Les Fleurs Du Mal/West Seattle/Tues April 11/10:55 pm: A Bellevue woman called the cops after she found an arrangement of black flowers -- decorated with the red numbers 666, and with pitchforks made of pipe cleaners -- on the doorstep of her business. Officer Berntson, who responded to her call, noted that the flower arrangement looked as if it had been done by a "professional." "The flowers and decorations," he reported, "were held together with florist wire [and] had been delivered in a gold florist box with a card that read: 'Thinking of you. With sympathy in a loss that is felt by many.'" Strangely, the word "many" had been crossed out. There was another piece of paper in this evil arrangement that read, "You may be a failure as a business person, but we make a great team. Cheer up, I'll always stand by you. Hope to see you soon! Yours truly, Satan 666." Seeing as the French poet Charles Baudelaire -- who was a Satanist and famous for his collection of poetry called The Flowers of Evil ("C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!") -- has been dead for over a 100 years, the cops have no suspects for this demonic crime.

Springtime Crime/University District/Thurs April 13/4:30 pm: Officer Tighe was working regular patrol when he responded to a report of a burglary in an unattached garage. Upon investigation, he found that the garage's doorknob had been pried apart with some type of burglary tool, and that these spring and summertime items were missing: a red Toro lawnmower, a black Fiesta gas grill, a green weed-eater, a green Green Machine blower, a gas-operated edger, and a black power-washer. The thief, however, didn't take the rake, as it is only useful in autumn when the leaves (both red and gold) start to fall.

The Living/Aurora/Sun April 16/3:03 pm: Seeing that the sun was out, Mr. Lucky decided, like thousands of other property owners around Seattle (myself included), to cut grass. He took his trusty lawnmower from the tool shed and began to methodically level the very thick and disorganized grass. At some distance from his house, Mr. Lucky noticed a man was sleeping in the bushes that formed the border between his home and Aurora Ave. Mr. Lucky was displeased with this because for some time now, transients, drunks, and other forlorn creatures of the night had been in the habit of passing out in his yard. Mr. Lucky switched off his grass cutter, returned to his home, and called the police. When the police arrived, Mr. Lucky asked them to contact the transient and throw him off his property. Officers Davis and Traverso dutifully walked to the bush and found that the man "lying face down on the grass was dead."

Inspection of the body by Sergeant Harris showed no obvious trauma, and when he went through the dead man's pockets, he found money and an ID card identifying the corpse as having once belonged to George Blackman. The medical examiner, who showed up 30 or so minutes later, determined that George had departed this world two days prior. After the corpse was removed, one certainly hopes that Mr. Lucky resumed cutting his lawn, because, as Pieter Bruegel's famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus points out, not even the plowman should stop for the dead. It's springtime! And life must go on, mon frère.