The Wicked Flea

Let’s try to get this straightened—” The cop cut him off. “There’s no misunderstanding. What there is, is assault on a police officer.”
    Sidling up to me, Wilson whispered, “What a fiasco! Sylvia did push her. For heaven’s sake, don’t mention this to Mrs. Waggenhoffer! I suppose I’d better go call a lawyer. Except there’s probably one here. Do you think I should ask?”
    The notion struck me as ridiculous. Is there a lawyer in the park? “Ceci, I think we should leave,” I said.
    “Walk out on Sylvia? Abandon her?” Ceci was aghast. “Holly, I’m surprised at you! Are you feeling all' right? We can’t just run off. After all, we’re witnesses!”
    Although it seemed only seconds ago that the officer had summoned help, a siren wailed, and a cruiser sped into the park and came to a halt near my Bronco. The owners whose dogs were still loose got busy retrieving and leashing their animals. A few people joined the circle around Sylvia and the cop. The sensible ones strolled casually off. I envied them. Meanwhile, two uniformed men leaped out of the cruiser, which they left with its lights flashing and front doors open, and made a dash to assist their fellow officer. Like everything else about the incident, the response seemed disproportionate to the trivial nature of Sylvia’s crime, if she’d even committed one. The only law I’d seen her break was the leash law. Was it illegal to call a cop a moron and a bitch? I didn’t think so. It was possible that Sylvia had pushed or maybe tripped the runner without knowing that the woman was a cop, but she hadn’t socked her in the jaw, pulled a gun, or otherwise committed an act of violence. Yet here she was, in handcuffs! Under arrest! Here in this pretty park in the Safest City in America. Weirdly enough, instead of normalizing the events, the presence of the uniformed cops only added to the sense of unreality. For one thing, the guys in uniform were incredibly handsome, with movie star looks too good to be real. Both were young and tall, with broad shoulders. One had short blond hair and fair skin, and the other, as if chosen by a casting director as the perfect foil, had short black hair and espresso-dark skin.
    “One of the nice things about Newton,” Ceci commented smugly, “is that it’s always such a pleasure to call the police, not in this instance, really, but our police are so handsome that it can’t be an accident, can it? The world is full of ordinary-looking people, so you’d think the police in Newton would be ordinary-looking people, too, but they’re not, obviously, and it’s nice to see that affirmative action hasn’t changed things, has it!”
    As Ceci babbled, the uniformed men, however handsome, led a protesting Sylvia to the cruiser. The reality of her predicament was now apparent to her and to everyone else. The anger had left her face, which was pale and tearful. Still, she had the presence of mind to shout instructions to Wilson and Pia about calling a lawyer and meeting her at the police station.
    “We’ll be there, too!” Ceci impulsively promised at full volume. “Holly, we need to go there right away so poor Sylvia doesn’t have to face this trauma all alone. Headquarters is in West Newton, which you could reach by going back to my house, but that’s the long way around, really, so we’ll take the... what do you call it? Hypotenuse, just the way we learned in geometry, about squaring sides.” She paused. As if the matter were of pressing importance, she asked, “Who was that man with the hypotenuse? Pythagoras! That’s who it was. We’ll do just what Pythagoras said.”
    I refused.
     

Chapter 12
     
    On the following Tuesday morning, five days after Sylvia’s altercation at the park and her subsequent arrest, I had a call from Ceci’s sister, Althea. I should mention that Althea Battlefield, BSI, almost never asked favors of anyone. The letters after Althea’s name signified her membership in the Baker Street Irregulars, an elite society of devotees of Sherlock Holmes. Revered by her fellow Holmesians as a sort of Irene Adler— the woman—she was universally acknowledged in Sherlockian circles to possess an intelligence that combined Sherlock’s rationality with the limitless brain power of his brother, Mycroft. Like Mycroft, Althea seldom ventured far from her lodgings. In her case, the reason was not a sedentary disposition, but the physical infirmity of great age. As Ceci always took