The "Jo Mhama" Case - Entry 1

I had just settled back into my desk, holding a steaming mug of Jaunty Alouette Cleveland Crump-Pumpkin coffee, and, as that that was the "business as usual" blend, I was unsurprised when the Lawson Detective Agency-Brand Supercellphonewatch © began ringing like fifteen-quarters off a ringside bell...heavy-breathing and minute gulps of air were not the sounds I had been accustomed to in the three months of tedious vacation time I had withstood at the request of Mental Fatigue, but they were welcome nonetheless.

To my dismay, however, I quickly recognized the laborious air-sucking as that of Randy, my put-upon employee who, after getting his wits about him while getting his ass handed to him during the last case, had seemingly regressed to that dull-witted dimbulb that was just as likely to create a secondary case as he was to solve the first one.

Still, it had been awhile, and it was nice to have order restored to the calamitous LDA HQ, if even for the few seconds before I made clear that, while phone-calls are nice, the work is to be done in the office. Suffice it to say, I had used the wrong batch of words in verbally reeling him into said office; the heavy-breathing phone-calls from two cubicles away from a giggling Randy were proof-positive that I was a little rusty in the field of Employee-Control. An electrifying 15-foot fling of a razor-sharpened number 2 pencil, expertly lodged between Randy’s shoulder-blades, was enough of an indicator that I was, indeed, in charge...so much so that the subsequent shoelaces-tied-together double-whack of Randy against the neighbouring desk/concrete floor was superfluous and yet exceedingly satisfying.

Randy had hit the desk with such force that his memory of the incident faded with his horizontality, but his slow-rising verticality produced the anger that only comes with confusing physical pain; it was an interesting combination, yelling with but a jumble of nonsense as a vocabulary, and I was fully invested in decoding the whole rambling affair when in shuffled a timid old man with a rolled-up newspaper and an elegant fedora in his hands.

After I had convinced Randy that this interloper was not the man who had wronged him, I was introduced to one Joquain Andreas Mhama...and the story he began to unfurl was one of both high entertainment value and low risk, the perfect combination for a lethargic and out-of-practice Detective.

Entry 2