The Sound and the Furry (11 page)

All of that pretty confusing except for the very end. I loved when that happened.
It was like wandering around in a strange place and then suddenly you’re home. So
were we home in some kind of way? Things were going well.

A ladder led down off
Little Jazz
’s back deck and onto a small platform at water level; the pirogue was tied to the
platform. “Some things you need to know about boats,” Bernie said, as we jumped down
to the platform, me actually jumping, “beside the most important fact that they’re
a hole in the water into which you throw money.”

Oh, no. What a terrible idea, worse than Hawaiian pants or even the tin futures play,
which would have made us rich except for an earthquake in Bolivia, or maybe because
the earthquake didn’t happen. Was Bernie about to throw three K into the bayou? I
didn’t know what I’d do.

“First, there’s all the lingo,” he said. “Bow for front, stern for back, et cetera.
Then, with small boats like this it’s important to remember—” A whole lot of things,
but I was too worried about
the money to concentrate. I kept my eyes on Bernie’s hands, as though . . . as though
he was a perp! That was bad of me, but I couldn’t stop.

Bernie showed no sign of reaching into his pocket. Instead, he grabbed the rope and
pulled the pirogue up against the platform. Then he knelt down so our faces were close.
That meant something important was coming.

“Okay, big guy, I know this is all new. What I want is for you to hop in the bow,
right in front of this thwart—” He patted a sort of seat in the pirogue. “—and then
sit nice and still. Can you do that?”

What a question! I was almost insulted. Except nothing like that could ever happen
between me and Bernie. He patted the seat again and said, “Go,” followed by “sit,”
and maybe something else. All I knew was that a moment later I was sitting in the
bow of the pirogue, facing front, perfectly motionless.

Bernie smiled, a very nice sight. He had beautiful teeth for a human. “You look like
a natural-born sailor.”

Bernie got into the back of the pirogue, fiddled with a switch or two on the motor,
pulled a cord, and
vroom vroom
! A nice
vroom vroom
with the deck of the little boat vibrating softly under my paws, but we weren’t going
anywhere. Bernie untied the line and pushed off.

And then we were gliding over the water, watery sounds bubbling and swishing all around
me. How lovely! I’d had no idea being in a boat was so wonderful! Plus the bow was
obviously the best place to be, just like the shotgun seat. I sat up even straighter,
gazing straight ahead, missing nothing. Chet, the natural-born sailor: what a life!

W
e moved along the narrow bayou, cruising through patches of shade and patches of sunlight.
A fish with a thick-lipped face that reminded me of Fritzie Bortz—funny how the mind
works—jumped right out of the water, its scales like a bunch of tiny flashing mirrors.
An empty beer can drifted by, and then a container of laundry detergent and a wicker
chair. It was beautiful out on the bayou, no question about that, but I wasn’t used
to the damp, heavy heat, and I didn’t seem to be getting used to it. All of a sudden
it hit me: How about a swim? I couldn’t think of a single reason why not; I didn’t
even try.

“Ch—et?”

I sat back down.

“There’ll be time for a swim later.”

Later? I tried to remember what that was about. The whole idea resisted me, retreating
into a shady patch in my mind and staying there. Meanwhile, we were coming to a sort
of fork in the road except we were on water. A dude named Yogi Berra—possibly a perp—had
once told Bernie, if I’m remembering this right, and I should on account of how often
Bernie’s mentioned it, that
when you come to a fork in the road take it, and that’s what Bernie did. We know the
ropes at the Little Detective Agency, although no one puts a rope on me, amigo.

The new waterway rounded a corner and opened up into a big round lake lined by green
grasses and some tall trees, all that greenery reappearing on the surface of the water.
And a boat—hey! our boat!—was doing that same doubled-up thing. Our boat but with
one very rough-looking customer in the bow. The hair on the back of my neck rose right
away, and I got ready to—

“Chet! For God’s sake! How many times do we have to go through this?”

Go through what? While I tried to remember whatever I was supposed to remember, the
rough customer stopped baring his enormous teeth and so did I. Why look for trouble?
And what was this? His ears didn’t match? And one of them had a tiny notch taken out
of it, the kind of notch a whizzing bullet might have . . . At that moment, I remembered
what I was supposed to remember. Then there was nothing to do but give myself a good
shake, which was what I did.

“Chet! You’re going to tip the goddamn boat!”

And then we’d have our swim? That sounded pretty good to—

“CHET!”

I went still.

Out in the middle of the lake rose a small island. Bernie glanced at the map. “This
is it,” he said. “Isle des Deux Amis. Kind of a long name for such a little spot.
Means island of two friends, maybe.”

Excellent name in my opinion. A few trees grew on Isle des Deux Amis and another one
had fallen into the water and lay there partly underneath. Bernie steered around it,
cut the motor, and we glided up to a low sandy bank and came to a stop with a
gentle bump. Bernie held out a rope end, waved it around a bit. A waving rope end
within snatching distance? Who could resist?

“Think you could hop out with it?” he said.

I didn’t even have to think, which is usually when I’m at my best. I’d leaped onto
the shore—more muddy than sandy, as it turned out—and trotted up to the nearest tree,
marking it at once, the rope end still in my mouth.

Bernie stepped out of the boat and—oops—sank down in the mud to his ankles. He pulled
his feet free with a couple of wet sucking plop sounds, not unpleasant, and then said
a few things I’m sure he didn’t really mean. He walked over, took the rope end, and
tied it around the trunk of the tree.

“My best sneakers, big guy.” They were? What about the other pair, the one without
the paint spatters? “This whole goddamn state’s drowning.”

That sounded like a problem, and maybe scary, too, but right then I was more interested
in the fact that another member of the nation within had already marked my tree, lower
down—much lower down, in fact, meaning a little guy—not very recently, certainly not
today or the day before. Other than that, all I learned about the little dude was
that like me he was a fan of Slim Jims. Suppose he had one? Snatching it away from
him would be a snap! Maybe not a nice thought. I tried to get rid of it, but it didn’t
want to leave.

“Time for a quick recon, Chet.”

I’d been just about to come up with that on my own—I knew it! Quick recons were what
we always did first thing in a new place, especially crime scenes. Uh-oh. Was this
a crime scene? I got ready for anything.

We moved on to ground that was a little higher and found a sort of path lined with
sawtooth grasses I’d never seen before and proved to myself how sharp they were right
away. “No
footprints,” Bernie said. “If Ralph came here, you’d think there’d be footprints.
Although with all the rain . . .”

He went quiet, but the thoughts kept on going in his mind: I could feel them, like
birds flying in the night. One thing was for sure: no footprints. That didn’t mean
no humans had been here. In fact, there’d been two, around the same time as that little
member of the nation within. Two human smells, both male and alike in lots of ways,
but that was something you had to get past in this business. Funny thing about me:
it didn’t take a lot of effort. None at all, was the actual truth, if you must know.
For example, one of these dudes had a garlicky thing going on and the other had overdone
it with the same aftershave that Bernie used before Suzie made him stop, the one that
comes in the square green bottle.

“I’m worried we’re a bit like a fish out of water down here,” Bernie said.

Whoa. A fish out of water? I love being in the water myself, but the fact is, I move
much faster on land. And so would a fish, unless I was missing something. Therefore:
nothing to worry about. We were going to crack this case—missing persons, if I remembered
correctly—crack it wide open!

“Easy, big guy!”

What was this? I seemed to be up on my hind legs, front paws on Bernie’s chest. Maybe
not the right time. But before pushing off, I gave those stitches on his forehead
a quick lick. They were right there in front of my face, after all; you’d have done
the same.

Bernie looked down at me, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand in the nicest
way. “Something—” His gaze rose beyond me, Bernie cutting himself off before saying
“bothering you, big guy?” which I’d heard many, many times and now heard again, just
inside my head. The answer was nothing was bothering me: nothing hardly ever did!
We had good times, me and Bernie.

Bernie moved toward a tree stump, not the kind smoothly cut by a tree guy with a chainsaw—and
it didn’t have to be a tree guy: how about Mrs. Teitelbaum cutting down Mr. Teitelbaum’s
prize tangerine tree while he watched helplessly from his chopper, just taking off
from the Teitelbaums’s private helipad? The Teitelbaum divorce: a nightmare. But forget
all that. The point was that this particular tree stump was the kind where the tree
just split off and fell with help from nobody. There it was, lying almost completely
hidden in the sawtooth grass. The stump itself was all soft and rotten, with small
white mushrooms growing inside and some interesting bugs wriggling around in there.
And what were those tiny glistening whitish things? Bug eggs of some kind? I couldn’t
help wondering how they’d ta—

“What have we here?” Bernie said. Caught on a piece of bark that stuck up from the
edge of the stump was a pair of glasses. Bernie took surgical gloves from his pocket,
put them on, and picked up the glasses: black-framed glasses that reminded me of some
long-ago singer Bernie liked, the name not coming to me at the moment.

“Buddy Holly–style glasses,” Bernie said. Wow! The very next moment and there it was!
Was I cooking or what? “Who else wears glasses like this?”

I had no idea. Bernie reached into his pocket again, this time taking out a photo.
We looked at it together. Was this the photo Vannah had given him? I remembered something
about that. “Ralph Boutette,” Bernie said, his voice quiet. Ralph had on glasses just
like those in Bernie’s hand. A ray of light shone down through the trees and caught
the lenses, glaring on a fingerprint or two. Fingerprints are big in our business,
which I’m sure you know. What you may not know is that sometimes they leave behind
a smell, like now. Ralph Boutette’s glasses gave off a very faint smell of garlic.

Bernie put the glasses in a baggie and tucked them away. Then
we took a real close look at the stump and the area around it. After that, Bernie
went down to the pirogue and brought back the paddle. We went over the whole island,
Bernie using the paddle to hack away at the sawtooth grasses so we could see underneath.
At first all that paddle hacking was a bit too exciting for me. And even not just
at first! We spent what seemed like a long time, the sun, no hotter than back home
but so much heavier, if that makes any sense, sliding down the sky, and sweat dripping
off Bernie’s face. Mosquitoes arrived. I’d only seen them once before, on a case we’d
worked at a wilderness camp in the mountains, but not like this, in swarms. I hated
their sound and when they went for my nose, but otherwise they didn’t bother me. Bernie
was another story: he smacked at them, yelled goddamn bastards a few times, ended
up with bite bumps all over his arms and legs, plus bloody and sweaty little smears
here and there. As for our search we came up with zilch.

Back in the pirogue, we rode away from the Isle des Deux Amis, the mosquitoes following
us for a while and then giving up. Bernie cut the motor, dipped his hands in the water,
washed off the bloody smears.