Ah, there was Nan Shepherd. She walked up behind her and made a few faces at her back. Just for good measure.
That night when she entered Duffy’s, Bertie got a standing ovation from the assembled reporters, who had clothespins on their noses. She accepted a bouquet of dandelions, no doubt picked from the lawn of the nearby park and bowed.
“Thank you, thank you, I accept your odoration... I mean, adoration.”
With a beer, the first of many bought for her by her admiring subjects, Bertie was ready to celebrate. She told the story several times, but after the 10th, or was it the 11th? fart joke, she was tired of it. She was getting a little embarrassed about the whole episode, but—hey, Bertie—too late now.
Shawn wandered in three or four beers later and talked to a few people before coming up to Bertie. “So you’re the hero of the hour?” he said loudly enough for several people to hear.
“Gimme the details. I gotta hear this one.”
They moved to the bar, out of direct earshot. They leaned against it, beers in hand. She looked at him in the mirror over the bar, and started to tell him, but he was distracted. She wound down, leaving an uneasy silence between them.
“You know, Bertie, do you think you should pull such stupid stunts? We keep hearing about layoffs; it doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do right now.”
“Who are you calling stupid,” she bristled. “When did you become Company Carl?”
“Bertie, that’s not what I was saying and you know it. I’m worried about all of us,” Shawn said wearily.
Bertie steamed for awhile, then relented. “I know, I know. You’re right. But once I got started, I couldn’t stop. I don’t even know where it came from—it just all started bubbling out. Ewww, wait a minute, not bubbling out—bad mental image—I just kind of blurted it out. But, honestly, you should have seen Don’s face, it was priceless.”
She laughed. He didn’t.
“So, uh, thanks, I guess, for your concern,” she said. They stood awkwardly together, both of them now looking in the bar mirror.
“So how’s the Bellingham story going?”
Shawn shot her a suspicious look. “Why? You’re not still trying to get a shot at it, are you?” If she and Shawn were actually dating seriously, he would’ve recognized her suddenly casual demeanor as the precursor to a lie.
“Nah, but I’m still interested since I was there at the start. I’ve more or less given up the idea of writing anything about it.” He turned and looked at her face, not her reflection in the mirror. He seemed doubtful of her sincerity—hard to believe.
“I’ve been working all week on the financial side of it. I think the police are looking in the wrong place if they’re still working on the family. This guy cheated and conned his way to the top from the time he could stand on a street corner and sell fake Gucci handbags. My story is running tomorrow. I was just answering some last-minute questions from Don and the company lawyer. They don’t want any lawsuits. And Bellingham had friends in high places in the newspaper and you know how that goes. I’m surprised no one hasn’t insisted on ripping the guts out of it.”
“Yeah, unfortunately I know how that goes.”
Sad memories of Bernstein and Woodward hung over them briefly. Shawn ordered another beer, moving briefly into the light.
“What is that on your ear?” Bertie asked.
“Oh, do you like it?”
“I can’t see very well. Turn your head.” It looked like a newly sprouted mole on his earlobe. “What happened?” Bertie asked. “Has a doctor seen that?”
“Bertie! C’mon! I took your advice and got an earring tattooed on my lobe. Cool, huh?”
Bertie was speechless, but she couldn’t look away from it. “Um, yeah, great, really cool,” she finally said.
“I told the guy I wanted a diamond stud tat. Doesn’t it look like a diamond stud?” Shawn touched his ear lobe, and looked at himself in the bar mirror, obviously pleased.
“Oh, at the very least,” Bertie said. There was another awkward moment.
Awkward on Bertie’s side, Shawn couldn’t tear his eyes away from the mirror.
“So, what’s new?” she asked, anxious to turn the subject away from his moley ear lobe.
“Oh, just a lot of Bellingham. I’m getting sick of the guy.”
“Good,” Bertie thought. She wanted him to lose interest in it; she wanted him to leave the field clear for her. She was getting a lot of good background material, but nothing she could use in a story yet. Too much innuendo, not enough solid conclusions.
“But, in between looking up the guy’s financial records, I spent some time tracking down Bellingham’s past, which was pretty hard to do considering the paper is getting so tight with travel dollars,” Shawn said.
“The guy has a past?” Bertie asked. “I thought he slithered out from under a rock fully grown.”
“Oh yeah, he has a past.” Shawn leaned an elbow on the bar and turned to her. She was standing close to hear over the din in the bar and could feel the heat radiating from his body.
““In a lot of ways, it wasn’t what I expected,” Shawn said. “He had a normal childhood in some postcard little town in Oregon. His family made the Cleavers look like a splinter group of the Manson family. All normal and happy, happy, happy. Mom was a housewife, dad was a plumber, two brothers -- one who’s a lieutenant colonel in the military and another who’s a lawyer All upright, upstanding Bellinghams. Little Bobby was apparently the only one who had a problem.”
Bertie ordered them both another beer. She sucked the foam off the top of hers and caught Shawn watching her. She smiled and licked a little foam off the corner of her mouth.
“And?” she asked when he didn’t say anything more.
“Oh! Yeah, and on the surface, there wasn’t anything that looked very serious. He had a penchant for ripping up the neighbor’s garden in the night when he was little, then going back the next day and offering to help them plant it again—for money, of course. The neighbors thought he was a hard-working little boy scout, earning his own money.
“There was a pattern of this kind of behavior, although I couldn’t get anyone to go on the record. No one wants to mess with Bellingham’s lawyers over a slander case.”
“How did you find this out?” Bertie asked. “I called some of the neighbors. You’d be surprised how few of them moved out. They remembered little Bobby, all right. They finally figured his garden scam out. One old guy almost swallowed his false teeth laughing, telling me about the night he put his new guard dog in the garden and Bobby showed up. They were picking Bobby’s pants out of the dog’s teeth for days after that.
“But Mommy and Daddy Bellingham wouldn’t believe that Bobby was a hustler, even after he had to get 20 stitches in his butt.”
“Anyway, the feces really hit the fan when Bobby was in high school. He persuaded the art students to paint portraits of the teachers in the nude.”
Bertie did an exaggerated jaw drop. “I’m assuming they were done from overactive imaginations and not first-hand knowledge,” she said. “They were just in high school.”
“Yeah, who knows? But anyway, Bobby got them printed up and was selling them like trading cards. He even gave a stick of gum with every card.”
Bertie burst out laughing. “You gotta hand it to him. He had a sense of humor.”
Shawn smiled. “That’s what I thought, too. Anyway, he got busted when one of the hall monitors ratted him out. Get this, the kid wanted a picture of the football coach—the male football coach—and Bobby only had the female teachers. He was expelled and the family moved but not before Bobby made a couple hundred bucks.”
“Wow,” Bertie said. “Great story.”
“But you see how he worked even then?” Shawn asked. “Nothing serious, he didn’t beat kids up or blackmail anyone, but there was always an angle and always for money. And someone always ended up looking foolish. I think that was a really important part of Bellingham’s makeup. He got a
kick out of being mean.
“I’m still working on his past. I lost track of him after the family moved, but I’ll pick it up again on Monday. No overtime for working on the weekends anymore.”
Bertie drained her beer and made getting-ready-to-leave noises.
“You going already?” Shawn asked. “This crowd is just getting wound up.”
“Hey, I’m beat,” she said.
“Too tired for a little company?” Shawn asked.
“Yeah, ’fraid so... it’s been a long week.” The words were out of her mouth before she even thought about it.
The look of surprise on Shawn’s face was almost comical. Before he could say anything, Bertie hoisted her purse over her shoulder and left Duffy’s.
“Well, well, well,” she thought. “Has the worm earned its stripes finally?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Saturday mornings were for turning over and going back to sleep. Bertie woke once at 7, rolled herself up in the comforter, her feet poking out, and drifted off again.
At 8:15, she was hard at it when a persistent whir popped her head out from beneath the pillow. She wrestled one arm free, grabbed the alarm clock off the bedside table and threw it against the wall. She buried her head again under the pillow.
Whir...whir...whir. Oops, not the alarm clock, the phone. She reached for it, looking at the exploded clock’s springs and gears on the floor, the bed, the bureau. It was innards-less. Sigh.
“Hello?”
“Bertie? It’s me, Katie. Oh my God, Bertie … I’ve been robbed! Someone broke into the kennel.”
Bertie sat up, almost strangling herself in the comforter. “Are you OK? What happened?”
“When I got here this morning, the door was standing open; someone jimmied it. The police are here now, but can you come over? Dave is at a convention this weekend, and Gene isn’t due till this evening. I’m alone.”
“I’m leaving now.”
She got there in record time and pulled around to the back of the kennel, surprised not to see a police car or policemen anywhere in sight. She stepped over the splinters from the shattered door and ran into the reception area where Katie was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin and a dog blanket around her shoulders.
“Thank God you weren’t here when it happened. Are the dogs OK?” Bertie said, kneeling down beside the chair. Katie was shaking.
“I’m OK, the dogs are OK. Why would anyone break in here, Bertie? Why here? There’s a jewelry store three blocks away. What could you possibly steal from a kennel that could be worth more than a Rolex or diamond earrings?”
“Maybe ’cause there’s less security here than at a jewelry store? I don’t know, but you’d think a kennel full of dogs barking their heads off would stop anyone.”
“It’s very hard to hear the dogs outside,” Kate said. “With the workout area in the back, and the closest neighbor a block away, I don’t think anyone would hear. Besides, I made a stab at soundproofing the place. Good neighbor, and all that.”
“What was stolen?” Bertie asked, following Katie into the back room.
“A couple of leashes, and the dogs’ TV. The petty cash box was broken into and about $30 is missing. I just don’t get it.”
“Me neither,” Bertie said. “The easy answer is that someone strung out on drugs did it. Thirty bucks could buy a lot of crack.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s what TV cops say,” Bertie said defensively.
“The real cops think it happened around 4 or 5 this morning.”
“What are they going to do about it?”
“I don’t know. They took a report, said they’d look into it and left.”
Kate sat at her desk, and put her head in her hands. “I’ll have to call a locksmith and a door guy. I think I’ll put up one of those signs: ‘No cash on premises.’ My poor dogs; I’ll have to get a new TV, too. They were into a series called ‘The Universe’ on the History Channel. The next episode is about cosmic holes.”
“Cosmic holes? Isn’t that a little ‘deep for them?” Bertie wanted to make Katie laugh, but instead her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, lord, don’t cry, Katie. I’m sorry, I was just being silly to make you laugh.”
Too late. Katie burst into sobs. “The idea that someone was in here is creeping me out,” she said. “What if they hurt the dogs?”
A loud “wah wah” was coming out of Kate. Bertie made soothing noises and a cup of coffee later, they started getting the damage repaired. Getting a handyman and a locksmith on a Saturday wasn’t as hard as Bertie thought it might be and by 2 p.m. the door was fixed and there was a new lock on it.
Katie had calmed down considerably, now she was getting pissed off. “Time to take one of those self-defense classes for women, I think.”
Katie was about 5’1’ tall and weighed about 105; Bertie hoped it was one hell of a self-defense class. But it was a good idea. Because of the zoning laws in this part of town, Katie had had to open her business about a half-mile from the retail stores that were also a part of the neighborhood. During the day it wasn’t bad, but it was winter and darkness fell early.
She stayed the rest of the day with Katie until Gene showed up for his Saturday night shift. Katie was concerned about his safety and offered to let him out of working on the weekends, when there wasn’t a lot of traffic on the streets, but he wouldn’t agree. He was outraged that someone would break in and scare the dogs.
“You can replace the TV and fill the petty cash drawer back up again, but every dog and cat is unique. You could never replace them.” Gene was tall and gangly with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed when he talked. His auburn hair looked like the fur of an Irish setter and Bertie had to restrain herself from petting his head and murmuring “good boy.” But she loved the passion he brought to his job. He cared for animals and couldn’t stand to see them hurt. He’d make a great vet.
Bertie got back to her apartment after dark, wearily leaning against the jamb as she unlocked the door. It seemed a long time ago that she’d leaped out of bed. She was glad to be home; her apartment was her refuge away from the craziness of the world. She’d lived there for six years and made it her own. There wasn’t much there, a tiny kitchen table, her bed and bed stand, a bureau, and in the living room, the flowered sofa, a matching chair, coffee table and desk.
A floor-to-ceiling bookcase dominated the space. Books were Bertie’s paramours, her midnight lovers. She avoided bookstores because there wasn’t one that she could pass without stopping in and buying a book or three or four. The bookcase was neat and tidy, but there were books under the chair, in the closets, under the bed, stacked in kitchen cupboards and, once, when she was expecting company, she’d put a few in the oven.
She shucked her jeans and bra and slid into comfortable sweats; she was too tired to go anywhere else today. As she changed, she picked up pieces of clock (time certainly could fly everywhere when thrown hard enough), and then nuked a Lean Cuisine. While she ate, she thought about the puzzle of Katie’s break-in.
The central question remained: Why would anyone break into a dog kennel? Bertie could understand stealing the TV and even the petty cash, but the leashes?
Her restless mind wouldn’t stop even when “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” came on the old movie channel. Harrison Ford.
She turned the sound down low and fired up her laptop at the desk. She scanned briefly for other kennel robberies in the city but that was a bust, as she’d expected.
She started noodling with “hair” and variations of “uses for hair.” She found out that cut human hair can be used as a garden fertilizer, to soak up oil spills, put outside for wild birds to make nests, twisted into ropes, and … more than she needed to know … treated by the Chinese and used to make soy sauce.
The main use of hair, of course, was in making wigs. She wondered if By Bellingham was going to branch out into human hair wigs, but that market was dominated by a
few big-name companies … the big wigs of wigs. Bertie cracked herself up.
There were also wigs for cancer patients, a worthwhile cause that she couldn’t see the Bellinghams contributing to, monetarily or hair-ily.
And where did R2 get bags of hair? Were there hundreds of bald men and women in Third World countries selling their hair?
She thought about what Shawn had told her about R1 Bellingham’s misspent youth. “Unreal,” she said out loud to her empty apartment. Even at a young age he’d been hustling people and even then there was that meanness. Making money wasn’t enough, he had to ridicule them, too. And he always operated behind a facade of respectability. It was too much to handle right now. She logged off and shut down the computer.
Bertie popped open a Diet Dr Pepper, popped a bowl of popcorn and wandered back into the living room. She fell asleep on the sofa watching “Indiana Jones” and spilled the bowl of popcorn down her front. She dug some out of her sweatshirt and went to bed, asleep again as soon as she hit the mattress.
She was dreaming of Madison, who was cracking a dog leash at a bad guy who was trying to ravage her (ravage—it was that kind of dream). He tied up the guy with the leash and they were gazing into each other’s eyes when Shawn showed up.
“Look, Bertie. I got another tattoo,” he said, ripping open his shirt to show her a Great Dane on his chest. Shawn’s nipples were the dog’s eyes.
She stared at the tattoo, and when she turned around again, Madison was gone. She was yelling at Shawn for interrupting when he morphed into R1
Bellingham, with huge crab claws instead of hands. He was trying to pinch her breasts when she woke up.
“Whew!” she thought. “Bizarre.”
She didn’t have a clock anymore, so she didn’t know what time it was, but her mouth was dry from sleeping with her mouth open. She needed a Dr Pepper.
Without turning on the lights, she headed for the kitchen. She stood in front of the open door of the refrigerator for a few moments, letting the cool air wash over her, then popped the lid of a can and started back to bed.
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