Ham Soup

              I scrutinize the scene. It’s messy, but impressively clean. Interesting how such a scenario can form, but, oh, how it can. My fingers roll my 1.0mm ball point Bic pen between their prints. Squatting before the carcass in the rear left corner of the office, I put the woman’s features to memory. Despite the red hand print right in the middle of her face—her own print, by the way—her eyes are sharply blue. She has a low bridge, her nostrils more of an upturned teardrop— thin septum. Her eye lids seem like they never were really open, always drooped slightly in something I’m going to claim as all around wear; long lives we can live in shorter times than we figure. Her lashes are coated thickly in mascara, paired with a charcoal blue pencil eyeliner. Her liquid foundation has parted ways with her skin in places, splotching into odd patches while looking flawless in others. She’s been dead for about 17 hours now. I would be suspicious if she looked any better. Her lips are mostly stained red with lipstick, except for two tracks on her bottom lip where her teeth ran. My bet is she bit down in pain. Other than that, her cheekbones aren’t protruding and her jaw is slight with a slender chin. Pretty, but frankly not enough to be a crime for those bizarre goddess hunters. A stalker, perhaps. Usually, though, stalkers don’t murder their prey. At least not right away.

              “No sign of struggle, her office door was open, and we haven’t gotten blood tests back yet. Swept the room for prints: nothing. Foraged for any DNA sample: nothing. No foot prints, hand prints, snot drips or skin flakes.” My assistant, Bread, repeats her notes from her 4 by 5 college ruled note pad. I can hear her thumb and index fingers rubbing the corner of a sheet between them.

              “Hm,” I huff, rolling my pen even faster. I glance around at the surrounding industrial grade carpet. Spotless, save the woman’s body and one of her shoes thrown a couple feet to the right. The only blood is the print on her face and a small puddle in the middle of her right palm. “Drugs,” is my conclusion as I stand, making Bread take a step back.

              “Drugs?”

              “Yes.” And to think, this morning I was reading a well written article of a man who died a week ago. Poison, they concluded. Suicide. ‘Tragic’ claimed his therapist Silver Spoon. I sigh, regaining my mind for this mission.

              “She’s squeaky clean, Sir,” a no-name detective intern from the building across the street claims from the other side of the room. He had been staring dubiously at a filing cabinet as if it had the answers to space and time within it. “We’ve done several different checks. No history of drugs.” He blinks frantically, only now realizing he had opened his mouth. “Or anything, really,” his attempt at redemption is flawless.

              I stare at him for a second, letting him feel the awkward slime he just infested the air with. “Not self use, kid.” His lips form an egg shape, but I’m not ready to listen to him question my theory I’m about to explain. “Someone gave her the drugs, whether in her coffee, in her ice cream, or,” I glance at her lipstick, “some other way. She didn’t willingly and or knowingly consume it.”

              “No enemies reported,” Bread refers her note pad just to be sure. 

              “We all have enemies, Corn Bread, but that doesn’t mean they kill us.” I pace away from the fallen woman and to her desk. Her wheel footed chair is scooted out a few feet, and I weave around it. Stopping with my soles on the plastic matt that ensures better wheelage, I bend and study the pictures on her desk. A young boy and a younger girl take up two 5 by 8 metallic silver frames. The woman herself and a black haired man take up another. There’s a few old people in a fourth, and lastly, are the children again with a golden retriever. I move my observations to her computer. By poking the mouse, the monitor awakens. On the screen, an email addressed to: Porcelain Bowl. The subject: It’s your boss. “But, perhaps, another person, a more powerful person, has an enemy. Possibly an enemy that would kill.”

              “You mean Porcelain Bowl?” Bread asks, nodding at the deceased near her feet.

              I nod, retrieving a cotton glove inside a plastic bag from my pocket, “Bowl had now power, however.” While I put the glove on, I say further, “Though, she could have been collateral. You’re both familiar with the tactic of divide and conquer?” The intern answers with a: yup, while Bread hums: mhmm. “Well perhaps that’s what Mrs. Bowl fell victim to.”

              “You think so?” Bread asks. I nod. “That leaves a potentially long list of suspects, then.” She knows it to be fact. “I assume the person in power here you’re referencing is Mrs. Bowl’s boss? And by divide and conquer you mean the company?”

              “A long list?” Intern sounds a bit shaken, and apparently oblivious to Bread’s last sentence.

              My eyes give the desk a once over, finding a spilled mesh pen cup, a crooked stapler, and a calendar book. I flip the page of the book to today and say, “A list maybe not as long as we think. Bread nor I would be on it. Probably not you, either,” I glance at the timid intern standing rigidly near the file cabinet. He doesn’t exactly have the ease of the guilty. “Bread?”

              “Yessir?”

              “How old are this woman’s children?”

              “14 and 11. Her husband is three years older than her at 41.”

              I acknowledge her answers with a slight grunt. Upon flipping back another page of the journal, I pause. Mrs. Bowl’s tilted and cautious handwriting is scribbled in two days ago: ‘Make over with Silver’ it says. ‘6 o’clock’. I continue on through the pages. “What sort of vehicle did she drive?”

              “Vehicle?” Coughs the intern in the corner. I’m not entirely sure why he’s just standing, now. He’s not even bothering to look busy shuffling through the files. “What does that matter, Sir?”

              Between pointless scribbles, I dart my eyes through the calendar. “Everything means something, intern. Learn that now, before you’re in the field.” He says ‘alright’ and continues to stand. I presume there’s some theories in his mind he’s juggling. Part of me wonders, but the rest of me doesn’t.

              “Kia Soul, 2015.” I’m not sure where Bread gets her info, or if it comes from the cleanest of sources, but she’s never been wrong, and I won’t claim I’m squeaky either. “Oil change two weeks ago. Maybe there’s something there.”

              I shake my head. “No. Too long ago.”

              “How do you know?” Can you guess who asked?

              “Intern, I know because she died 17 hours ago from some sort of drug, a poison. Had the mechanic given it to her, this case would have been in the papers 17 hours after the oil change.” Neither person replies to me, only goes on staring and looking over notes. I look over my shoulder at Porcelain Bowl. Her blue eyes are watching my heels like I’m ready to wheel on them. In fact, I do just that.

              Once again, I squat in front of the body. Her eyes, behind the red hand print, are very intent. Admittedly, most stares of the dead are, but they never seem so… specific. So I play along. I follow the trail of her gaze, and it leads me underneath her desk. The area is shadowed, but I do see something. “Hm,” I sound aloud, “Bread?”

              “Yessir?”

              “Do you know if the photographer caught this pen?”

              “Pen?” The intern finally breaks his form and takes two quick steps toward the desk. He’s on the opposite side, but he looks down as if he’ll be able to see. He meets my eyes instead. He drops back flatly on his feet.

              Bread takes a moment, thinking, “I don’t remember seeing one of a pen, Sir, no.”

              I pull aside the flap of my suit jacket and dig out a small flashlight. I point the beam on the Pilot G-2 0.38 click pen. The tip of it is red. With blood. “Well, I would suggest you call and get them in.” Nearly before I’m done speaking, Bread pulls out her phone. She steps out of the room while I turn to look at the woman again. I study the two absent marks in her lipstick. I scan the pool of blood in her hand. The shoe a few feet away. Then I stand again, spinning to watch her desk. When I flip the calendar back to two days ago, I notice I feel the intern’s eyes on me. “Tell me,” I say to him, “why do you think the pen is on the ground?”

              The intern takes a moment to think. There’s a bit of me that’s wondering if he’s even thinking about the objective, or if he’s just trying to think of what I think he should think. I’ll chose the latter. “Well, I see the pen cup is knocked over. Maybe it just rolled off?”

              I shrug, “That’s alright. A good start, I guess.” Not really, but got to give the rookies some confidence. Before you burn it down, that is. “But you know what really happened?”

              “You Do?”

—

              The light in the room is a little blaring. All to set the scene, I suppose. Off the metal table, the light reflects into my eyes. It makes me squint; all the more intimidating. “Porcelain Bowl,” I start, latching my hands behind my back, “was found dead in her office 19 hours ago on the 11^th day of May 2016.” My eyes dart to the woman sitting at the metal table. She put up a surprisingly small amount of fight for being dragged into the police department. Unlike the intern, I’d say she has the ease of the guilty. “There was no sign of struggle, no physical evidence left behind. Only a few little clues to follow.” The woman cocks her head, cockily awaiting for me to continue. “Approximately 19 hours and 5 minutes ago, Porcelain Bowl was at her desk doing her job. It was time for her to check her email. One, she found, was from her boss. You see, Mrs. Bowl wasn’t doing so hot at work. She drove a Kia Soul, a car that’s starting price is in the mid-teens. So, when she saw the subject ‘It’s your boss’, she got flustered, startled. Bowl reached quickly for a pen to take notes, assuming it may be the time for a meeting. In her panic, her palm came down too fast on her pen cup, the fine point of a Pilot G-2 0.32 click pen jabbing through her skin.” The woman blinks slowly at me. If her hands were not cuffed, she would wave me along, I presume. “From the pain, Mrs. Bowl jerked back, knocking over the cup and also,” I point at the woman, pausing for dramatic effect, “biting her bottom lip.” The woman doesn’t squirm, but her eyes refrain from rolling. “Now, Mrs. Bowl was wearing her new lipstick she got from a makeover she went to two days ago with someone named Silver. And,” I pull my finger back and put it on my lips, “it wasn’t until my partner, Corn Bread, brought up the fact Bowl had gotten her oil changed two weeks ago, and a certain, stiff intern to assume the mechanic slipped in the poison, for me to state if that had been the case, Porcelain Bowl’s death would have been in the paper two weeks ago. Now, this sparked my memory to an actual article I had just been reading this morning of a man who had poisoned himself in suicide. ‘Tragic’ claimed his therapist, Silver Spoon.” Now the woman lifts up her chin, her eyes—instead of rolling—look me up and down. “Back to Mrs. Porcelain Bowl. The poison took a moment to take effect as it dissolved into her tongue from the lipstick now on the back of her front teeth. This gave the ball point pen wound enough time to bleed out on her hand, cover it enough to make a hand print when she grabbed her face as a stabbing pain set into her brain. It hurt enough, she jolted out of her chair, causing it to wheel away from her desk. She tripped out of one of her shoes when she slipped on something, leaving it a couple feet right of her final destination. As Porcelain Bowl backed into the corner with the poison drug coursing through her meninges, she collapsed. In her final seconds, her eyes caught the pen that had stabbed her in the palm. It had fallen on the floor, and her high heel shoe had slipped on it, kicking it under the desk. She stared at it, wondering, had it never stabbed her, would she have made it through?” I take a step toward the table, “Would she have made it through had she never put on the lipstick given to her,” my hands press onto the metal table’s surface as I lean toward the woman, “by none other than Silver Spoon herself?” The woman’s lungs deflate in the most satisfying manor. Miss Silver Spoon, the therapist, waits a moment as she stares at me. It’d be interesting to know all the names she’s calling me inside her head. However, before I know those, I have one more thing to ask, “Then answer me this famous questions, Miss Spoon: why did you do it?”   

              “People tell you a lot of things in confidence, Detective. Some of those are convincing enough to make you do some rather… intense, things.”

              “Like murder?”

              She nods, in a way that tells me I’m only partially right, “or defense.”

              “Hm,” I lean away from the table, watching this… Silver Spoon. “Will you tell me the difference?”

              A small laugh makes her shoulders jump. There’s a metallic click as she puts her hands on the table, fingers interlaced, “I believe you know the answer to that one, Detective.”

              “Please,” we watch each other for quite some time, silently trying to glean the others thoughts, “call me Soup. Ham, Soup.”