Your boy is at it again, I see,” J.J., aka Jim Jenkins, the senior detective at 5th division, announces from across the squad room; you could almost taste the smirk. He obviously wanted to rub it in and make sure everyone got to enjoy my pain.
‘My boy’, is none other than Mr. James Moriarty, yes, that Mr. Holmes’ Moriarty. I label him that because I’ve never been able to apprehend him. He’s evaded me every time. And what hurts, really hurts, is I think I’m pretty clever. At least clever enough to know when I’m outsmarted. But I persevere; I’m a detective after all.
“What manner of mischief is so important to interrupt the challenge of your crossword J. J. – recognizing the demand it puts on your limited powers of concentration?” I dart the question back in an italicized voice telling everyone within hearing distance that I can give as good as I get.
Now the squad room is on high alert; nothing like a verbal tennis match to brighten up the day.
“He robbed a bank,” relished J, J.,”and it took two days before anyone discovered it.” A not too subtle laugh poisoned his barb. “Shouldn’t take you more than a week to give up on this one,” came the shot heard round the room.
I should explain that J. J. isn’t biting the hand that feeds him, mocking the constabulary, because Mr. Moriarty is sort of a celebrity in so far as he’s taken on a Robin Hood patina that has endeared him to the public. Mr. Moriarty commits crimes that aren’t too serious, white collar crimes where nobody gets hurt and not much money nor trouble changes hands. Worse, the police never catch him and that puts the public on his side.
I’m Rupert Tillinghast, detective of long standing and longer suffering, and somehow, over time, I’ve become the fall guy to Mr. Moriarty’s shenanigans. I represent the police to his world and I’m good press cause I volunteer to face the faces of the bemused scrum of reporters.
“So Tillinghast, Rupert,” is typically how the wiseacre press starts,”what ingenious plan do you have to bell our cat this time?”
I play along, I’m up to the challenge; I have semi-thick skin and a combative sense of humour that is bullet proof to most diatribe that’s fired my way.
“Slow news day, boys?” I zing. “Speaking of cats, none up a tree today to force you to look up multisyllabic descriptors? What will you computer strained wretches have to write about when we bring this tabby to ground? It’s my humouring this jokester that keeps you getting paid.”
“Oh blather not, Tillinghast,” comes thepseudo Shakespeariancounter, “admit it, Sherlock, he’s got you on the run.”
I conjure up a response, “Mark my words thee distemperate fooleth, tis he who’ll soon be hot footing it to the cooler, to use an oft-saith phrase. See you anon.”
I always try to leave them with a quote they have to look up. I exit, buying time and wondering what I’ll have to do to close the story on Mr. Moriarty.
(Next day)
“Welcome to our branch, Mr. Tillinghast, I’m Jessica Lin,” comes the warm, wondrous greeting from this vision from the financial world. Bank managers have changed for the better over the years.
“Thank you Ms. Lin,” is the only witty thing I can think of blinded as I am by her perfect teeth, perfect hair and perfect form. What can I say? Words failed me.
“I’m here about the robbery.”
“Yes, let me get Melissa, our senior teller, she was the one who’s involved.”
Ms. Lin leaves for a moment and I scope her office. No picture of hubby and children to ruin my day but a diploma on the wall that emphasizes her ability to glamourize the wonders of debt and a bronze star congratulating her on at least five years of sticking it out.
“Mr. Tillinghast, this is Melissa LaLiberté, pronounced La – Lee – ber – tay, like the French, the teller who was involved.”
Ms. LaLiberté is a well-rounded mademoiselle of indeterminate years who probably saw herself as ahead on the experience curve and ready for promotion until she ran into our Mr. Moriarty.
“Please tell me what happened,” I start,professionally taking the chill off the room.
“This man introduced himself as bank security and showed me some identification.”
“Do you recall his name?” I professionally enquire.
“Yes, Roberto Throgmorten, I remembered it because it was such as unusual last name.”
It’s my Moriarty, all right, loves to use my initials to create his noms-de-plume and give me a shot. He’s been Roger Trainwhistle; Reggie Transponder; Rufus Tutu and so on. I hate him.
“Yes, go on Ms. LaLiberté,” swallowing the bad taste in my mouth.
“Well, he said the bank was being plagued by bogus $100 bills and wanted to give our branch a heads up. He then showed me a bogus $100 bill and asked me to get a real $100 from the cash to show the differences.”
I could see this coming; well, I’m a detective.
“Let me save you the pain, Ms. LaLiberté, he left with the real $100 bill and you returned the bogus to cash.”
“How did you know?” putting her hand to her mouth in awe.
I was sorely tempted to say, “I’m a detective, a highly skilled detective, with an IQ in the far right region of the bell curve, excessively trained to handle complex matters, master in hand-to-hand physicality, borderline genius etc. etc.” but I demurred.
“We’ve seen this before.”
Ms. Lin interrupted. “Don’t be upset, Melissa, it’s difficult to recognize these situations.”
I interrupted Ms. Lin’s interruption. “What can you tell me about this individual … apart from his unusual last name? Twinturbo, I believe?”
“Throgmorten,” she corrected. “Well, he wore a hat.”
“She means a fedora,” Ms. Lin contributed.
The old hide the face trick, I calculated.
“And he was nice,” Melissa creatively remembered.
Ms. Lin figured things out. “Thank you Melissa, you’ve been very helpful.”
“So,” I summarized once Melissa had left, “you’ve been robbed of $100.”
“It seems so,” agreed Ms. Lin.
“I’d like that bogus bill and a copy of your security tape, please Ms. Lin.”
“Certainly, I’ll send them over to your office right away. And thank you for coming.”
Wait’ll J.J. gets a hold of this one, I ruminate ruefully, making my way out of the bank.
And the press!
Bank robbed of $100, massive man hunt under way. Downtown metropolis cordoned off. Military on stand by. Rupert Tilliinghast, master detective, enemy-to-those-who-make-him-an-enemy heading up investigation. Again
(Day three)
The entertainment world has made the viewing public aware of ‘cold cases’; situations that didn’t get solved but should get looked into when things warm up and/or cool down. This $100 robbery qualifies for ‘frozen, never to be thawed, cases’. What are you supposed to do? Moriarty is playing with us, he’s the Scarlet Pimpernel of the 21st century, throwing multiple metaphors into the mix.
And what if I did, somehow, apprehend him? The judge would probably charge him with, “Well done. Now, off you go.”
But there was some pressure to do something, while the police hierarchy would like me to spend all my time catching every flavour of bad people, it was forced to encourage me to give some token effort in apprehending this nuisance. The police chief, with the skill to suppress a smile while mouthing serious syllogisms, would say, sounding like my Mother, that ‘this kind of behaviour was not to be tolerated; It gave the wrong impression to the susceptible youth of today’ and so on and so on.
I reviewed the bogus bill. Our Melissa must have had a touch of the vapours that day. Or had been overcome by Moriarty’s nicety as this bogus bill wouldn’t have passed muster by anyone with a modicum of sensory sensitivity. He got the colour right but that was about it. The paper was somewhere on the spectrum between household wax paper and tin foil. The number 100 was Times New Roman on one side and Bodini Bold on the other. And you’d think even our Melissa would have puzzled over the picture of Brian Mulroney.
Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt, she doesn’t get to handle $100 bills that often.
The tapes didn’t shed any light either. Our Mr. Moriarty’s back isn’t distinguished and that fedora covered the rest. All I could take away from this evidence was our Mr. Moriarty was about 6 feet tall. I stretched that to two paragraphs in my report. “He was, one would say, tallish. Tallish for a man with an undistinguished back …”
I’m knee deep in high dudgeon.
So, back to basics, who is this guy? I dug up my police academy profiling lecture notes complete with marginal question marks. Moriarty doesn’t need money; probably picked up a PhD along the way; retired maybe; lives in town and just loves to put it to me; Roberto Throgmorten indeed. But he doesn’t want to get caught because then what would he do? So he’s risk averse, picking on the gullible. His psychological chart? An introvert, obviously. Gets great pleasure out of outsmarting his opponent.
OK Randy Thingamjig, enough Freud, game on.
(Day four)
I decided to play, ‘to catch a thief’. I am going to be Mr. Moriarty for a day. ‘Smoke him out,’ as the dime novels would say. So I put a call into Ms. Lin. My perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect form Ms. Lin. Still at a loss for words.
“Mr. Tillinghast, how nice to hear from you, have you caught him?” I bet J.J. put her up to that.
“Love your sense of humour, no, but I’d like your help in catching him.”
“Sounds like fun, what can I do?”
“Well, if you get robbed again, in a similar fashion to the previous time, ‘Robin Hood strikes again sort of thing’, but it’s the unknown me that robs you, I think we can get our man to bristle a bit because someone’s trespassing on his territory and hopefully this will force him to show his face.”
“Wonderful, how exciting, what do I do?”
“What could be set up so that the bank gets robbed but nobody gets hurt?”
“Let me think …. I know, I could give you a line of credit that you could draw down on and then I could claim that there was fraud. What do you think?”
“I like it, what’s involved on my part?”
“Not much, I’ll do the paper work and create an account for you. Once you sign the papers I’ll transfer the line of credit, let’s say $5,000, to your account and you can make a withdrawal whenever you like. How’s that?”
I was going to say, ‘perfect’ but that would dilute my expansive description of her teeth, hair and form so I went for a simple unpretentious, ‘preternaturally fabulous!’
“How if you drop by at 3 o’clock this afternoon?”
“I’ll be there and thank you.”
“You’re welcome, see you then.”
A few hours to kill, just time enough to clear my desk and make sure everyone’s on side. Get those wordsmiths lined up in time for the 5 o’clock news and sit back for the roosting of the pigeon.
“Miss Lin, please, she’s expecting me, I have a 3 o’clock appointment. It’s detective Tillinghast.”
“One moment, please.”
Out of the perfect mists of the manager’s office emerges the perfect bank manager probably on the verge of giving me a hug.
“What are you doing here?” she utters in a less than perfect timbre.
“Our appointment?” I gawped not understanding her understanding.
“But the call.”
“What call?”
“Your buddy, at headquarters.”
This wasn’t sounding perfect. Not even close to fabulous.
“A buddy? Do you recall his name?”
“Ringo. Ringo Tympani.”
“Ringo Tympani?” I chewed on this for all of 3 seconds,”An unusual name.”
“I thought so, too; he called to say you’d been pulled off this case and that he’d stand in for you. He arrived around 2 and signed all the papers and left.”
“Ms. Lin, can we go into your office for a minute? (Sound of quickening footsteps and a door rapidly closing.) Thank you. Now, would you open up, er, Ringo Tympani’s account, please? (Sound of computer keys clicking) Good, now how much is in his account? (Sound of someone thinking, ‘This isn’t happening.’) $4,900? (Sound of detective dying) Would you now please permanently close that account?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ms. Lin, would you be free, now, for a drink. Or two?”
(Day five)
I’ve got to hand it to J. J., his sarcasm was more muted than expected.
“I liked your idea, while it lasted. Kinda neat, though, same bank being held up twice in the same week each time for $100.”
“How did Moriarty know?”
“Well, you’re not exactly invisible. Every press conference seems to have your mug grinning at the camera. You’re thinking he doesn’t have TV or the Internet?”
“No, it’s just that …”
“… this place leaks like a sieve, you know that; it would only take a phone call or two to find out your schedule … and… how ‘bout he followed you into the bank a couple of days ago? Did a stake out, if you need a bit of visualizing, saw you go into Ms. Lin’s office, what’s she like by the way?”
“… perfect, bloody perfect.”