Pretty soon Bernie was really letting the steering wheel have it. Maybe that made the whirr whirr whirr go away, but in its place came a quiet click click click that to the best of my recollection would eventually lapse into total silence. After that we might see the tools.
Out came the tools. Bernie threw open the hood, leaned way in there, his head disappearing from view, which meant he didn’t see a taxi pulling up, and Vannah—now in jeans and T-shirt and carrying a little pink suitcase—getting in the backseat and being driven away. I sat on the dock. Bernie got out some different tools, squirmed under the car. Time passed. An oily blackened hunk of metal fell from somewhere in the engine, rolled across the dock and dropped into the water with a soft splash. Not long after that, Bernie crawled out from under and said, “That should do it.”
He climbed back into the car. I got in the shotgun seat. “Odds are she’s headed right back to the airport,” he said. “If we drive like the wind we can still catch her.”
Sounded good to me: driving like the wind was one of my favorite things. Bernie turned the key. Then came an explosion—although it’s fair to say not a big one—and smoke rose from under the hood. As for the flames, they were on the small side in my opinion, hardly worth mentioning.
Later that very same day we’d met some cool dudes—tow-truck dude, auto junkyard dude, mechanic dude—and the Porsche was running great, even louder than normal, on a brand-new old engine, and our three shrimpy grand was mostly gone. I felt tip-top, and so did Bernie, and even if he wasn’t at his very tip-toppest, he wasn’t completely miserable: I could tell from the expression in his eyes, not quite as murky as they’d been the whole after-Suzie time so far.
“Since we’re just about in the city anyway,” Bernie said as we pulled out of the junkyard, “how about we run down Pyro and see what’s up his sleeve?”
I remembered Pyro well on account of the visor that had hidden his eyes, the kind of bothersome detail that sticks in my mind and made me not like him much, but running him over? This was going to be a first. We were up to new tricks at the Little Detective Agency. Bernie? The best.
“Hey!” Bernie said. “What’s with you?”
With me? Nothing much. Maybe I’d just given Bernie a quick lick on the side of his face, maybe not. It was also possible that there’d been some swerving. A quirk of the new engine? That was my first thought. No other thoughts came, but in truth I didn’t wait for them very long.
Soon we were back in that sketchy boarded-up part of town where we’d first found Cleotis. Now his boxy little shotgun house was boarded up, too, all except for that thick steel front door, which had a big lock hanging from it. We parked out front and stayed in the car. Were we sitting on Cleotis’s house again? Any reason not to sit on an empty one? I had a feeling there should be. That turned out to be one of those feelings that didn’t go anywhere, often the case and I was cool with it. Bernie took out his phone and tried Suzie again—I could tell because her face came up on the screen—maybe for the zillionth time, which is a pretty big number, certainly way more than two.
“C’mon, pick up,” he said.
But she did not.
Bernie put the phone away, gazed at Cleotis’s crib. By that time, the sun was going down and the crib looked fuzzy in the dying light, like it wasn’t solid. “No Suzie, a complicated case, and we’ve already spent all of the fee we’re likely to get. I’m tempted, mighty tempted.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Tempted to do what? That was my question. I myself knew a lot about temptation, and always ended up handling it the same way.
Bernie never said what the temptation was. “Wouldn’t be me,” he said after a while. “Maybe I lack the imagination to slip the harness.”
Bernie in harness? What a terrible thought! And also a puzzler because Bernie wasn’t wearing a harness—today he had on his darkest Hawaiian shirt, the one with the nighttime bongo drums, plus jeans and sneakers—and never once had in all the time we’d been together.
“. . . simple curiosity, too,” he was saying when I tuned back in. “Suppose, for example, I’m right about Pyro’s wrist. If so, then someone didn’t want us on this case from the very beginning. Meaning we want to be on it more than ever.” That sounded right to me. Bernie opened the door. “How about we see if Cleotis got himself a new tenant?” I was sitting outside the driver’s-side door before Bernie had finished getting out. He tucked the flashlight into his belt on one side and the .38 Special on the other. Was there time for him to shoot a few dimes out of the air before we did whatever we were doing? Probably not.
TWENTY-EIGHT
We walked around to the back of Cleotis’s boarded-up shotgun house. The last of the daylight was gone now, the sky moonless and starless, this neighborhood not the kind where the streetlights worked. Darkness, sketchy part of town, backside of a sketchy little house, .38 Special: life was good. I get a feeling when a case is going well, and I had it now. Was it bothersome that the money was just about gone? Only if I thought about it. That was the kind of problem I could solve all on my own.
Bernie approached a boarded-up window by the back door, ripped off the boards like nobody’s business, which made no sense to me, this sort of thing being our business exactly. Next came the window. This particular window was pretty much our favorite kind, just one pane. First, Bernie tried to open it: locked. Locked was always my preference—it meant I got to see Bernie breaking the glass. Bernie was a great glass breaker—I’d seen him do it with his head! And more than once! But not tonight. Tonight we were trying to keep the noise level down. I knew that as soon as Bernie took off his shirt and wrapped it around the .38 Special. After that came a quick tap tap at the window, practically silent, and the glass broke into two pieces that fell inside and landed on something soft, making the gentlest shattering sounds I’d heard in my career so far.
Bernie glanced around—just an old habit of his, I’d have let him know if anyone was coming—then put on his shirt, picked a few shards out of the frame, and raised one foot as though to step inside. That led to a brief moment of confusion ending with us both safely through the window, me first.
“What a stench!” Bernie said in a low whisper, stench being a smell humans were capable of detecting but didn’t like. In the nation within, we have plenty of sounds we don’t like, but not really any smells. Smells are too big a world for simply liking or not liking, and besides, we get way too busy breaking down the smells, and breaking down the parts of the parts, and the parts of the parts of the parts! For example, here inside Cleotis’s crib we had big-time rotting smells, no longer a surprise to me in this city. You want a part? How about food? We had rotting fruit. How about parts of that? Rotting bananas and rotting pineapples. See the way this works? We also had rotting meat, rotting milk, rotting eggs—even humans never miss that last one. The rotting food part was actually a small part of the big smell picture, which was dominated by toilet back-up. It reminded me of a case we’d once worked involving rival septic tank companies owned by two dudes who hated each other. The ways they had of getting even! But no time for that now. Sometimes the most important smells in our business are the ones that aren’t there, and this was one of those times; meaning death was not in the house.
Another quiet whisper from Bernie: “I think I smell rotten eggs.” That was Bernie: human to the max.
He switched on the light. We were in the kitchen where we’d had our little face-to-face with Cleotis, but now everything was smashed up, including the fridge, tipped over on the floor. The floor itself was all puddly. I was considering the remains of an almost-floating drumstick when Bernie made a little click-click sound in his mouth and moved toward the stairs, the same ones Cleotis’s muscle guy Herman had climbed when he went up for his rest after the brief ruckus with Bernie. Bernie and I mounted the stairs, pretty much side by side, although the truth was I nosed ahead as we reached the top.
Bernie poked the light around. We stood in a narrow corridor, the kind you ge
t upstairs in a shotgun house. There were two doors off the corridor, both closed. The first was the bathroom with the toilet back-up problem. Bernie—gun in one hand and flashlight in his mouth—turned the knob and pushed the door open with his shoulder. He glanced quickly around at the wet mess, took the flashlight out of his mouth and whispered, “This is where that stink is coming from.”
Or something like that. I was still stuck on the image of Bernie with the flashlight in his mouth, one of the very best sights of my whole life. Was he going to start carrying things in his mouth more often? I hoped so. At that moment something thudded bump bump bump against the wall behind me. One backward glance and I knew right away it was my tail. I got it under control pronto: we were in quiet mode and I was a pro. Was it possible that my tail was not a pro? What a scary thought! And now it was drooping? Up, tail, and now! Up it went, nice and stiff, but for the first time I thought that I might be wrong about this case and it was headed off the rails.
We came to the second door. Bernie, about to shift the flashlight to his mouth again—I’d hardly had to hope at all—paused, and bent toward the knob. This was one of those old-fashioned doors with a keyhole—and the key was in it. Bernie looked at me, his eyes filled with some sort of meaning that didn’t come to me then and there. He turned the key, took a step to the side, keeping me behind him, mostly, meaning away from the door, then reached out with his hand and pushed the door open. This was when gunfire sometimes happened—and there was someone in the room, no doubt about that, someone I knew—but no gunfire happened. We moved in, the .38 Special pointing the way.
“Drrm froom,” said someone inside.
Bernie aimed the beam in the direction of the sound. This room had nothing in it but a big gas can in a corner and two chairs in the center, one of which was empty. Duct-taped to the other chair hand and foot, with one of those horrible ball gags in his mouth, sat Lord Boutette, his straggly goatee even stragglier than before, and again wearing only his tighty whiteys, except now they weren’t so white. Lord’s eyes were open wide and seemed to . . . to be begging for something, the way you might beg for a treat, which was a no-no in the nation within, at least at the table.
“Didn’t expect you here,” Bernie said. “I’m disappointed.”
“Hrrum?” said Lord.
“Who tied you up?” Bernie said. “What’s the story?”
Lord got louder. “Mrraanf ! Frummrr!”
“You want me to take the gag off?” Bernie said.
Lord nodded his head, kind of violently. His neck made a cracking sound.
“I have no objection to doing that,” Bernie said, “on one condition.”
“Wrrr?”
“That when you open your mouth, nothing comes out but the truth.”
More nodding. “Rrrr. Rrrr.” Lord was actually sounding a bit like Spike, buddy of mine who hangs out at Nixon Panero’s Autobody.
“The moment I hear a false note,” Bernie said, “the gag goes right back on. Plus we leave you here for whatever’s coming your way.”
Head nodding turned quickly, with another neck crack, to head shaking. “Nnnnnrrh, nnnnnrrh.” I found myself beginning to understand Lord just about better than any human I’d ever met.
Bernie tucked the .38 Special back in his belt, avoided a little puddle at Lord’s feet, and untied the ball gag. He held on to it, the ball dangling within my reach, but that was one ball I didn’t want to play with.
Lord made stretching motions with his mouth. “Goddamn nightmare,” he said. “Cut me loose, man. Get me out of here.”
“How did the nightmare start?” Bernie said.
“Very first time I got married,” Lord said. “Would you believe the bride started making out with Duke at the reception? He was fourteen, for Christ sake. Can we finish up with the memories somewheres else?”
“I meant this particular nightmare,” Bernie said, waving the flashlight.
“Like how I got here?”
“Exactly like that.”
“I’ll tell it much better if I can get some fresh air.”
“Then we’ll settle for the lesser version,” Bernie said.
“Huh?”
Bernie raised the ball gag up to Lord’s eye level.
“Can’t you at least untie me?”
“Maybe in a bit.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’ll need your story.”
Lord took a deep breath. “Do my best,” Lord said. “Step up to the plate, despite of feelin’ like shit.”
“Played much baseball, Lord?”
“Never,” said Lord. “But I had the rules down cold, back in the day.”
“Yeah?”
“Umped Little League games,” Lord said. “Till the bastards canned me.”
“You took payoffs from some of the dads?” Bernie said.
Lord gave Bernie a sideways look. “Who’s been talkin’?”
“Nobody.”
“You, like, guessed?”
“It’s not important,” Bernie said. “Back to how you got here.”
“There was only two dads,” Lord said. “But their goddamn kids were pitchers on—what’s the word?”
“Opposite.”
“Yeah, opposite teams. See the problem?”
“The clock is ticking,” Bernie said.
A problem, right there. I heard no clock. Was it possible Bernie could hear something I could not? Not a chance. So therefore? Good thing Bernie handled the so therefores, meaning I didn’t have to go there, there being the idea of Bernie making a mistake. Uh-oh: did I just go there anyway? Sometimes the mind had a mind of its own, and there was nothing you could do.
“You want to know how I got here?” Lord said. “That it?”
“And fast,” Bernie said.
“Then the joke’s on you, pal. ’Cause I don’t have a clue where the hell I am.” Lord started laughing. Laughter is usually the best human sound, but not Lord’s, which was high-pitched and squeaky. “Don’t think your dog likes me,” he said.
“What makes you think that?”
“The look in his eyes,” Lord said. “Like he’s a stone killer.”
Stone killer? Me? I had no desire to hurt Lord the slightest bit; and then, all of a sudden, I did! How about that?
“Chet just wants to hear your story,” Bernie said. “And I’d make it quick and to the point. He has zero tolerance for pussy-footing.”
Nothing truer than that, amigo. Lord got the idea and started talking fast.
“All I knows is I was mindin’ my own business—that’s how I am, ask anybody—just sittin’ in front of the tube with a cold one and a joint watchin’ LSU football—what else’m I gonna do, that son of a bitch shackle around my ankle—when all of a sudden I hear footsteps somewheres at the back of the house. Thought it was Duke, you know? Who else has a key? So I said, ‘Duke? That you?’ kind of thing. No answer. I took maybe one more hit or two, thinkin’ it musta been my imagination. I got a real good imagination—I’m kind of a writer, in fact.”
“Yeah?” Bernie said.
“Song lyrics,” Lord said. “One thing about Duke is he’s musical.”
“I’ve heard him play.”
“Then you know. Thing is, he comes up with these tunes, but he don’t have the words for them, mind don’t work that way. Where I come in. We’ve been workin’ on an album for a year or two or four, should be puttin’ some feelers out soon to the industry. Workin’ title’s Boomin’ You Baby in the Boom Boom Room—that’s also the leadoff song.”
For a tiny moment, Bernie got a look in his eyes that made me think he was about to laugh. No laughter happened. Instead, he said, “But it wasn’t Duke.”
“Huh?”
“Making noise at the back of your house.”
“Oh, that. No, not Duke, for goddamn sure. And it wasn’t my imagination neither. Problem was, the way I was sittin’, had my back to the hall.”
“When you
were watching football.”
“Like I said. LSU Tigers—I’m a big fan. Had a beer or two with Billy Cannon way back when, swear to God.”
“But it wasn’t him either.”
“Huh? Hell, you’re pullin’ my leg.”
I checked out Lord’s scrawny legs. Bernie would have no problem pulling them right off him, if they hadn’t been tied to the chair.
“. . . not Duke, not Billy Cannon,” Lord was saying. “But I can’t tell you who it was. I called out—still thinkin’ it was Duke, understand—‘In here, Duke, watchin’ the game’—and I remember distinctly leaning forward to crack open another coldie, but after that—blank.”
“Blank?”
“Next thing I knew I was in this goddamn room tied to this goddamn chair.” He glanced at the boarded-up window. “Where am I, anyways?”
“We’ll get to that,” Bernie said. “What happened when you came to?”
“I had this terrible headache.”
Bernie walked around Lord, peered at the back of his head. “Doesn’t look too bad. Won’t even need stitches.”
“Still got the headache,” Lord said. “As if anyone cares, always the way. So I wake up, get smacked by the headache, then the door opens and in comes this masked dude. I start in on makin’ what noise I can, lettin’ him know I want the gag out and pronto. Sucker comes over, leans in and points his finger at me, points it and points it closer and closer till it’s right in my eye. Which I tried to close but too late. So his finger’s on my eyeball, not pressing, but right there touching, see what I mean.”
“I do.”
“So I stopped makin’ noise. He took off the gag, fed me half a sandwich and a drink of water, and when he was done with that he gagged me up again and left.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Not that time. But he’s been back. Same dude, same mask, same thing with the sandwich and the water, but for the once when he brought that other chair and the gas can.” Lord jerked his head toward the gas can in the corner. “That was the only time he spoke.”
The Sound and the Furry Page 22