(no subject)
When the old timey phone on Chief Rick Hollo’s battleship grey desk jangled, the only one in the Sorbonne PD headquarters there to answer it was Deborah Hunt.
She pried herself, grudgingly, from her desk in what became known as “Debbie’s Little Study Alcove” - the desk a hollowcomb door, sans knob, overturned and propped horizontally across two squat metal grey filing cabinets. Flanking the desk was a bunker of vertically spined books, resting on stamped metal garage shelving. A morosely shaded light hung hauntingly over the little area.
Getting up, Deborah inched down her gaudy mini skirt, and clomped over to the jangling phone in her gratuitous Ugg boots Hollo had required her to wear as part of her ‘cleaning lady’ duties. She had nearly matched her meager stipend from Milton - doubling her resources, and finding refuge from the catty halls of the English department. It was all worth it in the end, she would tell herself.
She picked up the heavy black receiver.
“Sorbonne Police,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
“Pedophile?”
“Where?”
“Lake Me? Where on Lake Me?”
Deborah jotted down notes on a yellow legal pad by the phone. She wrote: “Pedophile.” She wrote: “Masturbation.” She wrote: “Overcoat,” and “Bum.” She wrote: “Blue Van.”
“Where exactly did you say?”
“Yes I know Lake Me, but where specifically?”
“The parking lot?”
“By the pars course.”
“Okay. We’ll send someone out right away.”
Deborah slowly returned the receiver to the cradle, and sashayed over to the VHF radio stand - a plywood mount covered with a carpet of blue Astroturf.
William Comparetto
© 2007