by Jan Dunlap
“This and that,” he said. “The wife went with her book club on a Caribbean cruise with some author who writes romance novels. I said ‘No way I’m joining you for that one, honey,’ and decided I’d visit some old friends down here while she’s out on the water drinking little umbrella drinks and talking about unrequited love and unbridled passion.”
I gave Eddie an expectant stare.
“What?” he said, feigning innocence. “You like those books? Why, Bob, I never knew.”
Luce laughed.
“Cough it up, Eddie,” I said. “I know you. You’re here working, aren’t you? Robotics or surveillance?”
He pursed his lips and squinted up at me.
“All right,” he conceded, “there was a little bitty job I thought I’d check out here as a favor to an old friend.”
“I knew it,” I said. “Who’s the friend?”
“What’s the job?” Luce asked.
Eddie grinned. “You two practice that?” He pointed at me, then at Luce. “That one-two thing? Finishing each other’s thoughts? How long have you been married?”
A shout rose behind me.
“There he is!”
I turned to see Rosalie, our grieving naturalist, walking towards us, accompanied by Chief Pacheco. Rosalie still clutched a handkerchief in her hand, holding it against her lips, and the chief looked grim.
I wondered what they wanted.
As it turned out, it wasn’t me.
“Are you Eddie Edvarg?” the chief barked out, directing his attention to Eddie.
“Yes, sir,” Eddie responded. “How can I help you?”
Pacheco came to a stop in front of us.
“Excuse me, folks, but I need to speak with Mr. Edvarg.”
He turned to Eddie. “Are you the special contractor who’s been testing the new surveillance sensors down at the river?” His words came out more as an accusation than a question.
Eddie paused a moment to look the chief over. I guessed he was as startled as I was at the chief’s confrontational tone.
“I am.”
Pacheco gestured back towards the park deck. “Then you’ll please come with me to answer a few questions,” he said.
It was a command, not a request.
Eddie squinted at the chief, sizing him up.
Compared to Eddie’s barely five-foot frame, I’d say ‘up’ was the operational word there, since Pacheco matched my own six-foot three-inch height. Besides which, the chief was a lot more muscled than my old friend, not to mention he was armed with a service revolver. Wisely, Eddie decided to go peacefully.
“Okay,” he told the officer, “Lead the way.”
Luce and I remained standing with Rosalie while the two men returned to the park deck.
“You know Eddie?” Rosalie asked me.
“He’s an old friend,” I said.
“You know why he is here?”
I shook my head. “We were just asking him, but we didn’t get the answer.”
Rosalie dabbed carefully at her eyes.
“He’s working with the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol,” she informed us. “Something to do with the new sensors to discourage illegal border crossings.”
“That sounds like Eddie,” I commented. “He loves that kind of work.”
“He had talked with Birdy about it,” she said, her voice catching. “And Birdy told me we would have to keep an eye on Eddie, for everyone’s sake.”
She looked back in the direction where the chief had taken Eddie.
“And now… now Birdy is dead,” she sniffed, her eyes brimming with tears.
“So the chief wants to question Eddie about Birdy?” Luce asked.
Rosalie nodded, her lips trembling. “Yes,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I overheard one of the deputies. He said he found a small empty bottle of some kind of drink near the body. Schooner and Gunnar overheard him, too. They told me it was a special liquor from Minnesota.”
“Oh, no,” Luce breathed beside me.
I felt my stomach roll in dread.
“The liquor,” I said, “was it called Aquavit?”
Rosalie looked at me suspiciously.
“Yes.” She nodded. “That was the name. How do you know that?”
“Just a wild guess,” I said, my stomach in complete free fall.
“Oh, no,” Luce repeated.
I took my wife’s hand in mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
“On second thought, maybe we aren’t done here, yet,” I told her, starting to lead the way back to the park deck. “I don’t know what kind of mischief Eddie’s gotten himself into, but I know for a fact he’s not a killer.”
At least, I really hoped not.
Don’t you just hate it when you’re wrong?
Chapter Three
As it turned out, though, Luce and I were done with Estero Llano Grande State Park for the day. Just as we stepped back on the park deck, Eddie and the chief passed us, walking in the opposite direction towards the park’s entrance and parking lot.
“I’m taking a ride with the chief here to the police station,” Eddie called back to us. “Don’t worry. I’m just going to give him my statement. Then I’ll ring your cellphone. See if we can have dinner.”
Luce and I watched the two men follow the brick path until they veered out of our sight. I hadn’t spotted any cuffs on Eddie, so I figured he was going along willingly in order to fully cooperate with the chief’s investigation. No need to antagonize the local law if you didn’t have to, right?
Especially if it was your bottle of Minnesota Aquavit found near a fresh corpse.
In Texas.
Where you were working on a special project.
What a coincidence.
“The chief obviously knew that someone was working with the surveillance system,” Luce observed, still looking in the direction the men had gone. “But he clearly hadn’t met Eddie yet.”
She turned to face me. “Although if Eddie is working with the Border Patrol, I suppose that might be a different agency than the chief’s department. I hope there isn’t bad blood between the two groups, but I got the impression the chief wasn’t too keen on the project Eddie’s involved with.”
I’d noticed the same thing, as I’m sure Eddie had, too, judging from the way he’d reacted to the chief’s initial greeting.
“I expect it’s probably a jurisdictional thing,” I surmised. “Government agencies and local police departments seem to be easily offended when they bump into each other on cases, even though everybody’s on the same team.” I paused. “Or at least, they’re supposed to be on the same team.”
Luce drew her sunglasses out of her backpack and slipped them on. “Let’s go get lunch,” she said. “We’re not going to be hearing from Eddie for a couple of hours, anyway.”
“Lunch it is, then,” I agreed. “Fat Daddy’s Barbeque, here we come.”
Less than ten minutes later, I was signaling a left turn off the highway into the parking lot of Fat Daddy’s. We’d passed the restaurant on our way to Estero Llano, and while the place had been empty at the earlier hour, there was now a line of people crowding into the door, and a parking lot filled with random rows of cars.
I’d gotten the tip to eat there from Birdchick, one of my birding colleagues back home in Minnesota, when I told her Luce and I were heading to McAllen, Texas, she said we had to try the barbeque at Fat Daddy’s in Weslaco. Birdchick travels all over the world birding, so when she recommends an eating spot, you can be sure it’s good. Of course, the fact that Fat Daddy’s was also conveniently located so close to the entrance to Estero Llano made it an easy choice for a meal for anyone visiting the park.
I just hadn’t expected that everyone from the park, and
the surrounding county, it seemed, would want to be eating there at the same time as us.
“What do you think?” I asked Luce as I tried to find a parking spot amid the jumble of cars. “Shall we go somewhere else less crowded?”
“Absolutely not,” she replied. “Most of the car license plates are from here, which means the locals love it. That’s the kind of restaurant we want. And I’ve had this craving for barbeque ever since we left Minnesota,” she added, pointing at a car that was backing out of the lot in a cloud of dust. “There’s our spot.”
I made a tight turn into the space, and after we got out of the car, we waited for another two cars to pass by before we could head to the entrance to Fat Daddy’s.
“It’s a fifteen-minute wait,” the young hostess told me when I angled my way through the waiting crowd to her noisy station inside the old clapboard building. The interior walls were paneled in wood and covered with memorabilia: autographed photos, longhorn skulls, framed local news articles, flags, and sports jerseys. Every table was occupied, and a team of waitresses scurried around the room, delivering plates of pulled pork sandwiches and steaming barbequed chicken.
“I think this might be Texas barbeque heaven,” Luce said when I rejoined her at the end of the line of customers that wound out the front door. “It sure smells like it is.”
I had to agree. I would have said something to that effect, but my mouth was too busy salivating in anticipation. I could almost taste the tangy sauced beef and pork ribs thanks to the thick aromas that had filled the dining room inside.
Four soldiers in fatigues fell in line behind us. I guessed they were in their early twenties, and I noticed they all had an American flag patch on their upper right arms.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “Thanks for your service.”
The soldier nearest me smiled. “You’re welcome,” he replied.
“Is there a military base near here?” Luce asked.
“Army National Guard, ma’am,” said another of the soldiers. “We’ve got an armory here in the city of Weslaco.”
I noticed that his name tape read Pacheco.
“We just met a chief named Pacheco out at Estero Llano,” I commented. “No possibility you’re related, I suppose?”
The young Guardsman laughed. “As a matter of fact, he’s my cousin. Two or three times removed—I can never remember which it is, since we’ve got so many cousins in the Valley. He was sort of my hero growing up,” he explained, “so I followed him into the Guard when I was old enough.”
His companions made clucking sounds, and one of them piped up, “Poor little boy. You were the pollo chiquito in the henhouse.”
Pacheco pretended to punch his friend. “Hey, I grew up to be the gallo! Not my fault my parents had six daughters and only one son.”
The men all laughed.
The young Guardsman resumed his conversation with me and Luce.
“But my cousin, the chief, went into local law enforcement when his eight years were up,” he went on. “He said he wanted to clean up this border zone, but I think he couldn’t bring himself to leave all the relatives. A lot of us here have family on both sides of the border.”
He pointed at his own uniformed chest. “As for me, I’m heading to California when I’m done, and I’m not looking back.”
One of his comrades gave him a friendly shove on the shoulder. “Yeah, right. And where will that leave your Pearlita, the Citrus Queen? Home all alone in Mission?”
Mission was one of the cities we’d visited in the last few days. Surrounded by citrus groves, it was the local capital of Texas fruit-growers, and the site of the annual Citrus Festival, which happened to be slated during our week of vacation. In honor of the celebration, Luce and I had both ordered our first slices of grapefruit pie for dessert the night before.
The other two soldiers laughed while Pacheco grinned.
“I’ll keep your Pearlita company!” the guardsman standing next to me eagerly offered.
“You wish!” Pacheco shot back, joining in the laughter.
“Pacheco’s girlfriend is this year’s Citrus Queen,” one of the quartet explained. “She’ll be in the festival parade on Saturday, riding the float for the Valley’s citrus growers. She’ll be the one holding the big grapefruits,” he added, holding his hands at chest level and winking suggestively at his comrades.
“Hey!” Pacheco objected indignantly, even as his buddies burst into another round of laughter. “Show some respect!”
“White, party of two?”
I turned to see our hostess waiting for us with two menus.
“Was that fifteen minutes?” I asked Luce as we followed the hostess to our table in the covered porch dining area of Fat Daddy’s. We took our seats at a small table covered with a cheerful red-and-white-checkered plastic cloth. A roll of paper towels sat on its end in the middle of the plastic.
“This is serious barbeque,” Luce said, then dove into studying the menu.
I glanced around the porch. A big American flag hung on one end of the room, and I noted that we were one of only two tables not occupied by soldiers in fatigues. Fat Daddy’s was clearly the lunching establishment of choice for the local Guardsmen, and as I watched a nimble young waitress set down a loaded tray of heaping portions of barbequed chicken and pork, I could understand why. Not only did the food smell terrific, but there was plenty of it, and after a morning of birding gone bad, I was more than ready to turn my attention to some good, old-fashioned comfort food.
Our waitress came over to the table, and Luce and I both ordered the pulled pork sandwich with a side of coleslaw and potato salad. As we sipped on our iced teas, I wondered how Eddie’s conversation with the chief was going. I didn’t want to even speculate how his trademark bottle of Aquavit might have ended up near a dead man, but unless my old friend had a rock-solid alibi for his morning, I doubted that the chief was going to write off Eddie as a prime suspect in the murder of Birdy Johnson. Just to be sure I hadn’t missed any calls from Eddie amid the surrounding din of happy diners, I took out my cell phone to check.
Nope.
No calls.
Was that a good or bad thing?
“Bobby, have you ever heard anything about a Space X program?”
Luce’s question prompted me to put my phone away and turn my attention in her direction. She was pointing at a framed news article that hung on the wall behind our table. The headline was about the Citrus Festival Parade’s Grand Marshals from the year before, and below it was a photograph of two men waving from the platform of a parade float that looked like it was a rocket ship made of oranges.
Something about one of the men in the picture made me think I’d seen his face before. I peered at the grainy photo, trying to place the man.
“It’s Buzz Davis,” Luce said, doing her usual trick of reading my mind. “And the caption reads ‘Buzz Davis and Birdy Johnson are giving Rio Grande Valley residents something besides citrus to celebrate this year. The two men will be welcoming the first load of passengers on the historic first flight that will change the Valley forever. More about Space X on page 5.’”
She waited for me to look away from the newspaper clipping and back at her.
“That’s Birdy Johnson with Buzz,” she said. “That’s the man we found dead in the park.”
I glanced back at the framed newsprint. “Not that I want to rain on their parade, but for some reason, I don’t think that rockets made from oranges are going to make it as the next generation of space vehicles.”
Luce reached across the table and smacked me on the shoulder.
“Ow!”
“I’m trying to be serious here,” she reprimanded me.
“So am I!” I protested. “I wouldn’t buy stock in some company making rockets out of oranges.”
I put
up my hands to ward off another smack from my wife.
“No, I don’t know anything about a Space X, to answer your question,” I said. “And whoever mounted this clipping didn’t considerately include page 5, so I guess we’re out of luck.”
At that moment, our waitress returned with our baskets of lunch and laid them in front of us.
“Thank you,” I told the young woman. She threw me a quick smile and hustled away to another table. I looked at Luce across the table from me. “We are not, however, out of food. Dig in, my dear.”
“Hey, Minnesota!”
I turned to look in the direction of the voice that rose above the din of the porch and recognized our three magpies from the park—Schooner, Gunnar, and Paddy Mac. I lifted a hand in a brief wave, and by the time I got my fingers back on my pulled pork sandwich, the men had crossed the room and were standing next to our table.
“We won’t keep you from your lunch,” Schooner said. “You obviously know the right birders if you found this place already—the barbeque’s to die for.”
He abruptly stopped talking and scrubbed his hand over his face.
“Sorry,” he added. “Given the circumstances, that was a pretty thoughtless comment.”
Paddy Mac punched Schooner in the arm. “Thoughtless? More like oblivious. Where is your sense of decorum, man?”
“We want to recruit you,” Gunnar said, ignoring his companions’ banter. “If you folks are going to be here a few more days, we are in desperate need of some help, and us birders have got to flock together, right?”
“What kind of help?” Luce asked, pausing between bites of her sandwich.
“Night work,” Paddy Mac said. He looked both ways as if checking to see who might be within earshot, then leaned toward me and loudly whispered, “We’ve got a deadline.”
This time, it was Schooner punching Paddy Mac in the shoulder. “Now who’s being oblivious?”
“Sorry,” Paddy Mac smiled sheepishly. “Not thinking.”
“Look,” Gunnar said. “You help us out, and we’ll help you. We’ve got some ideas about how to get your friend Eddie cleared with the chief.”
