Gumshoes

The Dead Are The Dead And Do Not Care

David Brown sags on the side of the ship and gets rained on. Fog has swallowed up the shore, and there’s nothing to choose between the rumpled steel grey of the sky and the dimpled steel grey surface of the lake. The winch goes down into the water, and he, and the three others on the boat, stand motionless watching it turn.

The divers break the surface like so many sleek-headed seals. The two sailors help them on board, take them below to change clothes, drink coffee, thaw. He and the woman move to the winch, start plucking the bodies off as they clear the rail, neatly wrapped in plastic. They are lighter than they look and he is grateful for the bags that keep them together and out of sight.

Six bodies; a carful.

They have been searching the water for three days; 59 hours. Another boat, erased by the weather, is bringing up the vehicle; a larger winch creaks through the rain. At this point they know names, faces, dates, or suspect they know them, or think they do. He knows those stories, but holds them suspended while they work; these six have nothing but time.

Vandyk

There were six dollars in the wallet and a student ID that had expired seven years ago. Paul Brofman, the name was, and he looked back at her with the smug, awkward look that Vandyk remembered from kids in her own college days.

He was maybe thirty, thirty-one now, and the eleven years that had passed since the picture was taken hadn’t improved his looks much. He would have been awkward and too-eager, she thought, when he was alive; even in death his face held a trace of excitable self-interest. In his inner coat pocket she found a little notebook filled with self-quotations; his observations were shallow and his wit stale, which as an epitaph she found almost tragically pathetic.

That was all. Nothing there to tell her what he’d wanted, if he’d wanted anything. She eased him back down and went inside to call the police. Six dollars wasn’t nearly her rate.

Vandyk

With slow steady patience Vandyk separates out the seeds and the stems, twists the paper between her hands and lights the reefer. She smokes two a day: one in the morning, and one just before she closes up. She just recently switched over from cigarettes because she was starting to get worried about her lungs. She doesn’t want the cannabis nearly so much, nearly so often.

It helps her concentrate on details. Usually paperwork. She spends the first couple of hours of the day going over her files, writing reports, dunning notices, that kind of thing. She polishes her billing letters to a deadly edge, mind calm and peaceful and blue, and sends them off. The responses — usually with money — are hilarious. Handwriting shaky, wind gone completely out of their sails.

She has her secretary send back the overpayments. No note. No note is scarier. Oh god, they must think, if she doesn’t want money, what in god’s name does she want?

Vandyk smiles to herself, lights her second and last joint of the day, and watches the sunset reflected off the buildings across the street. Only what I’m owed.

Jewel Heist

This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

We are such masters of disguise, The Great Detective and His Archnemesis, that we can never be sure which is which and who is who. Sometimes we slink through opium dens, the very soul of corruption and dissolution, and sometimes we ghost our way through the salons and fêtes of the idle rich, our long-fingered hands delicate and soft.

Tonight we are hunting each other at the opera. The Great Detective is elegant in a long velvet gown, wig piled high on his head, the fabulous scarlet emerald of Agafnd flashing at his aristocratic throat. Poor Inspector Cramer, who of course has no idea who the beautiful lady is that he’s chaperoning, dances attendance, bulldog eyes locked on the many faucets of the scarlet emerald while The Great Detective flirts outrageously with him.

There’s a commotion during the intermission. The jewel of Agafnd has been stolen! The Inspector is beside himself — he never took his eyes off the rock, not for a second! The Great Detective laughs, low and thrillingly, and kisses his mortified cheek. “No one could have done more, my dear Cramer, but this was not a crime we were meant to prevent.”

And with that, The Great Detective is gone, leaving the Inspector thinking — and blushing! — furiously.

Ways of Coping

The room is as composed as a photograph, from the spray of just-opened blossoms to the white muslin curtains weighted down with blood. The body itself is tumbled artfully in the middle of the floor, one arm gracefully extended. David Brown thinks: he was beautiful. He was beautiful and he is dead.

What he means is: here is a riddle. Or, is there a riddle here? Is there something to discover, to unravel, to figure out, or is there merely a long chain of events with a prosaic beginning and blood at the end?

Here is what he knows about the dead man: name, age, address. All of these found on an expired driver’s license in the leather wallet in the man’s left hip pocket. Also in the wallet were a credit card, a library card, two membership cards for nearby grocery stores, and a collage the size of a business card with a baby’s head and a bird’s skeleton on it.

Here are the things in the room: three wooden chairs; one orange couch; one elaborately patterned throw rug; five hundred and seventy books, mostly genre fiction, four hundred and twenty three of which are paperback; one battered coffee table. On the coffee table are one glass, one plate, one fork, all used; one package of Fatimas, out of which four have been taken and almost certainly smoked, but not necessarily (missing from the room: an ashtray; the smell of smoke); seven empty beer bottles, comprising three different brands, which suggests a dilatory cleaning schedule more than alcoholism.

About the body: skinny jeans. One white sock, one black. Shoes are missing (he makes a mental note). Tight white t-shirt with an airbrushed picture of a howling wolf, heavily stained with blood. Hair mussed, though intentionally, modishly; no sign of violence. And of course the raw red gash of the throat with the remote, seraphic face above it, empty now of whatever it might once have held.