The Case Against Randolph Dixon-Hertz - Entry 4

I must be losing my Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Edge.

How else to explain the sympathy I felt while looking through the cold iron bars that held Randy at the Jail House? There was, most assuredly, a bruised half-lemon poking out from above his eyebrow - a reminder of the Head-to-Car-Door-Frame "hello" the cops gave his smirking face when they rang him up like he was on sale; his left hand was, curiously, bandaged - the index and middle fingertips were smothered in gauze, at least from what I saw of the presumably mangled digits Randy was hiding from view, showcasing a vanity heretofore unrealized; the mischievous twinkle in his eye still shone, though dimmer and contrasted by ever-darkening rings underneath the sockets...grey bags that confirmed the pitiful "smile" that Randy stretched across his ripe melon-face, really more of a grimace that was as superficial as it was bewildering.

I was saddened further by the abject nonsense that was dripping from his mouth like so much drool - words that connected with other words, sentence-wise, to create a proper speaking rhythm, but the words themselves had no meaning other than to fill the auditory-void that was created when Randy opened his mouth, seemingly, to speak.

Waving my hand through the bars, I beckoned him closer...and while his shuffling walk showed his implicit agreement, his rambling, eerie incoherence betrayed nothing more than the jumbled, miswired understanding of the electro-shocked; I softly cradled the back of his head, as though to console him, and rapidly pulled his swollen melon-head into the bars, cracking him on the non-damaged side of his face...maybe I was hoping that an equal-force shot to the opposite side of his head would even him out; maybe I was thinking of Fred Flintstone and the identity-crises he endured while being repeatedly clobbered about the head; maybe I just wanted to get one last guiltless shot in, if, indeed, Randy's mind had become more warped than his attention-span.

Regardless, the guards were alerted to his "accident" as I left to brood over what was to made of this Randy after all; the little I knew of him was enough, up until this point, to leave his backstory alone for the duration of our working relationship...now, though, I was determined to wrest a couple of two-by-fours of Truth from his past, snagging the rubber-tires of Identity from his younger days, slapping it all together with the screws of Curiosity, and then maybe, just maybe, I might be able to cobble together a clearer understanding of this Soapbox-Derby Racer known colloquially as Randy.

Entry 5