Here’s the second half of Wonderland, which I posted the first half of last month. I do love Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, so it was fun to figure out how to work in some of the encounters and themes from those works into a private eye story.
The Grove, a nearby neighborhood whose only trees were stunted acacias planted singly at intervals along the streets. There was only one Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in the area, and fortunately, a police cruiser sat in its parking lot.
The jackrabbit and mouse sat outside on the patio with cups of coffee, the former on his phone, the latter apparently dozing. They hadn’t seen Sean yet, so he organized his thoughts for a moment before walking over to them.
He approached from behind the jackrabbit so he could see the mouse’s name badge. “Mura,” it read. “Officer Cluny?” Sean asked as he approached.
Cluny turned as his partner’s eyes cracked open. “Yeah?” the rabbit said warily.
“Sean Leroux,” he said. “I’m a private investigator.” That still sounded weird to say.
The cops shared a look and then turned their ears to him, their expressions moving from guarded to closed. “You want to talk to us,” the rabbit said, “go through our captain.”
“Saw him this morning.” Sean kept a smile on. The feeling of being small was partly mitigated by standing over the two seated officers. “He said you should give me five minutes.”
“Did he?” Cluny looked him up and down. “What’s this about?”
“Tuke Perez. You arrested him a couple days ago.”
“Did I? Not sure I recall.” The rabbit smirked at his partner.
“It was your name on the arrest report,” Sean said. “I just have a couple questions about the arrest.”
“I guess you have five minutes. But I have a pretty poor memory.”
“How’s yours, Officer Mura?” Sean asked.
“We’ll see.” The mouse kept his voice down.
“Why did you stop Mr. Perez?”
“This was in the report,” Cluny said.
“I—” Sean stopped. “I’d like to hear it in your words.”
“Don’t have the report yet, do you?”
Sean looked around the coffee shop patio as though the report might have been left somewhere there. “I’ve read it. You said he was ‘behaving erratically.’ I want to know what that means.”
“You’re wasting our time,” the mouse said through half-lidded eyes.
“What’s so difficult about it? It was only a couple days ago. I just want to know in your own words what happened. I’m not recording or anything.”
Again the two cops looked at each other. “Let me ask you a question,” Cluny said. “You a former cop?” Sean shook his head. “You ever arrest someone on drugs?”
“Several times. I was casino security for the Sultanate.”
“Ha ha.” The jackrabbit relaxed visibly. “Okay, mister non-cop. You get to know the druggies when you’ve been out on the street. We pick ‘em up and a week later they’re back on the street. This guy, this mink, he’s guilty of something, that’s for sure.”
The mouse cut in. “And this time he slipped up. He had heroin. That’s serious.” He adjusted his hat and let his eyes drift shut again.
“Yeah, he had heroin.” Cluny scowled. “Messed up big time.”
“Was he high on heroin when you brought him in?”
“How should we know?” Cluny said just as the mouse nodded and said, “Definitely,” without opening his eyes.
“Definitely,” the rabbit corrected himself.
“Funny,” Sean said. “You didn’t put that in the report.”
“The lawyers get picky if you name specific drugs.” Cluny took a sip of his coffee.
“But if it was definite then why not name it?”
The rabbit’s ears flicked. “You listening at all to what I’m saying?”
“Trying to.” Sean tried another tack. “Look, aren’t we on the same side here? I just want to see justice done.”
“Ha ha,” the rabbit said without humor. “Ha ha. Hey, Mura. He wants to see justice.”
“Sometimes you get justice from injustice,” the mouse said.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Cluny took another drink. “Because you don’t know nothing.”
Sean was starting to feel like he did know nothing. The cops maintained that they knew somehow that Tuke was guilty, that he’d been on heroin when they arrested him, but Mikey said Tuke was sober, and Ty had been sure Tuke didn’t do hard stuff. Sometimes you didn’t know your friends, that was true. Sean didn’t know Tuke at all and he had only run into someone on heroin once. They hadn’t been behaving really erratically that he could remember, just really happy and energetic. Until they’d crashed.
For a moment he got excited. If Tuke had crashed, he would’ve been in custody by then. It would be on the report.
And that’s why they hadn’t put down that he was on heroin. “Behaving erratically” was a catchall that allowed them to stop and search Tuke without pinning them down to any actual evidence. They’d clearly been around this whole circus before and knew all the ins and outs. Move on from one arrest to another, leaving the mess behind for the justice system to sort out. First the verdict and the sentence, and then the trial.
But as bad as Tuke might’ve been, if the cops had planted heroin on him, that was wrong. The problem was that Sean couldn’t figure out how to prove it. And their world operated on a whole different set of rules, one he was getting a headache trying to figure out.
*
Tuke was in a holding cell, so Sean could talk to him through the bars. An officer sat nearby, affecting to ignore them except for his pricked-up ears.
“They planted that shit on me,” the mink said loudly. He kept shifting his paws on the bars, ducking his head.
“Can you prove that?” Sean asked.
Tuke’s eyes bulged. “Prove it? Prove it? They were takin’ my stuff and then the one dropped the stuff in it and said ‘oh, what this?’”
“It’s your word against theirs, and you don’t have the best record.”
“Listen,” Tuke said. “I don’t do that stuff. I don’t mess with it. People that mess with it end up—you know.” His eyes shifted. His paws came off the bars to clasp each other briefly, and then went back to the bars, sliding along them.
“Dead?”
“Hey, I didn’t say nothin’ about that.”
Sean stuck his paws in his pockets and closed his fingers around his deck of cards. They tingled more than usual, but still he ignored them. “You have any drugs in your system? If I tell them to test you, would that be a good idea?”
Again the head dropped, and the mink’s claws scraped along the bars. “Don’t test me.”
“All right, so you got any suggestions? Anyone else witness the arrest?”
“The 7-11 guy, he saw it.”
Sean doubted whether a business owner could be convinced to testify against the police that covered their neighborhood, let alone a clerk at a local business, but he made a note of it. “All right,” he said. “Anything else you think of?”
“All the cops are corrupt!” Tuke yelled.
The red wolf put his fingers to his eyes. “You’re not helping.”
None of this was helping. He felt trapped in this crazy world where verdicts were passed before the culprit was even apprehended, where the culprit himself didn’t seem interested in gaining his own release, let alone the attorney designated to defend him. At the moment, Sean had two options open to him, neither of which felt attractive: he could walk away, out of the rabbit hole Ty had led him into, and leave the mink to the fate that, let’s face it, was going to get him sooner or later anyway—thereby letting down his friend and failing himself. Or he could go interview the clerk at the 7-11, could convince Mikey to testify, could drag himself into the case and endanger his future career.
His paw closed around the cards, now quiet. “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m open to it,” he muttered.
“I just tol’ you I didn’t,” Tuke said. “I just gotta get outta here.”
Sean had the glimmer of an idea. “If you got out of here, you have somewhere else to go?”
“What you mean?”
The red wolf glanced at the nearby officer, who continued to stare at his phone, feigning disinterest. “I mean…the cops here don’t like you much. You have family somewhere else? Somewhere you could go make a new start?”
The mink glared at him. “This my home, dude.”
“Yeah, I know. It sucks. But you’re either going to jail or going back on the street, and it sounds like if you’re back on the street the cops will find a reason to pull you back in here. You want to break the cycle, you want a chance at a normal life, you got to get out of their world.”
“Got all the answers, don’tcha.” The mink sneered at him. “Fancy suit, fancy talk, think you can buy your way outta anything. Well, this’s my home. I ain’t runnin’ away from my problems. I give up my home, them assholes won.”
Sean exhaled. “Give me a moment,” he said, and turned around.
Tuke was right, and he felt ashamed at having suggested that the mink flee the area. Tuke had as much right to be here as the cops did. He fingered the cards in his pocket, thinking. The small table in front of him was clear, so on impulse he pulled the deck out and shuffled it as he thought, What do I do now? Then he laid out three cards.
Jack of Hearts. Nine of Clubs. King of Spades.
The Jack of Hearts was Tuke, a kind but unrealistic young man. The Nine of Clubs meant something held in reserve. And the King of Spades was an authoritarian figure, ruthless.
He stared at the layout and then swept the cards up in his paw and replaced them in his pocket. “Tuke,” he said, turning around, “what if you could help the cops out?”
The mink’s eyes narrowed. “Why would I wanna do that?”
“So you can live here in your home.”
“You mean like turn in my friends?”
“Not your friends.” The King of Spades. “Your boss.”
It was a guess, but it hit close to home. Tuke dropped his gaze and his paws. “Don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I ain’t got a job.”
“Not talking about a job.” Sean lowered his voice. “I mean your connection. The guy you get stuff from.”
“Shhh!” Tuke slapped the bar. “You want to get me killed?”
The nearby officer had dropped the pretense of ignoring them and now stared right at Sean, ears perked. Sean ignored him. “What if we could get him off the street before they release you? You help the cops, they’ll leave you alone, and then you can stay home.”
“And how’m I gonna make money if Ch—if that guy ain’t around?”
Sean sighed. “I can help you find a job. Ty—you know Ty—got his job from me. I know people who work in the casino. But you got to promise to go straight. No more drugs, no more nothing.”
The mink scowled. “Don’t you preach to me, fancy suit.”
“Look,” Sean said. “This world you’re in might make sense to you, but I promise you that from the outside, it’s all upside down. You can work casino security, I’m sure. I’m sorry I asked you to run away, but I’m not sorry to be asking you to change. You can talk to Ty if you want, see how serious he is.”
Tuke didn’t say anything. Sean waited until the mink lifted his head, and then went on. “But if you don’t think you can do that…then you can go to jail. This is how I can help you.”
*
Captain Jones looked up as he walked into her office. “Have a nice time talking to the lowlife?” she asked.
“Very informative.” Sean held up a piece of paper. “You interested in a bigger fish? Drug supplier to the neighborhood?” The widening of her eyes answered him. “Tuke Perez is willing to give you enough information to arrest him, provided he’s released.”
The lioness licked her lips. “But he was found with heroin.”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “I’m thinking maybe you can write that up as an unfortunate mistake of some kind.” He waved the paper.
It drew her attention. “I could just take that from you.”
He crossed the office and dropped it on her desk. “Sorry, it’s just a prop. There’s not actually anything written on it. So are you interested in Mister Perez’s info?”
She opened the blank paper, looked at both sides, then dropped it in the garbage can. “I’ll have to talk to the assistant DA.”
“That’s all we’re asking.” He bowed. “Thanks for your time.”
He waved cheerfully to the pine marten on his way out of the police station. Coming out into the soft light of evening, he felt, if not tall, at least his own normal size again.
Now that you mentioned the allusions to Alice in Wonderland I started to see them. That.. hm. An interesting way to connect the two stories. Guess he had to follow the white rabbit after all.