The Kiskadee of Death

by Jan Dunlap

  “Uncle Buzz!” the young man shouted, his long arms splayed across the roof of the car. “You need any more lemons tonight?”

  He held up one hand to reveal a lemon in his palm.

  “I got it at the bar,” the kid’s voice slurred. “I told the bartender I knew just who could squeeze the juice out of it. You’re good at that, aren’t you, Uncle Buzz?”

  From our spot on the driveway, I saw Buzz Davis walk out of his big garage and head towards the boy and the expensive car.

  In the sudden quiet of the night, the older man’s words carried to where I stood.

  “I want you out of this car and inside the house,” Buzz told the young man. “Now.”

  The kid stood his ground, still leaning against the car roof.

  “Or what?” he challenged his uncle. “Are you gonna ground me permanently, like good old Birdy grounded you? You hated him for that, didn’t you? I get that, now. Payback is a wonderful thing, isn’t it, Uncle Buzz?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, son,” Buzz said, his voice tight, as he got closer to the kid. I could practically feel the older man’s muscles tensing.

  “I’m not your son!” the young man shouted at him. “I hate your guts! Everyone around here worships the ground you walk on, except for me, because I know what a two-faced liar you are!”

  “Holy buckets,” Luce breathed beside me. “The kid is not only drunk, but begging for a fight.”

  “And he’s not leaving until he gets it,” I said, watching the young man ball his fists on the top of the car while he glared at Buzz.

  The kid wasn’t about to move, let alone go quietly into the house.

  Whether that was because he was physically unable to stand unaided thanks to his alcohol level, or because he deliberately wanted to antagonize his uncle, I couldn’t be sure. Either way, I could see where this confrontation was going.

  It was headed south, and not in a good “escape from winter” heading-south sort of way.

  Unless I missed my guess, Buzz Davis was about two seconds from grabbing his nephew and forcefully removing him to the house.

  And I was fairly certain that, if he didn’t land the first punch, his nephew would.

  Crap.

  I was going to have to break up a fight between a senior citizen and a twenty-something kid.

  And I figured the odds were with the old guy winning.

  I started toward the two men, but then I got a last-second reprieve.

  “Yo, Mustang Mark!” Schooner shouted, running out of the garage to round the opposite end of the kid’s car from where Buzz was closing in. “Hey, buddy! Over here!”

  The kid’s head swiveled away from Buzz and toward Schooner. He squinted into the glare from the well-lit garage to see who was calling for him.

  “Hey, it’s the old hippie!” he grinned at the birder, his angry exchange with his uncle apparently forgotten for the moment. “What are you doing here?”

  Schooner threw his arm around the kid’s shoulder and led him away from the car and towards the garage. “Finishing the float, man. You and I met right here, last night, remember? We talked cars and microbrews.”

  I watched Schooner escort the kid into the garage and then up to, and through, the house door, avoiding the other birders, who, like me and Luce, had been accidental witnesses to what had almost amounted to a train wreck between Buzz and his nephew. A car door slammed, and my attention swung back to Buzz, who was now imitating his nephew’s stance, his palms spread on the roof of the Mustang, his eyes directed down at the concrete driveway.

  A few muted goodbyes were called to Buzz as the final float workers drifted off to the cars parked in the drive beyond the garage’s third bay where the green Porsche gleamed in the overhead lights.

  A love of sports cars ran in Buzz’s family, I surmised, my attention shifting back to the vintage Mustang from the Porsche. Buzz continued to stand, braced at the side of the car, and I recalled what Eddie had said about Buzz’s curtailed career as an astronaut: Buzz had been kicked out of the space program because he had a drinking problem.

  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

  The 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.