It's murder.
It's amazing what you can do when you have too much time on your hands, a twisted sense of humour, some beer and a little Crime Scene tape. You know, that yellow and black plastic band the cops tie between trees or doorways to block them off? My best friend had a roll of the stuff. We'll call him Legba, despite his American birth and Welsh background.

He worked in the Uni game room and that's where we met. We became friends quickly and had a mutual love of beer and pinball, both -- coincidentally -- available in the game room. I was the (AP-affiliate) newspaper's copy editor at the time and we were one floor up in the Student Union. Once the paper was ready for the printer, off I'd go to the game room where Legba was usually busy closing up and kicking people out, leaving us to play the Addams Family pinball machine and drink beer in peace.

Legba and I are big on obscure and oddball references. He'd come over to my flat a lot and we'd drink beer and watch the Rockford files or Rocky and Bullwinkle... maybe a film. And talk. Imagine two drunk, well-read, quasi-intellectuals giving the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment to a 1970's cop show and you've pretty much got the picture. "Oh captain, my captain!" indeed.

Anyway, during my ball, he started talking about his crime scene tape. We'd been throwing Repo Man quotes at each other that night. I sent the ball into the unlit electric chair, the machine said, "It's not plugged in yet," and Legba said, "Let's do some crimes!" I just spit out, "Yeah, let's do a murder and not pay!"

It had been a pretty boring summer and we were going to spice it up. He had the tape with him. All we needed was chalk and blood. There was chalk aplenty at the dart boards, leaving us needing only blood. I had a lot of paint and dyes at home and ran to pick some up (it was a three-minute walk to my place). We came up with a mixture of rose madder paint dye, beer and some other stuff. Actually, I came up with the blood, Legba having supplied the beer and tape. I made it the brownish colour of dried blood, not the bright red of the fresh stuff.

We went out to the front entrance of the Student Union building which faced a pedestrian bridge. It was on this bridge at dusk that we set up the scene. The building's main entrance columns would've made a great location, but we didn't want to risk it all being torn down before anyone could see it so we went for the wide bridge, choosing a sort of corner that was both out of the way and yet highly visible.

Legba lay down and I outlined him, not with curves following the body but with very basic, simple, straight lines. That's how it was really done then though I don't remember how I know that. Then we drew a couple of lines with arrowheads converging toward a point on the stairs about 10 meters away. Using a syringe, I set some "blood" at the chest with a little spatter on the wall, some coming from the mouth outside the chalk line, and a little smear "under" one of the hands. Next to the shoulder I drew a box and added a few cryptic letters and numbers, something like "H234/3 C37 AB3L". Or something like that.

Then I went to the merge point on the stairs and dropped a few coins on the ground. While Legba was doing his best to tie off the scene with the tape (strategically moving a rubbish bin to get a tie point) I drew circles around three of the coins, numbered them and then picked up my change. This showed where the casings had fallen. It was dark, we had our full scene completed and we headed to the watering hole laughing our asses off. It had taken us only five minutes to set up.

I was at the school around 7:45 the next morning and as I got to the bridge, I saw a couple maintenance guys jabbering into their radios and finally beginning to remove our scene. While I was a bit sad that it was disappearing so quickly, it had been seen. Rumours were flying around and the 37000-student campus was abuzz by mid-day. People at the paper were asking each other if anyone knew anything. Campus Security was refusing to comment. I spent the day trying not to laugh and was only mildly successful at it.

Legba and I were hysterical that night as we drank Rolling Rock and watched Rockford Files. Working in the game room where a couple of the kampus kops hung out, he'd heard them talking to each other. It turned out that the the cryptic stuff I wrote just happened to match the standard homicide notation! The first line was "Homicide, day 234 / shift 3". The C37 also matched "jurisdiction, ordinal number". Oops.

The campus police were mad because they figured the city cops had stepped on their jurisdiction yet again without telling them. The city cops kept saying there was no incident and were annoyed by the stupid questions. The morgue said no bodies came in. But the funniest bit of all were the people who talked about how some friend of a friend was a witness on the same day!

It's hard to drink when you're laughing so hard, even out of a longneck bottle.

Did I mention it was Freshmen Orientation that week? Yep, bunches of high school kiddies and their parents were touring the campus. Heh heh heh...

It took a few weeks for all the talk of the "murder" to die down, but the "blood" stains were there on the bridge for a year. Some two years later Legba was in ourn local and some chick who had been Student Government president at the time was telling her friends all about the murder scene she'd seen on her way home after working late at the uni. She saw it and legged it, screaming at the top of her lungs and running as fast as possible back to the sorority house. Legba overheard, broke out in laughter and 'fessed up. She damned near handed his head to him.

My memory's a bit shaky; maybe we did it on a Tuesday night.
(ReallyEvilCanine looks like an upside-down question mark with hair, Tue 12 Oct 2010, 13:41, 1 reply)

You have odd guns there.
Round shell casings?
Is Legba a Voodoo or a Gibson reference?
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Tue 12 Oct 2010, 18:08, closed)