A Fistful of Collars Read online

  We went out to the patio. We have a nice patio in back—this is at our place on Mesquite Road—with a stone fountain in the shape of a swan that Leda had installed before the divorce, but then wanted no part of when Bernie said she should take it with her. We had trouble understanding Leda, me and Bernie.

  Bernie sat in his favorite patio chair, the one with the drink holder, and I sat beside him. The sun was going down, changing the colors of the canyon that runs behind Mesquite Road, a canyon inhabited by lots of creatures, including some fat javelinas. Until you’ve chased a javelina you haven’t lived, and I wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else, although once I did dream I was living in a Dumpster, sort of a nightmare until it turned out the Dumpster stood behind a fast-food place. Dreams: don’t ask me to explain them.

  Bernie swirled his bourbon around, stared into it, took a sip. “Suppose I said let’s get married. What would happen then?”

  I waited to hear.

  Bernie drank some more. “Why shouldn’t she be ambitious?” He gazed at me, his face reddening in the evening light. “She’s got every right. So that leaves the option of picking up stakes and going with her. Which, you may have noticed, she didn’t mention.” Bernie drained his glass, went inside. I went with him, right on his heels. He took the bottle down from the shelf, refilled his glass. “Heading east,” he said. “How would that work? My ancestors headed west. Going back would be like—”

  The phone rang before Bernie could finish, but not a problem since I’d lost the thread long before. Bernie picked up.

  A man’s voice came over the speaker. “Bernie?”

  “Yup.”

  “Cal Luxton here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “From the mayor’s office.”

  “I know.”

  “How’re you doin’? It’s been a while.”

  “No complaints,” Bernie said.

  “Suppose I should congratulate you on that wilderness camp case.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Heard you drove another one over a cliff.”

  “You heard wrong.”

  Silence on the other end. In that silence, Bernie knocked back a big slug.

  “Got much goin’ on these days?” Luxton said.

  “How do you mean?” said Bernie.

  “Work-wise.”

  “We’re pretty busy.”

  We were? First I’d heard of it. Hadn’t done a stitch of work since the Big Bear Wilderness Camp Case, for which we’d been paid, yes, and plus there’d been the bonus of that gold nugget, now at Mr. Singh’s on account of some tax bill coming due, not something I’m clear on and neither was Bernie although he finally gave up on getting an explanation and just cut the check; which bounced, so he cut another one. In short, our finances were a mess. There hadn’t even been any divorce work, which we hated, me and Bernie, but took when nothing else—mostly meaning missing persons cases, our specialty—came along. The Teitelbaum divorce! Mrs. Teitelbaum at the wheel of that forklift, crushing Mr. Teitelbaum’s classic car collection! And what he did to her boyfriend right after that! Only it wasn’t her boyfriend! I gave myself a good shake. Meanwhile that Luxton dude was talking again.

  “I’m sure you are,” he said. “But maybe you could squeeze in a little job for us.”

  “Who’s us?” said Bernie.

  “The mayor, who else? Did I wake you or something, Bernie?”

  Bernie put down his drink. “Wide awake, Cal. So wide awake that I’m thinking, Why me?”

  “Why not you?”

  “We have a little history, the mayor and I, maybe from before your time.”

  “Back before you got—back when you were still with the force? I know all about it. Water under the bridge, as far as the mayor’s concerned. And what with the election coming up, he wants to reach out, to be more inclusive.”

  “Has he heard of the aquifer yet?” Bernie said.

  The aquifer? Bernie talks about the aquifer a lot, but he hasn’t shown it to me yet. Something about water, of which we’ve got a lot in the Valley—check out our golf courses every morning and evening, sprinklers spraying rainbows out the yingyang—although, come to think of it, none under any of the bridges. Whew! I’d taken that one pretty far! Right up to the point where Bernie always says “so therefore.” Bernie handles the so therefores. I bring other things to the table. That’s how come the Little Detective Agency’s what it is.

  “You can ask him tomorrow at ten,” Luxton said.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the only time he can see you this week.”

  “See me about what?”

  “This job, Bernie. Are you listening?”

  “What’s the job?”

  “He’ll tell you in person.”

  Bernie reached for his glass, downed some more. “I’m not interested.”

  “No? What’s your normal fee?”

  “Eight hundred a day. Plus expenses.”

  “Yeah? You can make that stick in an economy like this?”

  “Not always.”

  “What I thought,” Luxton said. Another phone rang at his end, and he spoke a little faster, so maybe I didn’t hear right. “The fee for this job is three grand a day, plus expenses, guaranteed, plus a bonus at the end if they like you.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “See you at ten.” Click.

  Humans tend to go to sleep in their beds and stay there all night. It’s different with me and my kind. For example, I often start in Bernie’s bedroom, on the floor at the foot of the bed, and later move across the hall to Charlie’s old room, even though he’s hardly ever there, the bed stripped, and after that I like to lie with my back to the front door. The sounds and smells of the night leak in through the crack under the door. Security is part of my job.

  On this particular night, my pal Iggy who lives next door got a little restless and did his yip-yip-yipping once or twice, and Mr. Parsons tried to shush him, and later a toilet flushed in their house. Our neighbor on the other side, old man Heydrich, went outside not long after that, and what was this? Whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk. He was sweeping the dirt from his part of the sidewalk onto ours? I barked, the low muffled kind of bark, not wanting to disturb Bernie. The whisk-whisking stopped, and old man Heydrich muttered something about curs, a new one on me. Then came the pad-pad-pad of his slippers, his door opening and closing, and quiet. I dropped down into dreamland. Did a car come down the street sometime later, moving slowly, pausing in front of our place, driving on? Maybe. Dreams can be so strong, and then you wake up and poof! It doesn’t work the other way. You always remember real life. Sort of. But forget all that.

  Except if a car did go by, its engine was making a little ticking sound. Tick-tick-tick. That tick-tick-tick happened once with the Porsche, not the blown-up Porsche but the one that actually did go off a cliff. Bernie’d taken out the tools. You never wanted to see that.

  “Knits up the raveled sleeve of care?” Bernie said the next morning. “I wish.”

  Uh-oh. We were in the van, headed downtown, possibly on something work-related, and now was when the linen shirt episode comes up? Linen: a complete unknown to me at the time, specifically on a visit I paid to the laundry basket not long after Suzie gave Bernie a long-sleeved linen shirt for his birthday. I prefer Bernie’s Hawaiian shirts, of which he’s got lots, including the one with palm trees and martini glasses that he was wearing at the moment, but that had nothing to do with what happened. It was just the strange feel of linen, and when it comes to feeling things, well, you always do better with your tongue, no news there. And what’s close to the tongue? Teeth. So there you go.

  But still, I felt bad. I moved across the bench seat, a little closer to Bernie. The van made one of those quick swerves across the lane that sometimes happens, not sure why. It’s not the smoothest ride in the world, but no complaints.

  “Hey, you’re crowding me, buddy,” Bernie said.

  I was? How had that happened? I shifted away, but
not before giving Bernie’s face a quick lick, just showing him that everything was cool between us. Bernie’s great-looking, even if he wasn’t at his best today, dark patches under his eyes, and possibly a patch or two where he’d missed with the razor blade, although he’d clearly made a good try; there was still a dab of shaving cream on the side of his neck.

  The downtown towers rose in the distance, their tops kind of merging with the copper-colored sky, a sight that always made me uneasy, hard to say why. We got off the freeway, drove past the college—a Frisbee soared by, went right into the window of a passing bus! I love college kids!—and parked at a meter in front of city hall, which I recognized from the two huge stone birds, very nasty looking, on either side of the tall arched doorway. Don’t get me started on birds. Bernie dug in his pocket for change, found none, but did come up with a cigarette, or part of one. He straightened it out, lit up, and said, “My lucky day.”

  “This must be Chet,” said Mayor Trimble. “What a handsome dog!” The mayor turned out to be a round little guy with more than one chin, very big ears, and a string tie. In short, what wasn’t to like? “Happen to be in possession of some nice rawhide chews,” he said. “Can he have one?”

  Bernie sighed, for no reason that I could come up with.

  What a mayor did, exactly, was anybody’s guess, but one thing for sure: we had the best mayor around. Soon I was lying on the floor at Mayor Trimble’s side, working on a rawhide chew, tough and tasty, just the way I liked. The mayor introduced everybody—“’Course you already know Cal Luxton, head of security, and this is Vera Cobb, chief of staff.” Then came handshaking, hello hellos, and nobody took a single sniff of nobody, all very human, and everyone sat down.

  Mayor Trimble rocked back in his chair. “Pleasure to have this opportunity to renew our friendship, Bernie.”

  “Is that what we had?” Bernie said.

  “Any mistakes were mine,” the mayor said. “Real or imagined. I should have patched things up long ago. Everything goes by so goddamn fast. Agreed?”

  “That everything goes by fast?” Bernie said. “I won’t argue.”

  “Bernie’s known for his sense of humor,” said Luxton, sitting in a shadowy corner of the room. Luxton was a thin dude with swept-back hair and the kind of long sideburns you sometimes see out here in the Valley, but not many other places, Bernie says. It’s a look, he also says, that goes with cowboy boots, which Luxton was wearing, and cowboy hats. Luxton had a big white one resting on his knee. A smell goes with hat wearing. I detected it now; not unpleasant.

  “One of the most important senses going,” said the mayor. Then came a silence. The mayor looked around, maybe waiting for someone to chip in. No one did. He cleared his throat—I can do that, too, especially if a bone was caught in it—and checked a note on his desk. “Vera here tells me your great-great grandfather once owned all of Mesquite Canyon.”

  Vera, sitting at the end of the same couch as Bernie—he was at the other end, but it wasn’t a big couch—said, “From where the airport is now all the way up to the Rio Seco railroad bridge.” She glanced at Bernie. Vera was blond, wore a dark suit, had her hair in a bun, always interesting to me. Human hair, big subject, maybe later.

  Bernie glanced at Vera, eyes going to that bun almost immediately—Bernie and I are alike in lots of ways, don’t forget—and said, “Um.”

  “Just think if your family had held on to that spread,” Luxton said.

  “Kind of pointless,” Bernie said.

  Which I didn’t quite get, because more than once, walking the canyon, Bernie has said almost that exact same thing to me: What if we still owned all of this, Chet? Rio Seco would have water in it—that’s for damn sure.

  “No living in the past for you, huh, Bernie?” said the mayor. “We’re on the same page, us two.”

  “Uh,” said Bernie, “I wouldn’t—”

  The mayor smacked his hand on his desk, not hard. He had fat little hands, wore a nice big pinkie ring. One thing I’ve noticed about pinkie rings—they’re never pink. But Bernie says I can’t be trusted when it comes to colors, so don’t bet the ranch. “The future, Bernie. I’m all about the future of this beautiful city, and my guess is you are, too.”

  “It won’t be so beautiful when the aquifer’s dry,” Bernie said.

  The mayor smiled. He had one of those real big smiles you see sometimes, a smile too big for the face, if that makes any sense. “Truth to power,” he said. “Not afraid of that, are we, Vera? In fact, we encourage it. Fill Bernie in on the water commission.”

  “I’m not sure we have time for that, mayor,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be getting on with the business at hand?”

  The mayor’s smile faded, down to normal size and then nothing. “What would I do without you, Vera?”

  Vera gazed at the mayor, her face showing nothing that I could see.

  “Vera here’s a Stanford graduate,” the mayor said. “My opponent’s chief of staff went to North Valley CC. What does that tell you?”

  “The Unabomber went to Harvard,” Bernie said.

  The mayor’s smile started going upside down. Vera laughed. Maybe not the nicest-sounding laugh I’d ever heard, kind of loud and harsh, but human laughter? One of the best things there is. The meeting was going great. I gnawed on my chew strip and soon my mind was wandering pleasantly. That’s part of the fun of chew strips, maybe news to you.

  “. . . water commission some other time,” the mayor was saying, or something like that. “What do you know about our Millennial Cultural Initiative, Bernie?”

  “Zip.”

  “Vera? Bring him up to speed.”

  Vera turned toward Bernie. Their gazes met, unmet, then met again. “Cutting to the chase,” Vera said, “the may—”

  “Cutting to the chase,” the mayor said. “That’s a good one, considering what we’re about to discuss. So—what’s the expression I’m searching for, Vera? Foreign, maybe?”

  “A propos,” said Vera. “The mayor believes that with proper planning and incentives, the Valley could be a mecca for movie production.”

  “Isn’t half the nation’s porn already shot in South Pedroia?” Bernie said.

  “Thirty-seven percent,” said Vera. “But the mayor is targeting mainstream Hollywood movies.”

  “Like Wild Horseman,” said the mayor.

  “Don’t know that one,” Bernie said.

  “Because it’s not out yet,” the mayor said. “Not even in production. But the whole world’s going to know about it in a year or two. Guess who plays the horseman.”

  “John Waters,” Bernie said.

  Vera laughed her harsh laugh again. The mayor blinked. I watch for that. When Bernie gets them blinking, it’s usually a good sign.

  “Tell him who’s starring,” the mayor said.

  “Thad Perry,” said Vera.

  The mayor chuckled. Suddenly all sorts of different laughs were in the air. Did it mean anything? I waited to find out. “Heard of him?” the mayor said.

  Bernie nodded.

  The mayor leaned forward, rubbing his hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. His pinkie ring caught a ray of brassy light coming through the window and glittered in a dull sort of way.

  THREE

  Thad Perry? Didn’t ring a bell. There was Mad Thad Thatcherton, who’d hijacked a beer truck that turned out to be full of empties and was now wearing an orange jumpsuit at Central State Correctional—Bernie made him recycle them all before we took him in—but other than that no Thads came to mind.

  “Hottest action hero in Hollywood,” the mayor said, “and that’s Variety talking, Bernie, not me. Familiar with Variety?”

  “No,” Bernie said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Neither was I. We’re on a learning curve here, lots of hard work ahead of us. But think of the payoff!”

  “What’s the payoff?” Bernie said.

  The mayor gave Bernie a long look. Then, over his shoulder, he said, “Yo
u were right, Cal.”

  “About what?” Luxton said.

  “Didn’t you tell me I’d love how his mind worked?”

  “Something like that.”

  The mayor pointed a pudgy finger at Bernie. “I love how your mind works,” he said. “Loop him in, Vera.”

  “I’m sorry?” said Vera.

  “The payoff, for Christ sake. Tell him about the payoff.”

  Humans can sometimes squeeze their mouths into very small puckered shapes, which Vera did now. “You already did,” she said.

  “Huh?” said the mayor.

  Vera turned to Bernie. “If the studio has a successful experience producing Wild Horseman here in the Valley, then—”

  “The mecca thing?” Bernie said.

  The mayor smacked his desk again. “Exactly! Hollywood West!”

  Then came a long silence. Vera gazed down at the floor. Bernie’s mouth fell open a bit, not a good look on most humans, but just fine on him.

  “Think of the revenue,” the mayor said. “And all those jobs—carpenters, electricians, drivers, cooks, waiters—what are the latte people, again?”

  “Baristas,” Vera said.

  “Baristas, et cetera, et cetera,” the mayor said. “Too many to list. But you catch my drift, Bernie?”

  “Voters,” Bernie said.

  The mayor laughed. He laughed and laughed, his face kind of jiggling. “I’m getting a real good feeling about this,” he said. “Welcome aboard, Bernie. I have complete confidence in you.”

  “What am I doing?” Bernie said.

  “Finger on the button,” the mayor said. “Just what we need around here. Walk him back, Vera.”

  “Starting where?” said Vera.

  “The money,” the mayor said. “Where else?”