Ask the Parrot

13

State Police Captain Robert Modale looked at the artist’s rendering of the bank robber, crumpled and greasy from having been in a desk drawer in Brian Hopwood’s gas station, and now that he knew the truth, he could see it, he could see that face, the same face as the man he’d talked with just yesterday up in the St. Stanislas parking lot. They’d talked about Lyme disease, and who would have ever guessed he was this fellow all along? The felons a man met up with usually weren’t that bold.

Captain Modale was a calm man, not given to extremes of temperament, but even for him this was a moment out of the ordinary. A lesser man might have sworn or punched a wall, but Captain Modale merely clenched his lips and flared his nostrils a little and nodded down at that picture he held in his unshaking left hand and thought, I’ll know you next time.

At the moment, eight-fifty on this Sunday evening, the captain was standing in the brightly lit living room of an old fellow named Jack Riley, whose report of a stolen revolver, a .22-caliber S&W Ranger, had started the unraveling of tonight’s events. Riley, bright-eyed and eager, perched on the forward edge of the easy chair where he obviously usually spent his time watching that television set over there. His granddaughter, Suzanne Gilbert, a good-looking woman if a little peremptory in manner, seeming apparently none the worse for wear after having been knocked around and tied up by the bank robber, sat on the arm of the same chair, her right hand protectively on her grandfather’s left shoulder. Brian Hopwood, still in his dirty work clothes, stood beside the sofa, talking on Riley’s phone to his wife, explaining to her all that had happened and reassuring her, possibly, that everything was all right now. Trooper Oskott stood at semi-attention over by the front door.

They were all waiting for Captain Modale to sort things out and decide what to do next, but by God, there was a full dossier here of things to sort out. There were too many people in this incident, it seemed to the captain, and too many relationships.

Start with the bank robber, who everyone here had known as Ed Smith, a name that had produced thousands of results upon the captain inputting it into the onboard computer in the cruiser, none of them seeming to be helpful in any way. So start with Mr. Ed Smith, whose name was certainly not Ed Smith, but who, for convenience’ sake, would be given that name, at least for now. What were the relationships between Smith and the other people in Pooley—or Fred Thiemann, too, let’s not forget the fellow just recently shot down by the captain’s own officers just across the road there—and how deep and long-standing might those relationships have been?

On entering this room, after being driven down here by Trooper Oskott from Barracks K, greeting the people already assembled here by the troopers who’d been the first responders to Jack Riley’s complaint, the captain had dropped onto the dark wood coffee table in front of the sofa the yellow legal pad he’d brought along with him, so that he could accept the Wanted poster Hopwood insisted on handing him, and now he sat down on the sofa facing that pad, Riley and the Gilbert woman to his right, television set to his left, Hopwood standing at the end of the sofa to his left, and took a retractable pen from his pocket. Clicking it open after putting the Wanted poster under the legal pad, he said, “I’d like first to close with this fellow Smith, and everybody’s relationship with him.”

Suzanne Gilbert, as though she might become offended, said, “Relationship? None of us had a relationship with that man.”

“I never even met him,” Jack Riley added.

Brian Hopwood, just off the phone, pulled over the small wooden chair from beside the television set, sat on it as though afraid to make it dirty, and said, “I only saw him that one time in my life, this afternoon, when he came in for gas.”

“But you recognized him.”

“Not right away. But I thought about it, and when he came back in to get his change—he didn’t use up the cash he gave me—I had it doped out who he was, and I went ahead and did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in my life.”

“You did exactly what a good citizen should have done, under the circumstances,” the captain told him, though he himself didn’t believe it even while he was saying it.

Nor did Hopwood. “A good citizen with a death wish,” he suggested.

The captain decided to let that drop. Facing the others, he said, “So none of you had had dealings with this man before today.”

With seeming reluctance, as though still troubled by that word “relationship,” Suzanne Gilbert said, “Well . . . I saw him last night.”

“Ah,” the captain said, not showing his surprise. “And where was that?”

“Just outside there,” she said, nodding at the front window. “I was driving by, and he was walking along the road. You don’t usually see people walking around here.”

“No,” the captain agreed. “You just happened to be driving by?”

“No, I often drive this way after work,” she said, as though he’d accused her of something and she was determined to rise above it. “If Jack wants to talk, he’ll have the porch light on.”

“Ah. And was the porch light on?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“I was asleep in front of the damn TV,” Riley said. “Again.”

“And you saw this man,” the captain said. “Just walking, you say?”

“Yes. I thought it was strange, so I stopped and asked him if I could help with anything, and he said he was staying with Tom Lindahl—”

“The man whose parrot was shot.”

She looked blank. “I’m sorry?”

So these people hadn’t heard that part of it. “Nothing,” the captain said, not wanting a distraction.

But Hopwood said, “Somebody shot a parrot?”

“Tom Lindahl’s parrot.”

“I never knew he had one,” Hopwood said. “Why would anybody shoot a parrot?”

“To keep it from talking,” Jack said, and actually cackled.

“Jack!” his granddaughter said, reproving him, and squeezed his shoulder to make him behave.

To her, the captain said, “Let’s get back. This man you talked to last night said he was staying with Tom Lindahl.”

“Yes.” She looked a little confused and said, “So then I thought it was all right.”

Hopwood said, “He had Tom’s car, at the station, I know that car.”

Suzanne Gilbert said, “Did he do something to Tom, too?”

“We don’t know, ma’am,” the captain said. “He isn’t at home, and neither is his car.”

Hopwood said, “That fellow stole Jeff Eggleston’s car. From my place.”

“The black Infiniti,” the captain said. “Yes, I know, we’ve put out a bulletin on it.”

“What I mean is,” Hopwood said, “if he’s got Jeff’s car, he can’t have Tom’s. You can only drive one car.”

“Then we have to assume,” the captain said, “that Lindahl is driving his own car. Does anybody have any idea where he might go?”

“Nowhere,” Hopwood said, and Suzanne Gilbert said, “When I talked to that man last night, he said Tom Lindahl was a hermit. I think that’s true.”

The captain paused, trying to think of a question that might help him move forward on this problem, and in the little silence the front doorbell rang, startling them all. The captain said, “Trooper Oskott can answer.”

The trooper turned, opened the door, and spoke briefly with somebody on the porch. Then he turned back to say, “To see you, Captain.”

“Thank you.” Rising, he told the others, “I think we’re just about finished. Let me see what this is.”

“I’d like to get home,” Hopwood said.

“I’m sure you would,” the captain said, and went out to the porch, where a plainclothes state police inspector named Harrison said, “How’s it going?”

“Confusing.”

“Well, this may help a little. Mrs. Thiemann gave us a statement.”

“Yes?”

“She says her husband was part of the group that went out looking for the fugitives yesterday.”

“I saw them there,” the captain said. “He was teamed up with the missing householder here, Lindahl, and this fella we’ve been calling Smith.”

“She says, her husband told her, they went up to Wolf Peak—”

“That’s right.”

“And up there her husband shot and killed a man.”

Now the captain could not hold his astonishment. “He did what?”

“Some old wino, bum, something like that.” Harrison shrugged. “He got excited, Thiemann, he thought it was one of the bank robbers, and shot him.”

“I swear I don’t understand this situation,” the captain said. “One of them’s a bank robber, another of them suddenly ups and kills a man—and a parrot—and the third, an ordinary fellow his entire life, goes missing.”

“The thing is,” Harrison said, “Thiemann would have turned himself in, but Smith talked him out of it, said it was to protect Thiemann.”

“It was to protect Smith.”

“Well, sure. But Thiemann couldn’t stand it. His wife said it drove him crazy.”

The captain looked across the road. “So he came down here to confront Smith. Nobody home.”

“Lucky for Lindahl,” Harrison said, and corrected himself. “Lucky for somebody.”

“This Smith,” the captain said, “robs a bank in Massachusetts, escapes, gets this far, hooks up with two other people, ordinary people, everybody starts going nuts.”

Harrison said, “You think he did it to them, somehow?”

“I truly don’t know,” the captain said, and looked out from the lighted porch at the dark road. “We are not going to know,” he said, “what this is really all about until Tom Lindahl tells us. I do wish I could lay my hands on him.” He nodded at the darkness. “Yes, Lindahl,” he said, “I would really like to know where you are.”