The Real Macaw(42)

I’d bet there had been, though. He’d probably inherited this house and moved in without doing any more redecorating than necessary. The knickknacks and doilies had probably gone to Goodwill or to other, more sentimental relatives. Unless Clarence was right and he didn’t have any. I supposed there was an off chance they were boxed up and stored in the attic.

I felt a curious sense of betrayal. I could shrug off the image I’d had of Parker, the cynical womanizer who’d used the glamour of his animal welfare activities to seduce women. But the Parker who lived in this neat, old-fashioned bungalow—a Parker who was either indifferent to his surroundings or cherished a kind of hominess that so closely matched my own? For some reason the idea of that Parker being a sleazy tomcat bothered me.

But time was wasting.

Nothing unusual in the living room. Or in the dining room, except that there was a furniture-sized empty space in front of the sunniest window. Had he sold a piece of furniture or disposed of a large dead houseplant? It would have to have been rather recent. People tended to fill such large, empty spaces rather quickly, either deliberately, with another plant or piece of furniture, or unintentionally, with the kind of clutter we humans seemed to generate just by existing.

Though I had to admit Parker’s house was as devoid of clutter as any I’d ever seen. What did that say about him?

For that matter, what did it say that a man who owned a furniture store lived in a house filled with comfortably run-down vintage furniture?

The kitchen suggested that Parker didn’t cook much, apart from grilling the occasional steak or microwaving frozen meals.

The first of the two bedrooms was set up as a neat, efficient home office. An old oak table served as the desk, with only a small tray of papers and a few accessories on top. The office equipment and several old wooden file cabinets were concealed in the closet. I sat down in a well-maintained vintage wooden swivel chair and browsed in his files. I envied him his orderly, neatly labeled filing system. Business records for the furniture store were separated from personal financial records and from the files on his animal rescue efforts. I felt a sudden surge of hope—maybe these meticulous files contained information on where he was planning to take all the animals. Maybe somewhere out there we’d find people anxiously fretting over Parker’s failure to bring them a much-anticipated macaw, or Irish wolfhound, or even a litter or two of unweaned puppies or kittens.

Yes, here it was: a file marked “Animal Rescue: Caerphilly Shelter,” with Friday’s date printed beneath. It contained a list of the people to whom he was taking the various animals, complete with addresses, e-mails, and cell phones. The list matched the menagerie we had in the barn, more or less. The macaw and the beagle puppies weren’t there—presumably they were relatively new arrivals to the shelter. But at the bottom of the list were the names of the people who’d agreed to take any unallocated animals. One name for the cats, one for the dogs, and apparently the Willner Wildlife Sanctuary would be harboring any birds, reptiles, exotics, or miscellaneous creatures.

I put the file in my tote and continued searching.

Next I found a small section of files labeled “Pruitt Investigation.” Detailed records on who owned what downtown buildings. If the preponderance of Pruitts in the list surprised him, he was much too naïve. A thick sheaf of articles from the Caerphilly Clarion about the beautification project. Not likely to contain state secrets.

The farther I got in his investigation files, the more my spirits lagged. They clearly showed he was obsessed, but gave no proof of the skullduggery he alleged.

Until the next-to-last file. It contained a thick copy of the loan contract between Caerphilly County and something called First Progressive Financial, LLC. It was a bad photocopy, slightly crooked on some pages—probably not acquired in any official way.

I flipped through it briefly. I wasn’t a lawyer, and I didn’t have time to try to decipher the whole document, but even a brief inspection convinced me that it was dynamite.

I looked around. No computer. A mouse, a set of speakers, and various other bits of hardware were scattered around the desk with their cords lying useless instead of being plugged into anything. No doubt the chief had confiscated Parker’s computer.

But he did have a printer like mine, one of those all-in-one machines that also served as a copier, a scanner, and a fax machine. I could make a copy of the contract.

And maybe I should make a copy of the contents of the next file, too. Apparently Parker Blair had been working on an article on his findings.

He’d missed his calling; he’d have been a natural as an investigative reporter. It was all here. Chapter and verse of exactly what the Pruitts and their cronies had been up to, and all the more scathing because he hadn’t used inflammatory language or tricks of rhetoric. He just laid it out, step by step, precise, organized … damning.