The body floating face-down
in the mansion's fancy pool created a horrific image, one that would surely prevent
those who have witnessed it from swimming in artificial water for a while. I
wasn’t one of those people. I’ve seen enough bodies in my line of work to
become indifferent to them. The sight stopped affecting me years ago and now I
could look at a dead body without any unnecessary emotions disturbing my
thought process. I can be very professional and collected in the sight. People
die. People kill. It is a fact. It is what it is.
The man’s body was pierced through by three
bullets in total, but not a single drop of blood could be traced in the water.
This was a clean job, done by someone who knew how to handle a gun, a hitman or
a gang member perhaps. My people told me that the mansion belonged to some
bigshot, who made his fortune by disputable and mostly illegal means, but
somehow always managed to avoid getting arrested. I went to speak with the lady
of the house who had found the body in her pool that morning. She was clearly
upset, not because she couldn’t swim for the time being, but because the victim
was the writer of a movie she was about to star in. This roused my suspicions
but I was missing the point. I couldn’t think of any reason why she would have
her rich husband kill the writer, especially when he had yet to finish writing
the movie. That would leave her without an acting job, wouldn’t it?
I decided that reading the script might give
me the insight I needed to solve this case, so I went to the writer’s house.
His place was small and messy, with papers strewn all over it. I looked for the
script amongst the piles of papers. When I finally found it, I started reading
it. It was full of notes and rewritings but after a while two things became
apparent: one, this was going to be another B-movie and two, the heroine’s
lines were getting fewer and fewer with every correction.
Mystery solved. The husband wanted to scare
the writer into giving his girl the protagonist role she wanted with plenty of
lines and chances to unfold her “talent”. Somewhere along the way things got
out of hand, which is always the case when you give guns to stupid people. The
writer was drunk and drew a pistol (which we later found in the mansion´s
bushes) and the husband´s lackeys were forced to kill him on the spot. After
that, they quickly threw him in the pool and went to get a car in order to
properly dispose the body. Apparently, the last thing they expected was the
wife coming back earlier than usual and screaming for help upon seeing the
body.
