Judy was still blinking spots out of her eyes as she made her way down the stairs from the attic, Nick a step behind her. From the faint sandpapery sound of the pads of Nick's paw against the smooth railing, she thought that his more sensitive eyes might have gotten the worst of it. Considering that Peggy had quite graciously helped them without asking too many questions about the crime Nick had been accused of, it had seemed a small enough payment to allow the raccoon to photograph them. Peggy might have been interested in the potential for the New Yak Evening Graphic to get a scoop or she might have simply wanted pictures of a bunny and a fox she could paste different faces over for some future story, but whatever her motivation was it had turned into a series of shots of Judy and Nick both together and apart. In the process, Judy had learned something else about photography she hadn't truly appreciated before: flash powder was blindingly bright.
Although Peggy had worked quickly and efficiently, each time she had set off her tray of powder as she took a picture Judy found herself momentarily blinded. Even after saying their goodbyes, it wasn't until Judy was a few steps away from the end of the staircase that went from the attic above the third floor to the ground floor that her vision was finally back to normal. Judy tried to ignore the receptionist as they walked out of the building; she could feel the beaver's eyes burning at the back of her neck, and she imagined that the suspicious mammal had to be dying to know all the sordid details of the supposed scandal Nick was helping to free her from. Once they were outside the building Judy turned to Nick and asked the question that had been eating away at her ever since Peggy had explained what she had found in the photographs. "Do you know any foxes with white tail tips?" she said.
Nick was obviously still trying to get his vision to adjust; he was blinking with something of a grimace set on his face, and he narrowly avoided stepping on the tail of a dormouse walking to a little electric car parked on the curbside. Still, when he answered his voice had its usual quality. "Could you name every bunny in your hometown?" he asked, and then before Judy could answer, continued, "Wait, wait, I'm sure you probably could."
Although his tone was teasing, Judy understood his point. If a crime had occurred in Bunnyburrows and all she had to work with was that it had been done by a bunny with, say, brown fur, the list of suspects would be impractically long, even if it was limited to the ones she knew by name. It had been something of a long shot to hope that Nick would have been able to identify the fox his own face had been pasted over with nothing to go on but the color of the tip of their tail, but Judy still found herself disappointed. "It does help though, doesn't it?" she said, trying to focus on the positive.
Nick nodded slowly as they kept walking towards where Judy had parked their car. "It has to be someone about the same height and build as I am, but with a white tail tip."
After a moment's pause, he added, "And much worse taste in clothes."
Judy laughed, but she remembered that Nick had said he wouldn't be caught dead in the clothes the fox in the picture was wearing. "Is his suit really that bad?" she asked, "It looks almost the same as the one you're wearing now."
Judy was sure that most of the look of horror that spread across Nick's face was him playing up his disappointment for her benefit, but his answer was immediate. "Bite your tongue!" he said, "Can't you tell the difference?"
He waved one arm up and down to take in his own appearance as he spoke. "My suit, as you'll notice, fits perfectly. His suit is at least a size too small. Look at the picture again. Wearing a suit that tight is a serious faux pas."
"I'll take your word for it," Judy said, but she did make a mental note of it, building out her mental image of the fox who had really showed up at Zweihorn's door.
"So do you think the officer who took the pictures was in on faking them?" Nick asked, smoothly changing topics.
He seemed to be able to see normally again, at least, and was looking at her with a thoughtful expression. "I don't know," Judy said; the same question had occurred to her, and she wasn't sure of the answer, "It was dark. Not everyone can see as well at night as you can."
The officer who had taken the picture might have only been able to make out that the mammal they had taken pictures of was a fox, but they would have also had to have missed getting a good look at whatever the fox had been carrying. Peggy had suggested that it had likely been a bottle, not a revolver as the picture showed, and Judy assumed that an honest cop would have said something after seeing the picture. Then again, maybe their vision at night was poor enough that the officer hadn't been confident in their memory, choosing instead to trust the photograph. Nick nodded sagely. "A terrible burden, I'm sure," he said, and then his tone became more serious, "But I'm not sure how we can follow up on that."
They both fell silent as they kept walking towards the car, the normal hustle and bustle of the city going on around them. The Zootopia office of the New Yak Evening Graphic was neither in one of the city's good neighborhoods nor one of its bad ones. The flow of traffic was solidly middle-class, mammals in modest cars and modest clothes going about their business. Whereas before Nick's Buchatti had always stuck out as far too nice a car no matter where they went, the one that Finnick had lent them stood out almost as much but for the opposite reason. No one had parked near it, probably out of fear that anyone willing to drive a car in such rough shape wouldn't be particularly careful pulling away from the curb, but that was just as well; Judy did find it somewhat difficult to maneuver with the odd tiller it had rather than a proper steering wheel. Just before she climbed up into the car, Judy paused and turned to Nick. "Do you want to drive? You're not limping anymore, and I seem to remember someone saying something about bunny drivers..."
Nick chuckled as he climbed into the car on the passenger's side. "I'm afraid not, Carrots. As much as I'd love to show you what a great driver I am, this jokemobile was made for someone your size."
He did admittedly have a point; it was a tight squeeze for him to get his legs and feet into the car, and he couldn't seem to move them at all once he was seated. Judy repressed a sigh as she started the car. She was incredibly grateful to Finnick for lending them a car at all, but Nick was right about calling it a jokemobile. "Chin up," Nick said, his voice perfectly audible above the feeble clatter of the engine, "Anything you drive after this is going to feel like my Buchatti."
Judy cranked at the little car's tiller as she tried to maneuver it into the flow of traffic without hitting anything. The car wasn't nearly as quick off the line as the Buchatti had been, and she heard the honk of a horn from behind as she darted into traffic. "Are you saying you won't let me drive it again?" she asked.
"We'll see," Nick said, raising an apologetic paw to the driver of the brand new Model A that Judy had just cut off, "Maybe not if you keep driving like this."
Judy forced a laugh. It was remarkable to her that Nick could keep his sense of humor even with three murder charges looming over his head, but she felt as though it was helping her not panic. It almost felt normal, at times, to ease back into bantering with him, that if they could act as though he wasn't in a dire situation that he wouldn't be. "Thanks," she said, and reached one paw over to pat his.
Nick didn't ask her what she was thanking him for, and maybe he didn't need to. Nick gave her a half smile. "To Dr. Tolmie, then?" he asked, and Judy nodded.
Although it was somewhat past noon, Nick hadn't had any interest in lunch when Judy offered to make a quick stop before driving to the coroner's office. Perhaps, like her, he was still full from the breakfast he had prepared, or maybe he just didn't want to eat before going to see the wombat. While Dr. Tolmie himself seemed completely unaffected by any of the horrors he ran into while doing his job, Judy knew that it wasn't the same for Nick. Considering the fox's sensitive sense of smell, the coroner's office had to be even more unpleasant for him than it was for her, but he walked through the door without complaint anyway, just a step behind her.
The reception area looked almost the same as it had on their previous visits, although there was one noticeable exception: the mammal behind the reception desk wasn't the woodchuck who had been there before. Instead, there was a pig sitting behind the desk, reading a thick book with the daunting title Comparative Morphological Features of Pulmonary Anatomy. There were two empty glass bottles standing on the desk off to his side, along with a few crumpled Moon Pie wrappers, and he had one hoof on a half-full bottle of something dark brown and fizzy. As Judy approached the desk he set his book aside and looked up, and she saw that he had smears of chocolate at the corners of his mouth and crumbs down the front of his faded blue sweater. She recognized the pig as Dr. Tolmie's assistant, but she couldn't remember the pig's name until Nick leaned casually against the desk and greeted him as though he were an old friend. "Jimmy!" Nick said, his face split by a winning smile, "You remember us, don't you? Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde."
Nick gestured to Judy and then to himself as he said their names, as if the pig could possibly have any difficulty telling who the names belonged to. The pig nodded and took an enormous bite out of a Moon Pie that hadn't been visible behind his book and a great swig of his drink before answering. "The two of you came here about Scursly and Bauson," he said, showing none of Nick's enthusiasm.
"That's right," Judy said, jumping into the conversation, "Is Dr. Tolmie in? We'd like to talk to him."
Jimmy shook his head, sending crumbs scattering from his jowls and onto the desk. "Not on Sundays," he said, and he glanced at his watch before continuing, "He's probably at church now."
"But I can help, if you need something," Jimmy said, "Sure beats just sitting here."
Judy hadn't paid much attention to the pig when she had seen him before, probably because she had been trying to focus on Dr. Tolmie's words and not the awful stench of the corpses of Bauson and Scursly. Looking at him more closely, he looked like a pretty typical pig; he had a slightly chubby build, his rosy pink skin perfectly visible underneath his short coat of bristly blond hair. Although his clothes didn't look particularly well cared for, with a stain of some kind visible on his sweater, his eyes were sharp and intelligent, and unlike his boss his words were crisp and directly to the point, almost cold, when he spoke. "We'd really appreciate that," Judy said; if he wasn't going to ask for her credentials, she wasn't going to risk him choosing not to talk if he learned that she wasn't a Prohibition Agent anymore.
"You know," Jimmy said, "Yesterday Dr. Tolmie said he had something he wanted to show you. Did you get his note?"
Judy exchanged a brief glance with Nick, and she guessed he was probably thinking the same thing she was. Judy hadn't returned to the Bureau of Prohibition since her arrest, and she had obviously missed out on any mail sent there. "I haven't been in the office lately," she said carefully, which was the truth, but the pig didn't press the issue.
He simply shrugged. "I guess everyone gets a day off," he said, apparently unaware that she had been fired, and then he stood up, "I'll be right back."
"What do you think Dr. Tolmie sent me a note about?" Judy asked once Jimmy was out of earshot.
Nick shrugged. "Could be anything," he said, but she could tell his interest was piqued.
They didn't have time for any further speculation as Jimmy returned, carrying a small but long cardboard box. "The police found these in a sausage factory Lionheart owned," he said, and when he lifted the lid to show the contents Nick turned away.
Judy couldn't blame him; there were two silver-plated horns in the box, bits of bone visible at their bases stained a rusty brown from dried blood. There was no question in her mind that they had previously been attached to Scursly's head; the silver parts were exactly as Gazelle had described them, covered with beautifully engraved loops and swirls. The metal gleamed brilliantly under the overhead lights; even the rivets that must have been used to attach them to Scursly's nubs of horns were made of silver, and Judy asked the obvious question. "These are Scursly's, aren't they?" she said.
Jimmy nodded, closing the box and setting them aside. "A perfect fit," he said, "Dr. Tolmie wanted you to know your theory was right. Scursly did gore Carajou."
Judy was struck by how blandly the pig was recounting the details; while to her it seemed that Dr. Tolmie simply didn't notice the worst of what he was surrounded by due to his enthusiasm for whatever he was talking about, Jimmy seemed as though he didn't care. She thought that she liked the wombat a lot more than she liked the pig, and her impression of Jimmy wasn't helped any by his response to the question that Nick asked. "A sausage factory on 34th Street?" he said.
"Obviously," he said, and Judy thought she heard a touch of annoyance in the pig's voice.
"Was there something else you wanted?" Jimmy said, turning his attention back to Judy.
"Ah, yes," Judy said, "Have you done a full autopsy on the two Zweihorns and River?"
"Dr. Tolmie has, yes," Jimmy said, "There's not too much to add to the original report."
"Please, indulge us," Nick said; if he had noticed the pig's dislike for him—and Judy was sure he had—he gave no indication of it.
A frown touched Jimmy's lips before his expression smoothed out, and when he spoke his words were all but devoid of emotion. "The cause of death was obvious for all of them. All three mammals were shot through the right eye at extremely close range," he said, "There were powder burns on their faces. River had enough laudanum in his body that I doubt anything could have woken him up at the time he died. The Zwei—"
"And that's not unusual?" Judy interrupted; if River had been poisoned, it might be a helpful clue in proving Nick's innocence, or at the very least that there was a cover up going on.
Jimmy seemed unperturbed by the disruption. "He had several bottles of laudanum in his medicine cabinet. His fellow officers said he frequently complained of insomnia, and he was nowhere near a fatal dose."
"Oh," Judy said, trying not to let her disappointment show on her face.
Jimmy continued as though she hadn't interrupted. "The Zweihorns had both consumed significant quantities of methanol. Again, unlikely to be fatal."
"And that's not unusual?" Nick asked, "Seems a bit odd for a cop and her husband to be drinking poison."
"Drinking methanol is common enough," Jimmy replied, and Judy heard a note of peevishness in his voice, "We see it all the time when mammals drink too much and end up on our tables."
Although Jimmy was right that it was common for mammals to drink things they shouldn't when they couldn't get alcohol—Judy had read, in the Bureau files, about a speakeasy that had been serving its patrons drinks made out of paint thinner—Nick was right that it was odd for a cop to drink it, especially a crooked one. One of the unfortunate truths of Prohibition, it seemed, was that the rich and connected got by just fine while poorer mammals killed or blinded themselves drinking anything that got them drunk. "Was whatever they drank still in their house?" Judy asked, trying to control her excitement.
It seemed an obvious link to her that, if the fox who had entered the Zweihorn's home had been carrying a bottle as Peggy had suggested, it might have contained the methanol that the two rhinos had consumed. Moreover, it might explain why the police officer keeping watch hadn't heard any gunshots before they left their post—the fox might have been pouring the Zweihorns drinks, chatting with them and getting them to drink enough methanol to put them out so that they wouldn't put up a fight and could be easily shot. If the fox had known about River's use of laudanum, killing him in his bed would have been a breeze. The pieces all seemed to fit, and Jimmy's answer didn't suggest she was wrong. "Yes, it was a tainted bottle of whiskey. Probably made by diluting down a real bottle with methanol to make a few fakes, but that's not my area of expertise."
Judy looked over at Nick, and thought that he had come to the same conclusion by the thoughtful look upon his face. "This might also be outside your area of expertise, but there are a couple more questions I was hoping you could answer," Judy said.
"I can try," Jimmy replied.
"Do you know any way to fake a test for gunshot residue?" she asked.
"It's easy enough for a test to come up negative," he said, "GSR is about the same consistency as flour—it washes right off. Even if a mammal doesn't wash their hooves, it'll fall off eventually in a few hours."
"What about a positive result when there isn't any residue?" Judy asked, and Jimmy shrugged.
"They're possible. I've heard varnish can do it."
None of what Jimmy had said was any help in proving that Nick hadn't fired her revolver to anyone but Judy, but it was something. She knew Nick had taken a shower before they went to the police station, and while she couldn't prove that to anyone else, it did prove to her that it had been no accident that the test came up positive for him. Judy had thought that it might have been possible that Nick had somehow gotten gunshot residue on his paws from touching Carajou's gun, but knowing that any residue would have washed off in the shower made her realize that it wasn't possible. Deliberate tampering seemed to be the only possibility, and she remembered the mammal who had administered the test. If the awkward koala was to blame, Judy wouldn't rest until he was in jail himself.
As Judy thought through the implications, Nick asked another question. "Back to that bottle of whiskey," he said, "Were there any fingerprints on it?"
"No," Jimmy replied, and once again there was a note of irritation in his voice.
"Was there anything else?" the pig asked, directing the question at Judy.
Judy bit her lip as she thought about it, but she couldn't think of anything else that the pig might be able to answer. Despite the chilly contempt he had treated Nick with, Jimmy had been genuinely helpful, and Judy tried to make her thanks sound as sincere as possible. "No, that's it. Thank you very much, though. You've been a huge help."
Jimmy nodded, but he didn't pick his book back up or move to return the grisly souvenirs Lionheart had taken from Scursly to wherever they had been stored. Instead, as Judy started to leave, Nick at her side, Jimmy unexpectedly spoke up. "Could I have a word with you, Agent Hopps?" he asked, his tone bland, "Alone."
Before Judy could start to say that anything Jimmy could say to her he could say to Nick, Nick touched her gently on the shoulder. "It's alright," he said, "I'll be outside."
Jimmy waited in silence until Nick was outside before he spoke, and when he did there was a gentleness to his voice that hadn't been there before. "Is that fox making you do anything you don't want to?" he asked, "If he is, we've got a telephone. I can ring up the police right now."
Judy wasn't sure what she had been expecting Jimmy to say, but hearing what sounded like genuine concern about her safety certainly wasn't it. "Of course not!" Judy said, a bit more loudly than she wanted to.
"Nick," she said, emphasizing his name, "Is helping me with an investigation."
"That's not what I meant and we both know it," Jimmy replied, his voice still gentle, "I can smell him on you. You reek of fox."
"We've been— That is, we've— We've spent a lot of time together on the investigation, that's all," Judy managed to get out, but Jimmy shook his head.
"You have spent time with him," he said, "But not in the way you'd ever need to for an investigation."
Judy could feel her ears flushing, but before she could manage another protestation, Jimmy raised one hoof. "Listen," he said, "If it's your choice and he's not forcing you, it's your business. But there's something you ought to know."
"What's that?" Judy asked, her throat feeling suddenly incredibly dry.
"Did you know Dr. Tolmie used to be married?" Jimmy asked, and it took Judy a moment to process the question before she shook her head.
It wasn't even close to how she had expected the pig to continue, but she had to admit she was more than a little curious about where he was going. "This was about thirty years ago," Jimmy said, "He married a squirrel. He doesn't talk about her much, but I know he loved her more than anything."
"What happened?" Judy asked.
She thought that Jimmy might be trying to warn her that relationships between two different species were doomed to fail, that they would in the end be too different to last together. The way he continued, though, was a far worse than that. "One night, they ran into a few squirrels who didn't appreciate seeing her with a wombat. Dr. Tolmie likes to think those squirrels didn't mean to do anything but scare him and his wife, but..."
Jimmy sighed. "I think sometimes he sees good in mammals that isn't there. Dr. Tolmie and his wife got thrown off a bridge, and she hit her head."
Jimmy didn't continue, but he didn't have to. Judy understood exactly what had happened, and could almost see the scene playing out before her. It wasn't too hard to imagine herself and Nick in the same situation, a horde of bunnies overpowering Nick and throwing him off a bridge while she could do nothing to help before it was her turn to go over. "If Dr. Tolmie was still married to her," Jimmy continued, "He might never have gotten his job as chief medical examiner. He loves his job, you know, and in the years I've known him he's never given it any less than his absolute best. But I know he'd trade it away to have his wife again."
Judy could feel a lump in her throat and Jimmy waited a moment before continuing. "I've seen what can happen when two different species get in a relationship," he said, "I've seen things come across the slabs here you'd never be able to forget. I've seen what happens when neighbors or families don't approve. I've seen smaller, weaker mammals get forced by a bigger, stronger one."
Jimmy's face crumpled a little on his last sentence and it wasn't hard to imagine why he had been just short of hostile with Nick. "I love him," Judy said.
She hadn't imagined that the first mammal she would say that to would be a somewhat unpleasant pig she didn't really know, but it felt good to say the words, to stand against the horror stories he was clearly imagining. Jimmy nodded, and for the first time Judy saw him smile. It didn't exactly light up his face, but it was so obviously genuine that Judy thought that the pig felt much more deeply than he let on. "Then take care of him," Jimmy said, "And yourself."
He pulled something from beneath the reception desk and gave it to Judy. It was a small bottle made of brown glass labeled "Peppermint Oil."
"It masks scents," Jimmy said by way of explanation, "We use it when we're dealing with bodies that have gotten a little ripe."
Judy curled her fingers around the bottle. "Thank you," she said, and Jimmy nodded.
"Stay safe out there," he said, and Judy smiled.
"We'll try."
Author's Notes:
The title of this chapter, "Nobody Knows (And Nobody Seems to Care)" comes from a 1919 Irving Berlin song, and I chose it because it seemed to apply to both the relationship of Dr. Tolmie and his wife and that of Nick and Judy. The lyrics are about feeling crushing loneliness and a deep need for companionship that is invisible to the outside world, which also seems to fit.
It's very common to see, in works set in the 19th century, a photographer using a plate of powder that gets ignited for a brief and extremely bright light rather than using a bulb for their camera's flash. Without a flash, pictures taken indoors or outside at night are murky at best, and pure black at worst, and once film technology had advanced to the point that images didn't require minutes of exposure photographers quickly turned to pyrotechnics for brief high-intensity lights, with the first use of flash powder for photography occurring around 1862. Using flash powder for a camera's flash was still common in the 1920s; although some pioneers experimented with high-intensity electric carbon arc lamps, flash bulbs weren't commercially available until 1929, a couple years after this story is set.
It shouldn't be too surprising that the book Jimmy is reading is thick; considering how many different species of mammal there are, it's got to be tough to be a doctor in the world of Zootopia. At least he's not dealing with live mammals, which gives him a bit more of a safety margin than other medical professionals. I'd imagine that most doctors would have to specialize in a few species or be really good at looking information up as needed.
Moon Pies are a real American confection, invented in 1917. They consist of graham cracker cookies sandwiching a marshmallow filling, coated in chocolate. Moon Pies were quite popular in the early part of the 20th century in the US as a working man's lunch, alongside an RC Cola, which seems to be how Jimmy is enjoying his lunch. Personally, I prefer Mallomars but Moon Pies are pretty tasty, and they're basically the same as Choco Pies if you're not in the US.
Jimmy was first mentioned in chapter 31, although as Judy notes in this chapter she didn't pay much attention to him at the time.
In chapter 35, Nick did mention that at least in 1925 Lionheart owned a sausage factory on 34th Street, and this chapter confirms that he does still own it.
Laudanum was still fairly easily available in 1927, and is a potent (and potentially addictive) painkiller. It was historically used as a sleep aid among many other uses, so River using it wouldn't have been out of the ordinary at all during the period in which this story is set. Nowadays, its use is heavily controlled and you certainly can't just go out and buy it.
Methanol, also known as methyl alcohol or wood alcohol (due to being historically produced from wood), is quite toxic. It can cause blindness and kidney failure in people who survive methanol poisoning, but it can also be easily fatal, as it is a potent central nervous system depressant. Unfortunately, methanol is extremely easy and cheap to manufacture in large quantities, and it's possible to get drunk off of it in the same manner as ethanol, which is the alcohol in alcoholic beverages. Worse, it smells and tastes basically the same as ethanol, so it's quite easy to unknowingly ingest. These properties—being easy to manufacture cheaply and being difficult to distinguish from ethanol—mean that it was not uncommon, during Prohibition, for people to drink it, either because they had been tricked into thinking it was ethanol or because all they cared about was that they could get drunk by drinking it.
Adulterating real bottles of alcohol certainly happened during Prohibition; considering the price that bottles of good quality alcohol smuggled into the country could command, it wasn't uncommon for greedy bootleggers to try increasing their profits by diluting it and making up fake labels to put on empty bottles. Of course, some bootleggers didn't even bother starting with real good quality alcohol and just made up fakes.
Gunshot residue does indeed have a consistency like flour, and Jimmy's explanation is correct. It's quite possible for someone to shoot a gun and then wash their hands and come up negative, particularly with the test in use in the 1920s. His example of something that can give a false positive is also correct; since the Griese test detects nitrites, it can falsely suggest that someone has fired a gun if they've handled something else that contains nitrites, which some varnishes do.
The story of Dr. Tolmie and his wife puts into a new context the cross-stitch that he has in his office, as mentioned in chapter 17, that reads "The squirrel that you kill in jest dies in earnest," which is a quote by Henry David Thoreau.
My intent, in this AU, is that marriage between members of different species isn't illegal (at least, within Zootopia itself) but is definitely uncommon. In the real world, we have no exact equivalent of inter-species relationships; I'd say that the closest real equivalent would be either gay or mixed race couples. In the 1920s, gay couples would definitely not be able to marry in the US, and mixed race couples could only get married in certain states. In fact, mixed race marriages were only legal in 12 out of 48 states in 1927. However, one of those 12 states was Illinois, where Chicago is located, and since Chicago was the basis for this version of Zootopia I decided that it'd make sense for inter-species relationships to be legal at least in the area where the city is. The caveat, though, is that I imagine prejudices against inter-species couples to be particularly strong for obviously different species, as demonstrated by what happened to Dr. Tolmie's and his wife. The two of them would have gotten married around 1897, depending on how accurate Jimmy's statement of it happening thirty years ago is. At that point in the real world, mixed-race marriages had been legal in Illinois since 1874. It's kind of a grim note to end a chapter on, I realize, but there are many less than positive aspects to the past and it's not an easy path that Nick and Judy have ahead of them.
Peppermint oil is actually used in the real world by some doctors to mask terrible smells, and considering that pigs can indeed have a very good sense of smell it makes sense for Jimmy to have a bottle on hand.
I've said, for a while now, that this story is reaching its end, and now that it's past the point where the number of remaining chapters could serve as a potential spoiler for people reading this story as it gets published, it's time to let you know just how close the end is. There will be 50 total chapters, which means that there are 4 chapters left. I hope that you enjoy seeing how things wrap up, and if you're so inclined to comment I've love to know what you think of this story.