clues at the scene

clues at the scene

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Carefully Darling, Carefully.


Broken egg illustration hosted on wikicommons. Lovely picture courtesy Etat sauvage from 2007. Outstanding image. Thanks for the use.

You know the type.

You're at dinner thinking about your writing or something related to your writing being "all quiet" keeping to yourself (because you are that huge introvert nerd writer) and some bore insists in asking what you are thinking about.

What lie do you tell?

I mean - honestly. Between us.

You sit at a dinner with seven other people in a restaurant and you wonder how your murderer can kill 'em all. Maybe he only wants to kill one of them but a little collateral damage isn't that bad. The character is a murderer. He has to do bad stuff.

Maybe he kills everyone in the restaurant ? Sure.

He poisons the water supply and just pokes at his food. Everyone else gets it. Of course, he has to explain how he survived when all the other patrons die but there is probably somebody else who makes it. Maybe the redhead bulimic over by the door pulls out, too? 

Hey -- it's not a terrible thing. It's a condition and it might save her life ... if she's in a restaurant full of poisoned people. You play the cards you'e dealt. I'm colorblind so the scintillating alien mind-beam from over in the science fiction stories isn't going to get me. 

My point is you're at dinner and you are plotting the demise of a person, people, a continent. Whatever.

Somebody pushes and pushes and wants to know your thoughts.

Do you mention you were thinking of how their liver might go with fava beans?

Of course not. You lie and say you were thinking of Yosemite or your honeymoon or the Caribbean beach of last winter.

You can tell me, though.

You can admit you were thinking the low lift-over tailgate of the new Subaru is perfect for your petite soccer mom contract assassin to drive because it makes her afternoon murder easy to tidy-up after. Maybe if she used the dog ramp to roll the body up into the rear. Hmmm.

You can tell me.

The pushy person at the dinner? Well.

Don't ask what you don't want to know. Every good attorney in a crime novel knows that one.

 Fava beans?

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