The "Expletive-Deleted" Case - Entry 15

There was no denying that Mossol-Belk was a charismatic figure; the video clips I found on the "official" Tallahallowockian website showed Mossol-Belk in all of his vainglorious glory, pounding a podium made up of dried otter pelts and what looked to be discarded, petrified orange-rinds with the tightly clenched fist of a masterful orator, a fiery intensity ablaze behind his fierce eyes. The language he was using, loudly, was not English, though the speech was peppered with some of the most profane English curse-words ever uttered by a human being of any ilk; incomprehensible strings of an unknown tongue dotted with what sounded like the improper usage of expletives.

Listen after re-listen, I started to recognize the cadence of his dissertation as resembling the stilted translation on the back of the East-Tallahallowockian Moonshine bottle; I cross-checked the introductory note on the site with the bottle-label, finding a helpful Tallahallowockian-to-English translation site that confirmed my suspicions: Mossol-Belk and his culture had been "Disney-fied" for the purpose of selling Moonshine; Mossol-Belk was viewed, I’m sure, as unpalatable enough to be glossed over by whomever bought the rights to advertise and distribute said Moonshine.

I began my search for the offending company, revisiting the Mossol-Belk video every time I found myself at yet another dead end, when it hit me all at once: during a casual turn away from the camera, not more than two seconds of a sustained profile, I noticed a striking similarity between this Tallahallowockian idol and one Tabitha Shinkleblossom; so much so that I opened up a cache of pictures on the site and pinpointed a stark black and white profile shot of Mossl-Belk, closing my eyes with the image still flitting in front of my mind’s eye to compare it with what I remembered of Shinkleblossom’s horrible visage. Though they were identical, save for Shinkleblossom’s wrinkled neck-fat, I couldn’t be sure; much like a golfer with a slice needs to aim away from his target to correct for said slice, I pictured Randy juxtaposed with the Mossol-Belk image and it too looked identical. It was just as I had feared; my obsession with the Nihs family and all of Tallahallowockian culture had clouded my reasoning faculties, and I needed to gather up my free mind-space if I was going to have any hope of either rescuing Randy or, more importantly, solving this infectious-disease of a case.

I stood, ostensibly to get the blood flowing throughout my lower half, but found myself pacing around the office like a rabid pheasant, clawing absent-mindedly at the note-covered corkboards adorning the walls of the LDA, unable to determine an appropriate plan of action; I stared long and hard at the Voncorps quote, thinking that the link between Mossol-Belk and Shinkleblossom was hidden within...and, remarkably, it was. There, within that one sentence encapsulating the Tallahallowockian belief-system, I had found my proof; I capitalized the first letter of each word in my head and then with a large black marker on my desktop I wrote:

In Voncorps, Only Righteous Yearning Cures All...Nothing Else

And then:

IVORYCANE

The very same ivory cane that Tabitha Shinkleblossom had reported stolen to begin this awful case...though I knew nothing as to the full significance of this discovery, I knew enough to know that this was no mere coincidence, and that I had to find the Hammertown distributor of this Moonshine, and I had to do so but fast; this case was becoming much more than a reclusive old-lady stealing a somewhat-valued member of the Lawson Detective Agency workforce...I was determined to be indemnified for all the maniacal transgressions of this Shinkleblossom, even if that entailed a complete investigation into the possibly-criminal ethos of the Tallahallowockian tribe; if Mossol-Belk and Shinkleblossom were indeed one and the same, as I strongly suspected, then there is no telling how deadly, misguided, and insidious those combustible video-sermons were.

I shuddered at the thought of all I might uncover, and swallowed hard before cautiously downing a cup of Albanian Zinc-Filtered coffee, as that was the anti-xenophobic blend, and even more cautiously headed off to the Hammertown chapter of the Moonshine-bottlers, Whiz-Key Inc., to hopefully find out more than I wanted to know.

Entry 16