We headed back to the Clearview Police Precinct. Officer Powell driving ahead in his pristinely kept squad car with silent sirens wailing above his head, whilst I had been forced to loiter by the bus-stop, desperate for one to arrive before the puddles around my feet grew too numerous to navigate. You may be wondering why I didn’t just use my trusty little car like I usually do. Well, let me explain…
As Lucy closed the door on us and I watched Officer Powell sail off in his vehicle, the sight of my little blue Buick convertible struck me like a rusty sledgehammer in the back of the ribs. The poor thing was a mess. Some local ruffian must have smashed the car to pieces while I was otherwise occupied. That, or some stumbling drunk with one too many shots in his system.
There was shattered glass everywhere, with the front windscreen and both side windows completely punched out. Inside the interior had become rife with the smell of damp leather as puddles of rain and broken glass were left all over the seats and down by the pedals. It was a complete right-off. My little blue Buick convertible was going no where fast, and neither was I.
I felt like a wet dog. A wet, angry dog cursing his luck and forgoing his fortunes. The only thing left to do was to call a local mechanic to come pick up the vehicle, but that would leave me three whole days or more without a car. Three whole days of sulking and skulking around town in the rain, without an umbrella, wishing there was something I could do to somehow repair things with Lucy. My actions had caused quite the scene back at her apartment and now there was no mistaking the roaring rift between the two of us. Things had turned south between the girl and me. There was simply no denying it.
Pretty soon I arrived at the precinct. My clothes torn and rinsed through with rain. Everyone had already turned up by the time my bus-driver decided to finally grow some balls and put his foot down, including Officer Powell of course. He watched me enter the building with a statuesque glare as if the two of us hadn’t just been exchanging blows outside in the street. Powell was positioned immediately behind Officer Dirkdale’s hefty right shoulder, as loyally as ever. But the time for minor details and other such specifics would have to wait it seemed. For inside the plain-bricked precinct housing the Clearview Police Department that very afternoon, a scene of great pandemonium was promptly underway.
“You tell that bitch to shut her fucking mouth!”
Wham! The pages of a large leatherback ledger flew right past my eyes almost as soon as I had taken my first steps inside the building. I swiftly ducked like one of those human-shaped cut-outs in a shooting range, as the metal ringed binder narrowly missed my forehead and skittered across the floor.
“…get this officer away from my face, I demand to call my lawyer!”
Two voices. Two women. Both hollering at one another from across the foyer with a dozen or so desperate looking policemen trying to keep them apart. Officer Dirkdale’s towering figure could be seen in the middle somewhere, trying to keep the peace amid the troublesome tides of chaos.
“You’re nothing but a jumped-up, good for nothin’ little whore, ya hear me!?!”
The first female combatant was the smaller, but I dare say mouthier of the two. I could just about make her out in the far corner of the room, rising on her toes and jumping every so often just to make herself seen above the crowd. She had no such problem when it came to raising her voice however. What the girl lacked in stature, she more than made up for via her unmistakably aggressive demeanour and animal-like snarl. At one point I watched her spit right across the room and attempt to land on her opponent, only for it to find the shoulder of one of Dirkdale’s hapless assistants instead.
“I hope you’re all watching this…” replied the other lady on scene, “…you’ve just committed an offence in front of seven on-duty police officers! This is all beginning to look rather dower for you young lady…”
The second woman was rather unlike the first. She was taller and older, more refined in the way she spoke, with the look of an old school headmistress in the way she held herself. The lady wore a sharp looking blazer with simple black trousers and elegant shoes that spoke of class and sophistication. But the furrowed lines of anger on her face seemingly told a different story. A much grizzlier story indeed.
A scene of great tension was brewing, and now it had began to reach fever pitch. The policemen looked helplessly across at one another, pondering the question of what to do next and just how on earth they ought to go about it. Breaking up drunks in the middle of the night was straightforward enough for these guys. Yet these two fired up damsels with fire in their bellies and the wind in their sales, they made many of Dirkdale’s highly trained boys in blue seem…forgive me dear reader, but a little out of their depth.
“Get off me will you!” continued the older of the two quarrelsome ladies, “…it’s her you ought to be terrorising…she’s the fraud, not me!”
“Watch your mouth bitch!” spoke her angry opponent huddled behind the policemen.
“There she goes again, is anyone going to do something!?!”
“I told you to watch your mouth you fucking little whore!”
With that the younger, and more violent of the two antagonists viciously launched herself at the other. She’d spotted a small gap between the police officers and jumped at the opportunity to strike. Suddenly, for not the first time in this odd little town, I recognised her face as she darted across the room, all twisted and contorted with rage. It was like watching an animal being released from their cage, muscles flexed and bloodlust in her eyes. For a while I thought I’d never seen someone quite so animated, quite so vexed…but then I thought back on my time in the Big City, and all the turmoil came rushing back to me.
That face though, her face…there was no doubt on god’s green earth that I’d seen it before, right here in Clearview. It was Carol! You remember Carol right? I’d met her in a bar on one of my very first days in town. Crosby’s Bar in-fact, where she downed shots of whiskey faster than a freight train and threatened to fix me up with scars just for looking her the wrong way.
Carol said she was Coburn’s sister, and that she would do anything to get him back. But what was she doing here? About to launch herself into the unknown older lady despite over a dozen of Dirkdale’s burly officers attempting to hold her back…
“Fucking bitch! Get the hell outta my way!!”
Thankfully she found no way past Officer Dirkdale, or for those of you that pride yourselves on being little sticklers for accuracy, she found no way past the police-chief’s rather imposing belly, the girth of which proving more than enough to hold the young lady back. Dirkdale wrapped his arms around Carol just before she could force her long pointy fingernails into her opponent’s face. The second woman swiftly shuffled back and held her tongue, taking deep breaths every now and then through fear of another attack. A sense of clarity was in order, and now that the two ladies had been sufficiently separated, the commanding officer wasted no time in trying to restore some much needed calm among the situation.
“Powell, Martins…” began the police chief urgently, “…take her into the interrogation room three, let her cool off a little before we play ball. Quickly, quickly…”
The boys in blue got to it immediately, keen to seize the young girl and take her out of sight. Carol howled and hollered the whole way down the corridor leading back to interrogation room three, shooting her foul-mouth off at anyone who just happened to be in earshot. Eventually even the fiercest of her catcalls grew distinctly quieter with the policemen swiftly hauling her away, leaving Dirkdale to reshuffle his shirt and roughly tuck it back into the reverse side of his belt. I noticed a rather apologetic look in his eye as he suddenly motioned over towards the other woman.
“Mrs Coburn…” he began earnestly, “…I’m ever so sorry. Let me assure you that we are doing everything in our power to find out how this could have happened…”
But the older woman silenced him immediately, “…no, no, no! It’s not good enough Dirkdale! I came to this town on business, very important business I’ll have you know with a lot of money at stake…and this is the kind of welcome I receive when I get here!?”
“…I assure you,” he continued, “…I’m not gonna let this one lie, and that’s a promise. Please, for the sake of all that’s important, take a seat in room number five over there. Just through there past the lockers…”
“You mean interrogation room five, do you officer?” spoke the lady in question.
Dirkdale struggled to hold his nerve, “…Mrs Coburn, please bear with us here. We’ve sat Ms Redwood down and will see to her promptly. Then, once we’ve had our words with her, cooled that fiery spirit of hers down a little, we’ll make sure to join you in no time. Straighten this whole thing out…”
“Fine…” the lady finally accepted, “…but I want you to know officer, that I will not be speaking to anybody until my lawyer arrives with all my papers…is that understood? Expect a knock anytime soon, I’ve already sent for him.”
“Very good…” spoke Dirkdale nodding his head in agreement, “Moses…make sure Mrs Coburn is made comfortable in there. We won’t be long now…in-fact, is that…?”
Suddenly the cumbersome police-chief was peering directly over at me, his gaze almost as weighty as the numerous piles of pounds hanging from his waist. Up until that point my presence in the precinct had gone largely unnoticed…and oh, how I wished it could have stayed that way. How I wished I had simply stayed outside and listened to the whole thing unfold through a creak in the window. That way I could have avoided all the unwanted fanfare that would soon come my way. That way, I could have gone on living in ignorant bliss, unaware of the advancing danger that was living right there on my doorstep.
“Yes it is…” the police chief continued, “…don’t worry my best man has just turned up.”
“Me…?” I asked, slowly raising my finger to the middle of my chest.
“Of course Lucky! Well done for finally showing your face pal, we were just starting to miss you! This is Lucky everybody, he’ll be handling the bulk of the proceedings from here…”
The lady paid little notice to my swift introduction, choosing instead to carry herself halfway down the hallway mumbling something about the state of policing in this ‘bizarre little town’. The same couldn’t be said for Officer Dirkdale and the remaining members of his squadron however, who had each begun to peer over at me like a golden halo had suddenly appeared above my head. I felt like a young pup about to be fed to the wolves. A bloody sirloin steak soon thrown straight into the lion’s den.
“Lucky…” bellowed Dirkdale in an odd sort of way, slapping me across the back with a disconcerting smile, “…and you thought you’d be missing out on all the fun, didn’t you?”
I said nothing, immediately regretting how I’d walked right into Dirkdale’s little ambush. The Clearview police-chief had already struck me as something of an untrustworthy kind of guy. A feeling of unshakeable suspicion had been in place between the two of us, but now he had me showing up like a puppet on a string, and I had been none the wiser as to what was really going on.
“Cat got your tongue…?” Dirkdale asked rhetorically, with Officer Powell grimacing wickedly in the background, “…well good. Save it for in there. You’ve got two uptight kitties on your hands now Lucky. It’ll take more than just a nice pearly smile to get through to those two, trust me…”
Some of his men laughed at his quips, some simply carried on eyeballing me as I made my way on over to the man they called boss, the man whose word they daren’t not cross. There I was, a lone detective in a room full of cops. To the untrained eye both parties presumably see the world through the same pair of lenses. But let me tell you dear reader, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, in the real world, detectives and cops are nothing at all alike. They couldn’t be further from one another in-fact.
“Why me?” I asked, suddenly finding my voice again “…why me Dirkdale? You got a room full of overpaid police officers in here just jumping at the chance to do some work. Why not one of them?”
“Lucky, Lucky, Lucky…” the police chief retorted, “…why would I send one of my Clearview boys in there when we’ve got ourselves a living, breathing Big City investigator within our midst?”
I knew I was trapped playing one of his little games, jumping every time he snapped his sausage-like fingers. But if this whole thing had something to do with Coburn, something that might prove important in my quest to uncover the presumably missing actor, then it was up to me to get knee deep in the details.
“…what’s this all about anyway? What the hell happened before I walked in here!?”
“What we got here…” Dirkdale replied slowly, “…is a case of mistaken identity. Well, actually, no it’s not. It’s a case of false impersonation, with a possible link to our friend Clarke Coburn. I assume that’s still of interest to you, Lucky?”
“That woman…” I began curiously, “…her name was Coburn?”
The police-chief nodded.
“Yes indeed…” he said, “…that’s Clarke Coburn’s sister, Penelope.”
“…but Carol, I thought she was Coburn’s sister?”
The police chief seemed suddenly bemused by my response, as too did the rest of his blue-shirted entourage, “…Carol? I don’t know what you’ve heard Lucky, but that young lady certainly isn’t Coburn’s sister. And her name certainly ain’t Carol neither!”
“What do you mean?”
But the crowd of policemen soon began smirking across at one another, almost like a crude private joke had just been shared around the room, and I was the only one yet to cotton on to the punchline.
“Lucky! I’m disappointed…” spoke Dirkdale yet again, “…what do you think this is, kindergarten?”
He looked at Officer Powell still hovering above his right shoulder, and gave him a nod as if to signal the next phase of his plan. “Go in there and find out for yourself! I’ve got enough on my plate with all this Wolfman business to contend with. And take Powell with you please, I want to have a good set of eyes I can trust in there whilst you conduct the interviews...”
“Interviews…?” I mouthed dumbly, somewhat frozen on the spot.
“Go ahead boys…” he spoke for a final time, now walking back to his office with an unlit cigar positioned between his lips, “…go immerse yourself within the art of the interrogation! Let’s see if this ‘Lucky’ character is really all he’s cracked up to be…”
Comments