Gumshoes

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.

Eidolon

The Great Detective keeps his gun over the map of the city with all the little pins stuck into it. The pins have little flags on them with the secret special code he invented that tells him where the file on that crime is in his secret special file cabinets. Every Thursday he takes the gun down and disassembles it, makes sure everything is in perfect working order, that the one bullet is still in the chamber.

Every weekend he goes to the firing range and drills until he can put six bullets through the same hole in the paper target, until he can hit the same pockmark on the concrete wall each and every time, until all of this comes to him as naturally as breathing. The Great Detective knows he will get only one shot, that he can’t afford to miss.

He is alone one night, brooding over the most recent crimes of His Archnemesis, when there is a step in the hallway, one he knows better than his own. There is a hand on the latch — the door opens — the beloved voice calls his name — the Great Detective’s gun cracks, just once, and a body crumples to the floor with the soft easy grace of a dry leaf. The Great Detective stands watch as the borrowed shape of his brother dissolves back into twenty years of grave rot.

By Such Signs Will You Know Him

He fell into the habit of lingering in the café for five or six hours, reading the paper, sipping cup after tiny cup of espresso, working the crosswords and people-watching. The clothes were slightly too tight, slightly too stylish, telling him that he was living in exile, a foreigner in a vast uncertain country. He didn’t notice the language any more, and the cars and the buildings wouldn’t have been so completely out of place in certain parts of Philadelphia, but the clothing always nagged at him. It was so nearly what he was used to; more strangeness would have been easier to overlook.

The people fascinated him. He began to recognize faces, voices, patterns: the old man who bought a coffee and a croissant every afternoon; the students who lingered defiantly over their books and their arguments; the fights that raged in a second-story room every evening; the women who sneaked out in the morning and came prowling back at night. Old habits stamped and filed away the ticking of the machinery of the neighborhood.

So he was unsurprised when the police came one day. Their cars so boxy and funny. There has been a murder, they announced. Does anyone have any information?

Ah, said David Brown, at home in spite of himself, hating himself for it.