Michael Chabon: The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

"Had a fall," said the one she believed to be Noakes.

Woollett nodded. "Bad luck, that," he said.

"Indeed," the old man said. The expression drained from his face as he made another of his long, deep examinations, this time of the outraged face of her son, who stared back at the old man with a look of hatred that failed to astonish her, any more than she was surprised when in the end Reggie's gaze faltered, and he stared down, looking much younger than his twenty-two years, at his skinny brown wrists crossed in his lap.

"What's she doing here?" he said at last.

"Your mother has brought a few personal articles," the old man said. "I'm sure they will be welcome. But if you like, I will ask her to wait outside."

Reggie looked up, at her, and in his pout there was something that resembled thanks, a sardonic gratitude as if perhaps she were not quite as horrid a mother as he had always believed. Though in her own accounting-and she was not generous with herself-she had never failed him, every time she stood by him he seemed to view it with the same skeptical surprise.

"I don't give a damn what she does," he said.

"No," the old man said dryly. "No, I don't suppose you do. Now. Hah. Hmm. Yes. All right. Tell me, why don't you, about your friend Mr. Black, of Club Row."

"There's nothing to tell," Reggie said. "Don't know the bloke."

"Mr. Panicker," the old man said. "I am eighty-nine years old. The little life that remains to me I would much prefer to spend in the company of creatures far more intelligent and mysterious than you. Therefore, in the interest of conserving the scant time I have, allow me to tell you about Mr. Black of Club Row. Word has lately reached his ear, I imagine, of a remarkable parrot, mature and in good health, with a gift for mimicry and a retentive mind far beyond the norm for its species. Were it his, our Mr. Black might sell this bird to a British or Continental fancier for a handsome sum. You had made up your mind, therefore, and got everything in readiness, to steal the bird and sell it to him, in the hopes of raising a large sum of cash. Which cash, if I am not mistaken, you require to repay the debt you have incurred to Fatty Hodges."

The words were spoken and left behind before her thoughts could catch up to them or to the instantaneous jolt they had sent straight through her. Fatty Hodges was by every reckoning and general acclaim the worst man on the South Downs. There was no telling what kind of mischief he had got Reggie up to.

Noakes and Woollet stared; Reggie stared; they all stared. How could he possibly have known?

"My bees fly everywhere," the old man said. He flexed his neck and rubbed his hands together with a dry rasp. A conjuror with cards, after the ace has been produced. "And they see everyone."

His conclusion, that his bees told him everything, he left unspoken. She supposed he feared it would have sounded mad; he was widely held to be quite batty.

"Alas, before you could steal the beloved pet and sole friend of a lonely refugee orphan, you were beaten to the punch by Mr. Shane, the lodger. But as he was about to make off with the bird, Shane was attacked and killed. Now we arrive at the place, or I should say at one place, where the police and I differ. For clearly we also differ as to the advisability of beating the Crown's prisoners, in particular those who have not yet been convicted."

Oh, she thought, what a fine old man this is! Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odor of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigor and rectitude of the Empire.

"Now, sir-" Noakes put in, reproachful; or was it Woollet?

"The police, I say," the old man said, innocent and serene, "seem fairly certain that it was you who surprised Mr. Shane as he was carrying Bruno off, and murdered him. Whereas I believe that it was another, a man-"

The old man's avid gaze now found its way to Reggie's black brogues, bright with the shine she had given them that morning, when the day had promised nothing out of the ordinary.

"— with feet a good deal smaller than your own."

Reggie's face slipped-that disappointed face, smooth as a kneecap. Motionless except where it twisted up at one eyebrow and down at one corner of the mouth. Now, for an instant, it fell away, and he grinned, like a boy. He pulled his great big feet from under the table and stuck them straight out in front of him, marveling as if for the first time at their appalling size.

"That's what I've been telling these two!" he cried. "Yes, all right, another day and I'd have had that bird sold and Fatty paid, and off my back. But the idea wasn't original with me. It's Parkins you should have in here. It was in his wallet that I found Black's card."

"Parkins?" the old man looked to the policemen, who shrugged, and then at her.

"My oldest lodger," she said. "Two years last March." She had never quite trusted Mr. Simon Parkins, she realized, though to all appearances there was nothing in the least exceptionable or shady about him. He rose at the same late hour each morning, went off to study his rolls or rubbings or whatever it was he pored over in the library at Gabriel Park until long past nightfall, and then returned to his room, his lamp, and his supper, warmed over, under a dish.

"Are you in the habit of studyin' the contents of Mr. Parkins's wallet, then, Reg?" said Noakes or Woollett, affably though with a hint of trying too hard, as though he felt the chance to fix Reggie with a murder charge slipping away and hoped to fix him with something else before it was too late.

The old man's head turned toward the policemen with an audible snap.

"I beg you gentlemen also to consider that my days are numbered," he said. "Pray don't ask superfluous questions. Does Parkins take an interest in the bird?"

The question was directed at her.

"Everyone took an interest in Bruno," she said, wondering why she referred to the parrot in the past tense. "Everyone except poor Mr. Shane. Isn't that strange?"

"Parkins takes an interest, all right," Reggie said. The sullenness to which he had at first treated the old man was all gone. "He was always jotting things in his little notebook. Every time the bird started in on those damned numbers."

For the first time since their arrival at the police station, the old man looked truly interested in what was happening. He rose to his feet with none of the moaning and muttering that had attended this action hitherto.

"The numbers!" He laid his hands together palm to palm, arrested between prayer and applause. "Yes! I like that! The bird was wont to repeat numbers."

"All bloody day long."

"Endless series of them," she said, failing even to notice the expletive, though it made one of the policemen wince. She realized now that she had indeed many times seen Parkins pull out a small paper notebook and copy down the numeric arias that emerged from the uncanny clockwork snapping of Bruno's black bill. "One to nine, over and over again, in no particular order."

"And all in German," Reggie said.

"And our Mr. Parkins. He is presently employed in what line of work? A commercial traveler, like Richard Shane?"

"He is an architectural historian," she said, noticing that neither Noakes nor Woollett was bothering to write anything down. To look at them, those sweating hulks in their blue woolen coats, they might not even have been listening, let alone thinking. Perhaps they felt it was too hot to think. She felt sorry for that intense little inspector from London, Bellows. No wonder he had sent for the old man's help. "He is preparing a monograph on our church."

"And yet he's never there," Reggie said. "Least of all on Sunday."

The detective looked at her for confirmation of this.