THE MUDDLED MYSTERY OF THE MURDERED MUSE, Chapter 29: A Sophist’s Kind of Hit Man

The Muddled Mystery of the Murdered Muse is a full-length novel, presented to you in Medium-sized chapters twice a week (Tuesday and Friday), that tells the story of Sebastian Holden, a paranoirmal investigator who solves the strangest cases this side of Jersey City and Brooklyn.

If you missed the previous chapter, read it here; if you’ve already read this chapter, read the next one here.

CHAPTER 29: A SOPHIST’S KIND OF HIT MAN

Yanni was an interesting guy, in his own interesting way.

For instance, he always carried a small fern with him wherever he went. “For my Pops,” he always said. It was a kind of token of remembrance for him, I supposed. Well, on this particular night, Yanni didn’t have it with him, which is how I knew this wasn’t going to be just another ordinary night meeting with the bastard Vowel.

Our meeting spot was always the same –– out on the cobblestone streets amid broken down warehouses at the cross section of Bay and Provost Streets in Downtown Jersey City. It was a dark roast of an evening; the streetlights died long ago, all except the one that cast a smidgen of light on the only square block that retained an old ghetto charm that was now reserved strictly for Grand Street above Jersey Avenue, a part of town which was anything but charming, but in the coming years would become just as gentrified as the rest of the waterfront.

Yanni seldom crept out from the shadows. He always kept near a spot where he once placed a dead city pigeon so the Fiats and Mini Coopers wouldn’t make a smashup of it on the street. Ironically, he found out later that the poor pigeon’s carcass was devoured by the neighborhood cat that lived on the opposite side of that dilapidated old chain link fence.

“What d’you got for me, Yanni?” I growled, still hung-over by yesterday’s session drinking some ouzo with Hunter Grayson. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“Did you see the meteor shower last night?”

Fuck! I hated when he did this!

Yanni was the worst snitch I’d ever met, but he always paid off in the end; I just had to endure stuff like this. I couldn’t piss him off, either –– he was a little bipolar in that way.

“No, I must’ve missed it.” That was an understatement.

“Oh Sebastian, it was amazing. So much of life is pointless when you look up into the stars and see something as majestic as the Perseid shower…”

And this is how the night would wear on like an endless date with a girl who might give it up or might go all conservative Republican and button up her top on you by the time the goodnight kiss made its long-overdue debut. What made it worse was that Yanni was the most philosophical hired gun I’d ever met, as well. I mean, there’s Lee Marvin’s Killers kind of existential questioning, and then there’s Yanni’s journey into the grandness of the Universe, philosophizing the whole way there and back. If I had more time and wasn’t on this particular case, I might actually join in the conversation, and happily, too. I can still wax the bone philosophic with the best and brightest bulbs of ’em all.

For now, I just let him wax that bone by himself until the squirt was done.

“…It makes you realize,” Yanni continued, but contemplatively pressed pause at the word “realize.” I could see the whites of his eyes in that single lamppost glow glisten up to the skies. “There’s so much more to the poetry of the Universe than meets even the mind, my friend.”

Then, those eye-whites darted back down at me. “Even more that you can fathom.”

“Oh?” I husked. Being every bit the gentleman and scholar that Yanni was, I couldn’t help but resent the way he stressed the word “you” in that sentence. Well, the scholar at any rate.

“Y’know, my sixth grade teacher –– Mrs. Wickle was her name –– she once gave me a ‘C’ on a book report because I wrote in it that this particular set of stories I had read and reviewed was non-fiction. She called me up to the head of the class and asked me in front of everyone, she said, ‘Yanni, do you really think these stories are non-fiction? That is, based on true, real-life events?’

“I looked up at her and asserted as firmly as a nine-year old can assert, ‘yes, I do, Mrs. Wickle.’ Then she smiled, patted me on the top of my head, and drew a big fat red ‘C’ on my book report. She gave it back, and I walked shamefully through the class as they snickered and some outright laughed in my face as I passed.

“But I sat back down with pride, knowing I was right. I knew the difference between fiction and non-fiction, sure as I knew myself. And what I read? That was no fiction, man.”

“What was the book?” I asked.

Yanni looked around, making sure we were as alone as we could be.

“Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.”

I must’ve made a face similar to Mrs. Wickle’s ’cause Yanni gazed directly at me and loaded his next sentence with words of caution, or a simple silent reminder:

“More than meets even your mind, P.I..”

And that was the answer I needed to hear.

With that, I tipped the brown Dobbs fedora I was wearing, turned around, and started walking off. Five steps down the street, I turned back around to look for my snitch. There were only shadows where once his feet had stood.

“What happened to your plant?” I asked anyway as a whisper out into the night.

“It died,” Yanni’s voice blew in from a crisp breeze, covered in a thicker kind of shadow. Then, a whisper in my left ear: “After thirty-five years, anything’s possible.”

Silence.

Funny, I thought to myself. I’m thirty-five now…

>> Continue reading: Chapter 30: The Loaded Die >>