The Nighttime is the Right Time

by Bill Crider

  "Who was the last person to leave the building on Monday? It wouldn't have been Franks, by any chance?"

  "I don't know. I went home early. I had a headache. I seem to be having a lot of them lately."

  He looked like he might be having another one, not that I blamed him. I felt like having one myself.

  "I want to talk to Voucher and Birch. Franks, too. Is there someplace private?"

  He waved a hand to indicate his shabby office. "Nowhere but here."

  "Would you mind stepping out while I talked to them?"

  There was a look akin to fear on his face. "Go out there with . . . them?"

  "Maybe you could walk over to the commissary, get a cup of coffee. Take an aspirin."

  "Aspirin. Yes. A fine idea." He practically jumped out of his chair. "I'll just go out the back way. You can call in whoever you want."

  He was out the door and gone before I had a chance to say anything else.

  ~ * ~

  I went out and called Lyman Birch. When he got there, I was behind the desk, so he had to sit in the chair. He ran nervous fingers through his thin brown hair and asked me what I wanted.

  "Just a little background. How much does the studio pay you for the use of your cat?"

  His mouth tightened. "Are you trying to insult me?"

  "Nope. Just asking."

  "All right." He attempted a smile and just missed. "I was just checking. They don't pay me a thing. I'm just glad Gus is able to help out."

  "And Voucher feels the same way about his bird?"

  "Naturally."

  Birch tried to relax, but it was impossible in that chair. He ran his fingers through his hair again. When he did, I saw something that looked like scratches just above his wrist. He saw me looking and put his hand down.

  "What about Cal Franks?" I asked.

  "I wouldn't want to say anything about Cal."

  "Sure you would. I hear that no one likes him."

  "Cal's all right. Not a bad guy at all if you get to know him."

  "And he's been trying to get his bird a job here. Why is that, if there's no pay?"

  "Cal just needs attention. He's always hanging around, or hadn't you noticed that?"

  I'd noticed. "So he thinks if his bird got famous, he'd get plenty of attention?"

  Birch shrugged. "Seems that way to me."

  "How far would he go? Would he do a bird-napping?"

  "Bird-napping? That's a pretty good one."

  I could almost see Birch's mind working on a cartoon script. Gus stealing Cap'n Bob off the perch and holding him for ransom, maybe. I tried to bring Birch back to the subject. I said, "Would he?"

  "Huh? Oh, maybe. You saw the things that go on out there. Anything could happen."

  Birch was right, and that was the trouble. How could anyone tell what that bunch might do?

  "Who was the last one to leave the building on Monday?" I asked.

  "What?" Birch snapped to attention. "Why do you want to know?"

  "I want to know who might have been alone with the bird, especially if it was Franks."

  "It wasn't Franks." There was a long pause, and then Birch said, "It was me."

  Well, that gave things a different slant.

  "I always hang around to spend a little time with Gus," Birch explained. "He lives here now, and I like to let him out of that cage every day for a while. He needs the exercise."

  That was true. If Gus were any bigger, they could use him as a stand-in for one of the tigers in Rick Torrance's next picture.

  "But there's a back door that goes to the parking lot," Birch went on. "It's supposed to be locked by whoever leaves last, but I may have forgotten on Monday. The watchman usually takes care of it later if we forget, but someone could probably have come in that way after I left. And I think one of the windows might have been open. It gets stuffy in here if you close all of them."

  Partin had mentioned the door but not the window. I wondered for a second or two how much he liked Cap'n Bob. Then I remembered that Partin was a producer. He liked anyone, or anything, that made money at the box office.

  "Was there anyone else who might have wanted to get rid of the parrot?" I asked.

  "No one," Birch said. "We all loved that bird. He was a gold mine."

  He didn't sound exactly sincere. "The bird didn't like Gus, though," I pointed out. "I hear that when the crew needed inspiration, all they had to do was open the doors to the cages."

  Birch nodded. "Gus was terrified of that bird. But he always calmed down after being attacked."

  We talked a while longer, but I didn't learn any more than I'd known before. The building was easy to get into, everyone loved Cap'n Bob, and Cal Franks had ambitions for his cockatoo. I sent Birch out and asked him to invite Herm Voucher in to see me.

  While I was waiting for Voucher, I telephoned Gober's secretary and told her to have the watchman get in touch with me. She complained that she'd have to wake him, but I told her it was an emergency.

  Then Voucher showed up. He practically had to duck to get through the doorway. He was even more uncomfortable in the chair than Birch had been. His eyes teared up when we talked about Cap'n Bob. Or Percy, as Voucher insisted on calling him.

  Voucher had thought at first that the parrot might have gotten out accidentally. "One of the windows was open. He could have gotten out of the building, but he would have come back when he was hungry."

  "But he didn't," I pointed out.

  "No," Voucher said. "And he was such a gentle bird, a real treasure. There was never another one like him. And to think that idiot Cal Franks thinks Percy can be replaced by a cockatoo!"

  "No cockatoos!" reverberated in my head, but the ringing of the phone cleared them out. I talked to the watchman, thanked him for his time, and turned back to Voucher.

  "Do you think Franks had something to do with Cap'n, uh, Percy's disappearance?" I asked.

  "I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Cal," Voucher confided, "but the truth is that he's just like a lot of stage mothers I've seen. He knows he'll never be famous, so he wants to make his bird famous instead."

  "And what about Lyman Birch?"

  "What about him?"

  "He loved Cap'n, uh, Percy just like everyone else?"

  "Why of course he did." Voucher's Adam's apple bobbed. "How could he not?"

  Good question. I dismissed Voucher and asked him to send in Cal Franks.

  ~ * ~

  Franks sat in the chair, and his toes dangled a few inches above the threadbare carpet. I'd been thinking about things, and I already knew what I was going to ask him.

  "How did you know the parrot wasn't coming back?"

  He was so startled that he almost fell out of the chair.

  "What?" His face grew even redder than was usual with him. "What do you mean? I didn't . . . I mean, how could I have known? I don't know what you're talking about!"

  He did, though, and I told him so.

  "Sure you knew. Otherwise, you wouldn't have moved that cockatoo into the cage so soon. Gober waited a day to call me about getting the parrot back, so he must have thought there was still a chance of that happening. Voucher thought so, too. But not you. You moved your bird right on in."

  "I . . . I knew could move him back out if Cap'n Bob came back."

  "But you aren't planning to move him, are you? You might as well tell me about it, Franks. I think I know what happened. What did you do, come in by the back way to pick up something you'd left behind and see the whole thing?"

  Franks' shoulders slumped, and he leaned back in the chair. His toes were farther from the carpet than ever.

  "Yes," he said. "That's what happened. How did you know?"

  "Never mind that. Just tell me your side of it."

  He didn't want to, but he was going to. He couldn't hold it back any longer.

  "You're right," he said. "Cap'n Bob won't be back. I saw it all. My car was parked around back on Monday. When I got in, I remembered that I'd left a book a
t my desk. I came back to get it, and that's when it happened."

  "Birch killed the bird?"

  "What? No, of course not. He wouldn't do that."

  "Wait a minute," I said.

  Obviously I didn't have it figured quite as well as I'd thought. I'd seen something green -- a feather? -- In the cat's cage. There weren't any other feathers around anywhere, so it wasn't molting season. Birch, by his own admission, was the last one to leave the building, and according to the watchman, the door had been locked. Nobody else could have come in.

  So I figured that Birch had finally gotten tired of the humiliation dealt out to his cat and decided to do away with the humiliator. The scratches on his arm would have come from the parrot's claws. Maybe Birch had even let the cat play with the carcass a little after it was all over. Birch was also the only one supporting Franks' plea to let the cockatoo take the parrot's place, and since no one liked Franks, I inferred that Franks had something on Birch.

  It seemed that I was right about the last part, but not about the first.

  "The cat killed the bird?" I said.

  Franks dug around inside his jacket and came out with a handkerchief. He wiped his face, but it stayed red. He wadded the hanky and replaced it.

  "That wasn't the way it happened at all," he said.

  Well, nobody's right all the time. But I was doing even worse than usual.

  "Why don't you tell me what happened, then." I was tired of guessing.

  "Like I said, I came back inside. I guess Birch didn't hear me. He was down on the floor, playing with his cat. I must have scared him, and he jumped back and hit Cap'n Bob's cage. The cage fell over, and --- "

  He stopped and went for the hanky again, but I thought I could get the rest of it.

  "The parrot got out," I said. "And flew out the window."

  "He got out, all right," Franks told me after he'd rubbed his face. "But he didn't go for the window."

  Damn. I was going to have to turn in my P.I. license if I didn't improve.

  "Where did he go, then?"

  Franks put the hanky away. "He went for Gus."

  "So?"

  Franks shuddered. "So Gus jumped him."

  "I thought the cat was scared to death of him."

  "He was. But Cap'n Bob was a little addled. The fall, I guess. He miscalculated and went by Gus and hit the cage, got a claw hooked in the wire and couldn't get loose. It was what Gus had been waiting for."

  "But he didn't kill him?"

  "No. But it was awful. Cap'n Bob was squawking, and Gus was yowling and scratching. The feathers were flying, and the fur, too, let me tell you. Lyman was trying to get them apart, but he couldn't."

  So that's where the scratches came from.

  "Something must have separated them," I said.

  Franks nodded. "Finally the Cap'n got loose somehow, and started flying around the room. It didn't take him long to find the window. And then he was gone."

  "Didn't you go after him?"

  "Sure we went after him. He flew over the fence and landed on a palm tree."

  "Did you try to get him down?"

  "The tree was on a delivery truck with two or three others. It was gone before we could do a thing. God knows where it is now."

  "But nobody killed the bird."

  "No. But we couldn't very well tell anyone what had happened. They would have blamed us. Gober might even have fired us. So we decided just not to say a thing."

  "And you brought in your cockatoo. Whose idea was that?"

  Franks gave me an indignant look. "Well, it wasn't mine. Lyman thought maybe we could get by with it, substitute one for the other, but you saw how they were acting out there."

  No cockatoos! I thought.

  And then I thought, But why not? This bunch was just goofy enough to go for it.

  ~ * ~

  The whole maniacal assembly was looking at me expectantly as I stood in the doorway between the cages of Gus and General Joe, which was the cockatoo's stage name.

  "I've cracked the case," I said.

  No one looked more surprised than Birch. "You have?"

  "That's right."

  "Where's my parrot, then?" Voucher asked.

  "Right there," I said, pointing to the cockatoo.

  "Huh?" I think all of them said it at once. And then someone said "No cocka-- "

  "Hold it!" They held it. "This is not a cockatoo. This is Cap'n Bob in disguise."

  "Huh?"

  Birch caught on fast. "I thought that bird looked familiar," he said.

  "Are you sure?" Voucher asked.

  "Let the cat out," I said. "And we'll see."

  Birch had to wake Gus first, but he finally managed to drag him out of the cage. There was a feather in there, all right. Birch and Franks had cleaned up, but they hadn't gotten that one.

  Gus stretched out his front legs and spread his toes while his rear end went up high. He swished his tail a time or two.

  "Now, Cal," I said, and Franks let the cockatoo out.

  It was hate at first sight this time, too, and General Joe shot off the perch like a V-2. Gus sprang to a drawing board and then to the head of the guy wearing the aviator's cap. He hit a hanging light fixture as he jumped to another guy's head, and then he was back on the floor, scuttling under tables and upsetting everything while General Joe patrolled the airspace and waited for a chance to dive bomb him.

  By that time people were cheering and whistling and clapping, and even Voucher believed that his parrot was back.

  In disguise, of course.

  When Gus cleared the tables and the cockatoo dived, I snatched up a drawing board and got it in his way just in time. He thudded into it and dropped to the floor. Franks grabbed him and stuck him in the cage. I didn't see where Gus had gone. Probably to the supply room.

  ~ * ~

  Birch saw me to the door amid a general atmosphere of hilarity and relief. "The Maltese Parrot" would be finished on schedule, Franks' cockatoo would be a star (in disguise, since he'd be drawn as Cap'n Bob), Voucher had his bird back (also in disguise), and all was right with the world.

  Birch thanked me and clapped me on the back as he wished me well.

  When I got to the Chevy, I took the "KICK ME" sign off and threw it in the back seat before I went to tell Gober the good news.

  Poo Poo

  Like Bill Ferrel in the previous story, Truman Smith is a private-eye. He lives on Galveston

  Island and has appeared in five novels and two stories, one of which is reprinted below.

  It was two days after Christmas, and someone had stolen Miss Ellie Huggins’ cat. Or so she said. I thought it had probably just run away. In either case, I didn’t want to try to find it.

  “It’s like we have an obligation, Tru,” Dino said. “She was our fifth grade teacher, after all.”

  Dino has a strange sense of obligation to the past. His uncles practically ran Galveston when it was a wide-open town, but when the Texas Rangers closed down the gambling, Dino didn’t feel obliged to go into some other branch of the family business. Instead he sits in his house and watches infomercials on television. But when an old friend, or even an old teacher, calls about some kind of problem, he feels as if it’s his job to set things right.

  The trouble with that is, he often feels it’s a lot more my job than it is his.

  “I don’t want to get involved,” I told him.

  I was sitting in my living room talking to him on the telephone. I didn’t want to go outside. It was cold and cloudy, and it was raining. I could hear the water running off the house and sluicing through the oleander bushes that surrounded it. I was drinking Big Red from a twenty-ounce bottle, reading The Beautiful and Damned, and staying dry and comfortable.

  “Remember the last thing you asked me to look into?” I said.

  “Hey, it wasn’t my fault that that turned out the way it did.”

  Dino had asked me to look into several things, and none of them had turned out very well. He continu
ed to maintain that it was never his fault.

  “Besides,” he said, “it’s only a cat. What could go wrong?”

  Now I was really worried.

  “I’ll help you out with it,” he said. “Partners, right?”

  I’d recently made the foolish statement that maybe Dino should go to work for me. What I did involved gathering information on people, the kind of information that I now have access to right in my living room, thanks to the wonderful world of computers. Since Dino hates to leave his house, the job seemed like a natural for him.

  “We’d have to get outside,” I said. “You can’t look for a cat indoors. And have you looked outside today by any chance?”

  “I know it’s raining, if that’s what you mean. But this is Miss Ellie we’re talking about.”

  He had a point, I suppose. Miss Ellie had been one of our favorite teachers a long time ago. Every day after lunch, she’d read to us: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Heidi, and the King of the Golden River. I suppose I owed her something for that.

  “And it’s her cat we’ll be looking for,” Dino said. “You have a cat, too, remember?”

  That wasn’t exactly true. I lived with a cat, but that was as far as it went. Nameless was a big orange tabby who came and went as he pleased. He let me feed him regularly, and on days like this one, he spent a lot of time curled up on one of my chairs or the bed, which was where he happened to be at the moment. But he wasn’t my cat. He pretty much belonged to himself.

  “She really likes that cat,” Dino said. “He’s the only company she has.”

  I sighed, put a playing card in my book to mark my place, and laid the book on the floor by my chair.

  “I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” I said.

  ~ * ~

  We drove over to Miss Ellie’s in my little Chevy S-10 truck. The rain drummed so hard on the roof that we couldn’t hear the radio, and the truck wasn’t as waterproof as Dino would have liked. Rain was coming in around the door on the passenger side and getting his shirt wet.

  “You ought to have a new seal put around this door,” he said, moving over a little closer to me.

  “I didn’t know it leaked,” I told him. “Besides, I don’t think a seal would help. There’s something wrong with the door.”