The Kiskadee of Death

by Jan Dunlap

  Luce interrupted my case of green envy by loading a crate of yellow lemons into my arms.

  “Follow me,” she commanded.

  As ordered, I trailed my wife to a section of the garage where a large sheet of chicken wire was slowly being transformed into the map of the migration corridors I’d seen in the sketches. I looked from the empty expanse that would become the state of Texas to the crate of lemons I was holding.

  “There is no way these lemons are going to cover that whole area,” I said. “We’ll be lucky if we can get the panhandle out of this crate.”

  A beeping noise behind me caught my attention and I turned to see Buzz Davis driving a small lift truck toward me.

  It was piled high with crates of lemons.

  “Let me guess,’ I said, stepping aside so Buzz could lower the front lift’s cargo onto the garage floor. “Lemons for Texas.”

  Buzz climbed out of the little truck and patted me on the back. “Welcome to the MOB, Bob. I hope you like the scent of lemons, because you’re going to be wearing it for a few days by the time we finish with the float. You know, Birdy—”

  His voice faltered, and I saw his jaw tighten and his eyes tear up. He looked up at the garage ceiling and let out a long breath. When he looked at me again, he had a smile on his face.

  “Birdy used to say we were making something a lot better than lemonade out of lemons when we built this float every year for the parade.” Buzz took another long breath. “He said we were building an invitation to every person at the Citrus Festival to get outside and appreciate birds.”

  Luce took the crate from my hands and put it on the floor. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Buzz,” she told the old man. “I’ve heard from some of the other birders here that you two had been close friends for almost fifty years.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “We flew combat missions together in Vietnam. Got shot down together. Can you believe that’s where Birdy got hooked on birding? In the middle of a war zone.”

  A forced laugh escaped from his mouth, and he shook his head. “Whoever would have thought he’d die from cracking his head open because he tripped over a log birding?”

  “Is that what the chief said?” Luce asked.

  I immediately took her elbow and steered her toward the other birders.

  “Ixnay on the eriffshay,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. To Buzz, I waved goodbye and said we’d check back with him later.

  “Why would the chief tell him that?” Luce asked me when I’d walked her around the chicken wire map to pick up a nail gun sitting on a bench. “He told us Birdy’s death is being handled as a homicide.”

  I handed her the nail gun and picked up a box of nails to go with it.

  “Luce, think about it. Birdy was at the park with Buzz. Buzz was the last one to see him alive, apparently. Chief Pacheco has to consider Buzz a suspect for that reason alone.”

  I saw a trio of birders kneeling on the map, working on arranging the limes to form the Mississippi flyway. I saw that Gunnar was among them, his signature bandana now tied into a sweat band around his head.

  “Where should we start with the lemons?” I called to him.

  “Take your pick,” he called back. “Anywhere inside that yellow painted outline is fine. That’s a whole lot of Texas to cover.”

  I grabbed a big tray of lemons that had already been halved.

  “I figure that the chief told Buzz it was an accident to keep the real details of the investigation under wraps, so whoever killed Birdy won’t know the police are already looking for him,” I continued, laying out my theory to Luce. “If Buzz is the murderer, you don’t want to tip him off that you’re onto him.”

  “But the Aquavit,” Luce protested. “It was Eddie’s bottle.”

  “Which he said he lost here, working on the float,” I noted. “Any of these people could have picked it up…”

  Luce finished my thought. “And then coincidentally happened to drop it near where Birdy’s body was found?”

  Our eyes met over the tray of lemon halves.

  “You know,” I slowly speculated, “if you were planning to kill someone, and you found a personal item that would link its owner to the murder scene, maybe you’d think that’d be a good idea—plant false evidence to point to someone else as the killer.”

  “Like a bottle of Aquavit,” Luce said. “But that means anyone who was here with Eddie…” She let her sentence trail off.

  I nodded. Almost in unison, we both turned our heads to scan the faces of the people in the garage.

  Buzz, Schooner, Gunnar, and Paddy Mac had all been at the park this morning when I’d spotted Birdy’s leg beneath the overturned canoe. Schooner and Paddy Mac had, in fact, been part of the small clutch of birders with us when I noticed the Green Kingfisher at Alligator Lake, just before I caught a glimpse of Birdy. Another person in the garage had also been at the scene, I now realized. Poppy Mac, Paddy Mac’s wife, was one of the women with us at Alligator Lake.

  As for the rest of the birders working on the float, I couldn’t recall if any had been at the park, but there was no rule I knew of that said a murderer had to hang around until his victim was found. For that matter, there was no reason at all to think the murderer had been on the park deck with us as Chief Pacheco began collecting statements. I knew I sure wouldn’t stay around if I’d killed someone—I’d make a beeline for the border.

  Huh.

  In this case, the border was right there—the Mexican-American border, that is.

  For just a second, I had a flashback to Buzz and Rosalie on the park deck before Luce and I set off to Alligator Lake and found a dead man. Buzz had made some comment about immigrants not being welcome and Rosalie’s response gave me the feeling she was offended.

  “That’s right!” I said, then realized I’d said it out loud, which was why Luce was giving me a funny look.

  “Rosalie’s an immigrant,” I said, laying the tray of lemons back on the bench.

  “What are you talking about?” my wife asked.

  “I thought you could read my mind,” I told her. “You always seem to know what I’m thinking. Here.” I took her hands and placed one on each side of my head. “Can you hear me thinking?”

  “I think the sunscreen we bought yesterday isn’t working and now your brain has fried along with your arms,” Luce suggested. She removed her hands. “No, I can’t hear you thinking. What are you talking about?”

  “This morning, at the park when we met Rosalie and Buzz. She was upset when Buzz made the crack about immigrants not being welcome in Texas,” I explained. “Pearl told us Rosalie grew up, poor, in Mexico, and that she really appreciated the opportunities she found in America. I bet she sympathizes with the illegal immigrants who risk so much to find a better life in the United States, and she was offended by Buzz’s attempt at a joke.”

  Luce studied my face a moment, then tapped me on the chest with the end of the nail gun. “And what does that have to do with anything?”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But there’s something about the border being so close to where Birdy was killed. I’m sure of it. I just don’t have it all figured out yet.”

  Luce pointed her nail gun at the tray of lemons. “How about we work on getting this map done? Maybe by the time we finish Texas, you’ll have another clue.”

  I picked up the tray of lemons again and followed her to the edge of the yellow outline where she dropped to her knees to start attaching the fruit halves I handed her.

  I didn’t want another clue.

  I wanted to solve the case and keep Crazy Eddie from getting killed.

  Because in my experience, once a birder sets his sights on a particular bird, he doesn’t give up until he gets it. I didn’t
want to find out the same was true of whoever had set his gun sights on my old friend, instead of the vultures, at Frontera Audubon.

  Chapter Ten

  After an hour of marinating in lemon juice as we worked on the panhandle of Texas, we were recruited by Gunnar to help him finish the lime ribbon that represented the Mississippi flyway. Since it was getting late (and nailing slippery lemons was taking longer than I had expected), the three of us decided it made more sense to combine our efforts to totally complete one section of the map and leave the rest of Texas for the next night.

  “I heard you guys talking about Eddie getting shot at over at Frontera,” Gunnar remarked after instructing us where to nail the last crate of limes. “That’s scary stuff. I knew your friend was working on some hush-hush deal with the Border Patrol, but he must have really ticked off somebody if he’s dodging bullets.”

  I set the crate down beside Luce and sat on the floor beside her where she was preparing to nail the halved fruits onto the chicken wire map. We exchanged a quick glance and a slight shake of the head to tell each other that neither of us had mentioned to anyone in the garage that the shooting was being considered as anything other than the work of a disgruntled and aim-challenged vulture hater.

  Yet Gunnar had assumed Eddie was the target, not the buzzards.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked him, trying to sound casual and not like I was snooping for Chief Pacheco, which, of course, I was. So far, everyone I’d told about Eddie’s “accident” had responded with the same assessment as Cynnie Scott—that the anti-vulture roost crew had some gun-happy vigilantes in their ranks. Gunnar was the sole birder to suspect something more was going on.

  “That’s what Paddy Mac said when he told me about it,” Gunnar replied, then looked up from the limes he was slicing in half. “That’s not what happened? Did Eddie get shot or not?”

  I debated how to answer that, but before I could say anything, Gunnar chuckled.

  “I should have known. That Paddy’s always pulling my leg. Always looking for a whopper of a story to tell. Last week he tried to convince me he was in the witness protection program. He’s got that Irish blarney streak in him for sure.”

  Gunnar shook his head and took another lime from the pile near his cutting board.

  “He was doing the same thing this morning,” he said, setting the lime on the board. “He came up with a dozen detailed scenarios for how and why Birdy died. Personally, I thought the one most probable was where Birdy stumbled into a drug deal gone bad.”

  He grabbed another two limes and lined them up with the one already set on the board. With one stroke of the sharp butcher knife in his hand, he sliced neatly through all three. His technique reminded me of Luce when she was doing her chef thing in our kitchen at home; calculated, extremely efficient, and very, very skilled.

  “I actually saw a drug bust on the street in Alamo one night when I was out owling,” Gunnar continued as he methodically sliced more limes. “You couldn’t miss it, really. A truck squealed to a stop, with a cop car behind it, and two more patrol cars zoomed in from the opposite direction. Three guys piled out of the truck cab, guns blazing. The police took the shooters down, cuffed them and stuffed them into the back seats of the squad cars.”

  “Whoa,” I commented.

  Gunnar looked up and smiled, his wispy white eyebrows lifted almost to where his bandana circled his head.

  “You don’t have that happen where you go owling?” he asked in mock surprise. “Anyway, it wasn’t until Chief Pacheco told us to have some respect for Rosalie’s grief and to quit with the theories and butt out, that Paddy shut up.”

  Gunnar cut through another three limes, then added as an afterthought, “I think Paddy forgot that Rosalie is Pacheco’s mother. He’s real protective of both her and his niece Pearl, I’ve noticed. I’ve seen the chief out at the park more than a few times in the last month, talking with Rosalie. Actually,” he paused, “not talking so much as arguing.”

  I almost dropped a handful of lime halves on Luce’s arm.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, needing to hear the family tree again. “Rosalie, the naturalist, who was Birdy’s close friend,” I said, giving a little pointed emphasis to the word “close,” “is Chief Pacheco’s mother?”

  Gunnar blinked. “Yes. I’m guessing from that look on your face you didn’t know that. Am I right?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said, still trying to keep everyone’s relationship to everyone else straight. “But Pearl—her last name is Garcia, I think.”

  “That’s right,” Gunnar said. “Her mom, Rosalie’s daughter, married a fellow named Garcia. The story is he was in the U.S. illegally and had to go back to Mexico, and Pearl’s mom went with him, leaving Pearl with her mom Rosalie. You can ask Rosalie about it. She’ll be happy to tell you what she thinks of immigration laws that break up families.”

  Ouch.

  As a high school counselor in Minnesota, I heard a lot of similar opinions from the families of our immigrant students. Whether they were Latino, Somali, Hmong or Russian, every one of my culturally diverse students related tales of splintered families, long separations and ethnic discrimination. Coming to America was as much an ordeal for some of them as it was a promise for a better life, and my students’ experiences were all on the legal side of the page.

  I couldn’t imagine what a mess it was for families that tried to enter the country illegally—the kinds of families that Eddie’s surveillance drone was designed to find and help.

  Eddie’s drone.

  Eddie had come to Texas as a favor to Birdy.

  Birdy was involved with Rosalie.

  Rosalie disliked the immigration laws.

  “And Birdy told me we would have to keep an eye on Eddie, for everyone’s sake,” Rosalie had said.

  And now Birdy was dead, and Eddie was getting framed for his murder.

  By Rosalie? Had her relationship with Birdy gone south—way south—when he became involved in creating more effective border control with drones, because of her own family’s heartbreak? As I recalled from our initial encounter this morning, Rosalie hadn’t taken kindly to Buzz’s inference about unwelcome migrants. And while she’d been suitably bereft with shock and grief early in the day, she’d impressed me as a tough cookie when she accused Eddie of Birdy’s murder when she’d shown up at the Valley Nature Center.

  How bitter was she about her family’s situation? Bitter enough to kill Birdy and pin it on Eddie? If that were the case, she could basically take out two birds with one stone: the border patrol’s drone designer and the drone’s test engineer.

  “Bobby?”

  I realized Luce was waving her hand back and forth in front of my eyes.

  “I think you’ve seen one lime too many tonight,” she said as I pulled my attention back into the garage. “We’re done with the Mississippi flyway, and everyone is calling it quits for the night.”

  I glanced around the garage and saw only a few people left near the float’s truck cab, which, to my surprise, was actually beginning to bear a resemblance to a Green Jay. I looked for the kiskadee costume on the flatbed, but it was gone. Our chicken wire map, however, was a beautiful field of various citrus fruits, except for an empty patch in the middle of the state that we could easily finish off tomorrow night.

  I stood up and then helped my wife to her feet. She swayed for a second, and I mentally kicked myself for letting us labor so long on the float when Luce had been feeling under the weather earlier in the evening.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  She gave me a sheepish grin. “I think I got up too fast, and all the blood rushed out of head. Plus, I forgot I didn’t have any dinner. I guess sneaking sections of oranges doesn’t quite cut it as high octane fuel for creating parade floats.”

  Nonetheless, I ke
pt an arm around my wife’s waist as we walked out of the garage.

  Which turned out to be a good thing, since I had to swing her out of the way as a car came roaring down the driveway, swerving dangerously close to where we were walking.

  “Hey!” I shouted at the driver, though I couldn’t see his face since I was almost blinded by the car’s headlights.

  The car squealed to a stop in front of the open garage bay and the driver’s door flung open. Out tumbled a young man, who quickly caught himself from falling flat on his face after he caught one foot in the car door frame. He pulled himself back up by grabbing onto the side of the door and hoisting his body erect to lean against the side of the car.

  “No wonder he didn’t see us,” Luce observed. “The idiot is wearing dark glasses. At night.”

  “Actually, I doubt he’d see any better without them,” I replied. “That kid’s drunk.”

  “Oh, my,” Luce whispered, her voice barely a breath.

  Startled by her sudden change in tone, I searched my wife’s face.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I pressed her.

  But she wasn’t looking at me. Luce’s eyes were riveted to the car in front of the garage.

  “It’s a vintage Mustang, Bobby.”

  I glanced back at the car.

  Luce was right. The drunk driver had a classic Mustang.

  Though I’d never been interested in cars other than to have them transport me to birding spots, my wife had grown up with a father who adored classic sports cars and shared that love with his only child. Looking at Luce, you’d never guess she was a grease monkey at heart, but believe me, the woman knew her way around a V-8 engine. In the years I’d known her, in fact, plenty of our weekend birding trips had ended with a classic car show in some remote community.

  I’ve learned that birders weren’t the only people who loved a good road trip.

  The car’s noisy appearance had likewise attracted the attention of the last folks in the garage, but before anyone could say anything, the inebriated driver yelled out.