joegoda | The Framing of Jon Smith

2761 / 50000 words. 6% done!
There's this mystery where Sherlock asks the immortal question - Why didn't the dog bark? The answer is obvious, kinda sorta. If the dog knows the bad guy, then he wouldn't have barked would he? Which is bullshit, by the way. I've known plenty of dogs that barked their heads off when I got near them, and they knew me like forever. Usually the small yapping type, and occasionally the large woofing type. I don't know why they bark like that. They just do.

Sherlock got lucky, is all. He guessed. And like I always say, it's okay to guess, as long as you guess right every single time.

So here I stand on the cracked concrete stoop of a four-story brownstone building, thinking to myself: Did the dog bark, or did he not? Said dog belonged to one Francis Mendlehousen, a prestidigitator of some repute, who once made the Statue of Liberty disappear and reappear on top of the tallest pyramid of Giza. A wiz if ever there was one.

A magician's magician and a gentleman's gentleman, Mendlehousen was renown for performing for packed houses and then giving the gate away to some local charity, usually an orphanage. He never wanted for money, did this guy, having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a golden wand up his butt. Not that he was a snob or anything. Don't get me wrong. But it's sort of like that bit where some lucky stiff has that horseshoe stuck where the sun don't shine and so his luck just doesn't turn bad.

Mendlehousen was like that. Born to riches, natural magician by the age of... just being born I guess. Legend had it that his first conjuring was to turn his mother into a cow and then turn her back again, just because Mendlehousen liked cow milk better. Total crap, of course. How could a baby know what a cow was? Still he was something else all together. The first of the first class conjurers, the media said. I know I never knew anyone like him, and it's likely I won't, either.

And now Mendlehousen was dead. Multiple contusion and broken bones and all sorts of injuries that looked like he had been shoved into a cement mixer with about a ton of bricks and just rolled around until someone said stop. Except there wasn't a cement mixer on the top floor of Mendleson's four story brownstone building. I don't even know if Mendlehousen himself could have conjured one up there.

Maybe it was baseball bats or those ugly sticks the English use... cricket bats that beat him up. Hell, I don't know. Maybe some wizard hating gorilla, freshly escaped from whatever zoo or circus was nearby, jumped up and down on Mendlehousen for the better part of an hour. I'll let the determination of cause of death come from the experts, said experts being my cousin Vinny, who is the one and only M.E. that the City's cops use when it comes to odd and unusual circumstances.

Cousin Vinny is like the Sherlock of the recently dead. Sometimes he guesses at what caused the dead to become dead, but he always guesses right. At least... he's never been proven wrong.

I, on the other hand, can't afford to guess. I make my living at looking at the odd and unusual just like Vinny does, but my looking at involves the whys and howcomes things happen. Such as why did this guy Mendlehousen get killed, and howcome someone wanted to do it. I get called in when the cops can't quite get a handle on the odd and unusual. It's not their fault. They're used to the ordinary and the usual. As in just ordinary guys picking up the usual suspects.

In the case of the Mendlehousen murder, there were no ordinary guys and there were no unusual suspects. There was just poor magical Francis, all crumpled up at the top of his brownstone, like someone tossed a wadded ball of wizard and missed the trashcan. He was, like I said, a gentleman's gentleman and everybody liked him.

Except, not everyone liked him. Someone disliked him enough to do an odd and unusual on him. With extreme prejudice.

Now, you may be asking yourself, if I'm so great, how come the cops don't have me solve all their crimes for them? How come good old Johann Sebastian Smith ain't swimming in the dough and living high on the old hog?

Because it doesn't work that way for good old Johann Sebastian Smith, my friend. I have to work to achieve what I want, unlike an unnamed and recently departed wizard I could name. I don't have the magical touch to walk up to the dead and say "Hey... you! What's going on here?" and get an answer. Heck, I'm lucky to have just enough magic to get my grill to light when I want it. And then only when and if the matches will light.

It works like this: When an odd and unusual pops up, the chief detective gives a call to my aforementioned cousin, and asks if I'm doing anything. The reason why the chief detective does this is because he recognizes that the men he's responsible for are the previously mentioned Ordinary Guys. The chief detective, Frank Lezardo, is a good guy for being a hard-assed, short, bald, squinty eyed, cigar chomping pain in the rump, and I have a lot of respect for him. First, because he puts his men before his paycheck and second, because he knows that I am anything but Ordinary.

We went to elementary school together, Frank and me, back when there were still elementary schools. That was way before this middle school crap. There was Kiddygarden, where you learned how to not crap in your pants and to say Please and thank you and you took a nap when you were supposed to and maybe you got a graham cracker with your milk if you were good or the teacher happened to like you because you were some sort of kiss ass like Froggy Henderson - the bastard.

Then came Elementary school, where you were introduced to the elementals - mean and harsh little godlings, who made a small boy piss his pants from fear and chuckled to themselves at the sight of it. It was here that you were given your elemental magic tests and given the elemental beginnings of what the real world expected of you, and from this you gained the understanding that if you didn't show some major magical talent early on then you better damn well work your butt off to become something that had a purpose like being a cop or maybe a hairdresser or even just a sometimes smarter than he should be detective for hire. I also babysit, walk dogs, trim trees and do minor repairs around the house. It's not much, but it pays the bills.

After Elementary school came Junior High and then High school, where I learned that rumor is much stronger than reality, and if someone thinks that you were born from a mom who didn't exist in this dimension and your dad was just a traveling space monkey who just happened to be passing through this timeline on his way to another and the two of them kaboodled together long enough to make a zygote and then either die off because this dimension is just to harsh to live in or fly out through a dimensional gateway to some far off final destination leaving said zygote on the doorstep of the "Don't want 'em, We'll take 'em" orphanage to grow up to become a magically challenged individual in a world where magic and the ability to use it is what creates the movers and shakers of society.

And you know... if that rumor is repeated long enough and loud enough and by enough people, some of whom you even develop a major pimply faced, cracking squeaky voiced crush on... then you actually start to believe it yourself, no matter how many times the counselors at the orphanage assure you that your mom had the normal number of arms and legs and your dad did indeed marry your mom and the only reason they weren't around any more is because they both died in a rail related auto accident and that you lived because the doctors worked for eight hours to make sure you did, when all bets were off and your little 7 month old lungs shouldn't have worked, and your little 7 month old heart should have broken, but the lungs, they did work, and the heart, it only broke a little bit.

If you were lucky enough to have parents to pay for it, or had a job so you could go, there was always college and higher up from there. I was neither lucky enough to have parents nor did I have a job that paid more than the smallest living wage the orphanage could afford to pay me for keeping the lawn under control and the moles away from the rutabagas.

Frank Lezardo went to college and above. And I think he never believe the rumors about my parents, because, even though he had a good set of parents and lived in a clean house, he still played with me when we were kids - kick the can, hide n go seek, billy goat gruff - that sort of stuff. He invited me to his birthday parties even, and I went to a few of them, feeling horribly uncomfortable as only a young boy can feel when he knows that not only is he out of his league but everyone else thinks he is as well, and why didn't he just stay in that nasty old orphanage where he belongs... why did he have to come out with the rest of us and he doesn't even know how to do the simplest magic.

Frank doesn't do magic either. His parents were hard working non-magical folk, who fought their way from the ground up and were the proof that you didn't have to have magic to be able to be successful. They were in the newspaper business, both of them, his mom and his dad. And it was from them, Frank's parents, that I learned that there were more non-magical folks in the world than there were magical folks, so who the heck did they think they were, flaunting their quote magical unquote abilities around when their farts smelled just as bad as everyone else's? That was a quote from Frank' mom, Annie. I love my aunt Annie and I still send her cards on her birthday. She turned one hundred and four just last month, bless her heart. She outlived Stevie, Franks dad by twenty years. She may be more magical than she let on. I'd ask her, but really... what's the point? With Steve dead and at one hundred four years old, she doesn't care, and I love her enough that I don't either.

So... where does this leave me?

Well, around my twentieth year, I found out that I did have some magical abilities after all. Seems that if I look squinty-eyed at some inanimate object long enough it makes my head hurt, but I can also see the immediate past that occurred around that object. Immediate means the most recent five to ten minutes of the past. It plays out in my head like a really short movie. And I can see the next five to ten minutes of the future as well. It's pretty neat and I learned I could do it one night when I was really, really drunk. But I hate the headaches and I don't like the weird after taste it leaves in my mouth. Like a combination of anchovies and cinnamon.

Still, it's a little gift that, apparently, nobody else in the universe has been able to duplicate. It does give me a bit of an advantage over your average cop to figure out what has just happened, regardless of the incredibly icky taste. I also get to charge a premium price for the use of said gift. Because of it's short range - five to ten minutes isn't very much - I have to get on scene pretty darn quick, and that means sometimes I'm inconvenienced. And if I'm inconvenienced then somebody else is gonna damn well pay. A lot.

Which brings us back to why I'm not swimming in dough and living high on the hog. While my little gift is useful and unique, it's also limited and expensive. It's like an engagement ring. You're not gonna buy more than one at a time, and you're only gonna buy one, period. If you are the sort of guy that buys more than one, please, please, come visit me. I have a bridge or two that I want to talk to you about.

And now, here I sit, on the cracked and concrete stoop of Mendlehousen's brownstone, looking at the stone gargoyle that sits on either side of these rough and worn steps, looming down from their bricky perches as if they know something I don't. And if they do, they won't for very long.

Here's my trick. I take my mind and toss it at whatever I'm staring at. Once I get a pretty darn good mental 3D picture of the thing, I sort of turn that picture around and about and hey presto, I get a movie of the most recent past. I do the same thing to get a hint of the future, but I don't need to do that and I hope I never do. Did it once, didn't like it, won't do it again. To answer your question, I lost the girl, okay?

So, Mister Gargoyle... or it could have been Missus or Miss... with gargoyles, how can you tell? So, anyway, THE gargoyle got wrapped in mystic vision and began to tell me it's tale.

What I was hoping for was somebody who might have seen something. Mendlehousen had been dead a whole lot longer than ten minutes. He had been dead for more like a day or so. I needed someone who had come out of the front door, or had gone into the building. If they, whoever they were, came out or when in, they had to have noticed something... the smell, more likely, because the dead? They do stink. Really.

I wanted to see what the face of the person or persons held. That would point me in a direction at least. Maybe I'll catch someone who was laughing their butts off and clapping their hands with joy. That would be an easy five grand. Or, maybe I'll catch someone leaving carrying a fifteen pound sledge hammer. someone who had just been sticking around, just cuz. Someone who slept over in the hallway near the body, warned everyone else to keep away and don't disturb the magician, because he's sleeping in that incredibly uncomfortable position. Really. He just looks like a broken puppet. He's fine.

Whatever. So I'm sitting there, watching the gargoyles, doing my thing and letting the universe hit it's rewind button for me. When the movie stops, Sans credits, I have to run it again. And a third time, just to be sure.

Said dog did NOT bark. Said dog was happy and not barking at all, because said dog was in the ever-loving arms of the worlds oldest living child, Mary, the little Match Girl. Yes, that little match girl. Of Hans Christian Andersen fame. Only she didn't light matches and freeze to death on that long ago and far away cold winter's night. No indeedy.

Mary lived another two hundred some odd years, still trapped in an eight year old body. Apparently it's not nice to play with matches back in ancient Germany and curse the gods for making your father a raging, abusive mad man. The gods will curse you back, and they'll do it in spades.

So there sat little Mary, on the stoop pretty close to where I now stood, holding Fido or precious or whatever the hell Mendelhousen had named his pooch. And she was smiling. An evil, evil smile, ruining the angelic and sweet two hundred plus year old, eight year old face that was the Little Match girl I knew so well.

Welp, that's what they pays me for. The Odd and the Unusual is what I do best.