“Goodness gracious! Buddy’s just a harmless bird. You’re not going to shoot him, are you?” she demanded.
Police officers live and die by the unexpected. Response to danger, real or imagined, is reflexive, instantaneous, decisive. Hesitating a moment too long can be crucial. And deadly.
But now as the sudden burst of adrenaline dissipated uselessly in my system, I fumbled sheepishly with my gun. My hand trembled violently. That silver-haired little old lady with her loudmouthed bird had come very close to dying in a hail of bullets. It would have been hell explaining that to a shooting review board.
“No,” I managed with some difficulty. “I’m not going to shoot him. We’re police officers.” I finally succeeded in shoving my Smith and Wesson back into its holster and pulled my identification from my pocket.
I glanced at Big Al, who was also struggling to his feet, his face gray and ashen. It had scared him as badly as it had me. For all the same reasons.
“See what you did, Buddy?” the woman said crossly, turning back to the offending bird. “You caused these nice men all kinds of trouble.”
“Buddy’s a bad boy, Buddy’s a bad boy,” the parrot agreed cheerfully, nodding his head up and down.
A second woman, almost a carbon copy of the first, appeared at the open end of the trailer. Both women wore their hair cut short, with a thin fringe of straight bangs across the forehead-Mamie Eisenhower bangs in my book. Both wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and stood ramrod straight.
“What’s going on, Rachel?” the second one asked briskly, smoothing her gray skirt and stepping to the ground in one easy movement. She was a spry old dame wearing what my mother always called sensible shoes.
“Oh, nothing,” Rachel replied. “Buddy’s up to his old tricks again. He scared these two nice men half out of their wits, but there’s no harm done.”
The second woman shook her head and clicked her tongue. “That bird never did have a lick of sense,” she said.
Rachel turned back to me. “You’ll have to forgive him. Buddy spent his formative years sitting in a living room with his cage next to a television set. He grew up on ”Police Story‘ and “Starsky and Hutch.” “
Big Al, getting a grip on himself, made a stab at polite conversation. “How old is he?” he asked.
“Watch it, buster,” warned the bird. “Don’t come any closer.” Al stopped dead in his tracks.
One look at Al’s face as he backed away from that parrot, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing. For two cents I think he would cheerfully have wrung that parrot’s cocky neck.
“Buddy!” Rachel exclaimed, handing the bird over to the other woman, who had come to stand beside her. The three of them made quite a picture, the twin old ladies with the wise-ass bird between them. I surmised the women must be sisters.
“Put him in the car, would you please, Daisy?” Rachel asked.
Without a word, Daisy took the parrot and placed him in the back seat of an old two-toned brown and beige Buick Electra that was hooked to the trailer. As soon as the door slammed shut behind him, Buddy hopped up to the back window and sat there, hunched over, glaring out at us.
I managed, with some difficulty, to stifle my laughter, but I was having a hell of a time thinking of anything useful to say. That didn’t matter much since Rachel was more than capable of keeping the conversation afloat single-handedly.
“Buddy’s sixteen now,” she continued. “Parrots can live as long as forty or fifty years. Jake, the man who owned him first, was a neighbor of ours. He was in a wheelchair, housebound you know. For years it was just the two of them. All they did was eat and watch television together. Finally, Jake’s kids had to put him in a nursing home, and Buddy couldn’t go along. That’s when Daisy and I inherited him. He was so fat the first thing we had to do was put him on a diet.”
I was still standing there holding out my ID, waiting for her to look at it. I felt a little silly. Eventually Rachel stopped for breath long enough to give my ID a cursory glance. I took the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.
“I’m Detective Beaumont, and this is my partner, Allen Lindstrom. We’re with the Seattle Police Department. We’re trying to locate either Dorothy or LeAnn Nielsen.”
The second woman, the one named Daisy, returned from the car. She stopped briefly beside her sister. “They’re not here,” Daisy answered curtly in response to my question. “Neither one of them.”
Abruptly, Daisy turned toward the stack of boxes beside the trailer. Something seemed to have offended her, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I watched her tackle the stack of boxes. She wasn’t a particularly stout woman, but she was evidently quite strong. With a groan, she hefted a trunk-sized box from the swaying stack in the alley and dropped it with a thump onto the floor of the trailer. The U-Haul bounced on its springs.
Daisy turned back to her sister. “Come on, Rachel. Let’s get busy. We haven’t got all day. I have to be at the zoo before long.”
“Do you have any idea where either one of those people could be found?” I insisted, directing my question at Rachel now, trying to steer the conversation back to the dead man’s wife and mother. “It’s important that we reach one or the other of them this afternoon at the latest.”
Daisy stopped where she was and stood with both hands on her hips. “What do you want ”em for?“ she demanded.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Well, stick it out your ear then,” Daisy said sharply. She turned away and grabbed another box.
Daisy may have been her name, but a sweet little wild flower she wasn’t.
Rachel looked shocked. “You’re almost as bad as Buddy, Daisy,” she scolded. “There’s no need to be rude.”
Her comment made me wonder which of them was older. It sounded like someone older and wiser chastising someone much younger. I would have thought those roles and distinctions would disappear with age, and these two were obviously well into retirement. But what would I know about that? I grew up as an only child.
Rachel turned back to me.
“Dotty’s in the hospital,” she said.
“Dotty?” I asked.
“Dotty. Dorothy, our sister-the one you asked about. She’s recovering from an accident, Mr. Beaumar,” Rachel explained.
I didn’t attempt to correct her pronunciation of my name. There was no percentage in it. “Could you tell us which hospital?” I asked. “It’s urgent that we be in touch with her.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“We really must speak directly to her.”
Rachel shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know. She’s supposed to be released tomorrow, but there’s no one here to take care of her. I don’t know where that no-good, worthless son of hers is. We haven’t been able to reach him in days. We’re bringing her home with us. We just came by to pick up some of her things.”
From that comment I gleaned at least one important scrap of information-there was no love lost between this zany pair of aunties with their outspoken bird and their precise, well-ordered, and recently deceased nephew. I’m sure he would have been shocked at the haphazard manner with which his mother’s prized possessions, including the four-poster canopy bed, were being crammed into the trailer. These ladies may have been quick movers, but careful they weren’t.
“Ma’am, this happens to be police business,” I argued gently. “Of course we wouldn’t want to trouble your sister if she’s too ill to see us. Instead, maybe you could tell us how to contact LeAnn Nielsen, then. It’s about your nephew, Dr. Frederick Nielsen.”
Rachel turned back to her sister, just as Daisy heaved another loaded box into the trailer. “What do you think, Daze?” she asked. “Should we tell him or not?”
Daisy shrugged. “I already told him what I think. Nothing he’s said has changed my mind one whit.” Daisy went right on loading boxes with a vengeance.
Meanwhile, Rachel was taking her sister’s opposition into consideration. She put one finger to her lips as if lost in thought. “I just don’t know what to say. I don’t think we should let you bother Dotty, not in her condition. This has been terribly hard on her, you know.”