Writing Club: A Clue Story

This was by far one of my favorite prompts, and I'm hoping we do it again. We each had to poll other people and gather together a random name of a person (real or fictitious, living or dead), a place, and an object. Then we exchanged these and used the random prompts to create the story of a crime scene. I think what I love MOST about these writing club nights is that we always come up with so many different ways to approach the same prompt, in every genre and format possible. This is especially true of this prompt. SO, without further ado:

July 22, 1987
Reporting by Celeste Darland

Onlookers in East London were shocked and horrified Tuesday night as beloved American baseball hall-of-famer Joe DiMaggio was led away in handcuffs after a bar brawl gone sour. At least two men were found dead and one other in critical condition, with the main suspect being DiMaggio himself.

“I was just at the Jack for a few tiddley’s when this Septic starts yellin’ all sorts of dickies and suddenly the whole room’s in an uproar,” Aiden Paisley, one witness to the night’s events, explains. “He probably came for a bender but now two blokes is hovis. Then the bottles took him away.”

When asked if he knew DiMaggio’s stature in American culture, Paisley’s only response was, “Sorry, I don’t get on the Liza that much.”

Clearly other Brits are not so ignorant. Protesters lined up outside of the jail cell only a few hours after the arrest, arguing DiMaggio’s innocence or immunity. Chief officials, however, are still interrogating their chief suspect and are not even considering release due to the severity of the crime and the incriminating evidence.

In an official statement released to the press Wednesday morning by the Scotland Yard, a number of witnesses recall DiMaggio allegedly “drinking ‘imself to pieces” and then yelling profanities when two young men came up to ask him for an autograph. DiMaggio threw his glass against the counter and attacked the men with his bare hands, which led several other bystanders into the brawl.

The next thing anyone knew, three bodies were lying on the barroom floor with blunt force trauma to the head and DiMaggio was holding his head in one hand and a bloody doorknob in the other.

“It’s the biggest lemon ‘round the Jack in years,” Paisley professes.

“I’m shocked, actually,” DiMaggio’s lifelong friend Armand Oliveri confides. “I’d never have pegged Joe for a killer, even in the foulest of tempers.”

“But he’s a classic example of the dangers of bottled-up aggression,” argues William Freedman, professor of psychiatry at Columbia and ardent critic of DiMaggio’s. “Sure, he’s a baseball legend and immortalized in every aspect of pop culture, but that was nearly five decades ago. Since then he’s seen the horrors of war, the hypocrisy of American idealism and being an ‘enemy alien’ in his own land, and two wives who he could never find the right balance for.”

“Marilyn (Monroe) did hit him hard,” Oliveri concedes. “But even then he was heartbroken, lost, not a raving lunatic.”

Evidence from key witnesses, however, suggests it was not the torment of his past that drove him to it. It was a mispronunciation of DiMaggio’s Italian name. “The kid pronounced his name wrong,” one American-born witness who wishes to remain anonymous claims. “Any true fan of Joe’s knows that it’s di-MAH-joh, not di-MAH-gee-oh like the media always says, and that he hates that. I guess with all the alcohol in him, he just couldn’t take one more idiot butchering his name.”

While the motive is still under investigation, the trial date yet to be slated, and fans across the world simultaneously disillusioned and driven to defend this American icon, one thing remains fairly certain:

It was Joe DiMaggio. In London. With a doorknob.