Parrot Blues

by Judith Van GIeson

  I flattened myself against the cracked stucco wall and stepped around the corner. The cowboy, who hadn’t heard me coming, was leaning sideways against the wall and peering down the hallway, watching perhaps for headlights to pull into my parking space. Even in cowboy boots there’d be time to run down the hall and jump me as I crossed the danger zone for women and inserted my key in my lock. Would anybody have heard? Or reacted if they did? I wondered.

  In boot heels, the cowboy was just about my height. Thick shoulder-length hair bridged the space between the hat and the duster. I held my key-ring Punch in my left hand, grabbed the hair and yanked it hard with the right at the same time that I rammed my knees into the back of the cowboy’s. It occurred to me that I might end up holding a blond wig in my hand, and that when the cowboy turned around I’d see a feathered mask. The knees buckled. The head spun around. The hair was real. The down-at-the heels expression belonged to the So-Cal cowboy. I could tell by the smell of his breath and the ease with which his knees buckled that Wes Brown had been drinking. He stammered, trying to find a swear word to fit the occasion. The best he could do on such short notice was “cunt.”

  “You already called me that,” I said. He hadn’t had time to draw his weapon, but I doubted he’d have come here without one. “Hand over the piece,” I told him.

  He blinked. “What piece?”

  “The one you’re packing.”

  “If I don’t?”

  “I’ll scream. I’ll blow my whistle. I’ll call the night watchman. I’ll call my neighbor, who’s a cop. I’ll squirt red pepper into your lungs and your face. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll kick.” Those are the self-defense tricks women are taught to rely on. Most of them were idle threats, but what did he know?

  As the Kid said, Brown was lacking in the bravery department. He surrendered the gun, another .45. Brown had a gun for every occasion, but so far I’d seen only the same caliber. I made him precede me into my apartment and sit down on the sofa. His duster dripped onto the yellow shag carpeting. I sat down across from him with the .45 in my lap. He leaned his head against the wall, stretched out his legs and looked at me from under his lashes. He’d taken off his hat, revealing a bad case of hat head; his hair was flatter than Garth Brooks’s.

  “What’s your game?” he asked in his surly drawl.

  “Like I told you, I’m a lawyer.”

  “Yeah? Then why are you living here?”

  “Beats living in dry dock,” I said.

  “You’re the one who turned the FWS onto me, aren’t you?” he asked.

  The news that they’d already gotten to him was birdsong to my ears. “Yup,” I said. “They arrested you?”

  “Yeah. I had to post bond to get out.”

  He’d probably done it with the smelly money.

  “Why have you got it in for me?” He poked the carpet with his scruffy boot. “What’d I ever do to you?”

  “You’re a parrot smuggler.”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  “I like parrots.”

  “I had to find some way to pay back the IRS.”

  “How about getting a job?” I asked.

  “In Door?” he blinked.

  I could have suggested he leave Door, but what would be the point? Cause and effect were inoperative inside his Jack Daniels envelope. If I had my way he’d be trading Door for a prison cell and whatever abusive substances he could obtain in there. “Your girlfriend, Katrina, said…”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “What is she?”

  “Someone I see when I come to Albuquerque.” He shrugged. “That’s all.” He crossed one boot over the other and watched me from under the liar’s lashes.

  “Why do you come to Albuquerque? To deposit the money for the IRS?” I asked. Or to get laid? Or to sell parrots? I didn’t ask. One offense at a time.

  “I don’t have to justify myself to you,” he snapped in a tone of voice that suggested I was beneath contempt, which, when you think about it, wasn’t all that different from the message his lashes had been sending. I let his answer pass. He would have to justify himself to the FWS, and anyhow, I had other means of getting my bank question answered. “Why’d you tell Katrina you wanted to get in touch with me?”

  “I wanted to know where you went Sunday after you left Door.”

  “Like Katrina said, I was at her house.”

  “Actually she didn’t say that, Ellen did.” I was kind of curious to see what his reaction would be to Ellen. Even in his fantasy envelope he had to know she didn’t like him.

  “Ellen’s jealous.”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “I met her before I met Katrina. She came on to me.”

  I’d heard that one before.

  “So if I was at the house then? What business is it of yours?”

  “Terrance Lewellen is my client. He died Monday morning.

  “You can’t be trying to blame that on me.”

  Why not? I thought.

  “What killed him?” he asked, giving me another look that left the door open for seduction or misinterpretation. Terrance’s death scared him. He’d been arrested for smuggling before and gotten out of that, but murder was a deep-water crime. I had a suspicion that if I responded to Wes Brown he’d back off, then tell some other woman that I’d come on to him. His fear of rejection could be so strong that he’d do it to you before you could do it to him. Maybe what he was really looking for was a woman who felt worse about being herself than he did about being himself. Although the come-on routine was an automatic response, I could see that he’d have no respect for anyone who said yes. A man with that poor a self-image is a coiled snake for an unwary foot, one reason I wear snake boots around my heart. Katrina probably felt that bad, I thought, but had Deborah? Or Sara?

  “An allergic reaction killed Terrance,” I said. “The OMI is investigating. Sara Dumaine found him dead in his house.”

  Sara’s name produced—like a lot of things I’d said—a shrug.

  “Did you know he and Sara were having an affair?” I asked.

  He blinked. “How would I know that?”

  “Did you know that Terrance had allergies?”

  “No. I barely knew the guy.”

  “Where is Deborah?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  I had one more question. “How’d you know where I live?”

  “Looked you up in the phone book.”

  That was enough to make me want to move out of La Vista in the morning and get an unlisted number. “I don’t have anything more to say. Do you?”

  “Yeah, I do.” He leaned forward on the sofa, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Get the hell out of my life.” His lips mouthed anger, but his eyes still begged “rescue me.”

  “Get out of my apartment,” was my answer.

  “Give me back my gun.”

  “No way.”

  “Cunt.”

  He drove off in his pickup, another loaded weapon cruising for targets on the highway.

  ******

  After he left I went into the kitchen to see what time it was. Ten by the oven clock. Too early to go to sleep, and who could go to sleep after the evening I’d had? Adrenaline sends sleep out the window. I knew that from my own experience as an adrenaline queen. It was the Kid’s night to play the accordion at El Lobo. I didn’t want to interrupt him; I didn’t want to go to El Lobo. It was a part of his world I didn’t belong in. El Lobo was not a gentle place. Neither was the Psittacine Research Facility when you got right down to it, but I was thinking of going there. I took the lab key out of my pocket and twirled it around in my fingers. What I was considering might be called breaking and entering. Technically, I wouldn’t be breaking since I had the key, I’d just be entering. If I got caught, I could always say my client had given me the key, that I was representing his best interests, that Rick Olney had been concealing vital information. Money talks even from the grave, and my client’s money was
running the lab. Besides, I’d already caught Rick Olney breaking into my place of work, so who was he to complain? I didn’t intend to get caught, and I didn’t intend to steal anything, only to listen and observe. I had a hunch about where the missing file was, and I wanted to hear what the parrot instruction tape had to say. There was always the possibility that the key I’d taken would not let me in, in which case I’d come home and forget about it.

  I put Wes Brown’s .45 in a drawer, intending to turn it over to Special Agent Violet Sommers. The only weapon of mine the feathered mask hadn’t confiscated in the desert was the Punch on my key ring. I took it.

  Before I left I called the lab. I didn’t want to run into Rick Olney again; I figured I’d already gotten all the information I’d get out of him. The phone rang five times, then the answering machine picked up. I was more than a little spooked by the voice that answered, Deborah Dumaine’s. Rick had not wanted to (or had not gotten around to) changing the tape.

  Deborah seemed to be speaking from beyond the reach of the law or the curve of the earth. “The Psittacine Research Facility is closed,” she said. “Office hours are from nine to five, Monday through Friday. Call back then.” She didn’t ask me to leave a message. I had no message to leave. I picked up a pair of gloves and a pair of headphones and I went out the door.

  The rain had stopped, but the pavement was slick with black water. The stars were twinkling on one by one and the moon slipped out from under a silver-bellied cloud. Someone had stuck a note beneath my windshield wiper. “Park in your own space, goddamn it,” it read.

  I ripped the white paper in pieces and offered it to the wind goddess, but she wasn’t taking. The scraps dropped into a puddle and sank.

  There were no cars in the parking lot when I returned to the Psittacine Research Facility. The door was shut, the lab was silent, the lights were off. I put on my gloves and took the key from my pocket. The key slipped in like the lock was made of butter. The tumbler turned, the dead bolt slid open. I stepped inside and bolted the door behind me. The lab was pitch dark. The parrots, having squawked the sun to bed, seemed to be sound sleep. They were so quiet it was possible to imagine they’d flown the coop. Rick had gone home or to Alice’s. I had a pocket flashlight, which I shined across the floor until I located the box of plastic booties. I managed to pull a pair on over my running shoes; I didn’t want to be leaving New Balance glyphs all over the place. I also didn’t want to waste my time taking running shoes on and off.

  Following the flashlight’s lead, I made my way across the lab to the room that housed the indigos. I lifted the light once to see what the birds were doing, and got a quick glimpse of two big macaws asleep, snuggled together on their perch. The one place in this lab an outsider would not be able to enter was this cage. The two scimitar beaks in there were capable of snapping a finger off, and one of the indigos, I knew, did not like strangers. If I were going to hide something valuable in this lab, I’d be tempted to put it inside the cage. If the macaws could keep Terrance out, they would have scared off any snooping security men. There was a tray underneath that collected the bird’s droppings. I pulled the handle, slid the tray out and beamed my flashlight over the contents. Nothing but bird shit on the top sheet of a stack of white paper. Apparently the top paper was pulled off whenever the cage was cleaned. I ran my hand under the bottom sheet and felt only the flat bottom of the tray. I pulled the tray all the way out. There was a subfloor under it, covered by a plastic mat. One floor ought to be sufficient to catch the bird droppings. I shined my light quickly on the indigos again—still sleeping, still snuggling—stuck my arm through the bars and into the cage. I slid my gloved hand under the mat until it slipped into a depression, a compartment under the cage. Inside I found a box and a plastic envelope. I pulled them out and shined my light on them. The box had the familiar shape of a video, the envelope contained a manila file folder. “All right,” I whispered.

  I put the tray and papers back into place, took the envelope and video into the lab, sat down at the table and scanned them with my flashlight. The video was your basic black plastic model with a label that read “Property of Terrance Lewellen” in his EKG scrawl. The file contained the valuable papers of Deborah Dumaine, the first of which was her will. That document left everything to the parrot trust, but Deborah didn’t have all that much to leave. Her prenuptial agreement (also in the file) said that she would take out of the marriage exactly what she’d brought in, which was close to nothing. Academics rarely get rich. I found letters to her attorney that said she was indeed trying to get out of her prenuptial agreement. The attorney had been encouraging her to pursue this path by whatever means were available, which is something I wouldn’t have done. Different strokes for different lawyers.

  Next I found the agreement, which stipulated, as Rick had said, that a trust fund had been established to care for the indigo macaws and the Amazons for the rest of their lives. The trust also provided money for the lab to continue its operations. Deborah was to manage the lab, and if she were unable to, Rick Olney would take her place. The lab’s budget was attached and every expenditure was itemized, from the price of the birds’ food to the size of the manager’s income, which was even lower than mine. The budget was geared to the cost-of-living index and could be raised in times of inflation and lowered in times of deflation. Terrance continued to control the lab even from the grave, and he did it with a tight fist. Running the lab was a prestigious job in the bird world, but no one, including Rick Olney, would get rich doing it.

  The last document was one of those do-it-yourself will forms that stated it was Terrance Lewellen’s last will and testament and was dated July 15. Not one dime was left to Deborah Dumaine. Most of what Terrance had went to his mother, with the exception of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars earmarked for Sara. The will had been witnessed in the appropriate places and was signed with Terrance’s uniquely sloppy signature. There was no evidence that Baxter, Johnson had been involved. Why not? I wondered. Because Buddy Baxter might have heard the testosterone talking and tried to change Terrance’s mind?

  I slid the file back in its plastic envelope and put on the headphones I’d brought. I plugged the male part into the cassette player and put the headphones over my ears so as not to disturb the sleeping parrots. I hit the Play button.

  The first sound was the gentle but firm voice of Alice of the long blonde hair and the long graceful body.

  “This is a … ?” she asked.

  “Pen,” replied a parrot.

  “Good boy,” she said, then, “pen?”

  “Nut,” screamed a bird who was probably Max, the brightest and loudest bird in the lab.

  “Good boy,” she said. Apparently she’d been testing him, showing him a nut and telling him it was a pen. This section of tape rambled on, with Alice showing the parrots an object, praising them if they identified it, correcting them if they were wrong. With his fascination for the newly beloved, Rick probably would have sat through this party dreamy-eyed, but I was soon bored. Why would he have had any objection to my listening to it?

  I fast-forwarded to the next track and heard The Wicked Witch of the West cackle, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.”

  “I’ll get you, my pretty,” echoed an Amazon, “and your little dog too.”

  The next voice belonged to Deborah in a cantankerous mood. “Terrance, you are such an asshole,” she said.

  “Terrance, you are such an asshole,” an almost identical voice responded, but it wasn’t hers, I knew, it was Maxamilian. Anger in, anger out. Parrots imitate sounds with emotional content. Deborah was using her emotions to get a reaction from Max, which didn’t strike me as exactly scientific.

  This track seemed to be aimed at encouraging the parrots to imitate, which came naturally enough. The next track tried for a response which wasn’t as predictable.

  “What’s your name?” I heard Deborah ask.

  “Maxamilian,” her prize pupil answer
ed.

  “What’s this?”

  “Pen.”

  “Good boy,” she said.

  “Nut,” he answered.

  There was a pause, then I heard the tentative, querying voice of Sara Dumaine. “Terry, sweetie,” she cooed. “I love you so much.”

  “Malinche,” a parrot screeched, so loudly my ears hurt. That voice didn’t sound like an imitation person; it sounded like a parrot, one of the parrots that was not a good talker. I snapped the cassette player off and yanked out the earphones; I’d heard what I wanted to know. Malinche was the Indian girl who had acted as an interpreter to Cortes and become his mistress. In Mexico a malinche is a traitor.

  My inner clock told me that my time in the lab was up. I put the documents back in the file, put the file in the plastic envelope and returned it to the indigos’ cage. One quick flash of my light told me that Perigee and Colloquy were still snuggled together on their perch. I pulled out the droppings tray, lifted the plastic mat and slid the file back into its niche. The video was coming with me. The mat buckled into a ridge, and I couldn’t slide the tray back in place. I pulled the tray out, reached through the bars and was tugging at the mat, trying to smooth it, when a flapping, fluttering whirlwind descended to the floor of the cage and latched onto my gloved finger with a grip that could snap a Brazil nut in two.

  “Ow,” I yelled. It had to be Colloquy; Perigee knew me better and had better manners. He was awake now and beating his wings. Colloquy shook until my finger went as limp as a worm. “Goddamn it,” I said. “Let go.”

  Perigee hissed “Malinche.” But I wasn’t the traitor—not yet anyway. Perigee had gotten Colloquy’s attention; she looked up at him, loosened her grip and dropped my finger, which I immediately yanked out of the cage. Blood was oozing through the glove. I pulled it off and sucked at my knuckle. I slammed the tray into place and rushed out of the lab, forgetting to remove the plastic booties, but remembering to bring the video and to lock the door behind me.