Read Online Armadillos & Old Lace by Kinky Friedman - Free Book Online Page A

those little old ladies, I sat down at the shady table behind the trailer and shuffled through them again like a mildly bored riverboat gambler. The victims had nice, old-fashioned names: Virginia, the Bandera bathtub woman; Myrtle, who died in the fire at Pipe Creek and then came back to haunt her sister Violet; Amaryllis, killed by a gunshot near Mountain Home; Prudence, near Kerrville, who’d had a slight reach impediment when it came to her oxygen bottle. I also glanced at the recent news story: Octavia, near Kerrville, who had had her lips sewn together. Had this detail been included, I thought, it was doubtful that the flap, no pun intended, would ever have died down.
    There didn’t seem to be any link between these cases other than the obvious fact that the victims were all little old ladies. Who could have hated little old ladies that much? I wondered. Maybe the killer was an extremely disgruntled little old man.
    The youngest of the women was in her early sixties; the oldest, in her late seventies. They were a surprisingly active group, belonging variously to the Bluebonnet Garden Club, the Lower Turtle Creek Volunteer Fire Department Ladies Auxiliary, the First Methodist Church Vacation Bible Class, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the Silver Thimble Quilting Circle, and the Huffers ’n’ Puffers Senior Square Dance Club.
    Just thinking about all their activities was starting to wear me out. But there seemed to be no pattern here, either. At least nothing you could hook your quilt on. After another cigar and another two cups of coffee, I gave up the ghost on the obits, chucked them inside the trailer, and ankled it up the little hill to the lodge. Sambo, being somewhat myopic, ran toward me barking ferociously, then, at the last moment, smiled like a rat-trap and licked my hand. After studying obits for several hours, a dog licking your hand can almost make you feel good to be alive.
    Few heads turned as Sambo and I entered the lodge. Cousin Bucky, who was busy handing rifles out the front door to boys from the Crow’s Nest, nodded a brief greeting. Marcie and Katy were sitting on the couch in the living room locked in an intense meeting with a trio of bunkhouse counselors. Sambo and I slipped past into the back room, where Uncle Tom was at his desk talking on the speakerphone and David Hart, the head men’s counselor, was wearing a funny-looking red hat and poring over a computer terminal. Neither looked up.
    “Fine,” Tom was saying in a tone that indicated the situation was anything but. “That’s just fine”  
    “I’m sorry, Dr. Friedman,” said the disembodied voice on the speakerphone. “These ice-makers’ll get a little hitch in their git-along every now and then—”
    “I’m running a camp. I need that machine working now!”
    “Well, we may have to order parts—”
    “This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”
    I walked over to where David Hart was working on the evening program.
    “Eddie wants to know if you’ll sing ‘Ol’ Shep’ for the Hoedown,” he said. “Phallax will be the boy and Eddie will be Ol’ Shep and he’ll end the song by urinating on both of you from the hidden water bottle like he did last year.”
    “Smells good from here,” I said. “Look, I’ve got to make a run to town.”
    David Hart punched in a few things on his computer. “We can spare you,” he said.
    I picked up the obits and a few cigars from the trailer, saddled up Dusty, and headed over to Earl Bucke-lew’s place. Earl was not only a timeless old-timer, he believed that “everything comes out in the wash if you use enough Tide.” He’d known the land and the people on the land for so long that he gave directions by the bends of rivers that weren’t even there anymore. Maybe he could get inside the minds of these women. If they’d known him when they were younger he might well have broken their hearts.
    Earl came out into the yard on a cane, his goats gathering around