Sprinkle Takes the Cake Read online

  Sprinkle Takes the Cake

  Sprinkle Takes the Cake

  Chapter 1

  Midpoint

  Sprinkle Takes the Cake

  By S.R. Buckel

  2017 Smashwords First Edition

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  Buckel’s Blog

  Chapter 1

  Someone had died in the last hour, while cupcakes baked in the oven.

  Sprinkle detected the aromatic remains of both. The smell of risen goodies always revved his engine; a good thing too, as he wasn’t getting any lettuce for this gig. The other scent—that of a man at least one hour into the big sleep—announced itself in a different manner. It was a background emanation, heavy, lingering, and it licked at his face like a dog with a mug disease.

  That one was strictly from Dixie, make no mistake.

  It was while trying to decide if either was in cahoots with the other that Sprinkle heard his assistant, June Dye, storming back his way. He knew by the boom-tappa-boom impressions her stompers made against the wood floor that she had just been ignored.

  When she settled down, June became a mime, quietly sulking beside him. Flushed by the heat her young body radiated, Sprinkle decided now was a good time to take his Stroll, give the doll a few minutes to cool off.

  The Stroll was an easy though jostling walk he liked to take through crime scenes. It lent a better impression of the murder room. Unlike most sightless men, Sprinkle did not use a cane, or even blacked-out glasses. ‘Those things are for blind dodgers’ he would say to those who asked, inevitably conjuring a giggle or uncomfortable grunt.

  Instead he used a small SONAR transducer, a handheld device favored by fishermen to help locate their quarry. He’d programmed it (had June program it) to send out ping’s so he could use it to gauge distances between himself and objects on the floor: furniture, end-tables, walls, corpses. ‘Much dandier than a cane, right June?’ he’d said. Holding it low, he activated the device. It chirped five times in a volume so low only Sprinkle and vermin could hear it, and so he commenced his stroll.

  Over the amalgamated aroma of death and cupcakes Sprinkle smelled a dame’s perfume and heard a dame’s strained voice. She was sobbing, was the dame, telling a tale. Every few words she paused to take a breath; during the interlude the detective grilling her uh-huhed.

  As clear as the notes to Astaire’s Puttin on the Ritz, Sprinkle knew the flatfoot was not buying what she was selling.

  The device pinged three times, informing him there was some kind of obstruction three feet ahead. Sprinkle stole two measured steps forward and then turned right. Although an unknown tidbit to most people, Sprinkle knew air pressure and temperature fluctuated constantly, even within the four walls of a single room. A fan, an open window, bodies, even certain plants, all affected these two factors. It was subtle, and it probably helped that he wasn’t distracted by visual stimuli. Once you’d trained your body to detect delicate variations in the microcosmic world around you, however, a riot of these interesting little tidbits began to present themselves.

  Like the nugget that Mrs. Rogers, the sobbing widow, had turned the oven (not gas) off not long ago, after baking her cupcakes. The air was heavier in this section of the house, near the kitchen; residual heat from the oven lingered.

  Sprinkle couldn’t say yet whether this was important, if it was a clue or just a titillating nugget, but he filed it away in his mental cabinet all the same, under ‘Mrs. Roger’s: Tidbits’.

  Pushing aside the aromas, the heartbreaking cries of the poor sobbing widow, and the constant returning pings from his device, Sprinkle shuffled around the object the transducer had warned him about, letting his bare stems guide him, acting like hands without fingers. Behind his back, detectives and full-time crime scene investigators and part-time bystanders often mocked Sprinkle for wearing sandals, but being able to feel the world around him was part and parcel to creating a life as independent as possible.

  His right ankle rubbed against something plush. The surface gave, but above it was a firmer plush surface, like cloth over wood.

  The corner of Sprinkle’s mouth curled upward, and he sank into the welcoming embrace of a couch. He imagined it was brown. Then again, brown was the color he associated with softness, thanks to the nature of his childhood teddy bear named Henry, whose soft brown fur had been one of the last things young Sprinkle had seen before disease robbed him of his sight.

  “Would you feel up to coming down to the station to put your statement on the record?” the detective asked.

  It was either Detective Brown or Detective Moreland who’d asked Mrs. Rogers the question; Sprinkle couldn’t tell their ‘cop’ voices apart when they were leading witnesses and or potential suspects like this.

  “Oh my God,” Mrs. Rogers broke down again. Her voice was muffled. Sprinkle translated this to mean she was either crying into her palms or the detective was standing in his path of hearing.

  “Excuse me?” a much more pleasant, feminine voice broke the stammering.

  Sprinkle cocked his head. June was going for it again.

  “I was hoping I could speak with Mrs. Rogers, alone,” June Dye said, all sugar and spice.

  “Who are you?”

  Sprinkle cringed. His assistant was a petite young dolly, with precisely one design flaw so far as he knew: she couldn’t stand being brushed off, especially by hard-boiled men.

  “I am June Dye,” she enunciated clearly. “Assistant to Honorary Investigator Sprinkle.”

  Silence.

  Sprinkle debated going over there to help. Decided it would be better not to. June provided him with his meals; last thing he wanted to do was tick off his baby-doll by playing the old fuddy-duddy who thought he needed to rescue the smidge girl.

  “I just want two minutes with the . . . with Mrs. R-Rogers.” Poor girl tended to stammer when she was afraid or filled with righteous anger.

  “Mrs. Rogers is coming with us down to the station.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to do that,” Mrs. Rogers chimed in, the tears gone from her voice.

  These scenes always played out the same. Sprinkle would have avoided confrontation, but in this case he’d heard something in the dames’ voice, something that didn’t quite jive with the accusatory tone in the detective’s chatter. So he stood and padded toward the small group. He stumbled only once, on a wood coffee table, but this was intentional.

  The clash of his shins making the hinged leaves bank against the wood cabriole legs of the table arrested the argument.

  He knew they were looking at him; he could feel their stares like peculiar heat rays in the air, and read them like an open (Braille) book: the detective would be half annoyed half amused, June would be angry, the widow consternated.

  “Detective . . .”

  “Brown.”

  “Ah yes, Detective Brown,” Sprinkle followed the direction of the voice, aimed the device at Detective Brown and, gauging the distance by the return ping, reached out and padded the man on his muscular biceps. “I thought so. You have a bamming voice. Make a bang-up orator, right up there beside Webster, make no mistake.” He turned to where he believed Mrs. Rogers sat stewing in her grief, nodded, then twirled back to face Brown.

  Sprinkle’s eyes were wide open. He rarely blinked, a
s the disease had stolen not only his vision but all ocular sensation as well, eliminating the desire to moisturize his dead eyes. Many people had told him it was creepy, and that he shouldn’t do it.

  Taking Brown’s arm, Sprinkle directed him away from the ladies. In a low murmur he said, “You are a fine young flatfoot, so I feel sunny about asking you to give my assistant a minute with the widow.”

  “That’s not exactly protocol—”

  “Oh stars, I understand that,” Sprinkle replied with a wave. He emitted a small yelp as his sandaled toe struck something hard and mean. “But I know that you know that these types respond better to the girlies. Maybe my June can convince her to confess—if she is guilty. At the very least it’ll save you some paperwork. We don’t wanna give the poor dame a bum-rap. What do you say, Detective Brown?” He smiled, and then muttered something to himself.

  “Sure, sure, just go and . . . I’ll take a break or something.” Heavy assured footsteps: the flatfoot sauntering away.

  Sprinkle had experienced it before. People often rushed away from him, like he was some geezer two days into a bender. He turned and nodded, trusting June was watching. A few seconds later the soft tones of his assistants’ voice filled a bright corner of his hearing, and Sprinkle listened, bobbing his head lightly the way people expect blind folk to do.

  Twenty minutes later June cranked the AC up in her sweet Chevy scootabout, a little Aveo that ran like a Chihuahua. They were cruising on the 5, heading back to the lab behind the coroners vehicle wherein lay the cadaverous Mr. Rogers.

  Chill air washed over Sprinkle’s chrome-dome. He smiled.

  “You don’t think she did it, do you?”

  “She sounded innocent to me,” Sprinkle replied. He preferred natural air with the windows down because it allowed him to hear traffic; it was nerve-wracking not being able to know where everyone was, to simply trust the baby-doll behind the wheel. June was a solid driver and all, but she tended toward road rage.

  “You think everyone sounds innocent.”

  Sprinkle tapped the pads of his fingers together before him. “Well, my dear. You grilled the woman. What do you think?”

  To his almost magically-attuned ears, it sounded to Sprinkle like June was pummeling a beach ball. Great gusts of air filled the car. Strange swishing sounds punctuated the gusts, contained nicely by a pair of grunts, like air quotes.

  “There weren’t any marks on the body,” June declared, sidestepping his question.

  “No fooling?” Sprinkle exclaimed. “Then why were those aces so eager to finger the poor widow Rogers with a bum rap, I wonder?”

  “You shouldn’t use that expression,” June said.

  Sprinkle turned to face her, eyes wide, seeing nothing. “Which expression?”

  A nervous giggle preceded the answer. “‘Finger’. That term . . . it means something different than it used to.”

  “For truth?” Sprinkle was genuinely surprised. “What on earth can it mean now, I wonder?”

  June honked at someone, unleashing an unladylike curse. “It just . . . it means . . . oh my gosh, didn’t your parents have the talk with you? You know, the birds and the bees?”

  “Well of course,” Sprinkle replied, not quite seeing the connection. “They sat me down when I was just a little shaver, ten or eleven.”

  Silence. “Um, can we just drop it?”

  “No dice! You’ve made me an eager beaver, June-bug. Now I simply must know.”

  So, through some hemming and hawing and a few false-starts, June managed to convey the modern gist of the archaic expression to Sprinkle.

  Repositioning himself in the bucket seat, Sprinkle said, “Well. That is . . . quite different.”

  “Yeah.” June was inhaling through her nose, long deep breaths. “Thank God you’re blind, because my face is so red right now.”

  Gravity shifted as June turned right, catching Sprinkle off guard. He latched onto the door.

  “There was pink-colored drool and foam all around the victims face and throat.”

  Judging from the turn and rate of speed, Sprinkle deduced they had pulled onto 86th Street; another quarter mile and they would ease on up into the small parking lot adjacent to Maxwell Laboratories, where Sprinkle ran a pathologists office.

  “We’ll check toxin levels,” he declared. Colored foam around the mouth or nasal passages usually indicated excessive levels of toxins. But there could be another explanation. He refused to believe the poor widow Roger’s had poisoned her poor dead husband.

  An hour later Sprinkle was wrist-deep inside the poor dead husband’s chest cavity. He turned his head. Even with a mask the stink of excavated bowels was atrocious. “Whoo-doggy, that is ripe!” He set the scalpel aside and carefully removed the liver.

  “Okay, right there,” June said, indicating that she was holding the stainless steel organ bowl directly beneath his hands.

  Sprinkle gently laid the fist-sized blob into the pan while June gagged.

  “How’s its color, my dear?” Sprinkle slipped off his gloves and removed his mask.

  While June dry-heaved, Sprinkle sidled expertly around the room, avoiding slabs, carts of instruments, and countertops to reach the wall by the door, where he flicked a switch. A low-humming fan whirred to life; within seconds the stink was gone, replaced by a sterile aroma of filtered air.

  “Color is good, normal reddish-brown, equilateral lobes,” June said. “Hang on. There’s some discoloration around the hepatic artery.”

  Sprinkle made his way back to the slab and waited patiently. He was an expert—heck, a savant—when it came to the texture, weight, and smells of vivisection, but sometimes these things just weren’t enough. To see what the organs looked like, that was June’s job. She was his eyes; she completed him. When he’d said that to her, using those words during her interview, she’d snorted, to his confusion.

  “There are tiny pink granules inside the artery,” the girl said.

  Dean Martin sang alone on the CD player while Sprinkle processed this news.

  “Now, hear me out,” cautiousness lent June’s soothing voice a curious lilt. “I’m no expert on toxins, but I don’t think this is something you pick up inhaling paint fumes or idling at a light. You know what we need to do.”

  “No.”

  “Hey, I don’t like it either,” she said. “But when it comes to toxins, he knows his stuff.”

  “He’s the dad-blamed killer-Diller,” Sprinkle conceded. “But it may not be necessary. Take a sample and run a stain on it, first thing.”

  Dean Martin concluded his rendition of Ain’t That a Kick in the Head, plunging the lab into silence save for the whirring of the fan.

  “Okay,” June agreed. “But if that comes back negative . . . I have no idea what toxin appears pink and granular. Do you?”

  “I do not.”

  “I didn’t think so. Now, if it comes back inconclusive, which you know it will—our database isn’t nearly as up to snuff as he is—will you agree to go see him. I know you hate the guy—”

  Sprinkle kicked the bottom drawer of the slab. “Ah, applesauce!”

  “Calm down. Look, okay, maybe Mr. Roger’s picked up whatever this is from home, or something at work.”

  Sprinkle snapped his kisser shut and stormed out of the room. To make his life simpler he had rented a block of rooms up on the seventh floor in the Maxwell building, and so, tracing the plastic chair rail along the walls he made his way to the elevator. Inside he brushed fingers along the button panel, located the third button in, second down, and pressed it.

  Some new-age jazz piece tinkled out of the elevators’ shoddy speaker.

  Most cases went without a hitch, Sprinkle being the best blind investigator slash pathologist in the biz. But sometimes, dad-gummit, he needed help. Memories stirred, instigated by the quaint musical score that took up the jazz piece, and Sprinkle, ever the optimist, strolled down pleasant thought-avenues. By the time the elevator dropped him off on the seventh flo
or he was whistling Coltrane.

  In the hallway on the old familiar path to his door, twenty-eight steps to the left of the elevator, he smelled a familiar smell.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Maybelline.”

  “Henry,” his neighbor chirped. “You always know when I’m within twenty feet. Sometimes I swear you’re just pretending to be blind.”

  Sprinkle grinned, tapped the side of his nose to join the joshing. “It’s to win over the dames,” he whispered. “They always go khaki-wacky for the cripples. Enjoy your night at the Moon Club, Mrs. Maybelline. I’m sure those dolly’s there will appreciate your new threads.”

  “They’ll call me spivvy, right?” she said, quoting a familiar Sprinkleism. “How is it you always know when I’m wearing new clothes?”

  “That, my dear, is between me and God.” He resumed his strolling and whistling.

  Speaking with friends and neighbors always brightened his mood. ‘There’s never a bad enough day that a little chat with a friend can’t brighten,’ Papa Sprinkle had always said.

  He hit the sack an hour later, slipping into the Land of Nod to the soothing strings of Appalachian Spring.

  He woke to the aroma of bacon sizzling on the griddle.

  “I could die, right now,” Sprinkle chirruped as he moseyed into the kitchen.

  “Doesn’t take much to please you, does it?” You could’ve filled a balloon with the airiness of June’s light-hearted laughter.

  She kept an apartment two floors down and always rose early to prepare breakfast for her boss. “Ah, excellent idea,” Sprinkle said to himself, poking the air with a finger. He shuffled over to his curio cabinet, where he kept the players and CD’s. The edge of each plastic case boasted a thin strip of cut-out Braille. It was a cinch locating the Donavan CD. He slipped it out and dropped the disc into the player.

  The blissful jingle of Colours instantly filled the apartment.

  Sprinkle sang along for awhile. “When we rise, when we rise. That’s the part I like the best.” They said he couldn’t carry a tune, but June was an angel; she never complained. He heard her flipping the bacon. “That smells just right, dear. Another ten seconds and you should—”