The door to Richard’s office opened, and swung outward into the hallway. When he first rented this office, the door swung inward, as all the nearby offices did. But he raised a big stink with the landlord, citing fire code, and how people could panic and pile up against a door that swung inward in the event of a fire. They had tried to reason with him, explaining that the city’s fire code didn’t actually require all doors to be like that, just the main thoroughfares and the fire exits, but he wouldn’t budge. In the end, they agreed to change his door, on condition that he shut up and not talk about it anymore. He had kept his promise. But he noticed, with some small satisfaction, that after the kerfuffle, the offices belonging to the landlord and the owners all had their doors changed to open outwards.
The sun shone in gossamer beams through the gaps in the Venetian-like blinds hung over the dirty windows, forming rigid areas where dust could be seen floating through the air, making a mad random dash for inscrutable destinations. Piles of notes, some swaddled in manila folders, others bound with binder clips, lay strewn over all available horizontal surfaces. The dim light seemed to give the office the appearance of sepia tone. Irritated with the monochromaticity, he twisted the rods on the blinds to open them. Painful amounts of sunlight poured into the small office; July in Tucson could be a vicious experience. Besides, he noted painfully, it didn’t improve the view; desert dust still clung to the outside of the windows, rendering them only partially translucent, and the thick blanket of dust over everything sapped the room of color. He sighed and closed the blinds again. The room could stand to have some plaintive saxophone music, but that wasn’t an option on any music-streaming service, and he didn’t have the funds to pay for one anyway. So instead, he imagined it.
Indignantly, he tossed the newspaper on top of his cluttered desk as he collapsed into his chair. It squeaked its loud protest as the rusted spring compressed to its limit. The headline seemed to scream at him: “Downtown still not redeveloped”. A few pages in: “Local psychics try to convince streets to miraculously repair themselves”, paired with a graph showing how much the city government expected to save by hiring mystics instead of shelling out for asphalt paving. Closer to the back of the first section: “City culture almost ready to acknowledge the 1950s”.
Richard cringed as he turned to the back page, featuring the “local color” article about his presentation in court. He almost wished they were allowed to use photos from inside courtrooms, because then the artist wouldn’t have captured the most humiliating moment, of him facepalming while everyone else laughed. The drawing of the superhero, little more than a dark outline framed by starlight, at least left something to the imagination.
He stewed angrily as he threw the paper down, sending a riot of dust in all directions, a mushroom cloud of allergenic destruction. If there was any consolation, no one actually read newspapers anymore; they served as little more than props to support exposition. He had managed to find this one in an odd newsstand, manned by a gray-bearded old codger, sandwiched between food booths mostly serving identical noodle concoctions. The same stand also offered mysterious non-volatile, partially interactive goods known as “magazines”.
Richard looked around his dusty, cluttered office. Oh well, he thought to himself – if he didn’t have any pending cases, at least he could finally take some time to straighten up around here. He grabbed the top folder on one random stack, brushing the dust from it. The ensuing torrent gave him a coughing fit; he fought to regain his breath. Thumbing through the contents, he chose a location in one of his filing cabinets. Reaching to open the sliding door, he found it locked. He spent the next few minutes rifling through his desk, looking for the key, finally locating it.
He managed to put away three folders, and begin on a fourth, when he heard a knock on his door. Sighing, he put the folder back down into the powdery swamp.
“It’s unlocked,” he called out.
The door opened slowly to reveal a young lady. Her mousy, shoulder-length hair meshed perfectly with the docile, bovine look in her eyes. A baggy sweater festooned with sparkling unicorns flowed over a pair of yoga pants that concealed far less than Richard would have preferred. What really stood out to him, what truly made her memorable, was that she was dressed like every other member of her generation — a nonconformist, just like all her friends. The bluesy saxophone in his mind, hazily played by a leggy French woman, was abruptly replaced by a bassoon being tormented by a first-year music student with insufficient lung strength. He could sense she was going to be trouble, despite not being devastatingly beautiful.
“I’m looking for a private detective,” she mumbled.
“How convenient,” he exclaimed in mock relief. “That’s what I do for a living.” She stared at him blankly. He motioned to the chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat. Please forgive my manners.”
She slowly sat down, the venerable wooden chair groaning in protest. She continued to stare at him meekly.
“You have a lot of choices when it comes to private detectives,” he explained. “How did you decide on me?”
Her voice broke before she replied. “Your ad said you offer free consultations.”
He tried to lean back in his chair dramatically, but all that did was let out a metallic shriek as the chair went past its limit. “All private detectives offer free consultations. So you could literally contact anyone else. Maybe it’d be better if you did.”
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“There was one other reason I came here,” she interjected, proffering a folded newspaper, turned to the article about his recent court case.
Richard’s heart sank. How typical of his bad fortune to meet the only other person in the city, under the age of seventy, that still read the newspaper.
“My group doesn’t get the respect we feel we deserve,” she explained. “That almost makes us kindred spirits.”
Richard cringed. It wasn’t enough that he was frequently referred cases by other private detectives with more business than they could handle. Now he was specifically being chosen for his loser reputation. He swallowed what was left of his pride and forced himself to smile.
“Well, that’s enough of a reason for me!” he chimed with false cheer. Taking the case still wasn’t a foregone conclusion; there were all sorts of ways he could manage to weasel out of it. He would have to apply the breadth of his formidable detective skills to achieve this desired outcome.
“So, what can I do for you, miss…?” he queried as brightly as he could muster.
“Bettencourt,” she answered. “Kelly Bettencourt.”
“Bettencourt,” he mused. “Any relation to Dr. Bettencourt?”
She hung her head. “He’s my dad,” she mumbled.
“Interesting,” he replied. She didn’t strike him as the daughter of a prominent local physician. On the other hand, sometimes the apple not only falls far from the tree, but rolls down a hill and into a muddy ditch, where it gets covered with burrowing insects. “So what do you do, Ms. Bettencourt?”
“Please call me Kelly,” she implored. “And I’m the leader of a local social protest group.”
“I see,” he concurred. As if he couldn’t guess that from her clothes. On the upside, if she had any access to daddy’s money, at least he could bill her heavily for the effort.
“I’m also the group’s medic; I patch them up when they get hurt. I’m very much into holistic medicine.”
“You don’t say.” That seemed like an odd choice for a doctor’s daughter. Or, through the timeless renewing forces of teenage rebellion, perhaps all too predictable.
“We were involved in a clash with the police last night, and one of us ended up dead.” She wrung her hands. “We’ve never had a death in the group! Injuries, yes, but this looked like cold-blooded murder. We found him face down in an alley.”
“That’s not the police’s usual M.O.,” Richard informed. “Does your group have any enemies? Do you know if he had any enemies?”
She sniffled. “Well, we don’t really get along with the other social protest groups in the area, but not enough for anyone to kill. Also, Jaden is one the sweetest guys I’ve ever met. His code name in the group was ‘Saint’! That should tell you something.”
“Certainly a puzzler,” he mused. “And no witnesses?”
“Not of his death, just his body,” she conceded. “We were trying to escape the police, and he didn’t arrive at the rendezvous point. But one of us had seen a body face-down in an alley, and that’s where we found him.” She began to cry.
Richard scoured his desk for something to hand her, but came up empty. “I’m sorry, miss,” he apologized, “I don’t have a tissue for you.”
She sniffed a few times. “That’s OK. It’s just that we wanted to help him, or at least take him with us, but we were still running from the police. I don’t know what happened to his body.”
“Well, I suppose I can start there,” he offered. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to see this case all the way to the end, but at least I can try to give you some answers.”
She nodded. “I understand. What do you want up front?”
“How about one day, at my normal rate, just to scope it out?” He gave her the figure.
“That’ll be fine. How do we start?”
“The first thing I’d like to do is interview the other members of your cell, to see if I can get any leads on who might want to kill him.”
She looked up suddenly. “You think one of us might have done it…?”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” he assured. “But they may know something that leads me to the killer. It may be the acquaintance of an acquaintance, know what I mean?”
She relaxed and cheered up slightly. “You’re right. I shouldn’t tell you how to do your job. That’s why I’m hiring you, after all!” She wrote down an address on a piece of paper and handed it to him.
His eyes narrowed as he perused it. “Harmony?”
“That’s the name of our group,” she chimed. “And we call our headquarters ‘Tranquility Base’. It’s a reflection of our vision for how the world ought to be.”
“How…noble,” he finally managed to say.
“I can probably get us all together this evening, say around six o’clock. Would that work for you?”
“Perfect. That gives me time to check some of my sources.”
The color slowly returned to her cheeks. “What kind of sources do private detectives have?”
“Oh, you know, like the guy down the street that shines shoes. He’s in touch with the word on the street, and hears a lot of things.”
She wrinkled her brow. “Really?”
Richard laughed. “No, that’s a cliché from an old episode of ‘Police Squad’.”
Her brow furrowed. “That’s not funny.”
Richard shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, you weren’t charged for it.”