JACK BEST AND THE LOGICAL UNIVERSE

Steve Olley

Someone once said that we all have this need for things to make sense, but the trouble is life rarely works that way.

So there I was, feet up on the desk, reading a story in last weeks local newspaper. It was about how thieves managed to make a clean getaway last Tuesday, after a smash and grab raid at the jewelry store on 2 nd street .

Just then the telephone rang. It was a guy named Frank, Frank Manigrazo. He had just been arrested by the Police and was using his one call to talk to me. Seems Frank didn't want a lawyer, he wanted a detective; and he knew that if anyone in New Dresden could prove that he was innocent, then it would be me, Jack Best; not to mention that I was the only detective listed in the phone book.

The Jack Best Detective Agency had been in business for about 6 months. I used to be a cop in the city, till I decided to quit. I'd had enough of all the grind of police work, and the claustrophobic city life, so I set up shop for myself in the small town of New Dresden . Where space wasn't at a premium and life moved along at a more manageable pace. Of course that doesn't mean to say that it didn't have its moments.

Frank Manigrazo was an accountant working out of a small second floor office at the corner of 2nd and Main . He had been arrested by the police for sending an “anonymous” letter to the local tax office, threatening deadly retribution for all the grief they had given him over the years.

Frank claimed his innocence, but the police had found a fingerprint on the back of the sheet of paper used for the anonymous note. When they ran the print, Frank's name came up. Twenty years before he'd been arrested for fighting in a bar. He later told me it had been over a woman.

I abandoned the newspaper and my contemplation of a far from logical universe, and drove my Sunfire across town to the New Dresden Police Department. A burly desk sergeant named Jeff let me in to the cell with Frank.

Frank sat on the bed looking at the floor. He wore a tired white shirt and a pair of dark pants that hadn't seen an iron in weeks. His sallow face hid beneath a thick head of grey hair. He looked wiped out.

“Hi Frank, I'm Jack Best.”

He looked up and gave me the weakest of smiles.

“Things not going too well Frank?” I said.

“Man life sucks,” said Frank still looking at the floor. “Things seem to be going from bad to worse. First my wife, she calls me home from work and tells me it's all over. Second, although she broke up with me, somehow, I ended up leaving and sleeping on the couch in my office; and now the police arrest me for something I didn't do.” Frank looked up at me and said, “You go along with your life thinking that everything is okay, and then bam it's all turned upside down. I tell you Mr. Best nothing makes any sense anymore.”

It was just like that guy in the book said. We go along expecting everything to make sense, but the real universe is always one step beyond logic. I thought about sharing these thoughts with Frank, but he didn't look like he was in the mood for these philosophical insights.

Frank thought the cops were convinced they had their man, and that they didn't believe him when he said he was innocent.

“I need someone on my side Mr. Best,” said Frank, giving me that beaten dog look that said, believe me I'm an innocent man.

And of course, it was up to me to prove him right.

In order to determine the truth, my old partner used to say, we first need to know all the facts.

Detective Lou Harry was the officer assigned to the case. A tough veteran of the force who'd smoked too many cigarettes, and lined the insides of his stomach with gallons of black coffee and donuts. We had actually met before when I worked in the city for the force. One of my suspects in one of my previous cases had lived in New Dresden. Lou Harry had provided me with some good information which eventually led to a conviction. He remembered me.

When I told him that I got the feeling that Frank was telling the truth, he agreed with me, but because of the threatening nature of the letter and the matching fingerprints he had to hold Frank. He said that they had spent much of yesterday going through Frank's office, to see if they could find anymore evidence that would determine this thing one way or another.

The letter had been constructed from words cut out of a newspaper and stuck on to a white sheet of paper. They had not found any glue or newspapers at Frank's office. Lou told me that the letter had been found in a plain envelope that had been dropped into the Tax Office's mail slot, 2 days ago.

Right now Detective Lou Harry had an officer at Frank's office going through his correspondence with the tax office, to see if there was any reason for him to hold a grudge against them, but again there seemed to be nothing.

I went back into the cell. Frank was still sat on the bed in the same position looking morose; a prisoner not just of this cell, but of his own thoughts as well.

‘Well Frank, I have to tell you that at the moment everything seems against you. But if we're going to find the truth, then we have to know all the facts. Tell me everything that has happened to you over the past week. Try to remember anything that seemed to you out of the ordinary, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.”

Frank straightened up, and tried to compose himself.

“Monday was a good day; I filed six returns and saved Mrs. Billington $600 in taxes. But then Tuesday came and things didn't go so well,” said Frank his look of resignation quickly returning.

“My wife called me home early from work. She said she had something important she wanted to talk to me about. So I left at 3 and went home to find her sat at the kitchen table waiting for me. She told me that she'd had enough, that she wanted a divorce. I was shocked, after 18 years of marriage you never really think your life is about to turn upside down like that.

“Anyway, even though she was the one who wanted the divorce, once she started crying I told her that I would go sleep at the office. What a smuck! But to be honest, I was glad to get out of there.

“I didn't go to the office straight away, I went to Joe's Diner on Main Street there, and had a meal and a beer. I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't want to talk to anyone. When I left there I walked around a bit to clear my head, but then it started to rain, so I went back to the office.

“When I got there my key wouldn't work in the lock till I realized that it was open already. I guess I must have forgotten to lock it when I left. When I went in there was the faintest smell of…of …what was it now…ah! Old Spice. Which was weird because it hadn't smelt like that when I left, so I figured maybe a client had come to see me, but when they saw that I wasn't there they had left. I went over to the desk to see if they had left anything for me, and that's when I saw it!”

“What? What did you see?” I said.

“A footprint, a dusty footprint right in the middle of the desk.”

“Did you show that to the police?”

“What you think I'd leave a dirty footprint in the middle of my desk for a week!” Frank gave me the look. “No, of course I didn't, I went and cleaned it off with some paper-towels. Anyway, seeing that footprint really freaked me out. So I double-locked the door before I got ready for bed. I set up on the couch with a blanket and a cushion, took off my pants and socks and stepped over to the desk to turn the banker's lamp off, when I caught my toe on something, and cut it open. More paper towels,” he said looking at me again.

“What did you step on?” I asked.

“I got down and looked carefully across the carpet, and there, invisible against the light colored carpet, I saw a small shard of glass. I also saw two more. I picked them up and threw them in the wastebasket.

“Nothing much else unusual happened after that. I'd get up in the morning, pop down to Joe's Diner for my meals and then back to work. Oh! There was one other thing. Three days ago a courier delivers an envelope, but when I looked inside there was nothing there.”

I wrote all the relevant points down, and told Frank not to worry, that I believed that he was an innocent man, and would do everything I could to help him, and for the first time, Frank smiled. It was as if he had passed off all his troubles to me, and confident of my abilities he relaxed.

So there I was, I had all the facts, but none of it seemed to make any sense at the moment, other than someone had been doing the foxtrot on the desk in Frank's office. So that's where I headed, back across town to 2 nd and Main .
It was getting towards the end of the afternoon, the sun was low in the sky, and the road was full of tired looking people driving tired looking cars, racing each other, so they could spend a few minutes more at home before the alarm clock rang the next morning, and the whole thing began again. I smiled to myself, so I was still working when they were headed home, but I was free.

The police tape still stretched across the glass door. I could see a police officer sat at the desk, his large bulk barely fitting into Frank's chair. I knocked and he struggled out of the chair and came over.

“Are you Jack Best?”

“That's me.'

“Lou phoned, said it was okay for you to take a look around.”

“Thanks,” I said ducking under the tape and entering the office.

It was a small place, about 12 by 12; a couch against the far wall, a large desk, where the officer sat. Several filing cabinets, and a few chairs. I went over to the wastebasket.

“I wouldn't bother,” said the officer. “We went through that already – just some paper towels.”

I looked in the wastebasket and there glistening at the bottom were several shards of broken glass. I grabbed an envelope from the desk and shook them into it.

“What did you find?” asked the officer.

“Some broken glass.”

“I can't see how that could be a part of this.”

“You never know,” I said, but it did confirm to me that Frank was telling the truth.

I looked at the desk, and tried to imagine someone standing on it. They could easily reach the suspended ceiling. The officer had files spread all over the desk, so for the moment I resisted the urge to climb up there. I went over to the window and looked across 2 nd Street . On the other side of the road I noticed a shop with its windows all boarded up with some tough looking plywood.

“What happened over there?” I asked the officer.

“That's the jewelry store.”

“The place that got broke into last Tuesday?”

“Yeah, they smashed through the front window and the metal screen with a sledge hammer, grabbed the jewels on display and ran.”

“Still not caught them yet?”

The officer shook his head.

“Thing was,” he said, “Just by chance we had cars at either end of the street. The jewelry store sounded the alarm as the robbery was taking place, and we sealed off the road immediately, preventing anyone from leaving without going through our checkpoint. It's not a busy street, so it wasn't that hard to do. Anyway we searched everyone and every vehicle for that bag of jewels, but nothing. I don't know how they did it, but they got clean away.”

“What time did that happen?”

“Late afternoon, about 4pm.”

“Why didn't they wait till the store closed?”

“They take the jewels out of the window at night and put them in the safe.”

I stood there looking down on to 2 nd Street, trying to envision the chaos of that afternoon; wondering what I would have done if I had been the thief and realized that the road had been sealed off, and then all at once it came to me. I had the answer. All the details that Frank had given to me: breaking up with his wife and sleeping at the office, the open door, the footprint on the desk, the broken glass, the empty envelope the courier delivered; it all made perfect sense to me now.

I turned to the officer seated at the desk.

“How much longer, will you be working here?” I asked him.

“I'm almost finished,” he said.

“Do you think you could hang around just a little longer? I don't want this office to be left unattended.”

“Are you paying my overtime?”

“Do you want to help solve this case and the jewelry robbery?”

The officer raised his eyebrows, “I'll stay,” he said.

It only took me a few minutes with Lou Harry to convince him, and a few more for him to agree to the stake-out; so that 2 hours later we were in position hidden across the hall from the entrance to Frank's office. For the first time in a week the place was dark and deserted.

The trouble with stake-outs like this is that you never get the chance to use the bathroom, and now I was regretting the black coffee I'd had back at the police station. My mind began to wander, thinking whether I could slide out of position and try and find a bathroom, when we suddenly heard someone coming up the stairs.

A tall well built figure appeared in the gloom. He moved slowly and cautiously to Frank's office. He tried the door, but it was locked. I saw him pull something out from a pocket in his overcoat and use it to convince the lock that it was better for its health to open. Lou and I both heard the lock pop; Lou looked like he was going to move. I raised my hand and signaled him to wait.

The big guy opened the office door and stepped inside. We watched through the glass door as he turned on a small flash light and began to move towards the desk. He stepped up on top of it, and shone the light up to the suspended ceiling. I heard him lift and move one of the tiles, heard him reach inside, and then let out a little whisper of joy as he pulled something out from its hiding place.

“NOW!” I yelled, and Lou and I and the officer from before dashed in to the office and turned on the light. There standing on Frank's desk was a big man holding a small black bag.

“POLICE, STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” shouted Lou, but the big guy didn't seem to like being told what to do. He leapt off the desk at us, knocking Lou and the other officer to the ground. He swung a fist at me. I dodged quickly to my right, and then brought my fist up strong and fast into his stomach. He let out a moan, but it only seemed to anger him. He leapt at me. I fell backwards under his weight. As soon as we hit the ground, he leapt up and began to run for the door. I wrapped my arms around his legs and waited for his fist to hit me, but nothing. The guy stopped squirming, and when I opened my eyes I saw why. Detective Lou Harry had a gun pointed at his head. The other officer quickly cuffed the man and I scrambled to my feet.

“Good work, Jack,” said Lou.

We picked up the bag that he had retrieved from the ceiling and emptied it out onto the desk, and there glistening in the light were the jewels from the robbery across the street.

Back at the station, the big guy, after some pointed questioning, confessed everything. His name was John Fitzpatrick, and he had smashed the window at the jewelry store and attempted to escape with a bag of jewels.

When he realized that the street had been cordoned off, he quickly ran into the small office building across the road. Seeing through the door that Frank's office was empty, he rushed in, climbed up onto the desk and hid the jewels in the ceiling. He then ran back down to the street and made his escape, thinking that later he would come back and retrieve the jewels. But that night, Frank broke up with his wife and began sleeping at the office, and had been there ever since. So John Fitzpatrick knew he had to think of a way to get Frank out of the office.

Fitzpatrick came up with the idea of the “anonymous” letter. Posing as a courier delivering an envelope, he got Frank to sign his clip-board, attached to the back of which was the sheet of paper that he was going to use for the letter, and which now had Frank's fingerprints on it.

After Frank was arrested, John Fitzpatrick figured he just had to wait till the police finished their investigation before he could go back and retrieve the jewels.

Frank Manigrazo listened to Lou Harry tell the story.

“You realize,” said Lou to Frank, “that if Jack Best hadn't convinced us to act when we did, John Fitzpatrick would have got clean away and there would have been no way of proving your innocence.”

Frank turned to me with a big smile on his face.

“Jack,” he said, “You are the Best,” and then laughed at his own joke.

Frank does my taxes now for a minimal fee. He moved into an apartment over Joe's diner, and, to tell you the truth, he's never seemed happier.

And me, well it was back to my desk and a lazy day with my feet up – till she walked through that door: the blond in the dark overcoat. As if she'd just come from a funeral. All black, except for that silver scorpion broach that she wore. But that's another story.