WOMEN GONE MAD Part 2

download

WOMEN GONE MAD Part 2

 

It looked like a bomb had been dropped on it. Papers were scattered helter-skelter like flotsam over the top. Styrofoam coffee cups lay on their sides, coffee spilling out in small brown lakes. An ashtray was brimming over with butts. Folders lay sideways hanging precariously over the edge of his desk. Some had fallen onto the floor. Some had perhaps jumped.

As soon as he fell into his chair, he lit up a cigarette. I could smell death sloshing around in his lungs and then seeping out of his nostrils like some nauseous fumes from a sewer grate.

“Mrs. Wallace?” Detective Brown muttered, smoke scaling the yellow walls of his teeth and falling over his smile. He had mustard stains on his tie. The buttons on his shirt were misplaced and his gut hung loosely over his belt. There were yellow cigarette stains on fingers whose nails had never been properly manicured. He was nothing like my Harold.

“Isn’t that against the law, detective?” I asked gesturing to the stiff like slug that dangled in his lips.

I continued:

“I will not jeopardize my health, detective,” I said, crossed my arms and clamped my jaw shut. I will not put up with a man who does not listen.

Detective Brown paused for a moment. Then he chuckled, pointing his cigarette at me.

“You are a funny lady,” he said shaking under a deluge of machine gun like coughs.

I did not smile. There was nothing amusing about death.