Armadillos & Old Lace (16 page)

Virginia Finnegan was a square dancer. Myrtle Beach belonged to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Amaryllis Davis played bridge. Prudence South was a hyperactive Republican. Octavia Willoughby was a member of the garden club. Beatrice Parks, Pat Knox’s recently discovered victim, had been a Red Cross volunteer once upon a time. And Gert McLane, who’d died in bed not quite as peacefully as she might’ve desired, didn’t even have a hobby as far as I could tell. What a shame, I thought, to go through life and not even be able to tell St. Peter: “I was an adult stamp collector.”

They’d all died on their birthdays. But their lives seemed to have almost nothing in common. At least nothing I could hang my cowboy hat on. In the days ahead many trips to the Butt-Holdsworth would be in order. Many phone calls to Pat Knox, J. Tom Graham, the Boyd Elders, the Debbie Ahasueruses of the world. Many cups of coffee.

Hank and his old pal Gandhi looked on with a glint of encouragement or possibly only curiosity in their eyes as clusters of worshipful daddy longlegs gently undulated upon the placid, glassy waters of their respective high rodeo drag.

Uncle Tom would not be happy with this trailer as a spiritual command center for a murder investigation. Sheriff Kaiser wouldn’t be rapturous, either. That made three of us, for I was hardly a happy camper myself. I was homesick for somewhere I’d never been. For life to be complete. For death to be kind. Or at least for it to be aware that it was cutting into my cocktail hour.

I’d left room on the wall for profiles of future victims. There’d be more where these came from. Death, I suspected, wasn’t going to sleep. Death didn’t know it yet, but neither was I.

“What a damned circus,” Pat Knox said as she sipped a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette at her small desk in her small office. The door was locked. The secretary wasn’t letting through any calls. It was just the two of us and a banana tree that was twice as tall as the little judge and looked about the way I felt. It made sense that if you stayed up pursuing investigative obituary half the night, in the morning you were going to feel half dead. The other half didn’t feel too good, either.

“Seven victims,” said the judge, as she poured half a cup of luke joe into the pot containing the banana tree. “Damn,” she added. “I’m not supposed to do that. It’s not good for it.”

“Who told you coffee’s bad for banana trees?” She didn’t seem to hear me. Just got up and poured herself a fresh cup, killed the cigarette, lit another, and sat back down at her desk.

“Seven victims,” she said. It was getting to be a mantra. “You’d think there’d be an overall, coordinated campaign of some kind, tests for semen, DNA—anything—after seven victims.”

“The sheriff doesn’t care if it’s twelve maids a-milkin’,” I said. “She’s going to run the investigation at her own pace—”

“And scare the livin’ bejesus out of every old lady within a hundred miles of here? There’s so much we’re in the dark about. I hear the sheriff s brought in some psychiatrist from Waco.”

“They
have
psychiatrists in Waco?”

“What I hear, they think the killer’s someone who hated his mother.”

“Where would they get that idea?”

“It’s just so damn frustrating not to know what’s going on. Not to be able to help. I know it’s crazy but I still have the feeling these are sex crimes as well as—”

“Hold the weddin’, Judge. I can tell you right now that the last one wasn’t. The McLane woman died when she was sandwiched by the mechanical bed. If the guy’d raped her he’d have to have been Houdini just to get his pee-pee out in time.”

The judge killed another cigarette and stared at the banana tree. “You do bring a certain sophistication to the case,” she said.

I belched the words: “Thank you, Judge.”

She continued her communion with the banana tree and didn’t crack a smile. There wasn’t a lot to smile about. Someone in the Hill Country was getting away with murder, and damned if it seemed there was anything the two of us could do to stop him. To make matters worse we were confined to a very limited, clandestine role in the whole rancid scenario, like two hoboes plotting together under a trembling trestle as the freight train of law enforcement rumbled by overhead on the way to nowhere.

I walked over to the coffee pot, filled my cup again, and studied the large map of the Hill Country that occupied almost the whole wall of the judge’s office. Little pins, dates, names of victims, all reminded me a bit of my own crime setup inside the green trailer. It was kind of poignant to see how Pat had set this up in her lonely little office, ostracized from the official investigation, no one to share ideas with but the banana tree, almost like a kid with a lemonade stand in a bad location.

“Look,” I said, “we may not have access to the experts, we don’t have much manpower, we don’t have state-of-the-art police procedural mechanisms—”

“What the hell
do
we have?” said the judge.

“We have two people who smoke and drink a lot of coffee and have a lot of accumulated miles along the rusty lifelines of human nature. You were the first person to realize that these deaths weren’t accidental, that they were related and methodically planned. I’ve had some passing experience butting heads with the NYPD, and while the races haven’t always been all that pleasant my track record ain’t too bad. I think the two of us can solve this thing.”

The judge stood up to her full half-banana-tree height and raised her coffee mug.

I raised my cup as well.

“L’ Chaim,” I said.

“What’s that mean?” said the judge.

“Objects may be closer than they appear in the mirror.”

Ten cups of coffee and three trips to the little private investigator’s room later, Pat Knox and I had burrowed our way through the victims’ profiles once again, coming up with no consistent element other than the obvious: old widows getting themselves croaked on their seventy-sixth birthday. The judge hadn’t left her desk except to get more coffee. Now we were both standing before the giant map on the wall.

“I find it amazing,” said the judge, “that having lived full lives during a rich, colorful era in Texas history, by the time they die all anyone can recall is that Myrtle was in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and Octavia belonged to the local garden club.”

“I find it amazing,” I said, “that a person of your size could have such a remarkable bladder.”

“Thank you very much,” the judge said humorlessly. We both looked at the map some more.

“This is not the pattern,” I said, “of your garden-variety serial killer. Your Ted Bundy or your Henry Lee Lucas.”

“He ain’t
my
Henry Lee Lucas,” said the judge. “The point is, Your Honor, a serial killer selects victims from a general population when, for whatever reason, they turn him on, so to speak. He has a little problem with blood lust. The killings almost always tend to escalate in terms of savagery and in their coming closer on the heels of one another. The downtime when the killer rests or goes out to play miniature golf usually becomes less and less as his murderous pace picks up. That’s when he gets a little careless. That’s when he usually gets caught. But I don’t see any evidence of that here.”

“You’re saying he’s working on a preselected population.”

“Correct. A special population.”

“You don’t think the shrink could be right? Maybe he’s a drifter, a stranger who’s been knocking off old ladies in other places before he came here because he hates his mother?”

“It’s unlikely. Let’s say he’s a monstro-wig that just blew in from Uvula, Texas, where he’s been whacking little old ladies. Assume he’s got some way of knowing when birthdates of geriatric widows roll around. There’s lots and lots of seventy-six-year-old women who
aren't
getting croaked around here. Everywhere you go there’s a little old lady right in front of you driving four miles an hour. Which brings us back to the twisted green fuse that’s driving this whole case.
How
does he pick his victims? If we can determine that we might figure out
why
.”

“He’s a local boy, I just know it. I don’t care what crap the shrink is tellin’ the sheriff, this ain’t no cry for help. He don’t care if he gets press or not. I think he’d just as soon as not. And he sure as hell doesn’t want to get caught.”

“I agree,” I said. “But if he’s media-shy he’s going to have some problems. The wire services and
Unsolved Mysteries
can’t be far away. There’s people in L.A. and New York right now who’re probably working on screenplays and book deals for him. He’s going to need an agent.”

“He’s gonna need more than that if I get my hands on him. If I just knew where to look.”

“There’s only one place you
can
start looking for a killer you can’t find arid you can’t understand.” 

“Where’s that?” said the judge.

“Inside yourself,” I said.

A fat man in a plain-wrapped squad car stopped picking his nose as I slithered out of the justice of the peace’s office. His eyes followed me as I crossed Main Street against the light and almost got T-boned by a cement mixer. I’d always thought it would be kind of sad for a cosmopolitan figure like myself to get his ass run over in Kerrville, Texas, but I suppose there were worse fates. Agamemnon comes to mind.

I popped into the Smokehouse to buy a box of Hoyo de Monterrey Rothschilds from Clint and JoLyn. Before Clint and JoLyn bought the place, Bill and Betty Hardin had sold me cigars at the Smokehouse. Before that I’d bought most of my cigars in New York. Two hundred years from now when archaeologists are searching for the tomb of Shithead the First I’ll probably be comfortably ensconced in hell buying cigars from Lenny Bruce and Gertrude Stein.

“Tell us all about the case,” said JoLyn as I walked in the door. “There’s a big story in today’s paper that if you and the sheriff and the local authorities can’t find the killer they may call in the Texas Rangers.”

“They always get their man,” I said, as my eyes roved past the tides of almost every used paperback in the world except
Steal This Book.

“That ain’t the Texas Rangers,” said Clint, puffing on his pipe. “That’s the Canadian Mounties.”

“I knew somebody always got their man,” I said. “Of course, it’d be a little silly callin’ in the Canadian Mounties.”

“So it’s true,” said JoLyn, “that he’s already killed seven people and there’s no clues.”

“Actually, there are some clues. At the scene of each crime the killer’s left a used paperback.” 

“Kinky!” said JoLyn.

“He’s kiddin’, honey,” said Clint.

Then she leaned over the counter confidentially. “Tell me,” JoLyn said, “what’s it like to work on a big murder case like this with the sheriff?”

“It’s a thrill a minute,” I said. “We have a very caring, sharing relationship.”

I entered the walk-in humidor before JoLyn could ask me any hard questions. The door closed behind me and left me all alone in a peaceful, rarefied atmosphere with thousands of quiescent cigars in neat little rows like children in a Rumanian orphanage waiting for their moment in the sun.

Whenever I walked into a humidor I always remembered the time many years ago in L.A. at a big tobacco store in some big shopping mall. Kent Perkins and Jim Ryder were with me as we found ourselves inside one of the largest, lushest humidors we’d ever seen. Just being inside the humidor felt like you were making love in a tropical jungle. I’ve done both in my lifetime—been in humidors and made love in jungles—and which is the more satisfying experience is a hard call to make without instant replay. But the humidor seems to shut out reality to a greater degree— allows you to cast your mind back to some Tennessee Williams childhood more vivid and colorful than the one you’ve no doubt already repressed. And there’s the added advantage of the humidor that you are very unlikely to suddenly be rear-ended by a large hippopotamus.

At any rate, Kent and Jim and I were in this humidor when for no particular reason I emitted one of the loudest, longest, most enormous farts of my adult life, much to the dismay of my other two humidor-eans. At just the same moment, the owner of the store, who of course had no way of hearing or gauging the phenomenon, came striding purposefully over to the humidor, possibly to help us with cigar selection. Kent and Jim and I were all laughing by this time. As Dylan Ferrero once observed: “Seventy-five percent of all men find farting humorous and zero percent of all women.”