The Dog Who Knew Too Much
Read The Dog Who Knew Too Much Online
Authors: Spencer Quinn
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Also by Spencer Quinn
Dog on It
Thereby Hangs a Tail
To Fetch a Thief
ATRIA
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Spencer Quinn
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Atria Books hardcover edition September 2011
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quinn, Spencer.
The dog who knew too much : a Chet and Bernie mystery / Spencer Quinn. --1st Atria Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Dogs--Fiction. 2. Private investigators--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3617.U584D65 2011
813'.6--dc22
2011020545
ISBN 978-1-4391-5709-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-6307-8 (ebook)
For all the friends of the nation
within the nation
Contents
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as I proud of Bernie or what?
True, he’d been pretty nervous going into this gig. I can always tell when Bernie’s nervous—which hardly ever happens, and never when we’re in action—because his smell sharpens a bit, although it’s still the best human smell there is: apples, bourbon, salt and pepper. But now, up on the stage, he was doing great.
“Which, um,” he was saying, “reminds me of a joke. “Sort of. Maybe not a joke,” he went on, turning a page, “more like a—” and at that moment the whole wad of papers somehow jumped out of his hands, all the pages gliding down in different directions. He bent and started gathering them up. That gave me a chance, sitting a few rows back, to recoy or recon—or something like that—the joint, always important in our line of work, as Bernie often said.
We were in a conference room at a hotel near the airport, and everyone in the audience—maybe not quite as big as it had been at the beginning, when Bernie had tapped the microphone, a painful sound for me, pounding like drums right next to my ears, although no one else seemed to mind, cleared his throat, and said,
“Can, uh, you hear me all right?” a terrific start, in my opinion— was a private eye, on account of this was the Great Western Private Eye Convention. We’re partners in the Little Detective Agency, me and Bernie, Bernie’s last name being Little. I’m Chet, pure and simple, and we’d been in business for almost as long as I could remember, although we’d never been to a convention before. “Not our thing,” Bernie said, so that was that, until Georgie Malhouf, president of the Great Western Private Eye Association, offered Bernie five hundred bucks to give a speech.
“A speech?” Bernie had said.
“Twenty minutes, tops,” Georgie Malhouf told him. “Plus questions.”
“I’ve never given a speech in my life.”
“So what?” said Georgie Malhouf. “There was also a time in your life when you hadn’t had sex. Did that stop you?”
That one zipped right by me, but the point was: five hundred bucks. Our finances were a mess. We hadn’t worked an actual case—not even divorce, which we hated—in I didn’t know how long, plus there was the hit we’d taken from the tin futures thing, and don’t get me started on the stacks and stacks of Hawaiian pants, locked away at our self-storage in Pedroia; we hadn’t sold a single pair. Why they hadn’t caught on was a mystery to me: didn’t everybody love Hawaiian shirts? Bernie had lots of them, was wearing one of my favorites right now up on that stage, the blue number with the gold trumpets.
He picked up the pages, or most of them, and tried to get them back into some kind of order. Meanwhile, I heard feet shuffling out of the room behind me, and across the aisle I was sitting in both Mirabelli brothers seemed to be asleep, their mouths hanging open. On my other side sat Georgie Malhouf, a real skinny guy with sunken cheeks and a thick black mustache.
There’s something about mustaches that makes it hard for me to look away, so I didn’t. After some time, I noticed that Georgie was looking at me, too.
“On the ball, aren’t you?” he said. “Just like they say.”
Ball? I’m just about always in the mood to play ball. A very faint thought arose in my mind, something about this maybe not being a good time for playing ball; but it sank quickly away, and I kept my eyes on Georgie Malhouf, waiting for him to produce a ball from somewhere. No ball appeared. Georgie Malhouf was keeping his eyes, small and dark, on me.