Armadillos & Old Lace (4 page)

The next morning with the sun shining brightly on Echo Hill, the nearby mountain from which the camp took its name, I called Pat Knox. It was such a beautiful day that it seemed nothing, with the exception of the cat’s not having returned, could be wrong in the world. Of course, Echo Hill was not the world. With a cup of coffee and a cigar under way, I sat at the tiny desk in my trailer and spoke to the secretary at the office of the justice of the peace, precinct one, Kerrville, Texas.

“Oh,” said the secretary, “she’ll be tickled pink.

You’re just the person she’s been wanting to talk to. She’ll be so relieved.”

“Relieved?” I said. “Is Kerrville under siege?” I thought of my campaign slogan in my ill-fated race against her boss: “I’ll keep us out of war with Fredericksburg.” Fredericksburg was a little German town about twenty miles down the road where they still tied their shoes with little Nazis.

“We’re not exactly under
siege,
darlin’,” she said, “unless you want to count the Yankees, the yuppies, the developers, the retirees—”

“That’s what I was hoping to be,” I said.

“I think the judge has other ideas,” she said.

I held the line and waited. I wondered what was going on. Perhaps Judge Knox had just received word that nine warships had broken through the Confederate blockade. I was pouring another cup of coffee when Her Honor came on the line.

“Can you come into town today?” she said. “I don’t want to talk on the phone. There may be spies.” 

“Spies?” I said. “In Kerrville? Do they wear satellite dishes on their cowboy hats?”

The feisty little judge was not amused. “This is serious,” she said. “If what I think is happenin’ is really happenin’, this little sleepy town is gonna have an ugly awakenin’.”

It was a fairly ugly awakening for me, too, I thought. My first day back in Texas, the cat’s gone, I’m trying to drink my second cup of coffee, and I’m already being sucked into some kind of foreign intrigue. Of all the happy campers who’d soon be at the ranch, I was definitely not one. With the cat gone, there wasn’t even anyone around to talk to. When you have to talk to a cat that isn’t there, you might as well be talking to yourself.

I poured a third cup of coffee, lit a second cigar, and wandered over to see my kid sister next door. Marcie, who, along with Tom, directed the camp, lived in a big white trailer that looked as if it had belonged in its first life to Jim Rockford. Marcie was very busy getting the camp ready to open and she was also having some trouble getting her eyes open because she’d stayed up so late meeting with the staff. She did not display a great deal of concern about the cat being missing.

“I’m sure your cat will come back,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This has never happened before.”

“It may never happen again, either,” she said. “Especially if Sambo gets hold of the cat.”

I paced up and down Marcie’s trailer as she was getting dressed, forgetting how much my cigar smoke always irritated her when she first woke up. Of course, almost everything irritated Marcie when she first woke up. She, as siblings often will, believed that it was I who was the grumpy one and that she herself had a constantly cheery, pleasant disposition. Both of us frequently confronted Tom with the well-considered opinion that he was grumpier than either of us. Tom would either laugh it off or sullenly deny it, depending on how grumpy he was feeling at the time. Whenever he laughed it off, it usually made me and Marcie pretty grumpy.

“I mourn the fact,” I said, “that young people today don’t drink coffee and that they don’t have more compassion for cats.”

“I mourn the fact,” said Marcie, “that I’ve got exactly one day to get this camp open and somebody’s marching up and down my trailer smoking a cigar when I’m trying to get dressed.”

“I mourn the fact,” I said, “that more effort hasn’t been made on the part of the directors to more fully integrate me into the camp program.”

“I mourn the fact,” said Marcie, “that you won’t get your ass out of my trailer.”

I walked up to the lodge just as Tom was filling the hummingbird feeders. The lodge was set in an area surrounded by a white wooden fence to keep the horses out, which it rarely did. Eighty-seven trees grew inside the fence, according to Tom. One of them, very close to the lodge, was dead. That was the one the hummingbirds always established as their home base when they returned to the Hill Country from South America or wherever the hell hummingbirds come from. They arrived punctually on March 15 and stayed until about the end of August. It was a good thing they weren’t house-pests.

More than thirty years ago, my mother had started feeding the hummingbirds, dissolving sugar in red-dyed water and hanging the glass feeders on the eaves of the porch. The job had now devolved to Tom and myself. There were more than fifty hummingbirds around now, and during happy hour things could get pretty busy. I thought of Tom as my assistant hummingbird feeder. He thought of me as his assistant hummingbird feeder. Somehow, we managed.

Tom was hanging the last feeder on a nail and

Ben Stroud was walking behind him trying to make up a list of things to get in town.

“Why are you following me?” Tom said to Ben.

Ben, aware that this was pretty much of a rhetorical question, did not give an answer. Instead, in the manner of a Talmudic scholar, he asked another question.

“Should I get the paper for you in town?” he asked. “I’m getting the laundry and the softballs and the donuts.”

“I could get Tom’s paper,” I said to Ben. “I’m going into Kerrville for lunch.”

“No, I’ll get it,” said Ben. “I’ve got a whole list of shit to do.”

Tom walked over to the redwood furniture, which was older than most of the counselors, and sat down in his favorite chair. Ben wandered over to check a thing or two on his town list.

“Why are you following me?” Tom said to Ben.

Tom and Ben and I sat and talked for a while, then they both had things to do. I wandered around the ranch like a stray horse for about an hour, talked to a few of the old counselors who were getting their activities set up, and ran into Marcie down at the picnic area. We’d both gotten over our little sibling snit from earlier that morning.

“Care to join me for lunch at the Del Norte?” I asked.

“I’ve got to stay here,” she said. “Camp’s starting tomorrow, one of the cooks hasn’t shown up yet, and Tom snapped his wig this morning when he couldn’t find a typewriter ribbon. Who are you having lunch with?”

“The Honorable Pat Knox,” I said.

“Pat Knox? Isn’t she the one who beat you like a drum in the election?”

“I’m not bitter,” I said.

I saddled up Dusty, my mother’s old wood-paneled Chrysler convertible, waved at my cousin Bucky, who was rounding up horses on the East Flat, and headed into Kerrville. I was thinking I could use a little liquor drink to cut the phlegm. I was also thinking how being here at camp would, of necessity, cut into my cocktail hour. My normal habits and lifestyle in New York were not especially healthy for green plants or children. Not that I was a role model particularly. I just felt that if kids were going to screw up their lives, they ought to figure out how to do it themselves.

Dusty was a talking car. My mother had always said it was a good car for lonely people. I hadn’t been back long enough to know whether or not I was lonely yet, but I was interested in hearing what Dusty had to say. As I drove down the gravel county road to the highway, Dusty demonstrated just how perceptive she was.

“Your washer fluid is low,” she said.

“I want to talk to you,” said Pat Knox in deeply conspiratorial tones, “about four little old ladies.” We were sitting at a corner table in the Del Norte Restaurant, a place I’d often referred to as the best restaurant in the world. At least it was the best restaurant in Kerrville.

“Four little old ladies?” I said. “Do they want me to join a quilting bee?”

“No,” said the little judge. “They’re dead.” 

“Eighty-six that quilting bee.”

“If you’re just gonna make fun of me, I might as well be talking to the sheriff. That’s what she did, too.”

Not for the first time did I think what a strange town was Kerrville, Texas. For decades it had enjoyed a redneck macho milieu, overpopulated with pickup trucks sporting loaded gun racks in their rear windows. Now, suddenly, Kerrville had a lady sheriff and a lady justice of the peace. What was the world coming to?

The judge summoned up all the dignity and controlled anger within her four foot eleven and one-half inch frame, which was fairly considerable when she stared at you across the table. I sipped my coffee and hoped the waitress would bring me my chicken fried steak before Pat Knox reached into her leather briefcase and pulled out a pearl-handled Beretta.

“When I first met you during the campaign,” she said, “I didn’t like you.”

“Quite understandable,” I said. “I have a certain superficial charm that holds up for about three minutes when I meet people. After that, it’s usually downhill.”

“I must’ve stayed around for five minutes,” she said, as she reached into her leather briefcase. I readied myself.

As fate would have it, she only extracted a sheaf of papers, but in her eyes I could still see the Beretta.

“It was later in the campaign, Richard,” she said, using my Christian name, “that I met you one day in the bank, and thought I saw that you were really a gendeman.”

“We all make mistakes,” I said.

“I don’t think I made one,” she said.

I had become so accustomed to dealing with NYPD types that I almost didn’t realize that this little woman was complimenting me and asking for my help. I didn’t really see how I could help and I wasn’t even sure what the problem was, but I felt a little ashamed about being a smart-ass. Maybe all law enforcement people brought it out in me.

The waitress came with our orders just as Pat was showing me a map of the Texas Hill Country with four little X’s scattered around a fairly wide area.

“Each X indicates an isolated location in which one of these old ladies—all of them were widows— lived. And died.”

I studied the map politely as I cut into my chicken fried steak.

“The sheriff has listed the deaths as accidental, natural, or suicide. She feels that four deaths in five months does not establish any kind of pattern and I can’t say I really disagree with her about that. Anyway, I don’t have the power to call for a formal investigation.”

I took a bite of chicken fried steak. It’s an overordered dish in Texas and most of the time it’s nothing you’d want to write home about even if you had a home. I was wondering what Pat was getting at. Did she want me to share her work load? That would’ve taken a lot of nerve after vanquishing me in the election.

“The first lady drowned in the bathtub near Bandera—”

“Household accident number 437,” I said.

“The second burned to death in her home near Pipe Creek.”

“Did she run back in trying to fetch her pipe?” Pat Knox looked at me with disappointment in her eyes. The look quickly changed to a flat, hard, tail-gunner’s expression.

“The third death occurred near Mountain Home. The victim was shot with a gun. The weapon was found near the body.”

“That was the suicide?”

“You New Yorkers sure don’t miss a beat.” 

“Hold the weddin’,” I said. “I come from Texas.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

“And it’s no disgrace to come from Texas,” I said. “It’s just a disgrace to have to come back here.” Her Honor laughed briefly. I assured her I was kidding. She continued reading her book of the dead and I continued eating my chicken fried steak which I hoped was dead.

“The fourth death occurred just outside of town on the road to Ingram. The woman required an oxygen supply and apparently the botde had come disconnected. That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“Now three of the deaths didn’t even occur in this county, so they’re not really my jurisdiction—” 

“Or mine.”

“That’s correct. But I’ve talked to other J.P.’s, to members of the families. I’ve conducted my own private investigation—I always do. Crime scenes, blood splatters, photos. I’ve kept records on all of this.”

I was only half listening now. I was thinking how a handful of deaths of elderly people wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans in crazy old New York. It wouldn’t even make good table conversation. I wondered again why the judge had called me. Did she want to show me how hard the job was and how overworked she was? Was she trying to rub it in that I’d lost the election?

“Okay, Pat, so what’s all this mean? Put it on a bumper sticker for me.”

“I know they were murdered.”

Great, I thought. The whole thing is coming down like some gothic novel. Pat Knox is Joan of Arc. Pat Knox is Cassandra warning the warriors of Troy. Pat Knox is Martha Mitchell reporting that Secret Service agents had kidnapped her and shot her in the butt with a hypodermic needle. Who listens to these people? No one. Not until a little B&E job at Watergate brings down a presidency. Not until the Trojan Horse is taken into the gates of the city. Not until we all can hear the voices that once were only in Joan’s head.