Parrot Blues (6 page)

The upper part of Sara's outfit was a short white jacket that copied the navy blue ones the U.S. cavalry wore. The Apaches called them blue coats, but the Apaches who put them on to track down their own were considered turncoats. Indian women took the jackets from the bodies of dead soldiers, hung fringe from the epaulets and sewed bone hairpipes slanted like ribs across the chest. The decoration of the uniforms had a significance for the Indian women, but what it meant to Sara I couldn't say. I'm one of those who believes it's unwise to purchase or wear what you don't understand. In my experience Indians don't reveal themselves readily to non-Indians, and why should they? Dressing like one isn't going to make you one. When it comes to clothes, I follow the Albuquerque KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.

With the jacket Sara wore a choker made of beads and feathers, a white broomstick-pleated skirt and tan cowboy boots. She was tall and willowy enough to carry the costume off, but her eyes were bluebonnets in the wind. They danced away from contact, and the fine lines beside her mouth were as jittery as an aspen.

“How long have you been in Santa Fe?” I asked to prove to myself that I'd been right.

“Three years,” she replied. Three years is the turning point there. Either you decide it's not working and get out of town, or you stay forever. “I came out here to visit Terry and Deborah, and I stayed.” She reached over to pat Terrance's bear claw hand. “Deborah's my sister,” she said.

“Your
sister
?” And I'd been assuming she'd come here as an appendage to Terrance. I'd been on target about the place, but way wide of the connection.

“Her half-sister,” Terrance corrected, sliding his hand out from under Sara's and reaching for his briefcase and a cigar.

“We have the same father. Deborah got his brains.”

Was she implying that she got his looks? The trouble with looks is that they eventually go out the window. Brains are more dependable. I would have said that Deborah got some looks too, but she hadn't made a career out of them. Deborah had to be ten years older than Sara, which could have made her the child of the father's first marriage, and Sara the child of the second, or the third or…

“I'm
so
worried about Deborah.” Sara picked at her fringe. “She's been getting so much attention
since
that
Time
article came out. Any crazy could have seen that and abducted her.”

“It wasn't
any
crazy. It was Wes Brown crazy,” Terrance said.

I thought I'd detected a flicker of jealousy under the pyre of sisterly admiration, and I couldn't resist fanning the flame. My motto has always been, never envy a woman until you've walked a mile in her shoes or slept a night in her bed, but I don't have a sister. “What do
you
do in Santa Fe?” I asked Sara. There weren't any university labs to run there, I knew, but there were a lot of tables to wait on.

“I'm an art consultant.” She took a card from her purse and handed it to me. Sara Dumaine, it said, Zia Gallery, Art Consultant. That could mean she sold art on commission. Whether it was good art or crap art or wearable art or T-shirt art, I couldn't say. Maybe she was making a living at it, maybe not. “I think Deborah's success was hard for her to deal with; there were so many demands,” Sara continued. “She was having a problem with success management?” She ended that sentence with the raised inflection of up talk, the tentative way some women have of expressing (or hiding) themselves.

Terrance pulled out his lighter and lit the cigar. “Success management, my ass,” he butted in, punctuating his remark with the smoldering cigar, his version of down talk. Up talk leaves room to continue. Down talk does not. “Deborah didn't have any problem with success management. She was a bitch long before she got into
Time
magazine, and she was a bitch after. Deborah, in fact, was a habitual bitch.” A man who disses the woman who precedes you will sooner or later end up dissing you. It's a useful guide for a woman to follow through the minefield of male/female relationships, but for some other woman, not me. I wasn't looking, and if I was I'd know better than to look twice at Terrance Lewellen even if he was richer than God, especially if he was richer than God. Rich enough, anyhow, to be asked to pay a million-dollar ransom and to afford a substantial legal fee.

“Can we put some effort into getting your wife and your bird back?” I asked, doing something to earn my fee.

“I'm not paying any million dollars, I'll tell you that. I'd have to sell most of what I own to raise that kind of money.”

“The gallery could sell the Lochovers for you.” Sara turned toward Terrance, and her serpentine tendrils curved like dollar signs around her face.

“Anybody could sell the Lochovers,” Terrance said. “After he died, the demand for him went ballistic. Offer Brown three hundred thousand dollars.”

“Will he accept that?”

“Let him make a counteroffer if he doesn't like it.”

“Your wife and your bird are at risk, and the negotiations are taking up precious time,” I said.

“What time?” Terrance demanded. “You call the machine, he calls the machine, we call the machine.” He stood up to go, stubbing out his cigar in my ashtray. “Place my offer. I'll check in with you
later.”

Sara's fringe bobbed as she stood up and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Nice meeting you,” she said with a tentative but orthodontically correct smile.

“
Mucho gusto
,” I replied.

She was a willowy aspen, Terrance a barrel cactus, but in volume he had her beat. Maybe there was a heart under all his barbs, maybe hot air. As they went through the door, Sara made a motion to pat his shoulder, but she stopped herself as if she'd seen the prickers there.

The minute they were gone and the Jag was rolling down Lead, I called the Relationships hot line and listened again to “Max a million. I am verrry valuable.”

“This is Neil Hamel, Terrance Lewellen's lawyer,” I replied. “Our offer is three hundred thousand dollars.”

Then I wandered into the outer office where Anna and Brink were killing the day. Brink was telling Anna about his first date with the semi-full-figured DWF now known as Nancy. “She's a great cook,” he said.

“What did she make?” asked Anna.

“Roast chicken with squash, cranberry sauce, corn bread and apple pie for desert.” It sounded to me like she'd been to Boston Chicken.

“Stop,” said Anna. “You're making me hungry. Who was that with Terrance Lewellen?” she asked me.

“His half-sister-in-law,” I said. Or his soon-to-be ex-half-sister-in-law, I thought.

“Cool jacket,” Anna said.

“It looks like a dead soldier's jacket,” said Brink.

“It is,” I replied.

“I bet it cost more than my suit.”

“You're right,” I said.

******

I burned up the afternoon dialing and redialing the Relationships line, wishing I had a button to do it for me. It wasn't till after five that I heard the miserable, digitally engineered voice say, “Not enough. Double or nothing. Indigo
dying
without mate.”

4

“S
IX HUNDRED THOUSAND!”
said Terrance Lewellen. “No bird in the world is worth more than a hundred.” It was Friday evening, but we were still in our respective offices talking on our respective-but-disparate phones. Mine doesn't have a visual image, but the thought occurred to me that Terrance's might, and it provoked an automatic reaction. Before I knew it, I was smoothing my hair and cranking up a smile.

“You asshole,” I mumbled to myself, since only one of those would be vain and stupid enough to primp for Terrance Lewellen.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Didn't you tell me that a pair of macaws is worth more than the sum of two individuals? You're getting a pair when you get Perigee back, since Colloquy is so miserable, maybe even endangered, without her mate.”

“Yeah, but even a pair, even the
only
pair, isn't worth six hundred thou.”

“There
is
a woman's life at stake.”

“Okay, okay. I'll offer Brown four hundred to get this business over with and to make Colloquy happy again, but it's my top offer. I won't pay him one penny more.” I couldn't see him, but I knew what he was doing, stabbing the air with the butt of his cigar.

“I'll place the offer,” I said.

“You do that,” he replied. And then, since the weekend was upon us, we exchanged numbers where we could be reached.

Before I went home I called the R line and left my message. “This is Neil Hamel. Four hundred thousand is our final offer.”

The weekend—and the wait—began. The Kid worked, so there was nobody to watch me punching numbers into my home phone like I'd gone on a Relationships bender. The R line had the addictive pull of popping bubbles in bubble wrap or culling a cigarette from the pack. The first thing I did when I got up on Saturday morning was dial in; the message remained the same: “Not enough. Double or nothing. Indigo
dying
without mate.” I called while I was having a cup of Red Zinger tea after my shower. Same unhappy voice, same message. What the heck, I was doing my job, I rationalized, and fifteen minutes later I dialed again. The only way I know how to quit something is to do it to wretched excess. By midafternoon I'd reached the saturation point. I made one more call, got one more message, put on my
running
shoes, went up to Miranda Martinez Canyon and took a hike.

Miranda Martinez Canyon is a green
V
wedged deep into the rocky brown Sandias, a woman's canyon at the base of the wind woman's peak. At the parking lot the only vegetation you see are the skinny, porous arms of the cholla and an occasional juniper the size of a boulder. The farther you climb, the more piñones and scrub oaks appear. Bushes turn into trees, the vegetation gets greener and lusher, until the pine needles have the shimmering weight of fur. I never hike to the end of the canyon myself, only far enough to forget I'm in a city. I don't know much about Miranda Martinez or why a canyon was named after her, but my name on a canyon is a mark I'd like to leave behind. Since it was a weekend the trail was full of chattering hikers and barking dogs, but I can wander fifty feet off the trail and convince myself I'm in a wilderness, and that's what makes Albuquerque a livable city—go fifteen minutes in any direction and you're out of it. I climbed to a favorite hiding place and hid behind a rock. The gray sprawl of the city was visible through a notch in the boulders. I looked once at the shimmering river and the monoliths of the downtown buildings, turned my back and looked away. Two hang gliders circled the Sandia peaks, red on top, white-bellied as a hawk underneath. They caught the wind, turned and drifted in and out of vision. The wind goddess was up there lazily exhaling and puffing the hang gliders up, inhaling and dropping them down. She was in a relaxed mood today, but I've seen her when she was pissed. Who hasn't? Those are the days when she tosses boulders down the mountain, smashes tumbleweeds into your fender and trash in your fence, when she flaps open the chinks in your armor and her fury invades your soul. Some religions worship at the altar of the ornery goddess.

I watched the hang gliders rise and fall and wondered where the other players in the kidnapping drama were and what they were doing. Colloquy would be squawking, pulling out her feathers and taking a chunk out of any stranger who got too close. Perigee might well be doing the same. Terrance could be dialing the Relationships line obsessively or he could be as in control as he pretended to be and playing golf. Sara Dumaine might be selling some rich tourist some bad art. It was a Saturday in August, high season for the art market in Santa Fe. What about Deborah Dumaine and Wes Brown? I wondered. Where were they? Maybe he had her locked in or tied up somewhere near the border in Door. Maybe she was a pissed-off wind goddess who'd had the wind knocked out of her. Maybe she was in serious danger. Maybe she was dead.

There's always the possibility that a kidnapper will get paranoid and kill the hostages, a danger that appeared to concern me more than it did Terrance Lewellen. It couldn't be in the hostages' best interests to drag out the negotiations. What's two hundred thousand if you've got it and lives are at risk? But I wasn't representing the hostages' best interests. I was representing my client's, and that's the trouble with being a lawyer. It puts you in the middle of the action, but not necessarily on the right side, if there is a right side. Representing my client while keeping the big picture in mind was a straddling act.
Would
Baxter, Johnson handle it any better? I asked myself. Probably not was my answer.

I don't wear a watch, but the piñones' shadows were spreading like a Navajo woman's skirts and telling me I'd stayed too long. Miranda Martinez closes at dark. While I'd been thinking about my case, everybody else had been going home. I was all alone as I walked down the trail. While being up there alone at dusk might be dangerous, it was also what made it interesting. As I walked I watched the lights of Albuquerque spread across the Valley and twinkle on one by one. The colors I saw were red, yellow and blue, the colors of stars in the blackest of skies. For one brief moment there was a balance, the number of lights on the ground reflected the number of stars in the sky, but the lights multiplied like bacteria, reducing the stars to a pale imitation. The lights that came on in the city extinguished the lights in the sky. The spotlights from the Sandia pueblo power bingo parlor were doing their spinning gambler's dance, annoying a lot of people and outshining the stars. Who would ever have thought the Sandias would be guilty of stealing the night? It could, from one perspective anyway, be considered sacrilegious.