The Time Machine Did It

Frank Burly is my
name. Okay, it’s not my name. I lied about that. My name is Edward R. Torgeson
Jr. I changed it for the business. You’ve got to have a tough sounding name if
you want people to hire you as a private detective out of a phone book. I chose
one that would give prospective clients the idea that I was a burly kind of
man, the kind of man who would have the strength and endurance to solve their
cases for them, and who would be frank with them at all times. Hence the name.

As my exciting story opens, I am
being punched in the stomach. But I guess a lot of stories start that way. Most
of mine do anyway. The guy who was punching me was a lot burlier than I was, so
it hurt plenty. But I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me at all, that I
actually liked it. It was hard to do this convincingly, because he had kind of
knocked the wind out of me there, so all I could do was smile and wink and give
him the thumbs up while I waited to be able to breath again. He thought I was
making fun of him and started punching me in the stomach harder. Meanwhile, I’m
not any closer to getting my breath back. Some days are like that.

This case I was working on wasn’t
a criminal case or anything glamorous like that. It was just a bodyguard job. I
don’t like doing that kind of work. We private eyes are a proud race. But
you’ve got to keep the old money coming in if you want to eat regularly. Which
I do.

The body I was guarding belonged
to an 18 year old punk named Eddie. He was afraid that some other punk was
going to cause him some trouble that night, so he hired me. Kids have too much
money these days, if you ask me. Anyway, he was right about the trouble. It
started in a vacant lot with the usual name calling and shoving; the same kind
of thing that I heard started World War I. Before things could get that bad, I
stepped in front of my client to guard him from harm, as per our agreement.
This is when I got my big surprise. The other punk whistled and some big guy
stepped in to protect him. He had a bodyguard too. So that’s how this fight got
started; the one involving my stomach.

I’ve got to admit that my stomach
is an enticing target. Not that I’m out of shape, you understand. I’m 190
pounds of rock hard muscle, underneath 40 pounds of sturdy protective fat. It’s
important to have that layer of fat. You can’t have guys hitting you in your
muscles all the time. But that extra padding also cushions the blow for your
opponent’s fists, which allows him to slug you longer and with more abandon. So
that layer of fat is both a good and a bad thing, I guess. It works both ways
is what I’m saying.

While we were beating the tar out
of each other, I noticed that Eddie and the other punk were sitting off to one
side watching us fight and smoking a joint. I found out later that they were
friends. They had decided to hire bodyguards and watch them fight because there
was nothing good playing at the theater. That kind of stuff makes me mad.

The fight was fairly even for awhile,
but then the other guy got in a lucky roundhouse punch to my jaw, followed by
three lucky kicks to my ribs, then he had the good fortune to step on my face.
That pretty much ended the fight right about there, with the victory going to
my opponent. But that’s okay. You can’t win them all, is a saying of mine. I’ll
win the next fight. Or one of the ones next month. While I was unconscious,
Eddie stuffed some money in my pocket and he and his pal wandered off. Probably
to see if they could start a war or a famine or something and watch that. I
don’t know about kids today. Television’s to blame, I guess. Or radio. Some
kind of broadcasting.

It was pretty late when I woke up.
I felt the money in my pocket, pulled it out, counted it, and grunted with
satisfaction. I had taken bigger beatings for less money, so I didn’t really
feel like I could complain. Besides, there wasn’t anybody around to complain
to. I had been out for quite awhile apparently. There were some soft drink
containers on me that had been tossed there by passing motorists. I’ve been
told by people that I’m shaped kind of like a garbage can, but I don’t know if
that’s the truth, or just some kind of an insult. Anyway, it would explain all
the soft drink containers. Also I noticed there was a rabbit hiding under me.
So I must have been laying there quite awhile. I decided to get out of there,
maybe get something to eat.

I know people reading stories like
these want to know all the little intimate details about guys like me. What we
like to eat and where we like to take a crap and so on. So, for the record,
when I sat down at a nearby diner, I ordered a ham sandwich with all the
trimmings. And since it was payday for me, I also ordered the fries-of-the-day.
In fact, I announced, fries for everybody. There were only a couple other
people in the place, so the gesture didn’t cost me much.

While I was eating, I thought I
saw something strange out of the corner of my eye. It looked like one of the
patrons sitting in the back booth kind of shimmered and went out of focus a
little. In fact, the whole booth shimmered. When things had stopped shimmering
he had a stack of hundred dollar bills in front of him and a 3 day growth of
beard.

Now, I’m not the most observant of
men, which is unfortunate, because I’m a private eye. I’m supposed to notice
things. It’s my job. People pay me large sums of money to notice things on
their behalf. When I don’t notice enough things, these same people yell at me
that they’re going to give me X amount of more chances to notice things or I’m
going to be replaced by Y or Z, whatever comes into their minds to replace me
with. But sometimes I get lucky and actually see something that’s going on.
This was one of those times.

The guy who had been doing all the
shimmering and beard growing saw me looking at him, felt his chin, then put on
a pair of sunglasses.

Something weird is going on, I
thought to myself. Right here in the diner. I decided to investigate.

I walked over to where the guy was
sitting. He quickly closed a briefcase he had open in front of him, which made
me kind of wonder what was in it.

He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

“Could you do that again?” I said.
“That suspicious movement you made there a minute ago? I missed most of it. All
that shimmering and going out of focus, I mean. Let me see that one again.”

“You a cop?”

I handed him a card. I had cards
printed up saying I’m a private eye, so I guess until someone prints up some
cards saying I’m not, I am.

He looked it over with contempt.
“Snooper, eh? Get lost.”

He tore up the card and threw it
on the floor. I winced. If he knew how much those cards cost he wouldn’t tear
them up like that. He wouldn’t frame them or anything. They’re not that
valuable. But he wouldn’t tear them up. But it was my fault for giving it to
him, I guess. We live and learn, I’ve noticed.

I got lost as requested and sat
back down at the counter. I asked the guy behind the counter if he had seen
anything weird.

“Every day, pal,” he said. “You
want to see life in all its permutations? Work behind a lunch counter.”

He started recounting all the
weird things he’d seen, starting from about 1973. I tried to get him to fast
forward a little to more modern times so we could get to the thing I was asking
about, but you know lunch counter guys. One story reminded him of another -
mostly because they were all exactly the same - and pretty soon we were back to
1973 again. My head was still hurting from my recent beating and I’d heard the
lunch counter guy’s stories before, so I finished my coffee and left.

I wasn’t interested in looking
into it any further anyway. Call me disinquisitive, if you like, if there is
such a word, but if what I had seen in the diner was part of some fascinating
seemingly insolvable crime, I didn’t want any part of it. The thing about fascinating
seemingly insolvable crimes is that they don’t pay any better than crimes you
can understand. You’ve got to pick and choose in this business is all I’m
saying.

The kind of case I like is where
I’ve just deposited my retainer in the bank and I turn around and there’s the
missing person I’ve been hired to find and I say something like ‘hey your
horseshit wife is looking for you’ and he says something like ‘No kidding!
Thanks for the tip. I’ll call her up right now’. And the case is solved. That’s
the kind of case I like.

The next morning I parked my car
in the garage and took the elevator up to my office to start what I hoped would
be a good day. I try to maintain a positive attitude at all times, because
clients notice little things like that, and if you’re frowning and crying all
the time and saying “why? why?”, they get worried. So I try to stay upbeat.

The words on the door to my office
said “Frank Burly Private Investigations.” I looked at it with pride. Not
everybody has a door with his name on it. Though I suppose everybody could.
Paint’s pretty cheap. But I was proud anyway.

I entered the office and paused in
my reception area (not everyone has a reception area) to talk to my secretary,
Elizabeth Squirrel. She was reading one of those love magazines that tell you
what love is like.

“Any calls?” I asked.

She didn’t look up from her
magazine. “What am I, your secretary?”

“Yes.”

“Look, just leave me alone.”

I went into my inner office and
sat down at my desk. I wondered if I’d had any calls.

When I started my business I tried
getting one of those wisecracking secretaries who is everybody’s pal and a good
egg and practically solves all the crimes by herself, like those secretaries
they have in the movies, but I couldn’t find any secretaries like that around
here. They’re probably all in Hollywood, making movies and important
wisecracks. The one I have is worse at cracking wise than I am. But I figure
when you hire the cheapest secretary you can find - when you base your hiring
choice on price alone - this is what happens.

I looked around my office with
quiet satisfaction. The place looked pretty nice. I had pictures on the walls
of me posing with clues, getting yelled at by the mayor, and so on. There was a
calendar on one wall that was running a couple of years slow, but it looked
okay and had the months right, so I left it up. On another wall was a sign that
said “DO IT TOMORROW”. I got it cheap because it’s bad advice.

I had been a detective for about
four years at this point. Before that I had just had regular jobs. Those jobs
that burly men get; lifting things, carrying things, keeping things from
rolling any farther, jobs like that. Then one day I had seen an ad in a
magazine that hinted that I might just be the guy the exciting field of crime
detection was looking for. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I got
out a pencil and took their simple and fun detective test and it determined
that I had the interest to become a serious student at their school. So I quit
my job, rented an office, and sent away for their mail order detective course.

This will probably surprise you as
much as it did me, but the whole thing turned out to be a scam. Yes it did. The
first couple of lessons taught me how to dress like a detective and spell
“detective”, but the last 38 lessons were just torn up newspapers. I could have
gotten those anyplace. I didn’t need to wait for them to show up in the mail.

This experience would probably
have turned some people off from the detective business just when they were
getting started, but after I had spent two months tracking down the guy who ran
the school and then forced him to give me my 3 dollars back, I started thinking
maybe I did have what it took. Solving crimes is hard tedious work. It’s not
for everybody. But I am a hard tedious guy. Once I get started doing something,
I can’t think of anything else to do. So I keep at it. This made me think I
should give the detecting game a try. And here I was four years later, still
giving it a try.

It’s tough to make a living in my
racket. Most people who need detecting done just go to the cops. They’re free.
I have to charge money for essentially the same service. Another thing that
makes it tough is that I’m not the best detective in town. In fact in this
building you have to pass the offices of three detectives who are better than
me to get to my place. So I guess I lose some business that way.

But I don’t blame people for going
with the more qualified detectives. Let’s face facts here. If you’re in a hurry
to have some crime solved you shouldn’t come to me. I mean, if that’s all you
want out of a detective is a quick solution to your problem, maybe you’d be
better off hiring someone else, because solving crimes is hard for me. That
doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Not at all. Of course, it doesn’t mean I’m a genius
either. It could go either way. We need more information.