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Irratino always drew his tarot cards on a Monday morning, bright and early. It was the start of the week; he had spent another excellent night with Logico; he was well-rested and looking forward to his work. Yes, a Monday morning was the best time to read the cards.
It would be a simple three-card read, he decided. Past, present, future. He rummaged around blindly in his card bin and came up with a pack, still in plastic. Upon looking at it, he winced, just a little bit. It was one Logico had given him, and for all the man’s good intentions, he had no good sense of design. It was the gaudiest thing he’d ever seen from the packaging alone. But Logico knew well enough about his bins of various methods by which he selected one out of many of that day’s method of prediction, so Irratino fobbing him off with ‘I’ll use it when I use it’ was sufficient excuse.
Still, he’d come up with this one, so he’d deal with the neon and glitter. Shuffling and cutting were natural actions, and he dealt himself the three he needed.
He drew for his past, and smiled. The Chariot upright. All was well–he didn’t need the cards to tell him that, but it was a welcome reinforcement. A good beginning.
His present was less assuring. The Seven of Wands, reversed. It augured a mass of troubles; he needed to pick his path carefully. His attention could not waver or split. He frowned. Very well, he would do so.
Moving on to the future, his frown deepened. The Eight of Cups, reversed. His progress would regress; his path forward would wind backward. Something in his life would force an inversion.
Well, he was forewarned. Now he could be forearmed.
-
Admittedly, sometimes it felt like forewarning made no impact. But, Irratino told himself, the fact of predictions assisted in mitigating what dire circumstances arose. So he’d left home late and got caught in a traffic jam. He could well have been caught in the pileup if he’d left on time. Likewise the spillage of paperwork might have fallen into the just-mopped floor instead of the carpet. Likewise his favourite sandwich at lunch might have given him food poisoning if it hadn’t been sold out.
Likewise the argument with Logico could have gone much worse.
It had unsettled Irratino, and he wasn’t feeling any better about it when he woke on Tuesday morning. Maybe even worse; he couldn’t remember what had sparked the argument. His quick scrying in an abandoned coffee? Logico handling the suspects?
His digging into the bin of crystal balls didn’t help his mood; despite his keeping them all individually wrapped in velvet, one had slipped out and cracked against another escapee, and he learned this by pricking his finger on the victim. Taking care of his finger, doing his morning reading (answer unclear, ask again later), actually having breakfast and all the usual habits of his morning took up much time. Thus it was that he didn’t bother to read the message all the way through, focusing only on the address.
Smitty hurried up to meet him as he parked, wringing their hands. This in itself was strange; Smitty was good at their job, and Irratino respected this by pulling aside one of the numerous constables that swarmed around the perimeter of the location of the crime scene. He normally saw them at the crime scene.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” Smitty was saying, darting in front of him before he could make his way into the building. They kept doing that, in fact, no matter which way Irratino turned, even though they kept backing away to allow him to move forward. It was annoying. More than that, it was concerning. Irratino stopped dead and stared up at Smitty.
“All right. What is it? Someone’s contaminated the crime scene? Done a runner?”
Smitty just wrung their hands more frantically. “Nossir, it’s, it’s Deductive Logico, sir, he’s- he’s-”
Irratino wasn’t tall enough to reach all the way up to Smitty’s shoulders, so he put his hands on Smitty’s arms as far up as he could instead. “Smitty.”
Smitty drew in a ragged breath, blurted “he’sthevictimsir!” and then burst into tears.
Irratino wasn’t clear precisely what happened next. Presumably, he had alarmed Smitty in some way, because when he came back to himself he was sitting in a corner of the building manager’s office, with a voluminous coat around his shoulders and a steaming cup of what smelled like coffee made with dishwater in his hands. Smitty, kneeling to his left, was emptying a packet of sugar substitute into said cup; a small pile of torn packets was rising beside him. The tears on their face had dried to tracks, but they were still hiccupping in the way of abortive sobs.
“Do stir that for me, please,” he murmured, handing the cup to Smitty. It would give them something to do, and he needed to think. This was obviously the catastrophe foretold. But how could the fates keep back how severe it was? How centered on someone so prominent in his life? Had he known it was Logico whose luck was to turn so badly, he could have warned him. He could have saved him! Irratino felt the regret and pain like a shiver up his spine. He touched his face, finding it dry. He hadn’t cried.
He could cry later. Right now, he breathed in deeply, straightened his spine, swept off the coat, took the cup (Smitty had stretched it out to him readily), stood, and downed the concoction. Then he spent a few seconds coughing and spluttering because it was too hot and too awful despite the sweetener.
Smithy arrived soon after, with baggies of evidence piled on a cart she had commandeered from someone. Her explanations washed over him like water, sluicing away his emotions. Now was the time to avenge his beloved friend; now was the time to see things through and get him justice. It was easy to find an empty space in which to do his work. Invoking Logico’s spirit would do no good; reaching the ghost of someone freshly murdered was difficult at the best of times, and Logico was probably not going to give him the satisfaction of admitting the existence of an afterlife.
Each possible crime scene was clean when he entered them. The forensic team did quick work–management often insisted on having their rooms back to use as soon as possible, so the team doubled as cleanup. It wasn’t necessary for what he was going to do. In each room, he set the tray on the floor just inside the entrance, and began flipping coins, marking the results in his notebook as he went. It was a tedious process, but Irratino always found the I Ching a valuable source of information.
The results this time were frustratingly unclear. Only one area could be cleared as having no death occurring there; the rest returned maybes or prompts for action instead of answers. The weapons were likewise as difficult in discerning its successful use in murder. Irratino found himself involving the suspects more–where they’d been, what they might have used, their reasons to kill Logico. But still he could not pick one out as being noticeably more guilty than the others. He continued having each of them drawing tarot cards, drinking cups of tea made with the torn open contents of what teabags the team scrounged up for him.
Eventually he had them flip coins, as he had with the crime scenes. Their motives were so banal–money, secrets, reputation. The suspects were varyingly curious or casual about the results; about half of them asked what their hexagram said. Only one elicited a much stronger response.
“All right, fine!” bellowed Grandmaster Rose at last. “I was in love with him! But he wouldn’t have it, he was always pining and swooning over you–” Smithy and Smitty had both tackled him before he could speak any further, but that was enough. Irratino was rooted to the spot. Paralyzed. Speechless. Immobile.
Aoi had towed him out of the interrogation room. “Sir,” he was saying as he settled Irratino into another, comfier chair. “Sir, are you all right? Do you want some water, sir?”
Irratino didn’t answer him. He was focused instead in getting his breathing under control, in clawing his way out of the fog of grief and regret back into the clear space where he could see justice done.
But even if he had solved the crime, he had not brought Logico back to life.
He could hear one of the team exiting, but he didn’t look up until they returned with another set of footsteps, and someone touched his shoulder.
Logico, with one of his brows raised in an even more magnificent arch than usual, was there. Alive. Very much not with any sort of stab wound in his gut (although that might be hidden). His arms were crossed, and he had a light flush on his face (surely not the result of any poison).
Irratino would not have said he was the type for grand romantic demonstrations, but he immediately ran forward, jumped to reach Logico’s face, and pulled him down in to a kiss. By the time they pulled apart, Akane had started her stopwatch and the rest of the team had placed bets, not that Irratino or Logico noticed. They only had eyes for each other.
“How was that taste of your own medicine?” Logico murmured, though it wasn’t easy to decipher, being that they were barely apart enough to breathe, and still pecking each other intermittently. Irratino had only the sentence itself and not its meaning, and it took a few more kisses for it to penetrate.
He pulled back farther, still in Logico’s arms, and stared at him. “Was this retribution?”
“You kind of have been faking your death regularly for ages, boss,” Smithy piped up from the room, where she and Smitty had allowed Grandmaster Rose to stand up, but with each one still holding his shoulder.
“He bribed us to help him with that,” Aoi explained to Logico. Irratino glared at him out of the corner of his eye. Traitor.
Logico smothered a laugh. “Ah, that explains why you all were so willing to go along with it.” They had helped him fake it? Were they all betraying him?
“I can’t believe you did all this just to jolt him into admitting his feelings,” Grandmaster Rose complained. “Can I leave? Since I obviously am not guilty.” He caught Irratino’s glare, and rolled his eyes. “And no, I’m not going to interfere in your little romance. It’s not him I’m interested in. You two always mooning over each other was getting boring. I didn’t think playing a part in this was going to take all morning.”
Reluctantly, Irratino dismissed all of them. And then he had to face the music.
“Well, how was it?” Logico prodded. “Thinking I was dead?”
“Jolt me into admitting my feelings for you?” Irratino retorted. “That’s how you go about it?”
“You started it,” Logico said easily, and pulled him closer again. “Don’t blame me.” Irratino allowed Logico this capper to their argument, since they were making out again. Eventually they were shooed out of the office when people had to actually use their desks, and they strolled out, closer than they ever were on their Sunday night outings.