Scents and Sensibility (12 page)

“The little Billys never do,” said Deke. “They do all their noticing after the fat lady sings.”

What was this? Now I had to be on the lookout for fat ladies? The case had taken an unexpected turn.

B
ack in the car, Bernie had a look on his face I always like to see, a strong-jawed look that means we know what we're doing and now we're going to do it, step aside, amigos! Maybe not all of that, but some. We took a crisp turn, then another, and were soon zooming toward the freeway ramp just past the big wooden cowboy who stood outside the Dry Gulch Steakhouse and Saloon—one of our favorite hangouts in the Valley, with a patio out back where they know how to take care of me and my kind, but no time to go on and on and on some more about their steak tips right now—when Bernie lightened his foot on the gas and eased into the slow lane.

He turned to me and said, “Iggy.”

Iggy? What did Iggy have to do with anything? Weren't we on the job, me and Bernie? Me and Bernie, period?

“We better look in on him.”

Look in on Iggy? What for? We'd never looked in on Iggy in the past. Why start now? Then I remembered where Iggy actually was at the moment, not at his place where he belonged but at our place where he was always welcome for a visit, of course, but in no way belonged. How had that happened, again? I took a swing at lining up all the facts in an orderly way. That was something Bernie often said, “Let's line up all the facts in an orderly way.” Who wouldn't love Bernie? A surprising number of people, in fact. I fell into a fun little daydream of meeting up with each of them, one on one.

Soon after that, we rolled into our driveway and walked up to the house. Bernie opened the door. “Oh, Iggy,” he said.

•  •  •

A long long time passed before we had everything all straightened out. We ended up pulling into the MVD just before closing, which was the only part of the day when the line wasn't out the door. In our business you need a contact at the MVD, and ours was Mrs. Trujillo. She spotted us in the waiting area and fluttered her fingers in the “come here” sign. We went past the counter where people were waiting to take a number and entered Mrs. Trujillo's corner office.

Mrs. Trujillo leaned back in her chair, stuck a pencil in her bun, if that's what you called the big round pile of graying hair on top of her head. “Well, well,” she said. “Long time no see.” Which made no sense to me, Mrs. Trujillo's eyes—pretty much the sharpest in the whole Valley—looking just the way they always did.

“How's Ramfis?” Bernie said, Ramfis being Mrs. Trujillo's kid, a grown-up kid we'd kept out of the slammer for reasons I couldn't remember, although I did recall that Ramfis was always nice to me. The same went for Mrs. Trujillo, who at that very moment was reaching into a desk drawer that contained biscuits, reasonably fresh and sniffed out by me as we'd come through the doorway. They were a fine family.

“He got a real job,” Mrs. Trujillo said, offering a nice big biscuit. I went closer and sat, the way you do when a biscuit is on the way. Although not sitting completely, in this case: Mrs. Trujillo didn't care about little things like that. Ah. Delish.

“Doing what?” Bernie said.

“Bartending for a wedding caterer.”

“Bartending?”

“It was either that or fracking in North Dakota, and Ramfis hates the cold.”

“Makes sense, then,” Bernie said. He held out his hand, the one with the writing on it.

Mrs. Trujillo glanced at the writing, then turned to her computer and started tapping away at the keyboard. “Here we go. Plate's registered to a Ms. Dee D. Branch, 2177 El Norte Highway, High Pines.”

“High Pines?

“A one-stoplight town up in the Burro Mountains. Starting to lose it, Bernie? Never stumped you before.”

“You haven't been trying,” Bernie said. “Can you bring up her driver's license photo?”

“Ha! One day I'll be able to bring up her innermost thoughts.”

“Stop scaring me.”

Uh-oh. Mrs. Trujillo was scaring Bernie? How was that possible? Just in case, I sidled into the space between them, the biscuit secure between my teeth, but droppable at any moment, supposing my teeth were needed for something else.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Trujillo was tapping away again. A woman's face appeared on the screen—a woman with lots of blond hair, not as old as Mrs. Trujillo, not as young as Suzie.

“What's that look called?” Bernie said.

“Tramp,” said Mrs. Trujillo.

•  •  •

The sun was low in the sky, a fiery blob quivering in our rearview mirror, as we left the last developments in the Valley behind and started climbing into the mountains.

“Did she hit on something?” Bernie said. “Am I losing it?” He rubbed his forehead.

What was this? Something totally beyond me. I curled up on the shotgun seat and thought about biscuits. Another one would have been nice. But you can't let little disappointments bring you down in this life. Forget all about them and get on with something else! For example: a nap.

•  •  •

“High Pines,” Bernie said.

I opened my eyes.

“Elevation four thousand sixty-three feet, population three hundred eighty-two. Could maybe plot them on an x and y axis, express each in terms of . . .”

Imagine waking up to that! As though Bernie had gone completely incomprehensible in the space of my very brief—what does Bernie call it?

He turned to me. “Catch a little beauty sleep, Chet?”

Beauty sleep: that was it. Did I need beauty sleep? I couldn't think why. But not the point. Bernie was back to being comprehensible again, meaning we'd be at our best for whatever came next. Heads up, bad guys! And even some good guys who sometimes let their goodness slide.

We rounded a bend, the sky deep purple on one side, black with a few stars on the other, and huge in every direction. All at once, despite being a hundred-plus-pounder, I felt a bit smallish. The fur on the back of my neck stood up. Feeling smallish? What was going on? Were we both losing it, me and Bernie?

“Hey! What are you barking about?”

That was me? I got a grip. But that bark, echoing and re-echoing through the hills, made me feel much better, in fact, pretty close to tip-top.

The land flattened out, and we rode down the main street of a little town, a few stores on either side, closed for the night, and a bar and a restaurant showing lights, dim figures inside. We came to the sole light in town, caught it on red. No traffic other than us. A quiet town—High Pines, was that it?—except for the wind, rising from the black part of the sky. The light made a clicking sound and turned green. Bernie peered at the cross-street sign. “El Norte.”

We followed El Norte out of town. Full night lowered itself around us, all except for the yellow tunnel our headlights made. The road narrowed, zigzagged through some switchbacks, and straightened out. A mailbox came in sight. Bernie slowed down and read the number. “Two one seven seven.” I saw a bullet hole or two in the mailbox, but that didn't mean anything out here. We turned onto a dirt track, bumped over a low rise, and stopped in front of a double-wide trailer up on blocks. The handlebars of a motorcycle gleamed at the entrance to a shed over on one side. No cars in sight, but lights shone in the windows of the double-wide. Bernie cut the engine, and we got out of the car. A woman called from inside.

“Billy? That you?”

Bernie put one finger across his lips. That was our signal for quiet. We have all kinds of signals. Take the trigger-pull signal. That means go-get-'im, one of my favorites. For a moment I forgot about quiet and thought only of go-get-'im.

“Billy?” the woman called. “What are you doing?”

Bernie gave me a surprised look and made the quiet sign again. Whatever low growling had been going on stopped on a dime, if that makes any sense, but still my tail drooped, as though it knew I'd done wrong. I got it back up nice and high. If by any chance there'd been some mess-up, it wouldn't happen again.

We walked around a kid's swing set, lying on its side, and stopped at the door. Bernie knocked.

“Use your key, Billy,” the woman called again. “I just got out of the shower.”

Bernie knocked.

“For chrissake!”

Then came approaching footsteps—the barefoot kind—and the door opened. A woman stood in the doorway. She had a towel wrapped around her head—the way women do after a shower, but not men, just another one of those man-woman mysteries—and was trying to get another one around her body, and fast. Meanwhile, her face was running through some expressions, surprise and fear being two. With her hair hidden under the towel, her face seemed so bare. And what was this? Practically no eyebrows at all?

“Ms. Dee Branch?” Bernie said.

At which point she lost her grip on the towel—not the one wrapped around her head, the other one—and it fell to the floor.

“Fucking hell,” she said, sort of half-bending and half-twisting around to pick it up. Bernie sort of half-turned away. What exactly was going on? Was this an interview? Were we off to a good start?

The woman finally got the towel nicely around herself, from the neck to not much below her waist: I'd seen bigger towels.

“Dee Branch?” Bernie said.

The woman made a grab for the door and slammed it in our faces. But not quite: Bernie already had one foot in the doorway, just one of our techniques at the Little Detective Agency. The door ended up slamming against his foot. Have I mentioned Bernie was wearing flip-flops at the time?

“Ow!” Bernie said, kind of loudly, like . . . like a cry of pain. Whoa! I'd never once heard a cry of pain from Bernie, not even that time when he'd climbed the big tree in our yard with the chainsaw, something about a dead limb. I won't go into what happened after that. No cry of pain, that's the takeaway. This woman—Dee Branch, perhaps—turned out to be dangerous. I stepped inside.

She backed away.

“What's going on?” she said, her voice rising in an edgy and unpleasant combo of bad emotions. “Who the hell are you?”

“I'm Bernie Little, and this is Chet.”

“Keep him away from me.”

“No reason to be skittish around Chet. He likes people, especially the cooperative kind.”

Hard to deny! I even like most of the perps and gangbangers we've rounded up.

“You're a cop,” the woman said.

“Nope,” said Bernie.

“You look like a cop.”

“Private investigator from the Valley,” Bernie said. He glanced around. “When's Billy supposed to turn up?”

The woman's eyes shifted. “Billy? Don't know any Billys.”

Bernie turned to her. “How about the Billy who has a key to your abode?”

The woman's face, so bare, went pink, and she called Bernie some names I'm sure she didn't mean. While that was going on, we eased our way inside and closed the door, Bernie doing the actual closing with his heel, a small move maybe, but one of his best, in my opinion.

“Any idea what he's up to when he's driving around in your car, Dee?” Bernie said.

“Shows what you know,” Dee said. “I don't have a car.”

“Fifteen-year-old Corolla, Arizona plate FTT347?” Bernie said.

Dee backed up another step. “So what if I have a car? It's my constitutional right.”

“It's also your constitutional right to strike up friendships with inmates,” Bernie said.

“Huh?”

“Or did you meet Billy after he got out?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Bernie gazed at her. “Maybe you don't,” Bernie said. “If not, you should know you're involved with a dangerous man.”

“You on something?” Dee said. “You're not making sense.”

“Billy Parsons did fifteen years for kidnapping. That's about as dangerous as it gets.”

Dee's voice rose. “You're so full of shit. They railroaded him. He was totally inno—” She clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Go on,” Bernie said.

Dee shook her head, kind of violently. The towel she'd wrapped around her hair slipped off, releasing a damp tangle, mostly blond but brown at the roots. Now her face didn't seem quite so bare; also it looked much more like the face in Mrs. Trujillo's photo. Ms. Dee Branch, no doubt about it, although much less friendly in person.

“I've got nothing more to say. Get the hell out of here. You're trespassing.”

“Why don't you call the cops?”

What was this? Her eyes shifted, like maybe she was considering doing exactly that? When was the last time a perp had called the cops on us? Wasn't Dee a perp? Kind of confusing, and that wasn't the end of it.

Bernie nodded. “Okay,” he said. “We're leaving. Here's our card if you ever want to talk.” He held it out. This was our new card, designed by Suzie. It had a floral decoration we weren't happy about, me and Bernie. Maybe Dee didn't like it either, because she made no move to take the card. Bernie dropped it on an upside-down milk crate by the door. And then we were outside. Turning tail on account of some cops? That didn't sound like us.

We got into the Porsche. Bernie backed away, spun us around in a quick three-point turn—which I loved even though I don't go past two—and we headed onto the dirt track, past the mailbox with the bullet holes in it, and down the mountain road.

But not far down. Just past the first switchback, a big rock, square and reddish in the headlights, rose by the side of the road. Bernie pulled over, tucked us in behind it, killed the lights.

“Let's see if we stirred up some hornets, big guy,” he said.

Silence fell, the deep nighttime desert silence you can feel, almost like there's a real big someone else out there with you. No missing the buzz of a hornet in a silence like that, but I listened my hardest anyway. Stirring up hornets? How could that strike Bernie as a good idea?