The Violet Griffin
A Hipster Holmes Mystery by S. Edith Hansen
Sherlock Holmes is a dick. Seriously, he is, and I would know, because I'm his roommate. The problem is, he's one of those genius-type dicks. He can tell your whole life story by staring at you for a few seconds, and he makes his money as a private investigator. He's fucking brilliant, and it really chafes my ass. Most people in the city have no idea who he really is, or why he does the crazy shit he does, or how he helps people the way he does. That's half the reason I'm writing about him, because even arrogant pricks deserve credit where it's due.
The other half of the reason is I need to get published again soon if I'm going to keep saying I'm a freelance writer, and when Holmes is around, and especially when he drags me into his little adventures, it's really difficult for me to write about anything else.
When I say Holmes is a dick, I'm not saying it in the normal roommate way. He's actually a pretty rad guy to live with, he's really clean and quiet, which is crazy because when he isn't working he snorts cocaine all the freaking time. What I'm trying to say is he'd be a great guy if it weren't for the fact that he's a cold-hearted bastard, like Spock without the human half multiplied by the power of Nikola Tesla.
Here's a phenomenal example. He once solved the murder of one of his coke dealers. Holmes called it "The Case of the Violet Griffin," and yeah, I'm aware of how gay that sounds, but it's his filing system, not mine, so let's just go with it.
I finished my shift on a Thursday afternoon and spent the next few hours chilling out. Holmes was between cases so he was in his room, probably high, and listening to these weird mixtapes that usually went Mozart, Mozart, Belle & Sebastian, Bach, Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power, Mozart, Cat Power. After work I liked to relax via acronym, aka grabbing some PBR out of the fridge and putting NPR on the radio.
I was chilling out as such when I heard a huge freaking bang come from his room. I jumped off the couch and threw open his door. Holmes's cat tore out like a bat from hell and jumped out the kitchen window. Holmes was firing a fucking gun!
"Jesus Christmas, fucker!" I jumped on him and pulled the piece out of his hand. He landed on the bed with a soft whump. "You want the cops raining down on this place? Huh?"
"I found a recipe for a homemade silencer," he told me.
"Well, I hope you saved your fucking receipt!" It was a common handgun. I dropped the ammo out and stuck it my pocket. Around the barrel was a complicated construction of tin foil and hairbands. Holmes stared at me with his infuriatingly bored expression as I tore the garbage off. "You look like shit," I told him. He hadn't been out detecting or deducing or whatever in weeks, as far as I knew. He smirked at me as I heard a car pull up out front. No sirens, which was good. I scrambled to stuff the gun in the back of my jeans and took off for the front door, leaving Holmes relaxing on the bed with his narcotics and his crazy.
I got to the door just as the policeman knocked. When I swung it open he looked very surprised to see me.
"Oh, sorry," He backed up a bit. "Is this 221B Baker Street?"
"Yeah."
"Is, um, Is Holmes around?"
"He is," said Holmes right behind my goddamn ear.
"Creeper!" I whipped around.
"What's up, Tubbs?" The officer gestured to his car.
"Can I tell you on the way? We're losing daylight."
"Sure thing, man." Holmes grabbed his coat and threw mine to me. "Why don't you tag along?"
"What?" I said.
"I've been thinking lately that you could like, help out."
"What?" I have a wider vocab than this, usually, I swear to fuck. If you knew how private he was, about his job, his cases, everything...I mean, that incident with the silencer was only the second time I'd even seen his room in the six weeks since I moved in.
Holmes just rolled his big brown eyes at me and started walking to the car. Tubbs looked as confused as me: Everyone knew that Holmes rolled alone.
"You guys...?"
"Roommates." I finished for him.
"Wow! Known each other long?"
"Almost two months, I think." I hurried up, locking the door behind me. Holmes was already in the backseat of the squad car.
We met at a party. Technically, it was my party, or rather, a party my roommate chose to throw in our house, so I was in a great mood to come home from my shift at the clinic to a building full of coked up hipsters arguing about music and queefs and whatever. I mean, that's just what you want to do at one in the morning after being on your feet sticking needles in people for eleven hours. Christ!
Anyway, I had been looking for a new place for weeks because he kept pulling shit like that. My girlfriend, Mary, lived with her parents, so that was out. She spent most of her time at our place anyway, but that's another story, as you'll see.
"Baby!" She shrieked as I got in the front door. She wrapped herself around me and bit my neck, which felt good, but I could smell that she was already drunk. "Johnny, there's someone here you've gotta meet-" One of her girlfriends dragged her off of me and onto the dance floor before she could finish the thought, so I pushed my way into the kitchen to find my roommate, Mark. He was spinning records on our kitchen table. The whole place was congested with noise and grinding, dirty people.
"HEY, WAAAAAH-TTTTIE!" Mark yelled as I made my way over. He was completely toasted.
"You fuck!" I yelled over the music.
"I know, isnt' this tight?" He hadn't heard me. We'd been through this a thousand times, it made no fucking difference. I didn't even bother to put out coasters anymore. I pushed my way through the crowd to the back door for a smoke, picking up an unopened can of blue ribbon along the way. I stood outside in the cool air and the yellow from the streetlight, lit my cigarette, and took a big drag, trying to chill out. It sucked having a roommate with a hedge fund. Working for your beer money gives you a different perspective.
I opened the beer and it exploded all over me. "FUCK!" I yelled and threw the half-full brew out into the darkness. I heard a soft whump and a groan.
"Ah, shit." I said and pulled my cig out of my mouth. "Hey, sorry!"
"It's cool, dude." It was another hipster kid in an old leather bomber pilot jacket, probably skulking out at the edge of the lot with a joint. He was skinny and pale, of course, with a pair of geek glasses and a mess of curly brown hair framing his face. I was surprised to see a simple tobacco pipe in his mouth. I guess it was the new thing. He joined me in the lamplight and tossed my now beat-to-shit brew into the trashcan before getting out a primitive zippo to light his pipe. His expression was bored and cold, his eyes half-lidded and his mouth straight as a razor. "Rough day at the Cabot free health clinic, Watson?"
"How do you know where I work?" I frowned. "Are you a friend of Mary's? I've never seen your face before."
"One of your pockets is filled with the empty wrappers for disposable, hypodermic needles and you have iodine stains on your hands. You're either a junkie or a nurse," he said, "And you're too fat to be a junkie."
I frowned at the dig, though I realized later he never meant anything by it. I'm not fat, really, just stocky. I mean, it's mostly muscle, and Holmes just says things tactlessly and takes the hits later.
"Also," he pointed with his pipe at the house, "Your nursing degree is on the wall over the fridge in there."
"So why mention heroin at all?" I was flabbergasted. He had to be a cop to size people up in a few seconds like that. I didn't like having cops at my house, even skinny hipster cops.
"To test your reaction." He shrugged. "I suppose you're not a fan of drugs, then, though you must come into contact with addicts quite a lot at Cabot," he added. "I figured you worked there because otherwise you would make enough money to not have to live in this area."
"You're right, I'm not a fan of drugs, thanks." I was getting a little pissed. "I'm sorry, what was your name again?"
"Holmes. Sherlock Holmes."
"My condolences," I told him. "Well, Sherlock, this has been just awesome," I dropped my half-done cig and ground it into the asphalt, "But I'm going to go inside now. Have a good night."
"Would you like to move in with me?" He called out in the same bored tone.
"What?" I whipped around.
"I heard you were looking for a more quiet place to live. I rent out the second apartment at 221 Baker Street," he explained, "And the price of organic food is rising."
"Are you serious?" I laughed at him. "You don't even know me."
"You were born in this city twenty-nine years ago. You joined the army the day after the twin towers fell and were deployed to Afghanistan after finishing your nursing degree. You won the purple heart in Operation Enduring Freedom and you were honorably discharged. You have lived here for seven years, moving from clinic to clinic but never settling down long enough to be promoted." He took a puff from his pipe. "You want to be a writer."
"Congratulations, Sherlock, you have an internet connection. I'm walking away now."
"You get a lot of writing done in this place?" As soon as he shouted that, my foot froze over the threshold. He was right. I had to stop moving from one hipster party flat to another.
"What's the deal, Holmes?" I turned back to him. "Why don't you just ask me like a normal person, without researching my whole life?"
"Because I don't want to waste my time or yours screwing around," he said, "and I know we'd both be better off if you came to Baker Street. You'd be able to write, and I'd be able to live where I want to live. There's nothing to suggest otherwise."
I was still exceedingly creeped out, mind you, but what he was saying made a hell of a lot of sense. "Can I come see the place first?"
"Duh," Holmes started walking past me into the house. "I'll be by tomorrow if you're free," he turned to look at me from under those long goddamn eyelashes. What the hell kind of voodoo god did you have to worship to get such pretty eyes on a dude's face? It was unnatural. He stood way too close, too, I could've licked his pipe if I wanted. I wondered if he had Asberger's or something.
"Okay," I said, and pushed him back into the noisy kitchen. Anything to break that weird tension. "Tomorrow." He nodded before disappearing into the mix.
The next day he pulled up on this killer old school motorcycle and took me over to 221B Baker Street, which, it turned out, was pretty fucking rad. The rent was steep but it turned out that it worked more like a boarding house. The owner, an old hippie lady named Hudson, smoked chronic and cooked all the time. All we had to do was keep after ourselves and go shopping once in a while, and we both got three squares a day of organic, vegetarian food. I had to go grab cheesesteaks to get my red meat fix every once in a while, but for the most part it was hella tight.
"Here's the deal, Holmes," Tubbs was talking to us through the metal screen. I'd never willingly rode in the back of a police car before. It was kind of cool without the overwhelming sense of dread and shame part fucking up your trip. "You might not want to take this one, but we really have no one to turn to at the time."
"Why wouldn't I take the case?"
"Well, it's not that we're stumped, it's that the police technically don't know about this." I stood up a little straighter. I thought cops who acted outside the law were a myth invented to sell action movies. "We received an anonymous tip about a murdered woman. I confirmed it myself when I looked in the windows in the back of the house." He switched off some machines in the front of the car. "I'll be back to actually check out the tip tonight."
"Interesting." Holmes smirked a little. I realized then, shit, this guy gets his rocks off from illegal activity in general, doesn't he?
"Also, it might be someone you know." He pulled over next to a bunch of skinny rowhouses and turned around to look Holmes right in the eye. "You remember Lureen Storm, Holmes?"
"The dealer, narcotics and ecstacy, very clean," rattled off Holmes, "reasonable prices. Accused of poisoning a minor three years ago."
"Bobby Green," agreed Tubbs. "Have you, uh...dealt with her recently?" I started to sweat. The officer knew about Holmes's coke habit. Outside the law or not, that was fucking serious!
"No," said Holmes, "though I had an appointment for next week." His face wasn't bored anymore. He had a new attitude when he was on a case, but I'd never seen it up close. He reminded me of the Desert Storm veterans who came with us on Enduring Freedom, hard-faced motherfuckers.
"Alright." Tubbs got out of the car.
"How long did you know her, Holmes?" I asked as we followed him up to the door. The sun had already set and everything was starting to turn gray.
"Two years," he told me. Not a sign of grief on his damn face. I told you, a cold-hearted bastard, didn't I? Officer Tubbs went up the stoop and opened the screen door just enough to feel the knob of the front one.
"It's not locked," he said before moving back onto the sidewalk.
"You're not coming in with us?"
"Just leave everything as is, Holmes," Tubbs ignored me.
Holmes opened the door into the darkening little house and stepped over the threshold. I looked back at the cop. He crossed his arms over his stomach. Holmes had already disappeared into the shadows of the corridor, so I creeped in after him, trying not to disturb the dead woman's home.
"Here," Holmes took off his keffiyeh scarf and handed it to me. "Cover your face." I complied, some kind of nasty smell had already hit my face, like the slaughterhouse district. It was chilling. Holmes' scarf smelled spicy. The serious way he walked silently towards the back of the flat spooked me.
"Tubbs already checked out this place, right?"
"He hasn't been in the house. He can't be caught on the scene. He's probably left us here, actually."
"What?" I pressed up behind Holmes so I could whisper through his scarf. He had a handkerchief or a floppy hat or something covering his own face, making it even more difficult to read his expressions when he turned around. All I could see was eyes and eyelashes. Have I told you yet that Sherlock Holmes has the longest eyelashes on the planet? "Whoever killed her could still be here."
"Of course," he said through his hat. I growled at him and threw his scarf back. We had already passed a few normal looking rooms, a kitchen and dining room, but now we were only a few feet from the back room where the shitty slaughterhouse smell was coming from. I pulled Holmes's gun out of my pants and took out the ammunition. Holmes raised his eyebrows at me.
"You know, dude, it is my gun," he said.
"Sorry." I did feel a little bad. It wasn't his fault he was a nutter, was it? He took the piece out of my hands and loaded it.
We changed so I now held his handker-hat thing over my nose and he jimmied his scarf over his face like a hipster cowboy. We made our way quietly into the room. The back was one long, open window crowded with houseplants. There were several flies buzzing around, gross. Holmes was fixed on the windows, I assumed checking for entry or exit or whatever, but apparently she hadn't locked her front door, so what do you expect?
I looked around for the body: It certainly smelled like death in here.
I noticed a dark stain in the carpeting that covered the right side of the room: It was a combo bedroom and study, apparently. I realized that blood had soaked the whole thing and was leaking out onto the hardwood. Holmes was almost on the edge of the gorey puddle. I felt like I was going to puke for a second so I turned to my right and then shrieked like a lady.
Holmes wheeled around, stepped into the blood and then fell forward into the gore. As he did his gun went off, blasting a round into the cheap ceiling. Some dust fell down as he leaped back up like a cat. If I hadn't been scared shitless I would've laughed at him.
I had found Lureen Storm, in her bed. Her face was peaceful like she was sleeping but the rest of her body was sliced open. Her clothes had been torn away and every inch gashed at in apparent haste. The only untouched skin was on her chest, where she had a brilliantly detailed tattoo of a purple griffin. It was without a doubt the vilest fucking thing I had ever seen.
Holmes was pissed at me. "Fuck, Watson!" He yelled. "I just shot a round in someone's house! This gun is under my name! Did you leave your balls in Afghanistan, or what?" He shrieked. I saw red, but not just because he was splattered with Storm's blood from head to toe. I moved to punch him in the face but he put up two red hands, palms out, to stop me.
"Watson, Watson," he suddenly regained his robotic calm. "I apologize, that was uncalled for."
"Let's just hurry up," I said. I had seen corpses in Afghanistan, but nothing like this. It was horrifying, and I screamed. I'm only human, goddammit.
"Agreed," he said shortly. I had noticed that when something pissed him off, the angrier he got, the more he talked like a college professor. "You know, Watson, Jack White had sex in this t-shirt," he added sulkily all of a sudden. I tore my eyes away from the poor victim and back on Holmes. He was a mess. Lureen Storm's blood was on his pants, scarf, his coat, and the apparent relic, a v-neck t-shirt with some kind of obscure screenprint design.
"With you?" I tried to joke. Holmes snorted at me, the closest to a laugh I'd ever heard. He pulled a small flashlight out of his coat pocket and shined it at the body, focusing for a long time on that violet griffin. If I could've seen it in a nicer context I would say it was one of the most beautiful tattoos ever. I'd never seen one so detailed, every hair and feather had been inked in, and the color faded smoothly from one end to the other from a pinkish lavender to a dark blue-violet. I didn't know tattoos could be like that.
"Clues, Watson." Holmes tossed me another flashlight. I used it as an excuse to turn my back to the body. Storm's office didn't look like a drug dealer's office to me. Then, what the hell does a drug dealer's office look like?
Well, apparently it has a cheap wooden desk, a dell desktop computer and a bunch of random newspaper articles pinned all over the wall. I put my light on that and scanned some of the headlines. One really caught my eye, screaming "LOCAL TEEN DIES FROM ROTTON COCAINE - Father Says He Knows Who Is To Blame!"
"Hey, Holmes check this out-" I turned to speak to him through the handkerchief, "Oh, dude, sick!" He was leaning over the corpse, prodding some of the wounds with a pen.
"What is it, Watson?" he asked without stopping his probing.
"Uh, a fuckin' clue?" I said. "Seriously, I am gonna vom if you don't stop poking that dead chick, and then they'll have my freaking DNA."e pen and came over to the desk. I pointed out the article. "Yes, that was a difficult time for Lureen."
"I bet it was cake compared to the last few days, though," I said without thinking. "Oh, shit, Holmes, I'm sorry-"
"Why?" He said, "you'd be right. Her death wasn't painful, though."
"Wasn't painful? Holmes!" I guestured blindly with my flashlight towards the room's ghastly third occupant. "
"She died of a single wound." He wasn't looking at me. He had that war veteran look again as he flashed his light over the contents of the desk and the articles on the wall. "And bled to death. She passed in her sleep."
"One wound?" I was confused, "Can you count, dude? She's covered in cuts. Guy must've been pissed!"
"Yeah, but she bled out of only one. The puncture wound in her stomach." His flashlight paused on a weird spot over her desk: There was a bare patch between the clippings, like one had been taken off the wall recently.
"If you say so, man..."
"Of course, it is a wonder that she didn't struggle." Holmes thought aloud, flipping his flashlight back towards the body. "All of this blood indicates that she simply fell down and let herself die." I watched in the dim light as a drop of her blood fell from his sleeve to the desk.
"Holmes, you're dripping." I pulled him back towards the carpet. What if they found fibers or something? "We really shouldn't be here. I mean, will they even pay you for this? Have you got anything in writing?"
"I'll be paid, or I'll reveal exactly how often the Philadelphia police have been turning to a coke addict with an incomplete master's degree for help solving murders." He told me shortly as he scanned his light over the plants lining the back wall. A bunch of them were dying or falling over.
"Let's go," said Holmes suddenly. He whipped out of the room and I could only follow.
"You can't go out on the street like that Holmes!" I yelled as he approached the front door. "You look like a mental patient."
"Yeah, that mustache makes you look like a responsible citizen, though," he quipped.
"Look, I'm sorry I scared you and made you fall down in a murder puddle, okay? But you're going to get arrested for reals."
"You can walk home by another route if you don't want to be seen with me, Watson," he said as he left the house. His voice had more venom than a cobra.
I was stunned. I mean, I pride myself on being able to read people. How had I gotten under his skin like that? I thought Holmes was logical, cold. He must have seen something to upset him back there. I mean, I didn't know her and I was still feeling sick. It got worse as I watched Holmes stalk away down the dark street, all alone and covered in a drug dealer's blood. He had turned to me for help, and I failed somehow. He was a freak, but he was brilliant, and besides Mrs. Hudson and that cat he didn't really have anyone. Anyone but me.
(To be continued...BUM BUM BUUUUM)