As she rides by

Sneezy!” I said brightly. “It’s me again. Riddle me this—what is green, about two and a half by six inches in size, and has a picture of Ulysses S. Grant on it?”
    “You riddle me this, Daniel,” he said. “What’s the same size but it’s got a picture of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite on it?”
    “One hundred bucks U.S. ,” I said. “That’s a bit steep, isn’t it, pal? You don’t even know what I want yet.”
    “As for part one,” he said, “so ask someone else, then. As for part two, I do know what you want, it’s what you always want.”
    “OK, OK,” I said. “You got it.” What the hell—it wasn’t as if it was my money I was spending. “The name’s L. R. Jones. Possible AKAs, Tex and Jonesy.”
    “The initials,” he said, “standing for what?”
    “Hang on,” I opened up the folder and on one of the contracts found out. “L for Leonard, R for Richard,” I told him. I gave him Tex ’s home and business addresses.
    “Hang on,” he said. A minute later he said, “The national’s out, I’ll get back to you, where are you?” I told him what number I was at, and hung up.
    I twiddled my thumbs. Then I poked my head into the control room to see what was goin’ down in there. Tom immediately told me to shush up, then told his partner, who was standing in front of a floor mike, earphones on, in one of the recording cubicles, to take it again and watch his pitch, please. Jerry made a well-known, one-fingered gesture in our direction. Tom rewound the master, then sat at the board again, then pointed one finger at Jerry. Guitar music began. Quite pretty, too, if you like that sort of thing. Then Jerry began singing something about being in Mozambique after the war and finding this teahouse on the shore that had a picture of a faded movie queen torn from the pages of some ancient magazine on the wall.
    When I tiptoed out he was warbling something about a parrot. Boy, I thought, could those powder puffs use a lyric with a little balls to it. A few minutes later Sneezy phoned back.
    “Zilch,” he said, “on your client statewise.”
    “I am unsurprised,” I said.
    “Zilch,” he said, “on your client countrywise.”
    “And, no doubt zilch on my client Interpolwise, which probably isn’t worth the trouble,” I said. “Thanks anyway, Sneezy. Your money is in the mail.”
    “Don’t make me laugh, Daniel,” he said. “I laughed already once today.”
    “No! Well, I do declare! I bet it was when you heard your dream girl, Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor, got arrested for socking some poor defenseless six-foot traffic cop.”
    “No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t. It had nothing to do with Miss Gabor. My second wife just got divorced from her third husband after four weeks of married bliss.”
    “I fail to see anything remotely amusing in that,” I said. “Tragic, I’d call it.”
    “Easy to see you never been married, Daniel,” he said. “Oh yeah. Talking about wives and other unnatural disasters, your client’s got one. And guess what she’s got?”
    “A record as long as a Carpenters album?” I suggested hopefully. “One cross-ref,” he said. “It’s a new function we just got working properly. It picks up similarities in MOs; repetitions of AKAs, addresses, CLs, you name it.”
    “Sounds good,” I said. “Congratulations. And what, may I ask, not wanting to take up too much of your expensive time, is Mrs. Jonesy cross-referenced for, or is it under?”
    “Witness to a fatality,” he said. “Interested?”
    “Mildly,” I admitted. “Seeing how much I’m paying for it, you might as well send me a printout of all you got on it one of these days, if you please. Tony knows my address, if he’ll give it to you.”
    “Will do,” he said. “But don’t hold your breath.” He hung up. So did I.
    Witness to a fatality, I thought. Which could mean she saw an old lady slip on a kiwi peel in Farmers’ Market and give up the ghost under an aubergine stall, which wouldn’t be all that helpful as far as Tom ‘n’ Jerry’s plight was concerned. Still, better than nothing, as far as me and my conscience was concerned.
    I went back inside. Jerry was still singing about that parrot. “A sleeping parrot, dreaming parrot dreams...”
    I, V. D., do not believe parrots really do dream. I know dogs do, because I’ve seen King grinning and wagging his tail while he dreamed of cat McNuggets and feline-flavored Friskies. But parrots—what’s the