Sin City: Fly in the Ointment (Geist)

So hey, I'm back with another last-minute write-up. No major news I feel up to talking about at the moment, other than Terra Firma is currently available in PoD for those of you interested in such things. (I've also got a freelancing assignment in the works but I'll be more comfortable talking about that when I'm a little further along on it.)

And now, back into Vegas. This was kind of a short session for reasons that will become clear in time.

So where we left off, the group had spent all day acquiring and taking apart some slot machines, recording the innards, etc., before retiring for the evening just to find a message at the hotel for Richard from a Detective Joseph Popham just wanting to check in.

So we jump ahead to the next morning (December 11th, 1951, in case anyone is keeping track). Eddy is mainlining coffee to wake up, Kenneth checks in with his superiors and confirms that there's going to be an independent investigator coming in tomorrow to take a look at the machines, and Richard calls the police station.

So when the cops pick up, Richard deliberately mispronounces the detective's name a couple of times while they try to get him on the phone. And he does. He explains to Detective Popham that he was out hitting the slots the day before and that's why he missed his call. Popham asks him to come in to the police station in about an hour so they can have a chat.

So Richard goes in, nothing fancy, the blonde at the front desk escorts him to a plain room with a table, a couple of chairs, and what appears to be a mirror along one wall. The detective joins him a minute later with a folder under one arm, and after a moment of pleasantries he pulls out a photo of Max and asks Richard if he knows him. Richard says that he thinks he might have done some repair work for him once upon a time, maybe fixed a TV or washer or something. The detective asks if he might have talked to Max a coupole of days ago. Richard doesn't think so. He then asks where Richard was at the time of Max's death. Richard's alibi is that he was at the hotel and that Eddy would vouch for him.

So then the detective explains that there are details about Max's death that didn't make the papers, like the fact that he was shot in the back of the head in a locked room with a door blocked on the inside by a dresser. He asks Richard why they got a phone call from Max telling them that a 'short little con artist named Richard Truman' was claiming to talk to the ghost of his dead fiancé. Richard claims to know nothing at all about that. I didn't exactly keep a transcript, but they go back and forth with Richard pretty much stonewalling him. I remember at one point that they brought up the door being forced open hard enough to embed the doorknob in the wall, and Richard comments that he doesn't have the physical mass to do something like that, to which the detective counters that as an engineer he might know the right spot to kick the door to produce that sort of effect.

But either way, the line of questioning regarding the call peters out and Popham asks Richard what he was doing at the hotel at that time. Richard says he was getting food, that he thinks he made pasta.

The detective makes a note of that and says he's almost done, and then he pulls out a photo of John Staff[0] and asks if Richard knows who that is. He claims ignorance. Popham explains the circumstances of Mr. Staff's death and that a couple of days ago a man comes forward confessing to the murder. The man is clearly traumatized and his wife is going to be shipped off to a mental hospital. She's not saying much, but she's babbling about stuff that sounds like she's recently been haunted. And then, about an hour or so before that, some unknown force tears up the alleyway where Staff was murdered. Popham explains that someone said it was like a bomb went off, but he comments that he was in The War, and he saw bombs and this looks very different.

But he finds it interesting that a man who seems like he's had an experience like that comes in, confesses to the murder of a man whose girlfriend he later married, and then a couple of days later a man whose fiancé had a freak accident has an encounter with someone claiming to talk to her ghost and is then mysteriously murdered. What are the odds of both of those happening in a single week, he wonders?

Richard says that he believes in ghosts, but the notion that someone is going around, contacting the dead, getting revenge, scorned lovers and such, well... it sounds like a radio drama, in his opinion.

At this point the detective, not having anything to hold him on, lets Richard go but tells him not to leave town if he can help it.[1] Richard says something in response, I'm blanking on what, but I think it was an attempt to sound tough and then he heads out. On the way out of the police station, he overhears the cops talking about someone breaking into the Flamingo the night before while they were briefly closed for maintenance and stole a couple of their slot machines. He files that away as he goes to return to the hotel.

And now we rewind several minutes to partway through the interrogation, when Eddy gets a call at the hotel. It's Officer Draper from the police department, wanting to follow up on something and he asks about Richard's whereabouts a couple of days ago at 5-6pm. Eddy says that Richard was with him, and they were eating -- steak and potatoes made by the hotel's kitchen staff. Eddy recognizes the voice of the cop as the same one who came looking for Richard the day before. The officer, having gotten that information, thanks Eddy for his time and hangs up.

Eddy freaks out and gets Kenneth on the phone, wanting to know what's likely to happen if this whole thing with Richard goes sideways. Because he don't know if he gave a wrong answer to that cop, but he knows he couldn't have known the right answer. Kenneth explains that one of two things is likely to happen, depending on what evidence they may or may not have on Richard:

1. They're going to craft a narrative that fits what they have and someone's going to go to jail, or...
2. They hit a dead end and things can't be explained to the law's satisfaction because the American justice system can't accommodate ghosts, and Richard is going to be watched for the rest of his life by people trying to make sense of what happened.

Kenneth's also a little concerned about his own career at this point, because his association with Richard could blow back on him if Richard's arrested of murder. He's pretty sure this isn't going to just blow over and they're all screwed.

Eddy, in a fit of frustration, says he's going to kill Richard, and Kenneth dryly observes that doing so would stop the investigation. Eddy then remarks that if the Wallis confession gets dragged into this somehow, then that's going to be even worse. But Kenneth reiterates that his career's in the toilet to begin with[2], especially if he winds up being associated with a murder investigation.

The only realistic solution, Kenneth argues, is to finger someone else for Max's murder and find a way to make it fit the facts. And he's not comfortable with that, as at that point you're talking about committing more crimes to cover up existing crimes. But regardless, the only options as he sees it are 'Richard goes to jail,' 'Richard disappears,' or 'someone else goes to jail in Richard's place.' And they leave that there for the moment.

Richard gets back to the hotel and tracks down Eddy, who's drinking, and they start talking about the interrogation and go back and forth. Eddy is especially worried about being dragged into this (though Richard reminds him he was still technically there for Max's murder) and somehow screwing up the Wallis testimony. Eddy's afraid to do anything for fear of looking suspicious. And he makes it clear that Richard can remain in the hotel for now, but depending on how things shake out he might have to get his own place afterwards. (I'm breezing through a lot of details and shouting here.)

After that, Richard remembers what he heard about the Flamingo and calls Kenneth. He volunteers up-front that Eddy's already read him the riot act, and then tells him what little he knows about the break-in. (Mostly that it happened.) Kenneth's first thought is that Rossi's going to pull some sort of switcheroo with the slot machines to cast doubt on Kenneth's findings and maybe bring in to question the timeline of when the modifications were put in. So when they get the chance he wants to mark the machines they took so they can later identify them.

But then Kenneth considers that there's something else going on because that seems a little too simple for all this. So he and Richard consider why he might need fresh slot machines in a hurry, and Richard reminds Kenneth that Carmen mentioned a possible occult arrangement. Maybe removing the marked machine from the arrangement is going to screw something up badly enough that they couldn't afford to wait for it to come back on its own. But at the moment, they've got no way of finding out for sure.

Then Richard brings up the subject of his murder case situation. He says that if it comes down to it, he wants Kenneth to be the one to arrest him. If he needs to take the fall, he wants it to look like Kenneth was investigating him the whole time so the agent can save face. Kenneth says that's noble of him, and it also ensures that he's not going to get shot up or something when he's being taken into custody. He says it shouldn't come to that, how ever, but Richard just says it's a 'last resort' situation. Kenneth offers to at least look into things.

And at this point we were still a little ways from our usual stopping time, but there'd been a lot of intense roleplaying going on and we decided to cut it early rather than produce a bunch of tonal whiplash by trying to switch subjects or try to follow that up.

So we left it there for now.

[0]-- If you've forgotten from the recent arc about this, John Staff is the living name of Eddy's geist, the Lonely Proprietor.

[1]-- I mention this here because I don't seem to have written it down in my notes and I can't remember if it actually came up over the course of the interrogation, but I think at some point some connection between Eddy and the Staff/Wallis case came up. I could be wrong, though.

[2]-- Something about vanishing into the desert and having to spend a month dragging himself back to town, half-dead, and not being able to explain himself has put a damper on his status in the Bureau.