Ask the Parrot

2

The name on the town sign was Pooley, and it wasn’t much of a place. One minor intersection was controlled by a light blinking amber in two directions, red in the other two. A gas station stood on the corner there, along with a shut-down bank branch, a shut-down bar, and a shut-down sporting goods store. Twenty houses or so were strung along the two narrow roads of the town, three or four of them boarded up, most of the rest dilapidated. An old man slept in a rocker on a porch, and an old woman a few doors down knelt at her front-lawn garden.

Lindahl drove straight through the intersection, then three houses later turned to the right into a gravel driveway next to one of the boarded-up houses. Behind the house, at the rear of the property, a three-car brown clapboard garage had been converted to housing, and that was where Lindahl stopped.

“You go on in,” he said. “It isn’t locked. I’ll take care of my rabbits.”

Parker got out of the Ford and walked over to what had originally been the middle garage door, now crudely converted to a front door next to a double-hung window covered on the inside by a venetian blind.

He pushed open this door and stepped into a dim interior, where the smell, not strong, was cavelike, old dirt combined with some kind of animal scent. Then he saw the parrot, in a large cage on top of the television set. The parrot saw him, too, turning his green head to the side to do it, but didn’t speak, only made a small gurgling sound and briefly marched in place on its bar. The newspaper in the bottom of its cage was not new.

The rest of the living room was normal but seedy, with old furniture not cared for. The television set was on, sound off, showing an antacid commercial.

Lindahl’s anger was money-based. He wasn’t supposed to be needy, living like this, shooting rabbits to feed himself. Hearing about a big-scale robbery had made him angrier and depressed and self-hating; which meant there was something he should have done about the money he felt was rightfully his, but he hadn’t done it. And now he thought that talking with a bank robber would help.

Parker spent the next five minutes lightly tossing the place: living room, bedroom, bath, kitchen, utility room with oil furnace. Three more rifles were locked to a wall rack in the bedroom, but there were no pistols. Lindahl lived here alone and didn’t seem to have much correspondence with anybody. He had a checking account with $273 in it, and wrote checks only for standard items like phone and electricity, plus ATM withdrawals for cash. A $1,756 deposit every month was labeled “dis”; disability?

Lindahl would tell him why he’d rather talk to a bank robber than turn him in. Whatever the reason, right now Parker needed it. The only identification he carried was no good any more, now that the police had the car he’d rented with it. For the next couple of days, in this part of the world, it would be impossible to travel anywhere, even by foot, without having to show ID every once in a while.

When Lindahl walked in, carrying his rifle and two white plastic bags, Parker was in the living room, seated on the chair that didn’t face the television set, leafing through yesterday’s local blat. From the headlines, it seemed to be all small towns around here, no cities.

Parker looked up at the door opening, and Lindahl said, “I’ll just take care of this and wash my hands,” and went on through to the kitchen. Parker heard the water run, and then Lindahl came back, now carrying only the rifle, loose in one hand. “One more thing,” he said, and went into the bedroom, and Parker heard the click as the rifle was locked into its place on the wall.

Now at last Lindahl came out to the living room and sat down on the left side of the sofa. “I’ve been trying to think how to tell you,” he said. “I’m not used to talking to people any more.”

He stopped and looked over at Parker, as though waiting for a response, but Parker said nothing. So Lindahl made his sour chuckle and said, “I guess you’re the same.”

“You have something to tell me.”

“I’m a whistle-blower,” Lindahl said, as though he’d been planning some much longer way to say it. “My wife told me not to do it, she said I’d lose everything including her, and she was right. But I’m bullheaded.”

“Where did you blow this whistle?”

“I worked for twenty-two years at a racetrack down toward Syracuse,” Lindahl said, “named Gro-More. It was named after a farm feed company went bankrupt forty years ago. They never changed the name.”

“You blew a whistle.”

“I was a manager, I was in charge of infrastructure, the upkeep of the buildings, the stands, the track. Hired people, contracted out. I was nothing to do with money.”

“So whatever this is,” Parker said, “you shouldn’t have known about it.”

“I didn’t have to know about it.” Lindahl shook his head, explaining himself. “What we had was a clean track,” he said. “The people working there, we were all happy to be at a clean track. There’s a thousand ways for a track to be dirty, but only one way to be clean, so when I found out what they were doing with the money, it just hurt me. It was like doing something dirty to a member of my own family.”

The strain of getting his point across was deepening the lines in his face. He broke off, made erasing gestures, and said, “I need a beer. I can’t tell this without a beer.” Rising, he said, “You want one?”

“No, but you go ahead.”

Lindahl did, and when he was seated again, he said, “What they were doing, they were hiding illegal campaign contributions to state politicians, running them through the track. Laundering them, you might say.”

Parker said, “How would that work?”

“A fella goes to the track, he bets a thousand dollars on a long shot on every race, he drops eight thousand that day. Just that day. That money stays in the system, because he did it with credit cards, but a lot of little penny ante bets from other people disappear. Bets made with cash. So the guy didn’t give the politician the eight thousand, he just lost it at the track, but a little later it shows up in a politician’s pocket.”

“The horses gave it to him.”

“That’s about it,” Lindahl agreed. “When I found out about it, I was just stunned. We never had dope at the track, we never had fixed races, we never had ringers, we never had the mob, and now this. I talked to one of the execs, he didn’t see the problem. They’re just helping out some friends, nobody from the track is making any money off it. This is just trying to get around some of those stupid pain-in-the-ass regulations from Washington.”

“Makes it sound good,” Parker said.

“But it isn’t good.” Lindahl swigged beer. “This is just corruption everywhere you look, the politicians, the track, the whole idea of sports. I talked it over with my wife, we talked about it for months, she told me it was none of my business, I’d lose my job, I’d lose everything. We never had a lot of money, she said if I threw our life away she wouldn’t stick around. But I couldn’t help it, I finally went to the state police.”

“You wear a wire?”

“Yes, I did.” Lindahl looked agonized. “That’s the part I really regret,” he said. “If I just said look, this is going on, then I’m just the guy who saw it is all. But the prosecutors leaned on me, they got me to help them make their case. And then, at the end, the politics was just too strong for them, it all got swept under the carpet, and nothing happened to anybody but me.”

“You knew that was going to happen.”

“I suppose I did,” Lindahl said, and drank some more of his beer. “They talked me into it, but I suppose I talked myself into it, too. Thinking it was best for the track, can you believe that? Not best for me, best for some goddam racetrack named after cow feed, I should have my head examined.”

“Too late,” Parker said.

Lindahl sighed. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Everybody told me don’t worry, there’s whistle-blower laws, they can’t touch you.” He gestured with the beer bottle, indicating the room. “You see where I am. My wife was true to her word, she went off with her widowed sister. I haven’t had a job for four years. I get a little disability from when a horse rolled over me, years ago, I don’t even limp any more, but I’m the wrong age and the wrong background and in the wrong part of the country to find anybody to hire me to do anything. Even flipping burgers, they don’t want somebody my age.”

“No, they don’t,” Parker said. “So you’ve been kicking yourself that you didn’t get even. Because you think you could get even. How?”

“I ran those buildings for years,” Lindahl said. “I’ve still got up-to-date keys for every door out there. I still go out every once in a while, when there isn’t any meet going on, when it’s shut down like a museum, and I just walk around it. Every once in a while, if I find a door with a new key, I borrow a spare from the rack and make a copy for myself.”

“You can get in and out.”

“I can not only get in and out,” Lindahl said, “I know where to get in and out. I know where the money goes, and where the money waits, and where the money’s loaded up for the bank, and where the money’s stored till the armored car gets there. I know where everything is and how to get to everything. During a meet, the place is guarded 24/7, but I know how to slide a truck in there, three in the morning, no one the wiser. I know how to get in, and then I know how to carry a heavy weight out.”

Lindahl had already carried a heavy weight out of that place, but that wasn’t what he meant. Parker said, “So once they cost you your wife and your job, you decided to rip them off, get a new stake, go away and retire in comfort.”

“That’s right,” Lindahl said. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else for four years.”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

“Because I’m a useless spineless coward,” Lindahl said, and finished his beer.