Armadillos & Old Lace (12 page)

“It’s one of them funny-soundin’ Mescan names,” offered the old man. “Rod-
ree
-gis. Gui
-tar-
is. One of them hard-to-say kind of names.”

“The guy’s name is Garza,” Sandy told me.

The old man nodded his head and cackled softly to himself.

“
Gar
-za,” he said. “There’s a jawbreaker.”

I got a cup of coffee from Sandy and she vanished to the back of the store. I decided to kill a little time and pain there at the old soda fountain until nine o’clock, when the Rose Shop just across Sidney Baker Street opened up. There were only three or four florists in Kerrville. If I was going to get a lead on who’d bought the yellow roses it wasn’t going to take very long. That was one advantage to being in a small town when it came to crime solving. It was the reason Miss Jane Marple, arguably Agatha Christie’s greatest detective, chose to live in St. Mary Mead instead of London. Jane Marple and Agatha Christie, I reflected as I sipped my coffee, were little old ladies themselves.

Jane Marple, of course, would live forever in the timeless casino of fiction, waiting for the freckled, feckless hand of a young person in Wyoming to pluck her off some dusty shelf and fall in love with the mysteries of life. Agatha Christie, like Jimmie Rodgers, wasn’t around anymore but in a sense I suppose they both still were, for they continued to ply silent rivers of words and music down into the yawning rugosities of our lives. Silver threads in an otherwise drab embroidery. Too bad Jimmie and Agatha never met. Might’ve made an interesting couple.

“If it don’t rain again by the tenth of July,” the old man with the bolo tie was saying, “then it ain’t gonna rain for the whole summer. It’s gonna be a hell of a scorcher.”

“Even if it does rain,” I said, as I laid down a buck for my coffee, “it’s not going to be too pleasant.”

Jesus Christ, I thought. Here I was casually paying a buck for a cup of coffee. What was the world coming to? We dressed casually. Waved casually on the street. Nobody got too excited. Everybody went with the flow. Now some nerd had casually taken six little old ladies off the board.

“Boll weevil’s comin’ back again,” said the old-timer as I headed for the door.

“Ain’t we all, brother,” I said.

At approximately 9:01 A.M. I crossed Sidney Baker Street and entered the Rose Shop, where an irritating little bell rang just above the door and climbed halfway into my inner ear. There was a fairly wide selection of flowers. The flowers smiled at me and I smiled back at them. No one else was in sight. No yellow roses, either.

“Someone in Texas Loves You,” read a bright ceramic wall hanging. “God Loves You,” read a nearby colorfully painted plate.

“Make up your mind,” I said.

“Can I help you?” said a voice from above.

This is it, I thought. On a bumper sticker, vengeance is mine saith the Lord. The family of man might be fairly dysfunctional but now God was coming down to straighten things out. And She did sound slightly irritated.

I looked up and saw a rather nice pair of legs descending a ladder. The legs were attached to a lady who was holding a hanging plant. She looked pretty earthy for a florist.

Her name, I soon learned, was Betty and she knew a lot about flowers. A little more, possibly, than I wanted to know.

But she didn’t have any yellow roses.

“Sometimes we’ll go for months without selling any yellow roses. We haven’t sold any in a long while. Now June through August we do have available our special ‘Texas Dozen’ offer. That’s fifteen flowers for $29.95.”

“But no yellow roses?”

“Red.”

“But if I wanted yellow, could you get them?”

“We’d have to order them. We’d bring them in from Austin or San Antonio. It might take a few days. Stores don’t usually stock them.”

“How long will roses last once you sell them?” 

“Well, that depends. Outdoors, indoors. Air conditioning, no air conditioning. Drafts will kill ’em faster than anything. Never put your roses in a draft.” 

“Thanks for the tip.”

Betty seemed to be working up a bit of a second wind herself.

“Now once we sell ’em we’ll only guarantee ’em for twenty-four hours. If something happens to ’em within twenty-four hours you can just bring ’em right back to us and we’ll see that they’re replaced. If it’s after twenty-four hours, you’re on your own.”

“Got to be tough.”

“Did you want the Texas Dozen?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Only $29.95.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m kind of like James Taylor. I just can’t remember who to send ’em to.” 

“Well, you’ve got to the end of August.”

“That’s a relief.”

I thanked Betty and cut buns out of there. I got in the old gray pickup and headed out toward Ingram, to a place called Showers of Flowers. I dimly recalled buying some roses there several lifetimes ago and sending them to a long-distance lover who worked at a Cadillac dealership in Spokane. She’d sent me a nice note back. Though it was addressed “Dear Occupant,” I’d still thought the relationship worth pursuing. Of course, it wasn’t, she wasn’t, and at the time, from most accounts, I probably wasn’t either. But it is precisely this futility, pain, and seeming absence of true communication that keep the flower shops of the world in business and, every once in a while, when shaken slightly, may even envelop the stars. Maybe I should’ve sent her a Texas Dozen.

Showers of Flowers was a big down-home kind of place with several greenhouses out back and flowers of every variety under the sun, so to speak. I saw the yellow roses right away. The owner, a friendly guy named Al, saw me right away.

“I remember the first time you bought flowers here,” he said. “A long time ago when we first opened up.”

“Spokane?”

“Before Spokane. Even before Los Angeles.” The guy was weaving a spiderweb of heartbreak right before my eyes. “It was to Hawaii. A dozen beautiful red roses in a very nice ornate vase, as I recall. You haven’t forgotten?”

It had been a long time ago. The flowers had been for Kacey, who’d died very young and been pressed between the pages of my life more than a decade ago. I’d called the hotel in Maui to make sure the flowers had gotten there. Kacey’d already left for Vancouver but I still recalled the words of the maid who was cleaning up the room. “The lady leave the vase,” she’d said, “but she take the flowers.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

I steered the conversation gently to yellow roses. “How many yellow roses do you sell, Al?”

“I don’t sell roses. People buy them. Yellow roses are very popular in Texas. For a friend, somebody in the hospital. Red is for deep love and things like that. We also have pink, white, and sonya. We grow ’em ourselves. We’ve got our own greenhouses here.” 

“What’s sonya?”

“Between pink and orange. Very pretty. We go through fifteen to twenty dozen roses a week. You always bought red before. Why do you want yellow?” 

“I got a friend in the hospital who doesn’t like pink or white. Really hates sonya.”

After some little badgering, my insistence upon the urgency of the matter, and my promise to treat with some semblance of confidentiality the relationship between a man and his florist, I got Al to bud a little. He’d sold yellow roses to three people over the past week. Or rather, they’d bought them. Al was understandably hesitant to show me the invoices with the customers’ names and addresses.

“I can’t tell you why I need this information, Al, but it’s very important to me. In its own way, it means as much as Spokane, Los Angeles, and even Hawaii. And if I’m not being too melodramatic, lives may be at stake.”

Al was a trusting sort. He let me copy the invoices. Names, addresses, dates. He also directed me to the other two remaining florists in the area. I thanked him and hoped to hell the flowers someone had placed in the Garden of Memories weren’t purchased out of town.

The third florist was closed. On vacation since the week before. So I drove across town to the last flower shop on my list. That was another advantage to a small town, I thought. You could drive all the way across it in less time than it took to find a cab in New York. And you could smoke a cigar without anybody giving you grief.

Hitting all the flower shops in Kerrville was the kind of investigative work Rambam would’ve liked. The life of the real P.I., he’d always contended, was made up of ninety-eight percent boring routine bullshit. The other two percent, he’d added, was merely tedious. According to Rambam, most of the time the results of long hard hours of digging in the investigative field would be inconclusive. Most cases, especially serial murders, were solved through dumb luck. Ted Bundy forgetting to fix his taillight. Jeffrey Dahmer repeatedly calling his refrigerator repair man.

The last place turned out to be a small affair on Ace Ranch Road just across the way from the Veterans Cemetery, which is a good location if you’re a flower shop. The fellow who ran it was a baby-faced, middle-aged guy who looked like he was wearing one of Jon Wolfmueller’s discontinued styles. There was nothing yellow in the store except his teeth.

“You don’t have any yellow roses, do you?” I said. It was pretty obvious he didn’t.

“We sure don’t. We’ve got some nice summery arrangements, if you’d like that. I could get you some yellow roses, but it may take a day or two.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’d really like. I think someone may have ordered some yellow roses from here recently. Would you have any information on that?”

He looked at me curiously for a moment. Then he smiled. It was not a nice smile. Obviously I wasn’t going to be any florist’s favorite customer.

“Let me check,” he said, and he disappeared into the back of the shop.

I waited. After a while I wondered if he’d passed away. Eventually he returned with a scrap of paper and my patience was rewarded.

“I don’t know why you need this, buddy, but I can’t see as it does anybody any harm. They were delivered here.” He handed me the paper with a name and address on it.

“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a great help.”

“You ain’t with the CIA, are you?” He laughed a loud, high-pitched, dangerous, redneck laugh. He laughed and laughed.

I laughed, too.

Then I left.

I figured if the case was going to be solved by dumb luck, I might as well strike while the iron was hot. I had the names and addresses of the four local people who’d purchased yellow roses within the past week. Why not run them down right now? There was an outside chance I could wrap this unsavory little booger up in a sailor’s knot before lunchtime, dump the whole thing on Sheriff Kaiser’s desk, and she’d pat the top of my cowboy hat and tell me what a good citizen I was. There was also an outside chance that she would become mildly agitato and have me committed to the Bandera Home for the Bewildered.

I checked the first address from Al at Showers of Flowers and gunned the old gray pickup down the road in that direction. Soft drink cans, basketballs, and old .177 rifles recently used in a tableau of Ira Hayes at Iwo Jima slid back and forth across the bed of the truck, making a hell of a racket under the attached camper. I shot a quick backward glance through the window of the cab and saw a sea monster swirling around back there, trying to reach through and grab my throat. A lit cigar fell out of my mouth as I hurtled down the highway. I wasn’t sure if it’d fallen on the seat between my legs or on the floor, where it’d probably roll under the seat and most likely burn me to death.

“Mother of God,” I said nervously. “This is what I live for.” A truck loaded with bales of hay barreled by on my right at about ninety-seven miles an hour.

Without taking my eyes off the highway I rose up slightly in the saddle and frantically felt around between my legs. Nothing was there except what was supposed to be, but I did receive a dirty look from a lavender-haired lady in a late-model Buick. Then I turned my attention to the sea monster. It was an old tennis net with fresh seaweed from the waterfront threaded all through it. King Neptune had worn it the week before on Shipwreck Night. Then I found a place to pull off to the side of the road, got out, and felt around under the seat until I burned the shit out of my hand.