A Fistful of Collars

by Spencer Quinn

  “Maybe there’s something in you that discourages the others,” Bernie said.

  Her face went white.

  “But none of that matters right now,” Bernie said. “What matters is why you didn’t tell me about April.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Not in so many words,” Bernie said. “But we were all around it. For example, you were vague about the Flower Mart, pretended it meant nothing to you. Care to revise that statement?”

  Dina said nothing.

  Bernie lowered his voice, just at the time when you might have thought he was going to raise it. “Your best friend was stabbed to death and tossed in the trash, Dina. Come on.”

  Dina squeezed her eyes shut. The tiniest drop leaked from the corner of one of them. “When I heard that . . .” She shook her head. “It tore me apart. I’ve never been the same.”

  Bernie’s face, already pretty hard, got harder. “Who killed her?”

  “I don’t know.” Dina looked at Bernie’s face. “Oh, my God, you can’t think it was me. She was my best friend. We had pet names for each other, from when we could barely talk.”

  “What were they?” Bernie said.

  A smile crossed Dina’s face, very small and quickly gone, but she looked a little younger in that moment. “She called me Dee Dee. I called her Prilly.”

  Bernie said nothing.

  “Now you’re going to grill me on where I was when she was killed and can I prove it,” Dina said.

  “Nope,” said Bernie. “Although I am interested in whether the police ever talked to you.”

  “They didn’t.”

  “Tell me about Manny Chavez,” Bernie said.

  “I knew Manny,” Dina said. “He was her boyfriend for, like, six weeks. Boyfriends came and went back then. It wasn’t that serious—we were seventeen.”

  “Were they having sex?” Bernie said.

  “Who wasn’t?” said Dina. “She wasn’t in love with him, or anything like that.”

  “Was it more serious for him?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe not because of who she was, but what she was.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Blond and Anglo. A kind of status thing, especially for those gangbanger types.”

  “Manny was in a gang?”

  “He was more of a wannabe—had a Harley, which was what attracted April in the first place—but some of the others were the real thing.”

  “What others?”

  “Guys Manny hung with,” Dina said.

  “What was the name of the gang?”

  Dina shook her head. “I’m not sure it was that well organized, with a name and everything. There was one guy, a little older, maybe. I remember not liking the way he looked at me. I was crazy back then, but not foolish.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember. Something Hispanic, maybe.”

  “Like Ramon?” Bernie said.

  “Might have been.”

  “Last time we spoke, you said that name meant nothing to you.”

  “So? A person can’t forget minor details with you?”

  Bernie seemed to think about that for a moment. “Have you seen Ramon since?” he said.

  “Since . . . since the summer April died? No.”

  “What about Manny?”

  “No.”

  “Heard anything about him over the years?”

  “No.”

  “How about lately?”

  “No.”

  “So you didn’t know he was stabbed to death last week?”

  Dina put a hand to her chest. “I did not.”

  “Happened in a foreclosed house on North Coursin Street,” Bernie said. “Only a dozen blocks from here.”

  She raised her hands, palms up.

  “April’s mother told me her daughter dumped Manny,” Bernie said.

  “How is she?”

  “Not too good. But is it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she dump him?”

  “I told you,” Dina said. “Back then six weeks—”

  Bernie made a chopping motion. I liked seeing that, hoped it would happen again, and soon. “Her mother heard her on the phone, almost certainly with you,” Bernie said, “saying she was interested in someone else. I need that name.”

  Dina said nothing.

  “How much did you have to drink at the ball game?”

  Dina looked surprised. I was, too. Ball game? Had there been talk of a ball game, kind of vague and—

  “The night Carla had those box seats,” Bernie added.

  Dina shrugged. “I probably had a few beers.”

  “I’m guessing you’re one of those people who get more talkative after a pop or two.”

  “Guess away.”

  “And maybe you wanted to impress her—this successful reporter—with a tidbit of information she didn’t know.”

  Silence. It went on and on. Not a complete silence for me, on account of a rat I heard creeping across the space above the ceiling.

  At last Bernie said, “You’ve answered the question.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You should have said, What tidbit? The fact that you didn’t means you told Carla that Thad Perry was from the Valley or spent time here. The question is why you’re trying to hide it.”

  Dina glared at him. Yes, a tough cookie.

  “So far,” Bernie said, “it doesn’t look like you’re in any kind of trouble. But once a series of murders starts up, it’s hard to get it stopped. So the next one will be partly on you.”

  “I hate your guts,” Dina said.

  People told Bernie that from time to time. I knew they didn’t mean it.

  “Comes with the job,” Bernie said.

  “And what’s that?” said Dina. “What’s your goddamn job?”

  “Retribution.”

  Whatever that meant, it made her stop hating him at once: I could see it on her face. She looked at Bernie in a whole new way. Not liking him, it wasn’t that. More . . . respecting. We have that, too, in the nation within. Dina took a big breath and let it out real slow.

  “This was long before he was famous, of course,” she said. “Thad Perry was a kid, just like us. He came here that summer to visit a cousin and met April at a car wash where the cousin worked. It all happened real fast, maybe two weeks from when they met till she died. He left town right away.”

  “Did he kill her?” Bernie said.

  “I don’t know,” Dina said. “He was gentler than most of the boys, and more polite. And much better looking. I saw them together just the one time, at the car wash. They were so beautiful together.”

  “Did they argue?” Bernie said. “Fight with each other?”

  “Not that I know of,” Dina said.

  Bernie gazed at her. “How come you didn’t want to talk about this?”

  Dina rose and went to the window, pushed the leaf of a big plant aside, looked out.

  “What are you afraid of?” Bernie said.

  “All the usual things,” Dina said.

  “Including the cousin?”

  Dina turned to him, her mouth opening.

  “Was his name Jiggs?” Bernie said.

  “If you know all this, why ask?” Dina said. “Nolan Jiggs, this king-size shithead. He blew town with Thad Perry, something I didn’t realize at the time. Then, years later, just before Thad’s first movie came out, he came back and found me.” Dina turned from the window, the plant leaf flopping back into place. “He paid me five grand to keep things to myself.”

  “That was the carrot,” Bernie said.

  “You’re not as dumb as you look,” Dina said. “The stick was a promise to kill me if I breathed a word to anyone.” She gazed at Bernie through the leaves. “Are you and your dog going to keep that from happening?”

  Bet the ranch.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Very late at night—but a time we’re used to being up at in this business—the Valley ge
ts as quiet as it gets. That near-quiet was what I was hearing now, like everyone was having restless sleeps. Bernie, at the wheel, face harder than ever in the green light from the dials, turned to me and said, “Take us at least twenty minutes to get there, big guy, even at this hour. Why don’t you grab a quick catnap?”

  Say what? I sat up my straightest for the whole ride, which turned out to be all the way across town to West Side Heights, one of the fanciest neighborhoods in the Valley.

  “Not sleepy, huh?” Bernie said, as we wound up a hilly street lined with big houses spaced far apart. Not if cats were sleepy, I sure wasn’t. Bernie pulled into a circular driveway, outside lights coming on right away, and stopped in front of a house that looked a bit like the old mission downtown. “Time to blow up this whole damn thing and start over,” Bernie said, as we got out of the car and went to the front door, one of those massive dark-wood double doors with lots of metalwork. We had no dynamite on us—one of the easiest smells going—so the explosions weren’t coming anytime soon. Fine with me. We’d blown up a shed once—the wrong one, it turned out—a really exciting day, at first, but Bernie had—not miscalculated, no way that could ever happen, more like he’d gotten a little too enthusiastic when it came to the number of dynamite sticks, and in the end we’d taken out a sort of bridge as well as the shed and all the tires on the Porsche, and had to walk a long way to the nearest gas station.

  Bernie rang the bell. I heard it sound deep inside the house, a big house, the size of many sheds. That worried me.

  Footsteps approached on the other side of the door: a man, barefoot, powerful. Bolts slid, locks clicked, the door swung open, and there was Bernie’s pal Gronk, the insurance dude from downtown. Had he hooked us up with the mayor’s office in the first place, or something like that? Hard to keep all this straight; good thing that wasn’t my territory. Gronk’s hair was all over the place and he wore a polka-dot silk robe. Polka dots do nothing for me, but silk has a very nice feel, something that had led to a problem or two in the past. Not now, of course: we were on the job.

  “Bernie?” Gronk said. His sleepy eyes were waking up fast; Bernie was like that, too, when he had to be. “What’s up?”

  “Need to talk,” Bernie said.

  Gronk paused for a moment, then nodded. “Come on in.”

  We went in, and at that moment a woman called from upstairs.

  “Stevie? Who is it?”

  “Nobody,” Gronk called over his shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”

  “But I heard you talking,” the woman said.

  “It’s just an old friend.”

  “Friend?”

  “Buddy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “Okay, Stevie. Don’t be too long. You’ve got that breakfast meeting.”

  Gronk cocked his head, listening for more. There was no more. “My wife,” he said. He lowered his voice. “The new one.” He led us down the hall and into a room that looked like a sports bar, except smaller, and not even that much smaller. “The old one was a much better sleeper.” Gronk gestured at the rows of bottles behind the bar. “Something to drink?” He sat on a stool.

  Bernie shook his head. He leaned against the bar. When he gets tired his leg bothers him. Sit down, big guy, I thought, sit down and have that drink. But he didn’t.

  “There’s a problem?” Gronk said.

  “Lots of them,” Bernie said. His voice wasn’t pally. Weren’t they old pals? “The one that concerns you is that story about getting me hired by the mayor’s office.”

  Gronk stared at Bernie for a bit, and then sighed. “You never change.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’ve always been and will always be a stubborn son of a bitch,” Gronk said. “A stubborn son of a bitch who doesn’t ever know what’s good for him.”

  “Spill it,” Bernie said.

  “You can’t just leave this simply as me getting a chance to do you a small favor and seizing the opportunity?”

  “Not if it didn’t go down that way.”

  “But what’s the goddamn difference?”

  “Life and death,” Bernie said.

  “I don’t get it,” said Gronk.

  Whoa! You can smell the difference right away, poor Carla in the Dumpster, for example. But Gronk wasn’t in the business, so maybe I was expecting too much.

  “I’ll explain when this is all over,” Bernie said. “Right now, there’s no time.”

  “Christ,” said Gronk. “Anybody else, I’d . . .” He went silent before I found out what he’d do; with a big strong dude like Gronk, probably plenty. “All right,” he went on. “Attaching you to the mayor’s office wasn’t my idea.”

  Bernie voice got quiet. “Whose was it?”

  “A friend of yours,” Gronk said.

  “Who?”

  “A cop. He . . . he told me about your situation, all the debt, a play you made on the commodity market, which I had trouble believing, something else about the fashion business, the whole crazy thing adding up to the fact that you could use a high-paying gig in the worst way and I was in a position to make it happen.”

  “The name,” Bernie said.

  “He didn’t want you to know,” Gronk said. “So you wouldn’t feel obligated. He was being stand-up, Bernie—why isn’t that good enough?”

  Bernie waited.

  “I checked him out,” Gronk said. “For a Metro cop, he’s got a good reputation.”

  Bernie kept waiting.

  “Stine,” Gronk said at last. “Lieutenant Lou Stine.”

  Dawn was breaking as we drove up High Line Road, at first just a milkiness in one part of the sky. Then it spread, pushing all the stars away and getting rid of the dark. After that there was a moment in the sky that reminded me of a time Charlie spilled all his paints, and then a small rounded sliver of sun poked up into view. I felt real good. Sunshine glowed beautifully on the tissue Boo Ferris was blowing his nose in.

  “Goddamn dust,” he said approaching the car. He looked over at me. “Didn’t realize that.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bernie said.

  “His ears don’t match,” said Boo Ferris.

  “I think it’s a plus,” Bernie said.

  “Oh, right, sure, of course,” Boo Ferris said. “Like if they were both black or both white, then . . .”

  “Exactly,” Bernie said. He made a little gesture toward the gate, meaning: open it, let’s roll.

  Boo Ferris checked his clipboard. “Headed up to the old Comstock place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t see you on the list for today,” Boo Ferris said. “Want me to call up?”

  Bernie shook his head.

  “Don’t want no trouble,” said Boo Ferris.

  “Who does?”

  Boo Ferris smiled. He had some teeth missing toward the back. The sight made me want to bite something, no idea why. Life can be pretty crazy sometimes. “You do,” he said. “All the guys inside thought that.”

  “Total bullshit,” Bernie said.

  Boo Ferris laughed and raised the gate.

  We drove to the top of the mountain and up the driveway of that huge house practically hanging over the cliff. “Not everything has to match,” Bernie said.

  The chopper stood on the helipad, its blades sort of droopy, which made me think of Dina’s plants for some reason. This case? I didn’t understand it, not one little bit. As we walked toward the house, the whole sun rose into view, the bottom wobbling and then growing steady. You could count on the sun, the same way you could count on . . . Bernie.

  “Hey, Chet, what’s with you?”

  Uh-oh. Was that me, bumping into the backs of Bernie’s legs, and more than once? Maybe, but I really felt like doing it. We were in for a beautiful day.

  I headed toward the front door, but Bernie made this soft click-click in his mouth, meaning “come,” so I did. We walked all the way around the house, real quiet. All the curta
ins were closed and the house was humming a low AC hum. We came to the gym. No curtains there. We looked in, saw nobody. Bernie went to the glass door, examined the lock, and took out his credit card. We’d had problems with that credit card before, maybe the worst one being a lunch at Le Desert Bistro where Bernie picked up the check and the waiter came back with the card and wagged his finger in what Bernie said was a French sort of way, French sort of ways turning out to make him mad, and things went downhill, which was too bad on account of that being the let’s-all-get-along lunch where we met Malcolm for the very first time. But not a problem today since the card always worked great when it came to B and E, which was what we were doing now.

  One thing I’ve noticed about B and Es: it’s different every time. For example, at the critical moment where Bernie leans forward and starts carefully sliding in the credit card, did a bird ever fly by, real low, and drop a smear of that weird white bird poop square on his shoulder? Not that I remembered, amigo. Bernie made a sound like “Gah,” and backed away from the door, twisting his head so he could get a good look at his shoulder. Meanwhile, other stuff was happening. The bird circled around and landed on a flowering bush right behind us, the flowers bright red like the markings on the bird’s wings, an unimportant detail I now realize, that almost distracted me from noticing the door suddenly opening from the inside and Jiggs, stooping down, giving Brando a little push into the great outdoors, the great outdoors being one of the best human expressions going, a subject for later or possibly never. Brando had a stretch—a real nice one: how did he get his back like that?—and glanced around. If he saw me or Bernie, he gave no sign, but he spotted the bird for sure, and that stretch turned into a kind of slow glide, hard to describe and not slow at all, really, and then, despite how pudgy he was, Brando took to the air, a fat golden streak, and pounced on the bird, caught him like there was nothing to it—far from the case, as I well knew from experience.

  But back in the doorway—things happening fast now, and in more than one place, the way it goes down in our business sometimes—Jiggs, wearing faded jeans and nothing else, was noticing us big-time. His gaze went quickly to Bernie, me, the credit card, and back to Bernie. His face started to redden and his whole body, huge to begin with, seemed to expand, kind of like a balloon.