The Masterpiece Murders #4

                The inside of the building was more lavish than I expected. A set of stairs led upward smelling vaguely of smoke and lemons. I looked at the mailboxes in the wall quickly finding “Blaire” amongst the names. I hurried up the stairs as fast as an old man could until I reached the third floor. A grizzled janitor hunched with his mop, giving wide strokes to the dull reflection of the floor. A cigarette hung from his mouth, the smoke was like a gray serpent slithering out of the shimmering orange end of his addiction, and his name patch read “Albert”.  Albert didn’t greet me; he didn’t even look up as I breezed past him. The Apartment had a weird smell to it, it wasn’t death, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant either. It wasn’t long until I figured out what the mystery smell was.  Bleach and cleaning solution, someone was hiding something. I walked through each room until I stopped at the bathroom, the smell was the strongest in here, this was the feature presentation of the house, but what was it hiding? A new smell came to me, this one was of cigarettes and something else and it was coming from her laundry hamper. I gingerly lifted it up, not sure what to expect. Inside there was a damp towel, and a dirty nightgown. Then it click to me, how simple it was, he came in, cleaned her up and got her dressed up then sat her in the chair, but how did he… of course. I walked to her medicine cabinet and opened it quickly and grabbed a few bottles of pills, aspirin, painkillers and sleeping pills quickly walked to the kitchen table. I started with the sleeping pills, quickly dumping some on the table and sifting through them with my fingers until I find what I’m looking for. There it was, like I thought, the sleeping tablets container was full of “Q”s, hard to tell something’s wrong when all of them look the same. I pocketed some, turned and walked to the chair that faced the window from the painting, the cigarette was gone. The ashtray however, was still there. I dipped a finger into the ashes. “Hmm, still warm.” I mumbled to myself rubbing my fingers together. He had been here recently. I made a few notes in my pad, about the bottles, the hamper, the smoke, the ashes and the bleach. When I took my leave out of the apartment I noticed a lack of the janitor whom had ignored me on the way in, he was probably a floor up but you never know who’s going to be important so before I left I scrawled his name on my pad. It was about time I took another look at that painting and had a talk with Ms. Blaire about some finer points about her sister.

Reviews

[N. Tripper]

This piece is obviously part of a longer body of work. You have some nice visuals here. I used to work as a janitor and thought 'would a janitor be smoking a cigarette while cleaning the floor - probably not!' unless he worked alone, unsupervised, and didn't care about getting ashes on his clean floor! But anyway you obviously pay attention to detail and you write well. I will read more.