Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

was just a question of breaking me in, getting me used to the nip of her high-heeled shoes.
    Once he realized his blunder I suppose he didn’t have any choice but to re-advertise the post. He lied about the affairs. There were four that I knew of. I was disappointed about the first affair and for perhaps three months into the second. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t thrown into a whirlpool of misery and I didn’t really care. I had a nice house to come home to and cable TV and a washing machine and dryer. What did I need a husband for? All I had to do was pretend to myself that I was living alone. I loved my job. I had my family to visit. I needed Yot to come home one day and say, “Jimm, I’m leaving you for a long-haired girl who wears dresses.” Then it would have been perfect. But he didn’t ever say it and he continued to share my house. I got tired of having him in my life. When I walked out I wasn’t making a stand, it wasn’t a statement; I’d just burrowed down to my threshold. He didn’t put up much of a fight to keep me.
    How did this get around to me?
    We didn’t hear from Sissi again until eight years ago when she turned up on the doorstep of Mair’s shop and asked if she could have her old room back. I was shocked at the difference time had made. She was looking every bit the twenty-eight-year-old ex-beauty queen. Her baggy clothes couldn’t disguise the fact she’d put on a lot of baggage and not even cement-thick make-up could tighten up the droop in her face. She’d let herself go and gave no impression she’d be chasing after herself any time soon. She also had no intention of telling anybody what had happened to her life.
    I was still tinkering with my marriage at the time and living in my husband’s home so her old room was free. She moved into it with her overnight bag and her computer and there began her self-imposed exile. The only consolation was that you can’t have two recluses in the same house, there’s a regulation or something, so Mair broke out of her cocoon and started to breathe again. It was a great load off her mind and I often wonder whether that escaping load might just have contained fragments of her sanity.
    It was at this time that Sissi began putting down the first few bricks of her Internet empire. She purloined the wireless Internet signal from the condominium next door and began a sedentary career at the low end of the World Wide Web pecking order. Apart from teaching herself the mechanics of this awesome network she started to pick up odd jobs: marketing, translating, editing. And eight years later she was already the George Soros of dodgy Internet business. Cyber-fiddles had made her a lot of money. I tried not to ask too many details because I didn’t like the idea of lying in court. What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. But I’d picked up hints about scams she was particularly proud of. For example, she had a knack for hijacking other people’s porn sites and making them her own for a month or two. That was a big earner. I think she might have dabbled in Nigerian bank scams for a while and, of course, who hasn’t been involved in identity theft? I believe it was hacking that gave her the most pleasure. She could break into a site, clear it out in seconds and use the information to commit audacious crimes even before the site owner was out of bed the next morning.
    There were days when I asked myself how I could dedicate my life to solving crimes and apprehending villains yet do nothing to bring Sissi to justice. And the answer came to me one evening when I was playing Grand Theft Auto III with her. Why, I wondered, was I getting so much joy from blasting innocent old ladies with a sawn-off shotgun? Of course it was obvious: because it wasn’t real. The world in which Sissi perpetrated her crimes didn’t exist. The online banks she robbed had no bricks or mortar or pens on strings; the charities she made up were never there to begin with. Even the identities she stole were fictitious. Nobody was born with a name or address or Social Security number. They were all artificial add-ons. So, who cared if someone borrowed them? It was like kidnapping Winnie the Pooh off the street, locking him in a cold, wet cellar, slicing off little bits of him and sending them in manila envelopes to the police. You know what? They wouldn’t care. He’s fiction. “Go for it,” they’d say.
    That’s how I justify Sissi’s career to myself. Her success