So here's the deal. This is NOT part of a novel. When I thought of the headline, I liked it so much that I had to use it. This...this is a writerly booknerd like myself entertaining himself.
The premise to was this: "Homicide detective picks up private detective. Asks for help." I was just playing around, improvising. After getting this far, I thought I might actually turn it into a story. I even came up with one, seeing how this isn't really a story, but I decided, nah... No need to force it. I was just messing around.
Anyway, give it a read and let me know what you think in the comments. If impressions are favorable, maybe I will turn it into something beyond a "fragment of a novel that exists only in this fragment."
Untitled
Gaffigan only kept me waiting in the cold for five minutes. He pulled up in an unmarked police car, parked long enough to step out of the car and lean over the hood. “Hop in,” he said. His tone didn’t indicate that it was going to be a joyous reunion between old friends.
I got in the car.
Gaffigan floored it, turning up 17th and going ten miles over the speed limit. He didn’t say where we were heading. He didn’t say anything.
Neither did I.
We had turned off Broadway and onto Colfax before he spoke again.
“Does the name Stan Waters mean anything to you?”
At first thought, it didn’t register but the way Gaffigan dropped it on me made me wonder if it should. I decided to play dumb. I said, “The dude in Pink Floyd?”
“That’s Roger Waters. I’m talking about Stan Waters, ran for mayor of Aurora last year but lost to Al Tower.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Don’t you live in Aurora?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t vote last year and I don’t give a shit who’s mayor. Why should I care about Stan Waters?”
“He’s dead.”
“That’s too bad, but what’s that got to do with me?”
“Him being dead? Nothing. Stan Waters died last year, two weeks after the election. Heart attack, they said. He was out golfing, dropped dead right there on the fairway. You didn’t hear about any of this?”
“No,” I said, even though the story about the guy dying at the golf course was starting to ring some bells.
“It was a big deal for about a minute. Some crank on the radio seized on it and declared a conspiracy. Al Tower killed Stan Waters with a poisoned cheeseburger or something. It was all part of a plot by the Democrats and the Tower family and the ACLU and PETA to control city government and destroy the American way of life. You know, Rush Limbaugh times eleven. Never mind that it’s preposterous. I mean, why kill a guy two weeks after you beat him in an election? And kill him with a heart attack? Woah, that’s clever. It’s exactly the kind of cleverness that keeps four good detectives stuck on a special detail investigating whether this apparently natural death could have, may have hopefully in my wildest dreams, been a murder.”
Gaffigan was gritting his teeth and spitting his words out, getting more and more aggravated as he spoke, which made me think he was one of the “four good detectives” assigned to the detail.
He took a deep breath and looked at me sideways. “I find it hard to believe you didn’t hear anything about this.”
“I heard about the dead guy at the golf course. I didn’t know about all the political intrigue.”
Gaffigan laughed. “That’s the thing. There is no political intrigue. Just a dead guy on a golf course. Two weeks we spent knocking on doors, learning everything we could about the last days of Stan Waters. Six weeks we spent waiting for the lab work to come back. Toxicology came back clean, the medical report said coronary disease. Clogged arteries, the whole bit. It took two minutes to write the report. Stan Waters wasn’t murdered. He just died. But don’t tell that to the conspiracy theorists. They’ll insist on a cover-up” He rolled his eyes. “There’s always a cover-up.”
I said, “It’s an interesting story, Mike, but it’s not why you called me.”
“It’s related, but I’ll get to that in a minute. You know who engineered --that’s the word the radio guy used, engineered-- the cover-up of Stan Waters’s murder? A homicide detective from District One named Mike Gaffigan. That’s right, me. The guy who was working a gang shooting before he got a bullshit call. Not only did I waste weeks of valuable case time on a natural death, I then decided to cover-up an obvious murder, because I want a low clearance rate apparently, vindicating Al Tower in exchange for a top spot as an enforcer in the Tower crime family. Do you see how it all fits, Max? It’s a puzzle, put together one piece at a time.” This last bit came dripping with sarcasm.
“I agree,” I said. “It’s absurd. But I still don’t see what it has to do with me.”
“Not everything has to do with you, Max. Will you shut up and let me tell the story?”
I cracked the window and lit a smoke. “If you’re going to waste my time, then I might as well enjoy it. Tell your story. I’m going to smoke.”
“Thanks, Max,” Gaffigan said, waving a cloud of smoke away with his hand. “Thanks a lot. You know that’s against city regulations.”
“Well, I don’t work for the city anymore. You want one too? I won’t tell.”
“No, I want to tell you about this radio clown. The one that made a beef about Stan Waters getting whacked.”
“Who was it?”
“Ah, now he’s interested,” Gaffigan said to an invisible audience in the backseat. “You ever hear of a guy named Terry Roth?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Can’t say I’ve heard him. He’s a right-wing asshole and I’m more of an FM guy.”
“It’s not my thing either, but he does have his listeners. There’s not many of them, but they’re real activist types. Letter-writing campaigns, protests on the Capitol steps, you name it. He speaks, they move. It’s not quite mind control, but you wouldn’t know it from the results.”
“You’re talking about the Boulder school board thing.”
Gaffigan looked at me sideways. “You’re not as dumb as you look, Max. You know about the school board thing?”
“A lot of people do,” I said. “It was in the news.”
And it was quite the big deal for a while, the story of how a high school history class turned into a roundtable on abortion, during which the teacher confessed to an abortion of her own.
Students told their parents. Their parents called into Terry Roth’s show. Terry Roth talked about it for weeks.
The school board was asked to fire the teacher, which for a variety of reasons was technically impossible. Letters were written. There were protests on the Capitol steps. But like most matters political and petty, things ground themselves out and nothing really happened.
Until election day. When the last vote was tallied, every single incumbent school board member had been voted out and replaced with someone more amenable to the Terry Roth position. In other words, the baby-killing hippie should be nowhere near the good children of Boulder. The new boardmembers didn’t force the teacher out, but she had seen the writing on the wall and resigned soon after.
Now the school board was talking about adding Intelligent Design to the biology curriculum.
Terry Roth no doubt approved.
“So you know what I mean when I say this Roth guy is influential,” Gaffigan said.
I nodded. “Influential enough to get you detailed on some goosechase case.”
“Every case is a goosechase, but yeah.”
“So is that why you called me? To vent about this Terry Roth guy ruining your life?”
“No. Well, kinda.”
We were stopped in traffic at the corner of Colfax and Colorado. I still had no idea where we were going or how long I would be. If Gaffigan needed a favor or had some sidework to hand out, I couldn’t see the angle. The Stan Waters case was solved and Terry Roth was just some guy on the radio.
I prodded him. “So?”
He exhaled a breath he had been holding for a while. “Terry Roth is dead. And this isn’t some Stan Waters boondoggle, Max. It’s the real thing, a stone whodunit. We found him shot to death in his basement, three shots from a handgun, two to the chest, one to the head, fired close range. You know, a very efficient, non-accidental way to kill someone. No witnesses, no sign of forced entry. It’s all in the file.”
He nodded over his shoulder to the back seat, where a thick pile of papers sat bursting out of a stretched manila folder.
“Ah, paperwork,” I sighed. “I don’t miss it.”
“I’m already working a few leads, and my partner is chasing down some others. I’ve got a hunch I want to explore, but so far, I’ve got no official reason to do it. That’s where you come in.”
“You want me to work your hunch on an open murder case?”
Gaffigan thought about it. “Well, yeah.”
“That’s not my normal line of work, Mike. Me and the cops, with few rare exceptions, just don’t get along. And a PI working a side investigation on a murder? How’s that going to look in court?”
“Anything you dig up, I’ll put in the due diligence to make sure it holds up in court. I’m not asking you to solve this case, Max.”
“Then what are you asking?”
“The teacher. I want you to go talk to the teacher, see what she knows. She’s not a suspect, or even someone who’s on our radar. Yet. But she’s someone I’ve been thinking about for a while now. We have something in common, me and her. Terry Roth tried to destroy us both, but with her, he succeeded. I know I didn’t feel any pangs of conscience when I heard he was dead, so I wonder how she took it.”
“You want me to find out how she feels?”
“Well, you know what I mean. Give her a sniff, see if you smell anything funny.”
“And if she’s all roses?”
“Then my hunches stink.”
I grabbed the small notebook from my jacket pocket and popped the cap off my pen. “What’s her name?”
“Contessa Wood. Goes by Connie in the phone book. Gilpin, I think is the street. Gilpin Drive.”
“Description?”
“White, fifties, don’t know the rest.”
I closed my notebook with a sigh. Gaffigan was going to make me do this the hard way. “You’re some cop,” I said.
“She’s not an official suspect, so I haven’t pulled her tag. I can show you a news clipping with her picture. Would that make you happy?”
“Every little bit helps. So what are you thinking, execution for hire? Two shots to the chest, one to the head is pretty sharp. No way you’re getting out of that one. I’m not sure a white English teacher in her fifties would have the necessary skills to pull that off.”
Gaffigan frowned. “I know.”
“So what makes you so hot for teacher? It’s not like you have any evidence of a conspiracy.”
Gaffigan’s frown tilted a bit, slowly becoming a grin and then after a while, a full-toothed smile. He said, “It’s the hunch, Max. Can’t ignore the hunch.”
“Yeah, sounds thin to me.”
“It is,” Gaffigan admitted. “But I want you to check it out for me anyway. I’m not going to have time. I’ve got a list a mile long of every crazed listener and angry lefty who ever called into Terry Roth’s Show. And then there’s his family and friends. His sister is supposed to call me after she gets off work. I’m meeting the ex-wife at three. I need your help, man."
Fin
So? What'd you think?
