Improbable Cause (4 page)

“Buddy’s a bad boy, Buddy’s a bad boy,” the parrot agreed cheerfully, nodding his head up and down.

A second woman, almost a carbon copy of the first, appeared at the open end of the trailer. Both women wore their hair cut short, with a thin fringe of straight bangs across the forehead—Mamie Eisenhower bangs in my book. Both wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and stood ramrod straight.

“What’s going on, Rachel?” the second one asked briskly, smoothing her gray skirt and stepping to the ground in one easy movement. She was a spry old dame wearing what my mother always called sensible shoes.

“Oh, nothing,” Rachel replied. “Buddy’s up to his old tricks again. He scared these two nice men half out of their wits, but there’s no harm done.”

The second woman shook her head and clicked her tongue. “That bird never did have a lick of sense,” she said.

Rachel turned back to me. “You’ll have to forgive him. Buddy spent his formative years sitting in a living room with his cage next to a television set. He grew up on ”Police Story‘ and “Starsky and Hutch.” “

Big Al, getting a grip on himself, made a stab at polite conversation. “How old is he?” he asked.

“Watch it, buster,” warned the bird. “Don’t come any closer.” Al stopped dead in his tracks.

One look at Al’s face as he backed away from that parrot, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing. For two cents I think he would cheerfully have wrung that parrot’s cocky neck.

“Buddy!” Rachel exclaimed, handing the bird over to the other woman, who had come to stand beside her. The three of them made quite a picture, the twin old ladies with the wise-ass bird between them. I surmised the women must be sisters.

“Put him in the car, would you please, Daisy?” Rachel asked.

Without a word, Daisy took the parrot and placed him in the back seat of an old two-toned brown and beige Buick Electra that was hooked to the trailer. As soon as the door slammed shut behind him, Buddy hopped up to the back window and sat there, hunched over, glaring out at us.

I managed, with some difficulty, to stifle my laughter, but I was having a hell of a time thinking of anything useful to say. That didn’t matter much since Rachel was more than capable of keeping the conversation afloat single-handedly.

“Buddy’s sixteen now,” she continued. “Parrots can live as long as forty or fifty years. Jake, the man who owned him first, was a neighbor of ours. He was in a wheelchair, housebound you know. For years it was just the two of them. All they did was eat and watch television together. Finally, Jake’s kids had to put him in a nursing home, and Buddy couldn’t go along. That’s when Daisy and I inherited him. He was so fat the first thing we had to do was put him on a diet.”

I was still standing there holding out my ID, waiting for her to look at it. I felt a little silly. Eventually Rachel stopped for breath long enough to give my ID a cursory glance. I took the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

“I’m Detective Beaumont, and this is my partner, Allen Lindstrom. We’re with the Seattle Police Department. We’re trying to locate either Dorothy or LeAnn Nielsen.”

The second woman, the one named Daisy, returned from the car. She stopped briefly beside her sister. “They’re not here,” Daisy answered curtly in response to my question. “Neither one of them.”

Abruptly, Daisy turned toward the stack of boxes beside the trailer. Something seemed to have offended her, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I watched her tackle the stack of boxes. She wasn’t a particularly stout woman, but she was evidently quite strong. With a groan, she hefted a trunk-sized box from the swaying stack in the alley and dropped it with a thump onto the floor of the trailer. The U-Haul bounced on its springs.

Daisy turned back to her sister. “Come on, Rachel. Let’s get busy. We haven’t got all day. I have to be at the zoo before long.”

“Do you have any idea where either one of those people could be found?” I insisted, directing my question at Rachel now, trying to steer the conversation back to the dead man’s wife and mother. “It’s important that we reach one or the other of them this afternoon at the latest.”

Daisy stopped where she was and stood with both hands on her hips. “What do you want ”em for?“ she demanded.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Well, stick it out your ear then,” Daisy said sharply. She turned away and grabbed another box.

Daisy may have been her name, but a sweet little wild flower she wasn’t.

Rachel looked shocked. “You’re almost as bad as Buddy, Daisy,” she scolded. “There’s no need to be rude.”

Her comment made me wonder which of them was older. It sounded like someone older and wiser chastising someone much younger. I would have thought those roles and distinctions would disappear with age, and these two were obviously well into retirement. But what would I know about that? I grew up as an only child.

Rachel turned back to me.

“Dotty’s in the hospital,” she said.

“Dotty?” I asked.

“Dotty. Dorothy, our sister—the one you asked about. She’s recovering from an accident, Mr. Beaumar,” Rachel explained.

I didn’t attempt to correct her pronunciation of my name. There was no percentage in it. “Could you tell us which hospital?” I asked. “It’s urgent that we be in touch with her.”

“Why? Is something wrong?”

“We really must speak directly to her.”

Rachel shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know. She’s supposed to be released tomorrow, but there’s no one here to take care of her. I don’t know where that no-good, worthless son of hers is. We haven’t been able to reach him in days. We’re bringing her home with us. We just came by to pick up some of her things.”

From that comment I gleaned at least one important scrap of information—there was no love lost between this zany pair of aunties with their outspoken bird and their precise, well-ordered, and recently deceased nephew. I’m sure he would have been shocked at the haphazard manner with which his mother’s prized possessions, including the four-poster canopy bed, were being crammed into the trailer. These ladies may have been quick movers, but careful they weren’t.

“Ma’am, this happens to be police business,” I argued gently. “Of course we wouldn’t want to trouble your sister if she’s too ill to see us. Instead, maybe you could tell us how to contact LeAnn Nielsen, then. It’s about your nephew, Dr. Frederick Nielsen.”

Rachel turned back to her sister, just as Daisy heaved another loaded box into the trailer. “What do you think, Daze?” she asked. “Should we tell him or not?”

Daisy shrugged. “I already told him what I think. Nothing he’s said has changed my mind one whit.” Daisy went right on loading boxes with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, Rachel was taking her sister’s opposition into consideration. She put one finger to her lips as if lost in thought. “I just don’t know what to say. I don’t think we should let you bother Dotty, not in her condition. This has been terribly hard on her, you know.”

I had almost decided to take the bull by the horns and tell them. Those two stubborn old bats weren’t going to give us an inch unless we gave them a damn good reason to do so. Evidently, Big Al had reached the same conclusion a little sooner than I did. He beat me to the punch.

“Look,” he said patiently. “Like Detective Beaumont told you, we’re from the Seattle P.D. With homicide. There’s been a murder.”

Rachel’s jaw dropped. Daisy swung away from the stack of boxes, her sharp eyes riveted on Big Al’s face.

“A

what?“ she demanded.

“A murder,” he repeated. “We’ve tentatively identified the victim as your nephew. Our first responsibility is to notify his next of kin. Out of common courtesy, we try to do that in person. If you could put us in touch with either your sister or your nephew’s wife, LeAnn, it would be a big help.”

“My land!” Rachel exclaimed. “Daisy, did you hear that?”

“I heard,” Daisy answered grimly.

Behind us a raucous horn sounded as a huge blue garbage truck rumbled into the alley behind our unmarked patrol car. The driver of the truck leaned out the window and shook his fist at our offending vehicles. “Hey, you guys. You gotta clear outa my way. I got work to do.”

Which is how Big Al Lindstrom and J. P. Beaumont, detectives with Seattle“s homicide squad, ended up helping two white-haired little old ladies load the last of Dorothy Nielsen’s personal possessions into a U-Haul trailer.

When it was all loaded, with the rocking chair settled in the last bit of open space, the end result looked none too stable to me, but Rachel assured us that they weren’t going far. She stood to one side while Daisy pulled the trailer’s doors shut, bolted them, and headed for the driver’s side of the Buick.

Rachel paused uncertainly with us as the old crate’s engine coughed and sputtered when Daisy turned the key and gunned the engine.

“Why don’t you follow us?” Rachel offered tentatively. “We’ll try to decide what to do on our way to the house. Maybe you two could join us for a bite of lunch. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

I walked her to the car and held open the door while she slid onto lumpy, clear plastic seat covers that had stiffened and yellowed with age to an opaque beige.

“Why, thank you,” she said graciously.

With a squawk, Buddy flapped his way from the back window to the front seat. There he settled comfortably on Rachel’s shoulder.

“Freeze, sucker!” he ordered again, glaring sideways up at me, waiting for a reaction. This time neither Al nor I gave him the satisfaction.

I closed the door and the Buick lurched away, belching a cloud of thick exhaust smoke.

The driver of the garbage truck laid on his horn again. We were still in his way. Hurrying into our car, we started after them. By then, the U-Haul was already around the corner and nearly out of sight.

“We’re not really going to have lunch with those two old battle-axes, are we?” Big Al asked plaintively.

“We’re going to do whatever it takes to worm some information out of them, including having lunch,” I told him.

Al shook his head dolefully. “If that means being in the same room with that son of a bitch of a bird, we ought to ask for hazardous duty pay.”

I laughed. “I’ve heard of guard dogs before,” I told him. “But this is the first time I ever met an attack parrot.”

That’s one nice thing about this job. I learn something new every day.

I suppose I had seen the Edinburgh Arms on occasion before in the course of my travels around Seattle, but it had never registered. The complex was situated in the 4800 block of Fremont Avenue, but its brick row house construction made it look like it had been plucked straight out of Merrie Old England. Scotland, actually, as Rachel was happy to explain to us during lunch.

Built as apartments but now converted to cozy condos, the Edinburgh Arms is a clone of another building, a project built in Edinburgh in the late 1920s. The Seattle contractor used the exact same specifications and plans. Now, some sixty years later, the weathered red brick, the squat chimneys to each unit’s fireplace, and the formal English garden courtyard gave the place a quaint, settled charm. Even the fat-cheeked, concrete cherub, peeing in the red brick fountain, seemed totally at home.

Al pulled up and stopped behind the Buick and the U-Haul, which were parked near an open doorway. The end gates were still closed and locked, however. Rachel and Daisy must have decided to eat lunch first and unload later.

“I shoulda figured those two dippy broads would live in a place like this,” Al grumbled, looking around.

“Why? What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“It looks just like ”em,“ he answered.

Rachel came to the door to let us in. A newly built plywood wheelchair ramp covered the two short steps leading up to the doorway.

“Daisy’s upstairs changing,” Rachel explained. “Come on in and have a seat. Lunch will be ready in a moment.”

The living room had an old-fashioned high ceiling with an amber-colored light fixture hanging from a brass chain in the middle of the room. It could have been a spacious, roomy place, but the furniture had been shoved together to make room for a hospital bed that had been set up in the far corner next to the fireplace. It was unmade. A stack of sickroom rental supply linens sat on a piece of plain brown paper on top of the bare mattress ticking.

Rachel saw me look at it. “They just delivered the bed this morning,” she explained. “We’re not quite organized yet. We had a hard time fitting it in here, but of course, Dotty would never be able to manage the stairs to get up and down to a bedroom.”

“What seems to be the matter with your sister?” I asked.

Rachel stopped in the doorway and looked at me before she answered. Reticence and hesitation weren’t her style.

“She broke her hip,” she said finally, decisively, then turned on her heel and disappeared through the dining room into the kitchen. Moments later we heard the banging of pots and pans as Rachel bustled about making lunch.

Buddy, confined to a large cage in the corner of the dining room, had been quiet when we first entered the house. Now, with Rachel out of the room, he piped up again. “What’s your name?” he asked, not once but several times.

We ignored him. There’s something undignified about being trapped into a conversation with a parrot.

The living room was light and airy, but filled with the motley collection of cheap knickknacks and trinkets—“tack” my mother would have called it—that had been gathered over two separate lifetimes and then somehow blended together.

In the corner next to the front door sat a . papier-mache elephant’s foot jammed full of umbrellas. Above it, an antique wood and brass hat rack held two yellow rain slickers with matching hats, two bright red motorcycle helmets, and two identical khaki-colored pith helmets. The two sets of helmets puzzled me. Neither Daisy nor Rachel looked much like the motorcycle or jungle safari type.

I wandered over to the fireplace to examine the marble mantel. On it sat a miniature zoo, complete with tiny, inch-to inch-and-a-half-tall animals, cheaply but recognizably made. There must have been a hundred of them in all. For a fastidious housekeeper, it would have created a dusting problem of mammoth proportions. From the layer of dust visible on each of the animals, however, fastidious housekeeping didn’t seem to be part of Rachel and Daisy’s program.