Hunting the Priest Killer - Day 1

With the capture of Henry A. Weldon out of the way and no new, interesting work heading my way and by interesting I mean well paying, I now have the time to hunt down the scumbag responsible for killing Patrick.


My first idea was to see what the police knew about the whole affair. There are two ways of learning about what the police know: 1) You take the officer in charge out for dinner or drinks, get him drunk and ask him or 2) You break into the police station and look at the case files. Since the officer in charge of the investigation was Harry Lee, it wasn't a good idea to get him drunk. Mainly because last time we had been in a bar together, Fred may have ended up throwing Harry through the window. We're all keen not to have a repeat of that incident.


Breaking into the police station isn't all that hard if you happen to have the keys of one nameless sergeant, who has always been very careless about where he leaves things lying around.    Not that I got the idea for this from watching Bill & Ted... Still if Fred finds out I have them he, at least, won't send me to military school in Alaska.


There are also perfect times for breaking into case files, namely lunchtime. For some reason the filing room is completely unmanned between the hours of 12 and 1 so it didn't take much to slip in and look over the notes.


All evidence suggested that the killing was gang related. No leads had been found as to which gang was responsible or what the provocation was. It's always so much fun to get so much information. 


Interestingly it was still useful in some small part. No gangs are known to operate in this particular part of town, especially not within spitting distance of my office and flat. There are also only three gangs that could operate in the area as it means they don't have to cross into anybody else's territory to get there. This did help a lot, so I just had to narrow it down to one gang and then maybe two or three morons who had made the biggest mistake of their lives.


Time to go talk and see what my friend Mitch has to say.

April Showers

There is something wonderful about April. A month of rain and wind that causes misery to more than half the populous. Of course the gardeners rejoice at their plants and shrubberies being watered by the skies and the farmers dance joyously as there crops and fields get doused with torrential downpours. But the average person moans and wails about the weather. The same people that moan about the rain also moan about it being too cold in winter and too hot in summer.

These people are - in short - annoying.

They can find almost anything to complain about, it gets dark too early, its too light outside, its too far to walk to get the paper, it hurts when I get shot. Okay well maybe the last is something most people would complain about.

But for me April is a wonderful time of year. The streets are practically empty as the generally public choose to stay out of the rain as much as possible. It makes walking from A to B an easy endeavour and not only that but there is such a joy to be had walking in the rain. To be buffeted by the wind and have my face splashed by the rain is one of the very few pleasures in life that I do take time to enjoy.

Sadly there is one other individual who also enjoys such activities and also may have started a  puddle water fight when he found me yesterday. Yes I speak of course of the most annoying man to ever grace the planet, Sergeant Frederick J Barlow.

Having taken time off after the arrest and incarceration of Henry A. Weldon, Fred finds that he has all sorts of time to make himself annoying on a whole new level. It has also meant that my enquiries into the death of Patrick have had to be some what covert until Fred returns to duty. 

As he was a friend of Fred's, he would obviously want to help with finding the man that killed him. However the order from the top brass was that the crime had been classified as an accidental death and was not to be investigated further. Fred would gladly disobey such a directive, but I wasn't about to let him risk his career when I was perfectly capable of seeking out his killer on my own.

So for another three days I have to endure the company of Fred and put off finding myself a murderer who I haven't quite decided what I am going to do with yet. If it is raining I am sure Fred will find me for further aquatic games, which in truth have been sort of fun so far...just as long as nobody tells him that it's okay.

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 23

The last two days, I should have been trying to capture Henry A. Weldon, but my mind has been otherwise occupied by thoughts of Patrick.


Patrick, a man who I did not know well, a man who by all accounts should have meant nothing to me, but a man who had shown me compassion without reservation or condition. He had been murdered and wanting to pay a debt of retribution to his killer had kept my mind in a state where not even the promised money for acquiring Henry A. Weldon was enough to make me concentrate.


I had spent hours wandering the streets of the city looking for any evidence as to the whereabouts of anyone who would know who would kill a man of God on a street corner on Good Friday, but no one was ready to talk. Not without some form of incentive.


Henry A. Weldon still remained comfortable in his ridiculous residence as far as the men in suits and the police were concerned. In truth he was not. He had decided, given recent events, that he would be safer if he were not at home. Considering how much I wanted to kill him, this was a fairly sensible idea.


Unfortunately his whereabouts seemed to be common knowledge and much easier to learn than the identity of a priest-killer. A pool hall on the outskirts of the city was rumoured to have a backroom where poker games were held during times of crisis for the crime bosses. This made it a more than likely location for one man running away from one P.I. to go into hiding.


People always make the mistake in thinking that no one will talk. There are of course a variety of ways to make a man talk. Some are in it for the money, some adverse to pain and others well, those are best not mentioned. So finding out where people are and who is responsible is only a matter of time. So my patience was wearing thin, but even if I couldn't get to Patrick's killer right now, I could take out Henry A. Weldon.


Normally doing any form of gunplay requires some amount of concentration, but I always think that anger is a great substitute for concentration. Kicking in a back door doesn't take much effort. Shooting two well built, broad shouldered bodyguards doesn't require a marksman and kicking an over inflated with self-importance man in the back, binding him with cable ties and throw him without ceremony at the feet of men in suits.


Shame that all that was in the pool hall was a load of dusty tables...

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 21

21 days into a 14 day job is never a place a P.I. likes to find themselves, especially if a good chunk of that time was spent in prison. On the plus side I am finally out of that God-forsaken cell. 


This is partly due to one Sergeant Frederick J Barlow who seemed to have spent the last 5 days on his hands and knees begging for me to be released. This could in part be due to the amount of insults that get hurled at him every time he is forced to walk past my cell and partly due to guilt that he is ultimately responsible for my current position. 


Any time I get arrested, it's always Fred's fault. I shoot a man in the shoulder for giving me a hard time and get arrested, somewhere along the line I can blame Fred for it.


So now being free was great but I was owed a significant amount of money by one Henry A. Weldon. The men in suits that had me arrested (even though it is still Fred's fault) it turns out have been working with Mrs. Weldon trying to get evidence against Henry A. Weldon on drug smuggling. No wonder the woman seemed to be sleeping around.


The reason I had been hired was to follow her and find out who her contacts were and hand them over to Henry A. Weldon...if there is one thing guaranteed to make me more angry than being held in prison on false charges or real charges, it's the criminal underworld thinking that they can use me to do their dirty work when they are paying me rates for doing something completely different!


I may have brokered a deal with the men in suits to cover the costs that Henry A. Weldon incurred in exchange for all the information I had and me managing to nail the creep to his own expensively plastered wall. 


My five reasons for not killing Henry A. Weldon just got a lot shorter and my five reasons for killing him just got an awful lot longer.

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 19

Fred has been to see me every day. Every day! There is definitely something he is not telling me about what is going on. To begin with I did consider the possibility that he was being sent down to try and worm information out of me, but every day he turns up with food (as I am still not being fed).

It occurred to me that Henry A. Weldon probably has a lot of influence with Mayor Major Tyler, but not even the Mayor has the power to keep me locked up for so long without any formal charges. So my thoughts have turned to higher powers than the local police force. Men in suits.

Men in suits had me arrested. Men in suits were keeping me in prison. Men in suits. I hate men in suits. Though it is true that every girl's crazy bout a sharp dressed man, men in suits don't count. Because behind men in suits is always someone out for money, power or something far more dastardly. In this case I had no doubt that the person behind the men in suits was Mrs. Weldon. What I didn't know yet is why on earth she would need men in suits and what exactly she is up to.

It is fairly obvious by this point that Mrs. Weldon was not just a woman having lots of illicit affairs and that Henry A. Weldon had landed me right in the middle of something I didn't want to be in the middle of.