DON’T MISS KINKY FRIEDMAN’S PREVIOUS MYSTERY STARRING KINKY FRIEDMAN
“Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola is this generation’s Catcher in the Rye. And it doesn’t make you want to shoot a Beatle.” —Don Imus
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BANTAM BOOKS
PRAISE FOR KINKY FRIEDMAN
________
“Spreads more joy than Ross Perot’s ears.”
—MOLLY IVINS
“For a guy who isn’t me, the Kinkster can really write.”
—ROBERT B. PARKER
“Kinky Friedman is one of Texas’s great natural resources.”
—FORMER GOVERNOR ANN W. RICHARDS
“Kinky Friedman is the best whodunit writer to come along since Dashiell What’s-his-name.”
—WILLIE NELSON
“Kinky, Mozart, Shakespeare—with what could I equal them?”
—JOSEPH HELLER
“You don’t like the Kinkster? Next time you see your therapist, get your money back.”
—ANDREW VACHSS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
________
Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola
Musical Chairs
Frequent Flyer
When the Cat’s Away
A Case of Lone Star
Greenwich Killing Time
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
ARMADILLOS & OLD LACE
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with Simon & Schuster
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Simon & Schuster edition published 1994
Bantam edition / September 1995
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994 by Kinky Friedman.
Cover an copyright © 1995 by Tom Hallman.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-9811.
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ISBN 0-553-57447-7
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
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This book is dedicated with lots of love to
Lottie Cotton
There were ten pretty girls
in the village school
There were ten pretty girls
in the village school
Some were short, some were tall
And the boy loved them all
But you can’t marry ten pretty girls.
—TRADITIONAL TEXAS FOLK DANCE
CHAPTER 1
It was my last night in New York before saddling up the cat, grabbing my old guitar, and heading back to the family ranch in Texas for the summer. Every spring, just about the time I heard my suitcase snap, I vowed never to return to the city. Every fall, I seemed to find myself, almost inexplicably, back in the Big Apple. Sooner or later I was going to have to decide whether Texas or New York was truly my home. Then, in that quiet moment of reflection, I’d hopefully find the answer to the grand and troubling question that has haunted mankind through the ages:
What is it that I really want out of life—horsemanure or pigeon shit?
Some of the boys had planned a little send-off at one of my favorite places, Big Wong’s on Mott Street in Chinatown. We were sitting at a large round table close enough to the kitchen to hear the cook whistling something from the Hong Kong Hit Parade. McGovern, large Irish society columnist for the Daily News and master of the magical background check, had brought about fourteen cases of beer over in paper bags from the little grocery store across the street. Ratso, my flamboyant, flea-market friend, editor of National Lampoon, and somewhat weatherbeaten Dr. Watson, had been quite disheartened when the waiter had told him: “No more roast pork.”
“No more roast pork,” Ratso was muttering to himself. The place closed at ten o’clock and we were pushing that now.
“It’s hard to keep continental dining hours at Big Wong’s,” said McGovern. “You get here after eight o’clock, you’re pretty well hosed.”
Rambam, a private investigator who’d worked with me on some of my cases and was wanted in every state that began with an “I,” stared stonily at the far wall and drank his beer. The few other guests had already left us with their botdes and the bill. At the next table, the waiters and busboys, dressed entirely in white, were silently shoveling down whatever’d been left over in the kitchen. Their outfits lent a nice institutional touch to the evening. It was a quiet affair.
I could use a little quiet, I reflected. I’d become somewhat ambivalent about performing country music gigs lately and I’d come to realize that anyone who uses the word “ambivalent” probably shouldn’t have been a country singer in the first place. Going on the road as a musician was always a killer, but these days, for me, even staying home could be murder.
Over the past few years I’d tried my fine Hebrew hand as an amateur detective in the city, resulting in both the criminals and the policemen not being my friends. I was an equal opportunity offender.
Worse, the crime-solving lifestyle had brought into my life a myriad of death, destruction, heartbreak, scandal, and a remorseless, lingering, spirit-sucking ennui, though several of the cases were not without charm. In my most recent adventure, which McGovern had dubbed The Case of Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola, I’d endeavored to locate a missing film about Elvis impersonators directed by my friend Tom Baker, who’d recently gone to Jesus himself. Because of that case I’d lost one or two girlfriends, depending on how you looked at it.
I glanced at my partners in crime seated around the table and wondered if they realized how much Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola had taken out of me. When I left New York this time, I figured, I might really never return. At least not until Jesus got his own postage stamp.
“You’ve never held a real job as long as I’ve known you,” Rambam was saying. “What makes you think you need a vacation?”
“It’s not a vacation,” I said, quoting my sister Marcie. “It’s a lifestyle.”
“The Kinkstah works,” said Ratso, rising above the roast pork situation to come to my defense. “He’s just finished a very grueling tour. Hey, I wonder if they have any pork gruel?”
“Believe me,” I said, “opening for Henny Young-man at a sports bar in New Jersey on Mother’s Day is hard work. I got so hammered after the show from being subjected to seven hundred video screens that I walked on my knuckles into a wall and smashed my guitar.”
“What a shame,” said Rambam. “It’s an omen. God wants you to go out and get a real job.”
“So you can be like the rest of us miserable bastards,” said McGovern
. He laughed a loud, hearty, Irish laugh that seemed to echo in the little room. Several of our neighboring diners looked over briefly from their fish head soup.
“Why is it,” said Ratso, “that the kitchen help always gets better food than we do?”
“Racism,” said McGovern.
As Ratso began his uncanny shell game of putting money into and taking it out of a pot to pay the check, I sat back and looked around the table. McGovern, Ratso, and Rambam, while very different in style and substance, were all New York down to the core of the Big Apple. There weren’t many like them in the Texas Hill Country. We liked to keep it that way.
“Are you taking the cat?” McGovern asked. Ratso palmed a twenty from the middle of the table and replaced it with a five.
“Of course,” I said. “Last year I left the cat with Winnie and by the time I came back she’d turned her into a strident feminist.” Winnie Katz ran a lesbian dance class in the loft above mine.
“It’s not the first pussy Winnie’s gotten her hands on,” said Rambam.
The cat would like Texas, I figured. She’d live on a beautiful ranch in a little green valley surrounded by hills. There’d be oak and cottonwood and cedar trees, streams flowing by, and lizards to chase on every rock. There’d be the spiritual elbow room available that you’d never find in the city. The freedom just to be a cat. She’d like it, all right. Of course, the cat would like an exhibit of twelfth-century Portuguese architecture if you put a can of tuna in front of it.
As we left Big Wong’s and walked up Mott Street that night, I could almost feel the hot Texas sun on my shoulders and the gentle breeze rustling the sycamore against my old green trailer like the wings of a cowboy angel. In the skies over Manhattan the stars were barely bright enough to make a wish on. I’d wait until I got to Texas.
“The thing I like about the Chinese,” said Ratso, as he looked around the crowded, oblivious street, “is that they don’t hold the Jews responsible for killing Jesus.”
“Yeah,” said Rambam, “but I think they know we contracted the lumber.”
Being in the process of lighting up and concomitantly attempting to laugh, I came precariously close to swallowing my cigar. I wondered fleetingly if there was a form of the Heimlich maneuver available for Americans who swallowed their cigars while laughing. Most likely not, I reasoned. There weren’t that many people who actually smoked cigars and, for those who did, life, very probably, was not all that funny. You could always not smoke and not laugh. Then you’d probably get run over by a bookmobile.
There is, of course, a very thin line between laughing and choking to death. Both sound about the same, look about the same, and, often, may feel quite similar to the occupant. The only difference is that if you’re only laughing you’ll eventually stop, but if you’re truly choking to death, you’ll go on laughing forever.
Apparently, I was only laughing. I said good-bye to my three companions as we dodged traffic on Canal Street. McGovern gave me a bear hug and Rambam clasped my shoulder with an iron grip. Ratso shook hands and copped a cigar from me. Then he borrowed my butt-cutter. Then he bummed a light.
“I’m a full-service friend,” I said.
“Well, at least you’ll get some rest down there, Kinkstah,” said Ratso. “Nothing much happens in Texas.”
“That’s true,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of wide open spaces.”
“Especially between people’s ears,” said Ratso.
CHAPTER 2
The next morning as the plane clipped like a Spanish dancer over the New York skyline, I watched the twin Trade Towers shrink to the Tinkertoys of a child, and the Statue of Liberty to the bright prize from a Cracker Jack box. Somewhere below, McGovern was probably still sleeping, dreaming of old-fashioned silk skirts rustling across make-believe ballrooms.
Ratso was down there too, someplace. Most likely tossing and turning in his cluttered warehouse of an apartment, having a nightmare about the five hundred interviews he’d soon be embarking upon in order to complete his new book on Abbie Hoffman.
Abbie was down there, too, I reflected. At peace finally. Somewhere off to the left.
Rambam, no doubt, had been up all night on a stake-out. Right now he was probably sipping coffee in a parked car and watching a door or a window or an alleyway. Those are good things to watch because, unlike many aspects of human experience, something meaningful may occasionally come out of them.
The cat had never taken kindly to the notion of leaving the loft on Vandam Street where the two of us had survived more winters than the saber-toothed tiger. Like many New Yorkers, the cat believed that no life whatsoever existed outside the confines of Manhattan. I could just imagine what her mental state would be like after flying four hours in the baggage compartment in a cage next to a golden retriever and somebody’s pet boa constrictor. I’d given her half a cat Valium before we’d left. The other half I’d taken myself. If mine didn’t kick in soon, I figured, I might have to up-grade to heroin suppositories.
I watched New York telescope away and then disappear completely beneath the cloud cover. I thought of the troubles and tension conventions I was leaving behind. The friends. The lovers. The little black puppet head sitting all alone on top of the refrigerator. How many times, with the colorful parachute attached and the key to the building wedged in its mouth, had I thrown it out the window into the eager hands of visitors and housepests? How many times had it come back to me, still smiling one of the most genuine smiles in New York City? What the hell, I thought. Maybe I’d get a little head in Texas.
I sipped a Bloody Mary for a while, then I closed my eyes and drifted through time and space like campfire smoke. We weren’t anywhere near Texas yet, but I could already see the ranch. My folks had bought the place forty years ago and in the summertime they’d operated it as a camp for boys and girls. I’d been a camper there myself, then a counselor, running the waterfront. These days, however, I felt a bit o-l-d to interact too intensely with the kids. The range of my responsibilities now rambled from dropping the laundry in town every morning in the pickup truck, to poisoning occasional mounds of fire ants, to feeding the hummingbirds, to singing a song once in a while at a campfire or hoedown. It was strenuous work.
The ranch was called Echo Hill. I had nothing but happy memories from all the years I’d been involved with the place. Now, for the first time, like echoes in a dream, I had a slight sense of foreboding about my imminent return to the Hill Country. A half-conscious uneasiness that I attributed to the fact that the guy sitting next to me in the plane looked like a mad scientist from Pakistan. If I’d known then what was awaiting me in Texas, I’d have grabbed the pilot by the beezer and told him to turn the plane around.
I woke from a fitful sleep, and having nodded out through lunch, had to make do with another Bloody Mary and a healthy piece of celery. I needed all the celery I could get. The accumulated stress of living in New York was still weighing heavily upon me. I felt vaguely troubled with a sidecar of impending doom as I looked out over what some New Yorkers call “flyover country.” America, I suppose. The place where celery comes from.
I drew some comfort from an old Texas axiom: Whether your destination is heaven or hell, first you have to change planes in Dallas-Fort Worth.
CHAPTER 3
It was late in the afternoon when I finally arrived in San Antonio, but the weather was still hotter than a stolen tamale. It reminded me of my days with the Peace Corps working in the jungles of Borneo as an agricultural extension worker. My job had been to distribute seeds upriver to the natives. In two and a half years, however, the Peace Corps never sent me any seeds. In the end, I had to resort to distributing my own seed upriver, which had some rather unpleasant repercussions. But I loved the tropics and seldom complained about the weather in Texas. Without it, no one would ever be able to start a conversation.
I breezed through the corridor to the gate and on into the terminal past straw cowboy hats, belt buckles as big as license plates, happy H
ispanic families. At the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where I’d gotten off the plane briefly to smoke a cigar, the women all had that blond, pinched look halfway between Morgan Fairchild and a praying mantis. The men at DFW appeared to have come in on a wing and a prayer themselves. They’d looked well fed and fairly smarmy, like so many secular Jimmy Swaggarts. At the San Antonio airport the people looked like real Texans. Even the one Hare Krishna had a nice “Y’all” going for him.
Greyhound bus stations, I reflected as I passed long rows of television chairs all individually tuned to “Ironsides,” used to tell you a lot about the character of a town. Today, it’s airports. All bus stations tell you anymore is the character of the local characters, and there’s damn few of them left these days in most places. I wasn’t even sure if I was still one myself.
I waited at the baggage claim for a period of time roughly comparable to the length of the Holy Roman Empire.
“What comes around goes around,” I said to a man who was dressed as either a pimp or an Aryan golfer.
“True story,” he said. “Last time I went to New Jersey the airline sent all my luggage to Las Vegas.”
“Sounds like your toilet kit had more fun than you did,” I said.
We waited.
Eventually, with suitcase, guitar, and pet carrier in hand, I strolled onto the sun-blinded San Antonio sidewalk like a lost mariachi and gazed around for anybody wearing an Echo Hill T-shirt. The cat gazed around, too. She had not taken the trip very well, apparently, and at the moment, appeared to be pissed off enough to scratch out the eyes of Texas.
If someone is late to meet you in New York it is cause for major stress and consternation. But Texas is close enough to Mexico to have absorbed by some kind of cultural osmosis a healthy sense of mañana. In the old days at the ranch, my brother Roger always used to throw any leftover food on anybody’s plate out in the backyard. “Somethin’ll git it,” he’d say.
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