Free Armadillos & Old Lace by Kinky Friedman Page B

whosever it is is going to have his or her hands rather full. I think I’ve stepped on something and it ain’t third base. I was going through the marriage license applications down at the courthouse the other day and I discovered that all five victims were seventy-six years old.”
    “The likelihood of that occurring naturally is statistically very small.”
    “Tom, they were all killed on their birthdays.” 
    “Sure. Fine. Whatever. Sonny boy, you’ve got to turn this over to the sheriff. We’re running a children’s camp here. We can’t allow the ranch to become involved with anything like this. We’re not equipped to handle it. We’re not geared—”
    “I’ll meet with the sheriff, all right? I’ll go into town tomorrow.”
    David Hart, wearing his funny red hat and carrying a clipboard, wandered into the dining hall just in time to hear my last sentence. He looked down briefly at his clipboard.
    “We can spare you,” he said.

CHAPTER 18

    Even then, on that torpid Monday afternoon in July as I was driving Miss Dusty to Kerrville, some part of my consciousness, some dim forgotten street corner of my peripheral vision, was stirring with the unpleasant notion that the baton pass to Sheriff Kaiser would not entirely extricate me from the ancient rusted meat hook that was this case. Maybe it was a deeper, darker well than a small-town sheriff s department could fathom or plumb. Maybe God, in his divine evenhanded perversity, was watching over all amateur Jewish private investigators and wished them to receive credit for stumbling over vital clues. That was unlikely, I figured, as I smoked a cigar and sped with the top down beneath a canopy of cottonwoods, cypress, and Spanish oak. God had created them, so they’d told me in Sunday school. God had also created a rather tedious situation with me and Sheriff Frances Kaiser. Not that I particularly blamed God. I wasn’t even sure if God was a he, she, or it. Possibly, he was the guy on the dim street corner of my peripheral vision who was looking for spare change for a sex change.
    Maybe he was none of the above.
    “A door is ajar,” said Dusty.
    “Nice of you to mention it,” I said, “but why’d you wait till I was halfway to Kerrville?” I opened the driver’s door and slammed it shut again.
    “Thank you,” said Dusty.
    “You’re welcome,” I said.
    As Dusty and I climbed the steep hill between the ranch and Kerrville, I noticed that the sky was growing increasingly foreboding. If you were writing a Victorian novel you might say the clouds were becoming edged with pewter. In Texas, we’d say they were getting dark.
    However you described it, the changing weather was only a physical manifestation of what I sensed were deeper, deadlier changes. Changes within the psyche of a killer capable of restraint and of remarkable rage. Changes in a weatherbeaten, war-torn world that was capable of absolutely anything. No big deal. I’d turn my evidence of murder most methodical over to the powers that be. That’d be all she wrote, so I thought. At the time, assuredly, I did not expect the hand of fate to be quite so well manicured. Nor was I aware that it might indeed be clutching quite such a prolific or such a poisoned pen.
    Thunder was crashing and lightning was forking the summer sky as I parked Dusty near the courthouse on Earl Garrett Street. The cat, I figured, was probably hiding under the bed in the trailer. She did not particularly like the sound of thunder, and Sambo liked it even less. It wasn’t all that popular with me, either, in spite of Ratso’s oft-noted contention that thunderstorms produce “negative ionization” which is “psychologically beneficial” to people. Ratso says that pounding surf can produce the same effects as thunderstorms in making you feel more energetic and creative—though, to my knowledge, Ratso’s never been near an ocean in his life, having rarely left the confines of Manhattan, which, according to