Enough rope hangs from the balcony to suggest fowl play, but the chicken wings dipped on Buffalo sweat threw a curve ball into The Dennis Racket, a small chain of locally owned and operated string merchants. They knew how to pull a heart and they knew how to loosen a noose. The only problem was their fingerprints were all over the cine.
As archivists will tell you, fingerprints leave enough oil to superglue a fuzzy suspect, though not enough to hold them down. For that you need pipe cleaners. That and it slowly eats away at the film. Soft white acid-free gloves are best for dealing with such delicate materials. Sold in bulk, a high count order was recently made to the The Gloverness, a factory specialising in such cotton finger sleeves.
The path leads to their secondary warehouse over on Primary Lane and Third Avenue. There we find a bricolage of body parts and tar. Feathers still in pillows frame the night. Canvassing the area is a local installation artist, who by their virtue of default effort, places a small placard at the neck and requests we pay a $10 entry fee to view the exhibit. The nerve, severed. The high cost of faux living.
This is what you have to do to reify suppositions, suspicions and segments into a case worth slamming a book against. Set the waters to boil, enough to cook, but not too long or too fast that the yolk comes out looking like a shaved, ashen scrotum. We leave and look up.
Tracking back, we visit an inmate at Casuarina, serving his first three years of a twelve year visit. Otherwise known as The Chicken Man, we believe to have found our guy. Over the course of a dinner bucket and coleslaw (from a store no longer in operation) we come to an understanding. Moist towelettes are too small and too flimsy for really getting off the grease. But also that chickens and cats, living together, cause mass hypothermia in such cold climate.
String, a moist towelette and a cup. We've found our noise maker. It's knot, how you tie up a case.
Written on Friday, 11 January 2013