That Monday morning Green Lake teemed with summer-crazed Seattlites who had gobbled up every bit of on-street parking for blocks. Al pulled over to the side of the street and paused in a bike lane long enough for me to get out of the car and climb up the stairs to the gate. It was locked from the inside.
Through the narrow bars I saw an immaculately tended front yard that instantly reminded me of Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s desk.
The yard was bordered by a series of scrupulously trimmed miniature trees that looked like they’d been pruned by a surgeon wielding a scalpel. The grass was mowed within an inch of its life. No forgotten toys or tricycles or wagons lingered in that well-ordered, manicured yard. They wouldn’t have dared. There was no indication that children had come within miles of the place, to say nothing of ever having lived there.
I felt a sudden, surprising wave of sympathy for Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s children, for that nameless seven- and eight-year-old boy and girl. Not because their father was dead, but because he had been their father.
I turned and walked back down to the car. “The gate’s locked,” I told Al. “Let’s go around back and try the alley.”
Finding the alley was easier said than done. Instead of running parallel to Green Lake as we expected, the alley was perpendicular to it. The entrance looked more like a driveway than a legitimate alley. When we finally attempted to enter it, however, we discovered it was totally blocked by a U-Haul trailer.
Sitting with its end gates wide open, the trailer was parked beside a shaky pile of assorted household goods and boxes. A wooden rocking chair, moving slightly with every hint of breeze, sat next to the trailer’s open end, while nearby two women struggled to load an unwieldy four-poster bed-frame canopy into the trailer. They hadn’t bothered to take it all the way apart.
“Looks to me like Mrs. Nielsen is bailing out and taking all her worldly possessions with her,” Big Al commented as he parked our vehicle as close as he could to the mountain of household goods.
He switched on our yellow hazard lights, and we both climbed out of the car. We had moved only a step or two toward the end of the trailer when a voice exploded from the shadowy interior of the trailer.
“Freeze, sucker!”
The reflex is automatic. We froze, but only for a moment. Clutching desperately for the loaded Smith and Wesson in my shoulder holster, I dove for cover. On the other side of the car Big Al dodged behind the front wheel, groping for his own weapon as he too hit the ground.
“Buddy!” a woman’s voice scolded sharply. “You knock that off right this minute! Do you hear me?”
“Buddy’s a bad boy, Buddy’s a bad boy,” replied a suddenly artificial, singsong voice.
One woman entered the trailer and emerged with a huge multicolored parrot perched jauntily on one shoulder. With his yellow head cocked to one side, he regarded Big Al and me with what seemed to be a lively interest.
The woman, a silver-haired lady in her sixties or seventies, clambered down from the trailer and hurried over to me. She recoiled a full foot when she encountered my drawn. 38.
“Goodness gracious! Buddy’s just a harmless bird. You’re not going to shoot him, are you?” she demanded.
Police officers live and die by the unexpected. Response to danger, real or imagined, is reflexive, instantaneous, decisive. Hesitating a moment too long can be crucial. And deadly.
But now as the sudden burst of adrenaline dissipated uselessly in my system, I fumbled sheepishly with my gun. My hand trembled violently. That silver-haired little old lady with her loudmouthed bird had come very close to dying in a hail of bullets. It would have been hell explaining that to a shooting review board.
“No,” I managed with some difficulty. “I’m not going to shoot him. We’re police officers.” I finally succeeded in shoving my Smith and Wesson back into its holster and pulled my identification from my pocket.
I glanced at Big Al, who was also struggling to his feet, his face gray and ashen. It had scared him as badly as it had me. For all the same reasons.
“See what you did, Buddy?” the woman said crossly, turning back to the offending bird. “You caused these nice men all kinds of trouble.”
“Buddy’s a bad boy, Buddy’s a bad boy,” the parrot agreed cheerfully, nodding his head up and down.
A second woman, almost a carbon copy of the first, appeared at the open end of the trailer. Both women wore their hair cut short, with a thin fringe of straight bangs across the forehead-Mamie Eisenhower bangs in my book. Both wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and stood ramrod straight.
“What’s going on, Rachel?” the second one asked briskly, smoothing her gray skirt and stepping to the ground in one easy movement. She was a spry old dame wearing what my mother always called sensible shoes.
“Oh, nothing,” Rachel replied. “Buddy’s up to his old tricks again. He scared these two nice men half out of their wits, but there’s no harm done.”
The second woman shook her head and clicked her tongue. “That bird never did have a lick of sense,” she said.
Rachel turned back to me. “You’ll have to forgive him. Buddy spent his formative years sitting in a living room with his cage next to a television set. He grew up on ”Police Story‘ and “Starsky and Hutch.” “
Big Al, getting a grip on himself, made a stab at polite conversation. “How old is he?” he asked.
“Watch it, buster,” warned the bird. “Don’t come any closer.” Al stopped dead in his tracks.
One look at Al’s face as he backed away from that parrot, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing. For two cents I think he would cheerfully have wrung that parrot’s cocky neck.
“Buddy!” Rachel exclaimed, handing the bird over to the other woman, who had come to stand beside her. The three of them made quite a picture, the twin old ladies with the wise-ass bird between them. I surmised the women must be sisters.
“Put him in the car, would you please, Daisy?” Rachel asked.
Without a word, Daisy took the parrot and placed him in the back seat of an old two-toned brown and beige Buick Electra that was hooked to the trailer. As soon as the door slammed shut behind him, Buddy hopped up to the back window and sat there, hunched over, glaring out at us.
I managed, with some difficulty, to stifle my laughter, but I was having a hell of a time thinking of anything useful to say. That didn’t matter much since Rachel was more than capable of keeping the conversation afloat single-handedly.
“Buddy’s sixteen now,” she continued. “Parrots can live as long as forty or fifty years. Jake, the man who owned him first, was a neighbor of ours. He was in a wheelchair, housebound you know. For years it was just the two of them. All they did was eat and watch television together. Finally, Jake’s kids had to put him in a nursing home, and Buddy couldn’t go along. That’s when Daisy and I inherited him. He was so fat the first thing we had to do was put him on a diet.”
I was still standing there holding out my ID, waiting for her to look at it. I felt a little silly. Eventually Rachel stopped for breath long enough to give my ID a cursory glance. I took the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.
“I’m Detective Beaumont, and this is my partner, Allen Lindstrom. We’re with the Seattle Police Department. We’re trying to locate either Dorothy or LeAnn Nielsen.”
The second woman, the one named Daisy, returned from the car. She stopped briefly beside her sister. “They’re not here,” Daisy answered curtly in response to my question. “Neither one of them.”
Abruptly, Daisy turned toward the stack of boxes beside the trailer. Something seemed to have offended her, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I watched her tackle the stack of boxes. She wasn’t a particularly stout woman, but she was evidently quite strong. With a groan, she hefted a trunk-sized box from the swaying stack in the alley and dropped it with a thump onto the floor of the trailer. The U-Haul bounced on its springs.
Daisy turned back to her sister. “Come on, Rachel. Let’s get busy. We haven’t got all day. I have to be at the zoo before long.”
“Do you have any idea where either one of those people could be found?” I insisted, directing my question at Rachel now, trying to steer the conversation back to the dead man’s wife and mother. “It’s important that we reach one or the other of them this afternoon at the latest.”
Daisy stopped where she was and stood with both hands on her hips. “What do you want ”em for?“ she demanded.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Well, stick it out your ear then,” Daisy said sharply. She turned away and grabbed another box.
