Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Case of the Missing Cricket (Part 17)
Dex had a long and complicated history with crickets. Mostly, it involved catching them. Occasionally, it involved not catching them, and those occasions stayed with him.
Dinner had arrived that evening in its usual paper cup, six crickets decanted onto the sand with the small ceremony Dex felt the occasion deserved, and he had accounted for five of them within the hour through his usual combination of patience and sudden violence, only to find, once the light had gone properly gold and lazy, that the sixth had simply vanished into the substrate the way crickets occasionally did, leaving behind nothing but a faint, mocking chirp from somewhere beneath the driftwood and an itch of unfinished business Dex carried with him all the way into sleep.
He woke into rain on a window, the particular gray, dripping kind found only in cities that existed nowhere but dreams and old movies, venetian blinds slicing the light into long amber stripes across a desk bearing his name in gold on frosted glass, D. Dragon, Private Investigations, and Dex understood, with the swift certainty dreams provide free of charge, that he had been a detective in this town for longer than he could specifically account for, and that business, judging by the dust on the appointment book, had been slow.
The knock came exactly the way such knocks always did in this line of work, hesitant and expensive, and the client who let herself in was a crested gecko done up in the kind of understated elegance that suggested old terrarium money, a strand of pearls at her throat and a voice pitched low with the particular grief of the recently robbed. "Mr. Dragon," she said, settling into the chair across from him with the practiced grace of someone who had settled into a great many chairs, "someone has taken Champion. My prize cricket. The pride of the Whitmore terrarium. Gone from his enclosure the night before the Uptown Insect Gala, and if he isn't found by morning, that trophy goes to the Abernathy tarantula, and I would rather retire from society altogether."
Dex took the case the way he took most things, without visibly agreeing to anything and simply standing up, shrugging into a coat that had appeared, dream-logic willing, exactly when the scene required it, and following her out into a rain that never once managed to actually reach his scales. The Whitmore terrarium turned out to be several floors of ferns and mist and a level of interior lighting design Dex found personally offensive, and the scene of the crime, a small glass pavilion where Champion had last been seen practicing his chirp for the judges, offered exactly one clue: a single, glistening thread of shed exoskeleton snagged on a decorative pebble, and the unmistakable, sticky handprint of someone who had climbed the smooth glass wall beside it without the slightest difficulty.
"Only one kind of customer walks up glass like that," Dex said, mostly to himself, in the low, unhurried voice he'd apparently always used in this line of work, and the trail of similar prints led him, by evening, to a fire escape three blocks over and a gecko of shifty bearing named Sticky Pete, who denied everything with the particular speed of someone who had clearly done at least one of the things he was being accused of, though not, as it turned out under Dex's patient and increasingly pointed questioning, this one. "I climb things," Pete admitted at last, aggrieved, "that's just what I do, it's not a crime, it's a lifestyle," and produced, in his own defense, an alibi involving a window three buildings over and absolutely no crickets of any kind.
The real trail, once Dex stopped assuming the obvious answer and started actually listening, led him back to the Whitmore pavilion after hours, to a faint, familiar chirping coming not from any hiding spot but from directly behind a decorative log Dex himself might have chosen, where he found, with the particular deflating clarity that always seems to arrive several hours later than useful, not a kidnapped champion but a champion who had simply relocated himself, mid-molt, to somewhere quieter, and beside him, looking considerably less like a criminal mastermind and considerably more like a fellow cricket named Delilah from two enclosures over, whom Champion had apparently decided he preferred the company of rather more than he preferred the Uptown Insect Gala.
Mrs. Whitmore, informed of her prize cricket's whereabouts and his newly declared priorities, took the news with the stunned silence of someone recalculating an entire evening's plans, then, to her considerable credit, laughed, a real laugh, and told Dex she supposed a gala trophy mattered rather less than she'd made it sound an hour ago, and pressed into his claw a fee he hadn't actually named a price for, along with the frank observation that any detective who solved a case by simply asking a cricket what he wanted was probably underselling himself.
Case closed, in the specific unglamorous way real cases tended to close once you stopped looking for villains and started looking for the truth, Dex walked back out into a rain that had finally, tastefully, stopped, collar up, case unsolved by force and solved instead by listening, which struck him as the kind of ending his line of work rarely got and he intended to enjoy without questioning it further.
He woke on the sand to the same faint, mocking chirp from beneath the driftwood, considerably less mysterious now that he'd apparently spent an entire dream learning what it might mean, and when Mike lifted the branch an hour later to investigate the noise, they found not a missing champion or a runaway romance but simply a cricket, quite alive, quite pleased with its hiding spot, and utterly unbothered by the detective work it had inspired. "There you are," Mike said, scooping it out with the mild exasperation of a man who had done this before, and Dex, watching his own case close in real time, decided the sixth cricket had gotten off rather easier than it deserved.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.