The Big Chihuahua (8 page)

“You’ve got a lot of nerve!” said Mark, whirling around, his fists clenched. “My wife is dead and you’re asking me for money.”

“Hey!” said our boss, putting out his hands in a placating gesture. “My operatives”—Jimmy G gestured at me and Pepe—“they are just trainees and so they neglected to collect the deposit on the first visit. According to our standard terms, you must pay half of our fee in advance and the other half upon completion. Seems to Jimmy G you owe us one thousand smackeroos.”

“How do I know they actually completed the task?” asked Mark.

I wondered about his anger. Easier to get mad than sad. My sister Terry had always been angry after our parents died. “And what do you mean
trainees
? I wanted licensed PIs. I need them to testify in court.”

“What do you mean testify in court?” I asked. The idea both thrilled and terrified me.

“Geri, did I ever tell you about my day in court?” asked Pepe. “I was the expert witness in a case of dog-food tampering.”

“Hush, Pepe,” I said.

“I’ve filed a suit against Crystal Star,” Mark said. “For alienation of affection and fraud. And now I’m going to add wrongful death. I don’t know how, but I know they were responsible.”

“All the more reason to pay our fee,” said Jimmy G, taking a step closer to Mark. “You can keep us on retainer for an additional five hundred dollars.”

“Look!” said Mark. He pushed his hands toward Jimmy G but without actually touching him. “I’m suing for a half a million. My lawyer thinks we have a good case. I’ll pay your agency a commission. Ten percent of whatever I get. After legal costs, of course. As long as your associates continue to gather evidence on my behalf. That’s one option.”

Jimmy G looked thoughtful. “And the other?” “I’ll write you a check for one thousand right now. Of course, I still intend to subpoena your”—he narrowed his eyes and squinted at me—“operatives, as you call them. But”—he pointed his finger at me—“she better be licensed by then!”

The phone began to ring. Mark frowned, then headed out into the hallway to answer it. I wondered if it was a sympathy call. I wondered if he had told anyone about his wife’s death. His voice was too low to hear what he was saying.

Jimmy G sat down again, leaned back, and crossed his legs. He seemed pretty proud of himself. “See how it’s done, doll?” he asked.

Mark slammed down the phone and reentered the living room. He was obviously shaken. His face was pale, his eyes frozen.

“That was the county sheriff,” he said.

I nodded. “Sheriff Pager,” I said.

Mark gave me a sharp look. “Yes, Sheriff Pager. He says my wife was murdered.” He threw the word at me like an accusation.

I was taken aback. “Really? Murdered?”

“Yes, the good news is that they already have a suspect in custody.”

“No!” I said, thinking of my sister.

Mark looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Did you know this?”

I shook my head, momentarily unable to speak.

“Tell you what we’ll do,” said Jimmy G, going over to Mark and draping his arm around the other man’s shoulders. “My operatives here will go back up there and investigate this murder.”

“Sounds like the sheriff already has it wrapped up,” said Mark.

“Can’t be too careful,” said Jimmy G. “My associates have an inside track. Sheriff doesn’t have that.”

Mark looked uncertain.

“Of course, we’ll have to charge extra,” Jimmy G said. “For hazard pay. Can’t be sending my operatives into danger without additional compensation.”

“How about twelve percent commission on the settlement?” asked Mark.

“Fifteen percent,” countered Jimmy G.

They finally settled at fourteen percent.

As we walked away from the house, I said to Jimmy G, “We came here to get one thousand dollars and we’re leaving with nothing but a promise. I don’t see how that was so effective.”

“Hey,” said my boss, “we came here to get one thousand dollars and we’re leaving with the potential of making . . .” He paused and scratched his head. “What’s fourteen percent of one million?”

“It’s a gamble, boss. That’s what it is. And the odds are against us,” I said as we piled into Jimmy G’s car, a red Thunderbird convertible from the sixties.

“Those are the kind of odds that Jimmy G likes,” he said as he revved up the engine. It sounded like it needed a muffler. “You don’t get the big payoffs without some risks.”

“No wonder he is broke,” Pepe said.

“So you gotta get yourself back up to that cult and start digging,” Jimmy G said as he pulled into traffic.

“I am good at digging,” said Pepe.

“You don’t have a problem with that, do you?” Jimmy G asked me. Before I could answer, he said, “Sure, they’re a bunch of weirdoes and it could be dangerous—Jimmy G knows that. But that’s the nature of the private dick business. Sometimes you just gotta put your neck on the line.”

“
Sí
. Our necks, not
his
,” said Pepe.

“No problem, boss,” I said. “We want to catch whoever did it as badly as anybody.”

“
We
?” asked the boss, glancing over at me. Pepe was sitting on my lap. “Oh, yeah, you and the rat-dog. He’s a regular Sherlock Chihuahua.”

“You would make a terrible Watson,” Pepe told Jimmy G.

“OK,” I said. “We’ll head back up there first thing tomorrow.” I wanted to find out what I could about Terry. Was she the suspect?

“Copacetic,” said my boss. “Jimmy G will come up, too. Establish a base camp so you can make regular reports.”

“I hope we don’t have to join the cult, though.”

“What? Are you nuts?”

“The introductory weekend is almost over,” I explained. “If we can’t figure out who killed Tammy by tomorrow night, we might have to join the Dogawandans to stay at the Center after that.”

“Oh,” said Jimmy G. “Do what you have to. Just don’t start believing you have to worship a dog.”

“She already does,” Pepe told him. “
Moi
.”

“It can’t be my sister!” I said to Pepe as we were driving home. “It can’t be my sister!”

Pepe said nothing, which was highly unusual.

“You think she did it?” I asked him.

“I do not know your sister,” he said.

“But you know me,” I pointed out.

“That is not to know your sister,” he said. “I do not know my siblings.”

“You had siblings?” I asked.

“Of course. I was the youngest of a litter of five.”

“I didn’t know that, Pepe. You never talk about your family.”

“That is because I was taken away from them when I was only six weeks old.” He seemed sad as he spoke.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said. Then I thought about my own family story, which was also full of abandonment and loss. My parents had died in a car accident when I was sixteen, and my younger sister had been kicked out by my big sister three years later when she was seventeen and disappeared altogether three years later. Although we live only about twenty miles apart, I’m not close to my big sister, Cheryl. Still I got an immediate urge to see her, if for no other reason than to let her know about Terry.

Instead of driving home, I headed for the floating bridge. Its official name is the Governor Albert D. Rosellini Bridge—Evergreen Point, but everyone just calls it the floating bridge. And it’s the longest floating bridge on earth. Two high-rise sections connect the bridge to land, but the middle section lies just above the surface of Lake Washington. You can look out as you fly along (or crawl if it’s rush hour). On the south side, the dark blue lake water is calm and glassy, and on the northern side it’s usually choppy, with little peaks of white on the tops of the waves.

My sister and her husband live in the Issaquah Highlands, a once-rural area rapidly being covered by developments, just east of Bellevue, Seattle’s little sister of a town. Bellevue tries hard to look glamorous and grown-up with its office towers and shopping malls, but it’s smaller and less cosmopolitan than downtown Seattle.

Cheryl lives in a development called Stonybrook, where all the streets are curved in on themselves and all the huge three-story houses are crammed into tiny lots with only a few feet between them. Cheryl’s house looks just like its neighbors, up to the basket of purple petunias dangling from a pot on the porch. I pulled into the driveway behind my sister’s silver minivan, which displayed a B
ABY ON
B
OARD
bumper sticker. The baby was now eighteen months old and having a screaming, squalling meltdown, judging by the sounds we heard when we got out of the car. Pepe began shivering. He is not afraid of much, but he is afraid of children.

“Oh my ears! My delicate ears!” he said.

“You can stay in the car,” I told him. I knew my sister did not want a dog in her house.

“But no, I have a job to do, and so I must do my duty,” said Pepe, marching by my side up the front steps.

I was surprised Cheryl could hear the doorbell what with all the yelling going on inside, but she answered the door with D.J. hitched up on her hip. His face was bright red and his cheeks were covered with snot. But as soon as he saw Pepe, his eyes widened and his screams stopped.

“Doggie!” he chortled, holding out his slime-covered little fingers.

“Well, your dog is making himself useful for once,” Cheryl said. She set D.J. down on his wobbly feet (he had just started walking at eighteen months—Cheryl carried him everywhere, so there was really no reason for him to learn). He lunged for Pepe, who darted behind me.

“Let him pet the dog!” said Cheryl.

“He might hurt him!” I snatched Pepe up into my arms.

“You’re right!” said Cheryl. “Your dog has sharp teeth.”

“Doggie!” wailed D.J., throwing himself at my legs and attempting to climb up me.

“Be nice to your auntie Geri,” said Cheryl, trying to detach D.J. from me, but he clung like a little monkey while Pepe shivered in my arms.

“Speaking of aunts,” I said in a bright voice, even though I doubted D.J. could hear me over his earsplitting shrieks, “I just found Auntie Terry.”

But Cheryl heard me. “What?”

“I found Terry,” I said, with some pride.

“I found her,” said Pepe.

Cheryl frowned. “D.J., let go this minute! Or I’ll put you in a time-out!” She tried to pry him off me, but he just held on tighter.

“OK, you are now in a time-out!” said Cheryl. She unlatched his fingers from me, one finger at a time and carried him away down the hall, howling and kicking and hitting. Even when she closed the door to his room, I could still hear him shrieking.

While Cheryl tried to quiet D.J., I stood in the living room and looked at the framed photos displayed on the mantel over the glassed-in fake fireplace. Photos of D.J. and his big sister, Danielle. Danielle posing with her chubby chin propped on interlaced hands. D.J. clutching a bright blue bear. Also on the mantel, photos of Cheryl and her husband, Don (I call him Don the Dentist). The wedding party: including me as bridesmaid (in an awful baby blue chiffon gown) and Jeff, my ex-husband, on the groom’s side, looking ever so handsome with his slightly shaggy hair and dark blue velvet sports coat. A little farther along, our wedding, which took place a year later, with Cheryl as my maid of honor and Don as Jeff’s best man. Terry was already gone when Cheryl got married, so she didn’t appear in these photos.

While I was looking at the photos, my cell phone buzzed and I saw that Felix was calling. But just then, Cheryl came back into the room.

“Do you have any photos of Terry?” I asked her.

“Somewhere,” she said. “I don’t put them out. I don’t want to try to explain who she is to the kids.” I knew my sister disapproved of Terry’s lifestyle (what we knew of it). And she also felt guilty. After our parents died, she had to be a guardian and mother figure for us. When Terry went wild, Cheryl, applied the advice she got from parenting experts at the time and threw her out of the house. Terry never forgave her for that. No wonder Cheryl was so overindulgent with her own kids.

“Where’s your dog?” she asked.

I hadn’t even noticed he was gone. “Probably in the kitchen,” I said. Pepe is very impressed with Cheryl’s cooking, since she cooks American classics like meat loaf and roast beef.

Sure enough, he was sitting in the middle of the floor, staring up at the granite counters, his little nose sniffing away. I could see what caught his attention: a plate of home-baked chocolate chip cookies. They gave off a delicious aroma.

“Might as well have a snack,” said Cheryl. I could still hear D.J. wailing in the background. She opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk and poured us each a glass. She put out two sunflower plates on the round glass-topped table set into an alcove off the kitchen, brought over the plate of cookies, and motioned for me to sit down. Pepe pawed at my legs, wanting me to pick him up and put him on my lap but I ignored him.

“So what’s the news about Terry?” Cheryl asked as she came over to the table with the glasses of milk. “Did you find her online?” She knew that I had been searching for Terry for years.

“No, I saw her in person!” I said.

“You’re kidding?” Cheryl sat down with a thump. “Where?”

“At a ranch out near Cle Elum,” I said.

“What were you doing there?”

“I was working a case,” I said. I helped myself to a cookie, broke off a piece, checked to make sure there were no chocolate chips in it, and held it out to Pepe under the table. He immediately carried it out onto the kitchen floor, where he sat down to polish it off with gusto.

Cheryl frowned. “So you still think you’re a private detective?”

Cheryl didn’t think too much of my new profession. She didn’t approve of my being an artist either, which is why I dropped out of college, abandoning my art degree for interior design (more practical). To be fair, it was also because I needed to support my new husband, who was getting his MBA. Cheryl also didn’t approve of our divorce, but there wasn’t much she could do about that.

“I
am
a private detective,” I said, “or to be more precise, I’m training to be a private detective. And my assignment was to go undercover in this cult—”

“That sounds really dangerous,” Cheryl said.

“Not with me at her side,” said Pepe, licking his lips.

“Cheryl, I’m trying to tell you about Terry!”

“Yes, yes, go on. I’m listening.”

“She belongs to the cult. She’s got a new name.”

“What?”

“She goes by Flicker.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“They all have names like that. Leaf. Flint. Fox. Artichoke.”

“What kind of cult is this?”

“The Dogawandans.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They worship an ancient warrior spirit who talks through a dog. Or maybe it’s an ancient warrior dog. I’m not quite sure.”

“I think Dogawanda is a dog, for sure,” said Pepe. “His wisdom is that of a
perro
.”

“Geri, you’re making that up.”

“No, I’m not!”

“That sounds ridiculous!”

“Actually it makes some kind of sense when you’re there.”

“It’s not ridiculous at all,” said Pepe. “Everyone should listen to dogs.”

“So did Terry explain what she’s been doing all these years?” Cheryl asked. “Why she hasn’t contacted us?”

“No, not really. She told me she couldn’t tell me. She said she was trying to protect us.”

“Probably just trying to protect us from knowing what she was really up to,” said Cheryl. Terry had been running with a rough crowd right around the time she disappeared.

“I suppose it’s possible she went to jail,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t want to tell us. She did mention needing to make a fresh start.”

“Perhaps she is a fugitive,” said Pepe, “and that is why the police came for her. Like Corinna in
Paraiso Perdido.
She was living under a false name . . .”

“This is not one of your Spanish soap operas!” I said.

“It sounds exactly like
Paraiso Perdido
,” said Cheryl.

Really? Did everyone watch telenovellas except me?

“Corinna came back to town but would not explain where she was for the last ten years,” Cheryl said.

“Maybe she has amnesia,” suggested Pepe, “like Corinna’s sister, Lourdes.”

“What’s next?” asked Cheryl. “When do I get to see her?”

“That might be a little difficult,” I said. “She’s under arrest at the moment.”

“What?”

“Yes, while we were there, we found a dead body—”

“This is exactly why you must stop working as a private detective!” Cheryl declared. Well, she might be able to order her husband and kids around, but she couldn’t boss me anymore. I decided to ignore her as I had in the past.

“—and it seems that the sheriff thinks Terry did it!”

“For all you know, she had been in prison the past ten years, like Corinna,” Cheryl said.

“A good point!” Pepe declared. “Or perhaps she has traumatic amnesia, like Lourdes. She was traumatized because she believed she had committed a murder. Only she had really been framed but she didn’t know that.”

“Come on, Cheryl,” I said. “She’s our sister. She’s not a murderer.”

“We don’t know anything about her and what she’s done in the past,” Cheryl pointed out.

There was some truth to that.

“I’ll find out,” I said.

“Yes, this is a case for Sullivan and Sullivan!” said Pepe, referring to the name of the fictional detective agency he thinks we are running.

“I’m heading back up there tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll figure out what’s going on and let you know.”

“OK, Geri,” said Cheryl with a sigh. “But please be careful. You don’t know what’s going on. I can’t afford to lose another sister!”