An Exaggerated Murder: A Novel

by Josh Cook

  “Not that. All of that … I’ve gotten over.” Max paused and used his right hand to bring down the point. “What if he’s wrong?”

  “But he’s not.”

  “No. He remembers perfectly what he has observed.” Max chopped through his statement with precise hand gestures. “What if he observed someone else’s mistake, or … he read a book that said one thing … three years later another book proves the first wrong. Unless the correction is observed … the mistake is preserved.”

  “And unless you’ve got that new book handy, you’ll never convince him he’s wrong.”

  “It is statistically … improbable.”

  “Thanks, Max. Now I have another thing to be annoyed about when I have debates with Trike.”

  “I aim to please.”

  “Okay, my turn,” Lola said. “I hate it when he quotes things directly. You know me, I love looking stuff up. So every now and again, when I don’t have something else to do, I’ve tracked down some of his sources. And he doesn’t just tell you what the point or the fact is, he actually completely quotes the source material. Word for word. And it’s like, dude, just make your point. You don’t need to remind us yet again, that your brain is a miracle of human biology.”

  “Never checked his sources,” Max said, pulling up in front of Lola’s apartment.

  “You just believe him?”

  Max shrugged. “Don’t care enough— Speak of the devil.”

  Max put the car in park and pulled the vibrating phone out of his pocket and read the text.

  “Huh,” he said.

  “What is it?” Lola asked, unbuckling her seat belt.

  “A text from Trike.”

  “I know that. Jerk. What does it say?”

  “ ‘Someone might have called the police before The Butler. Going to investigate,’ ” Max read.

  He put his phone away. Tapped nervously on the steering wheel. Leaned back in the seat.

  “Weird,” he said. “Too … weird. We should get cracking.”

  “Right,” Lola said, opening the door and getting out of the car. “Good luck, Max,” she said with the door still open.

  “And to you,” he responded.

  Lola closed the door and Max drove off. She slurped her shake finished and threw the cup in the garbage bin on the corner. There was something touching, sweet even, about the mangled pack of cigarettes still in the bin. She unlocked the door and opened it in one fluid motion, thinking to herself, “Now, to unlock the Joyce House.”

  THE SWEATY MESSENGER

  The walls of the police station were smeared with spleen, streaked with pancreas, and dappled with gall bladder. Desktops cluttered with kidneys. In-boxes topped with livers. Tendons tangled on drawer handles.

  Strips of intestines draped over filing cabinets. Muscle tissue decoupaged to white boards. Lung curtains spun on ceiling fans. Limbs scattered on the floor like toys at a preschool. That only included smears, streaks, and dapples reasonably identifiable. Every surface with a certain level of adhesion was an abstract expressionist canvas of human carnage.

  At least that’s how Trike pictured it. Otherwise, the frustration would have made his canthi bleed.

  He had a simple question: Who first reported Joyce’s disappearance? He’d been at the police station for four hours.

  The cops could keep the answer from him if they wanted. Even if it wasn’t The Butler, they could tell him it was and he’d have no logical reason to further investigate. They could tell him he needed a court order to see it. Or they could just tell him it was an anonymous call.

  Instead, he was shuffled from desk to desk. Secretary to secretary. Officer to officer. Up some undefined labyrinthine ladder of rank and permission.

  They showed him a call from the same date ten years ago. Claimed the record had been deleted. Claimed the dispatcher had been suspended for unprofessional conduct. Claimed the computer file had been corrupted. Showed him other calls on the right date. Threatened to arrest him without cause. Threatened to arrest him with reasonable cause; he did raise his voice. Asked him if the Irish had a chance on Saturday. Probably should have arrested him; his gestures got violent. Asked him how the fuck in the physics of Newton’s gravity he got away from Gustav Mace’s assassins. Offered him a stale Danish. Made him show his license.

  Whatever they were doing, they weren’t lying. And if they were trying to put up roadblocks, they were hand-baking the bricks out of imported clay instead of towing in Jersey barriers.

  Four hours.

  Trike was hunched over with both hands on the desk of some temp secretary. His head hung so his chin rested on his chest. He took a deep breath. Tried to forget how kickass a cigarette would be. A cigarette would kick ass.

  A copy of Garner’s Modern Usage poked out of the secretary’s messenger bag.

  Trike said, “Listen, I know you’re a temp making ends meet before the copyediting for the summer season picks up, and I know you were just reading a script someone with a bad sense of prepositions and the power to fire you told you to read, and I’ve heard student loans are a real drag when you’ve got them, but there has got to be—”

  Trike was interrupted by an overweight man in a gray sweat-suit with sweat stains walking up to the desk.

  The Sweaty Messenger said, “Horn-Rims said just let him see it.”

  Trike straightened up. Looked the messenger in the eyes. Eight months, two weeks, and four days ago, Trike had overhead this cop say to another about his new heart medication, “Put my pistol in my pocket, if you know what I mean.” He remembered from the obituary two years and three days ago that The Sweaty Messenger’s father died of a heart attack. And The Sweaty Messenger was clearly not getting the doctor-recommended exercise.

  Trike took The Sweaty Messenger’s hands and held them for a second. He looked into The Sweaty Messenger’s eyes and said, “Two years, three months, one week, and one day from today. Heart attack.” Trike patted him jovially on the shoulder. “At least you’ll dodge the Alzheimer’s that runs in your family,” he added.

  The Sweaty Messenger stammered nothing for a second. Then he stammered, “The dispatch room—”

  “I know where dispatch is,” Trike snapped and stormed off.

  And wouldn’t you know it, the record made things worse.

  There wasn’t a real name in the caller field. Nor was there “anonymous.” Nor was there a typical pseudonym. Nor was there a name of suspicious origin. “Kpmsyjsm Fpr.” Two jumbles of random letters.

  Trike divided his brain into two processes: verbal reasoning and cryptographic analysis.

  Verbal reasoning thought, “There are many reasons why an individual or group of individuals would want to obscure their identity as they report a crime, many of which are legitimate. The concrete in justice’s basement is partially composed of anonymous tips. However, in the legitimate cases, the caller would obviously use the legitimately accepted identity of ‘anonymous,’ and the anonymity is created or preserved. Given that, there is no need for someone with illegitimate reasons for hiding their identity to use any other technique besides the one inherently accepted by the legitimate powers. The path of least resistance makes sense to criminals as well. Unless, of course, the need to obscure the identity arose after the identity was provided in the initial call. In that case, perhaps the record was subsequently hacked and altered. But the moment of altering brings us back to the exact same problem. If you can change the record, you can change it to ‘anonymous,’ or one of the accepted permutations of ‘anonymous,’ or you can even just delete the record. Deletion would raise suspicions, but there would be less substance to be suspicious with. Really anything but random fucking let—” The cryptographic analysis discovered something.

  Trike put his fingers on the keyboard in front of him. Moved his hands one key to the right of home row. The entry was “Jonathan Doe,” with the typist’s hands one letter to the right of home row.

  “I’ll take evil genius any day,” Trike thoug
ht. “Stupidity is undetectable.”

  He just stopped himself from smashing the keyboard to powder with his face.

  “Helluva week to quit smoking,” Trike thought as he stormed out of the police station to go home and drink until he didn’t want to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes at once.

  NEVER OPEN WITH A REFERENCE TO THE BLACK PANTHER

  Trike woke up. Night spent more unconscious than asleep. His hand prospected the clutter around the bed for a cigarette. His brain, eventually, remembered he’d quit. Trike hoisted himself out of bed like the crane was looking forward to the holiday weekend. Another addiction moved the body to the kitchen.

  Someone wanted to scare him. To shock him. To make him scream. To thrust before his bleary eyes the gruesome truth of bodily mortality. To shake his confidence in the ability of law and order to keep him safe from the horrors of unrestrained violence.

  But Trike knew where bacon came from. And blood is water-soluble.

  There was a dead pig on his kitchen floor. Bleeding. A scrap of heavy fabric, with an embroidered message, was stitched to its flesh.

  Trike stepped over the ham-handed threat to the automatic coffee maker and poured a mug of automatic coffee. He leaned against the counter. Considered the pig.

  Dlugaz was the only butcher in the area that sold whole pigs. The pig was still bleeding, so it hadn’t been butchered. At least, not properly. It hadn’t started to smell. The outer edge of the blood seepage was a mere three feet from the carcass. The pig had been dead for at least five hours. Dumped in the last two. The fabric most likely came from a futon cover. The stitching suggested inexperience in the medium augmented by substantial dexterity.

  The note said, “You are the black panther. Next time I won’t hit the pans. Get off The Joyce Case.”

  Trike winced.

  “Hey, why is your door unlocked?” Lola shouted as she walked through the door.

  “The caterers didn’t lock it on their way out.”

  “Trike, the whole spy code thing was never funn—” Lola stopped short when she saw the pig. “What the hell is this?”

  Trike took a long, loud, slow slurp of coffee. “This, Lola,” he gestured with his mug as if someday this could all be yours, “is a dead pig with a lazy Ulysses reference.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Another slurp. “It means our threateners haven’t read the Hades episode yet.”

  “What?”

  Slurp. “If they had, they would have threatened to show up at my funeral in a mackintosh.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Trike shrugged. Threw down the ninth-best slurp of his life. “Not much I can do. Ulysses isn’t for everybody.”

  “Trike!”

  “Mademoiselle?”

  “There’s a dead pig on your kitchen floor.”

  “Blood is water-soluble and I bought a wheelbarrow after the last one. The pig is not a problem.”

  “So, the threat is the problem.”

  “The threat is stupid. One simply cannot react to stupid threats. It only encourages them. Besides, if they wanted to kill me they would have killed me. If you can break into my house and drop a dead pig on my kitchen floor, you can walk into my bedroom and shoot me while I sleep.”

  Nothing Lola could say.

  In a gunslinger’s gasp, Trike chugged the rest of his coffee and slammed the mug down on the counter. He clapped his hands together once and held them out.

  “What?” Lola said.

  “Well. You’re here. So. The blueprints. Records of renovations. Contractors’ contracts. All the weird stuff about the structure of the house.”

  “I couldn’t find anything.”

  “You couldn’t find anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Lola, how could you have not found anything about the house? That shit should’ve been like slipping Poe a cognac-flavored mickey.”

  “Right. Sure. Well, you should’ve heard somebody break into your house carrying a dead pig.”

  “I was in a state of profound contemplation,” Trike responded.

  “You were sleeping off a bottle of cheap port.”

  “Nice try. Alas, the crust on the rim of the port bottle on the floor of the living room you observed required at least four days to solidify. I drank that last week. Seventy-three percent for fun. The observation is commendable, though incorrect.”

  “Thanks. I think. Anyway, according to everything I could find, all the various usual records and documents for the Joyce House don’t seem to exist,” Lola explained.

  “Can’t say I’m a fan of the verb ‘to seem.’ Are you telling me they don’t exist?”

  “No. I’m telling you they don’t seem to exist. I found references to plans and contracts that could have been connected to the Joyce House, but not the plans or contracts themselves. And I found gaps in other records, like in the online archives of a non-profit organization called the Amateur Victorian Restorers of America Association, that seem like something about the Joyce House should be there, but I can’t be sure. The only concrete fact I could find about the house was that the electrical bills are exorbitant. All the other data you’d expect to find about an old house has either been stolen or destroyed, or somehow it never existed in the first place.”

  The muscles in Trike’s face relaxed. His mouth hung open enough to say, “Huh.” His eyes drifted around like he was following a pattern in the wallpaper.

  Lola called the look his data-face. She’d learned that Trike could focus so much of his brain on acts of computation, imagination, and analysis, that he lost control of the muscles in his face. Sometimes she imagined a massive library crossed with a vast biotech research complex specializing in abominations of science, and sometimes she assumed it had to be a bear on a tricycle wearing a fez, riding in tiny circles at the speed of light.

  After 2.3 minutes he said, “The near-impossibility of finding actionable information about the structure of the Joyce House leads to two likely possible explanations for Joyce’s disappearance: either the kidnappers and/or murderers arrived at a moment when the door was open, or Joyce faked his kidnapping.”

  “How do you get to Joyce faking his kidnapping?” Lola asked.

  “Joyce himself has the easiest access to the missing information, and thus, the most ability to make it missing should he choose to, and given the other circumstances, we can only assume that he would choose to make the information disappear to facilitate his own faked kidnapping. As it stands now, we cannot in good conscience rule out the possibility that kidnappers attacked when the secret door just happened to be open, but, given the planted nature of the bloodstain …”

  “Joyce most likely kidnapped himself,” Lola finished.

  Trike data-faced again. Lola gracefully stood.

  “I need you to focus on Joyce himself,” Trike snapped back. “I need everything you can find on him.”

  “Okay. And the pig?”

  “Heavy-duty trash bag, wheelbarrow, car, city dump. Lift with the legs, not the back.”

  “And the blood?”

  “Bucket of soapy water and a mild bleach solution. Nothing easier than cleaning pig’s blood off linoleum.”

  OFFICE COFFEE

  As it sloughed to a stop, the engine coughed like an asthmatic with a loose loogie lounging in the lower lungs. It took a minute of leaning on the door of his car to get the stubborn bastard to allow egress. The door popped open suddenly. Trike combat-rolled to keep his face from bouncing off the asphalt.

  He fixed his trench coat. Looked both ways. Threw the door closed behind him. It bounced off its frame and swung open. He tried to throw it closed again, but it stuck on its hinge, throwing him into the road.

  Trike held the handle up. Leaned his left shoulder on the window and walked the door to the frame. Still leaning into the frame he let the handle go. It clicked victory. “Questions are raised with tenuous answers. Structures are constructed of flimsy materials. Atypical phenomena are l
eft unjustified,” he muttered as he walked into the building.

  “You’re late,” Max said when Trike walked in.

  “I’m always late,” Trike responded.

  “Late … relative to you.”

  “Unforeseen errands, Max, and yes, several hours of unforeseen errands.”

  “And you need a new car,” Max added.

  “Car runs fine, Max,” Trike said, hanging up his trench coat.

  “Then get a new door.”

  “Door works fine, Max. It just has personality.”

  “Doors shouldn’t have personality.”

  “Well, Max, there is just something about a door with personality in a world where doors shouldn’t have personality.”

  “Which is?”

  “Nobody’s hired me to find out. Any messages?”

  “Agent Munday called.”

  “For me or you?”

  “You.”

  “Shit.”

  “There’s good news,” Max consoled.

  “Agent Munday is gay and only asked to meet me for coffee last week because she assumed I was desperately lonely for any scrap of feminine company and thus there are no hard feelings over the blatant stand-up?”

  “No. See Lola?”

  “Yes. And no psychological detecting until I’ve had my coffee.”

  “You drink a pot at home before you get here.”

  “No psychological detecting at the office until I’ve had my office coffee. Ethically, it’s a very simple rubric,” Trike clarified.

  “Entered into the manual. Want the message?”

  “Did you have good news because the message is Joyce Case–related?” Trike asked.

  “Yep.”

  Trike’s right hand covered his mouth. His eyes drifted to the shelf of binders above Max’s head. He came back forty-eight seconds later.

  “We can’t inspect the hidden door and the basement it leads to because that is one of the many places scattered about this nation in which the federal government is growing an imperial fuck-ton of weed.”