It could have been late in the afternoon. It could have been dusk, the setting sun spraying the city’s skyline with blood red light. It could have been just about the time that street lights and headlights are, by law, required to be turned on, as if their feeble rays could compensate for the lack of sunshine.
It could have been, but it wasn’t. It was 11:37:12. I’m on a digital system because, well, I’m supposed to know these things. The moniker is Johnny…that’s right, Johnny Laframboise. I’m a private detective (bilingual cases a specialty).
She said: “Mr. Laframboise, I need your help.”
I said: “Sure, babe, but why don’t you come into my office first? It’ll be a lot easier than trying to talk through that closed door.”
I guess she must have agreed with me, because the door opened a couple of seconds later, and she walked in. She was beautiful: pretty face, a – ahem – healthy physique and hair the colour of the sunset I tried to describe above, only it smelled better. I knew that I was destined to fall in love with her forever, or for the duration of the case, or whatever.
She said her name was Mrs. Mackenzie. That’s M-C-K. We both laughed at my literary faux pas and got down to business.
“It’s my soft drink,” Mrs. McKenzie said. “It…I don’t know. It just isn’t the same any more…”
“I see,” I said. Detectives are supposed to say that a lot (look it up in the Handbook – page 13, “Consoling distraught clients”). “When did you first notice the change?” I asked as calmly as I could, willing my heart not to beat so darn fast.
“Oh, a couple of months ago,” Mrs. McKenzie answered. “At first, I thought it was my imagination. I just had a vague sense of uneasiness, sort of like when you think you’ve caught Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo in your life out of the corner of your eye…”
“Could you be a little more, uhh, specific?” I asked, admiring her grasp of loopy metaphor.
“Sure,” Mrs. McKenzie responded. I was certain that if she became any more attractive, I would plutz. I started to notice that my soft drink wore a different top. The gold one. Oh, not everywhere at once, you understand, but gradually, over a few weeks. Then, there was the taste…”
She trailed off, so I prompted her: “What about the taste?”
“It was different,” she told me. “It was…sweeter, I think. Maybe a little smoother…it was more like Pepsi, but I don’t even like Pepsi!”
“Mrs. McKenzie,” I said, trying to ignore the gentle sigh that escaped her lips, “what soft are we talking about?”
“Coca Cola,” she stated.
I whistled. This was big league stuff, here. Suddenly, it all made sense: the different can, the different taste. I wanted to call her an idiot, to shout at her for wasting my time. But, love is not made of such stuff. “Hadn’t you heard?” I asked her, “that Coke changed its formula?”
She shook her head. “Why, no, I hadn’t,” she admitted.
“It’s been in all the papers,” I said. “After 99 years, they decided to make The Big Change. You really didn’t know?”
“I’ve been abroad,” Mrs. McKenzie claimed. “But why? Why would they change their formula like that?”
I said I didn’t know. She said she wanted me to find out. I said that that was crazy, that they were probably just losing too much of the soft drink market and needed a change. She said that it was a conspiracy, that I had an obligation to the public to find out what was going on. I scoffed, but I was really thinking of my own skin: I didn’t want to go up against the multinational that had broken the China barrier!
She pouted. “I didn’t want it to change,” she said.
Who did? I melted. I had seen it all before: the heavy ad campaign designed to create public demand for a drink that was, after all, just an unhealthy mix of chemicals. Never mind that it burned holes in rubber tires; once the drink had been emotionally tied to “the good life,” millions would run to their local grocery stores to buy some.
Coke was a victim of its own advertising success. So rooted in the marketplace had it become that it could not overcome its own image. I felt sorry for the kid who got caught in the marketing crossfire, but I couldn’t let emotion affect my decision about her case.
“There’s nothing here to investigate,” I insisted.
“Will a $500 retainer be enough?”
Well, there was no point in being stubborn. After all, 99 years of tradition couldn’t have just been thrown away without some deeper explanation, right?