The Crafty Teddy Read Online Free Page A

variation on the prologue that preceded most Dragnet episodes. I jiggled the bear slightly pretending it was the one actually speaking. “This is the city, Remmelkemp Mill—”
    “Actually it’s a village, sweetheart.”
    “Excuse me, but nobody ever corrected Sergeant Joe Friday.”
    Ash’s eyes were bright with merriment. “That’s because he was a stickler for facts. He wouldn’t have called Remmelkemp Mill a city.”
    “Okay…this is the village , Remmelkemp Mill, Virginia. It’s a quiet community, full of hardworking people, but some are deeply disturbed at the idea of a grown man making teddy bears. When they call the bear artist’s manhood into question, that’s when I go to work. My name is Joe Fur-day and I carry a tiny badge.”
    “He’s wonderful. Let me see him.”
    “Hang on a sec. I’m not done yet.” I resumed channeling the spirit of Jack Webb. “Saturday, June seventeenth. It was sunny and warm in Remmelkemp Mill. I was working the Day Watch out of the Rob-bear-y-Homicide Division.”
    Ash winced at the bad pun. You’d think she’d be accustomed to my wretched one-liners by now. I handed Joe to her and sat down on the couch.
    Back when I embarked on my new vocation of making stuffed animals, I’d struck on the idea of making bears that honored the fictional cops from television and film. My first effort was Dirty Beary, a mohair tribute to Clint Eastwood, and it had won an honorable mention at the Har-Bear Expo in Baltimore. I’d since given the bear to Tina as an inadequate token of gratitude for saving Ash’s life and mine last October. With Joe Fur-day finally finished, I had to decide which bear I was going to make next, Steve McBear-ett, from Hawaii Five-O , or Inspector Ursa-kin from the old Quinn Martin F.B.I. series.
    Joe Friday was a retro cop, so I’d made Joe Fur-day as a retro teddy bear. He was created from gunmetal gray mohair, had an old-fashioned seam running up the center of his head from his black nose, hockey stick arms with charcoal-colored felt paw pads, and a slight hump at the top of his back. His face and muzzle were shaved, which accentuated the stern appearance of the black glass eyes and grimacing embroidered mouth. In my commitment to authenticity, I’d even considered putting a tiny Chesterfield cigarette in the corner of Joe’s mouth, but eventually decided against it, because these days, where there’s smoke there’s ire.
    The bear was dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, tie, and a gray fedora—the clothing Jack Webb wore in the 1950s version of the show, which in my opinion was far superior to the 1960s incarnation of Dragnet , when Joe Friday was less a hard-nosed cop than a grouchy soapbox orator. There was even a leather holster on the bear’s right hip that contained an inch-long replica of a Smith & Wesson snub-nose revolver that I’d carefully carved from balsa wood and painted metallic black.
    “God, I love him,” said Ash as she examined the bear.
    “Really?”
    “Of course, really. Look at how your work has improved since October.”
    “Only because I had a great teacher.”
    “Thank you. Can I pour you some coffee?”
    “That’d be nice.”
    She placed the bear on the end table and went into the kitchen. Returning, she handed me a mug of coffee and said, “So, are you going to show him to the guild this morning?”
    Ash was referring to the new club she’d organized back in April, the Massanutten Teddy Bear Artist Guild. There were about eleven local women in the group, including Tina, and they met monthly at our house to socialize over coffee, discuss bear-making techniques, and work on stuffed animals. The club was an instant success and, if you didn’t factor my creations into the judging pool, the quality of the bears being produced was nothing short of amazing. Although, in fairness to me, most of the members had been sewing since childhood.
    For instance, Tina had already begun to experiment with giving her bears