As they kept walking to the Buchatti, Judy asked, "Do you know Zweihorn and River? They didn't seem to know you."
She remembered that Nick had commented that the pair were good and bought, and he certainly seemed quite capable of getting a rise out of both. "I never met them, myself," he said, "But I heard they're awfully fond of getting their beaks wet."
"Oh," Judy said, "So they're in on a numbers game?"
The significance of Nick's word choice, and River's reaction, made perfect sense if that was the case, which was why Judy was surprised when Nick gave her a sheepish grin. "That was a lucky guess," he admitted, "It didn't seem like much of a stretch, though."
"Zweihorn threatened you," Judy said, her brow furrowing in worry, "And now they think that you know about—"
Nick cut off her words with a breezy wave of his paw as they climbed into the Buchatti. "Oh, I'm not too worried about that," he said dismissively, "I bet the whole precinct heard her, and I seem to remember a certain bunny promising to keep me safe."
"You could make it a little easier for me," Judy said, but she couldn't help but smile at his words as she tried to push her own concern away.
Nick, at least, genuinely seemed completely unconcerned about what Zweihorn and River had said, and she supposed that he had a point. There were enough witnesses that if anything did happen to him, it'd be difficult for them to avoid suspicion. Of course, there were so many other mammals who might have it out for Nick that Judy couldn't help but feel worried again. Her gloomy thoughts were broken when Nick spoke again. "Easier?" Nick said, a crooked smile on his face.
He snorted dismissively. "If you go up against a rhino, my money's on you, ten times out of ten."
The Precinct Five police station was in the very heart of Tundra Town, and the drive was all the more miserable for having to pass through Sahara Square again to get there. The gate that divided the two districts looked much the same as the one that divided Sahara Square from the rest of the city, but with a thick layer of frost that had formed around the opening and made the dull steel surface of the wall erupt into an irregular maze of crystals that sparkled in the flash of the Buchatti's headlights. The transition between the warmth of the artificial desert and the chill of the artificial tundra made the change in temperature seem even more sudden, and Judy had to resist a shiver as she drove underneath the cold blast from the fans mounted at the top of the gate pushing air downwards.
In the light of day, even a day as overcast as it was, Tundra Town looked far different than it had the night Judy had walked from a train station in the district to the Thief of the Night. The buildings which had seemed oppressive in the gloom of the night appeared far less imposing in the light; most of them were low and solidly constructed of concrete. Like Sahara Square, they tended towards being more widely spaced than they were in the main part of the city, and the corners of the streets were wider too. The reason for this became evident on the first turn Judy made within Tundra Town itself, when the rear end of the Buchatti did its best to swing around to the front. While she had managed to get the car back under control by steering firmly into the direction it was skidding, Nick had given a yelp of surprise that she could hear even over the roar of the car's engine and she had to admit that her heart had started beating rapidly for that brief moment it seemed like they'd spin out into a fire hydrant.
When Judy pulled to a stop in front of the Precinct Five police station without further incident, she thought that she had at last found a government office even worse than the Bureau of Prohibition. The building looked cheap and shabby; it was only a single story tall, its walls of crumbling cinder blocks topped with a roof of corrugated steel that might have been painted white once but had faded to a dingy gray. The monotony of the cinder block walls was broken only rarely with tall, narrow windows that had all frosted over. There was a concrete block perhaps four feet on a side in front of the building that might have had the ZPD logo set into it; it was difficult to tell because the block had cracked nearly in half and the side facing the street was badly chipped and covered with patchy bits of ice.
There was no question that it was the police station, though, because on the wall above the large front door tarnished brass letters spelled out "PRECINCT FIVE POLICE STATION." Much like the Thief of the Night, the station was barely any warmer inside than the district was outside, although the officer at the front desk, an enormous and shaggy musk ox, didn't seem to need anything other than a duty uniform identical to the ones that the officers of Precinct One wore to be comfortable. The ox was, at least, much friendlier than the moose running the desk at that station; after welcoming Judy to Precinct Five she had launched into a cheerful and rapid monologue about the weather in Tundra Town that lasted nearly five minutes, ignoring every attempt that both Nick and Judy made at interrupting, before finally asking the purpose of their visit. "We're here to see Captain Keeshan," Judy said, responding before the ox had the chance to say anything else.
"Oh, her office is just down the hall that way, past the other desks," the ox said, "But there's a funny story about that. I'm not one to beat my gums, you know, but the Captain's office used to—"
"Thank-you-we-really-appreciate-your-help," Judy said, speaking so quickly that the words all ran together, and she grabbed Nick and pulled him in the direction that the receptionist had indicated.
"That was rude," Nick said as she hurried them along.
"She wasn't going to stop talking," Judy protested.
"Well, I doubt she gets many mammals worth chatting with," Nick said as they entered the main office area.
Judy thought that his remark might apply equally well to the officers of the station as it did to the mammals that they arrested. Somehow they didn't exactly seem like the ZPD's best—there were officers with frayed cuffs or tarnished brass buttons on their uniform jackets, and the looks that they gave her and Nick seemed insolent. Also unlike the Precinct One station, which had a few wolves and at least one cheetah, every single officer was a prey mammal, although most of them didn't seem particularly well-suited to the cold and some of them had wrapped themselves in their ZPD cold weather jackets even as they completed paperwork at their desks. Unlike the precise grid of both the Bureau office and the Precinct One office, the desks in the Precinct Five station were irregularly scattered around the room, although it seemed like there was plenty of unused space.
The door to Captain Keeshan's office was plain wood, the words "CAPT. JANE KEESHAN" painted on it in neat black letters. When Judy knocked on it, there was a brief moment of silence before Judy heard shuffling from inside the office, and then the door was unlocked and Captain Keeshan pulled it open.
Judy had expected the head of Precinct Five to be a mammal adapted to the perpetual chill of Tundra Town, like a reindeer. When the door to Keeshan's office swung open, Judy's initial thought was that she had been exactly right. Captain Keeshan was enormous, nearly seven feet tall, with a long, blunt muzzle full of flat teeth that were exposed when she looked down at Judy to give her a sardonic smile. What little fur was visible, as Keeshan's body was mostly hidden underneath a ZPD standard issue cold weather trench coat of thick blue wool paired with puttees of the same material wrapped around the parts of her legs that were visible, was bluish-gray except for a patch of white around her mouth broken up on either side by small black stripes, and the captain's ears were oval and almost rabbit-like.
As Judy got a better look, though, she realized that she was wrong about Keeshan being a reindeer. Judy couldn't remember whether or not female reindeer had antlers, but Keeshan didn't, and her body was entirely the wrong shape; she was almost triangular, her body flaring dramatically at the hips, and what little Judy could see of her legs looked far more powerfully built than any reindeer she had ever seen. It wasn't until Judy saw Keeshan's long and thick tail, also wrapped in a puttee, that the pieces came together; Keeshan was a kangaroo. A kangaroo that didn't look particularly pleased to see her, at that. "Well," Keeshan drawled as she sized up her visitors and not moving from the doorway, "When I left the farm I thought that'd be the end of rabbits squeezing me out."
She gestured at Judy, "Tell me, are you in the city because your kind finally overpopulated the countryside?"
Judy repressed a wince. Although it had been covered somewhat casually in her schooldays in Bunnyburrows, she did know that the area that became her hometown hadn't always been quite so homogeneous. Given how large bunny families tended to be, and how rapidly they grew ever larger, bunnies had a significant advantage over other mammals when it came to farm work because there was never any shortage of willing paws who didn't need to be paid in anything other than food. Her teacher had claimed that other mammals simply weren't willing to work as hard as bunnies to tend to the land, but she supposed that those other mammals probably didn't view it the same way. Judy had never met a kangaroo herself, but Keeshan was apparently all too familiar with bunnies, given the obvious contempt in her eyes.
"No," Judy said, "I'm here to—"
"Bogo rang ahead," Keeshan said, cutting her off, "I know why you're here. Come in, take a seat."
As Judy walked into the office, Nick went to follow her, but before he had a chance to cross the threshold the kangaroo abruptly added, "Not you," and shut the door in his face.
Keeshan apparently mistook the surprise on Judy's face for something else, because the smile that she favored the bunny with seemed knowing. "Foxes," she chuckled, shaking her head as she locked the door, "For how clever they're supposed to be, you sure have to show them their place a lot."
"You shouldn't have done that," Judy said, and the anger that was bubbling up in the pit of her stomach made the words come out tightly, "He's—"
"What, helping you?" Keeshan asked as she took a seat behind her desk, "Don't you see he's feeding you a line?"
"You don't know anything about him," Judy said, and she realized that the reason Precinct Five had no predator officers was probably sitting in front of her.
The kangaroo shrugged. "None of my business anyway. Tell him whatever you want, but I'm not going to have my office reeking like a fox."
Judy took a deep breath, looking around Keeshan's office as she tried to calm herself down. Compared to Bogo's office, it came off rather poorly. The walls were made out of unadorned rough cinder blocks, and the floor was cheap linoleum that was peeling at the corners of the room. The windows were tall, narrow, and thick, but Judy could still feel the occasional draft creeping in from around the glass even though yellowing old newspapers had been stuffed in the gaps. A cast iron radiator in the corner, the paint chipping away, did little to warm the room as it wheezed and burbled. Judy supposed that also explained why Keeshan was wearing full winter gear indoors the way some of her officers did, although her uniform was immaculately clean, the brass buttons gleaming under the electric lights.
"I heard from Chief Bogo that you've made progress on the murder of Thomas Carajou," Judy said at last, trying her best to be diplomatic.
"That's one way of putting it," Keeshan said.
"Frankly, you're wasting your time, and right now you're wasting mine," Keeshan said, pushing a manila folder across her desk at Judy, "We've got the murder weapon, we've got the murderer, we—"
"You have the murderer?" Judy interrupted.
Rather than appearing upset at the interruption, Keeshan simply gave her a thin smile. "Zoya Olegovna Medvedeva. That file has her record, if you don't know who she is."
It was a name that Judy had known even before joining the Bureau, as the polar bear had made headlines about fifteen years ago when she murdered her husband on their wedding night. The papers had dubbed her the White Widow, and the breathless reports from her trial had been a source of scandalized discussion in Bunnyburrows as the farmers shook their heads and clucked their tongues at the depravity Zoya had claimed her husband was guilty of and her own flatly emotionless statement that he had deserved to die.
Zoya Medvedeva had faded from the public consciousness afterwards, but from the Bureau's files Judy knew that after her release from prison in 1921 the polar bear's name had shown up from time to time in reports about the Black Paw. She was suspected of acting as an enforcer for the gang, but Medvedeva was apparently quite good at keeping her head down, as there had never been anything to link her to another crime.
Keeshan apparently saw the recognition that dawned on Judy, and she nodded in a self-satisfied manner. "The White Widow herself. We've got everything but a confession, but..."
The kangaroo shrugged. "Won't make too much of a difference, with all the evidence we have."
Judy flipped the folder open and started quickly scanning the contents, which certainly explained Keeshan's confidence. There was a picture of the lightning rod recovered from the garbage can, which by the ruler that had been positioned next to it must have been at least three feet long. The lightning rod, and the cloth it was resting on in the image, were both spotted with dark stains that could only be blood, although the black and white image made it far less grisly than it would have been seeing it in real life. According to the file, a number of hairs had been discovered on the cloth that the lightning rod had been wrapped in, which microscopic examination had positively identified as coming from a polar bear due to the tell-tale hollow structure.
Zoya Medvedeva had been arrested the morning after Carajou's murder at a club called the Blue Glacier that Judy guessed was a speakeasy, when the owner had been unable to wake her up to kick her out at closing time. By the time the police had arrived, the polar bear had been, in the words of the report, "drunken and belligerent" and after taking a swing at the responding officer she had been arrested. While Medvedeva was being processed at the Precinct Five station, it had been noted that she had blood splattered on her blouse and underneath the claws of her right paw, which hadn't meant anything at the time. However, a sample had been taken, and it must have only been a few hours ago that the blood had been positively matched to that of Carajou.
The story that the report told was one of efficient, clever police work outwitting a murderer who had gotten sloppy. It was also a story that Judy didn't think that she believed, as she couldn't remember having seen a polar bear in the Thief of the Night. Besides, as Judy flipped through the details of Medvedeva's arrest, there was something else that struck her. "There wasn't much blood on Medvedeva's clothes, was there?" Judy asked.
She had seen the puddle underneath Carajou's chair, and it didn't seem possible to her that he could have been stabbed without whoever did it getting themselves covered in blood. The murderer couldn't even have avoided getting blood on themselves by standing behind Carajou and pulling the weapon, unless the murderer also had a stab wound that aligned with the hole that went all the way through Carajou's torso. The only possibility that made sense was that the murderer had been facing Carajou, but Medvedeva had to be at least a foot and a half taller than the wolverine. That was a significant advantage in terms of her reach, but it still didn't seem like enough to avoid getting bloody, especially considering that whoever had killed Carajou must have gotten close enough to him to immediately break his neck before he could cry out.
All in all, it just didn't seem to fit, but Keeshan obviously disagreed. "So she was careful," the kangaroo said, a scowl on her face, "I don't go into the Bureau and tell you busybodies how to do your jobs, and I certainly don't appreciate you coming here to criticize how I do mine."
The kangaroo pointed one thick finger at Judy's face. "They don't exactly send me the cream of the crop when I go begging for officers, hat in hand, and you're crazier than Carajou if you think I'm letting this one slip out of my fingers."
Keeshan obviously had a chip on her shoulder about her assignment, and she seemed to have found a target for her frustration in Judy. Judy wondered, though, if Keeshan would accept the worst prey officer on the force before she would accept the best predator, and thought that the answer was almost certainly yes. Considering that Mr. Big's empire had been at the center of the ground that Precinct Five covered, she supposed that it might have been difficult to keep even good officers honest in the face of what the Zootopia Organization had been capable of offering, but that only made it more appalling that such a petty, small-minded bigot was in charge. "If you've arrested Carajou's murderer—"
"Which I have," Keeshan interrupted.
"Then all the Bureau is interested in is what he was doing in the Thief of the Night," Judy finished.
It wasn't exactly true, considering her original assignment had only been to determine whether or not the club sold alcohol, but she didn't think she was stretching the truth that far. Bellwether's attempts at surveillance on the various gangs in the city sometimes seemed to verge on being obsessive, and Judy thought that the ewe would certainly be interested in learning why Carajou had been in a club with three thousand dollars in cash in his pocket. It was convenient that it was also something Keeshan's current working theory couldn't explain, and the kangaroo leaned back in her chair, her scowl lessening by a degree.
"You can ask her yourself, then," Keeshan said, and stood up.
She opened the door to her office and barked, "Heude!"
The officer in question, a male boar with dark fur that made the white stripe that ran across his muzzle stand out, quickly jogged over to the captain's office. "Yes ma'am?" he asked, touching one hoof to his forehead right below the shock of grayish fur he had slicked back with so much pomade that it glistened greasily.
"Take them to see Zoya Medvedeva," she commanded.
"Yes ma'am," Heude replied, "Come along, then."
He gestured at Judy, and she saw that Nick had apparently been casually leaning up against the wall by Keeshan's door. Judy wondered how much, if any, of their conversation he had been able to hear through the door, as she wasn't quite sure how good a fox's sense of hearing was. Pushing the thought aside, Judy closed the folder Keeshan had given her and took it with her as she followed Heude down through a maze of corridors to a metal door labeled "INTERROGATION ROOM A." "Just close the door when you're done," he said.
Without another word, and without looking back, the boar turned and left them. Judy waited for the boar to be out of earshot, but she didn't open the door. "I'm sorry Keeshan treated you like that," she said.
Nick simply shrugged. "She's just mad I didn't go to her," he said, "Can you blame me, though?"
Considering what Judy had seen of the kangaroo, it made perfect sense to her that Nick hadn't approached her about cutting a deal. She thought he'd probably be in a cell somewhere at best, and she shook her head. "No, but she shouldn't be a captain."
"Say what you will about Keeshan, but Mr. Big never could convince her to look the other way," Nick said, "He never asked me to negotiate—for obvious reasons—but she was a real thorn in his side."
"That's not enough," Judy said, and she meant it.
Nick smiled at that. "Well, maybe when you're police chief you can change that. But if you do become a cop, it might be working for her."
That was a frightening thought, and she didn't know how to respond to it. Nick spared her having to say anything by opening the door. "Come on Carrots, we have a murder to solve," he said, and she followed him inside.
"I have heard of good cop, and of bad cop," Zoya remarked as Judy entered the interrogation room, "But never have I heard of bunny cop and fox cop."
The polar bear regarded the pair with remarkable good humor, considering that at the moment she was sitting shackled to an enormous steel table and was being charged with murder. Despite her nickname, Zoya wasn't exactly white—her fur was somewhat yellowish, and so thick that the sleeves of her gray shirt and the hems of her matching pants compressed it down more than an inch where they ended without touching skin. At five and a half feet tall, Zoya Medvedeva was short for a polar bear, even a female polar bear, but sitting down she still towered over Judy and while Nick was more or less on her eye level the powerfully built bear seemed at least three times as wide as the fox. "We're not cops," Judy said, jumping up onto one of the chairs opposite Zoya.
The interrogation room was fairly spacious, but even grimmer than Keeshan's office. While it had the same cinder block walls and linoleum flooring, there were no windows, and the lighting was harsh under a number of fixtures set into the ceiling behind steel mesh. The furniture was heavy steel bolted to the floor and painted an industrial white, but the dents and scratches in the surface of the table exposed shiny metal and a few rusty patches. The room was cold, too, even more so than Keeshan's office, not that it seemed to bother the polar bear. "Oh?" said Zoya, leaning towards Judy.
The polar bear's neck was surprisingly long, and even with her massive paws locked in place to the table she was able to lean nearly all the way across the table. "Then who are you, little bunny?"
Judy forced herself not to flinch as the bear stared her in the eyes from less than a foot away. Zoya spoke with the faintest hint of an accent, her voice deep and somewhat raspy with a faint undertone of curiosity. "I'm Agent Judy Hopps, from the Bureau of Prohibition," Judy said, showing her badge.
"And you, fox?" Zoya asked, swiveling her head to stare at Nick in turn.
He flashed her a brief grin. "Nick Wilde," he said.
Zoya's eyes widened briefly at that. "I had heard you were dead," she said.
Nick turned to Judy. "I've been getting that a lot, don't you think?"
Before Judy could respond, Zoya turned her attention back to Judy and asked, "So what is it that you are wanting, Agent Hopps?"
"I'm investigating the murder of Thomas Carajou," she said, "You didn't kill him, did you?"
Zoya settled back in her chair and regarded Judy for a long moment. "I did not," she said at last.
"Then what did happen, the night of the twenty-ninth?"
Zoya shifted in her seat, and then nodded at the folder Judy was holding. "I explained, many times, already."
"I want to hear for myself," Judy said.
Zoya regarded her coolly, and then nodded slowly. "For the Bureau of Prohibition, then," she said.
Author's Notes:
The title of this chapter, "I'm Sitting Pretty in a Pretty, Little City," comes from a 1922 Irving Kaufman song, although I'm using the title entirely ironically here, as none of the characters in this chapter are in a particularly good position except perhaps for Keeshan.
Nick did comment on Zweihorn and River as being good and bought back in chapter 12, where he clearly knew River's last name even though Judy didn't until chapter 19. Numbers games were a pretty typical gang activity in the 1920s, and are an illegal form of gambling not really all that different in how they run compared to normal lotteries. Bettors pay in to select numbers, and the people running the game randomly select them, paying out to the winner while they keep a portion of the money collected for themselves. Of course, unlike an officially sanctioned lottery, no one involved is paying taxes.
Wetting your beak is an expression meaning to take a piece of the action—that is, to get a cut of the proceeds of an illegal activity. This would imply that Zweihorn and River are getting paid off to ignore a numbers game that they're clearly aware of, considering how River reacted in the last chapter.
As I mentioned in my author's notes for chapter 13, in this version of Zootopia Tundra Town is surrounded by Sahara Square, which to me makes logical sense as cooling off one part of the city would generate a lot of waste heat that could be used to warm up another section of it.
Beating your gums is a bit of 1920s slang to mean idle chatter, which clearly shows that the musk ox running the reception desk at the Precinct Five station is somewhat lacking in self-awareness. Musk ox are well-adapted to the cold, though, explaining her comfort in the apparently mostly unheated station.
Unlike every other species of deer, where only the males grow antlers, female reindeer do grow antlers. Judy mistaking Keeshan for a reindeer is somewhat understandable, as the head of a deer and the head of a kangaroo are actually pretty similar looking, although they obviously have entirely different body types.
Captain Keeshan is a red kangaroo, and her description is accurate for a female red kangaroo; male red kangaroos are actually ginger-colored, while female red kangaroos are mostly gray. Her name is in reference to Bob Keeshan, the actor who played the character Captain Kangaroo, although her personality is certainly not even close to his. I picked a kangaroo because I wanted an herbivorous mammal that it seemed natural for it to have a dislike for both rabbits and foxes, and given the history of Australia it seemed like a good fit. Rabbits and foxes are both invasive species in Australia; rabbits eat the same food that kangaroos do, and foxes will prey on young kangaroos and smaller kangaroos if they get the chance. This chapter also implies some degree of bunny Manifest Destiny in outcompeting kangaroos for the best farming land, and the way that Judy recalls learning about it is unfortunately accurate to how such things were (and still are, in some cases) taught. I also wanted a mammal that would be uncomfortable at low temperatures, and a kangaroo certainly fit the bill there. Keeshan's clothing reflects what would be typical for the time period, and puttees are a type of clothing that have fallen out of use since about the 1930s. Puttees consist of long strips of cloth that are wound around the lower leg to provide protection and warmth to the calves and ankles. You can frequently see pictures of soldiers during WWI wearing them, and they were in use at the start of WWII, but they fell out of favor due to being difficult to put on or take off quickly as well as concerns over hygiene.
As TrekkerTim was the first to correctly guess Captain Keeshan's species down to my choice of her being a red kangaroo, and even touched on part of the reason I chose a kangaroo in the first place, I'm giving him a nod here and the promised worthless internet points, which in honor of his username will take the form of fifty quatloos. Honorable mention goes to Dragones and DrummerMax64 for being next in.
Although Keeshan is, as Judy notes, a petty and small-minded bigot, her frustrations aren't entirely unfounded. The Precinct Five station clearly isn't very well-funded, and her accusation of the Bureau of Prohibition being composed of busybodies is very much in line with how public perception of the Bureau went. Considering that Prohibition really only made organized crime worse, a police officer's distaste for them is quite understandable.
Medvedeva is an actual Russian family name, derived from the Russian word medved', meaning bear. In this case, Medvedeva is the female form of the name (Medvedev being the male form), since Slavic surnames are gendered. It's typical for Russians to have a first name, a patronymic name derived from their father's first name, and a surname. In Zoya's case, Olegovna indicates that her father's first name was Oleg, so his name could be something like Oleg Ivanovich Medvedev, which would in turn indicate that his father's name was Ivan. Further complicating things, in Russian there are also many possible diminutives for names, some of which are only appropriate in certain company and don't seem at all related to the actual name if you don't speak Russian. It's why as a native English speaker it can sometimes be difficult to keep up with the names of characters in certain works of Russian literature like The Brothers Karamazov.
Polar bears do indeed have hollow guard hairs, which are actually transparent but appear white, and even with the technology available in the 1920s it would be possible to positively identify a hair as coming from a polar bear if it was subjected to examination under a microscope. DNA profiling wasn't invented until 1984, and while DNA itself was discovered in 1869 it wasn't until 1953 that the structure of the molecule was accurately described. While it would therefore be impossible in 1927 to match a blood sample to a person with the same accuracy we have today, they were aware of the major blood groups and could test for them. There were some attempts at using this in paternity disputes in the 1920s when scientists realized that blood types were inherited, but as there are four possible blood groups (A, B, AB, and O) and people with type A or B blood can still carry the gene for type O, it wasn't useful very often.
Polar bears exhibit significantly more sexual dimorphism than most other mammals, which is why there's the qualifier that Zoya's short even for a female polar bear. On average, female polar bears weigh about half as much as male polar bears, and they tend to be about two feet (approximately sixty centimeters) shorter in length. Still, even being less than six feet tall means that she's still much taller than either Nick or Judy and could easily weigh four times as much as Nick does.
The fur of polar bears does tend to yellow with age, and Zoya is likely somewhere in her mid-thirties based on being married sometime around 1912.
Officer Heude is named after his species, Heude's pig, a species of wild boar native to Laos and Vietnam. They can have rather long fur atop their head, and slicking it back with pomade would be in style for the 1920s.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!