The Awful Truth About the Herbert Quarry Affair

by Marco Ocram

  “Oh Mom,” Esmerelda sobbed. “I’ve had to watch the movie and eat all the popcorn all by myself. Herbert was sick and had to leave. I think that girl Lola Kellogg was sick at the same time, because she left too.”

  “There, there,” said Quimara, patting her daughter’s hair tenderly.

  The next day Quimara decided to go to Herbert Quarry’s house by the beach overlooking the ocean to leave a card thanking Herbert for attending her soiree, hoping he was feeling better, and inviting him to take Esmerelda out any time he liked. She saw the door was open, so she knocked and entered, hoping she might talk to the famous novelist and impress him with more stories about Esmerelda’s beauty and popularity. However, she found the house empty. She was curious to know what Herbert was really like. Seeing his PC had been left switched-on, she stole a glance at the messages on his screen. She couldn’t believe her eyes. They were full of selfies of Herbert and Lola embracing and hugging, and ‘I love you, Lola’s and ‘I love you, Herbert’s and all kinds of sick messages between a grown man and a young girl. She flung Herbert’s PC screen off the desk and stormed out, ripping to shreds the card she had bought.

  “I’ll get you for this, you sick perverted pedophile bastard,” she cursed through her teeth as she slammed the door behind her and stomped back to her car.

  LESSON FORTY-ONE

  ‘How, Herbert, is the productivity of a writer measured?’

  ‘In words, Marco, in words.’

  ‘And what is the threshold of productivity beyond which the adjective ‘prodigious’ might be applied?’

  ‘There is no internationally agreed standard for prodigious literary output, Marco. However, there are several accepted benchmarks. Barbara Cartland, for instance, is reputed to have written 5,000 words per day, and she ranks as one of the world's most prolific writers.’

  ‘And how might a writer achieve such extreme rates of output?’

  ‘There is only one way, Marco, which is to write whatever comes into your head next.’

  ‘But for many people, surely, that would be repetitive meaning-less drivel.’

  ‘True, Marco. But remember what I have always told you—if it were easy everyone would do it.’

  ‘You mean...’

  ‘Yes. What separates the great writer from the good is the ability to generate at least 1,000 words per hour consistently, hour after hour and day after day, while presenting some semblance of coherent narrative impetus, however trashy or meaningless. And as I have also often said, you have such greatness within you. You, Marco, can churn it out with the best of them if you put your mind to it.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  In which inappropriate jokes precede a shocking revelation.

  Having played a series of rising arpeggios on a harp to signify our return from Flashbacks #1 and #2, I was just dropping the invitations at ACME Couriers—We Always Deliver, when Como rang.

  “I got a tip-off, Writer. Heading over to check it out. Wanna come along?”

  “You bet.”

  I told him where I was, and within minutes he pulled up outside to collect me.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The hospital.”

  “Not the maternity records department?”

  “No, the cancer unit.”

  “Why there?” I asked, hoping Como would give us all an idea of what was going on.

  “I got a call from Micky Tropic.”

  “Micky Tropic?”

  “Yeah. His real name’s Troppizkawinszki-Jones—Lithuanian Welsh—so Tropic’s easier. He’s a good guy, another lieutenant in the PD, six months away from retirement. Never had a day sick in five years. Last week he started seeing double, and they find it’s a brain tumor.”

  “Jeez.”

  “You said it, Writer.”

  “Can they operate?”

  “No—it’s terminal.”

  Now, don’t tell me you didn’t see it coming…

  “You mean,” I could hardly bring myself to type it, “they can’t cure Tropic of cancer?”

  Como shook his head with great sadness, a natural reaction to the appalling pun. Mind you, it could have been worse. Had I been quick enough, I could have named his colleague, Micky ‘The Crab’ Tropic, and written a sequence in which Como recalled hearing the news of his illness:

  ‘Hey, Como, you heard the news about Micky Tropic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s got a brain tumor.’

  ‘Cancer? The Crab?’

  “Why are we going to see him?” I asked.

  “They’ve given him a week to live, so he figures he needs to make peace with his maker. He says he found out that Chief McGee’s been up to no good. He’s been keeping quiet about it, but now he wants to get it off his chest.”

  We talked for a while about the cruel vagaries of life, before turning to speculation about the no-good Chief McGee had been up to. Based on comparable cases in thousands of bestselling crime novels, we constructed a shortlist of the more likely revelations, as follows:

  A drink problem—two to one.

  Embezzlement of Clarkesville County Police funds—three to one.

  An affair with a female colleague—five to one.

  An affair with a male colleague—twenty to one.

  Simultaneous affairs with male and female colleagues—a hundred to one.

  Leading a double life with another family in Pasadena—four hundred to one.

  At the hospital, we scraped together eighty dollars for the parking fee and headed for the cancer unit. I tried to alleviate Como’s melancholic mood by injecting a touch of humor.

  “Hey, maybe we’ve overlooked one.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Micky might reveal that Chief McGee’s a shape-shifting alien. Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw.”

  “Haw, haw, haw. Yeah, and maybe he’s planting big pods that’re gonna steal our bodies. Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw.”

  “Yeah,” I said through my tears. “Or maybe McGee’s been up to no-good with Lola Kellogg in his office. Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw…”

  “Haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw, haw…”

  We were still crying at our hilariously improbable jests when we arrived at Micky Tropic’s ward.

  Thirty minutes later, walking back to the car…

  “Wow, so McGee’s been up to no-good with Lola Kellogg in his office.”

  We sat in a stunned silence through the drive back to the coffee shop.

  LESSON FORTY-TWO

  ‘Tell me, Herbert.’

  ‘What, Marco?’

  ‘What should I do if I make a mistake when I am writing?’

  ‘A mistake? You are not thinking like a great post-modernist author, Marco. Great post-modernist authors do not recognize the existence of mistakes. The concept of error in literature is an outdated one, important only to the smallminded. Think like a true artist, Marco. If Picasso draws a head with three eyes, is it a mistake? No—it is an act of immense symbolism. To break the mold of literature, Marco, you must rid your mind of the concept of error.’

  ‘Write. Sorry, right.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  In which a lie is uncovered, and Marco flaunts his technical knowhow.

  Back at my special table in the coffee shop, Como flicked through the sports pages while I waited for the next thing to come into my head. It was Jacqueline, coming for our order.

  “Guess what, Mister Ocram,” she said with an excited smile, “I’ve been on TV too!”

  “Really.”

  “I can’t wait to show you.” She put down her menus and got her phone. “Look. My friend emailed it.”

  It was the exact same clip of the Clarkesville Giants game Marcia had shown to prove her alibi. One of the Delgado sisters was lying, and I could guess which.

  “Are you sure that’s you, and not Marcia?”

  “
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Gosh Mister Ocram, that’s a good joke. No, Marcia was working here, covering for my shift.”

  I looked at Como—he still had his head in the paper. I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to write another trip to the Hacienda Apartments to confront Marcia with proof of her chicanery. I ordered coffees and muffins. Maybe I could decide after a caffeine and sugar hit.

  I grabbed a napkin and cleaned the screen of my iPad, which had been horribly besmeared by forty chapters’ worth of frantic tapping by my right forefinger. Jacqueline’s mention of an email had tripped a cog in my mind, so I wasn’t surprised when Como put down the paper and said:

  “I been thinking.”

  That’s always a dangerous start with Como.

  “What?”

  “All this crap kicked off with an email from Quarry. If he hadn’t sent it by mistake, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “True, Como, it was a spooky coincidence that I was the recipient. But let’s not forget the rich literary tradition of stories that begin with some chance event. If Little Red Riding Hood hadn’t visited her granny, there’d be no big bad wolf. Last time I looked at Goodreads, there was no one saying ‘just as if’ about Little Red Riding Hood visiting her granny, so I fail to see why you are raising a fuss about my opening hook.”

  “That’s different, Writer. She would have visited her granny every day.”

  “That, Como, is conjecture. Show me where the Grimms wrote Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood decided to visit her granny, like she did every day. I think not. For all you know, she might have learned of the existence of her granny only through some freak event the day before.”

  “Bullshit. Everyone knows she was always going to her granny’s place.”

  Our argument about Little Red Riding Hood continued for some minutes, until Como remembered his initial point.

  “Anyway, why did Quarry send Lola the email if he’d already agreed to meet her when they talked on the phone?”

  “Christ, Como, don’t ask me—you’re the detective.”

  “Right. So why have you got me sitting on my ass talking fairy tales? Finish your coffee, Writer—we got some detecting to do.”

  I gulped the last of my coffee and followed Como out of the coffee shop.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Quarry’s place.”

  On the drive to Herbert’s, Como told me what he had in mind.

  “Maybe the email was just a coincidence, like you said, or maybe it wasn’t. I’m gonna take another look at Quarry’s PC.”

  My heart sank. Computers were as boring as a box of drill bits. Worse still, I knew nothing about them. And now I’d stupidly let Como talk me into writing about them—a certain recipe for making a complete fool of myself.

  In Herbert’s study, Como pressed a button which switched-on Herbert’s PC. So far so good—faultless technical veracity, no less. I had an idea to allow me to quit while we were ahead…

  “Shall I just go and make coffee while you take another look at Herbert’s PC?”

  “Screw that, Writer. Stick around—you might learn something.”

  I doubted it—but before I could think of another excuse to skip the PC examination, Como raised the stakes…

  “Before I moved into homicide, I was head of cybercrime, so we’re gonna let things rip.”

  Cripes. Now we were for it. Full forensic details about the working of computers, to be made up on the spot, Jackson Pollock fashion, while trying to stay awake. I hoped the readers could stomach the computing equivalent of a face with three eyes—or maybe five. Como flexed his fingers and started to flaunt his prowess with keyboard and mouse.

  “On the day of the murder, Quarry sent two emails—one to you, then one to Lola an hour later, which, incidentally, was two minutes after your reply.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, which was a change, given all the other nonsense in the book. “He emails me then realizes his mistake when I reply.”

  “Wrong. Your email address is nothing like Lola’s. Watch what happens when I start typing hers.”

  I watched. When Como started typing, the computer cleverly anticipated his remaining keystrokes to complete Lola’s address.

  “See? There’s no way to type your address by accident.”

  “What are you saying, Como? He emailed me deliberately?”

  “I’ve seen this before, Writer. Fraud case, four years ago. Someone getting emails authorizing payments. Thing was, they worked in personnel, nothing to do with payments.”

  “And?”

  “The emails were sent by fucked-up malware. Could be the same here. Okay, let’s get serious. We’ll do some reverse engineering on the registry…”

  I yawned as he reverse engineered the registry.

  “…then defrag the disk…”

  I pinched myself to fend off sleep.

  “…purge the FIFO stacks and…just pass me those pliers… reroute the I/O bus…”

  I slapped myself in the face.

  “…and intercept the MTA process threads.”

  Just as I was looking round for a cattle-prod to shock myself awake, Como said:

  “Bingo.”

  “What?”

  “Quarry deleted an email contact the morning of the murder.”

  “So?”

  “The contact began with a G.”

  “So?”

  “You’re next in his contacts after Lola.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s staring you in the face, Writer. Some idiot programmed malware to send an email to Lola, the twenty third name in Quarry’s contacts. But Quarry deletes the contact beginning with G. Lola’s now twenty second in the list, and you’re twenty third. The malware sends the email to you.”

  I wasn’t so sure. It seemed ridiculously implausible, even to me, and I’d invented it. God knows what the readers would think. I’d just have to hope they knew as little about computers as I did. Besides, it was only half the story—I put the point to Como.

  “That might account for my receiving the email, Como, but it wouldn’t account for the email being resent to Lola after my reply.”

  “No, that’s something else. Whoever made the mistake has also been watching Quarry’s email.”

  “Wow!” I hadn’t thought of that. What a brilliant twist. “Can you see who it was?”

  “No, but we might get some indications. We’ll set up a CSV file…”

  I felt sleep returning in waves.

  “…dump the IP packet log…”

  Zzzzzz.

  “…cross-reference the TCP proxy…”

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  “…compare that with a DNS whois ping…”

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  “Right, whoever’s watching Quarry’s email has been routing via an IP tunnel from BDP Communications.”

  “Who are they?”

  Como Googled them. They were a telco in Panama, with a network across the Caribbean. Now we were getting somewhere.

  “Can we get a warrant to search their HQ? Force them to trace the IP address?”

  “Are you shitting me? We can’t even trace the calls to police HQ.”

  I slumped on Herbert’s desk. I was losing the will to live. Nearly a thousand words about computers, all for nothing. Or maybe not. An idea came into my head.

  LESSON FORTY-THREE

  ‘What is a figure of speech, Herbert?’

  ‘An expression which conveys more than its literal meaning, Marco.’

  ‘What is the point of that?’

  ‘Figures of speech have no purpose other than to impress those who spot them, Marco.’

  ‘Does that mean I need not bother with figures of speech?’

  ‘No, Marco, it does not. If you wish to become a truly great author, you must employ figures of speech continually.’

  ‘Why, Herbert?’

  ‘An author is recognized as truly great
only through the collective opinions of other authors and critics. They are precisely the people who are impressed by figures of speech.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  In which a cunning trap is set, and Como’s character blossoms.

  Dear Mister Quarry. I know you are innocent, and I can prove it. Send someone with $5,000 to Clarkesville amusement park at 5:30pm today. Tell them to go on the Ferris wheel carrying a toy rabbit. I will make contact and hand over the evidence to nail the true killers. Yours truly. A Friend.

  “That should do it.”

  Como pressed Send to email the words to Herbert’s address, triggering my plan to trick whoever was monitoring his email into thinking they were about to be shafted by an informer, and thus lure them into the open at the fairground. Well, plan might be too strong a word, as the next steps in my brilliant scheme for trapping the eavesdroppers hadn’t yet come into my head. However, we still had some hours to kill before crossing that bridge, so to give my mind a break I told Como about Marcia’s deception with the Clarkesville Giants footage.

  “Why would she do that, Como? What’s she trying to hide?”

  “Could be she’s just friggin’ nuts, like everything else in this crazy case. We better have a word with her. Let’s go.”

  Half an hour later, Como rapped for the third time on the door of 1007, Block D, Hacienda Apartments. I didn’t mean it was the third time including the last two times we’d visited—I meant it was the third time he’d rapped on this visit, raps one and two having gone unanswered. We looked through the grimy windows of Marcia’s apartment.

  “It’s empty. She’s cleared out.” Como looked at his watch. “You got her sister’s number?”