Armadillos & Old Lace (15 page)

“Kinkster!” he shouted. “Let me introduce myself. Boyd Elder’s the name. Why didn’t you tell me you were the Kinkster?”

“I’m not the Kinkster,” I said, stalling for time to figure out what the hell was going on. “I’m a Kinky impersonator.”

Boyd Elder laughed. He was friendlier but he still had that dangerous, high-pitched, redneck laugh going for him. Laughter’s a signature that’s hard to forge.

“I’ve been readin’ all about you,” he said. “Right here in the
Kerrville Mountain Sun.”
He waved the newspaper before my disbelieving eyes.

“Yep,” said Elder, “that’s a right interesting case you’re workin’ on. How many little old ladies been killed? Is it five or six?”

“Let me see that.”

Elder forked over the paper and I skimmed the front-page story. It was today’s paper, the byline was J. Tom Graham, and just about everything, including my involvement in the case, was pretty much public knowledge now. This would change the river for sure. Kick the investigation into overdrive. And, much worse, possibly create a dangerous sea change in the killer’s mind, not to mention spreading sheer terror amongst the geriatric multitudes in the Hill Country. On the other hand, the case was not exactly galloping to a conclusion. Maybe if we got everything out in the open, the killer would die of exposure.

“Anything I can do,” Boyd Elder was saying, “I’ll be happy to help. Boy, can you imagine that. Comin’ all the way down here from New York to tackle this murder case here in Kerrville. Once a Texan, always a Texan. Right, Kinkster? I
can
call you Kinkster?” Boyd Elder laughed again. Same laugh. He was probably going to die laughing. If he wasn’t careful I was going to speed the plow a bit and strangle him with my own hands.

“You want to help,” I said, “here’s how you can do it. Those flowers you sent to Gert McLane last week. The lady at the old folks’ home on Water Street. Could you find out who ordered them?” 

“They were ordered by phone. Let me check out the credit card stub. Be right back.”

He went into his office and I could hear him riffling through files and drawers and generally being busy as a little bee helping the big private dick who’d come all the way from New York just to solve the case. That hadn’t been, of course, my reason for coming down to Texas, but I had to admit, it looked good in print. I scanned the story again and wondered what the hell was going to happen now. Any one of a million things. The killer could take a sabbatical till things cooled off. He could become more brazen. Try to contact the newspaper, the sheriff, or even the Kinkster. He could thrive in the media attention and increase his killing pace. Anything was possible. All bets were off now.

“Here we go,” Elder was hollering. “Good bookkeeping always pays off.” I took the little slip of paper from the florist.

The name on the slip was V. Finnegan. There was also a phone number and credit card number. Elder very obligingly let me take the credit card stub and the newspaper. We swapped phone numbers and hobbies and I told him I’d be in touch if I thought of anything else.

“You’ve been a big help,” I said. “This may bring us a lot closer to identifying him.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Elder.

“Why not?” I said, putting the stub in my pocket and lighting up a cigar.

“Cherchez la femme”
he said, in an accent hideous enough to make any self-respecting frog hop for the nearest puddle. But I wasn’t a frog and I wasn’t a prince. I just wanted the story to be over.

“Spit it, Boyd,” I said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The caller,” he said, “was a woman.”

Elder didn’t laugh.

Neither did I.

I popped into Pampell’s to have a cup of coffee, settle my nerves, and see if Jimmie Rodgers’s ghost was still hanging around the old opera house. After the third vaguely familiar person asked me how the case was going, I got a little nervous in the service and bugged out for the dugout. I drove Dusty past the ranch cutoff and over to Earl Buckelew’s place. I needed to get away from people for a while and Earl’s was perfect for that. Just Earl and his six-toed black tomcat. Neither of them asked too many hard questions. I knew the sheriff would not be happy with the
Mountain Sun
story. I doubted if my father would be overly pleased with it either, since it clearly was a giant step toward the destruction of the separation between ranch and state. Not only was I prominently mentioned in the piece, but so was Echo Hill. It wasn’t precisely best foot forward to base your murder investigation out of a summer camp for children.

“So now,” said Earl Buckelew, gesturing with his cane toward his own copy of the
Mountain Sun
,
“he
knows who
you
are and
you
don’t know who
he
is.” 

“I don’t even know for sure if he’s a he,” I said. “It was a woman who ordered the flowers sent to the last victim. Also, it’d take a pretty fair seamstress to sew somebody’s lips together. You don’t sew, do you?”

“I don’t sew, I don’t chew, and I don’t play with girls that do.”

I showed Earl the credit card stub with the phone number. “Looks like a local number, doesn’t it?” 

“That’d be Bandera.”

“Mind if I make a call or two on your phone?” 

“Long’s you don’t call Australia,” he said. I noticed he was wearing his “I Climbed Ayers Rock” cap. In 1985, about six months after my mother died, Earl, Tom, McGovern, and I—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—had visited Piers Akerman and his family in the land down under. Our adventures, no doubt, will be chronicled on another occasion, but it is not entirely inconsequential to note that Earl enjoyed himself immensely on the trip and developed somewhat of a clinical recall whenever Australia is mentioned. I was determined to head him off before he got out the photo albums.

“Let’s see what happens when I dial the number of this V. Finnegan lady who ordered the flowers.” 

“It’ll be disconnected,” said Earl, leaning back in his grandfather’s old green rocking chair.

“We don’t know that,” I said, getting up and walking over to Earl’s old phone on the wall. “Here we go—555-8826.... It’s been disconnected. How could you be so sure of that?”

“No killer that’s worth a shit is gonna give you his phone number that easily.”

“You’d make a good detective.”

“Beginner’s luck,” said Earl, and he winked. Very few people know how to wink and fewer still know when to wink, but Earl Buckelew knew both along with a lot of other human talents and that’s just one little reason why I’ve known him forever and it still seems like the wink of an eye.

“Okay, so it’s disconnected. Let’s try the credit card company. It’s a 1-800 number.”

“Sure you’re not callin’ New Zealand?”

“More likely New Jersey.”

When McGovern and I left Australia, Earl and Tom had stayed on and traveled to the outback and to New Zealand. Earl, having once been a champion sheepshearer, loved New Zealand, where there are more sheep than people. I’ve long suspected there may be more sheep than people in America, too, these days. It’s just harder to gather the statistics or, for that matter, the wool, because it’s harder to tell them apart. Having left Tom and Earl to their own adventures, McGovern and I had traversed to Tahiti, where we encountered a highly disproportionate number of transvestites and hon-eymooners, and from where McGovern set sail for Rarotonga and I returned for a gig I couldn’t get out of in the States, thereby becoming the first white man to ever fly from Australia to the Jewish Community Center in Houston, Texas.

I dialed the 1-800 number and listened while some automated nerd ran down the whole menu of buttons to push if you wanted to hang yourself from a shower rod and finally got around to telling you what to do if you had a rotary phone. Earl, of course, had a rotary phone. For Earl it was still a rotary world and maybe, considering the frantic, mindless, unhappy nature of modem times, it was the best of all possible worlds. The recorded voice told me to wait.

I waited.

Then a real live, bright, chirpy, young woman’s voice came on the line and said: “This is Debbie Ahasuerus. How can I help you?”

“I’m just checking a recent billing on my card. I don’t recall making the purchase.” I gave her the account number on the stub.

Debbie Ahasuerus had the information right at her fingertips. I hardly had time to light my cigar.

“The card member’s responsibility for this account has been terminated,” she said. “And we have a note. Our security department’s been cooperating with the Kerr County Sheriff s Office on this matter. We’ll just continue to leave the account open. Is that all right?” It looked like the sheriff was indeed on the case.

I took a rather unsteady puff on the cigar. “Yes, that’s fine.”

“And the corporation extends its condolences, sir, on the passing of your wife, Virginia.”

I mumbled a few appreciative words to Debbie Ahasuerus and hung up the phone. There was a ringing in my head and I turned to Earl, who was rocking in his old chair and staring thoughtfully off into the middle distance at something that probably had happened before I was born. Then the sudden reminder occurred to me, accompanied by a slight shiver, that the solution to this mystery might very well lie in something that had happened before I was born. Back when the rotary phone was the coming thing.

“Earl, you got a phone book around here?”

“Over on the table somewhere there’s an old one.”

“That’d be perfect.”

I sorted through barbecue, cookies, donuts, and cakes that his kids and admirers had brought him. With gout and high blood pressure, Earl’s doctors had decided that he shouldn’t eat anything and Earl had decided the hell with them. The phone book was there, all right. About the size of a comic book. The year was 1989. Close enough for line dancing.

Bandera made Kerrville look like a big town, so it wasn’t hard to find Virginia Finnegan. There weren’t any other Finnegans or any other Virginias, so that was that. However improbable it was, it had to be.

“Earl,” I said, “you remember that old lady in Bandera who drowned in the bathtub about six months ago?”

“I recollect I do.”

“Well, here’s something else to recollect. She just called the florist and ordered a dozen roses.”

I didn’t know what the hell was going on but I sure as hell was determined to find out. Why would a woman who drowned in her bathtub be ordering roses six months later? She shouldn’t even have any business ordering a rubber duck. I knew, of course, that it hadn’t been Virginia Finnegan, the first apparent victim, who’d placed the order. It was no doubt somebody who had taken her credit card and, very probably, her life.

I knew from limited personal experience, and from long late-night talks with Rambam, that some of the biggest souvenir hounds in the world were serial killers. They almost never dispatched a victim without retaining something for the wall, the album, the hidden drawer, or the dusty old hope chest up in the attic. The keepsake might be a credit card, driver’s license, photograph, article of clothing, finger, eyeball, or forget-me-not swath of pubic hair. If you stopped to think about it, the serial killer and the trophy hunter had a surprisingly similar mindset. There was little difference in the game they played— only in the game they hunted.

I was a hunter, too, I reflected, as I sat at my little desk in the green trailer and listened as the shouts and laughter of the children lightly segued into a chorus of cicadas and a lonely whippoorwill calling long distance to its mate. I was a hunter who tracked the wide open spaces between the ears of a madman, just barely within shouting distance of reality. Me and my shadow of death strollin’ down the avenue. No season. No limit. No regulations. God was the game warden. If there was a God. And if it was a game.

The cat and I were alone, but there was a certain intensity in the air. I’d brewed a large pot of coffee that lent an ambience vaguely reminiscent of some long-ago Bobby Kennedy campaign headquarters. Along the inner walls of the trailer where the little watermelon children once frolicked, Pentagon-like profiles of the seven victims were now pinned. But the portraits were pitifully incomplete. Patterns were not plentiful.