Brendan Peveril . net

Another piece tonight. I am writing things that pertain to actual projects, it’s just that my fragments recently have amounted to more than a little turn of phrase that I like here and there, and I want to share.

Most detective stories involve a murder and finding the murderer. This one doesn’t. You can’t fool all the people all the time, but sometimes you can make the right people turn a blind eye, like the time I killed my wife. She’d been cheating on me, so I tracked down her boyfriend and surprised her, alone, at his place. Never cheat on a private dick, just doesn’t make sense. I didn’t go there to kill her, or even him. I’m not a goddamned monster.

I jimmied the lock and sat on his sofa for a while, watching the news. She came out of the bedroom in her underwear.

“Hey, baby, what are you doing here?” She didn’t even look to see who it was, she was completely off guard. So off guard, in fact, that she wasn’t ready for the ensuing fight at all. No “This isn’t what you think,” “He means nothing to me,” “I think that things are over between us.” She just leapt to the offensive.

Things were over between us, I was ready for that. Hell, it’s what I was planning to tell her. Things had been so sour between us for so long that I wasn’t even angry that she’d gone looking for it somewhere else. I wasn’t ready for the personal attacks, though. Things I wouldn’t want my mother to hear, didn’t even want to hear myself. We’d been married for six years, what can I say? She knew how to push my buttons. I got mad.

I hit her once, the only time I’d ever hit her, her head snapped back, she dropped like a leaf in September. If the hadn’t hit her head on the counter, that would have been that, simple assault in a case like this is easy to ignore.

I had to call in a few favours though. As an ex-cop I had a list of debts to call in, but the murder used them up. I was lucky, really. Her boyfriend was about my size and looked generally like me. My wife had a type. Some more luck made him a prime suspect in a drug ring, a rape, and he was known to express his anger violently. My buddies were willing to overlook what little evidence pointed toward me and so was the D.A. Nobody owes me anything any more, but I guess it was worth it.

That’s how I got away with murder.

Who is this guy? I’m leaning toward the protagonist/narrator of a genre bending detective novel.

Also, if you’re interested, the title of this post is an allusion to some merch a buddy is selling.