“Before you go into that,” Drake interrupted, “tell Mr. Mason how you identify the parrot.”
“Well,” Gibbs said, “of course, I’m just acting on an assumption there. You’re asking me about a parrot that cussed whenever it wanted something to eat. I trained a parrot to do that stunt.”
“What was the idea?” Mason asked.
“It’s just a stunt,” Gibbs explained. “Occasionally, you’ll find people who think it’s smart to have a parrot that cusses. Usually they get tired of them before they’ve had them a long while, but when they first hear a bird swear, it’s quite a novelty.”
“And you deliberately train them to swear?” Mason asked.
“Sure. Sometimes a bird will pick up an expression or a sentence just from hearing it once, but for the most part, you have to drill sounds into ’em. Of course, we don’t train them to do any real lurid cussing; just a few ‘damns’ and ‘hells’ do the trick. People get such a kick out of hearing a parrot cut loose with a good salty line of talk instead of the usual stereotyped ‘Polly wants-a-cracker,’ they’ll buy a bird on the spot.”
“All right When did you sell this bird?”
“Friday, the second of September.”
“At what time?”
“Around two or three o’clock in the afternoon, I think it was.”