Bernie turned from the window, his eyes on Suzie. Her own eyes were going back and forth, back and forth in that machinelike way that means reading is going on.
“What are you doing?” Bernie said.
Suzie looked up, kind of surprised. Was it because of the hardness in his voice? I was surprised myself.
“Researching Aubrey Ross,” Suzie said. “Isn’t that the next step?”
“Not in my mind,” Bernie said.
“What do you mean?”
“First, I’d like to find out why Maurice thought you were Eben’s girl.”
Suzie’s face went very still. “Bernie?”
“If there was nothing to it, why would Eben have gone to the trouble of telling his father? It just doesn’t make—”
Suzie rose, smacking her laptop shut. “This is making me sick. It is sick.”
They glared at each other. I rose and walked around in a little circle.
Bernie turned to me. “Chet! In the car!”
In the car? Now? It didn’t seem right somehow, although how could a car ride ever be wrong? And I got the feeling, hard to explain why, that I’d be back in the shotgun seat. I beat Bernie to Suzie’s door. You can overthink sometimes in this business: I’d heard Bernie say that more than once. On my way out, I resolved to cut down on my overthinking.
We walked toward the street, me and Bernie side by side, not going fast. He seemed to be dragging his feet, scrape scrape on the path. That made my tail want to droop! How weird was that? I got it up nice and high. As we went by Lizette’s house, I spotted her sitting in the screened porch, mostly lost in shadows. I also caught the faintest whiff of some creature, a creature I knew, but maybe on account of Bernie’s dragging feet or Suzie’s tears, I couldn’t concentrate enough to place it. I slowed down a bit, sniffing the air, and as I did a man entered the screened porch from somewhere in the house. Hey! Was it Mr. York? Sure looked like him, that slicked-back hair giving his head a squarish shape in the shadowy light. Lizette rose real fast, like she was surprised—and maybe not too happy—by the sight of Mr. York. He strode over to her and said something. She slapped his face, good and hard. He slapped her right back, more of a punch, actually, and she fell onto the chair. Mr. York turned and disappeared through a door and into the house.
Whoa! I didn’t like any of that. Once some perp smacked his wife, also a perp, right in front of me and Bernie. Bernie decked him with one blow. And then came something crazy, namely the wife whapping Bernie over the head with a wooden spoon. But forget all that, the point being that at the Little Detective Agency we’re against dudes taking swings at women. I barked to let Bernie know what was going on.
What was this? He was already out on the street, getting into the car?
“Come on, Chet. Haven’t got all day.”
Why not? I kept barking.
“Chet! Do you want to ride or not?”
What a question! Of course, I wanted to ride, wanted it more than anything on earth. I amped the noise down to nothing and forgot all about why I’d been making it in the first place. Maybe it would come to me later. Things often did. And when they didn’t, how would you know? Wow! Was that overthinking or what, and just when I’d told myself not to. I hopped onto the shotgun seat.
FOURTEEN
* * *
Bourbon is Bernie’s drink, in case that hasn’t come up already. When he’s his normal Bernie-type self, he has it with ice. When things aren’t going well, the ice gets skipped. We were iceless at the moment, by ourselves on a tiny patio behind some bar that wasn’t doing much business, maybe on account of this part of town being kind of sketchy. In fact, there was a good chance we were lost. We’d driven around for a bit, the sun moving from one side of the car to the other, and after a while, Bernie had opened his mouth for the first time on the whole drive and said, “Where the hell are we?” He’d taken the next off-ramp, adding, “I mean that in every sense.” Which was a total puzzler, and now here we were on this patio: two tables, one torn umbrella flapping above us in the breeze, a waiter with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth.
“I’ll have another,” Bernie said. “And more water for Chet.”
“Never seen a dog so thirsty,” the waiter said.
“Uh-huh,” said Bernie. “And a pack of cigarettes.”
“We don’t sell ’em.”
“I’ll buy a pack from you personally.”
The waiter pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, gave it a squeeze so he could peek inside. “Got eight left.”
“I’ll buy ’em.”
“Hell, you can have ’em.”
“I said I’ll pay,” Bernie said. He took a bill from his wallet, handed it to the waiter.
“What’s this?” the waiter said.
Bernie gave it a narrow-eyed look, almost a squint. Uh-oh. Didn’t see that very often, only during iceless bourbon episodes, and not even all of those.
“Looks like a ten-pound note,” Bernie said. “That’s the queen. She’s actually German by heritage.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” Bernie said, snatching back the ten-pound note—I myself am a hundred-plus pounder, seems the right place to drop in that fact again—and laid a more normal bill on the table, meaning it was green.
“You’re offering me twenty bucks for eight smokes?” the waiter said.
“Take it or leave it,” said Bernie.
The waiter took it. Bernie stuck a cigarette in his mouth. The waiter lit it off his own cigarette. Bernie sucked in some smoke. The waiter sucked in some smoke. Their smoke clouds rose up under the umbrella and mixed together, then hung there with nowhere to go. And Bernie had been trying so hard to quit! I hadn’t seen him smoke a cigarette in longer than I could remember, except for once or twice or a few more times than twice. I don’t go past two, a perfect number in my opinion, something worth mentioning even if it’s come up before. Run the numbers: didn’t humans say that all the time? But the numbers can’t outrun me, if you see where I’m headed with this. Fine if you don’t. Neither do I.
“Uncle of mine developed a powerful thirst like this pooch of yours,” the waiter said. “Turned out to be diabetes.”
Bernie gazed at him without speaking. I’d never want that gaze on me.
“I’ll get that order,” the waiter said, backing away.
• • •
Bernie sipped his bourbon and smoked a cigarette, then did it all over again. My thirst finally went away. I lay down at Bernie’s feet, angling myself so I could keep an eye on him. Were we on our way someplace or just moving in here to this bar on a permanent basis? I was cool with either.
Bernie gazed up at the underside of the umbrella. A spider web hung between the pole and the umbrella material, a motionless fly tangled in the strands on one side and a fat round spider on the other, kind of flexing some of his legs, in no particular hurry.
“Suppose,” Bernie said, “we’d headed west instead of east. No one ever says, ‘Go east, young man.’ Remember when I pointed that out?”
I did not.
“Why didn’t I listen to myself?” Bernie took a big sip, shook his head. “Because I can’t be called a young man anymore?” Bernie thought about that, whatever it was. “All these people clinging so desperately to being young—what if that ages them in itself?” He laughed a small laugh, at what I had no idea. “Who wants to be like them? So it’s either somehow be forever young, which ain’t gonna happen this side of Ponce de Leon, or . . .” He took a deep drag, let smoke out slowly through his nostrils, a great human trick I never tired of seeing. Ponce de Leon was a new one on me, but would I ever forget Normy de Leon, whose scam had involved stealing garbage trucks and ended with me and Bernie digging him out of a landfill? And he didn’t even thank us while we were hosing him down and snapping on the cuffs! Ponce: possibly Normy’s brother,
and also up to no good? If so, heads up, amigo.
Bernie emptied his glass, looked around for the waiter. No waiter in sight. The sky was starting to darken. Up in the spider web, the fly was gone and the spider had moved over to where the fly had been, its round middle maybe fatter than before and pulsating a bit.
Bernie turned to me. “C’mere, big guy.”
I rose immediately, stood by Bernie. He gave me a very nice pat, then a scratch between the ears. “What do think, Chet? What’s the next move?”
The next move? I had no idea. Wasn’t that Bernie’s department? But I knew that Bernie was going through a tough time about something or other, so it was on me to step up. The next move . . . the next move would be to . . . chow down! That was it! We hadn’t had even one measly crumb in I didn’t know how long.
“Chet! Knock it off!”
Knock what off?
The waiter came hurrying out the back door of the bar. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“Huh?” said Bernie.
“That’s the loudest goddamn barking I ever heard in my life,” the waiter said. “What’s he want?”
“Nothing,” Bernie said. “We’re good. Just bring me another bour—”
“Maybe he wants more water.”
“His bowl’s half full.”
“Yeah, but with the diabetes—”
Bernie lowered his voice. “Don’t say that word again.”
The waiter raised his hands. “Whatever.” He glanced at me. Was I still or had I recently been barking? Tough questions. “Maybe he’s hungry,” the waiter said. “Got a burger out front the customer hardly touched.”
“Uh,” Bernie said. “Thanks.”
The waiter went inside. It got very quiet on this patio, a rather nice one, all in all. If there’d been some recent noise it had passed on through, but completely. Pretty soon, Bernie and I were munching on burgers, although in truth most of the munching was done by me, Bernie not seeming hungry. He took one bite—mustard spurting onto his Hawaiian shirt, but it was the sunset pattern shirt, the mustard fitting in perfectly—and tossed me the rest, caught in midair and made quick work of. After that, I licked the juices off the patio floor, doing a careful job. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, as Leda would tell Bernie every time she got him to rearrange the furniture, which happened a lot toward the end of their marriage.
“. . . I didn’t listen to myself then,” Bernie was saying, “but what’s to stop me from listening now?” We were supposed to listen? I listened my hardest, heard all sorts of things: a toilet flushing, another toilet running—a problem we often had on Mesquite Road—and, yes, a toilet seat banging down on yet one more toilet. It was all toilets in this burg. Not too shabby! Then I heard a fly buzz nearby. I looked up just in time to see it run smack into that spider web and come to a sticky sort of stop. The spider started up on that leisurely leg-flexing thing.
“I’m hearing one thing and one thing only,” Bernie said. “And it couldn’t be simpler. We’re working a case, big guy. We’ve got a client. We’ve taken money. What else is there to say?”
I waited to hear. Bernie was silent. After a while, he took out his phone. “What was the name of that guy? Aubrey Roth? Roe?” He played with the phone. Time passed. “Ross!” he said, kind of loud. I woke with a start, not that I’d been sleeping, more like dozing. There’s sleeping, napping, and dozing, all very nice and different from one another in ways we don’t have time for now.
Bernie gazed at his phone, his face in the screen glow reminding me of Donald in his aquarium, Donald being a fish Charlie had for a while and then not. I’d never meant what happened to happen, let’s leave it at that.
The waiter appeared. “Another round?”
Bernie, eyes fixed on the screen, didn’t seem to hear.
“Hey, buddy.”
Bernie glanced up. “Check,” he said, his eyes looking screeny themselves, if that makes any sense. Probably not, but of all creatures, humans are the most like machines, something that takes getting used to, and I’m not there yet.
• • •
Back in the Porsche, me riding shotgun, our recent seating problems just about forgotten, Bernie brought up machines first thing. “Amazing what you can find out with one of these,” he said, waving his phone around. “I’ll be able to do this job when I’m in a wheelchair.”
Whoa right there! Had I heard a worse thing in my whole life? True, Bernie limped sometimes on account of his war wound—hardly ever and only when he was very tired or we were working fast on steep ground—but it had never occurred to me that . . . that nothing. I wasn’t even going to let myself think it—no big strain, what with thought blocking being one of my strengths. Instead—
“Hey, Chet,” Bernie said, laughing and shrugging me away at the same time, “knock it off.”
Knock what off? Licking the side of his face? Just one more.
“CHET!”
Then came some braking and honking, maybe shouting from an easily frightened driver in the opposite lane, but all over quickly, no harm done. As for me and Bernie, we don’t frighten easily. If you saw me, you’d notice I’m wearing a collar made of gator skin. That sends a message.
• • •
A lovely evening, soft and warm, the sky dark on one side, fiery on the other, and wine-colored in between. We drove through a real nice neighborhood, the big brick and stone houses spaced far apart, parked in front of one of the biggest and stoniest and walked up to the door. Bernie pressed a button. I heard chimes inside. How lovely! I hoped no one would come so Bernie would press the button again and I’d hear more chimes. Which was what happened. And then again.
“Maybe nobody’s home.” Bernie stepped back. At that moment, I heard voices from behind the house. “Let’s hit the road,” Bernie said.
Those ears of Bernie’s: far from small, so you might expect them to do better, but in the end, they were just decoration. I started around the house.
“Chet?”
Bernie followed.
The house had long wings on both sides, fronted by flowerbeds and bushes, almost every single bush and flower marked by the same member of the nation within. I did my best to lay my own mark on top, but there were so many of his that eventually I ran out of ammo. What a disaster! And a first in my career, except for once, stuck deep in the desert and all by myself on a case of which I remembered nothing else. But just think: you lift your leg and squeeze and . . . and nothing comes out, not the teeniest drop! Where do you go from there?
“C’mon, Chet—give it a rest.”
I followed Bernie around the house. Just before we turned the corner, I heard a wooden knocking sort of sound that reminded me of good times with Charlie, playing with his blocks back when he was very little. The way those blocks ended up all over the place! In the pipes under every sink in the house! The fun we had! Except for Leda, can’t leave that out. “Are you going to let this dog raise your son?” she’d said more than once, maybe her very best idea.
We stepped into the backyard, a huge backyard surrounded by a thick tall hedge, the grass just like a putting green. Two men, both dressed all in white, were playing some sort of game, not golf, in what was left of the late evening light. This game, new to me, was about biggish balls—wooden, judging from the sound they made bouncing off one another; strange clubs that reminded me of the mallet in the tool box back home, used once by Bernie to undent a fender bend, although it ended up adding more; and bent U-shaped pieces of wire stuck in the grass. The men—one short and round, with heavy glasses on his round face and his feet pointing out, duck-style, the other tall and fit-looking—whacked away at the wooden balls with the mallets. Other than that, I understood nothing, but those balls looked pretty interesting, even from a distance.
“Sit.”
Me? I looked at Bernie.
“Who else?”
&nb
sp; I sat. Bernie stood beside me. We watched. The men played in silence. It’s usually easy to tell when women don’t like each other, their voices giving them away. Men can be harder, but I picked up a faint scent of something unfriendly between these two, a bit like fear except with a vinegar add-on.
The tall dude stepped up to a ball, whacked it into another ball that went flying. The round dude spoke. “Double tap, I’m afraid. Clearly audible.” Something about the way he spoke reminded me of Eben and Maurice. The tall dude gazed down at him. The round dude went to get the knocked-away ball, brought it back, kicked the other ball aside, then tapped his ball through one of the bent U-shaped things. “No beating luck,” he said, and held out his hand, like handshaking was in the offing. Instead, the tall dude gave him some money, then walked away, coming toward us. He noticed us and said, “He cheats,” as he went by, disappearing around the house. I heard a car start up and drive off.
Meanwhile, the round dude was rounding up all the equipment and loading it onto a cart, the shadows now falling fast. We just watched, one of our best techniques at the Little Detective Agency. The round dude started rolling the cart our way, saw us, and stopped, one hand reaching into the pocket of his white pants.
“Aubrey Ross?” Bernie said.
The round dude adjusted his glasses. “Do I know you?”
“We’re friends of Maurice St. John.”
“Is that meant to be a recommendation?”
“You tell me, Aubrey.”
Another pause. “Mr. Ross, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m Bernie Little,” Bernie said. “Bernie, if you don’t mind.”
We moved toward Mr. Ross. His hand stayed in his pocket. He had a gun in there, gun oil being one of those smells you don’t miss in our business. It didn’t matter now, what with the gap closing between him and us. Just go for it, Mr. Ross. But he did not. They hardly ever do when you want them to. And those other times, when you don’t want them to? That’s the problem.
Paw and Order Page 11
