Parrot Blues

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Thanks,” I replied as I hung up.

  There were three women circling in this case’s gyre. One of them had masqueraded as Roberta Dovalo and taken my measure. Had she done it for Terrance Lewellen, for Wes Brown or for herself? Was she working with or against a man?

  I moved on to the physical evidence, the lock of dyed red hair and the feather. The feather was Colloquy’s or Perigee’s. The hair was Deborah’s in color, but could have come from anybody’s head. Then I reread the ransom note: “Indigo dying without mate. Put two hundred thousand in Deborah’s BankWest Account.” The Journal had been clipped, taped and xeroxed, making the note impossible to trace. The hand-printed note on the back of the deposit slip (which might be traceable) remained with Charlie Register, unless he’d turned it over to the APD or the FBI, but if he had, I should have heard from them by now.

  None of the evidence I’d examined so far was leading in the direction I wanted it to go. I took the videotape I’d labeled Cotorra Canyon into Brink’s office. He’d returned from lunch and was peering into his computer. I had to clear my throat twice before he realized I’d entered the room.

  “Oh, hi,” he said, shifting his body to hide the computer screen from view as he hit the Escape button. His document went into a computer file, and the screen went blank.

  “What were you working on?” I asked.

  “Just a little will I’m doing for a client of Nancy’s,” he said.

  “A client of Nancy’s?” Who was his partner anyway?

  “She’s overworked now, and I’m not busy and…”

  Doing Nancy’s work on Hamel and Harrison’s time verged on malinche behavior, but it did give me leverage to do what I wanted to do right now—look at my videotape. “I have a video I want to look at,” I said. “Now.”

  “Okay.”

  Brink watched the video with me; he and Anna are always ready for a diversion. As I slipped my tape into the slot, I remembered how easy it had been to climb to the top of the butte, the rock stairs that seemed to have shown up exactly when and where we needed them. A man came on the screen, in black and white and at a distance, but clearly Wes Brown. He smoked a cigarette, waited and then exchanged a small amount of money for very valuable parrots, killing at least one of them in the process. The parrot transfer concluded, the video moved on to Wes Brown’s boat. I should have straightened my hat for this one. There was the back of the Kid’s head. There was a tippy image of Brown aiming his gun at the Kid.

  Brink gasped.

  The Kid knocked the gun out of Brown’s hand.

  “Whooo,” exclaimed Brink.

  The minicam zeroed in on Brown’s face and I felt my own rage expand. It was a strong force, but I could control it.

  The video was irrefutable evidence for the FWS and pretty much as I had seen it, except that the date and time showed up in the corner of this tape, which they hadn’t on Terrance and Sara’s. That information would be useful in court, but I hadn’t put it there.

  “Do the date and time usually show up on the videos?” I asked Brink, since he knew more about this subject than I did.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes you have to program the camera to put it there,” he replied. “Depends on the equipment.”

  I wondered if Brown always met the smugglers at the same time. It made sense; the desert was cool, dark and lonely at night. Did he meet them on the same day every week? Every two weeks? Every month? The tape finished, I rewound it and popped it out.

  Leaving Brink to Nancy’s will I went back to my office, where there was one more piece of physical evidence to consider, the still photographs of Wes Brown and the feathered mask at the ATMs outside Midnight Cowboy and on Tramway. Brown wore his black cowboy hat, a going-to-town striped shirt and a hangdog expression. I didn’t have the videotape of this transaction, but Charlie Register at Bank West did. I ran through the transaction in my mind. Wes Brown had put Deborah Dumaine’s ATM card (or a reasonable facsimile) in the slot, punched in her PIN number, deposited two hundred dollars into her account and left instructions in invisible ink on the back of a deposit slip. Whose deposit slip? I wondered. Everybody assumed it was Deborah’s, but had anybody ever checked it out?

  Deborah’s PIN number and the number that put Brown into her account was 2473. I looked on my telephone dial to find the corresponding letters: ABC, GHI, PRS, DEF. Customers usually have the option of taking the PIN number the bank assigns them or choosing their own. People pick words or numbers that they find easy to remember. I had no idea what the numbers 2473 meant to Deborah or anybody else, but the word those letters spelled out (the only word they could spell out) was BIRD. With ten numbers to fill four digits, there are ten thousand possible combinations and there’s bound to be duplication. Deborah would be the only person with her account number, but she might not be the only one with a PIN of 2473. The question, in this case, was who had gotten BIRD first? The person who would know was Charlie Register. I called and asked him.

  “I was just getting ready to call you,” he said.

  I’ll bet, I thought. “Does Wes Brown have his checking account with you?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do Deborah and Brown have the same PIN number?” I asked.

  “They do. I looked it up; it’s 2473.”

  “2473 means BIRD. Did you know that?”

  “No, but it figures, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “it does. Who got it first?”

  “Brown’s had it for three years.”

  “And Deborah?”

  “She got hers in July.”

  “Whose account number was on the deposit slip?”

  “Brown’s.”

  “But the money went into Deborah’s account.”

  “Initially, yes. The deposit was made with an ATM card that had her account number on the mag strip. You may remember that we were preoccupied with the message on the back of the slip.”

  I remembered.

  “It didn’t have anybody’s name on it, but we assumed it was Deborah’s deposit slip until we took a closer look.”

  “Doesn’t the name go on automatically?”

  “It’s the customer’s option.”

  “How can the code be transferred from one mag strip to another?”

  “You take a credit or ATM card that’s been stolen or is out of date and erase the magnetic strip with a magnet. The raised numbers on the card are only there for the customer’s information. The ATM doesn’t read them. A nine-volt battery and a couple of wires can copy the information from one mag strip to another. Or you can buy a mag card reader that’ll do it for you.”

  “So my Visa card could access Deborah Dumaine’s account if I transferred her information to my mag strip.”

  “And you knew her PIN number.”

  “Right.”

  “Is there any money in Deborah’s account now?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Was Brown making regular cash deposits to his account?”

  “Every two weeks.”

  “And writing checks to the IRS?”

  “Every month. That’s all he used the account for.”

  Brown was in a cash business, but he couldn’t pay the IRS in smelly money. He had to launder it somewhere. No need to put his name, address and phone number on the checks and deposit slip for that. Besides, he didn’t have a phone, didn’t have a real address and had a name that shifted with the seasons.

  “His last check bounced,” Charlie Register said.

  “Because his deposit went into Deborah’s account.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you talked to your attorney yet?”

  “No, but I intend to.”

  Somebody had to call Detective Hernandez, and it couldn’t be me. “I think you better put a flag on Deborah’s account.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Will you call me immediately if there is any activity?”

  “I will,” he said.


  I had one parting shot. “I hear Candace Lewellen is going to donate the Lochovers to the Dallas Fine Arts Museum.”

  “I know.” He sighed. “I sure have enjoyed having them here.”

  I said adios to Charlie Register, he said good-bye to me, and we hung up our respective phones. I’d be willing to bet that he leaned back in his chair, beneath the lamp that turned his hair to silver and gold, and admired the Lochovers.

  I took a moment to look at the kidnapping myself. There was a boldness and brilliance to that scheme that made it, in its own way, a work of art. I wished I could hang it on my wall and admire it. I wished I had a wall big enough to hang it on. The details had been sketched in carefully, but the overall effect was of water on the road, a shimmering illusion. It looked different up close than it did from a distance, which must have been the artist’s intent. There was no bold signature scarring this work of art yet, as there was on the Lochovers, but there might be a line like the one that led out of the rug. It had, after all, been the work of an imperfect human being.

  The whiteness of my bandaged finger flagged my eye and brought me back to my office on Lead with the bars on the window, the diploma on the wall and the plants that needed watering. I’d forgotten the pain in my finger while I’d been working this out. The pain began to beat again. The bandage was still far too white. With my left hand I took a magic marker from my desk drawer and marked it with an X.

  19

  I FIGURED THAT if Charlie’s call came at all, it would come before morning. I lay in bed, waited and listened to the Kid’s soft and regular breathing and the raspy, erratic rustle of the wind. It was a feline and feral presence howling in La Vista’s hallway and rubbing its back against my window. I got up and paced the yellow shag carpet, keeping time to the wind’s restless rhythm.

  By four, tired enough to believe that God had not been in the details, I went back to bed, but it was the illusion of the hour—very late at night or very early in the morning. Nothing ever happens when you wait; I was back in bed and sound asleep when the phone rang. At first I thought it was the alarm. I reached over and punched it, but it rang again. The Kid groaned and pulled the pillow over his head. I picked up the phone and heard Charlie Register’s cowboy-banker voice.

  “Sorry to wake you, ma’am,” he said. “I just got a call from my security folks, and there’s something you’ll be wantin’ to see. Could you meet me at the bank? I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I thought about punching the Kid in the shoulder, but he was deep in the sleep zone and waking him would be a bitch. I knew he cared about the outcome of my case, but I was afraid this outcome wasn’t going to be the one he cared about. I let him sleep, got up, threw on a pair of running shoes, jeans and a T-shirt, and drove to Charlie Register’s office on Tramway. I didn’t pass a single car on my way. I did pass several ATMs. None were in use.

  Charlie was waiting at the bank entrance to let me in. He too had thrown on jeans, but his hung low on his hips and were held in place by a leather belt with a large silver buckle. He didn’t yet have the middle-aged cowboy’s belly-over-buckle silhouette, but he was working on it. He wore a white cotton shirt with a fine beige stripe. His blond and silver hair had been brushed into place. “Glad you could come,” he said.

  “Thanks for calling,” I replied. “Someone accessed Deborah Dumaine’s account?” Why else would he have called me so late at night and so early in the morning?

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “From what machine?” There were multiple possibilities: Tramway, the airport, the bus station, anywhere along the border.

  “Tramway,” he said.

  I followed him down the hall and up the stairs to the video monitoring room. All the cameras were running. All but one looked at empty gray and white vestibules or car lanes. Charlie had gotten the tape from his security people, and he’d inserted it in the monitor on the table. The tape had been rewound and stopped at four-thirty, the minute the transaction began. The time and date were visible on the corner. I’d expected that, but was startled to see dots of color in the image.

  “The color is a new technology we’re experimenting with,” Charlie said.

  “Was it your decision to put it in that machine?”

  “It was. You ready?”

  “Go,” I said.

  Charlie started the tape. It was a moment like the one before sleep when reality shifts and images become surreal. I might have been entering someone else’s brilliant and confusing dream. My dreams have been filled with soccer players and rock stars, no cowboys and never, even in the background, a banker. A cowboy wearing a duster and a black hat slouched up to the camera, and for a moment I could convince myself that it would end as it had begun, with Wes Brown’s face on the tape. Then the cowboy took off the hat. The face widened and whitened like a fish belly as it approached the camera. The face was heavily made up. The lips around the teeth were bright red. The hair was full and scarlet. The eyes looked into the camera without a blink. It was the bold, technicolor face of Deborah Dumaine. She punched in her PIN—B I R D, and Charlie stopped the tape, giving us plenty of time to study her triumphant expression.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “You were hoping for Wes Brown?” Charlie asked.

  “Hoping.”

  “I didn’t care who,” he replied, “as long as it wasn’t her.”

  “That’s because you haven’t met Wes Brown. Was it a deposit or a withdrawal?”

  “Withdrawal.”

  “How much?”

  “Four hundred dollars. That’s the maximum we allow in a twenty-four-hour period.”

  “Did that close the account?”

  “No. She has a hundred dollars left. I don’t think she needs the money, do you?”

  “Nope. I think she has four hundred thousand dollars somewhere in cash or traveler’s checks or cruzeiros. I think she staged her own kidnapping, set up Wes Brown and collected her own ransom from this machine, and then from me by holding a .45 to my head.” Because of the hour and the bizarre circumstances, I asked a question I might not have asked Charlie Register during the day. “Are you in love with her?”

  “I love my wife,” he sighed. “But I’ve always admired Deborah’s spirit.” There’s a role a wild woman plays in a tame man’s fantasies. What banker or lawyer hasn’t considered chucking it all and running off to Brazil? And more than one of us has fantasized about bumping off a philandering spouse. People who act out what everyone else represses could be angling for a place on the God shelf. As The Book of the Hopi said, Deborah had traveled the Road of Life by her own free will and had exhausted her capacity for good and evil.

  “She called my office to scope me out while pretending to be a client who wanted a divorce,” I said. “She dropped off the ransom note and faked the Relationships line voice. Being married to Terrance, she must have learned a lot about high-tech equipment like the Scrunch. She sent me to Door at a time when she knew I’d come across Brown smuggling parrots, and she made it appear that he’d kidnapped her. Who’s going to believe anything Wes Brown says?” My voice had turned into a whisper. Deborah’s presence on the screen was so strong that I couldn’t shake the feeling she was listening to us.

  “You’re sure Brown wasn’t involved?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m sure. Even Brown isn’t fool enough to write a bad check to the IRS. I thought we were playing liar’s poker, but Brown wasn’t lying. He told me Deborah had been down there to see him, and I wanted to believe it was his ego talking. She must have gone between his trips to Albuquerque. She probably took his credit card and tried out the PIN. Either she found BIRD written down somewhere or she guessed. Then she opened up her own account, took the same PIN, transferred her mag strip to Brown’s ATM card, went back to Door and put the card back before he came up here and used it again outside Midnight Cowboy on Friday night. She printed her message on the back of his deposit slip. It was in invisible i
nk; he never noticed.”

  Charlie cleared his throat. “Do you think that she … slept with him to accomplish all this?”

  “I hope not. She had to have been hiding with Perigee in Door somewhere and put him on the deck of Brown’s boat while the Kid and Brown and I were down below. The only footprints on the ground looked like Brown’s; she was wearing his brand of boots. Deborah’s on her way to Brazil.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. They’re not known for enforcing their extradition treaties—if they have any extradition treaties. Rick Olney, her lab assistant, said she was treated like a queen there. Rick knew Deborah as well as anyone, and he suspected her of murdering Terrance. As soon as Terrance died and Perigee came back, he became evasive and stopped talking about calling in the police.”

  “Why did you suspect her?”

  “She knew about Terrance and Sara; she had a tape of them making love. She’d been giving Terrance small doses of peanuts for his allergy. She knew how vulnerable he’d be without the treatment.”

  “I don’t understand why she didn’t leave sooner.”

  “She needed time to launder the money. Maybe she stopped to admire her work and watch her sister suffer. Did you notice the rental car with tinted glass and the engine running during the funeral?”

  “Can’t say that I did.”

  “I think it was Deborah, and I think she wanted Sara to know who was responsible for Terrance’s death. She came to the ATM to leave her signature on the plan.”

  Charlie started the videotape again. Deborah’s frozen face broke into a smile. She counted her money, pulled down her cowboy hat, tipped it to the camera, took her card and receipt and walked away. I couldn’t hear them, but I could see that she was wearing high-heeled shoes. Maybe she hadn’t expected Charlie to put a flag on the account. Maybe he wouldn’t have if I hadn’t suggested it. Maybe she’d thought Charlie admired her enough to let her get away. It could also be that her own pride and ego had tripped her up. You never know what motivates a killer. There’s often a level on which they want to get caught and be punished. Taking a life is in the realm of the gods, but the people who do it are all too human.