Dog On It (2 page)

Bernie’s eyes shifted over to the money and stayed there, his face now readable to anyone from any distance, his mind on cash flow. “I’d like to see her room first.” When Bernie caved, he did it quickly and all at once. I’d seen it with Leda a thousand times.

Cynthia handed over the money. “Follow me.”

Bernie stuffed the bills deep in his pocket. I ran over to our car—an old Porsche convertible, the body sandblasted, waiting
a long time now for a new coat of paint—and jumped over the passenger-side door and into my seat.

“Hey. Did you see what your dog just did?”

Bernie nodded, the proud, confident nod, my favorite. “They call him Chet the Jet.” Well, Bernie does, anyway, although not often.

A coyote shrieked in the canyon, not far from the back of the house. I’d have to deal with that later. I no longer felt tired at all. And Bernie, turning the key in the ignition, looked the same: rarin’ to go. We thrived on work, me and Bernie.

One thing about humans: They like to get high. This comes up over and over again in our work. They drink booze, they smoke this and that, they pop pills, even stick needles in their bodies—we’ve seen it all. But the actual getting-high part was something I never understood, puzzled over for a long time. What was that all about? And then one day it hit me. What was my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world? Riding shotgun in the Porsche, far and away. Sitting up high, wind pushing my face all out of shape, and sights and smells—especially smells—rushing by so fast I couldn’t take them all in. Speed, rush, sensation: I knew about getting high, had been high lots of times.

Like now, for example, as we followed Cynthia Chambliss, mother of the possibly missing Madison, down our street. I saw things, real quick, zooming by: a man taking out the trash—was tomorrow trash day? Yes! Loved trash day; my pal Iggy, sipping from his bowl right inside his front door, turning, a little too late, toward the Porsche, just missing seeing me, typical Iggy; and then—

“Chet—what’re you barking about?”

I’d barked? Oops. Must have been at Iggy. And then: a white-tailed rabbit, standing very still on someone’s lawn, that white tail very white in the moonlight. Hair rose all down my back.

“Chet. Get down.”

I got down. But I’ve chased rabbits in my time, let me tell you. And once—oh, yes: It can be done.

“What’s with you right now?”

Nothing, nothing was with me: stoned out of my mind, that was all. I got my tongue back in my mouth; it was all dried up from the wind, felt more like one of those towels I sometimes found on the laundry-room floor. I liked burying those towels out in the backyard near the big rock, but burying towels was never easy. The chew strips—that was another matter, easy to bury and—Whoa! At that moment I had a very faint memory of burying one that I hadn’t dug up yet, near the orange tree by old man Heydrich’s fence. Maybe it was still there! I was gazing up at the moon and making plans when we turned in to a driveway and came to a stop behind Cynthia Chambliss’s car.

I hopped out. The pavement was still warm from the heat of the day. I smelled water, the swimming-pool kind, close by. We followed Cynthia to the front door of a house that looked a lot like ours, a lot like most of the houses in the high valley, but bigger.

Cynthia turned to Bernie. “The dog is coming in?”

“Why not?”

The skin on her forehead, between the eyes, got pinched up. That didn’t signal anything good. “There’s never been a dog inside.”

Bernie glanced up at the house. “It’s not too late.”

The pinched-up look got more extreme. “Excuse me?”

Bernie smiled. He had lots of different smiles. This particular
one I thought of as just showing teeth. I did the same. Bernie has nice teeth for a human, but I’m only being realistic when I say they’re nothing compared to mine. “Good chance we’ll be needing him, Ms. Chambliss. Missing kids—that’s Chet’s specialty.”

She gazed at me. “He looks too aggressive to be around kids.”

Closing my mouth now was the right move. I knew that, of course, but for some reason it didn’t close, maybe even opened wider, plus I started to pant a bit, getting pretty charged up.

“Never aggressive, not inappropriately.” Bernie patted my head. Thump thump. I calmed down. “Chet is a trained police dog, after all.”

“He is?”

“Graduated first in his class at K-9 school.”

That was stretching it a little, since I hadn’t actually graduated, which is how Bernie and I ended up together, a long story I’ll go into later if I have a chance.

“In that case . . .” Cynthia opened the door.

We went inside.

Bird crap. I smelled it right off the bat, sour and disagreeable, just like birds themselves. If I could glide around in the wide blue sky, would I be disagreeable? No way.

We followed Cynthia through a big room with a tile floor that felt nice and cool, then down a hall to a closed door. On the way I spotted a potato chip, lying there in plain sight near the wall, and scarfed it up on the fly; ruffles-style, my favorite.

A sign with a lightning bolt hung on the door. Bernie read it. “‘High voltage. Keep out.’”

“That’s just Madison’s sense of humor,” Cynthia said. She opened the door, we went in, and there was the bird, perched in a cage that dangled from the ceiling.

“Che-et.” Bernie spoke my name in the stretched-out way he used when he had a concern about what might be coming next. And sure, because of my leaping ability—I’d been the best leaper in K-9 class, which had led to all the trouble in a way I couldn’t remember exactly, although blood was involved—how could I not wonder a bit about certain possibilities? But I wasn’t about to find out now, was I? We were on the job. Thump thump. “Good boy.”

The bird—green with scaly yellow legs and feet and a weird spiky comb on top of its head—made a horrible croaking noise.

“Hear that?” said Cynthia.

“What?”

“He said, ‘Madison rocks.’ She taught him. He can say other things, too.”

Whoa. Cynthia was claiming that he—this beady-eyed inmate—could talk? I didn’t buy it.

“His name’s Cap’n Crunch.”

Cap’n Crunch bobbed his head back and forth, an ugly lizard-like motion, and made the horrible croaking noise again. It ended in a high-pitched squeak that hurt my ears. One glance at Bernie and I knew he wasn’t hearing that squeak. Bernie missed some things, true, but you had to admire him: He never let his handicaps get him down.

“What else can he say?”

Oh, Bernie, please.

Cynthia approached the cage. “Come on, baby.”

Squawk squawk.

“Hear that?”

“What?”

“‘Light my fire.’ He said ‘Light my fire’ when I said ‘Come on, baby.’”

Right.

But Bernie had one of those looks on his face, very still, eyes dark, meaning he was getting interested in something. “What else?”

Cynthia tapped the cage. Her fingernails were long and shiny. “Cap’n Crunch? Want a drink?”

Squawk squawk.

“‘Make it a double’?” Bernie said.

“You got it,” said Cynthia.

“Pretty impressive.” It was? A bird that supposedly said ‘Madison rocks’, ‘light my fire,’ and ‘make it a double’? Impressive how? What was I missing? Bernie turned to me. “Chet! What are you growling about?”

I wasn’t growling. But I sidled away all the same, sat down by the TV. It rested on a little table. At that moment I smelled a smell familiar from my days in K-9 school, and there, under the table: a small plastic bag of marijuana.

Bernie shot me a quick look. “For God’s sake, Chet. Stop barking.” He turned to Cynthia. “Does Madison talk much to the bird?”

“All the time. She’s had him, like, forever, really thinks he’s human.”

Bernie tapped the cage. His fingernails were short, bitten right down to practically nothing. “Where’s Madison?” he said.

The bird was silent. The whole room was silent. Bernie and Cynthia were watching the bird. I watched Bernie. Sometimes he worried me. If we were relying on eyewitness testimony from Cap’n Crunch, the case was hopeless.

“What a brilliant idea,” Cynthia said. She gazed up at Cap’n Crunch. “Where’s Madison?” she said. When the bird remained silent, she added in a pleading tone, “Come on, baby.”

“Light my fire,” said Cap’n Crunch. This time I heard it myself.

“Let’s back up a little,” Bernie said. “I’d like to establish a chronology.”

“What’s that?”

I was curious, too. Bernie used big words sometimes. If he had his choice, he’d probably spend every day with his nose in a book; but what with alimony, child support, and the failed investment in a start-up that made pants with Hawaiian shirt patterns—he loved Hawaiian shirts—Bernie didn’t have his choice.

“A time line,” he said. “When did you last see Madison?”

Cynthia looked at her watch. It was big and gold. She had more gold around her wrists and neck, and in her ears. I’d licked gold a few times, didn’t care for it, although silver was worse.

“Eight-fifteen,” Cynthia said. “When I dropped her off at school.”

“What school?”

“Heavenly Valley High.”

“Don’t know that one.”

“It’s pretty new, just north of Puma Wells. My ex is a developer up there.”

“Your ex is Madison’s father?”

“That’s right. We’ve been divorced for five years.”

“Did you call him?”

“Of course. He hasn’t seen her.”

“You have custody?”

Cynthia nodded. “She spends some weekends with Damon, every second Christmas, that kind of thing.”

Bernie took out his notebook and pen. “Damon Chambliss?”

“Keefer. I’ve gone back to my maiden name.”

Maiden name? What was that again? They kept changing
their names, all these people. I didn’t get it. I was Chet, pure and simple.

“Madison goes by Chambliss?”

“Yes.”

“And she was about ten at the time of the divorce?”

“Yes.”

“How did she take it?”

Cynthia raised her shoulders, lowered them: the shrug. Sometimes it meant not caring—a hard one for me, right there—but was this one of those times? “You know what they say.”

“What do they say?”

“Divorce is better for kids than a bad marriage,” Cynthia said.

Bernie blinked. Just a tiny movement, easy to miss, but I knew what was on his mind: Charlie; and Bernie’s own divorce. As for marriage and divorce, don’t look at me. Complete unknowns, both of them, where I come from.

“But,” said Cynthia, “I don’t see what any of this has to do with Madison’s disappearance.”

Neither did I, exactly.

“Just filling in the blanks,” said Bernie. One of his favorite lines, worked like a charm in most situations.

“Sorry,” said Cynthia. “Didn’t mean to tell you your business. It’s just . . .” Her eyes got wet again. Once one of Leda’s big fat tears had fallen to the floor and I’d had a taste. Salty; a big surprise. “It’s just . . . Oh God, where is she?”

Bernie glanced around, spotted a box of tissues on the desk, gave her one. “When did you realize she might be missing?”

“When she didn’t come home. She takes the bus. I’m here, but afternoons are my busy time—I run a small business out of the house.”

“Doing what?”

“Designing e-cards.”

“E-cards?”

“I can put you on my list if you’re interested,” Cynthia said. She took another tissue, blew her nose. Her nose was tiny, useless, so different from mine, but I couldn’t help wondering: What would that be like, blowing it? All of a sudden my own nose got twitchy. Cynthia and Bernie went on for a while about the bus, Madison not getting off, various calls she’d made to the school, Madison’s friends, the ex, but I wasn’t really listening, caught up in all these strange feelings in my nose.

And then: “Why is he snarling like that?”

“I don’t think he’s snarling,” Bernie said. “More like wriggling his nose. Chet? You all right?”

Humiliation. I gave myself a good shake, always a nice way of making a fresh start, and moved closer to Bernie, alert, tail high.

“He’s all right,” Bernie said.

Cynthia was looking at me funny. “I’ve never seen a dog like that before.”

“Like what?”

“His ears. One’s black and one’s white.”

Bad manners, commenting on someone’s appearance like that. Wasn’t it common knowledge? I decided then and there I didn’t like Cynthia. One look at Bernie and I could tell he didn’t, either.

“I’ll need some things from you,” he said, his voice cool, on the way to cold. “Contact information for your ex, Madison’s friends, any special people in her life—coaches, teachers, et cetera. Plus a good photo of her.”

“Right away,” she said, and left the room.

Bernie turned to me and, in a low voice, got down to business. “Find something?”

I went over to the TV table, leaned forward pointer-style. Bernie knelt, fished out the bag of marijuana. He hefted it in his hand, slid it back under the table.

“Good man.” Pat pat—and a quick scratch between the ears. Ah.

Cynthia returned, gave Bernie a sheet of paper and a framed photo of a girl with a ponytail. Horses I could do without, but I like ponytails. “Does Madison have a boyfriend?” Bernie said.

“No.”

Bernie looked around the room. “Then that should do it,” he said. “Except for something with Madison’s smell.”

“Her pillowcase?”

Bernie went to the bed, stripped off a pillowcase that looked pink to me, although I’m no judge of color, according to Bernie. I sniffed at it a couple times, got Madison’s smell: young human female, with hints of honey, cherry, and a kind of sun-colored flower I sometimes saw along roadsides. Bernie folded the pillow-case and sealed it in a plastic bag.

“We’ll be in touch,” he said. “But if you hear anything, call right away, day or night.”

“Thank you. I’m so grateful.” Cynthia led us down the hall to the front door. “Angela DiPesto raved about you.”

Bernie stopped, turned to her. “You said you worked with her.”

“That’s right.”

“How is she involved with e-cards?”

“She wrote my software.”

“Angela DiPesto?”