The Sound and the Furry (19 page)

“Don’t even say it,” Cleotis said, the vagueness gone from his eyes now; in fact,
they were a little too bright, in my opinion.

Bernie nodded. “How was Mack when you saw him?”

“His usual self.”

“Meaning?”

“Smelly,” said Cleotis.

That caught my attention. Smells hardly ever got mentioned in our interviews. Was
this an interview? I thought so, and if it was, then the case would soon be cleared,
on account of Bernie’s interviewing technique. I bring other things to the table.

“Smelly?” Bernie said. He’d noticed, too. No way to sneak something like that past
Bernie.

“Mack stinks of shrimp,” he said. “An occupational hazard. Even his money stinks.”

His money stinks? That came so close to reminding me of something. I don’t like that
not-quite-remembering feeling at all, but it usually goes away pretty soon—like right
now!—and then . . . and then . . .

“Why does Mack come all this way to feed his habit?” Bernie said. “No sources closer
to home?”

“Good question,” Cleotis said. “Are all PIs as smart as you?”

Bernie gave him a hard look.

“Not pulling your chain,” Cleotis said.

Don’t even think about it, amigo. Chain up Bernie? You’ll have to go through me first.

“You’re obviously a sharp guy,” Cleotis went on. “And this dog of yours is aces, no
doubt about that. He wouldn’t be for sale, by any chance?”

“Correct,” said Bernie.

Cleotis picked up our card, gave it another glance. “Maybe you don’t realize you’re
in one strange corner of the country right now. My advice? Go on back home. When dudes
start disappearing in ones and twos in these parts, there’s never a clear-cut result.”

“We’ll have to prove that to ourselves,” Bernie said. “And this may be a strange corner
of the country, but you’re not walled off. Ever heard of the Quieros?”

Cleotis had one of those smooth, unlined faces. Lines appeared on it now. “Heard of
them, yeah, but they’re not around here.”

“Yet,” Bernie said. He rose. “Where should I start looking for Mack?”

“He’ll turn up,” Cleotis said.

“Alive?” said Bernie.

“I’ve seen it happen.”

“Does he keep a place up here in the city—an apartment, maybe?”

“Wouldn’t know about that,” Cleotis said.

Bernie made this little
click-click
mouth sound that means we’re out of here. We left the kitchen, went to the front
door.
Bernie leaned the sawed-off against the wall and we walked outside, hopped in the
Porsche, and drove off, nice and slow, in no particular hurry. We don’t scare easy,
me and Bernie.

We turned down the first street we came to, turned down the next one, and then the
next, and hey! We were circling the block, just another one of our techniques at the
Little Detective Agency. We’ve got a bunch. Perps and gangbangers: heads up.

We parked by a big pile of trash around the corner from Cleotis’s. “Shutters all closed
on his side windows, big guy. Meaning we can see them but they can’t see us.” He gave
me a pat. We sat. That was what this was called: we were sitting on Cleotis’s house.

After a while it started to rain. Raining again? What was with this place? Bernie
closed the roof. Rain pitter-pattered down on it, dialed up to pounding, then went
back to pitter-pattering again, a very soothing sound. I took my eye off Cleotis’s
crib for a moment to see if Bernie was enjoying the pitter-patter, too. His head was
slumped forward and his eyes were closed. No surprise there: sitting on dudes often
made Bernie sleepy. I turned back toward Cleotis’s house. Water ran steadily from
the drainpipes into a gutter and down to the street, a very pleasant sight. The rain
pitter-pattered on and on.

And what had we here? A car pulling up in front of the house? Yes, a small white car
with a mashed-in headlight on one side, the windshield wipers going back and forth,
back and forth in a way that was hard not to watch. But I made myself not watch them
as a woman in a baseball cap got out of the car and hurried to Cleotis’s front door,
her flip-flopped feet splashing through puddles in the yard. She knocked on the door.
It opened and she went inside, but not before I’d noticed one other thing about her,
namely a long ponytail hanging down from above the back strap of her cap. That ponytail
got me to thinking. I thought for a bit, then shut it
down and just watched those wipers going back and forth, then cranked up the thinking
again, then shut it down and went back to watching the wipers, then—

Bernie straightened up real suddenly. “What are you barking about?”

Whew! I’d been trapped in a real bad circular thing there. And leave it to Bernie:
he’d busted me out of it. Things were much quieter, any barking that might or might
not have been going on now silenced. Bernie glanced toward Cleotis’s house, saw the
car.

“Customer in a hurry,” he said. “How do we know? The engine’s running.”

Bernie: the smartest human in the room. Did a car count as a room? I’d hardly started
to wonder about that when Cleotis’s door opened and the ponytail woman came out. Bernie
went still.

“Fleurette?” he said. “The waitress from Rooster Red’s?”

I knew I’d remember! Sometimes all I need is a little time.

“Good boy, Chet. Good, good boy.”

My tail did what wagging it could, not easy in the shotgun seat. Fleurette hurried
to her car, jumped in, and took off right in our direction. She went by us without
a glance, one of those drivers who lean over the wheel, holding on tight. We followed.

Bernie’s the best wheelman in the Valley, in case you don’t know that. He could follow
from close behind, way behind, from many lanes over, even from in front, all without
being spotted by the target, the trickiest part of following, which was how come we
kept an eye out for Fleurette checking her rearview mirror. But she didn’t, not even
once, so we followed mostly from close behind—into a nicer part of town, the rain
stopping all at once, steam rising off the pavement.

“The scales are starting to fall from my eyes, big guy,” Bernie said.

Oh, no! Had this ever happened before? Not that I recalled.
Did it hurt? I glued my own eyes to Bernie’s, saw nothing new. All I knew was that
scales—take the one Bernie keeps under the bed with the dustballs, for example—are
pretty big and hard to miss. I saw no scales, not falling from Bernie’s eyes, not
on his lap, not on the floor. But if Bernie said scales were falling from his eyes,
then that was that. All I could do was wait and see what happened next, not my usual
approach. What was my usual approach? Make it happen! Which is why they call me Chet
the Jet, although only Charlie actually calls me that. And me.

What happened next was Fleurette turning onto a street lined on both sides with nice-looking
old buildings and—whoa! Lots and lots of drunks? Yes: there’s no hiding drunks from
me, drunken humans being different from nondrunken ones in so many easily spottable
ways. These particular drunks were wandering around with big plastic cups in hand,
most of them—even the very fattest and wobbliest—dressed in shorts and T-shirts.

“Welcome to Bourbon Street, Chet,” Bernie said. “Keep an eye out for my wallet—I lost
it here twenty years ago.”

Twenty years sounded like a long time, but I might have been wrong about that, numbers
maybe not showing me at my best. As for Bernie’s wallet—a nice old leather wallet
with a smell all its own—I knew for a fact that he had it in one of his front pants
pockets. Just the same, I kept my eye out for wallets, and what did I see almost first
thing? A skinny skateboarding kid zooming down the street and lifting a wallet right
out of some drunk’s back pocket in a single smooth and easy motion. I loved kids!
The drunk took a huge swig from his plastic cup and pointed out a neon naked woman
sign to a buddy drunk. They both got a big kick out of it.

Fleurette made a few turns, ended up on a quieter block. She parked in front of a
building with a coffee cup sign hanging over
the door and went inside. Bernie pulled in right behind her real quick. We jumped
out—me actually jumping, and through the open window, what with the top down, not
so easy for a hundred-plus pounder—and hurried into the coffee shop. Why were we hurrying?
I only knew why I was hurrying: it was on account of Bernie hurrying. Sometimes he
gets this look on his face meaning there’s no time to lose. He had it now.

The coffee shop was small and dark and pretty much empty, one customer gazing into
a steaming mug over at a corner table and nobody behind the counter. Fleurette was
already at the back, opening a door and starting up a flight of stairs, her ponytail
swinging through a shaft of light.

She’d closed the door behind her, but it wasn’t locked. Bernie opened it real slow.
No sign of Fleurette on the stairs, rough and wooden stairs leading to a dimly lit
landing above. Bernie turned to me, finger across his lips, meaning we were in quiet
mode. Great idea! We hadn’t been in quiet mode for way too long. We started up the
stairs, Bernie first and me following, but I was in the lead by the time we got to
the top, all of that commotion taking place in quiet mode. We were pros, me and Bernie.

We stepped into a narrow corridor lit by one hanging bulb, with a door on each side
and another at the end, all of them closed. I followed Fleurette’s scent—typical young
female with an extra touch of shrimpiness—down to the end door. Bernie put his ear
to it. Did he hear that sound from inside, one of those quick human breath intakes,
maybe called a gasp? He showed no sign of it. Instead he drew the .38 Special, turned
the knob, and threw the door open.

Fleurette, standing by a bed, which was pretty much the only furniture in the room,
wheeled around toward us, her eyes wide and her face all out of shape. Bernie pocketed
the gun right away.
We moved toward the bed. Mack lay on it, wearing nothing but a T-shirt with a leaping
fish on the front. I saw again what a wiry dude he was, not much flesh on him at all.
A needle was sticking out of one of his skinny arms.

“Oh, my God,” Fleurette said, both hands over her mouth, something women did but never
men. “Is he—”

Bernie put his finger on Mack’s neck, but I already knew the answer, actually wasn’t
even thinking much about it. Instead, my mind had suddenly taken me by surprise, lighting
up a memory from my puppy days, long before I got together with Bernie. I had hardly
any memories from that time, not easy days living with gangbangers in an abandoned
house in South Pedroia. Raul, the only gangbanger who had no interest in swatting
or kicking at me or my kind, had ended up this way, on a bare mattress bed just like
Mack. I even remembered the T-shirt he’d been wearing, decorated with a picture of
an AK instead of a fish. Funny how the mind works.

O
h, no,” Fleurette said. “No, no, no.” She backed away from the bed, hands pressing
her face like she was holding it together. She looked at Bernie, then at me, and Bernie
again. All kinds of changes went on behind her eyes. She spun on her heel—one of the
cooler human moves, in my opinion—and strode toward the door, like she was out of
here and that was that: probably not in the cards, on account of how we do things
at the Little Detective Agency when dead bodies are in the picture.

Sure enough, Bernie blocked her way. She tried to cut around him, but I got there
first. Blocking someone’s way was a fun game I liked to play from time to time, or
actually just about any time.

“Who are you?” Fleurette said, backing up. “Let me go. You have no right.”

“Have to do better than that,” Bernie said.

Her eyes narrowed in that squinting look humans sometimes show you, never a pleasant
sight—undoing the whole heel-spinning thing in a way I couldn’t even begin to understand,
so I didn’t waste a moment on it—and said, “I’ve seen you before, right? At Rooster
Red’s?”

“Nice try,” Bernie said.

“What do you mean?” Fleurette said. “Now I remember distinctly—you had a beer with
Dr. Ory just the other day.”

“True as far as it goes,” Bernie said.

“I don’t understand,” said Fleurette. “And you’re starting to scare me.”

Bernie glanced over his shoulder at Mack, lying on the mattress, the needle still
sticking out of his arm. I wished Bernie would take it out. “You weren’t scared already,
Fleurette?”

“I was. I am. I’m scared out of my mind.”

“You’ll have to get past that,” Bernie said. “There’s not much time.”

“For what?”

“Let’s start with Cleotis.”

“Cleotis? I don’t know any—”

Bernie’s voice didn’t get louder, but it changed in a way that made it seem bigger
and way harder to ignore—not that I’d ever think of ignoring Bernie—and got the fur
on the back of my neck to stand up a bit. A furry thing like that happening, all from
just the sound of him. That was us. We’re a good team, me and Bernie, as a lot of
perps could tell you. What he actually said I sort of missed. It might have been:
“Start with what he told you about me.” Or something like that.

Fleurette shook her head, so hard that her ponytail kept swinging after her head had
gone still. I came very close to asking myself if the same . . . something or other.
“He—he didn’t mention you,” Fleurette said. “I don’t even know your name.”

Bernie gave her a long look. “Bernie Little,” he said. “And this is Chet.”

She shot me a sidelong glance. “Normally I like dogs.”

“That’ll work perfectly with Chet,” Bernie said. He handed
Fleurette our card. “We’ve been hired to find Ralph Boutette. Any idea where he is?”

“Ralph Boutette? Is he lost? I don’t understand.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Ralph? Enough to say hello to on the street, but I can’t even remember the last time
I saw him. He’s not a customer at the restaurant. Ralph’s a bit of a loner, in case
you haven’t—”

Bernie held up his hand in the stop sign. “Tired of hearing that,” he said. “And there’s
no time—I told you already. You’ve got maybe two minutes to be smart. I can’t stall
any longer.”