“If I did it, why am I here?”
She gave Bernie a long look, and in the course of that look the expression in her eyes changed a lot, ramping down through fear and rage to anger and worry, to confusion.
“Then who killed my son?” Miss Rendell said.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Who’s paying you?”
Bernie has great eyebrows, if I haven’t mentioned that already, with a language of their own. Right now they were saying something about being surprised; not them, but Bernie, if you see where I’m going with this. But forget all that. The point was whatever Miss Rendell had said, now gone from my mind, had caught Bernie by surprise.
“No one directly,” Bernie said. “But your son’s death is mixed up with this other case we’re working on.” He stopped right there, kind of abruptly, one of his interviewing techniques. We’d had good results from Bernie’s interviewing techniques in the past, but at the moment I felt disappointed on account of my curiosity about this other case.
Silence. It went on and on, like something pressing down on the double-wide. At last, Miss Rendell said, “What other case?”
“A missing persons case, which is mostly what we do,” Bernie said. “The missing person is a boy named Devin Vereen.”
Miss Rendell was very still, her face and body giving away nothing. But Bernie has this saying about how even the way nothing is given can give something—whew, what a thought: Bernie, the one and only! Was this one of those times?
“Name mean anything to you?” Bernie said.
Miss Rendell shook her head. Bernie was watching carefully. He also had a whole thing about how people shake their heads: how many times? too hard? not hard enough? and were they looking you in the eye while the head-shaking was going on? And even more! Just another reason the success of the Little Detective Agency, except for the finances part, should surprise nobody. Meanwhile, Miss Rendell wasn’t looking Bernie in the eye.
“Devin went missing during a hike from Big Bear Wilderness Camp,” Bernie said. “Turk was the guide.”
One thing about humans: they can not age for years and then do it right in front of your eyes. Like Miss Rendell now.
“What are you saying?” she said.
“I’m asking whether you know anything about this missing kid,” Bernie said.
“How many times do you want me say it?”
“You haven’t actually said it yet.”
“I don’t know anything about the missing kid. There—I’ve said it.”
“I was hoping for a more believable rendition,” Bernie told her.
She didn’t like hearing that, whatever it was. “This visit is over,” she said, pointing toward the door.
Bernie stayed put. So did Suzie. So did I.
“What you’re not getting,” Bernie said, “is that we’re on the same side.”
“No, I’m not getting that,” said Miss Rendell. “Not one little bit.”
“Your son was murdered,” Bernie said. “Do you want the murderer to go free?”
“What the hell do you think?” her voice rising.
Bernie’s voice went the other way, but it wasn’t gentle. “Then sit down.”
Miss Rendell sat down.
“How do you feel about Guy Wenders?” Bernie said.
“Never heard of him,” said Miss Rendell.
“You don’t have time for this.”
“How do you know what I have time for?”
“We’ll get to that,” Bernie said.
“Is that a threat?” said Miss Rendell. “I don’t take to being threatened.”
“I’m not the threat,” Bernie said.
Miss Rendell gave Bernie a close look, like she was trying to see inside him. Easy as pie for me—although what pies and easiness had to do with each other was a mystery; I’d sampled many of them and gotten nowhere on this—but maybe not for Miss Rendell, because she changed her mind about Guy. “I know Guy,” she said. “He’s from up this way originally.”
“Did you also know that the missing kid is his son?” Bernie said.
Miss Rendell was silent.
Bernie leaned forward a bit, put his hands in a wedge shape, fingertips together. I loved when he did that, wished he’d do it more. “Don’t you sense big trouble out there?” he said. “Out there and coming soon?” Miss Rendell didn’t speak, but she was scared; I could smell it. “We can help you—maybe not much, but some. First, we need a little cooperation. Did you know Devin is Guy’s son?”
Miss Rendell nodded, just the tiniest of movements.
“Where is he?” Bernie said.
Miss Rendell aged a little more. “How would I know that?” she said.
“Maybe you don’t,” Bernie said. “That just leaves the question of your business. Tell us about it.”
“You’re talking crazy,” Miss Rendell said. “I don’t have a business.”
“Then what am I smelling?” Bernie said.
That caught my attention, big-time. I waited to hear.
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Miss Rendell.
“Meth,” Bernie said. “This whole goddamn settlement smells like one giant meth lab.”
Oh, that.
Miss Rendell’s head bent slowly forward; she gazed down at the floor.
“I’m guessing,” said Bernie, “that you started right out of high school, what with your chemistry background and all. You discovered you were a good businesswoman and things took off. Also, you’re smart. Unlike your neighbor by the trail, you stayed away from the product, maintained that nice mouthful of teeth.” He paused. “Accurate so far?” he said. “Ballpark, at least?”
Miss Rendell didn’t answer or look up.
“After that is where I’m going to need some help,” Bernie went on. “What was Turk’s role, for example?”
Miss Rendell began to shake. And now came the tears. “He had nothing to do with it,” she said. Which was what I thought I heard through the sobs. “He was a good boy.” She looked up, her face blotched and streaming. “He loved the outdoors. That was his whole life.”
“I believe you,” Bernie said.
“I don’t give a fuck whether you do or not,” she shouted at him.
Bernie nodded like that made sense; it made no sense to me. Miss Rendell wiped her eyes on her sleeve, started pulling herself together, a thing some humans can do, others not, in my experience.
“That leaves the judge and the sheriff,” Bernie said. “Or is it the sheriff and the judge? Still not sure which one’s in charge.”
“Monsters, both of them,” said Miss Rendell. She did some more face wiping, also did some sniffling. “But the judge is the smart one.”
“When did they start horning in?” Bernie said.
“Almost from the get-go—I found out there are no secrets up here,” Miss Rendell said. She took a deep breath and—and gave herself a little shake? What a case this was! “They wanted protection money, of course, ten percent at first, sounded reasonable. Now they’re taking just about everything.”
“So cleaning up all that cash became an issue,” Bernie said.
She nodded.
“Some of it went into the camp?”
“One of Guy’s clever ideas,” Miss Rendell said. “But I never knew much about what they were up to, and never wanted to.”
Bernie rose, went to the window. I went with him. We gazed out at the strange-colored stream. Without turning, Bernie said, “I assume you have some escape hatch all set up, somewhere to go, money stashed away, that kind of thing.”
“Why?” said Miss Rendell. “What are you telling me?”
“The feds are coming,” Bernie said. He turned to her. “And soon.”
Miss Rendell rose, not quite steady on her feet. “Thank you,” she said.
Suzie stood up.
“And you, too,” Miss Rendell said.
Suzie’s eyes were locked on Miss Rendell, and they were hard and unfriendly
. I didn’t quite get that, not coming from Suzie.
Miss Rendell squared her shoulders, met Suzie’s gaze. “I have an idea—no guarantees—where the boy might be,” she said. “I can drop you on my way.”
Sometime later, we were all pulling away from the double-wide in the big red SUV, Miss Rendell driving and Bernie up front with her, me and Suzie in the back. I found I had a bit of egg—the sunny-side up kind—on my face, and licked it off.
THIRTY-ONE
We drove along the unpaved main drag of this town or village or whatever it was; hardly anything you’d call a real building, and what real buildings there were all in crummy shape. Up above the sky was turning purple in such a huge way that Jackrabbit Junction hardly seemed real. Except for the meth business smells: there was no getting away from them.
Miss Rendell checked both sides of the street. No one was around. “Should have done this years ago,” she said. “I waited too long, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know,” Bernie said.
“They’ll come after me.”
“Maybe.”
“How can it be maybe? Once the feds get started, they’re relentless.”
“That’s just because they’re a bureaucracy,” Bernie said. “The memos take on a life of their own.” Sometimes Bernie’s impossible to understand; that’s often when we get our best results. “Your hope has to be,” he was saying, “that you’re a secondary target. And if you aren’t, and they find you, then you make damn sure you become a secondary target. Understand what I’m saying?”
“I make deals?” Miss Rendell said. Wow. She understood all that? Miss Rendell was some kind of perp, no doubt about it, but she turned out to be pretty smart, no taking that away from her.
“Name every goddamn name you can,” Bernie said.
Miss Rendell glanced at him. “Thanks,” she said.
“No charge,” said Bernie.
Whoa. Billing Miss Rendell: I hadn’t thought of that. We’d never billed a perp, but why not?
We passed the last of the trailers on the other side of town. The road turned real bad right away, shrank to a narrow track, winding and rutted, mostly going down but up as well, and sometimes we splashed through puddles the size of ponds. “The cornerstone of my business plan, this stupid road,” Miss Rendell said.
Bernie laughed. So nice to hear his laugh at a time like this. A tense time, right, leaving in a hurry under that purple sky, now fiery around one edge, black at the other? Not tense for me personally, but the smell of human tension was in the air, and the way Suzie’s hand was clutching my back couldn’t have been called relaxed.
We came to a steep rise, thick dark woods on both sides, and climbed it in a series of real tough switchbacks, the tires fighting for traction beneath us. At the top, I saw we’d come to a long ridge that curved out in both directions, kind of like open arms. Straight ahead the track went switchbacking down the slope, not quite as steep as the way up. Far, far away against the dark part of the sky I thought I could make out a faint glow.
Miss Rendell pointed that way. “You can’t see it, but Durango’s right about there.” She stopped the car, pointed over toward Bernie’s side. “The cutoff back to Big Bear’s about at the half-way mark. And over here”—she pointed out her own window at a narrow lane almost completely weeded over—“is what you’re looking for.”
Bernie peered around her. “Yeah?” he said.
“Twenty or thirty years back,” Miss Rendell said, “this developer type from the east waltzed in and built a fancy hunting lodge. Couldn’t get the fancy hunters to come here, though, so the place went belly up. What’s left is half a mile down that lane.”
“And that’s where they’ve got Devin?” Bernie said.
“I told you,” said Miss Rendell. “It’s only a guess.”
Bernie gave her a look, not unfriendly, but I’d never want him to look at me like that. “I’m betting you’re a good guesser.”
We got out of the car. Bernie tapped the roof. Miss Rendell started down the track. We watched her go.
“You’re saying she knows?” Suzie said.
“Yup,” said Bernie. “But it doesn’t mean she knew all along— she might have just figured it out.”
“What makes you think we can trust her?”
“We’re not her enemy,” Bernie said. “She knows that, too.”
He slipped on his backpack; Suzie did the same. The purple was fading fast from the sky.
“Headlamps?” Suzie said.
Bernie shook his head. “We’ll just follow Chet.”
Of course. Standard procedure, but Suzie couldn’t be expected to know that. We turned to the lane. Bernie tramped down some vines and creepers.
“Wish you had your gun,” Suzie said.
“It’s not the only club in the bag,” Bernie told her.
A real puzzler, and maybe for Suzie, too, because she didn’t reply. We started down the lane, me first, then Bernie and Suzie side by side.
After a while, I heard her say, very quiet, “Didn’t know you were a golfer, Bernie.”
I glanced back and saw Bernie was smiling, his teeth so white in the growing darkness. “No talking,” he said.
Bernie a golfer? No way, on account of the whole aquifer problem. But once on a case, details of which are all gone from my mind now—except for this—we found ourselves alone on a golf course and Bernie hit one a country mile, the longest kind of mile, I’m pretty sure. That was Bernie: just when you think he’s done amazing you, he amazes you again. Hard to believe I haven’t gotten that in already, but maybe I slipped up.
We followed the lane, a winding sort of lane with some ups and downs, but mostly downs as the lane took us away from the top of the ridge. Sometimes the undergrowth disappeared and old tire-track ruts appeared, making for easy going, but mostly the lane was all about burrs and nettles and spiky things. I hardly noticed. The noticing part of me was more busy with smells. In a place like this, of course, there were more smells than you could shake a stick at—no time to get to the bottom of that, or even break through at the top—so the trick was to ignore all but the important ones. I smelled two. The first was coffee. The second, and maybe not important—more just interesting that I was picking it up again—was that strange locker-room-laundry-hamper smell. I ramped up the pace. Almost right away, I heard Suzie lose her footing. Bernie made a soft little noise he has, kind of like: fffft. It meant slow down. So I did, a bit.
We came over a rise and there lay a clearing, not far away. In the remaining light, still plenty for me, I could see a line of tall trees, and standing in front of them a log house, even bigger than Judge Stringer’s back in Big Bear, but in bad shape, with some big gaps between the walls, cracked windows, many with vines growing through them, and a tall chimney leaning so far over it had to fall the very next moment. What had Miss Rendell said? Something about … about an old hunting lodge? Yes! Got it! Chet the Jet, totally in the picture.
No cars were parked in front of the old hunting lodge and no sounds came from it, but a light, low and unsteady, shone in an upstairs window. We approached the lodge, real slow, real careful, and were almost at the front door, or rather, doorway, the door itself being gone, when I heard something. I stopped, went still.
Oh, yeah, no doubt. A car, and coming from back down the lane. I turned that way, head up, tail up, completely rigid; but also quiet—Bernie had mentioned something about being quiet, and at times like this I always followed his wishes completely, just about.
Bernie came up beside me and tilted his head. Oh, Bernie, come on. You’re not hearing it? But then he did. He motioned quickly to Suzie, then led us to some thick bushes, wild and overgrown, beside the door. We got between them and the lodge and watched the lane through this one tiny gap, all of us crowding in.
A pair of headlights blinked into view, vanished, blinked again, and then shone steady: in our eyes and on the lodge. A car bumped up and parked right beside the bushes that hid us. The headlights
went off but those other little ones at the front, name escaping me at the moment, stayed on, casting a pool of light that made for easy viewing, but I’d already seen what was what, namely that this car was a black-and-white, Sheriff Laidlaw in the passenger seat, closest to us, Deputy Mack beside him at the wheel, windows down.
Deputy Mack shut off the engine. It got real quiet. I could hear the sheriff breathing.
“What are you waiting for?” he said. “Go on up there and get them.”
“I’m not feelin’ too good about this,” Mack said.
“What are you?” said the sheriff. “Some kind of pansy? This ain’t about feelings. It’s about makin’ the right move.”
“How come this is the right move?” Mack said.
“I’m not walkin’ you through it again, shit-for-brains,” Sheriff Laidlaw said. “The kid’s not an asset anymore. If you don’t get that, you’re hopeless.”
“But—”
“Move!”
Mack got out of the car, tied a bandanna around the lower part of his face, and headed for the lodge, switching on a flashlight as he went in. I caught a glimpse of a wide, lopsided staircase rising into the darkness. The sound of Mack’s footsteps faded away.
Bernie can move fast for real short distances, and from behind the bushes to the side of that black-and-white was a real short distance. Zoom. He sprang around the bushes and rushed the car. The sheriff heard him coming and turned; turned just at the same time Bernie was throwing a tremendous punch through the open window, meaning Sheriff Laidlaw was turning his chin right into the blow. Which proved the sheriff was no boxer, on account of boxers knew never to do that, in fact, to roll with the punch, as I’d learned during that period after Leda left when we’d watched lots of fight videos—the Thrilla in Manila! Shut up!
One punch. Bernie clobbered him. The sound was thrilling. Sheriff Laidlaw slumped right over, eyelids fluttering down. Bernie opened the door, fast but quiet, yanked the sheriff out of the car, and dragged him behind the bushes. Did I get in a nip or two along the way? Possibly.
Bernie flipped the sheriff over, stripped off his belt. In what seemed like no time at all, he’d cuffed the sheriff with his own cuffs—behind the back, which was how we did our cuffing at the Little Detective Agency—stuck the sheriff’s gun in his own belt, and handed the sheriff’s nightstick to Suzie. Her eyes were wide and pearly, like they’d grabbed up the last of the evening light.
The Dog Who Knew Too Much Page 24
