The "Jo Mhama" Case - Entry 3

Murmur after murmur of lunacy escaped the slumbering lips of Jo Mhama, all "portents" and "harbingers", but I was too busy fiddling with his exquisite fedora to make much sense of it; it was as if the fabric was so soft that it was wet and, evidently, my Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Hands were too coarse for the fineness of texture that this wondrous hat was offering. As I did what any finely-tuned Detecting Machine would do, namely brushing the gentle hat-fabric against my cheek, Randy awoke from his repose looking at me as though I had just skinned two armadillos. I attempted, in vain, to convince my never-eager sidekick that the fantastical hat I was massaging my face with was an equivalent sensation to being licked by flames comprised of silk, but he was not only having none of it, he was having nothing of the kind.

With a grimace, he wandered off towards the coffee-machine and brewed up what smelled like Boca Raton Carbon-Plus!, a concoction I immediately knew it to be the "talk them down from the ledge" blend, and I took absolute and regretless offence...or mostly regretless. In actuality, I regretted it almost instantaneously; not the fact that I took offence, but that I had referred to it as "regretless". Soon, the hat was pulled from my clutches and replaced with a steaming cup o’ coffee, and within the first three, no, four sips, my haunting ambivalence had faded. The telling smirk on Randy’s smug face confirmed what I had just then begun to suspect: Jo Mhama’s fedora was an opinion-quelcher; a veritable ambiguity-invoker. The hat’s unmistakable elegance was like a Chinese finger-trap for minds; once enveloped by the subtle tenuity of said hat, the mind becomes too lost in the labyrinth of gossamer to make pronouncements one way or the other.

Using my Extra-Long Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Three-Hole Punch, I flicked the hat away from a progressively dewy-eyed Randy, walloping him behind his knees as he turned to go after it; the watery sadness in those eyes was quickly doused by the fury that comes with being beaten about the legs, and I was able to calm him down just before he was able to find something sharp to poke me with. I looked long and hard at that fedora, tilted insouciantly against Randy’s desk, and I was overcome with curiosity...the kind of curiosity that could only be sated with a few sharp-fingered jabs into Jo Mhama’s ample belly-fat. I was looking to see what depths the hat’s ambivalence had burrowed, and I was to find out but soon.

Entry 4