Coffee Stains

Blood stains. Coffee stains. Brains on the wall. Splatter patterns. Lines of trajectory. Grunge music. These are the things that haunt my sleep, that dictate my every waking moment. Something’s not right.

“Let it go, John.” My partner, Ross Finster. A good guy, great to work with, but he just doesn’t understand.

The crime scene photos are scattered across my desk, with grease pencil circles drawn around points of interest, anomalies, things to note. One shows the victim—you’d know him if I mentioned his name—lying propped against his kitchen wall, as if he sat there to eat lunch or something, the shotgun leaning across one shoulder and still cradled in his left hand, his mouth open as if singing one long last drawn-out note, his eyes focused on something outside the window. The whole scene seems mundane until you notice that his head just doesn’t seem right, foreshortened a little, and that a dark corona of blood and gray matter halos his head and shoulders like a twisted painting of Christ.

His stale coffee and cigarette odor announces him before I feel him tap me on the shoulder.

“My office. Now.” It’s a low growl, no patience left. Ross glances up from his desk and quickly down again. He knows what’s coming.

I stand up and turn to follow my boss, Chief of Detectives Delroy Jones, to his office, but he motions behind him with an outstretched palm.

“Bring the file.”

I don’t need to ask which file. I scoop up the photos, autopsy reports, canvas cards, and other paper paraphernalia that the department loosely calls an investigation into a brown accordion file and carry it to Jones’ office.

“Close the door. Sit,” he barks as he takes the file from my hands.

“Chief, I don’t think this is a—“

“I don’t give a flying fuck what you think. The autopsy report says suicide, I say suicide, the D.A. says suicide, and it’s a goddamn suicide. Close the file, or you’ll spend the rest of your life watching surveillance monitors at Sears.”

He was right. Everything pointed to suicide—everything except the stained tablecloth.

“Don’t you think it’s at least possible that the guy didn’t kill himself?”

Jones shook his head in frustration.

“Fuck! You just can’t get it through…. Listen. Yes, it’s possible. But not likely. We don’t have time for you to chase bullshit. We’ve got a backlog of real cases. You’ve got a backlog. This coffee stain crap isn’t gonna fly. You know that.”

He was right again. But it didn’t help.

Just minutes into the investigation—hell, the guy wasn’t cool yet—I had noticed the tablecloth. Right on the corner, amid splashes and splatters of blood and brain, was a clean area. The more or less circular white space stood out because it was surrounded by brown, red, gray, and yellow. It also stood out because of the half circle of brown liquid on the backside of the circle, farthest from the body. It stood out more because of the half circle of blood on the front side of the circle, nearest the body. It didn’t take a genius to see that someone had removed something, probably a coffee mug, from that spot. Because the blood had formed a half ring, it was also evident that the coffee mug or whatever had been there when the fatal shot was fired.

Someone had removed that coffee mug from the scene after the shot was fired, but before we arrived.

I tore that house apart looking for a coffee mug, but I didn’t find anything that would have fit the stain. I looked for coffee, a coffee pot, or anything related to coffee. I found nothing. Forensics confirmed that the brown substance on the tablecloth was, in fact, coffee. They also fed me this little morsel: The ring was made before the blood flew, because it was a full circle—coffee was found under the blood. What’s more, the stain was still damp and had been there roughly the same amount of time as the blood.

And yet this was being called a suicide.

“Chief, at the very least, we ought to try to find out who was there. The guy didn’t even drink coffee. Someone else was there.”

Jones took a long, deep breath. He looked like a long-suffering parent scolding an idiot child.

“The case is closed. It’s a suicide. Get over it and get out of my office. If I hear you’re working on anything related to this case, you’re done. Let this guy’s family grieve and go on. It’s a suicide.”

I stood up and left Jones’ office. I wasn’t convinced.

Sure, the victim was a basket case, a junky, a poster child for failed parents. But his wife was a greedy whore, his mother was a bull-goose loony, and he had more enemies than anyone usually lives through.

I left the office, thinking about the copy of the file I had just handed to Jones. It was in my floor safe back at my apartment. Waiting.

© 2000, Brian G Parker