But forget all that, or at least part of it. The only point was the high fence on both sides, the Parsons side and the old man Heydrich side. On the Parsons side the fence has a door—the very door we’d come through after the boat was all nicely in place—now closed but not locked.
Okeydoke? Back to this Ringo person. A perp-type name, in my opinion, so if you’re out there right now, Señor Ringo, I hope you look good in orange.
“Uh, sure,” Bernie was saying. He glanced at Mindy Jo’s arms. “Which one’s Ringo?”
“His name wasn’t actually Ringo, of course,” Mindy Jo said. “It was Jerry.”
“Got it,” said Bernie, although that was where I myself stopped getting it.
“And he’s not with the others,” Mindy Jo went on. “Being my first, and all.”
“Ah.”
“Still want to see?”
“Um, well, maybe better to just let the imagination kind of—”
Right about then was the moment the side door of the fence opened and someone looked in. This someone was Eliza, sort of Bernie’s girlfriend now that Suzie didn’t seem to be speaking to Bernie these days. All so complicated, not at all how we handle these things in the nation within. When we first met Eliza, Bernie was still in Valley Hospital after the saguaro case—no way I’m getting into all that now—and she was Dr. Bethea to us, in charge of getting Bernie better. Which happened, just one of the reasons I’m a big fan. Also she turned out to be a cousin of Cleon Maxwell of Max’s Memphis Ribs, my favorite joint in the whole Valley! I was a big fan of Suzie, too, although I didn’t recall any of her cousins being in the same league as Cleon.
Bernie did not notice Eliza at the door. He was too busy watching Mindy Jo, who was trying to lower one shoulder of her T-shirt, and when that didn’t quite work out the way she wanted, moving on to just plain taking the whole thing off.
“Here we go,” she said, pointing to the now-visible tattoo of a long-haired dude with a big, crooked smile on his face. “You like?”
“Uh, remarkable,” Bernie said. “Remarkable, like, likeness.”
“You knew Jerry?”
“I meant of Ringo.”
“Jerry wasn’t really Ringo, Bernie. It was an act.”
“Right, right, of course. Line between art and life and all, and—” He tore his eyes off the sight, and that was when his gaze swept over the door in the fence, now closed again, with no sign of Eliza.
Mindy Jo’s phone buzzed. She checked the screen. “Wreck on the airport cut-off,” she said, jumping up. “Sanitation hauler and two eighteen-wheelers.” Ringo, or Jerry, or whoever it was, disappeared from view, and Mindy Jo was gone right after that.
* * *
Bernie and I sat quietly, Bernie gazing at the fountain and me gazing at him. All at once, he slapped his hand on the table. “Evaporation! What’s wrong with me?”
That was an easy one. Zilch, zip, nada. For some reason, Bernie went behind the fountain, shut off the water. The flow from the swan’s mouth dwindled to a trickle, then a few drops. He watched those last few drops.
“Why did Wendell ask us to go out there in the first place? That got lost in the shuffle.” Bernie turned my way. “What did he want to talk about?”
Our fountain? Hey! A pretty good guess by me! I felt tip-top.
Six
“Wow. See what that dog just did?”
“Chet? Can you give the Frisbee back, please?”
“Is that your dog?”
“We’re more of a team.”
“I can’t believe he jumped that high. Does he have a YouTube channel?”
“Don’t give him ideas. Chet? The Frisbee, please?”
Why, certainly! It wasn’t my Frisbee. I knew that very well. I’d just been sharing it with these college kids. College kids were the greatest. Bernie said it was exam week now, so they’d probably be studying in their rooms, but this time—maybe for the very first time in his life!—Bernie was wrong. The college kids were all doing their studying out on the quad, learning about catching rays, smoking weed, chugging beers, and lots of other stuff they had to—what was the expression? Get their heads around?—before exam time. Plus, on top of all that, mastering the Frisbee, too! So much work for the poor kids. Thinking it over, I realized that I’d only been trying to help. Not to criticize, but that last throw, the one I’d snagged, had really been pretty wild, totally uncatchable. Although not by me. So picking that Frisbee right out of the air just as it fluttered away over a food truck was going to help the hollow-chested pipe-armed kid who’d thrown it with his confidence. And maybe now would be a good time to build up his stamina by having him chase me around a bit. Suppose I went up to him and almost gave him the Frisbee, but not quite, instead smoothly backing away just as he reached for it and—
“Chet!”
* * *
Prof was our expert when it came to money—everything about money except making it, which took me some time to realize. His office overlooked the quad, an office with stacks of books all over the place and a couch. Prof was lying on the couch when we came in, his hands folded over his big round stomach.
“Well, well, been a while,” he said as we came in. “Perfect timing—I just now figured out what’s happening on our college campuses—although not yet this one, thank god.”
“Yeah?” Bernie said. “What is it?”
“You expect me to simply tell you?”
“Why not?”
“That would be spoon-feeding, Bernie, the sign of the teacher who has thrown in the towel.”
Spoon-feeding? Totally unexpected. I smelled no food whatsoever in Prof’s office, but I was ready to be surprised. I’ve licked spoons from time to time, also forks, plates, and bowls. But none of that happened now. Instead Bernie said, “I’m not your student.”
“Good point. None of my students are remotely like you.” Prof sighed and sat up, not easily. “My breakthrough came when I stumbled on the following quotation. Can you identify the writer? Quote.” He raised a pudgy finger toward the ceiling. “To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed the proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted unless the proper limits are exceeded. Unquote.”
“Someone very dangerous,” Bernie said.
“Precisely!” said Prof. “Would you consider coming to one of my classes and giving a little talk?”
“About what?”
“The life of action.”
“No.”
“No to the theme or no to the talk?”
“Yes.”
That right there was the most confusing human conversation I’d ever heard. Anyone called Prof had to be brilliant, of course, and Bernie was always the smartest human in the room, so the fault had to be mine. I lay down and licked my paw for a while.
“Feel free to change your mind at any time,” Prof said. “The quotation comes from Chairman Mao. The self-righteous violating proper limits—that’s what we have today. But you probably didn’t come to hear me pontificate.”
“I could listen to you pontificate all day,” Bernie said.
Prof smiled. “You could?” His face changed and for a second or two I saw him as a cheerful, chubby boy instead of a sick old man. Yes, poor Prof was sick. The smell of something wrong inside him was in the air, faint but unmissable, at least to me.
“But,” Bernie went on, “we’re working a case, involving someone you might have known.”
“And who would that be?”
“Wendell Nero.”
“Terrible news,” said Prof. He rubbed his beard. Did a tiny crumb or two fall out? “But what case? I understood there’d been an arrest.”
Bernie nodded. “I’m just poking around. How well did you know him?”
Interesting, because at that moment I was poking around myself, hunting for those crumbs, soon found beside some balled-up papers on the floor. Bacon crumbs? I couldn’t believe my luck.
“Not well,” Prof was saying. “We’ve been on a committee or two over the years. And his
office is just down the hall.”
“Let’s take a look,” Bernie said.
“See! Right there! The life of action!”
“We’re just walking down the hall.”
“But because of a murder, Bernie. Intent changes everything.”
* * *
We walked down the hall, one of those chilly halls where the AC’s turned up to the max. Bernie’s not a fan of AC turned up to the max, or of AC at all. Is it because of the aquifer? That was as far as I could take it.
“Here’s his office,” Prof said. “Wendell wasn’t around much these last few years, busy with his consulting work. Did you know he actually lived in that RV?”
“I did not.”
“Saved time, according to him, time for his research. There isn’t a geologist west of the Mississ—”
At that point Prof opened the door. Wendell’s office was about the same size as Prof’s but it had a desk instead of a couch and was much tidier. A man was standing by the desk, peering into one of the drawers. This was a bit of a surprise. For one thing, I hadn’t smelled him through the door. Must have been on account of the AC, which can sometimes be like a river, washing smells away on a current of cold air. I smelled him now, of course, an everyday Valley male aroma of aftershave and weed, but mixed in very very faintly was a female scent, a scent of flowers a day or two before they get thrown out. Not his smell, if you see what I mean, but the smell of a woman he’d recently been near, riding in a car, for example. Just throwing that in, since I also picked up a hint of gasoline, the kind humans always have on them after they do their own pumping.
Whew! A lot of information, and maybe none of it as interesting as how the man looked, which was like surfers I’d seen in San Diego, especially one who hadn’t been enthusiastic on sharing a wave with us—a whole big wave, belonging to everyone! Same sun-bleached hair, same tan skin, the big difference being the scar on this dude’s cheek, the sort of little round puckered scar a bullet leaves, something I’d seen many times in my line of work, way more than two, the biggest number my mind is comfortable with.
“Hey, guys,” he said. As for what Bernie calls the element of surprise—a big thing in our line of work—he seemed a little surprised, but in a friendly, smiling way. Prof looked very surprised, his wild and bushy eyebrows raised high. No surprise at all on Bernie’s face. That was Bernie, a cool customer, especially in moments of danger, which this was not, so maybe he was just practicing.
“Hi,” he said. And then nothing. Nothing is part of Bernie’s technique. He’s that good.
“You folks with the college?” the man said right away, filling the silence, which showed that nothing was working its magic again, as it almost always did. “I’m Uncle Wendell’s nephew. What a terrible thing! But somewhere there’s a photo of him and my dad when they were kids. I was hoping to salvage it before everything got … disposed of.”
“The brother who died a long time ago?” Prof said.
The man nodded. “And they weren’t particularly close. But there’s a photo of the two of them on a horse when they were little boys that my dad often mentioned—like toward the end.” He closed the drawer, gave Prof a big smile. “But it doesn’t seem to be here, so I’ll get going. Hope I haven’t caused any trouble.”
“No, no,” said Prof, “no trouble at all.”
The man gave us one of those little salutes and was almost out the door when Bernie said, “When was the last time you saw your uncle?”
He turned and gave Bernie the same sort of smile he’d given Prof, but now it wavered slightly. “Been years.” He got a faraway look in his eyes. “But it’s still kinda … emotional.”
“Condolences,” said Prof.
“Thank you, sir,” said the man. He moved out of the room and down the hall. I heard an odd papery crinkle as he walked away.
Bernie went over to the desk. “Any reason I can’t take a look around?”
“I don’t see why not,” Prof said. “Looking for anything particular?”
“Wendell wanted to see us,” Bernie said. “I’d like to know why.”
“Because?”
Bernie shrugged. “It’s a gap.”
“A point of commonality between us—I can’t bear gaps either.” Prof gestured toward the room. “Fill in the gaps, Bernie.”
He left us by ourselves. Bernie’s an expert at searching a room, a pleasure to watch, which was what I did, curled up in a corner. Bernie went through everything, sometimes muttering things like “You’d think he’d…” or “so tidy he’s almost not even…” which I didn’t understand at all, but finally, “Aha!”
I sat up.
Bernie raised a small leather-bound notebook. Leather has always been an interest of mine. I rose and moved closer.
“His appointment book, Chet. Was he the type who jots down the subject matter of his meetings? That would be nice.”
Bernie leafed through the notebook. He paused, looked more closely, went through the notebook again, this time page by page. He turned to me, the notebook open so I could see. “Someone cut out yesterday, big guy, the day we were scheduled.”
He gazed at the door. Then all at once he was on the move, out the door and running down the hall. I ran after him, very soon taking the lead, running because Bernie was running. He ran for reasons of his own, more than good enough for me. We ran down a few flights of stairs—me mostly airborne the whole way—then burst through a doorway and out to the quad, running this way and that, along a street to a parking garage, up, up, up through all the levels, Bernie’s eyes so alert, looking here and there for something, no doubt about that, and finally we reached the roof and came to a stop. Bernie, huffing and puffing, went to the low wall at the edge, peered down. I got my paws on the top of the wall and helped with the peering. Very nice to see things from up here: the college, the quad, the surrounding streets, all the little people moving around. So busy and yet … so helpless. You had to love them. Whoa! What a strange thought! I pushed it aside and watched a Frisbee gliding through the sunshine, tiny suns glinting on its surface, a lovely sight.
But maybe not to Bernie. “Damn,” he said, in that quiet tone he used for talking to himself. Was something wrong? I tried to think what it could be. My mind went on a little trip, sort of … how would you put it? Peering into dark corners? Something along those lines. Except there were no dark corners. So that was that.
Seven
Deputy Sheriff Beasley was having lunch at a table out back of the Noshery, a strip mall place that was new to me. I’m the type who gets excited by somewhere new, especially somewhere new that smelled like this, so even though Deputy Beasley didn’t seem at all excited to see us there was plenty of excitement to go around.
“Mind if we join you?” Bernie said.
“Uh,” said Beasley, talking around a sandwichy mouthful, a sandwich filled with thin strips of meat that gave off wave after wave of powerful, complex aromas, some of them previously unknown to me. I faced the fact that Deputy Beasley had made a poor first impression on me and decided to give him a second chance. Who in this life doesn’t deserve a second chance, and maybe even one after that? “The thing is,” he said, “I’m kind of in a—what the hell?”
“Ch-et?”
Uh-oh. Somehow my paws—only my front ones, so it could have been worse—seemed to have placed themselves on the table, not far from the deputy’s paper plate. I got that situation cleared up and pronto.
“He just gets enthusiastic about things,” Bernie was saying. “It’s probably because he’s never been to a deli before.”
“Never been to a deli?” said Beasley.
“Not an authentic Jewish-style deli like this one.”
“Huh?” said Beasley. “You got something against Jew—” All at once, his face turned purple and he began coughing, choking, and gasping. Bernie went around the table and pounded him on the back. A small—but by no means tiny—piece of that fascinating meat popped out of his mouth, across the table,
and almost directly into my own mouth. I hardly had to move a muscle!
After that the next thing I really remember is the waitress coming to the table to take Bernie’s order, Bernie by then sitting down and me right beside him, highly alert.
“I’ll have what he’s having,” Bernie said. There: a perfect demonstration of his brilliance.
“One pastrami and corned beef triple decker on pumpernickel coming up,” said the waitress.
Beasley, back to eating again, his face its normal color—grayish, with pink splotches here and there—raised a finger. “Side of fries.”
“You got it.”
Jewish-style deli? Had I gotten that right? My whole life up to now had been … not false, oh no, what a frightening idea—but for sure I’d been missing something and hadn’t even known! But why be hard on yourself? I stay away from that as a rule.
Beasley took a nice big bite. He chewed for a bit, then gestured at Bernie with a handful of sandwich. That handful of sandwich came oh, so close to me. I could easily have … but I did not! Instead I proved that … that … whoa! What had I proved? Can a dude change his mind? This dude can and did! But too late.
Meanwhile Beasley was saying, “I’m not Jewish.”
“No?” said Bernie.
“But my stomach is, if you get what I mean.”
“I actually don’t.”
“Put it this way,” Beasley said, biting the end off a dill pickle with a sharp, crunching sound. The dill pickle he could have—I’ve tried dill pickles on more than one occasion, never with good results. “You can eat Jewish without being Jewish. It’s a free country.”
Of Mutts and Men Page 5
