Armadillos & Old Lace (10 page)

As I stood a little distance away there seemed something rather poignant about the tableau. The innocent intensity of the small boy and the equally intense sincerity of the large man. Chess, like life, is one of those rarest of endeavors that should never be taken lightly. In the case of life, it should, of course, never be taken at all.

“Treat adults like children and children like adults!” I said, quoting Tom after the little tableau had dissolved and Danny had rushed off to buy Cokes with the other kids.

“Why not?” he said to the rows of empty tables and benches. “Almost nothing’s ever been accomplished the other way.”

“True,” I said. “As I’m finding out in this current Kerrville caper.”

“What’s the latest with Pat Knox’s little mystery?”

“It’s not really Pat Knox’s little mystery.” 

“Whose is it?”

“I’m not sure. But whosever it is is going to have his or her hands rather full. I think I’ve stepped on something and it ain’t third base. I was going through the marriage license applications down at the courthouse the other day and I discovered that all five victims were seventy-six years old.”

“The likelihood of that occurring naturally is statistically very small.”

“Tom, they were all killed on their birthdays.” 

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. Sonny boy, you’ve got to turn this over to the sheriff. We’re running a children’s camp here. We can’t allow the ranch to become involved with anything like this. We’re not equipped to handle it. We’re not geared—”

“I’ll meet with the sheriff, all right? I’ll go into town tomorrow.”

David Hart, wearing his funny red hat and carrying a clipboard, wandered into the dining hall just in time to hear my last sentence. He looked down briefly at his clipboard.

“We can spare you,” he said.

Even then, on that torpid Monday afternoon in July as I was driving Miss Dusty to Kerrville, some part of my consciousness, some dim forgotten street corner of my peripheral vision, was stirring with the unpleasant notion that the baton pass to Sheriff Kaiser would not entirely extricate me from the ancient rusted meat hook that was this case. Maybe it was a deeper, darker well than a small-town sheriff s department could fathom or plumb. Maybe God, in his divine evenhanded perversity, was watching over all amateur Jewish private investigators and wished them to receive credit for stumbling over vital clues. That was unlikely, I figured, as I smoked a cigar and sped with the top down beneath a canopy of cottonwoods, cypress, and Spanish oak. God had created them, so they’d told me in Sunday school. God had also created a rather tedious situation with me and Sheriff Frances Kaiser. Not that I particularly blamed God. I wasn’t even sure if God was a he, she, or it. Possibly, he was the guy on the dim street corner of my peripheral vision who was looking for spare change for a sex change.

Maybe he was none of the above.

“A door is ajar,” said Dusty.

“Nice of you to mention it,” I said, “but why’d you wait till I was halfway to Kerrville?” I opened the driver’s door and slammed it shut again.

“Thank you,” said Dusty.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

As Dusty and I climbed the steep hill between the ranch and Kerrville, I noticed that the sky was growing increasingly foreboding. If you were writing a Victorian novel you might say the clouds were becoming edged with pewter. In Texas, we’d say they were getting dark.

However you described it, the changing weather was only a physical manifestation of what I sensed were deeper, deadlier changes. Changes within the psyche of a killer capable of restraint and of remarkable rage. Changes in a weatherbeaten, war-torn world that was capable of absolutely anything. No big deal. I’d turn my evidence of murder most methodical over to the powers that be. That’d be all she wrote, so I thought. At the time, assuredly, I did not expect the hand of fate to be quite so well manicured. Nor was I aware that it might indeed be clutching quite such a prolific or such a poisoned pen.

Thunder was crashing and lightning was forking the summer sky as I parked Dusty near the courthouse on Earl Garrett Street. The cat, I figured, was probably hiding under the bed in the trailer. She did not particularly like the sound of thunder, and Sambo liked it even less. It wasn’t all that popular with me, either, in spite of Ratso’s oft-noted contention that thunderstorms produce “negative ionization” which is “psychologically beneficial” to people. Ratso says that pounding surf can produce the same effects as thunderstorms in making you feel more energetic and creative—though, to my knowledge, Ratso’s never been near an ocean in his life, having rarely left the confines of Manhattan, which, according to Ratso, is a positive-ion environment conducive to suicide. Ratso also says that rich people often secretly install negative-ion generating machines in all the rooms of their houses, which helps them constantly think up more ways of making money and thereby maintain their wealth.

I asked Ratso once, as I looked around his hideously cluttered apartment, why he hadn’t bought a negative-ion generator for his own place. Aside from the obvious reason that there wasn’t any room for it. His answer was: “They don’t sell ’em on Canal Street.”

I walked patiently, luxuriantly through the storm to the courthouse and shook the rain off my cowboy hat into a nearby spittoon. The halls were dark, and so was the look on the secretary’s face when I told her I had to see the sheriff but I didn’t have an appointment.

“Always make an appointment if you want to see the sheriff,” said the secretary. “She’s got a very busy schedule and she hardly ever sees anyone without an appointment.”

“I’ll write that down in my Big Chief tablet,” I said.

Considerably later, and much to the secretary’s surprise, I found myself looking across the big desk at Sheriff Kaiser. I don’t know whether or not the sheriff had a negative-ion generator going for her but the room certainly had an almost palpable negative atmosphere. The secretary left and closed the door behind her.

“What do you want?” said the sheriff.

“Not a thing,” I said. “Just have a look at these.”

In a manner roughly akin to Bret Maverick, I fanned out the five copies of the marriage license applications on the desk before the sheriff.

“What’re these?” she said.

“Five of a kind.”

As Frances Kaiser adjusted her glasses and picked up the documents I walked over to the window and watched the storm. I lit a cigar and watched the trees on the courthouse lawn sway with an almost violent grace like dancers in Borneo. I imagined the emotions that must’ve been traversing the sheriff’s face as she read. Doubt, astonishment, thinly veiled anger. I was sure she’d been working diligently to get the grand jury seated, possibly prodding the D.A. to get his case together in order to gain an indictment against the suspect still in custody. The man she believed had sewn an old lady’s lips together. Now all that might be out the window. Into the storm.

Once the forces of the law are set into motion, once the D.A. goes for an indictment, the grand jury almost invariably rubber-stamps his recommendation. As Rambam once said: “If the D.A. really wanted it, the grand jury would indict a couch.” But now the forces of the law in this little town might have to take a step backward and rethink things a bit. Outside the window the forces of nature continued wild and unabated. They were not influenced by the D.A.’s recommendation. They were not subject to the sheriffs authority. They did seem to be moderately interested in exactly how far they could propel a deputy’s straw cowboy hat across the courthouse lawn and down Main Street.

“I see,” said the sheriff, as she stared past the window out into the fury of the storm. Her face was an emotionless porcelain mask that in some strange way seemed more unnerving than any display of mere emotion. I puffed politely on the cigar and waited. “You obtained these documents—”

“Down the hall,” I said. “But it was Earl Buck-elew’s idea to check the marriage license applications.”

“Ol’ Earl,” said the sheriff, her eyes going back in time. “We used to sneak onto his place and go fishin’ when I was a kid.”

“The same. He claims widow women always lie about their ages.”

Sheriff Kaiser smiled. It was a nice smile. Sheriffs usually don’t get to smile a lot but when they do it’s always appreciated. Kind of like Ronald Reagan giving a turkey to an orphanage on Thanksgiving.

The sheriff stood up, got rid of the smile, and stacked the pages neatly on her desk. It was a gesture of dismissal and I edged toward the door.

“You’ve been a good citizen,” she said. “We’ll take it from here.”

“I just did what anybody would do.”

“If that was really true,” she said, “I’d be out of a job.”

I opened the door and headed for the hallway.

“One more thing,” the sheriff called after me.

I turned around. She was standing like a giant in the doorway.

“Tell Earl Buckelew that one of the little Kaiser girls said hello.”

It was around eleven that night when the phone rang in the green trailer. Pam Stoner, the green-eyed handicrafts counselor from Oklahoma, and I were getting acquainted on a big flat rock out back. We had a Roy Rogers blanket that had somehow survived the lifetime of childhood and a few shots of Jack Daniel’s with a little Mr. Pibb backing it up. The cat was watching from the roof of the trailer.

“I’d better take this call,” I said.

“You really
are
Jewish,” said Pam Stoner.

“The ugly head of anti-Semitism rears up out of a peaceful, bucolic setting,” I said, as I, too, reared up and moved toward the trailer.

“Bring the bottle with you when you come back,” she said. She was smiling and her star-colored eyes seemed to be shimmering in the moonlight. A whippoorwill was calling from a nearby juniper tree. Maybe that should’ve been the call I took.

I grabbed the bottle with one hand and took the persistent blower from its cradle with the other. “Syrian Embassy,” I said.

“This is Pat Knox,” said the blower, “returning your call. I already know what happened at the sheriff s office today, so you don’t need to fill me in on that. You done good.”

“Thanks, Your Honor. Looks like the sheriff now realizes these five deaths are related.”

“Gettin’ her to realize it is only half the battle. The other half is gettin’ her to do somethin’ about it.”

“She assured me the full force of the law will be behind the case.”

Pat Knox laughed. It was a long, hearty, bitter laugh. When she recovered, her tone was dangerous and conspiratorial in nature.

“You and I have sure put her on the right track, but if you’ll pardon the choice of words, this case may just be too kinky for the sheriff.”

“It may be too kinky for me, too.” I twisted the top off the bottle of Jack and took a short pull.

“That’s not quite true,” said the judge. “And if there’s one thing I know about you it’s that you’ve got the kind of mind that loves a good mystery.”

I looked out the back window of the trailer and saw Pam lying on her back on the big rock in a very suggestive position.

“That’s right, Judge. Me and Miss Marple love a good mystery. What’ve you got?”

“Come see for yourself. You’re not gonna quit on me, are you? Let that big ol’ sheriff scare you?” The big ol’ sheriff didn’t scare me. In fact, she’d turned in a rather poignant performance that afternoon. But there was something almost sirenlike in Pat Knox’s appeal. And I wasn’t referring to the thing that’s mounted on the top of police cars.

I looked out the window and saw that nothing was going to be mounted around the ranch that night. Pam was asleep on the rock.

“Okay,” I said. “Where do we meet?” 

“Midnight. The Garden of Memories.”

“The cemetery?”

“Boo!” said Pat Knox, and she hung up.