Armadillos & Old Lace (7 page)

I wasn’t as pumped up as James Brown after a show, but it did feel good hearing the echoes as I packed up my guitar and slipped off into the dark, beautiful, anonymous night. Every performer, no matter how great, is a ham at heart. Whether you’re playing Carnegie Hall or a campfire for kids, it’s still another show in your hip pocket.

Part of my job at camp, along with the overwhelming responsibility of being hummingbird man and occasionally dropping off laundry in town, was security. Not that anyone expected six Islamic fundamentalists in a blue sedan to drive up to the flagpole. I was just supposed to walk around, turn on some of the lights at night, and, as Tom says, “maintain a presence.” It wasn’t very difficult. I’d been doing it most of my life.

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.”

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.

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 days 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.”