Shameless Crud

>> In what may or may not be a newspaper first, Hack Shodd creates an interactive mystery with a plot led by reader e-mail!

by HACK SHODD

CHAPTER 1

Sitting in the Crescent street bar Winnie's, Hack Shodd marvelled at the wonders of winter as he sipped on his Molson Ex. The foam of the beer reminded him of the wet, thick layer of the white stuff that blanketed the city's streets (except it didn't look anything like the muddier snow). As he ordered another beer, he marvelled at how simplistic his thought process was becoming.

"I'm so very tired of the sports beat," he thought to himself. "Crime stories--now there's a veritable goldmine for a writer." He scanned the paper, like a dog would scan a smelly bowl of Alpo. If the obit section didn't tell him something, he reassured himself, nothing would.

As he scanned the page, an amazing thing dawned on him: there they were, a number of obits, all conspicuously appearing on the same day, all about people who'd died. And there seemed to be a trend: many of those listed were in their old age, like, say, in their late 80s or 90s. And for some odd reason, no cause of death was listed. He had his story! Could it be that a serial killer was stalking and doing away with the senior set of Montreal?

He knew he was onto a good thing, but before heading back to the office, Shodd detoured to the Cavendish Mall to pick up some toilet paper, which he'd heard was on special. As it turned out, the rumours were true: $1.99 for nine rolls! He leaped back into his car and put his foot on the gas like a cleanly person stomping on a roach in a dirty restroom.

The Gazette office smelled like mothballs dipped in gin, but Shodd didn't care. To the Internet, where a quick obit search also found that indeed, older people were dying in disproportionate numbers to the young. So many unsolved crimes, so little attention. How could this be happening? But sometimes the most obvious crimes go undetected. His phone rang, a ring that screeched through the airwaves like the shrill scream of an unsuspecting victim who's faced with a masked, axe-wielding murderer with a limp. Shodd picked up the phone. "It's yer Aunt Gladys, she's dead," said his wife. "What? But I just saw her yesterday," he replied, aghast. "Hack, for Christ's sake, she was 98. Whaddaya want?"

Such callousness, even from a wife, was too much to bear. Shodd leaped back into his car, which was parked in a parking lot which looked like a bunch of toys if you look at it from the top floor of the adjacent skyscraper. He raced to the crime scene like a horse in a horse race.

"This looks like a heart attack, pure and simple," said Police Officer O'Malley, at Aunt Gladys's Côte-des-Neiges three-and-a-half. "She was 98--guess her heart just gave out." Shodd knew better--or worse, depending on how you look at it.

Gladys was sitting in her La-Z-Boy rocker, head back. CJAD was blaring in the background, like some kind of rotten radio station run by second-rate trumped-up "personalities." She was halfway through a glass of prune juice, and the Gazette, opened to the crossword, lay beside her corpse. It appeared Gladys had been stumped by a five-letter word for idiot that begins with C and ends with P when she was brutally murdered. "Chump!" Shodd screamed, figuring out her crossword dilemma. But that didn't solve the mystery of her lack of a heartbeat. Officer O'Malley's face contorted into a puzzled expression as he stared at Shodd, who was filling the letters into the crossword.

By some weird coincidence, an ad for Kain and Fetterly Funeral Home began blaring on CJAD. The eeriness of it all sent Shodd racing out onto the street like a scared cat being chased by a rabid wolf during a full moon.

Aunt Gladys was dead. To Shodd, the Geritol Murders had become personal. To hell with work, he had to solve this crime, even if his editors didn't like it. It was back to Winnie's, where another Molson Ex awaited him, and hours of mystery solving that would unravel like an especially big ball of yarn.

NEXT ON "Shameless Crud"

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ALTERNATIVE 1: A Cocoon-like development in which all of those who died are brought back to life by a mysterious force from another planet. Those who've been resurrected have a new spirit about living, and decide to make geriatric porn for the Internet.

ALTERNATIVE 2: Officer O'Malley, as it turns out, was at the scene of every crime. Shodd manages to link O'Malley to the Geritol Murders in a front-page story, but because there's so little evidence nor any motive, O'Malley goes uncharged. Still, the story makes Shodd a Montreal institution, after which he's eternally referred to affectionately as "Shoddy."

ALTERNATIVE 3: Soon, all senior deaths stop, and the seniors, realizing they've been ripped off of their immortality, begin to seek revenge on the young. Montreal is divided in civil war, not between French and English, but between the seniors of Côte-St-Luc, Hampstead and Westmount and the young punks populating the Plateau and Mile-End.

ALTERNATIVE 4: The Habs trade for the top 10 French-Canadian players in the NHL and promptly win 10 straight, putting them in playoff contention. Jeffrey Loria announces construction of a downtown ballpark for the Expos and goes on a free-agent spending spree. There is even talk of Montreal getting NBA and XFL teams. Hack Shodd, rejuvenated, re-embraces the sports beat and the Geritol Murders recede into Montreal media myth.