Sparkle by Rudy Yuly

the family room during the show, pajama botttoms soaked through, sweating and panting in mortal fear.
    That was when the two commercials that were to be his salvation had come on the air, one right after the other. The first was the frothy, smoochy ad for Sparkle Soda. The other was for—thank God—Shiny Gold allpurpose cleaner:
    The lovely young Mrs. Shiny scrubbed away at the already immaculate countertops in her spacious kitchen.
    “As a mom,” Mrs. Shiny said, “I know what it’s like to deal with tough messes.”
    Two little boys, looking a lot like Joe and Eddie, wearing baseball uniforms and carrying gloves and bats, burst in. They were muddy all over and cute as could be. They chased each other around and around, immediately turning the kitchen into a disaster area.
    After watching them in mock consternation for a couple of seconds, Mrs. Shiny said, “Boys! You stop right there!”
    The boys stopped in their dirty tracks, frozen in time.
    Mrs. Shiny held up a bottle of Shiny Gold. She tapped each boy on the head, as if knighting him.
    A cartoon whirlwind transformed them, the kitchen, and Mrs. Shiny into amazingly bright flawless versions of themselves.
    Music began. “If you’ve got a mess too big to hold, just grab a bottle of Shiny Gold!”
    Then came the best part. Just when you thought the commercial was over, Mr. Shiny, a grimy, hunky construction worker, came in, dirty and unannounced. He mutely threatened to upset the perfect gleaming world. But Mrs. Shiny knew what to do.
    “It works,” she said, “even when your messes are man-sized!”
    She tapped her husband. He too became spotless. The family stood together, happy and proud: “Shiny Goooold…”
    “Bye-bye, stains!” they all said happily.
    “Shiny Gold!” the announcer said. “Now that’s what I call clean!”

Chapter 9
    At age fifty-three, Detective George Louis was at the height of his career and abilities. He loved his work. Besides the fact that he was good at it, it was pretty much all he had in his life. No family, no clubs, no hobbies—except a little poker occasionally, bowling with other cops, and, in the year or so they’d been thrown together as partners, an occasional drink with Pinky. Somehow, though, things never really clicked between them socially. One gin and tonic, and Pinky would head for home, leaving Louis staring into the second round alone.
    Louis’s solid record was not based on any special genius. He had good intuition, he was tenacious, and experience had taught him patience. He knew how to conduct the type of plodding, thorough, quiet investigation that led to a successful prosecution.
    The main thing was not to make stupid mistakes. Stupid mistakes opened loopholes; loopholes let killers go free.
    Pinky had a contrasting personality, but it provided a good balance. Although she didn’t have Louis’s seemingly infinite attention span, Pinky was perfectly able to doggedly dot all her I’s and cross all her T’s. You couldn’t work homicide if you didn’t. True, she was a bit more excitable. She could get downright emotional at times—a trait she blamed on her Irish mother—but she was much quicker-witted than Louis, and her willingness to look at things from every angle under the sun was helpful at times when Louis had a tendency to get stuck in a rut.
    That emotional side had caused trouble with the Silver case. Forensics was making a conscious effort not to make a huge deal out of it. In fact, they were basically covering for her. The serious contamination of evidence was noted, but it was couched in some very technical, equivocal language that skirted the obvious. There wasn’t going to be any formal mark against Pinky for her lapse of judgement. But those things didn’t get forgotten.
    “I’m fucked,” Pinky muttered. She’d been saying it intermittently, in ten different ways, since they’d left the Silvers.
    “You’re not fucked,” Louis said, not bothering to look up from his stack