Bird, Bath, and Beyond

by E. J. Copperman

  My first thought when I got into my car, Barney’s cage safely strapped into the back seat, was to call Patty, and this time she actually answered the phone. The Bluetooth device hanging from my sun visor made her sound like someone whose upper respiratory system was waging war on her vocal cords. Which it was.

  “How’d the day go?” she croaked.

  I didn’t want to add to her discomfort, but she’d no doubt be seeing news reports online and on television any minute now. Dray’s murder had brought out the reporters in packs. News vans were everywhere when I left the sound stage, and intrepid journalists (we’ll call them that rather than use the more colorful language I’m trying to avoid) had surrounded Barney and me as we left, shouting questions about our “relationship” to Dray, which had consisted of one conversation (me) and the repetition of a catchphrase on cue (Barney).

  It was, in fact, surprising that Patty hadn’t heard about Dray’s murder yet, but her flu might have been keeping her away from the normal news sources. I knew she was speaking on a landline, not a cell phone, because the reception was much clearer, and besides, I had dialed her home number.

  So when I told her what had happened, the stunned silence that followed was not a surprise. I wasn’t sure if Patty had known Dray any better than I had—Barney had been working on Dead City for only a little over a week and had spent just one day on the set before I’d been drafted into service—but the murder of even a casual acquaintance is enough to stop a person in her tracks.

  “Who killed him?” she asked finally. “Who do the cops suspect?”

  “I have no idea,” I told her honestly. “They tend to keep me out of their more secure conversations.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Again, no clue. I didn’t get to know anybody there, so I have no idea what their interactions are like. Dray seemed like a nice enough guy for a big-deal actor. I don’t know why somebody would want to shoot him.”

  “What about Barney?” Patty asked. “Does he seem shook up?”

  I looked in my rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of the parrot jumping up onto his perch, a piece of soft wood in his beak, shredding it as he would on any normal occasion. “It doesn’t seem to have bothered him much,” I reported. “But I had to stay late after interrogation because he’s picked up a new phrase that he dropped at exactly the wrong time.”

  Patty’s rasp sounded a little more interested. “What phrase?” she asked.

  “Put down the gun!” Barney volunteered. He was being especially helpful today.

  There was a moment of silence. I felt it was in honor of Dray Mattone.

  “Where’d he get that one?” Patty said.

  “Frankly, I thought you’d taught it to him. It’s not in the script for Dead City; I checked.”

  “Nope, not me,” Patty answered. “Maybe someone on the set?”

  I was not convinced. “Maybe, but you know how long it takes to teach a bird new vocabulary. He wasn’t alone long enough.”

  There was a pause. “Barney was alone?” Patty asked. “Where were you?”

  Oops.

  “He had to rest for a while, Patty. I went out and made a few phone calls and came back. Barney’s fine, believe me.” All of which was true.

  “When did Dray get killed?” she said.

  Time to own up, Kay. “When I was out. But believe me, he’s not the least bit—”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Patty said. “If you’d been there watching him, something might have happened to you.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “You’re the best, Patty. Other owners would not be that concerned with the agent’s welfare.”

  “Well, you must be shocked after Dray got shot. Now that guy could get me out of bed. Or into it!”

  Okay, that was weird. Best not to go too far into it with Patty, who was sick and after all making strange comments about a guy she hadn’t known at all either. It’s funny how we feel like we are familiar with the people who show up on our TV screens.

  “Did you see anybody who was acting like they were mad at him?” Patty asked.

  “Mad? I barely saw anybody except Heather talk to him. It was like the crew was afraid to get into his sight line. When he wasn’t acting.” If you’re a crew member or anyone except another actor in the same scene, you don’t want to stand right in an actor’s view when he’s working; it distracts some and mightily enrages others. When I was onstage, I so completely didn’t care that I wonder if I was ever really an actress at all. I was a performer, sure, but an actress? Probably not.

  “Well, there sure was someone there who didn’t like the guy,” Patty wheezed. Then she started coughing again. I told her I didn’t want to tax her voice, and Barney made a comment about moving the key light to the left.

  There was a fairly long pause during which Patty’s coughing filled my sun visor and threatened to shatter my windshield. “I can hear you’re feeling a ton better,” I said when she finally managed to get control of her lungs back.

  “Please,” she croaked. “Maybe I’m not the best. I have to ask you something.”

  I knew what it was going to be and I felt the cage close around me. “What’s up?” I asked in the sunniest tone I could manage.

  “Can you take Barney home tonight? I’m not sure I could get out of bed enough times to take care of him. I promise it’ll just be the one night, okay?”

  I had already made the course adjustment and was heading for the Triborough Bridge (officially named the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, but everybody in the tri-state area knows better). “I’ll take him for tonight, Patty. You just get better, all right?”

  “I’m already better. You should have heard me yesterday.” She blew her nose. I made a mental note never to use the phone in Patty’s house.

  “I did hear you yesterday. It’s when you asked me to take Barney to the set today.”

  “See? My mind is going.”

  “I’ll take Barney, Patty. Feel better.” We said our goodbyes and I immediately called Consuelo to tell her I was taking Barney back to my house and not visiting the office again today.

  “I took care of the cat,” she reported. “I think she’s going to be a star.”

  Consuelo would like to be an agent instead of (or perhaps in addition to—the woman’s energy knows no bounds) an office manager, and I’m all for it. So she was angling for me to let her handle a client. “I’ve told you a hundred times,” I said. “You find a cat client you want to represent, go for it.”

  “I want to represent Celia,” she said.

  That was a problem because Celia the cat was already a client of mine and you don’t just palm someone off to another agent because she wants to make a star. “You know I can’t do that,” I told Consuelo. “Find yourself a cat we don’t already represent.”

  “Celia has a sister,” she noted. “Roberta.”

  Roberta the cat? “Can you get Doris to change her name? Fluffy or something?” It was hard to picture head shots with a cat under which the name Roberta would be printed.

  “So I can approach them?” Consuelo asked.

  I wasn’t crazy about the idea because we’d be splitting up two clients from the same owner, but I did want to help Consuelo start repping some talent and she appeared to have an eye for it. “What’s Roberta like?” I asked.

  “She’s a beautiful black-and-white and she has tons of personality,” my office manager said, already sounding more like a talent agent than I do. “I think she could—”

  “Be a star, right?”

  “Is it all right, Kay?”

  I needed a moment. “I’ll tell you what. You’ve already had contact with the owner and with the cat, whom I’ve never seen. So let me call Doris and ask her what she thinks about the idea. If she doesn’t seem put off that we’re splitting up the two cats, Roberta will be all yours.”

  “Oh, thank you!” If it was anybody except Consuelo I would have been worried about the tone, because it almost sounded like she hadn�
��t heard the qualifiers in that sentence. But Consuelo is among the most practical, down-to-earth people I’ve ever met, which is why I was already dreading the idea of her not organizing my day as much as she was building a cat empire.

  “Don’t do anything until I talk to Doris and you hear from me,” I said.

  “Put down the gun!” Barney shouted.

  “What was that? A gun?” Consuelo had no idea where I was or what I was doing.

  “It’s just Barney. You heard about Dray Mattone, right?”

  Consuelo switched from exultant almost-an-agent to level-headed office manager in a nanosecond. “Yeah. We’ve already gotten four phone calls from TV reporters. I didn’t tell them anything, but I figured you’d want them to go away.”

  “Yeah. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I really don’t want Barney to be the bird who saw Dray Mattone get killed.”

  “They know it’s you, though,” Consuelo warned. “If they can find your office, they can find your house. Are your parents there yet?”

  In the wake of Dray’s shooting I’d completely forgotten that my parents, fresh off a gig on a Greek cruise ship, were flying into Newark International Airport today and were coming back to stay with me until their next booking in an Atlantic City casino three weeks from now. My father doesn’t like layovers, but my mother wants what she calls “quality time” with her daughter, who is rather inescapably me.

  “I forgot, but their flight was getting in at three. If the traffic isn’t horrific, I might beat them back to the house.”

  “I had Peapod leave some groceries for you by the door, nothing perishable and nothing your dogs will be trying to scratch their way out for.” Consuelo was the most efficient woman on the planet.

  “Marry me,” I said.

  “Sorry, you’re not my type. Dray Mattone was closer to my type.”

  I’d barely had time to think about poor Dray. I hadn’t known him well. In fact I hadn’t known him at all, but the one time we spoke he’d seemed like a nice guy. Why would somebody want to kill him? (Now that I think of it, why would someone want to kill anybody?)

  “Yeah, he was very nice-looking,” I said.

  “If it makes you feel better,” Consuelo said, “he was married, but they didn’t have any kids.”

  It didn’t make me feel better.

  When I pulled up to my house in Scarborough, New Jersey, a full hour after having left the studios in Astoria, I felt like I’d spent the day being pummeled by Rocky Balboa in his prime. There was no car in the driveway, but that didn’t mean much. I’d find out who was inhabiting my home once I started hauling Barney and his cage out of my back seat.

  Sure enough, as soon as it was evident that I was carrying something bulkier than my purse and my iPad (which was actually in my purse), the door to the house flew open and I was descended upon by a horde of screaming Visigoths.

  Or so it seemed.

  My father, first out the door and already reaching for the now-covered cage (you cover the cage when transporting the bird for ease and safety), looked tanner and a little heavier than the last time I’d seen him two months earlier. The combination of night work, the Greek islands, sun, and cruise ship food certainly had affected him. He was smiling broadly and looked happier than I’d seen him in some time.

  My mother would have been next to the car, but she was beaten out the door by a wide margin. Eydie, my greyhound mix and queen of the house (according to her), bounded out as if I were a mechanical rabbit that had been put on a rail for her to chase. She was followed by Steve the dachshund and Bruno the ridiculously large and hairy mastiff, who had become great friends and were the strangest-looking double act you ever wanted to see. Steve is long and low to the ground. Bruno, whom I’d adopted after his previous owner had been slated for some governmental make-work, was roughly the size of a Volkswagen, friendly and rumbly where Steve was timid and stealthy.

  All the dogs got to Barney and me before Dad, which made a transfer of the cage—something I didn’t really need to do anyway—more difficult, so I just held on to it and handed my father my purse, which he didn’t want. It was a gesture; he could help me if he liked, but I was still the one holding the parrot. As gestures go, it wasn’t really a major one.

  “Who’s your friend?” he asked as the dogs barked and ran around me while I made my way to the front door, carrying Barney.

  “A new client,” I said. “He’s had a rough day.”

  “Was he the one working on that TV set when the actor was shot?” My mother pretends to be a 1950s housewife and is in fact a savvy businesswoman, a gifted performer, and an Internet hound. She knows the news before it happens. Well, it seems that way.

  We made it into the house as I admitted that yes, Barney and I (Mom hadn’t actually understood that I was on the set) had been around on the day Dray Mattone was shot. Mom retroactively worried about me and Dad looked concerned. I put Barney down on the coffee table in the living room, shaking my right hand just a bit to get the blood circulating again. That cage was not light.

  Barney squawked and fussed. The dogs barked as Eydie circled the coffee table with a wary eye on this strange object. Steve actually hid under the coffee table and Bruno, being Bruno, went into the kitchen and plopped down on his dog bed because he didn’t want to be a bother.

  I gave Mom and Dad the Reader’s Digest version of my day because I wanted to hear about their gig on the cruise ship, but Dad quickly dismissed any discussion about them because he said the situation with Barney was more important.

  “So the bird was there when the actor got shot?” he asked. “That explains the phone calls.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. My cell phone had been buzzing, but when I don’t recognize the number, I ignore the call. Let a prospective client talk to Consuelo at the office. They wouldn’t have my personal number anyway.

  “What phone calls?” I asked.

  “Seven calls so far,” Mom told me. “CNN, Fox News, the major networks, and News 12 New Jersey. They all want to know if you can tell them about Dray Mattone’s murder.”

  “I can’t because I wasn’t there,” I said.

  “Yeah, but the bird was there,” Dad noted. “They’ll think he can talk.”

  “He can talk,” I noted. “He just can’t have a conversation. They’ll think he can say who killed Dray, and he can’t.”

  My mother looked out the front window. “I’m surprised they’re not here already.”

  “Didn’t you tell them I wasn’t here and the bird couldn’t help?” I said. I looked out the window too, because hey, maybe Mom wasn’t seeing the whole front yard.

  “We told them you weren’t here,” she answered. “We didn’t know anything about the bird. We’ve been on a ship for two months.” The way she said that last sentence led me to believe she hadn’t absolutely loved the experience.

  (And by the way, there were no paparazzi in my front yard looking for a yellow Amazon parrot.)

  “What was the matter with the ship?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Dad jumped in. “They treated us very well. We were out in the sun, we had great food, and the guests were very nice.”

  I looked at Mom. “But?”

  Uncharacteristically she looked away. It’s not like Mom to avoid a subject, but she hates disagreeing with my father, especially when it’s about their careers. “I just get tired,” she said. And she did not elaborate, but I saw Dad’s face darken just a little bit. He looked away too.

  This wasn’t good.

  There was no point in my pursuing it right now. They’d deny there was any problem and change the subject and I would find out exactly nothing. But I would revisit this topic, and soon.

  It didn’t matter anyway because my phone rang and the caller was identified as NYPD. That’s never comforting.

  Turned out the caller was Bostwick, who was still on the Astoria lot questioning crew members. “Has the parrot said anything else?” he asked.

>   “Yeah, he mentioned something about bewaring the ides of March. Seriously, Sergeant, you need to get past this idea that Barney is going to tell you anything useful. He’s a bird. He just repeats back phrases that are drummed into his head over and over again. He’s not a brilliant conversationalist.” While I spoke, I removed the cover from Barney’s cage while calculating exactly what the risk of letting him out to roam around for a while might be. I decided against it for the time being. I was putting off a lot of things just at this moment.

  “A lot of people want you dead, Dray,” Barney said.

  “What was that?” Bostwick asked.

  Mom and Dad looked at each other in surprise. Whatever friction there had been in the room a minute ago was gone now.

  “That was just Barney,” I said breezily to the detective. “He said, ‘People want bread, okay.’ It was an exercise that he learned when he was just beginning training.” It didn’t make sense that Barney was coming up with these lines he could have heard only once. I needed time to think.

  My father walked over to me and said, “Always tell the truth to the police, Kay.” My father should have worked in civics films for third-graders. He could have written the dialogue himself.

  “Who’s that?” Bostwick demanded.

  “That’s my father,” I answered. No sense elaborating if I didn’t have to.

  “What did he say about telling me the truth?”

  Okay, so I had to. “He was saying I hadn’t given you the correct phrase Barney just said. He actually said, ‘A lot of people want you dead, Dray.’”

  “And you didn’t think that was something I should know?” Bostwick asked.