Free Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran Page B

then another beer, and when a man I’d never met before asked if he could buy me another drink I said yes. He asked me what I did.
    “I’m a private detective,” I said.
    “Yeah,” he said with a little smile, thinking he knew, “and I’m a cowboy.”

15
    A ND THEN THERE WAS the Case of the Missing Miniature Horses. I took the case twenty-five days after Paul died. A man named Ellwood James had a ranch near Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, in Marin County. Ellwood James was the cousin-in-law of the district attorney of San Francisco, and he raised miniature horses. It was a surprise to see just how miniature the horses were. The tallest was three and half feet, on all fours. The horses looked a little sad and ashamed that they weren’t going to grow anymore. They reminded me of the kids from
Flowers in the Attic
, never growing after being locked in an attic a few years too long.
    Ellwood James thought that someone was stealing his horses.
    “I started off with one fifty,” he said. He sounded like a real rancher, as if he were talking about heads of cattle. “Births, deaths, what have you, six months in I got ninety-nine. Someone is stealing my horses.”
    My theory was that the little fellows were running away to try to get some big boy genes back in the mix, or maybe committing suicide. I made a mental note to research equine suicides.
    He took me around the ranch. Your basic low-security operation. I explained to him that if he wanted to stop the thefts, he needed to put up some higher fences, some lights, and maybe some razor wire. If he wanted to find out who, if anyone, was stealing the little guys, he’d be better leaving things as they were and investing in some surveillance.
    Ellwood also bred peacocks.
    “Peafowl,” he corrected me, using the gender-neutral term. “Peacock’s a male, peahen’s the female.”
    He looked up; I followed his eyes to see a ring of vultures closing in.
    “Goddamn it,” he said. We followed the vultures and walked across the pasture, tiny horses in all colors roaming and grazing. Dandelions and little purple flowers I couldn’t name dotted the green grass. The sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at it.
    When we’d reached a hundred feet or so we saw what the vultures were so eager for. A dead peacock. Maybe a peahen.
    “Goddamn it,” Ellwood said again. “Damn things were supposed to live to twenty.”
    “Maybe she
was
twenty,” I said.
    Ellwood nodded. Neither of us knew how to date peafowl, that was for sure.
    A vulture swooped down and landed ten or fifteen feet from us.
    “Might as well let her have it,” Ellwood said, and we walked back across the pasture.
    “Not much of a job for a private eye,” I said.
    “I want to know who’s doing this,” Ellwood said. “A man has his honor. His pride.”
    I wasn’t sure where honor and pride fit into shrinking horses. When we got close to the barn one of the little guys, all black with a glossy coat, came toward me. I crouched down and we looked at each other. He looked sad and wise.
    “I see your point,” I said to Ellwood. “But what I charge’ll cost more than you’re losing.”
    “Money is not an issue,” Ellwood James said.
    Magic words.
    I took the case.
     
    From Ellwood James’s place I drove back to the 101 and up to Sonoma County and got off near Santa Rosa and drove out to the Spot of Mystery. The Spot of Mystery was one of those places where a very mysterious house slid down a very mysterious hill and now defied every known law of physics, if you squinted just right. Other highlights included a gift shop, a petting zoo of fainting goats, hot springs, and some extremely tall redwoods with names like Old Buddy and Faithful Susan.
    Jake, the man who ran the Spot of Mystery, was a retired police detective from San Francisco. In the cabins behind the main building he ran a kind of halfway house for detectives and cops, men and women who were halfway between one mystery and another. I