273. Gunsmoke

Gunsmoke tickled his nostrils as the smell of death slowly filled the room.

The damping hole in her head actually improved her looks, the cop that found her on the floor in an expensive pink dress would claim. Chuck Napier agreed. The gal had fallen hard from the ugly tree. Didn’t mean she deserved a bullet through the head, though. If only she hadn’t stuck her nose in his business.

He hadn’t noticed her when a money transaction had ended with three stiff Dagos in a dimly lit New York alley. No looks meant no husband. And no husband spelled no money. So she started blackmailing him. Putting the screws on Chuck Napier, page one detective and famed consultant to the NYPD.

“What would the public think about you dabbling with the mob?” she had asked.

The public. Not the police. She knew he was hardened enough to endure a couple of years in Sing Sing. But he would never cope with negative copy in the Examiner.

For two years he paid her off with ten-dollar bills in a brown envelope in an anonymous post box. By year three she was asking for hundred-dollar bills and Charles Napier wasn’t planning on indulging her greed any more.

Luckily an ugly girl’s weakness was easy to spot. When he shot her through the head the potatoes were boiling on the stove and the roast she’d prepared all day was nearly done. The dinner table was laid out beautifully with her best plates and two burning red candles. The only thing she’d messed up was her dress. Blue dots were hardly fitting for a first date.

For the first time since she started blackmailing him, Chuck Napier took pity on her.

“I bet you’d look good in pink, gal,” he told the corpse.

 

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258. When the genius fucks up

“When the genius fucks up, that’s when I step in,” she told me.

Her workplace was an insignificant nook of Scotland Yard, hidden between the broom closet and the exit sign. It contained an ugly grey desk, a dial telephone, an early nineties computer and a wall of dusty filing cabinets. For 23 years she had been the Yard’s best kept secret. Now, she was about to blow the lid off its most famous consulting detective.

 

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228. The letter broke off abruptly after the words ‘I love you’

The letter broke off abruptly after the words ‘I love you’, depriving detective Snodgrass of his only clue in the grisly murder case.

Sarah Pembrooke had been slaughtered, there was no other word for it. Not a drop of blood was left in her mangled body. The crimson liquid had oozed from her wounds, seeping into the Australian chestnut of her bedroom floor. The stickiness reminded Snodgrass of the time he had spilt a bottle of maple syrup on the kitchen floor as a boy. Her blood almost smelt as sweet as well, he thought.

The police photographer’s flash evoked images of what had happened here. Sarah Pembroke, a high-class prostitute had brought a client to her apartment. They had fucked. He had cummed in her every orifice. And then he had butchered her with a hacksaw. Bluntly, yet meticulously, like a toddler removing pieces from a wooden puzzle.

Every trace had been carefully expunged. Fingerprint were wiped and there wasn’t a hair follicle to be found in the entire apartment. As for the semen he had dumped in his victim, he had poured bleach all over it, assuring no DNA would be uncovered. The whole crime scene was one giant ‘fuck you’ to the police.

Which made it all the more puzzling that he had left the letter, written by a woman in love to one of her clients. A person she named, but whose identity was removed by a frustrating rip in the paper. Snodgrass grazed the rip but was surprised by its sharpness, which extracted a drop of blood from his thumb. The drop clung to the edges of the rip for a second, then rolled along the paper.

Right to left.

Snodgrass smiled.

Fuck the killer’s games. There always was a clue.

He was left-handed.

 

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124. The lunar detective

The lunar detective woke up with a hangover. They seemed worse here than on Earth. Must be something to do with the smaller gravitational pull. Luckily they still weren’t quite bad enough to stop drinking altogether.

The cell-phone on his bedside table contained forty-two messages. The detective erased them all with one click of his thumb. He seldom listened to his boss, who had never even set foot on the Moon.

They did things differently here compared to Earth. Even the murders.

Especially the murders.

The latest one was a prime example. The knife of the assailant had pierced the suit of his victim in the abdominal area. The suit immediately decompressed, causing the victim’s blood to boil. It was a gruesome death but one all too common in Lunaville.

The town was originally conceived as the ultimate hang-out for the rich and powerful but the barren Moon surface hadn’t proved enticing. So the government had turned Lunaville into a prison colony. A home to murderers, rapists and criminal embezzlers. They were allowed to roam freely, in the safe knowledge they had no place to go. And if they decided to wipe each other out, that was fine as well.

The lunar detective knew he was merely an elaborate excuse to give the appearance of law and order, as did the criminals. There was an understanding between them, an uneasy truce. If the murders weren’t too elaborate, he’d let them slide. If they were, there’d be hell to pay.

A knife in a belly was considered acceptable by both parties. The detective would check out the crime scene, make a report and that would be it. Some would consider it a cushy job. God knows he did.

As long as Earth kept sending regular supplies of whisky.

 

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114. An open and shut case

“An open and shut case, don’t you think?”

The consulting detective had only been on the crime scene for two seconds when he uttered those words. It wasn’t the first time he’d said them but he’d never said them this soon.

 

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