“My recent experiences,” Birk intoned imperiously, “have taught me the value of fingerless gloves.” Birk offered a drinker’s generous smile and picked up a tall gin and tonic. “Because, let’s face it, sometimes you need all your fingers to handle the finer things in life,” said America’s most notorious dipsomaniac before draining the drink in a single go.
Moreno glared at him and turned to the camera. Speaking in awkward, recently acquired English, the Spaniard said, “And sometimes you do not need to have gloves with fingers.” At this point, he raised his pitiable hand, which had been left with only a pinkie and ring finger to poke out of a red glove. “So why pay for more glove than you really need?” asked the captain, still palpably pissed off.
“That’s one thing we can both agree on,” Birk said. Then with a glance at the steaming captain, Birk added, “Maybe the only thing.”
The captain glared back at Birk, then stared at his miserable hand.
Okay, till now the ad remained marginally within the realm of, well, if not good taste, at least reasonable standards, but then Birk snarled, “Oh, stop your goddamn whining. All the time, it’s ‘What happened to my fingers? What happened to my fingers?’ I’ll tell you what’s happened to your goddamn fingers. I got them. Wore them right off the fucking boat. Here,” Birk tossed three bloody fingers at the captain, “let me give you a hand.” Then Birk reached behind him. “And here’s my shirt. It’s got your goddamn blood all over it. Go get it cleaned, it’s the least you can do.”
The ad ended with a look of shock and outrage on the captain’s face.
Later, it came out of course that the entire finale had been staged with the help of “fingers” from a special effects company in L.A., but not before the ad achieved record viewership on YouTube. It also appeared on all the networks and major cable channels, replete with bleeps, where news anchors and show hosts demonstrated indefatigable disgust—even after repeated showings of the entire thirty-second spot.
* * *
GreenSpirit’s murder was solved, but not as Sheriff Walker had planned. He was charged with the crime, and after dark-suited FBI agents escorted the handcuffed lawman to an unmarked vehicle and drove him away, the special agent in charge of the New York office, Albert Messinger, held a carefully planned press conference. In his prepared statement, he announced that key evidence against Walker had come as a result of “extensive and painstaking” searches over a ten-square-mile area surrounding the cabin in which GreenSpirit had been killed.
“Agents discovered a tiny swatch of clothing containing both Sheriff Walker’s DNA and the victim’s,” Special Agent Messinger said, his blue eyes roving over a phalanx of reporters. “The swatch,” which Messinger described as about one inch in diameter, “had been caught on the broken branch of a dead maple tree.”
“What about the bloody bandana that the sheriff said he found?” fired a short reporter with the bleary, haunted look of too many martinis for too many years. “That had the kid’s DNA on it, didn’t it?”
“It did, indeed,” Messenger replied, evidently warming to the task at hand. “We believe that Jason Robb’s DNA was placed on it by the sheriff when he took the young man into custody, which he did by himself despite being part of what was supposed to have been a coordinated state, federal, and local effort. As I’m sure many of you are aware from all the prime-time tutorials on forensics that you can watch almost any night of the week,” Messinger smiled, wrinkling his handsomely tanned face, “the sheriff could have lifted Robb’s DNA from the bars of his cell, or from Robb directly, without the young man realizing it, and that could have been enough to implicate him. As for GreenSpirit’s blood, we believe Walker committed the crime, so he had ample access to that.”
“Is that all you’ve got?” carped a regional reporter who had just written a lengthy story that lionized the sheriff for his “courage, thoroughness, and diligence.”
“We think the DNA evidence is sufficient to convict the sheriff of murder, but we also have other compelling evidence against him. Let’s start with Sheriff Walker’s contention that Robb disappeared the weekend of the murder of the Pagan in Vermont. We now know that that was the weekend that Robb and his girlfriend made their first trip to her family’s cabin. The young woman in question