A Fistful of Collars (13 page)

“What’s so interesting?” Bernie said, coming over to the window. He gazed out. “Nothing going on, big guy.” He moved back toward the whiteboard. I lay down on the rug—a nice nubbly rug with a pattern of circus elephants—and watched Bernie. I can watch him all day, never get tired of that.

When we’re working on a case, he likes to spend time at the whiteboard, drawing boxes and arrows. He was doing it now. Did it mean we were on a case? This Thad Perry gig was a case? How? Then I thought of Manuel whatever-his-name-was and that slit in his chest. Next I hoped for another thought that would come zinging in and clear everything up, nice and tidy, but it didn’t.

“Over here,” Bernie said, making a box inside a box—whoa, this was going to be amazing—“we have Jiggs and—”

The phone rang. Bernie went to the desk and hit Speaker. He was wearing boxers so I could see the wound on his leg, a patch of rough red skin surrounding more skin that was flat and bluish, the whole thing kind of pushed in a bit. I wanted to lick it—even started moving that way—but Bernie doesn’t like when I do that, something I remembered in the nick of time, an expression that Bernie and I have, on account of Quick Nick Castenedes, a very fast perp who practically ran across a whole parking lot before I caught him. Was he getting out of Northern State anytime soon? I couldn’t wait to catch him again.

“Bernie? Cal Luxton.”

“Hi.”

“How’s it goin’?”

“No complaints.”

“I hear you’re doing a great job.”

“Who says?”

Luxton laughed. “How come you’re such a hard-ass?” Bernie didn’t answer. “Nan Klein’s my source,” Luxton went on. “The assistant.”

“Do you know her?” Bernie said.

“Know her?”

“Like from before.”

“Met her the other day—you were there,” Luxton said. “Not sure I understand your question.”

“What about Jiggs?”

“What about him?”

“You just met him, too?”

“No.”

“So you knew him from before.”

“He flew in to check accommodations last month,” Luxton said. “I showed him around.”

Bernie didn’t say anything, just made a squiggle in the box in the box.

“What are you getting at, Bernie?”

“Nothing,” Bernie said.

“Is there something I should know?”

Bernie was silent again.

“Need to remind you who you’re working for?” Luxton said. “You’re my eyes and ears on this project.”

“A spy?” Bernie said.

“Wouldn’t put it that way,” said Luxton.

“And I wasn’t aware we were working for you personally, Cal. Thought it was the mayor’s office.”

“That’s how I meant to put it.”

Bernie made an arrow pointing from one box to another.

“You’ve got a question about Jiggs?” Luxton said.

“No,” said Bernie. “Do you?”

“What does that mean?”

“How about the mayor’s office—does it have a question?”

Luxton laughed, normally one of the best human sounds going, but not this time, hard to explain why. “Nothing like a sense of humor,” he said, “although it can open the door to misinterpretation.”

I checked the door. It stayed closed. No one came in. I heard no footsteps in the house, no cars in the street. Miss Interpretation? I knew a Miss Singh, daughter of Mr. Singh, our pawn shop buddy who sometimes kept Bernie’s grandfather’s watch—our most valuable possession—for us, but what would she be doing here? Didn’t they already have the watch?

When I turned back to Bernie, he was no longer on the phone. He just stood there, his gaze on some faraway place beyond our walls. Now and then I can feel Bernie’s thoughts—normally like soft breezes flitting by—but now they were dark and cold.

He turned my way. “What are you barking at?”

Me? I hadn’t even been thinking of barking.

Bernie gave me a little smile. “Wish I could lie down like that.” Huh? Like what? I was just lying with my chin flat on the rug, nicely stretched out but nothing unusual. Come on, Bernie! Try it right now! I know you can do it. But he didn’t. Instead he turned to the whiteboard and shook his head. “The whole thing’s starting to stink, big guy,” he said. What a stunner! First, although Bernie was always the smartest human in the room, he hardly ever smelled anything. Second, nothing stank: our place on Mesquite Road never did, except when Bernie forgot to take out the trash and another whole week went by. “One good thing,” he said. “It’s a legitimate reason to call Suzie.”

Losing me there, a little bit. Why would Bernie need a reason
to call Suzie? Wasn’t she family? Not only that, but I missed her. Luckily for me at that moment I happened to notice a tiny tuft of rug sticking up out of the fabric. Tiny, but could I get a tooth sort of wedged up and under like so, and then try pulling with a hard, quick—yes, I could.

Bernie picked up the phone.

“Hello?” said Suzie. In the background I heard ice clinking in a glass and a man laughing; also maybe a cork popping, farther off. Bernie’s face changed in a way I didn’t like seeing.

“Uh,” he said, “it’s me. Bernie.”

Suzie laughed. What a great laugh she had! I missed that, too. “You dope. Think I wouldn’t recognize your voice? I was just about to call you.”

“Yeah?” said Bernie. “Sounds like you’re kinda busy.”

“Not at the moment,” Suzie said. “Just a sec—I’ll turn this off.” Then came a click and all that partying went silent.

“Oh,” said Bernie.

“Oh what?” Suzie said.

“Nothing,” Bernie said. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked around, possibly as though for help. “Chet’s here,” he said.

“Give him a pat for me,” Suzie said. “I miss him.”

Bernie took a step toward me. No need for that. I was already there.

“I think he understood you,” Bernie said, giving me a nice pat, although not like Suzie’s; a nice patter, Suzie, but she never did that lovely scratching thing at the end that winds up so perfectly.

“He understands everything,” Suzie said.

“Seems like it sometimes,” Bernie said.

“No seeming about it,” said Suzie.

“You think?”

Bernie looked right into my eyes, a sharp, close look like he was trying to see inside me. I opened my mouth wide, unfurled my tongue as far as I could then reeled it back in. What fun! I thought about doing it again. And then I did do it again. Just as much fun!

“. . . strange place,” Suzie was saying. “It’s the center of real power and yet feels totally unreal to me.”

“And what about back here?” Bernie said.

Suzie’s voice thickened a bit. “That feels very real.”

Bernie shuffled from one foot to another.

“Shuffling from one foot to another?” Suzie said.

Bernie laughed. So did Suzie. The conversation had to be going great.

“How’s Thad Perry?” Suzie said.

“Nixon says he’s a lousy actor, but I disagree.”

“Yeah?”

“He has something strange inside him.”

“Like what?”

“It lets him absorb things from other people and reproduce them or reform them so that while he’s still sort of himself, he’s also . . .” Bernie made a little throwing up his hands gesture. Humans on the phone did lots of gesturing, as though they were face-to-face; I liked that about them. “Hard to explain,” he went on. “I think there’s a word for it, maybe starts with P.”

“Protean?”

“Yeah,” said Bernie. His face softened and he looked about to say more, but did not.

“I don’t want his autograph, by the way,” Suzie said.

Bernie laughed again. Suzie was good at making him laugh, one of the best things about her. “You’re the only one,” Bernie said. He went still. I sensed stillness on the other end of the line,
too, like they were both concentrating on what Bernie had just said. What was it again? When humans forgot things—Bernie’s mother being a great example—they liked to say that if it was important it would come back to them. Bernie’s mother, a piece of work: she called him Kiddo! But no time for that now. I was too busy waiting for whatever Bernie had just said to come back to me.

In the meantime, Bernie was now saying something like, “. . . remember you mentioning Thad Perry was from the Valley originally?”

“Or spent time there,” Suzie said. “Not sure which.”

“What was your source?”

“No source, really. It came up in conversation.”

“With who?”

“I’d have to think,” Suzie said. “Is it important?”

“Probably not,” Bernie said.

“Am I missing a story, Bernie?”

“There’s an irony.”

“Yeah,” said Suzie, all of a sudden much quieter. Something beeped on her end. “Have to take this,” she said.

After that, Bernie called somebody, maybe Rick, but I couldn’t be sure, on account of these dark clouds that came rolling into my mind—something that often happened when I lay chin-down on a soft rug—dark clouds that had this power of being able to make my eyes close.

It was night when we drove back into Vista City, the sky the normal dark-pink Valley night sky, the air smelling of grease; couldn’t have asked for more. We turned onto North Coursin Street, stopped in front of the house at the end of the block. It was dark, as were all the houses around, and none of the streetlights were
working. Bernie shone the flashlight on the door, now crisscrossed with crime scene tape, and then back and forth across the yard, passing over the kid’s bike lying on its side and returning to it.

“Nobody claimed Manny’s body,” Bernie said. “And then there’s that bike.” He went quiet. “I don’t know, Chet. Forcing relationships—always the danger when there’s not much to go on.”

Danger? Did we back away from danger, me and Bernie? Not how things got done at the Little Detective Agency, amigo. So: no surprise when the next moment we were out of the car and crossing the yard. Bernie knelt down, took a close look at the bike, a rusty bike, I now saw, with a lopsided seat and twisted training wheels. I knew training wheels from back when Bernie and I taught Charlie how to ride. The fun we’d had with that! And old man Heydrich’s flower bed was now totally back to normal, just as Bernie had promised, that whole episode with the pitchfork being way over the top.

Bernie picked up the bike, carried it back to the car. He was just wedging it into the space behind the seats when a face appeared in an upstairs window of the house across the street, a lighter pink oval in the dark pink night. I barked this low rumbly bark I have for just between me and Bernie. He glanced up, not in time to see the face, but he caught the twitch of the curtain.

“Good boy,” he said.

All of a sudden, the night got breezy. We’d crossed the street and were just about at the front door of this other house when I realized my tail had started up behind me. Bernie says my tail has a mind of its own. What’s wrong with that? Two minds had to be better than one unless I was missing something.

Bernie knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. No movement inside the house, probably because someone was already right there, on the other side of the door. Was Bernie
aware of that? Maybe, because he took a bill from his wallet and stuck it in the letter slot.

“More where that came from,” he said, speaking in an easy, normal voice, like he was kicking back with some pals. That was just one of his techniques. I’ve got some myself. We’ve cleared a lot of cases, me and Bernie.

The door opened, real slow. A tiny woman with long, shiny black hair stood there, the money clutched in her hand and a little kid sort of behind her, clinging to her dress. They shrank back at the sight of us, or more likely at the sight of Bernie. He’s a pretty big dude.

“Tengo miedo de los perros,” the woman said.

“Huh?” said Bernie. “Uh, can we come in? I’d like to talk to you about—”

“No habla ingles,” said the woman.

“Ah,” said Bernie. “El cyclo? The bike? Es el cyclo de Manny Chavez, or . . .”

The woman frowned at Bernie, not getting him at all. Bernie took out another bill, held it up.

“El cyclo?” he said.

The kid—a girl, I saw, about Charlie’s age and not unlike this great little kid we’d come across once, down in Mexico—stepped forward. “Bicicleta,” she said. “Not cyclo. And it belongs to Nino.”

Bernie crouched down to her level. “Who’s Nino?” he said.

“Manny’s kid,” said the girl. “He lives with his mother.”

“Where?” Bernie said.

“I don’t know,” said the girl. She snatched the money right out of Bernie’s hand and slammed the door shut. A bolt banged into place.

W
e got in the car and drove off, turning at the end of the block, then turning again, and—was it possible? Yes! We were circling the block, one of our very best tricks. Tricks and techniques were pretty much the same thing: I’d figured that out early on in my career. You learned stuff in this business all the time, way too many to remember, so it was important to keep in mind . . . something Bernie often said, and might come to me later.

We parked in the dark shadows of a droopy-branched tree on the darkest part of North Coursin Street, on the other side from where the little girl and her mother lived and partway down the block. Then we just sat there, which was why this was called sitting on a place. We were sitting on that house, waiting for something to happen, doing our job. Once—this was at a speech he gave at the Great Western Private Eye convention, and just because all the pages kept getting away from him and fluttering down to the stage didn’t mean it wasn’t the best speech I’d ever heard—Bernie said, “There’s no point in poking a hornet’s nest if you don’t stick around to see what comes out.” I’d been sitting
close to the Mirabelli brothers at the time—they run a shop in the South Valley—and they’d shared a look I hadn’t liked, maybe having to do with the possibility of getting stung—which actually had been my thought, too, but I’d abandoned it immediately. Who was better at this gig, Bernie or the Mirabelli brothers, with their big gold watches and sparkling pinkie rings? I don’t need to tell you. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve had more than one nasty encounter with hornets—lots more—maybe a story for another time.

Sitting with Bernie on a hot dark night, lots of desert dust in the air, and that Vista City backed-up sewage smell drifting by: I couldn’t have been happier. Bernie reached over and untangled the tag from my collar. I hadn’t even realized that it was twisted up: we’re a team, me and Bernie. He kept an eye on the house, actually both eyes. I kept an eye on the house and an eye on Bernie. We in the nation within have certain advantages, no offense.