Paw and Order Read online

  The elevator rose and came to a too-quick stop, the doors sliding open. Hey! I almost puked! We got out, walked down a hall, and stopped before a door. Suzie read the sign: “ ‘World Wide Solutions,’ ” she said. “Eben has a lot of good points, but modesty’s not one. Not much modesty in this town, now that I think of it. Possible story idea, Suzie girl.” Or something like that, way too hard to follow. Suzie opened the door and we went inside.

  You get to know offices in this line of work—Cedric Booker, the Valley DA has a basketball hoop in his! Which had got me a bit too excited, and the next thing I’d known Cedric’s basketball was all shriveled up, nothing ballish about it. A story for another time.

  This particular office had no hoop. Instead, there was just the usual reception part and an inner office at the back. No one sat at the reception desk, which bore a vase of flowers, the plastic kind without a trace of flower smell. Wasn’t flower smell the whole point of flowers? There were lots of human things that I didn’t understand. I was trying to think of another one beside the plastic flowers as we approached the closed door of the inner office.

  Suzie knocked. “Eben?”

  No answer, but a man was in there: I could smell him, and also smell that lovely leather briefcase. How nice a few moments with that briefcase, preferably alone, would be! Was that in my future? This was shaping up as a fine day.

  Suzie turned the knob, opened the door. The inner office was smaller than our office back home on Mesquite Road but much tidier, no papers scattered around, no piles of this and that, nothing on the desk but a closed laptop—in short, it was all as neat as Eben’s little trimmed beard. Eben was sitting behind the desk, kind of slumped in his chair. One of his eyes was open and the other closed, like he was winking. Except he wasn’t.

  “Eben?”

  I went closer, possibly pulling the leash from Suzie’s hand, but that’s the kind of thing that happens when I smell blood. It was seeping, although hardly at all, from a small round hole just behind one of Eben’s ears.

  “Oh, my God!”

  Eben’s open eye shifted very slightly in Suzie’s direction.

  “Eben! What happened?” Suzie, now right beside me, touched Eben’s shoulder, a light touch, but enough to make him tip sideways, right off the chair and onto the floor. Suzie’s eyes got huge and frightened, and she covered her mouth with her hand, something you see women do, but men never.

  The death smell started up almost at once, which was always how this goes down. So we had the blood smell, the death smell, and also—almost overwhelmed but definitely in the room—the guinea pig smell. I had the craziest thought of my life: the guinea pig did it.

  I needed Bernie.

  FIVE

  * * *

  Bernie?” Suzie said into her phone. “Come on, pick up. Please.”

  We were still in Eben’s office but had moved a little farther away from Eben’s body. His face was getting whiter and waxier, which somehow made his neatly trimmed beard more and more prominent, almost like the beard was alive on its own or something like that. I wished I hadn’t had that thought. It went away.

  “Bernie? Bernie? Wake up!”

  Right about then I smelled one of those smells Bernie and I had worked on. Who wouldn’t like working on smells? For one thing, it involves treats, often a Slim Jim. No other thing actually comes to me, but aren’t Slim Jims enough? This particular smell, the one I was picking up at the moment, was metallic and gunpowdery. I followed it to the foot of Eben’s desk chair, a roller chair pushed back from the desk a bit. A shell casing lay beside one of the little chair wheels. I sat beside it and barked, just this clipped and not very loud bark I use for smell work.

  Suzie looked down at me, saw the shell casing, and put the phone away.

  “You’re really something, you know that?”

  How nice of her! And even nicer was the Slim Jim, coming next. But it didn’t! Instead, Suzie turned and went into the outer office. I followed, followed very closely, the leash now forgotten by Suzie and dragging on the floor. Suzie opened the top drawer of the reception desk. The Slim Jims were in there? Made total sense to me. She reached in and . . . took out a notebook? She flipped through it, found no Slim Jims that I could see. Things were taking a bad turn. Suzie placed a finger on one of the notebook pages and picked up the desk phone.

  “The building manager, please,” she said.

  • • •

  Not long after that, we had a bunch of uniformed cops in the room. There was some back and forth, some huddling over Eben, and then Suzie showed them the shell casing. Meaning one of the cops had the Slim Jim responsibility? But no. They got started with crime scene taping, picture taking, gum chewing, all the usual cop things. The cop with the most gold on his uniform made a little motion to Suzie and led us out to the hallway.

  “You who called it in?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Suzie.

  “Name?”

  “Suzie Sanchez. And yours?”

  The cop didn’t seem to like that. His eyes, like little raisins—I’d tried a box of raisins once, found them too sticky for my taste—got even littler. “Lieutenant Soares.” He turned those raisin eyes on me. “This your dog?”

  “A friend’s, actually.”

  “Looks like a K-9 type.”

  I was! I was the K-9 type! Was Lieutenant Soares on Slim Jim duty? Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. He turned back to Suzie, seemed to be waiting for her to speak. When she did not, he said, “How about you take me through it?”

  “Through what?” Suzie said.

  “Your relationship to the deceased, for starters.”

  “He’s—he was an acquaintance.”

  “And the purpose of your visit?”

  “Eben was a consultant. I was consulting him.”

  “What did he consult about?”

  “International politico-economics.”

  “Is that what you do?” Lieutenant Soares said. “International politico-economics?”

  “In a sense,” Suzie said. “I’m a reporter for the Washington Post.”

  “Ah,” said Lieutenant Soares. His eyes shifted one way, then the other. That’s a sign of thoughts getting batted around in the human mind. Lieutenant Soares opened his mouth and looked on the point of saying something—I’d have bet anything it was about Slim Jims!—but at that moment the elevator opened down the hall and a man stepped out. He came toward us, a quick-walking dude in a dark suit. Lots of dark-suited dudes in this city; I thought about making what Bernie calls a mental note, but nothing came next and I dropped the whole shebang.

  Hey! The quick-stepping dude turned out to be the intense-type of human who pushes a sort of energy wave in front of him, a wave I could feel in a hard-to-explain way. Hadn’t run into one of those since Pepperpot McGint, a tiny booze-truck hijacker who’d put up the best fight of anyone I’d ever seen one-on-one with Bernie and now was breaking rocks in the hot sun, probably lots of them and real fast.

  This new energy-pushing dude—he had a big bony nose, something I always like to see in a human—stopped in front of Lieutenant Soares. “You in charge?” he said, flashing some kind of ID.

  Lieutenant Soares squinted at the ID in an unfriendly way and then said, “Yeah,” also in an unfriendly way.

  “I’ll be taking over now.”

  “Didn’t catch your name.”

  “But you just saw it.” They stared at each other. “Ferretti,” said the new guy. “Double R’s, double T’s, Victor D.” He pushed past us and entered Eben’s office. Lieutenant Soares muttered something that didn’t sound nice and followed. We did, too. By that time, Ferretti was already in the inner office.

  “Whoa,” said one of the cops, holding up his hand in the stop sign.

  “It’s all right,” said Lieutenant Soares.

  Ferretti ducked under a strip of cri
me tape in one easy motion and stood over Eben. He gazed down at him for a long time. Everyone else stopped what they were doing and gazed at Ferretti. He turned slowly away from Eben and then paused, his eyes on a potted plant in the far corner of the room.

  “What have we here?” he said, ducking back under the yellow tape and walking over to the plant. Something lay half-buried in the blackish earth. Ferretti snapped on plastic gloves, reached into the pot, and pulled out a gun. He blew off the dirt in two puffs and held it up, a real small gun with a pink handle.

  “Twenty-two?” said Lieutenant Soares.

  Ferretti nodded.

  One of the cops raised the shell casing. “Twenty-two,” she said.

  • • •

  When we got back to Suzie’s place, the red-haired woman—Lizette the landlady, had I gotten that right?—was outside the main house, watering flowers with a hose. Spray me! That was my first and only thought.

  “Hi, Suzie,” she said.

  “Hi, Lizette.”

  “Is something wrong?” Lizette said. “You look . . . not yourself.”

  “Terribly wrong,” Suzie said. “A friend of mine’s dead.”

  Lizette’s eyes opened wide, glittering and green. “I’m so sorry. Who . . . ah . . . ?”

  “A consultant named Eben St. John,” Suzie said.

  “The name’s not familiar,” said Lizette.

  “He was shot,” Suzie said. “Murdered.”

  “Oh, my God,” Lizette said, putting one hand to her chest. The other steered the hose nozzle back and forth in a steady rhythm over the flowers. “Shot? Murdered? What happened? Do they know who did it?”

  Suzie started in on a long explanation. I watched the flowing water from the hose. Spray me! It didn’t have to be for long: a quick spritz would do.

  But no. When I tuned in again, Lizette was saying, “. . . distance between him and the flowerpot?”

  “Ten feet or so,” Suzie said.

  “Ruling out suicide.”

  “That’s what the police thought.”

  “Who was in charge?” Lizette said. “I—I happen to know some people on the force.”

  “A lieutenant named Soares.”

  Lizette shook her head.

  “I hear you also know Lanny Sands,” Suzie said.

  “The political guy?” Lizette said. “I know who he is, of course, but we’ve never met. Where did you hear that?”

  “I must have got it mixed up,” Suzie said.

  Lizette looked about to say something, but at that moment she noticed that I seemed to be in the flowerbed.

  “I get the feeling he wants me to spray him,” she said.

  “A safe bet,” Suzie said.

  And the next thing I knew—yes! Spray, spray, and more spray! Nothing wrong with Lizette, in my opinion. They both watched me getting sprayed, the sight maybe relaxing them a little.

  “Your imposing friend find you all right?” Lizette said.

  “Imposing friend?”

  “The rather big gentleman who belongs to this dog,” Lizette said, turning the nozzle and cutting off my water supply. “Bernie Little—your boyfriend from back home, if I understood right.”

  “He did,” Suzie said.

  What was this? A rather big gentleman who belonged to me? As I shook off the water—sending my own spray right back on Lizette and Suzie, fun on top of fun!—I went over all my belongings. There were my collars, black for dress-up and gator skin for every day, gator skin replacing my old brown one on a case that’s way too complicated to go into now, but let’s just say I never wanted to see a huge green dude name of Iko ever again in my life. Then I had my water bowl at home, plus my food bowl, and don’t forget the portable water bowl for the car. The Porsche itself: a belonging? What else could it be? And shared with Bernie, the way I like to do things. Hey! That meant the house on Mesquite Road in the Valley was mine, too! Mine and Bernie’s, of course, goes without mentioning by now. And I’d be happy to share my collars and bowls with him if he wanted. I’d actually seen him drink from the portable water bowl on several occasions, the latest being toward the end of the Police Athletic League picnic. Other than those, I had no possessions, so I’d gotten nowhere on this problem, whatever it was.

  “. . . considered journalism myself at one time,” Lizette was saying. The light caught her green eyes in a way that seemed to green them even more. Lizette was one of those humans you wanted to stare at, hard to say why.

  “Oh?”

  Lizette smiled. She had very white teeth, small and even. “In a former life. Now I’m with a Web developer.”

  Suzie nodded. “Where was this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This former life.”

  “Ah,” said Lizette, “you’ve picked up the remains of my accent?”

  “But I can’t place it.”

  “I’m from Quebec originally,” Lizette said.

  “I went to winter carnival once in Montreal, back in college.” Suzie said. “I loved it.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “A B-and-B,” Suzie said.

  “Next time try the Château Frontenac—old Montreal at its best.”

  “Thanks,” Suzie said.

  One of those strange silences that seem to settle in from above now came over us. “So awful about—what was his name again?”

  “Eben St. John.”

  “So awful,” Lizette went on. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, leaving a dark smear of garden soil. “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  I stepped out of the flowerbed, careful not to damage hardly anything at all.

  • • •

  “Will you just look at him?” Suzie said, her voice quiet.

  For as long as she liked! We were in Suzie’s room, just inside the door, watching Bernie sleep. He lay on his side, face toward us, eyes closed, eyelashes crusted over with a surprising amount of eye gunk. That was Bernie, of course, always doing things in a big way, just another reason for the success of the Little Detective Agency, except for the finances part, which may have come up already, but it comes up a lot in real life, too, if that makes any sense, so . . . so something or other. Meanwhile, Bernie’s breathing—he’s a wonderful breather, hard to explain how exactly—was slow and regular, mouth open just a bit, drool leaking from the downward corner. He looked great. Suzie went over to the bedside table, picked up Bernie’s phone, checked the screen, sighed.

  She put the phone down, but too close to the edge of the table and it fell to the floor, landing with a not loud but sort of hard clack-clack. Then came something very scary I’d seen once or twice and had hoped never to see again. Bernie went from being totally still to totally in motion, springing from the bed with a kind of—yes, growl—and grabbing Suzie by the wrist so fast I didn’t really know what had happened until it was over. Suzie cried out. Bernie’s eyes, which were all blurry, slowly cleared. He let go of Suzie’s wrist, sat down on the edge of the bed with a heavy thump.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He hung his head. I hated seeing that.

  “What . . . what happened, Bernie?” Suzie said, rubbing her wrist. “Was it a bad dream?”

  “I don’t know.” Bernie took her wrist, gave it a kiss. I moved in a little closer. Don’t think for a moment that I had a problem with Bernie kissing Suzie’s wrist. It was just that . . . that . . .

  “I haven’t had an . . . episode in a long time,” Bernie was saying, “didn’t think I’d ever . . .”

  “Episode?” Suzie said.

  Bernie shrugged his shoulders.

  “Like a flashback?” Suzie said.

  “I guess that’s what they call it.”

  “To the war?”

  Bernie nodded. A long time ago, before we’d gotten toget
her, Bernie’d been to the war and had some bad times. I knew from the wound on his leg, which I may have mentioned before. He limped a bit, but not often, only if we were working real steep country, or he’d had to run for a long time. And Bernie didn’t have to run much, running being my department, amigo. He brings other things to the table.

  “Want to talk about it?” Suzie said.

  Bernie shook his head. He rose, rubbed his face hard with both hands, and then . . . then gave himself a sort of shake. Not my type of shake that goes from nose to tail and back again—impossible what with Bernie having no tail—but a pretty good shake, and in fact a great one for a human. But that was Bernie.

  “You’re all right?” Suzie said.

  “Yeah.” And I could see it. Bernie was back to normal Bernie, just the way I love him. He glanced at me—his expression changing slightly—and back to Suzie. “What have I missed?”

  SIX

  * * *

  Eben?” Bernie said. “The Brit who was here this morning?”

  “Yes, Bernie,” Suzie said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She gave him a sideways look, maybe enjoying the way his hair was all messed up. And his eyebrows, too! Have I mentioned Bernie’s eyebrows? They have a language of their own. “How about more coffee?” Suzie said.

  Bernie shook his head. A vein throbbed in one of his hands, something I hadn’t seen in a while, the last time being the only missing kid case we’d ever worked where we didn’t get the kid back. That vein had throbbed in Bernie’s hand; he’d whipped us into a screaming U-turn; we’d roared through the night, pedal to the metal; and gotten there too late. I’ll never forget when we opened that broom closet. We’d taken care of justice later that night ourselves, me and Bernie. I won’t forget that either. Or the name of the kid: Gail.