The Sound and the Furry (3 page)

“Bernie Little?” she said.

I left out the voice.

“Um, yeah.”

She became aware of me, a little late in the game in my opinion. “I’m not that comfortable
around dogs,” she said.

“You can be totally comfortable with Chet,” Bernie said.

“He’s so big.”

“But very gentle.”

She gazed at me, a narrowed, making-up-the-mind look in her eye. That just happens
to be a look that bothers me, no telling why. I barked—not the low rumbly friendly
kind, or the angry kind, or the kind where I’m warning you once and for all; this
was just the hi-it’s-me kind, but in a big way.

She jumped back. “Oh my God. Is he going to bite me?”

“Never. That wouldn’t happen. He never bites. Cool it, big guy, for Christ sake.”

Christ came up a lot, but I’d never met him; something to look forward to, maybe.
I cooled it. At the same time: never bites? What was with that? There were dudes—true,
not many and always the worst kind—now breaking rocks in the hot sun who knew different.

“How—how can I help you?” Bernie said.

“My name’s Vannah,” she said. “Vannah Boutette. I’m Frenchie’s wife.”

“Frenchie has a wife like—” Bernie cut himself off; why, I didn’t know. I’m always
interested in what he has to say.

“Yes?” Vannah said. “Go on.”

“Uh, nothing,” Bernie said. “Nice to meet you. I’m Bernie.”

“We’ve already gotten past that,” Vannah said. “Aren’t you supposed to be smart? I’ve
got three grand in cash which I’d like to give you without getting my goddamn arm
bit off, if possible.”

Bernie glanced at her arm. A nicely shaped female human arm, perhaps, but not much
there to sink your teeth into.

“Come in,” said Bernie.

V
annah Boutette crossed her legs, uncrossed them, crossed them again. Bernie’s gaze
went to the ceiling, the floor, back to her legs. We were in the office, just down
the hall from the kitchen, Bernie at the desk, Vannah on the couch, me on the rug,
a comfortable, nubbly rug with a circus elephant pattern. I was fond of the pattern,
had once gotten to know a circus elephant named Peanut quite well, but no time for
that now.

“You work out of your home?” Vannah said.

“Any problem with that?” Bernie said.

“Why would I have problem with that? I work out of my place, too.”

“Yeah? What line of, uh . . .”

“Let’s call it importing,” Vannah said.

“What kind of goods?”

“Good goods, bad goods, everything in between.” Vannah glanced around the room, taking
in the hat stand with Bernie’s baseball cap collection—he’d pitched for Army before
throwing out his arm, and even so could still fling the tennis ball a country mile,
whatever that might be—the basket of kids’ blocks lying
in one corner—the room was meant for a little sister or brother that never came along—and
the waterfall pictures on the walls. Humans get an oh-my look on their face when they’re
impressed. I wasn’t seeing it on Vannah’s. What if she knew that the biggest waterfall
picture hid the safe, and that in the safe were Bernie’s grandfather’s watch, our
most valuable possession, plus the .38 Special? We hadn’t had any gunplay in way too
long.

“You get eight hundred a day plus expenses?” Vannah said.

“Yup.”

“What if I said seven?”

“Try it.”

“Seven.”

“Nice meeting you.”

Vannah laughed. “Frenchie mentioned your sense of humor. He thinks the world of you.”

“He does?”

“Which is why you’re his first choice for finding Ralph.”

“You know Ralph?”

“Why wouldn’t I know Ralph? He’s my brother-in-law.”

Bernie nodded. He’s a great nodder, has different nods with different meanings. This
one could have meant anything.

“He was best man at the wedding,” Vannah went on. “Frenchie’s and mine.”

“Where did you two tie the knot?”

“I hate that expression.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t you? It’s so negative. Why not say shackled together and be done with it?”

“I see your point.”

“Married yourself?” Vannah said.

“Not at present.”

“All the better.”

Bernie looked at her, tilting his head how he does when he’s seeing someone in a whole
new way. The last person he’d used the head tilt on was Truffles Siminoni—a B-and-E
type specializing in high-end restaurants—who’d immediately thrown up his hands—I
love when they do that!—and said, “All right, you got me.”

Did Bernie hope Vannah Boutette was about to cop to something? Would I soon be grabbing
her by the pant leg, not so easy since she wasn’t wearing pants? How was I going to
do that, exactly? I realized my tongue was hanging out maybe a bit too much, and possibly
drooling; I curled it back up in my mouth and sat up straight, a professional through
and through.

“Frenchie and I got married at his mom’s place in St. Roch,” Vannah said, which didn’t
sound criminal to me, or even at all interesting.

But Bernie’s eyebrows went up. Have I mentioned his eyebrows? Nice and thick and expressive,
with a language all their own. Bernie was interested, no doubt about it. So, therefore,
I was interested. Whoa! Had I just done a “so therefore”? My very first? Chet the
Jet!

“St. Roch?” Bernie said.

“Down in bayou country,” Vannah said. “That’s where they’re all from, the Boutettes.
I didn’t see the point of a church wedding. Been there, done that. More than once.”

“Understood,” Bernie said. “There’s no right way of doing it.”

“You can say that again.”

But Bernie did not. Instead, he said, “I meant no single one right, um—”

“Whatever,” said Vannah. “Here’s a picture of Ralph.” She rose, crossed over to the
desk, took a photo from her purse—I
caught a glimpse of a roly-poly glasses-wearing dude—and laid it in front of Bernie.

“Except for the, uh, shape, he doesn’t look much like Frenchie,” Bernie said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. Which Bernie could have done, no problem,
but he kept his mouth shut. “Ralph turned out different from the others in just about
every way.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s an inventor, I guess you’d say.”

Inventor? A new one on me. I knew investor, especially of the golf-course subdivision
type: we’ve sent one of those up to Northern State Correctional, me and Bernie. That
was as far as I could take it, maybe farther.

“What has he invented?” Bernie said.

“Gizmos,” said Vannah.

“Like?”

“Things. He gets them patented and sells the patents.”

“I’m a little lost,” Bernie said. Which made two of us: don’t forget we’re a lot alike
in some ways, me and Bernie.

“What’s your problem?” She gazed down at him.

He gazed up at her. “I ran a quick online search, came up with no hits for Ralph Boutette.
That makes no sense if he’s got patents.”

Vannah blinked. “You think I’m making this up?”

“I don’t think anything,” Bernie said, which was one of my very favorites of all his
lines; no one was funnier than Bernie. Him not thinking anything! “I’m just trying
to figure this out.”

Vannah glanced around, looked at me. “Maybe the patents are in his company name?”

“Which is?”

“Not sure, exactly,” she said. “But something with Napoleon in it.”

“Napoleon?”

“Ralph’s dog.”

“What sort of dog?”

“Huh? Does it matter? A horrible little dog, pug, maybe.”

“Horrible in what way?”

“Hell, every way. And the dog’s missing, too, come to think of it. One day they weren’t
on the houseboat anymore, just vanished off the face of the earth.”

“Ralph lives on a houseboat?” Bernie said, turning to the keyboard and tapping away.

“Lives, works, everything.”

“Here we go,” said Bernie, eyeing the screen. “Napoleon Industrial Products, twenty-two
hits.”

“See?” said Vannah.

“Through a glass, darkly,” said Bernie.

“Huh?” said Vannah. I was sort of with her on that, but not really. I’d never cross
over on Bernie.

“Nothing,” Bernie said. “What’s the name of the houseboat?”

“Little Jazz.”

Bernie put his hands on the desk, leaned back.
“Little Jazz?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Named after Roy Eldridge?”

Vannah shrugged. “Never heard of him, but the Boutettes know a ton of people down
in bayou country, so anything’s possible.”

Was I following this right? Vannah didn’t know Roy Eldridge? His trumpet did things
to my ears, the best kind of things, especially when he played on “If You Were Mine”
with Billie Holiday, which we blast in the Porsche just about every single day.

“Tell you what,” Bernie said. “We’ll take the case.”

Because Vannah didn’t know Roy Eldridge? Bernie was full of surprises, just one of
the lovable things about him.

“Yeah?” said Vannah. She was surprised, too, no doubt about it.

“Yeah,” Bernie said.

Vannah opened her purse again, handed Bernie a fat roll. Not the fattest in my experience,
but it was always nice to see a fat roll coming our way. “Count it,” she said.

“I trust you,” said Bernie.

“You do?”

“On the three grand being here,” he said.

For a moment, Vannah’s forehead wrinkled up, like she was going to get mad. Then she
laughed. Bernie laughed, too. Then he started counting the money. Vannah laughed some
more.

“Three grand on the nose,” Bernie said, although he didn’t put it anywhere near his
nose. “This money clean?”

Interesting question. I actually picked up a whiff of shrimp coming off those bills.
Had Bernie done the same? That would have been a shocker. Bernie had a nice-size nose
for a human, but it didn’t do much, as I’d learned many times. But why had he just
brought noses into the conversation? I got the feeling I wasn’t quite in the picture.
It didn’t bother me at all!

“Do you care?” Vannah said.

“Yeah,” Bernie said.

“Then it’s clean.”

Bernie stuffed the roll in his—oh, no—chest pocket, somehow dislodging the lawyer’s
check already in there. The check wafted down under the desk and out of sight.

“Okay,” Bernie said, leaning back in a relaxed sort of way, “tell me everything you
know about Ralph’s disappearance, starting with how you heard about it.”

Vannah returned to the couch, maybe crossing, uncrossing and recrossing her legs again.
I’m pretty sure that happened but
not totally, on account of how worried I was about that check. I moved over to the
desk, a desk with sides that came fairly close to the floor, meaning I had to crouch
down on my belly and wriggle forward to squeeze underneath. Even just getting my head
under wasn’t that easy. I had to push up with the muscles at the back of my neck,
actually sort of lifting the whole desk somewhat off the floor, just to get started.

“. . . last week,” Vannah was saying. “Sometimes he takes his Zodiac up into the bayous
so the boys went looking.”

“The boys meaning Lord and—hey, Chet, what’s going on down there?”

Bernie reached down, his hand feeling around. For a moment, all those fingers seemed
to be moving like tiny humans with minds of their own, a real scary thought that I
hoped would never come again. Then they found my head and started giving me a nice
scratch. Nice scratches are always nice, but wasn’t I down here wriggling under the
desk for a reason? I tried to think. I thought:
Nice scratches are always nice.
I closed my eyes and enjoyed the moment. The sound of their voices flowed over me,
quite pleasant, especially Bernie’s.

“Right, Lord and Duke,” Vannah said. “Not boys except in the good ol’ way. The point
is there was no sign of Ralph anywhere.”

“Has he ever done anything like this before?” Bernie said.

“Gone missing, you mean?”

“Or made himself scarce,” Bernie said. “He sounds like a loner. Loners have a way
of going off by themselves.”

“Ralph’s a loner for sure,” said Vannah. “But it was Mami’s birthday last Tuesday
and he didn’t show. No way he’d ever be disrespectful like that.”

“Mami being?”

“Their mother,” Vannah said.

“Frenchie mentioned her.”

“Head of the clan.”

“A criminal sort of clan, if I understood Frenchie properly.”

Then came a silence, maybe not the friendly kind. The lovely scratching—right in the
perfect spot between my ears, impossible for me to get to myself—stopped. I opened
my eyes. And right in front of my face, was it possible? Yes, a bag of Cheetos, practically
full! How could that have happened? How long had it been there? I didn’t worry about
any of that. This was turning out to be one of the best days of my whole life. All
I had to do was—

“Chet! What the hell! Cool it right—”

Then came a crash, kind of big, and the next thing I knew Bernie’s desk was sort of
on its side. That was very wrong and if I had played any part in it, that was wrong,
too. Bernie was on his feet gazing down at me with not the best look on his face.
Vannah’s eyes were opened wide and she seemed to have jumped into the small space
between the couch and the wall. And the bag of Cheetos? Now nowhere in sight. But
on the rug, practically right at my feet, lay a small scrap of paper, somewhat like
a . . . a check? The check! I remembered the check! And in no time at all I’d snatched
it up, stepped forward, and offered it to Bernie.

“What’s this?” Bernie said. He took the check, smoothed it off, wiped away some moisture
that might have gotten on it. Then he gave his head a shake like he wasn’t seeing
right, patted his chest pocket, pulled his shirt forward so he could peer down into
the pocket—a button snapping off his shirt at that moment, which I snatched right
out of the air and swallowed, not even thinking twice; was I on a roll or what?—and
then his face softened in a lovely way and he said, “Good boy.”

“What’s going on?” Vannah said.

“Nothing,” said Bernie, standing the desk back up. “Nothing at all.”