It didn’t take Nyarla long to come back and bring with her building's manager, the person with the ladder. Introductions made, ladders handed, all that good and boring stuff that people in the TV show business call “shoe leather”. Crazy thing was, though, he wasn’t wearing any shoes. I couldn’t very well tell if Nyarla was wearing any either.

  Enter the building manager: Nehry Paintertape.

  A man of immense corpulence with a slight purple hue to his skin. Despite it being cool in the apartment building, he was sweating, wiping himself down with a thick scarf that dribbled down onto the floor from its soaked ends.

  “Now I do declare…!”

  I was on top of the ladder that he brought, looking at the body. From this point of view, I could clearly see what looked to be the cause of death. There was an indentation in the man’s head, blood running down (up?) his face. Right behind the man was a high window, which was broken. It looked more long than it did tall, about the length of a person of average height laying down on his side.

  Nehry was gesticulating, drowning in his ube-tinted flesh. Not really. He wasn’t doing that at all, but he did have a penchant for American-southerner-sounding-movie-cliché-phrases, which I didn’t question.

  He was eating a seven course meal on the floor and getting wild fried beastgrease all over Nyarla’s manuscripts. Not really, I lied again. I got down from the ladder and relayed what I figured out.

  “So, the window’s broke, and the guy’s on the ceiling with his head caved in. We should be looking for the murder weapon next. Something blunt and heavy about yea big.” I measured the size of the Hypothetical Murder Weapon X with my hands.

  “Wowwww…you’re so smart…uhh….”

  “What is it?”

  “I never ever caught your name, actually…”

  I nearly did a bit of dying myself. Felt like falling onto the floor in an exaggerated display of bewilderment. It was true that I wasn’t one for introductions, but it still felt ridiculous to me.

  “You made me your slave and you never even cared to get my name?!”

  Nehry just stared at us, tiredlooking and bumplike. As in, like a bump on a log, bystander, just a guy who was there.

  “Umm…mhm, yeah. That’s it!”

  “Morgan Spironolactone.”

  “That’s a stupid name.”

  “Ain’t the best one I’ve never heard now neither.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “How is it ANY worse than ‘Nyarla Paporplastic’ or ‘Nehry Paintertape’? Genuinely, explain that to me. I really want to know.”

  “Umm…well…it kinda sounds like the name of a guy from a fantasy novel. Like, a really bad one…”

  “Where I come from, ‘Nyarla Paporplastic’ would be in the exact same boat.”

  “My name’s put on boats in your world? That’s soooooo cool…but you’re not in your world anymore! What goes there doesn’t matter ‘cuz you’re not there.”

  I groaned. We weren’t really getting anywhere.

  “Anyway, we should look around for the murder weapon. I can’t imagine that they would leave it in here…fingerprints and stuff.”

  “Fingerprints? What’s that?”

  “Your world is so backward.”

  “What are they?”

  “Don’t worry about it, I guess. So, scratch that, the murder weapon may be in here. Was there anything else wrong with the room when you woke up that you remember, Nyarla? If you can even tell anything apart from anything else in this mess you call a room,” not like I was any better in that regard, though.

  “Ummmmm…nope. I was sleeping right in front of the door like I always do…and…um, yeah, nothing was missing, I think.”

  “I see. Well…okay, here’s what we’re going to do, I think. I don’t imagine you like people messing with your stuff, based on what you said earlier when I accidentally stepped on your scribbles.”

  “It’s a manuscript…!!! But yeah, you’re right…I don’t like people touching my things.”

  “I’ll leave you to search this room then for more clues. Remember, blunt instrument, about yea big.” I demonstrated the size again with my hands. “Finding anything off in general would be nice, too.”

  “Off?”

  “Like odd, out of place, weird.”

  “Ohhh. Gotcha.”

  “Nehry and I are going to look outside for more evidence. I think there’s a possibility the murder weapon could be out there, but there could also be other clues too. Nehry, you should see if there are any people lurking about outside or any tenants—er, people staying in this building—still awake.”

  He nodded, more cooperative than I would have thought him to have been. We exited through the door of her room into the hallway. The building was as tall as a two story house but only had six rooms, three on each side. Nyarla’s room was the bottom room on the left side of the building. Nehry’s room was the bottom of the right. That left four other people unaccounted for at minimum, assuming that all rooms were occupied and it was one person to a room.

  Nehry went off knocking and I went off to inspect the circumference of the building. I figured that if they entered the room from the window in Nyarla’s room, then there would be some sort of evidence outside.

  Maybe a mark on the wall if they had climbed up, or an indentation in the soil where they would have placed a ladder, if the ground was fresh enough. Maybe footprints. Hopefully footprints.

  Even if I acted confidently, as it stood I really didn’t have any idea of what to do, or really how to suspect anyone. Who to suspect. I tried to take it one step at a time, but there were some real puzzling elements. One of which being the fact of the corpse hanging upside down with no mechanism holding him up.

  It had to be magical, I thought, but other than that, I had no idea.

  I paced around the edge of the building until I found where Nyarla’s room should have been. The windows were a little difficult to see because they were high up, but her room wasn’t very hard to find due to it being in a corner.

  I made sure to lap the place counter-clockwise starting from her room, in order to see the whole of the building before ending up there. A couple things of importance that I found out: the grass was taller and more unkempt around the building than around other buildings. No other windows appeared to be broken, but I’d need to have entered the rooms individually to know for sure.

  And something else. When I finally reached the outer wall where Nyarla’s room should’ve been, I heard a crunching noise under my feet.

  There were shards of broken glass just outside of Nyarla’s room.