THE MONKEYSHINES CASE, ENTRY 2

My parking spot was parked in by a vehicle that wasn’t mine when I arrived at the office, and when I questioned Randy about this he shrugged and insisted he took the bus, which was borderline inhuman, both in practice and as a response to a civilized question, so that, along with his agonizingly potent after shave, made him suspect numero uno in my books.

I shook him down a bit about how only filthy liars wore aftershave powerful enough to bring tears to one’s eyes, and he explained that he was jumped by a gang of thieves using cologne as an agent of chaos, befouling the air in order to pickpocket and escape because he lived in an absolutely vile part of the city with the nearest bus stop doubling as a catch-all of all the maniacs who slid through the local psychiatric hospital’s net. I drank my coffee and nodded at the succinctness of my assessment, and into this self-admiring silence Randy abruptly—and, in my opinion, overly coarsely—asked if I had noticed anything peculiar about the offending car on my way in, which I course did not as I was blinded with rage and only made it into the building because I had memorized the steps from lot to door back when I first launched the agency, imagining it coming in handy should I ever be rendered sightless . . . though I imagined said sightlessness to be the result of an attack, not abject fury at some malcontent’s complete and total disregard for parking etiquette. Regardless, I took umbrage at Randy’s suggestion, as well as at the coffee he made and the general insouciance that wafted from his manner like weaponized eau de toilet, and excused myself to engage in some honest-to-goodness detective work.

First off, it was definitely a car of some kind, of that I was certain—a locked car that wore a matte black paintjob so bad it appeared to be sticky to the touch. It wasn’t, at least not until I spilled sugary coffee on it, and upon closer inspection I found there to be a clown sitting awkwardly in the front seat, a clear dummy or disused animatronic held in place by a seatbelt so tightly fastened that it bisected the clown into a leering tilt that would have made me jump were I not a hardened professional who had already jumped at the discovery of said clown, which is both how I spilled the coffee and more information than is necessary for the purposes of this entry.

Secondly, since the moment I stepped outside the office I had been inundated with a feeling of unease, as though a large-bottomed lady smelling of buttermilk and a lifetime of disappointment was threatening to sit on my chest and regale me with stories of near-miss shots at happiness and her endurance of tragedies that were only such because she had obsessed about them to the point where they became totems to begrudge rather than experiences to forget, and traced it to some sort of infrasonic vibrations emanating from the car’s undercarriage. Faced with a technology beyond what I had to that point accustomed myself to, I did what any self-respecting detective would have done in a similar situation and moved my car down a few spots.

Randy called something to me from the doorway as I exited my car, and when I motioned that I hadn’t heard him and that he should go suck a tailpipe with his filthy lying mouth, he went back inside muttering something about this being the very definition of and that was enough for me: I then and there made a mental note to take him down a peg on our company social niceties calendar, which would really limit the quality of Christmas gift he would receive, and hopefully get him to reign in the non sequiturs when I’m knee-deep in the boggy waters of a case.