Parrot Blues

by Judith Van GIeson

  They had the Kid to thank for that.

  “There’s a treatment some mothers use for children with a peanut allergy. I can’t recommend it because it is not approved by the AMA, although it can be effective. The mother mixes a very small amount of peanut with water and feeds it to the child daily. It helps to establish and maintain a tolerance. Peanuts are a difficult food to avoid. There was a case of a woman in New England who was highly allergic. She ate chili in a restaurant and it killed her. You wouldn’t think chili would kill anyone, would you?”

  It might, I thought.

  “A cook had put peanut butter in the chili to thicken it. I want you to know that I did not recommend this desensitizing technique to Terrance. He was using it long before he came to me.” Talbert tapped the file, which, presumably, contained evidence to support his claim. “His mother started it when he was a small boy, and Deborah continued the treatment. He shouldn’t have had such a violent reaction to the peanuts in the granola. There shouldn’t have been any peanuts in his granola.”

  “What would happen if the treatment were discontinued?”

  “He’d lose his tolerance, and his reaction could be severe.”

  “Did you know that he and Deborah had split up?”

  His reaction was startled. This was one event that his antennae had not picked up. “No. I didn’t.” He paused for a moment while his mind sorted through the invisible stimuli. “That would explain it. Deborah would never have discontinued the treatment; she loved Terrance.”

  “That’s not exactly what I’ve been hearing.”

  “I haven’t seen her for a couple of years, but when she first married Terrance she used to come here with him. She loved him then, but who knows? Love is not an exact science. I hate to lose a patient,” he said softly. He looked at the clock on the wall and sighed. “I have to go. I have a child with asthma to see.”

  “Thanks for you help,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. His attention had already shifted from the patient who was dead to the child who needed help.

  ******

  I stopped at the Wild Oats natural foods store on my way back to the office. In the bulk bins they had raspberry granola, blueberry granola, maple syrup granola, honey-nut granola. They had a total of fifteen different types of granola. All the ingredients were labeled, and not one of them contained peanuts.

  15

  I WORKED LATE that evening and stopped at the lab on my way home to tell Rick how Terrance had died. The sun was sliding toward Gallup as I entered the university. When I stepped out of the Nissan, I heard the sound of a raucous party. I remembered from my UNM days that partying is what college students do best. I’d been pretty good at it once myself. Music was playing—loud. The first sound I pulled out of the cacophony was the beat, but it wasn’t the nineties beat of grunge rock, or rap or Megadeth. It was the slow and raunchy retro rhythm of the blues. As I approached the lab I could see that the door was open a crack and hear that that was where the party sounds were coming from. The last time I’d pushed open an unlocked door I’d found a dead body, but that building had been as quiet as a vault and in this one a lively party was going on. Could Deborah have been returned? I wondered. Was she alive and well? Was this a celebration? Since the parrots ruled the lab, it occurred to me that this could be a party without a human present. It wouldn’t take much to get the parrots to partying.

  I pushed open the door and heard, “Start me talkin’, babe, tell you everythin’ I know,” in the voice of a world-weary blues singer or an irascible Amazon parrot—or both. The radio was on loud; the rhythm section kept the beat. It happened to be blues night on KUNM, and parrots love the blues. Maxamilian was balanced on top of Deborah’s computer, bobbing his head and belting out the lyrics. He watched the action through Deborah’s window on the lab, showing me the back of his double-yellow head.

  The other Amazons were on the lab table boogying and providing a disorderly backup chorus to Max. Colloquy and Perigee had been let out of their cage. They jerked and swayed on a manzanita perch. Their long blue tails shimmied, their necks stretched, their large heads bobbed in time, their eyes were bright and surrounded by yellow ovals. Rick Olney was dancing with the parrots. He snapped his fingers, swung his hips, shuffled his feet, and swiveled his pelvis, reaching deep into a collective and unconscious rhythm as instinctive in nature as a growl. He would have been surprised to see how rhythmically he could move once he forgot he was doing it. “Talkin’ Babe” finished, and KUNM segued into another song.

  “Round here,” Maxamilian growled in the raspy voice of a Bo Diddley or a Muddy Waters, “round midnight. Make me feel so good, make me feel…”

  “All right,” Rick Dances with Parrots shouted, leaping in the air.

  “All right,” the backup Amazons cackled.

  My pheromone sensors went into overtime. I had a few in my eyes, a few in my ears, a number in my nose, and a whole lot just under the surface of my skin; they sensed enough testosterone zinging around here to create a baby, cause a war, commit a murder. Energy seeks its own level, and Rick’s energy level said to me that he’d gained in power, succeeded at crime and/or gotten laid.

  Max swiveled his head one hundred and eighty degrees, and I came into his line of vision. “Call my lawyer,” he shrieked, laughing at his little joke. I made a shhhh motion with my finger to my lips, but it was too little too late and he wouldn’t have listened anyway. Rick spun around and saw me standing in the doorway. He stopped moving as suddenly and awkwardly as a kid caught playing the game of statues. He was off balance, with his weight on one foot, his elbows in the air and his hips in the middle of a twist. I could have pushed him over with my little finger. A blush started from his toes and rose rapidly to the edge of his square haircut.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, finding his balance, straightening up and snapping off the radio.

  “Midnight special, baby,” growled Max.

  “Be quiet, Max,” Rick said.

  “Quiet, Max,” the bird echoed. “Be your pistol, too.”

  “I, um … it was um … it was Alice,” Rick said, turning a deeper shade of rose.

  So it was a celebration. I’d been right about that. “When?” I asked.

  He looked around as if the walls had ears and those ears belonged to someone with money and authority, but no one with that profile was visible here. “A few hours ago.”

  “Was it all you expected?” I asked. In my own experience, it takes a while to get up to speed.

  “Better,” he sighed. “I’m in love.”

  I was reminded of the last time I’d heard the word “love,” only a few days ago. “Sara Dumaine told me that she and … Terry … were in love,” I said. I hadn’t told him that before; I hadn’t been sure it was any of his business.

  “No!” Rick cried. If he’d been a parrot, his feathers would have been standing on end.

  “Those were her words. She was at the house when I got there Monday, weeping over Terrance’s body.”

  “Goddamn,” Rick said. “It doesn’t surprise me that Terrance was screwing around, but with Deborah’s sister? No wonder Deborah had been in such a rotten mood.”

  “You think she knew?” Rick had let his guard down in love’s afterglow. Trust a lawyer to step into the breach.

  “She wouldn’t have told me if she did, but something had been bothering her. I could see that.”

  “She was getting a divorce,” I said, which, I knew as well as anyone, could ruin a mood.

  “She’s been divorced before,” Rick said.

  “That doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “Deborah and I didn’t talk about personal stuff much.”

  “Have you heard anything from her?”

  He shook his head. “Not a word.”

  “If you’re still thinking about calling in the police, I have the card of the detective who’s investigating Terrance’s death.” Now that the OMI had discovered the saline solution, I was sure there would be an investigation.
I handed Rick Detective Hernandez’s card, which he stuffed into his jeans pocket without looking at it, but taking a hard look at his running shoes.

  “I thought you told me it was an allergic reaction,” he said. “Why would the police investigate that?”

  “Someone substituted saline solution for the epinephrine that would have pulled him out of it, which makes it homicide.”

  “Really?” he replied.

  “Really. Are you going to call Hernandez?”

  “I’ll think about it.” He reached up to straighten the missing glasses. The rock and roller had vanished. The bright, stiff young scientist had returned. My question was why he had to think about doing something today that he’d once been so eager to do. I wondered if the answer might be found in the file Terrance and his men had searched Deborah’s office for. “I don’t have a copy of Terrance’s will,” I said. “I wasn’t his lawyer for that.” And if Baxter, Johnson had handled it they weren’t likely to tell me what it said. “Did Deborah have a copy?” It might contain information about the trust set up to provide for the parrots. It might tell me if Terrance had left anything (or everything) to Sara Dumaine. It might tell me whether Sara had a motive.

  “I don’t know where it is,” he mumbled, but his skin color gave him away.

  My next question was, “That tape that Alice showed my friend the other day, what was on it?”

  “Parrot talk. It’s a multiple-track tape that repeats phrases that Deborah wanted to teach them. Parrots learn by rote. With the tape, they could go on learning even when Deborah wasn’t here.”

  “Can I listen?”

  “It will get them worked up again.” He looked at the wall clock. “It’s bedtime.”

  The Amazons watched us with their pupils dilating and contracting, waiting for the next move. Colloquy preened Perigee. Max climbed up on the window ledge. “They don’t look like they’re ready to go to sleep to me,” I said.

  “I am.” He turned around, walked into Deborah’s office where God was in the details and Max was on the computer, and tried to coax Max into retiring for the night. There were a couple of keys hanging from a hook on the wall, and while Rick’s back was to me I lifted one and put it in my pocket. If he wouldn’t help me, I’d do it myself.

  I followed him into the office, and subtle as a lawyer, asked, “What do you do with the feathers that fall on the floor of the cage?” I didn’t want to admit that I’d been snooping through Deborah’s office. Max knew. “Don’t tell, Max”; I sent him an interspecies telepathic message.

  “We give them to the Hopis to use in their ceremonials,” he said.

  “Do you have any left? I collect feathers.” Not true. I don’t collect anything.

  He opened the drawer he’d put the feathers in before, only now it was empty. “No. We’ve given them all away,” he said in the absentminded manner of someone who was a poor rememberer or a bad liar.

  “Did Terrance come by the indigos legally?” I asked him.

  “Actually, he did. He took them out of the country before Brazil signed an export ban. You wouldn’t be able to do it legally now. Indigos were thought to be near extinction, but in nineteen seventy-eight a flock of about seventy was discovered in the Raso. The World Parrot Trust is taking steps to preserve them, and getting good cooperation from the local people. Deborah loved the Raso. In Brazil she was a queen. She got respect for being a linguist. Here, nobody’s interested. Parrots can be difficult, but it’s easier to get funding for studying them in America than for studying people. Time for bed, Max.”

  And time for me to go. “ ’Night, Max,” I said.

  “ ’Night, D,” he replied.

  “Deborah always put him to bed,” Rick sighed. “That’s when he misses her most.”

  16

  THE PARTY WAS over. It was dark when I left the lab, and the parking lot was not lit. I stood outside the door for a minute to get my bearings. Lights came on in a vehicle in the lot, low beams at first and then highs. The bright lights spotlighted me standing in front of the Psittacine Research Facility doorway. I put my left hand up to shield my eyes. The vehicle backed out of the lot without dimming the beams, without revealing exactly what kind of vehicle it was. With my right hand I reached into the purse that was dangling from my shoulder. The most dangerous place for a woman is between her car (or her place of work or the store) and her home. The fact that this had been Deborah Dumaine’s place of work, not mine, didn’t lessen the danger factor. It might have escalated it. I found my key ring with the car keys and mini-Punch hanging from it, and I clutched it between my fingers while my eyes made the adjustment from too much light to too little. I walked to the Nissan, entered it without using my weapon and started the engine.

  As I passed the parking lot near Central, two vehicles got into line behind me—one pair of headlights on high beams, one pair on low. I pulled onto Central heading east just as I would have if I were going home to La Vista. Both vehicles turned east behind me. When a clearing in the traffic opened up, I made a quick shift into the fast lane and spun a U. Nobody followed. I went a few blocks and made another U, turning me back east again. I hadn’t been followed, but an imaginary parrot on my shoulder was squawking “Watchate.”

  I was heading for the ATM on Tramway; I wanted to take a few steps in the ransom collector’s boots to see if that could give me an entrée to the kidnapper’s mind. An electrical storm brewed over the Sandias. Lightning stabbed at the peaks and bolted laterally from cloud to cloud. Sunset was a recent memory, and the lightning was the rosy pink color of the reflected sunset, the color the Sandias turn when there’s an afterglow, the color of Rick Olney’s blush. Sandia means watermelon, and some say the mountains were named for the evenings they turn watermelon pink. Other people believe the mountains got their name because they have a watermelon’s shape. In a place that has as long a recorded history as New Mexico, legends and place names get twisted in the wind of repeated tellings. The mountains farther north are called the Sangre de Cristos—the blood of Christ—but they turn the same pink color as the Sandias. If it’s the color of blood, it’s thin blood, blood that’s been diluted by tears or rain.

  I reached the solitary ATM on Tramway at the base of the mountains, the ATM where Laura Simonson had been mugged and where a masked person had claimed half of Deborah and Perigee’s ransom money. The parking lot was empty, the warehouse was a blank, white wall. How anyone kept a wall that graffiti-free in Albuquerque was a mystery to me. I turned the Nissan around to see if anyone had followed. No one had. The road back to Tramway was deserted. I could have gone to the drive-in window, conducted my business from my car and made a quick getaway, but I parked, got out and walked into the building that housed the ATM just as feathered mask had done. Lights flashed in the western sky, beyond the curve of the horizon, too distant to see the shape of the bolts. Those lights also had a pinkish glow and seemed to be synchronized to the flashes over the Sandias, one flash echoing another. It could have been a reflection of the Sandia storm or another storm farther west, or it might have been its own storm system. I couldn’t tell.

  There’s safety in numbers; there’s safety in lookouts. The Apaches didn’t have the numbers; they relied on awareness and lookouts. I didn’t have the numbers either, only myself, but I was high enough to see anyone coming and would have had time to collect the money, get in the car and drive away. With my ATM card and keys in hand, I approached the screen, smiled for the camera and inserted my card in the slot. The screen prompted me to enter my PIN. I did it, I noticed, more by remembering the location of the PIN digits on the screen than by remembering the digits themselves. Deborah’s PIN, I remembered, was 2473. I asked the ATM for one hundred dollars, and I got it in twenties. I put the money, my card and the receipt in my pocket. Having learned that punching in a PIN number is a rote action and that this was the most isolated ATM in Albuquerque, I left. I knew I’d been seen only by the eye of the camera, but I still felt that I was being pursued. Thund
er rumbled. The storm was moving east, but the air remained charged with the electricity that produces revelations, hallucinations and squawking parrot mind.

  I got in the Nissan and drove west on Montgomery. Fat rain drops hit my windshield and splattered in tiny, dusty explosions. I turned the wiper to intermittent, then moved it up a notch to slow. By the time I reached La Vista the wipers were running on fast and puddles were forming in the low places in the street. Soon runoff would be pulsing through the diversion channels like blood coursing through an unclogged artery. Ordinarily I park on the east side of La Vista in front of my apartment, in the space across from the dumpster that has my number on it, but the parrot on my shoulder squawked “Watchate,” so I kept on going. It was possible that someone had anticipated my movements, come here and waited. It wasn’t difficult to find out where I lived; my address was in the phone book. I noticed that La Bailarina, the homeless woman who lives in La Vista’s parking lot, had parked her van beside the dumpster. My place was empty, which it isn’t always when I come home at night. I left it that way and continued north.

  My apartment is also accessible from the back side of the building, down a dingy hallway. I don’t come in that way; it’s dark, it’s shabby, the parking spaces have somebody else’s number on them. I circled the north wall of the building. As I drove down the west side, I saw a shadow under the dim overhead bulb in the hallway. As I got closer the shadow became a cowboy wearing a black hat and a long duster, standing under the stairway to the second floor. The cowboy didn’t turn around to look as I drove to the south side of the building and parked in someone else’s space. I walked back up the west side, keeping close to the wall. Lights were on on the second floor, but the windows on my floor, the first, were all dark. I didn’t have a raincoat or hat; rain slid down my face. Weather doesn’t mess around in New Mexico. When the sun shines, it sizzles. When it rains, it pours. Water dripped from the canales onto my head. I felt like I was taking a shower with my clothes on, but the running water did conceal the sound of my footsteps.