Excerpt: Wonderland

This is actually one of the TFF conbook stories I’ve written, which someday I’d like to collect into a book. They follow Sean, the red wolf private eye from “Jacks to Open,” from the beginning of his career in Las Vegas up to a hypothetical point where I get tired of writing these prequel stories.

(I had a sequel planned but it never gathered enough energy to take off; maybe when the prequels are done it will.)

“Wonderland” was featured in the conbook for TFF 2018, and was twice as long as a conbook story should be, so here’s the first half of it.

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The office Richie had found for Sean had the advantage of being just one block over and half a block down from Richie’s office, far enough from downtown to be affordable, but close enough (hopefully) to be convenient. So the two red wolves shared lunch when they could, usually in Sean’s office because, as Richie joked, it was quieter.

The joke had more than a grain of truth behind it. In his first month, Sean’s ads online had brought in four people who wanted him to find out if their spouses were cheating and one person who wanted him to figure out which of his co-workers were aliens from the planet Zrygon. He had declined that last one and the first of the worried spouses, but had taken the other three after it became clear that he wasn’t going to be pulling in enough cases to be picky. The only small pleasure he salvaged from the first month was that he didn’t have to ask his ma’s cards for help for any of his cases. In two of the three, the spouse was indeed cheating, and had been depressingly easy to catch. Both had offered him a bribe to report false results, but in both cases he had turned over the materials to his client and had tried not to think about what would happen to their relationship. They ruined it themselves, not you, Richie told him as they lay together, but Sean took little comfort from that.

Richie could make him laugh, though, and that helped. Over this lunch, they were looking out the window at the people passing by on the sidewalk outside Sean’s one-room first-floor office. “Hey, that civet. See him? Who wears a long trenchcoat in March with a sweater underneath? Maybe he’s the world’s worst flasher.”

Sean laughed and picked up another mass of lo mein noodles with his chopsticks. Another advantage of this location was the proximity of Sing Tsau’s, the best Xaiqinese food he’d had yet in Vegas. “Maybe he’s a flasher on his way to work. You know, they have a locker room and they undress there, then go out in their trenchcoat.”

“Ha ha! Oh geez, look at this guy. Weasel looking for something. Think he forgot where he stashed his drugs?”

Sean jumped up from his seat and hurried to the door, opening it as the weasel poked his head into the building foyer. “Ty!” he called.

“Hey Sean!”

Richie stood as Sean escorted Ty into the office. “Oh, you know him?”

“Yeah, Ty’s an old friend.” Sean smiled. “Ty, this is Richie, my boyfriend.”

“Oh, hey, nice to meet ya!” Ty shook enthusiastically; Richie a little less so. “You work with Sean? I got a job for him—for you.”

“No, no.” The other red wolf waved a paw. “I work down the street. Tax help. You have someone to do your taxes?”

“Uh, no.” Ty took the card that had magically appeared in Richie’s paw. “Thanks.”

“I’ll take off, let you guys get to business.” He closed the plastic clamshell around the remainder of his noodles and shoved it back into the plastic bag, then gave Sean a hug. “See you tonight.”

“Bye.” They brushed the sides of their muzzles, and Richie waved to Ty as he left.

“Nice guy.” Ty took the seat Sean offered him. “Things going good? You should totally work together. ‘Red Wolf Detective Agency’ you could call it.”

Sean smiled and sat behind his desk. “I could still call it that. What’cha got?”

The weasel’s smile faltered. “Ah, yeah. It’s a friend of mine, a mink. See, he got busted for possession, but he says he didn’t do it and I believe him. He’ll do, y’know, some things, but not the stuff they caught him with, if that makes sense.”

“Totally.” Sean stayed away from drugs himself, but Ty talked about them enough that Sean had a pretty good idea what “some things” were. “What stuff did they catch him with?”

“Heroin.” Ty sagged back in his seat.

“Jeez, Ty.”

“I know.”

“Why would the cops frame him for that?”

He spread his paws. “He didn’t know, and I sure as heck don’t.”

Sean sighed. He’d so far avoided having to deal with cops. He only had two connections in the Las Vegas Police Department and they were not solid ones. This was going to bring him into the LVPD’s orbit for sure. But on the other side of the card, if Ty was right… “What’s your friend’s name?”

*

“Tuke Perez.” Captain Jones, a tall lioness, gave Sean his license back, but didn’t give him the folder she read from. “Arresting officer was Martin Cluny, jackrabbit.”

“Thanks. Where could I find Officer Cluny?”

The lion closed the folder. “You want my advice?”

“Um, sure.” Even though he stood as tall as the lion, Sean felt very small and unsure.

The lion’s paw tapped the folder twice. “This guy? He’s a loser. He’s guilty for sure. Whoever hired you to help out his public defender has an interest in seeing him back on the street. You might find some little technicality that’ll tie it up in court, but all that’s gonna happen is he’s gonna be right back here in a month or two.”

A hyena, passing by, stared at Sean. “Hired you?” Again Sean had the feeling of being peered down at, as one might study a beetle that had wandered into the police station and clearly didn’t belong there. “Like, a private detective? For real?”

“Yes.” Not knowing what else to do, Sean extended his license.

The hyena ignored it. “You must be pretty new.”

“First couple months.”

“I figured. Your clothes still smell like you wash ‘em. Ah ha ha!”

He walked on, and Sean returned his attention to the lion. “Thanks for the advice,” he said, “but I have to do the job I was hired for.”

“Your time being wasted.” The lion walked him over to the front desk, where a skinny pine marten was finishing up a phone call. “Hey, Mac.”

“Sergeant.”

“Tell Cluny to give this wolf five minutes of his time.”

“Yes, sir.”

The pine marten showed him to a small empty office and told him that Officer Cluny would be right along. This wasn’t a conference room like they had at the casinos; this was an office with a desk and no chairs, dust around the corners, power cables trailing out into the middle of the floor. He paced the ten feet from one wall to another, looked out the window onto the parking lot, then sat on the desk. The feeling that the office was shrinking came over him, and to calm his nerves he reached for his deck of cards.

His fingers thrilled to the familiar tingle, but he hesitated. He hadn’t needed their help yet, and just because he was feeling small and lost didn’t mean he should reach for their support at the smallest worry. He knew where he was and what he had to do; there wasn’t anything his cards could tell him. And yet, knowing that the cards were there helped him breathe more deeply and calmly.

After five minutes, he got up from the desk and paced the office again, looking back out at the parking lot. A jackrabbit and a mouse in uniform walked out briskly. The jackrabbit said something and the mouse laughed. They got into a car and drove off. 

Sean pushed his nose against the glass, then noted the car number on his phone. There could be more than one jackrabbit on the force, of course. Probably was, in Vegas. But he thought that Officer Cluny had just left the building.

Ten minutes later, the pine marten came to knock on his door. “I’m so sorry, sir,” he said with a smile that did not look at all sorry, “but Officer Cluny is out on patrol right now. He’ll be back tonight, if you’d like to come back.”

“Thank you,” Sean said. “I’ll do that. In the meantime, can I use your phone?”

He called the public defender and reached her in her office.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Sean Leroux.”

“Who?”

“I’m a private investigator?”

“Ugh.” She sighed. “Who are you investigating? Explain yourself.”

“Tuke Perez. I mean, I’m trying to.”

“Perez. Perez. Is he one of mine?”

“Yes. Shouldn’t you know that?”

Her voice sharpened. “Mister Aroo—”

“Leroux.”

“Mister Laroo, I have sixteen cases on my docket now, and this is a light week of work for me. I can hardly keep track of my clients from one day to the next. I suggest you talk to the prosecuting attorney and have them contact me directly for whatever you need.”

“What?”

“Good day, Mister Laroo.”

“Wait!” This world made less and less sense to him. “I’m helping you. He’s your client. I’m trying to prove that he’s being framed.”

“Framed?” She laughed. “Save your time and energy. Lopez is guilty.”

“His name’s Perez.”

“Whatever.” She tapped on some keys. “Tuke Perez, here it is. Arrested half a dozen times, possession of pot, mostly. One charge of burglary. None of them stuck. Why would the police frame him for possession of heroin?”

“I don’t know. Why would a guy who’s never been associated with hard drugs start carrying heroin?” His voice betrayed his frustration despite his attempt to rein it in.

“I don’t know, Mister Laroo. Maybe he was tired of the small change from dealing pot and wanted to move up.”

“Someone thinks he’s innocent.”

“Someone thinks everyone’s innocent. But I guess you have to get paid. So here’s my advice to you: keep your temper. Don’t go antagonizing the police. In your line of work they can be very helpful or they can make your life hell.”

“Thanks for the advice,” he said. “Do you have a copy of the arrest report I can look at, or should I keep bothering the police here?”

“Ugh. I’ll fax it to you. What’s your fax number?”

“I, uh, don’t have one. Can I come by your office?”

“I’ll leave it with my secretary. Is that all?”

“One more thing. Can I talk to Mr. Perez?”

There was a long pause, and then she said, “Ugh.”

*

The authorization to talk to the mink was going to take some hours to go through, so Sean went over to the public defender and picked up the arrest report. There wasn’t a lot there that he didn’t already know, but it did show that Perez had been picked up in the company of a bobcat who was listed only as “Mikey.” The bobcat had been released, but there was an address on the report for him.

Sean knew the neighborhood; it was close to where he and Ty had met. He hadn’t been back in years, and he was sure nobody there would remember him. In fact, he worried that he’d stand out, so he changed to a much more casual outfit.

Still, when he went around to the old row house at the address, the older bobcat who answered the door told him brusquely that Mikey was out. He stressed that he was here to help, but she shook her head stubbornly and said she didn’t know when he’d be back. He thanked her and walked around the building, looking for some kind of clue, though he’d no idea what.

“Psst!”

Sean jerked his head around. A grimy window had been pushed up about four inches, and the head of a small bobcat pushed out below it. He gave Sean an ingratiating smile. “Hi,” Sean said. “Mikey?”

“Shh! I’m not supposed to be talkin’ to you, but it was my fault Tuke got caught.”

“Why, what happened?” Sean pulled his phone out.

The cat and his smile vanished. “No recordings!”

“All right, all right.” The red wolf slid his phone back into his pocket and raised both paws. “No recordings.”

In the dimness of the room behind the window, the cat’s teeth shone first, and then his head moved forward into view. “Listen, if we’d just turned around like he wanted, none of this woulda happened. But I wanted to go to the 7/11.”

“None of what?”

Mikey looked back and forth nervously. “Look, I don’t know exactly. All I know is Tuke kept sayin’ to the cop that he didn’t do nothin’ and he didn’t see nothin’. And the cop told him to shut up. When we got to the station they split us up and then they let me go but I asked them about Tuke and they said not to wait.”

“What happened right before the arrest?”

Mikey’s ears flicked and he mumbled, “Dunno.”

“Anything you can remember would help. Was Tuke on drugs?”

Sean waited, but Mikey disappeared into the dim room again. The red wolf sighed, looked around, and turned to walk away.

“Hssst!”

He turned back. All he could see below the window was the gleam of the cat’s nervous smile. He drew closer.

Mikey whispered, “Tuke was sober. The cop had it in for him. Said if he saw Tuke on the street again he’d take him off it for good. I just heard him say, ‘This time you ain’t comin’ back’ when he arrested him.”

Sean committed that to memory. “That was Cluny? The jackrabbit?”

“Yeah,” Mikey whispered. His teeth shone, then dimmed and vanished. “And Tuke ain’t even done much. Not like some people.”

“Wait!” The red wolf hurried to the window. “What people?”

The bobcat didn’t answer. “Okay,” Sean said. “Do you know where I can find the cops?”

He’d almost given up on getting an answer when a whisper floated out, “Coffee Bean at the Grove.”