A piece of paper fluttered through the air and settled onto the desk before Bloebaum.
"Take it,” Old Red said. “Makes my hands feel dirty just holdin’ the thing."
Bloebaum snatched up the letter, clutching it tight in trembling hands. He gazed at my brother in wonderment a moment ... before ripping the paper into a hundred pieces. When he was done, he sighed contentedly, then looked back over at us.
"Thank you. Truly. But ... I'm sorry. I really can't afford to hire you. Not with—"
Gustav barked out a scoffing laugh.
"Mister, if you think we'd still wanna work for the likes of you, you're as dumb as you are dishonest,” I said.
As we headed for the door, I did to Bloebaum's “guarantee” what he'd done to his love letter.
"Well,” I said once we were outside again, “what now?"
"You know what now."
I crooked a thumb back at Bloebaum's office. “That don't give you second thoughts about detectivin’ for a livin'?"
Old Red scowled at me like I'd just asked if he had second thoughts as to the sky being blue or the grass green. “Bloebaum there might've been a disappointment, but our Holmesifyin'—that came through again, didn't it?"
"I suppose so,” I said, surprised to hear my brother mention our Holmesifying. He usually speaks of Holmes as something that belongs to him alone. “We did get things untangled ... eventually...."
Old Red nodded firmly. “There you go, then."
And that was that. His faith remained unshaken.
Or maybe I shouldn't call it “faith,” since that's something you're supposed to hold to in lieu of proof. And we've seen proof aplenty, because we've put Holmes's methods to the test time and time again, and they haven't failed yet.
We still haven't found jobs as detectives—or run across anyone who could hold a candle to Holmes. But that doesn't mean your friend's flame has flickered out. You helped it burn all the brighter when he was alive, I have no doubt, and you're keeping it ablaze today with your stories. I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to say the torch has been passed to my brother and me, but I will say this: We've seen the light.
For that, we both thank you.
Sincerely,
O. A. Amlingmeyer
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
June 21, 1893
(c)2006 by Steve Hockensmith
A BIRD IN THE SAND by Edward D. Hoch
Edward D. Hoch's professional couriers Stanton and Ives are off to a bird sanctuary in Ari-zona in the following new episode in their series. The research Mr. Hoch does for this and other series is truly astonishing—especially when one considers that he has written nearly 950 published stories, and many of them have exotic or historical settings. His writing has made him an accomplished “armchair” traveler, with only his home library to guide him.
The fact that Ives and I were flying west with a large white cockatoo didn't mean we were saving on air fare. We were on a commercial airliner along with the bird, who seemed notably unimpressed to have a seat to itself with the seatbelt fastened snugly around its cage. Mrs. Wineworth had insisted that the bird make the trip with the human passengers rather than be consigned to a dark and chilly baggage compartment, and we'd tried three airlines before we found one that would allow it.
So the cockatoo, whose name was Eddy, sat between Ives and me in row five, a drape over its cage to keep it from chattering away to the other passengers. “I've had Eddy since my husband died twelve years ago,” Mrs. Wineworth had explained that day in our little office on Broadway at 12th Street. “But these days I have enough trouble caring for myself. They tell me Eddy could live to be fifty years old, and I'll be long gone by then. I want to know he'll be looked after when I'm gone. I hear there's a place in Arizona...."
Indeed there was a place in Arizona, more than one, in fact. We were heading for the Mission Bird Sanctuary, southwest of Tucson, where a small group of dedicated folks had established a community for rare tropical birds in a former mission church. Mrs. Wineworth wasn't about to entrust her beloved Eddy to a package delivery company, so she came to Stanton & Ives.
"I don't like it,” Juliet Ives grumbled. “We've never had to transport a live creature before."
"It's only a bird,” I reminded her, dismissing the complaint. “If you weren't so finicky you could have done it alone while I stayed in Manhattan drumming up new business."
We left the plane at the Tucson airport with the temperature over ninety and Ives carrying the birdcage. I'd arranged for a rental car to take us over the dusty back roads to the mission. We headed out Route 86 with the cockatoo in the backseat. He'd stayed quiet for most of the trip, but once we turned onto the rutted dirt road near San Pedro he started squawking. “Hello ... what happened? ... cracker."
"Give him a cracker, Ives,” I suggested, “but don't let him nip your fingers."
"Easy for you to say!"
After twenty minutes of driving through a desert region of cactuses and mesquites the old mission loomed ahead of us on the horizon. “There's smoke off to the west,” I observed. “It's been a dry summer here, with some brush fires."
The sandy soil supported little vegetation and it was hard to imagine there was enough brush to burn. Ives studied the smoke and said, “I doubt if it'll reach the mission. Don't they fly over and bomb those things with water or something?"
We pulled into a parking area in front of the mission, next to a sign that read: Mission Bird Sanctuary—Visitors Welcome. Already we could hear the chattering from within, and before we were out of the car we were greeted by a petite young woman in khaki shorts and a parrot T-shirt. “How're you all? I'm Rosie Spain. Come on in!"
"We're not exactly visitors,” I told her. “I'm Walt Stanton and this is Juliet Ives. We phoned you—"
"Of course! You're the courier service.” Her face seemed to glow with anticipation. “Where's our new arrival?"
Ives lifted the covered cage from the backseat. “Right here. He's Eddy and he's all yours."
Rosie Spain peered beneath the cloth and grinned. “Eddy is just lovely. I think cockatoos are my favorite of all our birds. Those movable head crests are divine."
The chattering from within had grown in volume, as if the inhabitants were greeting a new arrival. “How do you live with that racket all the time?” Ives asked.
"We love it. Come on in, I'll show you around."
We followed her through the front door, which led directly into the old mission church. The statues had been removed, leaving only bare niches in the walls, and in place of the altar there was a large screened aviary that held perhaps fifty small birds. A young man was spraying it with mist from a garden hose. “Charles, come see our new cockatoo,” the woman called to him.
He turned off the hose and came over to meet us. “Charles Cromwell,” he said, shaking my hand.
"Walt Stanton.” I introduced Ives and she held up the cage.
Cromwell was properly impressed. “A white delight! Why would anyone want to get rid of a beautiful bird like this?"
"Mrs. Wineworth is too old to take care of him, and she's had a stroke,” Ives explained. “He got loose from his cage and she had to call a neighbor in to help catch him. She heard about this place from a friend and it sounded like a perfect retirement home for Eddy."
Rosie Spain nodded. “We get a lot like that, but not usually from the East Coast.” She motioned toward the aviary. “We have a bigger one outside, behind the mission, but with all that smoke from the fires we thought we'd better keep them in today."
The chatter was building again and I had to speak louder to make myself heard. “How many birds do you have?"
"Over five hundred. They're mostly tropical birds like cockatoos, macaws, and parrots, but we have roosters and geese, too—and even a flock of racing pigeons someone gave us. Our entire operation is supported by donations."
"There can't be many of your birds larger than this cockatoo,” I said.
Cromwell g
rinned. “We have a macaw over three feet long. I'll show him to you later."
The smaller rooms in the mission were given over to rows of large cages with pairs of birds in each. “Parrots are usually monogamous,” Rosie explained. “We try to find new companions for ones who've lost a mate."
The chattering was getting too much for Ives. “Can't you do something about all this noise?"
Rosie simply stared at her. “If you cut their vocal cords, that would be inhumane."
"Sorry, I didn't quite mean that,” Ives said, retreating a bit.
Cromwell interrupted them. “You've come a long way. At least stay for dinner with us and meet the others."
Our plane back wasn't till morning and the hotel room near the airport would be waiting for us whenever we arrived. There was no reason to decline. They ate early, at five-thirty, with another woman named Elsie preparing the meal of light Mexican food. “We take turns,” she explained to us. “Charlie wouldn't have invited you if it was his night to cook."
"Oh, come on, Elsie! I was busy with the pigeons all afternoon."
I counted seven chairs at the table, so I wasn't surprised when two other men joined us. The older one, Miles Beach, turned out to be married to Elsie, our cook of the day. The other one, younger and handsomer, was Keith Naco. He was Mexican-American, apparently employed as a handyman who also helped with the birds. He was the one who brought us bad news. “The fire's crossed the road,” he told Ives and me. “We're in no danger here, but you may not be able to leave until morning."
Ives all but groaned at the news. “Do the birds chatter like that all night?"
Cromwell chuckled. “No, Miss Ives. When we cover their cages they go to sleep like everyone else."
"I hope they don't make a lot of noise when they're mating."
"We don't encourage that. We certainly don't need more birds here. In fact, if one of them lays an egg, we take it and replace it with a ceramic egg."
"That's mean,” Ives said and dug into her Mexican dinner.
"We have an extra bed,” Rosie Spain told us later, “if you don't mind sleeping together."
"We'll manage,” Ives replied.
The extra bed was narrow and a bit hard, but as Ives said, we managed.
* * * *
I was awakened early by the cackling of a rooster and the strong odor of smoke. Hurrying to the window, I could see the fire still burning below us on the hill. “Come back to bed,” Ives mumbled.
"That fire seems closer."
"Come back to bed."
"I'd better get dressed and see what's up."
"You just want to get another look at Rosie's legs in those shorts."
I shook my head. “They're too muscular for me. You've got nothing to worry about."
It was just eight o'clock when I made my way downstairs to the mission refectory and found Elsie Beach trying to get through on the telephone. “The wires must be down,” she said. “I can't get a dial tone."
"Don't worry. Ives and I both have cell phones with us."
"We've got a couple here, too. I just wanted to alert the firefighters that it's getting a bit close."
"I'd better take a look."
"Those steps lead to the bell tower, the best view around. Charles is up there now with his pigeons. They're his responsibility."
I climbed the stone steps, worn down by countless Spanish monks before me. But the mission bells were long gone. Cromwell was just setting free a flight of pigeons when I reached the top. “Are you racing them?” I asked.
"Yeah, just for fun, to keep them in condition. They're homing pigeons, trained to fly back and forth between their bases. I fly these to Phoenix every day if the weather's good. The other staffers don't pay much attention to them."
"And they always come back?"
"Always. Some have been recorded as flying over fifteen hundred miles, but I limit mine to the two hundred fifty miles or so to Phoenix and back."
"How fast do they fly?"
"Around thirty miles an hour or a bit more."
I glanced down the other way at the brush fire. The smoke had shifted direction and was blowing away from us. “Looks like it's dying down,” I observed.
"Yeah. Elsie was in a panic, but we're safe enough here. There's just lots of sand around the mission and that's not going to burn."
"You get a great view from up here."
"Damn right! If it wasn't for that smoke you could see almost all the way to Mexico. It's only about sixty-five miles away."
We went back downstairs to find Elsie and Rosie Spain. Charles asked where Elsie's husband Miles was.
"Still sleeping, I guess,” she answered indifferently. “Have you seen him, Rosie?"
I sensed a certain tension between the women at her words, and it wasn't dispelled by Rosie's answer. “I imagine he slept better than you did."
A couple of parrots in the next room suddenly started chattering and that was enough to set off the whole place again. Ives came down to breakfast with her hair still mussed from sleep and looking unhappy. “There's a big ugly pig or something outside the window."
Somehow her words served to break the building tension between the women. Rosie Spain laughed. “That's a javelina, a wild boar. They're quite common around here."
Elsie Beach agreed. “Our birds don't seem to mind them. Coyotes and bobcats are more of a problem, but we have a couple of dogs to keep them away."
Ives looked at her watch. “We'll miss our plane!"
"I'll call them and get us changed to a later flight,” I said. “It looks like the fire is dying down."
Keith Naco came in with a big green-winged bird that I recognized as a macaw. “This one's got an injured wing but I think he'll be okay. You women can patch him up. Is breakfast ready?"
It was Elsie who answered. “Today's Rosie's turn. Ask her."
Rosie was at the stove now, in her khaki shorts, breaking eggs into a frying pan. “It'll be ready soon. Where is Miles?"
"Don't you know?” Elsie countered. “We've been sleeping in separate rooms, in case you hadn't noticed."
Rosie flipped over the eggs. “I wasn't with him last night.” She turned to Naco. “Go see if Miles is still asleep."
Ives just shook her head. “How could anyone sleep with all this bird chatter?"
"We get used to it."
Keith Naco was back before she finished the eggs. “Something's happened to Miles,” he told us, a bit short of breath. “You'd better come."
We crowded after him into the back bedroom, a large room overlooking the sandy hillside. Miles Beach seemed especially small in the large double bed, and to me it looked like the smallness of death. I'd seen it before. I started to turn him over and saw the blood, and knew that he'd been murdered.
Cromwell used a cell phone to call the state police, but was told there were trees down over the road and it might be evening before they could reach us. Ives and I were all too aware that we were trapped in this place with four other people, one of them a killer. “He or she will kill us all by that time, Stanton,” she told me later when we were alone. “How did we get into this mess, anyway?"
"We delivered a bird, remember?"
"As soon as the police get that road open we're leaving."
"They might have other ideas about that,” I reminded her. “We're suspects along with the rest of them."
The police had told us to touch nothing at the crime scene, but that was easier said than done. The old mission church had no air conditioning and with the temperature heading toward a hundred degrees, we could already sense an unpleasant odor of decay in the air. It was Keith Naco who came up with a temporary solution. In their storeroom they had a large roll of heavy plastic sheeting for covering the outdoor aviaries in the event of windstorms or rare winter frosts. He suggested we wrap the entire bed and its grisly occupant in plastic sheeting, thereby preserving the crime scene while cutting down on the odor. It seemed as good an idea as any, and I helped him with it wh
ile Ives watched.
"I'll wrap the head,” I volunteered while Naco worked at the bottom of the bed.
"Do you think he was shot?"
"No one heard anything, and it looks more like a stab wound, but that's for the medical examiner to decide.” I'd lifted the head as I spoke and Beach's mouth came open. There was something metallic in it. I cupped my hand to remove it without Naco noticing my action. Then we pulled the sheeting taut and taped it to the legs of the bed. “That'll help some,” I said.
"What's the story with the two women?” Ives wanted to know when we'd finished. “They're almost at each other's throats."
Keith Naco shrugged as if it was no big deal. “One man, two women. I guess the problem's solved now that he's dead."
"You think one of them killed him?"
"Maybe, unless it was Cromwell—or one of you two.” He smiled when he said it, so I let it pass.
He went off to check on the birds and I walked out to the front of the mission with Ives. The fire in this region was nearly out and we could see men working to clear away some thorny mesquite trees and burst cactuses that still blocked the dirt road. “We'll be out of here in an hour,” Ives predicted.
"The police will be here in an hour,” I corrected. “That doesn't mean we can get in our car and sail off to the airport. They'll have a lot of questions to ask."
"What were you doing with his body? It looked like you took something out of his mouth."
I reached into my pocket and took out the small tube I'd found. “It's very light, probably aluminum. I can't imagine what he was using it for."
"Snorting cocaine,” Ives suggested, “instead of rolling up a fifty-dollar bill."
"Maybe."
"You should have left it where it was."
"He may have been hiding it from his killer. At least it's safer with us."
It was just after noon when we went back to the kitchen to find Rosie Spain fixing sandwiches for everyone. “I figured we should fortify ourselves before the police get here,” she explained.
EQMM, February 2007 Page 12
