Spencer Quinn - A Fistful of Collars

Dina squeezed her eyes shut. The tiniest drop leaked from the corner of one of them. “When I heard that…” She shook her head. “It tore me apart. I’ve never been the same.”

Bernie’s face, already pretty hard, got harder. “Who killed her?”

“I don’t know.” Dina looked at Bernie’s face. “Oh, my God, you can’t think it was me. She was my best friend. We had pet names for each other, from when we could barely talk.”

“What were they?” Bernie said.

A smile crossed Dina’s face, very small and quickly gone, but she looked a little younger in that moment. “She called me Dee Dee. I called her Prilly.”

Bernie said nothing.

“Now you’re going to grill me on where I was when she was killed and can I prove it,” Dina said.

“Nope,” said Bernie. “Although I am interested in whether the police ever talked to you.”

“They didn’t.”

“Tell me about Manny Chavez,” Bernie said.

“I knew Manny,” Dina said. “He was her boyfriend for, like, six weeks. Boyfriends came and went back then. It wasn’t that serious-we were seventeen.”

“Were they having sex?” Bernie said.

“Who wasn’t?” said Dina. “She wasn’t in love with him, or anything like that.”

“Was it more serious for him?”

She shrugged. “Maybe not because of who she was, but what she was.”

“Meaning?”

“Blond and Anglo. A kind of status thing, especially for those gangbanger types.”

“Manny was in a gang?”

“He was more of a wannabe-had a Harley, which was what attracted April in the first place-but some of the others were the real thing.”

“What others?”

“Guys Manny hung with,” Dina said.

“What was the name of the gang?”

Dina shook her head. “I’m not sure it was that well organized, with a name and everything. There was one guy, a little older, maybe. I remember not liking the way he looked at me. I was crazy back then, but not foolish.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember. Something Hispanic, maybe.”

“Like Ramon?” Bernie said.

“Might have been.”

“Last time we spoke, you said that name meant nothing to you.”

“So? A person can’t forget minor details with you?”

Bernie seemed to think about that for a moment. “Have you seen Ramon since?” he said.

“Since… since the summer April died? No.”

“What about Manny?”

“No.”

“Heard anything about him over the years?”

“No.”

“How about lately?”

“No.”

“So you didn’t know he was stabbed to death last week?”

Dina put a hand to her chest. “I did not.”

“Happened in a foreclosed house on North Coursin Street,” Bernie said. “Only a dozen blocks from here.”

She raised her hands, palms up.

“April’s mother told me her daughter dumped Manny,” Bernie said.

“How is she?”

“Not too good. But is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she dump him?”

“I told you,” Dina said. “Back then six weeks-”

Bernie made a chopping motion. I liked seeing that, hoped it would happen again, and soon. “Her mother heard her on the phone, almost certainly with you,” Bernie said, “saying she was interested in someone else. I need that name.”

Dina said nothing.

“How much did you have to drink at the ball game?”

Dina looked surprised. I was, too. Ball game? Had there been talk of a ball game, kind of vague and “The night Carla had those box seats,” Bernie added.

Dina shrugged. “I probably had a few beers.”

“I’m guessing you’re one of those people who get more talkative after a pop or two.”

“Guess away.”

“And maybe you wanted to impress her-this successful reporter-with a tidbit of information she didn’t know.”

Silence. It went on and on. Not a complete silence for me, on account of a rat I heard creeping across the space above the ceiling.

At last Bernie said, “You’ve answered the question.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You should have said, What tidbit? The fact that you didn’t means you told Carla that Thad Perry was from the Valley or spent time here. The question is why you’re trying to hide it.”

Dina glared at him. Yes, a tough cookie.

“So far,” Bernie said, “it doesn’t look like you’re in any kind of trouble. But once a series of murders starts up, it’s hard to get it stopped. So the next one will be partly on you.”

“I hate your guts,” Dina said.

People told Bernie that from time to time. I knew they didn’t mean it.

“Comes with the job,” Bernie said.

“And what’s that?” said Dina. “What’s your goddamn job?”

“Retribution.”

Whatever that meant, it made her stop hating him at once: I could see it on her face. She looked at Bernie in a whole new way. Not liking him, it wasn’t that. More… respecting. We have that, too, in the nation within. Dina took a big breath and let it out real slow.

“This was long before he was famous, of course,” she said. “Thad Perry was a kid, just like us. He came here that summer to visit a cousin and met April at a car wash where the cousin worked. It all happened real fast, maybe two weeks from when they met till she died. He left town right away.”

“Did he kill her?” Bernie said.

“I don’t know,” Dina said. “He was gentler than most of the boys, and more polite. And much better looking. I saw them together just the one time, at the car wash. They were so beautiful together.”

“Did they argue?” Bernie said. “Fight with each other?”

“Not that I know of,” Dina said.

Bernie gazed at her. “How come you didn’t want to talk about this?”

Dina rose and went to the window, pushed the leaf of a big plant aside, looked out.

“What are you afraid of?” Bernie said.

“All the usual things,” Dina said.

“Including the cousin?”

Dina turned to him, her mouth opening.

“Was his name Jiggs?” Bernie said.

“If you know all this, why ask?” Dina said. “Nolan Jiggs, this king-size shithead. He blew town with Thad Perry, something I didn’t realize at the time. Then, years later, just before Thad’s first movie came out, he came back and found me.” Dina turned from the window, the plant leaf flopping back into place. “He paid me five grand to keep things to myself.”

“That was the carrot,” Bernie said.

“You’re not as dumb as you look,” Dina said. “The stick was a promise to kill me if I breathed a word to anyone.” She gazed at Bernie through the leaves. “Are you and your dog going to keep that from happening?”

Bet the ranch.

Very late at night-but a time we’re used to being up at in this business-the Valley gets as quiet as it gets. That near-quiet was what I was hearing now, like everyone was having restless sleeps. Bernie, at the wheel, face harder than ever in the green light from the dials, turned to me and said, “Take us at least twenty minutes to get there, big guy, even at this hour. Why don’t you grab a quick catnap?”

Say what? I sat up my straightest for the whole ride, which turned out to be all the way across town to West Side Heights, one of the fanciest neighborhoods in the Valley.

“Not sleepy, huh?” Bernie said, as we wound up a hilly street lined with big houses spaced far apart. Not if cats were sleepy, I sure wasn’t. Bernie pulled into a circular driveway, outside lights coming on right away, and stopped in front of a house that looked a bit like the old mission downtown. “Time to blow up this whole damn thing and start over,” Bernie said, as we got out of the car and went to the front door, one of those massive dark-wood double doors with lots of metalwork. We had no dynamite on us-one of the easiest smells going-so the explosions weren’t coming anytime soon. Fine with me. We’d blown up a shed once-the wrong one, it turned out-a really exciting day, at first, but Bernie had-not miscalculated, no way that could ever happen, more like he’d gotten a little too enthusiastic when it came to the number of dynamite sticks, and in the end we’d taken out a sort of bridge as well as the shed and all the tires on the Porsche, and had to walk a long way to the nearest gas station.