No Hope for Gomez!

by Graham Parke

  I looked up from my laptop and shook my head. “We’re probably alright for sweeping right now,” I told him. “Maybe you could take another look at those boxes we talked about?”

  Hicks shrugged noncommittally.

  “Or maybe you could update the window display again?”

  Hicks shot a quick look at the window, then shook his head.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like half a day off? Fully paid?”

  Fear welled in Hicks’ eyes.

  “No. I guess not.”

  “So what’re you doing?” He came over to look at my screen. “You seem very engrossed in something.”

  I turned the laptop so he could see better. “I was reading this blog,” I explained. “It was written by someone who died recently. I think he might’ve died of unnatural causes and I’m sure there’s something important in here, something that’ll explain what happened. I just can’t find it.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Hicks made a good show of pretending to examine the blog, but then sighed and said, “Looks pretty boring, if you ask me.”

  “That’s part of the problem,” I said.

  “Maybe what you’re looking for isn’t in the blog,” Hicks suggested. “Maybe what you’re looking for is what’s not in the blog.” He arched his eyebrows in what he probably hoped was a mysterious manner.

  “Yes,” I said. “That, in fact, is incredibly helpful.” I turned the laptop back round.

  “Don’t mention it.” Hicks glanced over his shoulder. “I guess I could take another look at those boxes,” he said. “Maybe come up with a preliminary plan of action. Something to help whoever is going to move them.”

  When I didn’t protest, he disappeared back into the shadows.

  Blog entry: Resumed my analysis of Joseph’s blog entries, hoping to find hidden meaning in one of the messages. (Today, I almost cut my finger. Must be more careful!) Or a cryptic warning sign. (Took an extra jumper to work. Looked like chilly weather.) Or even a supernatural omen. (Cut my finger. Somehow, I knew that was going to happen!) But I didn’t find anything.

  While I was trying hard to read meaning in nonsense, I had no idea that the actual clue was already clearly visible.

  As I sat back, about to give up, it occurred to me that Hicks had made more sense than I gave him credit for. There was a lot more to the blog than just its sidebar and the actual entries. And, while I considered this, my eye fell upon the one bit of text in the blog that actually contained some useful information. Or, to be more precise, the one bit of text that didn’t contain the information it should.

  I’d found an error. And I had a suspicion it was going to turn out to be a very important error.

  Blog entry: Hicks returned from the back to don his oversized coat. “It’s five,” he said, almost accusingly. “I have to go.”

  “Ah.” I checked my watch. “Right you are. Where did the time go?”

  Hicks shrugged.

  “Well, I’ll see you on Monday then.”

  Hicks nodded and left. I shut down my laptop and closed up the store.

  Blog entry: On my way home I realized I wasn’t sure what my next move should be. I’d discovered something, but there was nothing I could actually do with the information. It did seem to exonerate Dr. Hargrove, so that was a good thing. The only sequence of events that could still implicate her made her so incredibly evil, it wasn’t worth contemplating. So didn’t contemplate it. But there weren’t any follow-up steps I could take to further my investigation.

  Decided to give it a rest for the evening.

  Blog entry: Took the elevator and got off one floor early. Rang Warren’s doorbell and waited patiently for him to open. When he appeared, I asked him for his new manuscript. I had a neat little speech prepared, one which explained rather cleverly and conclusively that I wasn’t requesting the manuscript in order to stop the drilling, while at the same time making it subtlety clear that the drilling did in fact need to stop in order for me to appreciate the script fully. Before I could launch into this speech, Warren had already handed me the script, no questions asked.

  Instead of relief, I felt a heavy burden land on my shoulders.

  Sometimes there was just no joy in getting what you wanted.

  Blog entry: Throughout dinner my mind kept going round in circles. The clue I’d found wouldn’t leave me alone. Decided to leaf through the first 1,000 pages of Warren’s new manuscript – the time was lost anyway.

  Zoned out. Ended up staring off into space, contemplating a test to prove my feelings for Dr. Hargrove were real.

  Blog entry: No ideas on the test. Decided to clear the dinner table.

  Blog entry: Wondered about the experimental drugs in combination with certain foods causing dangerous side effects.

  Decided never to eat broccoli again.

  10.

  Blog entry: Sitting in the stuffy waiting room, I wondered how I’d managed to forget to bring my laptop. It was probably because I hadn’t expected them to be open on a Saturday morning. (Although, being there, I had difficulty remembering exactly why that was). Also, it hadn’t occurred to me they’d actually have a waiting room. You never saw that in movies, which was my only reference point for these kinds of places.

  The waiting room was as sober as it was unexciting. Posters depicting crimes and their punishments donned the walls. The plastic-backed chairs were linked together to form a crooked u-shape. The room’s three other occupants sat evenly spaced out and gazed about their persons disinterestedly. None of them looked non-threatening enough to strike up a conversation with. A stack of very old, dog-eared magazines lay discarded on a side table, serving merely as a reminder of much simpler times. Not even worth a cursory glance.

  With every passing second I began to doubt my sanity a little more and I feared that if they didn’t call on me soon, I’d run off and forget all about this crazy notion.

  Blog entry: Small silver lining: Waiting around without distractions had allowed me to come up with a makeshift love test. A little mental experiment that would tell me more about my feelings for Dr. Hargrove.

  Blog note: The test goes as follows: First, I’ll imagine us spending years and years together, Dr. Hargrove and I. Every single holiday, every Christmas, every one of my days off.

  This means that each time I have sex, she’ll be there. Every time I have relationship problems, she’ll be the cause. Whenever I try to take a shortcut, she’ll throw the map at my head. And so on.

  That’ll be the warm up part of the test. If that doesn’t make me miserable, I’ll move on to the next and final stage. I’ll imagine a future in which Dr. Hargrove is the sad victim of a paralyzing accident. I’ll be obliged to take care of her wheelchair-ridden body for the ensuing 40 odd years. And, if that thought doesn’t scare me as much as the thought of never seeing her again, then it’s on. I’ll know we’re meant to be together.

  My initial feelings don’t count, though, I might over-think things, so I’ll feel more about this later.

  Blog entry: The guy sitting closest to me, a biker with tattoos running down both arms, was called to the desk, where he was met by an officer. Then there were only three of us left.

  Again my insecurity tried to play tag with me; of course I wasn’t the crack detective I thought I was. Of course I had nothing new to tell these people. If they hadn’t followed up on the inconsistency in Joseph Miller’s blog already, it was because it wasn’t of importance. As soon as the officer in charge of the investigation had a few moments to spare, he’d come and tell me they received hundreds of these visits every day, hundreds of idiots playing detective and thinking they’d found a vital clue that’d turn out to be a dud. ‘The only difference between you and them,’ the detective would tell me, ‘is that you’re obviously not twelve years old anymore. Now scram!’

  Just because this was a totally new experience for me, something I’d never considered doing before, that didn’t mean I still wasn’t a raging cliché.

  B
log entry: Was about to excuse myself to the officer at the desk and flee, when a well-dressed man came from the back and blocked my escape. He asked me if I was Mr. Porter, then introduced himself as Detective Norton. He walked me to his desk.

  Blog entry: Detective Norton donned a grave expression and I braced myself for the ‘You’re not twelve years old anymore’ speech.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Gomez,” he said. “There’s been quite some pressure on me to put this case to bed.”

  I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he expected, so I said, “I see.”

  He nodded. “It looks like an unfortunate accident, and that’s what they want the report to say.”

  “Ah.”

  He leaned in closer. “But,” he said, lowering his voice, “between you and me, I’m not liking it. There’s something odd about this case. Something that doesn’t feel right.” He shot me a knowing look. “So, if you have anything I could use to keep this one open a little longer, I’d be grateful.”

  “Really?” That was a surprise, but it didn’t make me feel much better. My insecurity had helped me realize that what I’d found was only a shadow of a hint of a nothing.

  Detective Norton cleared his throat. “Well?”

  “There are some irregularities in Joseph’s meatpacking blog.” I said. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” I wasn’t sure how much of that sentence he’d understood, so I added, “A blog is an internet page of sorts. Joseph wrote stories on it about his days as a meatpacker.”

  Detective Norton frowned. He shift-pressed his computer out of screen saver mode and opened a site from his browser-history. It was the blog. “You sure?” he said. “I’ve read this drivel over and over and I couldn’t find anything remotely useful.”

  “May I?” I reached for the mouse. Detective Norton indicated for me to go ahead. I scrolled to the top of the blog, highlighted the time and date of the latest entry, and began to explain. He cut me off. “That’s almost a full twelve hours after Mr. Miller lost consciousness,” he said. He rubbed his chin. “I can’t believe I didn’t catch that.”

  “It took the insane ramblings of a multi-phobic for me to spot it,” I said. “But I’m not entirely sure what it means.”

  Norton made a note on a pad next to his keyboard. “I’ll get the tech boys to have a look, make sure there hasn’t been any date tampering, but, from what I can tell…”

  “Yes?”

  “It appears someone added an entry after Joseph passed out. That means we’re probably looking at foul play after all.”

  Blog entry: Detective Norton gave me his card and asked me to contact him if I discovered anything else. He even promised to keep me up to date on the investigation as much as he was allowed to.

  Returned home and flipped channels on the TV. My mind stayed on the Miller case. Who would update his blog and why? Whoever it was, they knew more about Joseph’s condition than I did, had probably contributed to it. But how?

  One thing was clear: No way was Dr. Hargrove devious enough to create a cover-up like this. And no way would she continue to dispense lethal trial drugs to the rest of the unsuspecting participants.

  No way.

  Blog entry: Thinking about Dr. Hargrove, I decided it was time for my love test. I lay down on the floor and relaxed. Slowed my breathing and ran over the scenarios I’d come up with earlier. I reiterated all the little details and mentally put myself in the different situations, then gauged my emotional reactions. When I was done, I repeated the entire exercise from the beginning, just to be sure.

  Blog entry: Passed the love test with flying colors!

  11.

  Blog entry: Next morning Warren came over to play a game of ludo.

  I asked him not to.

  I told him at the door that it would probably be a bad idea, what with me not really liking him and everything, mostly hating him in fact, but he smiled, said I was a ‘funny guy’, and pushed past me into my living room.

  He’d brought his own game and set it up on my living room table.

  “You start,” he said. “I’m not picky, choose any color.”

  I was still standing at the door at that point. I waited for him to make eye-contact, then nodded toward the corridor. “Come on,” I said. “Out!”

  Warren shook his head. He told me to stop kidding and pick a color. I did. Green. But I left the door open just in case. I wanted to keep the leaving-me-alone threshold as low as possible.

  We played for about half an hour before I realized we were actually playing two different games. What I’d thought of as ludo was actually a game called gin rummy, and what Warren was playing seemed to be a mixture of craps and table tennis. Once we started playing by one consistent set of rules, though, the fun was really over.

  Warren kept winning by throwing higher numbers, and I kept countering by asking him to leave. I still thought he might catch on that I wasn’t kidding. He didn’t.

  I don’t have a knack for board games either, it seems. But, even more annoying than Warren’s uninvited presence, was the fact that he consistently beat me at a game of pure chance. How was he defying the odds like that?

  Decided this warranted further investigation. First, I’d have to get rid of Warren.

  Blog entry: The games continued throughout the morning. Couldn’t get Warren to stop for a second. At 11:55 a.m. I took my pawns from the board and announced it was probably time for lunch. Warren agreed and said, “Thanks Gomez, that sounds great.”

  I didn’t get him anything to eat. Thought he was more likely to leave if he stayed hungry. This, however, didn’t happen. So I pretended to fall asleep. Which didn’t work either. Warren threw the dice for both of us and moved our pieces over the board. From his shrieks of pleasure I gathered I still managed to lose most of the games.

  So I pretended to get an important call. A friend had been hit by a car, I had to leave for the hospital right away. Warren donned a concerned expression and told me he’d wait, I might need to talk to a friend when I returned. I mumbled something to the effect that I hated hospitals and that the car hadn’t been that big anyway, and sat back down.

  Warren eventually left of his own accord.

  This was just after midnight.

  Blog entry: Went to bed but couldn’t sleep. There was no drilling, but wandering thoughts kept me awake.

  I wasn’t sure what to do about Dr. Hargrove now that my love test proved I really was in love with her.

  Clearly she needed to become my girlfriend. I was lost without her. But simply waiting for her to realize we were perfect for each other seemed a bad idea. This was my usual approach toward the opposite gender and so far it hadn’t done me any good. Plus, Dr. Hargrove was different from most women. She had the mind of a scientist. She was likely to ignore her own romantic feelings, especially regarding her test subjects.

  I couldn’t just wing it either, show up in her office and hope enough interesting banter occurred to me that she could not help but notice how great I was. I’m not good at banter at the best of times, and I am hard pressed to come up with anything sane when put under pressure.

  No, in order to catch an exotic fish like Dr. Hargrove, I’d have to come up with a military grade plan of attack. I’d have to clearly define my every move up front, including secondary targets, alternate routes, and exit strategies. I couldn’t leave anything to chance.

  Blog entry: Lay awake staring at the ceiling. Somewhere a dog barked. I realized I could actually do it. I could plan everything out to perfection. How would she even stand a chance? I may not be the brightest spark in the fire, but battles are often won, not by those who have smarts, but by those who have the resources. And I had almost unlimited resources!

  My job wasn’t very demanding, not mentally. My hobbies, home activities, friends and neighbors, they were anything but mentally demanding. I could easily divert all my mental resources toward finding ways of getting Dr. Hargrove to like me. Every minute of every day. That constituted a huge amo
unt of thinking.

  And what could she do? She didn’t even know there was a battle. She could perhaps divert a small amount of mental resources toward deflecting my advances, but they’d be too subtle for her to even recognize. By the time she realized there was anything to deflect, it would be too late. I would’ve grown on her!

  Suddenly I felt optimistic. I finally had a plan. Decided to figure out my first move right away.

  Blog entry: Nothing came to mind.

  Blog entry: Thinking for another hour. Still nothing.

  Blog entry: Thinking for another two hours. Nothing.

  Blog entry: Got up to get some water, thought some more, drank the water, did some more thinking, drank more water, hummed a tune to relax, thought some more, had to pee from all the water, thought on the toilet, drank some more water, thought on my way back to bed, closed my eyes, did some more thinking.

  Hours later I watched the sun come up. I realized this was going to be more difficult than I expected. I might have overestimated the power of my resources. Not to worry, though, less quality simply called for more quantity. It’d take a little longer, but the outcome would be the same: Dr. Hargrove would be mine!

  12.

  Blog entry: Arrived at the store an hour early, couldn’t lie in bed a second longer. Sat out on the sidewalk in front of the store browsing the net on my laptop while waiting for Hicks. Assumed he’d get very upset if I opened up without him.

  Hicks arrived on time but was still upset. He didn’t expect to find me on the sidewalk. Sat with Hicks until he calmed down, then helped him carry some crap out to the curb. Let him to do some sweeping as my way of apologizing for the change in routine.