Malone And Palmer

• Tara Livermore, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2020

At first glance, you would not think he is a qualified detective, but the reality is, he’s a really, really bad detective who is surprisingly actually good. His rugged featured, messy brown hair, dry skin, uneven nails. You would think he doesn’t even shower. But I assure you he does.
Detective Malone isn’t one to work well with others, except one person. She is smart, and quick but tends to overthink things all the time. Detective Palmer. A tidy, neat, complete opposite to Malone, the lady who can’t stand Malone’s techniques, but she’s the only person Malone will work with, so she has to put up with him.
This one particular day, however, Palmer came in to grab Malone for a case they’d been assigned to.
“Get up you bum; we have a robbery to investigate.” Palmer laments slamming the case file on the desk waking Malone up from his sugar coma.
“Ugh, you really need to stop consuming all that Junk,” Palmer sighs, picking up all the empty coke cans and throwing them away.
“Hey, I’ve swapped to diet coke,” Malone groans, lifting his head off the table. He picks up the file and looks at it very briefly and stands up. “Let’s go.” And they were off. They hopped into Palmer’s car and drove to the crime scene. A distressed lady stood outside, holding her white Persian cat.
“Hello ma’am, I’m Detective Palmer, this is my partner, Detective Malone, what seems to be the problem?” Palmer asks.
“Well, you see. I just got home, my husband wasn’t home and most of my jewellery was missing! I had called my husband, he doesn’t know anything,” The lady explained. Holding the cat closer to her for comfort.
“Where did you last have it?” Malone questions.
“Come, I’ll show you,” the lady ushers. The two detectives follow her to the master bedroom where there was an open jewellery box, right outside an open window. The detectives do a sweep of the room to find absolutely no evidence that anyone, but the lady had been in the room.
“Malone, can I talk to you for a minute,” Palmer asks pushing him out of the room. “do you think someone broke in, climbed through the window and stole the jewellery?”
“Don’t be silly, there were no traces of anyone but the lady.” He rolls his eyes.
“So, you think that maybe the lady faked it?” she asks.
“Doubt it. Let’s go do one more sweep.” He suggests.
“Okay.” Palmer nods, she walks back in and looks around. Malone walks in not long after, holding a can of lemonade in his hand. “Where did you get that?” Palmer asks.
“Never mind that, you don’t want to know, and I’ve just solved the case.” Malone Smirks. Palmer and the lady give him a puzzled look. “Okay let me explain. So basically, the window was open, so anyone or anything could’ve come in and that something was a bird.”
“How do you know this?” the lady asks.
“That tree, it's hanging out the edge, it's in the nest.” Malone grins pointing at the tree. Where sure enough a bird had used the necklace in their nest. Palmer rolls her eyes since she really didn’t think of it.