The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (34 page)

“Oh, that’s good, Daddy. Really. He’s gone nuts, not because of violent films and movies, but because of a misguided view about romance. I love it.”

“Makes as much sense as a guy saying he axed a family because he saw a horror movie or read a horror novel. There’s got to be more to it than that, of course. Rotten childhood, genetic makeup. Most people who see or read horror novels, romance novels, whatever, get their thrills vicariously. It’s a catharsis. But in the same way a horror movie or book might set someone off who’s already messed up, someone wound-up and ready to spring, the Harlequins do it for our man. He has so little idea what real life is like, he expects it to be like the Harlequins, or desperately wants it to be that way, and when it isn’t, his frustrations build, and —”

“He kills women, cuts them up, disposes of their bodies. It’s delicious. Really delicious.”

“It’s silly. There’s a sleeping bag in the closet. Get it out when you get sleepy. Me, I’m going to go to bed. I got a part-time job downstairs at Martha’s, and I start tomorrow.”

“That’s great, Daddy. Mom said you’d never find a job.”

On that note, I went to bed.

Next morning I went down to Martha’s and started to work. She had a storeroom full of books. Some of them were stuck together with age, and some were full of worms. Being a fanatic book-lover, it hurt me, but I got rid of the bad ones in the dumpster out back, then loaded some boxes of good-condition books on a hand truck and wheeled them out and began putting them up in alphabetical order in their proper sections.

About nine that morning, Jasmine came down and I heard her say something to Martha, then she came around the corner of the detective section and smiled at me. She looked so much like her mother it hurt me. She had her hair pulled back and tied at her neck and she was starting to sweat. She wore white shorts, cut a little too short if you ask me, and a loose red T-shirt and sandals. She was carrying a yellow pad with a pencil.

“What you doing?” I asked.

“Figuring out what Waldo the Great’s up to. I been working on it ever since I got up. I got lots of notes here.”

“What’d you have for breakfast?”

“Same as you, I bet. A Coke.”

“Right. It’s important we pay attention to nutrition, Baby Darling.”

“You want to hear about Waldo or not?”

“Yeah, tell me, what’s he up to?”

“He’s looking for a job.”

“Because he got fired for the dog-kicking business?”

“Yeah. So, he’s staying in the trailer park here, and he’s looking for a job. Or maybe he’s got some savings and he’s just hanging out for a while before he moves on. Let’s just say all that for ‘What If’s’ sake.”

“All right, now what?”

“Just for fun, to play the game all the way, let’s go out to the trailer park and see if he’s living there. If he is, we ought to be able to find him. He’s got all these dogs, so there should be some signs of them, don’t you think?”

“Wait a minute. You’re not planning on checking?”

“Just for the ‘What If’ game.”

“Like I said, he could have moved on.”

“That’s what we’ll find out. Later, we can go over to the trailer park and look around, play detective.”

“That’s carrying it too far.”

“Why? It’s just a game. We don’t have to bother him.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” It was Martha. She came around the corner of the bookshelves leaning on her golf putter. “It’s just a game.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be counting your money, or something?” I said to Martha. “Kill some of those roaches in your storeroom. That club would be just the tool for it.”

“I couldn’t help but overhear you because I was leaning against the other side of the bookshelf listening,” Martha said.

“That’ll do it,” I said, and shelved a Mickey Spillane.

“We’ve spoke, but I don’t think we’ve actually met,” Jasmine said to Martha. “I’m his daughter.”

“Tough to admit, I’m sure,” Martha said.

Jasmine and Martha smiled at each other and shook hands.

“Why don’t we go over there tonight?” Martha said. “I need something to do.”

“To the trailer park?” I asked.

“Of course,” Martha said.

“Not likely,” I said. “I’ve had it with the detective business, imaginary or otherwise. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I have anything else to do with it, in any manner, shape or form. And you can take that to the bank.”

That night, presumably an example of a cold day in hell, around nine-thirty, we drove over to the only trailer park in Mud Creek and looked around.

Waldo hadn’t moved on. Being astute detectives, we found his trailer right away. It was bright blue and there was red lettering on the side that read: WALDO THE GREAT AND HIS MAGNIFICENT CANINES. The trailer was next to a big pickup with a trailer hitch and there were lights on in the trailer.

We were in Martha’s old Dodge van, and we drove by Waldo’s and around the loop in the park and out of there. Martha went a short distance, turned down a hard clay road that wound along the side of the creek and through a patch of woods and ended up at the rear of the trailer park, about even with Waldo’s trailer. It was a bit of distance away, but you could see his trailer through the branches of the trees that surrounded the park. Martha parked to the side of the road and spoke to Jasmine. “Honey, hand me them binoculars out of the glove box.”

Jasmine did just that.

“These suckers are infra-red,” Martha said. “You can see a mole on a gnat’s ass with one of these dead of night during a blizzard.”

“And why in the world would you have a pair?” I asked.

“I used to do a little surveillance for a private investigation agency in Houston. I sort of borrowed these when I left. You know, boss I had hadn’t been such a dick, I’d have stayed with that job. I was born to it.”

“Sounds exciting,” Jasmine said.

“It beat smelling book dust, I’ll tell you that.” Martha rolled down her window and put the glasses to her face and pointed them at Waldo’s trailer.

“He’s at the window,” she said.

“This has gone far enough,” I said. “We’re not supposed to be doing this. It’s an invasion of privacy.”

“Settle down. He ain’t got his pecker out or nothing” Martha said. “Wish he did, though. He’s an asshole, but he ain’t bad-looking. I wonder what kind of rod he’s got on him?”

I looked at Jasmine. She looked a little stunned. “Listen here,” I said. “My daughter’s here.”

“No shit,” Martha said. “Listen, you stuffy old fart. She’s grown up enough to know a man’s got a hooter on him and what it looks like.”

Jasmine’s face was split by a weak smile. “Well, I know what they are, of course.”

“All right, we’re all versed in biology,” I said. “Let’s go. I’ve got a good book waiting at home.”

“Hold the goddamn phone,” Martha said. “He’s coming out of the trailer.”

I looked, and I could see Waldo’s shape framed in the trailer’s doorway. One of the poodles ran up behind him and he back-kicked it inside without even looking, went down the metal steps and closed and locked the trailer, got in his pickup and drove away.

“He’s off,” Martha said.

“Yeah. Probably to a fried chicken place,” I said.

Martha lowered the binoculars and looked over her seat at me. “Would you quit fucking up the game? ‘What If’ is going on here.”

“Yeah, Daddy,” Jasmine said. “We’re playing ‘What If’.”

Martha cranked the van and followed the clay road as it curved around the park and out into the street. She went right. A moment later, we saw the back of Waldo’s pickup. He had an arm hanging out the window and a cigarette was between his fingers and sparks were flaring off of it and flickering into the night.

“Smokey Bear’d come down on his ass like a ton of bricks, he seen that,” Martha said.

We followed him to the end of the street and out onto the main drag, such as it is in Mud Creek. He pulled into a fried chicken joint.

“See,” I said.

“Even murderers have to eat,” Martha said, and she drove on by.

My plan was to end the business there, but it didn’t work that way. I pulled out of it and let them stay with it. All that week Martha and Jasmine played “What If.” They pinned up the fold-out in my apartment and they wrote out scenarios for who Waldo was and what he’d done, and so on. They drove out to his place at night and discovered he kept weird hours, went out at all times of the night. They discovered he let the poodles out for bathroom breaks twice a night and that there was one less than there had been during the circus act. I guess Mommy had been wrong when she told her kid the poodle knew how to land.

It was kind of odd seeing Jasmine and Martha become friends like that. Martha had struck me as having all the imagination of a fencepost, but under that rough exterior and that loud mouth was a rough exterior and a loud mouth with an imagination.

I also suspicioned that she had lied about not being able to pay her rent. The store didn’t make that much, but she always seemed to have money. As far as the store went, it got so I was running it by myself, fulltime, not only putting up books, but waiting on customers and closing up at night. Martha paid me well enough for it, however, so I didn’t complain, but when she and Jasmine would come down from my place talking about their “killer,” etc., I felt a little jealous. Jasmine had moved in with me, and now that I had my daughter back, she spent all her time with a bald-headed, mustached lady who was her father’s boss.

Worse, Connie had been on my case about Jasmine and how my only daughter was living in a shit hole and being exposed to bad elements. The worst being me, of course. She came by the apartment a couple of times to tell me about it and to try and get Jasmine to go home.

I told her Jasmine was free to go home anytime she chose, and Jasmine explained that she had no intention of going home. She liked her sleeping bag and Daddy let her have Coke for breakfast. I sort of wish she hadn’t mentioned the Coke part. She’d only had that for breakfast one morning, but she knew it’d get her mother’s goat, and it had. Only thing was, now Connie could hang another sword over my head. Failure to provide proper nutrition for my only child.

Anyway, I was working in the store one day — well, working on reading a detective novel — when Martha and Jasmine came in.

“Get your goddamn feet off my desk,” Martha said.

“Glad to see you,” I said, lowering my feet and putting a marker in the book.

“Get off my stool,” Martha said. “Quit reading that damn book and put some up.”

I got off the stool. “You two have a pleasant day, Massah Martha?”

“Eat shit, Plebin,” Martha said, leaning her golf club against the counter and mounting her stool.

“Daddy, Martha and I have been snooping. Listen what we got. Martha had this idea to go over to the newspaper office in LaBorde and look at back issues —”

“LaBorde?” I said.

“Bigger town. Bigger paper,” Martha said, sticking one of her dainty cigarettes into her mouth and lighting it.

“We went through some older papers,” Jasmine said, “and since LaBorde covers a lot of the small towns around here, we found ads for the Jim Dandy Circus in several of them, and we were able to pinpoint on a map the route of the circus up to Mud Creek, and the latest paper showed Marvel Creek to be the next stop, and —”

“Slow down,” I said. “What’s the circus got to do with your so-called investigation?”

“You look at the papers and read about the towns where the circus showed up,” Martha said, “and there’s in every one of them something about a missing woman, or young girl. In a couple cases, bodies have been found. Sometimes they were found a week or so after the circus came to town, but most of the news articles indicate the missing women disappeared at the time of the circus.”

“Of course, we determined this, not the papers,” Jasmine said. “We made the connection between the circus and the bodies.”

“In the case of the bodies, both were found after the circus passed through,” Martha said, “but from the estimated times of death the papers gave, we’ve been able to figure they were killed about the time the circus was in town. And my guess is those missing women are dead too, and by the same hand.”

“Waldo’s?” I said.

“That’s right,” Martha said.

I considered all that.

Jasmine said, “Pretty coincidental, don’t you think?”

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean —”

“And the two bodies had been mutilated,” Martha said. She leaned against the counter and reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out the fold-out I had found. She smoothed it out on the counter top. “Body parts were missing. And I bet they were cut up, just like this fold-out is marked. As for the missing body parts, eyes and pussies, I figure. Those are the parts he has circled and blacked out.”

“Watch your language,” I said to Martha.

No one seemed to take much note of me.

“The bodies were found in the town’s local dump,” Jasmine said.

“It’s curious,” I admitted, “but still, to accuse a man of murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence.”

“One more thing,” Martha said. “Both bodies had traces of black paint on them. Like it had been used to mark the areas the killer wanted to cut, and I presume, did cut. That’s certainly a lot of goddamn circumstantial evidence, isn’t it?”

“Enough that we’re going to keep an eye on Waldo,” Jasmine said.

I must admit right now that I didn’t think even then, after what I had been told, there was anything to this Waldo the Great as murderer. It struck me that murders and disappearances happen all the time, and that if one were to look through the LaBorde paper carefully, it would be possible to discover there had been many of both, especially disappearances, before and after the arrival of the circus. I mean that paper covered a lot of small towns and communities, and LaBorde was a fairly large town itself. A small city actually. Most of the disappearances would turn out to be nothing more than someone leaving on a trip for a few days without telling anyone, and most of the murders would be committed by a friend or relative of the victim and would have nothing to do with the circus or marked-up fold-outs.