Armadillos & Old Lace Page 8

  “Come along,” said the judge.

  I stepped around and over the macabre obstacle course and followed her to the other side of the recently planted section. The night seemed to have gotten a good bit chillier and there was a fog rolling in from somewhere. There weren’t any oceans around. Where was the fog coming from? I wondered. Possibly, all bone orchards get a little misty after midnight. Who’s to say that they don’t?

  “Octavia,” said a voice out of the fog.

  I remembered Octavia. Her lips had been sewn together. Not an item you easily forget. I walked around the grave. The marker was a stone cross. There was a scroll on a little pedestal acknowledging her as an active lifetime member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. On the grave were six yellow roses.

  “Six yellow roses,” I said. “Either somebody’s made a floral typo or we’re missing one of our little ladies.”

  “This person’s pretty meticulous. I think if we hunt around a little we’ll find there’s been a victim we’ve overlooked.”

  “When did you first notice the flowers?”

  “I’ve been checking some vandalism in this cemetery the past few days. The flowers weren’t on the graves when I came by late this afternoon. Somebody put ’em here tonight.”

  “Looks like I’m drawn to this case whether I like it or not. I’m trapped like an insect in amber. You win, Judge.”

  “I knew you’d see things my way,” she said, smiling a slightly cadaverous smile.

  “Since you’ve got the contacts and the resources,” I said, “why don’t you try to locate our missing victim?”

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “What are you going to be doing?”

  I puffed on the cigar and blew a little smoke into the foggy night.

  “ ‘There’s a yellow rose of Texas,’ ” I said, “ ‘that I am going to see.’ ”

  CHAPTER 21

  Bright and early the next morning after I’d delivered a Gandhi-like truckload of ranch laundry to a nice lady named Arlena at the Country Clean Laundromat, I went to the Del Norte Restaurant for breakfast. Huevos rancheros without the yolks—my one healthy-heart habit. Chain-smoke Hoyo de Monterrey Rothschilds Maduros, drink as much Jameson’s as Gram Parsons drank tequila in the last few months of his life, and always eat huevos rancheros without the yolks if your waitress speaks enough English to get your order right, and you’ll live forever. Your life may not be very pleasant, but you can’t have everything. You’ve got to decide what it is you really want, ninety-seven years of shit or Mozart?

  It was still not yet eight in the morning and I was walking in the alleyway between the parking lot and the stores on Earl Garrett Street quietly cursing Ben Stroud. Ben had convinced Uncle Tom that the riflery program at camp had reached such a fever pitch that Ben himself must be present to supervise the qualifications. This left me to do the early morning laundry run and David Hart, Eddie, or Wayne the Wrangler to take the midafternoon run. The advantage to the early morning laundry run was that it was over fast, like a number of love affairs I’d been involved in. By seven forty-five I was through for the day.

  Most of the stores didn’t open till nine, but I thought I heard some activity inside Wolfmueller’s Town and Country Clothiers. I knocked on the back door.

  “Who is it?” said a muffled voice.

  “Charles Starkweather,” I said.

  I pushed the door open. Over about eight rows of tuxedos on movable floor racks I could barely make out Jon Wolfmueller’s head. He looked up from his invoices and calculator, waved me in, and returned to his work.

  “Who’s Charles Starkweather?” he said.

  “How soon they forget. Got any coffee?”

  “Right over there on the other side of the discontinued styles rack.”

  “Jesus Christ. How can you have discontinued styles in Kerrville?”

  Jon was busily at work back at the invoices and did not respond. I sipped some coffee and paced between the racks of clothes.

  “Just wait’ll the Nehru jacket hits town,” I said. “That’ll create a buzz.”

  Jon paid no attention. I sipped more coffee. “Jon,” I said, “I need your help with something.”

  “I don’t have any openings for male models, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

  Jon did have a sense of humor lurking back there somewhere. I often, in fact, referred to him as my faithful Indian companion. He wasn’t an Indian, of course. Tied to the store as he was, he didn’t even make much of a companion. But good help was hard to get these days for both of us. Jon was one of the few Kerrverts I knew who seemed to enjoy my company. At least he put up with me for extended periods of time. Maybe he was an Indian.

  One thing was for sure. Jon knew what was going on in Kerrville, and anything Jon didn’t know, his wife, Sandy, who ran Pampell’s drugstore and soda fountain, most assuredly did. Between the two of them I had my finger on the sometimes rather shallow pulse of Kerrville. I knew others, of course. Jody Rhoden, the photographer. Max Swafford, my former campaign manager, who abandoned the campaign right in the middle of the race to search for a gold mine in Mexico. Dylan Ferrero, who’d moved to Kerrville recently from a little town called Comfort, Texas, and communicated almost entirely in rock ’n’ roll lyrics. When you’re trying to keep a low profile and not irritate the sheriff, personal contacts were the only way to go. And Jon Wolfmueller was the place to start.

  “Jon,” I said, “what do you know about this grand jury they’re convening about the woman who was murdered and had her lips sewn together?”

  Jon pursed his lips in an unconscious manner not dissimilar to the way the victim must’ve appeared and thought it over. I sipped more coffee.

  “I know they’re having a hard time getting the grand jury together for some reason. I know the sheriff and the justice of the peace are each about ready to kill the other and sew her lips together. I don’t know the name of the subject of the grand jury.”

  “That’s kept secret.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Why don’t you go on over and ask Sandy?”

  I headed down Earl Garrett and hung a right on Water Street till I reached Pampell’s Drug Store, a building that had once belonged to the legendary Singin’ Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers, the man most people credit for popularizing the guitar in America. Rodgers was a seminal country blues singer who, next to Elton Britt, was the greatest yodeler of his time or anybody else’s. Jimmie wasn’t around anymore. He’d died of TB in New York City when most of us were jumping rope in the schoolyard. But every time I went into Pampell’s and looked up at the old balconies that had once surrounded his music hall and recording studio, I could hear a little distant Dopplered echo of a train whistle.

  Sandy was setting up the soda fountain. There was already one customer, a skinny old man wearing a straw hat and a bolo tie.

  “Jon just called,” she said. “You wanted to know who’s the subject of the grand jury?”

  “I thought they were supposed to keep his identity secret.”

  Sandy laughed. “There’s never been a secret in Kerrville that everybody didn’t know,” she said.

  “It’s one of them funny-soundin’ Mescan names,” offered the old man. “Rod-ree-gis. Gui-tar-is. One of them hard-to-say kind of names.”

  “The guy’s name is Garza,” Sandy told me.

  The old man nodded his head and cackled softly to himself.

  “Gar-za,” he said. “There’s a jawbreaker.”

  CHAPTER 22

  I got a cup of coffee from Sandy and she vanished to the back of the store. I decided to kill a little time and pain there at the old soda fountain until nine o’clock, when the Rose Shop just across Sidney Baker Street opened up. There were only three or four florists in Kerrville. If I was going to get a lead on who’d bought the yellow roses it wasn’t going to take very long. That was one advantage to being in a small town when it came to crime solving. It was the reason Miss Jane Marple, arguably Agatha Christie’s greatest detective,
chose to live in St. Mary Mead instead of London. Jane Marple and Agatha Christie, I reflected as I sipped my coffee, were little old ladies themselves.

  Jane Marple, of course, would live forever in the timeless casino of fiction, waiting for the freckled, feckless hand of a young person in Wyoming to pluck her off some dusty shelf and fall in love with the mysteries of life. Agatha Christie, like Jimmie Rodgers, wasn’t around anymore but in a sense I suppose they both still were, for they continued to ply silent rivers of words and music down into the yawning rugosities of our lives. Silver threads in an otherwise drab embroidery. Too bad Jimmie and Agatha never met. Might’ve made an interesting couple.

  “If it don’t rain again by the tenth of July,” the old man with the bolo tie was saying, “then it ain’t gonna rain for the whole summer. It’s gonna be a hell of a scorcher.”

  “Even if it does rain,” I said, as I laid down a buck for my coffee, “it’s not going to be too pleasant.”

  Jesus Christ, I thought. Here I was casually paying a buck for a cup of coffee. What was the world coming to? We dressed casually. Waved casually on the street. Nobody got too excited. Everybody went with the flow. Now some nerd had casually taken six little old ladies off the board.

  “Boll weevil’s comin’ back again,” said the old-timer as I headed for the door.

  “Ain’t we all, brother,” I said.

  At approximately 9:01 A.M. I crossed Sidney Baker Street and entered the Rose Shop, where an irritating little bell rang just above the door and climbed halfway into my inner ear. There was a fairly wide selection of flowers. The flowers smiled at me and I smiled back at them. No one else was in sight. No yellow roses, either.

  “Someone in Texas Loves You,” read a bright ceramic wall hanging. “God Loves You,” read a nearby colorfully painted plate.

  “Make up your mind,” I said.

  “Can I help you?” said a voice from above.

  This is it, I thought. On a bumper sticker, vengeance is mine saith the Lord. The family of man might be fairly dysfunctional but now God was coming down to straighten things out. And She did sound slightly irritated.

  I looked up and saw a rather nice pair of legs descending a ladder. The legs were attached to a lady who was holding a hanging plant. She looked pretty earthy for a florist.

  Her name, I soon learned, was Betty and she knew a lot about flowers. A little more, possibly, than I wanted to know.

  But she didn’t have any yellow roses.

  “Sometimes we’ll go for months without selling any yellow roses. We haven’t sold any in a long while. Now June through August we do have available our special ‘Texas Dozen’ offer. That’s fifteen flowers for $29.95.”

  “But no yellow roses?”

  “Red.”

  “But if I wanted yellow, could you get them?”

  “We’d have to order them. We’d bring them in from Austin or San Antonio. It might take a few days. Stores don’t usually stock them.”

  “How long will roses last once you sell them?”

  “Well, that depends. Outdoors, indoors. Air conditioning, no air conditioning. Drafts will kill ’em faster than anything. Never put your roses in a draft.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  Betty seemed to be working up a bit of a second wind herself.

  “Now once we sell ’em we’ll only guarantee ’em for twenty-four hours. If something happens to ’em within twenty-four hours you can just bring ’em right back to us and we’ll see that they’re replaced. If it’s after twenty-four hours, you’re on your own.”

  “Got to be tough.”

  “Did you want the Texas Dozen?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Only $29.95.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m kind of like James Taylor. I just can’t remember who to send ’em to.”

  “Well, you’ve got to the end of August.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  I thanked Betty and cut buns out of there. I got in the old gray pickup and headed out toward Ingram, to a place called Showers of Flowers. I dimly recalled buying some roses there several lifetimes ago and sending them to a long-distance lover who worked at a Cadillac dealership in Spokane. She’d sent me a nice note back. Though it was addressed “Dear Occupant,” I’d still thought the relationship worth pursuing. Of course, it wasn’t, she wasn’t, and at the time, from most accounts, I probably wasn’t either. But it is precisely this futility, pain, and seeming absence of true communication that keep the flower shops of the world in business and, every once in a while, when shaken slightly, may even envelop the stars. Maybe I should’ve sent her a Texas Dozen.

  Showers of Flowers was a big down-home kind of place with several greenhouses out back and flowers of every variety under the sun, so to speak. I saw the yellow roses right away. The owner, a friendly guy named Al, saw me right away.

  “I remember the first time you bought flowers here,” he said. “A long time ago when we first opened up.”

  “Spokane?”

  “Before Spokane. Even before Los Angeles.” The guy was weaving a spiderweb of heartbreak right before my eyes. “It was to Hawaii. A dozen beautiful red roses in a very nice ornate vase, as I recall. You haven’t forgotten?”

  It had been a long time ago. The flowers had been for Kacey, who’d died very young and been pressed between the pages of my life more than a decade ago. I’d called the hotel in Maui to make sure the flowers had gotten there. Kacey’d already left for Vancouver but I still recalled the words of the maid who was cleaning up the room. “The lady leave the vase,” she’d said, “but she take the flowers.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

  I steered the conversation gently to yellow roses. “How many yellow roses do you sell, Al?”

  “I don’t sell roses. People buy them. Yellow roses are very popular in Texas. For a friend, somebody in the hospital. Red is for deep love and things like that. We also have pink, white, and sonya. We grow ’em ourselves. We’ve got our own greenhouses here.”

  “What’s sonya?”

  “Between pink and orange. Very pretty. We go through fifteen to twenty dozen roses a week. You always bought red before. Why do you want yellow?”

  “I got a friend in the hospital who doesn’t like pink or white. Really hates sonya.”

  After some little badgering, my insistence upon the urgency of the matter, and my promise to treat with some semblance of confidentiality the relationship between a man and his florist, I got Al to bud a little. He’d sold yellow roses to three people over the past week. Or rather, they’d bought them. Al was understandably hesitant to show me the invoices with the customers’ names and addresses.

  “I can’t tell you why I need this information, Al, but it’s very important to me. In its own way, it means as much as Spokane, Los Angeles, and even Hawaii. And if I’m not being too melodramatic, lives may be at stake.”

  Al was a trusting sort. He let me copy the invoices. Names, addresses, dates. He also directed me to the other two remaining florists in the area. I thanked him and hoped to hell the flowers someone had placed in the Garden of Memories weren’t purchased out of town.

  The third florist was closed. On vacation since the week before. So I drove across town to the last flower shop on my list. That was another advantage to a small town, I thought. You could drive all the way across it in less time than it took to find a cab in New York. And you could smoke a cigar without anybody giving you grief.

  Hitting all the flower shops in Kerrville was the kind of investigative work Rambam would’ve liked. The life of the real P.I., he’d always contended, was made up of ninety-eight percent boring routine bullshit. The other two percent, he’d added, was merely tedious. According to Rambam, most of the time the results of long hard hours of digging in the investigative field would be inconclusive. Most cases, especially serial murders, were solved through dumb luck. Ted Bundy forgetting to fix his taillight. Jeffrey Dahmer repeatedly cal
ling his refrigerator repair man.

  The last place turned out to be a small affair on Ace Ranch Road just across the way from the Veterans Cemetery, which is a good location if you’re a flower shop. The fellow who ran it was a baby-faced, middle-aged guy who looked like he was wearing one of Jon Wolfmueller’s discontinued styles. There was nothing yellow in the store except his teeth.

  “You don’t have any yellow roses, do you?” I said. It was pretty obvious he didn’t.

  “We sure don’t. We’ve got some nice summery arrangements, if you’d like that. I could get you some yellow roses, but it may take a day or two.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I’d really like. I think someone may have ordered some yellow roses from here recently. Would you have any information on that?”

  He looked at me curiously for a moment. Then he smiled. It was not a nice smile. Obviously I wasn’t going to be any florist’s favorite customer.

  “Let me check,” he said, and he disappeared into the back of the shop.

  I waited. After a while I wondered if he’d passed away. Eventually he returned with a scrap of paper and my patience was rewarded.

  “I don’t know why you need this, buddy, but I can’t see as it does anybody any harm. They were delivered here.” He handed me the paper with a name and address on it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a great help.”

  “You ain’t with the CIA, are you?” He laughed a loud, high-pitched, dangerous, redneck laugh. He laughed and laughed.

  I laughed, too.

  Then I left.

  CHAPTER 23

  I figured if the case was going to be solved by dumb luck, I might as well strike while the iron was hot. I had the names and addresses of the four local people who’d purchased yellow roses within the past week. Why not run them down right now? There was an outside chance I could wrap this unsavory little booger up in a sailor’s knot before lunchtime, dump the whole thing on Sheriff Kaiser’s desk, and she’d pat the top of my cowboy hat and tell me what a good citizen I was. There was also an outside chance that she would become mildly agitato and have me committed to the Bandera Home for the Bewildered.