Scents and Sensibility

by Spencer Quinn

  “I’m listening,” Bernie said.

  Me, too, but to tell the truth I was no further ahead on the case, in fact had that worrisome feeling of slipping backward.

  “They stashed the money out in the desert somewheres,” Trish said. “It made them feel like winners after all, if you get what I mean.” She reached for another cigarette. “You say you’re looking for Billy?”

  Bernie nodded.

  “If you find him, he’ll be livin’ large.”

  EIGHTEEN

  * * *

  Missed the Texas plates, big guy,” Bernie said, when we were back in the car, headed toward the sun, now halfway down the sky. I preferred the sun high above, but really low was good, too, when it got all strange and blobby. Just not halfway down the sky, which is right in my face. No one gets in my face, amigo.

  “How is that possible? It doesn’t get more basic.”

  I tried to remember what this was about, came up with zip.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, his gaze not on the traffic behind us—an endless many-colored sort of bumper-to-bumper snake—but on his own face, the best face going, in case that’s not clear by now. “Am I losing it?”

  That again? Maybe this was one of Bernie’s jokes. Soon would come the funny part. I couldn’t wait.

  “Alzheimer’s?” he went on. “Too young, right? Plus no family history. Concussion? Sure, I’ve had my bell rung once or twice—who hasn’t? What else is there?”

  He went silent, rubbing his forehead a bit. Had I somehow missed the funny part? We crossed the Rio Arroyo Bridge. Down below I spotted the tiniest trickle of blue. No surprise, now that I’d seen the aquifer with my own eyes—just that one puddle Ellie Newburg had showed us at the construction sight. And soon after she’d had a round, red hole in her head and smelled of the no-longer-living. Was there some connection between the aquifer and what happened to her? Connections were a big part of our business, an important fact I’d picked up during the course of my career. Lucky for us, Bernie was great at connections. I pitched in when I could.

  He glanced over at me. “Something on your mind?”

  Me? No. Not that I knew of.

  “Have you already solved the whole case? And now you just sit back and watch me bumble around? Has that been our MO the whole time?”

  The funny part at last! I’d known it was coming, of course. Who wouldn’t love Bernie? A surprising number of characters, actually, but not me. I gave him a nice lick.

  He laughed, and even though we perhaps swerved across a lane or two—what was with all the honking?—he looked happier.

  “What would I do without you?” he said.

  I didn’t understand the question. But so what?

  • • •

  Sometime later, we were on Central Street, the main drag in South Pedroia. Headed to our self-storage, maybe, to check out our supply of Hawaiian pants? A big supply and never getting smaller, not even by one measly pair. Our visits, infrequent and yet too often, in my opinion, were always the same: Bernie stood in the doorway, just eyeing all those pants, on hangers and hooks and racks, in stacks and piles and mounds, golden dust motes hanging in the still air, nothing moving. I always got very uneasy, so I was glad we rolled right past the road with all the self-storages and kept on going.

  Bernie made a phone call. “Captain Stine, please.”

  “One moment.”

  “Hey, Bernie. What’s up?”

  “Got that file yet?”

  “Still working on it.”

  “The expected male life span is currently eighty-seven years, six months.”

  “You think you’re funny, Bernie.”

  Of course! Didn’t everybody?

  “What do you know about the kidnapping?” Bernie said.

  “What kidnapping?”

  “The case in the file.”

  “How would I know anything? We don’t have the file. Aren’t you listening?”

  “You know nothing at all? Never discussed it with anybody?”

  “Here’s some free advice,” Stine said. “You’re starting to sound paranoid. It’s not attractive.”

  Click.

  Bernie glanced at me. Had that conversation gone well? Wouldn’t have been my takeaway, but Bernie didn’t seem upset. His eyes had that lovely inner light thing going on. Maybe paranoid was something nice. Humans could be complicated, sometimes too complicated for their own good, no offense.

  “Funny thing about our business, Chet. Sometimes you can’t see a single way. Sometimes you can see one single way—doesn’t make it right, though. And then there are those times—always the hardest, for some reason, where you can see more than one way. Take now, for example.”

  I sat very still, eyes on Bernie, listening my very best. This was not easy to understand, and now there was going to be more? And then, listening my very best, I picked up the sound of distant barking, very faint—but not so faint that I wouldn’t have bet dollars to doughnuts, if that means you end up with doughnuts, on it being distant barking of the she-barking kind. Which made concentrating on what Bernie had to say even more of a challenge.

  “We could go back out to the desert, hunt for more missing cactuses, get a bead on who’s digging them up. Or we could talk to some biker pals, take a swing at seeing where Dee Branch might be hanging out. Then there’s the obvious route of hitting all the muscle-head gyms for leads on the Fu Manchu twins. People tend to remember twins, especially twins who look like those two. There’s also Garwood Mickles, the nephew, over at the Indian Hills precinct. We could even take a chance, try a direct route, get into a pissing contest with Brick himself. Or . . .”

  But don’t rely on me for what came after that. Because . . . because . . . pissing contest! There were pissing contests in this life? How was it possible that I’d reached my age—whatever it happened to be, exactly—without knowing about them? I knew about all kinds of competition, like baseball, football, basketball, lacrosse—great balls, each and every one, lacrosse balls being my favorite, just a wonderful springy resistance when you’re chewing on them—as well as boxing, wrestling, and even hockey, where I’d gotten onto the ice once, the slipperiness of ice being the biggest surprise in a night of surprises, and actually tasted puck, very odd, kind of like tires, but forget all that. What I’m getting at is that I’d never once encountered a pissing contest. How crazy was that, especially since—and this is the whole point—who was going to beat me in a pissing contest? Go ahead. Name anybody, and I’ll take him on. Two at a time! More than two! I was born for pissing contests. Pissing contests were my . . . how would you put it? Calling? Yes, that was it. Pissing contests were my calling. So why had I been kept away from them? I had a thought I’d never had before and hope I never have again: life was unfair.

  Bernie looked over at me in surprise. “Growling?” he said. “What’s that about? You mad at me?”

  Whoa! Mad at Bernie? What could that possibly mean? I was mad because . . . because . . . nothing came to mind. Meaning I was mad at nothing, which had to mean I wasn’t mad. There! All better. I rested my paw on Bernie’s leg, just to let him know we were cool. The Porsche lurched forward for some reason, but Bernie soon had it under control. Best wheelman in the Valley, as I’m sure you know by now.

  “Entry points is what I’m talking about, big guy, entry points to a trail that’s fifteen years old, maybe more.” For no reason at all, I had a nice big yawn. “A little—tedious from where you sit?” He kind of lost me there: I was sitting in the shotgun seat as usual. “But here’s something I’ve learned. To find someone, you often have to understand them first. So what I think we should do is poke around at Cactus Sound, see if we can pick up Billy’s trail from way back when.”

  Fine with me. Trails meant tracking. Tracking was my . . . how would you put it? Calling? Yes, tracking was my calling, except wasn’t there some other calling that had come up quite recently? I took a swing at remembering what that was, and whiffed. Tracking was my calling and
that was that.

  We went down a street lined with warehouses, some boarded up, and parked in front of an unpainted steel door with a sign in the shape of a saguaro hanging over it. “ ‘Cactus Sound,’ ” Bernie said. “ ‘Tomorrow’s Tunes Today.’ ” We got out of the car, and he pressed a button by the door. “What if you happen to like the sounds of yesterday?” he said.

  “Then you’re fucked.” A shadowy man peeled himself off a brick wall a few steps up the block and came our way, staggering a bit. His breath—just about pure alcohol—reached us first, which was how it always went down with winos. He held out his hand, a shaky, bony hand. “Spare some change? Preferably the paper kind.”

  Bernie gave him a greenback, actually two.

  “Bless you, friend.” The wino noticed me. “Nice pooch,” he said. “Looks kind of familiar.”

  Bernie was about to say something when a man’s voice came through a speaker grille over the door. “Etley?”

  The wino frowned and retreated back into the darkness. Bernie grunted into the speaker grille. A buzzer went bzzz and something clicked inside the steel door. Bernie turned the handle, pushed the door open, and we went into a little waiting room with nobody in it. Behind the reception desk was another door, also steel. Bernie tried the handle. It opened and out came the sound of a man singing. “Too much to ask / Is all I’m askin’ / Why can’t you love / A selfish guy?”

  We followed the sound down a hall and into a dark room lit up mostly by the lights of a long, flat control panel. A man in a funny little hat—porkpie, maybe, although there were no pig or pie smells around, mainly just stale pot—sat at the panel with his back to us. “Etley?” he said without turning. “Take a seat.”

  Hey! And not only stale pot, come to think of it. What else did we have? Cocaine? Heroin? Even a whiff of meth? Yes to all. I . . . I made a mental note!

  Bernie sat in a chair beside the porkpie man, but a little behind. I sat beside Bernie. From there I had a good view through a glass wall beyond the control panel and into a room where a man sat on a stool, playing a guitar and singing into a microphone that hung from the ceiling.

  “I made you smile / Last night in bed / So how come . . .”

  Over his shoulder, porkpie man handed Bernie a packet of paper. “We’re just tinkering with the bridge, but here’s your charts, you want to look them over.”

  Bernie took the charts, whatever they happened to be, and looked them over, his eyes going back and forth, back and forth. Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass, the singer had stopped singing and was now muttering, “ ’So how come now,/ I’m better off dead,’ or ‘So how come now / You wish me dead.’ Mr. Winners? Any thoughts?”

  The porkpie dude—Winners, if I was following this right—pressed a button. “Nope.” He turned to Bernie. Winners had a short-trimmed white beard, not gray, but white as the puffy clouds. His teeth were also very white, especially for an older guy, older guy teeth usually being yellowish. The same thing goes on in the nation within, although the difference between what we’ve got and what you’ve got in the teeth department isn’t worth discussing. No offense.

  “Any thoughts?” Winners said.

  Bernie shrugged. “Don’t like ‘wish me dead.’ Kind of melodramatic.”

  Winners pressed the button. “ ‘Wish me dead’ is kind of melodramatic.”

  The singer frowned, stroked his stubbly chin. “Maybe the whole goddamn song’s melodramatic. Even the chord progression. What if . . .” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, started scribbling away.

  Winners looked at me. “You brought a dog?”

  “Any problem with that?”

  “Guess not,” Winners said. “Long as he don’t have fleas. Van Morrison’s dog had fleas. I itched like a bastard for a month.”

  “No fleas on Chet,” Bernie said.

  Totally true, not since I’d been on the drops. But here’s a funny thing: all of a sudden I was itchy all over! How do you like that? I raised a paw, started in on the side of my neck.

  Meanwhile, Winners was saying, “Charts okay?”

  “Look fine to me.”

  Winners glanced around. “Where’s your ax?”

  “Ax?” said Bernie.

  Our ax was in the garage, hanging on a wall bracket. We never took it on the road. The case had taken a bad turn.

  “The bass. We don’t supply instruments.”

  “I don’t play the bass,” Bernie said.

  “Huh?” said Winners. “What do you play?”

  “Ukulele.”

  “No goddamn ukulele part in this session. What the hell’s going on?”

  “Plus a bit of trumpet,” Bernie went on, “although I haven’t touched it since high school marching band. Fact is I’m looking for someone.”

  “You’re not”—Winners flipped through a notebook—“Etley, bass player out of LA?”

  Bernie shook his head.

  “Then what the hell was all the chart bullshit?”

  “I can read music.”

  Read music? Not just listen like everybody else, but read it, too? Maybe the most amazing thing I’d ever heard. My Bernie.

  From a speaker came the voice of the singer. “How about we go to the next number, come back to this one later?”

  Winners pressed a button. “Your dime.” He swiveled toward Bernie. “Didn’t catch your name.”

  “Bernie Little.”

  Winners, with his porkpie hat and his trimmed white beard, looked like a friendly older guy, but what stood out, and what I was just noticing now, were his eyes. They were the darkest I’d seen, even darker than Suzie’s. They didn’t sparkle like polished countertops, the way Suzie’s did; instead they were flat and damp. Now they seemed to darken a little more, in fact, a lot.

  “You’re looking for someone here?” Winners said.

  “More likely in the past,” Bernie said. “Were you around fifteen years ago?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Do you remember Billy Parsons?”

  “Billy Parsons,” Winners said. He licked his lips. What a very damp tongue for a human! “There was a Bubba Parsons, played drums. Couldn’t lay off the goddamn high hat.”

  “Billy wasn’t a musician,” Bernie said.

  “Then why’d he be hanging out here?”

  “That’s one of the things I’m interested in.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s gone missing, for reasons that may go back fifteen years or more. I’ve been hired to find him.”

  Did that mean we were getting paid? Somehow I’d missed that.

  “Well, well. You’re a private eye?”

  “We say private investigators in the trade, but yeah.”

  “A private eye who can read music.”

  “We all have our pasts.”

  That brought a big white smile from Winners, just the mouth kind. His eyes stayed out of it. “That we do. Sorry I can’t help you.”

  “What about Travis Baca?” Bernie said. “Ring a bell?”

  “Nope.”

  “What’s your association with the studio?” Bernie said.

  Winners laughed. “What kind of investigator are you? I’m the goddamn founder.”

  A buzzer buzzed. Winners pressed a different button. A voice sounded. “Etley.”

  “You’re late,” Winners said.

  “Yeah?” said Etley.

  “Musicians,” Winners said, buzzing him in.

  “One last thing,” Bernie said. “Any possibility there were drug dealers operating out of here back then?”

  Winners turned those damp, dark eyes full on Bernie. “Zero chance,” he said. “Drugs have always been totally forbidden here. Won’t have them on the premises.”

  Premises meant what again? I didn’t know. All I knew was that the place reeked of drugs, as I mentioned already. Even a hint of those sickening ’shrooms. Weren’t ’shrooms so last year? And whoa! What was this? The scent, fairly fresh, of a member of the nation within, an
d not just any member of the nation within, but one who smelled a lot like me.

  “Chet?” Bernie said. “What’s up?”

  “Probably hungry,” said Winners.

  “He never barks for food.”

  “Might have a treat here.” Winners reached under the control panel, found a box of bone-shaped biscuits, tossed me one. I wasn’t hungry, never barked for food, in fact was barking about . . . something else, which would possibly come to me later. Meanwhile, I got busy with the bone-shaped biscuit, one of the tastiest I’d had in some time.

  “See?” said Winners.

  Bernie gave me a thoughtful look. I gave him one back. Then a tall thin dude came in from down the hall, a big, hard guitar-shaped case on his back. “Ric Etley,” he said, pot on his breath, but big-time.

  “Here’s the charts,” said Winners.

  “Don’t read music,” Etley said. “I’ll pick it up real quick soon’s I hear the tune.”

  Over the speaker came the singer’s voice. “Thought of a workaround on ‘Selfish Guy,’ ” he said. “Kind of open ended, let the music do the talking.” He peered at the glass wall, like maybe the control room was too dark for him to see in, and strummed his guitar. “I made you smile / Last night in bed / So how come now, oh, baby, how come now?”

  “Cool,” said Etley, unpacking his instrument.

  NINETEEN

  * * *

  Let the music do the talking?” Bernie said, back on the street at Cactus Sound and on our way to the car. “Then what’s the point of . . .”

  And maybe he went on about whatever it was, but at that moment I’d picked up a scent—the same scent I’d sniffed inside the studio but somehow forgotten all about! Funny how the mind works. There’s you and then there’s your mind, side by side. A bit tricky, probably not worth thinking about, plus there was no time, because this scent I mentioned, so like mine, was the scent of my little buddy Shooter. Shooter: who rode shotgun with Ellie Newburg, and wasn’t Ellie a big part of this case? Wow! Nothing was getting past me! Already I had no complaints in life and now things were getting better? I couldn’t begin to figure that out.