Parrot Blues (23 page)

And time for me to go. “ 'Night, Max,” I said.

“ 'Night, D,” he replied.

“Deborah always put him to bed,” Rick sighed. “That's when he misses her most.”

16

T
HE PARTY WAS
over. It was dark when I left the lab, and the parking lot was not lit. I stood outside the door for a minute to get my bearings. Lights came on in a vehicle in the lot, low beams at first and then highs. The bright lights spotlighted me standing in front of the Psittacine Research Facility doorway. I put my left hand up to shield my eyes. The vehicle backed out of the lot without dimming the beams, without revealing exactly what kind of vehicle it was. With my right hand I reached into the purse that was dangling from my shoulder. The most dangerous place for a woman is between her car (or her place of work or the store) and her home. The fact that this had been Deborah Dumaine's place of work, not mine, didn't lessen the danger factor. It might have escalated it. I found my key ring with the car keys and mini-Punch hanging from it, and I clutched it between my fingers while my eyes made the adjustment from too much light to too little. I walked to the Nissan, entered it without using my weapon and started the engine.

As I passed the parking lot near Central, two vehicles got into line behind me—one pair of headlights on high beams, one pair on low. I pulled onto Central heading east just as I would have if I were going home to La Vista. Both vehicles turned east behind me. When a clearing in the traffic opened up, I made a quick shift into the fast lane and spun a
U.
Nobody followed. I went a few blocks and made another
U,
turning me back east again. I hadn't been followed, but an imaginary parrot on my shoulder was squawking “Watchate.”

I was heading for the ATM on Tramway; I wanted to take a few steps in the ransom collector's boots to see if that could give me an entrée to the kidnapper's mind. An electrical storm brewed over the Sandias. Lightning stabbed at the peaks and bolted laterally from cloud to cloud. Sunset was a recent memory, and the lightning was the rosy pink color of the reflected sunset, the color the Sandias turn when there's an afterglow, the color of Rick Olney's blush.
Sandia
means watermelon, and some say the mountains were named for the evenings they turn watermelon pink. Other people believe the mountains got their name because they have a watermelon's shape. In a place that has as long a recorded history as New Mexico, legends and place names get twisted in the wind of repeated tellings. The mountains farther north are called the Sangre de Cristos—the blood of Christ—but they turn the same pink color as the Sandias. If it's the color of blood, it's thin blood, blood that's been diluted by tears or rain.

I reached the solitary ATM on Tramway at the base of the mountains, the ATM where Laura Simonson had been mugged and where a masked person had claimed half of Deborah and Perigee's
ransom
money. The parking lot was empty, the warehouse was a blank, white wall. How anyone kept a wall that graffiti-free in Albuquerque was a mystery to me. I turned the Nissan around to see if anyone had followed. No one had. The road back to Tramway was deserted. I could have gone to the drive-in window, conducted my business from my car and made a quick getaway, but I parked, got out and walked into the building that housed the ATM just as feathered mask had done. Lights flashed in the western sky, beyond the curve of the horizon, too distant to see the shape of the bolts. Those lights also had a pinkish glow and seemed to be synchronized to the flashes over the Sandias, one flash echoing another. It could have been a reflection of the Sandia storm or another storm farther west, or it might have been its own storm system. I couldn't tell.

There's safety in numbers; there's safety in lookouts. The Apaches didn't have the numbers; they relied on awareness and lookouts. I didn't have the numbers either, only myself, but I was high enough to see anyone coming and would have had time to collect the money, get in the car and drive away. With my ATM card and keys in hand, I approached the screen, smiled for the camera and inserted my card in the slot. The screen prompted me to enter my PIN. I did it, I noticed, more by remembering the location of the PIN digits on the screen than by remembering the digits themselves. Deborah's PIN, I remembered, was 2473. I asked the ATM for one hundred dollars, and I got it in twenties. I put the money, my card and the receipt in my pocket. Having learned that punching in a PIN number is a rote action and that this was the most isolated ATM in Albuquerque, I left. I knew I'd been seen only by the eye of the camera, but I still felt that I was being pursued. Thunder rumbled. The storm was moving east, but the air remained charged with the electricity that produces revelations, hallucinations and squawking parrot mind.

I got in the Nissan and drove west on Montgomery. Fat rain drops hit my windshield and splattered in tiny, dusty explosions. I turned the wiper to intermittent, then moved it up a notch to slow. By the time I reached La Vista the wipers were running on fast and puddles were forming in the low places in the street. Soon runoff would be pulsing through the diversion channels like blood coursing through an unclogged artery. Ordinarily I park on the east side of La Vista in front of my apartment, in the space across from the dumpster that has my number on it, but the parrot on my shoulder squawked “Watchate,” so I kept on going. It was possible that someone had anticipated my movements, come here and waited. It wasn't difficult to find out where I lived; my address was in the phone book. I noticed that La Bailarina, the homeless woman who lives in La Vista's parking lot, had parked her van beside the dumpster. My place was empty, which it isn't always when I come home at night. I left it that way and continued north.

My apartment is also accessible from the back side of the building, down a dingy hallway. I don't come in that way; it's dark, it's shabby, the parking spaces have somebody else's number on them. I circled the north wall of the building. As I drove down the west side, I saw a shadow under the dim
overhead
bulb in the hallway. As I got closer the shadow became a cowboy wearing a black hat and a long duster, standing under the stairway to the second floor. The cowboy didn't turn around to look as I drove to the south side of the building and parked in someone else's space. I walked back up the west side, keeping close to the wall. Lights were on on the second floor, but the windows on my floor, the first, were all dark. I didn't have a raincoat or hat; rain slid down my face. Weather doesn't mess around in New Mexico. When the sun shines, it sizzles. When it rains, it pours. Water dripped from the
canales
onto my head. I felt like I was taking a shower with my clothes on, but the running water did conceal the sound of my footsteps.

I flattened myself against the cracked stucco wall and stepped around the corner. The cowboy, who hadn't heard me coming, was leaning sideways against the wall and peering down the hallway, watching perhaps for headlights to pull into my parking space. Even in cowboy boots there'd be time to run down the hall and jump me as I crossed the danger zone for women and inserted my key in my lock. Would anybody have heard? Or reacted if they did? I wondered.

In boot heels, the cowboy was just about my height. Thick shoulder-length hair bridged the space between the hat and the duster. I held my key-ring Punch in my left hand, grabbed the hair and yanked it hard with the right at the same time that I rammed my knees into the back of the cowboy's. It occurred to me that I might end up holding a blond wig in my hand, and that when the cowboy turned around I'd see a feathered mask. The knees buckled. The head spun around. The hair was real. The down-at-the heels expression belonged to the So-Cal cowboy. I could tell by the smell of his breath and the ease with which his knees buckled that Wes Brown had been drinking. He stammered, trying to find a swear word to fit the occasion. The best he could do on such short notice was “cunt.”

“You already called me that,” I said. He hadn't had time to draw his weapon, but I doubted he'd have come here without one. “Hand over the piece,” I told him.

He blinked. “What piece?”

“The one you're packing.”

“If I don't?”

“I'll scream. I'll blow my whistle. I'll call the night watchman. I'll call my neighbor, who's a cop. I'll squirt red pepper into your lungs and your face. And if that doesn't work, I'll kick.” Those are the self-defense tricks women are taught to rely on. Most of them were idle threats, but what did he know?

As the Kid said, Brown was lacking in the bravery department. He surrendered the gun, another .45. Brown had a gun for every occasion, but so far I'd seen only the same caliber. I made him precede me into my apartment and sit down on the sofa. His duster dripped onto the yellow shag carpeting. I sat down across from him with the .45 in my lap. He leaned his head against the wall, stretched out his legs and looked at me from under his lashes. He'd taken off his hat, revealing a bad case of hat head; his hair
was
flatter than Garth Brooks's.

“What's your game?” he asked in his surly drawl.

“Like I told you, I'm a lawyer.”

“Yeah? Then why are you living here?”

“Beats living in dry dock,” I said.

“You're the one who turned the FWS onto me, aren't you?” he asked.

The news that they'd already gotten to him was birdsong to my ears. “Yup,” I said. “They arrested you?”

“Yeah. I had to post bond to get out.”

He'd probably done it with the smelly money.

“Why have you got it in for me?” He poked the carpet with his scruffy boot. “What'd I ever do to you?”

“You're a parrot smuggler.”

“What business is that of yours?”

“I like parrots.”

“I had to find some way to pay back the IRS.”

“How about getting a job?” I asked.

“In Door?” he blinked.

I could have suggested he leave Door, but what would be the point? Cause and effect were inoperative inside his Jack Daniels envelope. If I had my way he'd be trading Door for a prison cell and whatever abusive substances he could obtain in there. “Your girlfriend, Katrina, said…”

“She's not my girlfriend.”

“What is she?”

“Someone I see when I come to Albuquerque.” He shrugged. “That's all.” He crossed one boot over the other and watched me from under the liar's lashes.

“Why do you come to Albuquerque? To deposit the money for the IRS?” I asked. Or to get laid? Or to sell parrots? I didn't ask. One offense at a time.

“I don't have to justify myself to you,” he snapped in a tone of voice that suggested I was beneath contempt, which, when you think about it, wasn't all that different from the message his lashes had been sending. I let his answer pass. He would have to justify himself to the FWS, and anyhow, I had other means of getting my bank question answered. “Why'd you tell Katrina you wanted to get in touch with me?”

“I wanted to know where you went Sunday after you left Door.”

“Like Katrina said, I was at her house.”

“
Actually
she
didn't say that, Ellen did.” I was kind of curious to see what his reaction would be to Ellen. Even in his fantasy envelope he had to know she didn't like him.

“Ellen's jealous.”

“Of what?” I asked.

“I met her before I met Katrina. She came on to me.”

I'd heard that one before.

“So if I was at the house then? What business is it of yours?”

“Terrance Lewellen is my client. He died Monday morning.

“You can't be trying to blame that on me.”

Why not? I thought.

“What killed him?” he asked, giving me another look that left the door open for seduction or misinterpretation. Terrance's death scared him. He'd been arrested for smuggling before and gotten out of that, but murder was a deep-water crime. I had a suspicion that if I responded to Wes Brown he'd back off, then tell some other woman that I'd come on to him. His fear of rejection could be so strong that he'd do it to you before you could do it to him. Maybe what he was really looking for was a woman who felt worse about being herself than he did about being himself. Although the come-on routine was an automatic response, I could see that he'd have no respect for anyone who said yes. A man with that poor a self-image is a coiled snake for an unwary foot, one reason I wear snake boots around my heart. Katrina probably felt that bad, I thought, but had Deborah? Or Sara?

“An allergic reaction killed Terrance,” I said. “The OMI is investigating. Sara Dumaine found him dead in his house.”

Sara's name produced—like a lot of things I'd said—a shrug.

“Did you know he and Sara were having an affair?” I asked.

He blinked. “How would I know that?”

“Did you know that Terrance had allergies?”

“No. I barely knew the guy.”

“Where is Deborah?”

“I haven't a clue.”

I had one more question. “How'd you know where I live?”

“Looked you up in the phone book.”

That was enough to make me want to move out of La Vista in the morning and get an unlisted number. “I don't have anything more to say. Do you?”

“Yeah, I do.” He leaned forward on the sofa, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Get the hell out of my life.” His lips mouthed anger, but his eyes still begged “rescue me.”

“
Get out of my apartment,” was my answer.

“Give me back my gun.”

“No way.”

“Cunt.”

He drove off in his pickup, another loaded weapon cruising for targets on the highway.

******

After he left I went into the kitchen to see what time it was. Ten by the oven clock. Too early to go to sleep, and who could go to sleep after the evening I'd had? Adrenaline sends sleep out the window. I knew that from my own experience as an adrenaline queen. It was the Kid's night to play the accordion at El Lobo. I didn't want to interrupt him; I didn't want to go to El Lobo. It was a part of his world I didn't belong in. El Lobo was not a gentle place. Neither was the Psittacine Research Facility when you got right down to it, but I
was
thinking of going there. I took the lab key out of my pocket and twirled it around in my fingers. What I was considering might be called breaking and entering. Technically, I wouldn't be breaking since I had the key, I'd just be entering. If I got caught, I could always say my client had given me the key, that I was representing his best interests, that Rick Olney had been concealing vital information. Money talks even from the grave, and my client's money was running the lab. Besides, I'd already caught Rick Olney breaking into my place of work, so who was he to complain? I didn't intend to get caught, and I didn't intend to steal anything, only to listen and observe. I had a hunch about where the missing file was, and I wanted to hear what the parrot instruction tape had to say. There was always the possibility that the key I'd taken would not let me in, in which case I'd come home and forget about it.