The fact that I had continued my investigations despite their friendly warnings, delivered by them in what they felt was a friendly way, amazed the crooks and, yes, it kind of hurt their feelings too. This was not the way friends acted, they felt. It prompted a late-night visit to my home of four thugs, who invited me to come along with them for a little ride.
While this invitation was being delivered, the leader of the group absently picked lint off my shoulder and eyelashes off my eyelids. This helped me come to my decision. I would go along with them. I said a well lighted area might be a fun place to go, maybe someplace with a lot of witnesses, but they said they would choose the destination.
They took me to a drive in movie. About half way in to the second feature, they told me what was on their minds. They didn’t want me nosing around asking about TIME MACHINES ever again. They felt they had made themselves clear on this before, but obviously some facets of the matter had remained vague. They wanted to take this opportunity to make their request louder and clearer. They attached a drive-in speaker to each of my ears, then, tying into the theater’s sound system, repeated their warning at such a volume that, as I write this, my head is still vibrating enough to seem to be playing a little song. Then they asked politely if I had heard them this time. I said I sure did, boy. Heard it that time. Loud and clear. They said good.
As they drove me home, they told me a story about another man who hadn’t paid attention to their warnings. What was left of him was found by some Russians who were walking in space. If this story was true, it was alarming. I asked if it was true. They said it was. This was alarming.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I continued my investigations the next day, but more warily now, disguising myself by starting to grow a mustache. Surprisingly, this didn’t help. It’s like they didn’t look at my upper lip at all.
I was outside a movie theater studying the marquee which said “The Time Machine” and wondering if this was a clue, when some tough boys came around the corner and started heading my way, fitting brass knuckledusters onto their hands. This didn’t look like just a warning. This looked like something more painful than that. Maybe we were past the warning stage. I tried to lose them by taking off at full speed down the street, suddenly spinning around and then racing past them the other way. I found out that doesn’t work when you’re on foot. You need a car for that. They just grabbed me by the neck as I went by.
I said: “Look, if you’re going to hit me try to hit me in the middle part of my head. The front and back already hurt like hell. And try to leave a mark. My insurance company doesn’t believe me half the time.”
I’m not sure they were even listening to my instructions. They rebuked me for continuing on the case when I had been asked so nicely not to, and expressed scorn for the flimsy disguise I was attempting to grow. Then they pounded me to a pulp and dumped me in the middle of a roller rink, with my butt sticking way up in the air. So there’s the embarrassment factor too.
Recovering from the beating at home, I looked at myself in the mirror. It was me all right. Still me. Good old me. My clothes were pretty torn up though. People don’t realize that when a detective gets beaten up his shirt and pants take a licking too, and clothing isn’t cheap these days. Ask anybody. And clothing stores don’t take trade-ins, so it can run into some money. Ask those same guys from before.
The next morning a knocking woke me up. It was somebody knocking my head against a pipe. It was those same tough boys from the day before. They said they were on their way back from killing a milkman and had decided to stop by to see if I remembered what we had all discussed yesterday. I said sure. Was I going to be looking for any time machines today? I said sure. I tend to not know what people are asking me when I just wake up, so I usually just say sure.
They beat me up again, just as badly as the day before, but they weren’t allowed into the roller rink with me this time. The management had had enough. So they just dumped me in the dump.
I went to the cops to complain about all the rough stuff. Sgt. Dodge was philosophical about it. “Well, that’s what happens,” he said.
“I know it’s what happens. I want you to do something about it. That’s usually what happens next.”
He said the police were a little busy right now, trying to think up ways to harass private detectives who couldn’t keep their noses out of things which weren’t any of their business. Could I come back later? I said I could. He let go of my face and I left.
The lights were red for me all the way back to the office, for some reason, and there didn’t seem to be a way to turn onto my street anymore. I finally had to get out of my car and walk. When I got to my building, I discovered that the sidewalks around it were all being repaired at the same time, so I had a hard time getting up to my office. I had to jump through my window from another building.
When I got into my office, I found that it had been vandalized. Tables were overturned, papers were scattered around the room, and the words “You Asked For It” were spray painted on the walls. I figured some crooks must have done it, at first. Or maybe the cops. I seemed to have a lot of enemies these days. Then I found out from my secretary that it was done by that cut-rate interior decorator I had hired. I called him up and told him “this is not what we discussed. It’s kind of like what we discussed, but not exactly”. Then I hung up. Never again. From now on I’m going to pay top dollar for interior decoration.
The next day I got word that my private investigator’s license had been suspended, and my address had been revoked. Some guys from the city came over and scraped the numbers off my house. I wondered if this would affect my mail deliveries.
All of this was making me start to rethink my whole approach to crime detection. Maybe being tenacious wasn’t such a valuable weapon in my arsenal after all. Lately it had been causing me more trouble than it was worth. I thought of maybe dropping it from the 3 T’s. Maybe go to 2 T’s.
That night I was having a drink at a bar, thinking over the whole “T” thing, and taking the opportunity to quiz the other patrons about time machines – I tried to make a game of it - see who could divulge the most information in 60 seconds - when a criminal type at a nearby table offered to buy me a drink.
I thanked him and said I’d take some 80 year old champagne, if he and his henchmen would join me. He said that was fine. Instead of calling the waiter, he reached into his pocket and poured a can of something into a champagne glass and handed it to me. I noticed none of my companions were drinking. I asked about this. They said they would drink theirs after I drank mine. Some custom of theirs, presumably.
The whole thing seemed a little suspicious – when you’ve been in the business as long as I have you start to get suspicious - so I didn’t gulp the drink right down like I usually do with liquor I don’t have to pay for. I sipped it kind of slow-like. It tasted okay, and I couldn’t see any indication that I was being drugged. Everyone in the bar looked like kangaroos just like they should, so, reassured, I gulped the rest down and yelled for another.
The next few days are kind of a blur to me. I don’t remember much of what happened. I kept a diary, but my entries for those days just say “Ha ha ha ha hahhhh hah ha”
When I finally came out of it, I found that I was in a locked room with barred windows in one of our city’s more crooked and unpleasant private sanitariums. It didn’t look good for old Burly, I thought. Ha ha hahhh ha!
The door to my room was almost never opened. My food was slid under the door, giving all my meals a similar thickness and appearance. And I was expected to go to the bathroom under this same door. The guy who designed that place should have been shot.
They kept me in a half-conscious state most of the time. Drugged enough so I wouldn’t cause them any trouble, but conscious enough so that when they beat me I was capable of giving out a real good yell. I held up under all this pretty well. I was sleeping like a baby – waking up every three hours screaming and crapping my pants.
&n
bsp; The only time escape was a possibility was when the doctor came in twice a week to administer additional drugs to me and slap me around a little. I hoped I might get a chance to overpower him, but he had a lot of experience in places like this and didn’t even let me get close to him. He administered the drugs using a nine foot needle, and slapped me with a glove on a pole.
But one week the regular doctor didn’t show up – I think I heard he was skiing in Nazi Germany - and there was a substitute doctor doing his rounds. I informed this substitute that not only were his shoes seriously untied but there was something completely on his back. While he was tying himself into knots addressing these problems, I hit him over the head with my bed.
A few minutes later I was in the corridor, dressed as a doctor. All I had to do now was talk my way past the guard and I was home free. Despite my optimism, I shouldn’t have been able to convince the guard that I was one of the staff doctors, because I was still heavily drugged and my smock was on backwards and I was drooling and one eye wouldn’t stay open. I certainly didn’t look like a very stylish doctor.
But I did manage to talk my way out because the guy I was talking to, a dazed drooling guard, with his uniform only partially covering his institutional pajamas, was also trying to talk his way out.
So we both got out together and ran like hell in all directions, both of us ending up in the same getaway car, with me driving and him yelling to turn left.
I was back to normal physically in a day or two, but I was still angry for another week. Once I had recovered, I decided to go see Mandible and talk to him about maybe upping my daily rate a little. This case was dangerous. Only additional money would fix that. I headed downtown in my car.
I never got there. Somebody had been doing some major league tampering to my car. The brake lines were cut. The tires were on fire. There was carbon monoxide coming out of everything. And the radio was tuned to a station I didn’t like. I had to tip my booby-trapped hat to whoever tampered with this car.
I was late with my payments on the car anyway, and it looked like a lot of repair work was going to have to be done no matter how this came out, so I figured let the finance company worry about it. I called them up on my cell phone, told them where the car was, and jumped out.
I was going over sixty at the time, but luckily I didn’t hit the ground. There was a cliff there and I just went harmlessly over that. But just when you’re sailing along, thinking everything is going to be okay, something unexpected comes along to jar you out of your complacency. For me, in this case, it was the bottom of the cliff. I got bruised up pretty bad – they say I bounced for an hour - but luckily no bones were broken. That’s where that protective layer of fat I was telling you about comes in.
After word got out that I had escaped from their clutches and defied death yet again, the criminals held another emergency meeting. Apparently I was too tough and stupid to be stopped by normal means. Tough and stupid is a hard combination to beat, say the experts. So they decided to try another tack. Maybe beauty would tame the beast. They would get the irresistible vamp, Cola, to lure me to my doom.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cola was reclining on silken cushions, getting a quick touchup from her makeup team, and last minute instructions from her trainer, when I arrived carrying a bunch of roses and a box of candy.
I hadn’t realized I was so handsome before this, but according to this woman, if I heard her properly, I was a combination of Gregory Peck. She said she had to have a date with me right away. Tonight. And she told me to come alone. No cops. Apparently she felt if policemen were there it would be hard for us to get comfortable.
Cola took the roses and candy I had brought her and daintily chucked them onto a huge pile of roses and candy in the corner. She folded me in her arms and said she couldn’t live without me, which was confusing because she’d been living without me for about thirty six years, by my estimate, judging by her teeth. (I forced open her jaws while she was putting on some music.)
We sat down on the couch. She held me close and whispered in my ear how wonderful I was. Since I’m not wonderful, I was pretty sure this was a trap. So I figured I’d better grope her as much as I could before they sprung the trap. You’ve got to take what you can get in this life. I read that in a magazine. So I started smearing kisses on her and pawing the front of her dress, trying to get my money’s worth before somebody bashed my head in.
She kept moaning “Frank!… Frank!…” and I kept asking “What?… what?…” Suddenly she pulled away.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t do it. I was supposed to pepper you with kisses and then knock you on the head with a champagne bucket, but…”
“But your better nature prevailed?”
“No, you’re just so unattractive to me. I don’t care if our whole plan falls through. I’m not going to do it.”
I tried to be helpful. “Maybe if you thought of someone else?”
She shook her head. “I’ve thought of everybody else. Nothing works.”
I was disappointed that our date was going to be over so soon. For this I got my hair cut, I thought. But at least I hadn’t fallen into any kind of trap. At that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark shape rushing towards me. Then fifty more shapes. Then more fists than you could count, more fists than there are in the rainbow, started punching the bejesus out of me.
When I woke up I was being dragged by my feet down a long cement corridor, through metal doors, then down more corridors, always winding farther down under the street. It’s embarrassing being dragged like that. And yes, it scrapes your head up pretty good too. So that makes two things wrong with it. It wasn’t the best situation to find yourself in, of an evening, but I tried to stay upbeat and make the best of it. I sang a few songs, made plans for what I was going to do tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow, waved to the armed guards in the corridor etc.
I asked one of the armed guards if he could help me out. I said there was some guy dragging me by the feet. That guy with the crew cut. I suggested that there might be a few bucks in it for him if he would join the Burly Team. He didn’t answer. Probably thinking about something else.
I was dragged into a big room which, I was told used to be part of our city’s Civil Defense system, but was now owned by the Pellagra Crime Family. The city’s rationale for selling their Civil Defense System was that it would save taxpayers x amount of dollars a year – they never got more specific than that - and was no longer needed. Though they admitted that in the unlikely event of a nuclear attack, the public would probably have to go screw themselves, they stressed that this was a worse case scenario.
The big room I was in was the command center, which had all sorts of viewer screens and consoles and scary looking launch buttons, so you could conduct an entire nuclear war from in there if you wanted to. Pretty slick, I thought. Wish I had one of these.
The crook who had been dragging me said they had gotten tired of trying to kill me. It was too hard, for some reason. They didn’t know why. I started telling him about my protective layer of fat, but he told me to shutup. He said they’d run out of ideas, so they just decided to just toss me down here.
“Why don’t you kill me now? While I’m upside down?” I said. I like pointing out to criminals when they’re being inconsistent or their reasoning has some stupid flaw. But he just gave me a look that seemed to say I should mind my own business. Then he actually said I should mind my own business. So that’s what that look meant, all right.
He told me the crooks used this place for more than just a dumping ground for undesirables. He said they also had a lot of food stored here in case there was ever a nuclear war. That way they could insure that in the future there would still be criminals.
He said they even had a selective breeding program going on down here, trying to breed the perfect criminal by crossing themselves with gorgeous showgirls. I asked how the gorgeous showgirl part helps make the criminal.
; “Wouldn’t it be better to have the women be scrawny and beady-eyed?” I ventured. “Maybe with the face of a rat?”
“Hey, you have your selective breeding program, we’ll have ours.”
While he was untying my hands, straightening my jacket and combing my hair, I pointed out that this is where the bad guys always make their big mistake, giving the good guy, that’s me in this instance, all the information he needs to destroy them, letting him in on all their most criminal secrets.
“When I escape from your clutches, you’re screwed,” I told him.
I waited for him to blab some secrets to me, but he just left and slammed the door. So I figured now probably wasn’t the time. He’d tell me later, most likely. And then he would be screwed. I looked around. I wasn’t alone.
There were about two dozen other prisoners in the huge room. They were looking at me curiously, but also trying to cover as much of the floor with their bodies as they could so as to lay claim to that much space. Among them I recognized a couple of honest politicians and several honest cops I’d seen around who were plainly regretting their choice of sides by now.
Then I saw a geeky old guy with glasses, wearing a smock that had “Professor Groggins” embroidered above the pocket. I was getting sick of everybody I met being named Professor Groggins, but something told me this was the real Professor Groggins. And that something was him.
CHAPTER NINE
“I am the real Professor Groggins,” he said.
I made him show me three pieces of I.D. before I would let him say anything more. Then I asked him what he was doing here.
He told me that the crooks had broken into his home during a routine burglary, and had stolen everything from his lab that had looked like it was valuable, including the time machine he had invented. After they had found out the time machine really worked, they came back and stole Groggins himself so he could invent more useful devices for them.
The Time Machine Did It Page 4
