Case 1999.7.18
Client: Jasper Collins, 42, Male
Request: Two men keep fighting over illegal dealings in the apartment above him, without letting anything specific out, and Collins is at his wits end. Several attempts to bring the police in to observe have fallen flat and now that he could save up enough, he hired me.
First three weeks much of the coded speech is surface level nonsense, one saying "goods" while the other says "services" and the like without specifics, though they slip tone at times, speaking of "interference" and "disposal" in regards to people but they always divert such talk after a moment then go off on tangets about personal life things, some of which make them give away more than the work talk does.
Dennis, the first man, speaks of his mother and how she would chastise him for doing such dangerous work, while Carl, the second man, worries his son will learn how he makes his money and romantacize it. At first these men feel cold and frustrated with each other but as they soften they also began to breed affection. By the third week it was clear the men were devolving into an affair, likely because of their work isolating them from their family lives.
Week four was the slip up. I was contemplating blackmail as it would serve me better then outright waiting to get them on a blatant crime and the client's worries would be assuaged so long as they screwed off in a less intimate way, especially since Collins was harassing me nonstop on my progress to get them to cut out the sex sounds. I digress; the men said "killed" and "buried" when talking about a passerby who saw too much during a job, giving me a hook and in the worst possible way.
Tracked down the locations they referenced, a bit hard considering most of their talk was in landmarks. Once I found the "stigmatism", a gaudy hotel sign with a starburst behind it, beside an abandoned auto sales lot with broken ground, I had a body. A kids body. Put it back as soon as I clocked the age, called it in and passed along the evidence to the authorities.
Got paid, did the job cut and dry, yet I can't help but ponder if this brief romance between these two men was a weakness of character that gave me what I needed to prevent more dead kids or a weakness of the heart that just proved how bad they were at dividing right and wrong enough to live with. Im not the judge, might just be both, but of everyone who gets to sleep better its most likely just Collins.