The "Monkeyshines" Case - Entry 5

I was led to the couch, and while I wasn’t sure whether it was damp or just cold, what I was sure of was that it had been soiled at one point. Bernice’s low groan of a voice actually loosened up into a nice timber, almost delicate, and as I listened to her ramble on & on about her beastly "condition", I couldn’t help wondering why it was that she was kneeling in front of the door at the time of my arrival. After nodding, feigning my best "listening" posture for some 40-odd minutes, I interrupted as politely as I could, but found myself in the grip of Freudian-Slippery: I had begun to ask, not about her strange door-answering position, but instead about her seemingly 6-knuckled hands...those monstrous hands that held only five fingers. She sighed heavily & looked at her meat-hooks with the eyes of a mother looking at a child only said mother could love.

Feeling uncomfortable, as Bernice sat there, staring at her hands for what was an exceedingly expansive amount of time, I remembered that I was there to find out some information on the "monkeyshines" case I was working, and tried to take the heavy silence in the direction more befitting of what I was actually after. I was getting crushed by the literal & metaphorical gravity of the situation, and finally just blurted out the word "monkeyshines" before she could tell me anything more about her mutated clod-hoppers. Bernice’s ears perked up, and she explained that it was she who had called in the case in the first place; she’s wasn’t the "tipster" that I had thought, no...she was the client.

Good Lord, I thought to myself, I have to get this thing going or I’m going to have a very unpleasant monster on my hands.

Apparently, her brother Sean was a videographer who was trying to make the big-time...this Sean character had taken to creating disastrous events for the explicit purpose of taping them for his demo-reel to prospective employers. In his madness to capture the imaginary "story", he had already sent an empty school-bus off a cliff, tied an elk to a stopsign, set off fireworks at a bris, and organized a protest in a vain attempt to get Full House back on the air. This guy was obviously nuts, and I had to find him before he tried to make more "news"...though, I think I might have enjoyed seeing an elk tied to a stopsign; for some reason, that’s an image that has always appealed to me.

Regardless, I asked Bernice if she had any idea as to where her brother was last seen, or what he might have up his sleeve next. All she could tell me, slipping back into her Frankenstein’s Monster’s growl, was that he had been, in recent months, trying his hand at anagrams, and that she had a piece of paper that contained various jumbles of words in his hand-writing. Like a flash of lightning, if the lightning was an eight-foot tall walking oak-tree, she grabbed the aforementioned scrap of paper off a nearby side-table, promptly crumpling it up & tearing inconsequential bits off it...then handing it to me with the explanation that the gentleman she talked to at my Agency told her that this procedure was protocol in handing over documents to Agent Lawson, or, me.

Ooh, that Randy, I thought. I’ll get him good when I get back to the office, and this time it wouldn’t just be letting the air out of his tires. But revenge would have to wait, as I had some deciphering to do...and a Monster’s Lair to escape from.

Entry 6