White-faced Ibis  Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge       click to enlarge

June 26 7:37PM. I had been unable to pursue my runaway Ibis due to another case that sprang up and monopolized my time keeping me a virtual captive to a vicious but terrible client. Tired of the strident but shrill nature of that case I was desperate to get back to the case at hand. The Case of The Limping Ibis. It took a few of my Private Dick tricks straight out of the Private eye’s manual, plus the deliberate use of an “I don’t give a large rat’s posterior” attitude to be able to put the case of the Shrill but Strident Nightmare with its unreasonable client behind me and resume working on something important again, the original case I was hired for.

I knew where my quarry was going as I watched those three fleeing White-faced Ibis head north along the foothills looking for that break in the mountain range up near Laramie that would let them easily go from the East side of the mountains to the West side and then North again up into Utah without having to make the nosebleed flight over the divide. There have always been stories of sanctuary for outlaws and others not quite on the up and up in the canyon riddled badlands of central Utah. Butch and Sundance hid there. So did dozens of other bank robbers, train robbers, robber robbers, unscrupulous gamblers, ladies of the evening, ladies of the early afternoon, defrocked contortionists, truants, scofflaws, unpaid parking ticket avoiders, laudanum smokers, whiskey traders, whiskey drinkers, unsophisticated politicians and just about anyone or anything that needed a no questions asked, safe haven to hide out in.

I was worried that the trail had gone cold even though it was summer and the temperature was a balmy 72°. But I wasn’t that worried, I knew where they were going and in the weeks after losing them back in Colorado and finally getting back on their trail I had plenty of time to think about this case. I had questions, plenty of questions. My ex-cop, gumshoe instincts were going off like the alarm at a Chinese fire drill. Things weren’t adding up. What was really going on here I asked myself. Why was Ratzo, the mis-shapen but odorous director of the Florida bird sanctuary willing to pay so much money to get these Ibis’s back. Why had he deliberately fed them so much high-priced grain and seaweed and tender little soft-sided crustaceans until they could barely fly. Why did he have Ibis feathers stuck in his teeth. Why did he insist on that stupid comb-over and most importantly why wouldn’t the bastard pay me my 40 bucks like he said he would. Who were the Plaid men and what was their game. And why would they drive a Hyundai. The questions kept piling up like the dirty laundry in an Algerian cathouse. And I was beginning to see that the answers were beginning to smell the same way.

Back when I was a rookie detective on the job in LA, before some poor choices left me out of a job and out on the street with nothing but my dented fedora and my last paycheck, I was assigned to the Pershing Square area, that seedy underbelly of perversion and corruption that was the epicenter of everything evil in the City of Angels. After several long sweaty hours I couldn’t take it anymore, and to wash my overloaded and saturated mind of the ugliness I had seen, I got myself assigned to Vice where I was able to spend time counseling the working girls out on Sunset, trying to convince them that working the candy counter at Woolworth’s for twenty bucks a week was preferable to the life they had on the street even if they raked in the big bucks. That and getting the bait and switch cross-dressers to see that it would be a better business plan if they got on the bus to San Diego where the sailors down there weren’t that particular after a 6 month Westpac cruise and besides they wouldn’t have me to deal with. Letting them see the wisdom of that plan and showing them my gat that I kept in a well-worn shoulder holster under my cheap suit coat convinced most of them to take my advice. Since my arrests had gone straight down the crapper after arriving in Vice, the suits downtown sent me to Missing Persons as a last chance hope of saving a failing career. It’s funny though because there is just as much vice in missing persons cases as missing persons. I handled cases where someone was missing, or doing vice, or missing as they were doing vice, or the vice wasn’t there so they went missing. LA is a crazy town, you’ve got to keep your perspective. All of that experience made me see that this case wasn’t a simple missing Ibis case anymore, and there was certainly weirdness enough to go around. I felt like I was back in the old days of pinching hookers and laughing at the moon.

As I headed north towards Laramie I came across the burned out hulk that was the Plaid men’s car. That Hyundai had only made it about 30 miles with that slashed tire and it had been gone over pretty good, just about anything useable had been taken and it lay there with its axles pointed towards the sun like a gutted loaf of day old bread. There was no sign of the two phantom photographers but the plates were still on the back of the car so I ran them through a friend down at DMV and they came back listed to a couple of low-life, wannabe bounty hunters out of Key West. The Azwhype brothers, Solenoid and Nodule. This was bigger than I thought if these two mental midgets thought they could make a buck off this caper.

I turned the nose of my apple green 1951 Packard Custom Clipper westward and hauled bacon towards Utah. I didn’t know if Solenoid and Nodule, those two miserable excuses for human beings, had caught a ride or were still walking towards Utah and I was worried because they had a seven week head start on me. You could walk to Utah backwards in that time. I knew that if they got there before I did that Ibis family wouldn’t have a prayer. Those two would have them back to Ratzo before I could say “Put those Ibis down you no good Ibis stealing son of a bitch” and it would be all over.

I had finally figured it all out. All of the answers started falling in place when I realized what Ratzo’s real plans were. He didn’t care about the unpaid feed bill. Hell, he tipped that much at Big Leg Kathy’s every Friday night. No he wanted the Ibis. He’d fattened them up with all that expensive Ibis food because he was an Ibis Eater. He ate the Ibis that he was supposed to be taking care of. That’s why he had Ibis feathers stuck in his teeth. He hired me as a patsy, a dumb private dick, to find the Ibis first so that I could lead those two bounty hunting Ibis grabbers straight to them, giving them a jumpstart on the chase so he’d be dining on Ibis by the time I was still trying to get the 40 smackers he owed me. My brain burned like hell’s night-light with all the answers falling into place. All this figuring things out had me feeling like a sweat stained Orangutan but my work wasn’t done yet. I had to get to the Bear River Migratory Bird Sanctuary and deal with Solenoid and Nodule, those lousy Azwhype brothers, before they got to the Ibis.

I pulled into the Sanctuary early in the afternoon and began a frantic search for the Limping Ibis and her two wayward children. I began checking the various flocks of White-faced Ibis and there were hundreds of flocks, with thousands of birds in each, trying to spot one limping Ibis. It was slow going. I didn’t think that much more of them than I did when I first took this job, but they didn’t deserve to wind up like slightly roasted purple turkeys. We all try and make it the best way we can and sometimes you’ve just got to cut somebody a little slack. I was going to warn them and tell them to get out of the country, go to Canada, they don’t eat Ibis up there, not even around Whitehorse where it’s been said they’ll eat anything. Ham, Ram, Billy Goat, Baboon or Bear, but not Ibis. They’d be safe. Whether they straightened themselves out morally or not wasn’t my problem and I sure as hell can’t judge them.

Their strategy of hiding in the great flocks of White-faced Ibis’s at the  Bear River Migratory Bird Sanctuary worked because search as I would I couldn’t spot them again amongst the thousands and thousands of identical but looking exactly alike Ibis. If you look closely at the picture above you’ll see one or two of the Ibis with what may be tattoos, but then all the kids are getting them so you just can’t tell. As for those two losers, Solenoid and Nodule, one short phone call to one of the leading Mormon bishops about two southern Baptist looking clowns in plaid clothes making fun of plural marriages got them an extended stay at (USP) or Utah State Prison, the one that was built to replace Sugar House prison back in ’51, near Draper. They’ll be there until they see the error of their ways. That left only Ratzo and his refusal to pay me my 40 bucks. He should a paid me. It was strange how Florida’s fish and game department had enough information about his operation that there was a pre-dawn raid catching him plucking what was once a White-faced Ibis and now he plucks chickens at the Florida State Corrections Facility at Apalachee (West) Correctional Institution. They say he is a model inmate. My reward from the grateful state of Florida was enough to buy me a new truck with a better gas gauge and the satisfaction of knowing we won’t be running out of White-faced Ibis soon. Sometimes it wasn’t bad being a private dick.