Crime Scene

”It looks like a Crime Scene,” SSW announces into the dark and silent Utopian den.

What is she talking about?

The Jacuzzi. It’s ‘under construction’ and it’s scary. She’s right. It does look like a crime scene what with the yellow ‘keep out’ tape all draped across the metal handrails on either side of the steps and the little pool drained to reveal a most disgusting and frightening murky white grayness with 3 little squares on the bottom that may serve as drains but now just stare back and out in eerie uselessness.

Plus it stinks. Like something died in there.

And this is exactly what SSW says next, “It’s like a dead body could be discovered in there. With that yucky red drizzle of something oozing onto the bottom ….”

Her voice trials off as PP and DL sit heaterized and rapt. “Wow!" PP exclaims. "That reminds me of a scene I either read or saw in a movie of a dead body that was hidden in the bottom of a drained pool and the protagonist had to figure out a way to get the body out of the pool without the police discovering that it was there. And I can’t remember what it was….a book? Was it a Graham Greene novel?”

No one answers PP’s thinking out loud looking for the right literary reference. “DL, do you read Graham Greene?”
She nods, “Yeah, I read one, but I can’t remember what it was called.”
“Did it have a dead body in an empty pool?”
”No…no, I don’t think so….”




SSW gets up and wanders out of Utopia. PP wonders if she’s somehow offended by PP not asking her if she's read Graham Greene. Just assuming that she only reads the popular political nonfiction that she talks about. Something by David Brinkley or was it Tom Brokaw?

See, PP can’t remember any specific referents. Literary or otherwise. But the scene in the pool is so vivid to her and it really bugs her that she can’t remember the exact place where she read or saw it. Is it just her brain is going? That her middle age mind is unable to retrieve important pool body details out of its crowded morass so that she can impress DL and SSW with her literary prowess?

Yet PP is fairly certain it is a Graham Greene novel called The Comedians. She can see it on her bookshelf. She’s gonna pull it out when she gets home.



In the meantime. The Jacuzzi remains a scary empty crime scene. One that PP can write about.

Even if she is no Graham Greene.


“It was a dark and scary night. The local police were out in force searching for the missing person of one Dexter Fleming. Dexter had had his run-ins with the law, but this time he’d been undone. And no one, not Sam, not Desiree, not even his beloved pit bull, Angel, could help him now as he lay, motionless at the bottom of the seedy jacuzzi that had been drained for 'construction purposes.....”