Michael Foody

He walked down the halls deliberately, he wanted to communicate with his walk. Almost a march. The walk it meant something. Business. It was brisk. He didn’t look at his feet. When he saw a coworker he smiled. He was courteous. But it wasn’t a warm smile. It was brief. It was an acknowledgement of the fact that a smile was called for. It meant nothing beyond it. The smile. 

He walked like this often. He liked it. He imagined people seeing him. He imagined what they were thinking. It felt like reading minds. In his mind, in his mind’s voice they said things like “whoa where’s the fire?” or “ut oh, someone’s in trouble.” If it was a girl his mind’s voice was higher in pitch. Like a bad impression. Like reading the dialogue of a bedtime story to a child. He didn’t have children.

In truth there was no urgency. There was no fire. He had only chores. Reports to type up. His most pressing case was a robbery. While technically true the word conjured up a falsely grandiose image of the crime. In fact the robbery was a lawnmower stolen from an unlocked garage. An old lawnmower. The owner had said, that he was “pretty sore about the thing.” The detective said he’d do his best but he couldn’t promise anything. The detective wished that the owner had used the phrase “violated”. 

He had a folder. With Polaroids of footprints. Of tracks in the snow showing where the lawnmower had rolled. They led to the side walk and to the street and he could tell that the lawnmower had been loaded into a truck with chains on the tires. He had told the man this and the man had seemed hopeful. That was a shame. It wasn’t much of a clue. He had asked the neighbors if they had seen a truck parked there. No one had. It was a small town, but it wasn’t one of those small towns where everyone knew one another. It was a small town of a few thousand strangers who drove in their cars and watched television at night. The lawnmower was gone.

He got called into the sergeant’s office and he did his walk. He knocked on the the frosted glass panel lightly and heard no reply he knocked harder and harder until he grew concerned about striking the glass and instead wrapped against the wood. “Come in” said a voice.

The Sargent was a slight man mostly bald, pig pink. White hair sprang from his ears like cumulus clouds. He wore a thin moustache curiously darker than the rest of his hair meticulously trimmed so that it extended exactly to the edge of his mouth and no further. He spoke in a halting and deferential manner incongruous with his elevated station.

“We’ve got something here, might be a murder, might be not. Can’t say for certain. Tell you it spooks me though. Kid, his brother fresh buried, died in a car accident, calls says he got a letter warning that his brother going to die. Now sure that’s odd but here’s the parculier thing about it. The letter was dated before the crash and only arrives now. So thing is, if the letter was really written before the accident that’s a ’spicious thing isn’t it?”

The detective frowned and traced the topography of his cauliflowered ear delicately with his fingers. “Do we have the envelope? The letter?” 

“Yeah, got them right here. Gloves?”

“Not just yet, I’m just looking at the writing. Awful penmanship. The letter and the envelope match. I thought maybe someone just took an old envelope stuck a new letter, found it in the trash maybe, but no. Or recycling, I guess, kids recycle these days. Plus the envelopes torn all to shit. If that’s the way the kid opens his mail good luck finding some trash you can pass off as new.”

“Maybe someone sent a letter before the accident, found a way to get it back. Then replaced it?”

The detective shook his head. “Why would anyone do that unless they knew that brother was going to die. What use is a post dated envelope to a person? Either the letter is real and a warning, or it is fake and a trick. It could be a forgery.”

“You mean the writing in the letter forged to match an envelope?”

“Could be, but I expect a man would remember getting a letter with such distinctively bad handwriting twice. No, I meant the postmark. It looks real enough but I can’t imagine it would be so hard to forge or doctor.”

The sergeant smiled, “That would explain the whole thing, but what about all the stickers and such, the not at this address, are they forgeries too?” 

“Could be. They’re not currency they look right, but I can’t say I could tell a real from a fake. We’ll take it to the post office and check. Seems much more likely that someone doctored an envelope than someone warned about a car accident weeks in advance through a letter. What kind of man thinks ’someone’s going to die let me write a letter.’ It isn’t the 1800s. We have phones, we have cars. There’s another option that we haven’t talked about though. That the prank isn’t on the kid, it’s on us.”

A troubled look crossed sergeant’s face like a suspicious man walking under a ladder “I thought of that too, if it was the kid doing the prank it would be much less trouble. He takes an old envelope, writes a fake letter in the same shitty hand writing, calls the police giggles well we pull our hair out. What’s left of it at least. Thing is it would take a sick fuck to use his own brother’s death as cause for a joke.”

The detective rubbed his ear and grimaced “If it’s a joke at all it’s a sick fuck.”

“I know, but it’s easier to believe that someone is being a sick fuck at… to the kid, than the kid is being a sick fuck to us.” 

“Lots of sick fucks out there.” ”Your too right on that one. How’s the lawnmower case coming?” ”The lawnmower” said the detective “is fucked.”