Here’s a puzzle,” Bernie said as we drove away from Donut Heaven. “Outside the Parsonses’ house Mickles told us he suspected Daniel knew something and was going to get it out of him. Except according to Daniel, he’d already given him Billy’s name. I can understand Mickles keeping us in the dark, but now in his official report to Stine he’s claiming he has no leads. Mickles knows about Billy, but he’s keeping it to himself? What’s up?”
Uh-oh. Whatever that was, I’d missed the whole thing, hoped it wasn’t important. Meanwhile, we were crossing the canyon on the Coronado Bridge. “Why name it after him?” Bernie said every single time we were on it, except for now. Now he said, “Do we want Mickles finding Billy before we do? No. So Billy’s where we start.”
We entered a quiet neighborhood somewhat like our own, except hillier, a neighborhood I recognized from a rather exciting night in my past.
“Question one. What’s all the money for? Billy took twenty grand from his parents and almost certainly stole the watch. Adds up to a lot of green.”
Or something like that: I was pretty much lost in memories of that exciting long-ago night. How pleasant memories can be!
“One thing for sure,” Bernie said. “I smell a rat.”
All at once Bernie had my full attention. He had never smelled a rat before, not in any back alley, Dumpster, or landfill we’d ever investigated, almost all of them as ratty as you could wish for. Once we’d even worked our way into a sewer system. Rats out the yingyang down there, my friends. Invisible, yes, on account of the darkness, but they’d smelled the place up in a way that couldn’t be missed. But that was the point: Bernie had missed it. That was when I’d first been certain that his nose—really good-sized in human terms—was mostly for decoration. And now he was smelling a rat, when—trust me—there was no rat to smell? What was going on? I shifted my position a bit, keeping Bernie under close surveillance, waiting for some explanation.
But none came. After a while, he said, “We’ve got Billy’s number—how about we just ask him?” He tapped at his phone. A voice spoke. “Number no longer in service.” Bernie nodded as though that made sense. A moment or two later, he swung onto a cross street. “Wildheart Way—here we go.” And soon we were parked in front of a small house with a desert-style front yard, just like ours. We got out, looked around. “Shooter?” Bernie called. “Shooter?”
Whoa! Now he thought he was smelling Shooter? I could actually detect a bit of Shooter scent, but not recent. What was happening to Bernie? I went closer, my go-to move when I’m worried about him.
“Hey, big guy, a little space.”
I was already giving him space, more than he needed under these circumstances.
“Shooter!” he yelled. And maybe was fixing to do so again, what with me blanking out on how to stop him—Bernie! No Shooter on the premises!—when the door to the small house opened and a woman looked out.
“Who are you?” she said. “What do you want?”
Her voice was all ragged, the way a woman’s voice gets when she’s angry. But also when she’s been crying, and this woman had been crying: I could smell the telltale mixture of tears and snot. Why do women cry more than men? Is it because they also talk more? That was as far as I could take it, probably too far.
“I’m Bernie Little,” Bernie said. “I was just, um, sort of checking to see if Shooter had turned up. That is, if this is where, uh, if this is the house . . .” He gazed at the woman, a gray-haired woman in jeans and a T-shirt, maybe overweight, but kind of strong-looking, too. “Are you Ellie’s mother?”
The woman didn’t nod or speak. A tear leaked out of one of her eyes and left a silvery track on her cheek.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bernie said.
Now she nodded, a single brief nod. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Bernie Little,” Bernie said. “I’m a private detective. I was working with her on the case that . . . on this last case. Chet and I—” He nodded toward me. “—are the ones who discovered—who found her.”
“A saguaro?” the woman said.
“I’m sorry?”
She raised her voice. She’d been crying, yes, but she was angry, too. “The case. You’re the one who brought it up.”
“Sorry,” Bernie said. “Yes, the case was—is about saguaros, illegally transplanted from the desert to—”
“Why the hell did she care so much about a goddamn cactus?” the woman said. Her voice rose and rose, ended up close to a scream. I heard a window open in some nearby house.
When Bernie answered, his voice was very soft. “Someone has to,” he said.
The woman went still. “That’s exactly what Ellie said, her very words. But I’ll never understand.”
“I think she meant that if no one—”
The woman waved her arm, like she was knocking Bernie aside. “Why her?”
“I don’t know,” Bernie said. “But we mean to find out.”
“Who is ‘we’?” the woman said.
“Valley PD, for starters. Plus Carl Conte from her department. And—”
“She hated him.”
“Hated Conte? Why?”
“She said he was just another scumbag politician.”
“Any other reason?”
“Why would there be any other reason? What are you getting at?”
“Nothing,” Bernie said. “What I was trying to tell you is that Chet and I will also be working on this, full-time.”
“Who is Chet?”
Bernie pointed at me. At the time I was licking at an unruly tuft of fur sticking up on one shoulder, but I soon got that taken care of.
“He looks so much like . . .” the woman said.
“Ellie and I were discussing that,” Bernie said.
“I can imagine,” the woman said, and then with no warning she fell apart completely, wailing and sobbing, tears streaming down her face. Bernie went to her, turned her around, walked her into the house, and closed the door. Being inside didn’t keep me from hearing another window opening up in the neighborhood, and then one more.
• • •
“What’s your name?” Bernie said, refilling the woman’s water glass at the kitchen sink and handing it to her.
“Barb,” she said. She took a sip, dabbed at her face with the back of her arm, gazed around in that unseeing way humans sometimes do. How interesting they are! Meanwhile, there wasn’t much to see, just a lot of boxes, mostly empty, and stacks of kitchen things here and there. “Sorting through all the . . . all the . . .” Barb said.
“Is there any hurry on that?” Bernie said.
“I don’t know. Her lease is up at the end of the end of next month. But she was going to renew. So . . . I just don’t know.”
“Maybe you can get someone to help you.”
“Yeah.” Barb took another sip, looked my way. “Where do you think he is?”
“Shooter?”
Barb nodded.
“No idea,” Bernie said. “How about we call some of the shelters?”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
Soon they were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, talking on their phones. About what? I wondered about that. Then I picked up an interesting scent, followed it to a gap between the fridge and the stove, and discovered a chewy shaped like a little baseball bat—a chewy, from the smell, clearly belonging to Shooter. So nice of him to share! I’m a big fan of baseball—especially the ball itself, full of surprises when you get inside—and also of chewies, hardly bears mentioning, meaning my life was about to enter one of those perfect interludes. Do you have them? With me, they come around pretty often. Yet I’m always surprised, which takes it to an even nicer level. Who can make sense of all these things? Not me, amigo.
The phone calls went on for some time, then came to an end. Bernie and Barb shook their heads.
“Doesn’t mean he won’t turn up,” Bernie said. “And now if he does, they’ll call you.”
“She loved Shooter so much.”
“I understand.”
Barb gave Bernie a quick sideways look. “Maybe this sounds crazy, but I’d really like him found.”
“Why is that crazy?”
“Because I can’t keep him—I’m allergic.”
That puzzler cropping up again? I didn’t let it affect my mood.
“We’ll do our best to find him,” Bernie said. “Any thoughts on where he’d go if not here?”
“Such as . . . ?”
“Such as somewhere else he likes to go,” Bernie said. “Shooter didn’t start from here—I’m going on the assumption that he was with her when . . . that he rode along on the trip.”
“I didn’t think of that. But of course you’re right.” Barb’s eyes shifted, a sign her mind had gotten busy on something. “Where’s her truck?”
“Good question,” Bernie said. “But back to Shooter, and where he might go.”
“I just don’t know.”
“What about Ellie’s boyfriend? Where does he live?”
“Her boyfriend? Ellie doesn’t . . . there was no boyfriend, not recently.”
“My mistake,” Bernie said.
“There were boyfriends in the past,” said Barb. “But none of them panned out, for one reason or another. You know how men are these . . . excuse me.”
“No,” Bernie said. “Go on. It’s a teachable moment.”
Barb laughed. A small laugh, and quickly done with, but nice to hear. “I’ve said too much already.”
“I can take it.”
“That’s what they all say,” Barb said.
Bernie smiled. “Lesson one,” he said.
From the look on her face, I thought Barb was about to laugh again, but she did not. Instead she picked up a little silver trophy, dusted it off, and wrapped it in newspaper.
“How about Ellie’s ex?” Bernie said. “Did Shooter know him?”
Barb put down the trophy. “Ex? There’s no ex. Where are you getting your information?”
“Sorry,” Bernie said. “I must have gotten things mixed up.”
Barb gave him a careful look. “I hope you’re a good detective,” she said. “I don’t have money to waste.”
“Not following you.”
“I’m paying you, of course. To find whoever killed my daughter. And to bring Shooter back home.”
Bernie shook his head. “We’re going to do those things,” he said. “But we’re not taking any money from you.”
“I won’t accept charity,” said Barb.
“Nothing to do with charity,” Bernie said. “We already have a client.”
“Who?”
“That’s confidential.”
Confidential meaning he was going to say the name of the client or he wasn’t? I was hoping he was, the existence of this client being news to me. Do I need to fill you in on our finances? I kept hoping for client news until we were back in the car, and for some time after.
• • •
“Remember how that went, big guy?” Bernie said as we crossed back over the canyon. “Didn’t I tell Ellie I was divorced and seeing someone, and didn’t she say ‘same!’ or something like that?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. That was bad. On the flip side, I still had Shooter’s bat-shaped chewy. That was good, one bad and one good always leveling out to good, in my opinion.
“Why would she do that?” he went on. I waited to hear. My teeth felt tip-top, the way teeth do when working on a first-class chewy. “Is it possible she was laying the foundation for some sort of . . . some sort of something?” Bernie took a deep breath, let it out slow, accompanied by a small sound, not happy. “I’m not going to deny that I felt . . . what did I feel, exactly? A kind of beginning? I’m pretty sure I did. Do I have to beat myself up over that?”
I stopped in mid-chew. Bernie beating himself up? Had I ever in my whole career heard anything worse? Could he have forgotten about that lightning-quick jab and the damage it could do? Not to mention the hook that came pounding in right off the jab, both of them in the air at the same time, one coming, one going? He wouldn’t stand a chance! I kept a close eye on Bernie’s hands, was relieved to see they didn’t square up into fists, but stayed on the steering wheel, nice and relaxed. I wondered about taking Bernie on a long run in the canyon, maybe work off some of his excess energy. You had to get out in front of problems, as Bernie says, and now I really understood it for the first time. A simple plan—find a tennis ball, drop it at Bernie’s feet—was already forming in my mind as we turned into our driveway, but then the phone buzzed.
“Bernie?”
Hey! It was Suzie. Hadn’t heard her voice in way too long. Not easy for us, me and Bernie, being so far away from her. Seeing her in Foggy Bottom—if that was where we’d seen her: what a great time! Gunplay on a boat at night—you don’t forget fun like that. And Suzie had written up the whole case—the Barnum case as I called it to myself, on account of Barnum, a guinea pig who’d played a small role—for her paper, Bernie reading the whole thing aloud, although I’d fallen into dreamland soon after the Barnum part. Suzie had even ended up on TV! We’d watched her in a bar somewhere on our drive back home, except not all of it, what with the bartender changing the channel, which had led to a little rumpus best forgotten.
“Uh, hi, Suzie,” Bernie said.
“You okay, Bernie?”
“Yeah, sure. Just working on a case.”
“Is this a bad time?”
“No, no. I mean—for what?”
Suzie laughed. “Oh, Bernie, you’re just so . . .”
“Go on.”
“You. You’re so you.”
“That’s it? I was hoping for some revelation.”
“I’m no revelator,” Suzie said. “Just a journalist. Which is actually the point of my call.”
“Oh?”
“As well as hearing you being you, of course. Goes without saying.” Then came a pause. I noticed old man Heydrich out on the sidewalk, sweeping dust from his side to ours. He saw me, flashed a quick glare, and headed back toward his house. “The thing is,” Suzie went on, “they’ve offered me a promotion.”
“So soon?”
“My first thought, too. Either they’re in total disarray, or . . .”
“Or they really like you.”
“They’ve offered me Europe,” Suzie said.
“The whole of Europe, or just west of the Rhine?” Bernie said.
“Stop it. I mean the European desk. Head of it, Bernie!” She took a breath, reined herself in a bit. “Based in London. I want you to come.”