It's Not A Sandwich
Title: It’s Not A Sandwich
Fandom: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Pairing/characters: Dick Gumshoe/Miles Edgeworth, Tyrell Badd, The Chief, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: The Ace Attorney series and all related characters and settings belong to Capcom.
Prompt: 133. Any cop fandom, any character. Being LGBT does not automatically make one an expert on all related topics, but the rest of the team/squad seems to think it should.
Summary: Gumshoe has a hard enough time just doing his job. He doesn’t need people expecting him to know about all this complicated LGBT business just because he’s dating Mr. Edgeworth.
Warnings: Your usual Ace Attorney dose of murder and convoluted plots, nothing you wouldn’t find in the game itself.
Canon Note: Takes place before Ace Attorney Investigations with no spoilers or references to game events, although one minor character is taken from that particular game because he fit the position I was going to devote to an OC. Besides, it’s Badd. He’s awesome. I had to put him in.
Author’s Note: This fic contains a number of inaccuracies related to the real-world legal system and I fully admit to their purposeful existence. This is a canon where one can cross-examine parrots, assault the judge with a whip, and use random stuff you picked off the ground as legitimate evidence, so the AA legal system can pretty much do whatever it wants to in order to get the plot done. Thanks to flight_wo_wings and alanahikarichan for reading it over for me!
It’s Not a Sandwich
Some people might have found it tasteless to park their sandwich wagon next to the scene of a callous murder and start selling lunches to gawkers and investigators. Other people found money to be the best flavoring and simply adjusted their wagon so it wasn’t in direct line of sight to the perforated corpse spread out across one of the park benches.
Offering a police discount during a lunchtime investigation didn’t hurt, either.
“Stabbed twice in the back of the neck, insinuating this was a surprise attack, but it doesn’t seem to be the sort of force that comes with a crime of passion. The stolen financial papers from Mr. Dinero’s briefcase also hint at a planned, targeted attack, since the wallet was left untouched. Wouldn’t you agree, Gumshoe?”
“Mhm, sir.” Gumshoe seemed more interested in the sandwich menu than the murder. One hand fumbled around in his pocket, counting his available cash. “Is that discount for all the sandwiches?”
“Of course, officer,” said the sandwich maker. He was a perky blond man in jean suspenders and a red baseball cap, a sort who seemed more suited to plowing fields than touching food. “Also any sandwiches made to order, we’re always happy to accommodate our customers’ needs!”
Gumshoe grinned, recounted his money, then cheerfully ordered an LGBT on white bread. Edgeworth doubled over in a fit of awkward coughing.
No. No, he cannot possibly be this dense.
The server raised an eyebrow, then craned his neck to look at the menu behind his head. “An…LGBT?”
“Yeah!” Gumshoe smiled in his eager puppy-doggish way.
“What’s an LGBT?”
Gumshoe’s grin wavered. “It’s. Y’know. Like a BLT but with G on it.”
“What’s the G for?”
“I…” The grin fell off completely. “I was hoping you’d know,” Gumshoe mumbled. “You’re the sandwich aces. Says so on the front.” He tapped the aluminum wall of the sandwich wagon, where “The Sandwich Aces!” was helpfully printed right under the logo.
“Hrm.” The sandwich ace put his finger to his nose. The sign wasn’t technically a guarantee but it was only professional to give this conundrum the fullest of his effort. “Garlic?”
Gumshoe winced. “Ew. Maybe garnish?”
“Good thought, but I can’t see it meshing well with the bacon. Maybe it’s a new kind of sauce, we’re pretty traditional here. Greens, like a parsley?”
“Seems kinda obscure. Could be a side item. Grits?”
“Too breakfastey. Grapefruit?”
“Grapefruit isn’t really a sandwich kind of fruit.”
“Gumshoe!” Edgeworth finally managed to squeak out.
The detective laughed. “Well, I don’t think they’d name a sandwich after me, sir. Maybe after you but definitely not me. Maybe it’s--”
“Just…just a regular BLT, please. And a turkey wrap for me. And that’s everything. Please go away.”
“Okay…” The sandwich ace shrugged and ducked his head into the back of the wagon, leaving Gumshoe to be confused and Edgeworth to consider drowning himself in his can of lemonade.
“Something wrong, Mr. Edgeworth?” Gumshoe tried to put a reassuring hand on his prosecutor’s shoulder, and Edgeworth forced himself through several deep breaths. Gumshoe never made it hard to forget they were of different worlds and on different levels. It wasn’t just the way he dressed or the fact that Edgeworth needed to pay for their dinners (despite the fact that Gumshoe always offered) just to keep him from sinking into debt, it was in how he presented himself to the world.
Gumshoe was the sort of man who was completely incompetent at most things in life and knew it fully, but went ahead and tried anyway because his passion overrode his cynicism. He’d once gone without lunch for three days because he’d spent the money buying a traumatized child the biggest ice cream sundae possible. He was a lousy police officer and you could justifiably whip him until he bled (if you were the sort of person to keep a whip handy) but it took an especially horrific person to hate him.
Personally Edgeworth thought hating him was physically impossible, and felt he spoke from a position of authority given how many blunders he’d put up from the well-meaning detective over the years. But perhaps he’d picked up some bias.
“They said we were going to have some diversity awareness meeting presentation thingummy and the chief said maybe I could do something for it on the LGBT end of things.” Gumshoe explained, shoulders hunching in embarrassment. “And I said I’d think about it. I haven’t had my pay docked in over a month and I could probably pay for catering if I tried. I just didn’t know what kind of sandwich they were talking about.”
“I’d suggest turning him down. Gently.”
Gumshoe went into his ‘sad puppy’ impression, head down and tone mournfully obedient. “Yes, Mr. Edgeworth.”
After finding a bench that didn’t have a corpse sprawled across it, Edgeworth did his level best to explain what Gumshoe had actually been trying to order. Gumshoe listened with varying expressions of bafflement that eventually coalesced into a sun-shining expression of understanding.
“Ohhhh. That makes more sense.” The detective made happy noises around his sandwich, which had actually come with a neat slice of grapefruit on the side because the wagon man was curious as to whether it would actually work with the tomato and bacon even if that probably wasn’t the G they were working for.
“I can’t imagine why they think you’d know about such complex issues when you can barely get your own problems together,” Edgeworth commented.
Gumshoe nibbled on his grapefruit slice. “I guess they figure I know it from being it, y’know?”
“Ah, yes. Hands on experience.” Edgeworth didn’t realize how suspect it sounded until Gumshoe blushed. “Not as in…well, I suppose they’d think that too.”
“I mean, the only thing I’ve got real experience with is….well. Bein’ with you, sir.” Gumshoe smiled nervous around the grapefruit and Edgeworth gave him a small, approving nod. He was glad that their relationship had started coming out at Gumshoe’s end rather than his own. If it was him there might be some murmurings, some comments about his style of dress and taking advantage of subordinates, perhaps sideways looks and certain people refusing to speak to him about anything but legal matters. With Gumshoe being the first to nervously but proudly admit that yes, he was seeing Mr. Edgeworth and yes, it was ‘that way’, and yes, he was ‘that way’, things were easier. The comments came in, of course, and the worse than comments, but those making them suddenly found them up against a thick blue-uniformed wall built out of weenie lunches slipped to defense attorneys and hand-made cards when everyone else had forgotten their birthday.
Edgeworth, trained to remove any sign of imperfection and needless compassion from his life, broke nearly all of his mentor's values in one movement just by holding hands with the clumsy detective. But then, that was why he did it.
----
After concluding the investigation and zipping through his afternoon paperwork (and no doubt making a host of mistakes in the process), Gumshoe sat sideways on Edgeworth’s comfortable office couch with a large book spread across his lap. He’d taken the simplest looking of Edgeworth’s texts, disregarding the ones that talked about the legal status of the alphabet soup club in favor of a basic introduction to “LGBT issues”.
So far Gumshoe had found nothing about ordering wine in fancy restaurants and which Steel Samurai episodes could be considered ‘plot relevant’ as opposed to ‘filler’. The book was obviously not intended for those whose orientations pointed due Edgeworth.
“So a transgender-and that’s what the T is for-that’s someone who’s actually a man or a woman but it doesn’t match up with what’s, y’know, down there. Yeah?” Gumshoe frowned at the book and flipped through to try and find another one of those useful tables with the categories and little girl and boy symbols.
Edgeworth, still studying legal briefs for tomorrow’s case, made an affirmative noise and sipped his tea. He managed a neutral tone and didn’t bother with ‘supportive’, not when he’d needed to practically hit Gumshoe over the head with a legal text before the detective stopped pestering him with questions and let him work.
“But that’s not the same thing as being gay, yeah?” Gumshoe prodded.
“No. A transperson can be straight or nonstraight, it’s independent of their gender.”
“Uh huh. And, um…” Flip flip. Gumshoe felt like he was back in police training and trying to figure which of four depressingly similar terms meant he could legally arrest someone. He’d barely made it through the exams, and he’d studied for those. “So what if they’re sort of a girly person and like to wear pink, but they have a mustache and they’re not trying to look like a woman but sometimes they call themselves a woman? Is that trans or is that just liking pink?”
Edgeworth finally looked up, pale eyes narrowing in mild confusion. “I’m…not sure,” he said carefully. “Genderqueer, possibly. I suppose you’d have to just see what they wanted to be called. Why?”
“It’s the guy who used to own Très Bien. Maggey worked for him before she got accused of murder. The second time, I mean.” Gumshoe had always wondered what Jean’s deal was.
“Ah. I forgot what a strange city this is.” Edgeworth looked down at his papers again. His expensive fountain pen scratched across cream stationary, a louder counterpart to where Gumshoe was scribbling notes on scrap paper with a borrowed ballpoint.
“I always thought being gay was just…y’know. Liking guys,” Gumshoe complained, turning the page to a picture of two tearfully embracing old women in wedding dresses. “I didn’t know it got this complicated.”
“They don’t hand you an explanatory pamphlet and a gift basket when you come out of the closet, Gumshoe.”
“Tell everyone else in the force. I feel like I should know all this stuff. I don’t. It’s all big words and weird stuff and these funny little symbols I don’t get.”
Edgeworth’s pen made one final scratch before he slipped it back into its stand with an annoyed little click. “If I take you out to dinner after I win tomorrow, will you stop obsessing over this? Thinking this hard cannot be healthy for someone like you.” A quiet dinner out was a personal tradition after a case, self-imposed Pavlovian conditioning to encourage himself to do well. Usually he spent it reading or mentally preparing for a potential appeal--with Gumshoe now there was an excuse to have actual human interaction. It served to remind him that justice was preferable to victory.
“Can I take the book home, if you don’t need it? It’s been real educational.”
“Just don’t spill anything on it.”
“Of course not, sir!” Gumshoe gave the cover a delicate caress as he made sure the dust jacket was on straight. Edgeworth collected his papers, shutting the light off on the way out the door. Gumshoe followed him, nose still in the book.
“Did you know that the rainbow is a gay pride symbol, sir? I didn’t. I always thought it was magenta.”
“Magenta? Why?”
“Cause that’s what color your suit is, and Officer Tack says you’ve been flying the gay flag for years.”
-----
Gumshoe spent a few more hours studying the book after he got home, sounding out the more difficult terms over his evening noodles. It all came out so academic and complicated for something Gumshoe had found very, very simple. When his head started to really hurt he crawled into bed and settled himself to sleep with fantasies of the simplicity that was matching Catch of the Days with side salads and those warm shivers he got every time Edgeworth squeezed his hand and gave him a little approving smile.
Non-Edgeworth thoughts didn’t begin to creep into his head until the phone rang the next morning, loud and right next to his ear where a sweep of the covers had pulled it into bed with him.
“’lo?”
“Gumshoe? It’s the chief,” said a booming, fatherly voice.
“Oh. Hi, chief.”
“Having a nice morning? Cozy lie-in?”
“Yes, chief.”
“Too bad. You hear about Natalie Valdez?”
“No?” Gumshoe could barely remember who he was right now. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and tried to read his alarm clock.
“Assault victim, got found at the bottom of a cliff by Gourd Lake last night, only regained consciousness a few hours ago. Simple stuff, but here’s the twist: we got Valdez’s medical reports in and it turns out she’s a he. Now everyone’s thinking hate crime and fuck knows what and we still haven’t had anyone actually get their tail to St. Michael’s and get a statement. For all we know the victim was mugged by Gourdy.”
“Oh,” Gumshoe replied groggily, wondering what any of this had to do with him.
“So go talk to him and get a decent story, then get back around ten so you can catch up on the details. Supposedly there’s another witness too.”
“Okay.” Go to a place and interview a person about a thing. He could do that.
“Right. Sorry to call you in on your day off, but this seemed your kind of thing.” The captain hung up before Gumshoe could ask what his thing was and why this was kind of like it. He wasn’t even an assault kind of guy, he was in homicide, and someone getting beaten up wasn’t exactly specific. Maybe it was Gourd Lake? He’d handled a few cases down there before but he wasn’t an expert on the area.
It wasn’t until he pulled into the parking lot that he remembered that the last time something had been “your kind of thing” there’d been that unpleasantness with the that one sweet-faced guy and the tire iron to the skull and the ‘he came on to me’ defense. Edgeworth had utterly annihilated their argument in court but it hadn’t made Gumshoe feel any better.
----
Visiting the victim in the hospital was a bit strange. Visiting the victim at all was strange, he wasn’t used to them still being able to talk. Gumshoe picked up a few tissue-paper-and-pipecleaner flowers from the front desk and passed quickly through the sterile white hallways to the victim’s room, dirty coat pulled tight around him as if to ward off disease and death.
Natalie Valdez’s dark hair was spread out in tightly-braided strings around her head and only her eyes moved to look at him when he entered. There were bruises and scrapes pockmarking her face, most of them superficial, and her neck was bound up in a brace. The blanket covered her up to the brace around her neck, but he could see the curve of an arm cast poking out from underneath it and on the other side a fluid-filled tube slithered under the covers.
She’ll still be a bit groggy, the nurse had cautioned. Painkillers. Don’t press her too much if she’s not in a state to talk.
“Hi. I’m, um, Detective Dick Gumshoe. From the police.” He waved his tribute and finished with an awkward, “I brought you some flowers.”
“Oh.” Her voice was hoarse and croaking, and Gumshoe remembered why he didn’t like leaving homicide for assault. Dead bodies were sad but you didn’t have to look them in the face and see them afraid, or angry, or…just empty. The empty was worst.
Natalie’s eyes flicked to the side, where a cup of juice and breakfast tray sat abandoned on the table. “Gimme a drink?” she rasped. “I can’t reach.” She raised one hand, inconveniently placed on the other side of her body from where the food was.
Gumshoe obediently held the cup while she sipped, unsure of what to say. Comfort her that they’d catch the guy what did this, maybe. She didn’t look like she was in the mood for anything but sleeping. Natalie released the straw with a wet slurp and a soft okay and Gumshoe set it aside.
“You need anything else?” he asked, taking a seat beside her. “There’s some food over here, I think there’s a muffin. Maybe some eggs, it’s something yellow and squishy.”
“M’good. You can have it if you want.” Natalie’s eyelids slid shut, then slowly opened again. Everything about her seemed to move slowly, even blinking “So you gonna take my statement now?”
Gumshoe paused to chew the muffin he’d stuffed in his mouth. He’d heard hospital food was bad, but this was way better than instant noodles. “Mhm, mhm,” he nodded, managing a swallow before devouring the rest of the muffin.
“Don’t remember much.” Natalie let out a soft sigh, eyes closing again. “I don’t even remember going off the cliff. I just parked my car to rest for a bit and then I woke up here. Missed the whole thing, lucky me.”
“So you got knocked out?”
“No. Didn’t feel the slightest blow. I just fell asleep.”
Gumshoe swallowed and made a note to talk to the chief about not assigning him any more “your kind of thing” cases. “Your kind of thing” was unfairly confusing and depressing.
“Do you have a boyfriend? Or, or a girlfriend? Anybody close to you that owes you money?”
“Moved here two weeks ago. Don’t know anyone, much.”
“Well, can you tell me about what happened that evening?” he floundered. “Maybe we can work backward, find out what happened.” Mr. Edgeworth was better with this, he always asked just the right questions and then figured out the contradiction from the pattern of buttons on the victim’s shirt or something like that.
Natalie made a small twitch that might have been an attempt at a shrug. “I got off work at about five. It would have been six but two of my customers got into a fight so I got trauma leave.”
Gumshoe scribbled with firm dedication. “What do you do?”
“I’m just a receptionist, I work at a bank. Started about…ten days ago. Some divorcing couple started throwing punches at each other, then started throwing my office supplies at each other, then started throwing them at me, and then I just decided to call it a day after I handed the security guards my statement.”
Ah ha, a fight! Violent people. That might be a lead. “Then what?”
“I drove out to Gourd Lake down the street to try and catch a breather. I stopped to use the bathroom behind the boat rental place and noticed the cut on my face where I got hit with the stapler, so I bandaged it up.” Her eyes flicked upwards, as if to inspect her own eyebrows, and Gumshoe noted the tiny mark and bruise so easily hidden in the forest of her other injuries. “When I came out it was dark. I saw somebody dragging his buddy into the back of the restroom, I guess the guy was drunk, but there wasn’t anyone else there. After that I stopped for noodles--”
“Where?” Gumshoe frantically scribbled down everything. Not completely verbatim but enough to get by and get the major details. “Don’t think there are any noodle shops on that side of the lake.”
Natalie frowned, a tight gesture that only enhanced the ugliness of her beaten face. “You gonna keep interrupting?”
“It’s important to get all the details,” Gumshoe recited. It was how Mr. Edgeworth did it and in the absence of Mr. Edgeworth he needed to be competent. That was another problem with “your kind of thing” cases, why hadn’t they gotten someone who didn’t have his prosecutor in the middle of a trial? It was frustrating.
“It was a noodle cart,” Natalie said, tongue swiping over her lips. “Eldoon’s, I think?”
“Ooh, I love Eldoon’s! Best cheap noodles in the city. Did you try the Firecracker Noodles, with the chili pepper in with the salt?”
“Yeah, so hot it cooks your tongue. I couldn’t even taste the noodles.”
“Well, there’s not much to taste.” They shared a small, comfortable laugh before Gumshoe remembered he was a police officer and Natalie started coughing. He fed her some more juice before they continued.
“After that I started driving home. I was going past the lake when I started getting really, really tired. Could barely see the road, so I pulled over to get my head in order before I crashed. I guess that’s when I passed out. After that…no idea.”
Gumshoe wrote it down dutifully and then chewed on the end of his pencil. “That’s kind of weird. You don’t remember anything at all?”
“Mm-mm. Sorry.”
“Do you think maybe you fell?”
“I didn’t open my car door and I wasn’t parked anywhere near the cliff. No way I could have.”
“So…so you fell asleep and then somehow you didn’t notice going over a sheer cliff and breaking lots of bones and getting an ambulance called on you?”
“Mm-hm.” Natalie stared at Gumshoe apathetically, apparently unwilling to try and provide more answers than necessary. It was probably the pain medication-Gumshoe hoped it was the pain medication.
“Oh. Well. I’ll go take this down to the precinct. And we’ll catch whoever did this, I promise.”
“Okay.”
“You, um…you get better soon.”
“Yeah. Thanks for the flowers.”
The bruises didn’t do much for her face. But, Gumshoe thought, she looked nice when she smiled like that.
----
“Hey, Gumshoe, great. Some more stuff on the Mark Dinero came up, here,” Officer Tack called out as Gumshoe passed. He pressed a file into Gumshoe’s free hand and took off before Gumshoe could get in a hello.
Too many crimes too early in the morning. Gumshoe nursed his coffee over the updated file, the words slowly separating from each other and unblurring. Their main suspect had been Mark Dinero’s secretary Harry Red, a man who had access to both his schedule and his most intimate of financial documents. He was also, as of this morning, dead. They’d found him in a bathroom stall dead of a sleeping pill overdose, clutching a hastily written note that took credit for the murder. Someone, probably Tack, had scrawled “Bit too neat? Papers still missing.” at the bottom of the report.
Ugh. Why couldn’t murderers wait their turns until the crimes before them had been solved? It would make things so much nicer. Gumshoe rubbed his eyes and let the bustle of the station wrap around him, engulfing his sore mind in friendly chatter and the sound of shuffling papers.
Someone flicked the side of his head. “Gumshoe? You awake in there?” Gumshoe opened his eyes to see a mountain of a stubbled man leaning over him, tattered coat hanging from his shoulders like a cape of a battle-seasoned warrior.
The younger detective jumped into a salute so fast his empty cup went flying in the air. “Detective Badd!” he said as the cup came back to bounce off his head. “Hey, pops, didn’t know you were back from vacation. How was it?”
“Decent. Heard you were on the case for this one…been a while since we did an interrogation together. Figure this one…should be simple.” Badd twisted the trademark lollipop stick protruding from his mouth, his familiar slow drawl a comfort to Gumshoe’s worn-out mind. He liked interrogations with Badd. The man was experienced, intuitive, and really really scary when he wanted to be.
“An interrogation? Of who? I already talked to the victim.” Gumshoe held up his notebook, beaming like the good useful detective he was. Badd did not offer a biscuit.
“No, the witness.”
“Oh. What witness?”
Badd loomed forward slightly, his large eyes staring into Gumshoe’s soul, “The witness who saw Natalie Valdez…take a dive off the Gourd Lake cliff…last night,” he said, punctuating each phrase with a suck of his lollipop. “Did nobody fill you in?”
“…pops, I just got here and I had two murders and an attempted before my coffee. I’m not even sure I’m in the right police station.” Gumshoe did his best pleading look, shoulders slumping.
Edgeworth might have given him a tongue-lashing for such laxness and Franziska would have used more than her tongue, but Badd-who had practically raised him from a fledgling detective-was more forgiving. “Okay…long story short, we’ve got a witness…didn’t pop up until this morning, but…it makes the case simple. Lemme see your notes.”
Gumshoe handed over the notebook. The pause was only disturbed by the soft sound of Badd working his lollipop and Gumshoe going for another cup of coffee.
“Says she just fell asleep?” Badd finally asked, swishing the stick to the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah.”
“Funny place to sleep. Doesn’t quite match…what the witness said either.”
“Why? What did the witness say?”
“Witness says she took the dive herself.”
----
Mr. Hei Tenrun was a mismatched legal aide of a man, with tiny glasses straddling a thick nose and a fancy plaid shirt matched with black trousers so wide they looked like a clown’s funeral garb. He didn’t seem bad enough for ‘revolting’, but his general demeanor suggested he wasn’t the kind of person one could really have fun with.
“That’s a pretty charm bracelet,” Gumshoe noted as they entered the room, pointing at the chain around Tenrun’s wrist. There was a small pendent hanging from it with an odd symbol embedded on the front, a silvery pair of strings twisted around a stick. “Kind of a…hospital symbol, yeah? Are you a doctor?”
“It’s called a caduceus. And it’s not some girly charm bracelet, it’s a medical tag,” Tenrun sniped back in a nasal tone. He flipped the tag around and paused while Gumshoe tried to read off the words imprinted on it. They were all far too long.
“…high blood pressure,” Tenrun said finally. “It means high blood pressure.”
“Oh. I knew that.”
“He’s the janitor, right? He’s not going to be here for the whole interview? I was really hoping for an actual detective here.” Tenrun harrumphed and settled back in his chair, arms folded. “Ugh. Let’s get this over with, okay?”
Badd settled against the wall behind Tenrun and left Gumshoe standing in front of the witness feeling stupid and vulnerable. This whole day was making him feel stupid. Why did they think a case that was ‘your kind of thing’ would be any clearer to him than it would to someone more competent?
“So there’s not much to tell,” Tenrun began, leaning back into his chair and regarding Gumshoe with derision. “I was having a stressful day, so I went out to Gourd Lake to watch the sun set. I was returning home by Gourd Way when I saw this car stopped by the cliff. I thought maybe the car was broken, so I pulled over on the other side of the parking lot. That’s when I saw her get out of the car and walk over to the edge of the cliff. She didn’t reply when I called out to her, it was like she was in some strange trance. I was about to leave her alone to her business when I saw how close she was getting to the edge of the cliff. I paused in my tracks and then…”
Tenrun flinched and squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “And then she just stepped off into the air,” he finished in a mournful tone so forced that Gumshoe saw Badd’s eye twitching. “I could almost hear the thud as she hit the ground. I know I should have called the police but I was so traumatized by the sight that I couldn’t even bear to think about it until I saw the news article on her the next morning. It’s such a shame, what kids these days will do to themselves.”
Gumshoe thought of the deadened expression on Valdez’s face and wondered if maybe she had, maybe she was just lying. Then he thought of her smile and clenched one fist firmly. No, his victim was counting on him, just like all his other victims, to find the real truth of the crime and bring the killer to justice at any cost!
Heh. Starting to sound like Mr. Edgeworth there. Say what you want about the man, he was inspiring.
“You’re real sure she jumped? Nobody pushed her or anything?” Gumshoe asked, putting on his serious face.
“She left her car lights on. I’d have seen anyone else.” Tenrun folded his arms, looking just a little too smug for someone talking about a young woman’s tragic suicide attempt.
It was possible. She wasn’t the first presumed-victim to try and cover up a suicide attempt. In the hospital room she’d seemed not to care about anything, but…but. But that smile. And he’d promised. The detective stared hard at Tenrun and tried to think of what Mr. Edgeworth would do.
“You’ve got a stain on your sleeve,” Gumshoe burst out, in the middle of Badd doing his wrap-up questions and getting some contact information in case they needed him later. “It looks like a noodle stain.”
Gumshoe’s pride in his forensic skills wilting when both Badd and Tenrun turned to give him equal confused stares. “Yknow. Like when you’re having hot noodles and your sleeve gets into the bowl and you get a stain from the broth. That one’s definitely from Mr. Eldoon’s, I can tell from the coloration.” More staring, and Gumshoe withered into nervous silence. “…definitely Eldoon, pal.”
“Yeah. It’s from noodles. I stopped at the noodle cart before I went home,” Tenrun admitted, rubbing at the spot as if to make it come off by pure friction. “So what?”
“So…” This must be what Mr. Wright felt like in court, when he raised an objection and wasn’t sure what to prop up behind it. Gumshoe’s jaw worked as he flipped through his notebook, desperately trying to read his own messy handwriting.
“The victim stopped at Mr. Eldoon’s too. Did you see her there?” he asked, voice nearly shaking with panic. He wasn’t Edgeworth. He was Gumshoe. Pretty much anything he said was on unstable ground.
But Tenrun was twitching now, looking suspicious, and it gave Gumshoe a spot of hope. “Can’t say. Wasn’t looking,” he mumbled. “How do you even know it was Eldoon’s, it could be any noodle soup stain.”
“There’s no noodle stands on that side of the lake, not enough customers. Mr. Eldoon moves around so he can go through the entire area in one night but he’s the only one.”
“Look, are you going somewhere with this? What’s such a big deal about noodles?”
There wasn’t a big deal about noodles. Everyone ate noodles. Everyone except Edgeworth who was too good for them and Gumshoe’s dad who-
“You have high blood pressure, yeah? That means you can’t eat too much salt. And Eldoon puts a lot of salt in everything, he won’t listen if you tell him to go easy on the salt. So you couldn’t have eaten at Eldoon’s because you wouldn’t have been able to eat anything. So!” Gumshoe took a step back and threw out a dramatic finger. “So objection, Mr. Tenrun, because you’ve got a contradiction!”
His arm hung quavering in the air as Tenrun stared at it, a panicked expression flushing over his face. Tenrun made an attempt to stand. “Yeah, I’m just gonna be going. I have better things to do than listen to people criticize my health. You have my number.”
Badd, previously a grey and brown statue against the wall, stepped around the table to face Tenrun. He kept his wide, pale eyes on Tenrun and talked to the other detective without turning his head. “Gumshoe. The report mentioned the victim had an abnormally high dose of sedatives in her system. You remember the Mimi Miney case? All that talk about sleeping pills and car crashes? The sort of thing a law student might pay attention to.”
“That got proven to be a lie-” Tenrun tried to interject.
“She started feeling really sleepy right after she left the noodle place, sir, that’d fit.”
“You can’t trust hearsay evidence, I saw her stop the car herself-” Tenrun was getting more desperate now.
“No sleeping pills taken on her own terms?”
“Not on purpose. But the firecracker noodles would kill the taste of anything you put in the broth.”
“And no other reason she might want a nap?”
“You’re just making things up now, I know how you guys work, all about circumstantial-”
There was a loud crack from Detective Badd that made both witness and detective jump. Badd spit his beheaded lollipop stem out onto the floor and crunched down the rest of the pieces.
“Lemme lay it out…if your memory’s flagging.” he said, running a thumb through the stubble of his cheek. Tenrun cowered.
“Little miss Valdez, pure and innocent, did something you didn’t like. You followed her to Eldoon’s….hell knows what the original plan was. Then you see the noodles….and you see your cue. In go the pills. Then you follow Valdez to make sure it’ll work. Problem is…she does the smart thing and stops the car.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So now you’ve got a witness who’s gonna wake up. Cliff’s right there,things are simple…you drag her to the edge and throw her off. Since it’s too dark to see what’s down there you leave her for dead. You don’t see where she’s caught on the cliff edge, where the fall wasn’t enough to kill her. She’s smart….she’s lucky…you’re not.”
“The…the victim…” Both detectives glared down at their witness, whose large body was frozen in utter shock. “She’s still…”
“Alive? Talking? Yeah…you got a problem with it?” Badd said.
“No, no, that’s great. Good. Maybe she can get the help she needs. Very good that she survived.”
“Uh huh…”
Gumshoe’s head was buzzing. Something was important here, something was missing. He could feel it inches away, like two live wires surging with electricity and about to touch.
“You can’t prove anything!”
“You’re tying yourself in circles lying, that’s damn suspicious.”
“Not suspicious enough to convict me!”
“If you hadn’t done it, would you be flailing this badly?”
“Then what’s my motive?” Tenrun burst out. Badd faltered for a moment, his bluff called. The wires in Gumshoe’s mind connected with a harsh ‘zap!’.
“Because she saw you murder Harry Red. That was why you had to get her out of the way and make it look unrelated.” The coffee was flowing in his system, jazzing him up, waking up his brain and forging connections like he was Mr. Edgeworth with two sugars in his tea. Gumshoe leaned forward on the table, expression eager and hungry.
“Y-you can’t prove that either,” Tenrun gasped. He was starting to sweat and his face was flushed.
“She saw someone drag someone else into the public bathroom near Gourd Lake. His body got found in the bathroom near Gourd Lake, doped up on sleeping pills.” Gumshoe’s spirits surged even as Tenrun hunched further in his chair.
“No. No…” Tenrun folded up, hands over his head, his glasses falling from his nose to the floor and cracking.
“I bet once she’s up to it she’ll pick you right out of the lineup.” Gumshoe grinned wildly as Badd pulled a pair of handcuffs from his trenchcoat pocket, chuckling. “And if we go to your house we’re gonna find some interesting papers.”
“Nooooooooooo….”
“You’re busted, pal.”
---
Once they handed Tenrun off to central booking, Badd unwrapped a fresh lollipop and practically sucked the grape-flavored orb off its stick. “We are getting…Edgeworth on this?” he asked after he’d worked his frustration out. “The noodle evidence…is enough to arrest, might not be enough to nail him. We don’t even know if Valdez saw anything suspicious.”
“I’ll leave him a message, I think he’s still in court.” Gumshoe grinned widely. “But we have a confession, sir. I think we’re pretty good.”
“Edgworth up against Wright?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Right. He should be out in a few hours,” Badd said. He gave Gumshoe a hard pat on the shoulder. “Good job in there. Not quite what I think they called you in for…but good.”
“I know a lot about noodles, sir.” Gumshoe’s pride wavered. He’d done a bluff worthy of two Wrights in there and the horrified panic at how bad he’d have messed up if he was wrong was starting to sink through the victory high. “Just not about…that sort of thing. It’s really not my kind of deal, my kind of deal is noodles and ballistics and putting handcuffs on perps. I don’t want people thinking I know stuff I don’t just ‘cause I’m going out with Mr. Edgeworth instead of Miss Byrd, y’know? I’m still Gumshoe.”
Badd gave Gumshoe a gentler pat and an uncharacteristically sympathetic smile. “I’ll talk to the chief,” he said with a look over at their boss’s office door. “But I’ll make sure you get assigned to all the noodle related cases in the future.”
“Thanks, pops,” Gumshoe said, relieved.
“By the way, what made you think Tenrun was lying in the first place?”
“I…I dunno, it felt like…I thought she was telling the truth.” Now he was slowing his sentences, and he didn’t even have Badd’s perpetual lollipop sucking to interrupt his speech. “So I went with my gut. I believed in her. Guess I lucked out.”
“Heh.” Badd flicked the stick over to the other side of his mouth.. “You know…I might not like the answer…but I’m gonna ask. What’s a sweet idealistic guy like you…doing hanging around…the Demon Prosecutor?”
Gumshoe stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged, a nervous little grin dancing around his broad features. “I believe in him too.”
Fandom: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Pairing/characters: Dick Gumshoe/Miles Edgeworth, Tyrell Badd, The Chief, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: The Ace Attorney series and all related characters and settings belong to Capcom.
Prompt: 133. Any cop fandom, any character. Being LGBT does not automatically make one an expert on all related topics, but the rest of the team/squad seems to think it should.
Summary: Gumshoe has a hard enough time just doing his job. He doesn’t need people expecting him to know about all this complicated LGBT business just because he’s dating Mr. Edgeworth.
Warnings: Your usual Ace Attorney dose of murder and convoluted plots, nothing you wouldn’t find in the game itself.
Canon Note: Takes place before Ace Attorney Investigations with no spoilers or references to game events, although one minor character is taken from that particular game because he fit the position I was going to devote to an OC. Besides, it’s Badd. He’s awesome. I had to put him in.
Author’s Note: This fic contains a number of inaccuracies related to the real-world legal system and I fully admit to their purposeful existence. This is a canon where one can cross-examine parrots, assault the judge with a whip, and use random stuff you picked off the ground as legitimate evidence, so the AA legal system can pretty much do whatever it wants to in order to get the plot done. Thanks to flight_wo_wings and alanahikarichan for reading it over for me!
It’s Not a Sandwich
Some people might have found it tasteless to park their sandwich wagon next to the scene of a callous murder and start selling lunches to gawkers and investigators. Other people found money to be the best flavoring and simply adjusted their wagon so it wasn’t in direct line of sight to the perforated corpse spread out across one of the park benches.
Offering a police discount during a lunchtime investigation didn’t hurt, either.
“Stabbed twice in the back of the neck, insinuating this was a surprise attack, but it doesn’t seem to be the sort of force that comes with a crime of passion. The stolen financial papers from Mr. Dinero’s briefcase also hint at a planned, targeted attack, since the wallet was left untouched. Wouldn’t you agree, Gumshoe?”
“Mhm, sir.” Gumshoe seemed more interested in the sandwich menu than the murder. One hand fumbled around in his pocket, counting his available cash. “Is that discount for all the sandwiches?”
“Of course, officer,” said the sandwich maker. He was a perky blond man in jean suspenders and a red baseball cap, a sort who seemed more suited to plowing fields than touching food. “Also any sandwiches made to order, we’re always happy to accommodate our customers’ needs!”
Gumshoe grinned, recounted his money, then cheerfully ordered an LGBT on white bread. Edgeworth doubled over in a fit of awkward coughing.
No. No, he cannot possibly be this dense.
The server raised an eyebrow, then craned his neck to look at the menu behind his head. “An…LGBT?”
“Yeah!” Gumshoe smiled in his eager puppy-doggish way.
“What’s an LGBT?”
Gumshoe’s grin wavered. “It’s. Y’know. Like a BLT but with G on it.”
“What’s the G for?”
“I…” The grin fell off completely. “I was hoping you’d know,” Gumshoe mumbled. “You’re the sandwich aces. Says so on the front.” He tapped the aluminum wall of the sandwich wagon, where “The Sandwich Aces!” was helpfully printed right under the logo.
“Hrm.” The sandwich ace put his finger to his nose. The sign wasn’t technically a guarantee but it was only professional to give this conundrum the fullest of his effort. “Garlic?”
Gumshoe winced. “Ew. Maybe garnish?”
“Good thought, but I can’t see it meshing well with the bacon. Maybe it’s a new kind of sauce, we’re pretty traditional here. Greens, like a parsley?”
“Seems kinda obscure. Could be a side item. Grits?”
“Too breakfastey. Grapefruit?”
“Grapefruit isn’t really a sandwich kind of fruit.”
“Gumshoe!” Edgeworth finally managed to squeak out.
The detective laughed. “Well, I don’t think they’d name a sandwich after me, sir. Maybe after you but definitely not me. Maybe it’s--”
“Just…just a regular BLT, please. And a turkey wrap for me. And that’s everything. Please go away.”
“Okay…” The sandwich ace shrugged and ducked his head into the back of the wagon, leaving Gumshoe to be confused and Edgeworth to consider drowning himself in his can of lemonade.
“Something wrong, Mr. Edgeworth?” Gumshoe tried to put a reassuring hand on his prosecutor’s shoulder, and Edgeworth forced himself through several deep breaths. Gumshoe never made it hard to forget they were of different worlds and on different levels. It wasn’t just the way he dressed or the fact that Edgeworth needed to pay for their dinners (despite the fact that Gumshoe always offered) just to keep him from sinking into debt, it was in how he presented himself to the world.
Gumshoe was the sort of man who was completely incompetent at most things in life and knew it fully, but went ahead and tried anyway because his passion overrode his cynicism. He’d once gone without lunch for three days because he’d spent the money buying a traumatized child the biggest ice cream sundae possible. He was a lousy police officer and you could justifiably whip him until he bled (if you were the sort of person to keep a whip handy) but it took an especially horrific person to hate him.
Personally Edgeworth thought hating him was physically impossible, and felt he spoke from a position of authority given how many blunders he’d put up from the well-meaning detective over the years. But perhaps he’d picked up some bias.
“They said we were going to have some diversity awareness meeting presentation thingummy and the chief said maybe I could do something for it on the LGBT end of things.” Gumshoe explained, shoulders hunching in embarrassment. “And I said I’d think about it. I haven’t had my pay docked in over a month and I could probably pay for catering if I tried. I just didn’t know what kind of sandwich they were talking about.”
“I’d suggest turning him down. Gently.”
Gumshoe went into his ‘sad puppy’ impression, head down and tone mournfully obedient. “Yes, Mr. Edgeworth.”
After finding a bench that didn’t have a corpse sprawled across it, Edgeworth did his level best to explain what Gumshoe had actually been trying to order. Gumshoe listened with varying expressions of bafflement that eventually coalesced into a sun-shining expression of understanding.
“Ohhhh. That makes more sense.” The detective made happy noises around his sandwich, which had actually come with a neat slice of grapefruit on the side because the wagon man was curious as to whether it would actually work with the tomato and bacon even if that probably wasn’t the G they were working for.
“I can’t imagine why they think you’d know about such complex issues when you can barely get your own problems together,” Edgeworth commented.
Gumshoe nibbled on his grapefruit slice. “I guess they figure I know it from being it, y’know?”
“Ah, yes. Hands on experience.” Edgeworth didn’t realize how suspect it sounded until Gumshoe blushed. “Not as in…well, I suppose they’d think that too.”
“I mean, the only thing I’ve got real experience with is….well. Bein’ with you, sir.” Gumshoe smiled nervous around the grapefruit and Edgeworth gave him a small, approving nod. He was glad that their relationship had started coming out at Gumshoe’s end rather than his own. If it was him there might be some murmurings, some comments about his style of dress and taking advantage of subordinates, perhaps sideways looks and certain people refusing to speak to him about anything but legal matters. With Gumshoe being the first to nervously but proudly admit that yes, he was seeing Mr. Edgeworth and yes, it was ‘that way’, and yes, he was ‘that way’, things were easier. The comments came in, of course, and the worse than comments, but those making them suddenly found them up against a thick blue-uniformed wall built out of weenie lunches slipped to defense attorneys and hand-made cards when everyone else had forgotten their birthday.
Edgeworth, trained to remove any sign of imperfection and needless compassion from his life, broke nearly all of his mentor's values in one movement just by holding hands with the clumsy detective. But then, that was why he did it.
----
After concluding the investigation and zipping through his afternoon paperwork (and no doubt making a host of mistakes in the process), Gumshoe sat sideways on Edgeworth’s comfortable office couch with a large book spread across his lap. He’d taken the simplest looking of Edgeworth’s texts, disregarding the ones that talked about the legal status of the alphabet soup club in favor of a basic introduction to “LGBT issues”.
So far Gumshoe had found nothing about ordering wine in fancy restaurants and which Steel Samurai episodes could be considered ‘plot relevant’ as opposed to ‘filler’. The book was obviously not intended for those whose orientations pointed due Edgeworth.
“So a transgender-and that’s what the T is for-that’s someone who’s actually a man or a woman but it doesn’t match up with what’s, y’know, down there. Yeah?” Gumshoe frowned at the book and flipped through to try and find another one of those useful tables with the categories and little girl and boy symbols.
Edgeworth, still studying legal briefs for tomorrow’s case, made an affirmative noise and sipped his tea. He managed a neutral tone and didn’t bother with ‘supportive’, not when he’d needed to practically hit Gumshoe over the head with a legal text before the detective stopped pestering him with questions and let him work.
“But that’s not the same thing as being gay, yeah?” Gumshoe prodded.
“No. A transperson can be straight or nonstraight, it’s independent of their gender.”
“Uh huh. And, um…” Flip flip. Gumshoe felt like he was back in police training and trying to figure which of four depressingly similar terms meant he could legally arrest someone. He’d barely made it through the exams, and he’d studied for those. “So what if they’re sort of a girly person and like to wear pink, but they have a mustache and they’re not trying to look like a woman but sometimes they call themselves a woman? Is that trans or is that just liking pink?”
Edgeworth finally looked up, pale eyes narrowing in mild confusion. “I’m…not sure,” he said carefully. “Genderqueer, possibly. I suppose you’d have to just see what they wanted to be called. Why?”
“It’s the guy who used to own Très Bien. Maggey worked for him before she got accused of murder. The second time, I mean.” Gumshoe had always wondered what Jean’s deal was.
“Ah. I forgot what a strange city this is.” Edgeworth looked down at his papers again. His expensive fountain pen scratched across cream stationary, a louder counterpart to where Gumshoe was scribbling notes on scrap paper with a borrowed ballpoint.
“I always thought being gay was just…y’know. Liking guys,” Gumshoe complained, turning the page to a picture of two tearfully embracing old women in wedding dresses. “I didn’t know it got this complicated.”
“They don’t hand you an explanatory pamphlet and a gift basket when you come out of the closet, Gumshoe.”
“Tell everyone else in the force. I feel like I should know all this stuff. I don’t. It’s all big words and weird stuff and these funny little symbols I don’t get.”
Edgeworth’s pen made one final scratch before he slipped it back into its stand with an annoyed little click. “If I take you out to dinner after I win tomorrow, will you stop obsessing over this? Thinking this hard cannot be healthy for someone like you.” A quiet dinner out was a personal tradition after a case, self-imposed Pavlovian conditioning to encourage himself to do well. Usually he spent it reading or mentally preparing for a potential appeal--with Gumshoe now there was an excuse to have actual human interaction. It served to remind him that justice was preferable to victory.
“Can I take the book home, if you don’t need it? It’s been real educational.”
“Just don’t spill anything on it.”
“Of course not, sir!” Gumshoe gave the cover a delicate caress as he made sure the dust jacket was on straight. Edgeworth collected his papers, shutting the light off on the way out the door. Gumshoe followed him, nose still in the book.
“Did you know that the rainbow is a gay pride symbol, sir? I didn’t. I always thought it was magenta.”
“Magenta? Why?”
“Cause that’s what color your suit is, and Officer Tack says you’ve been flying the gay flag for years.”
-----
Gumshoe spent a few more hours studying the book after he got home, sounding out the more difficult terms over his evening noodles. It all came out so academic and complicated for something Gumshoe had found very, very simple. When his head started to really hurt he crawled into bed and settled himself to sleep with fantasies of the simplicity that was matching Catch of the Days with side salads and those warm shivers he got every time Edgeworth squeezed his hand and gave him a little approving smile.
Non-Edgeworth thoughts didn’t begin to creep into his head until the phone rang the next morning, loud and right next to his ear where a sweep of the covers had pulled it into bed with him.
“’lo?”
“Gumshoe? It’s the chief,” said a booming, fatherly voice.
“Oh. Hi, chief.”
“Having a nice morning? Cozy lie-in?”
“Yes, chief.”
“Too bad. You hear about Natalie Valdez?”
“No?” Gumshoe could barely remember who he was right now. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and tried to read his alarm clock.
“Assault victim, got found at the bottom of a cliff by Gourd Lake last night, only regained consciousness a few hours ago. Simple stuff, but here’s the twist: we got Valdez’s medical reports in and it turns out she’s a he. Now everyone’s thinking hate crime and fuck knows what and we still haven’t had anyone actually get their tail to St. Michael’s and get a statement. For all we know the victim was mugged by Gourdy.”
“Oh,” Gumshoe replied groggily, wondering what any of this had to do with him.
“So go talk to him and get a decent story, then get back around ten so you can catch up on the details. Supposedly there’s another witness too.”
“Okay.” Go to a place and interview a person about a thing. He could do that.
“Right. Sorry to call you in on your day off, but this seemed your kind of thing.” The captain hung up before Gumshoe could ask what his thing was and why this was kind of like it. He wasn’t even an assault kind of guy, he was in homicide, and someone getting beaten up wasn’t exactly specific. Maybe it was Gourd Lake? He’d handled a few cases down there before but he wasn’t an expert on the area.
It wasn’t until he pulled into the parking lot that he remembered that the last time something had been “your kind of thing” there’d been that unpleasantness with the that one sweet-faced guy and the tire iron to the skull and the ‘he came on to me’ defense. Edgeworth had utterly annihilated their argument in court but it hadn’t made Gumshoe feel any better.
----
Visiting the victim in the hospital was a bit strange. Visiting the victim at all was strange, he wasn’t used to them still being able to talk. Gumshoe picked up a few tissue-paper-and-pipecleaner flowers from the front desk and passed quickly through the sterile white hallways to the victim’s room, dirty coat pulled tight around him as if to ward off disease and death.
Natalie Valdez’s dark hair was spread out in tightly-braided strings around her head and only her eyes moved to look at him when he entered. There were bruises and scrapes pockmarking her face, most of them superficial, and her neck was bound up in a brace. The blanket covered her up to the brace around her neck, but he could see the curve of an arm cast poking out from underneath it and on the other side a fluid-filled tube slithered under the covers.
She’ll still be a bit groggy, the nurse had cautioned. Painkillers. Don’t press her too much if she’s not in a state to talk.
“Hi. I’m, um, Detective Dick Gumshoe. From the police.” He waved his tribute and finished with an awkward, “I brought you some flowers.”
“Oh.” Her voice was hoarse and croaking, and Gumshoe remembered why he didn’t like leaving homicide for assault. Dead bodies were sad but you didn’t have to look them in the face and see them afraid, or angry, or…just empty. The empty was worst.
Natalie’s eyes flicked to the side, where a cup of juice and breakfast tray sat abandoned on the table. “Gimme a drink?” she rasped. “I can’t reach.” She raised one hand, inconveniently placed on the other side of her body from where the food was.
Gumshoe obediently held the cup while she sipped, unsure of what to say. Comfort her that they’d catch the guy what did this, maybe. She didn’t look like she was in the mood for anything but sleeping. Natalie released the straw with a wet slurp and a soft okay and Gumshoe set it aside.
“You need anything else?” he asked, taking a seat beside her. “There’s some food over here, I think there’s a muffin. Maybe some eggs, it’s something yellow and squishy.”
“M’good. You can have it if you want.” Natalie’s eyelids slid shut, then slowly opened again. Everything about her seemed to move slowly, even blinking “So you gonna take my statement now?”
Gumshoe paused to chew the muffin he’d stuffed in his mouth. He’d heard hospital food was bad, but this was way better than instant noodles. “Mhm, mhm,” he nodded, managing a swallow before devouring the rest of the muffin.
“Don’t remember much.” Natalie let out a soft sigh, eyes closing again. “I don’t even remember going off the cliff. I just parked my car to rest for a bit and then I woke up here. Missed the whole thing, lucky me.”
“So you got knocked out?”
“No. Didn’t feel the slightest blow. I just fell asleep.”
Gumshoe swallowed and made a note to talk to the chief about not assigning him any more “your kind of thing” cases. “Your kind of thing” was unfairly confusing and depressing.
“Do you have a boyfriend? Or, or a girlfriend? Anybody close to you that owes you money?”
“Moved here two weeks ago. Don’t know anyone, much.”
“Well, can you tell me about what happened that evening?” he floundered. “Maybe we can work backward, find out what happened.” Mr. Edgeworth was better with this, he always asked just the right questions and then figured out the contradiction from the pattern of buttons on the victim’s shirt or something like that.
Natalie made a small twitch that might have been an attempt at a shrug. “I got off work at about five. It would have been six but two of my customers got into a fight so I got trauma leave.”
Gumshoe scribbled with firm dedication. “What do you do?”
“I’m just a receptionist, I work at a bank. Started about…ten days ago. Some divorcing couple started throwing punches at each other, then started throwing my office supplies at each other, then started throwing them at me, and then I just decided to call it a day after I handed the security guards my statement.”
Ah ha, a fight! Violent people. That might be a lead. “Then what?”
“I drove out to Gourd Lake down the street to try and catch a breather. I stopped to use the bathroom behind the boat rental place and noticed the cut on my face where I got hit with the stapler, so I bandaged it up.” Her eyes flicked upwards, as if to inspect her own eyebrows, and Gumshoe noted the tiny mark and bruise so easily hidden in the forest of her other injuries. “When I came out it was dark. I saw somebody dragging his buddy into the back of the restroom, I guess the guy was drunk, but there wasn’t anyone else there. After that I stopped for noodles--”
“Where?” Gumshoe frantically scribbled down everything. Not completely verbatim but enough to get by and get the major details. “Don’t think there are any noodle shops on that side of the lake.”
Natalie frowned, a tight gesture that only enhanced the ugliness of her beaten face. “You gonna keep interrupting?”
“It’s important to get all the details,” Gumshoe recited. It was how Mr. Edgeworth did it and in the absence of Mr. Edgeworth he needed to be competent. That was another problem with “your kind of thing” cases, why hadn’t they gotten someone who didn’t have his prosecutor in the middle of a trial? It was frustrating.
“It was a noodle cart,” Natalie said, tongue swiping over her lips. “Eldoon’s, I think?”
“Ooh, I love Eldoon’s! Best cheap noodles in the city. Did you try the Firecracker Noodles, with the chili pepper in with the salt?”
“Yeah, so hot it cooks your tongue. I couldn’t even taste the noodles.”
“Well, there’s not much to taste.” They shared a small, comfortable laugh before Gumshoe remembered he was a police officer and Natalie started coughing. He fed her some more juice before they continued.
“After that I started driving home. I was going past the lake when I started getting really, really tired. Could barely see the road, so I pulled over to get my head in order before I crashed. I guess that’s when I passed out. After that…no idea.”
Gumshoe wrote it down dutifully and then chewed on the end of his pencil. “That’s kind of weird. You don’t remember anything at all?”
“Mm-mm. Sorry.”
“Do you think maybe you fell?”
“I didn’t open my car door and I wasn’t parked anywhere near the cliff. No way I could have.”
“So…so you fell asleep and then somehow you didn’t notice going over a sheer cliff and breaking lots of bones and getting an ambulance called on you?”
“Mm-hm.” Natalie stared at Gumshoe apathetically, apparently unwilling to try and provide more answers than necessary. It was probably the pain medication-Gumshoe hoped it was the pain medication.
“Oh. Well. I’ll go take this down to the precinct. And we’ll catch whoever did this, I promise.”
“Okay.”
“You, um…you get better soon.”
“Yeah. Thanks for the flowers.”
The bruises didn’t do much for her face. But, Gumshoe thought, she looked nice when she smiled like that.
----
“Hey, Gumshoe, great. Some more stuff on the Mark Dinero came up, here,” Officer Tack called out as Gumshoe passed. He pressed a file into Gumshoe’s free hand and took off before Gumshoe could get in a hello.
Too many crimes too early in the morning. Gumshoe nursed his coffee over the updated file, the words slowly separating from each other and unblurring. Their main suspect had been Mark Dinero’s secretary Harry Red, a man who had access to both his schedule and his most intimate of financial documents. He was also, as of this morning, dead. They’d found him in a bathroom stall dead of a sleeping pill overdose, clutching a hastily written note that took credit for the murder. Someone, probably Tack, had scrawled “Bit too neat? Papers still missing.” at the bottom of the report.
Ugh. Why couldn’t murderers wait their turns until the crimes before them had been solved? It would make things so much nicer. Gumshoe rubbed his eyes and let the bustle of the station wrap around him, engulfing his sore mind in friendly chatter and the sound of shuffling papers.
Someone flicked the side of his head. “Gumshoe? You awake in there?” Gumshoe opened his eyes to see a mountain of a stubbled man leaning over him, tattered coat hanging from his shoulders like a cape of a battle-seasoned warrior.
The younger detective jumped into a salute so fast his empty cup went flying in the air. “Detective Badd!” he said as the cup came back to bounce off his head. “Hey, pops, didn’t know you were back from vacation. How was it?”
“Decent. Heard you were on the case for this one…been a while since we did an interrogation together. Figure this one…should be simple.” Badd twisted the trademark lollipop stick protruding from his mouth, his familiar slow drawl a comfort to Gumshoe’s worn-out mind. He liked interrogations with Badd. The man was experienced, intuitive, and really really scary when he wanted to be.
“An interrogation? Of who? I already talked to the victim.” Gumshoe held up his notebook, beaming like the good useful detective he was. Badd did not offer a biscuit.
“No, the witness.”
“Oh. What witness?”
Badd loomed forward slightly, his large eyes staring into Gumshoe’s soul, “The witness who saw Natalie Valdez…take a dive off the Gourd Lake cliff…last night,” he said, punctuating each phrase with a suck of his lollipop. “Did nobody fill you in?”
“…pops, I just got here and I had two murders and an attempted before my coffee. I’m not even sure I’m in the right police station.” Gumshoe did his best pleading look, shoulders slumping.
Edgeworth might have given him a tongue-lashing for such laxness and Franziska would have used more than her tongue, but Badd-who had practically raised him from a fledgling detective-was more forgiving. “Okay…long story short, we’ve got a witness…didn’t pop up until this morning, but…it makes the case simple. Lemme see your notes.”
Gumshoe handed over the notebook. The pause was only disturbed by the soft sound of Badd working his lollipop and Gumshoe going for another cup of coffee.
“Says she just fell asleep?” Badd finally asked, swishing the stick to the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah.”
“Funny place to sleep. Doesn’t quite match…what the witness said either.”
“Why? What did the witness say?”
“Witness says she took the dive herself.”
----
Mr. Hei Tenrun was a mismatched legal aide of a man, with tiny glasses straddling a thick nose and a fancy plaid shirt matched with black trousers so wide they looked like a clown’s funeral garb. He didn’t seem bad enough for ‘revolting’, but his general demeanor suggested he wasn’t the kind of person one could really have fun with.
“That’s a pretty charm bracelet,” Gumshoe noted as they entered the room, pointing at the chain around Tenrun’s wrist. There was a small pendent hanging from it with an odd symbol embedded on the front, a silvery pair of strings twisted around a stick. “Kind of a…hospital symbol, yeah? Are you a doctor?”
“It’s called a caduceus. And it’s not some girly charm bracelet, it’s a medical tag,” Tenrun sniped back in a nasal tone. He flipped the tag around and paused while Gumshoe tried to read off the words imprinted on it. They were all far too long.
“…high blood pressure,” Tenrun said finally. “It means high blood pressure.”
“Oh. I knew that.”
“He’s the janitor, right? He’s not going to be here for the whole interview? I was really hoping for an actual detective here.” Tenrun harrumphed and settled back in his chair, arms folded. “Ugh. Let’s get this over with, okay?”
Badd settled against the wall behind Tenrun and left Gumshoe standing in front of the witness feeling stupid and vulnerable. This whole day was making him feel stupid. Why did they think a case that was ‘your kind of thing’ would be any clearer to him than it would to someone more competent?
“So there’s not much to tell,” Tenrun began, leaning back into his chair and regarding Gumshoe with derision. “I was having a stressful day, so I went out to Gourd Lake to watch the sun set. I was returning home by Gourd Way when I saw this car stopped by the cliff. I thought maybe the car was broken, so I pulled over on the other side of the parking lot. That’s when I saw her get out of the car and walk over to the edge of the cliff. She didn’t reply when I called out to her, it was like she was in some strange trance. I was about to leave her alone to her business when I saw how close she was getting to the edge of the cliff. I paused in my tracks and then…”
Tenrun flinched and squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “And then she just stepped off into the air,” he finished in a mournful tone so forced that Gumshoe saw Badd’s eye twitching. “I could almost hear the thud as she hit the ground. I know I should have called the police but I was so traumatized by the sight that I couldn’t even bear to think about it until I saw the news article on her the next morning. It’s such a shame, what kids these days will do to themselves.”
Gumshoe thought of the deadened expression on Valdez’s face and wondered if maybe she had, maybe she was just lying. Then he thought of her smile and clenched one fist firmly. No, his victim was counting on him, just like all his other victims, to find the real truth of the crime and bring the killer to justice at any cost!
Heh. Starting to sound like Mr. Edgeworth there. Say what you want about the man, he was inspiring.
“You’re real sure she jumped? Nobody pushed her or anything?” Gumshoe asked, putting on his serious face.
“She left her car lights on. I’d have seen anyone else.” Tenrun folded his arms, looking just a little too smug for someone talking about a young woman’s tragic suicide attempt.
It was possible. She wasn’t the first presumed-victim to try and cover up a suicide attempt. In the hospital room she’d seemed not to care about anything, but…but. But that smile. And he’d promised. The detective stared hard at Tenrun and tried to think of what Mr. Edgeworth would do.
“You’ve got a stain on your sleeve,” Gumshoe burst out, in the middle of Badd doing his wrap-up questions and getting some contact information in case they needed him later. “It looks like a noodle stain.”
Gumshoe’s pride in his forensic skills wilting when both Badd and Tenrun turned to give him equal confused stares. “Yknow. Like when you’re having hot noodles and your sleeve gets into the bowl and you get a stain from the broth. That one’s definitely from Mr. Eldoon’s, I can tell from the coloration.” More staring, and Gumshoe withered into nervous silence. “…definitely Eldoon, pal.”
“Yeah. It’s from noodles. I stopped at the noodle cart before I went home,” Tenrun admitted, rubbing at the spot as if to make it come off by pure friction. “So what?”
“So…” This must be what Mr. Wright felt like in court, when he raised an objection and wasn’t sure what to prop up behind it. Gumshoe’s jaw worked as he flipped through his notebook, desperately trying to read his own messy handwriting.
“The victim stopped at Mr. Eldoon’s too. Did you see her there?” he asked, voice nearly shaking with panic. He wasn’t Edgeworth. He was Gumshoe. Pretty much anything he said was on unstable ground.
But Tenrun was twitching now, looking suspicious, and it gave Gumshoe a spot of hope. “Can’t say. Wasn’t looking,” he mumbled. “How do you even know it was Eldoon’s, it could be any noodle soup stain.”
“There’s no noodle stands on that side of the lake, not enough customers. Mr. Eldoon moves around so he can go through the entire area in one night but he’s the only one.”
“Look, are you going somewhere with this? What’s such a big deal about noodles?”
There wasn’t a big deal about noodles. Everyone ate noodles. Everyone except Edgeworth who was too good for them and Gumshoe’s dad who-
“You have high blood pressure, yeah? That means you can’t eat too much salt. And Eldoon puts a lot of salt in everything, he won’t listen if you tell him to go easy on the salt. So you couldn’t have eaten at Eldoon’s because you wouldn’t have been able to eat anything. So!” Gumshoe took a step back and threw out a dramatic finger. “So objection, Mr. Tenrun, because you’ve got a contradiction!”
His arm hung quavering in the air as Tenrun stared at it, a panicked expression flushing over his face. Tenrun made an attempt to stand. “Yeah, I’m just gonna be going. I have better things to do than listen to people criticize my health. You have my number.”
Badd, previously a grey and brown statue against the wall, stepped around the table to face Tenrun. He kept his wide, pale eyes on Tenrun and talked to the other detective without turning his head. “Gumshoe. The report mentioned the victim had an abnormally high dose of sedatives in her system. You remember the Mimi Miney case? All that talk about sleeping pills and car crashes? The sort of thing a law student might pay attention to.”
“That got proven to be a lie-” Tenrun tried to interject.
“She started feeling really sleepy right after she left the noodle place, sir, that’d fit.”
“You can’t trust hearsay evidence, I saw her stop the car herself-” Tenrun was getting more desperate now.
“No sleeping pills taken on her own terms?”
“Not on purpose. But the firecracker noodles would kill the taste of anything you put in the broth.”
“And no other reason she might want a nap?”
“You’re just making things up now, I know how you guys work, all about circumstantial-”
There was a loud crack from Detective Badd that made both witness and detective jump. Badd spit his beheaded lollipop stem out onto the floor and crunched down the rest of the pieces.
“Lemme lay it out…if your memory’s flagging.” he said, running a thumb through the stubble of his cheek. Tenrun cowered.
“Little miss Valdez, pure and innocent, did something you didn’t like. You followed her to Eldoon’s….hell knows what the original plan was. Then you see the noodles….and you see your cue. In go the pills. Then you follow Valdez to make sure it’ll work. Problem is…she does the smart thing and stops the car.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So now you’ve got a witness who’s gonna wake up. Cliff’s right there,things are simple…you drag her to the edge and throw her off. Since it’s too dark to see what’s down there you leave her for dead. You don’t see where she’s caught on the cliff edge, where the fall wasn’t enough to kill her. She’s smart….she’s lucky…you’re not.”
“The…the victim…” Both detectives glared down at their witness, whose large body was frozen in utter shock. “She’s still…”
“Alive? Talking? Yeah…you got a problem with it?” Badd said.
“No, no, that’s great. Good. Maybe she can get the help she needs. Very good that she survived.”
“Uh huh…”
Gumshoe’s head was buzzing. Something was important here, something was missing. He could feel it inches away, like two live wires surging with electricity and about to touch.
“You can’t prove anything!”
“You’re tying yourself in circles lying, that’s damn suspicious.”
“Not suspicious enough to convict me!”
“If you hadn’t done it, would you be flailing this badly?”
“Then what’s my motive?” Tenrun burst out. Badd faltered for a moment, his bluff called. The wires in Gumshoe’s mind connected with a harsh ‘zap!’.
“Because she saw you murder Harry Red. That was why you had to get her out of the way and make it look unrelated.” The coffee was flowing in his system, jazzing him up, waking up his brain and forging connections like he was Mr. Edgeworth with two sugars in his tea. Gumshoe leaned forward on the table, expression eager and hungry.
“Y-you can’t prove that either,” Tenrun gasped. He was starting to sweat and his face was flushed.
“She saw someone drag someone else into the public bathroom near Gourd Lake. His body got found in the bathroom near Gourd Lake, doped up on sleeping pills.” Gumshoe’s spirits surged even as Tenrun hunched further in his chair.
“No. No…” Tenrun folded up, hands over his head, his glasses falling from his nose to the floor and cracking.
“I bet once she’s up to it she’ll pick you right out of the lineup.” Gumshoe grinned wildly as Badd pulled a pair of handcuffs from his trenchcoat pocket, chuckling. “And if we go to your house we’re gonna find some interesting papers.”
“Nooooooooooo….”
“You’re busted, pal.”
---
Once they handed Tenrun off to central booking, Badd unwrapped a fresh lollipop and practically sucked the grape-flavored orb off its stick. “We are getting…Edgeworth on this?” he asked after he’d worked his frustration out. “The noodle evidence…is enough to arrest, might not be enough to nail him. We don’t even know if Valdez saw anything suspicious.”
“I’ll leave him a message, I think he’s still in court.” Gumshoe grinned widely. “But we have a confession, sir. I think we’re pretty good.”
“Edgworth up against Wright?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Right. He should be out in a few hours,” Badd said. He gave Gumshoe a hard pat on the shoulder. “Good job in there. Not quite what I think they called you in for…but good.”
“I know a lot about noodles, sir.” Gumshoe’s pride wavered. He’d done a bluff worthy of two Wrights in there and the horrified panic at how bad he’d have messed up if he was wrong was starting to sink through the victory high. “Just not about…that sort of thing. It’s really not my kind of deal, my kind of deal is noodles and ballistics and putting handcuffs on perps. I don’t want people thinking I know stuff I don’t just ‘cause I’m going out with Mr. Edgeworth instead of Miss Byrd, y’know? I’m still Gumshoe.”
Badd gave Gumshoe a gentler pat and an uncharacteristically sympathetic smile. “I’ll talk to the chief,” he said with a look over at their boss’s office door. “But I’ll make sure you get assigned to all the noodle related cases in the future.”
“Thanks, pops,” Gumshoe said, relieved.
“By the way, what made you think Tenrun was lying in the first place?”
“I…I dunno, it felt like…I thought she was telling the truth.” Now he was slowing his sentences, and he didn’t even have Badd’s perpetual lollipop sucking to interrupt his speech. “So I went with my gut. I believed in her. Guess I lucked out.”
“Heh.” Badd flicked the stick over to the other side of his mouth.. “You know…I might not like the answer…but I’m gonna ask. What’s a sweet idealistic guy like you…doing hanging around…the Demon Prosecutor?”
Gumshoe stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged, a nervous little grin dancing around his broad features. “I believe in him too.”