Dear Detective,
I’m not dead, but a lot of people can’t stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.
Before long, you’ll be standing in front of my lifeless body (ignore gray roots; would’ve colored hair if I’d known I’d be autopsied the next day). And you’ll ask, “Who would want to kill Iris Lipoff?”
As someone who goes way back with the victim, trust me when I say, “Who wouldn’t?”
“That’s like using a hula hoop to strain soup,” you’ll say. “Can’t you narrow it down?”
Start with these persons of interest. I’m not saying they’re guilty, just that it would be delightful if they were punished. Don’t fall for the “I was in Bora-Bora for a destination colonoscopy” alibi. If quantum physics has taught us anything, it’s that you can simultaneously use the lavatory in Bora-Bora and eliminate me in New York. Also, don’t fall for “Iris who?” Does anyone really know anyone?
Obviously, the old lady I sat next to at “La Bohème” has it in for me. But let me ask you, isn’t it opera-going law that, if the person next to you bends down to the floor to retrieve her cane, she forfeits the right to her half of the armrest? Anyway, give her the third degree, if she’s still alive. Then there’s the guy in the quiet car on the 10:33 A.M. New Jersey Transit train to Mahwah last Thursday. Looks like an Alan or possibly an Allen but not an Allan. He was blabbing on his cell phone—and kept blabbing even after I explicitly told him with my eyes to lower his blabbing! I just remembered another clue: he was wearing a beige beanie but left it on the train.
Listen, I get it that the last thing you need is some buttinsky telling you how to do your job, but I’m not just any old buttinsky. Forgive me, therefore, for pointing out forensic evidence that you might have missed. For instance, does it appear that I was forced to swallow molten gold—as was the fate, according to hearsay, of Emperor Valerian, in the third century? If so, arrest the members of my defunct book club. The group fell apart last week after seventeen years, defeated by the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Yes, the selection was my idea. I thought it was a rom-com.
Or was I sliced in two with a butter knife? If so, interrogate every waitperson at E.J.’s Luncheonette. Have you ever heard me order an egg-white omelette—“so soft it’s medically inadvisable and no butter or oil unless you have to and in that case don’t tell me”? (I don’t hate myself, but sometimes I do get on my nerves!) Waitperson, you didn’t hear it from me, but, if such a thing as mental self-defense exists, plead it.
If I was found duct-taped to death, the murderess is the FedEx lady with the herniated disk who delivers packages to my building. She is allegedly pregnant. Let her off the hook. Do you know how many boxes I receive every day from Amazon?
Let’s turn to the crime scene. If it contains putrefying fishes, especially mackerel, everyone on the Compost Container Aesthetic Committee in my co-op is suspect. As anyone who’s been on a Zoom breakout session with me knows, I interrupt constantly, listening for the briefest pause in conversation so that I can get in my bons mots about the labelling policy for bins. I’d want to kill me.
However, if I was eaten by a—
Oy. Just thinking about the inevitable tragic death of me, Iris Lipoff, is making my blood pressure spike to a hundred and nineteen over seventy-nine, which is on the border of being too high. You see, Detective, as long as I can remember, I’ve been part of my life. I know the back of Iris Lipoff’s hand like the back of my hand. I waited on her in the self-checkout line at Whole Foods. I can’t imagine the world going on without me, Iris Lipoff, and not only because I rely on her to remember my BritBox password.
An anonymous source—O.K., it was me—said that, when my time comes, the obit folks should be informed that I, Iris Lipoff, once donated my buy-one-get-one-free coupon to the woman behind me in line at CVS. One more thing, Detective. When you fill out my age on the death-certificate form, could you say that I was—on second thought, leave it blank. ♦
