“That’s exactly it,” Bernie said. “And maybe you can help. I’m Bernie Little and this is Chet.” Bernie took a quick glance at that gun. “Are you Iko?”
The wiry dude squinted down at Bernie. Then he laughed. “You’re not from around here.”
“True,” said Bernie.
“Where you from?”
“Arizona.”
Ha! We were from Arizona? I’d wondered about that.
“Got a moment or two to talk?” Bernie went on.
The wiry dude made a gesture with his hand. “This here’s my camp.”
“Very nice.”
“Where I come for relaxin’. So if this is gonna be a relaxin’ talk, then yeah. Otherwise no.”
Bernie smiled. He has different smiles, which maybe I haven’t mentioned before, some of them actually not even friendly. This particular smile was one he used on perps. It looked friendly unless you know Bernie. I know Bernie.
“Would fifty bucks help you relax?” Bernie said.
“Not as much as a C-note,” said the wiry dude.
“Imagine a grand,” Bernie said. “You’d be in a stupor.”
The wiry dude laughed again, this time long and loud and to the point of hacking and even a bit of horking, but off the side of the deck, not in our direction.
ELEVEN
I had me a dog once,” said the wiry dude, whose name turned out to be Mack Larouche. We were sitting on the deck of his camp—Bernie and Mack in lawn chairs, me on the floor, which was actually nicer than any lawn chair I’d ever tried, those straps with the in-between spaces always so uncomfortable—and having drinks—beer for them, water for me; not the warm, thickish water from the bayou but something much tastier. Mack gazed out over the lake. “Come to a bad end.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Bernie said. “What was his name?”
Mack turned to Bernie. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”
Bernie said nothing. I’ve run across some other humans—not many—who are good at saying nothing, Cedric Booker, for example, our DA pal back in the Valley, and Suzie, too, come to think of it, but no one in Bernie’s league. Excepting Suzie, come to think of it again. All of a sudden, I missed her. Bernie missed her, too: sometimes he spoke her name in his sleep.
“Dog was a she,” Mack said. “I called her Lucinda.”
“After Lucinda Williams?” Bernie said.
“How’d you know that?”
Bernie shrugged.
“You like that song of hers, ‘Metal Firecracker’?” Mack said.
“One of my favorites,” Bernie said.
By which he meant one of our favorites. Easy to slip up on something like that, and I forgave him even before it happened. But that wasn’t the point. The point was “Metal Firecracker”! How often we’d zoomed across the desert in the Porsche with “Metal Firecracker” cranked up to the max or even more on the sound system. Then one afternoon Bernie had turned to me and shouted over the music, “We’re in a metal firecracker ourselves, big guy, ever think of that?” And I hadn’t, not one single time. I made up for that in the following days, big time.
“Me, too,” Mack said. “She sang it for me one night.”
“I knew she was from around here,” Bernie said.
“Lake Charles ain’t around here, not to my way of thinking. But that one night she was right where we are now, and that’s for goddamn sure.”
“You’re saying Lucinda Williams sang ‘Metal Firecracker’ on this deck?”
Mack nodded. “This was at the height of my heroin addiction.”
“Meaning it was a hallucination?”
“You never know.”
“One of the drawbacks of heroin addiction,” Bernie said.
“You’re so right,” Mack said. “But back then it was a plus. That’s the heart of the matter.”
“Meaning now you’re clean?” Bernie said.
“Clean enough,” said Mack. “Maybe not squeaky.”
Bernie lowered his bottle, gave Mack one of his direct looks. “I’m paying for squeaky.”
Mack gave him a direct look back. “Fair enough,” he said, lowering his bottle, too. “Who are you looking for?”
“Any guesses?”
“Any guesses? I thought you were playing straight with me.”
Bernie looked away for an instant and then his direct gaze on Mack was back in place, but had I ever seen him break off that gaze before? Not that I could remember. I gave it the old college try, although I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly: every time we drove by Valley College, the kids—and I love college kids, don’t get me wrong—were mostly playing Frisbee or smoking weed. Sometimes both at once, true, but that was about it.
“Ralph Boutette,” Bernie was saying. “You know him?”
“Sure,” Mack said. “I know everyone around here.”
“Were you aware that he’s missing?”
“Not exactly,” said Mack, taking a nice big swig of his beer.
“What does that mean?”
“Heard talk, but I didn’t take it seriously.” Mack licked beer droplets off his mustache. He had a nice pink tongue, with plenty of size for a human. “Ralph’s an odd duck—everyone knows that.”
Whoa. Not me, amigo. I was just finding out now. I’d had experience with ducks, not good. They’re a kind of bird, something I hadn’t been clear on at first, and my history with birds is nothing but trouble. Bird beaks are surprisingly nasty, and ducks have them, too, as I came to learn and then learned again and maybe one more time after that. So my takeaway? If ducks were now in the case, we had problems.
“Tell me about this talk you heard,” Bernie said.
Mack stroked his mustache. “Have to organize my mind, get it all in the right order.”
“My guess is you’re good at that,” Bernie said. “No one ever took the SATs for you, did they, Mack?”
“Like Ralph did for all his goddamn brothers, plus every dumbass kid who could scare up twenty bucks?” Mack had a good laugh. “How’d you know about that?”
“Came up in the course of things,” Bernie said. “Word was that otherwise Ralph’s stuck to the straight and narrow all his life.”
“Far as I know—the point I was makin’, in fact, over at Rooster Red’s.”
“What’s that?”
“Joint just the other side of the St. Roch line.” He handed Bernie a card. “Good for one free drink—happen to have an interest in the place.”
Bernie tucked the card away. “There was talk of Ralph going missing?”
Mack nodded. “Some of the boys were saying Ralph got himself mixed up in some serious shit, and I told them that just wasn’t him. He’s just wandered off somewheres, Ralph being Ralph.”
“What serious shit are we talking about?”
Bernie cocked his head a little, the way he did when he wanted to listen real close. I listened real close, too. Getting mixed up in serious shit happened to me once, even to the point of rolling in it. What had gotten into me? That was what Bernie kept asking when he hosed me down.
“It’s kind of complicated,” Mack said, “and I don’t think it has anythin’ to do with, um, other developments or what have—”
“Talking about the shrimp heist?” Bernie said, cutting him off. Bernie did that sometimes, just another one of our techniques at the Little Detective Agency. We’ve got a bunch: the last one is pretty much always me grabbing the perp by the pant leg. I noticed that Mack was wearing shorts. No problem. I’d come up against that before, found other ways. “Gotta think outside the box,” Bernie says, and I’m totally with him on that: I’d been in boxes once or twice—if a crate wasn’t a box, then what was? Never again.
“Not sure you could call it a heist,” Mack said.
“What would you call it?”
“More of a mystery. A ton of shrimp came into the town dock on a Saturday night and Sunday morning it was gone.”
“Were they your shrimp?”
“Woulda been—I
was set to buy ’em first thing Monday morning.”
“So who took the hit?”
“That’s what’s not too clear, at least to me.”
“Wasn’t it Grannie Robideau?” Bernie said. “I don’t get all this uncertainty. Lord Boutette stole Grannie’s shrimp. Isn’t that the story?”
“That’s a story, anyways,” said Mack.
“It must have convinced the authorities,” Bernie said. “Lord’s under arrest and awaiting trial.”
“I heard,” Mack said.
“Let’s go back to the scuttlebutt at Rooster Red’s,” Bernie said. “Want to hear my guess?”
Mack shrugged.
“Indulge me,” Bernie said. “My guess is there’s a theory going round that Ralph, despite this lifetime of just about perfect straight-arrowness, barring the SAT caper, was in on the shrimp heist, and now he’s on the run, or hiding out somewhere.”
There was a long pause. Then Mack said, “You’re kinda quick to understand how things work in these parts.”
“But you’re not buying it,” Bernie said. “How come?”
“Makes no difference what I think.”
“No?” said Bernie. He rose, walked to the end of Mack’s deck, stared out at Isle des Deux Amis, very small in the distance. Then he turned to Mack, rubbing his hands together and looking sort of refreshed, like he’d just splashed cold water on his face, which he actually did sometimes. And then some on me! The fun we had! But that’s not the point. The point is this refreshed look thing was all about the technique Bernie called trying a new tack, for reasons not clear to me, my only experience with tacks being when I found one on the office floor and decided to give it a little chew. That single tack was more than enough; I didn’t have the slightest interest in a new one.
“I’m curious about this feud,” Bernie went on. “Boutettes and Robideaus—what’s behind it?”
Mack shook his head. “Goes back before my time.”
“To when?”
“The Civil War.”
“They were on opposite sides?”
“No, no, nothin’ like that. Our side, the both of them. Know about the Zouaves?”
“They wore colorful uniforms?”
Mack nodded. “That was the problem. The Boutette and Robideau dudes of the time got into a dispute over who owned this one particular jacket with lots of red embroidery. Led to a duel, and there’s been bad blood ever since.”
“Christ,” Bernie said.
“Uh-huh,” said Mack. “Another coldie?”
“If you’re having one.”
“Hell, I’m having a dozen—it’s my day off.”
A dozen: not a small number, as I recalled. I’d seen dudes down a dozen beers plenty of times, never pretty. Mack went inside. Bernie turned to me.
“ ‘Our side’—you catch that?” he said.
Actually not. Mack was on our side? Nice to hear. This case was confusing. But the money was good. Hey! Good money and it had also smelled of shrimp: I’d caught the smell when Vannah handed it over. And hadn’t Bernie and Mack just been going on and on about shrimp? So therefore? At the Little Detective Agency, in case I haven’t brought this up already, so therefores were Bernie’s department. I’d taken this particular whatever it was as far as I could. Not too shabby.
Mack came out with two beers, handed one to Bernie.
“What do you know about Isle des Deux Amis?” Bernie said.
“It’s that there island.” Mack pointed at it with his chin. I liked when humans used their chins for pointers. I can point, too, no worries about that, but I use my whole body.
“When was the last time you were on it?”
“Me? Actually on it? Been years.”
“Ever see other people there?”
“Nope. Nothin’ to attract anybody.”
“With the exception of Ralph,” Bernie said.
“Huh?”
“Isn’t it one of his favorite anchorages?”
Mack looked down at his feet. Bare feet: very dirty, the ends of the nails all black; in short, really interesting.
“Mack?” Bernie said. “Look at me.”
Mack slowly looked up, sort of met Bernie’s gaze.
“What are you hiding?”
Mack tilted back the bottle, took a long swig. It made him look a little tougher. I’d seen that kind of toughness, the bottled kind, disappear real fast.
“Nothin’,” he said. “And now, all the same to you, I’ve got work to do.”
“It’s Sunday,” Bernie said, “your day off. Those shrimp disappeared on a Sunday, and so did Ralph.” Bernie took out the baggie with the Buddy Holly–type glasses inside and held it up so Mack could see. Mack’s eyes locked on that baggie. “Ralph was anchored off Isle des Deux Amis that Sunday morning,” Bernie said. “You were right here. So you saw him. Now I just need to know what you saw and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Of which Mack had none, except for that bushy mustache. I felt a bit pukey.
“I got no memories of that day,” Mack said.
“How is that possible?”
Mack didn’t take his eyes off the glasses. His voice went quiet. “Truth is I backslid that day, drug-wise.” He looked up, took out the fifty Bernie’d given him. “Want this back?”
Bernie shook his head. “You may be needing it.”
Sweat beads popped up on Mack’s forehead. You saw a lot of human sweat in bayou country. And very little back home in the Valley. I came close to giving that some thought.
TWELVE
See the way St. Roch is divided in half by the bayou?” Bernie said. “Boutettes on one side, Robideaus on the other—it’s almost too damn convenient.”
We were in the Porsche, Bernie at the wheel, me riding shotgun, which was always our setup except for once after a long night at Pony Up, a dive bar in South Pedroia we no longer visit, and with the engine off, the car hadn’t been moving anyway. And then all of a sudden, with me in the driver’s seat and Bernie sort of—let’s say napping in the front seat—it was! Moving! And fast! A story for another time.
Right now we were crossing a bridge over the bayou. A narrow one-lane bridge where we’d had to wait on a red light while a battered old van came clanking across from the other side: didn’t seem all that convenient to me, but if Bernie said so, then it was. I’d never been on a more convenient bridge! And the view was beautiful: sunset over the bayou, the water fiery red, the trees and buildings black against a purple sky. Bernie says I can’t be trusted when it comes to colors, so forget the red and purple parts. But not the black. I’m very good at black.
We drove over the bridge, followed the bayou for a bit, lined with docks just like the other side, the air fishier than any air I’d ever smelled, then turned up a street and parked in front of a low building with a blue light hanging over the door. Blue lights meant the law. We’re on the same side as the law, me and Bernie, except for a whole confusing bunch of other times. There’s even a lawman or two wearing an orange jumpsuit on our account. They look so different that way!
Bernie opened the door under the blue light—bugs buzzed around it, big-time—and we entered the building. I’ve been in many cop offices, most of them messy with half-full paper cups all over the place, and also plenty of leftovers lying around, often within easy reach. Leftovers: one of the great human inventions, and leftovers within easy reach were even better.
The St. Roch setup was the other kind of cop office, the kind you hardly ever saw, neat and tidy, like Leda and Malcolm’s place in High Chaparral Estates, which I’d only been in once, and very briefly. No paper cups here, no leftovers, no files stacked to the ceiling, no dust. Although there was mold growing down in the basement, growing wildly: that had been obvious the moment I’d stepped in the room.
Two lawmen sat at side-by-side desks. They weren’t wearing orange jumpsuits yet, in fact they had on crisp, unwrinkled uniforms and kind of reminded me of FBI types Bernie and I have come across—clean-shaven, short-h
aired, watchful. What else? They smelled like brothers. Other than that, I had zilch so far.
The lawmen looked up at us. They both had ginger-ale-colored eyes and curly ginger-ale-colored hair, although one had lots of gray mixed in. That meant he was older: we have the same thing in the nation within. Take my old buddy Spike who hangs out at Nixon Panero’s yard, his face practically white now, but still a fine scrapper, with a snarl that makes you want to back away pronto, which I never do, goes without mentioning. If there was time, I could now add something about how come I know about ginger ale—which happens to be Charlie’s favorite drink at the moment, although he’s not allowed to have any at their place in High Chaparral Estates, and it’s possible he’s officially not supposed to at our place either—but there isn’t.
The older lawman smiled in a friendly way and said, “Help you?”
“Sheriff Robideau?” Bernie said.
“Guilty as charged,” the lawman said, raising his hands like he was turning himself in. Whoa! We’d closed the case already? Could I even remember a quicker result? Maybe the time that Stylin’ Sammy Minsk was still in the middle of hiring us to find his wife’s missing diamond ring when it fell out of a hole in his pocket right in front of my eyes. I grabbed him by the pant leg without even having to move, and the fraud squad from the insurance agency sent us a nice check, which Bernie put in his chest pocket, things going downhill from there.
“Bernie Little,” said Bernie. “And this is Chet.” They didn’t even look at me. My tail, which had started up in a normal meet-and-greet sort of way, ramped it down, although not all at once. Bernie stepped forward and laid our card on the sheriff’s desk, the new card designed by Suzie, the one with the flower.
The sheriff gazed at the card, meanwhile . . . tracing the outline of the flower with his fingertip? I couldn’t be sure from my angle. “Little Detective Agency,” he said.
“Correct,” said Bernie.
“Out of where?” said the deputy. The sheriff handed him the card. The deputy examined it, and yes, traced the outline of the flower with his fingertip, no question about it. “Long way from home,” he said.
The Sound and the Furry Page 9