When Nick broke off the kiss, what Judy saw in his eyes was unmistakable as anything other than sadness. "I wish we could have this out there, too," he said, and he gestured vaguely in the direction of his front door and the broader world beyond it.
"We can," Judy said, but the words sounded hollow even to her own ears.
"What do we have?" he asked, but he didn't sound angry.
A small voice in the back of Judy's head whispered, "This is when he's going to pull away," and it was hard to ignore.
"If I hadn't been arrested, where would we be?" Nick continued, and she felt increasingly sure that this time the voice would be right.
An answer to his question, or the unspoken one of why they shouldn't give up on what they had together, didn't immediately come to mind. When Judy had kissed him for the first time, it had been pure impulse, an action with no conscious thought behind it. It had, though, crystallized what she now suspected had been growing without her realizing it for some time. Nick had been the very first mammal to truly support her dream to become a police officer, and had kept helping her even when he had had the opportunity to quit. He had taken on terrible risks that Judy was responsible for, and Judy had seen what she thought no one else had for many years. Despite everything that the world had done to him, despite every door that was closed to him because of what he was, Judy had seen the mammal who wanted to do the right thing no matter the risk. He had made her realize just how selfish she had been as she treated him like a tool for her to use and inspired her to want to be better, to live up to what she had wanted as a kit when she decided that she wanted to be a police officer to make the world a better place.
No matter how Judy tried, though, she couldn't come up with how to put it all in words, and she simply said, "Dating would be a good start."
Nick looked at her for a moment, and then they both burst into laughter. Judy couldn't say exactly what it was that was so funny; maybe it was the absurdity of it all. Nick was accused of murder and what they were sitting around and talking about was what they meant to each other. Judy knew that she loved Nick even as she knew that she barely knew anything about him. But it didn't matter that, unlike the bucks back home, she didn't know every detail about him and his family in exhausting detail; that could all come later. She knew him, in the sense of what he stood for, better than she knew just about anyone else, including her parents and siblings. She suspected that the same was true for Nick of her, too.
"Well," Nick said at last, "I guess we're dating, then. But we need to be careful out there."
He was smiling his perpetual half-smile again, and Judy nodded. It wasn't a compromise that she liked, but she'd make it for his sake. He might not be ready to go out into the world as a couple, as she felt she was, or it might simply be that he was again seeing a danger that she wasn't. But even if she could only have Nick within the small confines of his house, it would be enough until he was ready too. "Then we'll be careful out there," Judy agreed, and Nick squeezed her paw.
Angelo Petruccio's office was much larger than Judy had expected it to be, although considering that the address that Nick had found in the yellow pages wasn't in Little Rodentia that shouldn't have been a surprise. The building it was housed in was in one of the nicer parts of the city, near the city hall, and was twelve stories of professional offices that Petruccio shared with a CPA, an architectural firm, a jeweler, a travel agency, and a few others that Judy couldn't guess at based on the names. The house that Angelo and Fru Fru lived in could have been put in a corner of the atrium and forgotten; a massive ceiling of iron and glass was suspended two stories over a floor of polished white marble. A balcony wrapped around the second floor, the railing continuing unbroken from up around a massive marble staircase that gracefully rose up out of the floor. Although Judy could see the metal supports that kept the building up, they had been so well-integrated into the design that they almost looked purely ornamental; they had been painted a clean white and included elaborate geometric designs with golden accents, and the spots where the massive support beams came together served the secondary purpose of suspension points for electric chandeliers. Rather than trying to hide the chandeliers whoever had designed the atrium had deliberately, Judy was sure, left them to contrast with the white and gold of the rest of the design. They were large, darkly metallic squares broken up by geometric patterns, at the center of which were large half-globes with smaller globes suspended from each corner. Between the natural light that the massive amounts of glass let in and the electric lighting, the atrium wasn't just bright; it felt bright, too.
A number of mammals were bustling around the interior space, most of them dressed in fine suits and dresses, and the soft murmur of dozens of conversations filled the room. It was a very reassuring building for a lawyer to set up shop in, Judy felt, and even the elevator that they took to the offices of Petruccio and Associates on the eighth floor was beautiful. The doors looked as though they had been made of gold and were polished to a high shine, and images of birds worked into something of a ziggurat pattern of stepped triangles interlocked with straight lines had been etched into them. Although the law office wasn't nearly as impressive, it had been decorated in a clean, modern style. Nick's mouth had quirked into a smile as they stepped in, and in answer to Judy's unspoken question he had said, "I'd bet you Fru Fru designed this."
If she had, Judy couldn't fault the shrew's tastes. Clean white wainscoting rose about halfway up each wall and a bold carpet of hexagonal patterns in red and gold complemented the design of the building's atrium even if it didn't quite match. The waiting area was spacious, to the point where it almost seemed like a waste of space in a building that had to cost a fortune to rent in, but perhaps that casual display of the law firm's resources was part of the point. The layout of the chairs wasn't like anything that Judy had ever seen before, but it made sense in a way that many other offices Judy had been in didn't. Although it did have matching upright chairs in a variety of sizes to accommodate mammals as short as Judy to ones taller and wider even than Chief Bogo, the very smallest of mammals hadn't been left out. There was a tiny little waiting area with its own array of chairs to comfortably sit mammals as short as shrews or as tall as rats built into the front of the reception desk, and there was even a small elevator for them to use to ride up to the top of the desk. A small lip had been built atop the desk so that they would have a counter space of their own, and Judy suspected that it also did double-duty by allowing the receptionist to be of just about any size.
At the moment, though, the receptionist on duty was a brightly-smiling squirrel wearing a dress that didn't look too different from one of the ones that Nick had purchased for Judy, although the squirrel had accessorized more than Judy ever did with a set of pearl earrings and a matching necklace. Other than the squirrel, whose greeting was just as chipper as her smile, the waiting room was almost empty except for a pig in a business suit with a briefcase on his lap and a dormouse reading a newspaper too small for Judy to make out the headline. He had broken his concentration on his paper when the squirrel had welcomed Nick and Judy, looking up at them before giving a squeak of alarm and moving to the part of the miniature reception area farthest away from them.
Nick, as it seemed he always did, simply ignored the reaction; Judy couldn't even guess at how often mammals were afraid of him or hated him just because he was a fox, but every reminder was a bitter pill to swallow. She wished that things could always be the way they had been when it was just Nick and her. In those moments they weren't a bunny and a fox or even a prey mammal and a predator. They were just two mammals, and everything else didn't matter.
But those things did matter in the wider world, and Judy pushed her own desire to give the poor frightened dormouse a piece of her mind down as Nick made his own introduction to the receptionist. "I'd like to talk to Angelo if he's in," Nick said, and the squirrel gave a little laugh.
"Mr. Petruccio almost lives here on the weekends," she said, beaming, "He says it's when his clients need him the most."
"I'm sure," Nick said, leaning casually against the reception desk and favoring the receptionist with a smile of his own, "I could use him, at least."
"I'll see if he's available, Mister...?" the squirrel replied, turning it into a question.
"Wilde," Nick replied, "Nick Wilde."
"Just a moment," she said, and after hitting a button built into the surface of her desk she spoke slowly and clearly into the microphone grille, "Mr. Nick Wilde to see Mr. Petruccio. Mr. Nick Wilde to see Mr. Petruccio."
Judy thought she could hear a faint echo of the words coming from somewhere further inside the offices, and after a moment a speaker on the receptionist's desk buzzed twice. "Wonderful, that means that he's available to see you, Mr. Wilde," the squirrel said, "Just go down this hallway all the way to the end, OK?"
Nick nodded agreeably. "Thanks," he said, and although he had taken his hat off the moment that they had entered the building he put it up to his head and tipped it the squirrel with a wink, "I'm much obliged."
The squirrel's giggling was as high-pitched as Judy would have expected it to be from her almost cloyingly sweet voice, and Judy had to bite down an irrational stab of envy. It was, after all, simply Nick being himself, and it certainly didn't mean anything. Still, it was a comfort when, halfway down the hallway, Nick had spoken so low that Judy could barely hear him to say, "I've only got eyes for you, Carrots."
Judy wasn't sure if she had reacted to the squirrel in some way, however subtle, that Nick had picked up on or if he simply knew her well enough that he could guess at what she was feeling, but it was almost as comforting as the feeling of his arms around her. She had seen relationships between her sisters go from that of the best of friends to the bitterest of rivals, and sometimes the trigger was something as mundane as one of them simply saying hello to a buck that the other was interested in. Judy had never quite understood it and had always told herself that if there ever was a buck she was interested in she wouldn't fly into a rage if someone else simply interacted with him.
Nick was many things, and while being a buck wasn't among them she found she had a new sympathy for her sisters. Thinking of Nick as hers and hers alone was so simple that it seemed to happen without her trying to do it, but it wasn't fair to him. Judy limited herself to just nodding slightly, but when they reached the door to Angelo's office she let her paw brush up against Nick's as she reached out to knock. At her first knock, a small voice called out from inside the room. "C'mon in!" Angelo said.
Judy opened the door, noticing as she did so that there was a much smaller door built into the bottom of it that looked as though it would be perfectly sized for the shrew. He certainly wouldn't have been able to open the entire door on his own, and once Judy did it revealed a beautiful corner office. It was spacious, perhaps fifteen feet on a side, with two of the walls dominated by windows that gave an impressive view onto the streets that formed the beating heart of Zootopia's financial district. The wall that the door was in had a number of pictures on it, all of them showing Angelo, Fru Fru, and their children at significantly more than life size; in one of them the image of Fru Fru was taller than Judy was. It was very clear to Judy that Angelo loved his family deeply and openly; everyone in all of the photographs was smiling or laughing but the images didn't look posed. There was one of Angelo reading a storybook with his children on his lap, one of them pointing at the page with an expression of open wonder across her face. There were several pictures that must have been taken at Angelo's wedding to Fru Fru, her in an elaborate wedding gown and him in a suit, dancing what looked like the Snarlston as they both laughed.
The other wall looked like a law library; it was completely covered with a bookshelf. Although the lower shelves were covered with books of a size that Judy would have been comfortably able to read, the higher shelves had, in turn, smaller bookshelves set on them with books about the size of postage stamps. An elevator was set into the side of the bookcase alongside a wrought-iron spiral staircase, both of them shrew-sized.
At the center of the room was a large and elaborately carved desk, but there wasn't a chair behind it; there was just a pair of chairs in front of it. In much the same way that the warden of the Jerboliet Prison had a desk to her scale set atop a work space, Angelo had a miniature replica of the large desk on top of the smaller desk, and there were a number of bookshelves and filing cabinets built to his size around the desk. "Nicky!" Angelo said as they entered, "And, uh, Agent Jumps, was it?"
Nick leaned delicately over the desk and gave Angelo's paw a gentle shake. "Judy Hopps," Judy introduced herself; she certainly couldn't blame Angelo for not quite remembering her name, but she didn't correct him about her title.
"Oh, Hopps, sure, sure," Angelo said, bobbing his head, "Real sorry 'bout that. I ain't got the best memory for names. What brings the two a ya here, anyhow? Sit, sit!"
Nick and Judy took the two chairs in front of Angelo's desk, which put them more or less on eye level with him, and the plump little shrew groaned as he sat back down in his own chair.
"Fru Fru said you were the best defense attorney in the city," Nick said, and Angelo chuckled and waved dismissively.
"Aww, she just says that 'cause she married me," Angelo said, although Judy thought she could see a small smile on his face, "I am pretty good, though. Ain't nobody wins all the time, but if my track record was any better I'd be runnin' races."
He laughed at his own joke, and then sobered up. "Ya needin' a lawyer, Nicky? Fru Fru thinks a ya like family, I know she does."
Judy felt a tension she hadn't realized she had been carrying leave her as Nick spoke. "I appreciate that," he said, "But this is a real bad one. Judy?"
Judy had been carrying both folders, both the one that Darnielle had given her and the thicker one that Bogo had, in a snakeskin leather bag she had found in Nick's closet. It was too big to be a purse for her and she had been forced to adjust the strap to keep it from hitting the ground, but it was perfectly sized for carrying the folders and her purse and she had happily borrowed it. She pulled out the folder Darnielle had given her and put it on Angelo's larger desk, taking care not to knock over any of the minuscule filing cabinets or shelves as she did so. "I'm sorry it's so large," she said, but Angelo just shook his head as he stood up and walked over to the folder.
"I'm used ta it," Angelo said, "Ain't no problem. I represented a coupla elephants once. Pair a yutes they said jacked a car. Every bit a paper was larger'n my damn desk, lemme tell ya."
"This is a bit worse than carjacking," Nick replied, "They're saying I murdered two cops and one of the cop's husband."
Angelo whistled between his teeth. "That's bad, alright."
"It gets worse," Judy jumped in, "They've got pictures and a forensic match on the gun."
Angelo shook his head. "Sounds like ya wanna legal miracle. Lemme ask ya right now: did ya do it?"
"No," Nick replied, and Judy thought she could hear a note of desperation in his voice.
She certainly couldn't blame Angelo's skepticism; it had to have been one of the least promising cases he had ever taken on. He surprised her, though, when he spoke again. "OK, OK, I'll take it, then. All a dis is client-attorney privilege, ya unnerstan'? Walk me through it."
They spent almost an hour going through the file Darnielle had provided, Judy and Nick taking turns to walk through the details while Angelo took copious notes. When at last they had come to an end, Angelo capped his pen and flexed his paw. "I'll do some diggin' a my own. Dis is good stuff, though. Where'd ya get it?"
"There was a lawyer named Darnielle—" Judy began before being interrupted by Angelo.
"Oh, Darnielle? She was born widda silver spoon up her—" he coughed, and then continued, "—mouth, but she ain't half bad for alla dat. Decent lawyer if ya got a simple case or the cops mess up, but she's got too much on her plate for the tough ones."
"This is a tough one, isn't it?" Judy asked, and Angelo nodded.
"Come back inna day or two," Angelo said, "We can talk strategy. For now, I gotta level wid ya, Nicky. Sure sounds like a frame job. Any idea who hates ya enough to frame ya?"
"Besides Lionheart or anyone who works for him?" Nick asked, "Not really."
Nick was silent a moment, and then he added with a chuckle, "Except maybe Bellwether."
"Director Bellwether?" Angelo asked, "Outta the Bureau a Prohibition?"
When Nick nodded, the shrew groaned and brushed at the fur atop his head. "That ain't funny, Nicky. She plays ta win, that one."
"As if Lionheart's any better?" Nick asked, and Angelo shook his head ruefully.
"Ya gotta point there, Nicky. Listen, ya think a any other real possibilities, ya let me know, OK? An' try an' keep ya head down."
"Will do," Nick said, and he stood up to shake Angelo's paw.
"We really appreciate this," Judy added as she made her goodbyes, and Angelo shrugged.
"Don't thank me yet," he said, "But I'll do what I can."
When they left the building that Angelo's office was in there wasn't much in the way of traffic on the street, let alone any taxis for hire, so Judy put her trust in Nick's sense of direction and followed him as he started walking in what she assumed was the shortest path to the nearest major street. There was a news stand on the corner of the nearest intersection, and Judy only glanced at it briefly. The proprietor, a bored-looking goat who didn't even acknowledge them as they walked past, had more than a dozen different newspapers on display, but all of the headlines seemed to run along similar lines. Literally every single one was about Lionheart's arrest, and they ran the gamut from ones as simple as "LIONHEART ARRESTED!" to the somewhat breathless "BELLWETHER STRIKES MAJOR BLOW AGAINST BOOTLEGGERS — ARREST OF LIONHEART A 'VICTORY FOR MORALITY.'" One of the papers, printed on luridly pink paper, was dominated by a massive photograph of Lionheart, his paws cuffed behind his back, being led out of the back of a van by Bogo and a burly moose.
When they were a few steps beyond the news stand, Judy stopped so suddenly that it took Nick a moment to realize that he was getting ahead of her. "Carrots?" he asked, "What's wrong?"
A well of excitement was bubbling up in Judy's chest, and the words more or less fell out of her mouth as he reached out to grab Nick's arm and pull him back. "The newspaper! Look! Look at it!"
Judy pulled Nick along until they were in front of the news stand and she pointed at the top copy of the newspaper with the photograph of Lionheart being led away. "Look!" she said, tapping it.
Nick shot Judy a questioning look, but he indulged her. "It's Lionheart being arrested," he said slowly, clearly not understanding what she wanted him to see, "If you want to read about it, there are much better newspapers than the ol' Porno-Graphic."
The newspaper was actually called the New Yak Evening Graphic, but Judy ignored Nick's joke. "No!" she said, so forcefully that the goat behind the news stand shifted a little in his seat and seemed to start actually paying attention to them, "It's Lionheart arriving at the police station! But it's not!"
The confusion in Nick's eyes lasted a moment longer before Judy could see him make the same realization that she had. His eyes widened, his ears tilting backwards as he grabbed the newspaper and looked more closely at the image. "You're right," he said, "This isn't what happened."
The memory of Lionheart being escorted out the back of a police van was burned into Judy's memory; she didn't think that she'd be able to forget it if she tried. The photograph, though, was completely wrong. The police van in the photograph was smaller than it had actually been, and its sides looked cheap and flimsy compared to the solid metal of the real one. It was parked in front of the Precinct One police station, but it was much too close to the main door and the perspective was just ever so slightly off. Lionheart himself wasn't right either—the lion in the photograph was wearing a suit, not pajamas, and while Lionheart's face was unmistakable the lion's body had a slight pot-belly unlike the powerfully built gang lord. Chief Bogo, by comparison, looked even taller and more heavily muscled than he actually did, but his police uniform wasn't quite right, his badge much too large and the sleeves not nearly long enough. The final piece of it, though, which was what had caught Judy's attention in the first place was the moose standing next to the chief; Judy distinctly remembered Bogo being joined by Captain Keeshan and a donkey in escorting Lionheart, neither of which were visible in the picture, and there hadn't been a moose officer involved at all.
"It's a fake," Nick said, and Judy could hear a reflection of her own excitement in his voice, "I should have thought of this! The—"
"Hey! This ain't a library, pal," the mammal at the news stand said, scowling as he leaned over the counter of his news stand and pulled the copy of the New Yak Evening Graphic out of Nick's paws, "Ya wanna read it, ya gotta buy it."
Judy fumbled in her purse and pulled out a nickel, slapping it down on the counter and pulling the newspaper back. "Keep the change," she told the goat, and grabbed Nick by the paw to tug him back away from the news stand in the direction they had been walking.
Judy held the newspaper tightly clenched in her free paw, but she didn't need to look at it again. "I should have remembered that the Graphic ran fake photos," Nick said, continuing his train of thought, "And I bet—"
"That whoever makes their fakes—" Judy interrupted, unable to contain her enthusiasm.
"—Could tell whether or not a photo was real," Nick finished, "Maybe even tell us who could make such a good fake."
It was exactly what Judy had been thinking, although at Nick's words she wondered if the picture of Nick outside Zweihorn's door was really all that much better of a fake than the one of Lionheart in the newspaper. The one in the newspaper was more obviously fake from all the little details that didn't match up with what Judy had seen from witnessing Lionheart being walked into the station through a window, but it probably would have been convincing enough for someone who hadn't been there. The picture that was supposedly of Nick had been taken at night and wasn't all that great of an image; it seemed to Judy that the darkness could hide a lot of imperfections that would have been obvious in a better-lit shot.
But while the police might not have anyone who could tell whether or not a photograph had been altered, Judy was willing to bet that someone who did it for a living could. All they'd have to do was go to the newspaper office and ask, and at the thought Judy's excitement started to dim. "But how do we get that? This paper is printed in New Yak, right?" she asked, letting go of Nick's paw to unfold the paper and spread it in front of them.
"They have a local office," Nick said, before he even looked at the newspaper again, and then quickly scanned the front page with a finger before pointing out a cramped address box at the very bottom of the page, "See?"
The addresses were squeezed under an article titled "'HE WAS A MONSTER IN THE BEDROOM' — VICTIM OF SCANDALOUS MARRIAGE SCHEME SPEAKS OUT!" and in addition to the address for the main office in New Yak City, there was indeed one listed for Zootopia. "How did you know that?" Judy asked, since Nick had clearly known about it even before spotting the address box.
Nick's response was nearly instant. "They have some really good puzzle contests," he said briskly, although Judy couldn't help but wonder if he had read the newspaper for its articles.
"I'm sure," Judy replied, doing her best to imitate Nick's half-lidded expression, and was rewarded with his laughter.
He wrapped one arm affectionately around her shoulder, despite his own warning, and Judy didn't resist, more than happy to keep walking alongside him. "We can take a taxi there," Judy said, and she was surprised when Nick shook his head no.
"We could, but we shouldn't," Nick said, and Judy's protest was nearly instant.
"But we might be able to prove your innocence!" she said, "And—"
"And I don't know about you," Nick interrupted, although his tone was gentle, "But I haven't even read half of what's in that file you got from Bogo. So why don't we go back to my place, read it all, and then plan our next play?"
Judy swallowed. She had tried to take a look at everything in the folder Bogo had given her, but she had read maybe only a quarter of it thoroughly. She wanted to prove Nick's innocence more than she had ever wanted anything else, but she could see his point. If they kept jumping at lead after lead without thinking, they might overlook something, or waste hours or even days trying to find something out that had already been documented. In her enthusiasm she had completely ignored everything she had ever read about the right way to do investigations, and the realization was painful. Getting Nick out from underneath the murder charges wasn't going to be a matter of just believing in him; he needed her to be thinking things out. "OK," Judy said, the word almost a sigh, and Nick brushed the bottom of his chin against the top of her head, making her realize that she had allowed her ears to droop.
"I do appreciate the enthusiasm, though," he said, and Judy could hear the smile in his voice.
He straightened back up, and they were both silent a moment as they kept walking. "You're right," Judy said, "But that doesn't make it easier to wait."
Nick chuckled. "Then it's a good thing that you have me to be patient for you," he said, "But we should make one stop on our way back. Walking and taking taxis everywhere is kind of a drag."
Judy looked up at Nick. "Did you have Finnick store a second car for you?" she asked; she didn't know what had happened to the Buchatti but assumed that it had been impounded as a piece of evidence.
"No," Nick admitted with a careless shrug of his shoulders, "But I'm sure I can talk him into letting me borrow one. After all, what are friends for?"
Author's Notes:
The title of this chapter, "You Gave Me Your Heart (So I Gave You Mine)," comes from a 1922 song written by Francis Wheeler and Harry Smith. I figured it's worked well as a reference to the beginning of this chapter, as Judy considers what Nick means to her. In this story, it's not just Nick that's inspired by Judy; she has in turn been inspired by him to try and live up to her dream rather than just following it for her own selfish ends.
The building that Petruccio and Associates is located in is based on the Rookery Building, a real-life building in Chicago very close to what I describe. It's in Chicago's Loop and is indeed fairly close to the Chicago City Hall. The building is one of my favorite examples of Chicago's surviving 19th century architecture. It was built in 1888, at which time Frank Lloyd Wright was an architectural assistant in the firm that designed it. In 1905, he had the opportunity to redo the atrium, which is very much as I describe it in this chapter. If you ever go to Chicago, it's worth checking out as it really is quite spectacular. If you're a fan of BioShock, it actually looks like it could be something out of Rapture if it was, you know, underwater instead of under the sky.
As of this chapter, the date is Saturday, September 03, 1927 as the raid took place very early in the morning of Friday September 02 and Judy was held overnight. Much larger chunks of time have passed in these past few chapters than in earlier ones, but my intent has always been to focus on what's important and interesting, and long periods of waiting really aren't. Besides, it'd probably get a bit torturous to have Judy stuck in a jail cell for ten chapters. Back to the point I was originally going to make, though, that's the reason that Angelo's receptionist references it being the weekend. The weekend is a good time for a lawyer to be available to their clients, at least, and also explains why Angelo was at home with Fru Fru when Nick and Judy visited; the guy does have a wife and children, after all, and if he's working on weekends it only makes sense to take days off during the normal workweek when he can. As previously mentioned, the Snarlston is a pun on the Charleston, a popular dance in the 1920s.
As when he last showed up, Angelo has a very thick Brooklyn accent. In particular, his pronunciation of the word "youth" as "yute" as well as his profession as a lawyer is a reference to My Cousin Vinny, which is a great comedy and supposedly a fairly accurate legal drama.
The expression that someone was born with a silver spoon in their mouth to indicate that they were born into a wealthy family was in use by 1719, although before Angelo cuts himself off it's likely he wasn't about to refer to Darnielle's mouth. Her being born into a wealthy family does explain, though, why she has the large diamond earrings that Judy noticed; Darnielle doesn't need to rely on her income as a lawyer to survive, so she can afford to work pro bono.
The New Yak Evening Graphic is a reference to the real-life New York Evening Graphic, a short-lived tabloid newspaper published from 1924 to 1932. The New York Evening Graphic had two distinctive quirks that set it apart from other newspapers: it featured stories in it were written from the first-person perspective (including from murderers, bootleggers, adulterers, and other scandalous criminals) and it frequently had what were dubbed "composographs," photographs that had been crudely manipulated. Generally, composographs were shot with actors on a set, and then the faces of the people supposedly involved in whatever story the picture went along with were composited over the bodies.
As you might guess, the New York Evening Graphic did not consist of what you would call quality journalism; it was quickly nicknamed the Porno-Graphic and it struggled to attract advertisers willing to associate their name with its reputation. It was, however, wildly popular, and its gossip column was a guilty pleasure of many upper-class people who wouldn't be caught dead reading it in public. The paper itself was also printed on pink paper, which helped it stand out. They did also have a popular contest section, so Nick's defense of knowing about them having a local office is plausible, although the local office itself is more of a plot device so that this story doesn't have to go across the country.
The existence of composographs does indicate that it was possible to manipulate photos in 1927, but I'll avoid discussing that any more in these notes; I'll return to this topic in a later chapter's notes. I do, however, want to give a tip of the hat to Alons-y inc for not only guessing at the possibility of photo manipulation but also referencing composographs as a precedent for the time period. Well done, Alons-y inc! I'm very happy to see that I inspired you to do some research; learning new things is one of my greatest passions and I love being able to share it even in a small way like this.
In 1927, copies of the New York Evening Graphic cost one cent, so Judy did overpay by giving the mammal at the news stand a nickel, which is worth five cents.
Describing something boring or unpleasant as being a drag dates back to the late 19th century, so Nick's usage of it in this chapter is period appropriate.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!