Play@YSDC

Jimmy Salvatore's Apartment Building - South Philadelphia
7:50 PM - Thursday, July 17, 1969

Cole Brocco finally reached his destination, a run-down apartment building. His regular fence had told him that there was a special job waiting for him in Philly. He wouldn't go into details, but the promised pay was good, so Cole hadn't really cared what it was. He'd been told to look up a local fence in South Philadelphia named Jimmy Salvatore, also known as Jimmy the Hand, an old friend of the fence in Boston. Jimmy would give him the details of the job. He'd been told to use a special knock: five knocks in a row, a short pause, and then two more. The apartment was up on the fourth floor, and a light shone in the window.

Well looks like he's home. I exit the car and take a small swig of my flask to warm myself before heading up to his room, I knock as instructed and wait for an answer.

There was no answer.

OOC,[b]Cole[/b], please roll Listen.

I pound my fist on the door very loud before repeating the secret knock.

http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3605349/

There was still no answer, and he heard nothing beyond the door. This was starting to get on his nerves. On the other hand, five hundred bucks was a lot of money.

Dammit the lights on he should be in there, shouldn't he? Ugh, knowing the fence type he's likely strung out in the bathtub or some shit. I thought, honestly though it might have just been an excuse to force myself in, which I did.
http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3605368/ lockpicking

It only took Cole a few minutes to jimmy Jimmy's lock. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated model. He pushed open the door and looked into the living room. There was a door in the left wall and a small kitchenette area on the right side of the room. The living room contained a threadbare couch and a leather armchair facing a television set at the back of the room, the screen dark. The back of the chair was to Cole. Sticking above it was the back of a man's head, curly brown hair atop it. He couldn't see any more from this angle. But why hadn't the man (Jimmy?) answered the door? And who watched a TV that was not even turned on?

"Hey are you jimmy Salvator?" I say shutting the door behind me and approaching him, looking at the situation I began thinking my originaly assumption was correct. I might be able to wake him up but chances were I was just gonna have to wait for him to come down. Oh well, $500

Once Cole got close enough to the chair to see the front of it, it was immediately apparent that nothing would wake up Jimmy Salvatore, if that was indeed who he was, until Judgment Day. The young man was naked, with bruises and burns all over his body. His eyes looked like they were bulging out of his head, but they were utterly vacant. He had no visible wounds, but someone had seriously gone to work on him before killing him.

OOC,[b]Cole[/b], please roll Sanity. Sanity loss is 1/1d4+1. If you lose 5 Sanity, you must roll Idea. Success at that roll means you go temporarily insane. Otherwise, you may act freely.

HOLY FUCK, WHAT HAPPENED HERE? I think as I step away. I was freaked but I brought myself under control. It didn't look like the guy got robbed so this was defiantly just a murder, but who would kill a guy so gruesome? I better let my regular fence know what had happened, maybe he could shed some light on this; or at least tell me the job Jimmy was gonna give me. I turn to leave and go back to my car, and back to Boston.

http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3611105/

Sorry I did that earlier today but must have forgotten to paste the link, I fixed it.

Cole hesitated with his hand on the doorknob. His criminal mind was always working, and he realized that his fingerprints were on the doorknob, both on the inside and outside of the door. If he left now, those prints would be found when the murder scene was eventually discovered. He had been arrested before, which meant his fingerprints were on file. Once the police turned up a match, he would naturally become a suspect.

It also looked like the man had been systemtically tortured before he had been killed.

Shit thats right, my prints are in the database, I need to wipe off this door handle. I quickly move to his kitchen looking for a rag of some sort to use for this task.

Cole found a washcloth in the kitchen and used it to carefully wipe off the knob on the inside of the door, making sure there was no trace of his prints.

OOC,[b]Cole[/b], please roll Listen.

Okay, I'm good; there's no way this death could be linked to me, I'm safe. Still losing this job sucked, big scores like this didn't come often. I took one last look at the body, it was really fucked up, this was brutal even for mobsters.

http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3614263/

There was a thin red line stretching around the dead man's neck - blood. It looked like he had been throttled to death, possibly with a garotte judging by the cut. The man's hands were also bound behind his back with electrical cord.

As Cole was examining the body, there was knocking on the door: five short knocks, a pause, and then two more.

.......Holy crap what do I do? Who else was even supposed to be here? I wasn't told of anyone. I hide myself somewhere trying to stay close enough to see and hear what this new man does.

Hide http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3614280/

Cole quickly found the only decent hiding place he could see. He ducked behind the counter in the small kitchen area.

"Yo, Jimmy!" called a man's voice from outside the door. "It's Terry, open up! You got the rest of my money?"

OOC,[b]Cole[/b], please also roll Sneak.

I remain quiet and still. Listening intently, if he leaves I'll try to tail him.
http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3615338/

"Come on!" said Terry after a pause. "I know you're in there, your light's on!" Cole heard the door opening. "Huh, it's unlocked."

Footsteps padded across the room. "Jimmy, you asleep, man?" Terry asked. "Come on, it took a lot of work to get both doses of Morpheus for your mysterious client, and that Anderson cat won't even know they're missing. I even snatched some of his research notes, and that's worth plenty extra. Not that the five hundred you gave me earlier isn't- Oh, crap!" He burst into tears, his mind shot. "God, no! Jimmy!" However, Terry was unable to process the scene before him and did not lose it completely. He did, however, vomit loudly.

error

I wait for him to calm down, once he does I go over to him with my pistol drawn. I immediately tell him not to cry out, I then tell him I didn't commit this murder and ask him how he knows this man. I put the gun away if he seems to believe me. If he doesn't I explain who I am and what I'm doing here.

Terry retched for another minute, then straightened up only to see Cole's imposing figure towering over him and pointing his pistol at him. The furious look he gave Cole made it obvious that Cole being Jimmy's murderer was exactly what he believed.

OOC,In order to fix continuity errors I had mistakenly introduced, I needed to make some edits to what [b]Terry[/b] said in my posts higher up on this page. Please reread them. [b]Garrett[/b], you'll need to roll Fast Talk, and you should also roleplay this out and say exactly what you say and do to convince him.

http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3617117/

"Don't look at me like that I didn't kill him. Think man, I don't have a speck of blood on me, nor do I have tools capable of doing this to a person on me. Not to mention that if I was the killer I would just waste you right now and eliminate the witness." Shit I might have to do that anyway, if this guy goes to the cops I'm definitely going away for a while and I really don't want to go to prison.

Terry, who was a very short young man, stared up at Cole. He didn't quite seem convinced, but at least he wasn't running away, screaming, or attacking. "Looks like he was choked to death," he said. "You wouldn't need to get any blood on you to do that. And how do I know what you do or don't have on you? What are you even doing here? If you didn't kill Jimmy, who did?"

I didn't see any reason not to tell this man the truth. "Pal I don't have half a clue what happened to him I was told to come here by my fence in Boston, said that this guy had work for me. He didn't answer when I knocked so I let myself in and found him like this. I was just about to walk out the door when you knocked, I decided to hide until I knew who you were. On that note, who are you?"

"I'm Terry Williams," said Terry. "Jimmy is - was - my friend. He's my fence too. I did a job for him last night and managed to get more than he asked for. He paid me the five hundred he promised me earlier today, but he said he'd pay me a bonus. He had to meet with his client first and get paid before he could do that, so he told me to come back tonight."

"Okay, what did he ask you to steal, and who's the client? If I had one guess that's who I'd guess did this."

"Jimmy refused to say who the client was," said Terry, "and I didn't want to push him on it. Now I wish I had. He had me steal a sample of this new drug called Morpheus. It was made by a Dr. Gregory Anderson at the University of Pennsylvania. He offered me five hundred bucks for the job. I tried to break in early last night, but a campus security guard detected me and I barely got away. I came here and talked to Jimmy about it. He encouraged me to keep trying, so I went back there a couple of hours before dawn. I got two doses of the drug, not just one, and I also snagged some of the doc's research notes. When I came to see Jimmy earlier, he said he'd pay me extra for that stuff too, but he only had the five hundred on him. He told me that once the client paid him, he could pay me my bonus, another thousand. He told me to come back tonight at eight and he'd have the money then. I guess...I guess the client didn't want to pay up...or wanted to make sure he never talked."

"If he didn't want to pay up he'd still wait until he got the drug to kill him, I guess he wanted to silence him but why?"

"He probably did get the drug, then, unless it's still here somewhere," said Terry. "I delivered it to Jimmy earlier today. From what Jimmy said, the client insisted on discretion and paid him for it, which is why he wouldn't tell me who it is. But Jimmy had to know, had to have seen the guy's face. Whatever's going on here, it's big...bigger than big."

"Well this was probably done by some heavy duty drug traffickers; the kind of people we really shouldn't fuck with. Do you know who does the dealing in this city? For that matter what the hell does Morpheos do? I've never heard of it."

"I don't know who the major dealers are," said Terry. "I usually stay away from that stuff. Jeez, Jimmy wasn't kidding when he said that I was better off not knowing who his client is. The cops probably know who deals, but I try to avoid them too. I do know a little about what Morpheus does. It's designed to help you control your dreams. Some of what was in those research notes was accounts of the test subjects' dreams while under the drug's influence."

"So Morpheus isn't just some stimulant that there gonna sell to junkies it has a purpose?" That would make it a lot harder to find out who did this, wait do I even want to find out? I don't want to cross whoever would do something like this over $500, I feel bad for this poor bastard but avenging him isn't my problem.

"Yeah, it has a purpose," said Terry. "Someone was willing to kill for it. Just who are you, anyway? You never said."

OOC,[b]Cole[/b], please roll Idea.

"I'm a retriever." I said using a common code word for pro thiefs. "I was told this guy had work for me by a friend in Boston."

53 http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3630986/

"Okay, but what's your name?" asked Terry.

"Cole."

"All right, Cole," said Terry. "Let's not panic. Jimmy had to have been murdered recently, since he was alive when I was here earlier today. Chances are it'll be some time before anyone comes by and finds him - anyone besides us, I mean. So that gives us some time to look around carefully. We need to find out who killed him and why, and make them pay. Maybe they left some kind of clues around. Once the cops get a hold of the scene, we'll never get a look at it."

I know I'm too curious for my own good but I went along with it anyway. Besides taking a quick look around couldn't cause too much trouble.

"Let's stick together as we search," said Terry. "That way, if one of us misses an important clue, there's a chance the other will find it. We'll start in here and then move on to Jimmy's bedroom. It's through that door on the left."

OOC,[b]Cole[/b], please let me know what you're searching first (you may want to review the description of the apartment on the first page of this thread) and roll Spot Hidden. You may also roll Psychology about [b]Terry[/b].