Armadillos & Old Lace (13 page)

All in a day’s work, I thought. Sometimes it requires pawn-shop balls for a private eye to stay on the case.

At a little after eleven I pulled up in front of the first address, a picturesque little house with an actual swear-to-God white picket fence in front of it. It wouldn’t have surprised me if some very sick bastard lived there.

A guy who looked like Methuselah’s older brother was mowing the lawn on the side of the house with a manual lawn mower. I got out of the truck and walked over to the guy without a thought in my head as to who to tell him I was or what in the hell I was doing there. I decided to settle on the old salesman’s icebreaker.

“Good morning, sir. I’m John Wisteria from Florists International. Just checking up on how the roses are doing.”

“They’re doin’ just fine,” he said. “They’re settin’ inside in the air conditionin’ and I’m out here mowin’ the goddamn lawn.”

“You want to be careful with that air conditioning,” I said. “A draft can kill them faster than anything.”

He looked at me as if he suspected that there was a draft between my ears. “You don’t say,” he muttered. “What’d you say your name was?”

“Well, I’m just checking,” I said, as I wrote a little imaginary note in my notebook. “Just to make sure the yellow roses arrived here all right.”

“Of course they arrived here all right. I went to the damn florist and bought ’em. Then I brought ’em home. Gave ’em to my wife for our fifty-seventh anniversary.” He was becoming increasingly belligerent.

“That’s nice,” I said. I began heading back to the truck, but now he wouldn’t let me go and began screaming for his wife.

The woman struggled out onto the porch, against my protestations, and backed up her husband on every tedious detail about the yellow roses. She was a grizzled old thing who got around slowly and painfully with one of those aluminum Jerry Jeff Walkers. Her name was Marsupial or something and she was a little deaf, so the dialogue between the two of them went on interminably. If I was the kind of private eye who carried a gun I probably would’ve pulled it out right there and shot myself to contain my ennui. Eventually, I departed with all three of us shaking our heads in disgust and confusion, softly invoking the names of our various gods.

The visit to my next customer was fast, and required no dissembling on my part. Two moving vans were parked in front of what looked as if it might’ve once been a happy home. The moving men were loading his things into one truck and hers into the other. The yellow roses were in front of the house, too. In a trash bin.

There’s a million stories in the city, I thought. Who the hell’s to say there’s not also a few in the town?

I drove to the third address. On the way I stopped for a cup of coffee and called Pat Knox’s office from a pay phone. We agreed to meet for a low-profile lunch at a funky little Mexican restaurant that had a lot of black velvet art going for it and no clientele from city hall.

When I got to the third address I was not surprised. It was the hospital. Just like Al had said, yellow roses for the friend in the hospital. But I had to be sure. So I checked with the desk, went up to the fourth floor, asked directions from a nurse, and walked by the room of a woman in a hospital bed watching
Smokey and the Bandit.
The yellow roses were there by the bed. Drooping a little, but so was Burt Reynolds’ cookie-duster. I was oh-for-three in my horticultural area. The last customer could wait till after lunch. One thing about dumb luck. You can’t force it.

When I sat down at the little corner table at the little Mexican restaurant across from the little judge, I could tell she was in a more upbeat mood than I was. Sylvia Plath was in a more upbeat mood than I was.

“What a team,” she whispered, almost shimmering with excitement.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’re some people— possibly cases of arrested development—who maintain an interest in high school sports well into their adult years. For them the prospect of going to State is like a lighthouse to their lives. As for me, the prospect of going to State—”

“I’m talking about
us,
you bullethead.
We're
the team.”

“—is not as important as the prospect of going to the men’s room.”

I did have to urinate like a racehorse. But I had another motive for getting up and leaving the table that Judge Knox was not privy to. I wanted to check out the restaurant, the little hallway, and the men’s room for any large, burly sheriffs deputies that might report our little rendezvous to Frances Kaiser. I wasn’t paranoid or anything. The fact that I was beginning to operate with a mindset not dissimilar to that of the Spy Who Came in from the Cold did not worry me too much.

I returned to the table, sat down, and stared in-tently at the judge.

“Jabber,” I said.

“I’ve found another seventy-six-year-old woman who died on her birthday. Happened about twenty miles from here in Center Point. Death was ruled accidental.”

“This is crazy. We’re working practically undercover. The sheriff s doing her thing. The newspapers haven’t got anything more than rumors around the courthouse to work with, so they haven’t broken the story. And meanwhile, some fiend has pulled the plug on six little old ladies and God knows when or if he’s ever going to stop.”

“If the papers get hold of this—and they will— there’ll be a panic no one’s seen the likes of since the Boston Strangler. It’s up to us, Richard.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.” I poked desultorily at my
came guisada.
“But I love it when you call me Richard.”

“What about the yellow roses?” quizzed the judge. “What’d you find out this morning?”

“That only four purchases of yellow roses have been made in this area in the past week or so. Three of them I’ve accounted for. The fourth came from that little shop near the Veterans Cemetery. I thought I’d check it out after lunch. They were sent to this address.”

I handed Pat Knox the last name and address on the list. She studied the scrap of paper.

“This address isn’t far from here. There’s several old-age homes in that area. Could be one of them.”

“We’ll both probably be in an old-age home before we solve this case,” I said.

“I’m goin’ with you to this address,” said the judge. She stood up and it seemed likely that lunch was over.

“Only if you promise me a round of croquet,” I said.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of activity as the judge parked her car by the side entrance of the Alpine Village Retirement Center. Of course, there was probably never a lot of activity around the Alpine Village Retirement Center. It wasn’t exactly the best place to go if you wanted to raise some hell.

“Looks quiet as the grave,” I said, as we got out of the car.

“Looks can be deceiving,” said the judge. “Otherwise, why would ninety-five percent of the marriages I’ve performed lately end in divorce or worse?”

“What’s worse than divorce?”

“You’d have to ask the other five percent.” 

“Jesus,” I said, as I carefully placed my lit cigar on a nearby windowsill. “Almost makes me glad I’m still a closet heterosexual.”

As we opened the door and walked from the sweltering summer afternoon into the side wing of the place it felt like we’d just taken up residence in the freezer department of a meat-packing plant.

“If I’d known we were going to Ice Station Zebra,” I said, “I’d’ve worn my long johns.”

“Shush,” said the judge rather violently.

The hallway was strangely quiet and empty. The only figures we passed were a young black orderly pushing what looked like a scarecrow in a wheelchair. You couldn’t tell if the scarecrow was a man or a woman or living or dead. About the only thing you could say for it was it sure kept the crows off the wheelchair.

My mind drifted back to when my father and I saw Doc Phelps for the last time. It was at the state hospital near Silver Spring, New Mexico. Marcie had visited him a few years earlier, before they’d put him in. She’d told me he was very thin and fragile and looked like Rip Van Winkle lying in his bed with storm clouds swirling all around his little house. He’d said that Hilda’s ghost had been nagging him about weeding the garden. Then Doc had told Marcie: “I’m a very lucky man because I’ve loved many people in my life and I still do.” Marcie said she’d sat by the side of his bed and cried.

By the time Tom and I saw Doc he’d been at the hospital for a while, been seated next to screaming people eating with plastic silverware, been pushed around like a sack of potatoes by young orderlies who didn’t know or care that in the thirties Doc with his pretty young wife on the back of his motorcycle had driven all the way from New York to San Francisco. I’d lifted Doc’s birdlike legs one at a time and put him into the front seat of the car as we took him to a restaurant for lunch. He’d smiled at me like a little child through the window, the man who’d led so many of us up the hills and down the canyons of summertime and childhood itself. At the restaurant Doc appeared to slip in and out of lucidity, somewhat in the manner of my own normal conversational style. I was yapping about Santa Monica, California, about people sitting on park benches by the sea and old folks playing shuffleboard. I said there were a lot of crazy, highly creative people out there because you could stand on the edge of the cliff and look out over the sea at night and realize that you couldn’t run any farther, that that was as far as you could go.

“Hardly,” Doc said. It was one of his more lucid moments.

Doc then proceeded to tell as a recurring theme through the remainder of the meal a story or joke about a woman and the gorilla at the London Zoo. Now that I think back on it, whether the rambling narrative was a story or a joke seems kind of important because Doc was one of the kindest, wisest men I’ve ever known and his words might’ve shed some light on whether life is a story or a joke. But life, like an orderly, was pushing me along too fast to remember what he said, and now it’s too late to ask him to tell me again.

On the way back to the hospital that day, Doc seemed to become disoriented. Tom asked him if he knew where we were. Doc didn’t say anything. Tom asked him if he knew who Tom was. Doc seemed confused and said nothing. At the hospital the orderly put him back in the wheelchair and Tom and I went along with him to his room. It was painted some kind of institutional fluorescent off-white and there was a small bed in there with high railings on both sides like a crib for a giant baby. The orderly sat Doc in a chair and he seemed almost catatonic. In the room there was not a picture, a letter, a scrap of clothing, an indication of any kind as to the deep, richly embroidered fabric that had constituted the vibrant, colorful mantle of Doc’s life.

I had stood by the door as my father directed a soft, one-sided conversation toward the anthropological remains of his old friend. Tom finally came over to the door, said good-bye one more time, and we both watched Doc stare mutely at something neither of us was able to see. As we started to leave, Doc, still staring into space, spoke the last words we would ever hear him say: “I love you, Tom.”

“C’mon,” said the judge, grabbing my arm. “Something’s goin’ on in the other wing.”

Indeed there was.

Nurses, orderlies, and sheriffs deputies were scurrying around like mice under a birdfeeder at midnight. The focus of the activity, we soon discovered, was a room belonging to one Gertrude McLane. The same name on the scrap of paper I’d shown to Judge Knox. The recipient of a dozen yellow roses.

They were there, all right. In a vase in a comer. Gert was there, too. All we could see, however, was a stick leg and a birdlike hand reaching out from the middle of an electronically operated bed that someone had raised both ends of until they’d met cruelly at the top.

The judge and I stared in mute horror until we heard a familiar voice and wheeled around. It was the grim and imposing form of Sheriff Frances Kaiser.

“You’re late for the slumber party,” she said.

“Many years ago, around a campfire much like this one,” Uncle Tom was saying, “a tribe of Indians were gathered. It was the custom of the tribe at the end of the day for the old chief to stand up by the fire and anyone with any problems or questions could ask his advice at that time. He was a wise old man and had been chief for many, many years.”