The Kiskadee of Death (4 page)

“It's your astronaut,” I said to Luce. “Buzz. I guess the park employee located him after all.”

“Where is he?” Buzz shouted. “I want to see him!”

Another loud wail came from Rosalie, the volunteer naturalist.

“This is not helping,” Pacheco muttered and strode briskly away from us, towards Buzz.

“What is going on?” Buzz demanded, his voice only a degree less in volume.

From where we were standing, it looked like Buzz was using his walking stick to keep a park employee and a deputy at bay while they were trying to get the former astronaut to take a seat at a table on the deck. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the park superintendent, a petite brown-haired woman, fall in behind Pacheco as he approached Buzz.

“She's no fool,” Luce commented about the superintendent's move. “I'd want a brawny chief between me and that walking stick, too. That antler on top could be lethal given the right circumstances.”

We watched Pacheco and the superintendent maneuver Buzz into a chair. Whatever they said to him calmed the man enough to convince him to lay down his walking stick and stop yelling. I could still hear Rosalie sobbing, and the crowd of birders and deputies continued to mill aimlessly around the park deck.

So much for another morning of successful vacation birding.

“Well,” I said briskly to Luce. “I think we're done here, don't you? We got our Green Kingfisher and a Vermilion Flycatcher, so mission accomplished. How about lunch?”

Luce let out a heavy sigh. I saw her lovely blue eyes rest on Rosalie, who once again was wiping her eyes with the wadded-up handkerchief. Another uniformed park employee had taken the superintendent's place behind the bereaved naturalist, his hand resting on Rosalie's shoulder.

“This is so sad,” Luce commented. She turned to face me and leaned in for a kiss. She smiled into my eyes and lightened her voice, too. “Yes, Mr. White, I think it's time we got out of here and got some lunch.”

She looped her hand around my arm and we walked to the edge of the deck platform, but we came to a stop before stepping onto the brick-paved path that led back to the parking area.

“Oh, my gosh,” she breathed.

“I see it, too,” I said.

Perched almost directly in front of us on a branch of mesquite was a Great Kiskadee. While we'd already seen several of the native flycatchers during the last few days, this one was especially distinctive. Its yellow belly was almost incandescent amidst the branches, but it was its large head with its striking black-and-white face pattern that really caught our attention.

Especially since it was missing an eye on that head.

“It's the one-eyed Great Kiskadee,” I said. “I thought Rosalie was joking earlier.”

Luce studied the bird, which seemed perfectly content to sit for her inspection.

“I wonder what happened to it?” she mused. “How does a bird lose an eye like that?”

A reply to her question came from the other side of the mesquite.

“No one ever said Mother Nature was a push-over.”

I could have sworn I knew the voice, but the spikey fronds of a Sabal Palm blocked a clear view of the person climbing out of the tangle of brush and trees towards us. I caught a glimpse of a flannel plaid shirt and bright red suspenders just as the visually impaired Great Kiskadee flew away.

“In fact, sometimes she can be downright nasty, you know.”

The man ducked his head to avoid the last branches of mesquite and emerged onto the brick pathway. His big belly preceded him.

I blinked, just to be sure I wasn't imagining the familiar face above it.

“Crazy Eddie?” I said. “What in the world are you doing here?”

My old friend Eddie Edvarg beamed us a big grin through his full white beard. A Norwegian by birth and Minnesotan by residency, Eddie had won an enormous lottery many years ago and secluded himself and his wife on a big spread north of Duluth, which he rarely left. The only times I now ran into Eddie were when he'd been enticed by someone to take on a high-tech, electronics project that had captured his interest. The man was an absolute genius when it came to gizmos.

Even if he did look like a Santa with his white beard and round belly.

“I was pretty sure I heard a Bob White over here,” Eddie laughed.

“Eddie, what a nice surprise!” Luce said, throwing her arms around him for a hug.

Over my wife's shoulder, my old buddy gave me a wink.

“So you went and married this kid, huh?” he asked Luce. “Even though he's not Norwegian? Well, you could have done worse, I suppose. He could have been a full-blooded Swede. This still calls for a drink.”

He began patting his plaid shirt and baggy khaki pants, obviously looking for the small bottle of Aquavit, the traditional Norwegian liquor, that he always carried. I remembered the first time Luce met Eddie when we'd been looking for Boreal Owls up in his neck of the Superior Forest—she thought he was Santa on an ATV—and he'd been enchanted by my wife's Norwegian heritage, not to mention her striking Nordic looks. Despite our decade-long friendship begun when we worked together one summer tracking moose for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Eddie never missed an opportunity to give me a hard time about my mother's Swedish background. I think he felt obligated to keep alive the traditional not-always-friendly rivalry between Norway and Sweden.

Even though he was as American as I was.

“Now where did that bottle go?” Eddie muttered, hunting methodically through his pockets. “Cripes, where did I leave it?”

“So what are you doing here?” I asked him again.

He gave up his search for the Aquavit and folded his arms over the top of his stomach.

“This and that,” he said. “The wife went with her book club on a Caribbean cruise with some author who writes romance novels. I said ‘No way I'm joining you for that one, honey,' and decided I'd visit some old friends down here while she's out on the water drinking little umbrella drinks and talking about unrequited love and unbridled passion.”

I gave Eddie an expectant stare.

“What?” he said, feigning innocence. “You like those books? Why, Bob, I never knew.”

Luce laughed.

“Cough it up, Eddie,” I said. “I know you. You're here working, aren't you? Robotics or surveillance?”

He pursed his lips and squinted up at me.

“All right,” he conceded, “there was a little bitty job I thought I'd check out here as a favor to an old friend.”

“I knew it,” I said. “Who's the friend?”

“What's the job?” Luce asked.

Eddie grinned. “You two practice that?” He pointed at me, then at Luce. “That one-two thing? Finishing each other's thoughts? How long have you been married?”

A shout rose behind me.

“There he is!”

I turned to see Rosalie, our grieving naturalist, walking towards us, accompanied by Chief Pacheco. Rosalie still clutched a handkerchief in her hand, holding it against her lips, and the chief looked grim.

I wondered what they wanted.

As it turned out, it wasn't me.

“Are you Eddie Edvarg?” the chief barked out, directing his attention to Eddie.

“Yes, sir,” Eddie responded. “How can I help you?”

Pacheco came to a stop in front of us.

“Excuse me, folks, but I need to speak with Mr. Edvarg.”

He turned to Eddie. “Are you the special contractor who's been testing the new surveillance sensors down at the river?” His words came out more as an accusation than a question.

Eddie paused a moment to look the chief over. I guessed he was as startled as I was at the chief's confrontational tone.

“I am.”

Pacheco gestured back towards the park deck. “Then you'll please come with me to answer a few questions,” he said.

It was a command, not a request.

Eddie squinted at the chief, sizing him up.

Compared to Eddie's barely five-foot frame, I'd say ‘up' was the operational word there, since Pacheco matched my own six-foot three-inch height. Besides which, the chief was a lot more muscled than my old friend, not to mention he was armed with a service revolver. Wisely, Eddie decided to go peacefully.

“Okay,” he told the officer, “Lead the way.”

Luce and I remained standing with Rosalie while the two men returned to the park deck.

“You know Eddie?” Rosalie asked me.

“He's an old friend,” I said.

“You know why he is here?”

I shook my head. “We were just asking him, but we didn't get the answer.”

Rosalie dabbed carefully at her eyes.

“He's working with the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol,” she informed us. “Something to do with the new sensors to discourage illegal border crossings.”

“That sounds like Eddie,” I commented. “He loves that kind of work.”

“He had talked with Birdy about it,” she said, her voice catching. “And Birdy told me we would have to keep an eye on Eddie, for everyone's sake.”

She looked back in the direction where the chief had taken Eddie.

“And now… now Birdy is dead,” she sniffed, her eyes brimming with tears.

“So the chief wants to question Eddie about Birdy?” Luce asked.

Rosalie nodded, her lips trembling. “Yes,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I overheard one of the deputies. He said he found a small empty bottle of some kind of drink near the body. Schooner and Gunnar overheard him, too. They told me it was a special liquor from Minnesota.”

“Oh, no,” Luce breathed beside me.

I felt my stomach roll in dread.

“The liquor,” I said, “was it called Aquavit?”

Rosalie looked at me suspiciously.

“Yes.” She nodded. “That was the name. How do you know that?”

“Just a wild guess,” I said, my stomach in complete free fall.

“Oh, no,” Luce repeated.

I took my wife's hand in mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

“On second thought, maybe we aren't done here, yet,” I told her, starting to lead the way back to the park deck. “I don't know what kind of mischief Eddie's gotten himself into, but I know for a fact he's not a killer.”

At least, I really hoped not.

Don't you just hate it when you're wrong?

 

 

Chapter Three

A
s it turned out, though, Luce and I were done with Estero Llano Grande State Park for the day. Just as we stepped back on the park deck, Eddie and the chief passed us, walking in the opposite direction towards the park's entrance and parking lot.

“I'm taking a ride with the chief here to the police station,” Eddie called back to us. “Don't worry. I'm just going to give him my statement. Then I'll ring your cellphone. See if we can have dinner.”

Luce and I watched the two men follow the brick path until they veered out of our sight. I hadn't spotted any cuffs on Eddie, so I figured he was going along willingly in order to fully cooperate with the chief's investigation. No need to antagonize the local law if you didn't have to, right?

Especially if it was your bottle of Minnesota Aquavit found near a fresh corpse.

In Texas.

Where you were working on a special project.

What a coincidence.

“The chief obviously knew that someone was working with the surveillance system,” Luce observed, still looking in the direction the men had gone. “But he clearly hadn't met Eddie yet.”

She turned to face me. “Although if Eddie is working with the Border Patrol, I suppose that might be a different agency than the chief's department. I hope there isn't bad blood between the two groups, but I got the impression the chief wasn't too keen on the project Eddie's involved with.”

I'd noticed the same thing, as I'm sure Eddie had, too, judging from the way he'd reacted to the chief's initial greeting.

“I expect it's probably a jurisdictional thing,” I surmised. “Government agencies and local police departments seem to be easily offended when they bump into each other on cases, even though everybody's on the same team.” I paused. “Or at least, they're supposed to be on the same team.”

Luce drew her sunglasses out of her backpack and slipped them on. “Let's go get lunch,” she said. “We're not going to be hearing from Eddie for a couple of hours, anyway.”

“Lunch it is, then,” I agreed. “Fat Daddy's Barbeque, here we come.”

Less than ten minutes later, I was signaling a left turn off the highway into the parking lot of Fat Daddy's. We'd passed the restaurant on our way to Estero Llano, and while the place had been empty at the earlier hour, there was now a line of people crowding into the door, and a parking lot filled with random rows of cars.

I'd gotten the tip to eat there from Birdchick, one of my birding colleagues back home in Minnesota, when I told her Luce and I were heading to McAllen, Texas, she said we had to try the barbeque at Fat Daddy's in Weslaco. Birdchick travels all over the world birding, so when she recommends an eating spot, you can be sure it's good. Of course, the fact that Fat Daddy's was also conveniently located so close to the entrance to Estero Llano made it an easy choice for a meal for anyone visiting the park.

I just hadn't expected that everyone from the park, and the surrounding county, it seemed, would want to be eating there at the same time as us.

“What do you think?” I asked Luce as I tried to find a parking spot amid the jumble of cars. “Shall we go somewhere else less crowded?”

“Absolutely not,” she replied. “Most of the car license plates are from here, which means the locals love it. That's the kind of restaurant we want. And I've had this craving for barbeque ever since we left Minnesota,” she added, pointing at a car that was backing out of the lot in a cloud of dust. “There's our spot.”

I made a tight turn into the space, and after we got out of the car, we waited for another two cars to pass by before we could head to the entrance to Fat Daddy's.

“It's a fifteen-minute wait,” the young hostess told me when I angled my way through the waiting crowd to her noisy station inside the old clapboard building. The interior walls were paneled in wood and covered with memorabilia: autographed photos, longhorn skulls, framed local news articles, flags, and sports jerseys. Every table was occupied, and a team of waitresses scurried around the room, delivering plates of pulled pork sandwiches and steaming barbequed chicken.

“I think this might be Texas barbeque heaven,” Luce said when I rejoined her at the end of the line of customers that wound out the front door. “It sure smells like it is.”

I had to agree. I would have said something to that effect, but my mouth was too busy salivating in anticipation. I could almost taste the tangy sauced beef and pork ribs thanks to the thick aromas that had filled the dining room inside.

Four soldiers in fatigues fell in line behind us. I guessed they were in their early twenties, and I noticed they all had an American flag patch on their upper right arms.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “Thanks for your service.”

The soldier nearest me smiled. “You're welcome,” he replied.

“Is there a military base near here?” Luce asked.

“Army National Guard, ma'am,” said another of the soldiers. “We've got an armory here in the city of Weslaco.”

I noticed that his name tape read
Pacheco
.

“We just met a chief named Pacheco out at Estero Llano,” I commented. “No possibility you're related, I suppose?”

The young Guardsman laughed. “As a matter of fact, he's my cousin. Two or three times removed—I can never remember which it is, since we've got so many cousins in the Valley. He was sort of my hero growing up,” he explained, “so I followed him into the Guard when I was old enough.”

His companions made clucking sounds, and one of them piped up, “Poor little boy. You were the
pollo chiquito
in the henhouse.”

Pacheco pretended to punch his friend. “Hey, I grew up to be the
gallo
! Not my fault my parents had six daughters and only one son.”

The men all laughed.

The young Guardsman resumed his conversation with me and Luce.

“But my cousin, the chief, went into local law enforcement when his eight years were up,” he went on. “He said he wanted to clean up this border zone, but I think he couldn't bring himself to leave all the relatives. A lot of us here have family on both sides of the border.”

He pointed at his own uniformed chest. “As for me, I'm heading to California when I'm done, and I'm not looking back.”

One of his comrades gave him a friendly shove on the shoulder. “Yeah, right. And where will that leave your Pearlita, the Citrus Queen? Home all alone in Mission?”

Mission was one of the cities we'd visited in the last few days. Surrounded by citrus groves, it was the local capital of Texas fruit-growers, and the site of the annual Citrus Festival, which happened to be slated during our week of vacation. In honor of the celebration, Luce and I had both ordered our first slices of grapefruit pie for dessert the night before.

The other two soldiers laughed while Pacheco grinned.

“I'll keep your Pearlita company!” the guardsman standing next to me eagerly offered.

“You wish!” Pacheco shot back, joining in the laughter.

“Pacheco's girlfriend is this year's Citrus Queen,” one of the quartet explained. “She'll be in the festival parade on Saturday, riding the float for the Valley's citrus growers. She'll be the one holding the big grapefruits,” he added, holding his hands at chest level and winking suggestively at his comrades.

“Hey!” Pacheco objected indignantly, even as his buddies burst into another round of laughter. “Show some respect!”

“White, party of two?”

I turned to see our hostess waiting for us with two menus.

“Was that fifteen minutes?” I asked Luce as we followed the hostess to our table in the covered porch dining area of Fat Daddy's. We took our seats at a small table covered with a cheerful red-and-white-checkered plastic cloth. A roll of paper towels sat on its end in the middle of the plastic.

“This is serious barbeque,” Luce said, then dove into studying the menu.

I glanced around the porch. A big American flag hung on one end of the room, and I noted that we were one of only two tables not occupied by soldiers in fatigues. Fat Daddy's was clearly the lunching establishment of choice for the local Guardsmen, and as I watched a nimble young waitress set down a loaded tray of heaping portions of barbequed chicken and pork, I could understand why. Not only did the food smell terrific, but there was plenty of it, and after a morning of birding gone bad, I was more than ready to turn my attention to some good, old-fashioned comfort food.

Our waitress came over to the table, and Luce and I both ordered the pulled pork sandwich with a side of coleslaw and potato salad. As we sipped on our iced teas, I wondered how Eddie's conversation with the chief was going. I didn't want to even speculate how his trademark bottle of Aquavit might have ended up near a dead man, but unless my old friend had a rock-solid alibi for his morning, I doubted that the chief was going to write off Eddie as a prime suspect in the murder of Birdy Johnson. Just to be sure I hadn't missed any calls from Eddie amid the surrounding din of happy diners, I took out my cell phone to check.

Nope.

No calls.

Was that a good or bad thing?

“Bobby, have you ever heard anything about a Space X program?”

Luce's question prompted me to put my phone away and turn my attention in her direction. She was pointing at a framed news article that hung on the wall behind our table. The headline was about the Citrus Festival Parade's Grand Marshals from the year before, and below it was a photograph of two men waving from the platform of a parade float that looked like it was a rocket ship made of oranges.

Something about one of the men in the picture made me think I'd seen his face before. I peered at the grainy photo, trying to place the man.

“It's Buzz Davis,” Luce said, doing her usual trick of reading my mind. “And the caption reads ‘Buzz Davis and Birdy Johnson are giving Rio Grande Valley residents something besides citrus to celebrate this year. The two men will be welcoming the first load of passengers on the historic first flight that will change the Valley forever. More about Space X on page 5.'”

She waited for me to look away from the newspaper clipping and back at her.

“That's Birdy Johnson with Buzz,” she said. “That's the man we found dead in the park.”

I glanced back at the framed newsprint. “Not that I want to rain on their parade, but for some reason, I don't think that rockets made from oranges are going to make it as the next generation of space vehicles.”

Luce reached across the table and smacked me on the shoulder.

“Ow!”

“I'm trying to be serious here,” she reprimanded me.

“So am I!” I protested. “I wouldn't buy stock in some company making rockets out of oranges.”

I put up my hands to ward off another smack from my wife.

“No, I don't know anything about a Space X, to answer your question,” I said. “And whoever mounted this clipping didn't considerately include page 5, so I guess we're out of luck.”

At that moment, our waitress returned with our baskets of lunch and laid them in front of us.

“Thank you,” I told the young woman. She threw me a quick smile and hustled away to another table. I looked at Luce across the table from me. “We are not, however, out of food. Dig in, my dear.”

“Hey, Minnesota!”

I turned to look in the direction of the voice that rose above the din of the porch and recognized our three magpies from the park—Schooner, Gunnar, and Paddy Mac. I lifted a hand in a brief wave, and by the time I got my fingers back on my pulled pork sandwich, the men had crossed the room and were standing next to our table.

“We won't keep you from your lunch,” Schooner said. “You obviously know the right birders if you found this place already—the barbeque's to die for.”

He abruptly stopped talking and scrubbed his hand over his face.

“Sorry,” he added. “Given the circumstances, that was a pretty thoughtless comment.”

Paddy Mac punched Schooner in the arm. “Thoughtless? More like oblivious. Where is your sense of decorum, man?”

“We want to recruit you,” Gunnar said, ignoring his companions' banter. “If you folks are going to be here a few more days, we are in desperate need of some help, and us birders have got to flock together, right?”

“What kind of help?” Luce asked, pausing between bites of her sandwich.

“Night work,” Paddy Mac said. He looked both ways as if checking to see who might be within earshot, then leaned toward me and loudly whispered, “We've got a deadline.”

This time, it was Schooner punching Paddy Mac in the shoulder. “Now who's being oblivious?”

“Sorry,” Paddy Mac smiled sheepishly. “Not thinking.”

“Look,” Gunnar said. “You help us out, and we'll help you. We've got some ideas about how to get your friend Eddie cleared with the chief.”

I looked at each of the men in turn.

“What do we have to do?”

Paddy Mac leaned in to whisper in my ear.

“We're members of the MOB, and we've got a job for you, ­Minnesota.”