“What’s your name again?” Ellen asked me.
“Neil Hamel,” I said.
“Neil wants to talk to you about Wes.”
“Oh?” said Katrina, shaking her head and flipping a lock of hair across her shoulder. The dog yapped again. “Shut up, Buster,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?” There’s a thin line between fear and hostility, and her eyes were walking it.
“I want to get in touch with Wes, and I was wondering if you know where he is.”
“Why would I know that?”
“A friend of mine saw you together at Midnight Cowboy.”
“Why do you want to get in touch with him?”
“I’m a lawyer.”
“He works for me,” she said, too quickly. “Around the house.” I figured that was the cover story they’d worked out to explain where Brown’s income came from. Maybe she thought I was an IRS lawyer, but Brown’s tax problems weren’t on my agenda yet.
“A client of mine died under mysterious circumstances,” I said. “Wes had some dealings with the client. I was wondering if Wes had any information that could help with my investigation.” It was bullshit; what I really wanted to know was if she’d been Brown, the loner’s, assistant, the night I was in Door.
“What’s your client’s name?”
“Terrance Lewellen.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s married to Deborah Dumaine.”
“Never heard of her either.” She did a little two-step and tugged at the rope under her chin that held her cowboy hat in place. Why the nervous gestures? I wondered. Because she was lying? Because she thought Deborah Dumaine was another of Wes’s conquests? Both?
“Have you been in Door recently?” I asked her.
“No.” She straightened her hat. “And I don’t have to answer your questions.”
“Not now, but you might somewhere down the road.”
“Pull up your socks, Katrina,” Ellen said. “Get rid of the guy. He doesn’t give a damn about you. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody.”
“How long has it been since you got laid?” Katrina snapped at her roommate.
“Too long.” Ellen sighed.
“You’re jealous.”
“Of him?”
“Of anyone. Look, I’m going to work. I’m not answering any more of your questions, and neither is she.” She took her left hand off one six-shooter and pointed it at Ellen. “And I want you out of this house.” She took her right hand off the other six-shooter and pointed it at me.
The dog barked. The bird squawked. Ellen zapped Oprah back on. “I’m going,” I said. I knew Katrina would tell Brown that I’d been there, but I didn’t care. That might even have been why I’d gone.
14
I STOPPED BY Charlie Register’s office on my way to work the following day. He’d hung Santa Barbara Canyon on the wall opposite Gila Bend and The Bosque. From a distance it was stream water sliding under leafy Aspens. Up close it was a collection of brush strokes, subtle and abstract, with Lochover’s bold signature sprawled across the corner. The wall opposite Charlie’s desk faced the long view, the wall behind him remained empty. Would he hang the last Lochover there, I wondered, or had he already hung it at home? The paintings were beautiful, but few rooms were big enough to hold them. Two were a balance; a third seemed excessive, a ménage à trois instead of a duo. To add a fourth would be a ménage à quatre and overkill. Charlie stood beneath the overhead light as he greeted me. His clothes were subtle, his hair was golden. The halogen lamp balanced on its stand like a long-legged crane watching for insects in the water.
“What happened to Lewellen?” he asked me. The question was full of emotional content, but Charlie’s voice was calm.
“When I got back from Door, I found him dead in his bed,” I said, trying to match his calmness. “A vial of epinephrine and a hypodermic needle were on the table. Dr. Talbert, Terrance’s allergist, told me it’s a drug people take to counteract allergic reactions. Did Terrance have any allergies that you know of?”
“No,” Charlie said. The macho posturing that went on between those two might have kept Terrance from admitting any sign of weakness—like an allergy—to Charlie.
“Terrance wasn’t alone when I got there,” I said. “Sara Dumaine, Deborah’s sister, was with him, weeping over the body. She said she found Terrance dead. She also said she and … Terry … were in love.”
Charlie shook his head and the silver danced among the gold. “What the hell was wrong with him?”
“He’d been chemically sexed.”
“Ma’am?”
“He wore a testosterone patch.”
“What for?”
I shrugged; the answer seemed obvious to me.
“Deborah’s a fine woman,” Charlie continued. “You’ve got to be lower than a snake in wagon tracks to sleep with your wife’s sister. If you ask me, Lewellen’s only real loves were his mother and his parrots. You didn’t find Deborah in Door?”
“No.”
“Did you hand over the money?”
“Yes.”
His eyebrows formed two quizzical and symmetrical arches. “May I ask to whom?”
“A person in a feathered mask with a finger on the trigger of a .45.”
“Wes Brown?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We talked to Brown, but he wouldn’t confess to knowing anything about the kidnapping.”
“You believe him?”
“I wouldn’t say Wes Brown is an honest person.” There was a place deep in the wagon ruts for him too. “I did get Perigee back.”
“What happens to the birds now?”
“Terrance set up a trust for them. They’ll be taken care of by Rick Olney at the lab.”
“Did you get anything on the video?” Charlie asked.
“We caught Brown buying smuggled parrots in Cotorra Canyon, and I recorded that. I didn’t get anything which would prove or disprove a kidnapping. I gave a copy of the video to the Fish and Wildlife Service. They’re going after Brown for parrot smuggling.”
Charlie leaned against his desk. “I always admired Deborah,” he said. “She’s loud, temperamental, and flashy, but she’s very smart.” It was the admiration a brown bird might have for a parrot, a banker for an actress, a lawyer for a con artist. Charlie was elegant, but he was monochromatic. “I’m going to be damned upset if she doesn’t come back.”
“I hear that Wes Brown comes up here every two weeks and puts money into his bank account,” I said. “Can you tell me if his account is with BankWest and what he does with the money?” I wondered what kind of customer confidentiality Charlie Register was required to maintain. He might not be able to give me that information, but he would have to give it to the FWS or the FBI if they got a warrant.
“I’ll look into it,” he said. “By the way, my security people made some stills of the ATM transfers.” He handed me a manila envelope with photographs inside, but I didn’t open it yet; I already knew what Brown and the mask looked like.
“Thanks,” I said. “What happens to the paintings now?” Legally, they belonged to Terrance’s estate; I had the document to prove that. Other than Charlie Register, I was the only one who did.
“I assume they’ll be left to Lewellen’s mother.” Did he assume or did he know? Charlie’s poker face didn’t give a clue. “It’s my impression that he left everything to her, including,” he said, “Wild Flower.”
“You knew about Wild Flower?” I asked.
“Didn’t you?”
“Not until I saw it hanging on the wall in Terrance’s living room. Why didn’t you make it a part of the collateral agreement if you knew?”
Charlie shrugged. “It’s a late work and of inferior quality; I didn’t want it.” So much for my taste in art.
“Do you know Terrance’s mother?” I asked.
“Yes. She banks with us.”
“Where does she live?”
“At La Buena Vida r
etirement home.”
Charlie Register had the sterling qualities a mother would appreciate. Did she know what the paintings were worth? I wondered. Would Charlie be able to talk her out of them? How badly did he want the Lochovers anyway? Badly enough to kill for? Charlie’s hair gleamed beneath the overhead lamp. He had a gambler’s heart, but a job that wouldn’t let him gamble much. He seemed far too civilized to kill, although Terrance—if he had been murdered—had been murdered in a very civilized way. “There is a possibility that Terrance was murdered,” I said, laying it on the table.
“How’s that?” Charlie stepped out from under the overhead light and moved behind his desk.
“I don’t know yet. The OMI is investigating.”
Charlie picked up a pen and rolled it around in his fingers. “What are you going to do about the kidnapping?” he asked. “Are you going to the FBI or the police?”
“I can’t; my duty to Terrance is the same in death as it was in life—to protect him. If the police question me, I’ll have to take the privilege.”
“Ma’am?”
“It would be an ethics violation to reveal anything Terrance told me.”
“What’s my duty?” he asked. “I don’t think Deborah should be left to rot in the desert.”
Neither did I, but I gave him a lawyer’s advice. It was possible that Charlie had committed some illegal acts himself. For one thing, he hadn’t been acting in the best interests of BankWest’s customers when he set up the ATM transfer. “That’s something you have to talk to your own lawyer about. Who is your lawyer?”
“Jed Martin.”
I knew Jed. He came from the same good old boy network as Charlie and was known to be cagier than a coyote. I handed Charlie one of Detective Rosalia Hernandez’s cards. “This is the number of the detective who’ll be investigating Terrance’s death,” I said, “if there is an investigation.”
“And the kidnapping?”
“That’s a matter for the FBI.”
He put the card in his desk drawer and waved his hand in an expansive gesture around the office. “Those Lochovers are damned beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” I said.
******
On my way back to the office, I picked up some spicy chicken to go from Panda Express at the mall.
“Where’d that come from?” asked Anna when she saw the white box in my hand.
“Panda Express,” I answered.
“I like their spicy chicken,” she said.
“Me too.” It had red peppers that could zing you out of a slump.
“Dr. Talbert’s office called,” Anna said. “They said to be there at three.”
I took the pink slip and went into my office. Who was a doctor to be ordering a lawyer around, I thought, but I went anyway and I got there on time. Talbert wouldn’t have called me if he hadn’t gotten some information from the OMI. His ego or his curiosity had set that wheel in motion. Besides, miss an appointment with a physician and you’re likely to get billed for your time. Should I have billed Roberta Dovalo for canceling? I wondered. Fat chance I’d ever collect a penny from her or that she’d ever get a divorce.
******
Dr. Talbert was situated lower in the Heights hierarchy than Charlie Register. The allergist’s office was tucked away in a one-story brick building across from the mall. The only view from there was a taller medical building across the street. His waiting room was filled with sneezing children. Newcomers to the Duke City like to bring their vegetation from back home with them, which adds to our native pollens. The pollen count has gotten so high that Albuquerque is thinking about hiring plant police. It was keeping Dr. Talbert in business.
I sat down and watched his wall clock tick away ten minutes of my billable hour before he came out. He was medium sized with short brown hair. He wore a white lab coat and a wide, red tie with Mickey and Minnie Mouse on it. He had the bright eyes of an inquisitive animal. “Hi, Dr. Talbert,” the children chirped. “Hi,” he replied, calling each of them by name. “You’re Attorney Hamel?” he asked me.
“Right.”
“Let’s go into the office.”
I followed him down the hall to his office, where a video of the doctor himself was playing on a TV. “Beta-blockers,” I heard the video say before he snapped it off.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “The previous patient forgot to exit. I’ve made a video of some of the things I tell all my patients. It’s cheaper for them to watch that than to pay for my time.” He picked up a file from the counter and sat down on a stool with the file in his lap. He motioned for me to sit in a chair opposite him. His gaze never left my face while we talked. He kept his head cocked, and it seemed to be surrounded by invisible antennae that picked up clues I didn’t even know I was sending. He could be sensing whatever I was allergic to, what I’d had for breakfast, whether I’d had sex last night. There was a low-level vibration buzzing around him like the hum of an insect’s wings.
“I hope Terrance listened better to you than he did to me,” he began.
“He did have his own way of doing things,” I said.
“He would have been happy to treat his allergies with a cortisone shot every year, but I won’t do that; steroids have harmful side effects. I tried to get him in here weekly for shots, but he wasn’t good about it. He didn’t have the patience. He came when he remembered or happened to be in the neighborhood.”
“Do the shots work if you don’t follow a regular schedule?”
“Not very well.”
“What was Terrance allergic to?” If we’d come to the doctor/patient confidentiality zone here, he was willing to cross it.
“Pollens, grasses, weeds, when he first came to me.”
“When was that?”
“About fifteen years ago, when he moved to Albuquerque. That was when he was married to his second wife, before he met Deborah. After I was treating him Terrance developed an allergy to parrots. That hurt him; he loved his birds. The best treatment for parrot allergies is avoidance. There are no parrot desensitizing injections. At first Terrance wouldn’t listen, but eventually he got so bad he had to give up the birds.”
“I saw him react to the parrots. He began to sneeze, and he left the room. It didn’t strike me as a reaction that would kill him.”
“One thing I’ve learned in twenty years of practice is that allergies are not an exact science. In India they believe asthma can be cured by swallowing live sardines.”
“That would cure me,” I said.
“I don’t believe it was Terrance’s parrot allergy that killed him.” Talbert paused while his antennae picked up the beat. Apparently, he didn’t sense a malpractice suit in the air and he continued. “I talked to a colleague of mine, Dr. Hirsh at the OMI.”
Why else would he have summoned me here?
“He told me that Terrance was wearing a patch on his arm that released testosterone?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Where on earth did he get that?”
“He financed the company.”
Dr. Talbert shook his head. “There are several ways Terrance could have died, all of them quick and relatively painless. Epinephrine is adrenaline. It’s a jolt to the heart, and it is a remote possibility that a shot could induce a heart attack. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen. Sometimes with anaphylactic shock, the blood pressure drops low enough to bring on a heart attack. If the needle had been injected directly into an artery, that could kill him, but the needle mark was in his upper arm, and there aren’t any arteries there. It’s possible that the allergy attack was so severe the epinephrine couldn’t revive him, which happens rarely, but it can happen. If the patient’s potassium is low, after strenuous exercise, for example, or with laxative abuse, epinephrine may not work. Beta-blockers, taken for high blood pressure, will inhibit the effect of epinephrine, but Terrance’s blood pressure wasn’t that high and he had been warned often enough about beta-blockers.”
�
��Could someone have slipped him some or done something to lower his potassium?” The strenuous exercise that was crossing my mind was sex.
“Possible, but that wasn’t what killed him.” He paused. His antennae quivered. I tried to stay as still as a lizard so as not to frighten him off. “It wasn’t epinephrine in that vial,” Talbert said. “That was the very first thing I asked Dr. Hirsh to check. Terrance has had allergic reactions before, and epinephrine always worked for him.”
“What was in the vial?”
“Saline solution. Saline solution had been substituted for epinephrine. Both are clear fluids. The difference would not be apparent to the eye.”
“Saline solution wouldn’t kill him, would it?”
“No, but it wouldn’t bring him out of anaphylactic shock, either.”
“Is there any chance the pharmacy could have made a mistake?”
“Highly unlikely.”
“Wouldn’t Terrance have noticed if the vial had been tampered with?”
“That would depend on how carefully it had been done. I’m sure the police will check for fingerprints.”
I was already expecting two sets. Who knew whether there would be any more.
“A person in anaphylactic shock is not going to be thinking or observing very carefully. The blood pressure drops precipitously, the tongue and lips swell, the bronchial passages close up, there is a strong sense of foreboding.”
“That seems natural if a person can’t breathe.” I had a bad vision of Terrance gasping for air and clutching the vial. It may have been a quick and painless death, but it had to be beyond terrifying. And what had I been doing that morning? Making love in the desert and handing over his two hundred thousand dollars.
“What killed him was anaphylactic shock and the fact that he didn’t have epinephrine to counteract it. I prescribed epinephrine and he was told to carry it with him at all times.” Dr. Talbert tapped the file on his lap. His conscience was clear.
“What was it that put him into shock? Do you know?”
“An examination of his stomach contents should determine that. However, I believe it was peanuts. Ever since he was a small child Terrance had been highly allergic to peanuts. It’s the one allergy he had that was life threatening. Peanuts were in the granola he ate for breakfast. The medical investigator took a sample.”
Parrot Blues Page 16