Bird, Bath, and Beyond

by E. J. Copperman

  As strenuously as I argued that I was, after all, the parrot’s agent and should be allowed into the crime scene (and yes, it sounded stupid even to me), the officer was not moved. “If there’s a reason to get in touch with you, I’m sure the detectives will call,” he said.

  As it happened, that was when the front door opened and out walked Patty, dressed in sweats and with her hair uncombed. She was alive, though, and that was certainly something.

  The thing was, she was also wearing handcuffs behind her back.

  Holding her left arm, the one closest to where I was standing, was Bostwick, and Baker, who astonishingly was not doing the talking as they walked, had the right. They were maneuvering Patty down the stairs to make sure she didn’t fall, and Bostwick seemed to be keeping up a running commentary in her ear as they moved.

  I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t a logical explanation for Patty’s being arrested and there wasn’t time to think about it right now. They were just about to make it to the sidewalk level when she looked over and saw me. Her face became animated—until now she’d looked like she was in a daze—and she called over to me.

  “Kay!” she yelled. Bostwick’s face indicated amazement that she wasn’t paying undivided attention to what he was saying and he looked over toward me to see what might have diverted her. “They’re arresting me! If I don’t get out in time, take Barney for the night, okay?”

  I might have opened my mouth once or twice. That just didn’t make sense. “Uh … sure,” I said. Patty leaned to my side, indicating she hadn’t heard what I’d said. “Okay!” I shouted. “What are you being arrested for?”

  “Shooting Dray Mattone!”

  They hustled her into the car.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “They arrested Patty for Dray Mattone’s murder?” Consuelo looked as puzzled as I’d ever seen her, and I’ve walked into the office with a boa constrictor on occasion. Okay, once. But she was usually unflappable, is what I’m saying. “How does that make sense? She was sick in bed when he got shot.”

  “Oddly, the police are not in the habit of explaining their arrest protocols with me,” I told her, placing Barney’s cage on the floor next to my desk. Maisie, the macaw who lives in the Powell and Associates office full-time, looked down from her suspended cage at the interloper and honked. Maisie does not work and play well with others. “I don’t know what kind of evidence they have against Patty.”

  I know what you’re thinking: My client’s owner and a friend had been taken into custody and said it was for the murder of a man I’d met the other day who just happened to be a famous television actor. My parents were breaking up the act they’d had together for close to forty years. I had custody of a client whose species is not in my area of expertise (he’s not a dog and I’m pretty good with cats, but beyond that I’m basically flying by the seat of my pants) for what now appeared to be an indefinite period of time. The set of Dead City was in complete chaos: Nobody even knew if there was going to be another episode shot or if the current one would ever be aired. I had responsibilities and obligations and I had some information for the police that they might or might not already know.

  So you want to know why I went to my office and not anywhere else. A fair question.

  The fact was, I really couldn’t help Patty in her current situation. I wasn’t her lawyer, and I’m not a criminal attorney at all, so looking into her arrest on her behalf was not an option. The information I’d gotten from Mandy (which she’d said she’d told Detective Baker) and Harve (which he definitely hadn’t) wasn’t going to help or hurt Patty as far as I knew, and with a suspect in custody, Bostwick surely wasn’t going to take my phone call, let alone see me in person. And the news vans had already started converging around Patty’s house before I’d managed to slip away.

  There wasn’t anything I could do about my parents’ decision. Besides, I would definitely see them tonight whenever I managed to get home. The work to be done there was really more in my own head than in the actual world. They’d made their choice and I just had to figure out how to cope with it.

  I had other clients who had been neglected the past three days, and that was not acceptable. Consuelo had not laid eyes on me for that same period of time, and although she is a remarkable office manager, she can’t do everything all by herself. And frankly being at the office was a source of comfort for me. Right now comfort was not the worst thing I could experience.

  “But what about Barney?” Consuelo wanted to know. “He’s stuck without his mom, and we don’t know how long that’s going to be.” Consuelo refers to the clients’ owners as if they are the clients’ parents, which is not only a little twee for my taste but also zoologically impossible.

  “I guess I’ll have to take him on,” I told her. “It’s not the best solution, but it’s the only one I can think of right now.”

  Consuelo shook her head. “You don’t know anything about birds,” she said. “I know about birds. I’ll take Barney.”

  I considered the crush of publicity that would unquestionably result from the arrest, and the horde of news vans that would once again appear outside my house now that the crazy parrot’s owner had been taken in for the murder. “I can’t let you deal with that,” I told Consuelo. “It’s more than you signed up for.”

  “It’s exactly what I signed up for,” she answered. “I knew what was going on with this agency when I interviewed for the job. And besides, nobody is going to be looking for Barney at my apartment.” It was a good point. If we could get the parrot out of the office unnoticed—which so far had not been a real problem, as when given a choice, reporters appeared to want to ambush you at your home rather than your place of business—there would be no reason anyone would make the connection and stake out Consuelo’s place. Not to mention her son, Diego, who prefers to be called Dee, would probably be able to convince anyone who came by that this was not in fact the bird they were looking for. Dee has Jedi mind powers, I’m pretty sure. He’s that smart.

  I resolved to find a cat client for Consuelo ASAP.

  I texted Mom and Dad to expect a bunch of reporters despite the fact that Barney would not be joining us for dinner. Mom got back to me moments later saying they were going out for dinner and I’d have the place to myself.

  Great. Me alone with my thoughts after the way this day had gone.

  Consuelo insisted on introducing Barney to Maisie, and as usual with one of her ideas, it went incredibly well. The two birds shared Maisie’s much larger cage for a while and seemed absolutely tickled with each other. Barney even gave up chewing on his piece of wood for ten minutes, a new record in my presence.

  I thanked Consuelo, got the rundown on four more clients I’d be dealing with tomorrow, and texted Madolyn Fenwick to confirm that Barney would not be needed the next day. She answered that there would be no need for the bird tomorrow or the next day and thanked me for “being so understanding.” She did not comment on the arrest of Patty, and I wondered if the company had been alerted.

  That freed up a lot of time for me. I thanked Consuelo sixty or seventy more times, wrote a couple of emails that I’d been putting off because I’d been Barney-sitting, and walked down the three flights of stairs from my office to the street feeling oddly free, considering a man I’d met had been murdered and a client’s owner was currently under arrest for the crime. Right now I could just be myself for a few hours until my parents got home; that seemed the near equivalent of a two-week vacation in Monaco.

  Note the word near.

  I had already unlocked the car and was settling into the driver’s seat when my cell phone rang. I swear I considered not even looking and letting the call go to my voice mail but thought it might be a client’s owner in need of service. I’m a one-person business except that Consuelo does half the work; if they can’t get me when they need me, they will surely move on to someone else.

  So I looked down. Dammit. The caller ID indicated I was being called by the New York
Police Department, an organization rarely interested in bringing you a glass of wine or awarding you millions of dollars just for being a nice person. Still, you can’t just ignore a call from the NYPD, and given the current circumstances, it was extremely unlikely the call was a mistake.

  Sure enough, I heard Bostwick’s voice on the other end of the line. “We have arrested Patricia Basilico in connection with the murder of Dray Mattone,” he said, no doubt being sure to word his information properly. “She has requested the services of an attorney during questioning and said you are her attorney of record.”

  That made even less sense than anything else that had happened in the past seventy-two hours, and I told Bostwick exactly that. “I’m not a criminal attorney, Joe,” I said, remembering he insisted on being informal. “Patty must be mistaken or so shook up that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “I’m not in any position to determine if the suspect is capable or incapable of determining right from wrong,” Bostwick told me. I wondered if a captain or somebody of higher authority was watching over his shoulder. He sounded like he was reading off an officially distributed NYPD guideline. “She requested you, you are in fact a practicing attorney licensed in the state of New York, and she is entitled to your services if you’re willing to provide them.”

  I started feeling the environment close in around me as if I had turned on the engine and siphoned the exhaust into the cabin. But trust me, I hadn’t done either of those things. “Let me talk to Patty,” I said.

  “She has already used her phone calls, but I’ll allow it,” Bostwick said. Which I thought was damn nice of him, given that he pretty much had to do that no matter what. The police are not entitled to stop a suspect from communicating with her attorney, and that was, at least for this one minute, what I appeared to be.

  There was the usual jostling of the phone receiver—it appeared the NYPD was still operating on landlines—until I heard Patty’s tentative “Kay?”

  “Patty, I’m not a criminal attorney,” I said. “They have to let you get in touch with one. I can look up a couple while we’re talking if you want…” I started to search on my phone while the speaker feature assured me I was still on the line with Patty. I never trust the smartphone to do anything it’s supposed to do.

  “I want you, Kay. You understand about me and Barney and you know that I was nowhere near Dray’s trailer when—”

  I cut her off. “Don’t say anything about Dray,” I said. “They can use anything against you, even stuff they overhear when you’re on the phone to me. I’ll recommend a criminal attorney; I’ll even call one or two for you, Patty. But you have to know that I’m not the person you want to be defending you on a murder charge.”

  “They haven’t charged me yet,” Patty said. Her voice was a little foggy as if she were on medication or just dazed from the events of the day. “But I trust you. I want you to be here. Please? Kay, I don’t know where else to turn.” And then she started to cry and that was just dirty pool.

  “Patty. Listen to me. I’ll do a bad job. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m an agent for parrots and dogs and cats, not someone who can stand up in court and prove you didn’t shoot somebody. Just let me find you someone who can do the right stuff. Are you going to have trouble paying? Is that the problem?”

  She just continued to sob. “Please, Kay. Please. I’ve got no one else. Please.”

  I was on my way back to Queens in two minutes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It took me six minutes to locate my New York State Bar Association membership card in my wallet and my license in a separate credential folder I keep buried so far down in my purse it was under a lipstick I hadn’t worn since my last actual date, which had been eleven months earlier. Lesson learned: I need to clean out my purse more often.

  The lesson about dating more often I chose to ignore.

  I needed the ID to get into the holding cell and the interrogation room where my “client,” Patty Basilico, was sitting still in her sweats, hands not cuffed to the desk, the hideous fluorescent lighting making her seem like a murderer even to me. Anybody would look like a killer under those things.

  “What evidence do they have against you?” I asked her after I had sat down, once again mentioned how I was the worst person on the planet to defend her in a criminal matter, and been rebuffed simply by her horrified expression.

  “I don’t know,” she moaned. Patty is usually very even-tempered, but this was an ordeal on top of an ordeal and her voice was starting to show it. “As soon as I said I wanted a lawyer they stopped questioning me and started getting on the phone to you.”

  “This is crazy,” I told her. “You weren’t physically capable of killing Dray. Did you have any reason to want him dead?”

  “No! I barely knew the guy.” Patty shook her head too vehemently. I could see now that my impression of her from the phone must have been correct: She seemed like she was on some medication and was reacting a little more slowly than I was accustomed to seeing. “I worked with him for a few days to teach him how to deal with Barney like they were old friends. He’d been working with the previous Babs, so he knew something about parrots, but each one has a personality and Dray wanted to know what Barney’s quirks were so they could show a rapport on camera.” Actors, ladies and gentlemen, are nuts.

  “Where did you work with him?” I was hoping it wasn’t Dray’s trailer because then it would be less likely Patty was familiar with the surroundings and that would at least be a point to bring up.

  “Dray’s trailer.” There’s a reason I’m not a criminal defense attorney. There are in fact thousands of reasons I’m not a criminal defense attorney.

  “And what did you think of him?” I asked.

  Patty shrugged. “He was a nice enough guy. You know actors—it’s all about them. But you should expect that in this business. If you don’t have a gigantic ego you won’t make it past community theater, and maybe not even that far.”

  “Anything unusual you noticed? Something that might have indicated he was in some sort of trouble or someone was mad at him?” Patty’s pretty smart and perceptive; she might have seen something that I could tell Bostwick to get him off the idea she had shot Dray.

  She thought for a long moment. And then shrugged again. “Nothing special. People in and out of the trailer all the time needing something from him. Makeup, hair, agents, accountants.”

  Accountants. “Did they seem to think he had some financial trouble?” I asked Patty.

  “Nothing I heard about, but they were always huddling in another corner of the trailer away from where I was sitting, so I didn’t really get much of the conversation.” Patty was trying to be coherent through what must have been the haze of illness (fading) and medication (I had no idea). “I was mostly dealing with Barney anyway.”

  I figured it was best to stay with her area of expertise. “How did the training with Barney and Dray go?”

  “Well, I thought. Barney seemed to like him and Dray was attentive to Barney. You saw how he was on the set, right?”

  Dray had been professional about working with the bird, I’d thought, but hardly like they were pals. “I thought they got along well enough to work together,” I said.

  “That’s just about right. After I think three days of training on and off when Dray wasn’t filming, they knew each other and Dray could cue Barney pretty well, which is really all you want. I didn’t want him to think he was responsible for Barney, especially since I thought I’d be on set every day, not you. Sorry about that.”

  I shook my head and held up a hand. “Don’t worry about it. You needed help and that’s my job. But here’s the thing: I’m still not a criminal attorney and I want you to have one.”

  Patty looked firm in her conviction. Probably a bad word to use. “I want you,” she said. “I can’t explain the whole thing about a parrot to a new attorney. Besides, you’ve already given me advice about not saying anything in front of the
police and all. I think you’re cut out for this.”

  But I wasn’t going to let an idle (and probably false) compliment condemn Patty to a long jail sentence. “I’ll tell you what I’ll agree to do,” I said. “I’ll be second chair on your case, if they charge you with the murder. But I’m going to contact a real criminal defense attorney and you’re going to work with him just as you would if it were me. That way I’ll know that my inexperience isn’t going to be the thing that sends you to prison. And I won’t agree to any other arrangement because that’s how strongly I feel about it. Is that okay with you?”

  Patty drew in her lips like she wanted to object, but she saw the look in my eyes. “Okay, deal,” she said. “So far they haven’t charged me with anything as far as I know, so maybe it won’t come to that. But I want you at that table if we get to court, yes?”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t happy about this, but I was considerably less anxious knowing I probably wasn’t going to have to do much of anything about defending Patty if she needed defending.

  I told her I’d be in touch as soon as possible with the name of a lawyer and that she should get in touch with me if anything changed with her status. I left the interrogation room and went immediately to look for Joe Bostwick because I still couldn’t believe Patty had been arrested at all and figured he could best explain.

  The officer who had brought me into the room showed me to Bostwick’s desk where the sergeant was sitting and talking on the phone. I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but he looked agitated and hung up quickly after he saw I was there. He did not offer me a chair despite there being two in front of his desk. I stood.

  “Since when are you a defense lawyer?” he asked.

  “I’m not,” I told him. “And I just spent a decent amount of time telling Patty that. Are you charging her?”