Entry 17

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a thing about process — not so much what I do but more the way I do it.   Bet that sounds odd coming from a guy with a short fuse and bad attitude; especially since I don’t think of my cases as police procedurals.   I rely far too much on hunches and instinct, and also harbor an unhealthy disregard for anyone’s rules but my own.  That blatant disregard for authority — and an occasional leap into the abyss — cost me my job as a detective with the NYPD, so I’m not known for my methods any more than I am for my patience.   I’m very much a bottom-line kind of guy. 

Through it all, though, it’s still about process.  Process, in fact, is what has prevented me from making more entries in this journal; I’ve been struggling to keep my head straight — and still attached to my shoulders — in a bizarre case boasting a rising body count, an ancient blood curse and one of the most dangerous Femme Fatales this side of our Lady From Shanghai, Elsa Bannister.  I’ve had my hands full, in more ways than one, and haven’t had much time for sidebars.  

So by process I mean my general approach to what I do.  When I begin a case, for example, I use the cork board panels in my study to literally throw shit on a wall.   There’s no order, no angles, no presumptions, no nothing: just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday of Dragnet might say; except since I have doubts about our ability to firmly establish facts of any kind its interpretations or quirky details that I’m really after.   Everything gets pinned to the wall — photos, character profiles, insurance policies, riders and inventories, newspaper clippings, downloads pulled out of the ether, sticky notes inscribed with stickier questions or scraps of paper with hunches scribbled under coffee stains — all pieces to a giant jigsaw puzzle that I’m supposed to fit together.  What am I looking for?   A point of entry into the case, the one sliver of evidence, a suspicion — yes, even a hunch—that quantifies and illuminates all the others.          

Observers might note that my process is curiously similar to that of my creator’s, because it is.   He’s been prone to use cork boards to stitch my literal storyboards together, and he struggles to find that point-of-entry into his writing the same way I do my cases.    Author-dearest doesn’t take ‘write what you know’ all that seriously, but he doesn’t totally disregard it, either.  

Solving a case—or writing a story—isn’t as easy as sometimes advertised.  Facts and/or interpretations can often fit together in disparate ways, and in my case there are usually one or more characters fiercely determined to obscure what’s really going on because, for them, it’s very much a zero-sum game.   For me to win they have to lose.   To make matters worse, I’m usually playing with only 51 cards in the deck — not me, mind you, I’m playing with far fewer than that  — but there’s usually some vital detail or innocuous clue either withheld or misrepresented that lures me down dark alleys and dead ends.     

That probably explains why my navigator and back seat driver, author-dearest, is the one armed with GPS.    He usually knows where I’m going before I get there.  He says it’s because he has to make sure that all the pieces fit together and make sense — no small feat considering the convoluted crap I step in.   Being as hardheaded as I am hardnosed I don’t have much use for road maps, but just because I have broad shoulders and wear the chip on mine better than author-dearest does the one on his doesn’t mean I’m ungrateful.   

I find it touching that someone has my back, makes sure loose ends aren’t left dangling and mitigates the damage when I screw up—which pretty much is all the time.   I try to return the favor whenever possible, but that could prompt the question of exactly who’s writing who?  

Talk about your mysteries…

Entry 16

I’m feeling cocky and like my old self again now that I’m out of the box I was being painted into against my better judgment.  Rumors of my premature demise at the hands of either Mexican drug cartels or a misguided author were indeed exaggerated.  I’m still standing and taking on all comers.   Better bring you’re A-game if you expect to become something other than the next head on my trophy wall.

Doubtless the notion of trophies on a wall now comes to mind because there’s a killer who collects them — like notches on a gun — from his victims in my new case.   That’s all blood under the bridge, so to speak, until that past intrudes upon the present and the killer is forced to kill again.   I hate it when that happens, and I find it happens a lot.   The past toys with us,  pretends its  safely  entombed, like Jurassic amber, only to abruptly crack open, unasked and uninvited, to unleash Pandora's worst ills on our world.    In fact, it's the way the past weighs upon and warps the present and corrupts the future that has emerged as the unifying theme of my new adventure.  

It’s a nasty idea — an active and insidious past — that undermines all our pretensions about being free in our self-absorbed here and now.   Such notions have always been bullshit, of course; the pixie-dust lies we sprinkle over our eyes to lull ourselves to sleep every night.  I’ve been known to have a dark, even jaded outlook on things, and so plead guilty to thinking the past is built more on fear and pain than it is on well-planned successes.   There is something innately poisonous about the past, something oppressive and tyrannical; the long arm of a shadow that grabs us from behind just as we think we're breaking away, or the noxious, sweet-smelling memory that jumps out of the hall closet to prick us to death with the sharp needles of last year’s Christmas tree.    

The past isn’t benign any more than it is static; it’s alive and as fluid as quicksilver.  It’s also the playground where our private demons nibble at our fingers and toes until growing bold enough to devour us whole.    Let’s be real: we’ve all done things in our pasts we hope have been forgiven, but forgetting them is a whole different thing.  Being a fatally-flawed fictional character I can neither forgive nor forget, but hopefully you’re a kinder, gentler soul and have managed to perfect the art of at least one of these dubious virtues.  

Tossing proverbial shit in the game is the fact that my latest antagonists aren’t any better at forgiving/forgetting than I am.  If anything, they’re worse; hard cases imprisoned by a past they can’t trick and can't out distance no matter how fast they run.  They’ve learned, as have I, that the past never truly goes away; it’s always just a sound, a touch, a scent away; ready to curl back and splatter us like a glob of spit in the wind.   When it’s really pissed-off the past can roll back on us with the vengeance of a runaway freight train or, better yet, the relentless resolve of a curse.  

There’s one of those in my new case, too — a curse —  more like Tut’s than Dain’s in this instance because it involves something — numerous things, really — stolen in the past; the bill for which has finally come due.   That’s what curses are, when you think about it, overdue bills, and getting them paid can be messy.     

Hence the title, “Blood Rituals”, and it seems I’m not the only collector tracking down deadbeats.  Someone is busy taking their heads and hearts faster than I can their names.   

Entry 15

Every once in a while this private dick is saved from a fate worse than death — a bad plot — through no doings of his own, and I’m happy to report this is one of those instances where common sense and second thoughts have pulled my proverbial chestnuts from the fire.    

That’s not always the case with us fictional characters.   Too often we’re at the will and whim of authors who patently disregard the better angels of their instincts and spit together the most absurd crock of swill likely to be found east of the Hudson River.   Admittedly much of that brine comes from the cyberworld of badly edited e-Books and over-FX’d Hollywood cinema, but being a character in an overwrought and empty tale is akin to being a deckhand on the Titanic.  You know the sucker’s going down and there’s not a damned thing you can do but go down with it.         

So I’m pleased to report that author dearest has come to his senses and saved me from a stillborn story line; it’s just taken him a bit longer than usual to determine which end is up.  The last several months have been brutal.  First he sends me to sip syrupy drinks under the palm trees of a resort on the Gulf Coast of Mexico waiting for an improbable case to enshroud me and then he scuttles the first half of the story and abruptly yanks me back to New York to pick up the pieces.  Not surprisingly for him, however, he then promptly proceeds to lose both himself and yours truly in our home town as he clings to the idea of using the ever-deteriorating crisis south of the border and the absurdity of our so-called ‘war-on-drugs’ as some sort of subplot in my next case.  

That might be a good idea if your name is Tom Clancy, but his isn’t anymore than mine is Jack Ryan.  Now, I can see where it’s easy to be seduced by the bright and sparkly marketplace, but for characters like me it’s always more important to stay grounded and allow yourself room enough to become who you are.    I suppose that’s easy for me to say.   I don’t mind obscurity.   I’m conjured up out of the ether and return there after you read the final chapter to my latest saga.  I can bark all I want about the high mortgage on my brownstone, the inflation impacting my favorite single malts and how much Nicole’s freshman year in college is costing me, but we both know that’s bullshit because it’s all make believe—like everything else about me.    Author dearest, however, does suffer from corporeal existence in a so-called ‘real world’ that’s becoming more and more absurd all the time, so every now and again I turn a blind private eye to this penchant for interjecting commerce into this mutual venture of ours.   Then too, I think I’ve mentioned that he harbors visions of artistic grandeur on occasion, and that sometimes leads him places neither he nor I should tread.   

Fortunately, the guy who writes me isn’t a complete idiot, no matter how well he acts the part at times, and he usually manages to correct his artistic missteps before they plunge us, headlong, into the abyss.   Sometimes he listens to my misgivings about a project, sometimes he sees the light all by his lonesome, and sometimes he has the wisdom to listen to the good counsel of others.  In this particular instance it took all three, especially the latter, to make him see the error of his ways.

Whatever works is my motto!  And so the fix is in.   I just stepped out of the lab author dearest calls his studio, where he stitches me and my cases together like Frankenstein did his monster, to grab a cigarette and spread the news, Colin Clive like, that “I’m alive!”  We’ll see just where that gets me when I go back inside.  

Entry 14

I usually avoid reunions with old flames like I do visits to the dentist, so it’s with a special sense of dread that while gleaning the plot outline for my next case I found myself swapping pleasantries and a good deal more with a former lover.    You can’t blame the guy who writes me much for hatching the idea.   Carmen always was irresistible; a femme fatale worthy of Hammer, Hammett or Chandler: seductive, vulnerable and dangerous — just not necessarily in that order.   Carmen was like one of those party poppers, only made with real dynamite: be sure to run for cover once you pull her string.   I damn near didn’t survive my first go-round with her, so please allow me my misgivings about this decision to regurgitate her now up out of my past.  

I met Carmen on the first case I was assigned to after my suspension lifted for having sent Harvey Krieger to the hospital — the first time.   I was still on the force at the time, and my father, also a detective, had recently been ‘accidentally’ shot by another cop — Krieger — while working undercover.   You might recall that Harvey liked to shoot things first and find reasons for them to be dead later.   Putting my father in a wheelchair for the rest of his life was a form of recreation to Krieger.  I took exception when Internal Affairs cleared him of any wrong doing in the shooting and told him so one night after work.   I didn’t much care for the lack of remorse in his response, and sent him to the emergency room with a fractured skull, broken jaw and several broken ribs.   Guess Carmen isn’t the only one with dynamite in her DNA.   

Anyway, Captain Vega wanted to ease me back into action when my suspension lifted, and told me to help Stan Cummings on a stalker case he’d been working.  It seemed innocuous enough to keep me out of sight and out of trouble.    An assistant curator at a local museum had attracted a co-worker’s attentions.  When flowers and candy didn’t work the co-worker sent her twisted love letters penned in blood.   The museum sent him packing, but that just gave him more time on his idle hands and a score to settle.   A court order didn’t help, and he continued to stalk her round the clock in an obvious attempt to wear her down.  

From the looks of her, he was succeeding.  Carmen was a mess when I first saw her, sitting in ‘Zo’s office; trembling like a wet kitten, her mascara running over the dark bags under her eyes from lack of sleep.   She nervously gnawed her fingers bloody as she pleaded for help and protection.   She looked up at us with lost puppy-dog eyes as Vega explained there was little they could do until the guy actually made his move.  She mumbled something to the effect she could be dead by then, but ‘Zo promised her they wouldn’t let that happen.   He volunteered me to make sure she got home safely, and said he’d have squad cars prowl her neighborhood to scare the creep off.    He probably didn’t believe that part any more than I did, but it seemed to calm Carmen down. 

Poor ‘Zo should have saved himself the bother about keeping me out of trouble.  Whether I’m looking for it or not, it seems to find me just the same.   Little did I know that trouble was also extremely fond of Carmen; things just seemed to happen to her in ways no one — she least of all — could understand or explain.   She reminded me of the women in classic screwball comedies who invariably got embroiled in the most bizarre kinds of trouble through no apparent fault of their own.  They seemed to thrive on chaos.  Damsels in perpetual distress one could call them, only with Carmen it wasn’t all harmless slapstick.   There was a darker, desperate side to Carmen’s entanglements that inexorably drew you ever closer to the flame without your realizing just how much danger you were really in.    

Which I hope explains why I’m a bit skittish about the idea of her stepping back into my life.    Men, like moths, need to know their limitations when playing with fire.  Carmen’s the kind of woman who stretches you to yours.   The neon signs inside your head signal STOP! CAUTION! but you ignore them and follow the pointing of your dick instead as if it were a reliable compass.     

That’s usually the problem with damsels in distress; you’re fucked if you help them, and you’re fucked if you don’t.    Either way you begin to care.   You construe their fear and vulnerability for weakness, not realizing until it’s too late that with women like Carmen the perception of helplessness is the scent that lures you in.    How did Brigid O’Shaughnessy put it?  “Be generous, Mr. Spade….You’re strong, you’re resourceful, you’re brave.  You can spare me some of that strength and resourcefulness and courage, surely.” 

That’s part of danger with femme fatales: they make the poor slob believe he’s better than he really is, make you believe you really can survive the shit they’re about to throw you into.  All the same, the warning of Noah Cross from Chinatown begins to murmur in your ear: “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.”  One thing invariably leads to another, and before you know better you’re sleeping with dynamite dressed in lace pants and doing something stupid.   Then you’re really fucked, because once you check into that particular motel there’s no checking out and the linen never washes clean; you’ve crossed the line somewhere in your efforts to help her and now it’s your ass, not hers, that’s in the fryer. 

Doesn’t author-dearest see where messing with a woman like Carmen will lead?   Bizet didn’t know the half of it.  I’ve been there, done that, and prefer not to descend into that netherworld again.   I was lucky to escape in one piece the last time.      

I don’t expect that will make much difference, though.   The guy at the wheel seems as hooked on Carmen as I was.   In which case, here’s hoping both of us have more than one life left in the bank.