“Chet! What are you doing?”
Getting a good grip on Nevins’s wrist, in preparation for dragging him the rest of the way up the stairs, what else?
“Knock it off.”
Knock it off? I don’t need to be told twice. If knocking it off is what Bernie wants, then knocking it off is—
“CHET!”
I knocked it off. There was one door at the top of the stairs, hanging open. We went on in.
Nevins turned out to be the messy type, often the case with guys who live alone. No one would call our place on Mesquite Road actually messy, but, of course, Bernie didn’t live alone. He lives with me, and Charlie on some weekends and every second holiday, meaning yes on Thanksgiving and no on Christmas, or the other way around, or either, or . . .
Back to Nevins. We were in a small living room, things all over the place—clothes, empty bottles, empty food cartons. Bernie sort of unfolded Nevins on the couch while I made sure the food cartons were indeed completely empty, just doing my job. And they were, all except for the end of what might once have been a spring roll. I made quick work of it, felt hungrier than before. What was that all about? If you kept eating, would you get hungrier and hungrier? No. So what was going on? I left it at that, followed Bernie into a tiny kitchen, too messy to describe, so I won’t. But I shouldn’t leave out the joint, smoldering away on a counter. Bernie dropped it in the sink, filled a glass with water, and returned to the living room.
We stood over Nevins, watched him breathe. “There are nine billion humans on the planet, Chet. Ever ask yourself—what’s the point?”
I never did.
“What would be wrong with scaling back to eight billion? Six? Three? If we could frack pure water out of rock, then maybe none of this would . . .” Had I ever been more lost in my life? But at that moment, Bernie poured the glass of water on Nevins’s face, which must have been the fracking part, and everything returned to normal. We were on the job, me and Bernie.
Nevins came to life, all sputtering and annoyed, the way they do at times like this. He sat up, groaned a bit, wiped his face on the back of his hand, gave us nasty looks, and said nasty things I’m sure he didn’t mean.
“How about we clean the slate, start all over?” Bernie said. His voice sounded nice and relaxed, and he was standing nice and relaxed, too. I felt nice and relaxed myself. We’re a lot alike in some ways, don’t forget.
“What the hell do you want?” Nevins said. “I’m a cop. I can arrest you at any moment.”
“I’m tempted to see how that would play out,” Bernie said. “But it wouldn’t be in your best interest.”
“Huh?”
“You’d be compounding your mistake.”
Nevins blinked, then kind of winced, like the force of just blinking made his head hurt. Maybe I went on a bit too much about Bernie’s hook and that sweet uppercut. His jab is not too shabby. I gazed at his hand, now relaxed. Bernie has beautiful hands. You might not think they can do what they can do, but Nevins wouldn’t be backing you up on that.
Bernie took a piece of paper from his pocket, held it up so Nevins could see.
“What’s this?” Nevins said.
“Private investigator’s license for DC and the surrounding suburbs. Notice the signature.”
Nevins gazed at the sheet of paper, rubbed his eyes, tried again. We do some eye rubbing of our own in the nation within, but only in itchy situations. Were Nevins’s eyes itchy? He was having a bad day.
“Soares gave you this?” Nevins said.
“Back up to speed,” Bernie said. “Good job. The point is Lieutenant Soares has hired us to assist in the Eben St. John murder investigation.”
Nevins opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Soares doesn’t do things like that—he’s a control freak.”
“This is a special case.”
“Special how?”
“That’s what brings us to you.”
Nevins went through the mouth routine again. A thought hit me: his mouth was doing it on its own! My tail played the same sort of tricks, but this was the first time I’d seen something similar in a human. Nevins—bleeding a bit from the nose, eyes glassy, reeking of pot, plus those sweatpants hadn’t been laundered in some time—was growing on me.
“Who’s this ‘us’ you keep talking about?” he said.
“Chet and I,” Bernie said.
“Chet?”
Bernie pointed my way.
“You’re what, like partners with a dog?”
And just like that, Nevins stopped growing on me and started shrinking.
“Your point?” Bernie said.
Nevins tried to wriggle farther away from Bernie, but the couch stood against the wall, and he had nowhere to go.
“We’ll be filing a report with Soares when all this shakes out,” Bernie said, “but at this moment, and not for too many moments more, you’ve still got a say in your destiny.”
“My destiny?” Nevins said.
“Not in a spiritual sense,” Bernie said. He glanced at me. “Although do we ever know when the spiritual is in the picture? Maybe the whole point. But forget all that—” Whew! Good news!—“I’m referring to your career in law enforcement.”
“You threatening me?” Nevins said.
“Exactly,” said Bernie. “My apologies for being obscure. I’m threatening you with exposure unless you play ball.”
Whoa! Just like that, out of the blue, we were going to play ball with Nevins? Wasn’t this an interview? Was playing ball ever part of interviews? Not that I remembered, but I’m the type who’s good to go at any time when it comes to playing ball. Bernie throws—he pitched for Army before his arm blew out, can still wing the ball a country mile, although we play in cities, too—and I fetch. I crowded in a bit closer. Would Nevins be doing some of the fetching? I didn’t know how I felt about that. And then I did. It was a bad idea.
“What the hell?” Nevins said, shrinking back on the couch. “Is he gonna bite me?”
“What a suggestion!” Bernie said, which was my take, too, but exactly. “Why would you even think something like that?”
“On account of how he’s practically on top of me with his mouth open wide,” said Nevins. “Plus his teeth are huge and he’s growling.”
Bernie turned to me. “Everything all right, big guy?”
Most decidedly not. I did the fetching, end of story. Once, back in the days when my best pal Iggy still got outside a lot, Bernie had just thrown me a ball when Iggy came pelting over from his place and snatched it right out of the air, a total surprise that led to some back-and-forth over at old man Heydrich’s place, old man Heydrich getting a new lawn out of the deal, the grass kind that Bernie hates. We ourselves have the desert kind, not so easily torn up. “That green cost me a lot of green,” Bernie said after, maybe on his second or third bourbon, dirt still under his fingernails from laying the sod. Perhaps a joke of some sort. Who wouldn’t love Bernie? Besides old man Heydrich, of course, who didn’t love anyone I knew of.
“. . . Chet?” Bernie was saying. “A little more space, if you can manage it?”
Nothing easier. Just a little was required? Done! I backed off the littlest possible.
“Good boy,” Bernie said.
“He didn’t do shit,” said Nevins.
“You’re welcome to your opinion,” Bernie said. “The point is Chet likes to see some cooperation, and you’ve given us zip.”
“He’s a goddamn dog!”
“Language.”
“He’s a dog.”
“Correct. And very friendly. The last thing he’d want to see would be your career in ruins.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nevins said.
“Think back,” Bernie said. “Back to when you were guarding the crime scene at Eben St. John’s off
ice.”
Nevins’s eyes shifted away, toward the window. I shifted my whole body in that direction. I’d seen perps jump out windows before, higher ones than this. Not on my watch, Nevins old buddy.
“What about it?” Nevins said.
“You told Soares you were standing in the hall, thought you heard a sound coming from the elevator end, turned that way, and got hit on the head from behind.”
“So?”
“We’re not buying it.”
“Why not? Doc said I was lucky, coulda been a skull fracture.”
“I know you got hit,” Bernie said. “It’s a question of where.”
“Where? You mean like occipital, cerebellum, like that?”
“I mean in the hall or someplace else,” Bernie said.
Nevins’s gaze went toward the window again, got interrupted by me. “Fuckin’ hell,” he said.
Bernie nodded in a sympathetic way.
“Soares put you on to this?” Nevins said.
“No.”
“But you’re working for him.”
“With him,” Bernie said. “On the Eben St. John murder, not on personnel matters in his precinct.”
Nevins gave Bernie a long look.
“Throwing you a lifeline here, Nevins,” Bernie said. Nevins raised his hands, let them flap down to his sides. “Christ,” he said. “I couldn’t have been gone for more than one minute, ninety seconds tops.”
“Tell us about it,” Bernie said.
EIGHTEEN
* * *
I’m a human being,” Nevins said. “Sometimes you gotta take a piss, orders or no orders.”
Whoa! Taking a piss made you a human being? It just so happens I’m an expert in this area, having taken pisses Nevins could only dream of. He needed to do some rethinking, and pronto.
“You know the point where you just can’t hang on?” Nevins said. “When you’re gonna piss your pants the next second?”
Say one thing for Nevins: some rethinking on his part required, yes, but he had a way of holding my interest. His line of talk made you want to hear more, or at least that was how it worked on me. Pants are not a factor in my case, of course. I wear a black collar for dress-up, and used to have a brown one for every day, now replaced by one made of gator hide, which still gives off the faintest whiff of gator, reminding me always of the scariest night of my life, maybe something we can go into another time.
“Bottom line,” Bernie said. “You abandoned your post.”
“Kind of judgmental, how you put that,” said Nevins.
“Judgmental would be having you shot at dawn,” Bernie said.
Nevins got an angry look on his face, like he was about to do something crazy. He dabbed at his bloody nose instead.
Bernie’s voice softened a bit. “So you went to the nearest men’s room.”
Nevins nodded.
“Which, as I remember, is past the elevators on the left.”
Nevins nodded again.
“And then?”
“I went back. Couldn’t a been more than ninety seconds. Twenty seconds there, twenty seconds back, plus fifty for pissing, max. The longest I’ve ever done was forty-seven.”
“You time your pisses?” Bernie said.
My ears were up as high as they could go. I’d never heard anything as fascinating, and never even expected to.
“Not now,” Nevins said. “This was back in the academy. We had a competition. One guy did a minute nineteen.”
“He should have his prostate checked,” Bernie said.
“Huh?” said Nevins.
“Never mind,” Bernie said. “You’re back at your post.”
“Yeah,” said Nevins. “Everything how I left it, tape still up, door closed, and then I hear a sound from inside.”
“Not from behind you, as you told Soares,” Bernie said.
“Ain’t that obvious by now?” said Nevins.
“Nailing it down’s a big part of what we do,” Bernie said. “Next?”
“Next? What would you adone?”
“Called for backup.”
Nevins snorted. Pigs are the best snorters, in my experience, but it’s always nice when a human takes a shot at it, and I was enjoying the moment when Nevins almost knocked me off my feet, not so easy to do, my balancing skills being off the charts, according to Bernie. “Pussy,” Nevins said.
“You calling me a pussy? Bernie said.
The room went quiet. Nevins gave Bernie a long look, then turned away. “Naw,” he said.
The right answer. Nothing catlike about Bernie. There’s only one creature out there that he reminds me of. I think you know.
“So instead of following procedure, you opened the door.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And?”
“Stepped inside. And then it’s like I said before—I felt this rush of air behind my head, and next thing, I was out like a light.”
“All of that now happening inside the office, not in the hall.”
“Makes no difference, ’cepting for the procedural part,” Nevins said. “Why get Soares all riled up for nothing?”
“Ever considered other careers?” Bernie said.
“You bet,” said Nevins. “I got this idea for an invention.”
“Yeah?”
“Swear you’ll keep it to yourself?”
“I swear.”
“A no-hands razor,” Nevins said. “Shaves you while you’re doing other things, guided by GPS.”
“Hmm,” said Bernie.
“Looking for investors,” Nevins said.
“I’ll think about it,” said Bernie. Uh-oh: that was my only thought. “Right now,” Bernie went on, “I’d like to go back to the moment you took that step into Eben St. John’s office.”
Nevins shrugged. “Sure.”
“Close your eyes.”
“What for?”
“To encourage visual recall.”
Nevins closed his eyes. He was one of those humans with not much in the way of eyelashes. I like eyelashes. Suzie’s are just about the longest I’ve ever seen, and Bernie’s are thicker than you’d believe. Suppose that one day the two of them, Bernie and Suzie, had a . . . I came close to having a not-my-kind-of thought.
“You step into Eben St. John’s office,” Bernie said, his voice low and quiet. “What do you see?”
There was a long silence. For a moment, I wondered whether Nevins had fallen asleep, but sleeping people have a different smell, and I wasn’t picking it up.
Nevins took a deep breath, let it out with a little hum that sounded musical to me. Was Nevins a perp? I was starting to hope he wasn’t. “I see,” he said, “an office.”
“Go on,” said Bernie.
“I’ve got my hand on my gun.”
“Smart.”
“Thinking of taking it out of the holster.”
“On the ball, no doubt about it.”
“But you know what?”
“I give up.”
“The back office.”
“What about it?”
“The office inside the office, if you see what I mean.”
“Well put. You saw something in the back office?”
“Not for long.”
“Why was that?”
“Because next thing I got clubbed on the melon.” Nevins’s eyes snapped open. “Are you following this at all, for Christ sake?”
“You spotted something just before the melon part.”
“What I’m trying to tell you. Someone was in that back office.”
“Who?”
“No one I knew.”
“Can you describe him?”
“It was a her.”
“An older woman? Well dressed, classy looking?”
“Nah. Classy maybe. Wouldn’t call her old. Thirty-five, maybe.”
“And?”
“No and. Then came boom, on the back of my head. How come you can’t—”
Bernie waved aside whatever was in the wings after that. His voice changed a bit, no louder but sort of throbbier, and harder to ignore, not that I’d ever ignore Bernie. “You must have seen something that gave you her age.”
“Like what?”
“Her face, for example. That’s usually a good way of establishing age.”
“Didn’t really get a look at her face,” Nevins said. “She was kind of turned away from me. Had a nice butt, now that I think of it.”
“She had a thirty-five-year-old butt?” Bernie said.
“Got a problem with that?” said Nevins. “Just so happens I have an eye for observation.”
“Then you can explain where the classy part comes from.”
“Easy,” Nevins said. “She had one of those French bobs.”
“Lost me,” Bernie said.
Which made two of us. Two’s the best number, in case that hasn’t come up yet, and it’s especially the best when you’re lost.
“At French bob?” Nevins said.
“Right there,” said Bernie.
“My ma owned a salon in Baltimore.”
“A haircutting salon?”
“Yeah. A salon.”
“French bob is a kind of haircut?”
Nevins raised his hands, made a little motion around his head. “Most expensive one on her list.”
“The woman in the inner office had a French bob?”
“How many times I gotta tell you?”
“What color was her hair?”
Nevins stared up at the ceiling. What was this? A pink blob of bubble gum stuck up there? Totally new in my experience. I got the feeling the case was taking a strange turn.
Nevins lowered his gaze. “Auburn, maybe?”
“That’s a color?”
“Sure. Reddish brown, or sometimes brownish red. Hers was more like that, brownish red.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Between reddish brown and brownish red? Mostly the way it takes the light, my ma said. Brownish red ending up brighter.”
Bernie went to the window, gazed out. “Your mom still in the business?”
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