I had almost decided to take the bull by the horns and tell them. Those two stubborn old bats weren’t going to give us an inch unless we gave them a damn good reason to do so. Evidently, Big Al had reached the same conclusion a little sooner than I did. He beat me to the punch.
“Look,” he said patiently. “Like Detective Beaumont told you, we’re from the Seattle P.D. With homicide. There’s been a murder.”
Rachel’s jaw dropped. Daisy swung away from the stack of boxes, her sharp eyes riveted on Big Al’s face.
“A what?“ she demanded.
“A murder,” he repeated. “We’ve tentatively identified the victim as your nephew. Our first responsibility is to notify his next of kin. Out of common courtesy, we try to do that in person. If you could put us in touch with either your sister or your nephew’s wife, LeAnn, it would be a big help.”
“My land!” Rachel exclaimed. “Daisy, did you hear that?”
“I heard,” Daisy answered grimly.
Behind us a raucous horn sounded as a huge blue garbage truck rumbled into the alley behind our unmarked patrol car. The driver of the truck leaned out the window and shook his fist at our offending vehicles. “Hey, you guys. You gotta clear outa my way. I got work to do.”
Which is how Big Al Lindstrom and J. P. Beaumont, detectives with Seattle“ s homicide squad, ended up helping two white-haired little old ladies load the last of Dorothy Nielsen’s personal possessions into a U-Haul trailer.
When it was all loaded, with the rocking chair settled in the last bit of open space, the end result looked none too stable to me, but Rachel assured us that they weren’t going far. She stood to one side while Daisy pulled the trailer’s doors shut, bolted them, and headed for the driver’s side of the Buick.
Rachel paused uncertainly with us as the old crate’s engine coughed and sputtered when Daisy turned the key and gunned the engine.
“Why don’t you follow us?” Rachel offered tentatively. “We’ll try to decide what to do on our way to the house. Maybe you two could join us for a bite of lunch. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
I walked her to the car and held open the door while she slid onto lumpy, clear plastic seat covers that had stiffened and yellowed with age to an opaque beige.
“Why, thank you,” she said graciously.
With a squawk, Buddy flapped his way from the back window to the front seat. There he settled comfortably on Rachel’s shoulder.
“Freeze, sucker!” he ordered again, glaring sideways up at me, waiting for a reaction. This time neither Al nor I gave him the satisfaction.
I closed the door and the Buick lurched away, belching a cloud of thick exhaust smoke.
The driver of the garbage truck laid on his horn again. We were still in his way. Hurrying into our car, we started after them. By then, the U-Haul was already around the corner and nearly out of sight.
“We’re not really going to have lunch with those two old battle-axes, are we?” Big Al asked plaintively.
“We’re going to do whatever it takes to worm some information out of them, including having lunch,” I told him.
Al shook his head dolefully. “If that means being in the same room with that son of a bitch of a bird, we ought to ask for hazardous duty pay.”
I laughed. “I’ve heard of guard dogs before,” I told him. “But this is the first time I ever met an attack parrot.”
That’s one nice thing about this job. I learn something new every day.
CHAPTER 4
I suppose I had seen the Edinburgh Arms on occasion before in the course of my travels around Seattle, but it had never registered. The complex was situated in the 4800 block of Fremont Avenue, but its brick row house construction made it look like it had been plucked straight out of Merrie Old England. Scotland, actually, as Rachel was happy to explain to us during lunch.
Built as apartments but now converted to cozy condos, the Edinburgh Arms is a clone of another building, a project built in Edinburgh in the late 1920s. The Seattle contractor used the exact same specifications and plans. Now, some sixty years later, the weathered red brick, the squat chimneys to each unit’s fireplace, and the formal English garden courtyard gave the place a quaint, settled charm. Even the fat-cheeked, concrete cherub, peeing in the red brick fountain, seemed totally at home.
Al pulled up and stopped behind the Buick and the U-Haul, which were parked near an open doorway. The end gates were still closed and locked, however. Rachel and Daisy must have decided to eat lunch first and unload later.
“I shoulda figured those two dippy broads would live in a place like this,” Al grumbled, looking around.
“Why? What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“It looks just like ”em,“ he answered.
Rachel came to the door to let us in. A newly built plywood wheelchair ramp covered the two short steps leading up to the doorway.
“Daisy’s upstairs changing,” Rachel explained. “Come on in and have a seat. Lunch will be ready in a moment.”
The living room had an old-fashioned high ceiling with an amber-colored light fixture hanging from a brass chain in the middle of the room. It could have been a spacious, roomy place, but the furniture had been shoved together to make room for a hospital bed that had been set up in the far corner next to the fireplace. It was unmade. A stack of sickroom rental supply linens sat on a piece of plain brown paper on top of the bare mattress ticking.
Rachel saw me look at it. “They just delivered the bed this morning,” she explained. “We’re not quite organized yet. We had a hard time fitting it in here, but of course, Dotty would never be able to manage the stairs to get up and down to a bedroom.”
“What seems to be the matter with your sister?” I asked.
Rachel stopped in the doorway and looked at me before she answered. Reticence and hesitation weren’t her style.
“She broke her hip,” she said finally, decisively, then turned on her heel and disappeared through the dining room into the kitchen. Moments later we heard the banging of pots and pans as Rachel bustled about making lunch.
Buddy, confined to a large cage in the corner of the dining room, had been quiet when we first entered the house. Now, with Rachel out of the room, he piped up again. “What’s your name?” he asked, not once but several times.
We ignored him. There’s something undignified about being trapped into a conversation with a parrot.
The living room was light and airy, but filled with the motley collection of cheap knickknacks and trinkets-“tack” my mother would have called it-that had been gathered over two separate lifetimes and then somehow blended together.
In the corner next to the front door sat a. papier-mache elephant’s foot jammed full of umbrellas. Above it, an antique wood and brass hat rack held two yellow rain slickers with matching hats, two bright red motorcycle helmets, and two identical khaki-colored pith helmets. The two sets of helmets puzzled me. Neither Daisy nor Rachel looked much like the motorcycle or jungle safari type.
I wandered over to the fireplace to examine the marble mantel. On it sat a miniature zoo, complete with tiny, inch-to inch-and-a-half-tall animals, cheaply but recognizably made. There must have been a hundred of them in all. For a fastidious housekeeper, it would have created a dusting problem of mammoth proportions. From the layer of dust visible on each of the animals, however, fastidious housekeeping didn’t seem to be part of Rachel and Daisy’s program.
Rachel came into the dining room carrying a stack of dishes, stopped by the table, and looked over at me. “Those belong to Daisy,” she announced when she saw I was examining the animals. “The salt and pepper shakers are mine,” she added.