Parrots Prove Deadly

by Clea Simon

  He was having trouble, I could see it in the way his whole body trembled. Tension, not fear, was what I was picking up from the little dog, but I wasn’t sharp enough to get at the root of it.

  “Fear, that’s it,” Growler said finally. I started to correct him, to explain that he was picking up on my perception. He barked once, short and sharp, to cut me off. “It’s the poison, isn’t it? ” The little head tilted up toward me, the button eyes holding me in their stare. “There’s some danger around the poison, and car man is thinking you’re involved.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Creighton—and Growler—were right. I was involved. And although I wasn’t afraid of Jerry Gaffney, I wasn’t enough of a fool to take him on alone. For once, the law was on my side, and if I had to get a court order to stop Jerry and his numbskull cousin from slaughtering wildlife, so be it.

  I’d kept Growler out longer than usual by then, so I walked him back to the Horlick house, my other questions still ringing in my head. Knowing now that the bichon’s perception was sharper than I’d thought, I tossed some of these at him as we walked.

  “That parrot—is he telling me something, or just repeating words and sounds he’s heard?” That was the big one, and I thought the little dog had paused as he considered it. That he’d paused by a particularly well-used hydrant brought me back to reality. This was Growler’s one outing of the day. He had his own needs, his own social agenda to fill.

  “Huh.” The chuff again, as he sniffed open-mouthed at the hydrant. “That’s a fight waiting to happen. Someone’s going to the vet again.” I didn’t want to interrupt as he catalogued the various scents. I did hope, however, that the object of Growler’s interest wasn’t another of my clients. “No trusting that one. Not him.”

  “You are talking about another dog, aren’t you, Growler?” Something about the vehemence worried me. That on top of Creighton’s cop-like reticence made me curious. “Or are you talking about ‘car man’?”

  He lifted his leg and then with a sigh that carried a wave of resignation, he plowed ahead toward his inhospitable home. “Women.” That I got, loud and clear. “Don’t see what’s right in front of them.”

  “What, Growler?” I stopped, and since I held the other end of the leash, he had to, as well. He turned and eyed me, his button eyes cold.

  “The guide dog—the one you call ‘Buster’? ” He broke his silence. “She’s more concerned with her person than with anyone else—and with good reason. People die there. She smells it, and I can smell it on her.”

  I nodded, grateful for that damp black nose. He was gleaning things from my memories that went beneath my radar. We continued walking, and I mulled over that last statement. Yes, people died at LiveWell. It was an old folks’ home, no matter what anyone called it. Death’s waiting room. Did he—or did Buster—mean there were suspicious deaths? Deaths that shouldn’t have happened—what the coroner would call misadventure? Or even murder?

  “Watch what happens to that bird,” Growler said, barking once as we came up to his door. “Nobody likes a blabbermouth.”

  Chapter Twelve

  If I hadn’t been concerned about Randolph, I was now. Yes, he was a nuisance, and, yes, he was going to be hard to place, given his vocabulary. But would someone besides me take his rantings seriously? Had the big bird repeated—the word “confided” didn’t seem right—his demonstration to anyone else?

  I rushed through my next few jobs—a regular claw clipping for a Persian who was a lot more accepting than Wallis would have been and a dachshund whose back necessitated physical therapy—and then raced over to LiveWell. I was early, but, hey, Jane had said she was always there these days, hadn’t she?

  The woman who answered my knock was even more of a mess than the day before. Eyes swollen, nose red, Jane had been crying. Bawling was more like it, if the little hiccups that had her head bobbing as she let me in were any indication.

  “Are you okay?” I didn’t want to get involved. Humans can care for themselves. However, this human had already given me a hefty deposit. “You know, I lost my mother about two years ago.”

  She turned and I followed her into the apartment. The box level looked pretty much the same as it had the day before, though the fast food wrappers were new. The parrot, however, looked worse. That bald spot on his chest was worried and angry. I nodded at him, trying to catch his eye. Before I could say anything, the woman who’d let me in coughed out a sob that had me looking for a box of tissues. She was ahead of me, though, and grabbed a bunch before turning to face me again.

  “It’s not that.” Her nose still looked sore, but the hiccups had subsided. “It’s—the hospital.”

  I waited while she grabbed another bunch of tissues. Those final bills can pack a wallop, but not enough to provoke tears, I figured. A lost wedding ring, maybe. It seemed unlikely they’d lose a body. “Didn’t she—” I caught myself in time. “I thought she passed here, in her home.”

  Jane shook her head and dabbed at her nose. “No, well, she did, it turned out. But they took her to the hospital anyway. She’d been there—Berkshire General—just a few weeks before, so officially she was under their care—as well as Doctor Wachtell’s. I don’t understand the arrangement.”

  “Wachtell is the gerontologist on duty here?” She nodded. Sweet arrangement: all your clients in one place. “He probably has an affiliation with Berkshire, so he can admit patients.” My mother had died at home, with hospice care. Still, I’d ended up learning about so-called institutional end-of-life treatment. “Care” had little place in the routine of tests and procedures. “He was probably her doctor of record.”

  Jane just shook her head. “I wish he’d been the one. He’s the best, really. At least, she was beyond hurting by that point.”

  But not beyond a couple of grand’s worth of procedures, I’d bet. Still, I didn’t see how all this had led to tears—and I wanted to get to work. “Is it—the thought of her being there?” I’m no good at this. Behind me, the parrot shuffled and muttered. “Damn it all.” I tried not to smile.

  “They had a meeting.” She bit down on the last word. “Mortality and—morbidity?”

  “Yeah, that sounds right.” Too many memories.

  “They’re saying that the death was not natural.” She had to pause there and reach for more tissues. I turned toward the parrot. Randolph tilted his head. “That someone was ‘at fault.’”

  I whipped back to Jane. “At fault?” God, I was sounding like a parrot.

  “Her care. My care.” Ah, that was why the tight mouth.

  “Are they going to do an autopsy?” How many days had the old woman been dead—five? No, six. “Can they?”

  A sharp, quick shake of the head. “They’d asked that morning, when she—when she—but I said no. I didn’t think…”

  I’d made the same decision. The offer seemed so pointless, the exact cause of death after so many months of suffering a useless bit of knowledge. Under the circumstances, though…

  Jane was still talking. “—saying she should not have been left unsupervised, because of the level of medication. The number of prescriptions she had.”

  My look asked the question. “Painkillers,” Jane said. I thought of the voice I had heard. Maybe that hadn’t been recent. Maybe Polly Larkin hadn’t been able to speak at the end. Keeping my own memories in mind, I tried to phrase my next query gently.

  “Was she in a great deal of pain?” Listening to my own voice, I could imagine how Wallis would scoff. Humans, as she well knew, were wimps.

  Jane was toughening up, though. “It was her back. Something with the cartilage in her disks—it had worn away. That was why she had the walker.”

  Another shake of her head, as she reached for some books. “But they didn’t know her. They didn’t know how tough she was. The amount of drugs she’d had, the strength of some of them, she shouldn’t have been able to get out of bed at all, they said.” She shoved the books into a box as if they were to
blame and reached for more. “The doctor on the phone told me that his committee was going to discuss starting some kind of inquiry.”

  “Well, that’s good, right?”

  In response, she grabbed more books. Anger came off her like heat, replacing the earlier sadness and shock. What I didn’t understand was why.

  “Pain meds.” More books. At least she was getting the packing done. “Their fancy new ‘miracle drug.’ None of it was working.”

  “Damn it all!” Randolph startled us both. “What are you doing? What are you doing?” He’d spread his wings—the cage gave him just enough room—and was flapping them as he shrieked. “Put that down!”

  “What?” Jane looked up confused.

  “He’s agitated. Your voice.” I went over to the cage. “Is there a cover? It might calm him down.”

  She handed me a light-resistant cover that I wrapped around the cage, fixing the Velcro shut. “Damn it all!”

  I shared the sentiment. “Look, maybe you should take a break. Go get a cup of tea or something.” I looked around at the hamburger wrappings, the Styrofoam cups. “Have something proper to eat. I’ll take care of Randolph.”

  Jane stopped packing. “Thanks.”

  As she reached for her coat, I had another thought. “When was the last time you let Randolph fly around?”

  “Fly around?” She turned back toward me, clearly clueless.

  I tried not to sigh audibly. “A bird that size, especially in a cage that size, should have some time to fly every day. Surely, your mother…” I paused. I really didn’t want her to start crying again.

  “She—I always thought that was a filthy habit. The bird is,” she bit her lip, “not trained.”

  “No, they aren’t. Still…” Even under his cage cover, we could hear Randolph fluttering, jumping from perch to perch. “Look, I’ll keep an eye on him and clean up if he poops anywhere.” I forced a smile. “You deserve a break.”

  Now that her anger had dissipated, the wan blonde did look exhausted. And so with one more nod, she let me escort her out the door. The moment it closed behind her, I fetched the canister of treats I’d packed for training purposes and hurried back to the cage.

  “Randolph?” I opened the cover tentatively. If the bird had fallen asleep, I’d let him be.

  “What the hell do you want?” It was as clear an answer as any I’d heard, but it wasn’t accompanied by frantic flapping. So I pulled the cover back and found myself once more eye to eye with the big, gray bird.

  “Would you like some fly time?” I had no idea what Polly had called it. Clearly, her daughter didn’t. “Fly time?” I offered a treat. “Fly?” I still had no bond with this bird. Without that, I didn’t stand a chance.

  “Waah,” the bird took the treat, then looked down and pecked at a large scaly claw. “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “Okay, then.” I opened the door and stepped back. Parrots can be aggressive, and this one was large and agitated. Plus, I’d realized, his favorite perch put us at eye level. I didn’t know how much this bird understood. I did know I didn’t need to get into a dominance contest with a client. “Go wild.”

  “Waah! Go wild.”

  “Very good.” Randolph stepped onto the door frame and accepted a second treat with his massive beak. “Go wild,” I tried again.

  “Wild.” He peered around the room. I didn’t think he was looking for Polly. The mess, I figured. Things must seem strange. Still, he spread his wings and took off. I stepped back and still felt the breeze from his wings. He was a big bird, and once again I wondered how old he was. How much he must have seen.

  I walked over to the wall to get out of his way. To lean back, I needed to move some of those boxes. “That’s mine. Stop it!” He squawked, landing on the windowsill. “Get your grimy hands off.”

  “Sorry.” I couldn’t help but smile. Polly must have been a little paranoid at the end. That was a much more logical explanation than an intruder. Than murder.

  “Waah!” Randolph accented his comment by letting loose some droppings. Well, the sill would be easy to clean. “Filthy animal.”

  “She said that to you?” He was perched below my eye level, and I had the uncanny feeling this was intentional. Randolph didn’t want me worrying about dominance, either. “Or are you repeating someone else’s words?”

  Rose, maybe. Or more likely Genie—though from what I’d witnessed, either Jane or her brother might have made comments if they’d visited and found the bird flying free.

  “Waah.” Randolph started to groom, working his thick beak through the feathers on his left wing. It must have felt good to stretch out, I thought. Being cage-bound was almost as bad as being bedridden. I shook the treats canister to get his attention, and then stopped myself. Thinking back over what Jane had said, what the doctors had said, was making me cautious. Parrots bond, and Randolph probably missed Polly. Still, this bird’s stress issues might have dated from long before Polly’s death. I didn’t want to push him.

  “Crap!” The bird stopped grooming and angled his head to stare at me. “Shit on a shingle!”

  “Okay,” I spoke carefully. “Maybe it’s not the same.” Did this bird understand me? My morning with Growler had alerted me to possibilities I wouldn’t have considered only a day or two before.

  “Bullshit.” The bird elongated the first syllable in a manner that would have been comical under other circumstances.

  “What are you trying to tell me, Randolph? If Randolph is indeed your name?” This wasn’t what I’d been planning. Still, both Wallis and Growler had put me on alert.

  “Full of crap, that one. Put that down! What are you doing? What are you doing? That’s mine! Aaah!” And with something that sounded eerily like a human shriek, the gray bird took off again, circling the room one more time before returning to his cage once more.

  I stood up in alarm: too quickly for the cluttered room. One box teetered, and I caught it. That walker though, it crashed forward with a familiar sound. In his cage, Randolph was watching me, the black pupil alert in the bright yellow iris. “Ka-da-klump,” he said. “Oh, my.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You do know what you’re saying, don’t you?” I stood facing the open cage door. “You’re saying that Polly, your person, was murdered.”

  “I am?” The bird tilted his head at a quizzical angle. With his wide-set eyes, I couldn’t tell if he was still staring at me—or if he was focusing on the cuttlefish bone wired to the side of the cage.

  “You know you are.” I caught myself. Pru Marlowe: interrogating a bird. “At least, I think you do.”

  “Know what I’m saying. Aww.” Either this bird was toying with me, or he was an extremely fast learner.

  “Hello?” A different voice, much softer, caused me to whirl around. Rose, with Buster and Genie in tow, was sticking her head through the door. “Anyone home?”

  “It’s me.” I started toward them and paused. The bird, the dog—Buster was well trained, but still. I reached back and closed the cage.

  “Crap,” said Randolph.

  “I found something!” Rose walked into the room slowly. Buster leading her between the boxes—and leaning back against her ever so slightly before she could bump into one of Jane’s piles. “Genie?”

  The aide stepped around them and held out a book to me. It was huge and hardbound, and I could see why the little neighbor had recruited the aide to carry it. “Sophie’s Choice,” I read the cover. “Large-print.”

  “Genie was reading it to me,” Rose gestured in the direction of the aide. “But I thought Jane might want it.”

  As a doorstop? I shot her a look before I once again realized that she couldn’t see it, and put the book on one of the more stable piles. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate your thoughtfulness.” All the clichés from my mother’s final days were coming back.

  “Someone’s been busy.” She looked around as if she could see, and I wondered how total her disability was—and how well her oth
er senses compensated.

  “That’s Jane. I’ve just been working with Randolph.” I became aware of a movement behind me. Genie had seen the bird dropping and gone to the kitchenette for a paper towel. “I’m sorry, I meant to clean that up.”

  “No trouble.” Her voice was flat, and I kicked myself. Another white lady making work. “That bird…”

  “It’s healthy for him to fly free a little. And this is an enclosed space.” The expression on her face let me know what she thought of my priorities. Then she smiled and shook her head. “Polly really did love that bird.”

  “So I gather.” I smiled back, and Genie went to toss the towel.

  “She doesn’t like the parrot,” Rose lowered her voice just enough to not be audible in the kitchenette. Genie, already returning, pretended not to hear, so I didn’t respond either.

  “Put that down! That’s mine!” I turned, but not before seeing the surprise on both Rose and Genie’s face.

  “He’s been doing that,” I said, as a thought hit me. They were both watching the bird, and I could study them. “And more.”

  “Stop it! Stop it! Ka-da-klump!” The crashing noise was eerily accurate, and I saw Rose wince. Genie simply looked stunned. “Aaaah…” Randolph finished his recital.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” I said, after a moment’s silence.

  “Disgusting, that’s what it is.” A new voice. Marc Larkin was standing inside the opened door. Behind him, his mouth ajar, stood a tall stranger, blinking, the blood drained from what should have been a well-maintained tan. “Dr. Wachtell wanted my mother to get rid of that bird.”

  “Indeed I did,” said the tall stranger, regaining his composure—and his color. “It was never a healthy pet for a woman in her condition.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Excuse me?” I don’t like being startled. I really don’t like amateurs judging other people’s pets.