Dead Boss 4

Dear Evil Editor,

On a whim I googled January Jeanville after reading the letter from your minion and came up with half a dozen addresses in some of the best neighborhoods outside the city, and strangely enough, I also came up with some hits on the obit pages. The details from a grisly triple-murder thirty years past kept jumping in between the lines of the obituaries for March, April, and June Jeanville, who had died under mysterious circumstances on Christmas Day 1980. I switched to the archives for the Times and suddenly it all came rushing back as I read the accounts from old newspaper articles. The three young daughters of December Jeanville had been future debutantes from a very large and wealthy group whose family tree had sturdy branches in Chicago, Florida and Vegas; their charred bodies had been retrieved from the ashes of a McMansion near the Miracle Mile. The parents, two sisters, January and February, and two brothers, July and August, survived the blaze. By the time I finished reading the online guestbook entries in memory of August Jeanville, reported perished in an avalanche last year, I had a pretty good idea of what might have happened. I suspected it had nothing to do with January Jeanville and confirmed the suspicion during a brief but informative cell phone call to Florida. Which reminds me, be sure to let your minion know that her boss, Muriel Zoot, is fine and will call from the Keys on Monday. But she was at least partly right about the dead body in the office. Turns out January was just covering for her brother August (not dead but living under Witness Protection as Mike T. Johnson) who had stumbled into the office in the midst of a psychotic break, packing heat and what courage there was to be found in a half-empty silver flask, and killed one of Zoot’s suitors.

Sincerely,

Frank Malone

--anon.