Free Armadillos & Old Lace by Kinky Friedman Page A

Wolff. At the end of the normal birthday song they tagged it with a rather unusual traditional Echo Hill verse. Sung in a minor key in the style of a funeral dirge, it went like this:
    Happy birthday, happy birthday,
    Misery is in the air,
    People dying everywhere,
    Happy birthday, happy birthday.
    “Not inappropriate,” I said to the bell, “considering recent events.”
    But the bell held its tongue.

CHAPTER 1 7

    Though it was clear to me that five women had been croaked on their seventy-sixth birthday, I was still somewhat disinclined to rush with the news to Pat Knox or Sheriff Kaiser. As far as the J.P. was concerned, a little bit of the little judge went a long way. I didn’t want this whole megillah to turn into a Nancy Drew affair with the judge playing Nancy and me in the role of one of her little chums, both of us futilely attempting to operate outside the powers that be. As for Sheriff Kaiser, it was indubitably her attitude that a little bit of Kinky went a long way. It was a hell of an understatement to say that she would not be par-
    ticularly desirous of entertaining another audience with me. The last one had been a tension convention, the repellent memory of which neither of us was soon likely to forget.
    On the other hand, since the day I’d learned that terrible secret on the courthouse lawn, the onus of that dark knowledge had been weighing heavily on my conscience. I now knew beyond .any shadow of a doubt that these five deaths could not be written off to coincidence. They were murders—a string, a chain, a cheap imitation necklace strung together by a madman—the end of which was nowhere in sight.
    This knowledge pressed brutishly against the translucent butterfly wings of my soul as I flitted in and out of camp activities, my mind always returning to the little old ladies who’d been hastened, if ever so slightly, through death’s door. If even one more victim were to be killed while I was the sole possessor of a crucial clue to the murderer’s dark agenda it would take a hell of a lot of Tide to make everything come out in the wash.
    I puffed on the cigar and wandered the flat on that sunny Sunday afternoon until the singing stopped in the dining hall. After a few moments I heard Uncle Tom’s voice saying “Well... ?” and answered by an army of children shouting “What are we waiting for!” Then the doors of the dining hall flew open and the peaceful little valley was suddenly alive with children running, shouting, and laughing. The hills seemed to echo their energy and joy, and it was a little sad to think how very briefly they would stay this way before joining all the other gray, weatherbeaten souls in the quotidian adult world.
    I left my cigar on the ledge and walked into the nearly deserted dining hall, where Uncle Tom was wearing his blue safari hat and working out a chess problem with an eight-year-old boy named Danny. They stood on either side of a huge wooden board I’d bought in Nuevo Laredo in another lifetime. With the chessboard at table level, the king and queen were slightly taller than Danny.
    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