Dear Chattery

It was a hard-boiled city, where secrets were stashed like bootlegged liquor and trust was as scarce as an honest politician. And on a night when the fog rolled in like a pack of thieves, Detective Bigsby was on the prowl in Interrogation Room 3.

Detective Sergeant Marlowe, a man whose wrinkles were etched by the acid of unsolved cases, left Bigsby with his suspect—a tight-lipped low-life named Jimmy ‘The Squeak’ Malone. “Unravel him, Bigsby,” Marlowe grunted, sliding his half-devoured pastrami sandwich onto the table as an offering to the cause.

Once the door sealed Malone in with the feline detective, the room became a world of its own, where the standard rules didn’t apply. Bigsby surveyed his domain from the doorway before he sauntered in with the silent grace afforded only to his kind.

Malone regarded the cat with a sneer, but underestimating Detective Bigsby was like ignoring a lit fuse on a stick of dynamite.

Bigsby leaped onto the table—a sinuous flow of muscle and fur—his yellow eyes locked on Malone. But it was the casual drop of his hindquarters onto a stack of carefully collated case files that initiated the subtle terror. The corners of the papers bent under his weight, the top sheets buckling and creasing, as if to cry out from the burden.

With a meticulousness that belied his indifferent exterior, Bigsby extended one paw and hooked a pen. He didn’t knock it to the ground immediately; instead, he rolled it back and forth, toying with it. Malone’s eyes followed each motion, the unspoken threat hanging in the air.

Then, with a flick, Bigsby sent the pen spinning off the table. The room echoed with the click-clack-click as it bounced and came to a rest. The tabby’s gaze never left Malone’s, the message clear: nothing was safe.

Next, Bigsby turned to a pile of witness statements. With his paw, he slid one off the edge. The slow journey of the paper seemed to suspend time until it fluttered to the floor like the wing of a fallen dove. Then another followed, and another, a procession of disruption that chipped away at Malone’s facade.

The cat’s movements were a performance, a symphony of calculated chaos. His paw reached for another pen, toying with it, spinning it with a craftsman’s skill before flicking it away. This time, the pen clattered against the wall, the sound sharp in the tense silence.

Malone shifted, trying to maintain his nonchalance, but his eyes were riveted to the feline, who moved with the quiet certainty of a closing net.

The room’s solitary plant—a spindly thing that had survived against the odds—caught Bigsby’s attention. He gnawed at its leaves, the ripping sound of vegetation adding to the orchestrated cacophony in the room. Then, as if to cement his disdain for the process, Bigsby casually backed up to the center of the room, and with a heave, expelled the greenery in a most unceremonious fashion. The audible splat as it hit the floor made Malone flinch, his lip curling in disgust.

Bigsby paused then, as if to admire his work, his tail sweeping across the table and displacing a meticulously arranged series of crime scene photographs. They scattered haphazardly, some face down, their hidden images a taunt to the order of law they represented.

“Goddamn it,” Malone muttered, his voice a mix of anger and grudging respect. “They didn’t tell me you played dirty.”

Detective Bigsby, with a calculated nonchalance, jumped down and sauntered over to Malone, beginning the slow, kneading dance on his thighs. The little pinpoints of pressure, insistent and unsettling, were a ticking clock to Malone’s composure.

But Bigsby wasn’t finished. As the cat’s kneading grew more insistent, his claws catching and pulling at the threads of Malone’s cheap trousers, his attention was captured by the metallic luster of the table. His claws reached out, scratching along the surface with a sound that set teeth on edge.

Malone squirmed, the psychological assault of Bigsby’s tactics breaking down the walls he had built around his secrets. As the cat moved to the door, scratching the metal with a sound like a siren call to madness, Malone’s hands flew to his ears.

“Alright, alright! I’ll give you names, places, anything. Just get him out of here!”

Marlowe returned to a scene of victory—a suspect undone by a detective of the feline persuasion, and a room scattered with the remnants of a case about to be blown wide open. Malone spilled his guts as Bigsby,