Armadillos & Old Lace Page 7

  “Treat adults like children and children like adults!” I said, quoting Tom after the little tableau had dissolved and Danny had rushed off to buy Cokes with the other kids.

  “Why not?” he said to the rows of empty tables and benches. “Almost nothing’s ever been accomplished the other way.”

  “True,” I said. “As I’m finding out in this current Kerrville caper.”

  “What’s the latest with Pat Knox’s little mystery?”

  “It’s not really Pat Knox’s little mystery.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “I’m not sure. But whosever it is is going to have his or her hands rather full. I think I’ve stepped on something and it ain’t third base. I was going through the marriage license applications down at the courthouse the other day and I discovered that all five victims were seventy-six years old.”

  “The likelihood of that occurring naturally is statistically very small.”

  “Tom, they were all killed on their birthdays.”

  “Sure. Fine. Whatever. Sonny boy, you’ve got to turn this over to the sheriff. We’re running a children’s camp here. We can’t allow the ranch to become involved with anything like this. We’re not equipped to handle it. We’re not geared—”

  “I’ll meet with the sheriff, all right? I’ll go into town tomorrow.”

  David Hart, wearing his funny red hat and carrying a clipboard, wandered into the dining hall just in time to hear my last sentence. He looked down briefly at his clipboard.

  “We can spare you,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  Even then, on that torpid Monday afternoon in July as I was driving Miss Dusty to Kerrville, some part of my consciousness, some dim forgotten street corner of my peripheral vision, was stirring with the unpleasant notion that the baton pass to Sheriff Kaiser would not entirely extricate me from the ancient rusted meat hook that was this case. Maybe it was a deeper, darker well than a small-town sheriff s department could fathom or plumb. Maybe God, in his divine evenhanded perversity, was watching over all amateur Jewish private investigators and wished them to receive credit for stumbling over vital clues. That was unlikely, I figured, as I smoked a cigar and sped with the top down beneath a canopy of cottonwoods, cypress, and Spanish oak. God had created them, so they’d told me in Sunday school. God had also created a rather tedious situation with me and Sheriff Frances Kaiser. Not that I particularly blamed God. I wasn’t even sure if God was a he, she, or it. Possibly, he was the guy on the dim street corner of my peripheral vision who was looking for spare change for a sex change.

  Maybe he was none of the above.

  “A door is ajar,” said Dusty.

  “Nice of you to mention it,” I said, “but why’d you wait till I was halfway to Kerrville?” I opened the driver’s door and slammed it shut again.

  “Thank you,” said Dusty.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  As Dusty and I climbed the steep hill between the ranch and Kerrville, I noticed that the sky was growing increasingly foreboding. If you were writing a Victorian novel you might say the clouds were becoming edged with pewter. In Texas, we’d say they were getting dark.

  However you described it, the changing weather was only a physical manifestation of what I sensed were deeper, deadlier changes. Changes within the psyche of a killer capable of restraint and of remarkable rage. Changes in a weatherbeaten, war-torn world that was capable of absolutely anything. No big deal. I’d turn my evidence of murder most methodical over to the powers that be. That’d be all she wrote, so I thought. At the time, assuredly, I did not expect the hand of fate to be quite so well manicured. Nor was I aware that it might indeed be clutching quite such a prolific or such a poisoned pen.

  Thunder was crashing and lightning was forking the summer sky as I parked Dusty near the courthouse on Earl Garrett Street. The cat, I figured, was probably hiding under the bed in the trailer. She did not particularly like the sound of thunder, and Sambo liked it even less. It wasn’t all that popular with me, either, in spite of Ratso’s oft-noted contention that thunderstorms produce “negative ionization” which is “psychologically beneficial” to people. Ratso says that pounding surf can produce the same effects as thunderstorms in making you feel more energetic and creative—though, to my knowledge, Ratso’s never been near an ocean in his life, having rarely left the confines of Manhattan, which, according to Ratso, is a positive-ion environment conducive to suicide. Ratso also says that rich people often secretly install negative-ion generating machines in all the rooms of their houses, which helps them constantly think up more ways of making money and thereby maintain their wealth.

  I asked Ratso once, as I looked around his hideously cluttered apartment, why he hadn’t bought a negative-ion generator for his own place. Aside from the obvious reason that there wasn’t any room for it. His answer was: “They don’t sell ’em on Canal Street.”

  I walked patiently, luxuriantly through the storm to the courthouse and shook the rain off my cowboy hat into a nearby spittoon. The halls were dark, and so was the look on the secretary’s face when I told her I had to see the sheriff but I didn’t have an appointment.

  “Always make an appointment if you want to see the sheriff,” said the secretary. “She’s got a very busy schedule and she hardly ever sees anyone without an appointment.”

  “I’ll write that down in my Big Chief tablet,” I said.

  Considerably later, and much to the secretary’s surprise, I found myself looking across the big desk at Sheriff Kaiser. I don’t know whether or not the sheriff had a negative-ion generator going for her but the room certainly had an almost palpable negative atmosphere. The secretary left and closed the door behind her.

  “What do you want?” said the sheriff.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Just have a look at these.”

  In a manner roughly akin to Bret Maverick, I fanned out the five copies of the marriage license applications on the desk before the sheriff.

  “What’re these?” she said.

  “Five of a kind.”

  As Frances Kaiser adjusted her glasses and picked up the documents I walked over to the window and watched the storm. I lit a cigar and watched the trees on the courthouse lawn sway with an almost violent grace like dancers in Borneo. I imagined the emotions that must’ve been traversing the sheriff’s face as she read. Doubt, astonishment, thinly veiled anger. I was sure she’d been working diligently to get the grand jury seated, possibly prodding the D.A. to get his case together in order to gain an indictment against the suspect still in custody. The man she believed had sewn an old lady’s lips together. Now all that might be out the window. Into the storm.

  Once the forces of the law are set into motion, once the D.A. goes for an indictment, the grand jury almost invariably rubber-stamps his recommendation. As Rambam once said: “If the D.A. really wanted it, the grand jury would indict a couch.” But now the forces of the law in this little town might have to take a step backward and rethink things a bit. Outside the window the forces of nature continued wild and unabated. They were not influenced by the D.A.’s recommendation. They were not subject to the sheriffs authority. They did seem to be moderately interested in exactly how far they could propel a deputy’s straw cowboy hat across the courthouse lawn and down Main Street.

  “I see,” said the sheriff, as she stared past the window out into the fury of the storm. Her face was an emotionless porcelain mask that in some strange way seemed more unnerving than any display of mere emotion. I puffed politely on the cigar and waited. “You obtained these documents—”

  “Down the hall,” I said. “But it was Earl Buck-elew’s idea to check the marriage license applications.”

  “Ol’ Earl,” said the sheriff, her eyes going back in time. “We used to sneak onto his place and go fishin’ when I was a kid.”

  “The same. He claims widow women always lie about their ages.”

  Sheriff Kaiser smiled. It was a nice smile. Sheriffs
usually don’t get to smile a lot but when they do it’s always appreciated. Kind of like Ronald Reagan giving a turkey to an orphanage on Thanksgiving.

  The sheriff stood up, got rid of the smile, and stacked the pages neatly on her desk. It was a gesture of dismissal and I edged toward the door.

  “You’ve been a good citizen,” she said. “We’ll take it from here.”

  “I just did what anybody would do.”

  “If that was really true,” she said, “I’d be out of a job.”

  I opened the door and headed for the hallway.

  “One more thing,” the sheriff called after me.

  I turned around. She was standing like a giant in the doorway.

  “Tell Earl Buckelew that one of the little Kaiser girls said hello.”

  CHAPTER 19

  It was around eleven that night when the phone rang in the green trailer. Pam Stoner, the green-eyed handicrafts counselor from Oklahoma, and I were getting acquainted on a big flat rock out back. We had a Roy Rogers blanket that had somehow survived the lifetime of childhood and a few shots of Jack Daniel’s with a little Mr. Pibb backing it up. The cat was watching from the roof of the trailer.

  “I’d better take this call,” I said.

  “You really are Jewish,” said Pam Stoner.

  “The ugly head of anti-Semitism rears up out of a peaceful, bucolic setting,” I said, as I, too, reared up and moved toward the trailer.

  “Bring the bottle with you when you come back,” she said. She was smiling and her star-colored eyes seemed to be shimmering in the moonlight. A whippoorwill was calling from a nearby juniper tree. Maybe that should’ve been the call I took.

  I grabbed the bottle with one hand and took the persistent blower from its cradle with the other. “Syrian Embassy,” I said.

  “This is Pat Knox,” said the blower, “returning your call. I already know what happened at the sheriff s office today, so you don’t need to fill me in on that. You done good.”

  “Thanks, Your Honor. Looks like the sheriff now realizes these five deaths are related.”

  “Gettin’ her to realize it is only half the battle. The other half is gettin’ her to do somethin’ about it.”

  “She assured me the full force of the law will be behind the case.”

  Pat Knox laughed. It was a long, hearty, bitter laugh. When she recovered, her tone was dangerous and conspiratorial in nature.

  “You and I have sure put her on the right track, but if you’ll pardon the choice of words, this case may just be too kinky for the sheriff.”

  “It may be too kinky for me, too.” I twisted the top off the bottle of Jack and took a short pull.

  “That’s not quite true,” said the judge. “And if there’s one thing I know about you it’s that you’ve got the kind of mind that loves a good mystery.”

  I looked out the back window of the trailer and saw Pam lying on her back on the big rock in a very suggestive position.

  “That’s right, Judge. Me and Miss Marple love a good mystery. What’ve you got?”

  “Come see for yourself. You’re not gonna quit on me, are you? Let that big ol’ sheriff scare you?” The big ol’ sheriff didn’t scare me. In fact, she’d turned in a rather poignant performance that afternoon. But there was something almost sirenlike in Pat Knox’s appeal. And I wasn’t referring to the thing that’s mounted on the top of police cars.

  I looked out the window and saw that nothing was going to be mounted around the ranch that night. Pam was asleep on the rock.

  “Okay,” I said. “Where do we meet?”

  “Midnight. The Garden of Memories.”

  “The cemetery?”

  “Boo!” said Pat Knox, and she hung up.

  CHAPTER 20

  If you’ve got to go to a bone orchard, midnight’s about as good a time as any. Things are just beginning to get stirring and you avoid the crowds. It was a funny thing, but the closer I got to the cemetery the more I felt drawn to it. Sort of like a part-time ghoul returning to the crypt. Of course, all ghouls are pretty much part-time. Being a ghoul twenty-four hours a day would kill anybody. Such were my thoughts as I drove up to the gates of the Garden of Memories. One other little thought that was in my mind was that Sheriff Kaiser probably wouldn’t approve of whatever Judge Knox and I were going to be doing here. But who was afraid of the big ol’ sheriff?

  I hooked a right off Sidney Baker Street and urged Dusty slowly through the main entrance to the bone orchard. The place was quieter even than the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library. Between the two of them there’d been a lot of books and a lot of people checked out. But there was no one here to say “Ssshhhh ...” Only the wind whispering in the shadows of the willow trees.

  There didn’t seem to be any human forms moving around or any vehicles parked along the entrance road. I drove a little farther until the town of Kerrville had disappeared behind me and the bone orchard had pretty well swallowed me up. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. There was a certain sense of peace to it. Kind of like the way it must feel to be inside a McDonald’s after closing time. Of course, there was no closing time here. There was not even any time here. It didn’t at the moment particularly feel like there was any here here.

  So I hit the brights.

  Dark forms and figures began springing up all over the graveyard. Dripping half-shadows of passengers aboard the Titanic descended from the willow branches. A partially drawn shade of Ichabod Crane galloped by with hooves of distant thunder. Cowboys and Indians and Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and tiny little Cambodians and soldiers and sailors and airmen from wars that are now trivia questions leapt up out of the night in the manner of game show contestants with the answers to the mysteries of life. But none of them spoke a word. Imagination can be a blessing, I thought, but it can also be pretty tedious.

  I puffed my cigar nervously.

  Dusty shuddered.

  Then, off to the side, glowing darkly through the night with the ageless intensity of Anne Frank’s eyes, came a beacon no less welcome than had it shone down from the Old North Church or skipped softly across the waters that gently lapped at Daisy Buchanan’s pier.

  Then the light vanished along with any residual personal enjoyment I had at being in that particular locus at that particular time. I pulled Dusty over to the side of the little road, not that there was a lot of oncoming traffic, and waited. The light did not come on again.

  I got out of the car, performed a few square-dance maneuvers around the headstones, and, following the directions of an old Bob Dylan song, “walked ten thousand miles in the miles of a graveyard.” I bumped into an ill-placed tombstone and almost burned my forehead. Recovering my balance I took stock of the desolate landscape. Where the light had been there was nothing. All around me in every direction there was nothing. It was like the sensation you sometimes get when you’re standing in the middle of a busy shopping mall.

  I stared up at the scythelike moon and the little freckling of stars and tapped a cigar ash onto the ground.

  “Ashes to ashes,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said a voice that scared the shit out of me.

  I landed a few moments later, practically impaling myself upon a small wooden cross. I struggled to my feet, glanced at the cross, and then at Judge Knox.

  “It’s a good thing it wasn’t one of those pointy-headed stars of David,” I said.

  “There are some advantages to living in Kerrville,” she said.

  “And dying in Kerrville,” I said. “A lot of people seem to be doing it. By the way, why are we here?”

  “Follow me,” she said.

  As I trudged behind the little judge and her shining path through the darkened country graveyard, no elegies came to mind. The only things that popped up were more shades, more shadows, more questions, the primary one from the latter category still being: “What the hell are we doing here?”

  Finally, we reached an area in the back of the cemetery
in which this season’s crop appeared to have been recently planted. The ground looked fresh, there were more flowers, and the stones were new enough to gleam slightly in what moonlight there was. These were definitely not the kind of stones that gather no moss. They’d soon be gathering plenty of it, along with litter, lichens, birdshit, and, conceivably, the occasional teenage swastika. Like many of the living, these stone faces seemed resigned to whatever fate lay before them.

  “Three of our little ladies are buried here,” said the judge. “The second victim, Myrtle Crabb, got burned up in the fire at Pipe Creek. They just went ahead and cremated her.”

  “Might as well dance with who brung you.”

  “Her son, I understand, drives around with her ashes on his motorcycle.”

  “Every mother’s dream.”

  “The fourth victim, Prudence South, the one who needed the oxygen bottle, she’s buried in a little church cemetery out the other side of town. So that leaves victims one, three, and five buried here. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  The judge walked like a determined little rooster to a plot about thirty feet away. I followed faithfully, puffing on my faithful cigar and beginning to realize that Judge Knox was either pulling a somewhat premature Halloween prank by bringing me here or she was really onto something.

  “Here’s Virginia. Supposedly drowned in the tub in Bandera.”

  She had a nice shiny granite stone. On the grave itself was one yellow rose. Pat Knox turned and I followed her farther into the graveyard.

  “Amaryllis,” she said. “Supposedly shot herself.”

  “In the back of the head. Wouldn’t that be difficult?”

  “For a seventy-six-year-old arthritic little lady, damn near impossible.”

  Amaryllis had a smaller, more modest stone. There was a vase of wilting flowers on the grave. Beside the vase were three yellow roses.