Red Wheelbarrow 2008 text FINAL REVISED.indd - De Anza College

The story ended like this:
“Copycat killers disgust me. Better to be original in one’s
homicides, I should think. The Inspector thought that too, and
as such I thought it most amusing to murder him last. I hadn’t
realized that he could also tell me the name of the murderer
who disrupted the morning buffet by bleeding his victim all over
the floor. It must have been a messy task indeed to clean that
floor, for the interior decorators had taken a pattern that already
resembled blood. How is one to clean such a thing? Nobody
could possibly know how to clean what already looks soiled!
‘You think that just because you’re no copycat killer that
you’re better than them, do you,’ said the inspector.
‘Yes, I replied.’
‘I’ll give you one thing, you’re very clever.’
‘Thanks. I didn’t think you’d noticed.’
‘You got us to think that the murderer had killed you by
altering the face of one of the porters to look like yours, and then
murdering him in front of us while you disguised yourself as that
novelist fellow.’
‘Yes; if you murder people the way that everyone expects,
then what’s the point?’
‘Oh, but they did expect it; you stole that from a French
magazine. You’re problem is that you think people are just sheep
that you can herd this way and that, that the human life is just
a plaything, that…’
In any case, as I hung the inspector from an especially
itchy rope he described the other gentleman whose acquaintance
I had scheduled to make. The fellow was ectodermic, plain-faced
and had a left ear that measured a certain length. He knew it
down to the millimeter, but I don’t recall at the moment just
what it was. The fellow also wore red, had good shoes that he
polished often, and a cadence to his voice that many find too
uppity for the man’s class. This characterization began to grow
as boring as one might possibly imagine! Consequently, I burnt
off his body hair with a box of matches the hotelier had been
so kind to provide to anybody with a gauche cigarette case. To
make it sporting, the inspector refused to tell me the fellow’s
name.
Thereupon, I decided that sports like schooldays and
Rieslings are to be best enjoyed young. I stabbed him in the ear
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