The Buchatti started, but only with great protest, the starter clicking several times as the engine groaned and coughed before spinning to life. Before Judy could put it into gear to drive off, Nick reached over her shoulder and grabbed her paw. "Let it warm up," he said, speaking up to be heard over the engine as he tapped on a gauge to show that the needle was pegged all the way to the left.
Nick pulled his paw away from hers and they sat in silence for a moment. Judy felt a new appreciation for Nick's thick fur; sitting in one spot seemed to make the cold even worse, and the part of her body that was squeezed up against him in the narrow cabin was easily the warmest. It was difficult not to be envious of his tail, too, as he had pulled it across his lap and buried his paws beneath it. Her own little cotton ball of a tail was useless for that purpose, but his looked incredibly soft and warm.
Judy looked away and back at the looming Precinct Five station. "Didn't Mr. Big run most of his rackets in Tundra Town?" she asked at last, seizing on a topic that she had found puzzling when she had first seen the station, "Why's the station here so...?"
"Lousy?" Nick suggested, and she nodded.
"He had plenty of pull on the city council," Nick said, "Besides, Keeshan's been in charge here since about '19 or so. Do you really think she's good at winning mammals over?"
Judy had to admit that it didn't seem likely that the kangaroo had any talent at building relationships with the mammals in charge of her funding, and she said as much. "No."
"Well, there you go," Nick said, "If you're cold we can go back in and see if she'll let you crawl into her pouch, or we can get going."
He tapped on the gauge as he spoke, and Judy saw that the needle had risen to the middle of its range. The mental image of how Keeshan would react if Judy asked what Nick had suggested made her shake her head, and she eagerly put the car in gear and pulled away.
Outside the Thief of the Night, two bored-looking officers were regarding a very familiar figure with thinly-veiled contempt. The pair, a bison and a horse, both positively towered over Mr. Quill, but that didn't seem to bother the fat little hedgehog, who looked almost on the verge of apoplexy as he raved at them. "Do you have any idea who I am?" he demanded, his voice shrill with anger, "I'll have your badges for this, I swear I will!"
The bison and the horse exchanged a glance, and then the horse knelt until he was on Quill's eye level, which meant that the horse was all but sitting on the ground. "Mr. Quill," he said patiently, "Do you know who I am?"
Quill froze, apparently surprised that he wasn't getting his way. "I report to Captain Keeshan," the horse said, "And I'm not letting you in."
"Keeshan?" Quill sputtered, "Why—"
"Why's the Captain in charge of Precinct Five saying how a murder in Precinct Five gets investigated? That's the real mystery, ain't it Woodsley?"
The horse directed the last part at the bison, who snorted and shook his massive shaggy head. "Don't razz him, Ajax," he said, and his voice was slow and deep with a mild note of warning in it.
Unlike his partner, the bison didn't kneel to look Quill in the eye, instead simply looking down at him. "Club's off limits 'til we get say-so from Keeshan herself," he said firmly, "You can stand there wasting your breath or you can beat it. Don't make much of a difference to me."
Woodsley gave a ponderous shrug, apparently to emphasize how little he cared, but didn't move from his position in front of the stairwell. Quill seemed ready to launch into a further indignant tirade before Nick cheerfully called out to him as he approached with Judy. "Quill! What's eating you, ol' fella?"
Quill turned away from the bison and the horse and looked at Nick, apparently stunned. "Wilde?" he gaped, "How on earth are you—I thought—"
Quill snapped his mouth shut suddenly and pulled fussily at his waistcoat, then fiddled with his pince-nez for a moment before speaking again with the same haughty tone he had used in La Porte Verte. "I told you I never wanted to see you at one of my clubs again. You'll have to leave at once."
Nick turned to Judy; she could see the obvious delight the fox took in antagonizing the hedgehog, and she was glad to see it directed at a mammal who really deserved it. "I don't think he gets to make that call, does he Agent Hopps?"
Judy pulled out her prohibition agent badge and flashed it at Woodsley and Ajax before looking at Quill, a little smile of her own across her face. "That's right. Agent Judy Hopps, Bureau of Pr—"
"I remember who you are," Quill snapped, "And I've had enough of your ridiculous theories."
He turned to the two police officers, and took on a wheedling tone. "You can't possibly take a bunny prohi and a fox seriously, can you?" he said.
Ajax stood up to his full height and exchanged a glance with Woodsley. Although Judy didn't know either of the officers, she had the feeling that the hedgehog was about to be sorely disappointed if he expected them to take his side. "Well, the Bureau of Prohibition and the ZPD have always worked well together, isn't that right?" Ajax asked.
Woodsley looked briefly puzzled, but then seemed to realize what his partner was doing. "Sure is," he grunted.
"So what brings you to Tundra Town, Agent Hopps?" Ajax asked.
"We're here to—"
"This is outrageous!" Quill interrupted, "You cannot—"
"Interrupt again and you're taking a ride to the Precinct Five station," Woodsley said, fixing Quill with a glare that made the hedgehog take a step back.
"We're here to investigate the murder of Thomas Carajou," Judy said.
"Well, the more the merrier, that's what my ma always said," Ajax said, "Go on in."
As Quill drew in a breath, almost certainly to begin pleading and threatening the two police officers again, Ajax shot Judy a wink and gestured towards the flight of stairs that led down to the Thief of the Night. Perhaps following Bogo's conversation with Keeshan the kangaroo had made the officers aware that Judy might be by later, but Judy somehow doubted it. She got the feeling that Ajax was cooperating more because goading Quill into a frenzy was more entertaining than simply standing guard outside in the cold, but she couldn't argue with the results. She hurried down the stairs, Nick a step behind her, and as her paw touched the doorknob she could hear Quill start to speak again.
Once the door was closed behind them, Quill's ravings immediately became almost inaudible even to her ears, the thick metal door blocking out most of the sounds from street level. The Thief of the Night seemed larger, somehow, when it was completely empty of mammals. Unlike when Judy had been there before and the only illumination had come from a small number of shaded lamps distributed throughout the cavernous space, additional lights on the ceiling had been turned on and made the club seem incredibly shabby. The ceiling was stained a dingy yellow-brown from cigarette smoke, and the wooden planks of the floor were dirty, covered with countless stains and scuffs that hadn't been visible before. The only part of the floor that actually looked clean was the large dance floor, the wood of which had been polished to a high gloss by countless paws and hooves; otherwise it looked as though no one had ever bothered to do any cleaning.
None of the tables or chairs seemed to have been moved since Judy had left, and even if where Carajou sat hadn't been burned into Judy's memory, it was immediately obvious, since the bloodstain on the floor had simply been allowed to dry. The stain appeared far more innocuous than it had when it was fresh, as though it had been molasses or oil that had spilled on the floor and not a mammal's blood. The awful coppery scent of fresh blood was gone too, although the smell of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume lingered; those scents would probably never come out.
Nick gave a low whistle as he looked at the chair Carajou had been sitting in, and Judy remembered how he had steadfastly refused to so much as look in the direction of Carajou's body when they had visited the medical examiner. If he had been squeamish about looking at a corpse, he had no apparent reservations about looking at the aftermath of the murder, as grisly as it was. "It looks like someone cut the heads off about a dozen chickens," Nick said, and Judy thought that was a fair way of putting it.
There was a stain about the size of a baseball, its bottom border an irregular mess of drips, on the back of the chair, and the blood running down the front legs of the chair stood out in sharp relief against the pale wood. The top of the chair's back had a small chunk missing; it looked like a piece had splintered off and the exposed wood was a bright white where it wasn't bloodstained. Judy moved to examine the wall behind the chair, the bricks of which were splattered with more brownish stains, when Nick followed up with a question before she could look more closely. "Do you smell that?"
"The blood?" Judy asked, running one finger across the bricks without turning to face him, "Not really, no."
She was grateful for that much, at least, and supposed that he must have a much better sense of smell than she did. "No, not the blood," she could hear Nick saying, "Alcohol."
"Someone dropped a drink when they saw the body," Judy said with a shrug, "It must be that."
Red probably hadn't been the only mammal to drop a drink in the history of the club, if the other older stains on the floor were any sign, but Judy was barely paying any attention to what Nick was saying, focused more on the wall. There was a slight divot in one of the bricks, where it looked as though something sharp had chipped away some of the material. The lightning rod that the officers had found, perhaps, but she frowned as she considered it. Carajou's chair was fairly close to the wall behind it, but it just didn't seem possible that someone could have pulled out the lightning rod and stabbed him without anyone noticing, even with the privacy screen around the table. "You said they were serving something clear, right?" Nick asked.
"That's right," Judy said distractedly.
It also didn't seem possible that someone standing in front of Carajou could have stabbed through and leave such a small mark in the wall. She was puzzling it over when Nick spoke again, his tone thoughtful. "It smells like single malt scotch," Nick said, and then he was quiet for a moment.
Judy was alone with her own thoughts until her concentration was interrupted by a peculiar snuffling noise, and when she turned around she wasn't prepared for the sight that met her. Nick had dropped to all fours and had his nose less than an inch off the floor, moving his head back and forth while his tail whipped back and forth in an unsynchronized manner. His nostrils flared as he sniffed at the floor, moving forward making the noise she had heard, and Judy could only stare. "What are you doing?" she asked.
Nick didn't respond at first, and he continued what he was doing, feeling around with the very tips of his claws until he paused on one of the boards that made up the floor underneath the table that Carajou had sat at. He gave it an experimental poke and the board wobbled. When he looked up at her, his eyes and his triumphant smile were the only parts of his face visible in the shadow cast by the table. "Breaking your case wide open, Carrots," he said smugly, and then pulled up hard on the floor board that had moved.
A section of the floor perhaps eight inches long and a foot wide separated from the rest of the boards, and Nick tossed it aside carelessly to reveal a shadowy hole. Nick looked down into the hole he had created and Judy could see his eyes widening even as she rushed to see what he was looking at. At first she couldn't see anything; it was just a gloomy pit until she heard the strike of a match and smelled sulfur as a point of light flared into being. Nick reached down into the hole holding the lit match and Judy saw what he had.
She couldn't tell just how large the space that had been revealed was, as the feeble light of the match didn't illuminate much of it, but she could see dirt about two and a half or three feet under the Thief of the Night's floor. The part of the crawlspace that had caught her attention, though, was what filled most of it. The light of the match bounced off dozens of bottles stacked in rough wooden shelves, but they didn't all look like they were full of the cheap moonshine the Thief of the Night had sold when she had been there. While some of the bottles were full of clear liquid with no indicator of what the liquid was, most of the bottles had printed labels, and while she couldn't identify them she would have bet anything that they had been smuggled into the country. There were exquisitely shaped bottles full of amber and brown liquids that must have been outrageously expensive even where they had been distilled, to say nothing of the premium they probably commanded in Zootopia. There were a few bottles full of something green that glowed in the light, and on the dirt down below near the edge of the circle of illumination that the match provided Judy could see the glittering shards of a broken bottle. About a third of the bottle was still intact, a small amount of some brown liquid—presumably the single malt scotch that Nick had smelled—still in it.
The light suddenly vanished as the match burned out, but Judy didn't wait for Nick to light another one before carefully squeezing herself through the hole that he had revealed, falling gently to the frozen dirt of the ground below. "That looks like a bit of a tight fit for me. Sorry, Carrots, but you're on your own," Nick remarked, and he passed the matchbook down to her.
Judy lit another match and took a more careful look around, her breath visible in front of her. Even holding the lit match in the crawlspace, it was impossible to tell how large it was, the shadows consuming her little light. However, from the support beams she could see holding up the floor above her, she thought it might be at least the size of the entire basement that formed the club. Judy had noticed before that the ceiling of the Thief of the Night seemed a little low, and thought that now she understood why; the floor had been raised almost three feet.
She turned her focus to the part of the crawlspace immediately under the table. There were a few blotchy stains on the dirt that formed the ground, which must have come from blood dripping through the gaps in the floorboards above, and when she looked up her match showed that there were blood splatters on the underside of the table that Carajou had been sitting at. "He was stabbed from down here!" Judy said, realizing what it meant, "That's why no one saw it!"
It perfectly explained what she had observed on the brick wall, too. It would have been extremely awkward for someone standing on the floor above her to stab through Carajou and hit the wall, but from underneath it was simply an upwards thrust. But that meant—"So there was someone standing up here to break his neck?" Nick asked.
"There must have been," Judy said slowly, trying to imagine how it must have happened.
Whoever had stabbed Carajou must have been standing about where she was, and must have been either quite a bit taller than she was or standing on top of something. They had pried the piece of the floor loose, waiting for their opportunity; maybe they had some pre-arranged signal with their partner standing next to Carajou, something that they could have said to let the mammal in the crawlspace know it was time to stab him. While Judy was thinking, the match burned down to her fingertips and she shook it out.
Before lighting another match, she looked up through the hole. It was dim, but she thought that even with the lights in the club as low as they had been when it was in business a mammal wouldn't need particularly good eyesight to aim for Carajou. Judy pulled another match out of the matchbook and prepared to light it before something caught her eye; there was a faint light coming from the direction of one of the walls. "I can see a light down here," Judy called up through the hole, "I'm going to take a look."
"Wait a minute," Nick said, and then the light from the hole in the floorboards all but vanished as he poked his head through it.
"I see it too," he said, "Watch out for the broken glass."
"I will," Judy promised.
She carefully positioned herself until the light was directly in front of her, and then lit the next match. She made her way forward carefully, skirting the shelves full of bottles of liquor, and paused only to look at the broken bottle she had seen. It had been fairly large, and there was a noticeable gap on a nearby shelf that she guessed it had fallen off of. Perhaps the mammal who had stabbed Carajou had accidentally knocked it off the shelf in their hurry to leave, as it was on the path towards the light. There were little circular bloodstains on the floor and some of the shelves, too; the mammal must have gotten themselves absolutely covered with blood.
When Judy reached the light, she saw that it was coming from a metal hatch, about three feet across and two feet tall. A thin mesh grating ran across the top third of the hatch, which had "ZOOTOPIA CLIMATE WORKS" embossed into it. Peering through the grate, Judy couldn't see much, just what looked like a concrete tunnel poorly lit by an electric light at least a dozen yards away. She seized the handle of the hatch and tried to open it, but it didn't give at all, and a closer examination through the grate showed the reason why: there was a layer of ice, at least a foot thick, that had formed on the other side of the hatch, which opened outwards. It'd be impossible to open the hatch without chipping away the ice.
Judy wondered if the mammal who had stabbed Carajou had been able to use the hatch; she wasn't sure how long it would have taken for the ice to build up in what could only be a tunnel that was part of the climate control system that kept Tundra Town frozen. She examined the wall around the hatch more closely, and there were fresh-looking scrapes in the metal that made her think that someone, at least, had used it fairly recently. Her examination also uncovered a switch, which she pushed without hesitation.
Instantly, a number of bare bulbs strung up on the undersides of the floorboard came to life, and Judy saw that she had been right about how large the crawlspace was. It was exactly as large as the space above, since it had been formed by creating a false floor. She could even see the bottom few steps of the staircase that led down into the basement, which had been re-purposed as more shelving when they had been hidden away. There had to be dozens of shelves and hundreds of bottles of alcohol, and as she looked out into the space, something else caught her eye.
In addition to the staircase that led into the basement, there were another small set of steps, near one of the walls, that looked like they were actually used as stairs since there wasn't anything stacked on them. Judy walked over to them and looked up, and could see the outline of what could only be a trapdoor, which easily swung open at her touch. She climbed the stairs and found herself behind the bar, which she supposed made sense; in addition to storing expensive alcohol, the Thief of the Night stored the cheap stuff that its patrons got to drink and the crawlspace easily hid it. "I found a way out," Judy called over to Nick, who was still sitting beside the hole in the floor he had revealed.
"That's a clever trick," Nick said, looking over to where Judy had re-appeared, "What's down there? Besides the booze, I mean."
"You can see for yourself," Judy said, gesturing down at the trapdoor.
Nick made his way over and once he was in the crawlspace Judy followed him down. It wasn't nearly tall enough for him to stand upright, and he hunched over, trying his best to avoid the cobwebs underneath the floorboards, looking at the hatch she had found. "So this is why Quill's so eager to get back into the club," Nick said, "Not very spiffy, but I'd bet he uses the maintenance tunnels for the climate wall to move his product around."
He actually sounded somewhat impressed, and Judy had to admit that credit was due to the hedgehog. She couldn't guess how much the alcohol in the crawlspace was worth, and there was no telling how much had been stored in the club since it had first opened however many years ago. "That's not a bet I'd take," Judy agreed, "It's just too bad the hatch is frozen shut."
Nick gave her a sidelong glance. "You really don't want to go into those maintenance tunnels," he said, "Even if your little bunny burrowing instincts kick in, you're not going to do anything but get lost without a map. We're at least a mile away from the wall, you know."
Judy had to repress a shiver at the thought of getting lost in the endless tunnels and corridors that formed the hidden portion of the climate control mechanisms. She wasn't afraid of the dark, but getting lost and slowly dying of hunger or thirst would be a terrible way to die. "So whoever stabbed Carajou must have known the tunnels?" Judy asked.
"Maybe," Nick said with a shrug, "Or maybe they just hid down here. If that hatch was frozen shut when Carajou was killed, they could have come down the same way we just did."
Nick had a point there, but it was difficult to tell. There was a trail of little droplets of blood that led towards the hatch, but it ended about two-thirds of the way there. "I think we can be pretty sure that Zoya didn't do it, though," Judy said.
Nick had a hard enough time fitting in the crawlspace, and the polar bear might be too big to even fit through either the trapdoor or the hatch. Nick looked around and nodded. "Pretty sure," he said agreeably, and then clapped his paws together, "So can we arrest Quill for all of this?"
Judy paused a moment before responding, thinking it through. There was no doubt that the hedgehog was in flagrant violation of Prohibition, and he might have been in on the murder. It seemed somewhat convenient that there was a hole in the floorboards perfectly positioned to stab up at Carajou, and Quill might have been the one to arrange it. Perhaps being arrested for one of his crimes would be enough to make him spill on another. "You know what?" Judy said, a slow smile spreading across her face, "We can."
Nick and Judy made their way up out of the Thief of the Night, where Quill was still talking with Ajax and Woodsley. Or, perhaps more accurately, he was talking at them, as neither the horse nor the bison seemed able or inclined to get a word in edgewise. When Quill caught sight of Judy coming up the stairs, he immediately turned his attention to her, but she spoke before he could. "Mr. Quill," Judy said, pulling her cuffs out of her purse, "You're under arrest."
A flicker of panic crossed the hedgehog's face before his bluster reasserted itself. "You're delusional, rabbit," he said, "I already told you the Thief of the Night doesn't serve alcohol, and it's certainly not my fault if some lowlife pred got—"
"We found the crawlspace," Judy interrupted.
"And the liquor," Nick added brightly, fixing Quill with a toothy grin, "Top shelf stuff, by the way. You've got good taste."
Judy moved forward to cuff the hedgehog, but before she could take a second step towards him Quill collapsed to his knees, his entire body suddenly limp as he only just managed to catch himself with his paws before his muzzle hit the pavement. The knees of his expensive suit were instantly dirty and his pince-nez swung on their chain and the lenses shattered against the ground, but he didn't seem to notice. His eyes were fixed firmly on his paws, which twitched convulsively. The two police officers from Precinct Five moved forward so that, together with Nick and Judy, Quill was completely surrounded, but the hedgehog didn't seem inclined to try running. Quill looked up at Judy, and his eyes were wide with horror, tears streaming freely down his face. "He'll kill me," he said, his voice suddenly hoarse and pleading, "Please, you can't. He'll kill me."
Author's Notes:
The title of this chapter, "Nobody's Using It Now," comes from a 1929 Maurice Chevalier song. I chose it both because it works as a reference to the crawlspace and because the lyrics refer to the singer not being taken seriously, which continues to be the case for Judy. Quill is probably deeply regretting that after this chapter, though.
A couple of weeks ago, OnceNeverTwiceAlways recommended the book "The Age of Edison" to me. I've had a chance to read it now, and I'll second that recommendation; it's an excellent history of electric lighting and early efforts at electrification, and it's a very engaging read. I don't think it's any secret that I love doing research, and I've gotten a few comments asking about the sort of preparation I've done. I thought I'd take this chance to recommend a few of my favorite books I came across in the course of researching this story.
I highly recommend "The Devil in the White City," which intertwines the story of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and that of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who was active during that period. That's obviously set quite a bit earlier than this story, but the Chicago World's Fair did a lot to define the spirit of Chicago, and I thought it was important to get a sense of that.
Elliot Ness's autobiography "The Untouchables" should pretty much be required reading for anyone with an interest in learning about Prohibition. Elliot Ness was given the task, in 1929, of assembling a team of incorruptible agents (nicknamed the Untouchables for their integrity) specifically to take down Al Capone. Although credit for Capone's downfall belongs more accurately to the work done by the IRS and US Attorney George Johnson, it's definitely an interesting read.
"Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone" is one of the definitive biographies of Al Capone, the most obvious point of reference for how I modeled Mr. Big in this story, and it does a great job of showing how Capone ended up as the king of Chicago's organized crime.
There are many others, but those three are some of my favorites. Now, onto the notes for this chapter itself.
There's quite a bit of debate as to whether or not it's a good idea to let a car warm up to its operating temperature in the winter before starting to drive it, but that debate really applies to modern cars with engines made using modern metallurgy techniques. For a car like a Bugatti Type 35, it would have been a good idea to let it warm up if the outside temperature is low to allow the oil to circulate and prevent a sudden change in temperature from cracking the engine block. As previously established, when Nick and Judy are in the Buchatti, Nick sits on the left side as a passenger, Judy sits on the right side as the driver, and the gear selector is to her right, hence why he has to reach over her.
The bison officer Woodsley is named after his species, the wood bison, a subspecies of the American bison with a native range in the northern parts of North America. The horse officer, Ajax, is named after an undefeated French racehorse that won the Grand Prix de Paris in 1904. To razz someone in 1920s slang was to make fun of them; Ajax is clearly the more sarcastic of the pair.
There's some continuity in this chapter back to chapter 7, when Quill told Nick he never wanted to see him in one of his clubs again, chapter 6, when Judy told Nick that whatever kind of alcohol they served in the Thief of the Night was clear, and to chapter 4, when the lecherous hare Red dropped his glass of alcohol. Although foxes don't have nearly as good a sense of smell as wolves, alcohol does have a pretty distinct scent. It's not directly noted in the story by Judy's narration, but Nick's superior night vision also comes into play, as his reaction to looking into the crawlspace clearly shows that he can see what's down there before lighting a match for Judy so that she can see.
Judy only being able to identify a bottle of alcohol as being green isn't a deliberate reference to the classic Star Trek episode "By Any Other Name" when Scotty similarly can't identify an alcohol beyond its color (although he was extremely drunk at the time) or the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode "Relics" where Data's inexperience with intoxicating beverages limits his ability to identify Aldebaran whiskey to simply noting that it is green. It's indicative instead that the bottle contains absinthe, which in the 1920s was illegal even in many countries that didn't completely ban the manufacture of distilled alcohol as the US did. The mixture of herbs that goes into absinthe was blamed for the drink's supposed properties that made it even worse than other alcohols; absinthe was thought to cause hallucinations, epilepsy, and even tuberculosis, and after a supposed absinthe fiend murdered his family and then himself in 1905 the drink was banned in Switzerland, with similar bans going into effect in France, the Netherlands, and even the US before full Prohibition began. Absinthe should really be stored in an opaque or brown bottle to prevent it from reacting with light and changing color, but as the color is part of the appeal it was and is sometimes bottled in clear glass.
Although Chicago doesn't have the vast series of catacombs that a much older city like Paris does, the city does still have plenty of utility tunnels. In 1992, portions of Chicago actually flooded when bridge work allowed water into a disused set of tunnels that had been used to transport coal and other goods about a century earlier. I imagine that the Zootopia climate wall is only the most visible portion of the mechanisms that keep Tundra Town cold and Sahara Square hot, and there's got to be a massive web of utility tunnels which would likely also do nicely for a bootlegger.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!