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Dirk Malloy Mysteries
2. Death of the Drunken Dandy
The Story
Madri Gras. A phrase meaning drunkenness, bared breasts, and unwanted pregnancies. Into this maelstrom of mildly-matured mammaries stepped a delegation of dandies from those Ivy-coated colleges that you and I and everyone we know got denied admission to. The wealthy gadabouts mingled uneasily with the buffed football players from mid-Western agricultural schools. The dandies were drunk, having consumed a case load of wine spritzers and witty banter to mask their physical failings.
For one of their party, Leslie Chatterworth (a sophomore at venerable Harvard University), the sight of freshman flesh had lost its allure. He had only agreed to come on this trip on the insistence of his private school chum, Manfred Hunter. Manfred had gone to Yale, and the two very rarely met. Leslie had been fully won over by the intellectual life of Harvard, and when drunk he preferred to ruminate on nubile virgins of English mythology, rather than those of Rutgers University. As they passed the House of Blues he slipped quietly into the alleyway where New Orleans' second hand book dealers congregated.
Several hours later Leslie's friends found him in that alleyway. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear, an echo of a smile his lips had only rarely formed (usually when watching The Daily Show).
Dirk Malloy's Investigation
Malloy's eyes were like a fine metaphor. They could tease, amuse, or frighten. They could also be perplexingly complex. But as he stepped into the stirring, pot-filled air they clarified his intentions. And he intended to sleuth. Sleuth until the last drop of meaning had been wrung from the case, sleuth like an overused metaphor.
Chatterworth's body was lying in front of an antiquarian book store. A bloody handprint smeared the window in front of a first edition of Morris of Canterbury's Tales of the English Saints. But Malloy had no time for reading about saints, his job was to catch sinners. But were saints and sinners two sides of the same coin? Malloy decided they were not, unless someone had two personalities (which isn't as common as people think). As Malloy thought about how much better the world would be if most people even had one personality he noticed several pools of vomit not far from the corpse.
He dipped a finger into one pile and sniffed. Malloy was an expert in identifying different foods and beers in vomit, a skill important when there was no time to send samples to the lab. Malloy identified Brunhauser, a cheap and relatively low alcohol beer. However, the food smell eluded him. Paprika was easy to pick out. Chilis, gherkins, lettuce. Any dime store private eye could distinguish them from stomach bile. Then a strange aroma danced up through the bracing acidity. A smell that bought back a flood of painful memories.
Malloy remembered back to a chilly winter holiday with his beloved Barbara. Where in that arctic tundra does her body lie? What sort of mad man would dig through frozen ground just to bury such an angel? He asked these questions because what he smelled was Huntsy the Wolverine's Smoked Cheese Spray, a foodstuff only available in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Malloy pounded the pavement. He searched youth hostels of the cheap, nasty variety. The sort of place college students curse when their doctor tells them they have syphilis. The sort of place kids from Minnesota could afford. At Mama Ramona's Hostel for Youth he found the group of newly arrived University of Minnesota freshman he'd been looking for. They reeked of unhealthy living. If it wasn't for the 5% orange juice in Fanta you could describe them as a scurvy lot. They sat around the TV lounge nursing their hangovers, watching a particularly bad episode of Friends (one with the chimp in it).
Malloy flicked the TV set off, naturally no one complained. "Alright punks, which of you freaks is a murderer?"
"Eh!" said the husky Rolo Francini, the first of the group to realise they weren't watching Ross playing with a chimp any longer. "You're talking crazy man."
"Outside the book store, one of you cut a man's throat open. The rest of you watched. It's either all or one, I get paid either way."
"You got the wrong guys, brother" Rolo shrugged. "We went down there and had a puke, but the only person we saw was asleep."
Something in Rolo's vacant eyes made Malloy realise he wasn't able to lie convincingly. Like a fish who wanted a sprinkle of fish pellets Rolo's eyes couldn't help asking for treats. Truth treats.
"Asleep" Malloy cursed "and you saw no one else?"
Rolo thought for a second. "An ugly girl ran right past us, eh."
So Who Did It?
Malloy stormed into the pansies suite at the Colonial Hotel.
"Which of you pansies is a English Lit major?" he growled like a dyke from Vassar. Three of them raised their hands.
"And which of you doesn't go to Harvard?" Manfred was alone in raising his hand.
"Manfred, the game is up." Malloy declared in a firm tone that said any sort of witty banter would earn Manfred a smack in the chops..
"But, how could you possibly…" Manfred stuttered like the tailpipe of a car that was nearly out of gas.
"Let me tell you future leaders something. Education is power to people in the real world. To you jerks your parent's money is power. In my line it pays to know who hates who everywhere. You just need to know that people everywhere hate you. That's why I know about the bitter feud between Professor Hunt at Harvard and Swanwick at Yale. They've been dissing each other for years about whether Morris of Canterbury was a proto-feminist of proto-communist. But it took you freaks to take that battle to the streets."
Manfred broke down in a way that was socially uncomfortable for all around him. "It's true I did it. Leslie got into the school I wanted to, he learned from the professor I wanted to. I couldn't handle it, so I tried to destroy the professor's reputation. When I realised I couldn't I was driven to kill…and I loved him."
"Jeez, one motive is enough." Malloy said with the special sneer he saved for the sons of rich jerks.
As the police lead Manfred away, the rest of the dandies could do nothing but marvel that a man who never attended an Ivy League school could be so brilliant. They ruminated on it over a night of drinking, but by morning the moment had passed and they began to wonder what the fuss was about.
Who will Malloy catch next time? It could be the person sitting next to you, or someone you've never met!
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