A Fistful of Collars (28 page)

“Total bullshit,” Bernie said.

Boo Ferris laughed and raised the gate.

We drove to the top of the mountain and up the driveway of that huge house practically hanging over the cliff. “Not everything has to match,” Bernie said.

The chopper stood on the helipad, its blades sort of droopy, which made me think of Dina’s plants for some reason. This case? I didn’t understand it, not one little bit. As we walked toward the
house, the whole sun rose into view, the bottom wobbling and then growing steady. You could count on the sun, the same way you could count on . . . Bernie.

“Hey, Chet, what’s with you?”

Uh-oh. Was that me, bumping into the backs of Bernie’s legs, and more than once? Maybe, but I really felt like doing it. We were in for a beautiful day.

I headed toward the front door, but Bernie made this soft
click-click
in his mouth, meaning “come,” so I did. We walked all the way around the house, real quiet. All the curtains were closed and the house was humming a low AC hum. We came to the gym. No curtains there. We looked in, saw nobody. Bernie went to the glass door, examined the lock, and took out his credit card. We’d had problems with that credit card before, maybe the worst one being a lunch at Le Desert Bistro where Bernie picked up the check and the waiter came back with the card and wagged his finger in what Bernie said was a French sort of way, French sort of ways turning out to make him mad, and things went downhill, which was too bad on account of that being the let’s-all-get-along lunch where we met Malcolm for the very first time. But not a problem today since the card always worked great when it came to B and E, which was what we were doing now.

One thing I’ve noticed about B and Es: it’s different every time. For example, at the critical moment where Bernie leans forward and starts carefully sliding in the credit card, did a bird ever fly by, real low, and drop a smear of that weird white bird poop square on his shoulder? Not that I remembered, amigo. Bernie made a sound like “Gah,” and backed away from the door, twisting his head so he could get a good look at his shoulder. Meanwhile, other stuff was happening. The bird circled around and landed on a flowering bush right behind us, the flowers bright
red like the markings on the bird’s wings, an unimportant detail I now realize, that almost distracted me from noticing the door suddenly opening from the inside and Jiggs, stooping down, giving Brando a little push into the great outdoors, the great outdoors being one of the best human expressions going, a subject for later or possibly never. Brando had a stretch—a real nice one: how did he get his back like that?—and glanced around. If he saw me or Bernie, he gave no sign, but he spotted the bird for sure, and that stretch turned into a kind of slow glide, hard to describe and not slow at all, really, and then, despite how pudgy he was, Brando took to the air, a fat golden streak, and pounced on the bird, caught him like there was nothing to it—far from the case, as I well knew from experience.

But back in the doorway—things happening fast now, and in more than one place, the way it goes down in our business sometimes—Jiggs, wearing faded jeans and nothing else, was noticing us big-time. His gaze went quickly to Bernie, me, the credit card, and back to Bernie. His face started to redden and his whole body, huge to begin with, seemed to expand, kind of like a balloon.

“What the hell is going on?” he said, fierce—but quiet at the same time, maybe . . . maybe because people were sleeping? Hey! Had I made a sort of . . . what would you call it? I wasn’t sure. Just when things were coming together: pop. Like soap bubbles. Once Charlie blew bubbles with his plastic bubble blower and I chased them around. It turned out not to be as much fun as lots of other games.

Meanwhile, Bernie was saying something about Thad Perry, like maybe we wanted to see him.

“You were breaking in the goddamn house?” Jiggs said.

“Didn’t want to wake anybody,” Bernie said. “Can you send Thad out here? We need to talk.”

Jiggs swelled up some more, really making Bernie look small. Meanwhile, Brando was tiptoeing off with what remained of the bird. I followed, and because of that maybe missed some of what was going down between Bernie and Jiggs. Did Jiggs ask Bernie what he wanted to talk to Thad about? Possibly. Did Bernie say something about that being none of Jiggs’s business? I’m not ruling that out. But at the moment I was following Brando through the garden. He stopped in the shade of a giant flower pot, got comfortable, and then, yes, began to eat the bird, although not the feathers. I myself had always wanted to catch a bird, but had never even thought of eating one, so this was kind of fascinating. I watched Brando. He watched me. Brando was a very tidy eater, a lot tidier than me, I admit it. And I was just on the point of admitting something else when I heard some thuds, hard and smacking, from the direction of the house.

I raced back through the garden, and there, by the glass door to the gym, stood Bernie. Oh, no! His mouth was bleeding! I ran right over to him. He patted his mouth with the back of his sleeve. I stood straight up with my paws on his shoulders: that blood had to be licked away and pronto.

“I’m all right, big guy,” Bernie said, giving me a quick pat on the shoulder, which might have been a bit of a push away, too, except I knew it wasn’t, “but we’ve got to move quick.” Which was when I finally noticed Jiggs lying on the ground, out cold. One of his teeth lay on the fancy red-stone walkway, sparkling in the morning sun. Those little details stay with you.

B
ernie is a big strong guy and he can lift heavy stuff. Once he even lifted the back end of the Porsche clear off the ground! Not the Porsche we have now, with the martini glasses, or the one before that that got blown up, but the even earlier Porsche, the one that flew off the cliff. What a day that was! It wasn’t the same day that Bernie lifted the back end—that came before the flying over the cliff part, of course, when we still had the car, on a night that Bernie bet a bunch of bikers a thousand dollars he could do it. And guess what. We didn’t have a thousand dollars at the time, in fact, didn’t have enough to settle the tab at the biker bar, a biker bar called Savages out at this desert crossroads where the saguaros were all full of bullet holes. Bernie came through, Bernie being Bernie, and the chiropractor had him back on his feet in no time.

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.