Vic was six hours into his investigation of the dead irish boxer when he visited Dead Dave. Dave got his name from the hundreds of death threats made against him over the years, mostly due to his profession. He was a full-time rat. Not the type that talked to get himself out of trouble, but the kind that stuck his nose into everyones business so he would have info to sell. If you were shady, Dave knew all about you.

"I need info on a boxer's woman. The dead irishman, Feeney." Vic said without wasting breath on pleasantries.

"Mona?" Dave said. "Did she step in shit, Vic? Nice lady, that one. Too good for Feeney."

"Just tell me everything you know about her. It's business, Dave." Vic was already going through the man's cupboards, making himself at home and looking for booze.

Dead Dave knew this gal for years. The way he was speaking, he might even have a thing for her. Apparently she was beautiful, from a good family with a schoolteacher mom that died when she was a kid, and a father who was a chemist with an industrial company nearby. She went to school, paid her taxes, and on Saturdays was usually beaten bloody by her bastard boxer boyfriend. Dave was too weak to stand up to him about it, and Feeney just joked that she saved him gym fees by letting him "work out" on her. Nice guy. Nice enough for this girl to want him dead, Vic thought. He scratched down her address and paid Dave half of what he was asking, since he was out of whiskey.

Vic punched the wooden door to the Feeney home with shaking hands. When Mona answered she was still in a bathrobe despite it being nearly six pm.

"Go away, whoever you are. I am grieving." She said, swinging the door closed and turning before realizing the unwanted guest had his foot in the door.

"You are gonna want to talk with me lady" Vic said, "I know you killed Jack, and I need to know the details." She gasped at the accusation, but didn't deny it as Vic stepped though the doorway and began rifling through her kitchen.

"I don't know who told you I hurt Jack, but they're damn liars!" Mona said through forced sobs. "I loved him. And he died in the ring, for God's sake!"

Vic found a half empty bottle of bourbon and a coffee mug, sat down at the kitchen table and poured to the brim. "Nobody told me anything, miss" Vic said without taking his eyes off the cup as it rose to his lips. "But if I had a daughter who was getting the shit kicked out of her on a regular basis, I would want to kill the man responsible. And if that man was as tough a sonovabitch as Jack was, I would probably shoot the bastard. Unless I had access to thousands of lethal poisons and had the education to use them, that is." He swallowed the contents of the mug in one gulp and placed it back on the table to be filled again. He had her full attention, and she reached for the bottle to fill his cup for him.

Being a man of low moral character, Vic Musket enjoyed betting on the occasional prizefight, and the more lopsided the victory, the better. But he rarely had the kind of scratch that would get him into betting on the casino bouts, leaving the weekend drifter matches as his venue. There you could fix a match by buying the loser a few drinks beforehand, unless of course he was irish. Booze was like spinach was to popeye for the micks, and that hard lesson cost him seventy bucks one time. But dry out a hard drunk and he couldn't drive a car, let alone win a fight. So when the papers reported about the in ring death of boxing legend "Green" Jack Feeney as related to a seizure from alcohol withdrawal, everything seemed to add up. Until the mob came knocking at Vic's car door.

The rapping at the window interrupted a pleasant dream about sodomizing a young filipino prostitute, and left Vic wondering if his wet clothes were due to sleeping in a car at noon during a heatwave or the combination of pissing himself and a wet dream. He gathered his senses and noticed a greaseball guido in a suit trying none too hard to disguise his mob connections standing outside. He gathered himself and followed the man into a nearby alleyway that served as Vic's office to either discuss business or get stabbed. Truth be told, Vic would accept either.

"We need you to look into Feeney's death last Saturday, Vic" the man said with a disgusted look on his face, possibly from the stench of the makeshift alleyway latrine. "One of my guys had a deal with him to throw the fight, and we think somebody fucked with our play and took him out."

"But if he was supposed to throw the fight anyways, what was the fix? He lost, didn't he?" Vic asked with a confused look.

"Whatchoo talkin about, Vic? If a guy fuckin dies in the ring it's a no contest. And we lost out on over 50 grand here! Somebody was messing around. We know Feeney wasn't fighting dry. He was shitfaced two nights before the fight at one of our clubs!"

Apparently the rules in sanctioned matches are a bit different than in the drifter bouts. In those fights a win by death paid out double. The guido didn't like being questioned, and was poking his finger in Vic's chest hard. He might be the first guy to get away with that, too.

"Alright, but what's in it for me? There are whores around here that rely on my business."

The man shook his head in disbelief at Vic's statement. "You tryin to be cute, Musket? You owe us over ten grand in bar bills at our clubs! You think we're paying for this job? Consider it a favor that we let you work it off instead of dropping you in a river somewhere!" The guy had a point.

"Alright, alright. I will get to the bottom of this, you know I will. Just clear the debt and open my tab back up in the club and we're square." Vic said as he pushed the man's finger away from his sternum. "Just tell me this, what did the autopsy say?"

"That's whats so fucking fishy. There was no autopsy. Feeney's broad said he was off the booze for a full week, and when they tested his blood he was clean, so the bitch had him cremated."

Well, at least there was somewhere to start. Vic pulled a half-full flask of whiskey from a sopping wet pocket and took a drink. The boxer's wife must have known he was still drinking, so her lies made her a prime suspect. Getting on the wagon certainly could kill a drunk like Feeney, Vic knew that from the way he felt after a long nap, let alone the week of sobriety his wife was claiming. But a hasty cremation was suspicious. Vic knew many dead irishmen, and right now his body should be sitting in a box on a bar somewhere having songs sung over it, not in a fucking jar.

Vic parted ways with the greaseball and headed off to one of his contacts to learn more about this shifty broad.

“When interrogating someone, they say you can tell if a person is lying to you by how they look into your eyes.  A good liar makes deliberate contact, thinking that an unflinching willingness to expose themselves to scrutiny lends them credibility.  But someone who is truthful is desperate for you to believe, and it shows.  The one trying too hard is the one you should trust, and the ambivalent subject is almost always deceiving you.”

A pale, sweating man in a bathrobe sat at card table in a smoke-filled and light-deprived room.  His nervous breathing was the only sound audible over the ringing of ice in a whiskey glass, dancing from the unsteady hand that held it.

“I think it’s all bullshit.”  He began again after a deep drink.  “There are no tricks of the trade, and the great detective doesn’t have some super-human insight to impress the studio audience with.  I get my answers every time, the old fashioned way.  With a promise of violence.  And I always keep my promises.”

Detective Vic Musket drank the last from the glass, then dumped the two ice cubes on the table between them.  “Take the ice.  You’re gonna need it.”  He said, pulling a small claw hammer out of the left front pocket of his filthy overcoat.

“For fuck’s sake, Vic.  I’m not the one who shit on your car.  My dumps come out of tubes these days.  I couldn’t make a proper log like that if I tried.”  The sweating man swung open his bathrobe to expose a small, crooked penis and a colostomy bag strapped to his leg.  Looks like this bitch isn’t in heat after all, thought Vic.  There were only so many people it could be.  Someone young and slim enough to climb atop his vehicle without denting the hood, but someone large enough to leave an NFL sized shit draped across the seam between the roof and the windshield.

“Sorry, Bill.  I haven’t done you right in the past, and you seemed like the logical culprit.  And, uh... sorry about the problems with your shitter.”  The man relaxed and swung his robes shut, albeit a little too slowly.  “No worries, Vic.  Help yourself to another glass of my whiskey, then get the fuck out.”

“I’m not done with you yet, Bill.”  Vic said, pouring himself another glass.  “When I walked through your kitchen I noticed two empty cans of creamed corn.  The same kind of corn that peppered the length of that log on my car.  But you couldn’t have left it there... Or could you have?”  Vic stepped closer to the man, yanking his bathrobe open again.  “But when you showed me the bag I noticed it had been leaking.  I thought the odor was due to your poor housekeeping, maybe a dead pet, but the small brown stain on the inside of your white bathrobe told another story.  A colostomy bag is a disposable item, for obvious reasons, and if used properly is a clean receptacle.  But yours has been tampered with.  And as a man who spent a lifetime as a plumber, you seem to be the type who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty.  Come on Bill, what kind of depraved fool hand-forms his own diseased shit into a makeshift log just to vandalize another man’s car?”  He held up the claw hammer once again.  “A very sorry man, indeed.”

Vic Musket climbed into his car with a whiskey glass, but no hammer.  Whatever he left in Bill’s apartment was evidence now, but he had been careful not to leave any prints.  Some might call his actions overkill, but his car was his home.  He ate there, drank there, and slept there, and any man who would desecrate his only possession deserved the harshest punishment.  He drank the last of the booze and tossed the glass over his shoulder into the backseat, where it landed without a sound.  How strange, Vic thought.  As far as he could remember, his backseat was always filled with empty bottles.  But where he expected a crash, he heard nothing.

Striking a match, Vic leaned into his backseat to see.  But where last night there were only bottles, there now laid a bedding of discarded corn husks.  Then it came flooding back.  The tequila, the drunken driving on the countryside, the cornfield he raided before making his way back to the city with an overwhelming pressure in his guts...

Vic was two blocks away before he heard the ambulance arrive.