Who Killed Iron Joe? Part 6: Moon of Making Fat

It sounds ridiculous, at least for me, to say this aloud, but Cavanaugh based his entire investigation on a journal.

Are you done laughing yet?  Maybe that passes for thorough police investigation among the Danab, but that would have been dismissed in any human court of law on any world and in any century that I care about.  But it’s sad reality here that anything but that happened to me.  The journal was discovered at the crime scene, not so far from the body of Iron Joe, and was quickly determined to have been written by Iron Joe himself, chronicling his entire term of office as governor of Magnumtown.

How quickly or thoroughly Cavanaugh read it before storming my home later that same evening is another question that does not seemed to have fazed the Danab in general, but its contents were quickly published in a number of formats, in the newspapers and as a book, so that Iron Joe’s celebrity only grew rather than shrank based on anything that might have been gleamed from it.  I myself have not read it, since that is apparently not a privileged of the condemned, but I’m still alive so there’s still a chance that I might enjoy it.

I can only imagine how those events unfolded, first the discovery of the journal, where exactly it was and if it is indeed what it is purported to be or an elaborate fiction without narrative, and so that much more believable but not so convincing as fiction, or so I’ve been told.  My trusty guardians in prison have often quoted from it, but they are not very thorough about it.  It seems I feature prominently in its pages, and that was the main reason Cavanaugh fingered me.

Iron Joe was as obsessed with me as I was with him.  That’s the simplified version, and I am thoroughly flattered, let me say.

I don’t know, I can’t explain that.  I wish that I could.  Did I make myself so prominent to the man who was so important in life and death?  It seems I did, and yet I cannot trace this course for myself, even though it was apparently vivid enough that Cavanaugh was convinced at a glance and all those inclined to believe this version of events, too, which is to say the Danab, who probably wouldn’t have been quite so convinced if Iron Joe had waxed eloquent about some random member of their own society.  Maybe he does, and they choose to ignore that as inconvenient.

But, yeah, I was convicted on the basis of a diary.  It sounds just as pathetic as it seems, to anyone with an objective perspective, but that’s not what happens in these circumstances.  Too much coincidence, once Cavanaugh started piecing everything together on his own, and it all fit what Iron Joe wrote, or so I must assume.  Some of this must make sense to subjective eyes, I must assume. The truth, or so it seems, must seem plausible, no matter how improbable.

I often picture the look on Cavanaugh’s face, when he found that journal.  I also envision his expression when he was handed the assignment in the first place, the horror, the responsibility of it, knowing that all the Danab in the universe, no matter where they were and if they’d ever even heard of Iron Joe in the first place, and how simple it all became in the blink of an eye, as simple as opening the cover of a book and finding the culprit in the dedication.  He never seems that ruthless when I see him in person, in fleeting moments, but it takes that kind of mind to make any of that make sense in the first place.  The absurd must be embraced by the person who first voices it, after all, become like a lover, caressing the back of their mind.

I would almost say it was all poetic, but then, I’m hoping to be more objective than that.