Scents and Sensibility (11 page)

“No.”

“Then come with me to London.”

“And live there?”

“You make it sound like Mars.”

“But what would I do?”

“I knew you'd say that! So I made a few calls and I've got some leads already.”

“Oh?” Bernie said.

“For example, have you heard of SecureX?”

“I know the name.”

“They're all over Europe and the Middle East. I had coffee with one of the directors yesterday—he knows you!”

“What's his name?”

“Marv Lister.”

“Yeah,” Bernie said. “We crossed paths once or twice in the service.”

“Well, you made a big impression. And they're hiring now—in London and Dubai, mostly.”

“Hiring what?”

“Investigators, of course! We're not looking for bodyguard duty, are we?”

“No.”

“I hear something in your voice,” Suzie said. “Have I done wrong?”

“No.”

“Been too pushy? I was actually meeting him about a story I'm working on and you came up by accident. Pretty much.”

“It's all right,” Bernie said. “I—”

A small car came slowly down the street. The driver—hey! Mr. Singh—caught sight of us and waved kind of wildly. He parked—not very well, one wheel sort of resting on the curb—and hurried up the driveway, if a quick sort of waddle can be called hurrying.

“Bernie?” Suzie said. “Still there? Did we get cut off?”

“Uh, no. No, it's just—can I call you back?”

“Call me back?”

“Just that I'm working on something now, and a potential witness has shown up, out of the blue kind of thing, wasn't even—”

“Yeah, sure,” Suzie said. “Sure. Call me when it suits your schedule.” Click.

“Damn it,” Bernie said, why I wasn't sure. Wasn't he happy to see Mr. Singh? Mr. Singh was a buddy, unless I'd missed something. Too bad he wasn't carrying a paper bag. A snack-sized helping of curried goat would fit perfectly in a paper bag, but Mr. Singh's hands were empty. We got out of the car.

“Bernie, Bernie, one of my colleagues has seen your watch!”

“Yeah?” Bernie said. “What happened? Something that made you come in person?”

“Coming in person is no problem—I have business in your neighborhood. I am killing two birds with one stone!”

Oh, yeah? How many times had I heard that one? And was I still waiting for a human—any human, step right up—to kill even one single bird with a stone? Or even try? The only human who'd come close was Bernie, as you might have guessed, and he'd thrown a tire iron, not a stone, and the bird had turned out to be a machine, possibly called a drone. As for Mr. Singh, he had no stone, did not appear to be looking for one, and the only bird in sight was the buzzard perched in its usual spot next to old man Heydrich's chimney, far enough away so you'd need a cannon arm to knock it off, and Mr. Singh's arms were of the short and pudgy sort.

“Yeah,” Bernie was saying. “Who's the—”

At that moment, old man Heydrich's door opened and out stepped old man Heydrich.

“Hey,” he called. “Over here, for chrissake.”

Mr. Singh raised a finger to the sky. “One moment, sir, one moment!”

Heydrich didn't like that—you could see from his face, although not liking things was pretty much his go-to expression—but he went back in his house and closed the door. Is this the time to mention a little puzzlement I have with human finger pointing? Pointing goes on with either that first finger, next to the thumb, like Mr. Singh had just done it, or with the big one in the middle. For some reason that big one in the middle gets humans stirred up—you see it on the highway all the time. But I'm still waiting to find out what's going on. A lot of humans—not Bernie, of course—seem to be in the grip of sudden mood changes. No offense.

“You know Heydrich?” Bernie said.

“In a purely business sense,” said Mr. Singh.

“He pawns things?”

“No, no, Bernie—he has no use for my lending capability. The selling of memorabilia is his interest.”

“Heydrich's into memorabilia? Like old Grateful Dead posters?”

“Ha ha, Bernie. All I know about the American sense of humor I have learned from you.”

“Then you're in trouble,” Bernie said.

Mr. Singh blinked. “Explain, please?”

“Doesn't matter,” Bernie said. “What does Heydrich sell you?”

“Things of a military sort,” said Mr. Singh.

“Weapons?”

“I do not deal in weapons,” Mr. Singh said. “Other than a single World War Two M4 Sherman tank, which can be yours for a special price.”

“Seventy-five or seventy-six millimeter gun?”

“The one-oh-five howitzer, Bernie! What a lot of wheely-deally to obtain it! But as for Mr. Heydrich, he is a provider of vintage uniforms, plus the occasional battle ribbon or medal.”

“What era?” Bernie said.

“World War Two exclusively.”

“Army? Navy? Marines?”

“Wehrmacht,” said Mr. Singh. “Mostly army but with some Luftwaffe articles.”

“He sells you Nazi uniforms?”

“And the occasional battle ribbon and medal, as I mentioned.”

Bernie gazed over at Heydrich's house. The buzzard on the roof—one of those red-headed buzzards with a bone-colored beak—turned in our direction. It loosed a squawky cry, rose heavily into the air, and flapped away.

“So nice for you to have an interesting neighbor,” Mr. Singh said. “My neighbor owns car washes in the west Valley, not so interesting. But the watch, Bernie! After your visit I notified some of my colleagues to be on the lookout. My instructions were to show keen interest, but make some palaver about further research, and invite the purveyor back at a specific time, when an excellent offer would most certainly be forthcoming.”

“You should be in my business,” Bernie said.

“But, forgive me, there's no money in it, is there, Bernie?” said Mr. Singh.

“No.”

No? Just like that? No? Meaning our finances would always be a mess? I refused to believe that. This must have been an example of Bernie playing what he called a deep game. The last deep game I recalled had involved crawling down an old mine shaft in the hills. And hadn't we found a real old Navajo blanket, which could have sold for big bucks if Bernie hadn't given it to the tribe? We could play deep games, Mr. Singh, and there was money in our business, better believe it.

“So,” Mr. Singh said, handing Bernie a sheet of paper, “here is all the—four one one, is that how you put it?—on my colleague. The—perp? correct?—is scheduled to arrive in”—Mr. Singh checked his watch—“forty-five minutes.”

“I owe you,” Bernie said.

“Join the crowd!” Mr. Singh laughed and laughed. He walked across our lawn toward Heydrich's house. The door opened, although Heydrich did not step into view. Mr. Singh stopped laughing and went inside.

•  •  •

A bell tinkled as we entered a shop in a strip mall out beyond the Old Western Studios, almost where the last housing developments peter out and open country starts up at last. Love that tinkling sound! It sends a nice little charge down to the tip of my tail and partway back again.

“Deke Stargell?” Bernie said to the dude back of the counter.

“Yup.”

No man looks good in a wife beater, in my opinion, and those who come off the worst are the ones with no muscles, just skin and bone. Deke Stargell was very much of that type. The bony knobs sticking up from each of his shoulders bothered me the most. Also he smelled like a smoker and Bernie had been doing so well lately. On the plus side he was one of those shopkeepers who supplied a bowl of water in case a member of the nation within should happen by. And wouldn't you know it? I was hit by a sudden thirst. Deke Stargell's water proved to be first rate, fresh and cool.

“Nice to meet you,” Bernie said. “I'm Bernie Little, friend of Mr. Singh. He—”

“Friend of Pappy's is a friend of mine,” Deke said.

“His first name is Pappy?” Bernie said. “Didn't know that.”

“Course it isn't Pappy, for fuck sake,” Deke said. “He's from India. His real name's some godawful gibberish but with lots of
P
s in it, so we all call him Pappy.”

“We all being?”

“Everyone in the biz. We're big fans of Pappy. Honest as the day is long and sharp as a whip.” Deke leaned across the counter. “Tell you something. I was totally against immigration till I met up with Pappy. Now I'm all for letting in the Indians willy-nilly. From India Indians. T'others is here already.”

“Before us, actually,” Bernie said.

Deke tilted his head sideways, squinted at Bernie. “Don't tell me you're a goddamn do-gooder.”

“Definitely not.”

Deke extended his hand. They shook. Deke looked my way. “Whoa! Your dog lapped up that whole bowl of water? Except what he splashed all over my floor?”

“Uh, this is Chet,” Bernie said, kind of rubbing his foot in a windshield wiper pattern on the floor, for reasons of his own. “He . . . he gets thirsty in this climate.”

Deke gazed at me. “Sizable fella.”

“Hundred-plus-pounder,” Bernie said. “Can't say exactly. Getting him on the scale's not so easy.”

I remembered that game! One of my favorites, and we hadn't played it in way too long. I glanced around. No scale in sight. I didn't like my chances.

“What is he, anyways?” Deke said.

“Chet? What is he? Want the long answer or the short?”

Oh, the long, please.

“Huh?” said Deke. “I meant like German shepherd, border collie, what's the word?”

“Breed?”

“Yeah. What's the breed?”

Bernie gave me a look. “He's a mix, obviously.”

“A mix of what?”

“I've wondered about that,” Bernie said. “A combo you don't often see, whatever it is.”

Deke thought for a moment or two. “I'm part Canadian myself, but you'd never guess.”

“You're right about that.”

“My mama's daddy was a lumberjack up in the Yukon.” Deke checked his watch. “Two on the dot,” he said. “Told him to be punctual.”

“Thanks,” Bernie said, glancing out the window. A car pulled in. A man got out, but he went into another store.

“This is a sting, right?” Deke said.

“Kind of,” Bernie said.

“Expect any trouble?”

“I doubt it.”

Deke reached under the counter, came up with a shotgun. “Better safe than sorry.”

“How about we keep it out of sight until needed?” Bernie said.

Deke put the shotgun away, lit up a cigarette, saw how Bernie was looking at it. “Smoke?” he said.

“No,” said Bernie. “Thanks. No thanks.”

But some time later—this was after I woke from a pleasant nap—Bernie and Deke were smoking together, Bernie on one side of the counter, Deke on the other.

“Looks like—what's his name again?” Deke said.

“Billy Parsons.”

“Looks like little Billy ain't comin'. Think he got cold feet?”

“No idea,” Bernie said, blowing out a long stream of smoke. “How little is he?”

“Wanna see a photo?”

“You've got a photo of him?”

“Hell, yeah. Everything here's on tape.”

Bernie stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray.

Not long after that, Deke had a monitor set up on the counter and we were watching a video. There was Billy, kind of the way he'd appeared in Mr. Parsons's photo: shoulder-length fair hair, vague sort of eyes, that snakehead tattoo on his cheek. Plus he turned out to have lots of ink on his arms as well. He stood at this very same counter, holding up a watch so that Deke could see. The Deke on the screen, is what I mean. The other Deke, Deke himself, right here, pressed a button, and the action on the screen froze. Then he pressed another button and we zoomed in on the watch.

“Yours?” Deke said.

“For sure,” said Bernie.

“A knockout,” Deke said.

Our watch, no doubt about it. A kind of wild idea—something about biting the screen—rose up in my mind. While I was getting that under control, Deke said, “Told me it was a family heirloom.”

“True as far as it goes.”

“Hear that all the time,” Deke said.

They both glanced outside. Nothing doing.

“Happen to see what he was driving?” Bernie said.

“Got that on tape, too.”

“I was hoping.”

More tape went blurring by on the screen, then slowed down, and we were looking out the window, not in the here and now—how hard this is!—but in the here and then, if that makes any sense. A dusty and dented sedan was parked outside.

“Little shitbox,” Deke said.

“Can you zoom in on the plate?” said Bernie.

Deke laughed to himself. “Sure thing, but hell of a lotta good it'll do you.”

He zoomed in the plate.

“All mudded up?” Bernie said.

“The kind of trick pulled by the kind of guy who thinks he's smart,” Deke said.

Bernie nodded.

“Which is a kind of guy that's always bugged me, know what I mean?”

“I do,” Bernie said.

“So while I had little Mr. Billy in here, I texted to my buddy Esteban who runs the auto parts store two doors down.”

Bernie smiled. I had no idea why and didn't care: Bernie's smiles are always a highlight of my day.

More blurring on the screen, and when it slowed down a man in denim bib overalls was moving toward the dusty sedan, a rag in hand. He knelt, wiped the license plate clean, and walked away. Deke zoomed in on the plate. Bernie grabbed a pen off the counter, wrote something on his hand. I loved when he did that.

“Did little Billy happen to notice on his way out?” Bernie said.