“And, uh,” Florian went on. “Um—what’s your name?”
“Bernie Little.”
“Well, Mr. Little, one more thing, going back to the … the situation in that trailer. I’m not a lawyer, but is taking something that belongs to no one theft? See what I mean?”
“Belongs to no one?” Bernie said.
“Sure,” said Florian. “When you’re dead you’re no one. That’s … that’s the whole point of, like, everything.”
Bernie looked down at Florian, gazed at him for what seemed like a long time. A bright sort of hopefulness rose in Florian’s eyes, one of those perp things you saw from time to time.
“What about his phone?” Bernie said. “His computer?”
“Don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Florian.
“You had no problem taking the wallet, but the phone and the computer were a bridge too far?”
“Bridge?”
Bernie gave him another look. This one made Florian turn away.
“Did you know Wendell Nero?” Bernie said.
“Not from Adam, Mr. Little. I swear on … on my mother’s grave, except she was cremated so she don’t have one.”
Bernie gave Florian a look. “Ever had any concussions?” he said.
“Hell, yeah. You just gave me one, for Christ’s sake. With that sucker punch.”
“Sucker punch?” said Bernie.
“Um,” Florian said. “No offense.” From somewhere overhead came the sound of the beating wings of a big bird, probably heard only by me.
“What were you doing at the trailer in the first place?” Bernie said.
“I was just ATVin’ around, happened to come across it. Had no idea anyone was inside, else none of this would ever have happened.”
“I believe that part,” Bernie said.
“Yeah?” said Florian.
“One hundred percent. But then when you did go inside, there was this rather well-known scientist working at his desk. An old man, but feisty. He didn’t like you coming in uninvited, didn’t cooperate when you demanded his wallet. So”—Bernie took out two baggies, big and small, tucked the knife in one and the wallet in the other—“some sort of scuffle broke out and your temper got the best of you, just like it did when Chet and I came in here, and you went for the knife, also just like in here.”
“No!” Florian shouted. His face went red, bright bright red, although Bernie says I can’t be trusted when it comes to red. “I’m tellin’ you the truth! This is a frame-up. You cut his throat and—and—”
By that time Bernie and I were back outside, and Florian sounded much farther away than he really was. Bernie walked around the boat to the back. Stern, was that the name? There’s all sorts of boat lingo, which I’d learned on our San Diego trip but mostly forgotten. Bernie scraped some dirt off the peeling paint and read: “Sea of Love.” Then came a long silence. After that he took out his cell phone.
“Deputy Beasley, please.”
Beasley came on. “Yeah?”
“Bernie Little here,” Bernie said. “There are tides in the affairs of men, Deputy Beasley.”
“Huh?”
I was with Beasley on that, but would never admit it, especially not to myself.
* * *
Deputy Beasley and some other officers plus some crime scene dudes showed up pretty soon. The officers hauled Florian out of the boat and got him into the caged back seat of one of the squad cars. The crime scene dudes climbed into the boat. Bernie started in on the explanations. Maybe Beasley hadn’t been a huge fan of ours the first time around, but now he was warming up.
“Well, well,” he said. “The wallet, huh? And the knife. Well, well. Hot damn. Glad I encouraged you from the get-go. I’m a good judge of talent, ain’t I, boys?”
The officers all gazed at the ground, or kicked at a pebble or two, except for the one non-boy officer. She folded her arms across her chest and gazed into the distance. For a moment I thought she was going to spit, a very interesting prospect: I’d seen lots of spitting in my time, but never by a woman. The moment passed with no spitting. Still, you could always hope and I always did.
“Got an idea,” Beasley went on. “Officer Zurburan?”
The woman officer turned to him.
“See that Bernie here gets one of those honorary sheriff’s badges. And maybe throw in a couple of them commemorative T-shirts.”
Officer Zurburan nodded the tiniest nod.
At the same time Bernie said, “Not necessary. And one thing you should be aware of, Deputy: the suspect admits to the theft of the wallet but claims the victim was already dead when he entered the trailer.”
“That’s a good one,” said Beasley.
Not long after that, the crime scene dudes and all the officers had driven away, with Florian in his caged back seat, head hanging down. Only Beasley remained.
“How’s Sheriff Gooden doing?” Bernie said.
“Pesky gallbladder,” said Beasley.
“You mentioned that. When’s he expected back?”
Beasley shrugged. “They’re runnin’ some tests. Might not be the gallbladder, I heard. What’s the pancreas? Part of the gallbladder, maybe?”
Bernie didn’t answer. He walked over to the stern of the boat. I went with him. “How come he’s been living in this?”
“The boat?” said Beasley. “Dunno. Probably stole the goddamn thing. No right to keep it here, of course. This is county land. I’ll have DPW haul it away.”
“Away where?”
“The dump.”
“Don’t do that,” Bernie said. “We’ll take it.”
“Why? It’s a wreck.”
“I’ll have someone come today,” Bernie said.
“Suit yourself.” Beasley hitched up his belt, got in his car, drove away.
Much later, the big wrecker from Nixon’s Championship Autobody—owned by our buddy Nixon Panero, who was also a part-time screenplay reader for a big Hollywood studio—drove up, Nixon’s sister Mindy Jo at the wheel.
“Hey,” she said, tossing me a biscuit, which I caught in midair. Then she got to work.
“I’ll help you with that,” Bernie said.
“Bernie. Please.”
We watched Mindy Jo with hooks and chains, winching the boat onto the wrecker. Mindy Jo has powerful arms, covered with tattoos of all the boyfriends she’s had.
“Is there a man alive who could…” Bernie said as Mindy Jo drove away with … with our boat, if I was following this right. I waited for Bernie to finish the thought, but he did not. Thoughts can be hard to finish, as you might have learned sometime in your life.
Then it was just me and Bernie. Whoa! Maybe not exactly. Because from a ridge far far away came a glare, in fact a sort of double glare that I’d seen before, and it meant one thing to me and one thing only: binoculars. The glare passed over me and my eyes cleared and I made out a small figure standing on that ridge. A very small figure—a stick figure really—about which I could tell nothing, except that it was a woman. A woman stands differently from a man, that’s basic in this business. Was the woman on the distant ridge something Bernie should know about? I thought so, and barked my low, rumbly bark.
“Something up, big guy?”
Bernie shielded his eyes from the sun, looked this way and that. When his gaze finally found the distant ridge, the small figure was gone. At that point I suddenly remembered the Slim Jims eight-pack, a powerful memory that caused the forgetting of everything else.
Five
“Damn it,” said Bernie, as we pulled up in front of our place on Mesquite Road, not entering the driveway on account of Mindy Jo already being there, busy unloading Sea of Love, if I’d caught the name of the blue boat. Our place on Mesquite Road is the best place in the whole Valley, in my opinion, and probably yours, too, after you come to visit. We’ve got the canyon out back, and on one side are the Parsonses, this old couple—maybe not doing so well these days—and my pal Iggy. On the other side lives old man Heydri
ch. Not long ago we found out—actually from our buddy Mr. Singh of Singh’s Pawnbroker and Financing for All Your Needs, who I think I may have mentioned already, although I may not have gotten to Mrs. Singh’s curried goat, a reason to visit even if you have no needs—that old man Heydrich collects Nazi memorabilia. Whatever those might be, Bernie’s not a fan, but that’s not the worst thing about old man Heydrich. What’s worse is the way he waters his lawn—not a desert-style lawn like ours and the Parsonses’, mostly about rocks and cactuses and dirt, really the nicest kind of lawn, Bernie says, but the green-grass golf-course kind, which is the worst. Even if it feels the best under your paws, but that last part’s just between you and me.
Now, switching off the engine, Bernie said, “There’s only one aquifer—what’s so hard to understand?” Possibly he raised his voice a bit, but I would never have called it shouting. It didn’t matter. Old man Heydrich wasn’t out there to hear, so the only answer was the hiss of his sprinklers spraying water high in the air, making a rainbow, yes, which had to be good, but also a puddle out on the street, and that was bad.
Bernie glared at that rainbow for a moment, then gave his head a quick little shake. I do the very same thing sometimes. We’re a lot alike in some ways, me and Bernie. Then, not looking angry anymore, he walked up the driveway to where Mindy Jo was at the controls of the winch, slowly lowering Sea of Love beside the house. I gave my head a quick little shake and followed.
“Anything I can do to help?” Bernie said.
“Pour me a cold one,” said Mindy Jo.
Bernie went into the house. I stayed outside. The boat touched down without making a sound. Mindy Jo started unhooking the hooks, paused when she saw me watching.
“One fine hombre, arn’cha?” She glanced toward the house. “Make that two f—”
Whatever was coming next didn’t come, because the side door of the Parsons’s house opened and out stepped Mr. Parsons, not actually stepping, but stumping on his walker, one of those hospital bands on his wrist.
“Hi, there,” he said. “I see Bernie got himself a—”
Boat.
That was my guess on where Mr. Parsons was headed with this. But I might have been wrong. The point was that Mr. Parsons didn’t get the word out because at that moment who squeezed between his leg and the door frame, a very small space? Why, that would be Iggy!
One thing about Iggy: he can squeeze through spaces even when there are no spaces. Once—this was before the electric fence guy got the Parsonses to put one in, an electric fence they could never get to work right, meaning nowadays Iggy was pretty much inside—when we were roaming in some distant neighborhood where the mailman left a biscuit in the box outside every house that included a member of the nation within—Iggy had actually jumped up—an amazing jump for such a little guy—and squeezed himself into a mailbox, the opening of which was way smaller than he was! And then he’d hopped out with that biscuit in his mouth and a crazy look in his eyes that got crazier when a sort of howling rose up from the nearest house. Around then was when I snatched the biscuit from Iggy—it seemed like the right thing to do—and he chased after me going yip-yip-yip, his tongue, astonishingly long, flopping out the side of his mouth. Of course there was no way Iggy could catch me unless I let him, which I did, although by that time there was no biscuit to be had. What a great game, and we’d made it up all on our own! We played that game over and over—the game of Iggy snatching biscuits out of mailboxes and me snatching them away from him—going from one neighborhood to another until the mailman checked his rearview mirror and hit the brakes. After that came a period of confusion, involving animal control, thornbushes, and several members of Valley PD, including one I happened to know, namely Leo “Kittycat” Leone, so everything turned out all right. Did I poop or what the next day! Poop and poop and—
But maybe too much information. And not really the point, which was all about Iggy squeezing through narrow spaces, just like he was doing now, and the next moment he’d be on the loose and headed for the hills, and me right with him. Iggy! My best buddy! I got ready to ramble and rumble and who knows what? But at the very instant when Iggy was popping free, Mindy Jo glanced his way, stuck a thumb and one finger in the corners of her mouth and whistled.
This was a whistle like none I’d ever heard, except maybe one time when Bernie and I were mixing it up with a couple of perps on a railroad track in the middle of nowhere and a train suddenly came zooming round the mountain. That train whistle, somewhere between a scream and a roar: the scariest sound I’d ever heard. The perps gave up and raised their hands immediately—when the right move actually was to leap off the tracks and get clear of that train, which was what Bernie and I had done. So then we had to go back and get them, with the train now practically on top of us! And they didn’t even thank us later that day when we went to check on them in their cells.
But forget all that. The only reason I brought it up is on account of that train whistle and Mindy Jo’s whistle being pretty similar. Cleared my head, I can tell you, and it was clear to begin with. Mr. Parsons’s mouth opened wide and he leaned back a bit, as though facing a storm. As for Iggy, he forgot about being on the loose, wheeled right around and darted back into his house.
To look at someone in awe—is that an expression? If so, that was how Mr. Parsons was looking at Mindy Jo. She looked at him in alarm.
“You okay, pal?”
“Perfectly okay.”
“Whew,” Mindy Jo said. “Thought for a second there you were having a stroke.”
“That was last week,” said Mr. Parsons. He went back inside and closed the door.
* * *
Not long after that we were out on the patio back of our place and having drinks—beer for Bernie and Mindy Jo, water for me. The swan fountain—the only thing Leda left behind after the divorce—made soft splashes, just the sound cooling off the day a bit. The sound of water! I came close to having a thought about that.
A lot of humans have trouble with the heat, but not Bernie and not Mindy Jo. They sat at the little round table, both relaxed in that easy way strong bodies have when they’re relaxing. Mindy Jo took a big sip of beer.
“What’re you going to do with the boat?” she said.
“Fix it up.”
“Yeah?”
“Am I hearing something in your tone?” Bernie said.
“Don’t know what you’re hearing,” said Mindy Jo, “but what’s in my mind is no frickin’ way.”
Uh-oh. Had Mindy Jo just said something not nice about Bernie’s fixing things up skills? Was it possible he and Mindy Jo would soon be throwing down out here on the patio? No way—Bernie could never hurt a woman, not even a big strong one like Mindy Jo.
And in fact he started laughing. He laughed and laughed, all of a sudden so happy. Mindy Jo laughed, too. They polished off their beers. Bernie went inside and brought out two more. They clinked glasses.
“Nixon always says you’re a special guy, Bernie,” Mindy Jo said. “And I agree. Older, true, but special.”
“Well,” said Bernie, “um, I wouldn’t say they’re mutually exclusive. No reason you can’t—”
“I had an older boyfriend once.” Mindy Jo leaned across the table, held one of her muscular arms so Bernie could see. She pointed at one of the tattooed faces, halfway down her forearm. “This guy,” she said.
Bernie peered at the tattoo. “Hard to really tell a whole lot from—” he began.
“Never again,” Mindy Jo said. “That’s what I told myself about older men.”
“Kind of sweeping, but—”
“You know why?”
Bernie shook his head.
“Take a guess.”
Bernie looked up at the sky. A plane was flying by high above, trailing one of those long white tails. Tails of any kind were always interesting, of course, but Bernie seemed to gaze at it for a very long time. Finally he said, “They start doubting themselves.”
“Exactly!” Mindy Jo punc
hed Bernie’s shoulder, not particularly gently. “And then they stop being fun. How did you know that?”
Bernie smiled this quick little smile he has. You hardly ever see it. I think it happens when he’s pleased with himself, but don’t go by me. “I just tried to imagine myself in the shoes of an older guy,” he said.
“Ha!” said Mindy Jo. “Ha!” She started to make a fist, as though to give Bernie’s shoulder another pop, and then stopped. What was going on? I checked Bernie’s footwear, saw he was wearing flip-flops, got no further ahead. Meanwhile Mindy Jo was looking at Bernie in a new way. But he’d gone back to watching that plane, so he missed it.
“Bernie?” Mindy Jo said.
His gaze came back down. “Yeah?”
“Got any tattoos yourself?”
He shook his head.
“Look down your nose at people with tats?”
Look down your nose? I’d never heard that before, and it sounded like something I should have known about. I sat up straight, tried looking down my nose and … and found I could do it easily! And what a nose, by the way! Absolutely fascinating, especially from this angle. It went on and on and on, a total champ of a nose. Who’s got it better than me?
“No,” Bernie said. He glanced at me, blinked, turned back to Mindy Jo. “Not at all.”
“Sorry,” said Mindy Jo. “My bad—didn’t mean to stereotype you.”
“No problem.”
Mindy Jo swallowed some more beer. “My first serious boyfriend played in a Beatles tribute band up in Vegas.”
“Yeah?” said Bernie. “Which mop top was he?”
“Ringo, of course,” said Mindy Jo. “Want to see?”
Here is where I should maybe describe our patio a little more. It’s fenced in on both sides with a high wooden fence and at the back a high adobe wall with a high gate, all this highness is really high so someone—say Bernie—would never have to worry about someone else—say me—taking off on what you might call an unplanned outing. A very smart idea and it had worked for the longest time, with that second someone not even dreaming of even taking a crack at leaping up and over. But then one night had come a sound unlike any other from across the canyon, namely the sound of she-barking. Bottom line: you don’t know what you’re capable of unless you try. For now let’s leave out the complications of the later appearance of a puppy supposedly resembling—if that’s the meaning of “spit and image”—me, a puppy now going by “Shooter” and living with Charlie—that’s Bernie’s kid—Leda and Daddy Malcolm, which was what Charlie was supposed to call Leda’s new husband, a rich dude with very long toes, Bernie being simply Daddy.
Of Mutts and Men Page 4
