by Leo Vartorella
It all started one night after we pried Mr. Jarocki off the fridge. Every few weeks he would lift a stethoscope from one of the doctors – even at his age, his mind a puddle, he still had the touch – and go down to the kitchen to try and break into the unlocked refrigerator. I saw him with his ear to the door, dragging his stethoscope across the battered white plastic, but I didn’t stop him since I needed to finish my rounds and knew I had about ten minutes before things got graphic. But either I lost track of time or he was moving faster than usual because the next thing I knew, he was screaming. Not pained or worried screams. Deeply sexual screams. It took three of us to get him off. Well not get him off. You know. Off the fridge. He was shouting “Marie! Marie! Oh fuck, Marie!” An old girlfriend, wife, who knows. Mr. Jarocki, like most patients at the Rickenmeyer Home for Criminally Wayward Seniors, did not receive visitors.
After we got him to sleep–his back to us, tangerine-sized bald patch looking out from his nest of gray hair like an unblinking eye–we all did another bed check then went to the breakroom to talk shit and eat Bugles. Due to a previous lawsuit regarding “lurid use of the change dispenser,” vending machines were banned at the Home, but they must have had some deal with Bugles because there were boxes of them for us in the double-wide utility closet where we were allowed to take our two fifteen-minute breaks each night. It was in this room that Fat Eddy–comical misdirection, he was actually quite thin–asked us about the perfect crime.
“Do you think there’s such a thing as the perfect crime?” he said.
“The perfect crime?” said Dan Chuckles. Named after the candy, morbidly obese but devilishly handsome.
“Yup,” said Fat Eddy. He was fastening a Bugle to his left ring finger.
“No such thing,” said Doc. To put it kindly, Doc looked like a bullfrog that had been run over by someone who didn’t have the heart to finish the job. He was the oldest and, as a Senior Orderly, technically our boss. Me, Dan Chuckles and Fat Eddy had all worked at the Home for nine months or less. Doc had been there for 37 years. Each night he drank two very large green Gatorades.
“How do you know?” I asked, a Bugle on each finger.
“I’ve worked here long enough to know. That’s how people end up in the Home. Keep chasing something that doesn't exist, end up going crazy,” said Doc.
“You’ve got a problem with your logic there,” said Dan Chuckles. “Maybe the perfect crime does exist and it’s just that the people who pull it off don’t go crazy and don’t end up in the Home, so you don’t know them. Here in the Home, you only get shitty criminals. The ones who got caught.”
“Everyone gets caught, Daniel. That’s crime 101.”
“According to shitty criminals."
“Boys, boys,” I said. Dan Chuckles held his hands up defensively. Doc burped. From upstairs, the echoes of a mumbling voice, someone crashing into a door. A sleepwalker, probably Mrs. Z. We spun a Bugle to see who would go get her.
***
The next night, I was in the breakroom eating Bugles off my fingertips, watching the grotesquely misproportioned shadow of Dan Chuckles march across the cinderblock wall. He had been reading about the health benefits of marching. Doc was down to the backwash of his first Gatorade when Fat Eddy came in waving a piece of paper.
“Hey guys, I got something here for you. I asked one of those AI chatbots about the perfect crime,” he said.
Doc made a sound like a dog sneezing.
“An AI whatbot?”
“Chatbot. You ask it questions and it answers. Artificial intelligence.”
“So, what’d it say?” asked Dan Chuckles. He was breathing hard, each word an island.
“I’ll read it to you.” Fat Eddy cleared his throat. “It is often debated whether there is such a thing as the perfect crime, and though there is no unified consensus, justice scholars from the University of East Bromwich have developed software to test hundreds of thousands of criminal scenarios and compare them across criteria which include risk, payoff, ingenuity and gumption. Surprisingly, they determined the perfect crime would entail two strangers meeting on a train and taking out insurance policies on each other’s asses. The subjects would then each gain three hundred pounds and redeem their respective policies.”
For fifteen seconds, the only sound in the breakroom was the crunch of Bugle on molar.
“What?” I said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” said Dan Chuckles.
“Crock of shit is what it is,” said Doc.
“I’m not saying I agree, this is just what the chatbot wrote,” said Fat Eddy.
“I don’t believe you. What kind of computer program would write something like that? It doesn’t make any sense,” said Dan Chuckles.
“Well, the technology is still young, they're working out the kinks, so not everything is going to be perfect,” said Fat Eddy. “But still pretty interesting, huh?”
“I don't know. It's not even a crime. And how could you take an insurance policy out on someone else's ass? What does that mean?” I asked.
“Not sure. Something about them gaining three hundred pounds I guess.”
“It's all mixed up. Double Indemnity, Hitchcock,” said Doc.
“Hitchcock took out an insurance policy on his own ass?” said Dan Chuckles.
“No, Strangers on a Train, the plot. But it’s all confused. This just proves my point. No such thing as a perfect crime.”
“Maybe. I’m just reading you what it wrote,” said Fat Eddy. “Thought it was interesting.”
Dan Chuckles’ watch beeped and he started marching again. Doc burped.
***
A couple weeks later, it was just me and Fat Eddy in the breakroom.
“You know, this is my last shift,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m moving to Tucson. My brother-in-law has a metal detecting business down there. Tours, rentals. That kind of stuff.”
“Huh. Did you give your two weeks' notice?”
“Nah, fuck that. I’ll just tell Doc on my way out. Go home, get a couple hours sleep, then I’m off.”
“Hot down there?”
“I think so. The desert, you know.” He rolled a Bugle between his fingers, held it up to the light like a jeweler. “I wanted to let you know, I wrote that thing about the perfect crime. The thing I said was from an AI chatbot.”
“Okay. Why?”
He shrugged. “Dunno. Just because. Don’t tell anybody, alright?”
“Alright.”
***
I didn’t last much longer at the Home. The pay sucked and a man can only eat so many Bugles. For a while I thought I might get a postcard from Fat Eddy, a picture of a cactus or something, but that would probably be tough without my address. Or my name. I’ll tell you what though, any time I’m on a train and I see two guys sitting across from each other, I always wonder if they're trying to pull something off. It’s almost gotten me in trouble a few times. The staring. Imagining what their asses would look like three hundred pounds heavier, how much that might be worth.
______
Leo Vartorella is a writer from Brooklyn, NY, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New World Writing, HAD, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House and scaffold.
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