Samantha
From Shades
Name: Samantha Clark, PI
Sphere: Mage
Occupation: Private Investigator
Nature: Martyr
Demeanor: Survivor
Apparent Age: Mid-30s
Height: 5'3"
Tradition: Dreamspeaker
"The pebble glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint. "[Cole] Investigations." It is a reasonable shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization...Come on in - there's nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly." - Raymond Chander
Contents |
Early Career
"I won’t quietly accept it: / “to sit with a blind brow / above an empty heart.” / I’m not sure I need / to know where empty is." Twelve Arrests, No Convictions by Kevin Connelly
August 4th, 2002 -- 12:46 am--I know where empty is. It's behind me. I'm not empty any more. I have a life. I have my life, and I have a motive in life. It's a lovely life. This is a lovely life. A lovely city. A lovely world. Or maybe I'm just drunk. Yeah, that's probably it. I'm drunk, but it makes things so bloody lovely. I never really had a 'diary' before. Diary. That sounds so girlie. Okay, take two. I've never really had a journal before. That's better. But sometimes, yanno, you just gotta write. You just gotta write to commemorate the occasion. And tonight, I just had to write. No one's listening to me, but the paper will listen. Well, the computer. Considering paper really is a thing of the past. My typing is far more legible this hour of the night than my writing anyway.
But I'm babbling. Getting back to the dirt. I won't quietly accept this world. The city is corrupt. This life is corrupt, with dirt, and shit, and gangs and the mob and divorce and muggings and everything you could ever imagine. Some nights it feels like there is more death in this city than life. Some nights it's so alive I feel my head could explode. And all nights, it's corrupt. The eastern mobs terrifying everyone with their brutal shit, and all the other gangs tryin' to get together to push them out. Everyone in everyone else's pocket. But I won't accept it, though it took me forever and a day to do anything about it. Three years, actually. Three bloody years to get my license. And tonight, it finally happened. I, Samantha Eleanor Francis Clark, am a private investigator.
I started as a cop, I thought that would be the route. The way to make things clean, make things right, find some justice in this bloody grey world. No colours but red and grey. But the cops were the worst. I hated it. No freedom, so much corruption. Everyone’s taking some sort of graft for someone. No other way to make enough to survive on the money a cop makes. So I get bossed around by these stuck up, unprofessional, graft-corrupt detectives who couldn’t see their own reflection if they looked in a mirror. That lasted all of three weeks. So I figured I’d got into the private business. Get my own office, do my own thing. Work free lance, take the real cases. The good cases. Do some real good in this city, god knows it could use it. And finally, three years later, that can happen. It’s about time.%r%rNot that anyone else really cared. No one did, but me and JD, so we went out and celebrated. Me and Jack Daniels went to the bar and celebrated real hard. He’s a good pal, JD. He was waiting at home for me too. Just sitting on my desk, waiting for another toast in celebration. JD and Sam Clark, PI. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship...
Private Investigation Work
Image:SamTgree.jpg Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being a fool.Sometimes I wonder if it's foolish to actually think that I as one person can change a god damned thing outside this room. Staring at the door, I get the sickening sense my hand might be the only one that ever turns the knob. Just another relic forgotten in the dusty, shadowed corners of the city. Shoved off to the side, with the homeless, yesterday's news paper, and the Styrofoam cup from the coffee you got at the convenience store that will never bio-degrade. Convenience, yeah.
And then I remember the look on that guy's face when I was carrying his little girl back to him from her fuck job of a mother who'd run off with the kid two weeks ago. You know, that was the only job that I didn't get paid in full for. At least, not in cash. I guess the guy paid me in other ways. I remember seeing his face, and seeing the fact that it is possible even in this messed up, black, white and red world, to make a difference. Damn him. Damn that man for giving me heart. Damn him to hell. Because he's damned me to hell.
He's damned me to the hell that is a shabby, dusty office of a building that probably should have been condemned long ago. He's damned me to the hell of sitting, waiting for the phone to ring or for the sound of the wooden stairs creaking just outside my door, containing some new customer with some new trouble that I could care less about. Some man searching for his cheating slut of a wife, some businessman looking for the dirt to get his 'partner' fired. But because men like that exist, and little girls like that need to be found, I'm sitting in this office and waiting. I'm waiting for the day someone with a real heart left walks through that door.
One day they will. And I'll be here, with JD and by 40 year old phone, and a soul that is still willing to help. Until then, I work for the shit to make the money to keep this townhouse which is now my own. Until then, JD and I have nice long conversations until midnight about subjects I'll blissfully forget the next morning. Until then, I survive. I'm ready to survive. It's about all I can really do.
Memorable Quotes and Poses
Image:SamTank.jpg"I can't get to sleep, I think about the implications of diving in too deep, and possibly the complications. Especially at night I worry over situations I know will be alright, perhaps it's just imagination. Day after day it reappears, night after night my heartbeat shows the fear. Ghosts appear and fade away..." - Colin Hay's Overkill
"Careful when you speak to him, that Freddie Easter's a bad boy." "Well, I'll bring my .38 along incase I have to spank him." - Richard Diamond Private Investigator Radio Show
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."--"The Simple Art of Murder", Raymond Chandler (essay)
"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 34), Raymond Chandler
"Usually, a PI gets a client who, for too little money, wants too much information. You get it or you don’t, depending on circumstances. The same with your fee. But once in a while you get the information and too much else, including a story about a body on a balcony which wasn’t there when you went to look. Common sense says go home and forget it, no money coming in. Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday quarter back who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He’s high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it’s always somebody else’s money he’s adding up." -Raymond Chandler, Playback
Connections and Contacts
Image:Sexcigsam.jpgSam's deepest connection would be with the city, if you asked her. She speaks about her awakening like some one night love affair with the man who disappeared out of her life in the morning -- that man being the father, protector, spirit of Ketchikan itself. She always was devoted to this town but now even more so. She speaks with the ghosts and spirits of the city probably more often than the actual living occupants. She knows that Ketchikan is a city of death as much as it is one of life, and so she respects both equally. She serves both equally also. She's never spoken directly with the spirit of the city again, but she speaks and works with his messengers on a regular basis. She knows one day she will meet him again. He is always there, waiting, just beneath her feet.
Samantha also has contacts in Ketchikan's police department. She was with them for three years and the few clean cops on the force remain respectful and helpful of her. She will thrown them a few bones on cases when she knows something, and vice versa they will let her into records or give her information if she's missing something they know. It's a precarious relationship, as several of the cops also resent her morals (miss high and mighty not able to take graft with the rest of them) but it's also an essential relationship to her business.
More to come.
