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perpetual_motionBecause it's NaNo time, and because we all know the way my brain turns to mush at that time, I'm going to give you my novel as it gets written. I make no promises as to the actual plot, structure, or anything grammatical as the month continues. It will get so much worse than this, of that I can promise.
It started, as it always did, with a dead body. It was male, face down in an alley, and missing a very large chunk of its head. Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson stood beside either leg and looked down.
“He’s dead, Jim.” This from Detective Craig, in total deadpan.
“Can you revive him Bones?” From Detective Jackson, and just as deadpan.
“Damnit, Jim; I’m a detective! Not a doctor!”
“Well, then, you’re pretty fuckin’ useless right now.”
The ME, a fresh-faced man in his late twenties who had just started at the morgue a week before and had never witnessed the scene antics of either detective, looked between them now in utter confusion and a smidge of disgust. “I’ve got a dead body here.”
“We can see that.” Detective Jackson took a step back and cocked his head to the left. “He’s dead from this angle, too.”
The ME sighed. “Would you two hi-freakin’-larious assholes leave me to work, please?”
Detective Craig, amused that the ‘please’ had been uttered after the world ‘asshole’, could only grin and jerk his thumb towards the edge of the scene. Detective Jackson followed him, and as soon as they were both a few feet away, they laughed. Detective Craig managed to calm down first. “We should probably take this seriously.”
“Of course we should.”
“It’d be terrible of us to laugh over a guy who lost half his head.”
“It would.” Detective Jackson glanced back at the body. “Did you see the other half of his head anywhere? Was it splattered on a wall?”
Detective Craig glanced back down the alley and squinted as he thought. “You know, I don’t think I saw any splatter.”
“Secondary crime scene?”
“We were tiptoeing around a pool of blood, so I’m going to say no.”
Detective Jackson shoved his hands into the pockets of his pants and whistled through this teeth. “Well, shit.” The way he said it, elongating the ‘i’, it came out more like ‘she-it’. “Hey, Bones?”
“Yeah, Jim?”
“We may be fucked.”
“That we may.”
*
Now is the time in the story, that particular time before the story has really gone anywhere worth reading, that there is a pause to explain the characteristics of the detectives and to also explain why it is perfectly fine for them to be making Star Trek [all rights reserved] references while standing over the body of a man who has half his skull missing entirely, and not just splattered in small pieces on an alley wall.
Detectives, as a rule, are very sick people. Not sick like ‘going to stab you and leave you dead’ sick, but sick as in they do a job that can be, at times, fucking disgusting and degrading and make them feel very much like they want to peel off their skin, scrub it with one of those old-time washboards, and slip it back on after it’s dried on the back line for a day or so. Thanks to this feeling, they find ways to relieve tension that may seem crude and low brow to other people—like joking about a dead guy who is missing half his head. This is, in fact, quite the normal reaction that a person, when dealing with death on a regular basis, will have to a man missing half his head.
Now that the terrible, sick humor of the detectives has been properly explained, it’s time to take a look at the detectives.
Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson are both men of high-calibar intelligence. Their disturbing sense of humors aside, they are smart, capable, and very good at their jobs. They also like their job very much. This is an incredibly important trait to have if you look at dead bodies all day. Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson are not as lily-white and WASPish as their names appear. Stanton is a lovely man the same color as an Almond Joy bar [minus the coconut], and Devin is the same olive-skinned tone as Ravi Kapoor, a lovely Indian man with a British accent who plays an ME on television. If you’ve not seen his work, you really must. Together, Stanton and Devin [or Dectective Craig and Detective Jackson if you prefer] are quite the team. They have worked together for an indeterminate amount of time, and they quite enjoy each other’s company. [If you feel unsure to this fact, please reread from the first line to the first asterisk. It should clear up any confusion.]
All other interesting character tidbits shall be revealed as the story carries on, and so it will now continue.
*
The ME, whose name Stanton and Devin still didn’t know, walked over to their little corner of the scene after ten minutes, and pronounced their body dead.
“You must have graduated top in your class to figure that out so quickly.”
The ME, his badge said ‘Dr. Larry Eppes’ [not that Stanton or Devin noticed], gave Devin a withering the look that reminded Devin strongly of his fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Kepler. She’d called him a ‘dirty Hindu’, and he’d thrown a rock at her at recess. They’d had a very tumultuous relationship. “You’re kind of a dick.”
“The word they use now is ‘detective’.” Devin grinned. The ME glowered. Stanton stepped in before Devin ended up missing half of his skull.
“Cause of death?”
The ME switched his glower to Stanton, obviously deciding that if one of them were evil, the other must be as well. “He’s missing half of the back of his skull. And half of his brain, as a matter of interest. The other half is there and in perfect condition, but it looks like someone deliberately took off with the left side of his brain.”
Devin, having decided that he’d played a total asshole long enough, asked an actual question. “You’re telling me that someone *deliberately* cut out the left side of the guy’s skull, cut out the left side of his brain, and left everything else *intact*?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. There aren’t any other wounds to the body.”
Stanton’s eyebrows shot up and made his forehead furrow. “No other wounds? At all?”
“Nope.”
“Not even anything minutely defensive?”
“Not even that.”
“That,” Stanton declared like a man about to open a great speech, “is severely fucked.”
“That,” Devin added as Dr. Larry Eppes nodded along, “is exactly what I just said to you.”
Before Stanton could correct Devin [he’d said they might be fucked, not that the situation as a whole *was* fucked], a uniformed officer walked over and interrupted with a grimace and a gesture towards a small apartment building two buildings down from the alley. “I’ve got a woman who says she saw something, but she won’t tell me what.”
Devin and Stanton shared a look, glanced at the apartment building, and quickly thew out a round of rock, paper, scissors. Devin got paper. Stanton chose scissors. Devin cursed. “Goddamnit.” He looked at the uniformed officer. “Let me talk to her.” He followed the uniformed officer like a dog going to the back room of the pound and left Stanton with the ME.
“What was that?” When Stanton gave him a look the ME made a motion like he was about to initiate rock, paper, scissors.
“Oh, that.” Stanton gestured to the apartment building with a bored wave of his hand. “High maintenance witness. She knows that something big went down, and she also knows that the uniformed officer isn’t in charge. She thinks she has something that’s going to get her on the news in her curlers and bathrobe, and she wants to talk to someone more important than the poor bastard in the car with the cool lights. I hate them, Devin hates them, and we’d rather farkle for it than have a big fight in the street about whose turn it is to put up with a glory hound old lady with fuzzy slippers and four cats.” Stanton clapped the ME on the shoulder and finally looked at his nametag. “Tell me, Dr. Larry, what else should I know about our half-headed body?”
*
The lady in the apartment building only owned three cats. They were all short hairs, fixed, and knew better than to jump on the kitchen counters. Devin found out all of this before he could even start asking questions. The lady was older but not quite elderly, and she was obviously fond of the sound of her own voice.
“Pickles was the one who was at the window when the noise started. He started tapping at the window like he wanted to go out, but I don’t let them out. They’re indoor kitties. They don’t even have their back claws.”
Devin reflexively curled his hands into fists. During the days of his somewhat misspent youth, he’d pissed off the wrong guys and gotten a fingernail pulled out for his dicking around. He’d since vowed to never declaw an animal, and to always keep his thumbs tucked into the palms of his hands. “Ma’am, did you go to the window to see what Pickles saw?” That was, he decided, the stupidest question he’d ever asked in the line of duty, and he’d spent two years asking guys in swerving cars if they’d been drinking.
“I didn’t at first. He likes to play at the window a lot, so I thought that there was a bug outside or something, but then I remembered that the lamp on the front stoop had burned out, and that there was no reason for there to be bugs by the window. That’s when I got up and looked.”
That, Devin decided, was a very roundabout way of saying ‘yes’. “And what did you see, Ma’am?”
“I saw someone lead a man into the alley across the way, and a little while after that only one person came out of the alley. I didn’t see a second person, and I sat at the window for awhile. Snowy and Bruce sat with me, but Pickles decided he would rather have something to eat. He stole the ham right out of the sandwich I’d been making when he first started mewling at the window. He was a bad kitty.” The lady bent down and shook a finger at the pure gray cat that was lounging on the ottoman. “You’re a bad kitty, Pickles.”
Devin considered asking how ‘Bruce’ had gotten away with a slightly reputable name as opposed to Pickles and Snowy, but he decided that staying on course would probably be better. It would sure as hell get him out of the apartment a lot more quickly. “Ma’am-“
“My name’s Ida Telborn. You never asked for it, you know.”
Devin was mostly certain that he had asked for it, but when he glanced down at his notebook, he didn’t see any reference to it at all. “I apologize. It’s been a long night.”
“That’s no excuse for bad manners.” Ida Telborn squinted her eyes behind her glasses and sized up Devin in one quick, assessing nod. “Of course, you people aren’t particularly polite to begin with.”
‘You people’ was a phrase Devin Jackson heard pretty often in his line of work. Although, unlike other cops, it wasn’t because he was a cop. Devin Jackson was Indian-the kind that came from India-and ever since the assholes in the planes had ruined the New York skyline, no one could tell him from anyone else who’d ever lived in a slightly dry climate outside of the United States. The most annoying thing about it was that he was, in fact, a full-out American citizen. His mother’s parents had immigrated before his mother was born, and he’d been born in a Catholic hospital right in the middle of the city. He couldn’t have been more American born and raised if he’d had blue eyes, blonde hair, and an apple pie in his hands. Of course, that was exactly the problem. He was *supposed* to have an accent. For some reason, it made the bigots feel safer if the people they didn’t like couldn’t speak unaccented English, but Devin Jackson, having grown up in the city and grown up with parents who’d spoken perfect English, only had the accent of a Northwest boy who’d lived the last twenty years on the South side of town. There wasn’t a hint of foreign in him, except for his skin color.
“Ms. Telborn,” Devin decided to ignore the ‘you people’ remark and pretend like she’d been talking about the cops, “did you see anything else?”
Ida Telborn squished her face together by wrinkling her nose, pursing her lips, and furrowing her eyebrows over his nose. She resembled a particularly ugly head of cabbage. “There was a car on the corner that I didn’t recognize. I don’t know what type it was, but I know the shape of every car on the block, and the shape was all wrong. It was very low to the ground, and it looked shiny. Another car drove by and the headlights made a reflection on the wheels. It was very bright. Scared the dickens out of Bruce.”
“Anything else?” Devin sincerely hoped not. He wanted out of the apartment as quickly as possible. Pickles had started twining around his legs, and Devin wasn’t interested in making friends with the cat of a woman who either disliked the police or anyone who had a not-quite-similar but not-quite-different skin tone from a terrorist.
“I think that’s it.” Ida Telborn unsquished her face by relaxing her nose, lips, and eyebrows and reached down to scoop up Pickles from between Devin’s legs. “Did I help?” And for just a moment, she seemed to sincerely care about what they’d been talking about inbetween stories of the cats.
Devin, never one to take away hope from crazy old ladies with three cats, closed his notebook and gave her his best professional smile. “You’ve given me more information than I’ve gotten from anyone else.” He didn’t mention that he hadn’t talked to anyone else. He was pretty sure that would ruin the moment.
“Well, good.” Ida Telborn walked Devin to the door and opened for him after fiddling with the chain. “Goodnight.” She closed the door as soon as Devin stepped through.
Devin listened to the sounds of the locks sliding into place and gave the uniform who’d dragged him over a wry smile. “Very nice lady. Crazy, with cats, but nice.”
The uniform, who’d worked with Devin before, grinned and jabbed a finger into Devin’s chest. “I call bullshit.”
“That’s a good call to make.” Devin gave the uniformed officer a friendly pat on the back and left him to finish questioning the other residents in the building. If there was an upside to dealing with Ida Telborn, other than getting a little information, it was knowing that the next high-maintenance witness got to go to Stanton. And Stanton had even less of a tolerance for attention whores than he did. Devin stepped onto the stoop and found Stanton at the bottom of the stairs, fingers twitching around the left pocket of his suit jacket. Stanton also seemed to have a low tolerance for waiting until Devin came out of the building. “Need something?”
“A cigarette.” Stanton clenched his hand a few times before shoving it into his pants pocket. “Why’d I quit smoking?”
“Because they cost a fortune.” Devin decided not to point out the cancer angle. Stanton, in the cigarette craving mood that he was in, was sure to dislike any mention of what cigarettes were capable of doing to him. “You missed a good time up there. I think you should go up and have a nice long talk with Ida Telborn. I don’t think she’ll like you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Stanton rocked back on his heels and tried not to think about the cigarette he had stashed in the glove box in the car. “And what about me would be so offensive?”
“You’re one of those colored folks. I’m pretty sure you’d make her piss down both legs.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes you deserve to piss down both legs.”
Devin grinned and flipped open his notebook. “She says she saw two people walk into an alley, and then a little later she saw one person walk out. She also says that there was a low-slung car on the street that shouldn’t belong here.”
“She knows all the cars on the street?” Stanton glanced up and down the block. There were at least three dozen cars parallel parked with varying success on both sides of the street. “She the neighborhood spy or something?”
“Her cat is.” Devin nodded at Stanton’s incredulous look. “The cat was playing at the window, and she looked around to see why he was out the window, and then she and the cats enjoyed a free movie that could probably be called, ‘Two Guys Walk into an Alley, One Guy Comes Out, the Other’s Dead’.”
“Did you capitalize that properly?”
“I did in my head.”
Stanton nodded and jerked a thumb in the direction of the alley. “ME, whose name is Larry Eppes, by the way-“
“Why do I care?”
“Because I care, and you want me happy.”
“Wait? You get happy? When has this happened?”
Stanton, as a last resort to shut him up, smacked Devin on the back of the head. “Are you done?”
Devin rubbed the back of his head for a second before returning the smack by hitting the back of Stanton’s head. “I’m done.”
“Good. As I was saying, Dr. Larry Eppes kindly informed me that our dead guy is named Carey Porman, and that he’s been dead for no more than six hours. The missing half of his brain and skull seem to have been taken very cleanly, and most likely here at the scene.”
“Carey Porman, you said?” Devin had to pat himself down to remember which pocket he’d shoved his pen into after he’d finished with Ida Telborn. He found it in his left pants pocket and clicked the top so that he could write. “Carey like Grant?”
“And Porman with one ‘o’. Do you want to look at the body again, or can I let them take it?”
“Let ‘em have it. I know what the back of his head looks like.”
Stanton turned to his left and flagged down the good Dr. Larry Eppes. “You can take him. Have fun.”
“It’ll be a blast, I’m sure.” Dr. Larry Eppes walked away to get the body off of the ground and into his van.
“Does he seem kind of snide to you?”
Stanton shrugged at Devin’s question. “Maybe we don’t come off as serious about our jobs.”
“I take offense to that.”
“Why?”
Devin seriously considered the question for a few seconds. “You know, I don’t know.”
Stanton sighed, ran a hand over his face and jerked on the back of Devin’s collar. “Come on. Put on your professional face and let’s get the rest of this done.”
*
Now is the time to stop and let you know that nothing of interest occurred in the next two hours and forty-seven minutes. Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson both questioned numerous people who saw either nothing, or a variation of nothing known as ‘nuthin’’. They were also subjected to numerous abuses of the American English grammatical style with uses of the word ‘ain’t’ and with sentences ending on prepositions. These are not sentences that any good writer would allow to be shown to the public, so they will not be seen here. Just be aware that the lack of information gathered at the scene left Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson rather peeved but not particularly angry. It is very rare that anyone rubbernecking at a crime scene has actually witnessed a crime. And if they had, they’d lie. Because that’s what people do. And they should all be terribly disappointed in themselves.
If you're curious, the first chapter is 3,349 words counting title. 2,440 of that was written in an hour last night.
It started, as it always did, with a dead body. It was male, face down in an alley, and missing a very large chunk of its head. Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson stood beside either leg and looked down.
“He’s dead, Jim.” This from Detective Craig, in total deadpan.
“Can you revive him Bones?” From Detective Jackson, and just as deadpan.
“Damnit, Jim; I’m a detective! Not a doctor!”
“Well, then, you’re pretty fuckin’ useless right now.”
The ME, a fresh-faced man in his late twenties who had just started at the morgue a week before and had never witnessed the scene antics of either detective, looked between them now in utter confusion and a smidge of disgust. “I’ve got a dead body here.”
“We can see that.” Detective Jackson took a step back and cocked his head to the left. “He’s dead from this angle, too.”
The ME sighed. “Would you two hi-freakin’-larious assholes leave me to work, please?”
Detective Craig, amused that the ‘please’ had been uttered after the world ‘asshole’, could only grin and jerk his thumb towards the edge of the scene. Detective Jackson followed him, and as soon as they were both a few feet away, they laughed. Detective Craig managed to calm down first. “We should probably take this seriously.”
“Of course we should.”
“It’d be terrible of us to laugh over a guy who lost half his head.”
“It would.” Detective Jackson glanced back at the body. “Did you see the other half of his head anywhere? Was it splattered on a wall?”
Detective Craig glanced back down the alley and squinted as he thought. “You know, I don’t think I saw any splatter.”
“Secondary crime scene?”
“We were tiptoeing around a pool of blood, so I’m going to say no.”
Detective Jackson shoved his hands into the pockets of his pants and whistled through this teeth. “Well, shit.” The way he said it, elongating the ‘i’, it came out more like ‘she-it’. “Hey, Bones?”
“Yeah, Jim?”
“We may be fucked.”
“That we may.”
*
Now is the time in the story, that particular time before the story has really gone anywhere worth reading, that there is a pause to explain the characteristics of the detectives and to also explain why it is perfectly fine for them to be making Star Trek [all rights reserved] references while standing over the body of a man who has half his skull missing entirely, and not just splattered in small pieces on an alley wall.
Detectives, as a rule, are very sick people. Not sick like ‘going to stab you and leave you dead’ sick, but sick as in they do a job that can be, at times, fucking disgusting and degrading and make them feel very much like they want to peel off their skin, scrub it with one of those old-time washboards, and slip it back on after it’s dried on the back line for a day or so. Thanks to this feeling, they find ways to relieve tension that may seem crude and low brow to other people—like joking about a dead guy who is missing half his head. This is, in fact, quite the normal reaction that a person, when dealing with death on a regular basis, will have to a man missing half his head.
Now that the terrible, sick humor of the detectives has been properly explained, it’s time to take a look at the detectives.
Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson are both men of high-calibar intelligence. Their disturbing sense of humors aside, they are smart, capable, and very good at their jobs. They also like their job very much. This is an incredibly important trait to have if you look at dead bodies all day. Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson are not as lily-white and WASPish as their names appear. Stanton is a lovely man the same color as an Almond Joy bar [minus the coconut], and Devin is the same olive-skinned tone as Ravi Kapoor, a lovely Indian man with a British accent who plays an ME on television. If you’ve not seen his work, you really must. Together, Stanton and Devin [or Dectective Craig and Detective Jackson if you prefer] are quite the team. They have worked together for an indeterminate amount of time, and they quite enjoy each other’s company. [If you feel unsure to this fact, please reread from the first line to the first asterisk. It should clear up any confusion.]
All other interesting character tidbits shall be revealed as the story carries on, and so it will now continue.
*
The ME, whose name Stanton and Devin still didn’t know, walked over to their little corner of the scene after ten minutes, and pronounced their body dead.
“You must have graduated top in your class to figure that out so quickly.”
The ME, his badge said ‘Dr. Larry Eppes’ [not that Stanton or Devin noticed], gave Devin a withering the look that reminded Devin strongly of his fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Kepler. She’d called him a ‘dirty Hindu’, and he’d thrown a rock at her at recess. They’d had a very tumultuous relationship. “You’re kind of a dick.”
“The word they use now is ‘detective’.” Devin grinned. The ME glowered. Stanton stepped in before Devin ended up missing half of his skull.
“Cause of death?”
The ME switched his glower to Stanton, obviously deciding that if one of them were evil, the other must be as well. “He’s missing half of the back of his skull. And half of his brain, as a matter of interest. The other half is there and in perfect condition, but it looks like someone deliberately took off with the left side of his brain.”
Devin, having decided that he’d played a total asshole long enough, asked an actual question. “You’re telling me that someone *deliberately* cut out the left side of the guy’s skull, cut out the left side of his brain, and left everything else *intact*?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. There aren’t any other wounds to the body.”
Stanton’s eyebrows shot up and made his forehead furrow. “No other wounds? At all?”
“Nope.”
“Not even anything minutely defensive?”
“Not even that.”
“That,” Stanton declared like a man about to open a great speech, “is severely fucked.”
“That,” Devin added as Dr. Larry Eppes nodded along, “is exactly what I just said to you.”
Before Stanton could correct Devin [he’d said they might be fucked, not that the situation as a whole *was* fucked], a uniformed officer walked over and interrupted with a grimace and a gesture towards a small apartment building two buildings down from the alley. “I’ve got a woman who says she saw something, but she won’t tell me what.”
Devin and Stanton shared a look, glanced at the apartment building, and quickly thew out a round of rock, paper, scissors. Devin got paper. Stanton chose scissors. Devin cursed. “Goddamnit.” He looked at the uniformed officer. “Let me talk to her.” He followed the uniformed officer like a dog going to the back room of the pound and left Stanton with the ME.
“What was that?” When Stanton gave him a look the ME made a motion like he was about to initiate rock, paper, scissors.
“Oh, that.” Stanton gestured to the apartment building with a bored wave of his hand. “High maintenance witness. She knows that something big went down, and she also knows that the uniformed officer isn’t in charge. She thinks she has something that’s going to get her on the news in her curlers and bathrobe, and she wants to talk to someone more important than the poor bastard in the car with the cool lights. I hate them, Devin hates them, and we’d rather farkle for it than have a big fight in the street about whose turn it is to put up with a glory hound old lady with fuzzy slippers and four cats.” Stanton clapped the ME on the shoulder and finally looked at his nametag. “Tell me, Dr. Larry, what else should I know about our half-headed body?”
*
The lady in the apartment building only owned three cats. They were all short hairs, fixed, and knew better than to jump on the kitchen counters. Devin found out all of this before he could even start asking questions. The lady was older but not quite elderly, and she was obviously fond of the sound of her own voice.
“Pickles was the one who was at the window when the noise started. He started tapping at the window like he wanted to go out, but I don’t let them out. They’re indoor kitties. They don’t even have their back claws.”
Devin reflexively curled his hands into fists. During the days of his somewhat misspent youth, he’d pissed off the wrong guys and gotten a fingernail pulled out for his dicking around. He’d since vowed to never declaw an animal, and to always keep his thumbs tucked into the palms of his hands. “Ma’am, did you go to the window to see what Pickles saw?” That was, he decided, the stupidest question he’d ever asked in the line of duty, and he’d spent two years asking guys in swerving cars if they’d been drinking.
“I didn’t at first. He likes to play at the window a lot, so I thought that there was a bug outside or something, but then I remembered that the lamp on the front stoop had burned out, and that there was no reason for there to be bugs by the window. That’s when I got up and looked.”
That, Devin decided, was a very roundabout way of saying ‘yes’. “And what did you see, Ma’am?”
“I saw someone lead a man into the alley across the way, and a little while after that only one person came out of the alley. I didn’t see a second person, and I sat at the window for awhile. Snowy and Bruce sat with me, but Pickles decided he would rather have something to eat. He stole the ham right out of the sandwich I’d been making when he first started mewling at the window. He was a bad kitty.” The lady bent down and shook a finger at the pure gray cat that was lounging on the ottoman. “You’re a bad kitty, Pickles.”
Devin considered asking how ‘Bruce’ had gotten away with a slightly reputable name as opposed to Pickles and Snowy, but he decided that staying on course would probably be better. It would sure as hell get him out of the apartment a lot more quickly. “Ma’am-“
“My name’s Ida Telborn. You never asked for it, you know.”
Devin was mostly certain that he had asked for it, but when he glanced down at his notebook, he didn’t see any reference to it at all. “I apologize. It’s been a long night.”
“That’s no excuse for bad manners.” Ida Telborn squinted her eyes behind her glasses and sized up Devin in one quick, assessing nod. “Of course, you people aren’t particularly polite to begin with.”
‘You people’ was a phrase Devin Jackson heard pretty often in his line of work. Although, unlike other cops, it wasn’t because he was a cop. Devin Jackson was Indian-the kind that came from India-and ever since the assholes in the planes had ruined the New York skyline, no one could tell him from anyone else who’d ever lived in a slightly dry climate outside of the United States. The most annoying thing about it was that he was, in fact, a full-out American citizen. His mother’s parents had immigrated before his mother was born, and he’d been born in a Catholic hospital right in the middle of the city. He couldn’t have been more American born and raised if he’d had blue eyes, blonde hair, and an apple pie in his hands. Of course, that was exactly the problem. He was *supposed* to have an accent. For some reason, it made the bigots feel safer if the people they didn’t like couldn’t speak unaccented English, but Devin Jackson, having grown up in the city and grown up with parents who’d spoken perfect English, only had the accent of a Northwest boy who’d lived the last twenty years on the South side of town. There wasn’t a hint of foreign in him, except for his skin color.
“Ms. Telborn,” Devin decided to ignore the ‘you people’ remark and pretend like she’d been talking about the cops, “did you see anything else?”
Ida Telborn squished her face together by wrinkling her nose, pursing her lips, and furrowing her eyebrows over his nose. She resembled a particularly ugly head of cabbage. “There was a car on the corner that I didn’t recognize. I don’t know what type it was, but I know the shape of every car on the block, and the shape was all wrong. It was very low to the ground, and it looked shiny. Another car drove by and the headlights made a reflection on the wheels. It was very bright. Scared the dickens out of Bruce.”
“Anything else?” Devin sincerely hoped not. He wanted out of the apartment as quickly as possible. Pickles had started twining around his legs, and Devin wasn’t interested in making friends with the cat of a woman who either disliked the police or anyone who had a not-quite-similar but not-quite-different skin tone from a terrorist.
“I think that’s it.” Ida Telborn unsquished her face by relaxing her nose, lips, and eyebrows and reached down to scoop up Pickles from between Devin’s legs. “Did I help?” And for just a moment, she seemed to sincerely care about what they’d been talking about inbetween stories of the cats.
Devin, never one to take away hope from crazy old ladies with three cats, closed his notebook and gave her his best professional smile. “You’ve given me more information than I’ve gotten from anyone else.” He didn’t mention that he hadn’t talked to anyone else. He was pretty sure that would ruin the moment.
“Well, good.” Ida Telborn walked Devin to the door and opened for him after fiddling with the chain. “Goodnight.” She closed the door as soon as Devin stepped through.
Devin listened to the sounds of the locks sliding into place and gave the uniform who’d dragged him over a wry smile. “Very nice lady. Crazy, with cats, but nice.”
The uniform, who’d worked with Devin before, grinned and jabbed a finger into Devin’s chest. “I call bullshit.”
“That’s a good call to make.” Devin gave the uniformed officer a friendly pat on the back and left him to finish questioning the other residents in the building. If there was an upside to dealing with Ida Telborn, other than getting a little information, it was knowing that the next high-maintenance witness got to go to Stanton. And Stanton had even less of a tolerance for attention whores than he did. Devin stepped onto the stoop and found Stanton at the bottom of the stairs, fingers twitching around the left pocket of his suit jacket. Stanton also seemed to have a low tolerance for waiting until Devin came out of the building. “Need something?”
“A cigarette.” Stanton clenched his hand a few times before shoving it into his pants pocket. “Why’d I quit smoking?”
“Because they cost a fortune.” Devin decided not to point out the cancer angle. Stanton, in the cigarette craving mood that he was in, was sure to dislike any mention of what cigarettes were capable of doing to him. “You missed a good time up there. I think you should go up and have a nice long talk with Ida Telborn. I don’t think she’ll like you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Stanton rocked back on his heels and tried not to think about the cigarette he had stashed in the glove box in the car. “And what about me would be so offensive?”
“You’re one of those colored folks. I’m pretty sure you’d make her piss down both legs.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes you deserve to piss down both legs.”
Devin grinned and flipped open his notebook. “She says she saw two people walk into an alley, and then a little later she saw one person walk out. She also says that there was a low-slung car on the street that shouldn’t belong here.”
“She knows all the cars on the street?” Stanton glanced up and down the block. There were at least three dozen cars parallel parked with varying success on both sides of the street. “She the neighborhood spy or something?”
“Her cat is.” Devin nodded at Stanton’s incredulous look. “The cat was playing at the window, and she looked around to see why he was out the window, and then she and the cats enjoyed a free movie that could probably be called, ‘Two Guys Walk into an Alley, One Guy Comes Out, the Other’s Dead’.”
“Did you capitalize that properly?”
“I did in my head.”
Stanton nodded and jerked a thumb in the direction of the alley. “ME, whose name is Larry Eppes, by the way-“
“Why do I care?”
“Because I care, and you want me happy.”
“Wait? You get happy? When has this happened?”
Stanton, as a last resort to shut him up, smacked Devin on the back of the head. “Are you done?”
Devin rubbed the back of his head for a second before returning the smack by hitting the back of Stanton’s head. “I’m done.”
“Good. As I was saying, Dr. Larry Eppes kindly informed me that our dead guy is named Carey Porman, and that he’s been dead for no more than six hours. The missing half of his brain and skull seem to have been taken very cleanly, and most likely here at the scene.”
“Carey Porman, you said?” Devin had to pat himself down to remember which pocket he’d shoved his pen into after he’d finished with Ida Telborn. He found it in his left pants pocket and clicked the top so that he could write. “Carey like Grant?”
“And Porman with one ‘o’. Do you want to look at the body again, or can I let them take it?”
“Let ‘em have it. I know what the back of his head looks like.”
Stanton turned to his left and flagged down the good Dr. Larry Eppes. “You can take him. Have fun.”
“It’ll be a blast, I’m sure.” Dr. Larry Eppes walked away to get the body off of the ground and into his van.
“Does he seem kind of snide to you?”
Stanton shrugged at Devin’s question. “Maybe we don’t come off as serious about our jobs.”
“I take offense to that.”
“Why?”
Devin seriously considered the question for a few seconds. “You know, I don’t know.”
Stanton sighed, ran a hand over his face and jerked on the back of Devin’s collar. “Come on. Put on your professional face and let’s get the rest of this done.”
*
Now is the time to stop and let you know that nothing of interest occurred in the next two hours and forty-seven minutes. Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson both questioned numerous people who saw either nothing, or a variation of nothing known as ‘nuthin’’. They were also subjected to numerous abuses of the American English grammatical style with uses of the word ‘ain’t’ and with sentences ending on prepositions. These are not sentences that any good writer would allow to be shown to the public, so they will not be seen here. Just be aware that the lack of information gathered at the scene left Detective Stanton Craig and Detective Devin Jackson rather peeved but not particularly angry. It is very rare that anyone rubbernecking at a crime scene has actually witnessed a crime. And if they had, they’d lie. Because that’s what people do. And they should all be terribly disappointed in themselves.
If you're curious, the first chapter is 3,349 words counting title. 2,440 of that was written in an hour last night.
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on 2005-11-01 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-11-04 07:27 pm (UTC)