Deputy Sheriff Beasley was having lunch at a table out back of the Noshery, a strip mall place that was new to me. I’m the type who gets excited by somewhere new, especially somewhere new that smelled like this, so even though Deputy Beasley didn’t seem at all excited to see us there was plenty of excitement to go around.
“Mind if we join you?” Bernie said.
“Uh,” said Beasley, talking around a sandwichy mouthful, a sandwich filled with thin strips of meat that gave off wave after wave of powerful, complex aromas, some of them previously unknown to me. I faced the fact that Deputy Beasley had made a poor first impression on me and decided to give him a second chance. Who in this life doesn’t deserve a second chance, and maybe even one after that? “The thing is,” he said, “I’m kind of in a—what the hell?”
“Ch-et?”
Uh-oh. Somehow my paws—only my front ones, so it could have been worse—seemed to have placed themselves on the table, not far from the deputy’s paper plate. I got that situation cleared up and pronto.
“He just gets enthusiastic about things,” Bernie was saying. “It’s probably because he’s never been to a deli before.”
“Never been to a deli?” said Beasley.
“Not an authentic Jewish-style deli like this one.”
“Huh?” said Beasley. “You got something against Jew—” All at once, his face turned purple and he began coughing, choking, and gasping. Bernie went around the table and pounded him on the back. A small—but by no means tiny—piece of that fascinating meat popped out of his mouth, across the table, and almost directly into my own mouth. I hardly had to move a muscle!
After that the next thing I really remember is the waitress coming to the table to take Bernie’s order, Bernie by then sitting down and me right beside him, highly alert.
“I’ll have what he’s having,” Bernie said. There: a perfect demonstration of his brilliance.
“One pastrami and corned beef triple decker on pumpernickel coming up,” said the waitress.
Beasley, back to eating again, his face its normal color—grayish, with pink splotches here and there—raised a finger. “Side of fries.”
“You got it.”
Jewish-style deli? Had I gotten that right? My whole life up to now had been … not false, oh no, what a frightening idea—but for sure I’d been missing something and hadn’t even known! But why be hard on yourself? I stay away from that as a rule.
Beasley took a nice big bite. He chewed for a bit, then gestured at Bernie with a handful of sandwich. That handful of sandwich came oh, so close to me. I could easily have … but I did not! Instead I proved that … that … whoa! What had I proved? Can a dude change his mind? This dude can and did! But too late.
Meanwhile Beasley was saying, “I’m not Jewish.”
“No?” said Bernie.
“But my stomach is, if you get what I mean.”
“I actually don’t.”
“Put it this way,” Beasley said, biting the end off a dill pickle with a sharp, crunching sound. The dill pickle he could have—I’ve tried dill pickles on more than one occasion, never with good results. “You can eat Jewish without being Jewish. It’s a free country.”
Good news! Not the free country part—I already knew that, on account of it being something Bernie often said, but the Jewish part. Was I Jewish, whatever that happened to be, exactly? I doubted it, had never even heard of Jewish until now, but it didn’t matter because if Beasley was right I could still eat Jewish no matter what, and eating Jewish was all I wanted to do at that moment. Did Beasley look like the kind of human who tended to be right about things? He did not. That was worrisome.
“Yes, a free country—with liberty and justice for all,” Bernie said. “I want to discuss the justice part.”
“Huh?”
“Specifically as it relates to the Wendell Nero case,” Bernie said.
“What case?” said Beasley. “I closed it already, with some help from you. Got no problem sharing credit. What’s the matter? Didn’t get the honorary badge and T-shirt yet?” He crunched off another bite of pickle. “I could maybe get you a couple hunnert outa the tipster fund.”
A sort of iciness appeared in Bernie’s eyes, there and gone in a flash. You don’t see that every day—in fact, I didn’t remember seeing it ever. “It’s not about the money,” he said.
“Whoa? You really a PI?” A joke of some sort. Beasley laughed and laughed, spewing a few pickle shreds, useless to me although I snapped them up anyway. What was the joke? Bernie was the best PI in the Valley. He’d even given the keynote address at the Great Western Private Eye convention, and plenty of people had still been in the room when it ended, or at least some.
“I’m the kind of PI who doesn’t like loose ends,” Bernie said.
Beasley shrugged. “So what? You got a client?”
Good question. Clients were part of our business plan at the Little Detective Agency, possibly an important part.
“Client or not,” Bernie said, “there are loose ends in the Nero case.”
Client or not? Uh-oh.
“I told you,” Beasley said. “There ain’t a case. And the DA’s office says it’s a slam dunk.”
“Who’s handling it?”
“Some gal? Deena? Dinah?”
“Deirdre Dubois?”
“Yeah. A ballbuster if there ever was one.”
That didn’t sound good, but Bernie didn’t seem alarmed so neither was I. “Where’s the RV?” he said. “I’d like another look at it.”
“Why?”
“Unless you’ve already recovered any phones or computers Wendell owned.”
“Nope.”
“He was a scientist with a consulting business,” Bernie said. “He must have had a phone, a laptop. Where are they?”
“Search me.”
Wow! We were going to pat down a deputy sheriff? Had that ever happened before? Actually, yes. And had I enjoyed it or what! Maybe it would become part of our routine! I moved around the table, took up a spot right behind Beasley’s chair, standard procedure. Bernie shot me a quick glance, possibly a little puzzled. Was I being too obvious? I went as still as I could, hoping to look less obvious. Did that mean smaller? I tried to look smaller. But how? Think small thoughts? I tried to think small thoughts but came up with none at all.
Around then was when the waitress arrived with Bernie’s sandwich and Beasley’s fries. On her way back to the kitchen, without even looking—like a behind-the-back pass in basketball!—she slipped me a thick rolled-up slice of that lovely meat. Pastrami? Corned beef? Both? What a talented waitress, sort of the Steph Curry of the restaurant business! After that my memory of events isn’t reliable, although I did get the impression that those fries—maybe the biggest plate of fries I’d ever seen—put Beasley in a better mood. The fry or two or possibly more that I somehow ended up with certainly made me more cheerful, and I’d been feeling pretty cheerful to begin with.
“… don’t really care what you do on your time,” he was saying, dipping his napkin in his water glass and wiping his chin, which had become pretty greasy. “The RV’s still at the shed, last I knew. The exes are fighting over it.”
“Exes?” Bernie said.
“Turns out your pal the scientist had some ex-wives. Three? Four? Something like that. It’s a wonder he lived as long as he did.”
Deputy Beasley thought that was pretty funny. He was still laughing when we left.
The shed’s in the part of South Pedroia where the last boarded-up buildings end and the desert begins. It’s a huge fenced-in dirt yard, really, full of all the cars, trucks, SUVs, RVs, tractors, motorcycles, bicycles, and a few strange homemade wheeled things with no name, that end up in possession of the law. The shed itself is at the gate, where we were waved through no problem. We’re known in places like this, me and Bernie.
Wendell’s RV, with the beautiful waterfall on the side, was in a middle row between a smashed-up truck cab and a pile of motorcycle parts, some of them red-stained. A group of women had a big shaved-head dude backed up against the RV. The women were all new to me, but the dude was Itsy Bitsy Litzenberger, a perp at one time and now the junior assistant attendant of the whole shed experience, which just shows you. He saw us coming and called out over the heads of the women.
“Bernie! Help!”
“Hey, Itsy,” Bernie said. “What’s going on?”
The women all wheeled around. We had an old one, a not-quite-so-old one, and a younger one than that, although you couldn’t call her young. They all wore yoga pants and gold watches. I sensed trouble.
“Flat out goddamn theft!” said the youngest one.
“Look who’s talking!” said the not-quite-so-old one.
“Pot calling the kettle!” said the oldest one.
Bernie held up his hand. “Ladies, please.”
They all spoke at once. “Don’t call us ladies!”
I got ready to run.
“Uh, women,” Bernie said. “Please, women. Maybe Itsy here can fill me in.”
“Well, Bernie,” Itsy said, shifting from foot to foot, “these three … visitors are all former wives of the guy who owned this RV and—”
The middle one jabbed her finger, the nail painted bright red, at the youngest one. “He never married her. They were just shacked up.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” the youngest one said. “We didn’t need a ring to keep us together. We had heat in the bedroom, foreign territory to you as I know from the horse’s mouth.”
“I was never a professional like you, that’s true,” said the middle one.
“More like a semi-pro,” the oldest said.
Then came a lot of shouting, including a few words I hadn’t heard since an all-you-can-drink night at a biker bar we went to once by mistake, all of it impossible to follow. But if horses—prima donnas each and every one—were involved then we had problems.
“Excuse me,” Bernie said several times to no effect. Finally he added, “We were the ones who found him, Chet and I.”
The women went silent and turned their gazes on us. “Who’s Chet?” said the oldest.
Bernie pointed my way.
“What a handsome boy,” she said. The others nodded. Had we turned a corner? Simply based on my looks? I couldn’t think why not.
Bernie rubbed his hands together like we were getting somewhere at last.
“I’m guessing you’re all united in feeling, um, or having felt, a certain … fondness for Wendell.”
He paused. None of them said no.
“Wendell had asked us to call on him yesterday morning,” Bernie said. “He didn’t say why.” He took out our business cards, handed one to each of the women.
“Can I have one, too?” Itsy said.
Bernie reached over the women, gave Itsy a card. Itsy glanced at it. “Hey. Cool flowers.”
I missed Suzie, but those flowers? Nothing we could do about it, since it was Suzie, although now that things weren’t so good with her anymore, maybe … I didn’t want to go there. I’d already gone further than I wanted.
“You’re a private eye?” said the youngest one.
“At least you can read,” the middle one told her.
“Why did Wendell want a private eye?” said the oldest.
“That’s the question,” Bernie said. “Have any of you been inside the RV yet?”
They all turned on Itsy. “He won’t let us!”
Itsy raised his hands. “Just doin’ my job, Bernie. Gotta establish ownership.”
“The owner passed,” said the youngest one.
“Deceased,” said the middle one.
“Dead,” said the old one.
“In which case,” Bernie said, “maybe there’s something in his will.”
“There is no will!” the women said.
“How do you know?” said Bernie.
“We called the lawyer,” they all said.
“Um, one at a time or all at once?” Bernie said.
“Is that meant to be funny?” said the youngest one.
“Separately, of course,” the middle one said. “We haven’t talked together all three in years.”
“Thank Christ,” said the oldest.
The women exchanged glares.
“Who made the last call to the lawyer?” Bernie said.
“Me,” the oldest one said.
“What’s your name?”
“Felicia.”
“Let’s talk, Felicia, just the two of us, for simplicity’s sake.”
“Simplicity’s sake?” said the other women. I was with them on that.
Bernie led Felicia away, toward the smashed-up cab. I followed—and soon led—feeling the gazes of the other two women all the way.
“I need to search the RV, Felicia,” Bernie said.
“Why?”
“There are unanswered questions in this case.”
“But haven’t they caught the murderer?”
“Nevertheless.”
“Are you saying they got the wrong guy?”
Bernie gazed down at her. “I’m saying two things. One: I want no objection from you or the others when I ask Itsy to let me search the RV. Two: I’m going to need a client.”
Felicia gazed back up at Bernie, eyes narrowed and suspicious at first, and then just narrowed. She gave him a nod, very slight, hardly any movement at all.
Not long after that, we were inside the RV, me, Bernie, and Itsy—Itsy along not because he didn’t trust us, but because he wanted to see pros in action. We have fans, me and Bernie. With fans you need to throw them a bone from time to time. Whoa! An actual bone? Never. I mean an unactual bone, whatever that might be. Meanwhile our search, for a phone or a laptop, if I’d been following things right, was turning up nada. Bernie stood very still, gazing at something far beyond the walls of the RV. That seemed to go on for a long time, and then he snapped out of it, an inner snap I could feel, and now his gaze was on the actual wall, focused, in fact, on that thumbtacked photo of Wendell and the girl. Bernie took the photo off the wall, checked the back, and slid it into his shirt pocket.
We went outside. The women were waiting. Bernie shook his head.
“Does that mean you’re giving up?” Felicia said.
I was hoping Bernie would say, What a question! Instead he went with, “No.”
“Good,” said Felicia. “Because we want to hire you.”
Bernie swallowed. “Meaning … the whole lot of, um…?”
“Exactly,” said Felicia. “The whole lot of um.”