The "Jo Mhama" Case - Entry 6

myxyezzpittlykI centered my reeling mind with the paperwork from a dozen un-started cases, attempting to realign my focus with some sort of non-hathathat reality. I was future-bound, staving off the feddorra-poisson by flinging myself into the non-begun cases, accessing some future almost-reality until it became all too clear that I had, in fact, lost a week...and the shock to my system was immediate and, in itself, perplexing.

I hooked a tether to the Jo Mhama case and pulled myself back towards the current, or actual, real-time reality that had been the periphery, and realized that, even withizzout the flashbacks to my inglorious time high on fedorasweathathathat, I had nothing to go on, and, even less appealing, nowhere to go. I delved back into the paperwork of said case, pantomiming a grasping-at-straws maneuver to remind myself to focus, and got down to facts-are-facts: Mhama was still hospitalized, the hathat was gone, and proceeding with the case was somehow akin to the sensation of pushing raw quartz across a twenty-three-mile span of lumpy, mirrored glass.

I hadn’t come into contact with Randy in the preceding week-and-a-half, and I ruminated on the pros and cons to murdering him with a potato-chip-bag clip and four metres of wet extension-cord for slipping me the crushed-coffee-bean-and-old-man-fedora special when he strolled into the office, looking very, very strange...and it wasn’t just the baggier-than-was-appropriate, breast-pocketed yellow golf-shirt; it was the look on his face that betrayed a half-in, half-out psychosis that was percolating with every twisted step. Randy looked bulky but malnourished, cocky but frightened, moronic and ridiculous. It wasn’t until a foot from my desk that he spotted me, the amazement flashing across his face like a humvee ricocheting along the sandy dunes of some desert that went on for years. His shirt lifted, more by the hand of horror than by his own, and there it was, a lumpy, skin-stretched blob protruding from his lower gut: Randy was growing a fedora.

My mind nearly snapped; the base-level motor-function of said mind, through the amazing discipline enforced by the Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Detective Manual, remained alert enough to wonder aloud as to the last time either of us had visited Mhama in the hospital; Randy confirmed what any right-thinking person would have thought in his position - that he was much more concerned with the freakish headwear that looked to be flowering from his appendix than he was with any case whatsoever.

Fair was fair, and with a quick glance at my own thankfully un-bloated left torso, I was a rumour in the office...a story that was once told that involved me and my quest to see about Jo Mhama and the devilish hat-infeection that he had possibly-inadvertently unleashed upon the poor, unequipped, almost-amateurish Lawson Detective Agency.

Entry 7