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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.
    “Daisy’s upstairs changing,” Rachel explained. “Come on in and have a seat. Lunch will be ready in a moment.”
    The living room had an old-fashioned high ceiling with an amber-colored light fixture hanging from a brass chain in the middle of the room. It could have been a spacious, roomy place, but the furniture had been shoved together to make room for a hospital bed that had been set up in the far corner next to the fireplace. It was unmade. A stack of sickroom rental supply linens sat on a piece of plain brown paper on top of the bare mattress ticking.
    Rachel saw me look at it. “They just delivered the bed this morning,” she explained. “We’re not quite organized yet. We had a hard time fitting it in here, but of course, Dotty would never be able to manage the stairs to get up and down to a bedroom.”
    “What seems to be the matter with your sister?” I asked.
    Rachel stopped in the doorway and looked at me before she answered. Reticence and hesitation weren’t her style.
    “She broke her hip,” she said finally, decisively, then turned on her heel and disappeared through the dining room into the kitchen. Moments later we heard the banging of pots and pans as Rachel bustled about making lunch.
    Buddy, confined to a large cage in the corner of the dining room, had been quiet when we first entered the house. Now, with Rachel out of the room, he piped up again. “What’s your name?” he asked, not once but several times.
    We ignored him. There’s something undignified about being trapped into a conversation with a parrot.
    The living room was light and airy, but filled with the motley collection of cheap knickknacks and trinkets—“tack” my mother would have called it—that had been gathered over two separate lifetimes and then somehow blended together.
    In the corner next to the front door sat a . papier-mache elephant’s foot jammed full of umbrellas. Above it, an antique wood and brass hat rack held two yellow rain slickers with matching hats, two bright red motorcycle helmets, and two identical