The Bird Boys Page 4

  As soon as Delpha had added the financial details, she rose from the client chair. Contract and ballpoint appeared on Phelan’s desk, squared into place by her hands, for the client. “Please add your telephone number, sir. Below your name there.”

  “Certainly. But…I’m quite often at a film. I might call you,” he said, gaze darting to her. “Progress reports.”

  “That’d be fine. And, ‘scuse me,” she said gently, “but…”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Rodney dangerous?”

  The client pulled back. “I didn’t—I never said the first word about dangerous. Why would you ask that?”

  As if teasing, Delpha said, “No special reason, Mr. Bell.” Her uneasy expression transformed into a smile of mild sweetness. Phelan noticed that the smile stopped short of her eyes but didn’t think Bell would.

  Bell still stared at her, but when her smile broadened, he relaxed again in his chair.

  Phelan shut down his own amusement—see, having her in here was a primo idea—lit a cigarette, and sat back in his swivel chair. “Routine question.” He gestured vaguely. “Miss Wade is being thorough. In this business, we have to know what we’re getting into. What’s the answer, Mr. Bell?”

  The dark eyes gazed at the left side of Phelan’s desk, skimmed across it and fixed on the right side. “Rodney…caused dangerous things to happen.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “He…” Bell’s pinkish nose reddened. “Was not a loyal brother. Took what wasn’t his.”

  “Say Rodney’s a thief?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What did he steal?”

  The client, apparently conducting some inward dialogue, did not reply.

  Finally, Phelan cut off the silence with, “All right, then, your retainer will buy you around, as you said, three weeks from Phelan Investigations. Full weeks but spread out over whatever time period is required, including nights and weekends if we’re obliged to work then.”

  Bell seemed to stuff his preoccupations back into himself and attend to the office around him. “Surely that’s long enough?”

  “Can’t say. Depends on how deep your brother’s buried himself. But you should know that we do work several cases at a time.” Phelan spread his palms. “Busy schedule. Now. Yours is a heavy research case. Any reason you’re in a hurry?”

  Bell stroked his mustache with a knuckle. “Not really, I suppose. Having someone working for me already helps.” He nodded, almost bashful. “It’s, well, it’s been such a long time since I’ve had…allies.”

  “Got allies now, sir. Phelan Investigations will do our best.”

  The flash in Xavier Bell’s dark eyes was that of a yearning six-year-old who knows better than to ask for anything, but dogs you anyway. It passed. But the tremulous smile combined with the mossy old nose activated Phelan’s sympathy gland.

  Phelan scooped up the hundreds and set them in his desk drawer on top of a bank deposit booklet. He came out from behind the metal desk and walked their client to the door, making a detour for the client’s still-wet umbrella.

  Behind them, he heard Delpha say quietly, “Mr. Bell.”

  Xavier Bell did not turn toward her. Instead, he offered his hand to Phelan and a speech that he seemed to be cranking out from memory. “I will be relying on you—”

  “Mr. Bell.” Delpha, a shade louder this time.

  Phelan glanced back at his secretary, saw the client’s sunglasses dangling from her hand, returned to Bell, who, reciting confidential discretion results, either didn’t hear her or didn’t want to lose his place in the speech.

  “…and I do appreciate your best effort. Thank you.” The old fellow exhaled.

  With a flip of his hand, Phelan directed his attention to Delpha. Bell twisted himself back toward her and exclaimed, “My word, I just walked right off without those!”

  Delpha presented the glasses to him as if they were General Eisenhower’s binoculars, smiled.

  Her smile imprinted on his face. He fit on the sunglasses and wagged his finger at her. “Madeleine Carroll.” They heard him descend the stairs carefully.

  Phelan went back and nabbed his camera from his desk. He was thinking that Bell was a nice enough old guy. A mixed bag. Delpha could melt him with sweet talk, but Phelan had the feeling he wasn’t always meltable. A tiny bit of unstandard about Xavier Bell.

  Hearing the outside door shut, Phelan trotted down to the dentist’s office on the first floor. Jogged across the waiting room with a nod to the receptionist, who trailed a hand at him. He dodged into a room where a girl reclined on a chair with her mouth gaping and her eyelids squeezed shut, the dentist bent toward her with a silver hook.

  “Beg your pardon, Milton, this’ll just take a second.” Phelan leaned toward the window and took hurried photos of Xavier Bell. The rain had let up some, but the man had unfurled his umbrella, looked left, right, then crossed the street.

  Here was something different: a brisk gait, unlike the deliberate steps on the stairs. Old age was afflicting Bell, but it had not yet unsteadied his legs. On the corner he paused, leaning out from the umbrella—perfect profile snap—to speak to a guy with a hat sitting in a dark car. For a second, he turned full face and looked toward Phelan’s eyes. Phelan snapped the button and pulled back.

  “Tom, I’m gonna charge you rent for my window. It’s not sanitary.”

  Phelan straightened. “Borrowing your window is helping me make your rent, Dr. Building Owner. Very sorry for the intrusion, Miss.”

  Phelan exited the treatment room, raised a hand to salute the receptionist behind the desk, and was rewarded by a paper airplane to the jaw.

  V

  HE WAITED WHILE Miss Wade, no, Delpha, de-cyphered the shorthand and typed up the case notes in English complete with a carbon copy, installed them into a manila file folder, labeled the folder ‘Bell,’ and delivered it to his desk. The woman kept to her order of things, and she liked those folders.

  She was sort of standing over him now, so Phelan read out, in crisp Courier, their missing person Rodney Bell’s given name, former name and places of residence, age, hobby; and Xavier Bell’s name, his age, former profession and pastime, city, his pouch of tobacco. She didn’t know the name of the rolling papers—hadn’t ever seen such before—but she’d described them: looked like the man was burning hundred dollar bills.

  “Hadn’t seen those? Patriotics. Writing on the bills says something like…like…” Phelan grinned. “‘A free country rolling in money is the greatest government.’ If I remember right. Wait, no. Is the highest government. Hippie dippie joke.”

  “Have yet to meet a hippie, Mr. Phelan.”

  He looked up at her. “Not too late. Plenty still around. Listen, let’s don’t go backward. I’m Tom, and you’re Delpha, and I didn’t say yet—welcome back. I’m glad…I’m…glad.”

  Well, that sounded stupid.

  “Thank you. I mean it, I do. Been stuck in my room or watching a little TV in the Rosemont lobby. Watergate hearings hitting a lull, I got so bored I helped Oscar in the kitchen couple days. Can that man cook! But it’s funny. In the lobby, Oscar’s pretty regular, but once he crosses the kitchen threshold, he turns into this…Egyptian pharaoh. Says I’ve got a heavy hand on the cinnamon.”

  “No such thing as too much spice.”

  That just about did it for the small talk.

  “OK,” Phelan said, “we got an odd duck for a client here. As it were. Please don’t make me ask you to sit down. Pull over the chair.” He didn’t look up. “So we search out Rodney’s new house. Which’d probably be bought under another name. But not his real name. And, I’m wondering…if you were seventy-three, would you blow a lot of money on a house? Why not rent? I mean, have a landlord mow the yard and all. No taxes, no upkeep.”

  “You could wanna leave it to somebody. Maybe Rodney’s got a life Mr. Bell doesn’t know about.”

  They looked at each other, agreeing. Delpha pushed over the client cha
ir and sat down.

  It was one of the two original chairs, identical to the one she’d sat in that day Phelan had found her in the office. Shoulda spent the extra fifteen bucks and replaced both of them. That day flashed in on him, the day he knelt at her knee, listening as she talked about the book, the diary of victims Deeterman had come to get. That she was holding in her bloody hand.

  He backhanded that picture right out of range. There was a lot to be said for not thinking about what you didn’t want to think about.

  “Listen, when you said ‘Mr. Bell’ twice, were you doing what I think you were doing? That wasn’t just about handing over the sunglasses.”

  “Kinda a test. Name’s not really your name, you might could forget it. Then again, you’re seventy-five, you might not hear right. I don’t know, Tom. Had this feeling when he came in he brought something with him. Silly, I guess.”

  “Brought what?”

  Delpha’s shoulders lifted, fell.

  Troubled, Phelan got up and strolled over to the window to find out how the rain was doing. It was on the job again. Spearing down and splatting on the street, joining its brothers and sisters in the gutter and rolling industriously along. Rain was independent as hell.

  However, it was conceivable that Thomas Phelan was not as solid-state, 24-carat Independent as he had once believed. Could that be? Could he need help with this business? The random thought beaned him. Like his brain was a pitcher brushing him off. He turned and faced Phelan Investigations’ sole employee.

  She met his gaze. Her eyes inquired and then battened down.

  He had no idea what would issue from his mouth.

  What did: “Where’d you learn that way to talk to him? Thawed him out every time.”

  She considered telling. Then said, “You fix cars, Tom?”

  “Change the oil, tune-ups, tinker a little, like that.”

  “Got different wrenches for different-sized jobs?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, there you go,” she said.

  VI

  HOW’D SHE KNOW how to talk like that? Zulma Barker. Zulma was serving the last weeks of a forty-one month stretch—she’d driven getaway for a toy boyfriend who’d robbed a pharmacy at gunpoint. Maybe because the young man, a would-be model, scurried out with a gym bag of dexedrine, the judge didn’t buy Zulma’s story, that she’d just been idling in her own car while her lover filled a weight-loss prescription for his mother. The prosecution also noted, in her act of aiding and abetting, the use of an alias as a cover up.

  Previous to her bad-decision day, Zulma Barker’d been the popular and respectable receptionist for the Beatrice Adcock Agency in Dallas. She got the job once she agreed to use the pseudonym Cynthia, Beatrice nixing “Zulma” as glamorless. The Agency handled a lot of high-strung people. Zulma learned to supply blandishments to pretty and not-pretty-enough girls panting to be models and to fend off their bitchy mothers. She developed the tone and patter to charm pricey designers and the proper worshipful timbre for photographers. This skill had never been any ambition of Zulma’s. She’d just discovered that her day went easier if she turned her voice into Karo syrup. In time, she discovered a disconcerting side-effect: the secret of feeling like she sounded.

  Delpha was working a stint in the kitchen then, winter, around the time President Eisenhower left and John Kennedy moved in. Sometimes she had a cut or a burn to nurse, not to mention the blaze in her heart and belly. She lay on the top bunk after the count and lights-out, tolerating Zulma’s farewell tutorial, which, more or less, went like this: You start with a base of welcome. Use their name if they give it to you, but not a lot because that’s phony. They want to explain, you listen. Listen, listen, listen. Agree, like mmm, uh-huhm, I’ll be. Save your breath, don’t over-talk. Apologize when you’re turning them down. Remember, they’re feeling sorry for themselves—so have your sympathy ready to spool out like scotch tape.

  “This is phone work,” Zulma said. “But in person, you got all kinds of advantage, hear?”

  Delpha said nothing. Zulma knew she was hearing her.

  “You got eye contact, however you want to use it. You can touch ‘em. Their hand. Their elbow, you know, nothing too friendly. You be careful about that.” Zulma had been. Until the would-be model. Profile like James Dean, only his nose was chunkier. But his ears were better. James Dean’d had ears like an elf. “Hey, wanna hear her?”

  “Hear who?”

  “Cynthia.”

  “Thought I was hearing her.”

  “Not full force.”

  Delpha hung her head down over the bunk. She held on, her light-brown hair swinging upside down, while Zulma sat up crosslegged, said pleasantly, “Good evening, Beatrice Adcock Agency.” She said, “Well, hello, Delpha” as to a friend, went on from there with a whole make-believe conversation: complimenting Delpha’s photos but putting her off until the right shoot came up, saying Delpha didn’t have to do a thing, they’d call her. It was all polite. But Zulma’s contralto carried a startling current of connection, like maybe the girl-caller on the phone had a sister somewhere she didn’t know about, and this was her. Smiling, making eye contact, Zulma reached toward the upper bunk. She squeezed Delpha’s fingers, briefly, gently, leaving Delpha with the sensation she’d been promised something nice. A goosepimple or two tingled her arms.

  Zulma hadn’t looked like her usual, pinched, forty-six year-old self. Must have been Cynthia’s smile that had, for a moment, lit up the bottom bunk like a fugitive moonbeam.

  It was three or four years before Delpha really understood why Zulma-Cynthia’s method worked. Wasn’t the pitch of her voice. It was the need of the person she was talking to.

  VII

  RECORDS. THEY WERE going to search various records to root out Rodney, and they agreed on this: their first order of business was his house purchase. A phone call to Golden Triangle Realty informed Delpha that each real estate company kept only an account of their own sold listings. Not other companies’. “No county-wide list, no city-wide. Inefficient, you ask me.”

  “Shit.” Phelan’s head chopped downward. “They gonna make us run around to every damn one. How many realtors are there?”

  Delpha’s finger pecked through the yellow pages. “Twenty-two agencies. Gimme a little bit.”

  After a while she entered Phelan’s office waving a legal pad. “Here’s the realtors to call. I’ll do that, no problem, but, you know, it might be harder to brush off Mr. Tom Phelan in person, you go in there with your pretty smile. A lotta realtors are women. Lotta secretaries, too.” Her eyes were questioning, but the corners of her lips moved up.

  She thought his smile was pretty. He’d save that for thinking about later. He liked being out and about on the job, but twenty-two chatty realtors meant he was sure to get trapped, and more than once. Tom Phelan scrutinized his secretary.

  “You know how to drive?”

  “Got groceries for the Rosemont. Drove my landlady’s old Ford, Miss Blanchard’s car.”

  “Legally?”

  Delpha shook her head no.

  “Well, get a license soon’s you can. It’ll be helpful for the business.”

  Faintly, she said, “OK.”

  The first time she’d driven a car after prison, Delpha had slipped into the driver’s seat tingling-excited. Soon thereafter—terrified. Each and every car was a four-wheeled rocket-ship blasting along. Cars lunged out of alleyways. Cars gunned around her and swerved back in her lane, cutting her off. Cars honked past her. Slunk through stop signs, burned rubber at lights. Most folks would have considered the ’55 Ford she was piloting a brawny automobile, but to her it felt mashable as a tuna can. Used to the lumbering of a heavy old bus loaded down with women, Delpha had forgotten the true speed, recklessness, and chance of motorized transportation. She had to pull over on the gravel shoulder and steady her head on the steering wheel between her gripped hands. Gave herself a talk. Doesn’t matter you’re scared to death, it is only you in this car. O
nly you. Drive. She’d put it in gear again.

  Phelan signaled her, and they went downstairs together. Outside steam was masquerading as air, and the small parking lot to the side of the building was an archipelago of blacktop islands amid a rainwater-sea filling its ruts and dips.

  “Guess this is it.”

  He paused by a dented, side-scraped ’68 Dodge Dart, green or black depending on which side you were standing. Besides being Delpha’s parole officer, Joe Ford was an old high school friend of Phelan’s. He’d told Phelan he’d be dropping off a car this morning. Keys’d be under the seat. The Dodge belonged to Joe’s wife’s father, and it was supposedly in a garage for repair. In the last year, by the father-in-law’s own grudging confessions, he’d hit several Godzilla potholes, sideswiped a couple parked cars, and rear-ended a cement mixer. Had the bruises and a concussion to prove it. The father-in-law had staggered into the Texas Department of Public Safety, where they’d extended his driver’s license for four more years. Joe had swiped the keys, and instead of taking the Dart to a body shop, he’d left it for Phelan to hide for a while.

  Phelan dropped the keys in Delpha’s palm. “All right, I’ve got some phone business we can talk about later, and I’m gonna go eat. You take your lunch, too, and then—the realtors are all yours.”

  As he strode away, Delpha admired the back of his head, that thick hair, barely curling at the ends, and the long lines of his body, thinking how graceful the man was made. Then she blinked. Had there just been a change here, in terms of her job at Phelan Investigations?

  Her turf, a steno chair and a desktop, a secretary office and a fat blue pillow sofa, had just enlarged to include a dilapidated Dodge and the city of Beaumont, Texas. Hadn’t it? Mr. Wally that taught Business at Gatesville, was this what he would call “division of labor”? No—that was when you sewed legs all day while the girl next to you sewed sleeves. Still, she pondered this notion.

  The car door creaked, reluctant at first, then pop flew open. She slid the key in the ignition and turned it. A rumble bloomed around her. Uh oh. Well, probably a lot wrong with this car, after all those collisions. Gash in the muffler, poor tuning.