Tailed Read Free Page A

forget the number as I stumbled behind the bar in search of the phone.
    I stumbled, all right.
    Onto Sprunty.
    He’d been mauled by a bear. How’d I know? Sure, those gashes in his chest could have been made by a knife. But Fulmore’s intestines were wrapped around the bear’s missing arm and paw.
    There was blood everywhere, and I almost slipped in it as I reached next to his head for the phone. I was averting my eyes from the gore, my breath coming fast, grunting with disgust, when I grabbed Sprunty by the nose by accident. His eyes, thankfully, were mostly closed. But his mouth was open. Something white was sticking out of it. A lizard? No, a gecko, probably a common house gecko. Dead, too? I didn’t know, I didn’t care.
    I grasped the phone and wheeled back around to the other side of the bar, falling to my knees on the clean white carpet. I misdialed three times before I got it right.
    That was the day Sprunty’s problems became mine.

chapter 2
    I didn’t like my new job much in the days after Sprunty’s death. Being interviewed by the police was one thing, but being hounded by the press was another. At first they camped in the hallway outside my hotel room. When the hotel kicked them out, they hid in vans outside the hotel. When I tried to make my getaway toward New York, they followed and jumped me at a gas station. Meanwhile, back at my New York homestead, they’d beset Angie looking for details. I even saw Otto on the evening news, microphones shoved toward his smiling steel dental work as he tried to flirt with one of the lady reporters. They kept asking what he meant by “not lookink.”
    Media frenzy? I’d call it media ape shit. They were desperate for details, and the police weren’t letting them have any. I was keeping my lip buttoned, too. Stella Lombardo, my handler at Wilberforce/Peete, had reminded me of their policy against discussing any matter pertaining to policyholders with third parties outside the firm. I got so used to saying “no comment,” that I reflexively said it to a Bob Evans waitress trying to take my order. Let’s be honest: a waitress holding a pen and pad does look kind of like a reporter.
    Thankfully, someone in the police department finally cracked and leaked a dribble of details that splashed across the headlines coast to coast.
    FULMORE HACKED
SPORTS STAR SLASHED
BEAR MAULS BEAR
    Mind you, I was avoiding newspapers. Having had the fun of discovering the body and living with the image of Fulmore’s intestines wrapped around a bear paw, I had no interest in following the case. But what little I absorbed by the time I got to Cleveland five days after the murder suggested that the police were being ridiculed. No leads, no suspects. The case was getting cold.
    Safely ensconced in the basement of Griswold’s Funeral Home, I felt more at ease than I had in days.
    Griswold’s had nothing to do with Sprunty’s end run through the mortal veil of tears. His funeral had played out the day before in Florida, his home state.
    But Griswold’s had everything to do with white squirrels. Lots and lots of them.
    Don’t ask me why, but there are a number of collectors who are fascinated by animal albinism. There’s a historical society in Lima, Ohio, that displays perhaps the world’s most extensive collection of albino taxidermy: porcupines, flying squirrels, hawks, owls, badgers, and any other domestic critter you might care to imagine. Or not.
    Mr. Griswold, the funeral director, was one such fellow, and he flooded the basement of his mortuary with white
Sciurus caroliniensis.
I’ve seen my share of black squirrels among New York’s legions of nut eaters, but never a white one. Though I understand there are towns across the land that stake their claim to fame as “Home of the White Squirrel.”
    But what made this collection unique was that the squirrels were all anthropomorphically