The Puffin of Death

by Betty Webb

  “Consider this. Two pretty people with little money, one being pushed forward by her mother to be the wealthy Simon Parr’s new girlfriend—or wife, if she played her cards right. If I were a detective, I would ask myself, how successful was that push? Was Judy having an affair with Simon even though she loved another man? I read a lot of American books, many romances and mysteries, and there I find that rich American men are often generous with their girlfriends, sometimes even writing them into their wills.”

  With a final sly smile, Bryndis walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She was still singing an Icelandic version of “Hey, Jude,” when I crawled into bed and immediately fell asleep.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Despite my few hours of sleep, five a.m. Wednesday found me huddled over my laptop scrolling through the Internet for any mention of James Burlingame, aka Tab Cooper. After ruling out the Burlingames I found elsewhere—they were all over Arizona—I finally hit pay dirt. Last July James Burlingame, Sr. had committed suicide-by-hanging in the garage of his Apache Crossing home. He left no note, but according to the newspaper article, an unnamed source said that after several failed investments, the family had been experiencing financial difficulties. A follow-up article two days later mentioned that James Burlingame, Jr., had been arrested hours later following a physical altercation with an unnamed male at the home of Elizabeth St. James, the famed romantic suspense author. Burlingame, Jr. “obviously intoxicated,” the article stated, had been briefly arrested, but released on his own recognizance the next morning when he sobered up. The “unnamed male,” almost certainly Simon Parr, refused to press charges.

  Looking back on our conversation the night before, I remembered Bryndis telling me that Tab appeared angry when discussing his parents’ situation. Perhaps in some way he blamed Simon for his father’s death, although that would make no sense. Simon had split from the business years earlier.

  It being still Tuesday night in Arizona, I punched in Cowgirl Spencer’s number on my new phone. As soon as she answered, I whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me the truth about Tab Cooper?”

  “Why are you whispering, Freckle Face?”

  “Because it’s five a.m. Wednesday here and my roommate’s still in bed. Does the name James Burlingame, Jr. ring a bell?”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yeah, that.” I waited.

  “He changed it legally last year, when he started getting a few TV roles. Walk-ons, mainly, but…”

  “Stop evading. Your boy Cooper or Burlingame or whatever you want to call him attacked Simon Parr the day after his father’s funeral.”

  “Water under the bridge.”

  “Except Parr got shot in the head a few days ago while Cooper/Burlingame was less than a mile away.”

  “Don’t be silly. We Arizonans don’t carry grudges.”

  “And I’m the Sugar Plum Fairy. Why are you so determined to whitewash him?” The minute the words were out of my mouth I figured it out: her earlier comments about lonely desert nights and her unceasing quest for a significant other, whether suitable or not. “Ah, Cowgirl, don’t tell me you were…” I paused, searching for a less blatant word “…uh, dating him?”

  A chuckle. “At night it can get pretty chilly out here on the Arizona desert, especially around February, and there’s nothing like hot young blood to warm things up.”

  “Cradle robber!”

  “Don’t judge, Freckle Face. Jimmy moved on a couple of months later, leaving me with happy memories.”

  Something ugly occurred to me. “Moved on to whom?”

  “Judy Malone. I thought you knew. But that didn’t last long, either.”

  “Because Judy ‘moved on’ to Simon, right?”

  “Sho ’nuf.”

  “And this happened right after Simon won the lottery.”

  “As I told you, Lucinda was having money trouble and she talked Judy into…”

  “Stop right there, Cowgirl. Are you certain that Judy went after Simon simply because her mother told her to? From what I’ve observed lately, she can be quite good at ignoring Lucinda. Perhaps the instigator of Judy’s relationship with Megabucks Simon was someone else.”

  “Like who?” She sounded baffled.

  “Like Jimmy/Tab.”

  She laughed outright. “Don’t be silly. Why would he do such a thing?”

  “From everything I hear, Simon had a habit of being financially generous to his girlfriends.”

  “And you think Jimmy…” She snorted. “No way, Freckle Face. That boy may be many things, but he was never venal. He—”

  I cut her off again. “Any rumors around Apache Crossing about the contents of Simon’s will?”

  “That’s a joke, right? The attorneys around here are as tight as a bronc’s saddle.”

  “A half-billion dollars is no joke.”

  She sounded irritated. “Don’t forget, Elizabeth got half, and with Simon dead, she gets the rest, not that she ever needed it, what with those stupid books of hers.” She paused, then grudgingly said, “And minus what he might have left to various charities. And maybe a woman or two.”

  “Such as Judy Malone.”

  A sigh. “He did seem pretty taken with her.”

  I had no more questions to ask, so we spent the next few minutes chatting about horses. When I finally rang off, Bryndis was up and singing in the shower.

  ***

  Later that morning, I stood in the quarantine shed at the Reykjavik Zoo watching Magnus eat his breakfast while I mulled over everything I had learned so far.

  Tab Cooper wasn’t the uncomplicated pretty boy he’d first appeared, and for some reason, held Simon Parr responsible for his father’s suicide. The only question was if he had enough brain power to cook up a Machiavellian revenge scheme that culminated in murder. Not only would Tab have to be smarter than he appeared, but his powers of persuasion would also have to be good enough to talk Judy into going along with his plan. To accomplish all this, Tab Cooper aka James Burlingame, Jr., would need to be a better actor than Cowgirl Spencer believed.

  But why kill Dawn?

  The obvious answer might be that Dawn had seen him leaving the hotel the morning of Simon’s murder, and being venal herself, attempted to blackmail him. Simon had dumped her, and she and her husband were on the brink of divorce. Her looks were fading and her own financial future looked bleak, so blackmail could have seemed like a reasonable solution to her problems.

  However, as the old saying goes, “You can’t get blood out of a stone.” Like most actors, Tab was broke. Surely, given Dawn’s limited brain power, she wasn’t capable of figuring out his elaborate plan of sharing his girlfriend’s theoretical inheritance. This made me question my earlier assumption that the murders of Simon Parr and Dawn Talley had been carried out by the same person. Unlikely as it seemed, there could be two murderers operating here, each killing for his—or her—own reason. And maybe one, or even both, of the killers was an Icelander. Take Oddi, for instance. The tour guide had been present at each…

  Magnus sneezed, derailing my train of thought.

  “You’d better not be coming down with a cold,” I told the polar bear cub. “You’ll never make it through Customs if you’re sick.”

  Taking the temperature of a mature polar bear can be tricky; not so with Magnus. His reading of 98.6, the same as a human’s, proved he was healthy. His eyes were clear and bright, too.

  After assuring myself of Magnus’ continued well-being, I tried to decide what to do next: visit the foxes or call Inspector Haraldsson to relay what I’d learned from Cowgirl. After some reflection, I decided that the smartest thing would be to stay away from both him and the Geronimos, but avoiding the latter might prove difficult. Although passport-less, the birders had been given permission to continue their sight-seeing tour, but instead were hunkered down at the Hótel
Keldur in downtown Reykjavik. Too close for comfort for me. I felt safer with polar bears.

  Especially since the bear in question was adorable little Magnus. I was already dreading the day Magnus grew to full size and I could no longer cuddle him. Right now he continued slurping down his breakfast, oblivious of my doting looks.

  “He is a sweetie, isn’t he?” Bryndis said, entering the quarantine shed. The last time I’d seen her this morning, she’d been cleaning the mink enclosure.

  “Will you miss him?” I asked, noting a brief flash of sadness in her eyes as she studied him.

  She nodded. “We zookeepers are cautioned not to fall in love with our animals but we do anyway. They are such individuals. Magnus there, he loves for me to hold his right paw while I scratch behind his left ear. Katrin, the last cub we rescued, the one we sent to the San Diego Zoo, she did not like her paws touched but she liked her belly tickled.”

  While we watched Magnus scarf up breakfast, I thought of the many animals at the Gunn Zoo I felt especially close to. Lucy, the giant anteater. Wanchu, the eucalyptus-loving koala. Alejandro, the rescued llama who had once saved my life. I loved them all. Then there were my personal pets: DJ Bonz, Miss Priss, Toby…Come to think of it, where was Toby now? Was the little half-Siamese still bunking with my friend Cathie Kindler, or had he returned to his bad old habit of roaming the marina, mooching off one gullible liveaboarder after another?

  Just thinking about my animal friends made me homesick, and for the first time since I’d arrived, I longed to be back in Gunn Harbor. Iceland was a great place, but home is home. No matter how handsome Icelandic men were—even the grim Inspector Haraldsson—none could compare with Joe, whose warm brown eyes…

  “Ah, I see you are thinking about your boyfriend.”

  I felt my cheeks redden. “How could you tell?”

  “By the dreamy look on your face.”

  “You should talk. I heard you muttering Ragnar’s name in your sleep last night.”

  Her turn to blush. “The thing between me and Ragnar, it is nothing serious.”

  “Right. I can tell.”

  Despite her embarrassment, she had to smile, and together we left Magnus’ shed and walked toward the outbuilding where the foxes were quarantined.

  Not only did Bryndis and I work well together, we shared what would surely be a continuing friendship. Since I was now not only passport-less but carless, I was back to commuting to the zoo with her, and on the way to work this morning, we’d discussed the possibility of her flying to Gunn Landing next winter to thaw out for a couple of weeks on the Merilee. I liked her “ex” boyfriend, too. Tonight Ragnar, who had returned from Höfn last night, was treating us to a night on the town. With the Geronimos out of the picture, I could relax and have a good time.

  But halfway between the quarantine shed and the foxes, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Watching the seals being fed were Enid and Perry Walsh, Adele Cobb, Lucinda Greaves, and Oddi, the Geronimos’ tour guide. Before I could scuttle behind an outbuilding, Oddi waved.

  “Miss Bentley! Why don’t you tell these lovely people the difference between seals and sea lions?”

  Sporting a smile I hoped appeared genuine, I limped over and began the same spiel I’d heard Bryndis give earlier.

  “For starters, sea lions bark, where seals—which we have here—mainly grunt,” I said, as the seals’ heads rose from the water to catch fish a zookeeper threw to them. “Sea lions have ear flaps, seals don’t, and seals spend more time in the water than sea lions. Their diet is a bit different, too, because leopard seals will eat penguins when given a chance, whereas sea lions usually confine their diets to smaller prey, like fish and small octopi.”

  “Penguins!?” Adele Cobb looked shaken, the lines on her face deeper than ever.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I like penguins.” The bright morning sun made her maroon hair glow, but it also revealed her gray roots. Since I had first seen her that night in the Viking Tavern, she’d aged ten years.

  “Most people like penguins,” I commiserated. “They look something like us, only more dressed up. Plus, they have an adorable waddle.”

  Her wrinkles softened. “Can’t help loving that waddle, can we?”

  The other Geronimos moved on to the barn to see the goats, but Adele remained staring at the seals. “They don’t look big enough to kill penguins.”

  “These seals aren’t. Wrong hemisphere, too. Like I said, it’s mainly leopard seals that do that.” Along with orcas and other large ocean predators which had developed a taste for penguins, but there was no point in reminding her that among carnivores, someone’s always eating someone else.

  “How’s your foot?” Adele suddenly asked, turning away from the seals.

  I looked down at my Nikes. “Sore, but as you can see, I’m still hobbling around.”

  Since she showed no inclination to join the others in the barn, I dismissed my earlier qualms about the birders and decided to get as much information from her as possible. The sooner the murders were solved, the quicker I could get back to Gunn Landing. And Joe. If Inspector Haraldsson didn’t like my meddling, too bad.

  “Where are Tab and Judy?” I asked. “And Elizabeth. They’re not with the group.”

  “Elizabeth was going to come with us, but she’s having a bit of a relapse over Simon. She seemed okay at the beginning of breakfast, but then she started crying again and ran off to her room. Ben’s in even worse shape. No one’s seen hide nor hair of the guy since Dawn was killed. As for Judy, Lucinda says she’s not feeling well and Tab stayed behind to keep her company.” When she made a sour expression, I noticed that her hastily applied lipstick had bled into the lines around her mouth. She had dressed carelessly, and her socks didn’t match.

  “Outside of birding, do you know Judy and Tab well?”

  Adele shrugged. “Not really. Given our age differences we don’t share the same interests other than birding. But Apache Crossing isn’t that large and we do run into each other from time to time. Judy seems okay. I’m even thinking about enrolling in one of her yoga classes. It might be good for my creeping arthritis. As for Tab, maybe it’s just me but there’s always been something about him that struck me wrong.”

  “In what way?”

  She shrugged again. “He seems like he’s always acting a part.”

  “That kind of thing can make you feel uncomfortable, all right.” I flashed back to the day at Thingvellir, and Tab approaching me with a smiling face and dirty hands. Seizing on the parallel, I added, “I used to feel the same way about Dawn. When we were in school it was always hard to tell which was the real Dawn and which was merely the Dawn she wanted you to see.”

  “She didn’t know the difference herself, poor girl.”

  “You sound sympathetic, considering everything.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Everything? Everything what?”

  Oops. “Her affair with Simon, for instance. I met you only days ago, but I could tell you loved him.”

  “Well, aren’t you the Smarty Pants?” But there was more resignation in her voice than anger.

  “Sorry if I upset you.”

  A bitter laugh. “After this past week, hearing someone state the obvious isn’t going to upset me. Yes, I loved Simon. Up until recently, he was one of the kindest, sweetest men I’d ever known. Why, look at everything he did for Elizabeth! He gave up his own career to do her scut work, research, PR, hell, he even did her typing for her. Men like that are rare as snow in July. But Dawn didn’t love him. With her, it was always about the money. Still, that didn’t make her any less pathetic, did it? Sure, Simon played around with her for a couple of months, and at the same time he was playing around with me. The man was a polygamist at heart.” Here Adele managed a smile. “But after he got that big Powerball payout, he dumped her, and rather cruelly. The poor th
ing came crying to me, saying it happened because of her declining looks, but I’m telling you there’s no way that was the case. I’ve looked like hell for years and it never bothered him.”

  “Then why do you think he broke up with Dawn?” While I didn’t think Adele, to use her own words, “looked like hell,” at her best she could never have competed with Dawn in the looks department.

  “Beauty can attract a man, but beauty alone will never keep him. Look at Marilyn Monroe. Men wanted her, but once they got what they wanted, they couldn’t wait to get rid of her. Maybe Joe DiMaggio truly loved her, but after a few years even he couldn’t put up with her neuroses. Dawn was like that, too. Every man wanted her, but she couldn’t make them stick around. Not even her husband, who as broken up as he seems now, was still divorcing her. When I first found out about the divorce, I thought, ‘God help her when she loses the last of her looks.’”

  Since Adele was in a soul-baring mood, I took a chance. “Speaking of breakups, what caused the split between you and Simon?” I didn’t bother asking why she had carried on an open affair with a married man, since none of the Geronimos—including Elizabeth—seemed to think there was anything was odd about it.

  “Beauty had nothing to do with my relationship with Simon, not skin-deep beauty, anyway,” she answered, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “We’d been together—I guess you can put it that way—for six years, which is longer than some marriages these days, but after Simon won that damned Powerball, everything changed. He changed.”

  Doctors say that the way a person lives his or her life can often foretell the way they would die, that life and death followed the law of cause and effect. Smoke too many cigarettes? Lung cancer or emphysema is in your future. Eat too much and exercise too little? Say hello to a heart attack. Murder sometimes worked that way, too. The two times I had seen Simon Parr alive he’d been drunk and churlish. Yet those who knew him best—his wife, his friends, and at least one of his mistresses—described him as considerate and generous. Which were they: broad-minded, naïve, or liars all?