A Fistful of Collars Read online

  “No problems,” Bernie said.

  Even though there were. But that was Bernie.

  Jiggs glanced at Bernie’s leg, maybe about to say something, but before he could, Doc Booker turned to me and said, “Chet’s looking great. Happen to have a biscuit on me.”

  Old news: I’d known the instant he stepped into the room, had almost stopped wondering if the biscuit was going to make an appearance. Now I was wondering again, wondering my hardest.

  “Down, Chet,” Bernie said.

  “Should I make him sit?”

  “Way past that,” said Bernie. “Just give him the damn thing.”

  Doc Booker reached into his pocket and gave me a biscuit. Maybe I took it, would be more accurate.

  “My God, he’s quick,” Doc Booker said. Then came a discussion of how much I weighed—I’m a hundred-plus-pounder—but I wasn’t paying attention, on account of the quality of the biscuit, very high.

  We drove past the gate—a different guy on duty now—along the ridge, and started down the mountain. After not too long, we came to a construction site with a partly built house and a Dumpster out front. All of a sudden, Bernie pulled off the road and parked behind the Dumpster. He shut off the engine.

  “If you know someone does his homework,” he said, “then you’ve got to do your homework, too.”

  At that moment, he noticed the fluffy white towel—just washcloth size, really—in my mouth, and took it away. No problem. My mind was on other things, namely homework. Once Charlie had to do some homework. This was on one of his every-second weekend visits, and did we look forward to them or what? Every-second weekends couldn’t come fast enough! But the point was, I knew about homework. You opened a book or two, did some writing, yawned, gazed around, got up and had a snack, turned on the TV. So I waited for Bernie to take out a book. The sooner the book part, the sooner we’d get to the snack.

  No book appeared. Bernie rubbed his shoulder. “How does he know he’s the exact right state of rugged?” he said, losing me completely. I didn’t sense a snack coming anytime soon. Kind of frustrating because there was a ham sandwich, or at least part of one, somewhere in that Dumpster: pretty much impossible to miss the smell of ham.

  Bernie glanced over at me.

  “You’re slobbering,” he said.

  Uh-oh. I wasn’t sure how to stop that. I tried panting. It worked a bit.

  Bernie smiled at me and gave me pat. “Let’s just keep in mind the three grand a day,” he said, rubbing his shoulder again.

  Bernie’s always been a great thinker, one of our strengths at the Little Detective Agency. I bring my own things to the table. We’re a real good team. Ask some of the dudes sporting orange jumpsuits up at Northern State Correctional.

  “Thad Perry,” Bernie said. “I’ve already changed my mind about him three times. Maybe that’s why he’s an actor. What’s that word? Sort of means changeable.”

  I waited to hear.

  “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” Bernie said.

  I gazed at him closely. At first his mouth was closed, then it opened slightly, and I saw the tip of his tongue. A beautifully shaped tongue tip, nice and pink, but there was absolutely nothing on it.

  “Suzie’ll know,” he said.

  Whoa. Suzie would know what was on the tip of Bernie’s tongue when she wasn’t even here?

  Bernie took out his phone, raised a thumb to start pushing buttons, then paused. “But maybe this isn’t the kind of thing I should be doing, now that . . .” He put the phone away. Why? I’ll leave that to you. All I knew was that he’d been happy when we started down the mountain—you can always tell by his eyes, the clearer the happier, the murkier the sadder—and now he wasn’t.

  We sat. “Starts with P,” he said after a while. My eyelids began to get heavy—what a strange thing, how eyelids could put on weight like that—and were just about to close when I heard a car coming down the road, and a few moments later a black SUV with tinted windows rounded a bend and whizzed past us. Tinted windows, but rolled down on the driver’s-side door, and I could see him: Jiggs. He now wore a T-shirt and his huge bare arm rested on the door frame. Bernie turned the key, let Jiggs get by the next turn, and pulled onto the road.

  We’ve tailed a lot of dudes, me and Bernie, and once I did some tailing with Suzie at the wheel. She did a fine job for a rookie, but Bernie was an expert. He could follow from far behind, from closer in, from different lanes, even from in front! Two tricks, when it comes to tailing, Bernie always says. Don’t let them lose you. That’s one. The other may come to me later.

  The road curved back and forth all the way down the mountain. We followed Jiggs from two curves behind, so he was always below us, making it hard for him to—yes! That was it. The other trick: Don’t let them spot you. I’d known it would come to me, just didn’t expect it so soon.

  Jiggs got on a freeway, headed back across the Valley, traffic pretty heavy. We followed from two lanes over, only a few cars behind, but on the passenger side of Jiggs’s car. Shadows got longer and longer, and soon Jiggs and lots of other drivers were switching on their headlights, but not Bernie. After a while, we reached Spaghetti Junction, this huge tangle of freeways that had once made Leda so mad she’d done something too upsetting to go into—in the end, Bernie persuading the tow truck guy not to sue—and Jiggs took one ramp, then another, with all these changes of direction and us now following real close. When we came out on the far side we were crossing the bridge over the Vista City arroyo and it was night.

  We hadn’t done much work in Vista City—just one case I could think of, and I never wanted to think of it—but I’d been down in that arroyo. It was dry, like all the arroyos in the Valley, although Bernie said that back in Indian times water had flowed in them all year long, and I had smelled water that one time, under the pebbly ground. That was just before I’d found the kid’s backpack, but too late. We’ve solved every missing kid case we ever took, except that one. I’ll never forget when we opened the broom closet. And later that night, we’d taken care of justice on our own, me and Bernie. That was part of what I never wanted to think about.

  EIGHT

  We have some tough neighborhoods in the Valley, South Pedroia being one, and Vista City another. They’re both in flat parts of town, where the heat gets hottest and the air dustiest. Also they’ve both got lots of boarded-up buildings, dive bars, and too many people just sitting around, watching. That’s never good when it comes to humans. We had the headlights on now, and they shone on the eyes of one of those watchers, an old guy sitting on a wooden box by the pumps of a closed-down gas station. His eyes followed us down the street.

  The black SUV turned at the next corner and went down a block of small, low houses, their yards all dirt, or grass burned brown by the sun. At first only a few of the streetlights were working; and then none. The night sky went dark and sort of pink, the way it got in the Valley, not a star showing.

  “This is getting interesting,” Bernie said.

  I waited to find out how. Meanwhile, we tailed the black SUV down a long street where there’d been a fire sometime back—I could still smell the ashes, very faint—and most of the lots stood empty. Some guys sat on lawn chairs on one of those empty lots, drinking beer from the real big cans. A block or two after that, the brake lights glowed brighter on the SUV. Bernie pulled over right away. That was him every time. He senses things.

  The SUV stopped in front of an unlit house that looked a bit bigger than any of the others in the neighborhood; had two stories, for one thing. Jiggs got out. He didn’t glance around—that’s something Bernie always watches for at a time like this, can’t go into it now—but just walked right up to the house. The door opened without him knocking and he went inside. Was he carrying something? I thought so. A moment or two passed, and then a light shone at the back of the house.

  “Curiosity killed the cat?” Bernie said. “Never bought into that, myself.”

  Then we had something in common; a
lot, in fact, and finding more all the time. Once we even howled at the moon together. What a night that was! Too bad about those bikers, of course. Back to the curiosity killing the cat thing. I’d never really understood it, curiosity being a bit of a puzzler. But it’s always nice to have a takeaway—that’s one of Bernie’s beliefs—and my takeaway was that curiosity must be a good thing.

  We hopped out of the car—the only actual hopping done by me, although I’d seen Bernie try it once, back when he and Suzie were first getting to know each other and we’d gone to pick her up—and started down the street, side by side and real quiet. That was just one of our techniques. We had a bunch, including me grabbing the perp by the pant leg, which was how we knew the case was closed. Was it going to happen tonight? You never knew, not in our business.

  Another technique we had was to get off the road and walk through vacant lots. We were doing it now. These lots were vacant when it came to houses, but there was plenty of other stuff—broken bottles, broken furniture, rusted-out parts of this and that, plus the smell of drugs, all kinds of different drugs. Two of my guys had passed this way recently, laying their marks at exactly the places where I wanted to lay mine. What an annoying coincidence! No time now for me to do anything about it, what with us on the job. Well, except maybe for one quick squirt on the side of this slashed-up couch, taking no time at all. Who could resist?

  We swung around a strange greenish puddle that smelled like metal when the welder gets his torch on it—Bernie always told me not to look, but I did anyway, then could never see right for the rest of the day—and squeezed through a hole in a chain-link fence; me first, although there was a little confusion about that. We stepped into the yard behind the house Jiggs had entered. The house had a small deck at the back. Bernie put his finger over his lips: our signal for quiet.

  We crept onto the deck. Right away, one of the boards made a cracking sound under Bernie’s foot. It sounded like a gunshot to me, but you never knew how humans would hear something. We went still, waited. There were two windows on the back wall, one above, one below. The top one had an air conditioner in it, making a high-pitched rattle that bothered my ears. A light shone in the lower window. No one came to peer out, meaning we were good to go; not good to go is something I have trouble with, I admit it. We went closer, Bernie bending down to my level, right at the sill, and looked in.

  We saw a small, bare room, with peeling paint and holes in the walls, plus a card table and two chairs. Jiggs sat on one, and a dude in a wifebeater with slicked-back hair and lots of tattoos sat on the other. They weren’t doing friendly things like playing cards or drinking or smoking or eating; they were just talking in an unsmiling sort of way, but with the window closed and the AC so loud I caught hardly any of it. Jiggs said something about someone named Ramon. The tattooed dude said he wasn’t here to talk about Ramon. Jiggs said he didn’t want this goddamn messed-up situation to get anymore messed up. The tattooed dude told him to stop acting like a girl. Whoa! Imagine a girl who looked like Jiggs. I couldn’t. Meanwhile, Jiggs had a real pissed-off expression on his face. The tattooed dude said it was just an expression, take it easy. Then he held out his hand. Jiggs reached down, raised a brown paper bag, set it on the table. The tattooed dude glanced into the bag and nodded. Jiggs got up and left the room. The tattooed dude just sat there. A moment or two later, I heard the front door close. Then the SUV started up. Bernie heard that part: I could tell from the slight turning of his head.

  What next? Go back to tailing Jiggs? Stay where we were? The what-nexts I pretty much left up to Bernie. He reached toward me, like he was about to tap my shoulder, meaning, Let’s go, big guy. But at that moment, the tattooed dude picked up the paper bag. Bernie’s hand went still. The SUV drove away, the engine sound fading. Was the tattooed dude, too, listening for that? He tipped the bag over and money spilled onto the table, lots of it. Then he started counting—when humans count money their lips move, like maybe there’s some connection between money and their mouths, about as far as I can take it, maybe farther—and then arranged the bills in stacks, snapping rubber bands around each one. After that, he dropped all the stacks back in the bag except for one, which he pocketed.

  The tattooed dude grabbed the bag, rose, and left the room, shutting off the light on his way out. I heard his footsteps; then running water; and the tiny squeak of mattress springs. After that, nothing but the AC.

  Bernie spoke, his voice very soft. “Wonder what’s going on?”

  What was going on? Did he mean besides the tattooed dude zonking out? If he did, I had no answers. I stood where I was, outside the back door. Soon the AC began dripping. I shifted out of range of the falling drops and sat down. Bernie went on gazing through the window at the dark room. Somewhere in the neighborhood a woman shouted, “Get out of my goddamn house!” A man laughed at her in a way that made my teeth feel like biting.

  Bernie tapped me on the shoulder. We went back to the car and drove home. On the way, Bernie said, “I’d sure like to know what Jiggs and that guy were talking about.”

  I wondered why. Nothing I’d heard had seemed particularly interesting, not even the parts I remembered.

  Nixon Panero came over for breakfast. Had that ever happened before? Not that I could think of, but I sure hoped he’d do it again. For one thing, he brought the food: coffee and egg sandwiches for him and Bernie, a nice fat sausage for me. Did we mind that his fingers were grease-stained? Not us. Some days you just hit the ground running; I knew this was going to be one of them.

  We sat out on the patio, water gurgling from the swan fountain, steam rising from the coffee cups, not a care in the world, at least not on my part.

  “What’s with the ice pack on your shoulder?” Nixon said.

  “You don’t want to know,” Bernie said.

  “Hope it was one of those you-should-see-the-other-guy dustups.”

  “Wasn’t any kind of dustup.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Nixon. He took a big bite from his sandwich, talked with his mouth full, saying something like “I read the script.” He tossed it on the table. “Guy who wrote it, Arn Linsky? They paid him a cool million.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Hollywood Reporter,” Nixon said. “He’s A-list. That’s what they get. Minimum.”

  “So it’s good?”

  Nixon shrugged. “Not claiming there aren’t good lines in it,” he said. He bit into his sandwich again, pawing—yes, just another nice thing about Nixon—pawing through the pages. “Like here, where Lolotea—she’s the shaman—says to Croomer—that’s Thad Perry’s character—‘I am unready to embrace the white man,’ and he says, ‘You could try closing your eyes.’”

  “That’s good?”

  “Guaranteed to get laughs. Plus it’s when he starts to appeal to her. And now you know there’ll be a hot scene with her and Thad Perry coming up. Heard who’s playing Lolotea?”

  “Nope.”

  “Kina Molenta,” Nixon said. “The brunette from Hothouse Flowers.”

  “Didn’t catch that one,” Bernie said.

  “It’s a TV show, not a movie,” Nixon said. “About strippers in a place called the Hothouse.”

  “She’s playing an Apache shaman?”

  “There are some—what’s the word?”

  “Authenticity?” Bernie said.

  “Yeah,” said Nixon, “authenticity issues you’re not going to like.”

  “For instance?”

  Nixon turned a page. “This part, where Croomer gets shot right through with an arrow, back to front, and then kills this other guy by falling on him so the same arrow goes—”

  “For Christ sake.”

  “It’s only a movie, like they say.”

  Bernie gazed at the script. “Do the rivers flow?”

  “Rivers?”

  “The arroyos, the washes, the gulches—do they flow in the movie?”

  “No,” Nixon said. “It’s dry as dust. They talk about that a lo
t. There’s even a scene where Lolotea takes one of those forked sticks and tries to—”

  “Water flowed,” Bernie said. He put down his coffee—actually sort of banged it down, a tiny black wave slopping over the rim—and pointed to the canyon beyond our back gate. “Flowed right past where we’re sitting now.”

  “Maybe you gotta pay two mil for that kind of detail,” Nixon said.

  The phone rang while Bernie was shaving. Bernie hated shaving, didn’t do it every day, not even close—causing some problems, back in the Leda days—and he looked great shaved or not, in my opinion, except for that one camping trip where he’d ended up with an actual beard. Too much for me, and we’d had to drive into the nearest town, hardly even a day’s ride, for a disposable razor.

  He hit the speaker button.

  “How’s it goin’ so far?” said Rick Torres.

  “Don’t like the script,” Bernie said.

  “Yeah?” said Rick. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s not accurate.”

  Silence. Then Rick said, “Don’t forget it’s a director’s medium. The script doesn’t mean squat. It’s what happens on the set and in the editing room.”

  “They pay a million bucks for something that doesn’t mean squat?” Bernie said.

  “That’s Hollywood.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “It’s common knowledge,” said Rick. “Met Thad Perry yet?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “You know,” Bernie said. “Just a guy.”

  “Puts on his pants one leg at a time?” said Rick. “C’mon, Bernie. Help my marriage.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I told you—Marcie’s a big fan. She needs details. And don’t forget about that autograph.”

  “Always the wife,” Bernie said. And then: “Ow.” Uh-oh. A fat drop of blood welled up on Bernie’s chin, trickled down. I wanted to lick it up, but sort of remembered Bernie not liking that when I’d tried it before, and all the other befores. Bernie cut himself shaving just about every time.