“It’ll just be an hour, hour and a half at most,” Heather said. “I’ll tell you what. You go ahead and do what you have to do. I’ll take Barney into Dray’s trailer until the moment he’s needed and I’ll do my best to get him out and ready to go home by the time you get back. How’s that?”
I didn’t want to leave a client alone, but Dray’s trailer? Had to be luxurious. “Dray won’t mind?” I asked.
“No. He’s bonded with Barney, just told me he likes the bird.”
“He’ll need some stimulation,” I said.
Heather looked at me strangely. “Stimulation? Dray?”
“No, Barney. He can’t just sit. He needs his toys and he needs his pellets to eat. It’d be great if we could let him out to fly a bit, but I wouldn’t recommend that in Dray’s trailer.”
She chuckled. “No, I don’t think I can let Barney fly. But we’ll see to it he has all his toys. Did you bring more than are in the cage?”
I gave her what I had for Barney and Heather agreed to have one of the production assistants—who probably had been longing to get into Dray’s trailer under any pretense—stay with Barney for a while when I was gone. I was a little reluctant, but hadn’t been planning to do much more than put the cage in my car and drive to Sunnyside, not far from where Dead City was filming in Astoria. Barney wouldn’t have gotten much stimulation anyway.
It was a way of rationalizing the move, I know, but I’d budgeted the time and Heather was asking for more. This way Barney was in more of the show and I got to do my other work.
I took him into Dray’s trailer, which was indeed quite lovely and spacious, and told the bird I’d be back soon, which I would. Then I called Patty, got her voice mail—she was probably asleep—and left a message. I put the cover over Barney’s cage in the hope he would chill out, but could hear him knocking around and squawking, so I took it off again.
“I’ll be right back, Barney,” I told him. “Play with the wood.” There was a small dowel in his cage he liked to pick up and move around. I raised it to show him and he put it in his beak. “That’s a boy.”
“Can’t kill a zombie!” Barney responded.
I couldn’t have agreed more. I left the trailer, walked to my car, and called Consuelo, my assistant back at the office in East Harlem.
“I’m glad you called,” she said. “There’s a movie shooting in the same studio you’re at now and the production company called. They need a dog, and I thought Bruno…”
I’d adopted an enormous Tibetan mastiff named Bruno because … it’s a long story. “Bruno has quit the business,” I said. “He’s retired.”
“Well, they want a big shaggy dog and we represent a few,” Consuelo reminded me. “Do you have pictures on your phone?”
“Always.”
She gave me the address of the production company, Giant Productions, on the lot. I drove (these places are huge) to the trailer that was serving as its headquarters while preproduction was going on.
It was a five-minute meeting. Unfortunately, it took place after forty minutes of waiting for the casting director, a harried-looking woman aptly named Harriet, to appear. I showed her some photos of my clients and she asked me to send her two, one of a bearded collie named Herbert and one of an English sheepdog called Bagels. She wanted to give the director a choice.
So by the time I got back to the Dead City set, I had again called Consuelo to arrange for bigger pictures to be sent to Giant Productions and for the Siamese to be beautified. The schnauzer’s audition was pushed to the next day at the producer’s request.
I’d gotten all that done in less than an hour, and still when I arrived back at the set, Dray Mattone had been shot dead in his trailer.
CHAPTER TWO
I’ll say it: My first concern was for Barney.
Hey, that’s my job, and besides, Barney was the one I knew best at the studio. We’d spent the most time together, we’d shared a few laughs (mostly me; Barney doesn’t have a great sense of humor), I’d fed and cleaned up after him, and we’d bonded. Besides, I’d barely interacted with any of the humans in the place, since they all knew I was incapable of advancing their careers.
So when I got to the set again, after having been less than a mile away for less than an hour, and found the place besieged with police cars and ambulances, my first thought was that Barney had somehow gotten out and hurt himself.
Then I wondered why they’d send four police cruisers and a human ambulance for a yellow Amazon parrot, and my heart started beating a little less rapidly. Still, it wasn’t a good sign that all this official activity was going on around the set where my client was working.
A uniformed cop at the door to the sound stage held up a hand as I approached practically at a run. “Nobody goes in,” he said. “Crime scene.”
Crime scene? Did someone steal Barney? “I’m a member of the company,” I told him. “I’m the parrot’s agent.”
Maybe that wasn’t the best tactic to use, but my mother always says that lying only gets you into more trouble and frequently brings up Richard Nixon when making that argument. The cop glared at me, perhaps wondering if he needed to call another ambulance, this one with padded walls. “The parrot’s … what parrot?”
“You watch the show?” I asked. “Dead City?”
He shook his head. “Cop show? I never watch them. They’re too unrealistic.”
This wasn’t going to be easy. “Well, this one has a medical examiner who has a parrot in his … office, and I’m the parrot’s agent.”
The cop, whose name tag indicated he was called Anderson, nodded as one does to a dangerous psychotic one is trying to contain without any loss of life. “You’re the parrot’s agent,” he, well, parroted back to me.
“Don’t you think I’d come up with a better story if I was lying?” I said. “My client is in there and I need to see if he’s all right. Now, are you going to let me in?”
“No, I’m not. Orders are nobody goes in and nobody goes out. You’re not going in and the parrot … the parrot? Isn’t coming out. Okay, lady? So go—”
I never got to find out what he thought I should go do because a man in a relatively ordinary blue suit came through the doorway and looked at him. The guy was a little under six feet tall, I’d say, and was clean-shaven, not in the way actors are clean-shaven but always manage to have one day’s growth of beard. No pocket square. Scuffed black shoes.
A detective in the New York City Police Department if ever I saw one. And I saw one.
“What’s the problem, Officer?” he asked. He pulled a pack of chewing gum out of his pocket and put a stick in his mouth. Cops don’t smoke anymore, I guess.
“This lady wants to go in and you told me not to let anybody do that, Sergeant. So I’m explaining to her that she can’t.”
The detective, who hadn’t even offered the uniformed cop or me a stick of gum, looked me over, not in a sexist way. He was gathering information. “Why do you need to get inside, miss?” he said.
“I was explaining to Officer Anderson that I’m the agent for a … cast member on this show, and I need to see that my client is all right. What’s been going on in there, Sergeant?”
“She’s the parrot’s agent,” said Anderson, who I immediately decided did not deserve a stick of gum.
“The parrot?” the detective asked. “Babs?”
Everyone can be starstruck. Even New York cops. “That’s right,” I told him. “Babs is my client. Can I go in and see that he’s okay?”
“Babs is a he?” The detective seemed either confused or disappointed.
“It’s all showbiz magic,” I told him. “Now, may I?”
The detective extended a hand. “Joe Bostwick,” he said. “And you are?”
“I’m Kay Powell. What happened here, Sergeant Bostwick?”
He waved a hand. “Joe.” He looked at Anderson, whose expression indicated he had become bored with us and wished he could go inside and solve a crime instead of stopping cr
azy ladies from walking in to confer with birds. “It’s okay, Officer,” he said. “I’ll take responsibility for Ms. Powell.”
Bostwick led me into the sound stage. “What happened?” I asked again. “Is everybody all right?”
He looked sad, in a professional way. “I’m afraid not,” he answered. “One of the cast members has been shot.”
I stopped walking. The stage—they’re huge, mostly distinguished by the incredibly high ceilings, from which cinematographers hang lights and directors can suspend cameras when they want to get arty—was always a bustling place, but now it was not being used to film anything. All the crew members I recognized were present, but there were also police officers, EMS personnel, other detectives, and some studio cops walking around talking to the crew.
“Shot?” I echoed. “Who got shot?”
Bostwick, who clearly was a fan of Dead City, shook his head. “I’m afraid it was Dr. Banacek,” he said.
“Dray Mattone? Dray got shot?” I looked around, and sure enough, Dray was not visible when virtually everyone else I’d seen here was still in attendance. “Is he okay?” That’s a stupid question. How many people get shot and they’re okay? The real question was one I didn’t really want to ask, but Bostwick answered it anyway.
“He’s dead,” he told me.
I had a moment during which I honestly didn’t know how to react. I hadn’t really known Dray at all, but we had engaged in conversation that one time. He’d been at least professionally nice to me. For a star actor, he hadn’t been a real beast, and that’s what you get used to, so by comparison Dray had been a saint.
“Oh my” was the best I could do.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bostwick said in the way cops do because that’s what they’ve been told to say. It truly wasn’t my loss at all, but even so, the words came across as sort of flat and studied. Bostwick could have used an acting coach.
Then it occurred to me where Barney had been stashed between scenes. “Where did it happen?” I asked with a little more edge in my voice than I’d intended.
“That’s why I let you in here,” Bostwick said. “I really was supposed to be keeping out anyone who wasn’t physically on the premises to begin with.”
“Sergeant, my client was in Dray Mattone’s trailer. Are you saying that’s where he was murdered?” How do you say something like that and not sound melodramatic?
“I’m afraid so,” Bostwick answered. “And the parrot is the only known witness to the crime.”
Well, that was crazy in so many different ways that I really had no response to draw upon. I just looked up at Bostwick and said nothing. For a while. A fairly long while. He didn’t say much of anything either; I guess he was gauging my reaction, but that was mostly in the area of dumbfoundedness, accent on the dumb.
Finally I got myself together enough to say, “May I see my client?” And I would like it noted that I said “may I” and not “can I,” despite operating under a considerable amount of stress.
He thought it over for a moment, apparently expecting me to say something else, perhaps “It was me! I did it! Arrest me, please!” and not getting what he’d wanted. Then he moved his lips back and forth, no doubt chewing on the piece of gum that I’d not been offered, and said, “I suppose so. Follow me.”
It wasn’t like I didn’t know where Dray Mattone’s trailer was situated on the lot. I’d brought Barney there and seen to it that he was settled, after all. But now I was most concerned to find out if I had to call Patty and tell her my client, whom I’d left alone for less than an hour, was spattered with blood or traumatized beyond repair.
Still, following Bostwick was the fastest way to accomplish my goal. There were cops at every door and in every hallway, none of whom would have let me by without my official escort. We made it to the door to the outside, where the trailers were parked behind the sound stage so that civilians visiting the lot would not—heaven forbid—catch a glimpse of their idols at an unguarded moment, like walking to the set or berating an assistant.
We made it to the trailer with Bostwick flashing his badge seventy or eighty times and got inside after only one more checkpoint. I had tunnel vision for Barney’s cage, but I had to sidestep a seeming army of forensic geniuses and regular cops to get there. I didn’t really pay attention to anyone else until I reached Barney and held my breath getting there.
For all my worrying, my client seemed perfectly unharmed by whatever experience he’d had or seen. He was a little antsy, hopping from the floor of his cage to his perch and back again, but I’d seen him considerably more hysterical, flying around the cage and bumping unthinkingly into its bars. And that was just because his food was a few minutes late. Barney could be a diva too, if something really serious happened.
There was no evidence of any mayhem on the cage itself either, so I guessed whatever happened—and this conjecture was also based on the positioning of the technicians and the videographer in the trailer and the marks made on the floor—had not been directly in front of Barney at all. He’d been in the area, certainly, but was not what you’d call an active participant.
“You okay, buddy?” I asked him. I fished in my pocket for his favorite treat, a pretzel goldfish, and extended it to the parrot, who took it and ate it immediately. “Everything okay in there?”
“Don’t know much about history,” Barney said. Patty had trained him to speak partially using old song recordings. It’s not supposed to work because singing is different from talking, but Barney had been a remarkable pupil.
“I guess you don’t,” I told him. I gave him another pretzel even though I wasn’t supposed to. “I was worried about you.”
“He saw what happened.” Bostwick was behind me now, so I turned to look at him when he spoke and saw the activity in the rest of the room.
It wasn’t pretty. There were stains on the floor that I preferred to avoid with my eyes. There were some on the walls too, but they weren’t quite as vivid or large. Bits of wood had sprayed from where the bullet had hit a windowsill. It was a large trailer, a double-wide befitting a star actor. Even so, it was crowded with people, all of whom worked for some law enforcement agency or other. And each one of them had a vital job that was being done earnestly and with intensity.
It was like being on the set of Dead City. Only with real blood. And, I trusted, no zombies.
“What did happen?” I asked.
“I told you. Somebody came in here and shot Dray Mattone, Dr. Banacek himself. In the head. Twice. Which was probably once too much.”
“Twice too much, if you asked Dray,” I said absently.
“I don’t think he got the opportunity to have an opinion. He was shot in the back of the head and was dead before he hit the floor.” Bostwick wasn’t so much telling me as he was sizing up the room and the evidence being gathered to process it himself. Colored strings were being used to approximate shot trajectories. One uniformed cop—not Anderson by any means—was standing in traced footprints as directed by a plainclothes detective—not Bostwick—and holding his arms in front of him as if shooting a pistol.
“Can I get Barney out of here?” I asked the sergeant. I’m not sure if I was asking for my client or for me, because I sure as heck wanted out of the trailer as fast as possible.
“In a minute,” Bostwick said. Then he leaned over, being careful to make sure none of the other cops could hear what he was saying, and very quietly asked, “Can you get the bird to talk?”
Was that code? “Huh?” I said. It was the best I could do on short notice.
“Can you get him to say something?” Bostwick repeated, still sotto voce but a little more urgently. “He saw what happened. Maybe he can help.”
I had thought Bostwick to be a fairly intelligent, if off-the-rack, detective, but this was a little nuts even in my business. “You do realize he doesn’t converse,” I said. “He repeats phrases he hears.”
“But he heard what was being said before the murder,” Bostwic
k said, still practically hissing but now with an expression that indicated I just wasn’t bright enough to get what he was telling me. “If you can get him to repeat it, we might have a really strong indicator.”
Now, don’t get me wrong: I wanted to help in the investigation if I could. But it was clear that Bostwick had a grand total of no experience with parrots. Mine had been somewhat limited, but I knew better than that.
“You have to train him,” I explained. “Repeat the phrase over and over. Use a clicker to indicate to the bird when he’s said the right thing and when he hasn’t. It can take hours. It can take days. He can’t simply hear something once and immediately integrate it into his vocabulary. Think of it as teaching a one-year-old how to speak.”
Bostwick looked at me, then at Barney, then back at me. “I guess it was a stupid idea,” he said.
“Not really.” I was trying to be cooperative and, let’s face it, kind. It had been a stupid idea. Well, not stupid, exactly. “It was just a question of your not having much experience dealing with parrots. It’s understandable.”
“Sorry,” he said, looking away. He was embarrassed.
And then Barney looked over at me and said, “Put down the gun!”
CHAPTER THREE
I went through another hour and a half of questioning from Bostwick, a second detective named Baker (who never actually said anything), and a forensics expert whose name I didn’t get but who seemed to be a fan of Dead City and just wanted to know backstage gossip, of which I had none. I’d been on the set for exactly one day, and it had turned out to be a doozy.
The bottom line was that I could not induce Barney to say anything more than the lines he’d been taught for the show, the few phrases I knew Patty had given him, and his new personal favorite, which had already gotten us detention after school. He seemed especially enamored of yelling, “Put down the gun!” every minute or so. This had not helped my cause, which was getting home in time to meet my parents for dinner.
After finally convincing the gathered cadre of police masterminds that I could not simply get Barney to name the killer and wrap up their investigation, I was told by Bostwick that he’d be in touch the next day and asked to “see if you can convince him to say more by then.” Explaining—again—that Barney would only repeat things he’d been painstakingly taught to say and not simply a random phrase he’d heard once seemed futile. I told the sergeant I’d talk to him the next day, picked up Barney’s cage, tried again not to notice the signs of violence in the trailer, and left.
Bird, Bath, and Beyond Page 2
