He was dozing in the office per usual when the phone jarred him from his dream about hot tubs. Wanda? he thinks about the girl there. Who’s Wanda? He cuts off the rings by answering, assuming it was a wrong number. 5:30 in the morning. Who would be calling him now?
A dame named Wanda, that’s who. Or so she said. Probably the psychic police again, he thinks, hounding me until the end.
“Sykes,” she said about a last name when he asked her, poised for retribution.
“Is that with an i… or a y?”
“W-why (nervous laugh)… do you ask?”
“Because I was just dreaming about a dame named Wanda,” private dick Wendell “Biff” Carter admitted but cockily, “and I wanted to know how to spell her last name for the next time we meet up.”
“How odd,” the woman also claiming to be Wanda said on the other side of the line in a tone that Carter identified as sincerely surprised. Maybe not the psychic police after all, he pondered. Maybe one of those what you call *synchronicities*. He tested further. He realized she seemed to be talking to someone with the receiver’s mouthpiece covered. The detective was good at detecting that — had to be to survive, he said to himself as he honed his craft by trying out one muffled voice after another with his girl Friday secretary Berta. What kind of cloth or hanky or whatever was used for the muffling? Could be important. In this case he was thinking: cashmere. Slight bit of scratching against the receiver (wool) coupled with a Cape Cod accent. Rich dame, he surmised. He needed money. He’ll overlook the oddities to proceed forward.
“What can I do you for?” He tried to wake up as much as possible to absorb the stream of information he assumed was coming his way.
“I *was* looking… for a mirror.” That was it. Mirror. The dream, he knew. She found it. Click went the receiver. Took a long time to return to sleep after that. Wanda in reality, he thought, glancing over at the phone again. Wanda in the dream. Maybe if I return to the same dream I can get more info from the dame who lives, ahem, *inside*. He leaned back, hands behind his head just like we started with. “Wanda Wanda Wanda,” he muttered as Newton slid back into Jasper. “Wanda Wanda (snore) Wanda…”
(to be continued)
Sunklands 