Armadillos & Old Lace (22 page)

“Mule barn,” said Earl Buckelew, as he habitually answered the phone.

“Earl!” I shouted from the pay phone in the lobby of the Menger Hotel.

“Kinky Dick!” he shouted back.

“Earl, I’ve got a problem. It involves two women—”

“That’s always a problem.”

“The problem is that I don’t know them and I’m hoping you do.” I lit a cigar in the enclosed phone booth and it soon filled up with the very pleasant aroma of good Honduran tobacco.

“Just a minute,” said Earl. “Let me turn down the television.” I heard the sound of Earl’s cane clumping across the floor to the television, then I heard it again, quite distinctly this time, on the return trip to the phone.

“Damned A-rabs and Jews goin’ at it again,” he said.

“We just can’t help ourselves, Earl.”

“Cowboys and Indians,” he said.

“Anyway, you ever heard of Hattie Blocker or Dossie Tolson?”

“I never heard of that last one, but Hattie—if that’s the same damn one I remember ...”

“How many Hatties can there be?”

“Oh, you go back a ways, you’d be surprised. There’d be a Hattie poppin’ outta every rumble seat.” 

“This one’s about seventy-six years old, Earl, and she’s not likely to be poppin’ out of rumble seats anymore, and I’ve got to find her to try to get some evidence about a man we believe has already murdered seven women.”

“Yeah, she was a fine little filly.”

“Well, the question is where is she now?”

“Back in the thirties I used to take her out in my ol’ blue Model A roadster. It was the first car in the Hill Country to have a radio put in it, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t, Earl. But do you know where this woman is now?”

“Hell, it’s been a while—I’ve lost touch with her—but it seems like I heard ... if it’s the same one ... she’s over at Purple Hills, that place in Bandera. Some people call ’em old folks’ homes.”

“Earl, one more question. This Hattie Blocker— this young girl you used to drive around in your Model A ...”

“Fine
young filly.”

“Yes, I know. But just tell me one thing: Was she ever a debutante?”

“Not when she was with me,” he said.

Dusty and I flew out of San Antonio like a Texas blue norther heading east with a vengeance. We took I-10 to the 46 cutoff, then blew through Pipe Creek on the road to Bandera. All along the way the girl with no name or face haunted me, her fearful featureless countenance rising up like a violated vision on the dim tie-dyed horizon of American history.

I’d called ahead to the Purple Hills Nursing Home and learned that Hattie Blocker was indeed a patient there. No, it would not be a problem for her godson, Oswald T. Wombat, to pay her a visit later this afternoon. I asked the nurse how Hattie’s memory was and she said her short-term memory was almost nonexistent. I said that was a blessing and asked somewhat trepidatiously about her long-term memory. If Hattie was cookin’ on another planet she wasn’t going to be much good helping to nail Hoover.

“The old days are about all the poor dear has left,” the nurse had said.

“Can she remember over fifty years ago?”

“Like it was yesterday.”

“That’s a blessing, too,” I’d said.

Everything was a blessing, I thought. It’s just that none of us knew it yet. Most people today didn’t even realize that daddy’d taken the T-bird away until they tried backing out of their driveway and got skidmarks on their ass.

As I drove through the blazing streets of Bandera, the image of the young woman’s body without a face began to get to me and I became somewhat garrulous with Dusty.

“I have this really spooky feeling that she’s trying to tell me something,” I said. “I’ve known a name without a face and a face without a name, but this poor child appears to be redlining in both departments. Yet I can hear her voice clear as a loudspeaker across a used car lot. ‘Help me!’ she’s saying. ‘Help me!’ If we can’t delve into the past and arrange this case in its accurate historical framework, Willis Hoover, even though he may be guilty as sin, is surely going to walk.”

“There is a problem in the electrical system,” said Dusty. “Prompt service is required.”

Hattie Blocker looked like Barbara Fritchie on a bad hair day. I’d been to Barbara Fritchie’s house in Frederick, Maryland. I’d been to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. Now I was at Hattie Blocker’s house.

There’s no place like home, I always say.

The reason there’s no place like home is that home is not a place. It’s a time in your life when maybe you thought you were happy, a time you think back to long after your three minutes are up. I didn’t have to look back. I just had to look around Hattie’s empty, antiseptic little room at Purple Hills. It could’ve easily been Doc Phelps’s last little room at the state hospital in New Mexico. There was nothing here but Hattie and her memories. And Hattie wasn’t talking.

Hell, I probably wouldn’t’ve been talking either if I’d had one of those oxygen things plugged into my nose, everyone I knew was dead, and a strange-looking cowboy was sitting at my bedside acting like he was dying to light that cigar any minute.

“Hattie,” I said softly.

Nothing.

“Hattie,” I said, turning up my vocal mike, “I really need your help with this. I just saw a beautiful picture of you with your friends at the 1938 Cotillion Ball of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. You looked grand.”

Hattie said nothing but her eyes were shining. I pulled my chair a little closer to the bed.

“Hattie, this is very serious. I wouldn’t even tell you this, but we need you to help us convict a criminal. He’s already killed seven of the debutantes at the cotillion, Hattie.”

I reeled off the list as if I were reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and noticed that Hattie seemed to be trembling slightly. This was a hell of a way to make a living.

“Virginia ... Myrtle .. . Amaryllis . .. Prudence ... Octavia ... Nellie ... Gertrude ...”

Hattie Blocker said nothing.

I got up from the chair and walked over to the little window. Hopeless. Hopeless and undeniably cruel. Of all the times in my life when I may have taken advantage of people and situations, this had to be the lowest. Terrifying an old lady who was already walking the garden path to heaven’s door. It did not make me proud to be an American.

I looked back to where Hattie lay propped up on the bed. Still motionless. Eyes straight ahead. She looked like a little bundle of twigs. I gazed out the window again.

Then a little twig snapped in my head. I had to go ahead with this inquisition. It was too late to ask the Baby Jesus what other flavors you got? Dossie Tolson could be in worse shape than Hattie Blocker, if indeed she was even still alive. The girl with no face and no name was trying to get through but I was having trouble adjusting my set. I had to keep walking down Yesterday Street and hope I could get wherever the hell I was going before today became tomorrow and yesterday was lost forever to a country funeral, a hotel fire, or a cat pissing on a telephone number.

“Look, Hattie,” I said with some excitement. “Look what’s cornin’ up the road. It’s Earl Buckelew in his blue Model A roadster. And you’re sittin’ right next to him. My, you look fine. And he’s got that cute little rumble seat back there. Wait. I can hear his radio playin’. What’s the song? Oh, I hear it now. ‘Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone else but me ...’ ”

I stood perfectly still, continued staring out the window. A moment passed, I suppose. What Hollywood screenwriters are fond of calling a beat. In truth, just another step down that garden path that all of us unconsciously tread every day of our lives. Hattie was just a little ahead of us in the line.

“She was a cute little thing,” she said, in a surprisingly clear voice. “A saucy little redhead. The boys all liked her and some of the girls were jealous.”

I gazed out the window and held my breath.

“I told that Octavia. I said, ‘Octavia, you got a big mouth, honey. Don’t you go spreadin’ scandal. You could ruin that poor girl.’ ”

Octavia, I thought. Octavia. Oh, my fucking god. Octavia with her lips sewn together.

I waited. There was nothing for a while.

Then she said, “Don’t remember her last name anymore. The little redhead. But her first name was Susannah. Like ‘O Susannah, don’t you cry for me.’ ”

“Try hard, Hattie,” I said. “Can you remember Susannah’s last name?”

She was trying but I could see that it was useless.

“I want to sleep now,” she said finally.

Her face looked like a well-loved, well-worn human road map and I suspected that Robert Frost was right. She had miles to go before she slept.

“You’ve been very helpful, Hattie,” I said. “God bless you.”

I squeezed her hand and walked to the door. At the door I looked back at the old woman and the little room.

“You really looked beautiful in that Model A,” I said.

Her face was still turned to the window when I left.

Dusty was waiting for me right where I’d left her under a large Spanish oak tree in the front circular driveway of Purple Hills. I’d just climbed in and put the key in the ignition when I saw a florist’s van pull up to the side entrance. Boyd Elder got out, opened the back of the van, and, moments later, entered the side entrance of the building carrying a bouquet of yellow roses.

Maybe it was something Hattie Blocker had told me or maybe it was something I’d been unconsciously worried about all along, but the noose that had seemed to be tightening nicely around Willis Hoover’s neck now appeared to be whirling wildly and wickedly like a lasso out of control in the hand of a very sick cowboy. I jumped out of the car and dashed across the driveway.

“Don’t forget your key,” said Dusty.

The peaceful green lawns of the nursing home belied the dark thoughts fairly zimming through my brain as I scuttled across the side entrance like a crab on cruise control. Was it possible that we all could’ve missed the boat so completely? Was it possible that I’d soon be staring dumbstruck at what used to be Hattie Blocker?

The side door was locked now.

I raced around again to the front of the building and my mind was racing right along with me. Of course Willis Hoover was the wrong guy. It would have been virtually impossible to have sewn Octavia’s lips together with a nervous hand disorder. And if he grew yellow roses, why order them from a store? And what about Boyd Elder? Last seen owning a little flower shop. Easy access to all kinds of flowers. Last seen helping with the investigation. Pointing us in the direction of Willis Hoover. Last seen carrying yellow roses into Purple Hills. Last seen locking the goddamn door behind him.

I bolted through the main entrance and shot down the nearly deserted corridor like a runaway bowling ball past a geezer in a wheelchair wearing a Houston Oilers cap. The Oilers were having their troubles and so was I.

“Where’s the fire?” he said.

I hooked a left at the far end of the hall and slowed down halfway along the side corridor. The place was all pretty quiet and peaceful, like an old library where somebody’d checked out all the books and just never brought them back. I ankled it carefully over to the vicinity of Hattie’s room. I listened with dread and was mildly relieved to hear the two voices in conversation.