The Legoland Jazz Club Murder

As soon as I opened the door to my office, I noticed the smell. She smelled fresh, the sort of smell you get when you’ve only been unsealed from your bag a short time. When I saw her, I could see that she was more plastic than Pamela Anderson’s boobs. She had auburn hair, a color so bright you just knew it had to be artificially made. She was going to be trouble.

This is the problem with my office, it’s the problem with every door in Legoland, no locks. People can just walk in wherever, whenever. For all the engineering geniuses around this place who can invent tall buildings, vehicles, and spacecraft, you’d think someone could create a lock.

As I walked across the office to the other side of my desk, she started to speak, “Mr. Brickman, I’m…” But, before she could finish, I cut her off, “You’re Lulu Larue, the famous jazz singer and more recently the first murderer to be arrested in Legoland”. The expression on her face didn’t change, it was as if it had been painted on, so I kept talking. “You’re in my office because you want my help and right now, you’re thinking about how great a detective I am for figuring out who you were so fast”, as I sat down, I threw my hat to the hat stand.

She looked surprised, replying, “Well yes, how did you…” I interrupted her again, “Miss Larue, this isn’t a big town, the Jazz Club is the building next door to this one, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jazz singer in this town before. Plus, I can read a newspaper, any help I gave would be to plead guilty and work out a deal once they figure out how to build a courthouse and come up with a judge”.

She didn’t appreciate my candor. She threw herself to her feet, placing both hands on my desk and leaning forward. “I didn’t murder anyone”. This was not the first time in my life a woman in Legoland had gotten mad at me, I knew exactly how to resolve this situation. I placed my feet up on my desk, my hands behind my head, and said, “Calm down Miss Larue”. Strangely, she did not calm down. It appeared that my tactic was somehow flawed.

Instead, she began yelling at me, some of the words I could not comprehend. If she had a saliva gland, I would have expected spit to be flying from her mouth as she abused me. As her tirade continued, I opened the bottom drawer and withdrew the morning’s paper. Normally the headline of the Legoland news was an article on donut thefts or the unfounded claims of the greatest hero ever. Today was different. Today the paper had a picture of Lulu Larue being walked from the Jazz Club in handcuffs, with the bold headline “Murder in Legoland”.

I began reading aloud the article halfway through, “…two witnesses saw the flame-haired singer push her former lover from the upstairs balcony to his death…” Lulu stopped ranting for a second, it was as if she had stopped breathing altogether, that’s if she had been able to breathe at all before. She placed her head in her hands and started to cry. She wasn’t a murderer, heck she wasn’t even a doughnut thief.

I offered her my handkerchief, gentlemen still do that in Legoland, the only snot that ever covers us has usually come from a child anyway. She sat down and we talked. Her relationship with Toby McCrae had been complicated. He was her bass player, then they started dating, then they broke up. She said it was difficult but there had never been any violence. She couldn’t believe that the police had arrived so quickly. But I pointed out that the stroke of genius in the design of the Jazz Club was that there was a pizza parlor next door, which would ensure a constant police presence, rivaled only by the doughnut shop next door to the Police Station.

Lulu had been getting dressed when she heard a commotion, she came out when she heard the screams from down below. She looked over the balcony and there, splayed over the bandstand was Toby.

It seemed to be a rock-solid case, but I knew in the pit of my hollow stomach that something wasn’t right. I went over the case as best I could. All witnesses said that they had seen a red-headed woman argue with Toby and then push him over the balcony. The only other woman found on the first floor was Mitsy Lonnergan, and she was a brunette.

I needed to clear my head the only way I knew how. I went downstairs to Al’s Barbershop to get a trim. I had barely sat down in the chair when it hit me. I raced to the Police Station, destined to clear Lulu’s name.

What was it that I realized, I’d seen Mitsy Lonnergan before, except she wasn’t a brunette. When I saw her, she was leaving Al’s sporting a nice red wig. It seems that to the people in this town, all the faces pretty much look alike, it’s when you change the hair and the clothes that they stand out.

The Legoland Police didn’t have to work very hard, Mitsy didn’t have a spine! She broke down and confessed, she wanted Lulu out of the way so that she could take the spotlight. Toby was an unfortunate casualty of her greed. Lulu was free. The Jazz Club didn’t miss a beat. A new drummer and bass player were on stage the next night, and to everyone’s surprise, they looked just like Toby and Mitsy.

It felt good to help the innocent, but I still had more cases to solve. Now, where did that doughnut go?

To read more about the origins of Ace Brickman, Lego Detective, please look up the story "The city built on a broken baseplate".

This story was inspired by the Lego Icons Jazz Club set.

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