Fic: Skip Muck, PI - Chapter Five
Title: Skip Muck, PI - Chapter Five
Summary: AU. It's 1988. Skip and Penkala are detectives, searching for a missing clock - and making a few other discoveries besides.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2981
Disclaimer: Not my property, not for profit. All characters based on depictions in the miniseries, and no disrespect intended to anyone real.
Notes: Crossposted to ihave_no_idea.
Chapter One: In which Skip is frustrated, Penk is hungry, and Julian's been murdered.
Chapter Two: In which Lipton is strangely familiar, Speirs is irritable, and Malarkey is unexpected.
Chapter Three: In which Winters tries to be helpful and Harry insists on bragging.
Chapter Four: In which there are parachute pants.
Wednesday morning came and it was humid as hell. My shirt was sticking to my back and my hair had gone all limp and disappointing. What was worse, Penk had got dibs on the Camaro and its air-con, so I had to ride the bus down to the post office. I swear, it was like they were holding a convention for sufferers of overactive sweat glands in there. I ended up getting off two stops early just to escape the smell.
The post office itself was a little confusing. With all the lines and counters, I'd got no idea where to turn. According to Perco's note I needed to meet some guy called Allen Vest, but finding him was the first problem I needed to solve.
I decided I might as well just put myself at the end of the nearest queue and see what happened. I was there for fifteen minutes before I finally caught sight of the sign marked 'Inquiries' across the hall. Smacking myself on the forehead, I hustled over and joined the end of that line instead, which had the benefit of being both a little shorter, and a merciful relief from the extremely cranky Hispanic couple in front of me before, who had for some reason chosen this particular time and place to hold the breakdown of their marriage.
About five minutes of shuffling my feet later, I got to the counter. Leaning in towards the glass, I said,
"Excuse me, ma'am. I'm looking to speak to Allen Vest in connection with parcels sent over the past couple of months."
She tipped her head to one side, looking unimpressed.
"I'm a private investigator," I said, rooting through my pockets. "I'm trying to track down an antique that's gone missing." Dammit. I must have left my investigator's license in my other pants. I wasn't sure how I was going to convince her I was legit.
"Perco said I could talk to him," I added, on the off chance she recognised the name.
Luckily for me, she did.
"You're a friend of Frank? You should have said," she said. "Go down there, turn right, and it'll be the second door on the left."
I thanked her and departed, heading down what felt like the billionth corridor I'd been down that week. When I found the door, I knocked sharply and waited for the answer. After a pause long enough to make me consider trying the handle and seeing if anyone was even in there, it finally creaked open.
"Can I help?" asked the office's occupant - a young man, just under average height, medium weight, ears a size too large for his head.
"Are you Allen Vest?" I asked. He nodded, frowning. "Can I ask you a few questions?"
"What for? Who are you?" he said, fingers tightening on the doorframe.
"Skip Muck, PI." Man, I love saying that. "I'm searching for a valuable antique that's gone missing. I was hoping you'd let me take a look at some of your records to see if any parcels fitting the right specifications have been sent anywhere in the past month or two."
"Isn't that kind of, well, vague?" Vest asked. I nodded.
"Yeah, but I figured it's better than nothing," I said. "I've not been very lucky so far."
"Well, I'll see what I can do," Vest said, finally stepping out of his office, locking the door behind him. "Come in."
His office was small and poky, made even smaller by the filing cabinets lining the walls. Pushed up against one wall was a desk, with a microcomputer and a printer hooked up to it. Vest leaned under the desk to switch the power on, and waited for the PC to warm up.
"Private detective, huh? That must be awesome," he said, grinning at me. I wondered whether to tell him the truth, but couldn't bring myself to. He seemed so eager to hear my reply, it'd have been like kicking a puppy.
"Oh, yeah, never a dull moment. Shootouts, car chases, I've done it all," I said. "And the chicks totally go for it."
"I bet," Vest said, his grin getting wider. "Still, I don't think I could do that myself. This job's kinda dull, but at least it's reliable."
He talked a bit more about the non-thrills of the postal service, but I'd tuned out. My claim about the chicks hadn't been a total lie; it was how I'd first persuaded Faye to go on a date with me, by spinning her tall tales about the things I'd seen and making her interested in hearing more. Pity the glamour wore off so quick when she realised the shitty hours I worked and the even shittier pay I tended to get in return. Thinking about her put a bit of a crimp on my good mood, but I had a job to do, so I pushed it down and tried to focus again.
"Oh, here we go," said Vest, glancing back at the computer and seeing it was ready, monitor displaying a blinking command line. "Hang on." He rummaged around the stacks of paper on his desk, and pulled out a manual.
"I've only had this thing a few months," he said, pulling out his chair and sitting down at the desk. "I don't quite understand what the big deal is. I mean, one power cut and we could lose everything. Still, head office say they're the future, so I'm trying to learn. What do you want to look up?"
I flicked through my notebook to find the right page.
"A list of the addresses where parcels were sent, between these two dates and these maximum and minimum weights. Is that alright?" I asked, tearing off the page and handing it to him. He frowned hard at the note, as if that'd somehow make it easier to remember, and then turned back to his manual.
"I think so," he said, though he didn't sound sure.
I stood by while Vest tapped at the keyboard with one finger, tongue sticking out of his mouth as he concentrated on typing in commands properly. He hit the Return key, and leaned over to check the printer. Nothing happened. He hit Return again. He thumped the printer. He checked it was properly plugged in and had plenty of paper. He looked back at the computer, which was now displaying a scrolling screen full of nonsense.
"Um, could you hang on a moment?" he asked, getting up out of his seat. I watched as he opened the door, stuck his head out and bawled,
"Zielinski! Zielinski, I need your help!"
A few moments later, in came a guy cursed with ears even stupider than Vest's - what was with this place? - who immediately got tapping away at the keyboard. Fifteen minutes later, after a lot of shouting, consulting of the manual, switching the computer off and on again, and finally, Vest stroking the printer's casing and calling it a cute little printer who'd be real kind if it'd just print for its Uncle Allen, I got my addresses. The list was intimidatingly long. But if I was lucky, it could give us a really important lead. And if I wasn't, well, there's worse ways to spend a morning.
When I got back to the office, Penk was sitting at his desk eating lunch.
"Oh man, you got bagels without me?" I said, pulling up a chair to join him.
"There's enough for you too," Penk said, or something along those lines. Hard to tell when he's speaking with his mouth full. I picked one out of the bag and thumped my wedge of printer paper down on the desk.
"Addresses," I said.
"Yeah, I can see that," Penk said, picking up the top page with a cream cheese-smeared finger.
"So where do we go from here?" I asked. "We can hardly visit them all personally."
Penk grinned at me. It wasn't a pretty sight. God, I wish that guy was a tidier eater. He swallowed and said,
"Here's where my morning's work comes in. I've picked up some addresses of my own."
"Oh yeah?"
"Oh yeah. There I was thinking, well, it's all fine and well Skip going to the post office, but what are we going to do with all those addresses? And then it came to me. If we can match any of your addresses with any in the address books of our suspects, we might be onto something. Now, the cleaners don't keep little black books, but I did manage to sneak into Speirs' office while he was in a meeting and go through his Filofax."
"Penk, you're a goddamn genius."
"Yeah, I know."
I won't summarise the tedious half-hour we spent going through all those addresses, getting more and more bored and less and less confident we'd find anything. We were close to giving up and writing the morning off as a dead loss, when we finally hit on a match.
"Here!" Penk said, half jumping from his seat in excitement. "Chuck Grant, 72A Park Road. It's in both. Look."
I checked the addresses he was showing me, and sure enough, they matched.
"Looks like we need to go pay Chuckie a visit."
We decided to leave it until the evening to visit Grant, figuring he'd probably be out at work, so killed some time down the bowling alley before cruising over to his place.
"Oh, heaven is a place on earth," Penk sang, tapping his fingers on the wheel, generally getting far too into it. I did my best to convey with my facial expression that I was not associated with this man in any way, just in case any passers-by got the wrong impression.
"It oughta be my turn to drive and pick the music," I grumbled. "You got the car this morning."
"Dibs on the car last for a 24 hour period," Penk said. "We agreed, remember? Pinky promised it and everything. And you don't break a pinky promise, Skip, you just don't. Anyway, what's so bad about Belinda Carlisle?"
"I genuinely can't believe you're straight," I said.
"I'm secure enough about my sexuality that I don't feel a need to hide these things," Penk said. "Though talking of sexuality, what about you and that detective guy I caught you chatting to outside the club?"
"That's just Don. We know each other. Kind of. We hung out this one time on Spring Break," I said, feeling my face start to burn.
"Hung out, huh? Yeah, I bet you let it hang out," Penk said, grinning.
"Shut up," I said.
"I fucking knew it!" Penk said. "Oh, Skip. You were such a slut at college."
I punched him on the arm.
"I was not a slut. You're just jealous because you hardly got laid at all."
"Pfft. I have standards," Penk said. He was enjoying this far too much for my liking.
"Anyway, so what if we did hook up?" I continued. "It's not like I want to get together with him now. It's too early for me to think about relationships, and anyway, I don't really know him."
"And since when has that stopped you?" Penk said.
"I can't win with you. I try and take my time and you say I can't do it, I rush into things and you call me a slut," I grumbled.
"I'm just telling it like it is," Penk said. I thumped him again, hard enough to leave a bruise this time.
"We're just buddies. I don't want it to go any further," I said. That wasn't completely true, but I figured if I said it enough, I'd start believing it myself. "Okay?"
"Fine," Penk nodded. "Anyway, I think we're here."
Grant's place looked pretty nice from the outside. Not hugely swanky, but definitely several steps up from the little apartment I called home. Penk rang the doorbell and from behind it erupted a volley of barking. We heard the sounds of someone clattering through a hallway, calming the dog down, and eventually the door was answered.
"Hi there," said Penk, holding out his license. "Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?"
Grant peered at the license for a few moments, skimming it over.
"Um, yeah. Come in," he said. "Watch out for the dog."
Luckily for us, it was the kind that was all bark and no aggression, a jumpy spaniel who bounded around our feet as we headed into his lounge.
And there it was.
Sat on his bookcase was a silver carriage clock.
It was just too good to be true. I immediately ran up to it, examining it closely. It fit our specifications in every detail, from the hallmarks on the silver to the maker's name on the clock face.
"Where'd you get this?" I asked.
Grant approached me, looking at the clock like he'd never seen it before.
"It came in the post a few weeks ago," he said. "My friend Ron sent it to me for my birthday. Which I thought was a bit odd since it's not my birthday for several months. Still, Ron's always been a bit of an eccentric."
"Ron?" Penk asked.
"Ron Speirs. A good buddy of mine, used to work with me a few years back," Grant said. Me and Penk exchanged glances.
"Why did he change jobs?" Penk said.
"He was fired. Somehow, I don't know how, he managed to steal two hundred dollars' worth of office supplies in three months. I say steal, he said he was liberating them from people who didn't use them wisely. He's a great guy, Ron, but he's got kind of peculiar attitudes. Bent paperclips make him angry."
Kleptomaniac tendencies, eh? I made a note.
"He talk to you much about his current job? Does he have any strong opinions about his boss?" I asked.
Grant sat down, chin in hand.
"He respects Nixon. He's certainly grateful to him - not many folks would employ him after the whole supplies thing. He does seem to think he's a bit irresponsible, though, needs to be a bit more focussed," he said. "I think that's it. He doesn't talk about work much."
"Mr Grant, are you aware this clock may be stolen?" Penk said.
"You think Ron stole this and sent it to me?" Grant said.
"We can't be completely sure yet. What we do know, however, that a clock exactly like this went missing from Lewis Nixon's office several weeks ago," I said. Grant blinked, trying to take it in.
"I suppose you'd better give it back to Nixon, then," he said. "I don't mind. It's not really my taste anyway."
"Mr Grant, you've been incredibly helpful," I said, shaking his hand.
"No problem."
And there it was, just like that. I almost couldn't believe it had all been sorted out so simply.
Of course, things are never so simple. Back in office, I sat at my desk, and asked Penk,
"What now?"
"We give the clock back to Nixon and get our reward," he said.
"Should we tell him we think Speirs took it?" I said.
"We weren't paid to solve a mystery, we were paid to retrieve an item," Penk said. "We've done that. Anyway, we don't have any solid evidence, it's all circumstantial."
I looked closer at the clock, still not quite satisfied with all of this. Something caught my eye - a thin streak of some kind of residue, deeply embedded down one of the ridges on the clock's casing. I scratched it with a fingernail, but couldn't get my nail in deep enough to pry it away.
"Look at this," I said, holding the clock up. "I think this might be blood."
"Don't be stupid. Why would there be blood on a clock?"
That had me thrown. I put the clock back down and paced over to the window. I do all my best thinking there. And it was while leaning against the windowsill, glaring out through the blinds, that it hit me.
"A few days ago, I talked to Ralph Spina about the Julian case," I said. Penk burst out laughing.
"For fuck's sake," he said. "Julian was shot. Don't go butting in to a murder case just because our cases suck."
"No, hear me out," I said, turning round to face him. "Julian wasn't just shot. He had a head injury. Now, Spina thought it was postmortem, but what if, what if - Penk, do you think that clock would be heavy enough to break a man's skull?"
Penk picked it up, weighing it in his hands.
"Put that down!" I shouted. "It's evidence!"
"It's useless for fingerprinting anyway," Penk said, looking closer. "God, that does look like dried blood. But what have Nixon Industries got to do with Julian?"
"That," I said, "Is for More and Don to figure out."
"Oh, I get it," Penk said. "This is just an excuse for you to see Don again."
I folded my arms.
"Do you really believe I'm in the kind of man who would make up an excuse to waste the time of a homicide detective just to get in his pants?" I said. Penk raised his eyebrows at me."Oh, ye of little faith."
I was far too fired up to care about his cynicism now. This was it, we'd found a murder weapon. We had the key evidence for a mystery far bigger than some clock-pinching weirdo. This was the big one. And as for Don's pants? Well, I'd take that step when I came to it.
Is Speirs really a murderer? What does he have against Julian? When are Skip and Don going to get it on, anyway? These questions may or may not be answered in the next thrilling instalment of - Skip Muck, PI!
Summary: AU. It's 1988. Skip and Penkala are detectives, searching for a missing clock - and making a few other discoveries besides.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2981
Disclaimer: Not my property, not for profit. All characters based on depictions in the miniseries, and no disrespect intended to anyone real.
Notes: Crossposted to ihave_no_idea.
Chapter One: In which Skip is frustrated, Penk is hungry, and Julian's been murdered.
Chapter Two: In which Lipton is strangely familiar, Speirs is irritable, and Malarkey is unexpected.
Chapter Three: In which Winters tries to be helpful and Harry insists on bragging.
Chapter Four: In which there are parachute pants.
Wednesday morning came and it was humid as hell. My shirt was sticking to my back and my hair had gone all limp and disappointing. What was worse, Penk had got dibs on the Camaro and its air-con, so I had to ride the bus down to the post office. I swear, it was like they were holding a convention for sufferers of overactive sweat glands in there. I ended up getting off two stops early just to escape the smell.
The post office itself was a little confusing. With all the lines and counters, I'd got no idea where to turn. According to Perco's note I needed to meet some guy called Allen Vest, but finding him was the first problem I needed to solve.
I decided I might as well just put myself at the end of the nearest queue and see what happened. I was there for fifteen minutes before I finally caught sight of the sign marked 'Inquiries' across the hall. Smacking myself on the forehead, I hustled over and joined the end of that line instead, which had the benefit of being both a little shorter, and a merciful relief from the extremely cranky Hispanic couple in front of me before, who had for some reason chosen this particular time and place to hold the breakdown of their marriage.
About five minutes of shuffling my feet later, I got to the counter. Leaning in towards the glass, I said,
"Excuse me, ma'am. I'm looking to speak to Allen Vest in connection with parcels sent over the past couple of months."
She tipped her head to one side, looking unimpressed.
"I'm a private investigator," I said, rooting through my pockets. "I'm trying to track down an antique that's gone missing." Dammit. I must have left my investigator's license in my other pants. I wasn't sure how I was going to convince her I was legit.
"Perco said I could talk to him," I added, on the off chance she recognised the name.
Luckily for me, she did.
"You're a friend of Frank? You should have said," she said. "Go down there, turn right, and it'll be the second door on the left."
I thanked her and departed, heading down what felt like the billionth corridor I'd been down that week. When I found the door, I knocked sharply and waited for the answer. After a pause long enough to make me consider trying the handle and seeing if anyone was even in there, it finally creaked open.
"Can I help?" asked the office's occupant - a young man, just under average height, medium weight, ears a size too large for his head.
"Are you Allen Vest?" I asked. He nodded, frowning. "Can I ask you a few questions?"
"What for? Who are you?" he said, fingers tightening on the doorframe.
"Skip Muck, PI." Man, I love saying that. "I'm searching for a valuable antique that's gone missing. I was hoping you'd let me take a look at some of your records to see if any parcels fitting the right specifications have been sent anywhere in the past month or two."
"Isn't that kind of, well, vague?" Vest asked. I nodded.
"Yeah, but I figured it's better than nothing," I said. "I've not been very lucky so far."
"Well, I'll see what I can do," Vest said, finally stepping out of his office, locking the door behind him. "Come in."
His office was small and poky, made even smaller by the filing cabinets lining the walls. Pushed up against one wall was a desk, with a microcomputer and a printer hooked up to it. Vest leaned under the desk to switch the power on, and waited for the PC to warm up.
"Private detective, huh? That must be awesome," he said, grinning at me. I wondered whether to tell him the truth, but couldn't bring myself to. He seemed so eager to hear my reply, it'd have been like kicking a puppy.
"Oh, yeah, never a dull moment. Shootouts, car chases, I've done it all," I said. "And the chicks totally go for it."
"I bet," Vest said, his grin getting wider. "Still, I don't think I could do that myself. This job's kinda dull, but at least it's reliable."
He talked a bit more about the non-thrills of the postal service, but I'd tuned out. My claim about the chicks hadn't been a total lie; it was how I'd first persuaded Faye to go on a date with me, by spinning her tall tales about the things I'd seen and making her interested in hearing more. Pity the glamour wore off so quick when she realised the shitty hours I worked and the even shittier pay I tended to get in return. Thinking about her put a bit of a crimp on my good mood, but I had a job to do, so I pushed it down and tried to focus again.
"Oh, here we go," said Vest, glancing back at the computer and seeing it was ready, monitor displaying a blinking command line. "Hang on." He rummaged around the stacks of paper on his desk, and pulled out a manual.
"I've only had this thing a few months," he said, pulling out his chair and sitting down at the desk. "I don't quite understand what the big deal is. I mean, one power cut and we could lose everything. Still, head office say they're the future, so I'm trying to learn. What do you want to look up?"
I flicked through my notebook to find the right page.
"A list of the addresses where parcels were sent, between these two dates and these maximum and minimum weights. Is that alright?" I asked, tearing off the page and handing it to him. He frowned hard at the note, as if that'd somehow make it easier to remember, and then turned back to his manual.
"I think so," he said, though he didn't sound sure.
I stood by while Vest tapped at the keyboard with one finger, tongue sticking out of his mouth as he concentrated on typing in commands properly. He hit the Return key, and leaned over to check the printer. Nothing happened. He hit Return again. He thumped the printer. He checked it was properly plugged in and had plenty of paper. He looked back at the computer, which was now displaying a scrolling screen full of nonsense.
"Um, could you hang on a moment?" he asked, getting up out of his seat. I watched as he opened the door, stuck his head out and bawled,
"Zielinski! Zielinski, I need your help!"
A few moments later, in came a guy cursed with ears even stupider than Vest's - what was with this place? - who immediately got tapping away at the keyboard. Fifteen minutes later, after a lot of shouting, consulting of the manual, switching the computer off and on again, and finally, Vest stroking the printer's casing and calling it a cute little printer who'd be real kind if it'd just print for its Uncle Allen, I got my addresses. The list was intimidatingly long. But if I was lucky, it could give us a really important lead. And if I wasn't, well, there's worse ways to spend a morning.
When I got back to the office, Penk was sitting at his desk eating lunch.
"Oh man, you got bagels without me?" I said, pulling up a chair to join him.
"There's enough for you too," Penk said, or something along those lines. Hard to tell when he's speaking with his mouth full. I picked one out of the bag and thumped my wedge of printer paper down on the desk.
"Addresses," I said.
"Yeah, I can see that," Penk said, picking up the top page with a cream cheese-smeared finger.
"So where do we go from here?" I asked. "We can hardly visit them all personally."
Penk grinned at me. It wasn't a pretty sight. God, I wish that guy was a tidier eater. He swallowed and said,
"Here's where my morning's work comes in. I've picked up some addresses of my own."
"Oh yeah?"
"Oh yeah. There I was thinking, well, it's all fine and well Skip going to the post office, but what are we going to do with all those addresses? And then it came to me. If we can match any of your addresses with any in the address books of our suspects, we might be onto something. Now, the cleaners don't keep little black books, but I did manage to sneak into Speirs' office while he was in a meeting and go through his Filofax."
"Penk, you're a goddamn genius."
"Yeah, I know."
I won't summarise the tedious half-hour we spent going through all those addresses, getting more and more bored and less and less confident we'd find anything. We were close to giving up and writing the morning off as a dead loss, when we finally hit on a match.
"Here!" Penk said, half jumping from his seat in excitement. "Chuck Grant, 72A Park Road. It's in both. Look."
I checked the addresses he was showing me, and sure enough, they matched.
"Looks like we need to go pay Chuckie a visit."
We decided to leave it until the evening to visit Grant, figuring he'd probably be out at work, so killed some time down the bowling alley before cruising over to his place.
"Oh, heaven is a place on earth," Penk sang, tapping his fingers on the wheel, generally getting far too into it. I did my best to convey with my facial expression that I was not associated with this man in any way, just in case any passers-by got the wrong impression.
"It oughta be my turn to drive and pick the music," I grumbled. "You got the car this morning."
"Dibs on the car last for a 24 hour period," Penk said. "We agreed, remember? Pinky promised it and everything. And you don't break a pinky promise, Skip, you just don't. Anyway, what's so bad about Belinda Carlisle?"
"I genuinely can't believe you're straight," I said.
"I'm secure enough about my sexuality that I don't feel a need to hide these things," Penk said. "Though talking of sexuality, what about you and that detective guy I caught you chatting to outside the club?"
"That's just Don. We know each other. Kind of. We hung out this one time on Spring Break," I said, feeling my face start to burn.
"Hung out, huh? Yeah, I bet you let it hang out," Penk said, grinning.
"Shut up," I said.
"I fucking knew it!" Penk said. "Oh, Skip. You were such a slut at college."
I punched him on the arm.
"I was not a slut. You're just jealous because you hardly got laid at all."
"Pfft. I have standards," Penk said. He was enjoying this far too much for my liking.
"Anyway, so what if we did hook up?" I continued. "It's not like I want to get together with him now. It's too early for me to think about relationships, and anyway, I don't really know him."
"And since when has that stopped you?" Penk said.
"I can't win with you. I try and take my time and you say I can't do it, I rush into things and you call me a slut," I grumbled.
"I'm just telling it like it is," Penk said. I thumped him again, hard enough to leave a bruise this time.
"We're just buddies. I don't want it to go any further," I said. That wasn't completely true, but I figured if I said it enough, I'd start believing it myself. "Okay?"
"Fine," Penk nodded. "Anyway, I think we're here."
Grant's place looked pretty nice from the outside. Not hugely swanky, but definitely several steps up from the little apartment I called home. Penk rang the doorbell and from behind it erupted a volley of barking. We heard the sounds of someone clattering through a hallway, calming the dog down, and eventually the door was answered.
"Hi there," said Penk, holding out his license. "Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?"
Grant peered at the license for a few moments, skimming it over.
"Um, yeah. Come in," he said. "Watch out for the dog."
Luckily for us, it was the kind that was all bark and no aggression, a jumpy spaniel who bounded around our feet as we headed into his lounge.
And there it was.
Sat on his bookcase was a silver carriage clock.
It was just too good to be true. I immediately ran up to it, examining it closely. It fit our specifications in every detail, from the hallmarks on the silver to the maker's name on the clock face.
"Where'd you get this?" I asked.
Grant approached me, looking at the clock like he'd never seen it before.
"It came in the post a few weeks ago," he said. "My friend Ron sent it to me for my birthday. Which I thought was a bit odd since it's not my birthday for several months. Still, Ron's always been a bit of an eccentric."
"Ron?" Penk asked.
"Ron Speirs. A good buddy of mine, used to work with me a few years back," Grant said. Me and Penk exchanged glances.
"Why did he change jobs?" Penk said.
"He was fired. Somehow, I don't know how, he managed to steal two hundred dollars' worth of office supplies in three months. I say steal, he said he was liberating them from people who didn't use them wisely. He's a great guy, Ron, but he's got kind of peculiar attitudes. Bent paperclips make him angry."
Kleptomaniac tendencies, eh? I made a note.
"He talk to you much about his current job? Does he have any strong opinions about his boss?" I asked.
Grant sat down, chin in hand.
"He respects Nixon. He's certainly grateful to him - not many folks would employ him after the whole supplies thing. He does seem to think he's a bit irresponsible, though, needs to be a bit more focussed," he said. "I think that's it. He doesn't talk about work much."
"Mr Grant, are you aware this clock may be stolen?" Penk said.
"You think Ron stole this and sent it to me?" Grant said.
"We can't be completely sure yet. What we do know, however, that a clock exactly like this went missing from Lewis Nixon's office several weeks ago," I said. Grant blinked, trying to take it in.
"I suppose you'd better give it back to Nixon, then," he said. "I don't mind. It's not really my taste anyway."
"Mr Grant, you've been incredibly helpful," I said, shaking his hand.
"No problem."
And there it was, just like that. I almost couldn't believe it had all been sorted out so simply.
Of course, things are never so simple. Back in office, I sat at my desk, and asked Penk,
"What now?"
"We give the clock back to Nixon and get our reward," he said.
"Should we tell him we think Speirs took it?" I said.
"We weren't paid to solve a mystery, we were paid to retrieve an item," Penk said. "We've done that. Anyway, we don't have any solid evidence, it's all circumstantial."
I looked closer at the clock, still not quite satisfied with all of this. Something caught my eye - a thin streak of some kind of residue, deeply embedded down one of the ridges on the clock's casing. I scratched it with a fingernail, but couldn't get my nail in deep enough to pry it away.
"Look at this," I said, holding the clock up. "I think this might be blood."
"Don't be stupid. Why would there be blood on a clock?"
That had me thrown. I put the clock back down and paced over to the window. I do all my best thinking there. And it was while leaning against the windowsill, glaring out through the blinds, that it hit me.
"A few days ago, I talked to Ralph Spina about the Julian case," I said. Penk burst out laughing.
"For fuck's sake," he said. "Julian was shot. Don't go butting in to a murder case just because our cases suck."
"No, hear me out," I said, turning round to face him. "Julian wasn't just shot. He had a head injury. Now, Spina thought it was postmortem, but what if, what if - Penk, do you think that clock would be heavy enough to break a man's skull?"
Penk picked it up, weighing it in his hands.
"Put that down!" I shouted. "It's evidence!"
"It's useless for fingerprinting anyway," Penk said, looking closer. "God, that does look like dried blood. But what have Nixon Industries got to do with Julian?"
"That," I said, "Is for More and Don to figure out."
"Oh, I get it," Penk said. "This is just an excuse for you to see Don again."
I folded my arms.
"Do you really believe I'm in the kind of man who would make up an excuse to waste the time of a homicide detective just to get in his pants?" I said. Penk raised his eyebrows at me."Oh, ye of little faith."
I was far too fired up to care about his cynicism now. This was it, we'd found a murder weapon. We had the key evidence for a mystery far bigger than some clock-pinching weirdo. This was the big one. And as for Don's pants? Well, I'd take that step when I came to it.
Is Speirs really a murderer? What does he have against Julian? When are Skip and Don going to get it on, anyway? These questions may or may not be answered in the next thrilling instalment of - Skip Muck, PI!