Jacques Guillaume: Missing lawyer

 Jacques Guillaume: Missing lawyer

Maître Laurent Besson had not appeared at the Palais for four days. His clerk came to the office near République because the police had said a grown man with no note and no blood was allowed to be elsewhere. Guillaume made coffee. He did not ask how she took it.

“What did he take?” he said.

“His good coat. Not the briefcase. His passport is still in the drawer. The diary for next week is full.”

Guillaume walked the chambers himself. Besson’s desk was tidy in the way of a man who meant to return. One file was missing: a small commercial matter for a restaurant group in the 11th, a lease dispute that had suddenly become a question of who owned the company that owned the lease. The clerk said Besson had been short with everyone since a meeting on the Tuesday.

Guillaume did not flash a card. He bought a coffee at the place across from the restaurant and listened. The manager remembered the lawyer. He had come in after closing, argued with a man in a leather jacket, and left looking ill. The man in the jacket had a scooter and a habit of parking it on the pavement outside a gaming club two streets over.

Besson was in a room above that club. Not tied. Not beaten much. He had been told to sit there until he signed a paper withdrawing the client’s claim. He had not signed it. He had also not been allowed to leave. Guillaume did not go up alone. He called a commissaire he still spoke to, gave him the address, the file name, and the scooter plate, and waited on the corner with the clerk’s number ready.

They brought Besson down twenty minutes later. Coat on, hands shaking, diary still in his head. Guillaume walked him as far as the Métro. He told the clerk where to collect him and sent the invoice the next morning. The lease fight would go back to court. Guillaume had only been hired to find the man who was supposed to argue it.

Dave the Hamster: The Case of the Painted Corn Bin

 Dave the Hamster: The Case of the Painted Corn Bin

The little one sat on the edge of the crate with her arms folded and her whiskers pointed in the exact angle that meant I don’t believe you.

She was a rescued hamster—small, clean, still learning that not every hand that opened a cage wanted something from her. Dave had found her three nights ago behind a pet shop dumpster and brought her to the only place he trusted: a quiet corner of the world that still smelled like straw and honesty. She had asked, flat out, how a hamster got to be a detective. Not a joke. A challenge.

Dave lit the plastic-straw cigar he didn’t actually smoke and sat back on his heels.

“Before Boston,” he said. “Before the notebook was full. Before the big man in the boots. There was a farm.”

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Farmer Brown’s place sat at the end of a dirt lane that turned to mud whenever it felt like it. The animals had a rulebook—literally. A board nailed to the barn wall with chores, rations, and the order of things written in chalk that got rewritten more often than it should have. Dave had been small even then. Field stock. Fast. The kind of animal other animals looked over when they were counting heads.

The pigs were getting fat.

Not the honest kind of fat that comes from work and a fair share. The other kind. The kind that happens when the corn in the bin doesn’t match the chalk on the board. Every morning the rations were measured. Every evening the board said the numbers were even. And every night the pigs went to sleep heavier than the day before.

Dave started watching.

He didn’t have a notebook yet. He had memory and a stubborn streak. He noticed the corn bin had a fresh coat of paint along the bottom edge—bright, clean, like someone wanted the wood to look new. He noticed the rulebook’s chalk lines were always a little thicker on the days the pigs smiled. He noticed a trough behind the far shed that never appeared on any chore list.

The chickens said it was none of his business. The cows said the pigs had always been greedy. The sheep said nothing at all. Dave said less. He measured.

One night he slipped under the fence and into the space the pigs thought belonged to them alone. The secret trough was there, half full of corn that should have been in the main bin. The paint on the corn bin wasn’t decoration. It covered the mark where the true level had been carved into the wood years ago. Someone had raised the visible line and called it fair.

Dave didn’t confront them in the open. He was too small for open. He left proof where the right eyes would find it: a trail of corn kernels from the secret trough back to the bin, a scrap of the old measurement mark he’d scraped clear of paint, and—because even then he understood the power of a written record—a careful line of scratches on the barn wall that matched the real numbers.

Henrietta the hen found it first. She was the one who kept the morning count. She looked at the scratches, looked at the bin, looked at Dave, and didn’t laugh.

The pigs tried to rewrite the board one more time. The other animals had already seen the truth. Farmer Brown—when the noise finally reached him—had the secret trough broken up and the rations set back to the old marks. The pigs stayed fat enough. They just stopped getting fatter on everyone else’s share.

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Dave tapped ash that wasn’t there off the end of the straw.

“Henrietta found me after,” he said. “Said a detective needed a proper hat if he was going to keep sticking his nose in. She gave me the fedora. Too big at first. I grew into it. The notebook came later—Boston taught me paper lasts longer than scratches on a wall. But the looking started on that farm.”

The little hamster’s arms had uncrossed. Her eyes were still sharp, but the doubt had moved over to make room for something else.

“That’s how I learned,” Dave said. “The smallest eyes see the biggest wrongs. The pigs counted on nobody checking the paint. Nobody checking the trough. Nobody small enough to care about a line in the wood. Justice doesn’t start with a badge. It starts with noticing.”

He slid a clean page across the crate toward her and set a stub of pencil on top of it.

“Now get out there and take notes.”

She picked up the pencil. It looked enormous in her paws. She didn’t put it down.

Outside, the city made its usual noise. Inside, for a moment, it still smelled a little like a barn at the end of a dirt lane—where a small animal had learned that a painted corn bin was never just paint, and that the first case a detective ever works is the one that teaches him why he looks at all.

Dave & Marmalade: The Wire Job

 Dave & Marmalade: The Wire Job

Cheaters Tavern ran on noise the way other places ran on light. Music, argument, glasses hitting wood—enough cover that a man could talk business in the back booth and believe the room wasn’t listening. Dave noticed the regular on a Thursday.

The guy never ordered a drink. Same stool near the back booth, every night. Water he barely touched. Left when the booth turned over. Dave wrote it down the way he wrote everything: time in, time out, which way the coat was folded, whether the eyes watched the room or the table. Most people would have called it nothing. Dave called it a pattern.

He told Marmalade the next afternoon over a plate of fries neither of them had paid for yet.

“Guy’s not drinking,” Dave said. “He’s listening.”

Marmalade licked salt off a claw. “Or he’s broke.”

“Broke people don’t tip the bartender to keep the water coming. This one does.”

That was enough. They split the work the way they always did. Dave took the small spaces. Marmalade took height, muscle, and anything that required a presence people didn’t argue with.

Dave spent two nights mapping the booth from underneath and behind—service gaps, baseboards, the narrow runs a body his size could fit without collecting stares. Nothing on the furniture. Marmalade checked the upstairs hallway that fed the old ventilation and caught the smell first: hot batteries and the sharp stink of wiring that had been running too long in a tight space. Dave couldn’t have reached the vent without a ladder and a scene. Marmalade popped the grate, reached in, and came back down with a look that said the job had stopped being theoretical.

The bug was small, pointed at the back booth where the serious conversations happened. Someone wanted the talk that didn’t go in notebooks.

They traced the regular. He wasn’t mob. He was a bar owner from three streets over who’d been losing the good whiskey accounts to Cheaters for a year and had decided that if he couldn’t win the supplier, he could steal the terms. The water act was cover. He collected the recordings, transcribed the useful parts, and tried to undercut the deals before Cheaters closed them.

Dave wanted to end it there. Small case. Clean. Marmalade was already shaking his head.

“Smell’s wrong,” the cat said. “This guy’s selling more than supplier names. Watch the dead drops.”

They watched. The rival owner wasn’t only undercutting whiskey. He was packaging the same conversations—who was moving what, who was short, who needed a quiet favor—and selling the highlights to actual muscle from a crew that didn’t care about bourbon. The bar owner thought he was running a petty theft. He’d become an unpaid research assistant for people who broke fingers when the information was good.

The anticlimax came first. They caught the rival in the alley behind his own place with a pocket full of transcripts and the face of a man who’d just realized the joke was on him. He folded without a fight. Dave almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Then the real muscle showed up looking for the next delivery, and the night stopped being funny. Marmalade handled the negotiation the way he handled most things that required size and a lack of patience. Dave documented the names, the times, and the particular threats that got made when the muscle understood the tap was burned. By morning the rival owner was explaining himself to people who didn’t care about his whiskey problem, and the crew that had been buying the feeds had a new reason to stay away from Cheaters.

They walked back toward the tavern in the thin early light. Dave’s notebook had three fresh pages. Marmalade’s shoulder carried a scrape from the alley.

At the corner they both reached for the door at the same time and knocked heads with the exact same dull sound they always made when they forgot the height difference.

Dave rubbed his forehead. Marmalade rubbed his.

“You take the high stuff,” Dave said.

“You take the vents,” Marmalade answered.

It was as close to a truce speech as either of them ever got. Inside, Cheaters was already waking up—chairs coming down, first coffee going on, the back booth empty and quiet. Dave ordered water he planned to drink. Marmalade ordered something that came in a wider glass. Neither of them mentioned Brogan. They hadn’t needed him. The detective instinct had been enough: notice the pattern, follow the smell, let the small case show its larger teeth.

Dave opened the notebook to a clean page and wrote the date. Then one line underneath:

Wire in the vent. Rival bar. Actual muscle. Heads bumped. Still even.

Marmalade looked over his shoulder, snorted once, and raised his glass.

“Next time you climb the vent,” he said.

“Next time you fit under the booth,” Dave answered.

They both knew neither thing would happen. That was the point of the partnership. One of them went small. One of them went large. Between the two of them, the room got covered. And Cheaters, for another night at least, kept its conversations where they belonged.