But forget all that. The point is that Bernie, strong as he is, still had a bit of trouble hoisting Jiggs up onto his shoulders. How I wanted to help him! I jumped up and down: it was the best I could do. Bernie carried Jiggs in a-I don’t want to call it staggering, so I won’t-way that didn’t look easy-peasy, whatever that may mean, and dumped him fairly gently into the Porsche. Jiggs filled the whole car and slopped over the sides. Bernie probed around for the glove box, found the cuffs, locked one of Jiggs’s enormous wrists to a door handle. He rose, straightened his back with a low groan, barely audible even to me, and said, “All set, big guy?” What a question!
No need for any of our credit card B and E moves: the glass door to the gym hung slightly open. After some confusion in the doorway, we went inside, me first; I spotted a feather with bright red markings right away. We passed the boxing ring, the whirlpool room, another room full of exercise equipment, and entered a long hall. Bernie looked one way, then the other, hesitated for a moment, and then set off in the second direction, a good thing if we were after Thad Perry, because that was where his scent led.
We came to a closed door. Bernie turned the handle very slowly, pushed the door open just enough, making hardly any noise, almost certainly none in human terms. We peeked in: a bedroom, dark, but light leaked in through a tiny silvery gap in the curtains, enough to illuminate two people sleeping in the bed. One was a woman with short dark hair-Nan Klein, Thad’s assistant. The other was the skinny, messy-haired writer dude, Arn Linsky. It took me a moment to recognize them without their glasses, which lay on top of each other on the bedside table.
Bernie closed the door softly and we kept going. In a real low voice, he said, “She’s smart, meaning the old joke about the starlet and the writer isn’t true.” That one went right by me. No problem. We’d reached the next door, and I smelled pay dirt on the other side-not actual pay dirt, of course, although I knew that smell, too. That mine with the golden seam, the cave-in, my escape with the nugget? Hard to forget things like that. All we had to do is go back there and dig through the rubble-digging being one of my best things-and then we’d be rich! If only Bernie knew.
He put his hand on the knob, opened it just as he’d opened the first one. Another bedroom, but much bigger, with a sitting area first and then the bed, a huge round one raised on a platform. No gap in the curtains this time. We stood there, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness, just one of our techniques at the Little Detective Agency. This turned out like all the other times: my eyes adjusted right away and then we waited for Bernie’s to catch up.
We stepped into the room, Bernie closing the door behind us. There were some comfortable-looking chairs in the sitting area, plus a big-screen TV, lots of flowers, and a large couch, extra-deep and extra-long. Felicity lay sleeping on the couch, covered by a puffy duvet-no time to go into an unfortunate accident involving a very similar duvet once belonging to Leda-her blond hair fanned out on a pillow, seeming somehow to light up her face, not happy at the moment, as though bad things were happening in her sleep. We walked by her, real quiet on the carpeted floor, and stepped up on the platform. Thad Perry slept in the round bed, one arm thrown over his face and what looked like dried tear tracks on his face. A pill bottle lay open on the blanket and a few blue pills had spilled out; also there was coke around somewhere, one of those real easy smells for a dog in my profession. Bernie picked up the bottle, squinted at the label, then stepped down off the platform and returned to the sitting area. I managed to get there ahead of him.
We crossed the floor, checked the bathroom, the biggest bathroom I’d ever seen. The shower was a sort of rocky grotto and the bathtub was like a small swimming pool.
Back at the couch, Bernie leaned over Felicity, touched her shoulder. She groaned softly. Bernie touched her shoulder again. Her mouth opened. “I can’t,” she said, more of a low mumble, hard to understand, so maybe she’d said something else.
“Felicity,” Bernie whispered. “Wake up.”
Her eyes opened in a slow, uncertain sort of way. At first they were a complete golden brown blank, like she wasn’t really there, and in that blank period Bernie placed his finger across his lips in the human sign for not a peep. Felicity’s eyes came to life, went through some quick changes all about surprise and fear, but she didn’t make a sound.
“It’s all right,” Bernie said, lowering his hand. “We’re here to help.”
Went without mentioning: that was what we did. Although who were we helping, exactly? I hoped to find out soon, but if not I was cool with that, too.
Felicity nodded.
“Will you stay in the bathroom for a few minutes?” Bernie said quietly. “I need to talk to Thad.”
“About me?” said Felicity, even quieter.
“Why would it be about you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. And then: “We usually sleep together.”
“I’m not the togetherness police,” Bernie said.
Whoa! A totally new one on me. Policing was more than Metro PD, the state troopers, FBI, ATF, Secret Service, Game and Fish? Even with someone like me who’d been in the business just about forever, there were still new wrinkles. But I was in good shape on account of wrinkles never bothered me, Leda’s obsession with ironing every single piece of clothing remaining a total mystery.
Meanwhile, Felicity was nodding again, like she was having no trouble following all this. “It was just that he was having such a bad night,” she said.
Bernie held out the bottle. “How many of these did he take?”
“He needs them to sleep,” said Felicity.
“But how many?”
“There’s nothing I can do to stop him when he gets… the way he gets.”
“Was he drinking, too? Drugging?”
“Probably. He has demons.”
“What kind of demons?”
“I don’t know,” Felicity said. “It’s all tied up with him being an artist, but sometimes they take over.”
Bernie took a long breath. “Okay,” he said. “Just go in the bathroom and stay quiet.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Try to beat back the demons a little,” Bernie said.
“Thank you.” Felicity rose. She wasn’t wearing any clothing-my preference as well: once Bernie’s mother had tried to get a vest on me! — and Bernie did a pretty good job of trying not to watch her, sort of, all of that a bit of a puzzler, while she took a robe off one of the chairs and threw it on. Felicity went into the bathroom and closed the door. Bernie and I returned to the big round bed. The darkness in the room had a sort of feel, like weight pressing on my back.
We gazed down at Thad, still sleeping with his arm thrown over his face, a big strong arm, although now the muscles looked soft. Bernie’s face was hard. I stood very straight and still, ears way up. We know how to send a message at the Little Detective Agency. Thad made a low sound and shuddered in his sleep.
“Dreaming about April?” Bernie said in his normal voice, no lowering or whispering.
There was a long silence. Then Thad’s face-the visible part, below his arm-twitched, and very softly he said, “Oh, April, no, no.”
“What’s happening to April?” Bernie said.
Another silence, not as long as the first. Then, even more quietly, Thad said, “It’s too horrible.”
“What is?” Bernie said.
Thad groaned. “Blood,” he said, “too much. Way, way too much.”
“Whose blood?”
“Everywhere,” Thad said, his voice rising. “Blood all over us, all over the sheets.” And he suddenly threw off his covers. He had a lipstick stain on his chest: I had time to spot that just before he opened his eyes, those huge blue eyes, now all blurred and foggy. “A knife?” He twisted sharply toward his empty hand, gazed at it. Was he expecting a knife to be there? I didn’t get it.
Thad turned, jumped at the sight of us, his eyes clearing fast. He sat right up. “What the hell?” he said
.
“What happened to the knife?” Bernie said.
Thad licked his lips. He looked very bad, dark purple patches under both eyes, his skin kind of pasty and waxy, like he’d gotten a lot older since the last time we’d seen him. But his eyes were clear now and he was wide awake. “Knife?” he said.
“The knife you used to kill April,” Bernie told him.
“No,” Thad said, shaking his head. “No, no, no.” He glanced around in that desperate way perps do when they’ve got a notion to book. “How did you get in? Where’s Jiggs?”
“Waiting for us to finish our conversation,” Bernie said.
“Jiggs knows you’re here?”
“No question.”
“But… but he’d never do that.”
“Maybe he’s decided it’s time to cut his own deal.”
“Deal?” Thad said. “He knows I’d give him anything.”
“Not a deal with you,” Bernie said. “I’m talking about the law.”
“The law?” Thad reached for the covers, pulled them back up, meaning… meaning it would be harder for him to book. At that moment, I knew one thing for sure: Thad was no perp.
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Bernie said. “And from information we’ve developed it’s pretty clear that Jiggs was an accessory after the fact.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Thad said.
“Chet and I,” said Bernie. What was wrong with Thad? Wasn’t that obvious?
Thad’s gaze shifted to me, then back to Bernie. “Where’s Brando?”
Bernie shrugged.
Thad licked his lips again. They were all dry and cracked. He glanced at the bedside table. An empty water bottle lay on its side in a little puddle on the tabletop. “I need water,” he said. “Can’t think straight.”
“Try easing up on the drugs,” Bernie said.
And all at once, I was thirsty, too: funny how the mind works. I went over and licked up that puddle.
Meanwhile, it looked like Thad was starting to get angry. “A real feather in your cap, huh, bringing down a movie star?” he said.
“I couldn’t care less about that,” Bernie said.
Or something close, my mind getting stuck a bit back at the feather part. That feather on the gym floor, glossy black with the red markings, would probably look great in a cap, but Bernie never wore one. And just as I was thinking about the feather and how it got to end up in the gym, from out of nowhere came Brando, sort of flowing across the room, up onto the bed, and settling down in the crook of Thad’s arm. Brando settled some more. He could settle like nobody I’d ever seen. Thad gazed down at him, then back at Bernie, and now the anger was gone.
“I knew it would be someone like you,” he said.
TWENTY-NINE
What are you talking about?” Bernie said.
“Someone ruthless,” Thad said. “Who came to take me in. That’s what you’re doing, right? Arresting me? Aren’t you a cop or something?”
Bernie’s laughter is one of my great pleasures in life, but there’s one laugh he has that’s not so nice. Still pretty nice, since it’s Bernie, after all, and it’s not that I didn’t like hearing it. I just didn’t like hearing it quite as much, and I hardly ever did. But Bernie laughed that not-quite-as-nice laugh now, laughed it in Thad’s face.
“You think I’m ruthless?” he said. “Just wait.”
“For what?” Thad said.
“For what’s coming.”
Thad’s eyes shifted. “Maybe I should call my lawyer.”
“Who’s that?”
“I’ve got lots of lawyers,” Thad said. “Nan will know.” He glanced toward the door. “Where is she?”
Bernie shook his head. “You’re on your own right now.”
Thad pulled Brando in a little closer. Brando wasn’t in the mood. He rose, sort of drifted off the bed, and vanished in the shadows.
“What about Felicity?” Thad said.
“You’re dealing with me,” Bernie said. “Me and Chet.”
Thad looked at me. For no reason at all, I chose that moment to bare my teeth; actually, it was more like my teeth chose the moment to bare themselves. Has that ever happened to you? But even if it has, so what-no offense-human teeth being what they are?
Thad turned quickly away from me and back to Bernie. “What do you want?”
“Start with the facts about April’s murder,” Bernie said.
Thad took a huge breath, let it out in a way that was almost a sob. “I was just a kid.”
“So was she,” Bernie said.
And then Thad did sob, one big teary cry that he muffled by putting his hands over his face. “I don’t even know where to start,” he said, or something like that, not too clear what with his hands like that.
“Start with the car wash,” Bernie said.
Thad peeked at Bernie through his fingers. I’d seen Charlie do the exact same thing. Did that mean Thad was some sort of child? What a thought! It disappeared from my mind, and not a moment too soon.
“How do you know about the car wash?” Thad said.
Bernie just gazed down at him. Slowly Thad lowered his hands.
“The car wash,” he said. “It was in Vista City. Jiggsy worked there. He’s my cousin, although nobody knows it, so I’m asking you not to…” His voice trailed away.
“You came from LA to visit him?” Bernie said.
Thad nodded. “Just for a couple weeks. It was my first time away from home. I was sixteen, knew nothing about nothing, except for surfing. Then one day April drove into the car wash.”
“Alone?”
“With her friend.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No. Her friend Dina.”
“And then?”
“I sort of became the boyfriend. It all happened so fast. And so intense. I was a virgin up until that time, believe it or not.”
“And April? Was she a virgin, too?”
Thad shook his head. “She was only a year older, but way more experienced. And kind of wild. I loved that about her.” He gazed toward the window, hidden by the dark curtains. “In fact, I actually just loved her, period.”
“So why did you kill her?” Bernie said.
Thad sobbed again, this time more than once; his eyes teared up, but they didn’t overflow. Bernie watched with a real cold look on his face. I raised my tail, high and stiff.
“I don’t know,” Thad said, shaking his head from side to side. “I’ve tried and tried and tried and…” He kept shaking his head like that, faster and faster. Bernie reached out and slapped him across the face.
Thad stopped shaking his head, looked real angry. He glared up at Bernie and his hands balled into fists. But then they unballed and those big blue eyes-kind of like a movie all by themselves-went dead. “Just kill me. Kill me now.”
“I’ll take a rain check,” Bernie said.
Uh-oh. That was a bit of a baffler since it never rains in the Valley. So did a rain check mean never? I’d been over this ground before, always with the same result, meaning zip.
“Right now,” Bernie was saying, “let’s get back to why you killed April.”
“I already told you-I don’t know,” Thad said. “I don’t remember a thing about that night.”
“What night?”
“That goddamn night. I’d never done drugs before, not even pot. I’d hardly ever been drunk.”
“You did drugs that night?”
“April was kind of wild, like I said.”
“What drugs?” Bernie said.
“Oh, man,” said Thad, “I’m one of those people that drugs just live for, you know?”
Bernie didn’t say whether he did or didn’t, whatever Thad’s question might have been. That was one of his interviewing techniques and this was an interview, no doubt about it, and not close to being the first one we’d done with someone or more than one someone in bed. In fact, that kind of interview often went well for us.
“Stick with that nig
ht,” Bernie said.
“I told you I don’t-”
Bernie cut Thad off, his voice rising. “Where were you?”
Thad kind of cringed, just at the sound of Bernie’s voice. “If you’re going to hit me again, don’t stop. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
“There’s no time for your dramatics,” Bernie said. “Where were you?”
Thad laughed, a harsh little laugh, quickly done with.
“Something’s funny?” Bernie said.
“The opposite,” said Thad. “I’ve trained myself to shut out the critics. Now you come along.” Bernie stared down at him. Thad looked away, turning again to the curtains; he seemed to be seeing something far away. “We were at Jiggs’s place,” he said in a voice that got quieter and also stranger as he went along, almost like he wasn’t really with us, hard to explain. “Jiggs was living at his dad’s and his dad was usually gone-he worked in the oil patch out in Texas. This particular night was my last one. I had to go home the next morning for summer school on account of my lousy grades. I wanted April to come with me. She wanted me to stay. We had a little fight about that.”
Silence. We waited. That was another part of our interviewing technique. Bernie had explained why more than once, but it was one of those reasons that just didn’t stick. I tried not to worry about that; actually, I didn’t even have to try. I’m lucky that way.
One thing about this particular technique: there was no point in waiting forever. Just before we were about to hit forever, Bernie said, “What kind of fight?”
Thad glanced at Bernie, squinting as though Bernie was too bright. “Nothing physical, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said. “We argued a bit, that’s all. Maybe she cried. But then she came up with this idea to take LSD. Go on a trip together after all, kind of thing. I wasn’t that enthusiastic-we’d smoked some pot and we were drinking vodka, too. But I went along. All I remember-I still see them-were these terrible visions, in a tunnel, April and me, although we were actually in bed, and claws.”
A Fistful of Collars cabm-2 Page 23
