On the way to the movies yesterday, my sister told me about a guy who'd apparently committed suicide a couple days ago by the restaurant she works at. He was found in a concrete dumpster enclosure for my sister's restaurant and several other businesses in the parking lot--I remember walking to it with Tim when he worked at the Radio Shack there and he had to take out the trash. This guy, it seems, worked at the Target where I bought my copy of Ferris Bueller's Day Off on Independence Day. I remember seeing the employees gathered in a circle around the manager, taking instructions for the holiday's approaching night. I wondered if I saw him among them.
My sister said his hands and feet had been bound and that he'd apparently hanged himself. It seemed to her like it might actually have been murder, which was why she found it strange that the police didn't stick around very long. It sounds like the body was just cleaned up and the books were closed. It seems strange to me, too, but I suppose we don't know the whole story. I was half tempted to put on a deerstalker and examine the area, and complain to passers-by about the cold trail.
I quoted to her Edward G. Robinson's famous monologue about suicides in Double Indemnity; "Come now, you've never read an actuarial table in your life, have you? Why, they've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by colour, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poison, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by types of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth. Suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But, Mr. Norton: Of all the cases on record, there's not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train. And you know how fast that train was going at the point where the body was found? Fifteen miles an hour. Now how can anybody jump off a slow-moving train like that with any kind of expectation that he would kill himself?"
I still have drawing to do to-day; well, just inking now and colouring.
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