGovern and have him run down the obits for me. Here I’d have to look them up myself. It was tough being your own legman.

  I backed the little convertible out of the courthouse parking lot and promptly became tied up in traffic. For a small town, Kerrville was coming on strong in the gridlock department. Of course, in New York I wouldn’t have been driving. I’d have been sitting peacefully behind some guy in a turban who was honking his horn, shooting the finger, and screaming Sri Lankan death threats. Here, I was waiting for an ancient Studebaker that appeared to have only been driven to church and bingo games to turn left, right, or back into me. At the wheel was a little old lady who barely reached the dash.

  A little old lady.

  Why was I going to the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library to read obits? I was supposed to be on sabbatical, leaving big-city crime and strife behind me in the big city where it belonged. I should listen to the sheriff, whether or not I respected authority figures as large as tractors. They had a little murder. They caught the suspect. The grand jury was going to indict him. The mills of the Lord would keep grinding just like my teeth. People lived and when they got o-l-d they died. Pat Knox had obviously been taking Slim lessons. Slim, in his last few years when he lived alone on the ranch in the wintertime, claimed he was seeing children in trees.

  There were no children in trees. And, most likely, there was no succession of little old ladies upon whom some unknown fiend was performing heinous crimes.

  Even if by some weird proclivity of fate it was true, why should I get myself embroiled in something a hell of a lot more unpleasant than traffic?

  Soon the little old lady was gone and the guy in the pickup truck behind me was honking his horn and spitting tobacco juice. I tooled past the Smokehouse, where I bought my cigars, the Main Book Store, wherein resided Alex the parrot, the post office, from whose steps I’d campaigned for justice of the peace in the manner of Huey P. Long, and Jon Wolfmueller’s store, which took care of my somewhat questionable sartorial needs. Kerrville wasn’t quite my hometown, I reflected, but neither was New York. My hometown was probably spiritually somewhere between the two, very far away, its longitude and latitude lost in a lullaby. Its citizens were smoke. Its children, beyond any shade of doubt, resided in the trees.

  I was daydreaming by the time I pulled into the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library parking lot, which is a conducive state of mind if you’re going to the library. I’d look through old newspapers for a while. Give the obits a quick scan. Get the hell out of there. If I stayed too long I might stumble on my own name.

  The woman behind the counter at the Butt-Holdsworth wasn’t Marian the librarian from The Music Man, but she maintained roughly the same rigid sense of library decorum. She insisted upon my parking my cigar outside before I had even remembered to whisper. I walked outside, wedged the cigar between two bricks in the wall, and came back in with a micro-chip on my shoulder.

  “I’m looking for yesterday’s fish wrappers,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Back issues of the local rag.”

  “Just what are you looking for, sir?”

  “The croaker section.”

  “I beg your pardon.” She was starting to warm up to me.

  “Worm-bait page.”

  “Are you referring to the obituaries, sir?” She gave a slight moue of distaste.

  “Dead right,” I said.

  In a rather brusque manner the lady pointed me toward the last row on the far wall. I started to thank her for her help, but she’d already directed her attention to a romance novel being checked out by a woman who gready resembled a large pelican.

  All I could get out of Butt-Holdsworth was a photocopy of the news story about the previous night’s victim. It was too late to cover the crime scene and too early for the obit. I mumbled to myself something Uncle Tom often said: “This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”

  I couldn’t find the back issues I was looking for and the lady at the desk had taken on an almost autistic countenance toward me, so I took the photocopy I’d made and picked up my cigar on the way out the door. It was still smoldering. People are rarely as resilient as cigars and most of the time they’re a lot less pleasant. Especially when they’re lit. I puffed on the cigar like a pneumatic lung for a few moments and pretty soon it was going again and so was I.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Kerrville Mountain Sun, which called itself the “Harvester of Happenings in the Heart of the Hills,” was not only somewhat given to the use of alliteration, but had been published once a week for so long it had probably run an obit for Nebuchadnezzar.

  J. Tom Graham, the publisher, welcomed me warmly. I told him what I wanted and, before long, I was seated in a dim and dusty back room poring over the ancient newsprint he’d selected for me. As I looked through the obituaries, I thought of some of the things McGovern had told me over the eternal mahogany of a million nocturnal bar conversations.

  He’d mentioned Alden Whitman, the Times obituary writer who had a sixth sense for when people were going to die. When he’d call someone and say “This is Alden Whitman with The New York Times,” you knew your number was up. Whitman himself had died fairly recently. It wasn’t clear whether or not anybody’d called him prior to his departure.

  McGovern had written many obituaries for the Daily News. Often they were written when the honoree was still alive. His editor had told him to “Get one in the can” for Hirohito when the Japanese emperor was in the hospital fading fast. McGovern had delivered within twenty-four hours but, unfortunately, the emperor got well. The same thing had occurred with Bob Hope. In fact, anytime McGovern was called upon to write an advance obit for anyone, the subject invariably got better. “Bob Hope’s been in the can for ten years,” McGovern once told me.

  Finding the obits I wanted took little more than an hour out of my life. I figured I could study and compare them like baseball cards later at the ranch. I might very possibly turn up life rafts of survivors and interview them all, but the point, in the final analysis, would most likely be right on top of my head. “Pat Knox be damned,” I said, to whatever residual ghosts might be swirling about the little room.

  I saddled up Dusty and rode back to the ranch. I walked into the green trailer with a troubled mind and a hand full of death. The cat was sitting in the kitchen sink watching me curiously. The red light on the answering machine was blinking like a panic-stricken whorehouse. Across the small expanse of trailer the red light filtered through the afternoon shadows and pulsed wildly against the ancient, distorted, almost sideshow-like mirror over the sink. It looked like an answering machine from Jupiter. Next to the mirror and directly over the commode a huge, mounted longhorn steer stared malevolently down at me. A hundred years earlier it had peacefully grazed on the prairie until some great white hunter had blown it away. For years it had hung in the lobby of the Bank of Kerrville. Now, since both the steer and the Bank of Kerrville had gone belly-up, it graced the space immediately above the commode, which required somewhat of an acrobatic maneuver for those who wished to take a Nixon in the trailer. Eons ago, one of its eyes had fallen into the dumper and had never been recovered. The remaining eye appeared to be imploring me to check the answering machine. I did.

  “It’s J. Tom Graham,” the tape said, “from the Kerrville Mountain Sun. Please call me as soon as you get this message.”

  Some shard of good sense told me not to call J. Tom Graham. Just take the news account of last night’s murder—which, I’d noticed, did not mention the victim’s lips being sewn shut—put it together with the four obits, and take the little stack of paper up to the Crafts Corral for Eric Roth to make into one of those little Japanese ducks. Whatever weirdness was going on
in the Hill Country was none of my business. If I wasn’t damn careful it might keep me from having fun at camp.

  Under the gun from the steer’s eyeball, I punched J. Tom’s number. I lit a cigar and took a few puffs as I waited for him to come on the line. The cat watched rather disapprovingly, I thought.

  “Kinkster, how are you?” said J. Tom.

  “Long time between dreams,” I said.

  “A dream’s why I called you as a matter of fact. Just after you left, an old lady came in. Said her name was Violet Crabb—”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “So’s Kinky. Anyway, she said her sister died a few months back in a house fire near Pipe Creek. Sounded like one of the obits you were looking for, so I thought I’d call you. She thinks her sister was murdered.”

  “Go on,” I said. I felt a prickly sensation on the back of my neck and it wasn’t a daddy longlegs.

  “Seems her dead sister appeared to her in a dream. She was wearing a white, formal dress and walking toward her. Suddenly, she could see blood dripping from her breast and her side and her neck—”

  “Hold the weddin’, J. Tom. It’s just some old lady’s dream. Maybe Violet Crabb had gas or something. Why are you trying to spook me with this?”

  “I thought you’d be interested since you were checking up on the same old lady she was dreaming about. The two of you coming in like that was a little too close for coincidence. What’s goin’ on, Kinkster? You wouldn’t be wearing your Sherlock Holmes cap under that cowboy hat, would you?”

  “Hell, no, J. Tom. You know I always wear my little yamaha under my cowboy hat. Covers my horns.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been hearin’ some rumors out of the courthouse to the effect that some of the recent deaths around the Hill Country may not have been from natural causes. I checked over some of those obits and there’s been a lot of little old ladies droppin’ like Texas houseflies around here lately.”