Chief Harding slammed the door of his cruiser and pulled up the collar on his coat. He jogged across the foggy street and up to the house, passing by the other officers who were circling around without as much as a sideways glance. He ducked under the caution tape barricading the front door, and his two detectives were waiting inside.
“Sanderson, Maxwell, what’s the situation?”
Maxwell took a bite of his banana and shrugged. Sanderson held a hand up to Harding’s chest. “This is by far the strangest murder case I’ve ever encountered, sir.”
Harding leaned to one side and then the other, trying to see if the scene was worse than the Jones case, the one where the guy fed his victims through the snowblower. “Lemme see the stiff,” he demanded.
“Chief, you don’t understand,” Sanderson said. “The stiff is here, but so is the perp.”
Harding pushed the detectives aside like a pair a french doors and got his first eyeful of what was truly the most remarkable crime scene he’d ever dealt with.
There was a body, of course, or else there wouldn’t be a scene at all. He was facedown in a plate of buttered toast and surrounded by a pool of his own blood. Next to him was a bloodied shovel. And next to the shovel was another man, unconscious but breathing, lying on his side with a hand over his eyes.
—
Back at the station, Harding paced his office in a frenzy. He dumped the pencils out of the cup on his desk and threw handfuls of them at the wall. He pulled a file out the cabinet and flipped through it before tossing it in the trash can, which he proceeded to trip over and spill all over the floor. The phone on his desk rang. “Chief Harding, we have an emergency!” “SHUT UP!” he answered swiftly before slamming the receiver back down.
Because he was making a considerable ruckus, May poked her head into the office. She’d been Harding’s secretary for almost three years, and she was desperately in love with him. She painted up her lips all red every single day, the way she knew he liked, but never once had he returned any of her sentiments. “Do you want some coffee?” she asked.
“No, shut up, leave me alone. Go get me some coffee, will ya?”
With a sympathetic sigh, May turned to leave, but leaned back through the doorway to ask, “Sugar?”
“Don’t call me that,” Harding snapped.
“I meant for the coffee,” she said.
Harding laid his head down on his desk, mumbling incoherently. As May left the office, Harding heard someone else clambering in. “What’s the scoop, Chief?” an eager voice inquired. Jimmy was the local newspaper’s youngest reporter and he’d been sniffing around the station every day for six months just waiting to stumble across the tip of the century.
“Not now, Jimmy, I got bigger worries than you right now,” Harding grumbled.
A light twinkled in Jimmy’s eyes. “Worries, eh?” he prodded, turning a chair around backwards and sitting down, notebook open. “What’s the worry?”
Harding looked up, knowing that Jimmy would never leave him to his misery if he didn’t at least give him a quote. “How’s this for a headline: Police chief tells local reporter to ‘Scram before I ship you up the creek’?”
Jimmy sat back, astonished. He put down his pencil. “Wow, Chief, it usually takes about four or five questions before you start threatening me. Off the record, I swear this time. What’s going on?”
Harding smacked a paperweight off his desk. “I finally found the criminal I can’t crack because he already cracked himself!”
Jimmy picked his pencil back up and scribbled something in his notebook.
“Hey kid, I thought we said this was off the record, or am I going to have to impound that moleskin of yours again?”
Jimmy shook his head as he scuttled out of the room. “No, sir, you can trust me, Chief!”
Harding put his head down on his desk, trying to figure out how to approach the interrogation.
—
Cecil the shovel-murderer sat at the silver table in the plain white room, looking blankly from wall to wall. Harding was watching him from the one-way window while Maxwell and Sanderson sat at a table behind him eating yesterday’s doughnuts.
“You don’t even have to get a confession, Chief, you just gotta tell him the charges,” Sanderson said. “His prints were on the shovel and when he woke up the first thing he said was ‘Is Potter still dead?’ He’s as good as guilty, Chief.”
“Good as guilty, Chief!” Maxwell repeated, his mouth full of doughnut.
Harding looked over his shoulder. “What did I tell you about eating my sprinkles, kid?”
Maxwell placed the half eaten doughnut back in the box. “No, no,” Harding scolded, “You might as well eat it now that you got your slobber all over it.” Maxwell grinned and crammed the entire remaining doughnut in his mouth at once.
Harding turned back to the window. Cecil was still sitting there with that dumb, dumb look on his face. Harding sighed and headed into the interrogation room.
—
“Aren’t you supposed to offer me, like, doughnuts or something?” Cecil asked.
Harding, who sat across the table from him, ignored the question, knowing Maxwell would have polished off the entire box by now. “Lookie here, you’re giving criminals a bad name, boy, and you’re giving us cops a bad name for catching a criminal with a bad name. And the criminals with good names are giving cops a bad name because the cops with good names spend all their time catching criminals with bad names instead of the ones with good names.”
Cecil looked up at him. “What?”
Harding pounded the table with his hand. “Listen to me, son. We’re gonna get to the bottom of this if it takes until the pizza we ordered gets here, which means you got less than thirty minutes to spill the corn.”
Cecil shrugged. “Shouldn’t you be shining a really bright light in my face, then?”
“What do you think this is, a Humphrey Bogurt picture?”
“Bogart?”
“SHUT UP!” Harding waved his hands in the air. “I don’t take orders from you, you dirty, rotten criminal. Why’d you do it, anyway?”
Cecil drummed his fingers on the table. “It was more spur of the moment than anything. Potter, he was an old business partner of mine, and I found out that he was planning to patent one of my ideas for a seven-slice toaster and I was just so mad that I wanted to get rid of him before he could do it.”
Harding stared in disbelief. “It’s not that easy. It never is.”
Cecil went on. “I marched over there by myself, took the shovel from his shed, waltzed in his back door, and did it.”
Harding leaned forward over the table, taking Cecil’s collar in his fist. “Kid, I’m gonna let you in on a secret. I’m the one who solves the hard cases around here. I’m the good cop and the bad cop. There ain’t never been a crook too slippery for me to catch, until you went and did that for yourself. I just need you to tell me, before we send you off to the judge, what was it that ruined your plan? What act of God beat me to the punch?” Harding was stammering and his forehead was slick with sweat.
Cecil bit his lip. “I guess I didn’t expect there to be so much blood.”
Harding just about fell out of his chair. He still clenched tight to Cecil’s shirt. “What do you mean?” he sputtered, hardly able to make words.
“I get real queasy at the sight of blood.”
Harding’s mouth hung open. “And this never crossed your mind when you were on your way to bust someone up with a blunt object?”
“I mean, I didn’t think about it. Obviously, there’s no manual to read that warns you about this kind of thing.”
Harding got up from the table and paced nervously back and forth. He stopped every few steps to look at Cecil, who stared blankly back at him. “So that’s it? I’ve been overshadowed by some punk’s weak constitution?”
“I whacked him, and when I saw all the blood, I just got woozy. I think I fainted just about as quick as he did. I guess that makes me the world’s worst murderer, huh?”
Harding ran his hand over his face, trying to accept the fact that this was one murder that was solved before he could lay his hands on it. He walked around the table to lay a hand on Cecil’s shoulder. “Maybe not the worst, kid, but definitely the stupidest.”
—
Cecil was toted off to jail to await his trial, Maxwell and Sanderson went home to their wives and kids, and Chief Harding sat in his office, rubbing his temples and sipping out of the flask he kept in a hollowed out police code manual for occasions such as this.
A light knock on the door interrupted his existential daydreaming. “ Chief, it’s May, can I come in?”
“I think you mean, ‘May I’.”
She came in anyway.
“Jimmy told me about the case today. I know it threw you for a loop.”
Harding clenched his fist. “Oh, that Jimmy Peterson better run and hide if he wants to make it to his late twenties.”
May sat down on the edge of his desk. “Harry, just because your work was done for you doesn’t mean you didn’t do your job.”
“I told you not to call me that, Sugar. In this building, my first name is Chief.”
“Only from 9-5, it is,” she replied, running her finger down the center of his chest. Harding swatted her away.
“After that, it’s Mr., like it is to my lawyer and my milkman.”
May ignored him and tugged on his tie. “Why don’t you take me down to the interrogation room and show me the third degree you gave that guy,” she suggested with a wink.
Harding got up out of his chair and started putting on his coat. “How about I give you $3.50 for the cab home and you beat it?”
May rolled her eyes and made for the exit. She turned at the last moment and asked, “Should I still bring you your coffee tomorrow morning?”
“If I wanted to get my own coffee, I would have hired myself as secretary.”
-Ivy Decker, Senior Staff Member, and Matt Warner, Guest Writer