FILE ONE [&_&_&]

This is a work in progress. Story starts after the jump.

I felt the rush of wakefulness hit after twelve chimes from the alarm. I also felt the familiar symptoms of an early morning hangover. I didn’t worry about it, though. One of the perks of extended bachelorhood was waking up at any hour of the morning – or in some cases, afternoon – with nobody itching to kick you out of bed. I practically had the whole day to myself, work notwithstanding. There was a storm last night, and the streets were probably healing from the gridlock. The magazine I worked for probably wouldn’t have much need for a hung-over writer, unless they needed someone to cover floods, and nobody was immediately available.

I was preparing to make some breakfast when my laptop rang. The machine was in a makeshift office I had across the living room, fairly close to the front door. As I walked through the small area of my studio, I noted that the place was unusually clean. The pillows on the sofa were neatly arranged. The drapes over the windows on either end of the door were closed (I usually liked them flung haplessly open, giving me a great view of the world outside through the windows). I flipped open the laptop’s lid and clicked on the green phone icon to answer the call. “Hello?” I muttered into the mic.

Wouldn’t you know it, my editor was on the line. “Hey. You sound like you had a late night,” she said. Without skipping a beat, she continued, “We need you to cover a murder downtown. We received a tip from our guy at the station near the business district a few minutes ago. The scene’s still fresh.” 

I reached over to the curtains and pulled one aside. The construction pit next to my small building was bustling with workers shimmying up and down the scaffolding, glistening with sweat from the neck down. It looked like the rain from last night didn’t last too long. The workers who weren’t busy with work were huddled in one corner, under the shadow of a beaten-up old crane that loomed over my small apartment building. It was, by all standards, a good day to step outside.

What was she saying? Oh right, a murder. “Can you give me the name of our contact?” I said. “I’ll take a quick shower, and head down to the precinct as soon as I’m done.” She sent me the details via chat and told me that she needed a draft within the afternoon.

Christ. That was one of the hardest things about writing for an online publication. The publishing process was short, so you had very little time to get anything done. You received an assignment in the morning - or in my case, close to noon - and you had to get it out by mid-afternoon. You sacrificed a lot of editing, and fact-checking, but you were first with the news, and that was all that mattered.

Of course, there was still that hangover I was dealing with. I sat on my sofa, and leaned back into the pillows as far as I could, letting my body sink into the damaged upholstery. My head was pounding, and while I wasn’t retching from the alcohol, I knew that I needed to get something to eat, and maybe a little hair of the dog wouldn’t hurt.

I realized that I didn’t ask her about the details of the murder. Now you might be asking what else I needed to know about a killing downtown, right? These things happened all the time, so the details were mostly repetitive. When there were families involved, you’d see a news segment with a group shot of the family members all broken up over the poor victim’s body or casket, weeping with shocked disbelief over the tragedy.

The fact that people still ate this up, though, now that was the real tragedy.

***

After a brief argument with my id, I hoisted myself off the sofa and made my way to the kitchen area. I went on over to the stovetop and proceeded to scramble a couple of eggs with a bit of pepper and chili. I felt better after polishing off the meal and brought the dishes to the sink for cleaning. I didn’t have much time, so I just rinsed the dirty dishes with a bit of water. To be washed later.

After all that, a shot of arrack, and a shower, I was feeling a little bit better. I checked the messenger app for the address of the murder site. This was a ways downtown, but thankfully, it was close to noon. The traffic wasn’t going to be a problem, so I could take my car. My biggest problem was that it looked like an incredibly hot day outside, and my vehicle’s air conditioning was shot. Well at least I wouldn’t be stuck in rush hour traffic, so I’d be spending less time baking. Still, it was not an exciting prospect. But work was work. I grabbed my keys and headed downstairs and into the parking lot.

My apartment building was this two-story shoebox in the middle of, save for the construction next door, an otherwise empty compound. The landlord originally wanted to set it up as a duplex with a parking lot, but the problem was that none of his tenants owned a car, until I came along. So the “parking” space was mostly overgrown carabao grass, with the only undisturbed patch of trimmed grass being the spot beneath my regular parking spot.

I stepped into my car—it was blistering hot inside, as expected, so I rolled down my windows and waited for the heat to dissipate before starting her up. It wasn’t easy, driving this heap through the metro, but when you see how difficult it was for most people to commute to work every day, you took every blessing you could get.

After a few minutes, the air in my car felt a bit friendlier. I turned on the engine and slowly made my way out of the compound.

It was incredibly hot outside. I saw people walking down the street in sleeveless clothing and umbrellas to ward off the sun, but with little success. The jeepneys offered no refuge either, since they were basically open-air ovens of steel and iron, with a combustion engine up front and exhaust at the back.

Not that my vehicle was any better. My car was a battered old remnant of the days when box-types roamed the streets and unleaded gas was an unheard-of precaution. It had two huge dents on the front bumper and it needed a tune-up badly; but on the whole, she was quite a serviceable relic. Until recently, when the air conditioner decided to die on me. So in this heat, my back was swamped with a v-shaped sweat stain that extended from one armpit to the other within minutes of driving through the quieter residential streets on my way downtown.

It was not lost on me how traffic got heavier the closer I got to my destination. The police were rerouting traffic away from the crime scene, so all the vehicles were crowding away from the main streets into alternate side streets that weren’t made for heavy traffic. I parked a couple of blocks away from the town’s police station—the jeeps were making it difficult to get any closer—and walked into the fracas.

I lived in a city that looked like a hawker’s market mated with an angry mob. Or at least, that was how downtown looked like. Stepping into the sidewalk meant rubbing elbows with a stranger every two seconds, street urchins begging for money in every four blocks, and salesmen showcasing their goods from a straw mat laid out on the sidewalk. The police line didn’t deter any of the passers-by from crossing through the crime scene on foot, and right in front of the police station was a hawker with pirated DVDs of current (and future) film features. For some people, this was everyday life. And if you were the guy who was brazen enough to tag a target in broad daylight, you could probably escape unnoticed into the crowd just by pretending to look at socks and fake jewelry. You’d be completely anonymous, and nobody could do anything about it.

I couldn’t stand the pace of life downtown, though, and decided to move into the middle of nowhere when I reached my mid-twenties. I also traded in a daily broadsheet reporter’s desk for a largely home-based job. Hey, when I say I liked my solitude, I mean it. Being back in downtown was like meeting an old lover who gave you interesting sex by way of repeatedly punching your face during climax.

I whipped out my press ID and showed it to the policeman on duty just outside the crime scene. I also mentioned the name of the magazine’s contact, and he directed me away from the scene and into the shade of the precinct. The crime scene was just a few meters away from the local police precinct, so the first question on my mind was how does anybody get murdered within plain view of the cops? And there were millions of prospective witnesses, and maybe even a camera caught the killer somewhere. I decided to delay speaking with my contact for now, and interview some of the salesmen on the curb nearby.

I walked up to one who was selling pails and plastic containers and struck up a conversation. “Good morning! What happened over at that police line near the precinct?”

The woman, an old lady who was both swarthy and obese, nodded at me. “Somebody got killed this morning. Happened in broad daylight, too.”

“Broad daylight? So people saw it?”

“Some people probably did. We were busy setting up shop, so we didn’t see anything until people started shouting.” She cackled. “But when we did see the murder, we knew exactly what’d happened!”

Never underestimate the power of the public to pass judgment. “What do you mean? Oh, and how much for that plastic toolbox?”

She gestured towards the precinct. “It’s fifty for the box. The man that was killed was this vagrant named Anding Bilog. He always hung around the precinct late at night, after finishing a bottle of gin by himself. That always pissed off the night desk officer!” She gave off another one of her rooster-like laughs. This woman enjoyed telling me the story, it looked like. “One time, he peed and puked on the wall of the precinct! When the desk cop saw the mess he’d made, he was so angry he pulled a gun on him!”

“You saw all this happen?” Wow, a vagrant who liked to piss off the cops, and an officer with a temper. Doesn’t sound like a very good combination. I made a mental note to check with my source if this was true.

The woman shook her head. “No, this happened a week ago, late at night. Pedro the street sweeper of the barangay told me all about it the next day though!” She enjoyed the memory of the story so much, her laughter enveloped more of her face.

I made another mental note of this, paid and picked up my purchase, and started walking to the precinct. It looks like this Anding Bilog getting killed wasn’t that strange for the locals. No surprise there, since vagrants of any kind was bad for business, even if your storefront was just the sidewalk. As I walked to the precinct entrance, I could make out the site of the crime scene from beyond the crowd of curious passers-by and bystanders. The body had been removed already, thankfully, and all that was left was a body outline and maybe some blood, although it could easily have been an oil stain from a stray parked jeepney. The uniformed officers were finished recording the details of the scene, and soon the area would be scrubbed, and the police line removed. It was a public thoroughfare, and you can’t hold up traffic for that long.

One of the people at the scene was a cigarette vendor who was carrying his box around, trying very hard to look like he was interested in the scene, but you could tell that he was there to try to make somebody buy from him. I went up to him and bought a lemon candy. “You here all the time?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’m here from the early morning, ever since these people start selling.”

“Did you see how it happened?”

“No, it happened earlier than that. The body was found just before five in the morning, and the police have been keeping this area closed since.”

So much for that. Looks like I’ll need to get the official statement from the precinct before I could learn more about how things unfolded this morning. The saleswoman mentioned the street cleaner, so I asked the cigarette man for the location of the local barangay hall. He gave me directions—it wasn’t too far from here—and I went on my way.