Armadillos & Old Lace (11 page)

If you’ve got to go to a bone orchard, midnight’s about as good a time as any. Things are just beginning to get stirring and you avoid the crowds. It was a funny thing, but the closer I got to the cemetery the more I felt drawn to it. Sort of like a part-time ghoul returning to the crypt. Of course, all ghouls are pretty much part-time. Being a ghoul twenty-four hours a day would kill anybody. Such were my thoughts as I drove up to the gates of the Garden of Memories. One other little thought that was in my mind was that Sheriff Kaiser probably wouldn’t approve of whatever Judge Knox and I were going to be doing here. But who was afraid of the big ol’ sheriff?

I hooked a right off Sidney Baker Street and urged Dusty slowly through the main entrance to the bone orchard. The place was quieter even than the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library. Between the two of them there’d been a lot of books and a lot of people checked out. But there was no one here to say “Ssshhhh ...” Only the wind whispering in the shadows of the willow trees.

There didn’t seem to be any human forms moving around or any vehicles parked along the entrance road. I drove a little farther until the town of Kerrville had disappeared behind me and the bone orchard had pretty well swallowed me up. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. There was a certain sense of peace to it. Kind of like the way it must feel to be inside a McDonald’s after closing time. Of course, there was no closing time here. There was not even any time here. It didn’t at the moment particularly feel like there was any here here.

So I hit the brights.

Dark forms and figures began springing up all over the graveyard. Dripping half-shadows of passengers aboard the
Titanic
descended from the willow branches. A partially drawn shade of Ichabod Crane galloped by with hooves of distant thunder. Cowboys and Indians and Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and tiny little Cambodians and soldiers and sailors and airmen from wars that are now trivia questions leapt up out of the night in the manner of game show contestants with the answers to the mysteries of life. But none of them spoke a word. Imagination can be a blessing, I thought, but it can also be pretty tedious.

I puffed my cigar nervously.

Dusty shuddered.

Then, off to the side, glowing darkly through the night with the ageless intensity of Anne Frank’s eyes, came a beacon no less welcome than had it shone down from the Old North Church or skipped softly across the waters that gently lapped at Daisy Buchanan’s pier.

Then the light vanished along with any residual personal enjoyment I had at being in that particular locus at that particular time. I pulled Dusty over to the side of the little road, not that there was a lot of oncoming traffic, and waited. The light did not come on again.

I got out of the car, performed a few square-dance maneuvers around the headstones, and, following the directions of an old Bob Dylan song, “walked ten thousand miles in the miles of a graveyard.” I bumped into an ill-placed tombstone and almost burned my forehead. Recovering my balance I took stock of the desolate landscape. Where the light had been there was nothing. All around me in every direction there was nothing. It was like the sensation you sometimes get when you’re standing in the middle of a busy shopping mall.

I stared up at the scythelike moon and the little freckling of stars and tapped a cigar ash onto the ground.

“Ashes to ashes,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said a voice that scared the shit out of me.

I landed a few moments later, practically impaling myself upon a small wooden cross. I struggled to my feet, glanced at the cross, and then at Judge Knox.

“It’s a good thing it wasn’t one of those pointy-headed stars of David,” I said.

“There are
some
advantages to living in Kerrville,” she said.

“And dying in Kerrville,” I said. “A lot of people seem to be doing it. By the way, why are we here?” 

“Follow me,” she said.

As I trudged behind the little judge and her shining path through the darkened country graveyard, no elegies came to mind. The only things that popped up were more shades, more shadows, more questions, the primary one from the latter category still being: “What the hell are we doing here?”

Finally, we reached an area in the back of the cemetery in which this season’s crop appeared to have been recently planted. The ground looked fresh, there were more flowers, and the stones were new enough to gleam slightly in what moonlight there was. These were definitely not the kind of stones that gather no moss. They’d soon be gathering plenty of it, along with litter, lichens, birdshit, and, conceivably, the occasional teenage swastika. Like many of the living, these stone faces seemed resigned to whatever fate lay before them.

“Three of our little ladies are buried here,” said the judge. “The second victim, Myrtle Crabb, got burned up in the fire at Pipe Creek. They just went ahead and cremated her.”

“Might as well dance with who brung you.” 

“Her son, I understand, drives around with her ashes on his motorcycle.”

“Every mother’s dream.”

“The fourth victim, Prudence South, the one who needed the oxygen bottle, she’s buried in a little church cemetery out the other side of town. So that leaves victims one, three, and five buried here. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

The judge walked like a determined little rooster to a plot about thirty feet away. I followed faithfully, puffing on my faithful cigar and beginning to realize that Judge Knox was either pulling a somewhat premature Halloween prank by bringing me here or she was really onto something.

“Here’s Virginia. Supposedly drowned in the tub in Bandera.”

She had a nice shiny granite stone. On the grave itself was one yellow rose. Pat Knox turned and I followed her farther into the graveyard.

“Amaryllis,” she said. “Supposedly shot herself.” 

“In the back of the head. Wouldn’t that be difficult?”

“For a seventy-six-year-old arthritic little lady, damn near impossible.”

Amaryllis had a smaller, more modest stone. There was a vase of wilting flowers on the grave. Beside the vase were three yellow roses.

“Come along,” said the judge.

I stepped around and over the macabre obstacle course and followed her to the other side of the recently planted section. The night seemed to have gotten a good bit chillier and there was a fog rolling in from somewhere. There weren’t any oceans around. Where was the fog coming from? I wondered. Possibly, all bone orchards get a little misty after midnight. Who’s to say that they don’t?

“Octavia,” said a voice out of the fog.

I remembered Octavia. Her lips had been sewn together. Not an item you easily forget. I walked around the grave. The marker was a stone cross. There was a scroll on a little pedestal acknowledging her as an active lifetime member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. On the grave were six yellow roses.

“Six yellow roses,” I said. “Either somebody’s made a floral typo or we’re missing one of our little ladies.”

“This person’s pretty meticulous. I think if we hunt around a little we’ll find there’s been a victim we’ve overlooked.”

“When did you first notice the flowers?”

“I’ve been checking some vandalism in this cemetery the past few days. The flowers weren’t on the graves when I came by late this afternoon. Somebody put ’em here tonight.”

“Looks like I’m drawn to this case whether I like it or not. I’m trapped like an insect in amber. You win, Judge.”

“I knew you’d see things my way,” she said, smiling a slightly cadaverous smile.

“Since you’ve got the contacts and the resources,” I said, “why don’t you try to locate our missing victim?”

“I’ll do that,” she said. “What are you going to be doing?”

I puffed on the cigar and blew a little smoke into the foggy night.

“ ‘There’s a yellow rose of Texas,’ ” I said, “ ‘that I am going to see.’ ”

Bright and early the next morning after I’d delivered a Gandhi-like truckload of ranch laundry to a nice lady named Arlena at the Country Clean Laundromat, I went to the Del Norte Restaurant for breakfast. Huevos rancheros without the yolks—my one healthy-heart habit. Chain-smoke Hoyo de Monterrey Rothschilds Maduros, drink as much Jameson’s as Gram Parsons drank tequila in the last few months of his life, and always eat huevos rancheros without the yolks if your waitress speaks enough English to get your order right, and you’ll live forever. Your life may not be very pleasant, but you can’t have everything. You’ve got to decide what it is you really want, ninety-seven years of shit or Mozart?

It was still not yet eight in the morning and I was walking in the alleyway between the parking lot and the stores on Earl Garrett Street quietly cursing Ben Stroud. Ben had convinced Uncle Tom that the riflery program at camp had reached such a fever pitch that Ben himself must be present to supervise the qualifications. This left me to do the early morning laundry run and David Hart, Eddie, or Wayne the Wrangler to take the midafternoon run. The advantage to the early morning laundry run was that it was over fast, like a number of love affairs I’d been involved in. By seven forty-five I was through for the day.

Most of the stores didn’t open till nine, but I thought I heard some activity inside Wolfmueller’s Town and Country Clothiers. I knocked on the back door.

“Who is it?” said a muffled voice.

“Charles Starkweather,” I said.

I pushed the door open. Over about eight rows of tuxedos on movable floor racks I could barely make out Jon Wolfmueller’s head. He looked up from his invoices and calculator, waved me in, and returned to his work.

“Who’s Charles Starkweather?” he said.

“How soon they forget. Got any coffee?”

“Right over there on the other side of the discontinued styles rack.”

“Jesus Christ. How can you have discontinued styles in Kerrville?”

Jon was busily at work back at the invoices and did not respond. I sipped some coffee and paced between the racks of clothes.

“Just wait’ll the Nehru jacket hits town,” I said. “That’ll create a buzz.”

Jon paid no attention. I sipped more coffee. “Jon,” I said, “I need your help with something.” 

“I don’t have any openings for male models, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

Jon did have a sense of humor lurking back there somewhere. I often, in fact, referred to him as my faithful Indian companion. He wasn’t an Indian, of course. Tied to the store as he was, he didn’t even make much of a companion. But good help was hard to get these days for both of us. Jon was one of the few Kerrverts I knew who seemed to enjoy my company. At least he put up with me for extended periods of time. Maybe he
was
an Indian.

One thing was for sure. Jon knew what was going on in Kerrville, and anything Jon didn’t know, his wife, Sandy, who ran Pampell’s drugstore and soda fountain, most assuredly did. Between the two of them I had my finger on the sometimes rather shallow pulse of Kerrville. I knew others, of course. Jody Rhoden, the photographer. Max Swafford, my former campaign manager, who abandoned the campaign right in the middle of the race to search for a gold mine in Mexico. Dylan Ferrero, who’d moved to Kerrville recently from a little town called Comfort, Texas, and communicated almost entirely in rock ’n’ roll lyrics. When you’re trying to keep a low profile and not irritate the sheriff, personal contacts were the only way to go. And Jon Wolfmueller was the place to start.

“Jon,” I said, “what do you know about this grand jury they’re convening about the woman who was murdered and had her lips sewn together?”

Jon pursed his lips in an unconscious manner not dissimilar to the way the victim must’ve appeared and thought it over. I sipped more coffee.

“I know they’re having a hard time getting the grand jury together for some reason. I know the sheriff and the justice of the peace are each about ready to kill the other and sew her lips together. I don’t know the name of the subject of the grand jury.” 

“That’s kept secret.”

“Don’t bet on it. Why don’t you go on over and ask Sandy?”

I headed down Earl Garrett and hung a right on Water Street till I reached Pampell’s Drug Store, a building that had once belonged to the legendary Singin’ Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers, the man most people credit for popularizing the guitar in America. Rodgers was a seminal country blues singer who, next to Elton Britt, was the greatest yodeler of his time or anybody else’s. Jimmie wasn’t around anymore. He’d died of TB in New York City when most of us were jumping rope in the schoolyard. But every time I went into Pampell’s and looked up at the old balconies that had once surrounded his music hall and recording studio, I could hear a little distant Dopplered echo of a train whistle.

Sandy was setting up the soda fountain. There was already one customer, a skinny old man wearing a straw hat and a bolo tie.

“Jon just called,” she said. “You wanted to know who’s the subject of the grand jury?”

“I thought they were supposed to keep his identity secret.”

Sandy laughed. “There’s never been a secret in Kerrville that everybody didn’t know,” she said.