The Big Nap

The Big Nap(Brian Hicks) The Big Nap

She was there all right, in a maroon Packard just like she said. I parked behind it. The door opened and she unfurled a leg onto the pavement. It took a long time. It was a long leg.
The other followed. It was nearly as long, in the same sheer silk. She limped down the path, without acknowledging me with a look or a word. I got out and followed her, liking the rear view and being left with my imagination about the front.
She opened the door, which was unlocked, and I went in after her. I followed her to the conservatory.
She brushed against the going out table as she was going in and knocked a health club membership offer (Three months free!) off the edge of the table. It fell to the floor and lay partly hidden beneath the end of the sofa.
In the middle of the room lay a man, sprawled on his back, face like a dirty ashtray with four cigarettes and a cheap cigar. I knew this Jake. And I always figured I’d find him like this someday. He didn’t show any signs of recognizing me.
He was completely motionless. Well, other than rotating at 860 miles per hour around the center of the earth, that is, while simultaneously travelling at 66,660 miles per hour around the sun, orbiting the galaxy at 483,000 miles an hour, and rocketing in the general direction of the constellation Leo at 1.3 million miles an hour. Moving all crazy directions at once, like a cheap carnival ride in Culver City, the kind designed to make you lose your lunch. But all that aside, he was completely motionless.
“He’s not moving!”
Like hell, he’s not, I thought, as he sped eastward at 860 mph - -
“He’s not moving at all!” She repeated her wildly inaccurate assertion with more urgency, and I didn’t contradict her. She had a point. It’s all relative, I thought. Anyone who’s spent more than a long sordid weekend in this city figures that out sooner or later.
I took in the scene, making a mental inventory of the evidence. His eyes were staring unseeingly up at the ceiling. His skin was bluish. He made no move to wave away the flies around his eyes, nose, and mouth. There were six bullet holes in his shirt in a tight pattern over his heart. A knife was up to its hilt in his throat and an ax was buried in his skull. There was a smell of bitter almonds in the room. Standing over him, with a candlestick, was Colonel Mustard.
“I think he’s dead,” I said, acting on a hunch. The dame’s message had only mentioned blackmail. I was going to have to renegotiate my fees.
“That’s nice,” she said absently. I looked at her, now, for the first time. She had a name. It was Ginger. Her eyes had a drowsy, unfocused look and were pointed at the place where the walls and ceiling met. Too much chamomile tea, I could see now. I knew her type – Democrats. LA is lousy with ‘em.
The inspector choose this moment to make his appearance.
“I am the Inspector, here to inspect. It’s what I do. And you are?” Inquired the Inspector, addressing me and the dame.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“Is this the way you found him?” inquired The Inspector, seeing the Colonel for the first time. “Was he laying there with his arms akimbo and his face pressed against the overturned coffee table like that?”
“No, he was lying there with his arms akimbo and his face pressed against the overturned coffee table like that,” the Colonel replied, flatly.
The Inspector was not satisfied with this answer. It seemed that this witness was already contradicting herself. “Miss, let me ask you again. Was he laying there with his arms – “
“He was lying there. He wasn’t laying there.”
“I see. But I don’t think that is important at a time like this, really.”
“It is presumably very important to those who loathed him. As well as those who feared him, despised him, abhorred him, disdained him, …, and, though this is purely hypothetical, it would also be very important to any who might have loved him, admired him, or respected him.
The inspector took this in. “There may be many with motives,” he mused quietly to himself. “And of course there are the red herrings,” he added thoughtfully, almost under his breath.
“Yes, there are numerous red herrings. I can give you a list, if you like. And some are still in the Frigidaire.”
“Perhaps later.” The inspector had no intention of asking this person for a list of red herrings. He was the Inspector. It was not clear what she was, but he knew that she was not the Inspector and that red herrings were not, therefore, hers to deal with. He now looked at her more closely.
“Is that a cudgel you are grasping in your right hand?”
“No.”
“I see. I await the evidence of the coroner of course, but the visible injuries strongly suggest that the deceased was cudgeled to death.”
“Not pummeled? I was thinking maybe he was pummeled to death.” I insinuated myself into the conversation.
“No indeed. These injuries are inconsistent with a pummeling and entirely consistent with a cudgeling. Another possibility that can’t be ruled out is, of course, a bludgeon. Although perhaps it was just a sound pasting with a blunt object. There is that, too…” The inspector’s musing was cut short as the significance of the presence of this muscular woman standing over the dead body wielding a cudgel insinuated itself into his ruminations.
“Where did you obtain that cudgel?” the inspector asked, suddenly alert to nuance.
“I brought it with me from home…assuming you speak of the candlestick.”
“With what purpose in mind, if I may ask?”
“Illumination, of course. And self-defense, should it come to that. If you were to go alone to the home of an evil, vicious man who would stop at nothing to eliminate enemies, to confront him with evidence of his evil viciousness and tell him that you had with you the only evidence that could convict him and condemn him to a life in prison, would you not want to bring along a cudgel, just in case? Or, absent any good cudgels, a candlestick?
“I see. I believe we will have to take a statement from you, miss.”
I looked around and for the first time noticed the bowling pin, the framing hammer, the barbell, the stout stick… the place was a veritable museum of blunt objects. On a pedestal, under glass, was a bludgeon. On the wall above it was a framed cudgel. Now, everywhere I looked…
We had come in the side entrance, before open hours, and so had avoided paying the entrance fee. If this was like other museums in L.A., it would open at 10 AM. We had better work fast.
The response from the dog was inscrutable. He appeared not to have understood. I made no attempt to clarify for the benefit of the dog.
There was a knock on the door. The knock was merely a formality. A large, wiry apprentice detective burst in. Jake. I knew this Jake, too. Lived in West Covina, known as the Gateway to El Monte. He took in the scene, making a mental inventory. His eyes sought out evidence of a crime, and found the body. “He’s not moving!”
I didn’t bother to dispute this wildly inaccurate assertion. After all, the victim was, by all appearances, quite dead.
“He is, by all appearances, quite dead,” Jake stated flatly.
“Jake, check the kitchen.” I said to Jake, naively thinking this would busy him for a while so we could continue with our detecting. But, within seconds, a yell came from the kitchen.
“Come here – there’s something I think you should see!”
I excused myself to walk to the kitchen. There was a small fish on the counter, next to a cutting board. There was a sharp knife on the cutting board, though the fish was intact. The knife had recently been used to slice avocado. The fish lay on an envelope, badly stained with fish juice. The window over the sink let in a musty, putrid light.
I gave him a withering look, to no avail - he remained quite unwithered. “Oh for Pete’s sake, never mind that – come back in here” I admonished, and turned to go back to the other room.
“But what is it, what does it mean?”
“Really? You don’t recognize it?”
“No, I’m a detective, not a goddamn ichthyologist!”
“Well then, all the more reason you should know it! In detecting school you must have read dozens of bad detective novels, right?”
Blank look
“You really don’t know what that is?... It is a diversion, a distractions, something of no relevance but which people like you tend to ascribe significance to, and lose precious time investigating”
“Ohhhh you mean it is a – “
“Exactly. Now come on back out here”
“I thought it would be more brightly colored”
“Everyone does at first. When you’ve seen as many as I have…
There was a telephone in the hallway. I took this opportunity to call the chief. “Chief, you better get down here. Seems Jake’s time ran out… Yeah, that Jake… If you aren’t quick about it, the cops will be here. You know the place: Mulholland Drive, then North on Deep Canyon.”

Deep Canyon only goes South off Mulholland – Ed
Thanks for catching that – I’ll fix it in the next draft – Author

“That will be twenty-five cents for the next three minutes.”
I fished in my pocket for change, found a quarter, and inserted it, not pausing to wonder why Jake had a pay phone in his hallway. Or why it was a long distance call from here to HQ. Had I done so…
“Still there, chief?” No answer. I assumed he had hot-footed it down to his Studebaker and would be here shortly.
As I re-entered the conservatory - not pausing to wonder why Jake had a conservatory – there was a knock at the door. The dame answered it. She came back alone, “Jehovah’s Witnesses” she said, giving me a sidelong look, seemingly calculated to be noticed by the inspector.
“But how does this relate to last night’s murder?” A voice behind me said. It was the chief.
“What murder might that be?” I asked.
“It might be the murder of Jake.”
“Aha! Who had sworn to kill The Deceased!! It does seem there might be a connection.”
The chief laughed uproariously, “Gotcha!! I said it might have been, but it wasn’t. No, the murder victim last night was that jake what washed ashore in the fish pond. At that mansion. The one near Los Angeles. On that street with all those big houses and rich people. You know the one. Guy said it was bad for glass, and I couldn’t disagree. As for that Jake, last I heard, he was harvesting saffron near Esfahan, after being kidnapped by a band of Gypsies.
“Chief? Could you go out and come back in, smarter? Thanks.”
“Hi again!” A voice behind me said. It was the chief. Followed by a cadre of L.A.’s finest. The coroner was with them, as was the crooner. Frank spoke first.
“Why not take all of me?”
“Why indeed.” It was Ginger, barely stifling a yawn.
The coroner checked the pulse, pulled up the eyelids, listened to the heart, and pronounced her dead. I blamed his mistake on the chamomile tea. The inspector brought the coroner’s attention to the body lying on the floor.
“Dead as a doornail,” said the coroner.
“Yes, but how, why, when? And, if you can figure it out, ‘who’?
“That’s above my paygrade. But maybe we could drill down, pivot, reach out, circle back and take this offline. Go for the low-hanging fruit and think outside the box, provided we’ve got the bandwidth…”
“Excuse me, but none of that is English at this time. Maybe someday far, far in the future, but not now.”
“Is ‘erstwhile’ English? I hope so, it’s always been one of my favorite words. Right up there with caterwaul. But let me say it in another way then: I don’t know.”
“That would be your learned opinion? Thank you. So we still don’t know how, when, why or whodunit. I think we’ve got ourselves a mystery novel!”
Frank spoke again, “Witchcraft.”
The coroner nodded sagely. “Given the paucity of plausible explanations, we can’t rule that out.”
The inspector, growing increasingly annoyed with the Colonel, turned to her now. “Miss, I am afraid I need to make a report. Could you give me your given name?”
“You won’t like it. I don’t. It’s been a trial all my life. It’s yours if you want it.”
“What I mean to ask, of course, is ‘what is your given name’?”
“Mustard.” I was named after the condiment… well after.”
“Your ‘given name’ is your ‘first name’.”
“Correct.”
“Pardon?”
“You are correct – given name means the same as first name.”
Could you just tell me your full name?”
“Yes.”
“What is your full name?”
“Mustard M Mustard.”
“I won’t ask what the middle initial stands for.”
“My father was a big fan of Joseph Heller.”
“I see,” said the inspector, not seeing at all. What he did not see, in addition to the allusion to Catch-22, was the mouse, scurrying away under the door to the Billiard Room. He also didn’t see the dame pocketing a spent cartridge, nor the rust forming on the poker near the fireplace.
The coroner was now examining the body. “Well, I think we can eliminate bludgeoning…and cudgeling,” he added. Examining the bullet wounds, knife wound, and the split skull, and catching a whiff of the bitter almond smell, he reached a tentative conclusion: “Murder most foul.”

The concept is stupid, this whole thing is derivative, confusing, completely implausible, and has no character development. Besides, anybody who might get the pointless ‘noir’ allusions died years ago. Start over – Ed.
Thanks for catching that. I’ll fix it in the next draft – Author

The dame sidled up close to me and whispered in my ear, “Where does saffron come from?”
The Inspector pressed a button in the arm of the weathered chesterfield. This summoned the butler. “You rang?”
At the appearance of the butler, the chief and I exchanged knowing glances, neither of us having the foggiest notion of what the other knew. Awareness dawned on the butler’s face like cheap cologne.
“How long has your master been in this state?” The Inspector queried.
“Years, since he moved here from Philly”
The silence was broken by the flapping of butterfly wings in Brazil. I braced myself for what was to follow.
The Inspector squinted at the butler and decided he was not dumb, nor devious, so much as very, very literal. “How long has your master been dead?”
The butler did a quick mental calculation, “26 hours and 41 minutes. Rounded to the nearest minute.”
“Who killed him?”
“His killer.”
“Where does saffron come from?” It was the dame, more insistently this time.
“From the stigma and styles of Crocus sativus, which is believed to have originated in Persia.” It might have been the butler.
“It could just as well have originated in Greece or Mesopotamia,” countered The Inspector, dizzily, overcome by Ginger’s perfume.
“Granted. The question has not been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.” conceded the butler.
“Has anyone checked the ballroom?” I queried, as much to throw them off the scent of saffron as to further the investigation. They were too close already.
Everyone tried to rush to the ballroom at once. The coppers got there first. “Katie, bar the door” a voice emerged from the scrum like a fly emerging from a pile of maggoty meat forgotten behind an overturned trash can on skid row. A burly officer barred the door. We went back to the conservatory. The Deceased was having one last cigarette. He dropped it on the floor and collapsed again. The Inspector picked up the cigarette and put it into an evidence bag. “Fingerprints,” he said, unnecessarily.
But I already had everything I needed, except, of course, a good stiff drink. “Ice pistol” I allowed, to general bafflement.
“Sure, see the strings, the hooks on the wall?” I went on to explain: “Pretty easy, actually. Carve a pistol out of ice. Probably a Smith & Wesson. Load it with an actual bullet, or, in the more sophisticated variant, an ice bullet with actual gunpowder. Set up some kind of trigger mechanism – string on the trigger attached to doorknob is the usual, but I’ve seen mirror-lens things where there’s an ice ‘safety’ which is melted by a beam of highly concentrated light when victim picks up gin bottle. That one is nice because there is no unsightly string left. Anyway, victim comes home, trips the trigger mechanism. Gets shot. Dies. Pistol melts and wallah! - evidence is reduced to a pool of water on the floor. Best if this dries up before the police arrive. The spent cartridge is just mysterious. Suggests the killer walked out with the gun. That’s all wrong of course. Goes without saying that although the ice pistol had all kinds of fingerprints on it, no fingerprints now. Sherlock himself couldn’t get prints from a dried up pool of water.”
“But wouldn’t it have melted before The Deceased got home?”
“It was a cold night.”
“Uh, Jake, we’re in LA - a cold night in LA is 68 degrees…”
“In any case, the murderer left by the back door - note the spider pressed into the door frame, having had the misfortune to try to escape during that brief moment when the door was opened. I don’t need carbon dating to tell me when that spider died - after setting up the mechanism. Heading down the back steps he slipped on the roller skate that was left on the 3rd step - as evidenced by the oil stain marking the place where the key mechanism was - and pitched over the railing into the cactus. That’s probably his body down there.”
The body down there, on the steep slope, impaled multiple times on cactus spines, was up against the neighbor’s fence.
“So it appears that the murderer died before committing the murder.”
“But we haven’t found a spent cartridge” The boss man, weighing in.
“No. We haven’t”
Ginger was whistling an innocent little tune, that might have been “How Much Is that Doggie In The Window.”
Colonel Mustard took this moment to excuse herself and go to the little girls’ room.
The Butler coughed up his sleeve.
The boys from downtown returned from the Ballroom, quite exhausted, but still with a little hop in their steps.
The dog stared at me with an inscrutable expression.
The Deceased didn’t move. Relatively speaking.
The scriptwriter threw up his hands and strode back to his car.
The clock on the clubhouse wall was eerily silent.
“Well, I only put a nickel in the meter. I’d better get back to my car,” and with that, I left the scene of the crime and went down to the juke joint on Sunset Boulevard that I frequented when I was tired of trying to explain things to people who don’t have an ounce of sense. Which was pretty much a daily occurrence. The bartender glanced up from the racing form and queried, “The usual – a Shirley Temple?”
“Yeah. In fact, it’s been a rough morning. Make it a double.”

Martha Hume

10/07/2022

Thank you for sharing your story with us. I loved it

Thank you for sharing your story with us. I loved it

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