justice in miniature

Hi Readers - These past few weeks, I haven’t been able to give Justice in Miniature the level of effort that I feel it deserves. This is partly because I started a new full-time writing job, and partly because, after more than 130 tiny crime stories, I’m running out of steam. So, I will be closing out this week with two of my old favorites, and then taking a break to reassess the project. As always, thanks for reading!

- Sean

The Dispatcher’s wife called him at work from her nature-writing retreat. “I’m not convening with nature as big time as I want to,” she said. “I’m coming home today. Probably in a couple hours depending on the traffic here in nature.”

This troubled the Dispatcher. Assuming she would be, as planned, away from Monday to Saturday, he had not done any house chores.

I must take desperate measures, he thought. He went to the radio. “Calling all units, drop what you are doing and report immediately to 435 Chestnut Avenue.”

All around the city, squad cars sounded their sirens and headed, at great speeds, towards the Dispatcher’s house. It took only a few moments for the first officer to arrive. “What I’m looking for?” he asked over the radio.

“Several fugitive grass blades are making a run for the sky,” said the Dispatcher, “Cut them off before it’s too late.”

As the officer started the lawnmower, another squad car screeched into the driveway.

“Reports of crude and disorderly conduct among plates in the inner-sink,” radioed the Dispatcher. “Better hose em down and lock em up in solitary over at the dish rack.”

“What you got for me?” asked the third officer to arrive.

“Loitering,” said the Dispatcher, “Several shirts, pants, and socks loitering in and around the hamper. Soften em up by taking em for a spin and then give em the heat until they fold.”

It took the officers only a half-hour hour to lay down the law at the Dispatcher’s house. When his wife arrived later, order had been restored.

Hi Readers - These past few weeks, I haven’t been able to give Justice in Miniature the level of effort that I feel it deserves. This is partly because I started a new full-time writing job, and partly because, after more than 130 tiny crime stories, I’m running out of steam. So, I will be closing out this week with two of my old favorites, and then taking a break to reassess the project. As always, thanks for reading!

- Sean

***

The Lawyer had been giving her closing remarks for quite some time, perhaps too long, perhaps for an hour or longer. If I keep talking, I’ll eventually find my through line, she thought.

“…we do not just call them mountains,” she heard herself say. “We call them volcanoes. We categorize them as violent and explosive. We mark them as things to be feared. And when they prove us right, we are outraged. And so it has gone with my client…”

Her speech had hypnotized everyone in the court. The jury sat completely still, not blinking. One jury member drooled on his blue collared shirt.

“…and, at night, when the neighborhood cats wake us with the harsh hissing and growling of their fights, we are annoyed. But how dare we look at it this way! How dare we view survival as a nuisance…”

Who was she defending? The Lawyer hoped it was the good guy, but she could not be sure. She glanced over at him: thick-rimmed glasses and a goatee. It could go either way with a goatee like that, she thought.

“…think about it: if people were smaller, would rose petals seem like anything more than gaudy, impractical napkins?”

If the through line does not come to me, I must find it myself, thought the Lawyer. She envisioned her remarks as a jungle. She unsheathed her machete and began cutting her way through. She bushwhacked for a whole day before making it to a clearing.

The Criminal Mastermind could tell the henchmen were frustrated after she announced yet another delay of her plans for world domination.

“It’s just a minor setback,” said the Criminal Mastermind to the chorus of exasperated sighs in the amphitheater.

“I think ‘setback’ is the wrong world to use,” said a henchman, “because a setback implies something that no one expected, and to honest, if there’s anything that I can expect to deal with in this job, it’s these supposed setbacks. Am I right, guys?”

The crowd roared in angry agreement. The Criminal Mastermind, herself, remained silent because they were right; these frequent issues had become increasingly predictable. The reason for this, though, was not due to sloppy planning. No, the sloppiness itself was actually planned.

The truth was that the Criminal Mastermind had successfully taken over the world at least three times on her own. In fact, her planning and execution had been so fluid each of these times that no one had even noticed. Or maybe they realized that something changed the moment the Criminal Mastermind officially took power, but only barely. It was like if a tenth of a second had been removed from a song; everyone listening sensed something wrong when they reach the point of tenth’s extraction, but then as the song continued to play just fine, they assumed they simply imagined the glitch or that the glitch had always been part of the song.

The Criminal Mastermind felt no satisfaction from this kind of takeover, no feeling of victory to wave in front of an enemy. If she had tried to make a big, evil speech, everyone would have cheered for her. That’s how well she’d done.

So for this attempt, the Criminal Mastermind built in the sloppiness so that her efforts would be noticed. She would make just enough mistakes to get attention, not enough to go up in flames. Attempting to explain this idea to the henchmen, that would definitely fit into the up in flames category.

The Jewel Thief dreamed of being a sound. He would be a different kind sound than any other, a sound that could steal jewels and mingle with attractive women. But at the day, he would just be a thing you heard. No body, no face, just a pitch, an invisible cloud of audibility.

If the Jewel Thief were a sound, there’d be no way he could get locked up in jail. And that’s if they ever found him. There wouldn’t be any police sketches of him, no surveillance camera footage, no mug shots.

And if, at some point in the future, the police figured out how to draw pictures of a criminal noise and build a jail cell that could hold it and they caught the Jewel Thief and locked him up for life, he could at least take pride in the fact that his very existence brought about a breakthroughs in both visual representation and methods of containment.

The Private Eye signed an endorsement deal with a magnifying glass company. “When you’re at the scene of the crime, you’ll take it out and look through it,” said a representative from the company, “and make some audible noises to indicate discovery.”

Sitting in the representative’s office, the Private Eye thought about this for a moment and said, “Sounds easy enough.” Then he collected his magnifying glass and his first endorsement check and went on his way.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Having worked with only his bare eyes for so long, the magnifying glass made everything look huge. Fingerprints looked to be the size of an entire palm, footprints appeared as big as skateboards. For the first time in a decade, the Private Eye struggled to solve his case.

The company rep called him into the office. “You’re making us look bad,” he said. “What the hell’s going wrong? Is it just a tough case?”

“Not particularly,” said the Private Eye. “It’s just that I interviewed the suspects, drew some conclusions, figured out who I believed the killer to be, but it just didn’t fit. You see, the man I suspected is of average stature, and whenever I look at the evidence with my magnifying glass, well I’m sure that the real killer must be some kind of giant.”

Many are surprised to learn that there is actually literature categorized as “crime poetry.” In truth, though, it is a popular genre of writing that has been around for quite some time, so long, in fact, that there are many well-established subgenres that must be explained to the novice crime poetry reader.

First there is “standard crime poetry.” This is more-or-less the poetry equivalent of crime fiction. There are no form restrictions; maybe it’ll be a limerick about a bumbling detective, or a sonnet concerning an officer going undercover in the mob. The only requirement is that the story must conclude within the lines of the poem, making crime haikus the most challenging. At many crime poetry workshops, there’ll be one student, new to the genre, who will attempt a crime haiku, and often the only way he can bring closure to all he has set up in the first twelve syllables is with a final line such as “then the world ends.”

But this is not the only kind of “crime poetry.” There are also “poem crimes.” Within these pieces, the author will commit a crime against poetry. He will write a series of heroic couplets but the final line will not rhyme with the one that comes before it, or he will call something “free form” when, in fact, it is clearly metered. Or the worst crime of all: after a series of jagged line breaks, he will allow for one line to keep going, letting it freely and openly devolve into prose. Some popular crime poets embrace this style, but many scholars loathe it. “The only crime I see committed on these pages is property damage,” said one of the most vehement critics of poem crimes. “We are letting these rebellious morons break down and stomp on our high standards.”

The most intriguing and dangerous form of crime poetry, though, is the “criminal poem.” These poems appear to be harmless poems about anything at all, but after the last line has been scanned, the reader will notice something different, something illegal that has occurred to them. No one but the criminals who write them knows how they work, but they should be avoided at all costs. Many of these poems have stabbed or shot or badly beaten their readers. Others seem, at first, to be less severe but should also be approached with caution. Consider the man who read a short poem about a guitar after during which time several pennies in his pocket disappeared. He rather liked the poem, so he read it again, not even noticing the involuntary withdrawal of funds. Now, all of his money and possessions having been taken, he sleeps at the train station, unaware that his financial downfall was brought on by nothing more than five lines of devious verse.

Some groups of concerned citizens view the speed limit as only step one. Each year these groups lobby for more driving limitations.

For example, one group would like for there to be a limit on the amount of times a driver can crack his knuckles per hour. “Knuckles and the fingers they hold in place are an important part of driving,” explained a group representative to a reporter from the newspaper. “If a person cracks his knuckles too much, his fingers might come off, and if his fingers come off, he may have difficulty holding on to the wheel, thus making him more likely to veer off the road causing injury or property damage.”

Another group wants to limit the intricacy of the humming and steering wheel drumming. “Humming and drumming simple, slow two note tunes are fine,” reads the text atop their petition, “but as a driver’s humming and drumming grows more complicated, he might begin to think about adding more sounds to his compositions, the sound of the engine for example, or the horn. Before long, the car will be his orchestra, and he will be honking and revving, leaping forward and coming to a complete halt, all in time with the tempo of his song and with no concern for anyone’s safety.”

A particularly paranoid group thinks it necessary to limit the range of thoughts that a driver can entertain while behind the wheel. “First you’re just driving,” said the group’s leader on a local talk show. “Then you’re driving and thinking, not about anything harmful, maybe your grocery list. Maybe you need beef, and your mind wanders to slaughterhouses, and soon you’re thinking how you can turn that car of yours into a mobile slaughterhouse of pedestrians and pets, all because your brain is legally allowed to explore any subject it wants!”

The Policeman thought about the old rhyme, “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” while he walked his daily beat. Of course, it was just a catchy piece of folklore, no basis in reality at all, but what if it were true? I’d certainly be breaking a lot of mothers’ backs with all the cracks on this sidewalk, thought the Policeman.

What would it be three hundred, four hundred broken backs? Per day? Five days a week? Six to eight thousand hunched over mothers every month? Surely they’d start catching on. One would see another barely making her way through the supermarket, both of them fresh out of physical therapy. It would go, “When did it happen to you? That’s around when it happened to me! And you know so-and-so and so-and-so? Them too!” Then it’d be off to the hospital to check with the doctors about any other mothers coming in, but they wouldn’t even make it to the doctors’ offices; the whole ER waiting room would be packed full of pained mothers.

The Policeman wasn’t sure how they’d figure out it was him, but he knew they would before long. They were mothers for crying out loud; they’d figured out stranger things than this.

He saw it all ending in a convenience store parking lot, one he passed on his beat. A whole horde of them would have him surrounded on all sides. He’d have his gun out but then he’d put it down because who would fire at a bunch of moms?

“Ladies please,” he’d say, trying to level with them as they inched closer, “I understand your frustration, but this is really an issue you should take up with the people who pave the sidewalks. I’d be happy to help you find them if you’d like.” And those would be his last words before the motherly mob collapsed in on him and swallowed him up completely, never to be seen again.

The Medical Examiner cut open a senile old blind man. He’d been shot; that much was certain at the outset. What was a surprise was to find a pair of glasses lodged in the cadaver’s throat. “The poor guy was choking to death when he got popped,” the Medical Examiner said aloud to himself, alone in his lab.

The glasses clearly belonged to the suspected shooter, a man with a volatile temper and connections to organized crime. What happened, as the Medical Examiner saw it, was that one night the blind man was out wandering the streets aimlessly until he bumped into the shooter. He reached out to touch the shooter’s face (as he was known to do) and found his glasses. Feeling desperate to show someone his vision-deprived world, the blind man took the glasses, quickly attempted to swallow them whole, but was unable. At that point, the shooter shot him twice in the heart.

“Pretty good aim for a guy without his spectacles,” said the Medical Examiner as he moved on to inspecting the chest, “or else just a weak prescription.” And at this he began laughing hysterically, because these are what jokes sound like when you dig around corpses for a living.

You see, what the bank robber doesn’t know is that the bank has developed a new silent alarm. It doesn’t alert the authorities; it emits a frequency that causes anyone within four feet to begin dancing. The frequency, like a dog whistle cannot be heard, nor can it dictate the type of dance; all it does is cause “dance” to happen in those in proximity. Once the bank robber begins dancing, the teller will hit the old silent alarm, and when the bank robber is arrested, he will be haunted in jail by the thought of, “If only I had just stopped dancing.”

Or this is what would happen if the bank robber were to ever enter the bank again, but he won’t. You see, what the bank doesn’t know is that the bank robber has discovered the exact vocal pitch that will frighten anyone into agreement. From now on, he will rob the bank by simply calling bank patrons and asking them politely to take out fifty or one hundred or five hundred dollars and hide it in a place where he can collect it later; with the right vocal pitch, they will be powerless to stop themselves from complying. No more gun, no more mask, just a parade of people shivering with fear, mumbling about a sizeable withdrawal.

Or this is what he would do if he and the bank would be alive and standing by the end of the day tomorrow, but neither will be. You see, what the bank and the bank robber don’t know is that there will be an earthquake tomorrow in the early morning that will render all of this – the dancing, the pitch, the money – completely inconsequential.