Tammy Lou was just passing through Orlando. Her home, her family, her roots, were in Maypop, Florida. Bernie had moved there to court her, working for McDonald’s until he had married her, and they had lived there ever since. An uncle of Tammy Lou’s served as a deputy in the Sheriff’s Office. As soon as Bernie had obtained his citizenship papers, he had begun to do likewise. Now a balding, slightly overweight man who could have passed for an Italian if it were not for his accent, Bernie had grown to love the job. It seldom bored him, and sometimes it gave him a chance to help someone.
Pulling off the road at the address he had been given, Bernie blinked and shook his head at the gaudiness of the small house’s neon pink paint job. But the moment he opened his car door to get out, the odor that assaulted his nostrils took up all his attention. He frowned. This was no mere case of dead fish.
There was no need to draw a weapon, he decided; whatever had happened here was in the past tense. Still, it would be better, he decided, to enter the pink house some way other than by the front door, where the odor stank strongest and where, he noted, a package had been left in a plastic bag by the mail carrier who had called this in. Ducking under mimosa trees, he walked around back, stopping to stare at the Toyota parked out of sight of the road and out of place; what was it doing there?
He tried the kitchen door, unsurprised when the knob turned in his hand. In the Maypop area, most people locked the front door to let friends know they were not home, but left the back one unlocked in case somebody needed to get in.
Bernie entered. He did not pull his gun to point it various directions while yelling “Police!” He just walked in.
What he noticed first in the kitchen was how the things on the table—saltshakers, napkin holder, a pink pottery catchall bowl, bottles of stool softener and Tylenol and Tums—how everything stood exactly centered, like soldiers ranked along an imaginary line. Yet in the sink he saw a heap of dirty, messily stacked dishes with bugs and cobwebs on them. Cobwebs on dishes—that said something. The dishes looked slimy, and they stank.
But something else smelled far worse. Proceeding to the living room, Bernie found an unpleasantly dead dog on the carpet near the door. It looked like it had been a miniature dachshund, poor little thing, somebody’s pet.
This was not good.
Bending over it, careful not to touch, Bernie counted three bullet wounds.
So where was the gun?
Standing up, Bernie took a look around the room. He saw no weapon. Which was not a surprise, because Bernie very much doubted that the woman who lived here had shot her own pet and left it lying on the carpet.
Still scanning the living room, Bernie noticed that all the books and magazines on the coffee table and the sofa’s end table were stacked exactly on top of one another, corners aligned, according to size.
Also he saw from marks in the carpet that the furniture had been moved. Straightened.
He shook his head and went to investigate his doubts, checking out the bedroom. There he found an unmade bed. And in the bathroom, talcum powder covered everything like that north Florida rarity, a thin snowfall.
Bernie recalled the report: the mail carrier said a single woman named Liana Clymer, aka Liana Leppo, lived here. The flowery sheets in the bedroom, the cosmetics in the bathroom, and the Hello Kitty artwork on the walls tended to confirm this. The kitchen sink plus the bedroom and bathroom showed she didn’t care much about keeping things orderly. So who had rearranged the kitchen table, straightened the furniture, and put the mail-order catalogs in tidy stacks?
An intruder?
The same intruder who had shot the dog?
A compulsively tidy person who had let the dog bleed to death on the carpet?
Shaking his head, Bernie started muttering to himself in Spanish, as he often did when something stank figuratively even more than literally. Where was the woman who was supposed to live here, and why had she left her dog to rot? He needed to contact her or someone who knew her.
Bernie roamed the small house, pulling out drawers and checking shelves, searching for more information. Old enough to remember how things used to be, Bernie missed address books, landline telephones with important numbers posted next to them, piles of snail mail. What he needed to find was the Clymer woman’s cell phone or, better yet, her handbag with a cell phone in it.
He found neither purse nor phone.
Which caused him to say something particularly profane in Spanish, because what the hell was going on? The Clymer woman took her purse and went somewhere, but without her car, and leaving her dog dead on the floor?
Bernie had reached the point at which he should have left the scene, gone to file a Missing Persons report, and turned it over to the chief sheriff. What happened after that would be none of his business.