Chapter 10 -- The Inspector's Trilemma

the body could not be seen from the door, until one entered the room part way, hunched over as
it was on the leftward side of the angled, mahogany desk which was too large for the room.

at a glance, Inspector Winsteeple took in the entirety of the murder(?) scene, the commonplace,
likely-to-prove extraneous details as well as the clearly out of place.
against the backdrop of the brightly sunlit west windows, the pale green walls, the liquor cabinet
and overabundance of water carafes, the tusk or rib bone mounted on a modest pedestal, what
leapt out at him immediately were the plain abnormalities...

the corpse, face down on a broad open book, (obviously, even from here and 'upside down', a
stamp album), had one hand up and was still holding, between thumb and forefinger, what looked to be a pair of tweezers.
he leaned in a bit, arms behind his bulky back, to be certain there seemed nothing in their metal
tips. and noted with a start, in the view of his left eye, the roughly 3x4 inch rectangle, left by
something now missing, in the slight coating of dust on the otherwise immaculate desk.
out of habit, he did not gasp or otherwise indicate this discovery, instead backing away again
to his standing position partly, (and deliberately), blocking the door.

he could hear the murmuring of the van drivers, whom he knew, in the narrow hall behind him,
but gave their words no attention. he acknowledged the officer in the room, to his right---
"Glidden(?)", he half-hinted---who nodded, and spotted the framed, black & white lithograph
(some sort of beast crouching in the desert?) on the wall just behind the rather tall man's head.

there was a coating of dust, much older and untouched than that on the desk, on the picture's
upper edges. perhaps, like the tear in the empty armchair (which looked to be an old one...
the stuffing was grey), it was worth remembering.

"It's Mr. Jampers, sir". "Yes." "He was the theatre manager. This is his office." "mmmp".

The Inspector adjusted his offkilter, black-rimmed spectacles, trying to find their right askew.
He was very nearsighted and almost completely bald, his skin slightly jaundiced a pale yellow
almost the same color as his too-wellworn, linen suit.
His body looked like an upended meatloaf, his head like a dinner roll jammed on top. He
stood heavily, in ill-fitting clothes, about 5 foot 10 and 240 pounds.
His black bolo tie with its hollow-eyed, houndhead slider-clasp did little but disappear.


As Officer Glidden spoke on a mite more on the convoluted Jampers family tree, Winsteeple
bent down to the floor and plucked out, (with his own tweezers), a tiny bit of turquoise gravel from a patch of untramped nap of the flattened carpeting.
He held it up to his bleary eyes, pleased as a child, as the officer watched the whole manouvre.

"Has it all been photographed?"--the officer hesitated, thinking he meant the whole of the gravel
bit---"Especially the desk?" "Yes, sir."
Pocketting the gravel in a cigarette paper, the Inspector heaved himself around to view the
body from behind. As he spun 'round the southwest corner of the desk, he noted the empty
brass ashtray, so perfectly placed as to belie any disturbance.

after reenforcing his first impressions of the upraised hand and the proximate, open-tipped
tweezers and rectangular 'shadow' in the dust, he looked all about the body and the floor
nearest its legs and feet, (still tucked under the desk), slightly and gently moved the head
and, raising himself straight again declared, "There's not a drop of blood visible."

the desk had clearly not been shifted on the carpet in years. pulling the dead man's waxy
chair back he revealed Jampers' enormous, water-logged belly straining it's white shirt
even more than did his own.


three interlocked questions had emerged to him from all of this:
the excessive water intake, tho likely a personal, idiosyncratic habit might bear indirectly
on the means of death?
the missing object that had been on the desk, where & what was it??
and had the motive, or the missing object, anything to do with what had been held in the
stamp-collector's tool???

he would have difficulty listening to his beloved wife, tonight.