Armadillos & Old Lace (8 page)

“Are you referring to the obituaries, sir?” She gave a slight moue of distaste.

“Dead right,” I said.

In a rather brusque manner the lady pointed me toward the last row on the far wall. I started to thank her for her help, but she’d already directed her attention to a romance novel being checked out by a woman who gready resembled a large pelican.

All I could get out of Butt-Holdsworth was a photocopy of the news story about the previous night’s victim. It was too late to cover the crime scene and too early for the obit. I mumbled to myself something Uncle Tom often said: “This is
exactly
what I didn’t want to happen.”

I couldn’t find the back issues I was looking for and the lady at the desk had taken on an almost autistic countenance toward me, so I took the photocopy I’d made and picked up my cigar on the way out the door. It was still smoldering. People are rarely as resilient as cigars and most of the time they’re a lot less pleasant. Especially when they’re lit. I puffed on the cigar like a pneumatic lung for a few moments and pretty soon it was going again and so was I.

The
Kerrville Mountain Sun
, which called itself the “Harvester of Happenings in the Heart of the Hills,” was not only somewhat given to the use of alliteration, but had been published once a week for so long it had probably run an obit for Nebuchadnezzar.

J. Tom Graham, the publisher, welcomed me warmly. I told him what I wanted and, before long, I was seated in a dim and dusty back room poring over the ancient newsprint he’d selected for me. As I looked through the obituaries, I thought of some of the things McGovern had told me over the eternal mahogany of a million nocturnal bar conversations.

He’d mentioned Alden Whitman, the
Times
obituary writer who had a sixth sense for when people were going to die. When he’d call someone and say “This is Alden Whitman with
The New York Times,”
you knew your number was up. Whitman himself had died fairly recently. It wasn’t clear whether or not anybody’d called him prior to his departure.

McGovern had written many obituaries for the
Daily News.
Often they were written when the honoree was still alive. His editor had told him to “Get one in the can” for Hirohito when the Japanese emperor was in the hospital fading fast. McGovern had delivered within twenty-four hours but, unfortunately, the emperor got well. The same thing had occurred with Bob Hope. In fact, anytime McGovern was called upon to write an advance obit for anyone, the subject invariably got better. “Bob Hope’s been in the can for ten years,” McGovern once told me.

Finding the obits I wanted took little more than an hour out of my life. I figured I could study and compare them like baseball cards later at the ranch. I might very possibly turn up life rafts of survivors and interview them all, but the point, in the final analysis, would most likely be right on top of my head. “Pat Knox be damned,” I said, to whatever residual ghosts might be swirling about the little room.

I saddled up Dusty and rode back to the ranch. I walked into the green trailer with a troubled mind and a hand full of death. The cat was sitting in the kitchen sink watching me curiously. The red light on the answering machine was blinking like a panic-stricken whorehouse. Across the small expanse of trailer the red light filtered through the afternoon shadows and pulsed wildly against the ancient, distorted, almost sideshow-like mirror over the sink. It looked like an answering machine from Jupiter. Next to the mirror and directly over the commode a huge, mounted longhorn steer stared malevolently down at me. A hundred years earlier it had peacefully grazed on the prairie until some great white hunter had blown it away. For years it had hung in the lobby of the Bank of Kerrville. Now, since both the steer and the Bank of Kerrville had gone belly-up, it graced the space immediately above the commode, which required somewhat of an acrobatic maneuver for those who wished to take a Nixon in the trailer. Eons ago, one of its eyes had fallen into the dumper and had never been recovered. The remaining eye appeared to be imploring me to check the answering machine. I did.

“It’s J. Tom Graham,” the tape said, “from the
Kerrville Mountain Sun.
Please call me as soon as you get this message.”

Some shard of good sense told me not to call J. Tom Graham. Just take the news account of last night’s murder—which, I’d noticed, did not mention the victim’s lips being sewn shut—put it together with the four obits, and take the little stack of paper up to the Crafts Corral for Eric Roth to make into one of those little Japanese ducks. Whatever weirdness was going on in the Hill Country was none of my business. If I wasn’t damn careful it might keep me from having fun at camp.

Under the gun from the steer’s eyeball, I punched J. Tom’s number. I lit a cigar and took a few puffs as I waited for him to come on the line. The cat watched rather disapprovingly, I thought.

“Kinkster, how are you?” said J. Tom.

“Long time between dreams,” I said.

“A dream’s why I called you as a matter of fact. Just after you left, an old lady came in. Said her name was Violet Crabb—”

“That’s a funny name.”

“So’s Kinky. Anyway, she said her sister died a few months back in a house fire near Pipe Creek. Sounded like one of the obits you were looking for, so I thought I’d call you. She thinks her sister was murdered.”

“Go on,” I said. I felt a prickly sensation on the back of my neck and it wasn’t a daddy longlegs.

“Seems her dead sister appeared to her in a dream. She was wearing a white, formal dress and walking toward her. Suddenly, she could see blood dripping from her breast and her side and her neck—”

“Hold the weddin’, J. Tom. It’s just some old lady’s dream. Maybe Violet Crabb had gas or something. Why are you trying to spook me with this?”

“I thought you’d be interested since you were checking up on the same old lady she was dreaming about. The two of you coming in like that was a little too close for coincidence. What’s goin’ on, Kinkster? You wouldn’t be wearing your Sherlock Holmes cap under that cowboy hat, would you?”

“Hell, no, J. Tom. You know I always wear my little yamaha under my cowboy hat. Covers my horns.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been hearin’ some rumors out of the courthouse to the effect that some of the recent deaths around the Hill Country may not have been from natural causes. I checked over some of those obits and there’s been a lot of little old ladies droppin’ like Texas houseflies around here lately.”

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.

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—”