“Morning, Bernie,” he said.
“What’s up?” said Bernie.
“Looks like I just caught you,” Georgie said. “Headed anywhere interesting?”
“No,” Bernie said.
Georgie laughed. “Always loved your sense of humor,” he said.
“Yeah?” said Bernie. “We haven’t really spent much time together.”
“Maybe I’m a quick study.”
Bernie gave him one of those second looks. “Maybe you are.”
“Why I’m here,” Georgie said, “is to make sure we get past that little hiccup yesterday.”
Hiccups! I had them once. So weird. Bernie clapped his hands real loud, right in my face, and they went away. But hiccups yesterday? I had no memory of that.
“Already past it,” Bernie said.
I watched him closely. Was Georgie saying Bernie had the hiccups? I’d never seen him hiccup before, hoped he had no plans to start now.
“What I’d like is for you to accept the speaker’s check,” Georgie said.
Bernie shook his head.
“In that case, my lawyer wants you to sign this waiver.” He handed Bernie the papers.
Bernie riffled through them. “Saying I agree to accept no fee for the speech?”
“Legal verbiage to that effect.”
“This is a lot of bullshit, Georgie.”
“You know lawyers.”
Bernie dug in his pockets, failed to come up with a pen. Georgie gave him one.
“Sign there,” he said.
Bernie signed.
“And initial here. And here. And here.”
“For Christ sake.”
Georgie shuffled the paper. “And one last signature right there.” He stabbed his finger at the bottom of a page. Bernie signed, not even looking. “Much obliged,” said Georgie. He got in the SUV. The driver backed onto the street, turning his head. That gave me a real good view of his necklessness. I barked.
“What’s on your mind, Chet?” Bernie said, and then a nice pat pat.
Nothing really, besides wanting to give that driver a quick nip.
Bernie climbed in the car. “Know what I’m thinking?” I waited to hear. “Lawyers are an easy target.” I waited some more. “Do you want a nation of laws?” I didn’t know. “Then you’re going to have lawyers.” The only lawyer I could think of was Rex Lippican Jr., whom we’d brought down for doing something or other and was now sporting an orange jumpsuit up at Northern State. But if lawyers were okay in Bernie’s book they were okay in mine.
* * *
Anya Vereen lived in the North Valley. It was one of those developments Bernie hated where all the streets were cul de sacs and all the houses look the same. “How can this be sustainable?” he said as we pulled into her driveway. I wasn’t sure about that, but there was no doubt in my mind that someone was frying bacon, and not far away. Some days—has this ever happened to you?—bacon crops up over and over.
The door opened and out came Anya, wearing jeans, a tank top, and a small backpack. She hurried over to the car and paused, her eyes maybe on me, riding shotgun.
“Oh,” she said.
“Oh?”
“I’d forgotten he was part of this.”
“Chet?” Bernie looked confused. “He’s part of …” He glanced over at me. “… everything.”
Of course. We’re partners, me and Bernie, in the Little Detective Agency, if I haven’t made that clear already.
“Okey-doke,” said Anya. “I’ll just squeeze in behind.”
“Oh, no,” Bernie said. “That’s not necessary. Into the back, Chet.”
The back was this tiny little sort of bench. I’d sat there before, but only when Charlie or Suzie was coming along for the ride.
“Chet?”
I have this ability to make my whole body very stiff and immovable, but I hardly ever use it.
“That’s all right,” Anya said. “He’s bigger than I am anyway.” She sprang into the back and wedged her backpack between the front seats, all in one easy motion.
Bernie’s eyebrows rose. They were straightened out now after his shower, but Bernie’s eyebrows were always expressive, spoke a language of their own. Right now they were saying he was impressed.
“I weigh ninety-nine pounds,” Anya said. “Soaking wet.”
Bernie looked thoughtful. I was thinking, too, along the lines of: I’m a hundred-plus-pounder. More or less than Anya? I’ll let you be the judge of that.
“How much do you weigh, Bernie?” Anya said as we pulled away from the curb.
Bernie’s weight: had that ever come up before? Not that I remembered. I waited to hear.
“Not actually sure,” Bernie said.
“Don’t be shy.”
“Haven’t stepped on a scale in a while,” Bernie said.
“How about at your last checkup?”
“That’s been a while, too.”
She gave him a long look, but he didn’t see it, now that we were on the road. We drove out of Anya’s development, went by some strip malls packed with fast-food joints. Humans come up with great ideas sometimes, fast-food joints being one of the very best.
Maybe Bernie was thinking the same sort of thing—not the first time that had happened to us—because he said, “Want to pick up something to eat along the way?”
“I packed some sandwiches,” Anya said, tapping her backpack.
Tuna, peanut butter, egg salad: old news.
“Hey, thanks,” said Bernie.
We took a ramp, hit the freeway.
“Too breezy?” Bernie said, glancing at Anya in the rearview mirror. The wind was blowing back her hair—short and kind of reddish. Women often looked different with their hair sort of out of the picture like that. Anya, for example, looked older.
“I love the wind,” she said.
Me, too. Then I had a strange thought: so did Suzie. Where had that come from? What did it mean? No idea. I pushed the whole thing out of my mind. That was easy. Nothing sets you up better for the day than a clear mind.
“Good thing,” Bernie said, “because the top’s gone.”
“What happened to it?” Anya said.
We merged into light traffic, got in the fast lane. We like the fast lane best, me and Bernie. He started telling the story of how we lost the top, a long story I’d heard many times, involving a perp named Fishhead Hobbs, a heist he was planning at the jewelry store in the Downtown Ritz—this was the same case where I ran into trouble at the fountain in their lobby—and a bee sting, which was when Fishhead’s whole plan started coming apart. Bernie’s words streamed by in a very pleasant way. City smells grew weaker; country smells grew stronger; and at last we were out of the Valley and into the desert. Hills rose in the distance, the zigzag foot trails up their slopes shining like silver in the morning light. I’ve been on trails like that before, wanted to be on them again, like right now, and real bad.
“Easy, big guy,” Bernie said.
“What got into him?” said Anya.
“He likes open country, that’s all,” said Bernie.
Doesn’t everyone?
We left the freeway, took two-lane blacktop, rose higher, the air getting fresher and cooler. Did Bernie say something about crossing a state line? Maybe, but that was around the time I spotted a roadrunner. This little bugger, like all roadrunners, thought he was fast. Well, get ready, amigo, to see what real speed—
“Chet?”
Soon after that, we took a lunch break. Bernie parked by a long flat-topped rock at the side of the road, just like a bench. Peanut butter for Bernie; egg salad for Anya; tuna for me—the chunky kind, my favorite. Mountains rose, not too far away, greener than the mountains I was used to.
“Tell me about your ex-husband,” Bernie said.
“What do you want to know?” Anya said.
“Start with the investment business.”
Anya gazed at the distant green mountains. A cloud or two hung over them, not dark cloud
s, but the fat, golden kind.
“This used to happen to me a lot as a kid,” Anya said.
“What’s that?” said Bernie.
“Wishing that time would stop.”
Whoa. She was wishing time would stop right now, leaving us with the crusts of one egg salad sandwich? At that moment I knew one thing for sure: Anya was a risk taker.
She turned to Bernie. “Do you ever think that?”
“No,” said Bernie. Phew. We were on the same page, meaning dinner was still in the plans, and possibly a snack before that.
Anya’s face flushed. That’s something I look for. You see it in kids and in women, hardly ever in men. It has something to do with feelings inside; I haven’t gotten farther than that—every time I try I come up against the thought: does that mean kids and women have more feelings than men? And stop right there, on account of knowing Bernie the way I do.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to—”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Bernie said. “Back to the investment business.”
Anya took a deep breath, her color returning to normal. “Guy handles money for some private investors,” she said.
“Are these the people you don’t want around Devin?”
“Maybe that wasn’t fair,” Anya said. “I don’t really know them.”
FOUR
Back in the car. So quiet, except for the wind, and even the wind was sort of quiet. There are lots of different quiets: this one was all about everybody thinking to themselves. No idea what was on Bernie’s mind or Anya’s, but I was thinking: we’re dealing with a guy named Guy on this job? That couldn’t be good.
We drove into green mountains, tall trees unlike any I’d known standing by the side of the road. A fast-flowing creek also appeared at times, the water frothing over shining rocks and looking delicious.
“Has Guy ever been violent with you?” Bernie said after a while.
“Not really,” Anya said.
“I’ll take that for a yes,” said Bernie.
Anya gazed at the back of his head. From the way I was sitting in the shotgun seat—where I belonged—angled and facing Bernie, I could easily watch both of them without turning my head. Humans have to turn their heads much more than we do, in the nation within, to keep their eye on things.
“You’re a smart man,” Anya said. “Autumn mentioned that.”
Bernie looked surprised but didn’t say anything.
“He pushed me, but just once,” Anya said. “That was the night I made up my mind to separate. There’s a line, you know? Especially with someone the size of Guy.”
“Does he carry a gun?” Bernie said.
“I don’t know about now, but back when we were together, no,” Anya said. After a silence she said, “I notice you didn’t ask how big he is.”
Bernie shrugged.
“Wouldn’t most men in your position?”
“What position is that?”
“My—air quotes—friend,” said Anya, kind of losing me.
Bernie shrugged again. This was about the size of the guy named Guy? Who cared about stuff like that? Not me and Bernie.
“Are you armed, Bernie?” Anya said.
“Nope.”
Oh, too bad. A little gunplay is always exciting, and the .38 Special is often in the glove box. So: this wasn’t a real job, more like a vacation trip. All of a sudden my eyelids got real heavy. Does that ever happen to you, so fast that you barely have time to get comfortable before they slam shut?
“… actually a pretty good father,” Anya was saying. A dream I was having—all about chasing a chubby javelina in the canyon behind our place on Mesquite Road, a chubby javelina that from out of nowhere sprouted a rattlesnake rattle on its twisted little tail in that way dreams have of abruptly getting away from you—broke in tiny pieces that zoomed away and vanished, like spaceships in those sci-fi movies when Bernie and I went through a period of watching sci-fi movies, over pretty quickly, one good thing about it.
“Not that he sees much of Devin,” Anya went on, “but he’s never missed a child support payment and he’s paying the whole shot for the camp—it was even his idea.”
We weren’t moving. I poked my head up over the door. We were parked at the side of a narrow road, flowers everywhere and a creek bubbling by. Hey! It was still a dream!
Then I saw Bernie and Anya. She was on the near side of the creek, dipping her bare foot in the water. Bernie was on the other side, sort of wandering around at the edge of a forest—the first forest I’d seen in real life, although I knew them from the Discovery Channel—like he was looking for something.
“It’s not a fat camp, exactly,” Anya was saying. “More of a build-you-into-a-man wilderness thing.”
“Uh-huh,” said Bernie, a sort of uh-huh he had for when he wasn’t really listening.
“Not that Devin doesn’t have a weight problem,” Anya said. “It breaks my heart sometimes. Kids can be so cruel.” She took a pack of cigarettes—uh-oh, Anya smoked cigarettes?—from the pocket of her jeans—how they fit in there was hard to say, her jeans being so tight—and lit up, flinging the match in the stream. “Tell me why that is?”
“Ah,” said Bernie, suddenly stooping by a tree trunk and pulling something out of the ground. “I thought this might …”
“What’s that?” said Anya.
Bernie held it up. “Boletus edulis,” he said.
“A mushroom?”
“Yup.”
“Edible?”
“Delicious.”
I hopped out of the car, no particular reason.
“Are you sure?” Anya said. “When I was a kid my dad told me never to eat wild mushrooms.”
“Yeah?” said Bernie. “My dad showed me how to find the good ones.”
Bernie’s dad was suddenly in the picture? He never talks about his dad, who died a long time ago. His mom, a real piece of work, lives in Florida with the husband who came after the husband after Bernie’s dad, with possibly one more husband in there somewhere. I met her once: she called Bernie Kiddo! But I know now that wasn’t enough reason to do what I did, and it will never happen again, supposing she pays us another visit.
“He sounds like a cool guy,” Anya said.
Bernie didn’t say anything.
“Your dad, I’m talking about,” Anya said. “Are you still close?”
Bernie shook his head.
“That’s too bad,” Anya said.
“Yeah,” said Bernie. He looked over at me. “C’mon, Chet, grab a drink of this nice mountain water.”
Exactly what I was thinking, or just about to think. The next thing I knew I was standing midstream up to my shoulders, lapping up just about the best water I’d ever tasted—fresh and cold, with just a little hint of something stony from the water flowing over smooth clean rocks.
“Amazing,” said Anya.
“What is?” said Bernie.
“The way he really seems to understand you.”
Bernie gave her a funny look, like he didn’t quite get what she was talking about. Neither did I. He took a long step onto one of those smooth rocks in the stream—careful, Bernie!—and another, maybe slipping a bit on the second one, but he lowered his hand to my back and kept his balance, and then he was on the near-side bank.
“Who wants to try this mushroom?” Bernie said. He and I were the only takers. What can I tell you? Delish. About that time, kind of late in the game, Bernie noticed the cigarette in Anya’s hand. “You smoke?”
“I’m trying to quit,” Anya said.
“Me, too,” said Bernie.
“Sorry,” Anya said and spun the cigarette into the stream. It fell in with a tiny hiss—I love sounds like that!—and bobbed away in the current.
“Hey,” said Bernie, giving her another one of those second looks of his. “Thanks.”
Not long after, back in the car, we entered a long rising canyon with mountains on both sides, tall green trees growing on their lower slopes but all
rocky and steep above that. The air smelled different from any other air I’d ever smelled in my life, all the scents—of trees and grass and flowers, and the toothpaste Bernie had used that morning, and the smoke on Anya’s every breath even though she hadn’t lit up again—so much stronger and also each one more spread out, with more room for itself, sort of more smells and less air. Made no sense, I know, and I drove the whole complicated business out of my mind just as we turned onto a dirt road and passed under a sign that hung beneath a huge set of horns nailed to a thick wooden beam. Who needs complications?
“Big Bear Wilderness Camp,” Bernie read. “Eight thousand and ninety-nine feet.”
Did he say bear? We didn’t have bears in the Valley, or anywhere in our desert, but I knew all I needed to know about them from Animal Planet, which was that I had no desire to meet one.
“This is exactly where my altitude headache kicked in when I drove Devin up here,” Anya said.
“And now?” Bernie said.
“Nope. I feel fine.”
So did I. I’d had a headache once, after this time when a perp name of Jocko hit me with a baseball bat, a Willie McCovey model, Bernie said, which we later sold to a collector for a “tidy sum”—“for once, how about a sum so big it’s untidy?” Bernie had said to our buddy Sergeant Rick Torres from Missing Persons in the Valley PD, a joke Rick didn’t get, me neither, and anyway, Bernie invested the money in something or other that soon went belly up, and Jocko’s now breaking rocks in the hot sun, so nothing to worry about there, but the point was that unless I’m dinged on the head I don’t get headaches, which is different for humans. Bernie, for example, wakes up with a headache if he drinks too much bourbon the night before—half a bottle always does the trick—and as for Leda, headaches could strike at any time for any reason, although most often when they were about to go to bed, she and Bernie.
But enough of that. We crossed a narrow wooden bridge. A stream flowed underneath, wider and faster than the creek I’d drunk from. Not thirsty at all, but I wouldn’t have minded a quick sample. What was going on with all this water? Nothing like travel: you got to see new things.
We went through a grove of trees—did I spot something dark and shadowy moving deep in there?—and followed the road on a long curve toward the sunny side of the canyon. Up ahead a large, flat clearing backed into the mountainside, and in the clearing stood a few big log cabins—smoke rising from the chimney of the biggest one, eggs and sausages in the air—and across from them at the top of a little rise, two rows of blue tents. Camp! Of course! Everything clicked together in my mind, a lovely feeling that hadn’t happened since the Furillo divorce when I caught the scent of Mr. Furillo’s aftershave on the flight attendant who turned out to be his girlfriend. Case closed, although I didn’t grab her by the pant leg: that’s a no-no in divorce work, a lesson I’d learned early on, and then relearned a few times. But the point was we had a tent, me and Bernie, and had been on lots of camping trips, bringing Charlie along, plus Suzie, once or twice. Sometimes our camping trips took us out into the desert, but mostly we camped in the backyard. My job was to carry the mallet for banging in the tent pegs, and soon after that we’d be roasting all sorts of things over a fire, and Bernie would haul out the ukulele and singing would start up, all our favorite camp songs like “Parachute Woman,” “The Sky Is Crying,” “Arrivederci, Roma.” Had we brought the ukulele now? I didn’t remember seeing it, but nobody’s memory is perfect, as Bernie had said to Leda during one of their last fights.
The Dog Who Knew Too Much Page 3