The Time Machine Did It (2 page)

When I first opened my office, I
tried to increase my business by putting an ad in the phone book that had a
snappy slogan underneath my burly looking picture. Something like “Eye See That
Thing You’re Looking For” or “Eye M A Detective” or something like that. Maybe
with a picture of an eye on there. Or an animal. But it never sounded right and
I didn’t want to promise too much. I didn’t know how much people could hold you
to legally about promises made in phone books but I didn’t want to chance it.
And I can’t draw an eye anyway.

On this particular morning, I
didn’t need any crazy publicity stunts like advertisements to increase my
business. Two prospective clients walked in the door within the first 45
minutes. The first one came in hesitantly, as if hiring a detective was not an
everyday experience for him, like he was afraid he might get hurt somehow. I
was anxious to make him feel comfortable. I slicked back my hair and invited
him to sit. Sit, by all means. Sit all he wants.

“Your name Burly?” he asked.

“Sort of”.

He sat down and told me his story.
There had been a burglary at his home two nights before. All that was stolen
was a new mailbox he had recently purchased and lovingly pounded into his yard.
He wanted me to investigate and, hopefully, get the mailbox returned to him
unharmed. He said the police weren’t interested because it was “only a
mailbox”. His voice was shaking a little when he told me that.

I indicated that I had some free
time at the moment and was willing to investigate what sounded like a most
important case.

“How much do you charge?” he
asked.

“$500 a day, plus expenses.”

“Will the expenses make it less?”

“Possibly, but in my experience expenses
usually add to the total.”

He thought about this for a
moment, then frowned. “Well, I suppose I should just forget about it then.
Spending $500 a day to find something worth $20 wouldn’t make economic sense.”

“That’s true, if it’s just the
money you’re concerned with here and not the justice angle.”

“No, it was the money more than
anything else. I guess it would be cheaper to just buy another one.”

I agreed that this was probably
so. He got up and left, and aside from the occasional Christmas card, I never
heard from him again.

I was about to write off the
morning as a total loss and take an early lunch, maybe go to that new
all-you-can-eat spaghetti place downtown. I usually come out ahead in
all-you-can-eat places. They underestimate how much I can eat. But just when I
was starting to wonder just how much spaghetti I could eat, another prospective
client came in.

Looking back on it, the mailbox
case would have been easier.

He was a scraggly
smelly specimen, looking even less promising than most of my clients, but he
breezed in like the Secretary Of The Treasury.

“I am Thomas Dewey Mandible The
Third,” he announced.

He seemed to think that was a name
that should create a sensation in my office. That I should faint dead away upon
hearing it, or call the newspapers and tell them to hold the front page because
guess who was in my office. But it didn’t create much of a sensation. In fact,
I was a little disappointed he’d come in right at that moment. I asked him if
he wanted to go get some spaghetti with me, we could talk over his problem
there, while we were seeing how much we could eat, but he wasn’t hungry.

I sighed and motioned for him to
sit down in my client chair. Since he seemed so aristocratic I was glad I’d
decided to designate the best chair I had – the one that didn’t violently fall
over periodically – as my client chair.

“What can I do for you, Mr.
Mandible?”

He informed me that he was a
multimillionaire, the wealthiest man in the city. I looked him over with a
skeptical eye and made a discrete snorting sound. He bristled.

“What is the meaning of that
snort, young man? Don’t I look like a wealthy man to you?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Kind of. But
you look more like a tramp. Or maybe a maniac.”

For a moment it looked like he was
going to sock me. But that would have been inadvisable. He might have had the
style, but he didn’t have the weight. I guess he realized that because he
quickly calmed down and told me what had brought him here.

He said he had been a
multimillionaire when he had gone to bed the night before in stately Mandible
Manor, but somehow during the night he was robbed of everything he owned: his
money, his clothes, his house, bank accounts, stocks, everything he had in the
world was gone.

“I woke up this morning in a
cardboard box, which I was told to get out of because it wasn’t mine.”

“Sounds like a very serious
robbery you had there.” I said.

“Yes.” He brooded for a moment,
then continued: “But none of that is important.”

“No. Of course not. I can see
that.” I made a circular motion with my finger around my temple to indicate I
thought this guy was crazy, forgetting that there was no one in the room to see
this circular motion except him. He saw it and frowned.

“That is to say, it’s important,
but it need not concern you. I will handle the recovering of my fortune. But
during the robbery I also lost an item of enormous sentimental value to me.
That is what I want you to find.”

He handed me a picture of a
figurine about twelve inches high of Justice Holding The Scales: that statuey-looking
thing you see when you’re watching one of those courtroom dramas on TV. The
figurine didn’t look very valuable to me. I guess he could see that in my face,
and hear it in the raspberry I blew.

“It has no monetary value, as you
have guessed,” he said “but it was my family’s most prized possession. It
belonged to my grandfather. Get it back for me and you can name your own
price.”

I thought about his story, and
consulted my notes. I realized I couldn’t read my notes, and had forgotten most
of his story.

Sometimes my clients have to
explain their problems to me more than once. I don’t charge them for that. It’s
part of the service, I figure. If the case is really complicated, I might ask a
smarter detective, or the guy who runs the elevator, to sit in and simplify the
whole thing for me. You can’t be vain about these things. You can only bluff
your client for so long, then you have to admit you didn’t understand what he
was talking about and you’ve forgotten his name, and to please start again. And
the longer you put off admitting it, the madder he’s going to be. I made
Mandible run through his story again. He was mad, but like I said not as mad as
he would have been later.

I studied the picture of the
figurine he’d given me. “I could probably find your house easier.”

“Just the figurine, Mr. Burly.
Find that and you’ll have earned your fee.”

“Who do you suspect? Who steals
from you normally?”

He said his family had always had
trouble with a group of idle low-lives called “poor people”. Ever since Mandible
Manor was built poor people had been plaguing it; squatting on the extensive
grounds, stealing fruit from the trees, and so on. Some of them even lived in
the walls of the manor itself. You could hear them at night, sometimes, when
they scuttled out to play the piano.

“It might have been one of them.
Or it could have been one of those pest control people I bring in periodically
to spray for poor people. Or it could have been just a common burglar. But
that’s what I’m paying you to find out.”

I closed my notebook and told him
I’d get right on it. But I figured I’d better be honest with the man. You’ve
got to have a bond of mutual trust with your client.

“I’ve got to warn you,” I warned
him, “I’m a pretty lousy detective, all things considered. I mean, I don’t know
if things like that matter to you, but I stink.”

He said he knew that before he
came up here. No decent detective would take a case like this. He had already
asked them. And they had already said no. So he had to take what he could get.
He dug into his smelly pocket and pulled out his squalid checkbook. He tore off
a check that had flies buzzing around it and handed it to me.

“I’m giving you a blank check.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have any money in the
bank. But I will soon. Don’t worry about the money. Just get going and solve
this case. In fact, here are five more blank checks. That’s how important this
case is.”

I agreed to take the case and
tossed the blank checks in a drawer. I didn’t have any other clients at the
moment, and I didn’t think my stomach could take another bodyguard job right
now. Maybe this would turn into something.

Mandible left as regally as he had
entered. I put on my hat, got my gun and notepad and headed for the door to see
what kind of a start I could make on this case. My secretary watched me go,
suspiciously.

“You’re not going to be fooling
around with any of those criminal women are you?” she asked.

I told her that wasn’t too likely
the way my day was going, but she would be the third to know.

Every detective has
his own methods for solving a case, but for me it’s mostly just legwork. When I
first became a detective I had tried solving crimes the way mystery writers do:
coming up with the solution to the crime first, then working back to the point
where you don’t know what the hell is going on. But for some reason every time
I tried that I ended up locked in a closet. So now I just solve crimes the old
fashioned way - I walk there.

The first person I went to see was
a fence I knew named Frank. Frank the Fence, we used to call him. Then we’d
laugh a little, because there were two “F”s in there. He never got the humor of
it. It was easier to track him down than usual because instead of operating out
of a dimly lit back room somewhere, or from a slowly moving automobile, he had
a big neon sign over his downtown showroom that said “Frank’s Fencing Service.
We Pay Cash For Stolen Merchandise”. That seemed a bit brazen to me, but I
guessed that he knew what he was doing, and that the cops didn’t.

I walked in, waited while Frank
haggled with a bank robber over the value of a teller’s window, then I asked
Frank if he’d handled any worthless figurines lately. He asked me how stupid I
thought he was. I told him and we stared at each other for awhile. Then he
checked in the back.

“Just these,” he said.

He had a couple of Maltese
Falcons, but that was about all. I thanked him for his time, reminded him that
trafficking in stolen goods was illegal, wiped his spit from my eye, then went
on my way.

Then I checked the pawnshops around
town. Stolen merchandise often ends up in such places, despite the laws that
discourage that. But the results I got were invariably disappointing. I would
describe what I was looking for, they would listen, nod, then excitedly show me
some second hand luggage and meerschaum pipes. I got the feeling they were more
interested in making a sale than in helping me out. It’s a sad commentary on
something. Money money money, when will we ever learn?

During my visits to the pawnshops
I noticed a lot of valuable merchandise was circulating around the city these
days. A lot more than normal. Every shop seemed to be loaded with rare coins,
old paintings, and all kinds of valuable collectibles. I asked the proprietors
where all the good stuff came from and they got real excited and tried to sell
me that luggage again, so I left. I don’t want any luggage. I thought I had
made that clear.

Even though Mandible had told me
that his missing figurine had no intrinsic value, I thought I should check that
out. So I went to several art galleries and showed the proprietors the picture
Mandible had given me. They all made the same raspberry sound I had made, so
that settled that.

I also made discrete inquiries
about Mandible himself. It’s important to know if your client has been telling
you the whole truth. Because one of the things he’s been telling you is that
he’s going to pay you. So I checked out his story. I got the same answer
everywhere I went. People had seen Mandible around, but nobody could remember
him ever being rich. He had always just seemed like a tramp to them.

I decided I’d better take a look
at the house he said he had lived in. He said it was called Mandible Manor and
was on top of the biggest hill in town. That should be easy to find, I thought
confidently, even for a detective of my caliber. I got in my car and drove up
there.

The gate didn’t say Mandible
Manor. It said Pellagra Place. And it looked like that name had been on the
gate for a long time. I was familiar with the Pellagra crime family. Strictly
minor leaguers, I had always thought. But that didn’t fit with what I was
seeing here.

I knocked on the door and asked to
see the head of the house. The butler looked me over in that snooty way
butler’s have, put his gun away, and told me to wait. A few minutes later Big
Al Pellagra came to the door and asked what I wanted.

I told him what Mandible had told
me. Pellagra frowned. He said he had never heard of a guy by that name and,
more than that, he had never heard of me either. This guy had never heard of
anybody. He said his family had always owned this place – everybody knew that -
and I should get lost. I agreed I probably should. It would be best for
everybody.

I went back to see Mandible at the
address he had given me. It wasn’t so much an address as a couple of cross
streets. I found him sitting in a gutter, accosting passersby.

“Spare change, peasant? Oh it’s
you, Burly. Have you found out anything? Do you have a theory?”

“Yes, I’m working on the theory
that you’re a nut. I not only haven’t found your figurine, I’m beginning to
doubt there ever was one. I think that figurine of yours is one of those things
people have in their minds, but it isn’t anywhere else. And I’ve been checking
around about you too. Nobody in town ever heard of you being anything but a
tramp. Some added descriptive adjectives like ‘stinky’.”