by Jan Dunlap
“I don’t know if I can,” I said, because my imagination was already busy trying to figure out a way to make a graceful exit from Poppy’s conversational clutches. “I’m so new to Texas, I’m still getting over not seeing cowboys and herds of longhorns everywhere. The whole citrus festival thing was enough of a surprise to me—I always thought of Florida, not Texas, when it came to oranges.”
“No kidding? And we have such wonderful citrus around here. The valley used to be filled with orchards. Speaking of which, you are coming to the parade on Saturday, right?” Poppy asked us as I edged Luce toward the store door. “We can always use last minute help with the float, you know. And I’m not sure who’s going to be wearing our kiskadee outfit this year. You two are both so tall, maybe you’d be willing? You’d make great kiskadees!”
Poppy laughed, apparently delighted with her word choice. “Oh, my. Great Kiskadees! Get it? Our signature kiskadee is a Great Kiskadee!”
“I’m sure we’ll be there,” Luce replied, waving goodbye. “Tell Paddy hello for us.”
She tucked her hand around my arm and steered me out of the mansion.
“She sure likes to talk,” Luce commented. “I wonder if Paddy used to get so immersed in his work that she never felt like she had anyone to talk to. He seems like a jovial kind of guy, but if he was into curating museum collections, maybe he wasn’t a very good conversationalist while he was working. ”
“Or maybe he just got used to tuning her out,” I suggested. “She can really get going when she wants to.”
We walked back down the beautifully landscaped walk to the main driveway leading to the parking lot. The sky was blue and the sun shone brightly. Along the walk, cacti mixed with mesquite and a host of other native plants from which issued a variety of chirping and cheeping calls of hidden birds. Plain Chachalacas scooted around under the trees, while a continuous stream of visitors made their leisurely way up the drive, many of them stopping to take photos of the towering date palm trees and the occasional Great Kiskadee or Inca Dove that posed obligingly in the nearest trees.
The place was a playground paradise for birders and photographers. No wonder Quinta Mazatlan received thousands of visitors every year.
“I bet that moving around a lot was probably hard on Poppy,” Luce speculated, obviously still thinking about her conversational exchange with Paddy’s wife. “Maybe she’s never had close friends as a result, and that’s why she just dives in and starts talking. And talking.”
“I think we should introduce her to Chief Pacheco, and she can talk to him,” I said. “She told me she thinks Mark is doing drugs.”
Luce slowed her step and turned to face me.
“Why would she say that to you?” she asked. “We don’t know Mark, and even if we did, it’s none of our business. That’s more than just talking. That’s malicious gossip.”
I opened the car door for her, and she got in. I understood, and agreed with, what she said about Poppy speaking badly about Mark. It was inappropriate and none of our business.
At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if Poppy’s speculation might help connect some dots on the way to solving Birdy’s murder. In particular, I was still thinking about Mark’s comment to the Boston birder about how well he knew the hidden spots in Estero Llano. If Poppy’s suspicion that Mark was involved with drugs was true, might he also be involved in some illegal drug activity?
Illegal activity that Birdy Johnson might have unknowingly interrupted during his regular Wednesday morning birding walk?
I couldn’t forget how green Mark had grown at the reminder of Birdy’s death just a short while ago. I’d attributed it to belated remorse over his thoughtless comments to his grieving uncle, but what if that remorse was… guilt?
Did Mark know something about Birdy’s death that no one else knew?
Could Mark himself have killed his uncle’s best friend?
“Gossip or not, Luce,” I said to my wife as I slid into my car seat and started the engine, “I’m telling the chief about it. Eddie’s not the only one at risk here, remember. We’ve got a nameless note writer to worry about. The more leads I can pass along to Pacheco, the faster he’ll solve his case, and then I won’t have to keep checking for cars tailing us all the way back home to Minnesota.”
“You think trouble might follow us home?” Luce asked. “But the note writer wants us to leave. You know—what happens in Texas, stays in Texas.”
“That sounds like a line from a country-western song.” I exited the parking lot and turned right, back towards downtown McAllen. “I need some coffee. And doughnuts. I hope this place where we’re meeting the chief has both because I have the feeling it’s going to be a very long day.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Luce was downloading the directions on her phone to our rendezvous with Chief Pacheco.
“The name of the place is Shipley Do-nuts,” she told me. “And every review I’m seeing here raves about the doughnuts, especially the glazed ones. Nothing about coffee, but I’ve never seen a doughnut shop that didn’t have coffee.”
“And birders for customers,” I added. “Doughnuts are one of the five food groups for birders, you know.”
“And for policemen,” Luce added.
“Absolutely,” I agreed, laughing. “Did I ever tell you about the time a patrolman stopped me on the highway and I offered him a doughnut… ?”
Chapter Fifteen
Sure enough, as soon as we stepped into Shipley Do-nuts, we recognized a birder we’d met last night at the float construction. He was just leaving with a box of doughnuts, and after a quick hello, he hustled back out to the parking lot, leaving us with a panoramic view of more varieties of doughnuts than I’d ever seen in one place.
My mouth started watering in anticipation.
“No wonder there’s a line of cars at both of their drive-up windows,” Luce remarked as she stood transfixed in front of the loaded racks of pastries that stood behind the counter. “I didn’t think a shop like this existed anywhere anymore. There have got to be at least sixty different varieties of doughnuts in here.”
She looked beyond the metal racks to the bustling open kitchen space on our left where a team of four workers was mixing and cutting dough, sliding trays in and out of fryers, injecting doughnuts with creamy fillings, and dipping doughnut tops in frostings and toppings.
“Hand-cut,” Luce breathed in awe. “These doughnuts are all hand cut.”
“Can I help you?” asked the Hispanic woman behind the counter after passing a box of doughnuts to her coworker at the drive-up window. Her dark hair was tucked up into a Shipley Do-nut ball cap and her white apron had smudges of pink and chocolate frosting on it. Beside the register was a stack of flat boxes, all marked with the red-and-white Shipley Do-Nut logo that matched the tall street sign outside the shop. I thought that The Greatest Name in Do-Nuts emblazoned on the sign was setting a pretty high standard, but one whiff of the doughnuts inside the shop convinced me that whoever made the sign knew what he was talking about.
This was doughnut heaven.
“Yes, please,” I said to the cashier. “We’ll take a half-dozen.”
I began reeling off my selections of doughnuts, with Luce adding in her choices when I hesitated. A moment later, we sat down at one of the round, brown tables in front of the bright red half-wall that separated the seating from the open work area, a box of six different doughnuts in my hands and two big cups of coffee in Luce’s.
“This place is a real find,” Luce said, opening the box and letting her hand hover over the doughnuts, trying to decide which of the warm, fragrant delicacies would be her first taste of a Shipley Do-nut.
“Hey, Bob! Luce!”
Chief Pacheco waved to us from the counter, where he was ordering his own half-dozen doughnuts. I could hear him speaking
in Spanish to the woman who worked the counter, and he called a greeting to several of the kitchen workers as he carried his order to the table to join us.
“Looks like you’ve been here before,” I commented as the chief sat down.
“Are you kidding?” he smiled. “We have standing orders with Shipley for staff meetings. Not to mention that I know everyone who works here. I spent a couple summers cutting doughnuts myself when I was in high school.”
“These are to die for,” Luce said, wiping a crumb of a Bavarian filled doughnut off her lip with a slender finger.
I nudged her foot under the table. “Luce,” I said, rolling my eyes in the chief’s direction.
She looked at me and then at the chief.
I could see Pacheco trying hard not to smile at my wife’s choice of words.
“Oh,” she said, wiping her lips with a napkin, a light blush of pink rising on her cheeks. “Sorry. Maybe not the best thing to say right now. How about… they’re amazing.”
Pacheco let his smile spread across his face. When he did that, I could see a startling family resemblance to his mother and niece. I’d thought Rosalie and Pearl were both beauties; now I realized Pacheco was probably what most women would consider a very handsome man. In fact, if he’d been a faculty member at Savage High School, I had a sneaking suspicion I would have probably been spending a good portion of my forty-hour work week dealing with teenage girls’ crushes on that good-looking Mr. Pacheco.
Thank God for small favors.
The chief picked up our conversation where it had been before Luce’s ill-timed turn of phrase.
“The company is a great employer, too,” he said. “Shipley is a Texas company, founded in 1936, and they’ve had loyal customers for generations. Most of the workers here stay on the job for ten years because they like it so well. We’re big on digging in around here, in case you haven’t noticed—Texans stick together, for the most part.”
His last words struck a chord in me, and I instantly recalled the tension I’d sensed between Rosalie and Buzz Davis yesterday morning on the park deck when Buzz made his veiled remark about immigrants. He’d struck a nerve with Rosalie, and now that I knew about her daughter and son-in-law’s situation, I could understand why.
“Are you referring to the debate about illegal immigrants around here?” I asked.
Pacheco’s face clouded.
Crap.
I gave myself a mental head slap.
My mouth had run ahead of my mind, and my foot had jumped right in it. Rosalie’s self-exiled daughter was Pacheco’s sister.
Way to go, Bob. Remind the nice chief of his own family heartache.
“I’m sorry.” It was my turn to apologize. “Forget I said that. Let’s start over. How’s Eddie doing this morning?”
Pacheco took a bite out of one of his glazed raised doughnuts and chewed slowly, keeping his eyes on me the whole time.
“No, let’s clear the air here, first,” he said. “Yes, illegal immigration is an issue for all of us who live in this part of Texas, but you have to remember, it’s nothing new to us, either. The Lower Rio Grande Valley has a history of border control problems, and many families have members on both sides of the border. It’s a fact of life here. We deal with it.”
He took a gulp of his coffee and set the cup back down. He tipped his head in the direction of the workers in the open kitchen.
“As you can see, our population is filled with Americans of Hispanic descent. Hispanic culture has shaped the area, and it’s one of the reasons this strip of towns along the border is growing so fast. People come here on vacation and then move here to live. We’ve got nice weather, a blend of cultures, great restaurants, a laid-back lifestyle, and low taxes.”
“And birds,” Luce reminded him. “Ecotourism is a booming industry around here from what we see.”
Pacheco nodded. “Believe me, we like that it is, and we want to keep it that way. But every growing area has its headaches, and illegal immigration happens to be the one that we can’t make go away.”
“But I thought Eddie was here to work on improving border control,” Luce remarked. “If you want to improve something, doesn’t that mean the current method isn’t working as well as you want it to?”
Pacheco finished one of his doughnuts and picked up another.
“The drone project has been in development for a lot longer than people realize,” he explained. “Personally, I don’t think it’s the best way to find illegals trying to cross the border. It picks up heat signatures, and we have a lot of wildlife around here, so we end up tracking animals, instead of people. I’m sure the US Fish and Wildlife Service appreciates our effort because we can provide them with a lot of data they wouldn’t otherwise get, but it’s not solving any immigration problems.”
I snatched the chocolate-iced doughnut out of our box before Luce could grab it. With a look of mild reprimand, she took the coconut-topped one that was left.
“What Eddie—who, by the way, is doing fine this morning and back at the border control offices—is working on is a hush-hush drone program that targets drug runners using some new technology I don’t even pretend to understand,” Pacheco continued. “And because it’s got high security, most folks don’t know that it’s about drugs. As a result, our local community that works with illegal immigrants is convinced it’s a new program targeting illegals, and it’s got them upset, which translates into one more big headache for me.”
“Your mother, Rosalie,” I guessed. “She’s a part of that local community that advocates for new immigrants.”
The chief nodded. “Every time I see her for the past month, she reams me up one side and down the other for being insensitive to the plight of illegals. I thought Birdy would set her straight since he was working on the drones with Eddie, but my mother…”
His voice trailed off in frustration, and he shook his head.
“She’s very stubborn,” he said, “and hot-tempered. I think Birdy took great pleasure in teasing her. It wouldn’t surprise me if he refused to give her the details about the drone just to see her get angry.”
I slid a look at my wife. I’d been known to push her a little too far with teasing, myself. Generally, that resulted in me apologizing and her letting me make it up to her with gift cards to her favorite massage salons.
I wondered how Birdy made up with Rosalie when he teased her too much.
A fancy night out?
Flowers and chocolates?
Finding a park rarity?
Buzz’s comment came roaring back to me. He’d said that was why Birdy had headed to Alligator Lake yesterday morning—to find a park rarity for Rosalie. I’d assumed he’d meant a rare bird, but now I wondered…
“Does the border control keep records of what the drones find?” I asked Pacheco.
The chief finished his coffee and set the empty cup down.
“You’d have to ask Eddie,” he said. “It’s not my program.”
“Why?” Luce asked me, folding the top over to close our empty box. I could see suspicion in her eyes. “What are you thinking?”
I gave her a smile and turned to address the chief.
“I have something to show you,” I said, pulling both the threatening note and the fabric shred from my pocket.
He took them both and read the note.
“I found it taped on our guest suite door very early this morning,” I told him before he could ask. “And the material is a shred the dog found near the wall where I think our note-writer exited the yard. I don’t know if it’s from the intruder, but the dog seemed really pleased when she brought it to me.”
“You didn’t tell me you had that,” Luce said, a hint of annoyance in her voice. “The dog brought you a scrap?”
She turned to Pacheco. “Can I see that?�
�
He handed it to her.
Luce fingered the cloth for a moment.
“Do you recognize it?” I asked her.
“From what?” My wife didn’t sound annoyed anymore.
That was a good thing.
Except that now, she sounded really ticked off, instead.
That was not a good thing.
In fact, I got the feeling that if Pacheco hadn’t been seated across the table from us, my wife would have read me the riot act for failing to share the material scrap with her. Luce never liked it when I withheld information from her, even when I thought it was best for her not to know. As a husband, I took my marital responsibility to protect my wife very seriously, but Luce insisted that she could take care of herself just fine and that I needed to chuck my outdated perspective of women as the gentler sex.
On the other hand, if anyone delighted in being spoiled with spa certificates or world-class chocolates, it was my wife. A smart husband remembers those kinds of things… which led me to wonder if there was a really good massage place in McAllen where I could get Luce an appointment for this afternoon.
I had a feeling we were both going to need it after this particular instance of my not sharing information with her.
“Anywhere,” I prompted her, trying to move her past my glaring sin of omission and into the realm of brilliant collaboration. “Does the print look familiar at all?”
She flashed me another angry look before studying the little bit of fabric more closely, and then I watched understanding spreading over her features.
Hooray. Maybe I was going to get away with my protective instincts after all.
“It’s a floral print, like the Hawaiian shirt Schooner was wearing yesterday.”
The chief’s attention zeroed in on the fabric.
“A lot of people wear prints like that around here,” he said.
“But a lot of people don’t know that Luce and I are staying at the Birds Nest or that we’re from Minnesota,” I countered. “And Schooner isn’t the only one with a shirt like this. Mark,” I said, then realized I didn’t even know his last name, “Buzz’s great-nephew, he was wearing a shirt like this when he birded with us this morning at Quinta Mazatlan. And guess what?”
