Daisy may have been her name, but a sweet little wild flower she wasn’t.
Rachel looked shocked. “You’re almost as bad as Buddy, Daisy,” she scolded. “There’s no need to be rude.”
Her comment made me wonder which of them was older. It sounded like someone older and wiser chastising someone much younger. I would have thought those roles and distinctions would disappear with age, and these two were obviously well into retirement. But what would I know about that? I grew up as an only child.
Rachel turned back to me.
“Dotty’s in the hospital,” she said.
“Dotty?” I asked.
“Dotty. Dorothy, our sister-the one you asked about. She’s recovering from an accident, Mr. Beaumar,” Rachel explained.
I didn’t attempt to correct her pronunciation of my name. There was no percentage in it. “Could you tell us which hospital?” I asked. “It’s urgent that we be in touch with her.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“We really must speak directly to her.”
Rachel shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know. She’s supposed to be released tomorrow, but there’s no one here to take care of her. I don’t know where that no-good, worthless son of hers is. We haven’t been able to reach him in days. We’re bringing her home with us. We just came by to pick up some of her things.”
From that comment I gleaned at least one important scrap of information-there was no love lost between this zany pair of aunties with their outspoken bird and their precise, well-ordered, and recently deceased nephew. I’m sure he would have been shocked at the haphazard manner with which his mother’s prized possessions, including the four-poster canopy bed, were being crammed into the trailer. These ladies may have been quick movers, but careful they weren’t.
“Ma’am, this happens to be police business,” I argued gently. “Of course we wouldn’t want to trouble your sister if she’s too ill to see us. Instead, maybe you could tell us how to contact LeAnn Nielsen, then. It’s about your nephew, Dr. Frederick Nielsen.”
Rachel turned back to her sister, just as Daisy heaved another loaded box into the trailer. “What do you think, Daze?” she asked. “Should we tell him or not?”
Daisy shrugged. “I already told him what I think. Nothing he’s said has changed my mind one whit.” Daisy went right on loading boxes with a vengeance.
Meanwhile, Rachel was taking her sister’s opposition into consideration. She put one finger to her lips as if lost in thought. “I just don’t know what to say. I don’t think we should let you bother Dotty, not in her condition. This has been terribly hard on her, you know.”
I had almost decided to take the bull by the horns and tell them. Those two stubborn old bats weren’t going to give us an inch unless we gave them a damn good reason to do so. Evidently, Big Al had reached the same conclusion a little sooner than I did. He beat me to the punch.
“Look,” he said patiently. “Like Detective Beaumont told you, we’re from the Seattle P.D. With homicide. There’s been a murder.”
Rachel’s jaw dropped. Daisy swung away from the stack of boxes, her sharp eyes riveted on Big Al’s face.
“A what?“ she demanded.
“A murder,” he repeated. “We’ve tentatively identified the victim as your nephew. Our first responsibility is to notify his next of kin. Out of common courtesy, we try to do that in person. If you could put us in touch with either your sister or your nephew’s wife, LeAnn, it would be a big help.”
“My land!” Rachel exclaimed. “Daisy, did you hear that?”
“I heard,” Daisy answered grimly.
Behind us a raucous horn sounded as a huge blue garbage truck rumbled into the alley behind our unmarked patrol car. The driver of the truck leaned out the window and shook his fist at our offending vehicles. “Hey, you guys. You gotta clear outa my way. I got work to do.”
Which is how Big Al Lindstrom and J. P. Beaumont, detectives with Seattle“ s homicide squad, ended up helping two white-haired little old ladies load the last of Dorothy Nielsen’s personal possessions into a U-Haul trailer.
When it was all loaded, with the rocking chair settled in the last bit of open space, the end result looked none too stable to me, but Rachel assured us that they weren’t going far. She stood to one side while Daisy pulled the trailer’s doors shut, bolted them, and headed for the driver’s side of the Buick.
Rachel paused uncertainly with us as the old crate’s engine coughed and sputtered when Daisy turned the key and gunned the engine.
“Why don’t you follow us?” Rachel offered tentatively. “We’ll try to decide what to do on our way to the house. Maybe you two could join us for a bite of lunch. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
I walked her to the car and held open the door while she slid onto lumpy, clear plastic seat covers that had stiffened and yellowed with age to an opaque beige.
“Why, thank you,” she said graciously.
With a squawk, Buddy flapped his way from the back window to the front seat. There he settled comfortably on Rachel’s shoulder.
“Freeze, sucker!” he ordered again, glaring sideways up at me, waiting for a reaction. This time neither Al nor I gave him the satisfaction.
I closed the door and the Buick lurched away, belching a cloud of thick exhaust smoke.
The driver of the garbage truck laid on his horn again. We were still in his way. Hurrying into our car, we started after them. By then, the U-Haul was already around the corner and nearly out of sight.
“We’re not really going to have lunch with those two old battle-axes, are we?” Big Al asked plaintively.
“We’re going to do whatever it takes to worm some information out of them, including having lunch,” I told him.
Al shook his head dolefully. “If that means being in the same room with that son of a bitch of a bird, we ought to ask for hazardous duty pay.”
I laughed. “I’ve heard of guard dogs before,” I told him. “But this is the first time I ever met an attack parrot.”
That’s one nice thing about this job. I learn something new every day.
CHAPTER 4
I suppose I had seen the Edinburgh Arms on occasion before in the course of my travels around Seattle, but it had never registered. The complex was situated in the 4800 block of Fremont Avenue, but its brick row house construction made it look like it had been plucked straight out of Merrie Old England. Scotland, actually, as Rachel was happy to explain to us during lunch.
Built as apartments but now converted to cozy condos, the Edinburgh Arms is a clone of another building, a project built in Edinburgh in the late 1920s. The Seattle contractor used the exact same specifications and plans. Now, some sixty years later, the weathered red brick, the squat chimneys to each unit’s fireplace, and the formal English garden courtyard gave the place a quaint, settled charm. Even the fat-cheeked, concrete cherub, peeing in the red brick fountain, seemed totally at home.
Al pulled up and stopped behind the Buick and the U-Haul, which were parked near an open doorway. The end gates were still closed and locked, however. Rachel and Daisy must have decided to eat lunch first and unload later.
“I shoulda figured those two dippy broads would live in a place like this,” Al grumbled, looking around.
“Why? What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“It looks just like ”em,“ he answered.
Rachel came to the door to let us in. A newly built plywood wheelchair ramp covered the two short steps leading up to the doorway.
