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

the next morning I thought of the only time I’d ever seen anybody’s lips sewn shut. It’d been many years ago and the lips had belonged to the shrunken head in the Bandera museum. The sight hadn’t been pleasant on a head the size of a tennis ball, and I could only too well imagine the nightmare vision of an actual-size human face mutilated in the same macabre fashion. It was enough to put you right off your huevos rancheros.
    The old courthouse hadn’t really come to life yet, if it ever did. The old lady who’d been spliced the
    night before wouldn’t be coming to life again either, unless it was to haunt my dreams someday when I was tucked away in the Shalom Retirement Village.
    The halls seemed empty as my heart. I walked past some old wooden doors that looked like they’d been closed for a hundred years, some pebbled glass, and about seven spittoons. Before I knew it I was sitting in a big office in front of a big desk behind which sat a big woman. Everything was big in Texas, I thought. Even the small towns.
    “The old lady who died last night,” I said. “The one with her lips sewn shut. That one definitely goes down as murder, right?”
    “Of course it was murder,” said Sheriff Frances Kaiser, looking fairly murderous herself. “Can you think of anything else you could call it?”
    “There’s always the possibility,” I said, “that she might’ve had a nearsighted tailor?”
    I chuckled a brief, good-natured chuckle. A large vein throbbed in the sheriffs neck.
    “What in the dickens would lead you to believe it wasn't murder?” she said. “Poor old thing was strangled and her lips sewn shut. Doesn’t that sound like murder to you? Maybe you’ve been in New York too long.”
    “This kind of wanton violence never happens in New York,” I said. “We’re all good, God-fearin’ little church workers up there. Mind if I smoke?”
    The sheriff gave an expansive, almost papal, wave as if she were shooing away an extremely large gnat. I fished around for a cigar in the many pockets of my beaded Indian vest. This created an awkward moment and, by the time I found the cigar and started setting fire to it, I could see that the sheriff was fresh out of charm.
    Sheriff Frances Kaiser was no one to putz around with. She was a big, tall, no-nonsense type who’d grown up on a ranch near Medina. As a kid, she’d done chores around the ranch and driven the tractor. Now, in her first term in office, she was one hell of a mean-looking sheriff. I could tell she was past wondering what I was doing in her office. Through the blue cigar smoke I heard her speaking to me.
    “We’ve heard tales of your exploits in New York. Any truth to them?”
    “There’s a little. You know how those New Yorkers like to brag. I was just wondering whether you had any leads in this latest case.”
    “Are you offerin’ us your expert help?”
    “Hell, no. I figure you’d probably have things just about wrapped up by now.”
    “And you’d be right,” said the sheriff, her eyes straying to a gun on her desk. “We’ve already apprehended a prime suspect and the D.A.’s convening the grand jury to get the indictment.”
    “Jesus. I thought the mills of justice were supposed to grind slowly but exceedingly fine.”
    “Those’re the mills of the Lord,” she corrected. “The mills of justice grind just about as fast as I tell ’em to. Don’t you know about the mills of the Lord? It’s in the Bible. Your people wrote it.”
    “Sure, we wrote it. But we didn’t like it all that much. We loved the movie.”
    The room was rapidly beginning to fill up with cigar smoke and unpleasant vibes. It was difficult to pry any information from Sheriff Kaiser without mentioning Pat Knox and, from what I’d already gleaned, mentioning Pat Knox to the sheriff could be lethal. It would totally disseminate what rancid crust of credibility I’d managed to attain. Apparently, my “exploits in New York” had impressed Kaiser about