“Care to sample anything else while you’re here?” Cleotis said.
“Huh?” said Bernie, giving him a close look. “What makes you ask that?”
Cleotis’s eyes got vague and cloudy. He shrugged.
Bernie was still for a moment. Then he reached over to the ashtray and mashed the cigarette out. He and Cleotis stared at each other. Cleotis’s eyes got a little vaguer.
“The man we were looking for originally is Ralph Boutette, also from St. Roch,” he said.
“Never heard of him.”
“According to our information, he and Mack Larouche are best friends.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“But you know Mack.”
“I do.”
“In what context?”
Cleotis smiled. He had very nice teeth, maybe the biggest and whitest I’d ever seen on a human. “In what context, man? In the context of I deal smack and he’s a customer.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Three weeks ago this coming Friday at nine p.m. He was here for about ten minutes, spent five hundred and fifty bucks.”
“You’re very precise,” Bernie said.
“This is a business,” Cleotis said. “I keep records.”
“In your head?”
“It’s that kind of business.”
Bernie gave him a look. “Someone like you—”
“Don’t even say it,” Cleotis said, the vagueness gone from his eyes now; in fact, they were a little too bright, in my opinion.
Bernie nodded. “How was Mack when you saw him?”
“His usual self.”
“Meaning?”
“Smelly,” said Cleotis.
That caught my attention. Smells hardly ever got mentioned in our interviews. Was this an interview? I thought so, and if it was, then the case would soon be cleared, on account of Bernie’s interviewing technique. I bring other things to the table.
“Smelly?” Bernie said. He’d noticed, too. No way to sneak something like that past Bernie.
“Mack stinks of shrimp,” he said. “An occupational hazard. Even his money stinks.”
His money stinks? That came so close to reminding me of something. I don’t like that not-quite-remembering feeling at all, but it usually goes away pretty soon—like right now!—and then . . . and then . . .
“Why does Mack come all this way to feed his habit?” Bernie said. “No sources closer to home?”
“Good question,” Cleotis said. “Are all PIs as smart as you?”
Bernie gave him a hard look.
“Not pulling your chain,” Cleotis said.
Don’t even think about it, amigo. Chain up Bernie? You’ll have to go through me first.
“You’re obviously a sharp guy,” Cleotis went on. “And this dog of yours is aces, no doubt about that. He wouldn’t be for sale, by any chance?”
“Correct,” said Bernie.
Cleotis picked up our card, gave it another glance. “Maybe you don’t realize you’re in one strange corner of the country right now. My advice? Go on back home. When dudes start disappearing in ones and twos in these parts, there’s never a clear-cut result.”
“We’ll have to prove that to ourselves,” Bernie said. “And this may be a strange corner of the country, but you’re not walled off. Ever heard of the Quieros?”
Cleotis had one of those smooth, unlined faces. Lines appeared on it now. “Heard of them, yeah, but they’re not around here.”
“Yet,” Bernie said. He rose. “Where should I start looking for Mack?”
“He’ll turn up,” Cleotis said.
“Alive?” said Bernie.
“I’ve seen it happen.”
“Does he keep a place up here in the city—an apartment, maybe?”
“Wouldn’t know about that,” Cleotis said.
Bernie made this little click-click mouth sound that means we’re out of here. We left the kitchen, went to the front door. Bernie leaned the sawed-off against the wall and we walked outside, hopped in the Porsche, and drove off, nice and slow, in no particular hurry. We don’t scare easy, me and Bernie.
We turned down the first street we came to, turned down the next one, and then the next, and hey! We were circling the block, just another one of our techniques at the Little Detective Agency. We’ve got a bunch. Perps and gangbangers: heads up.
We parked by a big pile of trash around the corner from Cleotis’s. “Shutters all closed on his side windows, big guy. Meaning we can see them but they can’t see us.” He gave me a pat. We sat. That was what this was called: we were sitting on Cleotis’s house.
After a while it started to rain. Raining again? What was with this place? Bernie closed the roof. Rain pitter-pattered down on it, dialed up to pounding, then went back to pitter-pattering again, a very soothing sound. I took my eye off Cleotis’s crib for a moment to see if Bernie was enjoying the pitter-patter, too. His head was slumped forward and his eyes were closed. No surprise there: sitting on dudes often made Bernie sleepy. I turned back toward Cleotis’s house. Water ran steadily from the drainpipes into a gutter and down to the street, a very pleasant sight. The rain pitter-pattered on and on.
And what had we here? A car pulling up in front of the house? Yes, a small white car with a mashed-in headlight on one side, the windshield wipers going back and forth, back and forth in a way that was hard not to watch. But I made myself not watch them as a woman in a baseball cap got out of the car and hurried to Cleotis’s front door, her flip-flopped feet splashing through puddles in the yard. She knocked on the door. It opened and she went inside, but not before I’d noticed one other thing about her, namely a long ponytail hanging down from above the back strap of her cap. That ponytail got me to thinking. I thought for a bit, then shut it down and just watched those wipers going back and forth, then cranked up the thinking again, then shut it down and went back to watching the wipers, then—
Bernie straightened up real suddenly. “What are you barking about?”
Whew! I’d been trapped in a real bad circular thing there. And leave it to Bernie: he’d busted me out of it. Things were much quieter, any barking that might or might not have been going on now silenced. Bernie glanced toward Cleotis’s house, saw the car.
“Customer in a hurry,” he said. “How do we know? The engine’s running.”
Bernie: the smartest human in the room. Did a car count as a room? I’d hardly started to wonder about that when Cleotis’s door opened and the ponytail woman came out. Bernie went still.
“Fleurette?” he said. “The waitress from Rooster Red’s?”
I knew I’d remember! Sometimes all I need is a little time.
“Good boy, Chet. Good, good boy.”
My tail did what wagging it could, not easy in the shotgun seat. Fleurette hurried to her car, jumped in, and took off right in our direction. She went by us without a glance, one of those drivers who lean over the wheel, holding on tight. We followed.
Bernie’s the best wheelman in the Valley, in case you don’t know that. He could follow from close behind, way behind, from many lanes over, even from in front, all without being spotted by the target, the trickiest part of following, which was how come we kept an eye out for Fleurette checking her rearview mirror. But she didn’t, not even once, so we followed mostly from close behind—into a nicer part of town, the rain stopping all at once, steam rising off the pavement.
“The scales are starting to fall from my eyes, big guy,” Bernie said.
Oh, no! Had this ever happened before? Not that I recalled. Did it hurt? I glued my own eyes to Bernie’s, saw nothing new. All I knew was that scales—take the one Bernie keeps under the bed with the dustballs, for example—are pretty big and hard to miss. I saw no scales, not falling from Bernie’s eyes, not on his lap, not on the floor. But if Bernie said scales were falling from his eyes, then that was that. All I could do was wait and see what happened next, not my usual approach. What was my usual approach? Make it h
appen! Which is why they call me Chet the Jet, although only Charlie actually calls me that. And me.
What happened next was Fleurette turning onto a street lined on both sides with nice-looking old buildings and—whoa! Lots and lots of drunks? Yes: there’s no hiding drunks from me, drunken humans being different from nondrunken ones in so many easily spottable ways. These particular drunks were wandering around with big plastic cups in hand, most of them—even the very fattest and wobbliest—dressed in shorts and T-shirts.
“Welcome to Bourbon Street, Chet,” Bernie said. “Keep an eye out for my wallet—I lost it here twenty years ago.”
Twenty years sounded like a long time, but I might have been wrong about that, numbers maybe not showing me at my best. As for Bernie’s wallet—a nice old leather wallet with a smell all its own—I knew for a fact that he had it in one of his front pants pockets. Just the same, I kept my eye out for wallets, and what did I see almost first thing? A skinny skateboarding kid zooming down the street and lifting a wallet right out of some drunk’s back pocket in a single smooth and easy motion. I loved kids! The drunk took a huge swig from his plastic cup and pointed out a neon naked woman sign to a buddy drunk. They both got a big kick out of it.
Fleurette made a few turns, ended up on a quieter block. She parked in front of a building with a coffee cup sign hanging over the door and went inside. Bernie pulled in right behind her real quick. We jumped out—me actually jumping, and through the open window, what with the top down, not so easy for a hundred-plus pounder—and hurried into the coffee shop. Why were we hurrying? I only knew why I was hurrying: it was on account of Bernie hurrying. Sometimes he gets this look on his face meaning there’s no time to lose. He had it now.
The coffee shop was small and dark and pretty much empty, one customer gazing into a steaming mug over at a corner table and nobody behind the counter. Fleurette was already at the back, opening a door and starting up a flight of stairs, her ponytail swinging through a shaft of light.
She’d closed the door behind her, but it wasn’t locked. Bernie opened it real slow. No sign of Fleurette on the stairs, rough and wooden stairs leading to a dimly lit landing above. Bernie turned to me, finger across his lips, meaning we were in quiet mode. Great idea! We hadn’t been in quiet mode for way too long. We started up the stairs, Bernie first and me following, but I was in the lead by the time we got to the top, all of that commotion taking place in quiet mode. We were pros, me and Bernie.
We stepped into a narrow corridor lit by one hanging bulb, with a door on each side and another at the end, all of them closed. I followed Fleurette’s scent—typical young female with an extra touch of shrimpiness—down to the end door. Bernie put his ear to it. Did he hear that sound from inside, one of those quick human breath intakes, maybe called a gasp? He showed no sign of it. Instead he drew the .38 Special, turned the knob, and threw the door open.
Fleurette, standing by a bed, which was pretty much the only furniture in the room, wheeled around toward us, her eyes wide and her face all out of shape. Bernie pocketed the gun right away. We moved toward the bed. Mack lay on it, wearing nothing but a T-shirt with a leaping fish on the front. I saw again what a wiry dude he was, not much flesh on him at all. A needle was sticking out of one of his skinny arms.
“Oh, my God,” Fleurette said, both hands over her mouth, something women did but never men. “Is he—”
Bernie put his finger on Mack’s neck, but I already knew the answer, actually wasn’t even thinking much about it. Instead, my mind had suddenly taken me by surprise, lighting up a memory from my puppy days, long before I got together with Bernie. I had hardly any memories from that time, not easy days living with gangbangers in an abandoned house in South Pedroia. Raul, the only gangbanger who had no interest in swatting or kicking at me or my kind, had ended up this way, on a bare mattress bed just like Mack. I even remembered the T-shirt he’d been wearing, decorated with a picture of an AK instead of a fish. Funny how the mind works.
EIGHTEEN
Oh, no,” Fleurette said. “No, no, no.” She backed away from the bed, hands pressing her face like she was holding it together. She looked at Bernie, then at me, and Bernie again. All kinds of changes went on behind her eyes. She spun on her heel—one of the cooler human moves, in my opinion—and strode toward the door, like she was out of here and that was that: probably not in the cards, on account of how we do things at the Little Detective Agency when dead bodies are in the picture.
Sure enough, Bernie blocked her way. She tried to cut around him, but I got there first. Blocking someone’s way was a fun game I liked to play from time to time, or actually just about any time.
“Who are you?” Fleurette said, backing up. “Let me go. You have no right.”
“Have to do better than that,” Bernie said.
Her eyes narrowed in that squinting look humans sometimes show you, never a pleasant sight—undoing the whole heel-spinning thing in a way I couldn’t even begin to understand, so I didn’t waste a moment on it—and said, “I’ve seen you before, right? At Rooster Red’s?”
“Nice try,” Bernie said.
“What do you mean?” Fleurette said. “Now I remember distinctly—you had a beer with Dr. Ory just the other day.”
“True as far as it goes,” Bernie said.
“I don’t understand,” said Fleurette. “And you’re starting to scare me.”
Bernie glanced over his shoulder at Mack, lying on the mattress, the needle still sticking out of his arm. I wished Bernie would take it out. “You weren’t scared already, Fleurette?”
“I was. I am. I’m scared out of my mind.”
“You’ll have to get past that,” Bernie said. “There’s not much time.”
“For what?”
“Let’s start with Cleotis.”
“Cleotis? I don’t know any—”
Bernie’s voice didn’t get louder, but it changed in a way that made it seem bigger and way harder to ignore—not that I’d ever think of ignoring Bernie—and got the fur on the back of my neck to stand up a bit. A furry thing like that happening, all from just the sound of him. That was us. We’re a good team, me and Bernie, as a lot of perps could tell you. What he actually said I sort of missed. It might have been: “Start with what he told you about me.” Or something like that.
Fleurette shook her head, so hard that her ponytail kept swinging after her head had gone still. I came very close to asking myself if the same . . . something or other. “He—he didn’t mention you,” Fleurette said. “I don’t even know your name.”
Bernie gave her a long look. “Bernie Little,” he said. “And this is Chet.”
She shot me a sidelong glance. “Normally I like dogs.”
“That’ll work perfectly with Chet,” Bernie said. He handed Fleurette our card. “We’ve been hired to find Ralph Boutette. Any idea where he is?”
“Ralph Boutette? Is he lost? I don’t understand.”
“How well do you know him?”
“Ralph? Enough to say hello to on the street, but I can’t even remember the last time I saw him. He’s not a customer at the restaurant. Ralph’s a bit of a loner, in case you haven’t—”
Bernie held up his hand in the stop sign. “Tired of hearing that,” he said. “And there’s no time—I told you already. You’ve got maybe two minutes to be smart. I can’t stall any longer.”
“Stall?”
“The cops.”
Fleurette put her hands over her chest. “You’re calling the cops?”
“No way around it. I’m obligated to report unnatural deaths.”
“Unnatural?”
“He didn’t die of old age.”
Fleurette turned to the bed. “Poor Mack. I didn’t know he was in to mainlining.”
“No?” Bernie said. “He wasn’t exactly shy about discussing his addiction with me the very first time we met.”
“I’m not talking about his addiction,” Fleurette said. “I’m talking about mainli
ning. Mack hates—hated—needles. He was a snorter.”
Bernie’s voice went quiet. “How do you know?”
Fleurette looked away. “I, uh, heard.”
“Do you work for Cleotis?”
She said nothing.
“Look at me,” Bernie said.
Fleurette turned to him real slow, like it took all the strength she had. Her eyes met Bernie’s for a moment, then moved down slightly, to maybe his nose. Bernie has a very nice nose, not small for a human and with a tiny sort of bend, hardly noticeable at all, that he says he’ll get fixed when he’s sure he won’t be in anymore fistfights. Which I hope is never! He’s so good with his fists, as lots of perps could tell you; a pleasure to watch, although just watching at times like that isn’t my best thing.
“It’s not really what you’d call working for him,” she said. “I run an errand or two, that’s all.”
“Running dope, you mean,” Bernie said.
“Judge me all you want,” said Fleurette. “I’ve got an autistic kid at home—two of them if you count my husband.”
“You can explain that to the cops,” Bernie said, taking out his phone.
“Oh, no, please,” she said. Her face twisted up in a way I don’t like seeing even in bad guys. Was Fleurette a bad guy? I didn’t think so. “Please let me go.”
“Why should I?” Bernie said, his voice real hard, so maybe I was wrong about Fleurette.
“They’ll put me in prison.” She started to cry, tears running down her face, one or two dripping to the floor. “What will happen to my kid?”
“I’ll try to cut you a break,” Bernie said. “But you’ve got to tell me everything.”
“Everything about what?”
“Start with why you’re here.”
“Why I’m here?” Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, but no sound came out.
“Cleotis sent you is the answer,” Bernie said.
The Sound and the Furry Page 14
