Cindy knew what was at the end of her cord, but what was at the other end of mine? A woman at the wheel of a convertible? A grasping tentacle? A black hole? Even Los Desaparecidos make themselves felt, sending signals like the ones amputees receive from their phantom limbs.
Cindy stood up and put her hand on Emilio’s shoulder. “Mother was terrible to you, Emiliano, and she lied to you, Neil. I know that, but I have to go.”
He put his hand on top of hers. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Do what you have to, Cindy,” I said.
After she left, Emilio and I sipped at our beer. “Have a smoke if you want,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Okay.” I lit up. For lack of an ashtray, I dropped the match in the empty lime dish. “Cindy is pretty forgiving.”
Emilio shrugged. “Considering that none of us is perfect and every one of us is gonna die, what else is there to be?”
There wasn’t much to say after that, so I put my cigarette out, finished my Tecate and went home to La Vista.
******
The Kid came for dinner, stopping by the parking lot on his way in to leave a couple of tacos for La Bailarina. After she came back, they had picked up where they left off. He gave her the food; she kept her pride and her distance. Martha’s sentence was a victory of sorts, but I wasn’t feeling any pheromones or power. The Kid and I argued about nothing at all and everything. The tacos were not hot enough, the beer was not cold enough, someone had promised to buy limes and forgotten. When we’d finished eating and I cleaned up by throwing the wrappers away, we got into bed and tried to resolve the tension.
Something woke me later—the wind, maybe, rattling a leaf or a branch against the window. Winter was in the wind, and snow would be falling in the higher elevations. It was the hour the infomercials come on TV, when the secure and the steady are fast asleep, when the man in dark glasses plugs God and the fat boy dances in the street, when even the homeless have found a den somewhere and burrowed into it for the night. I got out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans, a sweater and running shoes, went to my purse, took out all I had, five twenties, put them in an envelope, went outside and shut the door behind me. The moon sat on the horizon like a half-full cup. The air smelled of piñon burning, and I could see the shape of my breath. In the medium distance eighteen-wheelers crisscrossed the Big I. In the near distance, La Vista’s parking lot, La Bailarina’s van was in place.
I walked across the lot and looked in through a space where the curtains didn’t meet. There was enough light to see her curled up in the back like a sack of old clothes. There’s no pride or pretense or bravado in sleep, and she looked like what she was—vulnerable and sad. She might be a woman who found herself somehow without a job or a man in midlife. She might also be one of those reckless women who’d cut the cord and committed herself to the lonesome highway. If she had, did she ever wish she could find the way back? Was she too ashamed or too weak or too sad or too proud? I took the envelope from my pocket, folded it and stuck it under the windshield wiper. “Don’t blow it all in one place,” I said. I rapped on the window so she’d know it was there and get it before someone else did.
I went back inside, took off my clothes, got into bed, closed my eyes and turned the headlights on my own life. I saw a bend in the highway. The high beams made a long arc that landed on a woman in midflight. I put my foot on the brake, slowed down and took a good look. It was one of those nights when people reveal just what they are capable of. The woman stopped running, turned to face the light, and her hair fell down around her shoulders. Her eyes glittered, red and blank like the eyes of animals you come across in the road at night. She was no longer laughing or at the peak of her power. Her hair had turned gray, and her chin and breasts were showing the sag of gravity’s pull. Like everyone else who lives long enough, she was growing old. She began to shrivel under the high beams’ glare. Her shoulders hunched over, her knees bent. She put up a hand to protect herself from the light, but she got small as a child anyway. What should have happened over thirty long years was taking place in a flash. She was losing her desire, her youth, her power to hurt or to nourish. “You have to make peace with what can’t be resolved. I did what I had to. I’m sorry,” she said. There was nothing left in the highway, and the headlights went out.
I made a noise in my sleep or touched the Kid with my cold feet. He woke up, turned over and put his arm around me. “You have that dream again, Chiquita?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” I said.
THE END
Enjoy a free preview of A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #6
Parrot Blues
1
IT BEGAN WITH the sound of high-heeled shoes. It ended with the sound of a hand shuffling money, but that was many miles away. The heels clipped the sidewalk to a staccato beat. They were stilettos, maybe, or spikes, heels that left their impression on the pavement. A key turned in a lock, a dead bolt snapped from its chamber, a door swung open. There was a gasp and then a woman’s angry voice asked, “What are you doing in here?”
“What do you think?” a man answered. “You’re coming with…” He left the sentence unfinished, slurring his words from laziness, possibly, or drink.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“Stop it, you’re hurting me.” A slap was followed by a thud, then the sound of wings beating furiously. Someone or something screeched.
“You can’t take Perigee. Terrance will be livid.”
“Fuck Terrance. Ouch. Goddamn it. He bit me.” The laziness left the man’s voice once he got bit.
“What did you expect?” the woman asked.
There was another, lighter thud. More wings began to beat, the screeching escalated; the cry of one annoyed individual became the cacophony of a pissed-off flock. It was a whirlwind of sound, but words floated to the top like feathers riding the airwaves. “Hello-o?” queried the voice of a tentative woman. “Call my lawyer,” demanded a deep-throated man. “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too,” cackled the wicked witch of the West. “Start me talkin’, babe, tell you everythin’ I know,” growled a whiskey-soddened blues singer. “Pretty boy, pretty boy,” a new voice croaked. The next word, “malinche,” was a vindictive hiss.
“Move it,” said the man.
“I’m coming,” answered the woman. “Stop shoving me.”
The cacophony stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The door slammed shut. Boot heels scuffed the pavement, mingling with the pointissimo of the high-heeled shoes, but the snap had gone out of that step. The cassette player whirred. I struck a match, lit a cigarette, blew out the match. My client, Terrance Lewellen, who was sitting on the other side of my desk, reached over and clicked off the cassette player. It was a sleek, black, expensive model that belonged to him. He took the cassette out and placed it on my desk.
“I made you a copy,” he said.
“That sounded like it was taking place in the next room.”
“I use a Marantz extended-play recorder; it’s the best in the field.”
What field was that? Electronic surveillance? Bugging? Whatever you call it, it’s illegal without the consent of the people involved.
“Actually,” my client continued, “the incident took place at the Psittacine Research Facility my wife runs at UNM.”
“Your wife wears high-heeled shoes to work?”
“My wife wears high-heeled shoes everywhere; her arches shrunk, so she can’t wear anything but. Her name is Deborah Dumaine. She works with Amazon parrots and has taught them to do things no one ever believed parrots were capable of. If you ask them how many blue blocks are on a tray, they’ll tell you—when they feel like it. They’re smart. They’re also first-class mimics. You have to watch what you say around an Amazon; you’re likely to hear it repeated … over and over and over again.
“Ha. Ha.” Terrance Lewellen laughed a big man’s double-barreled laugh. He wasn’t a big man exactly—he was about five fee
t five inches tall, a few inches shorter than me, and I never wear high-heeled shoes. But he took up a lot of cubic space. His shoulders were broad, his belly big enough to hide his belt buckle. His hands had the thick, doughy shape of a bear claw pastry. His eyes were deep set and grayish green. They could twinkle when he laughed, glitter when he got mad, turn as opaque as one-way glass when he sat back and waited for a reaction. His shirt was undone a couple of buttons, revealing gray chest hair that didn’t match his brown piece. It was a bad piece, but nobody ever sees a good one. It was the same hair that middle-aged actors and newscasters wear, not big hair, TV hair. If Terrance had gone natural, he might have looked distinguished. The piece made him look like a late-night infomercial salesman, which could have been exactly the effect he intended. Terrance was a successful businessman, a seasoned and wary corporate raider. He never revealed his hand if he didn’t have to, and he didn’t leave much to chance. He took out a cigar and lit up. I hate the smell of cigar smoke, but my own cigarette butt was burning in the ashtray, which limited my right to complain.
“Were those the Amazons screeching?” I asked.
“Yes. Deborah’s grad students have let them get out of control. They’re spoiled rotten.”
“How many were talking?”
“It’s hard to tell. One Amazon can do many voices, and many Amazons can do one voice. They sound just like people, they sound like dogs, they can sound like the dishwasher if they want to. That last parrot voice on the tape was Perigee, my male indigo macaw. The macaws are bigger and better looking, but they don’t have the vocabulary of an Amazon and they’re more likely to talk in their own voice than to imitate.”
“That was the one that said ‘malinche’?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what that means?”
“No.”
“Malinche was the Indian girl who became Cortes’s mistress and interpreter in the new world. There are those who believe she betrayed her people, and malinche means traitor to them. She’s still a figure in pueblo Indian ceremonials.”
“How ’bout that?” Terrance Lewellen leaned back, stretched his legs and exposed a pair of scaly cowboy boots, expensive but ugly. Ostrich hide? I wondered. Snake? “The Amazons belong to Deborah’s lab; the indigo macaws belong to me,” he continued. “When I got to the lab, Perigee was gone. He’s one tough hombre and he put up a hell of a fight. Feathers were all over the floor.”
There was a sleek leather briefcase with a combination lock on Terrance’s lap. He keyed in the combination and snapped the briefcase open, giving me a glimpse of his cellular phone. He took out a long, thin feather and handed it to me. I thought indigo was the color of jeans after they’ve been washed a few times, but the feather was a turquoise that was as deep and iridescent as the Sea of Cortez.
“It’s a tail feather. Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Terrance.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Keep it.”
“Thanks.” I stood the indigo plume in an empty glass on my desk and it arced gracefully over the side, a hit of beauty whenever I needed a break from my sun-baked Albuquerque lawyer’s life.
“The Latin name of the indigos is Anodorhynchus leari,” Terrance said. “They are extremely rare in captivity, damn near extinct in the wild and very, very valuable.”
Some people are collectors by nature, some are dispersers. My own personal motto is to never own anything you can’t afford to lose; it’s too much trouble. “Where did the indigos come from?” I asked Terrance.
“The Raso in Brazil.” His eyes sparked. “I cannot believe that Deborah allowed Perigee to be taken.” He smashed the fist of one large hand into the palm of the other.
“It didn’t sound like she had a choice.”
“She had the choice of not associating with Wes Brown, a worthless human being if ever there was one.”
“The voice on the tape?”
“That’s him. Those were his boot heels, too. He grew up in Southern California, but he thinks he’s a cowboy.”
Terrance, I knew, had grown up in West Texas, which gave him a license to wear boots. “Macaws have the bite of a snapping turtle,” he continued. “I hope Perigee got a chunk out of Wes Brown’s hide.”
“What is Deborah’s connection to him?” It wasn’t quite the question I wanted to ask, but timing is of the essence in law and interrogation, and the time wasn’t ripe for my question yet.
“He’s a smuggler. He contacted us on occasion and tried to sell us smuggled parrots. We refused. Deborah hated his guts, but she encouraged him. She had a notion that she would learn something useful about his smuggling operation.”
“Did she?”
“I doubt it.”
“How did you get the indigos?” Parrots that were very rare and very valuable were also likely to be very illegal, one explanation for why Terrance had come to me with his story and not the police or his corporate law firm.
“I used to be in oil exploration and was doing some exploratory drilling for Petrobras in the Raso in the late sixties and early seventies. I like to bring something back from all the places I drill. On my first trip there, one of the natives offered me the indigos, and I accepted. They were a hand-raised pair, too tame to survive in the wild. That was before Brazil signed an export ban, and it wasn’t illegal to take indigos or any other parrots out of the country. Things have changed.”
Considering the exchange rate between the third-world cruzeiro and the oil-world dollar, and the escalating pace of parrot extinction, the macaws had probably turned out to be a better investment than the oil.
“Deborah and I met in the Raso,” Terrance said. “She’s a linguist. She was studying the language of the indigenous people before they become extinct, too. While she was down there, she got interested in parrots. She tried teaching the macaws to speak, but that didn’t work, so she turned to Amazons. Now that she’s famous for her work, she’s become the adrenaline queen. She never sleeps. She travels all the time. The birds don’t like it.” He peered into an ornate scroll of silver and turquoise on his wrist, found the time, snapped open his briefcase and brought out a small bottle with a long neck. He removed the plastic cap, squirted once into each nostril and sniffed. “Goddamn allergies,” he said.
It was comparable to pulling out dental tape and flossing in public, satisfying to the person doing it, repulsive to anyone else. “Is that really necessary?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t because Terrance Lewellen was watching me with cat-at-the-mouse-hole eyes, waiting for a reaction. He exuded a vibe having to do with power, success or plain old testosterone that made him hard to ignore. He was the kind of short man who usually has a tall, good-looking woman on his arm (with the spike heels Deborah wore, she was bound to be taller), and the reason wasn’t entirely money. He was coarse, but he was smart. He appreciated beauty, and beauty likes to be appreciated. I picked up the indigo feather and ran my fingers down the barbs, thinking that if Terrance Lewellen were a bird he’d be a bantam cock. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You have a pair of indigo macaws?”
Terrance stuck the cap on and put the bottle back in his briefcase. “Yes.”
“But Wes Brown only took one?”
“Right.”
“Were they both in the lab?”
“Yes. When I developed a parrot allergy I had to move the indigos out of the house and into the lab. Wes Brown knows parrots. He knows macaws mate for life and that Colloquy will be one sad parrot without Perigee. She’s already moping and pulling her feathers out. Wes is going to use that knowledge to extort money from me. I got this in the mail today.”
He opened his briefcase again, took out a stamped envelope and handed it to me. Inside was the Relationships section of the Sunday Journal. In the Male to Female Relationships column, between “no Democrats or psychos. Harley-Davidson a plus” and “Love the Lord,” he’d marked this: “Lonely indigo desperately needs mate. #12441.”
I looked at the postmark on the envelope. Tuesday
. “When did you record the abduction?”
“Monday evening.”
Today was Wednesday, the message had appeared in Sunday’s paper. “That’s pretty good timing,” I said. “The ad appeared the day before the crime; it was mailed to you the day after.”
“Time is of the essence in crime,” Terrance said, watching me and appropriating one of those phrases that seem to float around a lawyer’s office. Maybe he pulled it out of the air or maybe he read my mind, because it’s what I was thinking but hadn’t said. Terrance made a point of saying the things other people wouldn’t. “I got the ad today,” he continued. “If the abduction hadn’t worked, I never would have seen it and who else would have known what it meant? I don’t read those ads. Do you?”
“Nope.”
“To answer, you call 1-900-622-9408 and listen to the person’s recorded message. Go ahead. Call it; tell me what you think.”
I dialed the number and got a generic female operator’s voice asking me to push the number one if I had a Touch-Tone phone. I did as I was told, pushed all the required numbers and eventually heard, “I’m so lonely without my mate. Bring me home soon, please” in a voice of quivering emotion and ambiguous sexuality. It could have been a husky-voiced woman’s or a high-pitched man’s. It could have been an Amazon parrot or an indigo macaw. It wasn’t Wes Brown’s voice, although it did stretch out the o’s in “so” and “lonely.”
“Was that Perigee?” I asked.
“No. It was Wes Brown.”
“Except for the drawl, it doesn’t sound like him.”
“He used the Scrunch, a digital voice changer. It has eight positions, ranging from deep male to high female. It can make a man sound like a woman, a woman sound like a man and a human being sound like a parrot.” In the world of high-tech gamesmanship, Terrance Lewellen knew all the equipment.
The Lies that Bind Page 24
