Authors: Neal Goldy
All
the lockers inside were painted white, which didn’t add up in D.’s opinion.
White lockers . . . who came up with that idea? The locker room had a long,
narrow hallway that went on for four minutes. Reaching to the end wall, D. found
a massive web of pictures, documents, files, and evidence. It was the plan of a
madman, filled with newspaper clippings of deadbeat crimes and suspicious
killers, maps of the city, and profiles of what D. believed to be some of the
officers in the force. They were plastered everywhere. If you stepped back
enough, a whole web was formed in the shape of an inverted pyramid.
“What
in God’s name?” D. tore off a newspaper clipping. In black bold letters the
headline read: DO OLD PEOPLE LOOK LIKE CHILDREN WITH WRINKLES? The title story
concerned not an event but how old people, during the last years of their
lives, begin to act more and more like children. All of it was based on
scientific studies and the poem, “The Little Boy and the Old Man” by Shel
Silverstein. D.’s mother once read the poem to him. Still, what was it for?
The
date of the clipping read September 23--a few weeks ago. Stepping back, D.
found the web forming from the mind of a man diagnosed with schizophrenia. Large
indented circles looped over and over, darkened from the graphite. In the
center of the web, where in big red letters it read START, there were lyrics to
a song. D. read them. He had heard the song more than once before, a long time
ago, since he listened to 30s and 40s music. Too frequently people thought him
mad to spend his time hearing music targeted for children and bedtime. An old
man hearing such things and people already begin cooking up ideas of
pedophilia. People were control freaks, for the most part. The song, according
to its lyrics, referred to the all-too-famous Boogeyman that scared children in
their sleep. Whoever sent this must have seen similar parallels between the
poem and the web the old detective was glancing at. The description of the
Boogeyman sounded quite odd when he read it, something between a fuzzy bear and
a pedophilic stalker during the night. And the teeth that somehow laughed even
when he wasn’t smiling . . . the man who wrote and sang the song probably
wanted to bring up various ways to stop the devious monster, but it brought
D.’s attention to whether there was a way to stop the lurking shadows that may
or may not be entirely real.
What
did this mean? Was it connected to McDermott in some way, or not at all? Did
this web have a purpose or did it just represent madness? To whom did this
belong to?
D.
took the note and stuffed it in his pocket. He followed one line and continued
on the yarn that made up one-sixth of the web. A note told of a man who was
the chief of the city police force. Huh, that sounded very familiar. No names
were written on the note, but you didn’t need to be a detective to figure it
out.
Red
tape followed the first note onto several branches, and at each he encountered
the tale of the police chief who had a failing marriage. His son, Joe, came out
straight. The police chief decided to never speak to him again because of the blot
he gave to the family name. The only living, breathing thought he had in life
was his job. Day after day, the chief went further into the new case presented
to him. When he read it, he banned the case from anyone’s eyes: he wanted to do
it himself. He was falling apart, and finding the plot of a psychopath was an
easy job to pull his strings back together. As he figured it, the psychopath
wanted to burn down the police station to ashes. He wanted people dead, burned
alive. The chief wouldn’t let that happen, and would put a stop to it.
D., following the story, went up to the
top of the inverted pyramid where all the branches expanded out into multiple
endings. Photos of the chief’s son were there, indicated by a name labeled
below. Others showed his family and journal excerpts from his wife spelling out
abstract messages. The words “KILL”, “CHIEF”, and “DEAD” were pasted on top of
the chief’s wife’s photo of her head and shoulders: she was smiling at the
camera. When the story began to end, the chief somehow got the psychopath under
his arms and began beating him. Only through the description of the words, it
didn’t sound like beating. The chief had begun torturing the psychopath with
pleasure, as if making love. Oh how did the love of pain and blood make him
burn with fever! When he finished, he ripped a limb from the psycho-plotter,
and left him there. Everyone was saved, and when he was done, the chief shot
himself in the head. The psychopath had lived with a metal leg and ended up
burning down the police station after all. Dozens of officers lost their lives
in the fictional fire. At the conclusion, the chief’s wife had married a drug
dealer, Joe was a political figure trying to legalize heterosexual marriage,
and the psychopath went on playing with the police and the government.
The last scene contained with these
words:
and they were happy for the time being, all police forces hunting
down Killer (that was the sick-minded man’s name) and bringing down justice.
They keep looking, but when will they stop?
A photo was on top of the last
note, showing a bunch of policemen sitting in a dark room. In the background D.
could see the same web of madness on this wall in the locker room--on the wall
in the photograph. D. searched elsewhere in the web. He saw a scribbled page
taken from a spiral notebook; he noticed the three-holed paper punched through.
Dark purple hue from the pen ink filled the page coloring the tiny letters.
To Whoever Can Read,
I
believe I am so innocent that I am perhaps guilty. People believe I committed a
CRIME, betrayed my fellow officers, and raped two little girls in a petite
school building. With my head clear, I can safely assure you all that I never
committed any crimes (I vow this even to GOD) and have only left the force for
secret reasons even I cannot pen into THIS NOTEBOOK.
As
for those two little girls . . . PEOPLE BELIEVE ANYTHING. [Illegible from tears
and pen scribbles] they, them . . . they were too innocent for me to touch
them. I didn’t do anything harmful to them, only gave them candy. Then one
day, one time, they SCREAMED and everything went [illegible]. A touch of a
dress was all, okay? OKAY? OKAY! OKAY, YOU BELIVE ME! I’m so sorry I’m yelling
even though nothing is coming out of my mouth. But the girls, Lisa and Jenny,
they never were wrong, though. They had friends but never were they so cruel as
to tattletale like this. I never raped anyone nor will I ever. "I’LL NEVER
TOUCH ANOTHER WOMAN IN MY LIFE, I SWEAR IT. I’D NEVER . . . I’D NEVER . . .
JOANNE IS THE ONLY ONE FOR ME, EVEN WHEN SHE DIES
I promise. Do
you promise?
Sincerely,
Your Best Friend
D.
was tight-lipped. An attack on the police department and a confession letter
was supposed to fix what? He noticed the man signed himself, “Your Best Friend.”
Best friend of someone, but D. never suspected him or the chief to be one of
them. Nevertheless, it presented a very frightening scene to him and much more
to an officer who stumbled upon this while doing his daily locker routine.
He
thought it quite a story indeed.
D.
opened the door and exited the locker room. He decided to go out the back since
he didn’t want to appear suspicious to the security guards at the front and
Chief Advert for departing so late. For the second time that night, D. began to
think. Big money was always a good thing, but D. didn’t know if it was worth
it. People were always looking for crimes to solve, so there must be
competition. But even then, why would the chief police want him, D.? As
mentioned before, he was nearing his seventies and worked slower than before;
his prime years must have been in his forties. Lonely hours watching reruns of
old TV shows did nothing to help the matter, but it was what he did to pass the
time. He grew old to the bitter taste of crime, knowing many types of cases that
didn’t require much of a brain to solve (just for extra money he slowed himself
down, but that didn’t happen often). If he were to buy that new apartment on a
higher floor than the dingy one he had now, he had to get working.
D. rushed out onto the raining streets
of the city. His case was a simple one, but he never understood it. The chief
had given him a folder containing all the information he needed to get started.
However, when D. got a good look at it, he was sorely confused. All the
information given was the background info of a man named Paul McDermott, a
wealthy billionaire who had a company making hotel buildings. The McDermott
franchise was a large one, but what was the point? It had nothing to do with
the case he was going over with the chief both on the phone and in person. A
mystery within a mystery . . .
Why couldn’t he understand all of this?
Cases were cases, not puzzles to test the crime investigator in him. When he
asked about the McDermott case, the chief told him it was connected. Somehow
Adams had been following closely McDermott’s every step and breath, keeping contact
as a stranger and then a close millionaire friend. How he did it, the chief
didn’t explain. But recently, before his disappearance, Adams had noted in a
journal he left in his house that McDermott was drunk on his money. A couple
days ago he had made an announcement that the world had never heard – an
announcement that on October 18, he would kill himself. What method would be a
huge surprise, he had promised. D. didn’t want to find out.
Did money need to exist? D. thought this
when he walked down the rainy streets to his apartment building. He needed his
briefcase and a ticket to the subway. Everybody was drunk on greed in this
city, no need to deny it; you’ll just look like a fool. Walking, D. pondered
the idea of money not existing – what would happen then? Could people be
happier than now? He only wished.
*****
The
phone call was a stern and furious one for Officer Lincoln Deed. Chief Advert,
their boss, would be speaking with the new detective involved with the
McDermott case, and if he accepted the job, then they’ll be conducting the
search together looking for anything new. However, his voice roared like a
lion’s flame, or a dragon’s fire. The chief was so loud that, in order to
understand him without blowing his ear off, Lincoln held the phone half a foot
away. Even then he felt his ear splitting like wood being chopped.
“So
what happened to Darren Will?” Lincoln wondered.
Big
Hands face paled. “He’s dead, you idiot.”
“Oh,
right.” He hoped the hand that was cupped over the mouthpiece blocked out any
sound he made, especially what he said about the previous investigator, Darren Will.
As if the phone would soon burst, Lincoln lifted his hand from the mouthpiece,
going a few inches up until he knew safety was assured. “Are you still there,
chief?”
“Yes,
I am.” The chief was fond of using short, blistering sentences when he was aggravated.
Lincoln
laughed in relief. “I’m sorry for leaving you hung up for a few minutes.”
“Sorry?”
He asked that question too flat, and without the higher pitch at the end, it
didn’t sound like a question at all. “I heard everything.”
Lincoln
winced as if the chief had broken a beloved painting, preferably Doré’s
The
Creation of Light
. Did the chief always have to be this stern, he wondered?
“About the . . .?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?”
he asked.
The
mouthpiece crackled, which meant something. “Don’t waste my time, Deed. Like I
said, there’s going to be someone working with you on the fifth search through
McDermott’s apartment.”
“Yes,
I remember you saying that,” Lincoln said, “but what was his name? I didn’t get
a chance to hear it with all that . . . racket.”
“Racket,
eh? More like you weren’t paying attention to what I’m saying!”
Lincoln
muttered sorry so low not even Big Hands could hear it, and he stood six inches
away from him. “When do you expect he’ll be here?”
“When
he gets the job, maybe he’ll be there in about a half hour at most. So, on
another note, have any of you found anything new in the apartment?”
“There’s
nothing new, unfortunately.” Lincoln glanced off, seeing Big Hands was smiling;
they both knew what that meant. He growled but Big Hands kept on grinning. “We
searched the usual rooms and there’s nothing there.” Big Hands still grinned,
getting under Lincoln’s nerves. “Actually, I did find something.”
A
big hand wiped off the big grin on Big Hands’ face. That was surely something
to laugh at.
“What
did you find?” asked the chief.
Lincoln’s
eyes went everywhere finding anything that could be labeled as evidence,
anything. The phone shook in his hands and he was afraid it might crash if he
wavered just a little. A second and his eyes matched a small Polaroid
photograph.
“Deed,
you there?”
“Uh-huh.
I found a picture of something . . . I’m trying to figure out what it is.” As
he spoke, Lincoln made his way across the room, reaching for the Polaroid. He
knew those white borders anywhere: the only camera he ever used was a Polaroid.