Parrot Blues

  Parrot Blues

  A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #6

  Judith Van Gieson

  For Dora

  I’m very grateful to the following for their help with my research: Bobbie Holaday; Terry Baker; Jeff Hobbs; Chip Owen; Janice Steinberg; Dr. Steven G. Tolber; Shirley and Jim Tanzola; Mona and Jim Tanzola; Irene Pepperberg and Alex; Gwen Campbell, Susan Stacey and Patti Ferris of the Avian Propagation Center at the San Diego Zoo; Warren Illig at the Phoenix Zoo; and Noel Snyder.

  Although many of the places depicted in this novel clearly exist, none of its characters represents or is based on any person, living or dead, and all the incidents described are imaginary.

  ******

  PARROT BLUES

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1995 Judith Van Gieson.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole

  or in part, by other means, without permission.

  First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-464-5

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9493-6

  Cover photo © Roberto A. Sanchez/iStock.com

  Parrot Blues

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Free Preview of HOTSHOTS: A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #7

  MORE MYSTERIES BY JUDITH VAN GIESON

  1

  IT BEGAN WITH the sound of high-heeled shoes. It ended with the sound of a hand shuffling money, but that was many miles away. The heels clipped the sidewalk to a staccato beat. They were stilettos, maybe, or spikes, heels that left their impression on the pavement. A key turned in a lock, a dead bolt snapped from its chamber, a door swung open. There was a gasp and then a woman’s angry voice asked, “What are you doing in here?”

  “What do you think?” a man answered. “You’re coming with…” He left the sentence unfinished, slurring his words from laziness, possibly, or drink.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “Stop it, you’re hurting me.” A slap was followed by a thud, then the sound of wings beating furiously. Someone or something screeched.

  “You can’t take Perigee. Terrance will be livid.”

  “Fuck Terrance. Ouch. Goddamn it. He bit me.” The laziness left the man’s voice once he got bit.

  “What did you expect?” the woman asked.

  There was another, lighter thud. More wings began to beat, the screeching escalated; the cry of one annoyed individual became the cacophony of a pissed-off flock. It was a whirlwind of sound, but words floated to the top like feathers riding the airwaves. “Hello-o?” queried the voice of a tentative woman. “Call my lawyer,” demanded a deep-throated man. “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too,” cackled the wicked witch of the West. “Start me talkin’, babe, tell you everythin’ I know,” growled a whiskey-soddened blues singer. “Pretty boy, pretty boy,” a new voice croaked. The next word, “malinche,” was a vindictive hiss.

  “Move it,” said the man.

  “I’m coming,” answered the woman. “Stop shoving me.”

  The cacophony stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The door slammed shut. Boot heels scuffed the pavement, mingling with the pointissimo of the high-heeled shoes, but the snap had gone out of that step. The cassette player whirred. I struck a match, lit a cigarette, blew out the match. My client, Terrance Lewellen, who was sitting on the other side of my desk, reached over and clicked off the cassette player. It was a sleek, black, expensive model that belonged to him. He took the cassette out and placed it on my desk.

  “I made you a copy,” he said.

  “That sounded like it was taking place in the next room.”

  “I use a Marantz extended-play recorder; it’s the best in the field.”

  What field was that? Electronic surveillance? Bugging? Whatever you call it, it’s illegal without the consent of the people involved.

  “Actually,” my client continued, “the incident took place at the Psittacine Research Facility my wife runs at UNM.”

  “Your wife wears high-heeled shoes to work?”

  “My wife wears high-heeled shoes everywhere; her arches shrunk, so she can’t wear anything but. Her name is Deborah Dumaine. She works with Amazon parrots and has taught them to do things no one ever believed parrots were capable of. If you ask them how many blue blocks are on a tray, they’ll tell you—when they feel like it. They’re smart. They’re also first-class mimics. You have to watch what you say around an Amazon; you’re likely to hear it repeated … over and over and over again.

  “Ha. Ha.” Terrance Lewellen laughed a big man’s double-barreled laugh. He wasn’t a big man exactly—he was about five feet five inches tall, a few inches shorter than me, and I never wear high-heeled shoes. But he took up a lot of cubic space. His shoulders were broad, his belly big enough to hide his belt buckle. His hands had the thick, doughy shape of a bear claw pastry. His eyes were deep set and grayish green. They could twinkle when he laughed, glitter when he got mad, turn as opaque as one-way glass when he sat back and waited for a reaction. His shirt was undone a couple of buttons, revealing gray chest hair that didn’t match his brown piece. It was a bad piece, but nobody ever sees a good one. It was the same hair that middle-aged actors and newscasters wear, not big hair, TV hair. If Terrance had gone natural, he might have looked distinguished. The piece made him look like a late-night infomercial salesman, which could have been exactly the effect he intended. Terrance was a successful businessman, a seasoned and wary corporate raider. He never revealed his hand if he didn’t have to, and he didn’t leave much to chance. He took out a cigar and lit up. I hate the smell of cigar smoke, but my own cigarette butt was burning in the ashtray, which limited my right to complain.

  “Were those the Amazons screeching?” I asked.

  “Yes. Deborah’s grad students have let them get out of control. They’re spoiled rotten.”

  “How many were talking?”

  “It’s hard to tell. One Amazon can do many voices, and many Amazons can do one voice. They sound just like people, they sound like dogs, they can sound like the dishwasher if they want to. That last parrot voice on the tape was Perigee, my male indigo macaw. The macaws are bigger and better looking, but they don’t have the vocabulary of an Amazon and they’re more likely to talk in their own voice than to imitate.”

  “That was the one that said ‘malinche’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “Malinche was the Indian girl who became Cortes’s mistress and interpreter in the new world. There are those who believe she betrayed her people, and malinche means traitor to them. She’s still a figure in pueblo Indian ceremonials.”

  “How ’bout that?” Terrance Lewellen leaned back, stretched his legs and exposed a pair of scaly cowboy boots, expensive but ugly. Ostrich hide? I wondered. Snake? “The Amazons belong to Deborah’s lab; the indigo macaws belong to me,” he continued. “When I got to the lab, Perigee was gone. He’s one tough hombre and he put up a hell of a fight. Feathers were all over the floor.”

  There was a sleek leather briefcase with a combination lock on Terrance’s lap. He keyed in the combination and snapped the briefcase open, giving me a glimpse of h
is cellular phone. He took out a long, thin feather and handed it to me. I thought indigo was the color of jeans after they’ve been washed a few times, but the feather was a turquoise that was as deep and iridescent as the Sea of Cortez.

  “It’s a tail feather. Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Terrance.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Keep it.”

  “Thanks.” I stood the indigo plume in an empty glass on my desk and it arced gracefully over the side, a hit of beauty whenever I needed a break from my sun-baked Albuquerque lawyer’s life.

  “The Latin name of the indigos is Anodorhynchus leari,” Terrance said. “They are extremely rare in captivity, damn near extinct in the wild and very, very valuable.”

  Some people are collectors by nature, some are dispersers. My own personal motto is to never own anything you can’t afford to lose; it’s too much trouble. “Where did the indigos come from?” I asked Terrance.

  “The Raso in Brazil.” His eyes sparked. “I cannot believe that Deborah allowed Perigee to be taken.” He smashed the fist of one large hand into the palm of the other.

  “It didn’t sound like she had a choice.”

  “She had the choice of not associating with Wes Brown, a worthless human being if ever there was one.”

  “The voice on the tape?”

  “That’s him. Those were his boot heels, too. He grew up in Southern California, but he thinks he’s a cowboy.”

  Terrance, I knew, had grown up in West Texas, which gave him a license to wear boots. “Macaws have the bite of a snapping turtle,” he continued. “I hope Perigee got a chunk out of Wes Brown’s hide.”

  “What is Deborah’s connection to him?” It wasn’t quite the question I wanted to ask, but timing is of the essence in law and interrogation, and the time wasn’t ripe for my question yet.

  “He’s a smuggler. He contacted us on occasion and tried to sell us smuggled parrots. We refused. Deborah hated his guts, but she encouraged him. She had a notion that she would learn something useful about his smuggling operation.”

  “Did she?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How did you get the indigos?” Parrots that were very rare and very valuable were also likely to be very illegal, one explanation for why Terrance had come to me with his story and not the police or his corporate law firm.

  “I used to be in oil exploration and was doing some exploratory drilling for Petrobras in the Raso in the late sixties and early seventies. I like to bring something back from all the places I drill. On my first trip there, one of the natives offered me the indigos, and I accepted. They were a hand-raised pair, too tame to survive in the wild. That was before Brazil signed an export ban, and it wasn’t illegal to take indigos or any other parrots out of the country. Things have changed.”

  Considering the exchange rate between the third-world cruzeiro and the oil-world dollar, and the escalating pace of parrot extinction, the macaws had probably turned out to be a better investment than the oil.

  “Deborah and I met in the Raso,” Terrance said. “She’s a linguist. She was studying the language of the indigenous people before they become extinct, too. While she was down there, she got interested in parrots. She tried teaching the macaws to speak, but that didn’t work, so she turned to Amazons. Now that she’s famous for her work, she’s become the adrenaline queen. She never sleeps. She travels all the time. The birds don’t like it.” He peered into an ornate scroll of silver and turquoise on his wrist, found the time, snapped open his briefcase and brought out a small bottle with a long neck. He removed the plastic cap, squirted once into each nostril and sniffed. “Goddamn allergies,” he said.

  It was comparable to pulling out dental tape and flossing in public, satisfying to the person doing it, repulsive to anyone else. “Is that really necessary?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t because Terrance Lewellen was watching me with cat-at-the-mouse-hole eyes, waiting for a reaction. He exuded a vibe having to do with power, success or plain old testosterone that made him hard to ignore. He was the kind of short man who usually has a tall, good-looking woman on his arm (with the spike heels Deborah wore, she was bound to be taller), and the reason wasn’t entirely money. He was coarse, but he was smart. He appreciated beauty, and beauty likes to be appreciated. I picked up the indigo feather and ran my fingers down the barbs, thinking that if Terrance Lewellen were a bird he’d be a bantam cock. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You have a pair of indigo macaws?”

  Terrance stuck the cap on and put the bottle back in his briefcase. “Yes.”

  “But Wes Brown only took one?”

  “Right.”

  “Were they both in the lab?”

  “Yes. When I developed a parrot allergy I had to move the indigos out of the house and into the lab. Wes Brown knows parrots. He knows macaws mate for life and that Colloquy will be one sad parrot without Perigee. She’s already moping and pulling her feathers out. Wes is going to use that knowledge to extort money from me. I got this in the mail today.”

  He opened his briefcase again, took out a stamped envelope and handed it to me. Inside was the Relationships section of the Sunday Journal. In the Male to Female Relationships column, between “no Democrats or psychos. Harley-Davidson a plus” and “Love the Lord,” he’d marked this: “Lonely indigo desperately needs mate. #12441.”

  I looked at the postmark on the envelope. Tuesday. “When did you record the abduction?”

  “Monday evening.”

  Today was Wednesday, the message had appeared in Sunday’s paper. “That’s pretty good timing,” I said. “The ad appeared the day before the crime; it was mailed to you the day after.”

  “Time is of the essence in crime,” Terrance said, watching me and appropriating one of those phrases that seem to float around a lawyer’s office. Maybe he pulled it out of the air or maybe he read my mind, because it’s what I was thinking but hadn’t said. Terrance made a point of saying the things other people wouldn’t. “I got the ad today,” he continued. “If the abduction hadn’t worked, I never would have seen it and who else would have known what it meant? I don’t read those ads. Do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “To answer, you call 1-900-622-9408 and listen to the person’s recorded message. Go ahead. Call it; tell me what you think.”

  I dialed the number and got a generic female operator’s voice asking me to push the number one if I had a Touch-Tone phone. I did as I was told, pushed all the required numbers and eventually heard, “I’m so lonely without my mate. Bring me home soon, please” in a voice of quivering emotion and ambiguous sexuality. It could have been a husky-voiced woman’s or a high-pitched man’s. It could have been an Amazon parrot or an indigo macaw. It wasn’t Wes Brown’s voice, although it did stretch out the o’s in “so” and “lonely.”

  “Was that Perigee?” I asked.

  “No. It was Wes Brown.”

  “Except for the drawl, it doesn’t sound like him.”

  “He used the Scrunch, a digital voice changer. It has eight positions, ranging from deep male to high female. It can make a man sound like a woman, a woman sound like a man and a human being sound like a parrot.” In the world of high-tech gamesmanship, Terrance Lewellen knew all the equipment.

  “He hasn’t asked for money yet.”

  “He will.”

  “If he does, he’s going to cross the line between abduction and kidnapping.” Neither was a crime I’d likely ever see again in my world of real estate and divorce. I didn’t have the typical corporate attorney’s client list of businessmen, crooks and businessmen/crooks. This case was getting more interesting by the minute. The inclusion of an endangered species made it almost irresistible. Still, I gave Terrance Lewellen a cautious lawyer’s advice even though caution has never been my style and wouldn’t turn out to be his either. “After twenty-four hours the FBI can step in. You ought to take this to them.”

  “The Fan Belt Inspectors, the Fucking Big Idiots?” Terrance’s
gray-green eyes had a feral yellow gleam near the center. He flicked an ash in my ashtray. “They’ll screw it up.”

  “They can find out who placed the ad a lot more effectively than you or I.”

  “I know who placed it—Wes Brown—and I know how to handle him.” If he had other reasons for not wanting to involve law enforcement, he didn’t reveal them.

  “Who does your corporate business?” I asked.

  “Buddy Baxter at Baxter, Johnson.”

  “Why didn’t you go to him with this?”

  “I heard you had experience with endangered species. Is that right?”

  “Right.”

  “Baxter doesn’t know an endangered species from a sparrow. I want Perigee back. Wes Brown knows what he’s worth on the black market. I’ll pay him that much, but not a penny more.”

  “And your wife?” I asked. “How much are you willing to pay for her?”

  “Zip, nada,” he said. “Not one skinny dime. Deborah and I are getting divorced. She moved out of the house, and she’s not my responsibility anymore. Brown is going to be rip shit when he finds that out.”

  “Why were you taping Deborah anyway? You weren’t trying to catch her in an affair, were you?”

  “Deborah? Naah. She’s going through the change. She hasn’t been interested in sex for years. All she cares about are parrots.”

  “Women don’t just dry up and sit on the shelf once they hit the … change … you know.”

  “Oh, yeah, now they’ve got estrogen, right? Well, Deborah wouldn’t take it; she said it wasn’t natural. After the oil business cratered, I moved into corporate takeovers and venture capital. There’s a little company in Texas that I’m backing. You heard about the nicotine patch?” He looked at the cigarette I was still smoking. “Maybe not. Well, this company makes a testosterone patch. Think what that’s going to do for aging baby boomers. It’s a great place to put your money. The investment for the nineties.”

  I didn’t have any money, and if I did I wouldn’t be putting it into testosterone. If you ask me, what the world needs is not more testosterone, but better distribution of what’s already out there. That thought led to my next question, the one I’d been wanting to ask, being of a suspicious mind when it comes to male/female relationships. “You’re sure Deborah wasn’t having an affair with Wes Brown?” There was a certain intensity in their exchange that could have been the result of sexual repulsion or its flip side—attraction.