30. Mr. Leonard Elsewhere, under surveillance

Elsewhere was sitting on the park bench
before he disappeared somewhere else

(Submitted by RJC, free-lance)

When I first observed Mr. Leonard Elsewhere, he was sitting on a park bench, feeding bread crumbs to the Canadian Geese. I noted that it was odd that he fed only Canadian Geese to the exclusion of our many local birds. When he saw me focusing my camera on him, he stood up, waved in kind of a semi-salute, and disappeared almost instantly. I was sure I had captured him on camera, but the photo to the right is all that was recorded. Oddly enough, all the geese had vanished as well.

Mr. Leonard Elsewhere was a worthy adversary--a much greater threat than Krista Von Matisse. The report I received from unnamed government officials indicated that Elsewhere was not a smoker and had tremendous upper body strength, two significant advantages over Krista Von Matisse. Though unclear, with many redactions and a few missing pages and a lot of typos, the report went on to say that Elsewhere had left a long trail through a variety of countries, from the Middle East to Australia and then mostly to Canada. Mr. Elsewhere in fact had spent considerable time in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, possibly because his transmission had gone out during a local mechanics' strike--caused in part by what the mechanics considered an unfair exchange rate imposed on them on American parts, which weren't all that great to begin with. The strike lasted for weeks with no hope of a settlement; the mechanics, in fact, did not even know who to negotiate with. When the lead mechanic made a call to a local union in Duluth, a little girl answered the phone and said the following: "Deal with it, turkey. Or become an American." Then she hung up and wouldn't answer the phone again. A tough little negotiator . . . 

I noted Mr. Leonard Elsewhere's travel itinerary. He had been in many of the major Canadian cities, but in no particular order, starting in Winnipeg, then Thunder Bay, then Toronto via Montreal, off to Quebec, back to Vancouver, and finally to Ottawa (where Elsewhere had initialed receipt of a letter by Duane Hawkinson, owner of Duane's pretty good Smokehouse Salsa, entitled "My Formal Apology to the National Government of Canada in Ottawa; Elsewhere wrote a single annotation: "What a dumb apology letter. Must be a product of the American public education system.") I would have to dig deeper into my evidence files, create a criminal profile, and forecast what kind of plot this Mr. Leonard Elsewhere was planning to hatch. 

Tons of work lay ahead of me. I was going to need a few pots of coffee, maybe a package of doughnuts . . .

. . . and some Slim Jims.