I should clean out the box more.

The inbox I mean, it’s just a box I stash under the door’s mail slot every time I’m out for the day. Used to just sit on the floor but that would get knocked over, and then I’d come back from the day and spill god knows how many letters and requests all over the office. Someone got a tad angry at me when I misspelled their name, solely because a wet loafer print smeared Laughlin into Langoliun. Last time I made that mistake.

Now I just have a hanging pot that I found a couple of hangars on that hold them on to the box just securely enough to not be a problem. Not exactly an ideal solution, it rattles like crazy and if a mailman has the panache to shove a box into that slot and into it, it comes crashing down. Then someone complains, and the landlady’s yelling at me for the next few hours about how “pernicious they are” with their whining requests. I thank Ms. O’Neil for some favors. Low rent, lower complaints about my work and my business but I do have to acquiesce when she’s dealing with her other tenants.

Sure, they do get precedent. They’re treating this building as it was intended to be ,a proper apartment complex. And I do indeed use my office as an apartment. I kept the bed, the sink, the kitchenette and all that garbage. And I still need the space to do my work as it stands and thus the living room is my office. There’s a desk, there’s the cabinets, there’s an ashtray, a typewriter, my letterbox and the space I claim to have a secretary in. I don’t, although I’ve sent a job listing out in the classifieds for one several times and I got bupkis for it.

Well I mean not bupkis entirely, I got a few people interested. They came, either young fresh-out-of-school girls who wanted their first job to be something good or retirees who wanted something that wasn’t Gamble’s Dime Store. I’d show them the station, what I’d ask them to do, what the rates were and they’d give me a curt “thank you for their time” and I awaited a call back that never happened.

It’d get to me more if it was something more prudent, but cases have been quiet as of late.
Nothing to the worst extent that I’ve been considering polishing up my own resume and floating it up the channels, but it’s not the highlight reel. Beer Act and mentions of finally getting rid of the Volstead Act have made all the local moonshiners go quiet, and even the most ardent loudmouths are trying to keep out of the eyes of Johnny Law. Not that I’m complaining as much, they were always the worst to handle.

Only so many damsels in distress and gin runners with more automatic weapons than sense I can take in one month, pay or otherwise.

I’ve taken the break, both mandated by my doctor and by the twelve stitches the butt of a Remington rifle left in my skull. There was more than enough work in my back catalog to go through that wasn’t as liable to get me killed.

Countering industrial espionage, doing the dirty work for some rich fucks in Uptown who wanted to sort their family affairs before their tickers stopped working. Standard stuff. That’s the devil of the thing too, that’s most of my work. You say your job is “private detective” and people are already putting up the fancy ideas of what you do. Dashing Mr. Breckenridge, solving the day with a cigar in his lips, a good idea in his brain and a .38 in his palm. True, some of his jobs ended like that.

The rest ended with a “thank you, sir”, a check in my hand and an ice pack shoved under my cap while I drove my Auburn down their half an acre of driveway. Said ice pack nursing the blunt end of a book thicker than my chest about their family history and having to piece together what in god name their cousin was to the grander scheme of things. They weren’t my favorite, it felt like busy work but they paid well enough.

Hell, one of them paid me with the car.

Bribery was flattery in this business, and he can always taste that familiar funky tang with gifts like this. Lots of the big name families of New England kept their fingers delicately wrapped around the necks of one another, jockeying for power and playing with ruthless efficiency. Well oil machines of blackmail and subterfuge, backstabs and knuckle dusters loaded to bear with legal documentation and Pinkerton agents. He’s honestly had his teeth broken in by more hired muscle from then than mafiosos.

Doing business in Boston. Never again.
The pile is thinned out slowly by flicking through how his name is written. It’s a weird way of approaching dealing with mail, but it was one that showed promise. The people that knew him knew him, they knew to use all the right butter to grease him up for the work. None of that “to whom it may concern” trash. He knew what that was. It was either a bit of the ol’ entrapment and hooking up him to the wires or some cake muncher trying to get him to fall for an interview. Damn journalists.

Always one of them working an angle and wanting to use him as a source, always using the most asinine ways of getting his attention. Call me by my name, not this nome-de-plume trash you use to get away with stuff at the Herald.

The box itself is jammed full of requests, here and there with little true cohesion. While nominally he likes to open them up and check, he usually can gauge the quality now from merely the words scribbled on it. It was a system of sorts.

Something that came off of a typewriter implied either a corporate or governmental governing body, although the former had a tendency of thinking that writing a letter by hand would make him not assume some bit of espionage. They were pretty typical types, slimy, didn’t pay well or paid absolute gobs for pains of work. Coin flip between hustling antique book store owners for some no-name patent drawing so a company could sue another for infringement or taking on some Pinkertons with nothing more than a snub nosed and a dream. I like having my teeth intact, thank you.

Now handwriting, that seemed like muddy water to go into. Pens and pencils, different impressions on the paper, the quality of the paper, the quality of the pen and/or pencil. Devoting a lot of time to it was something your average cop or PI didn’t do, but it was a fascinating bit of art in its own right. And learning it had saved him time, money, effort, medical bills and so on. A divining rod of sorts, forged in his mind. With these letters three, let us speak to how they’re different.

The first is boring normal card stock, probably bought at a corner grocery store with leftover change. It’s flimsy, it has sharp edges that always love to cut your finger when you’re not thinking about it and it is begging for someone to oh so accidentally rip it open and steal the contents. Not that he ever has done that and fibbed he “found it like that”, oh no that would be immoral and moderately illegal.

The front fascia is more interesting, albeit not by a large margin. It’s written in pencil, however by someone with some level of decorum. Rather than the brash imprint of graphite to paper that you normally find when you hand a person a pencil and ask them to put down their John Hancock, the writer has elected to be soft. Guide the tip of the pencil to work the magic. They even managed to spell the name right. Breckenridge.

Most people tend to assume Breckinridge and hope the Postal Service fills in the rest.

The letter feels slim, not too heavy, not too light. Just enough words on a piece of paper to be interesting without overwhelming him with needless minutia. Someone competently put this together, and it intrigues him. But not yet. Settle current affairs now, come back to the intrigue.

The second letter is a little less chintzy, decent card stock of an envelope with that smooth feeling to it. It isn’t just paper, it’s card stock, as the advertisement would read should anyone feel a need in making one for something so benign. It’s silky to the touch, a decent weight within its delicate folds and it’s written in ever so dashing pen.

Never liked pens. Permanency to them that always made application a problem. Misspell an ame, address or anything in pencil and you can at the very least scrub it out and the highest risk you run is a cheap eraser ripping a page in half. A pen is here and done, now that address is forever 193 Mooore Avenyue.

That being said, handwriting is a little brackish with it. It has a shaky hand writing it, but not in a way of concern but mild ineptitude. Too long strokes between A and G, a splotch in the one corner that’s more than dyed straight through to the letter itself. It says either someone’s just got a pen and is trying to figure it out, or that it’s someone who has got a pen and refuses to learn how to use it before wheeling and dealing.

He can already smell the ego with one and the problems with the other.

The third one though. Wax seal.

That’s rare.

A form of ancient panache that, while excessive in the modern day, evokes the feelings of yore. This be not a simple letter asking for assistance, Ser Breckenridge, this be a tome of ultimate power. A request beseeching you to assist the Lord of Bumbleshire in his taking of the Castle of Lower Grondlesnatchery. Exquisite cardstock underneath, this had the drippings of something rich.

Rich aloof people were suckers for private detectives. Many people do not quite understand this about the American wealthy, but there is a constant war going on between the ultra rich and each other. They’re utter devils behind the scenes, spending their hard earned or stolen cash to batter each other with croquet mallets of litigation, gossip and all levels of skullduggery. It was a field of cut throats, people employed by cut throats and the most fun of all, the cut throat’s uncut throaty kids who were settling who gets what part of the estate.

Estate deals are, without question, a favorite.

Morbid? Yes. Utterly vampiric in nature given he’s taking money out of the closers of one person’s life. But he always had a principle. No one without a six digit net worth and with the connections of New England, that was not impossible to manage. He had floated offers up to Rockefellers and Carnegies and schmoozed his way through their dorky but still horrifically wealthy underlings. It made dividends.

He didn’t like admitting that he liked these gigs but they were easy, paid well and normally speaking rich bastards never hired good people. His competition were endless mixtures of other nobodies given lump sums playing detective. The real players played with Pinkertons, the lower ranking alumnus used goons like him and bozos like them. It was easy money and he was all for it.

Which made it worse when he saw how his name was written. For it was not simply just “Mr. Breckenridge” or “Clint Breckenridge” or even “Breckenridge Detective Agency” for that would be too simple. The Esteemed Detective Clark Breckenridge.

Which meant only one family.

The Moore’s.