Parrot Blues (25 page)

The receptionist in the main building had an Anne Richardson helmet of white hair. There was a bowl of hard candy on her desk, and she offered me a piece. Her ring finger wore a large, fake, yellow stone. Her nails were long and opalescent.

“Thanks anyway,” I said. “I'm Terrance Lewellen's lawyer. I'd like to talk to his mother.”

“I'll give her a call. What'd you say your name was?”

“Neil Hamel.”

She dialed Mrs. Lewellen's room. “Candace, honey,” she said. “There's a lawyer here named Neil … Is that right? … Hamel.”

“Right,” I said.

“She wants to see you.” She peered at me over the top of her glasses. “Candace says to go on up.”

“What's her apartment number?” I asked.

“She don't have an apartment, honey. She's got a
casita.
Terrance provided good for his momma.”

I'd been told to look for a good provider once, but the message didn't stick. Security has never been in my candy bowl.

“Pity about that poor boy,” the receptionist said.

“Who?” I asked. If she meant my client, he'd been neither poor nor a boy.

“Terrance. The way he died.” She rolled her eyes. What did she know about how Terrance had died?

“You mean the allergies?” I asked.

“That's right. His momma feels real bad that no one was givin' him the peanuts mixed with the water. She says that's what killed him. That nobody was doin' that for her boy.”

It was a contributing factor, I knew, but not the whole story. “Terrance was a grown man. He could have done it for himself.”

“
That ain't the way a momma sees it, honey.”

The receptionist would have kept me there all day, talking, if I'd let her. Seniors know all the little tricks for getting and holding your attention, and the ones with time on their hands are quite capable of wasting yours. “How do I get to Candace's
casita
?” I asked.

She gave me directions and offered me another piece of candy. “No thanks,” I said.

******

Candace's doorbell played a tinkly tune, but her voice was a blast of dusty Texas wind. “Door's open. Come on in,” she bellowed. I let myself into the living room of her
casita,
which, except for the Lochover overflowing one wall, was a study in birds and indifference. The furniture was beat up and beige. The color scheme was similar to Charlie Register's, but his look was carefully planned and this room had been thrown together. Birds were all over the wall in watercolors and oils, and all over the shelves in ceramics and wood. Her taste in birds ran to the small and the pretty. I saw a kestrel, but no eagles or peregrine falcons. I saw a parakeet, but not a single parrot.

I knew a girl named Candace when I was in grammar school who was more often called Candy Ass. If any boy had ever called Terrance's mother that, he'd only have done it once. She was small, but she was no candy ass. She was sitting in a large beige armchair. A wooden cane leaned against the arm of the chair. Her skin was weathered and her hair was tied in a bun. Her glasses had thick lenses and gold frames, but her eyes had Terrance's gray-green sparkle. She reminded me of a small, sharp nail. She held a cigar in her hand, but she hadn't lit it yet. A glass of something brown and medicinal (or recreational) sat on the end table. She took a sip.

“Excuse me if I don't get up.” She pointed toward the cane.

“No problem.” I sat myself down in a sofa that had the charm and comfort of a hunk of rental furniture.

“You care if I smoke?” she asked.

“Nope.”

She lit up and was enveloped in a cloud of her own foul-smelling smoke. She puffed on her cigar with the same relish that her son had chewed on his. If God wasn't in the details, he might be in the genes. “You're a lawyer?” she asked me.

“Right.”

“With Baxter, Johnson?”

“No,” I said, lighting up my own smoking instrument. “With Hamel and Harrison.”

“I thought Buddy Baxter was Terrance's lawyer.” Her eyes narrowed from distrust—or smoke.

“Not for everything,” I said.

“
What did you do for my boy?”

“I can't discuss it. I'm sorry.”

“Was whatever you were representing him for what got him killed?”

“It's possible,” I said, which was as far as I was willing to go.

“A Detective Hernandez was here. You know her?”

“We've met.”

“She said someone put saltwater into my boy's allergy medicine.”

“I heard that.”

She sipped at the brown stuff, put the glass down and gripped the arms of her chair. It was the first sign she gave of any emotion. “You know who did that?”

“No,” I said, honestly enough, “I don't, but it occurred to me that the motive might be found in his will.”

She shook her head and a couple of hairpins fell in her lap. “He left everything to me, and I didn't kill him.”

“You sure you were the only heir?”

“Of course I'm sure. Who else was he gonna leave it to? He and Deborah were getting a divorce. He never had any kids.” She narrowed her eyes. “You're not
her
lawyer, are you?”

“No.”

“You positive?”

“I can produce a retainer agreement if you want proof that I was representing Terrance.”

Candace studied me with her wary eyes. “You worried about getting paid? Is that why you're asking all these questions about the will?” Maybe I should have been, but that issue hadn't even occurred to me yet. That's how far I'd come from being a greedy lawyer. “You send me a bill showing me the work you've done, you'll get your fee.”

“I'll do that,” I said. “My feeling is that I am representing Terrance just as much now as I was when he was alive, and that I could do it better if I knew what was in his will.” Actually, I did know what was in one will, but it appeared that it wasn't the only will.

She nodded. Something—our mutual addiction maybe, or our mutual pigheadedness—had led her to trust me. “What else do you want to know?”

“When the will leaving everything to you was drawn up, and who prepared it.”

“Buddy Baxter prepared it years ago when Terrance married Deborah. He had an agreement with her that she wouldn't be gettin' anything, and he wanted it all down in writing. Terrance didn't want to think anybody would be marrying him for his money.”

Maybe he'd softened with age. Maybe synthetic testosterone was gentler than the other variety.
Maybe
Sara and an affair scared him less than Deborah and a marriage.

“Do you get the Lochovers?” I asked.

“Right.”

“What will happen to them now?”

“You ain't the only one who's been askin' about that.” She looked at the painting on the wall. Candace may have had her own
casita
at La Buena Vida, but the rooms were small, and at this distance the painting was neither fine brush strokes nor leaves in fall or winter. It was a blur of paint. She lifted her glasses and squinted at the painting. “Damned if I know what everybody sees in those things. Terrance had them all over the house. They look like water to me.” She sniffed. “I'm a desert rat, and I never did trust water. You don't know what's hiding in it.”

Having grown up near the Irish Pond in Ithaca, New York, I knew: fish, snakes, turtles and frogs. All of them wriggle and swim, some of them bite. Desert critters bite too, but you can see them coming.

“Charlie Register's been here,” she said.

“Oh?”

“You know him?”

“I do,” I said.

“Charlie's a charmer.”

“He can be.”

“He told me he had an agreement with Terrance to keep those paintings for a month. You know anything about that?”

“I drew up the agreement.”

“What was it? Some kind of bet?”

“Something like that.”

“Boys will be boys,” she said.

Not necessarily, I thought. Sometimes they even turn out to be men.

“Charlie offered to buy those paintings from me,” she said.

“Did he?” I asked, easing forward on the lumpy sofa.

“You have any idea what they're worth?”

“An idea. What did he offer?”

“Three hundred thousand dollars for three paintings! You think they're worth that?”

She didn't believe it, but I did. Charlie had taken them as collateral for less. “I'd have them appraised before I'd sell them to anyone,” I said, “but I suspect that's a pretty fair offer.”

“I grew up poor on a dirt farm in West Texas,” she said, looking into the distance. What I knew of West Texas was the smell of the cattle pens, and that the minute you cross the border into New Mexico
you
can start breathing fresh air again. “That was the depression. We walked five miles to school barefoot, and if we got an orange in our stocking at Christmas we were damn lucky. Terrance's daddy worked in the oil fields. He died in a drilling accident when Terrance was just a little boy. We never had nothin'. Terrance worked real hard to make some money. Now he's dead too, and it looks like somebody killed him. He took good care of his momma. He moved me here.” She leaned forward and whispered. “To tell you the truth, I liked it better in Texas, but I never would tell Terrance that.” She leaned back. “I been through a lot, and there's nothing worse than losing your boy.” She clutched herself in the middle of the solar plexus. “It hurts real bad. Now I'm getting the houses and the art and all that stuff, and what the hell am I supposed to do with it?” She answered her own question. “I'm giving the paintings to the Dallas Fine Arts Museum, and after I die the rest of it goes to the Audubon Society of Texas.”

Once a Texan, always a Texan. It was her choice, but it seemed a shame to me that the Lochovers would be leaving the state.

“You'll tell me if you find out who killed my boy?”

“I will.”

She took a sip of the brown stuff, looked at her watch. “Now I have to start gettin' ready for the funeral.”

“When is it?” I asked.

“Eleven-thirty at Rosario Cemetery. You comin'?”

“I'll be there,” I said.

******

When a man dies in the heat, he gets buried in the heat. It suited Candace Lewellen's dirt farmer background to put Terrance in the ground beneath the blazing sun, but if it had been up to me I would have waited till nightfall. Candace didn't hold a church funeral for Terrance; she had a short and to the point service at the cemetery.

At eleven-thirty in the morning the only shadows around were under the mourners' cars and feet. If I listened hard I could hear the flowers on the coffin dry up and wilt. The rain that had fallen last night had evaporated or seeped deep into the underground aquifer. The ground was as hard and as dry as adobe brick. It must have taken a pickax to carve out Terrance's grave; a shovel would have been worthless against that soil. A grave site in the Heights struck me as a poor place to lay a body to rest. A back-to-the-earth burial is better suited to a softer place, a place with fungus and worms to keep the soil loose. Sometimes I think we ought to go with the fact that between the Rio Grande Valley and the timberline, New Mexico is desert, and put the bodies out on a ledge and let the coyotes and vultures pick the bones clean.

It
was too hot to make polite conversation. It was too hot to make any conversation. Most of the mourners sat in their air-conditioned cars with the windows closed and the engines running, waiting for Candace Lewellen and the minister to show up. Once they did, everybody got out and walked to the grave site. Candace was the only one wearing black—a solitary raven on the barren landscape. She leaned on the minister with one arm and on her wooden cane with the other. Most of the mourners were wealthy businessmen in cowboy hats and bolo ties. Charlie Register was there. His boots were polished, his shirt and pants were white and beige, he wore a Resistol white hat. Candace nodded to me, said hello to the men, patted some of their arms and ignored Sara Dumaine. Except for her dark shades, Sara was all in white: a white dress, white moccasins, the choker made out of bone pipe and feathers, a white fringed bag hanging from her shoulder. Sara and I were the youngest women there, which wasn't all that young. I was there in a professional capacity. I didn't know about Sara's capacity, but her grief appeared genuine. Her shoulders shook as she bent over her white handkerchief and sobbed.

The minister said a few words. Candace leaned on her cane. I heard the sound of a car engine running and turned around to look. Most of the cars here were larger or sleeker than Sara's white Saturn and my yellow Nissan. Many of them had tinted glass. If someone had remained inside, I couldn't tell which car or who it was. It seemed extravagant to keep a car running just so it would be cool when the driver got back into it, but it was a hot day, there were a lot of wealthy people here and nobody was likely to steal a car at a funeral even if it did have the keys in it.

The minister finished the service. I told Candace how sorry I was and squeezed her bony hand. “Who's the Indian?” she asked, squinting in the direction of Sara. “Is that Sara Dumaine?”

“Yes.”

“Guess I should have known better than to expect Deborah to show up.”

“Guess so,” I said.

I said hello to Charlie Register, then stopped at the coffin to say adios to my client. “
Vaya con dios,
” I said. “You were a bad actor, but you're still my client, and I am giving your case my best shot.”

Sara had her hand on the door of her white Saturn when I caught up with her. She dispensed with the greetings and got right to the point. “My life is a mess,” she said. “I've lost Terry. I've lost my sister.”

And whose fault was that? I wondered. “What will you do now?” I asked.