Armadillos & Old Lace Read online

  I paced back and forth in the trailer, like a tiger tethered to the telephone. I’d been careless letting J. Tom know what I was looking for. Now, whether I got into the case or not, I had a pesky journalist on my hands and in Kerrville it was always a slow day for news.

  “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” I said.

  “You still want to hear about Violet Crabb’s dream?” asked J. Tom relentlessly.

  “Spit it.”

  “Blood’s pouring out of her sister and suddenly the white dress goes up in flames. Just before she’s totally engulfed in the flames, she whispers one word.”

  “Plastics?”

  Graham laughed a little longer than was necessary. The cat eyed me impatiently.

  “What the hell was the word?” I asked.

  “Cotillion,” he said.

  CHAPTER 15

  The next morning I woke up to a nightmare of my own. A Martian was standing in the trailer at my bedside. Each of its eyes was tunneling blinding silver beams of light into my brain. The effect was paralyzing, not to say a bit unnerving. I’d always wanted to be picked up by a UFO, but not before breakfast.

  “Kinky,” said the Martian. “Wake up!”

  I sat up in bed and realized that the Martian was Marilyn and the tunnels of light were the sun’s rays reflecting off her thick glasses. On her head, I now observed, was a rather singular silver porpoiseshaped cap that read I SAW SEA WORLD.

  Marilyn had, no doubt, left her bunkhouse early, possibly to avoid bunk cleanup, and somehow slipped into my trailer, where she’d stood there like a Martian and scared the hell out of me. Security was pretty lax on the ranch. I, of course, was in charge of security.

  Marilyn was what we called a “floater.” Someone who didn’t necessarily go where they were supposed to go or stay where they were supposed to stay. They tended to cause havoc with bunkhouse counselors, but I felt a certain kinship with them. I’d been a floater most of my life.

  We talked about cats and bugs and handicrafts for a while and eventually I aimed her in the direction of her bunkhouse group, put some coffee on, and fed the cat some tuna. While I waited for the coffee to perk I tended to my morning ablutions over the small sink next to the giant steer’s head. The eyeball, I noted, was still missing. It was a good thing, too. No matter how well you washed your face or brushed your hair, in the tin, carnival mirror of the green trailer everyone looked like William Henry Harrison.

  The sun was doing its best to seep through dusty windows and rusty screens into the bowels of the trailer, but the place still gave off somewhat of a rain forest ambience. I took a cup of coffee, a cigar, the obituary notices, and a rather surly attitude and stepped outside the trailer into the blinding sunlight. A group of young boys, the Mavericks, I believe, came riding by on horseback and waved and shouted. I waved and shouted back.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “It’s afternoon,” one kid yelled back.

  Still searching for some pattern in the death notices of those little old ladies, I sat down at the shady table behind the trailer and shuffled through them again like a mildly bored riverboat gambler. The victims had nice, old-fashioned names: Virginia, the Bandera bathtub woman; Myrtle, who died in the fire at Pipe Creek and then came back to haunt her sister Violet; Amaryllis, killed by a gunshot near Mountain Home; Prudence, near Kerrville, who’d had a slight reach impediment when it came to her oxygen bottle. I also glanced at the recent news story: Octavia, near Kerrville, who had had her lips sewn together. Had this detail been included, I thought, it was doubtful that the flap, no pun intended, would ever have died down.

  There didn’t seem to be any link between these cases other than the obvious fact that the victims were all little old ladies. Who could have hated little old ladies that much? I wondered. Maybe the killer was an extremely disgruntled little old man.

  The youngest of the women was in her early sixties; the oldest, in her late seventies. They were a surprisingly active group, belonging variously to the Bluebonnet Garden Club, the Lower Turtle Creek Volunteer Fire Department Ladies Auxiliary, the First Methodist Church Vacation Bible Class, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the Silver Thimble Quilting Circle, and the Huffers ’n’ Puffers Senior Square Dance Club.

  Just thinking about all their activities was starting to wear me out. But there seemed to be no pattern here, either. At least nothing you could hook your quilt on. After another cigar and another two cups of coffee, I gave up the ghost on the obits, chucked them inside the trailer, and ankled it up the little hill to the lodge. Sambo, being somewhat myopic, ran toward me barking ferociously, then, at the last moment, smiled like a rat-trap and licked my hand. After studying obits for several hours, a dog licking your hand can almost make you feel good to be alive.

  Few heads turned as Sambo and I entered the lodge. Cousin Bucky, who was busy handing rifles out the front door to boys from the Crow’s Nest, nodded a brief greeting. Marcie and Katy were sitting on the couch in the living room locked in an intense meeting with a trio of bunkhouse counselors. Sambo and I slipped past into the back room, where Uncle Tom was at his desk talking on the speakerphone and David Hart, the head men’s counselor, was wearing a funny-looking red hat and poring over a computer terminal. Neither looked up.

  “Fine,” Tom was saying in a tone that indicated the situation was anything but. “That’s just fine”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Friedman,” said the disembodied voice on the speakerphone. “These ice-makers’ll get a little hitch in their git-along every now and then—”

  “I’m running a camp. I need that machine working now!”

  “Well, we may have to order parts—”

  “This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”

  I walked over to where David Hart was working on the evening program.

  “Eddie wants to know if you’ll sing ‘Ol’ Shep’ for the Hoedown,” he said. “Phallax will be the boy and Eddie will be Ol’ Shep and he’ll end the song by urinating on both of you from the hidden water bottle like he did last year.”

  “Smells good from here,” I said. “Look, I’ve got to make a run to town.”

  David Hart punched in a few things on his computer. “We can spare you,” he said.

  I picked up the obits and a few cigars from the trailer, saddled up Dusty, and headed over to Earl Bucke-lew’s place. Earl was not only a timeless old-timer, he believed that “everything comes out in the wash if you use enough Tide.” He’d known the land and the people on the land for so long that he gave directions by the bends of rivers that weren’t even there anymore. Maybe he could get inside the minds of these women. If they’d known him when they were younger he might well have broken their hearts.

  Earl came out into the yard on a cane, his goats gathering around him like a biblical shepherd. Two severe strokes and the gout had slowed him considerably but they hadn’t stopped him. He took me into his house, where the furniture and the pictures on the wall seemed to keep the past alive and the television appeared to run “Wheel of Fortune” on an endless loop.

  Earl studied the obituary notices for a long time, slowly shaking his head.

  “You don’t know any of them?” I asked.

  “Don’t know them,” he said, “but I do know widow women. And there’s three things you should never try to do. Never try to climb a barbed wire fence leanin’ toward you. Never try to kiss a girl leanin’ away from you. And never try to get a widow woman to tell you the truth about her age.”

  I sat back in the rocker, the one that had belonged to Earl’s grandfather who’d been captured by the Indians—but that was another story, and one that I didn’t wish for Earl to launch into at this time. I thought about the widow women. Of course, they’d all been widows. A small detail maybe, but it might be important.

  “How would I get their correct ages?” I asked.

  “You could try thinking about a marriage license.”

  “Earl,” I said. “This i
s so sudden.”

  Earl laughed. I rocked and thought it over. If I got my ass out of the rocking chair there was still time to get to the courthouse before the Comanches got me. But there was something seductive about Earl’s place. Before I knew it, he was telling me about his adventures in Tahiti, which he pronounced in about eleven different ways, pausing only to spit Red Man chewing tobacco into a coffee can on the floor. I rocked comfortably in the chair, smoked my cigar, and listened to the tale I’d heard many times before, almost as if it were a modern mantra. Listening to old people and young people was a hell of a lot better than just listening to middle-aged nerds, I thought. It was certainly better than listening to yourself.

  Eventually, Earl wound down and he painfully walked me out to the gate. I thanked him for his help, though I had my doubts about how much light it might shed on the investigation. I was climbing into Dusty when another thought struck me.

  “Earl, have you ever heard of a cotillion?”

  “Hell,” he said, “everybody knows what that is. It’s a long-necked lizard from West Texas.”

  A little over an hour later I was standing under a shade tree outside the Kerr County courthouse with five copies of marriage license applications in my hands. Earl Buckelew had been right. The obituaries had been wrong. Almost all of the widow women had lied about their ages.

  I took out a pen and small notepad and began doing some quick calibrations, subtracting the year each woman was born from the year she’d died, which was for all of them the current year. I put my pen and pad away after the first two. It wasn’t necessary. The pattern was not only abundantly evident, it was crazier than you’d be likely to find on a quilt. It made me almost shiver under the shade tree.

  Each of the five, at the time of her death, had been exactly seventy-six years old.

  Happy Birthday.

  CHAPTER 16

  June shed its cocoon; July opened one eye. The summer was rolling obliviously along like a wayward beachball thrown onto the field of a nationally televised sporting event by some California sicko. Over a week had passed since I’d stood on the lawn of the Kerr County courthouse and uncovered a dark secret under the summer sun. I’d kept it to myself. One reason was the horrific nature of some of its possible interpretations. Another reason was that most of the people I talked to these days were about three feet tall. They weren’t ready for it yet. I wasn’t sure that I was, either.

  It was Sunday and I was joining the Bronco Busters’ table in the dining hall for lunch. Everyone at the table was seven or eight years old except Ben and Eric, the two counselors, who sat on either side of the little group like enormous bookends. Sunday lunch was always fried chicken and everybody wore their whites. It was Rosie and Elese’s fried chicken, but before that it’d been Louise’s fried chicken. Before that, long before any of the Bronco Busters had been bom, it was Hattie’s fried chicken. Before that the chicken had been running around pecking apple cores in the backyard of the Garden of Eden.

  The fried chicken was still great and, as always, a big favorite at Echo Hill. Seldom was heard a discouraging word like “cholesterol.” As Earl Buckelew once commented: “Hell, when I was growin’ up, we didn’t even know we had blood”

  I’d barely laid my hot green peppers out on the table—no Bronco Buster had ever eaten a hot pepper—when the kids began singing the noonday prayer. It was a little number from Johnny Appleseed and it went as follows:

  Oh the Lord is good to me

  And so I thank the Lord

  For giving me the things I need

  The sun and the rain and the appleseed

  The Lord's been good to me. Amen. Dig in.

  Eating a fried chicken lunch with a tableful of seven-year-olds will certainly take your mind off weightier matters. Along with the chicken and the mashed potatoes and gravy, the adult world with its ponderous problems just seems to disappear. Conversation is limited to bunkhouse activities, hikes, horses, snakes, water fights, softball, archery, and ri-flery. The subject of girls never even comes up.

  “Is Uncle Tom really your father?”

  “Yup.”

  “And Marcie’s your sister?”

  “Yup.”

  “Wow.”

  “My dad says he was in your bunk when you were ranchers and that one night you both snuck up and put horse manure in the counselor’s bed.”

  “Very possible.”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” said Ben, towering over the table like a giant Buddha.

  As I sat amongst the Bronco Busters, a gentle sense of arrested social development came over me. My gaze wandered across the crowded dining hall and my mind wandered back across the hot dusty summers to a time before any of these children were born. I remembered being seven years old myself and watching the oldest boys’ bunk playing with their food, mixing it with ketchup and bug juice in a bowl in the middle of the table. Their counselor that summer was an Israeli named Tuvia who’d fought in a number of wars and seen men starve to death in some godforsaken biblical desert. Tuvia took the bowl and three of the culprits away from the dining hall and apparently made them eat the mess, because I vividly remember hearing various retching noises occurring through the choruses as the rest of the ranch was singing a round called “I Like the Flowers.” From that day forth I’ve never had any inclination to play with food.

  There were two more things Tuvia did that I would never forget. Once, when the rope snapped during flag lowering and Old Glory fell to the ground with the whole camp standing at mute attention in a circle, Tuvia had snatched it up, put the rope in his teeth, and climbed the old cedar flagpole to tie the rope ends together. I remember thinking that he wasn’t even an American.

  The other thing Tuvia did was teach us a new bunk yell. It was almost forty years ago and I still remembered it. The bunk yell went precisely as follows:

  Avivo! Avavo!

  Avivo, vavo, voo-hey!

  Lefty, Befty, Billillilla Lefty,

  Chingala, Mingala,

  Loof, Loof Loof Yea, Bunk Seven!

  That was all in the mid-fifties before the bunks had names. Now Tuvia himself was just a name, remembered only by a very few of us. A member of a lost tribe that wanders somewhere within the soul. Sooner or later all of us would be members of that tribe.

  To the boisterous strains of “When They Built the Ship Titanic” I handed my plate and silverware to the ranch KP and slipped out ahead of the throng. I smoked a cigar by the old bell that stood by the office. I looked out at the empty flat soon to be swarming with scores of ranchers. From inside the dining hall the kids were now singing “Happy Birthday” to Eddie Wolff. At the end of the normal birthday song they tagged it with a rather unusual traditional Echo Hill verse. Sung in a minor key in the style of a funeral dirge, it went like this:

  Happy birthday, happy birthday,

  Misery is in the air,

  People dying everywhere,

  Happy birthday, happy birthday.

  “Not inappropriate,” I said to the bell, “considering recent events.”

  But the bell held its tongue.

  CHAPTER 17

  Though it was clear to me that five women had been croaked on their seventy-sixth birthday, I was still somewhat disinclined to rush with the news to Pat Knox or Sheriff Kaiser. As far as the J.P. was concerned, a little bit of the little judge went a long way. I didn’t want this whole megillah to turn into a Nancy Drew affair with the judge playing Nancy and me in the role of one of her little chums, both of us futilely attempting to operate outside the powers that be. As for Sheriff Kaiser, it was indubitably her attitude that a little bit of Kinky went a long way. It was a hell of an understatement to say that she would not be par-

  ticularly desirous of entertaining another audience with me. The last one had been a tension convention, the repellent memory of which neither of us was soon likely to forget.

  On the other hand, since the day I’d learned that terrible secret on the courthouse lawn, the onus of that dar
k knowledge had been weighing heavily on my conscience. I now knew beyond .any shadow of a doubt that these five deaths could not be written off to coincidence. They were murders—a string, a chain, a cheap imitation necklace strung together by a madman—the end of which was nowhere in sight.

  This knowledge pressed brutishly against the translucent butterfly wings of my soul as I flitted in and out of camp activities, my mind always returning to the little old ladies who’d been hastened, if ever so slightly, through death’s door. If even one more victim were to be killed while I was the sole possessor of a crucial clue to the murderer’s dark agenda it would take a hell of a lot of Tide to make everything come out in the wash.

  I puffed on the cigar and wandered the flat on that sunny Sunday afternoon until the singing stopped in the dining hall. After a few moments I heard Uncle Tom’s voice saying “Well... ?” and answered by an army of children shouting “What are we waiting for!” Then the doors of the dining hall flew open and the peaceful little valley was suddenly alive with children running, shouting, and laughing. The hills seemed to echo their energy and joy, and it was a little sad to think how very briefly they would stay this way before joining all the other gray, weatherbeaten souls in the quotidian adult world.

  I left my cigar on the ledge and walked into the nearly deserted dining hall, where Uncle Tom was wearing his blue safari hat and working out a chess problem with an eight-year-old boy named Danny. They stood on either side of a huge wooden board I’d bought in Nuevo Laredo in another lifetime. With the chessboard at table level, the king and queen were slightly taller than Danny.

  As I stood a little distance away there seemed something rather poignant about the tableau. The innocent intensity of the small boy and the equally intense sincerity of the large man. Chess, like life, is one of those rarest of endeavors that should never be taken lightly. In the case of life, it should, of course, never be taken at all.