Brownie and the Dame by C. L. Bevill

jacket somewhere,” Kiki said with a shudder. “He did say something about his wife and he having an arrangement .” She shuddered again.
    “No one else?” Janie asked.
    “I was a mite busy,” Kiki said. “Those cookies don’t pack themselves. And there are tons of people in this world who want fortune cookies.” She rubbed her top lip with the tip of her finger. “Think it has something to do with the economy.”
    “Should we give the mayor the third, shake him down, brace him proper?” Brownie asked Janie. “I hear Big Joe has a way with bright lights and rubber hoses. We could ask him for an assist.”
    Janie shook her head. “Politicians are bad news. They complain to people. People complain to other people, like aunts. Aunts come down on our heads, and then we can’t investi ma gate, I mean, investigate.”
    “Besides the mayor is drunk all the time,” Kiki said. “I don’t think he’d steal a tree unless he thought it had alcohol in it.”
    The three wandered over to the hole. A few piles of dirt and a ball shaped depression were all that were left of the scene. Janie and Brownie knelt down beside it. Brownie saw that something had been dragged away and left a clear trail. It was almost like someone had drawn on the grass with a very wide magic marker.
    “That tree,” Brownie said, “is it heavy?”
    Kiki shrugged. “The root ball is about the size of a bowling ball, I guess. Maybe ten pounds, most of it is the dirt in the roots. I don’t see why they had to drag it off, unless it was some kids, oh hey, I didn’t mean you guys. Obviously you guys are much different.”
    Brownie was thinking of a p-p-penguin. Mortimer had been identified as about a foot and a half tall. If Brownie remembered his plushes, that would make the penguin’s tushie about a foot wide. It wouldn’t have weighed much, but someone had dragged it through the field and through the woods of the Boomer’s farm, as if it had been too big to carry.
    “Ifin it don’t weigh that much, why drag it at all?” Brownie mused.
    “Maybe the perpetrator couldn’t carry it,” Janie suggested. “We need to find a suspect who can’t carry things like regular people.”
    Kiki said, “Maybe someone without arms.”
    “Do you know someone without arms?” Brownie asked.
    “I know the bartender at Grubbo’s, and he lost one hand in Afghanistan. He’s got a hook thing he uses to shake the mixed drinks. Also he tells this one rotten joke about pirates, but— hey, what was I saying?”
    Brownie sighed and stood up. “Let’s follow this trail, Janie.” He glanced at Kiki and winked. “Thanks for the straight dope, sweetheart. I hope you never get a fortune cookie that says, ‘Help, I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory.’”
    Kiki’s face quirked into a smile. “You’re a riot, Sam Spade.”
    “See,” Brownie said to Janie. “She gets it.”
    They left Kiki behind and walked their bikes while following the meager dirt trail. A few minutes after looking downward, Brownie tripped over a curb and said a bad word. Janie snickered. Then Brownie stopped. He hunkered down and picked up something. He displayed it for Janie. “This is hair,” he said.
    Janie looked at it closely. “It’s hair. It’s brown and white.”
    “The goats were brown and white,” Brownie said.
    “So are a lot of animals,” Janie said.
    Brownie got his notepad out, ripped out a page, and made an impromptu envelope for the hair. “Evidence,” he said. Janie nodded in approval.
    After a few hundred feet, the dirt dispensed into nothingness. They walked slowly for a few hundred more feet and discovered themselves to be in front of the Moose Lodge.
    Janie looked up and said, “Hey. Look where we are. Maybe this is where all the perps are. I think the Faithful Order of Perpetual Moose sounds suspicious anyway. Since when are there moose in Texas? Mooses? What’s a group of mooses called?”
    “It’s just plain moose. And