Armadillos & Old Lace (14 page)

Not unlike the apocryphal Indian tribe, the children were gathered on their blankets under the stars listening to Uncle Tom. Not unlike the chief, he was a wise old man and Uncle Tom had been Uncle Tom for many, many years. Casting my mind back upon everything that had happened since I dropped off the laundry that morning, I had a rather ennui-driven realization that Kinky had also been Kinky for many, many years. Willie Nelson had once told me that the thing he was really best at was “getting into trouble and getting out of it.” Maybe I was only good at the first part.

“But some of the young bucks thought the chief was getting too old,” Uncle Tom continued. “They wanted to show him up in front of the whole tribe. So they talked it over that day and finally one of them said, ‘Look, I’ve got a plan. I’ll go out and find a small bird that fits inside my closed palm. Tonight at the campfire I’ll ask the chief if the bird is alive or dead. If he says it’s alive, I’ll squeeze my hand quickly and open it and show everyone that it’s dead. If he says it’s dead, I’ll just open my hand and the bird will fly away. Either way, in front of the whole tribe, the old chief will look like a fool.’ ”

I was feeling kind of like a fool myself. After running into the sheriff at the rest home and witnessing several of Gert McLane’s fragile extremities poking out of that bear trap of a hospital bed, we’d spent the rest of the afternoon in the sheriffs office listening to her lecture us like schoolchildren. It was her case, her jurisdiction, and she would do whatever it takes to keep us from meddling. What
ever
it takes, she’d said. It wasn’t going to take too much, I thought. I was about half ready to hop on a plane for New York, where nobody gave a damn what anybody did. What was stopping me? What, indeed.

I looked around at the rapt circle of little faces all watching Uncle Tom. Even the counselors and the older kids who’d no doubt heard this story many times were listening intently. Hell, so was I.

“That night,” Uncle Tom was saying, “after the meal and the ceremonies and the stories and the dancing were over, the old chief stood up in front of the tribe and asked if anyone had any questions or anything to say. The young buck stood up in the back and came forward into the firelight holding out a closed fist. He said, ‘O great chief, I have a question to ask of you. I’m holding in my hand a small bird. The question I ask you, O great and wise chief, is simply this: Is the bird in my hand living or is it dead?’ “Well, the old chief realized at once what the young buck was trying to do. He was attempting to show him up in front of the whole tribe, because whichever way the chief answered the question he would be made to appear foolish. The chief thought for a moment. Then he looked at the young man and said, ‘You’ve come to me with a question. You say you hold in your hand a small bird and you ask is the bird living or is it dead?’ ”

Every child was listening and watching as Uncle Tom lifted his arm dramatically toward the sky, palm upward in a closed fist, and intoned the final words of the old chief:

“ ‘The answer to your question is: That, my son, depends on you.’ ”

Later that night, after the bell had rung for lights out, Tom, Sambo, and I were having a snack in the kitchen of the lodge. I was drinking coffee and eating a sweet roll, Tom was drinking milk and reading his newspaper, and he and Sambo were sharing a great many sweet rolls. This was a ritual with the two of them, and watching it almost gave you the sense that all was right with the world.

“No doubt about it,” I said. “The sheriff means business this time. She can get a court order. She can have me arrested. She can make things a real nightmare for me if I stay on the case.”

“And what does Pat Knox say about this?”

“She’s part of the problem. There’s the big sheriff with her hands on her hips standing in the doorway watching me leave her office and sitting there behind her is the little judge winking at me. I’m caught between two women and I’m not hosin’ either one of them.”

“That’s a first,” said Tom, as he gave Sam another sweet roll.

“Even worse,” I said, “is if I hang around here, lead two-hour nature hikes up Echo Hill to the crystal beds, become active in the garden club, sing songs around the campfire, and, as a result, more people die. There’s certain leads, weird hunches I’m working on that the sheriff would never follow up even if I could explain them to her. It takes a not quite normal mind to solve a case like this.”

“Sounds like they need you, my boy,” said Tom jovially.

“Of course they do. They just don’t know it. And I don’t know whether it’s worth risking my health, my happiness, and my personal freedom, such as they are.”

“That, my son, depends on you,” said Tom, and he turned back to the sports page of the
Austin American-Statesman.

“Is there an echo on this ranch? All I need now is a moral dilemma. Hell, I didn’t get where I am letting others tell me what to do and what not to do. I’ve walked my own road. I’ve worked hard. I’m the laundry man! I’m the hummingbird man!”

Tom put down his newspaper.

“I’m
the hummingbird man,” he said, and he gave another sweet roll to Sambo.

It is not usually considered normal for a grown man to look forward each night to sleeping with a cat. But the early hours of the laundryman job and the additional stress of investigating the handiwork of a particularly talented serial killer were wearing me out. I was dimly aware that Pam Stoner, in her faded, perfectly fitting, sinuously crotched cutoffs, was staying up in the Crafts Corral to watch the kiln. I had all I could handle cuddling up with the cat and counting yellow roses. I had decided long before the campfire embers were cold that I was never going to squeeze my fist and kill the small bird. I was always going to open my hand and let it fly away. In a strange way I knew that what happened with this case did depend on me.

If you ever have a choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There’s always time to be humble later, once you’ve been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong. By then, of course, it’s too late to be cocky.

“It may seem arrogant,” I said to the cat, “but if I don’t get to the bottom of this—find out why somebody’s croaking these old ladies—I doubt if anybody ever will. Is that terribly immodest?”

The cat, who was by nature, of course, wholly self-absorbed, did not seem to particularly care.

“As Golda Meir once remarked: ‘Don’t act so humble—you’re not that great.’ ”

The cat affected no reaction whatsoever to this statement. The politics and culture of the Middle East had never held much interest for her. Her idea of a fascinating place was probably Sardinia.

Around eleven-thirty I poured a shot of Jameson’s down my neck a little too quickly and almost needed a Heimlich maneuver. Hell of a way to go. Hank Williams, Gandhi, and the cat all hanging around watching you choke to death. By about the time Cinderella met the guy with the shoe fetish I’d managed to recover enough to put on my sarong and go to bed. But I didn’t sleep.

I was thinking of a recurring motif in this case. Something besides the obvious—the yellow roses, the victims being old ladies all of an age. It was a little detail, I was sure—unimportant, inconsequential, just barely pricking my consciousness. Just a feeling I’d seen or heard something several times that I should’ve paid more attention to.

I thought of a conversation I’d had with Tom a few weeks back about baseball. I’d asked him who, in the history of baseball, was the all-time rbi leader by the all-star break.

“Jimmy Foxx,” he’d said.

“Wrong.”

“Not Jimmy Foxx?”

“Not Jimmy Foxx. Not Jimmie Rodgers. Not Jimi Hendrix.”

“Who’s Jimi Hendrix?”

“Played in the Negro leagues. You give up? Okay, I’ll tell you. Hank Greenberg, in 1935—103 rbi’s at the all-star break and they didn’t even pick him for the all-star team.”

We both shook our heads in dismay.

“That’s right,” said Tom, “I remember. The manager was Mickey Cochran, a vicious anti-Semite.”

“It’s still a pretty good piece of trivia.”

Tom looked at me for a moment, then seemed to stare off into the long ago.

“There
is
no trivia,” he said.

As I played the conversation back, in the wide open spaces between my ears I realized that Tom’s last sentence was a great truth. There is no trivia. The principle applied to life, to love, to baseball, to murder investigations. Even to trivia.

I was thinking these trivial thoughts and jimmying with the door of dreamland when I heard a loud clanging sound echoing in the darkness somewhere near my head. The cat and I both leaped sideways. To my relief, it was only someone knocking on the door of the trailer. A trailer, particularly an older model like mine that isn’t ever going anywhere again, has a submarine-like metallic skin that can turn a normal knock in the darkness into almost a psychedelic auditory experience.

I opened the door of the green trailer and saw two green eyes staring into my own. It had to be either a nuclear jackrabbit or else Pam Stoner had decided to take a break from watching ceramic leaf ashtrays glowing in the kiln.

“Come in,” I said. “You scared the shit out of me.” 

“I have that effect on some men,” she said.

I walked over to the bottle of Jameson’s on the little counter beside the sink and poured out two stiff shots. Pam lifted her glass in a toast.

“Here’s to the big private dick,” she said. “I hope you find out who’s killing all the little old ladies.” 

“How did you hear about that?”

“Oh, you know what they say. The ranch is a rumor factory. A girl hears things.”

“And all the time I thought I was successfully disguised as the lonely laundryman of life.”

“Don’t worry. All your secrets will be safe with me. And I’ll bet you’ve got a bunch.”

We clinked glasses, killed the shots, and I felt my hand move softly through Pam’s boyish hair and down her woman’s body. She had that rare ability some women possess of looking stunning and sensual even by bug-light. I kissed her once gently. Then longer and harder until her lips took on the familiar feel of the well-worked webbing of a kid’s first baseball glove.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” I said.

“You already have.”

When Chuck Berry made his one and only trip to Disneyland and saw all the inflated figures of Disney characters there to greet him at the entrance, his first words reportedly were: “Fuck you, Mickey Mouse.” That was pretty much the way I felt about the sheriff and her minions, one of which, I noticed, was waiting the next morning in a plain-wrapped squad car as Dusty and I flew over the cattle guard and drifted down Highway 16 toward Kerrville. A guy with a big head and a big cowboy hat began following us at a respectable distance.

“We seem to have picked up a tail,” I said.

“Your washer fluid is low,” said Dusty.

“After last night,” I said, somewhat confidentially, “your washer fluid would be low, too.”

Dusty coughed politely. The sheriffs deputy stayed there like a flyspeck in the rearview mirror. It was as good a place as any for a sheriff s deputy. The dance cards they’d been dealt in life were rarely very full. Not that I myself lead a bustling, industrious existence; I just had better things to do and places to be than a flyspeck on somebody’s rearview. So I decided to proceed with the investigation until I was forcibly restrained from pursuing the truth. And pursuing the truth, I knew from experience, was almost as difficult and dangerous as pursuing happiness. I also had observed in my travels that the two pursuits were somewhat star-crossed, for just when you finally found one of them you always seemed to have mysteriously misplaced the other.

I pulled Dusty into the parking lot of the little flower shop by the Veterans Cemetery, with the flyspeck still in the rearview and a sense of foreboding clouding the horizon. The guy had just opened the place and was moving pots of flowers around hither and thither when I walked in the door. I did not receive the reception I’d been expecting. The guy, who before had seemed almost ready to give me ether on a piece of Kleenex, now, quite inexplicably, seemed thrilled to see me.