Those Wondeful Quilly Words

It is a Quilly day. Time to take Quilly’s three words for the day and write a story.Today we have three words from Quilly Click on the word for a definition: oporopolist; phalerae; & stibogram



Detective Clint Mallory studied the stibograms , made at the crime scene , and now posted on the “ thinking board” at the office. They clearly started at the oporopolist ‘s stand , went through the back yard, continued into the house up to the body of Judge Woodrow Hangum , and then out the back door and across the lawn. The stibograms were almost the only clues they had. They were too neat ,too well made. It’s as if the killer wanted the footprints seen.
There were no fingerprints, the bullet had passed through the judge and they hadn’t found it. There was so little blood that the coroner , old Doc Brown , thought the judge might have been killed somewhere else and dumped in his living room. That made the footprints even more mysterious.
Then there was the phalarae the killer stapled to the head of the judge. The detective had to wonder if the five headed thing depicted on it had some kind of significance.
Clint pondered all of that while asking himself why anybody would want to kill Judge Woody, as he was referred to at the Courthouse. The only people that were upset with him were law enforcement people since contrary to his name he gave out the most lenient sentences of any of the three judges. Criminals and their lawyers breathed a sigh of relief when assigned to his court. Surely , law enforcement wouldn’t do this.
Just then the phone rang. It was Clint’s friend from the musuem. Clint had given him a picture of the phalarae stapled to the head of the judge , in the hope he might be able to explain the five headed thing depicted there. And now he did have an explanation. The five headed thing was a minor Roman God, the God of cowards. The phalarae was given to a Roman soldier who failed in battle just before his commander ran him through with a sword.
Did this mean that somebody killed Judge Hangum because he was a coward?

AS Clint pondered all of this his commander announced there had been another murder. This one of the Bank President Rupert R. Rich. He was found dead, shot , in his office just a few minutes ago. Clint hurried to the crime scene. He had stibograms made of the bloody footprints leading up to and away from the body. He felt sure they would match the muddy footprints from the last murder. The bullet had gone clean through, not much blood. It was like a repeat including stapled to the victim’s head another phalarae. This was different from the last and he would send a picture to his friend as soon as possible.

Clint hated this kind of case. The paper was already calling the murders the work of the phalarae killer and demanding the police solve the case and protect the unstapled public. This never helped but it did sell papers. There should be some kind of phalarae that could be stapled to the behind of the reporter that came up with the term “ unstapled public”. Now the TV reporter was using the term phalarae killer . When will they ever learn ?
But Clint’s job was to protect even those idiots and so he started with the one clue he had. He called his friend at the museum and asked where one could get authentic phalaraes.

(To be continued next Thursday}

Of course the dragons were busy today you can see them HERE.