Detective Dufresne

I saw J.J. Dufresne last Saturday night. Al and I stopped by his apartment. I used the bathroom. When I went to wash my hands, rusty water trickled out of the faucet, but there was a copy of Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre on the back of the toilet, and a tube of St. Ives Apricot Facial Scrub on the side of the tub.

J.J. told us about what had happened to him that morning, how the night before he’d been at a wedding and how when he woke up, he sisn't know where he was. He was on a couch but he didn’t know whose or where.

“The apartment was immaculate,” he said. “Really clean. And it smelled good. That’s how I knew a chick lived there.” He spotted a photo album on the book shelf, and as painful as it was to get up, walk across the room, and retrieve that album, J.J. suspected it might provide him with some clues, maybe it would contain a photograph of somone he knew.

"Did it?" we asked.

"Yes," he said, and before we could press him for further details, his cat Marvin began using the side of the couch as a scratching post. "He's allowed to do that," J.J. said.