Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

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.”