The Toddler Detective
Tuesday afternoon. 2:30 PM.
The sun was out, a beautiful day.
The old lady said I was cranky, she had to put me down for a nap.
Like I hadn’t downed a few slugs of formula myself to try to find some shut-eye.
I woke from my adjustable baby-walker thing with a bang.
The door flew open, I drew my palm over my soft spot as I woke, and the police chief stomped over to me.
Dry Cheerios flew off the tray onto the floor in the commotion.
Damn, I could really use those right now…
“I had some trouble finding you,” started the chief of police, a plump old Irishman.
He was too old by a decade to hold the post, but his round and rosy cheeks served him well. Never had any trouble with the politicking, but basic police work was apparently beneath him.
I knew him.
His outward nicety fell away when we were together.
We’d had something of a falling out when he asked me to go to the Policemans’ Ball.
The old Patty insisted that I put my shoes on, and I just utterly refused to do so.
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to. Don’t want to now!
“Well, Sherlock Holmes,” I snorted derisively, “How’d you manage to crack the case of where I would be?”
He sat, took his cap off, and wiped his brow. “Figured you’d be in the Toddler Town part of the city,”
“Great insight,” I gruffed, reaching into my desk and grabbing a can of powdered formula.
“Then I just took to walking. Just walking around, looking around. And I got to a place where they were playing a lot of Cocomelon…”
“Sure,” I replied, now pouring water into my flask of baby formula powder. “Lotta kids like that show,”
“Yeah, yeah. They sure do,” said the police chief. “But you wanna know the thing that really tipped me off?”
I shook the flask around, trying to stir it, but I don’t have total command over my body functions so it just kind of flew off to the side of the room and I tried to play it off like that’s what I meant to do and I coyly answered “What?”
“You have a 15 by 15 foot billboard on the outside of this building advertising that you are the only Toddler Detective in the world. So I took that to be some kind of a clue.”
Maybe this Mick bastard was smarter than I thought.
“Alright, so what’s the case? Why are you disturbing my nap time?”
“Murder,” said the police chief, “I wouldn’t drag you out of retirement for some petty theft or something,”
“I never know about you,”
“Please,” said the police chief, his countenance suddenly becoming far more grim and serious as he leaned forward, “You’re the only detective that we can hire in exchange for a Ziploc baggie full of animal crackers that we can give this case to.”
I leaned back in my bouncy little roller thing, you know what I’m talking about right? Thought about the trauma of birth. About my brain growing at an exponential rate. Thousands of pathways being born, each moment of every day. Thought about how I could dunk on the fucking police chief if I solved this thing after I already told him to go fuck himself. Also I needed money. Babies ain’t cheap.
“I’m in. Goo goo gah gah. Just kidding.” I polished off the flask of formula and I don’t remember the cop leaving. Think I dreamed about Cocomelon.
I was still learning my numbers, but the math just didn’t add up.
Even for a seasoned P.I. like me, the crime scene was especially brutal. The departed had been killed, and then cannibalised. Partially eaten. Called to mind Dante’s Inferno, where the lowest layer of Hell sees its victims frozen upside down in ice and Satan continnualy gnaws on their legs, or the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Somebody was chewin’ on this stuff.
You’d expect them egghead dorks in forensics to come up with somethin’, but they were stumped. Just like I am when I have to try to put a square block through a round hole in a spatial awareness reinforcement toy.
“The perp was a ghost. Either he was the cleanest hitman ever seen, or I didn’t develop object permanence yet and forgot evidence as soon as it was out of my immediate field of vision. Either way, this was a tough walnut to crack,” said I.
“Ahh shit,” said the police chief, as we stood in the rain. “I would have assumed that with your unspoiled baby brain that you would have been able to see things that we may have missed, right? Like children are the most honest because they don’t have the social conditioning that forms their-“
“Hey!” I interrupted
He began trailing off “assumptions and…well, yeah, what?”
“I just shit my pants.”
The police caution tape snapped in the wind, and the formula in my flask separated into solid chunks and liquid whey in my pocket.
“Guess the map is not the territory, huh brother?” asked the police chief
“I don’t know because I am a baby.”
We shared a laugh in the rain.
Stay tuned for more adventures of The Toddler Detective but maybe not because it’s a pretty dumb idea
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