The Bird Boys Read online

  There was more than sun on her cheekbones now—there was deep pink embarrassment. She closed the door behind her, saying, “I shoulda called, but I decided to speak up face to face, so whatever way this went, I could tell you in person that I am grateful that you hired me and sorry you and your new business got pulled into such a dirty mess.”

  Phelan felt like he’d swallowed a bowl of concrete chili. The heat from his neck was lapping at his ears.

  She wasn’t coming back.

  “I got you into the mess, or Phelan Investigations did, and that’s the same thing. You know that’s the truth.”

  “Neither one of us to blame for that man, Mr. Phelan.” This judgment sounded settled.

  Phelan cleared his throat and went for it. “You well enough to come back to work?”

  They looked past each other, him to her mid-section, where a pale blue blouse tucked into a swirly skirt he’d seen on many days. She was glancing sideward toward the new furnishings. The pink on her cheeks spread down to her jaw.

  “Is there any work, Mr. Phelan?”

  “Matter of fact. We got a ten o’clock today.” He’d said that with a shitload of relief. Shoulda just sounded businesslike. And…we, he’d said we. “The gentleman who called you up before…well, before.”

  “The one wanted to be invisible? Yeah. I ’member.” She turned directly to the two-piece sectional and broke out a finer smile than people usually give to used furniture. “Where’d the plaid couch go? What’d you do to the urp-green walls with the scratched and chipped-off patches?”

  Phelan shrugged self-consciously. “Spiffing up our business image.”

  “I see that.”

  “Tax deductible, right?”

  “Right.” Her chin lowered. She scrutinized the fat-pillow couch. “That blue’s a nice color. But, you know, it could be two chairs, you pushed it apart. People might not want to sit right smack next to each other. And if we put a coffee table—”

  We. He exhaled.

  She looked down, shifted one black flat to the other.

  Hooked her hair behind an ear. “Guess we could start using first names now, Mr. Phelan, if you want. Being as there’s water under the bridge. Being as you’re keeping me on after what happened. Lotta people wouldn’t—”

  “If I’d a been down here like I should’ve been…” Phelan shoved his hands in his pockets, addressed his gaze to the floor. “…that good deed you did wouldn’t have fallen to you.”

  “That’s not how those people work, Mr. Phelan. Tom. You were here, he wouldna tried nothing. Still be out there.” A shudder crawled through her shoulders. Delpha turned and placed her umbrella in the coat closet. She went over and sat down at her desk. There she repositioned the Selectric an inch, pulled out the tray drawer and stirred the pencils. She opened her middle side-drawer and set a new manila file folder onto her desk, hovered a pen over its tab.

  “What’s the ten o’clock appointment’s name?”

  IV

  DELPHA RELIEVED XAVIER Bell of a dripping umbrella, set it in a corner of her office to dry. She showed him into one of the mismatched client chairs. As she turned, she had a strange sense of wind changing against her face. Unlikely, because the air in the office came from a flaky AC unit. She squinted at it.

  “Wait a minute.” Phelan stopped her before she got out his door. “Why don’t you bring in a pad and take down the details of this meeting shorthand? Like we do on all cases this important.”

  Her gaze examined his. Phelan’s eyes roamed downward. To date, zero case-notes had been recorded in shorthand, a language Miss Wade had learned in Mr. Wally’s business class at Gatesville Women’s Prison. She went into her office, opened and closed desk drawers, and returned with a new steno pad and a ballpoint. Peeking out beneath, Phelan could see a folder that she used to hold their standard contract form. A sheet of carbon paper would be clipped to it. Discreetly, she pushed the second client’s chair away from Mr. Bell, all the way to the side of the room, where she sat and poised the pen.

  “This is my secretary, Delpha Wade. She’ll make sure we record every detail of your case accurately.”

  “Yes, I spoke to Miss Wade on the phone.” Mr. Bell’s spine stretched a mite before he dipped his head in her direction. “Well, look at you. Miss Wade, would you do me the favor of turning your head to the side?”

  Delpha lifted her gaze from the steno pad. She looked directly at the client, and again, for a second, her eyes narrowed. Then she turned her head in the direction of the wall that had most needed repainting.

  “I am right. You’ve got the profile of Madeleine Carroll. Not the hair of course, hers was wavy. And blond. But, really, the nose, the chin, a dead ringer for—”

  “’Fraid I don’t know who that is.” Delpha returned her attention to the pad.

  “You’re too young. She was the star of, no, Robert Donat was the star, of course, but she was the lead actress in ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps.’ Alfred Hitchcock, 1935. You’ve seen it?”

  No, at Gatesville, movie-time was Doris Day and Elvis Presley. Delpha placed her chin a fraction higher in the air and a slight smile on her lips, to act out interest.

  “I’m a film buff. I realize it’s not everyone’s passion, but for me, well…” The client’s gaze turned to rope in Phelan. “Let me remind you that I’d like my identity to remain confidential.”

  The sunglasses had told Phelan that.

  The man’s nose—straight-bridged in profile but redveined and lumpy from the front—suggested that he liked the bottle. The gray tinge of its tip, that he was an ardent smoker, and the vertical folds in his cheeks, that he had some decades on him. But he didn’t have an elderly hump or a spindly frame. He was built thick like a wrestler or boxer who gravity had weighed down. And he was turned out—wore a navy blazer over a blue plaid shirt, the snap-brim fedora with neat brown hair around its edges. The hair and the mustache, sort of a briefcase brown, looked less than natural. That he kept his hat on—a man of his age, indoors and in the presence of a woman—said he was hiding what was or wasn’t under it. Vanity? Probably. But sunglasses in the rain, well, that said eye problem, ugly, or disguise.

  “Yes, sir. We got that part. I assure you confidentiality is one of our principles. What is it you want us to do for you?”

  “I…I’m all by myself now.”

  The client halted, lips still open. “Excuse me. It’s startling to say that.” A gust hit the window, and the glass rattled. One of his hands moved to hug the other. “I want you to find my brother. I have reason to believe he’s recently purchased a house in Beaumont. We went our separate ways long ago. One of those family matters.” Bell looked away. “My health…well, I’m not young, as you can see. I’d like to see him once more. Clear the air, as it were.”

  “And he’s not in the telephone book?” Phelan’s head angled toward a corner, where they had twenty-seven or eight phone books piled up because sometimes phone books were useful.

  “I don’t even know what name he’d be using.”

  Phelan’s head inclined. “Why would your brother use an alias?”

  “He’s…Rodney’s got this cloak and dagger mania. He’s always had it. As kids, we’d play hide and seek, and Rodney would just run. He’d never come in, even when we called ‘Ally-ally-in-come-free.’ Our mother had to call him. Then he’d come in.” Mr. Bell’s brows squeezed.

  “Rodney got your goat.”

  Bell looked at Phelan, angled, and threw a glance toward Delpha. “He knew he did. That’s why he did it.” After a moment he took a breath, and his head sank. “Ridiculous, I know. Here we are at the end of our lives, and Rodney is still running.” He drew a tobacco pouch and small packet from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind?”

  Phelan pushed over an ashtray, eyebrows lifted. Bell was using Patriotic rolling papers, the C-note pattern.

  The man nimbly fashioned a cigarette, saying, “Things happened in our family. Like any family. I told myself the sky was still blue
without Rodney. But now I’ve changed my mind. I want to see my brother.”

  “Whatever family things happened—they didn’t bother Rodney?”

  “Ohhhh.” Pondering. “They did. But we have to be realistic. Neither of us can take it back.”

  “Take what back?”

  “My word! The past, of course.” He leaned back, homemade clamped between his lips, drew a small coin from the breast pocket of his blazer. Phelan took it: gold, worn out of round, foreign words bracketing the head etched in the middle. Which, as near as Phelan could tell, was two Siamese twins with fat lips, joined together at the back of the skull.

  He glanced over at Bell.

  “Roman. The god Janus, who faces both the past and the future. Nice to look at, isn’t it? To remind yourself that the past is gone.” Bell plucked back the coin and stowed it again in the blazer’s pocket, gave it a pat. “Or that, in the future, something can be done to make up for it.”

  “OK, you want to talk to your brother, maybe make up. You’re retired, Mr. Bell?”

  “Yes. I’m retired. And I want to see Rodney again, just one more time.”

  Phelan damned the sunglasses. He’d have liked to have studied the old fellow’s eyes.

  “Then I’ll go home. Go to the movies, tavern, gymnasium, attend Classical Club meetings until, well, until I can’t do those things anymore. You have a great many years before you’ll know what I mean, Mr. Phelan.” He bent his head toward Phelan in what maybe was meant to be a fatherly nod, but his bottom lip bowed upward.

  “Classical Club?”

  An expression of pleasure lifted the man’s heavy face. “A group of professors. I taught an occasional night class at Loyola, just an elective, a history of early film. Paid practically nothing. But the credential allowed me discounted entry to some events. My favorite is The International Film Festival in Houston, I always drive over. Maybe you’ve gone?” Bell threw a glance at Phelan and turned inquiringly to Delpha.

  “I missed that,” Phelan said, so that Delpha didn’t have to find a reply. What Phelan did not miss, some years back, was movie night at a base camp in Kon Tum province—“The Alamo” projected onto an outdoor screen with holes in it. Him and Jyp Casey still wired from the night before, hauling a guy around downed and blasted trees, Zion Washington striding beside, both hands on his M-16.

  “Too bad. Film’s my passion, but my livelihood…it was drearier. I took over my father’s business. While my brother Rodney was off gallivanting here and there, I was selling coins, like the Roman one I showed you. Sabres and pistols, assorted antiques. I added movie memorabilia, autographs to our stock. I kept the shop going. Cooped up inside the same four walls every day. Same noisy little streets, my god, the racket tourists make, the local fools. Yowlin’ like cats.”

  “Where was that?”

  Coy smile. “Confidentiality, remember? Let’s just say, a city.”

  Having connected Loyola, the client’s accent, noisy little streets and yowling tourists to New Orleans, Phelan was annoyed by the lack of verification. He injected the atmosphere with a friendly smile. “Born and bred in New Orleans, Mr. Bell? Sell a lotta sabres down there?”

  With the nicotine-stained fingers of his right hand, Bell doffed the black glasses and set them on Phelan’s desk. His eyes were darkest brown and hooded, the lax skin of his upper lids balanced on pale lashes. “I suppose it’s not that difficult to guess. Born and bred. Yes, we sold sabres. Daggers, dirks, fancy pistols. Weapons, you know, of war.”

  “Was your brother Rodney a part of your business?”

  “A long time ago. He kept the books. When he moved away, he simply got an allowance for doing nothing.”

  “And that chapped you.”

  “Oh, not really. They thought…they thought that was better for everyone.”

  “They?”

  “Our parents.”

  Had his bottom lip quivered? His voice sounded hollow. His clean-shaven jaw had slipped sideways. Bell had, for a moment, become unhinged.

  “Happy family?”

  “Like any other.”

  “Uh huh. Do you have more siblings?”

  Xavier Bell took a last deep draw, spit-extinguished the homemade, and dropped the butt into the ashtray. Exhaled the smoke. “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “And Rodney?”

  “Seventy-three.”

  “Is he married?”

  “Not that I know of. He never seemed inclined toward marriage.” Bell’s face was bland.

  As was Phelan’s, while he batted around questions he decided could wait. “OK, got it. We find your brother, you spend some time, say goodbye and godspeed. Correct?”

  “That’s close enough.”

  “You mentioned an alias. Is Rodney your brother’s real name?”

  “No. He uses different names.”

  “Really,” Phelan said, adjusting to this information. “How do you know that?”

  “Because in the early days, I’d call, but then I stopped being able to find him. During this last decade of our…estrangement, I happened on the name he was using. Rodney Harris. I followed up. But then he moved again.” Xavier Bell resettled his shoulders in the blazer.

  Phelan noted again that they were not frail or humped shoulders. “That how you found Rodney was here in Beaumont? Somebody happen to tip you?”

  “Within this last year, financial conditions changed. Some aged relatives passed away. A portion of the estate was deposited into a bank here.”

  “I see,” Phelan said. “Large estate?”

  “That’s hardly relevant. Or your business, Phelan. But I will say that the apple of our mother’s eye was real estate, and she never sold a property. The sweet old miser.”

  That description rang for a beat.

  “How long ago was it you found your brother? And where, sir?” Delpha’s tone had taken on heavy-cream, she managed to pump the question full of courtesy and concern.

  Bell angled toward her. “He was around Jacksonville, Florida. About four years ago. 1969, that would make it.”

  “Four years ago. That’s the last time you saw him,” Phelan said. “You saw him in person then?”

  “Briefly.”

  Delpha offered a sympathetic smile. “Y’all couldn’t fix things up?”

  The old man’s hands opened and stretched. “I’m afraid not. My brother is a coarse man…coarser than he once was. We took different paths in life, I suppose. I told him I forgave him—”

  “For what, Mr. Bell?”

  “Everything! Forgiveness…is an attribute of the strong, they say. But I fixed nothing. As much as I tried to.”

  “What was it that you hoped would happen?” Now Delpha’s softened voice was a balm directed to Mr. Bell’s ear alone, and Bell oriented his whole body toward her.

  Phelan’s forehead wrinkled. How was she doing this?

  “Just…just…just to be his big brother again, for a little while. When he was small, he thought I hung the moon. To feel how that felt again, well, that…that was worth a great deal, and I’m a man who knows what things are worth.”

  After some seconds of silence, Bell glanced at Delpha and then passed his hand over his eyes. “I’ve embarrassed myself again, haven’t I?”

  Phelan changed the subject, asked, in a matter-of-fact tone, for Rodney’s description, a picture of him if there was one, list of habits or pastimes Bell knew about. Like, was Rodney a bowler? Or a Baptist, so they’d know where to look for him.

  Bell drew from the navy blazer a yellowed black and white photo. “That’s Rodney and me.”

  Phelan studied the photo: two men of different heights standing on a street corner, a broad door behind them. Part of a street sign above their heads read “Orle.” Their faces were alike: same black brows, straight nose, and slightly upturned lips. The men wore identical clothes: lightish suits, double-breasted unlike the blazer Bell wore today, but tacked in at the waist, two-tone
d shoes buffed to a sheen. Straw boaters. The taller man had an arm extended to the shorter one’s shoulder, the hand blurred as though he’d reached out at the last minute. These two could have been any youngish, well-enough-off white men in the United States in, say, 1930, ‘32,’34—sometime in there. Which told Phelan about the brothers’ conditions, being as how a fair number of Americans in the 1930s could not have produced a shiny pair of cap-toed, two-toned shoes without the aid of a fairy godmother.

  “Which is you?”

  Bell touched the photo. The taller one.

  “And this is the most recent you have? How old were you?”

  “Thirty.”

  Great, a forty-five-year-old picture. Phelan mentally rolled his eyes.

  “As for habits. We were Catholics, but I don’t know that my brother has kept up attendance. Rodney likes birds. Always did. Birds. Nature.” That was why he’d been in Jacksonville because that’s where a lot of birds nested or flew over or some such. And now Beaumont. There were wetlands all around the area.

  “Birds. All right. That’s helpful.”

  “That’s really all I have to give you. Oh, then there’s this.” Xavier Bell reached into his inside jacket-pocket, pinched bills from a wallet, and counted out a dozen real hundreds onto the metal desk. “Your fee for three weeks. I’m willing to pay a bonus if you find him by, say, September 30. Five hundred dollars. If you find him in a week, I’ll expect an immediate per diem refund. And of course I want a receipt.”

  Phelan kept his voice even. “Thank you, sir. Miss Wade will need your signature on our contract. That will also serve as a receipt for your retainer.”