Vest-Pocket Vocabulary

If you missed the first installment of Mac’s mysterious and grandiloquent Vest-Pocket-Challenge-winning entry, you can find it here.

Warning: the following contains coarse language, sexual innuendo, depressing content and altiloquence. Reader discretion is advised. Please also note, the author takes no responsibility for forensic, medical or police-procedural accuracy.

I looked up. The dumpster was pushed up against the side of a four-storey apartment building. It was possible…

Feeling the familiar adrenaline rush, I launched myself out of the bin, past a startled Edwards and headed around the side of the building.

“Hey!” I heard Enright call after me. “What the hell? Is the body cleared to go to the morgue now or what?”

I turned back to her. “Yeah, sure.” I grinned. “See you at home?”

She snorted, but then she smiled in that way that always reminded me of the fourteen-year-old tomboy who had delighted in finding plump worms with me after the rain.

“Always,” she replied.

Edwards spoiled the moment by interrupting in a querimonious tone, “Are we solving this thing or what?”

I shot him a killer look that he missed because he was punctiliously picking a speck of grime off his Italian suit. Biting off yet another retort, I spun on my heel and headed toward the entrance of the apartment building, knowing Edwards would follow like a dog.

The interior of the building didn’t smell much better than the trash bin, although someone had put a pine-scented air freshener in the entryway. It was a nice thought, but God help the human race when forests smelled like this.

It was a walk-up. Figured. I would have run up those four floors twenty years ago—hell, I’d have taken them three at a time. But I wasn’t twenty-five anymore, and I no longer expected excellence or enthusiasm to be rewarded.

Besides, if I was right I was in no hurry to ruin the peace of the person at the top of the stairs. Edwards, as usual, didn’t have a clue and went clomping up the stairs. He stopped after the first flight. “Where are we going again?”

Not bothering to mention that I hadn’t told him where we were going, I motioned to the top of the stairway. He charged onwards, and I again thought of a dog after a bone.

Four flights later, I joined Edwards—who annoyingly wasn’t even breathing hard—and led him down the hallway lit by a single, naked, valetudinarian light in the ceiling.

At the end of the hallway was the door to the fire escape, propped open by a brick. I stuck my head out the door and looked up—a rickety metal fire escape went all the way up to the roof.

Closing the door again, I searched for the nearest apartment to it. I extended my hand to the knob. It’ll be unlocked. It turned with a little squeak.

Edwards whipped his gun out of its holster. With a swat of my hand I pushed the thing down and glared at him. He shrugged and slipped it back into its holder. We both stepped back and I knocked loudly.

It took a couple of raps, but finally a bleary-eyed man opened the door. “What is it?”

Edwards and I showed him our badges and his shoulders slumped. He knew before we even said it. He’d always feared this.

“Where did you find her?”

“In the dumpster out back,” Edwards answered.

“Is she all right?”

I looked at Edwards. He looked at me. I shook my head.

“My wife…” The man stuffed his fist into his mouth to stifle a wail. “She sleepwalks. Usually just to the roof. She jokes that her subconscious likes to camp out.”

“Are there any railings on the roof to prevent…” I searched for the right words, but he knew what I meant.

“No,” he whispered. “I thought…she might walk into traffic, a car…but off the roof?” This time he didn’t try to restrain the sob that shook his entire body.

In the face of such grief, of such frailty, I felt so redundant, useless. “She likely walked off the edge of the roof and fell face-first into the garbage bin. Still unconscious, she must have suffocated on the plastic bags…. I’m sorry for your loss.” It was an empty offering, but it was all I could give him.

Edwards, thankfully, seemed as at a loss as I was.

We explained the rest—that he had to go identify the body, do the paperwork. Then he would be alone to find solace in whatever ritual of death gave him the most peace.

As we left him, broken and keening, I found my own solace in hoping he was a questmonger. Maybe he’d get something out of the owners of this dump.

“I guess you win this one, man,” Edwards said. “You want to celebrate with a beer?”

Much as my soul needed to be refocillated with a stiff drink, this felt far from a victory. “Rain check. Maybe Bob left out some pot roast for you.”

Edwards’ eyes lit up. “Yeah, good thinking! See ya tomorrow, partner.” With a wave and a lightness to his step that I envied, he was off in the direction of home.

I headed the opposite way, thinking of a strange feature of sleepwalking. Like those of the dead, its victims’ eyes stayed open, seeing nothing.

I went home to Sally.

THE END

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If you missed the first installment of Mac’s gritty yet florid Vest-Pocket-Challenge-winning entry, you can find it here.

Warning: the following contains coarse language, sexual innuendo, depressing content and altiloquence. Reader discretion is advised. Please also note, the author takes no responsibility for forensic, medical or police-procedural accuracy.

Yes, I live that close to the corner of Drug Deal and Hooker Heaven. Cops get paid shit, and when you’re called at 3 in the morning to eyeball blood and gore, it’s convenient to be close to the action.

Edwards lives in the area, too, although mostly because he’s a sorner and this is where is his current victim domiciliates. Though he’d been with Bob now for over three months—a diuturnity for Edwards—so it was either love or the fact that the 300-pound biker kept his fridge stocked with Bud and cooked like a 1950s housewife. Complete with the Jell-O moulds. Edwards liked things that jiggled. Maybe that’s why he was still with Bob.

I decided to walk to the crime scene. It would take less time than having to find a parking spot where it was safe to leave my car without it getting jacked. Sad that in this part of town my 1997 Chevy is more valuable than me. Besides, anyone walking on 42nd at 3 a.m. was probably packing. And I was.

I made it to her before Edwards. The crime scene guys were already gone—they lived in the suburbs and finished real quick when they were down here—just Sally Enright, the ME, was still there. Though judging by her stance—crossed arms, hip thrust out to one side, foot tapping out a rapid tattoo—she was none too happy to be kept waiting. Beside a dumpster, no less.

She saw me. The foot sped up. “There you are, you pompous breviped. What the fuck took you so long?”

“Oh, Sally, you malapert fizgig. Despite your uberous flattery, there will be no naked grubbling with you tonight. Alas, duty calls.”

“Thank heaven for small mercies. You couldn’t find my tits with the lights on.”

“You may not be well endowed, Sally, but my desire for you is immarcessible.”

“Right back at you, witling.”

I gestured to the vic. “What’s her story?”

“I can’t give you much more than you already know—female, youngish, probably suffocated then dumped in the trash, TOD within the last six hours. No ID.”

I put on a pair of latex gloves and climbed into the rusted metal bin. The stench of rotting food and piss filled my nostrils as I waded into the filth. Some of the trash was in an assortment of colored plastic bags, some of it was just strewn loosely about in various stages of decay. Good thing I hadn’t dressed for the occasion, I thought as I tossed a milk carton out of my path.

From what I could see, neither had the vic. She was wearing some sort of flimsy silk dress that barely covered her ass and was held up with thin spaghetti straps. Either the crime scene guys or Enright had flipped her over onto her back, her eyes staring forever at the stars, arms and legs akimbo, feet bare.

I crouched close to the body and picked up her fingers, examining the nails—clean. “No sign of a struggle,” I called out to Enright. “Probably knew her attacker.”

“Or was too high to notice.” Edwards poked his head over the side of the trash bin barely holding on to it with his gloved fingertips. “Like I said, drug related.”

“No clear evidence of drug use—no track marks,” I argued.

He shrugged. “So she took a pill. Maybe she injected between her toes. Come on, man, look at her. She ain’t no soccer mom.”

I could have pointed out that even soccer moms were known to shoot up. I should have torn a strip off of him for staying on the other side of the dumpster, passing down his judgment on the victim from on high. But I’d long since learned that a policy of pauciloquy was best with Edwards. With his unfailing arrogance, it was wasted breath. And it was far more satisfying just to prove him wrong.

Turning my back on him, I bent down to gently press her eyes closed. As my hand trailed over her mouth, I noticed the bright pink plastic clinging to her lips like a kiss.

To be continued…

Stay tuned for “Open and Shut” part 3.

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I know you can’t wait to read Mac’s chilling and circumfloribus Vest-Pocket-Challenge-winning entry, so without further ado here it is.

Warning: the following contains coarse language, sexual innuendo, depressing content and altiloquence. Reader discretion is advised. Please also note, the author takes no responsibility for forensic, medical or police-procedural accuracy.

People always choose the most inconvenient time to die. Or more accurately where I’m concerned, people’s bodies are always found at the most inconvenient times.

The call came just as I was putting the finishing touches on my latest masterpiece of xylography—a flammivomous dragon, whelming his exitious, burning breath over a jimp knight.

Jaunty though he was, the knight was a tragic figure. Heroic in his brave fight against a larger opponent with considerably more firepower—literally, in this case—his shield was nonetheless almost to the ground, his eyes already closed so that his last glimpse would not be of the hideous, nefandous form of the dragon.

Most people don’t get that choice. At least the ones I see, anyway. When I get to them, their eyes are always open. As if in their shock at being murdered they couldn’t even choose the simplest defense against their killer. And so it’s his image that they see last—his victory, their defeat.

Most rookies are bothered by the blood, the smell, the injustice. Not me. My regret has always been that I cannot give them that xenium and close their eyes to the horror. Not even after it’s too late for them to care.  In the end it’s a bald luskish guy in the morgue that finally sews their eyes shut to this hell as he washes their ket into the gutter. This one would be no different.

At the phone’s insistent ring, I put down the piece of wood with a sigh. By now I’d learned not to let sudden noises cause me to yawl or make my hands jump and ruin a centuplation of hours of work. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to replace the simple solidity of wood with the medium of modernity.

I answered the phone with a curt: “Who died?”

A nidorosity was my partner’s greeting. “Ugh, sorry, dude. What can I say, Bob makes a mean pot roast.” He paused to take a swig of something—no doubt some watered-down taplush. “They’ve got a DB for us. Female, late twenties to late thirties, looks like a suffocation. 43^rd and 2^nd—ten to one drug-related.”

He didn’t need to eclaircize; that area was Grand Central for drug deals. Still his conclusion irked me. Detectives were zetetics, their job by definition was to search, question, seek answers. Assuming the obvious obnubilated the clues that lead to justice. But Edwards wasn’t about justice; he was about expediency. Unfortunately, the justice system was also a bureaucratic system, which meant buzz words like expediency and efficiency were more holy than the truth. And that’s why Edwards was on the fast track to lieutenant and I was on the slow track to early retirement.

Of course it didn’t hurt that Edwards was also a bestselling crime writer and our captain liked having a “celebrity” with a pretty smile to trot out on occasion to the press. In my opinion, his books were hedge-notes filled with cacography and battology. But then, I did have a vocabulary straight out of the vest-pocket dictionary.

Still, even with Edwards’ nonexistent imagination I wasn’t about to challenge his odds on our most recent vic. “See you there in 10.”

To be continued…

Stay tuned for “Open and Shut” part 2 and part 3!

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