The Time Machine Did It (5 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.