Bird, Bath, and Beyond

by E. J. Copperman

“Look, Sergeant. You have to understand. Barney just isn’t capable of using a phrase he’s heard only once. I don’t know how he’s coming up with these things and I don’t want you jumping to conclusions based on what a bird says. There has to be an explanation other than Barney’s hearing these words at the time of the shooting.”

  I sat down on the coffee table next to the cage. Barney really looked like he wanted to get out and spread his wings, but I was worried that one of the dogs (okay, Eydie) might misinterpret such a move as either threatening or delicious and take inappropriate action. I reached into my purse for the bag of parrot toys Patty had given me to find something that might occupy his attention.

  So you can imagine my surprise when I felt something heavy and metal touch my fingers. Barney likes a nice chew, but he doesn’t want to break his beak. Besides, this object was much too large. Much.

  It was a gun.

  I immediately withdrew my fingers. Like, my hand sped away from the crime scene at ninety miles an hour. My mother looked predictably alarmed and my father actually said, “Wha—”

  “Sergeant Bostwick,” I said, “can a forensic investigator tell the difference between a fingerprint that’s a few hours old and a very fresh one?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the conversation. “I’m not sure, but I’m guessing they can’t make a distinction that small,” he said. Then his voice took on a higher level of urgency. “Why?”

  “Because I think there’s a really good chance I just found the murder weapon in my purse.”

  My mother sat down.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Detective Sergeant Joe Bostwick arrived at my home two hours later. What with rush-hour traffic, it was a minor miracle he made it there before midnight.

  In the time we were ostensibly waiting for his arrival, I told my parents not to touch anything in my purse or Patty’s bag—as if they needed the instruction—and took the dogs for a walk, an act that seems somewhat comical when you see it. These three dogs are a study in contrasts, and that does not end with their ability to yank on a leash. Steve just plods along, sniffing every blade of grass for information. He’d make a great forensic scientist. Bruno, big goofy pal that he is, trots at an excited pace, sure that everyone he meets will be his best friend forever. Eydie, the greyhound mix, is not given to running as you might think. She’s suspicious and imperious, holding her head high and expecting nothing less than the admiration and obedience of all who cross her path.

  We did our usual tour of Scarborough, heading out to West Roosevelt Avenue (the main drag) and nodding at people. I put my earbuds in but didn’t turn on my phone’s music app; it was more to stop idle chatter than to listen to something. I needed to think.

  I’d been involved in a police investigation regarding a client—Bruno, actually—before, and it had not been tons of fun for me. In that case, of course, the client’s owner had been murdered, which made it somewhat more personal, and I’d been accused of a great many things I had not done. So the whole dealing-with-cops prospect was an activity I preferred to avoid when I could.

  Except now I couldn’t. Barney had been present when Dray had been shot and killed. That didn’t mean much to the investigation, I believed, since he was going to have roughly as much understanding about and knowledge of the incident as the overstuffed armchair Dray had kept in his trailer in which to read future scripts and think deep thoughts. In fact, given what had been splashed all over that chair, it would probably yield more information to Bostwick than Barney could.

  But I had been unable so far to convince the sergeant of that fact. This was partially because people want to believe that parrots are actually conversing with them and partially because Barney insisted on shouting out some new gun-related adage every time I was insisting he could offer no help. Barney was a smart bird, but he was also becoming something of a pest.

  I wasn’t thinking about my route very much because I had not avoided the turn off West Roosevelt that would have kept me clear of Cool Beans, the local coffeehouse, where Sam Gibson was leaning on the doorframe. It’s not that I had wanted to stay away from Sam, exactly, but I needed to think through my current situation and Sam wasn’t going to help me do that.

  I’ve known Sam since I moved to Scarborough and he had even asked me out once, but I’d declined. Lately I’d been rethinking that decision, but oddly, once I showed a flicker of interest, Sam had assiduously avoided asking me out again. It was the kind of thing that made a girl wonder. At least it made me wonder. And this wasn’t the time to wonder about such things.

  “What are you thinking about?” Sam asked as I nodded to him, pretending to be listening to a great audiobook. Really, how could one interrupt me when I was enriching my mind so obviously? “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  I actually took one of the earbuds out to pretend I could hear him now. Which I could, because I had always been able to hear him. So maybe pretend wasn’t the correct word. But you know what I mean, don’t you?

  “What makes you think that?” I said.

  “The look on your face,” Sam answered. He knelt down to pet Steve, since he could easily get to both Bruno and Eydie from a standing position. Sam thinks that Steve is the overlooked baby brother in the family, although Eydie would protect him savagely and Bruno would defer to him in all cases because Bruno defers to everybody about everything. Bruno is a pushover. “Also the sound of your voice, the fact that you’re walking around with earbuds in while you’re not listening to anything, and the news report about a murder I saw ten minutes ago that had a non-interview with you carrying a birdcage.” One of the news crews that had gotten to me while I left the set with Barney.

  “Oh, those things,” I said.

  “Yeah. You want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  Sam absorbed that and nodded. “Okay. Want an iced coffee?” He gestured inside his store.

  That was not an opening. Sam will make me an iced coffee anytime. It’s his job.

  I smiled and it was genuine. “Not today, okay? I’ve got to think this thing through. I just happened to be there, not even when it happened, but my client was, and the cops are convinced he knows something.”

  “Your client’s a bird?” Sam asked.

  “Barney,” I answered. “He’s a yellow Amazon parrot.”

  “Does that mean you can get him free with two-day shipping?” Sam thinks he’s funnier than he actually is.

  “See, I’m not even concentrating enough to double over with laughter at that one,” I told him. “I’m going to walk the dogs back to the house and meet with the police, and I imagine that’ll be it. They’ll find out who killed Dray, and I’ll get back to representing Barney and other nonhumans like him.”

  “Sounds like you’ve thought it through pretty well,” Sam noted.

  Actually, that was true. “You’re right. You made me see it more clearly.” I watched as Sam stood up from his Steve-petting and made sure the other two dogs got some attention as well.

  “I have that effect on women,” Sam said. “I make them think.”

  “I imagine it’s served you well.”

  “It’s a blessing and a curse.”

  The four of us said our goodbyes to Sam and walked back to the house.

  * * *

  “You found the gun in your purse?”

  Bostwick was drinking a lemonade (from the carton) my mother had gotten for him and sitting on my sofa opposite Mom and Dad, who wouldn’t miss such a dramatic scene for the world. They’d say they were there to protect me. I have an active license to practice law in the states of New Jersey and New York, and they still think I need my parents to watch over me when a policeman comes to the house to ask questions.

  “Sort of. I had a bag with all of Barney’s equipment in it, and when I took everything out of the car, I put the bag in my purse to make it all easier to carry. I had the cage with me, after all, and that’s not light. So the bag with the bird stuff was in my purse, a
nd the gun was in the bag, which was in my purse. So if you want to say the gun was in my purse…”

  Bostwick looked at me a little wearily. “The gun was in your purse,” he said.

  “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

  Bruno, always the friendliest of the dogs, walked over and pushed his head under Bostwick’s hand. Since Bostwick was sitting down and Bruno is the size of a Quonset hut, Bruno had to duck down to achieve his goal, but he got a few pats on the head and that was enough. It was evident, though, that the sergeant was a little nervous around dogs, especially Eydie, who just lay on the floor and watched him without blinking. Eydie is great at mind games.

  “That’s how it is,” Bostwick said. “Now what you’re telling me is that it was in your purse and you didn’t know it. How could you not feel the weight when you picked it up? That is not a feather in there.” The pistol, which Mom and Dad had definitely not touched, was now safely ensconced in an evidence bag and had been taken by a uniformed officer to Bostwick’s car so it could be fingerprinted and whatever else it is they do back at the lab with the quirky medical examiner, who no doubt had a parrot in the morgue, because didn’t I see that somewhere on TV?

  “I was carrying a birdcage with an actual bird in it, and it wasn’t my bag of bird toys, so how heavy or light it should normally be isn’t something I’d just know off the top of my head,” I explained.

  Mom, of all people, looked thoughtful and pointed a finger to the ceiling. “Of course you had been carrying the bag all day, sweetie. So if all of a sudden there was a gun in it, you’d think it would be noticeable.” My mother, ladies and gentlemen.

  Bostwick held out his hands. “Yeah,” he said, “what about that?”

  “I can’t explain everything. All I can tell you is I had no idea there was a gun in the bag.” I petted Bruno and then Eydie aggressively to show Bostwick I wasn’t afraid when even he might be. “Otherwise, why would I have told you that on the phone? If I’d shot Dray—and everybody you talk to on the set will tell you I was nowhere near the place when that happened—and then stashed the gun in Barney’s kit, would I have been stupid enough to tell the detective investigating the murder?” It seemed like a pretty valid point to me.

  “You could be covering for someone.” Refreshingly, it was Bostwick and not my mother making the case.

  “The question remains: Why tell you? Why not throw the gun into the Hudson River on the way home or have one of the dogs bury it in the backyard?” I couldn’t have gotten the dogs to bury a gun in the backyard if I’d promised to take them to Kibbleland for a year. If there was a Kibbleland. What do dogs know?

  “I don’t have the answers yet.” Bostwick stood up as Barney fluttered his feathers in the cage. Letting him out would be a necessary risk I’d take later; he was getting bored and cranky and wouldn’t be able to act tomorrow.

  Wait. Was there going to be filming tomorrow? I hadn’t heard from any of the producers, but surely one of their stars being dead would be a crimp in the—pardon the expression—shooting schedule, wouldn’t it?

  “What does that mean?” I asked Bostwick.

  “It means I’m not ruling anything out, but you have a point,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense that you’d tell me you had the gun if you didn’t want me to connect you to it.”

  “She could just be clever,” my father piped up. My parents are so anxious to be of help that they sometimes don’t care who they’re helping. It comes from decades of trying to please audiences.

  I decided not to write them out of my will just yet, since that probably wasn’t the best way to get back at them. Instead, I looked at Bostwick. “How about this, Sergeant? I left Barney’s bag in Dray’s trailer when I put him there because there was no sense in my having it if something was needed. So for that forty minutes, anybody—especially the person who shot Dray Mattone—could have put the weapon in Barney’s supply kit. Yes, you’ll find my fingerprints on the gun because I touched it when we were on the phone. But I’ll bet that’s the only set of my prints you’ll find. Anybody else’s on that gun could be your murderer.” So maybe I have a flash of the melodramatic in my genes. I admit it. I just don’t embrace it.

  “I seriously doubt we’ll find prints that aren’t yours on the gun,” Bostwick said, heading for the door, which was a remarkably short walk. Eydie stood up and followed him, perhaps as a warning and perhaps just to see what he smelled like close up. Bostwick was aware of her but tried very hard not to look down. “I don’t think the killer is that stupid.”

  “Swell.” I reached for my phone and texted Madolyn Fenwick, the producer of Dead City I’d been communicating with directly. She’d know about the coming schedule and what effect Dray’s death would have on production.

  Bostwick watched me tap on my touch screen furiously for a moment. “Who are you texting?” he asked.

  “It’s business. It’s not about Dray.” It was sort of about Dray, but not in the way that the detective would have wanted.

  “Pass me the birdseed!” Barney shouted from his cage. He loved that one because people tended to laugh when he said it. This time Mom and Dad chuckled, but Bostwick and I were way too intense for such a frivolity.

  My phone buzzed. Meeting tomorrow. Group text later. Madolyn was efficient if not verbose. Some people text like they’re writing long letters; Madolyn texts like she’s paying by the word.

  Bostwick watched my face for signs of interest but found none and did not ask any questions. He said his farewells to my parents, nodded at me, and left.

  The dogs followed him and watched through the storm door as Bostwick got into his unmarked Chevrolet Impala and drove away. Bruno and Steve watched with wagging tails, but Eydie was far too hip for such a vulgar display. She sat down and scratched herself in any number of areas.

  I breathed out, possibly for the first time in an hour. I closed the door, which disappointed the two male dogs, and turned toward my parents. “Remind me not to appoint you guys to my defense team, okay?” I said.

  “What?” my father asked, apparently in earnest.

  “You and Mom kept coming up with ways that I could still have killed Dray whenever I was explaining how I couldn’t,” I told him.

  “We were just trying to help,” Mom said.

  I considered asking exactly who they were trying to help, but there was no point. They’d just gotten in from a long trip and a long gig, and they were, after all, my parents. It was starting to get dark, so I ordered a pizza and we were around the table (dogs circling like sharks for dropped pepperoni) in less than an hour.

  When I had decided to “break up the act,” as my father still puts it, and go to college, I had worried that Mom and Dad would suffer professionally. This was not because I thought I was such a gifted entertainer, believe me. On a good day I was adequate. But the idea that a three-person act was going back to a double act after all the years I’d been involved was risky.

  They had not missed a beat. They’d sniffed a bit about my disloyalty (that was mostly Dad; I think Mom was secretly proud I wanted to be a vet, even if it hadn’t turned out that way), but Dad had gone back to his yellow legal pad and started pounding out a new act. Frankly I don’t think it was all that difficult, as I’d been an addition to the scenes rather than the focus. He took me out and there was still plenty for the two of them to do. They got laughs and sang songs. They’ve been booked fairly solidly ever since.

  But the vibe I was getting from Mom, mostly, after this last cruise was not something I’d seen before. My mother has shown signs of a certain weariness with the traveling life, but anytime I’d seen them perform (all on land; I don’t go on the cruises), she’d come alive when she hit the stage and seemed exhilarated after the show was over, just like always. Not this time.

  “The ship was fine,” she insisted. “And the audiences were fine too. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “You’ve come back to my house after ev
ery gig for the last five years and I’ve never seen you look so relieved to be here.”

  “It got a little bit rough,” Dad admitted, not looking up from his pizza. He actually dropped a piece of pepperoni purposely on the floor for Steve, who is Dad’s favorite because he’s the smallest. Eydie swooped in and stole it, but Dad was ready with another because he knew she would. Steve happily lapped the second piece up and I decided against admonishing my father for spoiling my dogs. “The facilities on the ship weren’t always Class A.”

  “The facilities for performers are never Class A,” I noted. “They keep you in steerage like the poor slobs on the Titanic. I always worry you guys are going to hit an iceberg.”

  “We were in the Aegean Sea,” Mom reminded me. “They don’t have icebergs.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Anyway,” Dad said, “our accommodations were a little small and there were some slight problems.”

  “The toilet didn’t work,” Mom blurted out.

  “That’s worse than slight,” I said. “Why didn’t I hear about this on the news? You always hear about it when a cruise ship has that kind of problem.”

  “It wasn’t the whole ship,” Mom said, giving me a significant glance. “It was just us.”

  Beat, two, three … “So why didn’t you ask for a new stateroom or get someone in to fix it?” I asked. There had to be more to the story.

  Sure enough, there was. “Your father didn’t want to ask for another room.” Mom sniffed.

  “They were booked solid,” Dad said. “There was no other room.”

  “And the … facilities?” I asked, because I didn’t want to hear my parents argue the point.

  “Your father thought he could fix it himself,” Mom told me, something like a moan in her voice.

  Dad ate in silence even as Steve looked up hopefully for more. Bruno, who could have knocked over the table and had the whole pizza if he’d wanted to, sat patiently to the side. He was just happy to be included. “So what happened?” I asked, even though I knew the inevitable answer.