The Case Against Randolph Dixon-Hertz - Entry 9

There was no doubt, defying all logic, that Randy was missed in the day-to-day operations of the Lawson Detective Agency, if for no other reason than as a target to heap verbal and physical abuse on...but that still didn't prevent me from deducting the cost of hiring a moving-company to haul his "click-click-whirr"-ing desk out into the asymmetrical parking lot from his last paycheque.

Let the raccoons figure out what that ticking noise is; my focus was on coffee, and that I needed some.

Once inside my all-but-abandoned office, I took a deep, relaxing breath and found the air clear and odourless...a mockery of the myriad odd-smells and strange ambience that used to hang in the air like a thousand stalactites of filth and repugnance. I started my coffee a-brewin’, hoping that the stink would comfort me as I sat and leafed through the faded newspaper-clippings that I had been carrying since I began this laborious process of looking into Randy’s past - a process not unlike herding ill-tempered goats into a suede-roped line at the bank: mentally-fatiguing and generally pointless.

Surprisingly, his name kept popping up whenever there was a quote from an eye-witness:

“I think his car hit that flag-pole,” a twelve-year-old Randy said in regards to a prominent local-politician running his car into a school’s flag-pole while Randy was playing tetherball at recess;

“I didn’t see it happen, but it looks crazy,” said Randy at fifteen when asked about an ape that had escaped from the zoo and ran through the plate-glass window of the downtown bakery where Randy was having lunch;

“I was looking at this guy on a totally rad bike,” Randy answered when asked if he saw the 3000 lb. safe that fell from a twelfth-story window and dented the sidewalk five-feet from him.

Fifteen stories in all, in every-one a quote from Randy about how he had missed what had happened.

“Is THAT what happened?”

“Jeez, that looked like it sucked.”

“I was asleep maybe?”

Randy was a Child of Coincidence, apparently...on the periphery of Circumstance, out of reach of What Happened, just to the left of Consequence.

But no longer; since he has been in my employ, he has been, briefly, a woman, sodomized by a transgendered old lady, the victim of some appendix-related hat-birthing disease, and thrown in jail...though while reading his third-page-news exploits, I had formulated a plan to get my twice-head-trauma-ed employee from the brinks, and I had resolved to do it with a style that is so often lacking in typical Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Machinations.

In other words, I will attempt to do it right.