“No, but in this case the parrot’s owner isn’t feeling well and needs the time to sleep, so I’m doing her a favor.” His gaze was unnerving me, and not in the way a guy’s gaze can unnerve you just under normal circumstances. “What’s the interest in my business all of a sudden? Am I a suspect?”
“Mind if I follow you to the parrot’s house?”
What can you say to a request like that from a member of the NYPD? “You suspect Barney?”
“Until I know who did it, I suspect everybody. Do you mind if I come along?”
I didn’t see a way around it, so I agreed. I waited until Bostwick brought his dull-looking car around and followed me off the lot. Every time I looked into my rearview mirror or the side mirror, there was the dull-looking cop in his dull-looking car, right on my tail.
I felt a lot like a suspect.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Patty Basilico was not up to having guests, but here I was in her bedroom, with Barney’s bigger “home” cage on a stand in one corner, and I had brought a New York City police detective with me. Not only was I nervous about getting whatever Patty had, but I also felt rude for having burdened her, in this condition, with an unwanted intruder who had questions about Dray’s murder that he wanted to ask her parrot.
Honest to goodness, Bostwick was busy questioning Barney within three minutes of having essentially barged his way in (okay, I knew where the spare key was kept, but it was the effect that mattered), and he was both wasting his time and trying my patience. Patty, being a very sweet-natured person, was pretending this was a completely normal occurrence, like she had detectives in to interrogate her bird twice a week.
“Barney,” the detective said into the cage, “who had the gun?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Patty rasped for the fourth time. “He doesn’t answer questions.”
I sat down in the easy chair next to the bed, moving Patty’s jacket out of the way as I sat. This had become tiresome.
“Then what does he do?” Bostwick asked. “I’ve heard him talk, and I’ve heard him say things I don’t think he’d spent hours learning.”
Patty coughed a little, so I jumped in to save her throat. “You have to be mistaken on one of those points, Sergeant,” I said. “Barney simply isn’t capable of saying something if nobody has taught it to him and taken a long time doing it.”
Bostwick shot me a look that stopped me in my tracks, if you can make tracks sitting in an easy chair. “I wasn’t asking you,” he said brusquely. “I was asking Ms. Basilico.”
I could have argued that he was being rude, but Patty has an instinct for defusing tense situations. “The sergeant is right, Kay,” she said. “He’s already heard everything you can tell him. I’ve known Barney a lot longer.”
“That’s right,” Bostwick said. I noted that he did not jump on the opportunity to apologize to me. “So tell me, how does the parrot’s being in the room when Dray Mattone was shot help me find the person who killed him?”
“It doesn’t,” she answered. “Barney has a repertoire of phrases that I’ve taught him. No one else has ever had him long enough to teach him a new phrase.” She coughed again and a gray strand of hair fell forward. Patty rushed to push it back, making sure she continued to look all blond. “Even Kay couldn’t have given him new words to say in the time she had him; it just takes longer than that.”
“Ms. Powell had the bird overnight yesterday,” Bostwick noted. “Does the process take more time than that?”
“Under some circumstances it wouldn’t, but in this case I’d say it’s pretty much impossible,” Patty told him. She was propped up in the bed at an angle that made her look as attractive as a patient can, and she was using it on the detective. I wondered whether she had a crush on Bostwick, although his charms were certainly eluding me. “Kay doesn’t have enough experience with Barney to teach him quickly and hasn’t ever tried it before. Not to mention that the bird can’t work for long periods of time. He’ll get tired and cranky and then you’re just working against yourself.”
Bostwick turned his attention back to the cage and its occupant. “Barney,” he said, “the gun. Who had the gun?”
Patty and I exchanged a look. Some men just aren’t ever going to admit that they can’t solve the problem without help. “He’s not going to tell you, Sergeant,” I said.
“He’s talked about the gun a couple of times,” Bostwick said. “I want to see if maybe I can get him to say something else.”
“Can’t kill a zombie!” Barney informed him. Bostwick did not look amused.
“It’s the newest thing he learned,” Patty said. “He’s proud of himself and wants you to know he can still do it.”
The detective turned to face her. “Can you get him to say something about the gun?” he asked.
“The only way to do that would be to say it myself and have him repeat it to me,” Patty told him. “I don’t see how that’s going to help you much.” She coughed lightly, but it didn’t escalate. I was hoping that meant she was getting better and maybe I wouldn’t have to take Barney home with me tonight.
“But you’re not the only person who can get the bird to say his lines,” Bostwick pointed out, finally giving up on the cage and walking closer to where I was sitting but paying attention to Patty, which she appeared to like. “You were sick yesterday and had someone else prompt him when he needed to say the line for TV, right?”
I didn’t know how I felt about being referred to as “someone else,” but kept quiet, which is an underrated skill for agents. Believe me, I use it more often than not and it has served me well.
“That’s right,” Patty said. She played the pleased teacher well, knowing it would make Bostwick easier to deal with if she appealed to his ego. “You understand, Sergeant. Once the teaching has made an imprint on Barney’s memory, meaning he knows the phrase, someone with a knowledge of the bird, someone like Kay, can get him to repeat it once I let her know what’s most likely to work. In this case, because we knew the lines from the scene in advance from reading the script, we could teach him to say his line when he heard the prompt from the other actor. How did Barney do with that, Kay?”
They turned their attention to me, which startled me a bit. “Well, you know I told you yesterday that Barney had been a pro from start to finish. He never flubbed a line or missed a cue. But I don’t think that’s what the sergeant is concerned with, is it, Sergeant?”
Bostwick had been given the chance to act like a cop in charge and he wasn’t about to let that one go by. “No, you’re right. I’m more concerned with the parrot being in the trailer when Dray Mattone was shot, and the fact that after it happened, he started using the phrase ‘Put down the gun.’ Can you explain that?” He had directed the question at Patty.
“Actually, yes I can,” she said. “It’s a phrase I’ve been working with Barney on for a few days. It’s in next week’s script, so I was introducing it into his vocabulary.”
That was odd. When I’d told Patty what Barney had said after the shooting, she had seemed surprised. What was she doing now, covering for the parrot?
I felt it would be wrong to call her on it, so I said nothing. Bostwick nodded since the explanation seemed reasonable. He looked back into the cage and exhaled a bit wistfully.
“I guess you’re not going to tell me much, are you?” he asked Barney.
“Kill Les Mannix!” Barney shouted.
There was a very long moment of stunned silence. I looked at Patty, who was staring at the cage, astonished by what she’d heard.
Bostwick, who had been leaning in toward the cage to better discuss the matter with the resident parrot, stood up straight with his back still to Patty and me. He took another moment.
Then he turned and regarded Patty, who was wheezing a bit in her bed and still gaping at her talking bird.
“Is that in next week’s script, too?” Bostwick asked.
CHAPTER NINE
“The bird said he wanted to k
ill the executive producer of the TV show he’s working on?” Sam Gibson sat on a lawn chair in my backyard watching the dogs do laps around the perimeter for no discernible reason. Dogs like to run.
Sam had entered through the back gate to avoid the two news vans still staking out the front of my house. The rest of the horde, having grown tired of sitting at my curb watching the house not do anything, had taken off for the greener pastures of Manhattan or at least Passaic, where there had been a nice juicy fire that day just to give the TV reporters something to do.
I was going to give the dogs their regular walk tonight, and if the news vans wanted to follow me, they were … okay, welcome might be overstating it, but if that was how they wanted to waste their time, it was theirs to waste. I would be walking my dogs.
But Mom and Dad had gone out to a movie (with Dad saying he wanted to get some tips from Will Ferrell about timing, because my father’s only been in the business since John F. Kennedy was president and Dad was a toddler) and the dogs had gotten restless watching me eat reheated pizza. Sam had closed his store early and dropped by ostensibly to see how I was holding up under the strain. The way I saw it, it wasn’t my strain.
“Well, he didn’t so much say he wanted to kill Les Mannix as he said someone should kill Les Mannix,” I said, swirling the red wine in my glass because I’d seen people do that in movies and it looked classy. “It was either a command or an opinion. It was hard to tell.”
“But there’s no way he could have learned that in such a short time, and you had him all last night.” Sam looked over at me. He wasn’t drinking wine but had a cup of his own iced coffee from which he’d been sipping steadily. It never seemed to deplete the amount of liquid in the cup. Perhaps Sam had a secret supply stashed somewhere. “Where could he have picked that up?”
“I have no idea. I thought Patty was going to cough up a lung when she heard it. She barely spoke for five minutes, she was so stunned.”
“Is that how she got you to take the parrot overnight again?” Sam asked. Barney was lounging in his travel cage in my bedroom tonight. I wasn’t about to let him fly around the house again, so we’d let him do his winging at Patty’s place before I’d packed him up to leave. Tomorrow Patty was getting her parrot back even if she was so sick he had to stay in her hospital room.
“No, we’d agreed to that before Bostwick even suggested coming along when I went to pick Barney up.” I stretched out on the chaise longue while Steve, always the first to tire in the more strenuous games the dogs played, lay down at my feet and drank from the water dish I’d left there. Steve knew he had to get to the water first, and he was no dummy. “But that was weird. All of a sudden the detective wants to take a ride with me to talk to a bird he knows can’t tell him anything.”
“And then the bird tells him something.” Sam rested his coffee cup on his stomach, holding it with both hands. “It doesn’t make sense that he’d start spouting all this new stuff right out of the blue, and it’s always about the murder.”
A microphone started to insinuate itself between two posts in the stockade fence. “That’s right,” I told Sam. “Clearly Barney has begun to hallucinate and anything he says is completely without any merit. I’m only worried someone will take something he spouts seriously.” Off Sam’s confused look, I nodded in the direction of the mic and he looked, nodded, and smiled.
“I didn’t know birds could become delusional,” he answered. “What do you think caused it?”
I made sure my voice was audible to the microphone, which was now clearly visible through the fence. “I think it’s too much exposure to TV reporters,” I said. “It’s obvious Barney has taken up with a group of people who will believe anything they hear and have no powers of intellect so they just parrot back whatever is said to them.”
“Very funny,” came a voice from the other side of the fence. The microphone was withdrawn. “And we’re radio reporters.” Well, that taught me a lesson.
Sam grinned and took another minuscule sip of coffee. “I still don’t get how Barney could get new phrases if you’re not teaching them to him and Patty’s not teaching them to him. Was he alone on the set with anyone who would have had the time?”
“I can’t think of anyone. I was there for only one day, but I was with him the whole time.”
“What about Patty?” Sam asked.
“She’s been sick in bed for two days,” I reminded him. “She couldn’t teach Barney anything except how to cough.”
“Well, it must have been someone from the show,” Sam said, leaning back as much as he could in the lawn chair. Bruno, who misses Steve when he stops playing, came over and nudged Sam’s hand with his head. He got the stroke he was looking for; Bruno is a crowd-pleaser. Maybe I should start putting him up for roles again, but that’s a full-time job and one I don’t especially want. “That’s the only thing that makes any sense,” Sam went on.
“You know what’s nice?” I said.
“That it’s really not our problem who killed Dray Mattone?”
“Exactly. I’m sure Bostwick will be around another time or two because he has this odd idea that Barney holds the key to the murder, but after tomorrow that’ll be Patty’s responsibility. And from the looks she and Bostwick were passing to each other, I don’t think that’ll be too much of a burden for her.”
“Really!” From the glass doors to my kitchen I heard my mother’s voice. I turned, and there she and Dad stood. I had no idea how long they’d been watching us, but it couldn’t have been much because the dogs ran up to my parents as soon as they were aware of new sources of treats and pets.
“What are you doing here?” I asked them. I stood up as Mom and Dad, dodging various canines, walked down the stairs from the deck to the yard. “Did the movie sell out?”
“There was no movie,” Dad said. My parents passed a look between themselves that wasn’t at all encouraging. “I guess we sort of lied to you, Kay. Sorry.”
“But I see the two of you are having a nice evening,” Mom said, gesturing to Sam, who came over and shook hands with my father. Men do that. I’m not sure why; the whole showing-you-don’t-have-a-weapon thing has been outdated for at least a couple of years.
“Yeah, but I want to hear why you told me you were going to the movies when you weren’t going to the movies.” I wasn’t about to let them off the hook. I am not at all a fan of suspense, but luckily Alfred Hitchcock isn’t around to be insulted anymore.
Again, they exchanged a glance that was of the nervous variety. “I think that can wait until later,” Mom said. She was professional enough not to telegraph her thoughts with a sideways look at Sam to indicate it was a family matter.
But he got the message. “I have to get back,” he said. “It’s getting late, and I have to open bright and early.” That was true, except that it was only eight in the evening. Sam was being gracious and clumsy at the same time. It’s not easy, but he can pull it off.
There were the usual protests that it wasn’t necessary, but Sam was outside my compound gates within five minutes. He hadn’t made much of a move out of the just-friends mode we were in now, even when my parents weren’t around, so I assumed that ship had sailed and it was just as well. It would have been so awkward after we’d broken up and I still came in to get coffee in the morning. I like Sam, but I love his dark roast.
“Okay, spill it,” I said once he was gone. “What’s the deal here?”
“Don’t you have to walk the dogs?” Dad asked. “It’s about that time.”
“The dogs have been out here in the backyard with me for an hour and you’re stalling,” I said. “You’re getting me worried. Now tell me what’s going on. Right. Now.” Before there was time, I added, “And don’t pass one of those guilty looks between the two of you. That’s what’s making me most nervous. Talk.”
I looked at my father, who is always the spokesman for the team. He nodded, looking solemn. This was going to be a big one, I could tell.
“We�
�re breaking up the act,” he said.
“I need cake,” I told him.
We went back inside and the dogs of course followed, no doubt worried about the end of the entertainment dynasty that was the Powell family. I had more concrete concerns, like whether my parents were actually going to move in with me permanently. I’d been considering looking for a larger house, but was on the fence about it financially given the mortgage I still had on this one. Did they have any money saved up? I’d never asked my parents about their retirement plans, and now it seemed they were retiring.
I headed directly for the refrigerator and took out a store-bought chocolate cake with white frosting that I hadn’t actually managed to completely eat yet. There was about half of it left. There were three of us. It would be tight, but I thought we could manage.
Nobody said a word as I went into the bedroom (mine) and checked on Barney, who was still a parrot. It seemed you couldn’t count on anything these days, but that had remained a constant.
I stood there a moment and took a nice cleansing breath that I’d learned in a yoga class ten years earlier (and that was all I remembered). Then I went back into the kitchen to talk to my parents and (mostly) eat cake.
Mom had already put out plates and cups and started coffee brewing. I knew it was chocolate cake with white frosting, so I got a glass to fill with milk. I was a rebel.
“Okay,” I said as I sat down, “what’s all this about retiring?”
Dad had taken off his jacket and stopped halfway between the table and the silverware drawer. “Retiring?” he asked. “Who said anything about retiring?”
“You did,” I reminded him. Were there memory issues I wasn’t aware of going on here? “You said you weren’t going to do the act anymore.”
He shook his head. “No, I said we were breaking up the act.”
I felt my eyes narrow to slits. “So you’re going to do two solo spots now?” Had they decided they could make more money charging as two acts?
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