Gumshoes

Apples Out of Season

When he dies, the family comes out of the woodwork by the hundreds. A firm believer in the virtue of his genetics, and, also, that he would, somehow, eventually, cheat death, he didn’t just have offspring, he seeded himself across the western hemisphere like a white Temujin. The immortality never came, of course, but the children do, drawn by the promise of his vast fortune and the human need to see him lying dead to know for sure, blood and bone, that he was truly gone and would not threaten to return.

In the high school auditorium the attorneys reserved for the reading of the will, they crowd the bleachers, eye each other warily, half-siblings all, with no connection save of blood. Which of them finally caught up with him? How had they done it? He wasn’t smart but he was paranoid. Had it been poison? A knife in the dark? A plausibly malfunctioning car? Had they bribed a servant, cozened his latest child bride into mixing something extra in with his pills? Speculation is rampant, a deep rumbling through the gym, loud enough to drown out the lawyer as he tries to take the stage.

When he has their attention at last, he coughs and reads a short statement: “Per the wishes of the deceased, the doors have been locked and the building wired to explode. There shall be no inheritance, nor heir; if I have gone, I will take you all with me.”

They howl, and howl, and, when the building fails to explode, turn on each other in fury. When the police arrive to unlock the doors, they wade through blood and viscera three feet deep to arrest the sole survivor.

Everyone Can Live in the Building But the Architect

Paranoid, the Great Detective can trust no one, least of all himself. Who taught him to fear the Other, after all? What were they hiding about the Self? Who is he working for? Who is anyone working for? What does working mean in this instance? Who is a boss, and who is a laborer, when the only produced good is ephemeral information of, at best, dubious accuracy?

Still, and despite his best efforts, he lives in a society, if not quite a state. He speaks, because he is handed a microphone, and they listen, or at least stand on the grass in front of the podium; they cheer when he pauses, applaud when he stops for breath, laugh at what he is only dimly suspicious are jokes. He promises them anything that comes to mind: more freedom, more health, more money, more leisure; less fear, less surveillance, less linguistic drift. Progress is regression is progression, after all, like the wheel on a penny-farthing.

He tries to break away, and they are waiting with flags and banners with his face on them. He drinks himself into a stupor and tries to drown himself in a fountain, and when he awakes, face up in six inches of mondegreen water, the press is there on the pavement to get his latest statement. He plays along, and they quote him; breaks away and they cheer. When he is elected, he stabs buttons in a mania, desperate to find the one that shatters the system, that rains fire down upon this idyll.

False hope, as they all are: the power he was promised was always only ever contingent. The cap of the pyramid cannot escape the stones laid below.

William Fitzgerald Turns the Page

He’d been hired to find the husband, an ex-writer supposedly taking some kind of dipso cure at a dilapidated ranch, and William Fitzgerald had done it, watched the light drain back into his eyes as the opiates let go, but he wasn’t happy about it; hopheads gave him the itch. The reunion went as expected, back on the bottle as soon as he walked in, the wife’s long hair not quite covering the week-old bruise on her face, William Fitzgerald an unnoticed grotesque against the faded yellow wallpaper.

They pay him off before the screaming starts in earnest and he’s gone.

Two weeks later he reads with bored disinterest of the husband’s death by suicide and the wife’s disappearance, a lot of tumult for a rich artist’s colony, and the second in as many months. One of their neighbors along the beach had beaten his wife to death and fled the country, killed himself or been killed in a town on the west coast of Mexico. The only thing that summons a flicker of attention, for the novelty, if nothing else, is the sidebar about the matriarchal societies that still flourish in the area. William Fitzgerald has an ophidian sense of sociology at most, but somehow he doubts he’d be much appreciated in a matriarchy.

Death in a Time of Strife

There are long periods of time in which no one is killed and no one needs saving, and the Great Detective does indeed savor those moments, but only ever in retrospect. Life is more vibrant, more real, somehow, when the Rule is broken. He can almost feel, like the turning of the seasons, all the various parts of his long and colorful history shivering briefly into synthesis with this more contemplative life. He is never so devoted to the order as when he is flouting its strictures, never so passionately in love with monastic life as when he is breaking curfew to ride through the woods with a lean and lissome deputy sheriff in hopes of saving some poor doomed idiot or other.

But he does cherish the quiet times; the long months of growth and harvest, the placid nights of plainsong, the unmemorable merriment of a feast day, the hushed chill of an icy winter. Even in the midst of civil war, he has found, clung to, a peace everlasting.

His Archnemesis, never one to be outdone, has anticipated him, wormed his way into the abbey before the Great Detective’s calling had even come upon him. But he, too, is made mild by the unchanging hours of the liturgical day, rendered no more venomous than any other toadying subprior trotting along behind a marmoreal and unregarding bore. They snipe at each other in chapter, but what of it? Their swords are sheathed, always sheathed, in the presence of the divine.

Blood on the Newel

The Great Detective is many things to many people, but she is absolutely not a cop.

Violence is deplorable, sure, murder vile, she scorns these as any member of a society might do, but really she’s in it for the solve; hooked on crosswords at a young age, she graduated to the harder stuff when the pleasure ebbed. A nice theft, some swindling, a kidnapping or two, arson here and there, the occasional bit of barratry, all merely opportunities to excercise a soul quaked with idleness, a chance to pit herself against the invisible mind of another.

But she has no calling for conviction. Once the solve has been achieved, the pleasure is over, the world dims again, some of the sparkle goes out of her eye, some of the spring out of her step. The game is over with the reveal. More, as an amateur, she has a world of latitude in how she acts. She has discretion.

Her Archnemesis, in this moment, is smaller than ever before, less clever; if they have thwarted all the yeomanly efforts of the nation’s constabulary that is beginner’s luck more than anything. There was no premeditation to their latest murder, if quite some malice; pushed to the brink they merely snapped.

“I do not think,” says the Great Detective, slowly, “that the police will ever find you out. Go; I will not stop you.”

And like that Her Archnemesis is gone. This is justice, of a sort: the Great Detective knows that some people need killing, and the state has no monopoly on violence.