The Kiskadee of Death (10 page)

Buzz had been an alcoholic.

My eyes went to the house door at the back of the garage where Schooner had ushered Buzz's nephew.

Apparently, that was another thing that ran in the family: alcoholism.

“I have to say something to him,” I said quietly to Luce.

She nodded and turned away to go to our car, leaving me to speak alone with Buzz.

I was probably five feet away when Buzz broke the silence that had descended on the driveway.

“His name is Mark,” the one-time astronaut said, still gazing down at the ground. “He's my sister's grandson, and his mother, my niece, didn't know what to do with him anymore, so I said I'd take responsibility for him. Get him straightened out.”

Buzz looked up at me, the planes of his weathered face harsh in the bright glare of the garage's lights.

“I'm not doing a very good job, am I?” he remarked.

“It's not my place to say,” I told him. “But I can assure you there are places you can find help.”

Buzz attempted a half-hearted smile.

“I know,” he said. “Been there, done that. If you haven't heard about it already, I'd be surprised. I'm an alcoholic, Bob. I've been sober for thirty years now, but you don't cure this disease. You live with it… if you're lucky and you get treatment. If you're not lucky, it kills you.”

He tipped his head towards the house door.

“I don't want to lose Mark, but he's been fighting me tooth and nail. He'd actually been doing a lot better lately. He was beginning to develop a new interest in things. But today…” His voice trailed off. “Ever since he heard about Birdy, he's been a mess. I'd almost say a disaster waiting to happen, but obviously, the waiting is over.”

Buzz leaned down and retrieved the lemon that his nephew had dropped.

“That was the comment about me squeezing the juice out of the lemon,” he explained. “Mark knows he's a mess, the ‘lemon' of the family, and he says I'm squeezing all the fun out of him by trying to get him into treatment.”

Buzz tossed the lemon in the air and caught it easily. “But I'm trying to save his life… the same way Birdy Johnson saved mine.”

He leaned his back against the car and held the lemon up in front of his face as if he were studying it.

“The hardest part,” he said, avoiding my eyes and keeping his own trained on the fruit in his hand, “was that Birdy had to ruin my career in order to do it.”

 

Chapter Eleven

T
he faint alarm of warning bells began to ring in my head.

Here it comes,
the bells told me.
Buzz Davis is going to tell you his life's story.

Crap. After all my years of experience working with high school students, you'd think I'd get used to people unloading their tales of woe on me, but the truth was, I'd be unspeakably happy if I never again had to listen to another soul-baring monologue from a person who was basically a stranger. At work, I got paid to listen, but for some reason, it seemed that even when I wasn't at work, people wanted to confide in me. I didn't know why that was. Maybe it was the open posture and kind smile I honed during my graduate school training to become a counselor.

Or maybe people just thought I was a sap, and I'd listen to anyone.

Whatever the reason, I decided it wasn't going to happen tonight. I was on vacation, and it was late, and I'd started the day by finding a dead man, stood steps away from my old friend when he was grazed by a bullet, and spent the last few hours getting lemon and lime juice squirted in my eyes.

I mean, really, how much could one man take?

“Buzz,” I said, “it's late. Go to bed. Get some sleep. It's been a terrible day.”

And I walked away to get in my car with my wife.

“What did he say?” Luce asked me as I pulled out of Buzz's driveway and pointed the car in the direction of the Birds Nest, a cozy bed-and-breakfast retreat we'd booked for the week that was actually a private guest suite on the property of another birder.

“He's a recovered alcoholic and Birdy Johnson ruined his career,” I told her, giving her the condensed version of our conversation.

“He said that?” Luce sounded shocked. “Are you telling me Buzz Davis just admitted to you he had a motive to murder Birdy Johnson?”

I glanced at her face, which was softly lit by the streetlights we passed as I drove out of Mission and crossed the city limits into the residential neighborhoods of McAllen.

“Yes, I guess I am telling you that,” I answered, though I hadn't even thought of it in those terms till she mentioned it. All I'd considered was that I wanted to call it a night and get some sleep.

“Shouldn't you call Chief Pacheco or something?” Luce asked. Her voice sounded more animated than it had been all evening. “Don't you think he'd want you to share that information with him as soon as you got it?”

“I'll share it tomorrow,” I told her. “Besides, I know you haven't felt real good since this morning. I thought you'd just as soon turn in for the night.”

“I got a second wind.”

“I didn't,” I told her. “I'm beat. And you know what? I'll bet that Chief Pacheco is already looking into Buzz and Birdy's history, which means he probably knows about Buzz getting kicked out of the astronaut program because of the booze. And if his mom, Rosalie, was as close to Birdy like it seems she was, the chief probably also knows about any bad blood between the two men.”

Or
, I mentally added,
if there was some kind of trouble between Rosalie and Birdy because of his drone work for the border patrol.

I realized I had another suspect to add to my list of birders who'd been at the park when I spotted the dead man: Rosalie Pacheco.

Pacheco as in mother of Chief Pacheco.

Geez. Could the list of suspects get any more tangled in ­relationships?

Another possibility hit me.

Could the chief himself be a suspect?

The young National Guardsman we'd met at Fat Daddy's—Pacheco's third or fourth or whatever cousin—he'd mentioned that the chief had stayed in the area to clean up the border zone. At the time, I hadn't thought much about what that meant exactly, but now I had to wonder. Was “cleaning up” about drug smuggling or illegal immigration? If his mother Rosalie was bitter about immigration laws because of her granddaughter's family situation, maybe the chief had his own ax to grind on his niece's behalf.

But that didn't tell me which camp the chief was in.

Pacheco may have sympathized with the illegal immigrants because his own family had been split apart as a result of immigration law.

Or, because his own family had been split apart by immigration law, the chief might be determined not to let that same thing happen to anyone else's family.

Which still didn't tell me if Chief Pacheco might have had a motive to kill Birdy Johnson.

And then something else popped into my head.

The Guardsmen had ribbed Guardsman Pacheco about his girlfriend, Pearlita, the Citrus Queen of this year's festival.

Rosalie's granddaughter—the chief's niece—was named Pearl.

Pearl Pacheco was the Citrus Queen and Guardsman Pacheco's girlfriend.

“Luce,” I said, pulling up to the security gate that guarded the driveway to the Birds Nest. I leaned out of my window and punched the access code into the console. “I just realized that Pearl, Rosalie's granddaughter, is the Citrus Queen.”

The wrought iron gate slid back, and I drove past our host's home to the attached guest quarters where we'd spent the last few nights.

“And her boyfriend is the young man we met at lunch,” Luce confirmed. “I know. I heard a couple of the birders working on the float tonight talking about the Citrus Queen and her court. All the birders know Pearl because of her work at the Valley Nature Center. I guess you missed out on that conversation.”

Yeah, I guess I did. Luce must have picked up those tidbits of information while I looked over the float sketches tacked up on the garage wall. Maybe I should ask my wife to start wearing a wire so I could overhear all of her conversations.

That wasn't too creepy of an idea, was it?

Clearly, I was more tired than I thought.

We got out of the car and collected our birding gear from the back seats to take inside with us. From the other side of the guest quarters, I heard the call of an Eastern Screech Owl. Our birding host, Rhonda Gomez, had a veritable birding oasis in the middle of McAllen. Enclosed by a brick fence, her one-acre yard regularly attracted local and migrating birds, and Rhonda's own backyard bird list had more than thirty species on it.

The fact that we could see so many birds right outside the suite was one of the main reasons we'd chosen to stay with Rhonda. If for some reason, all we could force ourselves to do once we got to the sunshine and warmth of the area was to lie around on chaise loungers and soak up heat, we could still come home with some Texas specialties on our lists, like Great Kiskadees, Green Parakeets, and Chachalacas.

As it had turned out, both Luce and I had a lot more energy for birding once we arrived in McAllen, so we had yet to lay around on a lounger. When you find yourself in a birder's paradise like the Lower Rio Grande Valley, it's a crying shame to not spend every waking moment exploring one of the hundreds of excellent birding spots in the area.

“Rhonda left us a note,” Luce said, picking up a piece of stationery from the little bistro table where we had breakfast every morning outside our bedroom. She read through it and handed it to me.

 

Hey, Bob. Just wanted to let you know that I had a visit this afternoon from a Chief Pacheco asking me to verify when you arrived here at the Birds Nest earlier in the week and what time you left this morning. He said it was part of an investigation, and since I saw the news at noon about Birdy Johnson, I'm guessing you were at Estero Llano when the body was found. Does this mean you're going to be staying in the Valley longer than you had originally planned?

Rhonda
:-)

 

“I don't know if this is good or bad news,” I told Luce after reading Rhonda's note. “Good in that we have a witness who can verify our location at the time of the murder, or bad in that the chief felt the need to double-check our statements.”

I looked again at the note from our hostess.

“She added a smiley face at the end,” I pointed out to Luce. “I guess that means she'd be happy to have us stay longer in the Birds Nest if we have to stick around in the Valley because of the investigation.”

“As long as our staying longer in the Valley doesn't mean arrest and a stay in jail,” Luce amended. “That would definitely not be my idea of a fun way to end our winter getaway.”

“Our getaway, huh? You've been spending too much time around the MOB, doll-face,” I said. “You're beginning to talk like they do.”

“Doll-face?” Luce grimaced. “Where did that come from?”

I opened the door to our room and stood aside to let her go in ahead of me.

“Too many late nights watching old gangster movies when I was in college,” I replied. “Either that, or I was a mobster in a former life.”

“That would be quite a jump,” Luce noted, “from gun-toting hitman to the mild-mannered, sensitive, peace-loving birder I know and love.”

She dropped her birding backpack on the big cushioned chair in the corner of the room and sat down on the end of the quilt-covered bed.

“Seriously,” she said, “we're not going to have to extend this trip to help clear Eddie of murder, are we? I know you're concerned about him. So am I, especially after someone took a shot at him tonight. But all my instincts are telling me we can't help him, Bobby. We don't know the territory. We don't know any of these people. How can we help?”

I put my Birds Nest key and my binoculars on the dresser next to the bed. Luce was right: we might as well have been chickens with our heads cut off, running in circles, for all we knew about the circumstances surrounding Birdy Johnson's death. Not only that, but by accompanying Eddie to observe the vultures roosting, we'd unintentionally put ourselves near a line of fire. Watching my wife pull off her hiking boots, I resolved this was one crime I was going to leave to the authorities, and this was one birding trip that was not going to go bad.

Except that I was pretty sure we'd already hit the “bad” threshold.

I needed to rephrase that.

This was one trip that was not going to get even worse.

“Tell you what,” I said to Luce. “I'll call the chief in the morning, give him the play-by-play from tonight at Buzz's garage, check in with Eddie to make sure he's all right and has the name of a good lawyer, and then we're going back to being birders on vacation. No more sleuthing. Just good birding.”

Luce gave me a tired smile. “Right now, I'll settle for a good night's sleep.”

* * *

Within thirty minutes, my wife was well on her way to dreamland, the soft sound of her breathing slow and relaxed beside me in the bed.

I, of course, was wide awake, despite my resolution to leave the day's deadly events in the hands of the local chief. As I mulled over the people we'd met, I tried to imagine each one committing murder. Buzz and the chief certainly had the strength to deliver a killing blow to the head, but why would they bother to hide the body under a canoe? And if hiding the body was their intent, why didn't they check to be sure no body parts were still showing? It was, after all, Birdy's foot sticking out from beneath the canoe that had revealed his location.

Which told me that whoever flipped that canoe didn't take the time for a thorough check for total concealment.

Which also told me the murderer was aware of the presence of others in the area who might suddenly appear as they birded.

The murderer was, therefore, familiar with the park and its patrons, so whoever killed Birdy Johnson was no stranger to Estero Llano.

Or to Birdy, because he'd let his killer get close enough to hit him in the head.

I rolled over in the bed, realizing I had no idea what kind of blow Birdy had taken.

But the fact that it was a fatal blow to his head forced me to eliminate Rosalie Pacheco, Birdy's close friend, as a suspect. Rosalie was short, and while Birdy would certainly let her get close enough to hit him, she would've had to swing upward in order to reach Birdy's head. Picturing the petite Rosalie in my mind, I was certain she couldn't muster enough power to kill Birdy with one blow, at that angle.

Buzz and Chief Pacheco, on the other hand, would have found it easy. One of the first things I'd noticed about the chief was his muscular arms, and Buzz, too, looked lean and strong. Either of the men could have fatally injured Birdy, and while it was common knowledge that Buzz had accompanied Birdy when they'd first arrived at the park, no one could be expected to know the chief's whereabouts before his arrival after the 911 call.

Pacheco could have been sitting right outside the park… because he'd just left it after killing Birdy.

Of course, that didn't explain Eddie's bottle of Aquavit near Birdy's body, which just seemed much too obvious as a piece of ­evidence pointing towards my old friend. If Eddie had lost the bottle during a float-building session as he said, then Buzz would be the logical finder of the bottle, and the planter of the same as evidence.

Motive? Birdy had destroyed Buzz's bid for a place in space exploration history when he ratted out his friend's drinking problem. Though Buzz seemed to have done just fine financially, I supposed that could have been an awfully tough pill to swallow when it happened, especially for someone who had worked hard for that opportunity. Losing it not only meant public disgrace and forfeiting a career, but the denial of a personal dream.

And no more parades as an astronaut.

Even worse, it gave your drunk great-nephew ammunition for publicly humiliating you.

Although I didn't think Buzz was so much humiliated by his young relative's verbal attack as he was just completely frustrated with the kid's self-destructive behavior. Besides, as far as I could tell, Buzz's disease was no secret among the MOB. Everyone already knew about it.

Which also meant that Buzz's history with Birdy could be a very convenient motive for a MOBster to use for framing Buzz for his friend's murder. I ran down the list of birders in my head one more time.