Once, I was an engineer at Chevrolet. I designed them all. Cathedral ports. Short-runner intake manifolds. Cams with a base circle so thick, you could throw a fully grown Papillon through the empty journals and it would emerge untouched.
That’s when the Problems started. GM was going into bankruptcy. They just didn’t have room for a guy like me, they said, they were going to have to find someone who understood the new world a little better. Oh, I understood that plenty well, and after falling on hard times for awhile I had begun to pick myself back up. I was a private detective, the best you could find, as long as your crime somehow involved volumetric efficiency. I got a real thing for volumetric efficiency.
Luckily enough, I picked the perfect town to hang out my shingle in. Before the first week was through, I was summoned to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to investigate a murder. The cops were flummoxed: how could a respected scientist be killed inside a sealed wind tunnel without leaving a single piece of evidence? They turned to me to answer.
Without a further word, I unfurled a 3D plot of the wind tunnel’s flow rates based on a rough estimate of compressor size and plenum depth. It was drawn in crude charcoal and coloured with a yellow Crayola I had stolen from the pizza restaurant below where I rented my office.
“Holy shit!” yelped the head cop. “Did you draw that in the car on your way here?”
I just smiled, my thin lips wrapping around an unlit matchstick, and then I knelt down. Under the body, I showed them, was the secret. An unopened bottle of prescription heart pills rolled out from beneath. It was certainly true that a pump had failed, but it wasn’t the one they were looking at.