Can You Please Stop What You’re Doing For 2 Seconds and Have a Normal Conversation? Op-ed by a TV Show Detective

By guest writer: TV Show Detective 

Excuse me. You there.

The one cleaning, polishing, bathing, brushing, feeding, and saddling your horse to go out on an afternoon ride.

I know you’re busy, but this is important. Not to be too much of a burden on you, but someone you personally knew is dead, and I’m just trying to get to the bottom of it. Could you just, I don’t know, give me just a minute of your time? Put down the horse brush and give me some eye contact? Just for a second?

I’m just gathering information. I talked to your mom already. She was shoveling manure. She hardly gave me anything. In fact, she seemed annoyed to talk to me. She kept giving bare minimum answers while focusing on shoveling manure, and I had to just stand there awkwardly and take notes and try not to say anything that would tick her off. Which is weird, because it’s her brother that died. So why isn’t she mourning? And why do I feel like I’m further down on her priority list than manure?

I know it’s been rough on the farm lately, and you really need to keep things moving. I get it. But you are personally related to the victim of a heinous crime, and I have to pry out information from you while you keep shining that saddle and brushing your horse. Do you realize how suspicious that looks? Don’t you think I, as an investigator, deserve a little bit more of your attention? It’s almost like you think just talking isn’t interesting enough. Like you need to keep things intense and visually engaging. It’s really weird.

Look, I’ll be out of your hair soon. I have this gut instinct that there’s a clue somewhere on this farm that will get me closer to solving the murder. And if you can at least act like you are trying to help me out, I wouldn’t feel like I’m not getting the full picture. Do you see how that works? You giving me just a minute of your undivided attention actually gets me out of here faster. It’s a “help me help you” kind of situation.

But right now, you can’t even give me eye contact. You’re just working away, giving me cold naked answers to pretty easy questions and acting like I should already know more than I do. That’s not how this is supposed to go.

Aha. See that? You finally gave me that clue I needed. It only took you eight minutes. If you had just acted like a normal person and talked to me like you would your neighbor, we would have gotten there five minutes ago. Did we learn a lesson today?

Now, I need to see if your boyfriend Tristen knows anything. He was at a bar suspiciously close to where the murder happened.

What’s that? His house is just down the street?

Great! What’s he doing today?

He’s working on his car?

Crap.