Saturday, March 31, 2007

Dead Man's Hand - A Mini-Mystery

The thumping on my door was too loud to be a potential client and too long and insistent to be the police. I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed my Sig Sauer and went to stand by the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Bumpy Miller,” he said from outside. “Let me in, man.”

Bumpy was lucky I was sleeping alone that night. If Cindy was there she’d have told me to shoot him. I’ll cop to being tempted myself.

“What the hell would make me want to open my door to a gambler and a hustler like you at two-thirty in the morning?”

“Let’s see,” he said. “A dead body, four guys who could go to jail where only one ought to, and five large if you can figure out who the one is.”

Well, Bumpy had the right answer. There are only three things I could think of that would get me pulling on my black suit at that hour: a corpse, a puzzle and a nice fee.

Inside of fifteen minutes Bumpy was knocking on another door with me standing beside him. Bumpy was a little guy with a bald head and a little scar over his right eye. Still he got respect because of the monster opening the door. Bruise got his nickname because he was so black he was almost blue. But when you’re five inches over my six feet and pushing 300 pounds, nobody laughs at you.

A poker table dominated the room, but there were no chips, just stacks of cash. I knew the two guys still sitting. Freddie was a West Indian fancy man with a bad attitude and, from what I could see from the table, bad luck at cards. Victor was a loose cannon the gangs called on from time to time to correct a member’s behavior. Victor was good at making people see things his way. He liked blades and he liked fire. I didn’t like him.

“What the hell?” Victor said, getting half out of his seat. Bumpy waved him back down.

“Gentleman, I called Hannibal Jones here because I trust him, and you both know he’s honest. You also know that if five-oh comes in here and looks in that bedroom we’re all going down, just because of our history. So I say, he goes in there and tries to figure out who the real trouble maker is. Then that guy goes with Hannibal to see The Man, and the rest of us go home.”

“This is bull,” Freddie started to say, but Bruise took a step in his direction and he shut right up.

“So who’s the fifth player?” I asked.

“It’s Gant,” Bumpy said, pushing the bedroom door open. “Or it WAS Gant.”

Gant was tall and lanky, and on that night wore a dark blue suit and alligator shoes. His kinky hair had hints of gray at the temples and when I’d seen him before he always had a ready smile, not the lethal leer most pimps wear. Slumped in that chair he didn’t look like he had smiled in weeks.

I pulled on my gloves and stepped closer. He had a rock the size of a cat’s eye marble on his left hand and a fountain pen clutched tight in his right. His Rolex was still on his wrists so nobody tried to rob him at least. A hastily-scrawled suicide note lay on the bed’s side table. Twenties and fifties were splayed across the bed and on the floor. I lifted his left hand and let if go. It fell limply. No rigor. In fact, he was the most relaxed dead man I ever saw.

“And you know it wasn’t suicide, because…?” I asked Bumpy, who never walked past the doorway.

“Cause why the hell would Gant kill himself?” Bumpy said. “He been winning all night. Winning, and grinning. Then he comes in here and never comes out. But now, if you think he might have really offed hisself, we’ll just head on home and you can be the one who found him. Same fee.”

I chuckled, and stared checking the area around the body. “Who really found him?”

“That was Freddie,” Bumpy said. “Little fool damn near pissed his pants.”

“And nobody came in here since?” I asked, fishing in the trash. Didn’t see much, but there was a little medicine bottle. I wondered what Gant might have been taking.

“Not a soul,” Bumpy said. “Bruise saw to that.”

The bottle might have held any number of possible drugs, since it had no label, but my nose told me it probably also held something more than Gant bargained for.

“If it was suicide, he did it right,” I said. “I got the bitter almond smell of cyanide here.”

“Naw, I seen Gant swallow pills out of that bottle before,” Bumpy said. “They was for his blood pressure he said. I nodded and looked again at Gant’s face, so relaxed in death. I dropped the bottle back in the little trash basket and brushed past Bumpy. I was tired and didn’t want to make this an all-night affair.

“So, Bumpy, did you collect from everybody else for my fee?”

“Damn right he did,” Victor said.

“Fine,” I said. “Pay me, Bumpy. Then you and the boys can go home. Except for Freddie here. He goes with me.”

“What?” Freddie said, jumping to his feet. “How can you do that? Victor here is a stone killer, every body knows that. And Bumpy, he’s so slick, and he sure hates losing all night at his own poker game.”

“Well, I sure ain’t mad at you,” Bumpy said, “but I am curious how you can be so sure Freddie did Gant in.”

“Then let me give you all a little forensics lesson,” I said. “Cyanide is such nasty stuff because it’s actually a nerve agent. If you swallow that stuff, death comes pretty damn fast but first you go into convulsions. After that, your body goes completely limp. All the muscles relax.”

“So what?” Freddie said. “When I saw Gant he looked pretty limp to me. Dead limp.”

“Yeah, probably so,” I said. “But you had to go and get dramatic and fake a suicide. You wrote a sloppy note, and that was okay. But then you had to get fancy and stick a pen in his hand.”

Freddie dropped back in his chair, white as a West Indian ghost, but I kept talking.

“Guess you didn’t know it, but after death by cyanide there’s no way in hell he could have held on to a pen through the convulsions and even if he did, when his body relaxes his hand would have dropped it. And since you found him and nobody else went in the room, you’re the only one who could have pushed that pen into his hand. Now Bumpy, how about making that anonymous call, and I’ll baby-sit Freddy here until the cops show up.”

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Real gun control - Washington DC had the strictest gun ban in the country until a court recently overturned it.

“So how does it feel to not be the only gun in town?” Cindy asked me the day after the ruling.

She was talking about the 30 year old District law that pretty much outlawed handguns or rifles except for police or security guards, until it was overturned a few days ago.

She was facing me over a chess board, with Monte looking on. We were supposed to be demonstrating, to help him sharpen his game. But I knew she really wanted to win, and had brought up what she figured was one of my hot buttons to distract me.

“Actually, I feel safer with more law abiding citizens getting armed.”

She pushed her king’s pawn forward another space. “So you figure it’s okay that a court decided that the District’s law limiting gun ownership to police and professionals like yourself was useless.”

“Actually, what I think the federal appeals court decided was that DC’s handgun ban was unconstitutional,” I said, putting my queen’s knight out. “It was a violation of our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Surely an officer of the court like yourself must respect the constitution.”

“We both know the founding fathers meant that right to apply only to militias,” Cindy said. She was pulling out her queen way too early.

“We do?” I castled and managed to get into the king’s Indian defense. Let her try to get in there without losing her queen. “The court specifically said that the activities protected by the Second Amendment are not limited to militia service.”

She actually stopped to think about her next move. That was the lesson I wanted Monte to learn. But she kept talking. “So, you don’t mind losing your edge as the only one out there not in uniform but packing a gun.”

“I don’t know,” I said, turning to Monte. “Tell me, do you know anybody else who carries a handgun?”

“You kidding?” Monte barely avoided laughing out loud. “Be easier to ask me who I know who ain’t strapped.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said, almost forgetting about the game. “Crooks don't obey the law, so they got guns. Always have, always will. The law only disarmed law-abiding citizens."

“Oh you know that’s not true.” Cindy was on her feet now. It seemed I had pushed her buttons instead of the other way around. “Just by keeping gun shops out of the city the law helped decrease gun violence here.”

Even Monte had to laugh at that. “This is your idea of a city with reduced gun violence? Sure don’t seem like that to me.”

“And even if that was true, that sounds like you’re saying the ends justify the means, and we can just brush the constitution aside. That’s no way for a lawyer to think.”

“Oh, so you think everybody should have a gun? I can see how that would play out on our streets.”

“Yeah,” Monte said, miming pulling an automatic’s slide back and pointing it sideways, the way movie gangsters do. “Then I’d get some respect.”

“Oh, baby, you know better,” I said, smiling my best conciliatory smile. “Does everyone have the right to own a car? There are reasonable restrictions we should all be able to agree on. I’m good with guns being registered, just like cars, so we know who has what. Like cars, guns should get safety inspections to make sure they’re safe to use. And I’d even support mandatory training, like we require driver’s ed before kids get their license. Of course, no guns for criminals or crazy people.”

That softened her attitude… a little. But it didn’t take her hands off her hips. “I know you’re trying to make this all sound reasonable, but those ideas don’t equal gun control.”

“Gun control?” I quipped. “I’m strongly in favor of gun control.”

“What?”

“True gun control,” I said. “Proper breathing, sight picture and trigger squeeze so the bullets hit their intended target. THAT’S gun control.”

Saturday, March 03, 2007

It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here. So What?

One opinion on global warming

After my girl Cindy and I had our quasi-scientific conversation about global warming, she thought I should let it all hang out here in the web log. Good place to vent, she says. Yeah, and maybe she’s right.

Well to start you ought to know that I’ve heard the scientific stuff and accepted it. 2,500 scientists got together and agreed that the earth IS getting hotter and they’re pretty sure we humans are the cause. The average temperature around the planet is going to go up at least 3 and maybe as much as 7 degrees by the turn of the next century, a short 93 years from now. And sea levels will rise by 23 inches. Or maybe, the same group says, only by seven inches. This they equate with the coming of Armageddon, or the end days in Revelations. I get it. And I suppose it’s probably real.

Of course, I have a detective’s natural skepticism of their evidence. We’ve got maybe a century worth of hard data. The planet, as I understand it, is six BILLION years old, and tends to work in very long cycles. And it seems like in the 60s and 70s the scientists were just as certain that the earth was cooling off.

Also, can we check our egos, people? Personally, I think it’s pretty damned arrogant for us to assume that we’re actually changing planetary conditions. And maybe it’s even MORE arrogant for us to think we can change it on purpose and fix this “problem.”

But here’s the thing. Suppose the scary scientists are right. I sure won’t live to see it. If I had kids, they probably wouldn’t either. But after I’m gone the ocean will rise up and bury us. Well, let’ see… 23 inches… 93 years… I think that’s like a quarter inch per year. And that’s the worst estimate. Are we really scared that we can’t adapt to this? Build all our stuff a little farther from shore, or build dikes a little higher? Or how about digging a couple channels and letting those extra inches of water flow in and irrigate some of our existing dessert land and making arable so more folks can eat? Why must everything be a calamity?

The truth is we got way too much ignorance, hatred, poverty, crime, and terrorism going on right now, not to mention pestilence, war, famine and death. Yep, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have already arrived and “warmth” ain’t one of them. So how about we focus on the crap we need to fix here and now, instead of sweating what might happen a couple of generations down the road?