The body lay slumped against the wall, a large red hole in the forehead encrusted with dried blood the color of rust, and a spattering of hardened, pink brain matter covering the wall on which it leaned. A weapon, its firing chamber seeming to be empty, along with a general suspicion about it, was positioned on top of the victim’s lap, in such a way that the muzzle was pointed opposite the body. The face, which was male, was also expressionless, as it was a dead body and was thus incapable of producing any sort of emotions, much less channel those emotions through its face tissue and muscles; muscles which no longer worked because the body ceased to be living.
The house, excepting the dead body sitting in its own bodily fluids on the kitchen floor, was relatively intact. In fact, had it not been for the murder, the house would have looked as if there were no murder at all.
Three policemen, dressed similarly in blue uniforms, slick black boots, black gun holsters, the butts of the guns sticking out just enough so that their polished handles caught the sunlight that poked in through the kitchen windows, stood stiffly in front of the body. They wore identical badges, identical neckties, and were about the same size. Even their faces seemed to resemble one another; the rigid, bony nose that had been broken sometime in the past, the low, bulbous cheeks that jutted out, giving each man a slightly squirrely look to him were all relatively similar. The low brow line, made distinguishable by two thick eyebrows of a golden hue, and the large ears that stuck out sideways. Had it not been for their unique moustache styles (one was curled at the ends like a slightly effeminate Frenchman’s, the other was a thick, rectangular bar of facial hair, and the last was a dodgy looking and pencil thin moustache that traced the upper lip of its owner’s face) it would have been impossible to tell them apart.
Rectangular nameplates pinned on their breast pockets revealed them to be Watson, Coombes, and O’Leary. Watson was often the subject of very tasteless jokes that centered around an Arthur Conan Doyle novel, of which Watson was unfamiliar. The second, Coombes, was often mistaken to be Watson, and so received the same razzing from the other members of the police force. O’Leary, however, was not at all mistaken to be Watson, but was mistaken to be Coombes, and Coombes was often mistaken for Watson, who was the recipient of some very tasteless jokes about an Arthur Conan Doyle book, of which O’Leary was unfamiliar.
Each man took a morbid fascination with the body splayed out before them, looking intently at the body, as if they were waiting for it to do something. Each man also scribbled something unreadable in a notebook they carried in their left or right pants pockets. O’Leary was drawing a picture of the body, though any practical application of that drawing was useless and therefore not at all functional to any degree whatsoever. Boredom was his main incentive. Watson scribbled in his notebook because he saw O’Leary scribble in his, and he didn’t want to seem like he was eschewing any sort of workload by not taking notes. But he wasn’t taking notes; he only wrote and rewrote the lyric to a song he had heard on the radio earlier that morning. Coombes did the same thing, but the lyric belonged to a different song, one he’d heard on the radio two nights ago. Coombes did this not because he was self conscious about his second rate police work, but because he’d grown rather fond of the song, and couldn’t help but be reminded of it, even when he was staring at dead bodies.
After a brief round of pointless scribbling, O’Leary pocketed the pencil and notebook and moved closer to the body. Coombes did the same, as did Watson. Nothing was being accomplished, but at the very least it seemed otherwise to the three men who stared straight through the gaping hole in the front of a man’s head.
“This is definitely a murder,” O’Leary finally said, his thick voice suddenly overtaking the empty kitchen.
“It definitely is,” Watson concurred.
