Parrot Blues (28 page)

By four, tired enough to believe that God had not been in the details, I went back to bed, but it was the illusion of the hour—very late at night or very early in the morning. Nothing ever happens when you wait; I was back in bed and sound asleep when the phone rang. At first I thought it was the alarm. I reached over and punched it, but it rang again. The Kid groaned and pulled the pillow over his head. I picked up the phone and heard Charlie Register's cowboy-banker voice.

“Sorry to wake you, ma'am,” he said. “I just got a call from my security folks, and there's something you'll be wantin' to see. Could you meet me at the bank? I'll be there in ten minutes.”

“I'm on my way.”

I thought about punching the Kid in the shoulder, but he was deep in the sleep zone and waking him would be a bitch. I knew he cared about the outcome of my case, but I was afraid this outcome wasn't going to be the one he cared about. I let him sleep, got up, threw on a pair of running shoes, jeans and a T-shirt, and drove to Charlie Register's office on Tramway. I didn't pass a single car on my way. I did pass several ATMs. None were in use.

Charlie was waiting at the bank entrance to let me in. He too had thrown on jeans, but his hung low on his hips and were held in place by a leather belt with a large silver buckle. He didn't yet have the middle-aged cowboy's belly-over-buckle silhouette, but he was working on it. He wore a white cotton shirt with a fine beige stripe. His blond and silver hair had been brushed into place. “Glad you could come,” he said.

“Thanks for calling,” I replied. “Someone accessed Deborah Dumaine's account?” Why else would he have called me so late at night and so early in the morning?

“That's right,” he said.

“From what machine?” There were multiple possibilities: Tramway, the airport, the bus station, anywhere along the border.

“Tramway,” he said.

I followed him down the hall and up the stairs to the video monitoring room. All the cameras
were
running. All but one looked at empty gray and white vestibules or car lanes. Charlie had gotten the tape from his security people, and he'd inserted it in the monitor on the table. The tape had been rewound and stopped at four-thirty, the minute the transaction began. The time and date were visible on the corner. I'd expected that, but was startled to see dots of color in the image.

“The color is a new technology we're experimenting with,” Charlie said.

“Was it your decision to put it in that machine?”

“It was. You ready?”

“Go,” I said.

Charlie started the tape. It was a moment like the one before sleep when reality shifts and images become surreal. I might have been entering someone else's brilliant and confusing dream. My dreams have been filled with soccer players and rock stars, no cowboys and never, even in the background, a banker. A cowboy wearing a duster and a black hat slouched up to the camera, and for a moment I could convince myself that it would end as it had begun, with Wes Brown's face on the tape. Then the cowboy took off the hat. The face widened and whitened like a fish belly as it approached the camera. The face was heavily made up. The lips around the teeth were bright red. The hair was full and scarlet. The eyes looked into the camera without a blink. It was the bold, technicolor face of Deborah Dumaine. She punched in her PIN—B I R D, and Charlie stopped the tape, giving us plenty of time to study her triumphant expression.

“Shit,” I said.

“You were hoping for Wes Brown?” Charlie asked.

“Hoping.”

“I didn't care who,” he replied, “as long as it wasn't her.”

“That's because you haven't met Wes Brown. Was it a deposit or a withdrawal?”

“Withdrawal.”

“How much?”

“Four hundred dollars. That's the maximum we allow in a twenty-four-hour period.”

“Did that close the account?”

“No. She has a hundred dollars left. I don't think she needs the money, do you?”

“Nope. I think she has four hundred thousand dollars somewhere in cash or traveler's checks or cruzeiros. I think she staged her own kidnapping, set up Wes Brown and collected her own ransom from this machine, and then from me by holding a .45 to my head.” Because of the hour and the bizarre circumstances, I asked a question I might not have asked Charlie Register during the day. “Are you in love with her?”

“I love my wife,” he sighed. “But I've always admired Deborah's spirit.” There's a role a wild
woman
plays in a tame man's fantasies. What banker or lawyer hasn't considered chucking it all and running off to Brazil? And more than one of us has fantasized about bumping off a philandering spouse. People who act out what everyone else represses could be angling for a place on the God shelf. As
The Book of the Hopi
said, Deborah had traveled the Road of Life by her own free will and had exhausted her capacity for good and evil.

“She called my office to scope me out while pretending to be a client who wanted a divorce,” I said. “She dropped off the ransom note and faked the Relationships line voice. Being married to Terrance, she must have learned a lot about high-tech equipment like the Scrunch. She sent me to Door at a time when she knew I'd come across Brown smuggling parrots, and she made it appear that he'd kidnapped her. Who's going to believe anything Wes Brown says?” My voice had turned into a whisper. Deborah's presence on the screen was so strong that I couldn't shake the feeling she was listening to us.

“You're sure Brown wasn't involved?” Charlie asked.

“I'm sure. Even Brown isn't fool enough to write a bad check to the IRS. I thought we were playing liar's poker, but Brown wasn't lying. He told me Deborah had been down there to see him, and I wanted to believe it was his ego talking. She must have gone between his trips to Albuquerque. She probably took his credit card and tried out the PIN. Either she found BIRD written down somewhere or she guessed. Then she opened up her own account, took the same PIN, transferred her mag strip to Brown's ATM card, went back to Door and put the card back before he came up here and used it again outside Midnight Cowboy on Friday night. She printed her message on the back of his deposit slip. It was in invisible ink; he never noticed.”

Charlie cleared his throat. “Do you think that she … slept with him to accomplish all this?”

“I hope not. She had to have been hiding with Perigee in Door somewhere and put him on the deck of Brown's boat while the Kid and Brown and I were down below. The only footprints on the ground looked like Brown's; she was wearing his brand of boots. Deborah's on her way to Brazil.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. They're not known for enforcing their extradition treaties—if they have any extradition treaties. Rick Olney, her lab assistant, said she was treated like a queen there. Rick knew Deborah as well as anyone, and he suspected her of murdering Terrance. As soon as Terrance died and Perigee came back, he became evasive and stopped talking about calling in the police.”

“Why did you suspect her?”

“She knew about Terrance and Sara; she had a tape of them making love. She'd been giving Terrance small doses of peanuts for his allergy. She knew how vulnerable he'd be without the treatment.”

“I don't understand why she didn't leave sooner.”

“She needed time to launder the money. Maybe she stopped to admire her work and watch her
sister
suffer. Did you notice the rental car with tinted glass and the engine running during the funeral?”

“Can't say that I did.”

“I think it was Deborah, and I think she wanted Sara to know who was responsible for Terrance's death. She came to the ATM to leave her signature on the plan.”

Charlie started the videotape again. Deborah's frozen face broke into a smile. She counted her money, pulled down her cowboy hat, tipped it to the camera, took her card and receipt and walked away. I couldn't hear them, but I could see that she was wearing high-heeled shoes. Maybe she hadn't expected Charlie to put a flag on the account. Maybe he wouldn't have if I hadn't suggested it. Maybe she'd thought Charlie admired her enough to let her get away. It could also be that her own pride and ego had tripped her up. You never know what motivates a killer. There's often a level on which they want to get caught and be punished. Taking a life is in the realm of the gods, but the people who do it are all too human.

We might have been watching a Western in which you hope the Indians will get away, but you know they won't. Deborah had become Dextrous Horse Thief Woman and we were the cavalry. The cavalry always wins in the movies and, even in real life, they won eventually; they had superior numbers and equipment. In this case, Deborah had had the superior technical equipment. All I'd had was my intuition and brains. Deborah had challenged me to do my best, and I'd responded. What else would a lawyer do? But now Charlie and I had the opportunity to hit the Pause button and change the outcome, which was more power than two people ever ought to have. How long would it take for the wild bird to fly away? How long would we have to hesitate? In an hour or two, the first flight would be leaving ABQ for anywhere on the road to Rio.

“Have you told anyone about the kidnapping scheme yet?” I asked Charlie.

“Not yet,” he said.

Sooner or later Detective Hernandez was likely to get a warrant if Charlie didn't volunteer Deborah's tape. Even if she didn't know about the kidnapping, she'd want to take a look at Deborah's account; the first suspect in any homicide is always the victim's spouse. We only had to stretch the law for a few hours. Who knew Deborah was on the lam but Charlie and me?

I felt as if I was carrying two large objects, one in each hand. One was a bird, and one was a stone. The stone was the murder of Terrance Lewellen, the bird was Deborah's desire to go free. It's not in my nature to hesitate. It is my nature to root for the birds and the Indians. Terrance had done the unforgivable by sleeping with her sister. He'd made it even worse by videotaping the act and including Sara in his will. For a moment, the objects were in perfect balance, but even if I did nothing, one of them would fly away and the other would weigh me down.

I looked at Charlie and he looked at me. I saw question marks in his blue eyes. You wouldn't
know
it from inside BankWest's security room, but somewhere out there birds were calling up the dawn and the sun was responding with rosy-fingered feelers. The jets were fueling up at Albuquerque International. If we were going to stop Deborah, we had to do it right now. It must have been why Charlie had called me here, to distribute the weight. If we hesitated, we'd be sharing a deep and incriminating secret. I'd have to answer to him, he'd have to answer to me, and we'd both have to answer to ourselves. Charlie was a banker. I was a lawyer. Deborah was a wild and brilliant bird who was used to the cage but who longed to be free. I saw her for a moment, flapping her wings high above the canopy.

But the bottom line, the place where dreams and flight end, brought me back. There always is a bottom line in law and in life, and mine was that my client was dead. I could forget about being manipulated. I could deal with being held up at gunpoint. I could admire Deborah for her brilliance in setting up Brown, but I couldn't forget that my client had been murdered. That turned out to be the heavier object. I don't know what the bottom line was for Charlie; it might have been that he had security people working for him or that he owned BankWest. It might have been that he'd let me make the decision. It wasn't, as it turned out, that he loved Deborah Dumaine.

“You have to call Detective Hernandez,” I said. I knew now that Terrance had not been involved in the crime of kidnapping, but I still considered it my obligation to protect his reputation by keeping my mouth shut.

Charlie sighed and reached for the phone. In this light the highlights in his hair were more gray than gold. “You're right,” he said.

On the drive home the sun was a ball of flame searing the back of the wind goddess, and my finger hurt. I let myself into my apartment at La Vista and into my bedroom. The Kid was still asleep. I crawled into bed behind him, laid my cheek against the soft spot on the back of his neck and pretended it had been a dream.

******

Detective Hernandez caught Deborah at the airport. She was booked on the seven A.M. flight to Dallas and from there to Rio de Janeiro traveling under the passport and ID of a Joan Kite. Most of the ransom had been wired ahead to a bank in Rio. She was carrying ten thousand dollars in cash and travelers' checks in her money belt—all the money she could legally take out of the country without registering with the customs service. There wasn't a single serial number that could be traced. All the ransom money had been laundered. God had been in that detail. The fact that she'd been caught fleeing the country with a phony ID and a lot of money was incriminating, but Deputy DA Anthony Saia, who ended up being the prosecutor in the murder case, had a tough job ahead of him convincing a jury that she'd murdered her husband. The saline solution could have been bought anywhere by anyone, as could
the
peanuts. There was approximately a twenty-four-hour envelope from breakfast to breakfast when the peanut substitution could have been made, and a much bigger envelope for the saline substitution. Any one of the suspects could have gotten into Terrance's house. None of them had a twenty-four-hour alibi. The only fingerprints found on the vial were Terrance Lewellen's and Sara Dumaine's. Deborah's fingerprints and fibers were all over the house, but so were Sara's. The only thing the prosecutor had going for him was motive. Deborah had an abundance of that, but Sara stood to gain two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Terrance's death if she filed the will. Even with invincible evidence, it's hard to get a murder conviction these days, and nearly impossible to convict a suspect on motive alone. It's one thing to solve a puzzle, another to get a conviction from a jury of one's peers. Runaway juries have gotten softhearted in the nineties.