Testimony Of Police Investigator

(My retelling of The Burnings resumes. All episodes of the retelling appear under the “Burnings” tag.)

PROSECUTOR: Please state your name and position.

HARSHMAN: I am Detective Leo Harshman of the county police. My jurisdiction includes both Westview and Centerville.

PROSECUTOR: And you were the lead detective for the Village Booksmith fire, correct?

HARSHMAN: Yes, I was.

PROSECUTOR: In your own words, can you describe the events of the night of September 16?

HARSHMAN: I got a routine call to investigate a code 11-71C.

PROSECUTOR: 11-71C? Can you explain to the court what that means?

HARSHMAN: 11-71 is a standard police code for fire. We add the letter C to mean the fire is known or suspected to be caused by Ed Crankshaft.

SPECTATOR: Hey! I re-assemble that remark!

THE JUDGE: (bangs gavel) The spectators will remain quiet at all times. Please continue, Detective Harshman.

HARSHMAN: The dispatcher gave an address, which means it didn’t happen at Crankshaft’s house, which  is a little unusual. But I knew the address was right next door.

PROSECUTOR: You were familiar with the address?

HARSHMAN: Yes, local first responders know Mr. Crankshaft personally.

PROSECUTOR: What happened when you responded to the call?

HARSHMAN: Well, 11-71C has a reputation for being, well, a waste of the officer’s time. We usually give them to rookies. 

THE JUDGE: Detective Harshman, we’ve had a talk about you maintaining a professional tone when you’re giving testimony. It is common for people involved in the case to be spectators in the courtroom, which is clearly happening right now.

HARSHMAN: I’m sorry, Your Honor. Anyway, when I got the scene, it was obvious this was something different. There was creosote oil poured  all over the place, and the victim Lillian McKenzie was unusually distressed. I called the state arson investigator to come out, and secured the crime scene.

PROSECUTOR: What did securing the crime scene entail?

HARSHMAN: I marked off the area with tape, told Lillian not to use or let anyone use the burned stairs, and that she had to close the bookstore until further notice.

PROSECUTOR: What was her response to that?

HARSHMAN: She – said she would not comply with this lawful order. Her exact words were, “My neighborhood isn’t zoned business, the town can’t tell me what to do.”

PROSECUTOR: What happened after that?

HARSHMAN: I added her comment to my report in case somebody got hurt and tried to sue the town, and made a mental note to report her to the state Attorney General. Again. 

PROSECUTOR: Let me rephrase that. What happened later in the evening?

HARSHMAN: There was a call for a 10-100, Civil Disturbance, at the same address, about 2:30 in the morning.

PROSECUTOR: What did you think was happening?

HARSHMAN: I had no idea. The whole thing made no sense. It was an obvious arson, and the last thing an arsonist would do is go back to the scene later that night. Whoever committed this arson obviously didn’t know what they were doing. 

PROSECUTOR: You responded to the second call? 

HARSHMAN: Yes.

PROSECUTOR: Please describe what happened.

HARSHMAN: When I pulled up to the house the second time, people started running off in all directions. It looked like a high school party was breaking up because the cops arrived. That’s honestly what I thought it was, but about half the people stayed.

PROSECUTOR: Who were those people?

HARSHMAN: Mostly neighbors, and friends of Lillian and the bookstore. I recognized Harry Dinkle, The World’s Greatest Band Director.

THE JUDGE: Mr. Harshman, please do not give your opinion unless you are asked for it.

HARSHMAN: No, Your Honor, I wasn’t. That’s actually his legal name. He changed it to that.

THE JUDGE: I apologize, Officer.

HARSHMAN: Shall I continue?

THE JUDGE: Please do.

HARSHMAN: The people at the scene were counter-protestors, and told us they were supporting Lillian McKenzie against some protestors. Something about some book, “Fahrenheit” something. I called in a 10-101 for assistance with the public disturbance, and asked officers to pull over anyone who appeared to be running from the scene, or was out driving in the middle of the night. There was a good chance one of these people was our arsonist. I also made one arrest at the scene.

PROSECUTOR: Who did you arrest at the scene and why?

HARSHMAN: Pete Roberts-Reynolds, the owner of Montoni’s Pizza. He was charged with a 5th degree felony under section 2921.31, for interfering with a police investigation.

PROSECUTOR: What did he do?

HARSHMAN: I said earlier that I secured the crime scene with tape. Roberts-Reynolds had removed some of the tape, and was wearing it as some kind of costume.

PROSECUTOR: What did you do next?

HARSHMAN: I brought Roberts-Reynolds back to the station for questioning, formally charged him, and released him on his own recognizance about 5 AM. He seemed very tired, he had these bags under his eyes. But we determined he was not a suspect in the arson, just a mo– misguided person.

PROSECUTOR: Were there any other arrests?

HARSHMAN: No arrests, but several people were caught by other officers, and many of them were charged with misdemeanors.

PROSECUTOR: What were they charged with?

HARSHMAN: Most of them were under 18, so mostly curfew violations.

PROSECUTOR: Lillian McKenzie testified that the protestors dispersed when she pointed out her surveillance camera. Did you review the video?

HARSHMAN: There was no video to review.

PROSECUTOR: Why not?

HARSHMAN: Because that’s not a camera, that’s a floodlight. That doesn’t even look like a camera. If that was a camera, it was pointed the same place as where the fire started, and I would have had to do a lot less police work to do.

Unknown's avatar

Author: Banana Jr. 6000

Yuck. The fritos are antiquated.

61 thoughts on “Testimony Of Police Investigator”

  2. A lot of the crap that happened wouldn’t happen if they didn’t have to deal with flakes and sheeple.

  4. HARSHMAN: I said earlier that I secured the crime scene with tape. Roberts-Reynolds had removed some of the tape, and was wearing it as some kind of costume.

    I brought Roberts-Reynolds back to the station for questioning, formally charged him, and released him on his own recognizance about 5 AM. He seemed very tired, he had these bags under his eyes. But we determined he was not a suspect in the arson, just a mo– misguided person.

    Now that’s funny. How many people remember Mopey Pete appropriating the crime scene tape during the counterprotest?

    Thanks for including all the links.

    1. Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed that detail.

      The point of this whole exercise is “make Batiuk’s story make sense, while also being consistent with Batiuk’s details.” We didn’t see the police put any crime scene tape out; this was a detail I added. But it’s something the police realistically would have done at the scene of an obvious arson. And it explains how Pete would have gotten some of this tape, because it’s not an object most people have lying around their house. Once I established all that, the next story beat wrote itself. A cranky police officer would not have been amused to see this.

      “Lillian’s camera was actually a spotlight” was another detail I invented that fits the story, and actually corrects the story. Because if that was a camera, then it was pointed right at the fire the whole time, and we’d already know who the arsonist was. (There’s also the small problem that the story doesn’t care who the arsonist was. We do, as any audience of the story would.)

      It also corrects the artwork. Because the artwork looks like a floodlight, not a modern security camera. We know Lillian’s preference for outdated things, but a 1980s-style outdoor security camera would have looked like a VCR compared to a 2020s one. There’s no way that tiny box with a light on it is a security camera Lillian “roll-top desk” McKenzie would use. And if it was, it would have instantly solved the whole mystery. And nobody could have installed it in the middle of the night. Not even Ed Crankshaft, with his “hang from roofs” ability. (He’d need a free hand to do the installing.)

      So Lillian basically bluffed the crowd into leaving. She’s clever enough to do that. The crowd would have to be extremely stupid to fall for it, but we’ll soon see why that is.

  6. That’s right. He’s too busy depicting Lizard Woman bribing people with high-octane baked goods to care about trivial things like who the protesters were or who set the fire.

  7. Currently, Dick Tracy is in re-runs with artwork by one Rick Burchett. Take a look, and you can see that when he has an actual set of interesting characters, he can draw quite well. Which explains why his FW artwork was so bad.

    1. Burchett had serious issues keeping the characters on model (or, as implied, he didn’t care to), but his was probably the most interesting artwork FW ever saw. Criticism of TB’s writing aside, Burchett probably was never a good fit for a strip laden with dialogue and limited in action and it seemed that this was realized quickly as Burchett’s tenure drawing the strip was quite short-lived.

      I do think that Burchett’s artwork in FW really shined on the rare occasions when TB wanted to sell a gag or an emotion with some visual flair. Sometimes Burchett would give us a little visual flair when the writing didn’t call for it at all.

      Burchett was also responsible for one of my favorite FW panels of Act III.

          1. Oh no, I edited the text. I wanted something to fit that creepily cheerful disposition on Bernie’s face and “Here’s Bernie!” seemed too on the nose.

            TB, Byrne, or Ayers would never have given us The Shining meets band fundraising, and for that I appreciate Burchett’s work on the strip despite all the skyscraper foreheads.

      2. Batiuk was pretty contemptuous of Burchett in his old funkywinkerbean.com blog, but I don’t think those posts survived the migration to tombatiuk.com.

  8. BJr6K, a round of applause. I love the name “Leo Harshman” and I love the tension and drama. Just this week I watched Witness for the Prosecution and Anatomy of a Murder, and this is a gripping continuation of the theme. Only, y’know, those movies are about murder trials and this is about a slightly singed lower step of a wooden staircase and a lightly smoke-stained garage door. (Which, because it happened to Batiukverse Mary Sue #14, is far more dire than any murder could possibly be.)

    Crankshaft has been in an unsnarkable phase for a while. Hopefully the recrudescence of Dinkle will get us all back into the snarking groove.

    PS: I grieve the loss of the old WordPress template, as I guess we all do. If the strip was bland and lifeless, it was always a comfort to come here and see the playful design and the ever-changing masthead. Gee, WordPress sure sucks.

    1. I’m glad you liked ‘leo harshman’, it took me a while to come up with that. By the way,

      post, you inadvertently named the next deponent. I was struggling with a surname until you used the exact word I needed.

  10. Related to the Batiukverse: More fanart of mine

    Wally as the Joker (specifically Heath Legder’s version)

    Holly Budd-Winkerbean

    Sherry Carlyle

    Cindy and Marianne

    My redesign of Rolanda Mathews

    another drawing of Chien

    Mickey Lopez-Bushka with Shadow the Hedgehog (if you watched this video by Jehtt then you understand

    1. That strip is now old enough to get a drivers license! When it was printed there were still over a dozen World War I veterans alive! Netscape Navigator’s final version was released mere months prior!

      And I don’t think it is the first instance of that gag either…

  12. Today, some random potato lady commits the grave sin of not knowing who Harry L Dinkle is, and we get to see him instantly fly into a rage at not being properly recognized and worshipped.

    Snarkability meter is in the green again, folks!

    1. As if Harry L. Dinkle wouldn’t be known and despised by every school, church, instrument shop, and other music-related entity within 200 miles of Cleveland. They should all have a picture of Dinkle posted prominently, with the notation DO NOT ALLOW ON THE PREMISES FOR ANY REASON.

      1. You’d think most people would feel a sense of foreboding as Dinkle’s massive ego arrives a minute or two before he does—like a herald.

        Receptionist: Oh, no, Harry Dinkle is near! Let’s lock the door, turn off the lights, and pretend like we’re not here.

    2. I figure that in the fourth panel, omitted due to space constraints, the desk lady says, “Harry Dinkle? Yeah, we got an email from the band director at Worstview High warning about you. If you’re still here by the time I count three, I’m calling security.”

      1. No, of course they immediately gave Dinkle the job. The “industrial arts teacher” they mentioned is probably inconsolable.

  13. Related to the Batiukverse: A week-long storyline from 2000 where Pete and Jess/Blondie McBighair/80’s Glam Rock Reject/Judging By Her Hairstyle, The Eighties Never Ended/Generic Blond Woman (Who Looks Like She Came Straight from the Eighties With That Hair Of Hers)/Blond Woman Who Would Later Become Darin’s Wife work on a assignment in school (I know it’s a repost but I don’t think many people saw it)

    Les: Here are the teams I assigned: Jess Darling and Pete Roberts, Darin Fairgood and Chien Parks, Bulk Dombrowski and Nicole Franklin, Matt Miller and Samantha Watson, Dave Haller and Ally Roberts, blah blah blah blah (devolves into mind-numbing rambling)

    Jess: Pete, isn’t Mega Man a video game character owned by Capcom?

    Pete: Shit, I forgot.

    Jess: Pete, why are you trying to sabotage our paragraph?

    forget about what Pete and Jess wrote, what did any of the other students write? (seriously, what did they write?)

    1. Another far-too-revealing insight into Tom Batiuk’s writing process. Just write whatever you want, pay no mind to what’s already happened or to making any sense, ignore everyone else who has any control over the story, and make it about YOUR childhood interests! That’s exactly how TB writes.

      And Pete is the guy who grew up to write the <i>Star Wars</i> of this universe? And be the Stan Lee Junior of this universe? And he’s one of the better writers in this universe, when there are at least a dozen writers? This is embarrassing.

    2. Jess: Isn’t Mega Man a video game character owned by Capcom?

      Tom Batiuk: So what?

  14. How many times has Dan Davis copied and pasted finger-pinch Dinkle? Four? Six? Twelve? Six dozen?

    It may have been possible For me to find some instances of finger-pinch Dinkle, but the 2023 and 2024 summaries are missing.😭

    CURSE YOU WORDPRESS!!! 🤬🤬🤬

    1. Finger pinch Dinkles from April 16 2024, May 25 2024, and August 31 2024. Oh, how I hate him.

      The bottom image makes me wonder how many times ‘Smirking Lillian’ has been used. At this point, Dan Davis may as well just create a rubber stamp collection.

      1. That last panel may be the single most insufferable thing Batiuk has inflicted upon us. Smirking Les, Smirking Lillian, AND Smirking Dinkle? Three of his most loathsome characters doing the most punchable facial expression? (The quarter-inch pinch is just gravy on the insipidness.)

        I’m really expecting that one panel to get major recognition at the Funky Awards for 2024, because it definitely deserves it.

        1. 100% Agreed. It’s the most insufferable Funkyverse panel ever. I hereby nominate the August 31st strip as The Worst Crankshaft strip of 2024 for the next Crankshaft Awards. This strip features three of the Funkyverse’s most hated characters, an awful dad joke that is more worn out than our dog’s rawhide bone, and the infamous obligatory smirks after hearing a terrible joke. It’s a trifecta of terribleness.

          It’s also the most blatant example of photoshopping I’ve ever witnessed in a comic strip. Copy pasta from three different sources with a cross-hatch background. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

          Dan Davis: Eh, it’s a living.

          1. On top of all that, this smugfest was in the service of an award-baity “prestige arc.” Complete with Tom Batiuk-writen puff pieces in the Cleveland Press-Beacon-Journal-Whatever. The climax of which was a fire that almost burned the fourth step of a staircase. Somehow this stifled literacy for two generations – until it was restored by Dead Lisa IV. After created Lisa’s Story, and “behavior-patterned algorithms making humanity our nation”, this cemented the Moore’s position as the greatest family in human history.

            This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: Fuck. This. Shit.

          2. Banana Jr. 6000:

            That, too. No need to sugarcoat it.🤣🤣🤣

            The Burnings© story arc was a humungous nothingburger. It failed to meet even my lowered expectations. No questions about The Burnings© were answered. Nothing made any sense whatsoever, and I need something to make sense of it. That’s why I’m enjoying your retelling.

          3. The Burnings was a humongous nothingburger that spent weeks telling you how important it was going to be. As if the Beach Boys could turn <i>Smiley Smile</i> into what <i>Smile</i> was supposed to be, just by endlessly talking it up.

          4. I think the only way that panel could have been worse is if Batton Thomas and Skip Rawlings were in it. (Although I probably shouldn’t say such things out loud, lest it give Batiuk ideas.)

      2. The bottom image makes me think of if Jack Doherty (he’s a disgraced Kick streamer who was permanently banned from the site on October 2024 for crashing his car while he was looking at his phone and didn’t give two fucks about his injured cameraman, and he’s a asshole who taunts people and hides behind his bodyguards who are at least a foot taller than him), Andrew Tate (He needs no introduction) and Johnny Somali (real name Ramsey Khalid Ismael) (if you don’t know who he is, then he’s a IRL streamer on Kick who is hated because he is incredibly racist, and he gets rightfully beaten up for it) teamed up just to be this trio of insufferable pieces of shit (the sad part is that Doherty is almost 3 years older than I am and Johnny Somali is 6 years older than me)

  15. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    Harry Dinkle: I AM HARRY L. DINKLE THE GREATEST BAND DIRECTOR IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD AND YOU-

    All of Centerville High School: GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE SCHOOL AND NEVER COME BACK!

  16. Related to the Batiukverse: more chienposting

    Chien: That’s not the point, Mr. Moore. The teacher will give me detention if I don’t show him a pass.

    Darin: I’m sure we don’t have posterity, bitch.

    Chien: Fuck you too, Darin.

    1. “Someone should record this for posterity, assuming we have one”? What does that even mean? “Someone should record this for the future” would have made sense.

    1. Dinkle should have been left behind in 1991. Once the main cast graduated from high school, and time-skipped their college years, Dinkle had no purpose in the strip except as an antagonist for future high school students.

  18. Related to the Batiukverse: some old Crankshaft (I’m sorry Epicus and BWOEH)

    When I saw the words “Jefferson” in this strip, I immediately thought of Rowley Jefferson from Diary of a Wimpy Kid

    Holy hell Lillian looks just as smug as Dick Facey on a normal day in this strip

    Take away Morgan’s text in Panel 3 and you can insert anything in it and I just made a template for everyone here to make their own edits

    1. “When I was little, I thought we came here because we were poor”? That’s sick. This person must have had some serious emotional problems in her upbringing. And is that supposed to be Mindy? Meaning Pam and Jeff ARE her parents? THEN THEY CAN WIPE THOSE FUCKING SMIRKS OFF THEIR FACES. This isn’t a joke, it’s an indictment of their parenting. It says one or more of these things:

      1. Pam and Jeff are such bad communicators that their child came to this incorrect conclusion on her own.
      2. Pam and Jeff were so pathologically cheap that Mindy’s needs weren’t met. (For another example of this behavior and the damage it can do, see Pluggers.)
      3. Jeff spent an inordinate amount of the family’s income on stupid comic book shit.
      4. Pam and Jeff pretended to be poor when they weren’t, for some sick reason.
      5. Ed destroyed so much of their property that Pam and Jeff had to live beneath their means.

      Yes, Mindy’s extreme stupidity probably played a role. But something real must be driving this. Also, “kids say the darnedest things” stops being cute after they get into their 30s.

      1. Yeah, that was Mindy with the light brown hair (and sometimes freckles) before she became one of the indistinguishable blondes. That 2005 strip was well before Time Mop and the Atomik Komix crossover. Mindy was a teenager. We have seen TB’s dim view of teenagers on numerous occasions.

        For some reason, TB always seemed to relish making young Mindy look like an idiot. One early example I remember is how she, as a young child, dropped Crankshaft’s silver dollar collection down a sewer grate because she thought the slots resembled those of a piggy bank. 🙄

        As for why Pam and Jeff are smiling, I’m not really sure. Most likely, TB has Pam and Jeff smirk to let the readers know there was a punchline. Perhaps they’re both smiling because they’re thinking Mindy takes after their spouse’s side of the family.

  19. RE: Saturday’s Dinkleshaft, “December 7th…A date which will live in inanity”

    And the punchline here is…an elderly man wants to keep teens locked up in school overnight?

    Whatever today’s non-joke is, the question I’d like to ask Batiuk is “Why is the December Dinkle Arc Taking Place in Centerville High Instead of Westview?” Wouldn’t it have been another quarter-inch closer to reality to have a story where Becky and her hubby DSH John won a Christmas trip to Disney World, Hawaii, or some other exotic vacation locale, and she asked her old mentor to fill in for the two weeks or so leading up to the Holiday Concert? Harry would be back at his old stomping grounds. We could see the Grady Twins and maybe some of long-forgotten FW folk (like, say, Cayla at the front desk instead of Nameless Centerville Secretary). And the school’s willingness to let him take over would have made a bit of sense, instead of Dinkle just walking into a situation and, entitled smugface that he is, getting exactly what he wants. And, of course, there’s going to be at least one more week of this nonsense to go.

    1. I’m not sure which is more annoying: Dinkle strutting his pompous self into Centerville to offer his services that no one asked for, or the implication that the band (and by extension the current band director) is terrible and would have been during the concert had he not arrived to save the day.

      1. The band is only terrible because Dinkle scrapped the concert they’ve been practicing for the last two months and replaced it with Claude Barlow’s Holiday Concert.

  20. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    If I were the principal at Centerville High, and I found out that Dinkle keeps his students after school to torture them by making them practice until the day after, I would’ve fired his fat ass immediately

    1. In the real world, none of the children would stay late and none of the parents would allow their children to stay late. Who the fuck is this guy? Nobody. He’s nobody. He’s a substitute for a high school band director. He’s there to wave his arms around at a concert, and that’s it.

      But yeah sure, it’s funny because it’s Dinkle, and because all children are dumb fucks, and their normal director is apparently just as useless. Laughs all around.

      1. The biggest problem of the entire Funkyverse is that people wouldn’t tolerate the behavior of the main characters.

  21. That triptych of Smug Smirks (for it is in the last panel that our “punchline” takes place) of the most utterly unliked characters in the strip’s history, Les, Lillian, and Dingleberry, as the most punchable faces (always in the strip, for it is Tom that lurvs them!) has been replaced with CS 12/7.

    Talk about Pudd’nhead Wilson. He looks like a souffle someone tried to bake during a buffalo stampede in a “NAILED IT” baking meme. But what could you punch? Your fist would just get stuck in that goo-ball blob like he was Clayface.

    (I have achieved my goal: To reference Bulwer-Lytton, Sam Clemens, and Batman: TAS in one post! All I can achieve has been done. I shall leave your planet now–For my destiny awaits–AMONG THE STARS!)

    (The last bit, also the 1989 Marvel comedy series Damage Control. Site foreman: “I’m gonna need a new worker. One of my guys just had an origin.”)

  22. Well, Sunday came and went without so much as a wordless cameo by Ed, just more Dinkle being a jerk to the young performers he’s supposed to be mentoring and encouraging.

    Also, I hate to tell you, Harry, it was lyricist Joseph Mohr who called the poem he wrote “Silent Night,” He then asked composer Franz Xaver Gruber to write a melody to accompany his words so they could play the song at an 1818 Christmas Eve Mass in the Austrian town of Oberndorf. Maybe if you studied composers other than Claude Barlow you’d know this.

    1. The truly stupid and annoying thing about the sadistic petty tyrant is that nobody ever expects much of a high school band. They sound God-awful and that’s okay because giving enough of a damn to show up is supposed to be enough. You’d have to be a fool to live the life he does.

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