Part 1

It was the bad part of town. The wrong side of the tracks, they say. A crummy street in the middle of urban rot and decay. A tall bearded man walked into the cloudy pool of light beneath a dim streetlamp, lit a cigarette and waited. Anyone could have seen he was out of place there. His suit was too expensive. His hands were too soft. The smoke coming from his cigarette wasn’t acrid enough and his hair was too well-trimmed. The tall, bearded man had business in the alley but he didn’t live around there. That was obvious.
Miss Loretta Jolie came out of a bar across the street after she finished scrubbing the vomit off the bathroom floors. She saw the tall, bearded man but didn’t care. She was tired. A car drove by and Loretta heard it backfire. She kept walking. Behind her, a tall, bearded man fell and lay unmoving, sprawled over the curb. His body was still halfway illuminated by the streetlamp. Everything was silent.

The next morning the situation was quite the opposite. Cops swarmed everywhere, trying hard to find even the slightest clue. Unfortunately, with so many around, their mere presence was effective in destroying anything decent.
Stone Stevens parked his beat up Chrysler a block from the body and walked through the police tape into the crime scene. Stevens was the detective in charge of the case. He was a powerful man but in an understated way. Medium build but extra large confidence. He had the power to command the room- or the crime scene- by his mere presence. His face was all angles- square chin, sharp nose, flat eyebrows, shaded by a beat up fedora. His raggedy trench coat scraped the curb as he stepped up to the body.
He checked the details with Officer Hannigan while examining the corpse. One man dead. No identification, but almost $2,000 in cash in his right hip pocket. He was shot once in the chest. The shot must have come from the street. Could have been someone on foot but it probably came from a car. Happened sometime between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM the following evening. Not much to go by.
Stevens lit a cigarette and kicked the lamppost. They always gave him the tough jobs, the ones with no obvious motive and no apparent clues. This had a tendency to tick Stevens off.

“Hey, Morgan! Get over here!” A short, round man in a uniform with spectacles and a bad toupee walked towards Stevens. He carried a pad of a paper and a sharp #2 pencil and half tripped over the dead man’s feet when he approached Stevens. This was Riley Morgan, a new guy on the force. They called him “Comic Relief” around the precinct cause he was always tripping over something or dropping his glasses. But he worked hard at what he could do, which was usually just paperwork the tougher cops wouldn’t touch.
“Alright, Morgan, I’m using you on this case,” Stevens declared. “We got anything to go on yet? Any finger prints, tire tracks, that kind of thing?”
“Nothing so far- well, nothing that’s any good anyway. Too many people around this place. It’s a busy street,” Morgan replied pushing his glasses back up his nose. “The guys are still looking but I doubt they find anything.”
“Yeah, I figured. But it doesn’t hurt to ask. Who found the body?”
“A beat cop on patrol found him about 7 this morning. A hundred people must have gone by before the cop came along. But then again, that’s a popular bar across the street. Sometimes guys pass out around here.”
“The murder took place between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM is what I’m hearing. Anybody from the bar see or hear anything?”
“We’re still checking into it.”
“Thanks, Morgan.”
The preliminary steps taken, Stevens called the wagon up and let the men put the body in. As they were closing the doors Stevens got a hunch and had them hold for a second. He stared intently at the face as if looking for something before a grave look came over his face.
“Morgan, do you recognize this guy?”
Morgan looked at him shocked and confused and asked why.
Stevens grabbed the man just above the ear and peeled off a fake beard revealing a clean-shaven chin with a large mole. “This is Detective Forsharpe. He’s been undercover. This case just got a lot more tricky.”