Of Mutts and Men

by Spencer Quinn

  “Ah,” he said.

  That was Bernie. He always knows just the right word.

  The dirt track led us past a huge red rock with a big black bird perched on top, then down into a long and narrow box canyon.

  “Dollhouse Canyon,” Bernie said.

  At the end of the canyon stood a white trailer with blue writing on the side. Bernie read the writing. “Nero Hydrological Consulting. Water Equals Life.”

  We parked near the trailer and hopped out, me actually hopping. And almost landing in a thicket of jumping cholla! I’ve had a lot of experience with jumping cholla, all of it bad. Those yellow spines are capable of doing some hopping of their own, which is the whole point of jumping cholla, but hard to remember for some reason. I moved to Bernie’s other side, getting him between me and the thicket. Did that mean I’d rather he got stuck with the yellow spines instead of me? I hoped not and left it like that.

  We stood side by side in front of the trailer. The day still smelled fresh and new, and so did we, Bernie because he’d taken a shower before we left, and me because … because I just do. He was wearing jeans, flip-flops, and the Hawaiian shirt with the laughing pineapples. I had on my everyday collar, the gator skin one I’d picked up on a case down in bayou country that there’s no time to tell you about now. Bernie knocked on the trailer door. No answer. He knocked again. No answer. “Wendell? Dr. Nero?” Zip.

  Bernie turned, cupped his hands, called out, “Wendell? Wendell?”

  From the sides of the box canyon, the call came back. “Wendell? Wendell?”

  Then there was silence. I sniffed at the crack under the door. Uh-oh. I have this certain low, rumbly bark that’s only for Bernie. I barked it now. Bernie looked at me and stopped feeling relaxed inside. He turned the doorknob. The door opened. After a moment of confusion, we went inside. Me first.

  Two

  The trailer had windows but the shades were drawn, meaning it was pretty dark inside. The shaft of light that slanted in through the open doorway fell just short of a shadowy desk at the far end. A shadowy figure sat behind the shadowy desk, leaning back, like maybe sleeping or in deep thought. Humans tend to close their eyes when deep thoughts are going on. Maybe it helps them. I’m not the one to ask, deep thoughts not something I bring to the table. But there’s a lot to be said for shallow thoughts, or even none at all. The Little Detective Agency was successful for a reason, except for the finances part. But we’re way off track. I almost left out something important, namely that I knew right away that the shadowy figure wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t thinking thoughts of any kind. A faint smell, in its very early stages, was coming off that figure. It’s not a smell I miss. I also knew he was a man, of course, and exactly which man. Once I meet you, your smell sticks in my mind and stays there forever. Remember that if you’re ever tempted to do something perpy when I’m around.

  We moved forward. “Wendell?” Bernie said. “Wendell?” Bernie’s a hopeful guy, one of the very best things about him.

  But there was only silence, except quiet bubbling sounds coming from a bunch of glass tanks stacked along one wall. Beside the other wall stood a workbench with racks of test tubes, all of them filled with dirt.

  “Wendell?”

  Silence.

  Bernie raised one of the shades, the kind that rolls up real quick with a noisy clatter. It came close to scaring me, kind of strange since I’m the type that doesn’t scare. It frightens me just to think of being scared, so I avoid it completely, if you see what I mean.

  Light fell across Wendell’s face. Yes, sitting at his desk, leaning back, eyes closed—just as I’d already known. I’d even known there would be blood, although not from where on his body. It turned out to be from the throat, slashed open from one side to the other. Not something we hadn’t seen before, me and Bernie, but we both went still. Some sights just stop you, no matter how tough you are, and we’re the toughest. Just ask the Frenzies, a motorcycle gang originally from down in Immler Springs but now up at Northern State Correctional, sporting orange jumpsuits and breaking rocks in the hot sun. All their Harleys ended up in a tar pit, but no time to go into that now.

  Bernie took surgical gloves from the back pocket of his jeans, put them on, and raised all the shades. All of sudden, in the bright light, Bernie looked so alive to me! A wonderful sight. I knew then and there that things were going to be okay forever.

  He walked around the desk, put a finger to the back of Wendell’s wrist, looked at me, shook his head. Not news, but so nice Bernie wanted to include me. You had to love Bernie, and I did.

  Next came examining the crime scene. I’m in charge of sniffing around. There’s really not much to it. Mostly you just breathe and soon a whole scent world rises up in your mind. Well, maybe not yours. After not much time at all, I knew that two humans had been in the trailer recently, one man and one woman. The man was a gum chewer who liked cherry flavor and also had toe fungus—human toe fungus is impossible not to pick up, like it was spraying from a fire hose. The woman had a smell that reminded me of flowers just before they get thrown out; she also had a hamster in her life. I’d known a hamster once, name of Harry, who’d gotten out of his cage, which had somehow tipped over, and we’d ended up playing a game called nudge Harry all over the floor with your paws. A game that had ended too soon, as I recalled, an unhappy ending that included the loss of the client, who turned out to be Harry’s human companion, a fact I learned too late, if at all.

  Meanwhile Bernie was looking on top of things, under things, opening desk drawers, examining papers, patting Wendell’s pockets.

  “No wallet,” he said.

  Bernie gazed at Wendell, almost like … like he was waiting patiently for some explanation about the wallet. Interesting moments like that happened from time to time with Bernie, as though some other world was just around the corner. I was always glad when they ended.

  Bernie turned away from Wendell, went over to the workbench, and peered at the test tubes full of dirt. Although all the dirt looked the same, the smells were not. Some of them were even new to me, and I’d thought I’d smelled everything when it came to dirt.

  “No phone, no computer of any kind,” Bernie said. “I wonder…” He didn’t finish his thought, at least not out loud. Instead he took out his own phone and called the sheriff.

  * * *

  A squad car pulled up outside the trailer and a pudgy guy in a too-tight uniform climbed out. His cheeks puffed up a bit—possibly one of those burps that doesn’t quite get free—and he turned to us.

  “Hey,” he said. “You the one who called?”

  “Correct,” said Bernie.

  The pudgy guy took a notebook from his chest pocket, wet his thumb, paged through. “Bennie Little?”

  Uh-oh. Bennie? We were off to a bad start.

  Bernie gave the pudgy guy a look. The pudgy guy blinked and checked his notebook again. “Says here you’re a PI?”

  “How’s Bennie spelled?”

  The pudgy guy squinted at the notebook. “B-E-R-N-I-E.”

  There was a long pause. Then Bernie said, “Where is Sheriff Gooden?”

  “Laid up for the time being. Pesky gallbladder. I’m Deputy Beasley.” His cheeks puffed up again. This time he covered his mouth with his fist, but a burp escaped, no doubt about it. Deputy Beasley had been eating Honey Nut Cheerios, and also dill pickles. “What kind of PI are yuh?” he said.

  “I don’t understand the question,” Bernie said.

  “There’s the kind that’s on the side of the law and the other kind.”

  “What about the kind that’s on the side of justice?”

  “Huh?” said Deputy Beasley.

  “Or,” Bernie went on, “the kind that just discovered a homicide in your jurisdiction?”

  “Homicide?” Deputy Beasley hitched up his belt, a move you often see from paunchy types, and the deputy was on the big side of paunchy. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Be my guest,” said Bernie. We w
ere standing in front of the trailer door. Bernie pushed it open with his heel. Is anyone cooler than Bernie? Also, if Deputy Beasley was our guest, did we now own the trailer? This case felt promising.

  We followed the deputy inside. He stopped in front of Wendell and gazed down at him.

  “Had one a few years back where some loser slit his own throat,” he said.

  Bernie folded his arms across his chest. The things he does! I could watch him all day, which I actually do. “You’re saying suicide’s a possibility?”

  “Can’t rule it out.”

  Bernie nodded. “Meaning he did it with his bare hands?”

  “You nuts? Had to be a knife or some such.”

  “Which he hid somewhere before plunking himself back down and expiring?”

  “Huh?”

  “We’ll wait outside,” Bernie said.

  On the way out I saw a small photo thumbtacked to the wall, a photo of Wendell Nero and a girl—older than Charlie, Bernie’s kid, but not grown up—standing side by side, both of them smiling on a sunny day. Wendell’s RV was in the background. Also, the girl was holding some rolled-up papers under her arm, and what looked like a baby goat was sitting on her feet. All in all, a very nice picture: happy people are such a nice sight. A nice picture, except for the baby goat. I’ve had problems with goats, although not, it’s true, with baby ones.

  * * *

  We went over to the car, had a nice drink of water, Bernie from a bottle, me from my portable water bowl. It was the hot time of year, when water always tastes best. Bernie held his water bottle in the sun, gave it a close look, as though hoping to see something. All I saw was water, but so clear in the bright light that it was almost like seeing water for the very first time. The next moment, I understood water completely. The moment after that, I didn’t understand it at all. I felt a bit dizzy. Now would come feeling pukey, but before pukiness arrived this strange little—would you call it a spell?—passed and I got back to being normal me, which is all in all my favorite type of me, certainly the most relaxing to be with.

  “Why did he want to see us, big guy?” Bernie said.

  A tough one. I had no idea, also wasn’t sure who Bernie was talking about. Meanwhile I was picking up the toe fungus smell. I followed it around the trailer to the base of the steep slope at the end of the box canyon, where it mixed with the cherry gum smell. The cherry gum smell got stronger and stronger and then there it was, an actual glob of cherry gum. It lay on the ground beside a scrubby gray bush, not hardened but not fresh either, just somewhere in between. I’d tried gum all those ways, hard, soft, in between, with never a single good experience. So now I told myself, Chet, don’t touch that gum. But what harm could there be in nosing at the crumpled-up gum wrapper? I nosed at that, nosed at another little scrap of paper, and the next thing I knew I was nosing at the gum itself! There’s just no end to life’s surprises. I nosed at the gum for a bit, then opened my mouth and—

  “Chet? What you got there?”

  Nothing really, nothing at all. I paused, realized my mouth was open, closed it, and resumed pausing.

  Bernie came over, squatted down, put on the surgical gloves, poked around at the gum, the wrapper, the little piece of paper. He picked up the piece of paper. “Receipt from QwikStop in San Dismas, yesterday at one thirty-seven p.m., one pack of Big Chew Cherry Gum, one dollar seventy-nine cents, one fish sandwich, three dollars nineteen cents, total four ninety-eight, amount tendered five dollars, change two cents, clerk Sofia.” Bernie took a baggie from his pocket, put in the gum. “Some gum chewer tosses this away.” He stuck the crumpled wrapper in the baggie. “Then reaches into a pocket for a fresh piece.” And finally he put the receipt in the baggie as well. “Meanwhile dislodging the receipt.” He glanced back at the trailer. “A nice little narrative, Chet. Good work.”

  My tail started up, meaning the pausing was over. Good thing: pausing gets very bothersome after a while.

  “Even if it turns out to be irrelevant,” Bernie added.

  That part zipped right by me. I was still back at the good work part. My tail, in a very good mood, kept on wagging as we walked around to the front of the trailer. The door opened and Deputy Beasley stepped out.

  “You still here?” he said.

  “Figured you’d want to talk to us,” said Bernie.

  “About what?”

  Bernie didn’t answer. An ambulance and a squad car appeared at the open end of the canyon, lights flashing but sirens off.

  “It’s a robbery gone bad, by the way,” the deputy said.

  “Yeah?” said Bernie.

  “No wallet on him.”

  “Ah.”

  “Exactly. Thief comes in, old dude resists, things go south. Seen it a thousand times. Probably some dope fiend, or one of them traffickers from down on the border.”

  “Good luck,” Bernie said.

  We headed for the car. I had already hopped in and Bernie was sliding behind the wheel when Beasley came running up, an odd paunchy run with lots of motion but not much of the forward kind.

  “Hey! Shoulda asked—what were you doin’ here in the first place?”

  “Looking for water,” Bernie said.

  “Huh?”

  Bernie pointed to the sign on the trailer. “He was an expert.”

  “Hydrology is water?” said Beasley. He did one of those dry spitting things. Spitting is a big subject. Men spit and women don’t, for example, and then there’s the special kind of man who goes in for dry spitting. There’s also the spitting up that babies do after feeding, spit up that tastes quite nice, actually, as I learned when Charlie was still in his high chair. “Ain’t no water anywheres near here,” Beasley went on, “not for miles.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. There was our water bottle, of course, under Bernie’s seat, but was I picking up something else, very faint yet at the same time very big, from far far down beneath us? I kind of thought so, but then we drove away and it was gone. After a while Bernie gave me an odd look and said, “That discrepancy Wendell mentioned works both ways, doesn’t it?”

  I had no answer, didn’t even understand the question. My mind was at peace, a very nice feeling.

  Three

  We drove away, silent for a long time, the car full of Bernie’s thoughts. I loved the feeling of Bernie’s thoughts. They were giants! And the West—which was where we lived, a fact I’d learned quite recently—was a giant land, so we matched up perfectly, Bernie and the land, and me, too, of course. Don’t forget me. I like being in the mix.

  Back on the two-lane blacktop, Bernie took a deep breath and all the giant thoughts went still, as though fallen fast asleep. “Got to beware of simplistic ideas, big guy,” he said. Whoa! Those—whatever they were—had never occurred to me. I knew to beware of perps bearing guns, and also bears—ever since that time we’d come between a mama bear and her cubs, mama bears turning out to be amazingly fast on their feet—and now I added simplistic ideas to the list.

  “But sometimes,” Bernie went on, “simplistic is better than nothing at all. Water equals life, for example. And the reverse—no water equals death. Isn’t that, way down deep, why I feel so strongly about…”

  Whatever Bernie felt so strongly about remained unspoken, so I never found out. But still it was nice to be zooming along in the Porsche, the wind ruffling my fur, lots of wind since the top was down, in fact actually lost, and—and whoa! A roadrunner! A roadrunner was also zooming along, practically right beside us. I’ve chased the odd roadrunner, never successfully. Not yet. And this was not the time. I knew that so well. But then, as we passed him, the little bugger turned his little birdie head and gave me a look with his little birdie eyes. There’s only so much anyone can take. I barked my most savage bark, a great feeling, but not quite great enough. All on their own, the muscles in my legs bunched and got ready for a mighty—

  “Ch—et?”

  Bernie has a way of saying my name—slowly more than loudly—that causes this str
ange tapping of the brakes inside me, hard to describe. He laughed and gave me a pat. What was funny? Pat pat pat. I didn’t know and didn’t care.

  * * *

  We passed some big orange mounds, almost hill-sized, but smelling of copper—meaning they weren’t hills but tailings, and this was mining country—and entered a small mining town.

  “San Dismas,” Bernie said, as we rolled down the main street and stopped at a red light, the only stoplight in sight. We have two kinds of mining towns out here. The kind with stuff still in the mines is where you see lots of brand-new pickups. The kind where the mines are all mined out is where you see boarded-up buildings. San Dismas was this second kind of mining town.

  We pulled over in front of a convenience store. Bernie read the sign. “QwikStop. A long shot, big guy, which should come after all other possibilities have washed out, but let’s do things backwards today.” He paused. “Call it the Beasley method.”

  Deputy Beasley was still in the picture? A bit of a surprise, but if Bernie said so, then that was that. We hopped out of the Porsche, me actually hopping, and entered the QwikStop.

  Here’s something about convenience stores—and I’ve been in many: they always have Slim Jims for sale. How convenient is that! I followed the Slim Jim smell over to the Slim Jim display. A whole rack! What a fine convenience store—even if business seemed a little slow, what with the only customers being me and Bernie—maybe the best I’ve had the pleasure to visit. The Beasley method—whatever it was, exactly—was working already.

  Meanwhile Bernie was at the cooler, picking up a water bottle or two. He carried them up to the counter. The clerk was a very small old lady wearing huge hoop earrings.