The dollar curls drooped beside her face. She raised her dark glasses to look at me. Her eyes were red and puffy. She hadn’t bothered with eye makeup and no mascara ran down her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she whispered. She lowered her glasses and got into her car. Her windows, like mine, were clear, coated only by a fine layer of dust.
The first vehicle to pull away had the gray anonymity of a rental car and the dark tinted glass of a person who wanted to see without being seen. I hadn’t noticed anybody getting into it, but I might have been distracted by my conversations with the living and the dead.
18
ON MY WAY to my office I stopped at Arriba Tacos and got a meat and potato sopapailla with green chile and an iced tea to go. That was my idea of brain food: vitamin B and potassium for sustenance, caffeine and chile for energy. Anna and Brink were still out to lunch when I got to Hamel and Harrison, which was all right with me. Time alone in the office is rare, and it’s the best (if not the only) time to think. My first piece of business was the blinking red light on the answering machine. There was one message; Special Agent Vi Sommers asking me to call her. I took the microcassette out of the machine, brought it into my office, sat down and ate my power food. Then I called Vi.
“The video of Brown was superb,” she said.
I like praise as much as anyone, but I had to give the credit to Terrance Lewellen’s minicam. “I think that had more to do with the equipment than the operator,” I said. I couldn’t take any credit for the impeccable timing, either.
“We took a warrant out for Brown, sent a couple of agents down to Door and arrested him. We got his ledger, his bags of bird feathers and his goshawk bones.”
“Way to go,” I said.
“We found the yellow-headeds and the blue-fronted parrot at Birds of Paradise. They were preparing to put illegally obtained leg bands on them. We arrested the owner.”
“Bueno.”
“Brown’s out on bail. He paid in cash, and the bondsman complained about the smell. We found twenty thousand dollars buried in the hole in Cotorra Canyon”
“That’s all?”
“That was it.”
There were plenty of other places to bury money in Door. Brown might have hidden the ransom in one of them—if he’d hidden the ransom. “He came to see me last night. He was drunk.”
“That figures. What’d he want?”
“To threaten me, I guess. Or maybe he just can’t stay away from women and trouble, which are one and the same for him.”
“Mr. Tough Guy, right?” She laughed.
“He had another .45 on him that I took. I’d like to turn it over to you.”
“We would have confiscated whatever weapons were on the boat, but we didn’t find any.”
Both she knew and I knew that it wouldn’t take long for a guy like Brown to come up with a new gun.
“Where’s the .45?”
“At my apartment.”
“Let me know when you’ll be home. I’ll send an agent over.”
“Okay. Brown figured out I was the one who turned you onto him.”
“You’re identified only as a confidential informant in the warrant.”
“It was pretty obvious; it was only last Sunday that I was down there.”
“You were right about the DEA and IRS,” Vi said. “He cut a deal with them for the drug smuggling and was paying off the back taxes in monthly payments.”
That was one thing Brown hadn’t lied about. “He told me he had to get into parrot smuggling to make the payments,” I said.
“They’ve always got some excuse. The IRS will lose their payments, but we’ll get him for violating the Lacey Act. If there’s anything else you have on him, let us know. We might be able to help.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“We turned the thick-billed over to the Phoenix Zoo’s captive breeding program. It should do all right there. Maybe it’ll even get turned loose some day. Your friend seemed pretty attached to it.”
“He loves birds.”
“Since the thick-billeds are endangered, we’re not allowed to give them to private citizens, but we hold auctions periodically to find homes for the parrots we confiscate at the border. Brown’s birds will be up for auction, but I’d like to offer one to you and your friend now. It’s the best I can do in the way of a reward.”
It was an offer as appealing and terrifying as a baby on the doorstep, and this was a baby that would never grow up. It could be a clever and amusing companion; it could also be a loud and jealous mate. I knew which illegal alien the Kid would want, too, the blue-fronted, the native Argentine parrot, the one he thought he’d heard calling him El Pibe back in Buenos Aires.
“Can I have some time to think about it?” I asked. “Sure. No hurry. Well, thanks again.”
“Glad to help,” I said.
******
Anna had shown up while I was on the phone and waved to me from the doorway. She stepped out of my range of vision, did a double take, came back and pointed at the bandaged finger on my doodling hand. Not being able to draw could severely limit my ability to think, and this was not a day on which I could pull a no-brainer.
“What happened?” she mouthed.
“Tell you later,” I mouthed back. Once I’d maneuvered my way out of the shower and into my clothes I’d forgotten all about the finger, but the minute she pointed at it, the pain started all over again. I looked down at the bandage, which was very neat and very white. Like a graffiti artist facing a blank wall, I had a powerful desire to put a tag on it.
When I got off the phone, Anna came back and plunked a cup of Red Zinger tea on my desk. She was celebrating youth, summer and a size six body by wearing a tiny black skirt and a tiny white top with a slice of black lace sticking out of the cleavage. I was wearing a boring lawyer’s shirt buttoned far above my cleavage line. Anna had listened to my advice about the shoes anyway. Today she was wearing thick-soled black sneakers with her black ankle socks. It was an outfit that sent an approach/avoidance message: You can look at my underwear, but I’ll run if I have to.
“It’s just a cut finger,” I said. “I can still make my own Red Zinger.”
“Hey, I was only trying to help.”
“You’re right. Thanks.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
“I put my hand into a parrot’s cage.”
“Yow! What for?”
“There was something I wanted inside.”
“Did you get it?”
“Yup.”
“What is it?”
“A video.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Can I see?”
Why not? I thought. The video was as good a place to start my investigation as any, and Anna was sure to have something to say no matter what it contained. “Where’s Brink?” I asked.
“Out to lunch.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We took the black box into Brink’s office where the VCR was. He bought one because he thought he’d use it to watch videotaped depositions, but there was a thick layer of dust on top. I closed the blinds, put in the tape, and we sat down to watch it.
The tape was in color and began with a woman walking slowly across a room. She was naked except for her white moccasins, the feathers in her hair and fringed pasties on her nipples. Cellulite quivered in her thighs, but she had a good body, slender and well proportioned. Her breasts were firm. Her legs were long. Her skin was pale, and her pubic hair was several shades darker than her blond curls. Anna and I were voyeurs at a private moment, but people who want to keep their moments private shouldn’t videotape them. There’s no telling whose hands the tape will fall into.
“Hey, that’s the woman who came to the office with Terrance Lewellen,” Anna said.
“Right.”
“I thought she was his sister-in-law.”
“She was.”
The camera followed Sara to the king-sized bed in Terrance and Deborah’s bedroom. I recognized the elaborately carved headboard. Terrance sat on the edge of the bed, naked too, except for a gold chain and the piece. His belly was white and furry. The testosterone patch had obviously been doing its work. Sara stood in front of him while he licked the pasties off.
“Yow,” Anna said.
Terrance fell backward onto the bed and pulled Sara with him. A bronco with two backs rolled and bucked. Sara ended up eventually straddling Terrance, still wearing some of the feathers. It was exciting, it was ludicrous, it was embarrassing, it was infuriating, depending on one’s point of view. The only detail that distinguished it from porn was that Terrance was overweight and not enormously endowed. Sara was actually better looking than most porn stars. It wasn’t a turn-on—not to me anyway—although it must have been to Terrance when he watched it later. Why else would he have taped it? To further inflate his already overblown ego? As an advertisement for the patch? There was a certain fascination to the video that kept me from hitting the Eject button, and we stuck with it to the very end—a vigorous back-arching orgasm from Sara that seemed staged to me. Maybe she knew she was on camera, maybe she was earning her living.
“Overdone, don’t you think?” I said.
Anna rolled her eyes. “Very.”
Deborah must have seen this. What had she felt? I wondered. I knew what I’d have felt—rage at a sister for screwing my husband, fury at a husband for sleeping with my sister. It was about the worst betrayal two people could commit. It wouldn’t matter whether a woman loved the husband anymore or didn’t, she’d still be furious. Sex is territorial. That they’d done it in her bed made it even worse, and you could multiply the anger several times over by the fact that he’d taped it and then been stupid enough to leave the tape where it could be found.
Anna stood up, stretched and shook her curls into place. Some black lace peeked out from under her white blouse. “Kind of hard to go back to work after that,” she said.
“Not that hard,” I replied. I rewound the tape, hit the Eject button and took it out. I hadn’t been aroused physically, but I had been stimulated mentally. I went back to my office, sat down at my desk, took the blue macaw feather from the cup and ran my finger down the barbules, smoothing them into place. The back side of the feather was silvery gray. The front was flat blue or shimmering indigo depending on how the light hit it. I thought about my client’s death. If I looked at it from one perspective, I saw it one way. From another angle, I saw it differently. I badly wanted to pin it on Wes Brown, but knowing who you want to charge is never the best place to begin an investigation. The video I’d made was compelling evidence that Brown was a poacher and a scumbag, and Terrance’s audiotape was compelling evidence that he had kidnapped Deborah in spite of all his denials. The camera doesn’t lie, and you can’t fool a tape recorder, I thought. Or can you?
I closed the door and got out the top of my own high-tech line of sound equipment, a thirty-dollar boom box from Price Club and a couple of blank cassettes. The boom box could run from an electrical outlet or six size D batteries. It had two decks that would play and record, and that was about it. I replayed the tape Terrance had made on his Marantz. It began with the beat of high-heeled shoes and ended with a cacophony of parrots. The shoes, I believed, were Deborah Dumaine’s. The parrots, I knew, were the Psittacine Research Facility’s. In between there was a conversation between a man and a woman. The voices were angry, and the words went like this:
“What are you doing in here?”
“What do you think? You’re coming with…”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“Stop it, you’re hurting me. You can’t take Perigee. Terrance will be livid.”
“Fuck Terrance. Ouch. Goddamn it. He bit me.”
“What did you expect?”
“Move it.”
“I’m coming. Stop shoving me.”
The voices belonged to Wes Brown and Deborah Dumaine. I’d heard enough of both of them by now to be sure of that. I played the tape again on deck one and recorded it on deck two. I stopped whenever Deborah spoke, fast-forwarded deck one to the next time Brown spoke and fast-forwarded deck two to leave some room for my own input. And then I made another tape doing the reverse, recording only Deborah’s voice. I played back the tape with Deborah’s voice first and heard:
“What are you doing in here?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Stop it, you’re hurting me. Terrance will be livid.”
“What did you expect?”
“I’m coming. Stop shoving me.”
If Terrance had faked the tape, he could have recorded a conversation he had had with Deborah, then taken out his voice, had Brown add his part later and copied the new tape. I ran my tape again, assuming that Deborah came upon Terrance unexpectedly, either in the lab or her apartment, and filling in words for Terrance Lewellen.
Deborah: “What are you doing in here?”
Terrance: “You’re stealing valuable papers from me.”
Deborah: “No, I’m not.”
Terrance: “Give them back.” (He grabs her arm.)
Deborah: “Stop it, you’re hurting me.”
Terrance: “You’re causing a lot of trouble.”
Deborah: “What did you expect?”
Terrance: “Let’s get out of here.”
Deborah: “I’m coming. Stop shoving me.”
One problem with that scenario was, where had the “Terrance will be livid” line come from? It might have been something Deborah said in the lab or at home that Terrance’s recording equipment had picked up. Starting at the place that said Terrance faked the tape, I let my thoughts wander down the highway. They didn’t roam as freely as they might have if my finger hadn’t hurt and I’d been able to scratch in the back roads with my doodling right hand. I tried using the left, but all I could make with that were scribbles.
I continued a little farther down the road, supposing that Terrance had hired Brown to either kidnap or kill Deborah and take Perigee along for authenticity. In this case Brown had to have had an associate. It could have been Katrina, or the malinche, Sara, or his cousin, or anyone else willing to wear a feathered mask, a cowboy hat and a duster. I’d turned over half the ransom to someone, come across Brown smuggling parrots and recorded it on Terrance’s equipment. Maybe Brown was supposed to give some of the money back to Terrance, or he wanted more money, or Terrance knew too much about Brown’s involvement, so Brown and/or his partner found a clever way to get rid of Terrance.
Next I played the tape that had only Wes Brown’s words.
“What do you think? You’re coming with…”
“Yeah, you are.”
“Fuck Terrance. Ouch. Goddamn it. He bit me.”
“Move it.”
And then I began filling in the empty lines. Knowing Brown, I filled them in with a woman’s voice, an angry woman’s voice. But this time I played around with the order of Brown’s words.
“Terrance thinks you’re a scumbag of a smuggler.”
“Fuck Terrance.”
“Do you think Terrance cares that I came here?”
“What do you think?”
“Move it. You’re coming with…” (Here I imagined him talking to a parrot and a parrot answering back.) “Yeah, you are. Ouch. Goddamn it. He bit me.”
“What did you expect?”
The parrot in this scenario could be any parrot. It didn’t really matter. Both Deborah and Brown’s voices were real, but the roles they’d played could easily have been faked.
Next I played back the microcassettes I’d made of the voice on the R line in the handheld recorder I used for dictation.
“I’m so lonely without my mate. Bring me home soon, please.”
“Max a million. I am verrrry valuable.”
“Not enough. Double or nothing. Indigo dying without mate.”
Just for the heck of it I called 12441 on the R line again. It hadn’t taken long for them to assign the indigo’s number to someone else. This time I got a woman speaking up talk with a southern drawl. “Oh, hi? It’s really nice of you to call? I’m from Kentucky and a newcomer to Albuquerque and I…”
I’d heard enough of that and hung up. Terrance had said that anyone with a Scrunch could change a voice from deep male to high female, from Amazon parrot to indigo macaw. Of all the suspects, Wes Brown was the least likely to have a Scrunch or any high-tech equipment at all. The r rolled off the tongue in verrrry, which is a sound I’ve never been able to duplicate.
I had another microcassette to play, but I wasn’t sure what—if anything—would be on it. That tape came from our ancient answering machine. The newer models erase every time you rewind, but on our machine the new messages record over the old ones, and if you’ve been out of town or had a busy day, some messages (or fragments thereof) can stay on the tape for weeks. I put the microcassette into my recorder, rewound and pushed the Play button. First I got Vi Sommers asking me to call her back. I’d already done that. Next was Stevie for Anna, with his bass booming in the background. Then Nancy for Brink. I couldn’t hear any background noise, but I got the scent of cookies baking in the oven. Then came the Kid for me. “Pick up if you’re there. If not, I’ll hang.” Didn’t anybody ever get work-related calls here? After the Kid I heard someone trying to sell us legal forms and then, “Can’t make the appointment ’cause I’m gettin’ back with my Jimmie. Sure am sorry about that, ma’am,” in the cowgirl twang of Roberta Dovalo. When I’d imagined a woman to go with that voice, I’d seen a red dress with a full skirt, silver tips on her blouse collar and cowgirl boots. I saw makeup that had been applied with a trowel, and hair as full and fake as Dolly Parton’s. It’s not unusual for a client to want to investigate a lawyer before hiring her. It usually isn’t done over the phone. I called the number I had in Ruidoso, got the B & L Bake Shop and asked to speak to Roberta Dovalo.
“Nobody by that name here, ma’am,” the person who answered said.
“Is this…” I repeated the number.
“You bet.”
Parrot Blues Page 20
