Parrots Prove Deadly

by Clea Simon

  “What do you say, Randolph?” I was looking at the bird, but I was really talking to myself. Call me biased. I didn’t think the avian brain was up to the situation.

  “Some piece o’ cake, huh?” The parrot barked out what sounded like a laugh. “Stupid cow.”

  “And just who are you talking about?” He was repeating words. He had to be, I wasn’t getting the usual feeling of connection—of translation or psychic contact, and yet…. “The neighbor Rose? The daughter?”

  “Daughter, daughter. Dishwater!” With a loud squawk, he flapped his wings and succeeded in fluttering above his perch. Nothing else; no mental messages. Still, I felt for him. This cage was too small for a grown bird. Then again, Polly’s apartment had been too small for a grown woman, even an old one. I looked up and saw he had trained one cool eye on me, as if expecting a response. I reached out with my thoughts: What are you trying to tell me? Is it about Jane?

  “Dishwater!” The hoarse voice could almost have been laughing, but there was nothing more.

  “I think we agree on that one.” I said finally. “What I want to know is who said that?” I didn’t really expect an answer. We were in Rose’s apartment. Randolph had been here before, Jane had said. It was likely that he’d picked up Rose’s words, maybe because they rhymed, and it made sense that being back here would spur him to repeat them.

  “No talking. Shut up. Shut up. Skwah?” Randolph shifted on his perch, stopping only to groom his breast. He plucked out a bit of down, enlarging the bald spot. This was anxious behavior, the avian equivalent of biting your nails until they bled. This was the problem I should be addressing, not some crime that may or may not have ever happened. I shook my head. I was being worse than foolish, I was being neglectful. Whatever else was going on, this was an animal in distress, and I had been hired to help him.

  “Crap!” He said, loud and clear.

  I had to laugh. Okay, I hadn’t been hired to help the bird except indirectly. I’d been hired to clean up his language, which would allow him to find another home. The fact of his distress, or his loss of his longtime companion, might be relevant, however. I thought of the comfort he must find in repeating phrases that he either heard from the old lady or that had amused her and shook my head. Yeah, my clients were the people who paid me. Times like this, I really wished I could just avoid that part of the transaction entirely.

  “Randolph, let’s talk.” One yellow eye focused on me, and for a moment I wondered. I didn’t think he understood me. I wasn’t getting any of that connection I would have with a cat or even with a focused work dog like Buster. Still, that cool sideways gaze made me wonder. What the hell, I thought. The sound of my voice might reassure him—might serve as a point of contact. “Would you like to talk?” The eye looked me up and down. “About Polly?”

  The bird whistled and shuffled down his perch, his gaze moving on to the apartment around him. There was no connection here; my first instincts had been correct. Randolph was still, however, an animal in crisis. I looked around. I’d love to let him out, let him stretch what looked like considerable wings. However, we weren’t in his home apartment, and I didn’t want push the bounds of neighborly privilege. Parrots aren’t usually litter trained.

  “It’s fine, sweet cheeks. Caw!” The gray head tilted and suddenly the parrot was sizing me up again. This time, I did the same. Those little eyes were cold, but just then, I’d have sworn there was something in them—some spark.

  “You know, I think you can understand me. At least sometimes.” I waited, trying to blank out my mind of anything except the bird. Then I let in other images—the apartment we had just left. Jane.

  Another low whistle, and the bird took a dump.

  “Was that an editorial comment?” I asked, unable to stifle a chuckle. He didn’t respond. In truth, I was lost here. I wanted the bird to be happy. I wanted him to quit pulling out his own plumage. That meant finding him a home. To do that, I needed to retrain him—and fast. “Okay, forget that. Let’s start with the basics.”

  I put my face close to the cage and waited until the bird looked at me again. “Nice birdy,” I said, enunciating each syllable. “Nice, nice birdy.”

  I felt like a fool. The parrot’s silence felt like scorn. But what choice did I have? In the absence of a single, strong stimulus, parrots learn by repetition. Tomorrow, I’d remember to bring some treats; positive reinforcement works for anyone. The key, though, was to replace those offensive phrases with something more benign.

  “Nice, nice birdie. Bird-eee.”

  A little flutter, an understated coo. “Birdy?” I was trying.

  “Bitch.” Another squawk followed, but I’d heard him loud and clear. The bird was getting to me. I could see why Marc didn’t want him. I wondered whom else he’d pissed off. “Stupid bitch.” I would have dismissed it, too, except that I got a flutter—I couldn’t call it more than that—of something underneath the human-sounding words.

  “Bad. Bad bird.” Then again, out loud: “Bitch.”

  “Randolph?” A squawk. “You’re not—you aren’t calling me a bitch, are you?”

  Nothing. Nothing from the parrot, anyway—and it hit me. The kick I gave myself could have knocked me down. How stupid could I be? Just about the first thing I’d learned with my gift was to ask an animal its name. Wallis had told me that, once I’d stopped freaking out. She’d been called Mrs. Ruffles before, a stupid name, but the one she’d had at the shelter where I found her. Turned out, she hated it more than I did.

  Now I turned to the parrot once more. “I’m sorry. I started to ask you yesterday, but we got interrupted.” I didn’t know if any of that would translate. Still, it couldn’t hurt to be polite. “I’m Pru, Pru Marlowe. Would you tell me your name?”

  “Skwah!” Another shuffle. “Crap!” More obsessive grooming, so painful to watch. “Bitch!”

  I wasn’t getting anywhere. The parrot didn’t want to talk, only to curse. There had been something though—the briefest of thoughts: “Bad bird.” The words echoed in my head.

  Where had that come from? Well, Marc was one obvious source. I remembered, I’d been thinking of the old lady’s son when the bird had started talking again. Marc had probably said as much, maybe worse, to his sister—or to his mother—in the bird’s hearing. And the rest? Would Randolph call Marc a bitch? I didn’t know enough about avian comprehension. For that matter, I didn’t even know if the words Randolph repeated back to me were connected with anything he meant. They might just be sounds. Noises that got him attention and, just maybe, kept him from finding a new home.

  Marc didn’t like the parrot, that was clear. If Jane couldn’t take him, though, he was the obvious one to give him a home. He’d mentioned kids. Maybe one of them would take to this lonesome parrot, teach him new words and let him fly around a room. If I could get the bird to where Marc would let him into the house.

  “Bad bird.” There it was again, gone as soon as they appeared. Randolph was peering around, his little head craning this way and that. Marc might not be on his Top 10 list, but there was something else going on.

  As if to emphasize the point, the parrot reached down and pulled out more silver down. I watched the slight, curled feather drift out of the cage and to the floor. This apartment held bad memories for the bird. I thought of Rose. She seemed innocuous, charming even in her gruff way. To a captive animal, she might seem quite different—and she did have strong feelings about her former friend, and all those who were close to her. Then again, Genie, the aide, had been here, too.

  I needed to go back to my old notes. I couldn’t remember much about parrots—how they learned or the way their memory worked. They had excellent vision, I recalled, better than most mammals. There was something else—something about having more cones, more sensors, in their eyes. As I mused over this, more came back to me: some theory that said parrots had the gift of filling in the blanks, of seeing what should be there, as well as what shouldn’t—a gift that would be cruci
al to survival in their native jungle habitat. Was there anything in this room that would have, should have been a visual clue to the parrot? Something that would remind him of Genie? Or of Polly?

  I was stretching. I knew that, but with little else to go on, I looked around the little living room. Neater than her across-the-hall neighbor’s, but not as spare as I’d originally thought. I saw photos, a lot of them, framed on the wall and along the long windowsill, easily visible from the parrot’s perch. Would a photo register to a parrot?

  “Aw-wah!” I turned as Randolph—or whatever his name was—gave a strange-sounding call. He was biting at the bar of his cage, his hooked beak gnawing on it.

  “You okay?” He stepped back, head bobbing, and I considered how he’d been standing. Head bent, sideways, he’d have been staring at the floor. At a large rawhide chew toy. Buster’s no doubt. That didn’t mean—

  “Bitch! ”

  Of course. The service dog would always have been here, in this room. That’s what Randolph was looking for, what he didn’t see.

  “Bitch!” The parrot was louder this time, and it hit me. I hadn’t examined Buster, simply assumed he was an altered male. He was small for a shepherd, but I’d assumed that was a result of whatever cross had given him that glossy dark coat.

  “Buster?” I did my best to look the parrot in the eye, one eye at a time. The result was disconcerting.

  “Aw.” The parrot clicked with his tongue, his disappointment clear. I had not only not seen the obvious, I had been a fool. Buster was a female, a bitch. And my suspicions had once again come to nothing.

  Chapter Eight

  “It’s hopeless. I really am the sad sack Creighton thinks I am.” An hour later, I was home again, trying to unwind with a beer and my cat. “I can’t even get the basics about a damned guide dog right.”

  “Well, those animals have no life.” Wallis gave the feline equivalent of a shrug, flexing and settling her long white whiskers. “No sense of self. No sense of fun.” Wallis may be neutered; she’d been spayed in the shelter where I found her. She liked to let on about a wild past, however.

  “It’s worse than that, Wallis.” I joined her at the windowsill. The view from my mother’s kitchen took in a stand of birches, already golden against the bright red of the sugar maples. “I’m imagining murders now, too.” I told my feline companion. “When all I’ve really got is gossip, an overworked daughter, and maybe some interspecies tension.”

  I confess, I was looking for more than sympathy. Beyond support, I was hoping for confirmation of what I’d suspected, and I did what I could to relax my defenses. If she could see what I saw, sense what I had experienced, maybe she’d have another take on it—another way in. Maybe I wasn’t making this all up.

  “You are bored, aren’t you? ” Wallis’ eyes closed slightly as she stared at me, taking it all in.

  “Maybe a little.” I had to give her that.

  Her whiskers flattened out against her face in satisfaction. Our move back to Beauville had been my decision, made unilaterally. As much as she enjoyed the view of the woods, I knew she would never let me forget our panicked flight from the city—from everything she had ever known.

  “Little town, little life.” She turned toward the window and, with a moment of calibration, leaped to the sill. “What fun is it without the chase? ”

  I didn’t answer that. I did, however, think of Creighton. He thought I was amusing myself. Maybe not consciously, but at some level—looking for a bigger mystery than the one I was really supposed to be solving. Meanwhile, he had real problems on his hand. And if he was asking me for help, he was stuck without a clue.

  I took in the vista outside. For all its problems, until now this little town had managed to escape the drug scourge that had swept through so many other former industrial towns. We had tourism. Those maples, the ones turning red, were worth their weight in gold. And we were small enough, our industrial past far enough behind us, that our troubles tended to be small too.

  Without thinking, I reached to stroke Wallis’ back. I hadn’t had a friend like her when I was growing up. Maybe if I had, I could’ve held a little steadier. Instead, I’d gone as wild as was possible. In those days, that meant drinking too much. Smoking pot and driving wild. The low point for me had been a scary night in an earlier incarnation of the cop shop Creighton now occupied, pulled over in a stolen car one of my buddies had jacked for a joyride. When my mother had bailed me out, she’d sat me at the table that still stood beside me. Read me the riot act. And I’d made up my mind to get out—as soon and as far as I could.

  Wallis’ fur was a lot warmer than any of those memories. Still, it made me sad to think of those days. Not that I’d come back, but that my town had grown so much harder and more dangerous.

  “Tell me about the bird.”

  I looked down into Wallis’ green eyes. Was my cat trying to distract me?

  “I find birds…amusing.”

  “You find the hunt amusing.” She didn’t deny it. However, it was useful to catalog what I knew.

  The bird’s repeating things it heard, I “told” her, letting the memories sift through my head. Not even necessarily what it had picked up from Polly. I thought of Rose and her foul language. Maybe the two old friends had spent more time together than apart; maybe they’d cracked each other up teaching the bird insults. I knew I should find out more about their relationship. Maybe Genie would know. Or the resident doctor.

  It was pointless. Maybe the parrot had come to Polly cursing. Maybe he’d spent decades living with an actual sailor. There was no way I could tell who he was mimicking, or when he’d picked up whatever he repeated to me now. Not unless he let me in, and I was beginning to believe the bird’s limited mental capabilities would make that impossible.

  “Now, now, don’t underestimate the undersized chicken.” Wallis had begun using metaphor more. I didn’t know if this was something she was picking up from me, or if I was just hearing her in a new way. “I told you, it’s a skill that you have to work at.” That came through loud and clear. “Funny, isn’t it? When prey animals do it so naturally? ”

  “What was that, Wallis?”

  “Listening.” She looked up at me as if I were a kitten. “They have to understand, or they’re what you call toast.”

  “So you think that parrot understands me?” I tried to get my mind around this. “Even if I can’t understand him?”

  “From what you’ve told me, ahem…” A little hiccup that could have been a hairball, but was more likely her way of accenting that I ‘told’ her more unconsciously than with words. “He’s got a few years on you.”

  Great. I was being played by a parrot.

  “Not necessarily.” Wallis wasn’t the type to humor me, so I paid attention. “He may be waiting, testing you. Especially considering all he’s been through recently.”

  She had a point there.

  “Besides, they hear what they need to hear—but they don’t necessarily get the larger picture. There’s a reason they call them feather brains. Juicy, though.” I waited, trying to ignore the way my own belly had started rumbling in sympathy. “But for noticing the little things? Well, they can do that.”

  A wave of disappointment came off Wallis, and I had the distinct desire to turn around and check to see if a twitching tail had given me away.

  Chapter Nine

  I wanted to go back to that parrot. To talk to him, see if I could break through his bird-like reserve. Not that I trusted Wallis’ words entirely. Like everyone, she had her angle. But for her to credit a bird with anything—besides flavor? I had to give it some credence.

  I’d made a promise, though. A spoken one to Albert, and a silent one to that caged raccoon, pacing in his cage, and so before it got too late, I headed out again. The tourists had disappeared as the shadows lengthened, making the drive more fun. Besides, I’d figured my visit with the Evergreen Hills manager would be the easy part of the day. Animal expert making a house ca
ll, suggesting an easy fix to keep the residents happy; what’s not to like? I was even careful about parking, pulling neatly into a space marked for visitors before I went searching for the man in charge. I didn’t expect it to be difficult: Evergreen Hills—“Your Place in the Pines”—seemed to believe in obvious signage, with placards pointing the way to the sports center and the manager’s office in a green and yellow combination not found in nature.

  “Mr. Gaffney?” When I found the office locked, despite the acid-yellow sign saying “open,” I began to poke about the grounds. The sign said someone would be on duty until five, and an hour seemed a reasonable time to settle this mess. The birds were all settling in, quiet coos of nesting and nighty-nights as the shadows lengthened. They kept earlier hours than most humans, however. “Hello?”

  “Pru!” I turned to find a heavy-set man who looked surprisingly like my father, what I remembered of him anyway, complete with the gin-blossom nose and the jowls of a hound. “I thought it was you.”

  “Jerry?” Jerry Gaffney had been part of my crowd in high school. We hadn’t had much in common besides drinking and cars. Still, seeing him shook me. He didn’t look good. “Good to see you.” I fixed a smile on my face and submitted to a hug. He held me a little longer than necessary. Then again, from the smell of him, he probably hadn’t had much of an opportunity to get close to a woman recently.

  “God, you look great.” He practically licked his beefy lips. “I’d heard you were back in town. Couldn’t stay away, huh?”

  I smiled in reply. I was used to this. People in Beauville were either surprised I’d come back or pleased, and not in a good way. It didn’t say much about the town that returning was rated a failure, but there it was. “So, you’re the manager here?” Albert had told me his title. It was a fancy term for “custodian” or “groundskeeper,” which made me wonder who was really in charge. I needed Jerry on my side, however. As I’ve said, a little positive reinforcement works for everyone.