by S. R. Buckel
That elicited a giggle from June.
“First thing we need to do is figure out who would want to make the poor widow Roger’s a fall girl.”
“Maybe it was someone she’d spurned,” June suggested.
Sprinkle scratched his chin. He hadn’t shaved in two days, and the stubble embarrassed him. ‘You have a clean honest face,’ Mama used to say. ‘Don’t ever cover it up; you’ll look like a little lumberjack.’
“Well, you may be right,” he conceded, “but as for me I don’t believe the poor widow Roger’s is the type to philander.”
“You don’t think anyone is ‘the type,’” June said. “But even if you’re right, someone clearly wanted to make her look guilty, someone with a fetish for toxins and access to the Roger’s home. Probably someone overheard you defending Mrs. Roger’s at the scene.”
“Yes,” Sprinkle chimed in. “I applaud your keen thoughts, my dear. Someone was watching us, of that I’m sure. Tell me, did you notice anyone suspicious?”
“Suspicious how? Red eyes, a sinister curling mustache, a maniacal laugh?”
Like a breath of fresh air, listening to June crack jokes invigorated Sprinkle. He chuckled heartily. “You’re a hoot. But did you see any looky-lous or lurky-lurkers? Maybe someone who was watching us, his peepers darting here and there?”
“No. I didn’t notice any lous or lurkers or darting peepers darting anywhere.”
They sat in silence for several minutes until June spoke up again, with a statement of disturbing relevance.
“Whoever it is means business. Henry, they tried to kill you just to keep you from figuring it out. Wait, how come Mr. Roger’s needed daily untraceable-sized doses of the dendro-stuff to bite the bullet, but I got knocked for a loop just inhaling the stuff once?”
Sprinkle tapped his chin. “I imagine the Dendrobatidae was laced with DMSO. It makes whatever you mix it with a thousand times easier to absorb through the skin.” He chuckled a good healthy chuckle. “I remember the older folks, like my parents, true-blue fuddy-duddies, were afraid the hippies would lace it with their LSD and paint it on doorknobs to get the old folks high. But that was just a bupkis idea; no way the hippies would waste their acid like that.”
“Henry?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you do a lot of drugs when you were young?”
It was croaking wild idea. Henry J Sprinkle had never so much as smoked a cigarette. He shook his head, a bit miffed that his dolly even felt the need to ask.
“What if they’re watching us right now?” June continued, switching focus without warning in the way only women and computers can. “Are we even safe here? I mean, the killer could be anybody; they got access to crime scenes; maybe he or she is an EMT. Oh God, I—”
“Calm down, my dear,” Sprinkle reached out, fumbled over a sheet, and took her hand, giving it a firm squeeze. “We are alive, the sun is shining, and we have our wits about us, yes?”
He felt her nodding.
Then she released a nervous-sounding giggle. “You know, I’ve never seen you with a beard. Maybe . . . er, maybe you shouldn’t grow one. I mean, you don’t really need one, is what I mean.”
“Ah, the lady speaks the truth. I’ll run on home and plow the field, then get straight to work on our theories.” He stood to leave.
“Oh no,” June intervened. “I hate the idea of you wandering Philicity on your own.”
“I have the pingster,” Sprinkle pointed out.
“And I suppose you think that little gizmo is as useful as me?”
Just then footsteps interrupted. A manly voice followed the sound of the footsteps, originating from roughly six feet higher. “Good, you’re up.”
“Yes, I am up,” June responded with a dash of petulance. “I’ve been up for awhile now, in point of fact. Who are you supposed to be?”
More footsteps. “I am Doctor Mayfair. I’ve been overseeing your care since they brought you in. I’m going to check your vitals, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind,” June said in her ‘don’t touch me’ tone. “My vitals are just as I like them: mine.”
“June,” Sprinkle said “does he look Johnny-on-the-nose?” In other words: Does he look like a real doctor, or does he have the look of a man who dabbles in poison and murder?
“Hmm, he’s a tall drink of chocolate malt with a side of beefsteak and a frank mug of beer.”
Sprinkle nodded. They used shorthand whenever he wanted to get the measure of a man he’d never met, just to ease his noodle about leaving her in the company of strangers. In their way she’d told Sprinkle that Doctor Mayfair was a tall black man, tending toward muscular, with honest-and-harmless-looking features.
He left June with a promise to return the moment he had any new dope on the case.
Muttered whispers and muffled gobbledygook pelted Sprinkle’s highly attuned ears as he made his way across town. The transducer pinged for seven blocks. Its song became a sixth sense to the man, an extension of his consciousness. Normally it worked just dandy, but these days everyone had a cell phone and many of them tended to babble on while they walked, effectively becoming as blind as Sprinkle.
So he had to endure a couple of spills and several more passing shoulder-bumps.
Eventually he did reach home. Police had cleared it, and the crime scene cleaners had left it smelling of disinfectant and bleach, a harsh aroma that nearly overwhelmed Sprinkle’s sense of smell. He wrinkled his nose and entered.
All the windows were open; the cleaners always left scenes that way, to allow the place to air out. He shivered.
Five steps in, Sprinkle froze.
Someone was inside his apartment. He could sense the presence of a living body clear as day, though its sweat and natural bodily scents were barely detectable beneath the potent stink of bleach. Instead of obeying his first instinct (to run!), Sprinkle stepped inside, feigning ignorance of the interloping intruder—or the intruding interloper. Whichever.
To complete the appearance of ignorance, he set his wallet down on the end table and shuffled over to a curio cabinet sporting a busty drawer and a nice pair of cabriole gams.
As silently as he could, Sprinkle tugged on the overloaded drawer.
Being a pacifist, he did not keep weapons in his abode. But, being a pragmatist, and on June’s suggestion, he did keep a bottle of mace in the apartment.
A gust of wind gusted into the rooms, carrying the scent of intruder on its back and whisking it over to tease Sprinkle’s tender olfactory nerves. He tugged on the drawer again. It opened this time, and without uttering so much as a keening squeak, but when it reached its furthest reach and stopped, he was left to rummage around inside. At length the drawer spilled its guts; the bottle of mace was smooth, surprisingly heavy.
Footsteps. Someone was coming his way.
Sprinkle twisted round, held the defensive measure out, fingers fumbling for the button.
The footsteps stopped.
By the particular squawk the floorboard had made, Sprinkle judged the distance of his unwelcome guest to be about ten feet.
“Who are you?” His hand trembled. Confrontation always gave Sprinkle the heebie-jeebies.
Before speaking, there was a pause, as if the intruder were looking him up and down. Maybe waving his hand around. “You really are blind, aren’t you?” There was laughter in the voice. “That being so, I suppose I should tell you I’m aiming a gun at your face.”
“What kind of gun?”
“What?”
Sprinkle suppressed a grin. He didn’t want to set the man off, just in case his theories here were wrong. “You don’t have a gun.”
“Yes I do.”
“No you don’t,” Sprinkle replied with unwavering certainty. “And here’s how I know. Logic tells me you must be the man who poisoned Mr. Roger’s; I’m too nice a guy and this place is too boring a neighborhood for some knucklehead to randomly stumble into my apartment and claim to be pointing a gun at me. Are you w
ith me so far, knucklehead?”
“Yes, I mean no.”
Sprinkle plowed ahead. “The reason I know you don’t have a gun is because—being the poisoner—if you had a gun, if you preferred the use of guns, you wouldn’t have gone through the hassle of poisoning Mr. Roger’s and attempting to poison me.”
“Maybe it’s personal,” the stranger said. “Maybe I just wanted to make Mr. Roger’s suffer.”
Sprinkle made a show of scratching his chin—not yet de-stubbled—before saying, “Hmm, I don’t buy it.”
“Well buy this, baldy: if you don’t shut up, I’m going to shoot you in your gabbling mouth.”
Though he lowered the mace, Sprinkle kept the nozzle trained straight ahead, where, judging by the tenor and volume of the voice—he knew the intruder to be standing. “Mrs. Roger’s doesn’t even know about you, does she? This wasn’t the action of an angry vindictive wife. She didn’t hire you. You’re just some random bumpkin who gets his jollies off killing easy-peasy prey. Easy-peasy random stranger prey, no less.”
A pause, as if the stranger were picking his shocked thoughts up off the floor. “No. No, that’s not right. Me and Mrs. Roger’s acted as a team. Because we’re lovers.”
“Pfft,” Sprinkle chuckled. “I applaud your attempt at complicity, my dear sir, but the truth is plain as the nose on my face to you. Mrs. Roger’s has never heard of you, and she certainly hasn’t been privy to any lover-type activity with you.” He leaned forward to whisper, “If you really were true-blue lovers, you would have called her Pamela, not Mrs. Roger’s. And by the by, don’t wear cologne when breaking and entering, and don’t don heavy cotton threads; they make you sweat.” Sprinkle raised his arm and pressed the button, spewing a stream of Mace at the unnamed intruder.
Scuffling. A clichéd expletive peppered the air.
Sudden pain bloomed in Sprinkle’s left cheek. He dropped the Mace to place his hand against the tingling half of his mug. In the next ten seconds three odd things happened: Sprinkle was shoved to the carpet, Sprinkle felt the heat of an unfamiliar body and the familiar feel of heavy leather, and Sprinkle realized he could identify this strange stranger—if he survived the encounter, that is.
“You won’t kill me,” Sprinkle cried, hoping his words were more than just hopes dressed up as certainties. “Not with your hands. You’re a poisoner.”
Hot breath caressed his buggered cheek, smelling of tuna fish and something even more offensive.
“Doesn’t matter,” the stranger with the offensive breath said. Sprinkle cringed. “You can’t identify me in a lineup, Mr. Sprinkles. So I don’t have to kill you.” Weight and breath and body heat eased as the stranger stood up. The man spat on Sprinkle.
Laughter filled the apartment for seventeen seconds. Then the door opened and a voice said, “Good luck finding me.”
Weariness creeping in, Sprinkle slowly clambered to his feet.
In the sudden quietness and by the sweat-and-cologne-free air, he knew he was alone. He sped over to the door, slammed it shut, and threw the latch. His breathing was a ragged squeezebox gasping for every last morsel of breath it could get, just to sing that one final note.
The strange stranger was right; Sprinkle didn’t have a hope of identifying the man—not visually, anyway.
When he could breathe again without sounding like a popped bagpipe, Sprinkle took a Stroll. Here, in his own little corner of the world, he didn’t need the pinging transducer. He simply strolled. As he strolled, Sprinkle recited every detail and nugget of information he had gleaned concerning the intruder during his monologue. It had been a gamble, but, he believed with all his abused heart, that it had been a gamble worth taking, was conversing with the intruder ad nauseum.
At length he completed his stroll and sank into the embrace of his sofa.
Sprinkle smiled.
“They say the worst thing you can do as a criminal, is show your mug,” he explained to the assembled officers at the station the next day. He held up a finger. “But, my pops always said ‘the worst mistake a criminal can make is to open his mouth and speak.’ And I got this guy to speak, dang nabbit.”
Several flatfoots chuckled. Sprinkle didn’t hear any of the dame cops give off rude chuckles, or even discourteous guffaws. No, these were classy dame cops.
“What can you tell us about this guy?” Detective Brown asked.
Sprinkle was about to reveal his cool-hand when he heard a familiar and diabolical sound fill the station: the mirth of his nemesis, Ishmael. It was unmistakable as nails on a chalkboard, as horrible as those wailing sirens that announce the approach of tornadoes.
“Ishmael?”
Ishmael’s unique sauntering footsteps stopped. “Hello, candyman.”
“What are you doing stinking up the joint?”
Foul cigarette-flavored breath wafted beneath Sprinkle’s nose as Ishmael said, “It seems some pathetic loser killed himself last night in his cell. I’m here to collect the body.”
Horrible as that was, Sprinkle couldn’t help but wonder if this was no incidental accident.
The station had fallen silent. Everyone here knew of the Sprinkle/Ishmael rivalry, though not of its origins.
“What’s eating you, chrome-dome?”
Sprinkle said, “A man attacked me last night in my apartment.”
“Oh?” Ishmael sounded neither terribly surprised nor deeply concerned. “And who would bother attacking a blind fatty such as yourself, when there are so many lovely girls to harass, just hanging about?”
Sprinkle leaned forward. He grinned, puffed his chest out (it still didn’t exceed the outward protrusion of his belly, which was a smidgen rolly-polly if he was being honest with himself). “It was the man who killed Mr. Roger’s,” he declared, practically strutting his tail feathers. “Beat me daddy eight to the bar, and stick that in your pipe, you pessimistic pessimist.”
“Okay.” Sneakers squealed, telling Sprinkle that his nemesis was turning to leave.
He thrust out his arm to where he believed Ishmael’s arm to be, but latched onto air instead. “Wait. Aren’t you shocked, stunned, and surprised?”
“No.”
All his hot-diggity-dog feelings from a moment ago vanished, sunken under the weight of Ishmael’s ambivalence.
“But . . . but you were certain it was the poor widow Roger’s who’d done it. Now you find out it was some traveling scumraker and you couldn’t care less or be less surprised? What gives? I don’t understand.” He paused to try and reclaim a normal pulse. “You . . . you, you were so certain-curtains about her guilt that you nearly had me convinced!”
A rough pat on the back accompanied Ishmael’s chortle. “Poor, blind, bald Hank. You don’t get it. Never have.”
Pompous footsteps, heading away; Ishmael was leaving.
“Understand what?” Sprinkle demanded, nearly shouting.
A few seconds passed. Sprinkle thought his nemesis had departed, but then a vile odor filled his territorial bubble, and cigarette-flavored breath wafted around his head. “You don’t understand,” Ishmael whispered “that I-just-don’t-care-either-way. I assume everyone is guilty. In the rare cases when I am wrong, I simply go about my day, undisturbed. That is what separates you and me.”
Sprinkle could hardly breathe.
Ishmael continued. “In your little sprinkly brain you actually believe the world to be comprised of puppy dogs and hugs, a happy planet where everyone is nice—and boring. But the truth is, people kill puppy dogs—”
Sprinkle gasped.
“—and the only reason they hug is to facilitate stabbing you in the back.”
Like an executioner haunted by the talking heads of the executed, Sprinkle was forced to endure the derisive laughter of the only man in the world he hated.
Fortunately there was no time to linger over his psychological beating; Sprinkle needed to fill the police in on his discovery. Within two minutes he had Detective Brown’s group standing at attention again. Sprinkle
was no fool. He understood most of these officers were simply humoring him. Too many times had he overheard the whispers, the sniggers, the loser/sneezes behind cupped hands to remain ignorant of other men’s views on Henry J Sprinkle.
But he had a job to do here. Only a self-important dolly-woggle would allow himself to indulge in even a moment of self-pity when lives were at stake.
“The strange stranger I tussled with smelled of Aqua Velva and had a penchant for tuna fish. And not just an occasionally hankering, but a full-on addictive craving; the stink permeated him as if he swam with fishes, and not in a convenient-for-us way, either. He was decked out in a heavy leather jacket, long, reaching down to his mid-thigh. I’d guess our neighborhood poisoner has a bit of a body-heat-loss problem. He didn’t leave any clues at my apartment,” Sprinkle took a breath. “So, we can safely assume he is familiar with crime scenes and crime scene procedures, elsewise he would have left something behind.”
“Elsewise?” one of the guys mocked.
Then the man made a pained grunting noise, and Sprinkle deduced that one of the dame cops had elbowed him a good one in the ribs.
He continued. “The odd oddity did not speak like a cop; I believe we can safely deduce that our dog is a crime scene cleaner. His cabinets will be filled with cans of tuna. His closet with cleaners and a long leather jacket. His garage or basement or hopefully-not-so-cleverly-hidden hideaway room will contain a coterie of South American dart frogs and various tinctures of poison.” He crossed his arms and cocked his head, letting Detective Brown know he was done, and that everyone should be most impressed.
Pindrops.
“You can’t know he’s a crime scene cleaner,” the same man who’d been ribbed said.
Sprinkle had heard the dismissive comments before—and so had Detective Brown. Fortunately the good gumshoe knew better than to dismiss Sprinkle on mere ridiculous premises and theories.
Two hours later they arrived at their second crime scene cleaner residence. The first had been a bust, just a creepy old creep with a fetish for cats.
A gentle breeze carried on its shoulders the aroma of freshly mown grass. The breeze was too gentle to help alleviate the unseasonably warm April morning. Sprinkle suspected—judging by the occasional whispered complaint of the heat and humidity—that he was the only one decked out in appropriately comfortable threads. One of the officers led him up creaky porch steps, panting, and told him to ‘Stand here and wait’ while others knocked on the door.