Bernie stood beside me in the front hall, sipping bourbon and gazing out the window. I gazed with him. What a nice moment! In fact, it doesn’t get any better, as you may or may not know.
“Clay Winners tells us drugs are anathema at Cactus Sound, but turns out to be one of the biggest dealers in the state,” Bernie said. “He also says the names Billy Parsons and Travis Baca ring no bell. See what logic demands here?”
I did not. But the moment stayed nice. I shifted closer to Bernie, possibly sitting on his feet. He scratched between my ears, a spot so hard for me to reach, and did his usual perfect job.
“What if the average IQ was, say, six hundred?” Bernie said. “Would I have solved the case already? Or would the fact that everyone else involved was that much smarter as well mean we’d be exactly where we are right now? Or even worse. Maybe, Chet, the whole construct of human progress is a sham. Then what have we got?”
What did we have? Was that the question? An easy one, always my preference. What we had was me and Bernie gazing out the window of our place on Mesquite Road, some expert head scratching under way, and not a care in the world. Was it possible Bernie had somehow missed all that? I gave him a close look, something I could do from where I was without turning my head. Human eyes may not be lined up in the best possible way. No offense, and not even the point. The point was—
“Uh-oh,” Bernie said.
What was this? Through the window, I saw Mr. Parsons coming out of his house. He wore striped pajamas and one plaid slipper; his other foot was bare. Maybe that was why he moved so slowly. I’ve never worn slippers myself, although I’ve . . . I’ve worn through a number of them with my teeth. Hey! Had I just come close to making an actual joke? That wasn’t me, Bernie being in charge of the jokes at the Little Detective Agency. Meanwhile, Mr. Parsons had made his way to his car, all dusty since it hadn’t been used in some time. He patted his pajamas pockets, searching for what I didn’t know—certainly not keys on account of the keys being already in his hand. Bernie put down his drink, opened our door, and we stepped outside.
“Daniel?”
Mr. Parsons looked up. We crossed over onto his property. Iggy, somewhere inside their house, started up on his yip-yip-yipping. Wasn’t Iggy in charge of security at the Parsonses’ place? If so, they were in big trouble, which takes nothing away from Iggy, still the best pal anyone would want.
“Oh, hi, Bernie,” Mr. Parsons said. “Don’t mind Iggy. He means well.”
“I know that, Daniel,” Bernie said. “Going somewhere?”
“If I can find the damn keys. Got them on me somewhere. Just a matter of a methodical search.”
“Where were you headed? We’d be happy to drive you.”
“That’s all right,” Mr. Parsons said. “You’ve done too much for us already. Edna and I were discussing that just this morning.”
“So you’re back home together.”
Mr. Parsons smiled. “That we are. Such a relief, I can’t tell you.”
“Is the hospice—is the nurse here now?”
Mr. Parsons’s smile got bigger. “No need to mince words. It’s okay to say hospice.”
He kept patting his pockets: two on the chest of his pajama tops, two on the pants, all empty except for one of the chest pockets, which was sending out a biscuit smell. Iggy’s biscuits were smaller than mine but every bit as tasty. I found myself closing the distance between me and Mr. Parsons.
“We know the score, Edna and I,” Mr. Parsons continued. “I’m not what you’d call a believer, Bernie, but I do believe she and I will be together in one form or another. Doesn’t bear closer examination than that, if you see what I mean.”
“Don’t think I do,” said Bernie.
“Closer examination means you start asking questions like what age are we going to be on the other side. Everybody twenty-five, for example, dads and moms and kids and grandkids and great grandkids and . . .” Mr. Parsons lost his breath. His mouth made motions that reminded me of a goldfish of my acquaintance on a day when he’d somehow come sloshing out of his bowl. Bernie went quickly to Mr. Parsons, put a hand on his shoulder.
“Daniel?”
Mr. Parsons gasped, started breathing again, first wheezily, then in a more normal way. From up close his breath reminded me of the air inside a certain broom closet, the broom closet at the end of the only missing-kid case we hadn’t solved. Not quite true: we’d solved it all right, but too late. The kid’s name was Gail. Mr. Parsons was much, much older, but his breath smell and that last lingering one in the closet were almost the same.
“I’m fine, Bernie, just a momentary . . . bump,” he said. “Like a bump in the road.” He patted a chest pocket again, patted it with the hand that held the keys, and this time stuck his hand in the pocket and withdrew the biscuit. He gazed at his palm, now holding the biscuit and the keys. He looked up with a kind of vague triumph in his eyes, hard to describe. “Knew I had ’em somewhere.”
I took the biscuit from his hand, as gently as I could. Bernie did the same thing with the keys.
“How about I do the driving?” Bernie said.
“You’re not in our will yet,” said Mr. Parsons.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’re putting you in the will as soon as the lawyer stops by. Can’t believe we didn’t think of it sooner.”
“I don’t want to be in the will,” Bernie said.
Mr. Parsons put a hand on his car, maybe to steady himself. “You don’t?”
“It would be an honor, but there’s no material thing we need.”
What were material things? C-notes, perhaps? If C-notes were material things, we needed them big-time. I made quick work of the biscuit and gave Bernie a nudge.
“In any case—oof,” he was saying, “let me drive you.”
Mr. Parsons glanced at his house. “Don’t see why not.”
Bernie went to unlock the car, but it was unlocked already. He helped Mr. Parsons into the front passenger seat. I ended up on the backseat, happy to start out that way. Seating arrangements often changed, in my experience. Bernie got behind the wheel.
“Where to?” Bernie said, turning the key.
“The gym,” Mr. Parsons said.
Bernie nodded. I watched him in the rearview mirror. This particular nod was very close to the nod he has for when things make sense, the only difference being that his eyes shifted slightly, namely to the passenger seat side. “Any particular gym, Daniel?” Did that mean something didn’t make sense after all? I would have wondered about that but around then was when I discovered a not-unsizable chunk of biscuit somehow forgotten under my tongue. Iggy’s biscuit, which made it all the tastier. I hope that’s not bad of me.
Mr. Parsons was silent for a bit. Then he said, “I’ll have to think.”
“I didn’t know you’ve been going to the gym,” Bernie said.
“Oh, no, not me,” said Mr. Parsons.
“Someone else has been going to the gym?” Bernie said.
“Well, maybe not going, precisely,” Mr. Parsons said. “But she has some association with it.” His voice sharpened, rose to a level I’d never heard from Mr. Parsons before, a level that made me nervous. “Let me think, goddamn it!”
“No problem,” Bernie said. He let go of the wheel, sat back, looking straight ahead.
Mr. Parsons snuck a glance Bernie’s way. From that angle, I could see just one of his eyes, of course. Hope you can picture this; I’m doing my best. At first, that one eye was glaring and angry. At Bernie? I wasn’t buying that at all. Then the glare and anger faded and that eye got moist. Mr. Parsons put his head in his hands. “You’re such a good man, Bernie,” he said, or something like that, his hands muffling the sound. “I hate lying to you.”
“We’re going somewhere else?” Bernie said. “Not the gym?”
“It’s not that.” Mr. Parsons rubbed his face, leaving a snotty smear on one cheek, and straightened up. “Afraid you’d think me a fool, so I wasn’t truthful about . . . about some of what I told you about Billy.”
“You mean his peripheral involvement?” Bernie said.
“Peripheral involvement? I don’t understand.”
“In the kidnapping,” Bernie said. “Falling in with bad people, all that.”
“No, not that,” Mr. Parsons said. “Billy has the sweetest nature, down deep. Not even all the awful things that happened in prison can change that.”
“He told you about awful things in prison?”
“Not in so many words. But something’s eating inside him, and that was never true before.”
Something eating inside someone? Oh, no. What could be worse? How I wished I hadn’t heard that! And . . . and maybe I hadn’t. I leaned in that direction, leaned as hard as I could.
“What did he say exactly?” Bernie said.
Mr. Parsons shook his head. “Not much exactly,” said Mr. Parsons. “Certainly not in front of Edna.”
“Was this the same time when he asked for the money?”
“In the form of a loan,” Mr. Parsons said.
“To go to school, as I remember.”
“Forestry management. Edna found the program and recommended it. More wishful thinking on our part.”
“So what was the money for?” Bernie said.
Mr. Parsons shrugged. “We sent him care packages—as many as they allowed. But after eight or nine years, our visits . . . tailed off. Edna’s a trooper. It was hard. I’m talking about the maximum-security building, always with Billy behind glass. And then when the girlfriend came along, he preferred to schedule his visiting times with her. At least we thought so at the time. But maybe it was a rationalization. One of my biggest weaknesses, Bernie. I envy your strong-mindedness, can’t tell you how much. Blinds you, in this case to Billy’s anger.”
“Billy’s angry at you?”
Mr. Parsons nodded, dabbing at his eyes. That spread the snot smear around a little more. Bernie fished under the seat, came up with a paper napkin, not too dirty, and cleaned up Mr. Parsons’s face. Mr. Parsons didn’t seem to notice. “Angry because we stopped visiting. We still called on the phone every Sunday. His anger caught me by surprise. And Edna . . . well, poor Edna. I just had no idea the visits meant so much to Billy. He was always monosyllabic, often cut them off early. But there I go again—rationalizing.”
“So Billy revealed this anger for the first time when he came to discuss the loan?”
Mr. Parsons stayed silent for what seemed like a long time. I don’t mind sitting in an unmoving car if we’re at Donut Heaven, say. But we were not. Right around then I noticed what you might call a tiny flaw in the rear seat upholstery.
“I don’t like where you’re leading me,” Mr. Parsons said at last.
“Where’s that?” Bernie said.
“To a place where decisions get made on account of guilt.”
“What decisions are we talking about?”
“Edna’s and mine,” said Mr. Parsons. He wrung his hands. That always bothers me, hands being a bit like tiny people, and you never like to see people in distress. “To fund Billy’s business venture.”
“What kind of business venture?”
“A start-up,” said Mr. Parsons. “Now just give me a moment and I’ll get this right.”
His lips moved, but no sound came out. Hey! My lips were moving, too! When it comes to leather upholstery there’s a kind that looks like leather but smells like plastic. That was what Mr. Parsons had in the backseat of his car. I prefer real leather, although I’m not fussy.
“The securities recovery sector,” Mr. Parsons said. “That was it. Billy needed capital to hire some staff.”
“I’m not familiar with the securities recovery sector,” Bernie said.
“Neither was I. Now I am. But don’t ask me to explain it.” He laughed, laughter that suddenly cut off. “Stiller’s Gym! That’s the name. It was on her jacket. Do you know Stiller’s Gym, Bernie?”
“I know where it is,” Bernie said. “Whose jacket are we talking about?”
“Oh,” said Mr. Parsons. “The girlfriend. Didn’t I mention her? She’s very pretty.”
“What’s her name?”
“Dee. She came by yesterday, wearing the jacket. The satin kind. I noticed the name on the back.” He leaned forward. “So shall we get started? That is, if you’re still willing.”
“Was Billy with her yesterday?”
“He was at a staff meeting with the twins.”
“The twins?”
“He hired twin brothers. Billy says they finish each other’s sentences! And Dee was only dropping off some papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
Mr. Parsons started patting his pockets again. “Thought I had them right here. Whole point of the exercise.”
Bernie’s voice, gentle already, got more so. “What kind of papers?”
“Mortgage papers. A very smart kind of mortgage Billy found for us. It pays you instead of you paying it!”
“A reverse mortgage?”
“Something like that,” Mr. Parsons said. “Dee was going to come around for the papers in a day or two, but my thinking is let’s move things along, start those checks flowing!” Then came more pocket patting. “Where in hell—?”
Bernie switched off the engine. “Let’s go in the house and look for them.” He opened the door. Yip yip yip: Iggy had it dialed up to the max. “Chet? How about you wait here?”
Wait here? What sense did that make? I got to my feet, made my reaction clear.
“Chet? Need you to step up now, big guy.”
Barking can sometimes change to yawning in a flash, just one of life’s little surprises. Bernie led Mr. Parsons into the house. Not long after, he came out alone, reading some papers. He let me out of Mr. Parsons’s car, his eyes still on the papers, and we crossed over onto our property. Bernie stuck the papers in the glove box of the Porsche.
“Securities recovery,” he said, slamming the glove box closed so hard the whole car shook.
We hit the road.