Steve Braunias provides a true-crime drama.
I hired a private detective once. God I hated him. He was a conceited sonofabitch who gave the impression that he felt a great longing to look at himself in the mirror for hours on end. I suppose he was quite handsome but he wasn't that handsome. I saw a guy recently at a fashion event – yeah, I know, what the hell was I doing there? – who was so handsome that his face glowed like a lantern. The rest of the room was in darkness. Well, everyone wore black.
I hired a private detective as an act of love. She was so moved that she wept. She was a beautiful woman with narrow green eyes and her mouth was set in a kind of smirk. I was fascinated by that smirk and the whole time we were together I wondered what it meant and whence it came from. All I found out about her background is that she came from old money. "First four ships," she explained; we took a tour of Canterbury once and walked along the clifftops of Taylor's Mistake, which her people owned.
I hired a private detective to track down her jewellery. Necklaces and rings and bracelets, all of them heirlooms from some grand ancestor who sailed in on a vessel of ruthless enterprise, had been taken in a burglary. She lived on the beach. At night, the tide shivered in the shiny rocks and a green light from the opposite shore shimmered on the black water. Colonial landowner wealth washed up on her doorstep; she was a catch, but we never really looked that good together. There was something wrong about us, something unconvincing.
I hired a private detective after the police said they couldn't do all that much about it. She was devastated. Generally she wasn't a very emotional person. She was poised; she was restrained, kind of diffident. She moved through life with a light step and had a vague, smokey kind of presence. I found all of that madly attractive. My love for her was like a search party. She was flattered by the close attention, for a while.