It's In the Eyes

Clinton Pearl was immediately on the phone.  His demeanor was rushed, almost hysterical, something that those who knew him were not accustomed to.  See, Clinton was not one to get flustered; he had a cool, laid back character that, while certainly intimidating, also put the minds of his company at a relative rest.  Relative, because in his line of work, even the composed Clinton Pearl couldn’t help but feel uneasy at times.  Of course, he would hide this well, so well, in fact, that even he may not consciously detect it.  Pearl was a private detective, along the likes of Sherlock Holmes, or Lord Peter Wimsey; any of them, really; Pearl could be compared to the best.  He wouldn’t have it any other way.  If nothing else, Clinton Pearl was an overachiever.  Born on Long Island, he spent his childhood shuffled to and from his father in Port Washington and his grandparents in Aspen, Colorado.  His home-life was lacking in the department of tender care or empathy of any kind, as early on in his childhood, Pearl’s mother had mysteriously vanished; though Clinton himself had more than just a vague inclination that his father had been responsible for this.  After graduating Eighth Grade, Pearl’s father had enrolled him at a boarding school in Switzerland.  Though his father probably rationalized that he was doing Clinton a favor, Pearl could not get enthused that his father had elected to send him away rather than doing to Clinton whatever he had done to Clinton’s mother.  Either way didn’t really matter anyway, as this was the last time Clinton Pearl would ever see his father.  In fact, Clinton couldn’t even remember what he looked like anymore.  The only thing that was burned into his brain was that nasty scar across his chest.  That damned ugly scar that would burn red every time he got the desire to beat the shit out of Clinton.  Motivated not by the desire to show-up his father, but rather for the excuse to never go back home, Pearl excelled in the challenging environment of boarding school.  After graduating near the top of his class, he went on to become educated at only the best universities in the world, including Oxford, Brown, and Georgetown.  His acquaintances all expected him to become nothing short of president of the United States.  That, however, was not Clinton’s style.  No, indeed, Clinton Pearl may have been the only person not to acknowledge his own unique abilities.  He had little desire for fortune, no desire for fame, and even less desire for power.  He was a reserved person, always had been.  He was the type who didn’t say much, but didn’t miss anything either.  Still, when he found a motive to speak, and opened his mouth to reveal his thick Noo Yawk accent, people listened.  He was a born leader, but didn’t necessarily like to lead, which may have actually made him an even better leader.  So instead of throwing his hat into the crooked game of politics, he tried his hand at something that could bring out the best in his introverted personality: solving crime.  And after only a few years in the business, Clinton Pearl had established himself as the premier private eye in New York.  Indeed, his only real competition was a man thirty years his elder, Stone Dickson.  Well, at least that’s what everyone knew him as, it was a kind of open secret that Stone Dickson wasn’t actually his real name.  Clinton hated that man.  Not because he was competition, and not even because he was very possibly the biggest asshole in New York.  Come to think of it, Clinton wasn’t sure exactly why he hated him.  It was his attitude, his obnoxious over-confidence, his habit of acting the part of a sixty year-old playboy.  And there was something more, something specific, something inciting a long-forgotten part of his brain, but exactly what that something was, he just couldn’t quite put his finger on.  He hated him so much, in fact, that he oftentimes found himself wishing Stone Dickson dead...which was probably not wise to admit at the current time, as that’s exactly what had Clinton Pearl on the phone.  He may have hated him, but he damn well respected the man.  Perhaps the one person whose skills came close to his own, a murdered Stone Dickson was enough to have any man in hysterics.
         Clinton Pearl was thirty years old, but looked more like twenty.  He had short dark brown, almost black hair the color of a gallant Clydesdale basking in the summer sun.  This hair, however, was almost always covered by an old and tattered brown Aussie digger hat, and exuded a bit of the Indiana Jones aura.  On the rare occasions when he wasn’t wearing his hat, Pearl would push his hair forward, with the very front naturally flipping upward in a light wisp.  His facial features were relatively delicate, yet didn’t give the slightest hint of a feminine air.  His nose was long, and straight, and pointed, and gave way to a pair of slicing thin and well-defined eye-brows.  Shadowed by these were two angular eyes a more brilliant green than even the most precious emerald in any museum or collection.  His mouth, like his eyebrows, was thin and sleek, as if designed as a jet to slice through the air.  His skin was almost always tanned in a golden hue, like that of a lightly toasted marshmallow.  Clinton Pearl was tall, six-foot-one, and his slim 160 pound figure made him look even taller than this.  His fingers were stretched and slender, and vaguely resembled a miniature version of his body.  His arms were long, and hung down like those of an orangutan.  Clinton hated his arms; he never knew what to do with them.  They just kind of hung there, like two pendulous logs, swinging in the wind.  Because of this, he often kept his arms crossed, or his hands in his pockets.  This was not meant to be a cool aloofness, and it was definitely not because he thought he was better than anyone, but because of this dilemma with his arms.
         Slowly, seemingly still dumbstruck by the murder of Stone Dickson, Clinton Pearl eased the receiver back into its cradle.  He turned around and stared out the window, the dust and grime coated on the pane almost enough to fog from his mind the grisly scene just inside the duplex across the way.  Through the scattered clean holes in the window, the day’s cruel sun, amplified a thousand times by the shimmering layer of bleached snow deposited the night before, shot through and pierced Clinton’s eyes like a hundred golden lances all thrown down from God.  Absently, he turned back toward the door, nodding his thanks for the hospitality of the old woman who let him use her phone.  He replaced his hat, shaking from it some water which had condensed on the brim.  Hearing a commotion from across the rough cobble-stone ally, he assumed the police had arrived.  Breaching the threshold of the crime-scene, Clinton paused for a moment, squeezing his eyes closed in an attempt to adjust to the blinding darkness of the house.  Opening his lids once more, he was pleased to note that everything was as he had left it; with the notable exception, of course, of the crowd of uniformed idiots bumbling around the scene.  The crisp air in front of Clinton shuddered as he exhaled; the warm puff of air condensing and forming a lethargic swirling cloud of mist extending conically from Pearl’s intense lips, pressed tightly together, parting only momentarily for the occasional breath out.
         “Mr. Pearl.  I’ve heard some extraordinary remarks on your skills.  I’m delighted to have such able support as your own on this case.  From the looks of things, we may need to hear what you have to say.”  This came from an annoying voice, nasally, sarcastic, and frankly fucking stupid, Must be from Brooklyn.  Clinton shot a quick glance with his hard eyes over his shoulder at the sardonic detective; a short, skinny little thing with a disgustingly sly half-smirk sloppily slapped onto his Napoleon-like face.  Barely acknowledging his remark, Pearl reached into his double-breasted khaki overcoat’s inner pocket and produced a tattered pack of cigarettes.  The pack had obviously been sitting there for a while without having been smoked.  Clinton proceeded to pull out a smoke and place it loosely dangling from the right side of his mouth.  He didn’t bother to light the cigarette, much preferring the taste and smell of pristine tobacco to the addicting qualities of nicotine.  Only then did Pearl bother to nod and grunt a reply to the detective.  Pearl had already taken in the scene, before calling the cops, so he didn’t see much purpose in a re-examination; just a waste of time.
         There wasn’t much to examine anyway.  Dickson was lying face-up in the middle of a foyer, his eyes staring, unseeing, into the abyss of the cavernous arched cathedral ceiling, straining to touch the clouds.  His arms were strewn out, reaching for some imaginary object beyond his head; perhaps the massive mahogany bureau neatly pressed up against the far wall, sporting all kinds of intricate carvings and posted upon the artist’s rendition of the feet of some monstrous creature.  Dickson’s feet were pointing, as if the tip of an arrow, toward an old rickety stairway, the wear in its white-washed wooden stairs covered by a frayed and faded red carpet.  Everything seemed to be in order, save, of course, for the dead body lying fully clothed and peacefully, as if sleeping in the middle of the house.  Not surprising, if you were to ask Clinton Pearl; any man smart enough to knock off Dickson wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave much evidence behind.  Certainly, the man wore gloves, confirmed by the frustrated looks on the faces of the men with brushes, trying in vain to lift just one finger-print.  Surely, whoever killed him would have used a pair of shoes a size too big to throw anyone off the case; not that it mattered anyway, there wasn’t a shoe print to be found.  No witnesses, no distinct fibers, no note, no mark, nothing.  Which was to be expected, really.
         “So tell me, Mr. Pearl.  Apparently you’re the expert.  What happened here?”  It was Napoleon again, probably noting the calm, or even smugly confident look on Clinton’s face.
         Pearl looked at the man in disgust, and slowly, being sure to quietly make a show of it, bent down next to the body.  “Isn’t it obvious?”
         “Yeah, he was shot in the head.”
         “Is that all you’ve got?” Again, that air of confidence, though this time he couldn’t help but exude a barely-discernable feeling of arrogant superiority.
         “I suppose you wanna tell us more?  Like what those marks on his back are?”
         Clinton already knew what they were, but flipped the dead guy over, just for the show.  He pointed to the bottom of Dickson’s otherwise pristine black pin-striped sports coat, and to his perfectly matching pants.  They were worn, more so than they should have been, and tattered, as if he had been wrestling on the ground.  “Is that the strangest thing you guys found here?”
         Napoleon stared at him, silent.  Clinton momentarily stood up and gestured with his arms around the room, his hands partly curled, palms turned up toward the ceiling, and index finger casually pointed out, “Where’s the blood?”  Again, silence on the part of the little man with the badge.  Pearl returned to the dead man’s shredded pants, “What did you geniuses make of that?”
         “He put up a fight; poor son of a bitch lost the scuffle.”
         Pearl shook his head, meant more as a gesture of sadness than to indicate to Napoleon that he was wrong.  He looked back up at the short man from Brooklyn, and removed his cigarette from his mouth.  He flipped it around, and used its butt to point to Stone Dickson’s shoes.  “Look at his shoes, their backs are all kinds of fucked up…just like his clothes.  And they’re almost falling off him, for Christ’s sake.”  Sure enough, the dead man’s shoes, while halfway off his feet, were pristine, black, and spit-shined until one’s eyes took in their ragged and scuffed backs.
         “Yeah…?”
         “Will ya lemmie talk?”  Clinton moved to the man’s head, and removed his black Charlie-Chaplin hat.  “Look at this gun shot.  Perfect…right to the back of his head.  Execution style.  Think whoever killed him could’a done that in a scuffle?”  Clinton shook his head and frowned, “Not unless he was one goddamn good, or one goddamn lucky shot.  No, there was no scuffle.  Not here at least.  Look at your surroundings.  Too pristine.”  He was right, to be sure.  The mahogany bureau remained backed up tightly against the wall, what little light shown through the room reflecting against the immaculate finish, accentuating the grain in the wood.  The grain, indeed, the only scratches that could be seen on the monstrosity.  There were no marks from the chest’s sharp talon-like feet to blemish the stain in the hard-wood floors.  Perched atop it, leaning delicately against the cream wall was an ornate mirror, not a smudge, let alone a crack or break to give away any kind of disturbance.  All in a row, flanking an empty piece of parchment paper sat a line of gleaming golden pens, all neatly and perfectly pushed together, glistening from the light shimmering off of the mirror.  The lamp with the long green porcelain shade, dexterously balancing on the corner would have plummeted and shattered at any note of a fight; its gold-plated chain hanging limply and eerily still.  “Now look at his hat.  See anything weird?”
         Napoleon tried hard to find something to say, looking like an idiot flipping the hat over again and again in his hands, looking over every detail, every scratch, eyeing the bullet hole as if it had magically appeared; but in the end, could only manage a weak, “…….No…”
         This time it was Pearl’s turn to shoot a sly smirk, “The bullet hole.  It doesn’t line up with the hole in the guy’s head.  Someone removed the hat after he had been shot, then replaced it.”
         “And I guess you have the slightest clue as to why?”
         “Not the slightest clue, my friend.  I can tell you exactly what happened here.  What I can’t tell you is why or who.”
         There was a long awkward pause, Clinton thriving in the moment of the detective’s discomfort.  “So what was it?!”  Napoleon couldn’t contain himself.
         “Stone Dickson wasn’t killed here.  The blood, the shoes, the pants.  No, he was not killed here, someone dragged him here by his arms.  His entire lower body was dragging on the ground the whole way.  His shoes, they were almost taken off by the ground exerting its pressure in the other direction.”
         “And his hat?”  Napoleon was trying to act smart, trying salvage what was left of his pride, still bleeding out by the second, by picking out something, anything that Clinton couldn’t answer for.
         But Clinton could answer for it, and he spoke slowly and deliberately, as if Napoleon were a foreigner straining to understand English.  “Well, it seems to me that if I was dragging a dead body down the street, and he was wearing a hat, it would be quite difficult for me to keep it on his head.  Whoever killed Dickson finally gave up and carried the hat, only replacing it after he was neatly lain down to rest right here.”
         “Obviously,” Napoleon rolled his eyes, trying not to feel like an idiot in front of his men.  “So tell me, Mr. Holmes, why here?”
         “Detective, I do believe that is your job.  I’ll tell you what, let’s see who can figure that out first.  You win, I owe you a beer.”  Clinton Pearl replaced his cigarette and casually walked out from whence he came.  He smiled to himself; the detective had obviously not done his homework.  Only a block down the street, Pearl stopped and knocked on a door.
         It took a minute before the door made any attempt to open.  He used the time to digest the scene before him.  He was atop a short and well-used staircase, the flight showing symptoms of the disease well-known to old stairways, with each step creating a wave-like pattern as the outsides where people have incessantly stepped were depressed down into two bowls.  Beyond the stairs was a brick walkway winding through a small grassy lawn, now covered by a flawless flat layer of iridescent white snow, aimlessly ambling along the row of marble-based houses as if it were the ocean along the white cliffs at Dover, Ireland.  Taking in everything as was his involuntary habit, Clinton was interrupted by a hurried ruffling from inside the brick house, which was shortly followed by a cringing in the hinges of the heavy old oaken door as it squeaked slowly open.  Behind the door hovered a manly woman, arms bulging larger than Clinton’s, she looked like a solidified mound of fat carved into the shape of some gladiator-ess.  She stood straight as a cadet in boot-camp, blocking the way into the house so completely that even beams of light couldn’t squeeze through the space between her body and the door.  She was wearing a night-gown, and was rubbing her back as if it ached.  Automatically, Clinton looked her up and down, not because she was attractive, she most definitely was not, but to discern what, if anything, she may be unconsciously telling him.  She was shivering ever so slightly, and her eyes were glazed over, though with a hidden twinkle, as if she were a tired child who just woke up on Christmas morning.  Her cheeks were rosy red, as if she had just come in from the cold to a big mug of hot chocolate, and her knees, showing just beneath her thin pink gown were glowing bright red.  Her hands were pruney, as if she had just enjoyed a long, hot bath, and her fingers were like stubs of Vienna sausages; bloated and about to pop.  At the base of her left ring-finger was a thin and shriveled band of loose, half-dead skin, white and clammy, set off from the rest of her finger by a dreadful tan-line.  Her fingernails were worn down and broken, as if filed by a rock, and her fingertips, likewise, looked as if they’d been over a cheese-grater. 
         “Gladys Harrington?  Clinton Pearl.”  Pearl removed his hat, and gently extended his hand to her.  “You’re Stone Dickson’s fiancé, no?”  Clinton, as gently as he knew how informed her of Stone’s death.  She showed no emotion, or maybe she did, but it simply was impossible to recognize upon her boulder of a body; but it made no difference, as he had hoped, she invited him in.
The house stood in stark contrast to the dreary place in which Stone Dickson’s body lay.  It was brightly lit, light radiating from the immaculate white walls, almost blinding a person.  He stood upon an ornate Persian-rug with flowers and curls leading down a narrow hallway to the kitchen, blocked from sight beyond a swinging white door.  On his right, carved out of a joyful red wall was a tall flight of white stairs, and to his left a threshold leading to a cozy sitting room.  Set into the far wall was a fire place that looked as if it had come straight out of Parliament, and above their heads was a breath-taking chandelier that may have come from the same.  Upon the plush maroon carpet sat a bevy of cushy pink sofas, chairs, and love-seats, all arranged around a marble-topped coffee table sporting antique and original-print books of all sorts.  It was upon one of these love-seats, with a cushion conspicuously bulging upward, that Gladys motioned for him to sit, “May I get you anything?  Tea, perhaps?”
“Oh, please, that would be great, if you don’t mind.”  Clinton took the opportunity alone to raise the cushion.  He was greeted by mild surprise when he found, staring back at him, a large revolver.  Before he had a chance to check out its contents, he heard heavy footsteps coming toward him.  Quickly, he replaced the cushion, and took Ms. Harrington’s tea, hoping she hadn’t noticed him snooping.
It was just then that Clinton barely detected a strange, yet familiar smell, almost as if a match had just been lit. 
Gladys caught on to this, “Oh, I apologize for that,” she laughed, “I burnt some biscuits just a minute ago.”
         Clinton cracked a half-smile and chuckle, to be polite.  “Ms. Harrington, I know this is an awkward position I have put you in, but I really need to ask you a few questions to help me with your fiancé’s murder.”
         “Of course, anything that might help.”          
         “Ms. Harrington, I don’t want to take up much of your time.  But I would be much obliged if you might be able to tell me some about what or who Stone was working on before he was killed…”
         “Oh my!” Gladys sounded surprised.  She cupped her mouth with her hand, looking as if she had just experienced a brilliant epiphany.  “Oh my,” she repeated, “I…I think you’re right.  Yes, it makes perfect sense now.  Well, you see, he doesn’t usually tell me anything about his work.  He doesn’t want to worry me, he said.  But let me tell you, a week ago he came home flustered.  He gave me a big hug, something he never did, and pressed a package into my hands.  It was heavy and cold like metal.  I didn’t know what it was at first.  When I looked down, I saw that he had given me a gun.  ‘You shouldn’t need this,’ he said, ‘but just in case.’  That was it.  He didn’t say anything else, but I knew it wasn’t a ‘just in case’ like he said.  Yes, that’s it, he was worried about something in particular…someone…it must have been someone in his case that was threatening him…or threatening me, maybe.”
         “Gladys, listen,” Pearl said seriously but with compassion, “I know you’re in shock right now.  But I really need you to think back.  Did he ever mention a name?  An address?  A city?  A description?  Anything?”
         Gladys took a minute, then definitively shook her head.  “No.  No, like I said, he never talked about his work.  But I know that he always has with him a list of phone numbers.  For emergencies; people he thought could help him, I guess.  He keeps it tucked into his pants…under his shirt.  I always thought it was silly, but it was something he always did.”
         Clinton Pearl politely made his excuses and pushed himself up from the sofa.  On his way out the door, he stopped for a moment and looked back at Gladys Harrington.  “If you don’t mind,” Clinton continued as he handed her his card, “Please call on my office tomorrow around noontime.  I should have something for you by then.”
         Once again, Clinton Pearl had donned his intense detective look; and once again, he was strolling toward the house which contained a dead body.  The sun had set by this time, and no longer were there police milling about.  The snow, slush, and ice crunched refreshingly beneath his cowboy boots, their heels worn down to little more than a rounded nub.  Clinton stopped and once again took in the scene outside.  Everything seemed in place, no obvious signs of a murder, or anything else even remotely menacing for that matter.  The only thing that seemed to bother Clinton was the week’s worth of mail still stuffed and over-flowing in the rusted mailbox posted beside the door.  Just as he turned the dull brass knob and was about to push in the door, something in the bushes flanking the utilitarian concrete porch glinted in the light of the full moon.  At first, just in case he was being watched, he played it off as if it were nothing more than a chipmunk.  But then he doubled-back and reached into the bush.  He came out holding, along with a fist full of numbing snow, a fat diamond ring.  He nodded to himself as he pocketed the ring.  His footsteps echoed loudly in the silence of the night, combining with the song of crickets to form an ethereal opera.  He left the door ajar, and the wind whistling through it added an eerie melody to the symphonic trance that seemed to be warning of a sinister plot in the works.  Clinton bent down and undid Stone’s shirt, looking for that slip of paper.  What he found instead was enough to knock Clinton on his back.  Pearl just sat there, awestruck and silent.  He couldn’t even think, he was just a mass of flesh staring at a dead man’s chest.  No longer could he hear the night’s ominous chorus.  The only thing that existed was what was staring back at him: a long red scar running from Stone Dickson’s right shoulder to the bottom of his left ribcage.

         Still reeling from his discovery of the night before, Clinton Pearl sat like the bones of some ancient creature: unmoving, inert, and barely breathing in the lavish green leather of his desk chair.  In front of him sat a stagnant and cold cup of coffee, which he hadn’t even pretended to take a sip of, the mug no longer throwing great swirls of steam into the atmosphere.  In his mouth sat the butt of a long-smoldered-out cigarette, and in his hand a pen which hadn’t written a word in the hours since Clinton had picked it up.  His elbow rested eternally on the desk, and his head limply in his hand.  His eyes stared, like those of his father, unseeing at some knot in the grain of the cherry-wood finish of the desk.  Clinton had known for about a month that Stone Dickson was his father.  But he wasn’t prepared for the shock and horror that once again seeing that evil mark would impart upon him.  Knowing something and living something are two very different things, especially for a highly controlled and compartmentalized being as Clinton Pearl.  Pearl had known, but it wasn’t until last night that he had lived it out again and again.  It wasn’t until last night that the painful memories locked in his subconscious were unlocked by that smoldering scar, and allowed to flood Clinton Pearl’s entire being in an unstoppable deluge of emotion, of power, and of fear.  It was in this numb state that Clinton sat as the shadow just beyond the cloudy glass of his office door turned the knob and became a woman.  It took a minute for Clinton to realize that she was standing there, and another again to recognize Gladys Harrington; but he was finally able to motion for her to sit down in one of the crescent-backed leather chairs he had positioned in front of his fortress of a desk.
         “I have to tell you,” Clinton started, still in a daze and not quite sure how he was going to finish it, “what I found was very interesting.”  He tried taking a bit of his coffee, but after feeling the clammy cold liquid on his lips thought better of it.  He was about ready to continue when there was a ruckus in the hallway.  Before he was able to investigate, three police with guns raised rushed into his office.
         Napoleon spoke, “The gig’s over, Pearl.  We know you did it, don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
         Clinton looked incredulous.
         “We know all about how you hated Stone Dickson.  We have witnesses up the wazoo who can testify to that.  It’s convenient, isn’t it, to have your only competition just simply fall out of the way?  But that’s not why you did it.  No, but you did it, that part’s clear.  Personally, I think you found out, just as we did, that he was sleeping around with your wife.  But no, I think your hatred runs even deeper than that.  And I can’t wait to get you back to the station to figure out why.  But Pearl, you should have been more careful.  Your prints, they’re all over the place.  We have you at the scene.  I don’t know how we missed them until this morning, but they’re all over, clear as day.  So give it up, Pearl.  Make this easy for the both of us.  Either way, you’re gonna end up behind bars for a long time.”
         Clinton continued to stare dumbfounded, whether from the discovery of his father or from the accusations spewing from the nasally mouth of this half-man.  Then he broke out in an uncontrollable laughter, he just couldn’t help it.  After regaining some semblance of control, and clearing the water from his eyes, he spoke.  “You guys want the murderer, huh?  Well, I gotta commend you, you came to the right place,” Clinton chucked once more, “just for the wrong guy.  I didn’t kill Stone Dickson.  Sure, you got my prints, why didn’t you find them yesterday?  Simply because they weren’t there.  I went back last night, and sure, I left some prints behind.  I was careless.  You want the murderer?  You needn’t look farther than this very office.”  Clinton Pearl diverted his commanding glare from Napoleon and gazed directly at Gladys Harrington.  “I wasn’t sure until I went back to the house last night.  In fact, it wasn’t until I left her house yesterday that I even suspected her.  All I knew was that Dickson had been killed without a struggle, and dragged to his resting place by someone who knew the owner wouldn’t be there to object to the body being dumped.  I knew that the owner of that house had been gone for some time, as there wasn’t one light on in the place, and the heat had been off for quite a while.  Not to mention his pile of unclaimed mail.  I figured that the murderer must have had some connection to the owner of the house to know that he would be gone.  I went straight to Ms. Harrington’s place, without even a twinkle of suspicion for her.  Sure, she lived near enough to know that the owner was on vacation, but so did a dozen other people.  When she opened the door, it was obvious that she had been scrubbing hard at something.  Her back was bothering her from bending over, her knees were sore from kneeling, and her hands were beat-up from scrubbing, in this case, Dickson’s blood off the floors.  When I walked in, one thing jumped out at me right away: that smell, it was unmistakably the smell of a gunshot.  I, of all people, know that smell well.  Ms. Harrington will claim she burned some biscuits.  Go ahead, look for the biscuits, you’ll never find them, they were never there.  Besides, who cooks biscuits in her nighties?  Then there was the gun in her sofa.  That gun that she tried so hard to hide.  My guess is that’s what all the disturbance was before she answered the door, she was looking for a place to hide the gun.  And here’s the kicker.  Ms. Harrington and Mr. Dickson were engaged, but Ms. Harrington didn’t have on her ring.  But it wasn’t until I went back to the dumping house that I was absolutely convinced.  There, in the bushes by the door, was this engagement ring.”  Out of his pants pocket, Clinton produced the ring, and slipped it onto Ms. Harrington’s bloated finger.  Of course, it squeezed perfectly into the tan-lined slot of dead skin.  After all, it was her ring.  “The question that remains is why.  Well, I think I can answer that too, and I can’t say I totally blame Ms. Harrington for what she did.  See, what I discovered last night that got me so careless as to leave you my prints was that Stone Dickson was my father.  And I know what my father did to my mother.  And I can only assume that’s what he did to Ms. Harrington as well.”

         Clinton Pearl glanced back down the street at Gladys Harrington.  She was a wreck, kicking and screaming, escorted on both arms by the three cops.  Clinton gave her a slight not of the head, and a wink.  He turned his back, and nonchalantly disappeared the other way down the smoky ally.  As he faded away like a pirate-ship through a foggy bay, he gave up trying to hide his furtive grin.  Was it just relief?  Or was that a crafty twinkle in his eyes?