The Time Machine Did It (3 page)

Then I told him about my visit to
“Mandible Manor”, and how I’d discovered that it was actually named “Pellagra
Place”, and had been named that since it was built 60 years ago.

Mandible got pretty angry at this.
“I specifically told you to confine your investigations to the figurine. You’ve
exceeded your authority! Disobeyed instructions! Violated confidences!”

“Well I’m sorry.”

“You’ll be sorrier still if you
disobey my instructions again. Now get back to work. And make sure you follow
my orders to the letter this time.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I
think I’ll just resign from this case. I don’t need your money that much,
especially since it’s so imaginary.”

His tone changed immediately. “You
can’t quit. I need you. No one else will help me because I have no money to
offer them and my story is so preposterous. You’re my only chance. I need help.
My family needs help.”

He jerked a thumb back over his
shoulder. I saw a group of snooty looking tramps eyeing me coldly.

“My daughter used to be the #6
ranked debutant in the city,” he said. “She was fondled by Presidents. Now she
counts herself lucky when she gets slobbered on by a garbage man. If you won’t
continue on this case for my sake, do it for hers.”

I looked over at his daughter. She
gave me the finger. I didn’t really feel like doing anything for this family. I
told Mandible so. He couldn’t believe it. It was the most amazing thing he’d
ever heard. The most astounding thing anyone had ever said. He couldn’t believe
he had heard me right. I told him he had. Now he couldn’t believe that! This
guy was making me tired.

“Thanks for the afternoon’s
entertainment,” I said. “I’ll flush a copy of my bill down the toilet. You
should be getting it in a couple of days.”

I left. Behind me I could hear the
protesting Mandible taking out his fury on a nearby dog turd.

I started heading for home. I had
decided to call this case “The Case Of The Lying Tramp”. Halfway down the
street I spotted a small time crook I knew named Small-Time Charlie. He was
walking down the street carrying a briefcase. I wondered about this, because
criminals do not generally carry briefcases. It doesn’t match the rest of their
costume. I wondered if this was some new fad, like when criminals briefly went
to the see-through mask.

While I was watching him he looked
around to make sure no one was watching him, then ducked into a telephone
booth. It shimmered for a second and went out of focus, then returned to
normal.

The door opened and Small-Time
Charlie came out. He was carrying a bag stuffed with money and had a Van Gogh
under his arm. He looked around to make sure he still wasn’t being observed,
then hurried down the street. This got me curious. Small Time Charlie had
gotten his name from the small crimes he specialized in. A big day for him was
when he stole enough to stay alive. He had started out stealing things from
people’s garbage cans and then hiding them in the dump. He stopped doing it
when the city started paying him for it. Seeing him making big scores like this
was intriguing to me. So I followed him.

I kept about a block or so behind
him all the way to the seedy hotel where he lived, gave him a couple minutes to
drag the loot up to his room, then followed him up and knocked on the door.

“Nobody home,” he called.

I thought about this. “Then who is
talking to me?”

“The answering machine. Beat it,
Burly.”

The hinges on those old hotel
doors are no match for the old Burly Shove. I forced open the door and ambled
in.

“Hi, Charlie. I was in the
neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by and nose around your home. See what I
could find.”

He was hanging up the Van Gogh
next to a print of dogs cheating at cards.

“You can’t just barge into
people’s happy hotel rooms like this. I got rights.”

“I know. I just want to see what
else you’ve got.”

I gave the place the old Burly
Onceover. It was obvious that Charlie had been doing very well since I saw him
last. His cheap room was filled with valuable antiques and bales of cash. There
were fancy paintings on the wall. I looked closer at one of them. It showed an
old lady sitting in a chair.

“Did you paint this?” I asked.
“Because it’s good.”

“Yeah, I painted it last night. So
what? Get outta here. You ain’t invited to as many places as you show up.”

There was a brass plate attached
to the frame that said “Whistler’s Mother”.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is
Whistler’s Mother!”

“Used to be, maybe. It’s my mother
now.”

Along with the paintings, there
were also a number of diplomas on the walls from major universities issued in
the name of “Professor Groggins”, which Charley informed me was his nom de
college, the name he used when he graduated from colleges. It surprised me to
find out that he was a learned man. I sat down on a small stack of gold bars
and looked through some photo albums he had on a coffee table.

“These pictures of you?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why? Don’t they
look like me?”

“Not really. They look more like
an older, taller, different man.”

He glanced at the pictures. “Those
were taken back when I was different.”

That didn’t make sense, but it
followed. I put the photo album down.

“Where’d you get all this money
all of a sudden, Charlie? And if you’ve got so much money, why are you still
living in this dump?”

“What do you mean? This is a great
room. What’s wrong with it? It’s great.” He looked around the room, suddenly
not sure.

I kept questioning him for awhile,
but I wasn’t getting anywhere. He had an answer for everything, even if most of
the answers were “none of your business, Burly” or “you already asked that,
stupid”. So I decided to cuff him around a little and see if that would shake
any information loose. It’s said that the first person who raises a hand in
violence is the person who’s run out of ideas. That’s usually me. I run out of
ideas fast. Violence I’ve got plenty of. While I was shaking him I threatened
to call the police if I didn’t get some answers that were more useful and less
insulting to me personally.

“Go ahead and call them,” he said.
“I don’t care. In fact, I’ll call them myself.”

He shook himself loose from my
grasp, picked up the phone, and called the police. I confess this maneuver
surprised me. I wasn’t sure what my next move should be, so I pretended to look
at some of the paintings on the walls, making what I hoped were intelligent
sounding comments.

Five minutes later the cops
arrived, listened to my story, then invited us both downtown to sort the matter
out there, where they had better lighting and more ways to make people talk.

Everything should
have been great once we got to the police station. The police and I are on the
same side in the fight for truth and justice. Teammates. Like ham and eggs. But
I didn’t like the way things were going this time. They had me in the
interrogation room, where they were beating the stuffings out of me with their
billy clubs. Meanwhile, Small-Time Charlie was behind the one-way glass
watching me being interrogated and wearing an honorary police chief’s hat.

“What do you want me to tell you?”
I asked one of the cops.

“We want you to tell us how much
this hurts.”

They pounded me some more, then
conferred. One of the cops said: “This is definitely the billy club for me, the
Riot-King. I like the grip.”

“I think I still prefer the Lump
Master,” said the second cop.

“Let me try that one again.”

They beat me for a little longer,
then tried out various truth serums on me. ”Which truth serum tastes better?”
asked one.

“It’s hard to say,” I said.
“They’re both so awful. This one, I guess.”

“He’s lying, Lieutenant.”

They worked me over a little
longer – trying out various brands of tear gas and suspect kicking boots on me
– you can’t beat that kind of “in the field” testing - then they spent a half
hour pushing me off the tops of file cabinets. I don’t know what that was
about. I would have broken down and talked after awhile, but, like I said, they
didn’t seem to want to know anything. So I confined my comments to the
occasional request that they quit it.

Finally they told me that Charlie
had declined to press charges on the breaking and entering, so I was free to
go. This was good news. I’m always glad to be free to go. But the way I’d been
treated kind of stuck in my craw a little bit. There was part of a police
pencil stuck in there too. As they were returning my possessions to me and
processing me out, I took the opportunity to complain to the desk sergeant
about the treatment I had received.

“The arresting officers didn’t
even read me my rights,” I complained. “They just stapled them to my forehead.”

The desk sergeant looked at me for
a long moment. “That’s awful,” he said finally. “I blame myself.”

Detecting a sympathetic ear, I
started showing him some of my bruises. He made a slight motion with his head
and two policemen walked up to me. I started showing them my bruises.

I picked myself up off the
pavement in front of the police station and started limping home. I couldn’t
figure out why Charlie – clearly the bad guy here - had gotten such good
treatment while I – the good man - had been knocked all over the lot. I also
wondered where the police got all those valuable paintings they had on the
walls. And where some of the policemen got those top hats they were wearing.
The whole thing was a mystery to me. But then, most things are. I guess it’s
lucky for me I’m a detective.

As I was walking along puzzling
about this, an elevator suddenly appeared on the street, I heard a small ding,
the doors opened, and a bunch of crooks ran out of it at full speed carrying
armloads of loot. Now there’s something you don’t see everyday, I thought.
This, I felt, was something that should be looked into.

I walked over to the elevator and
looked into it. There was nothing unusual about it at all. Just a perfectly
ordinary elevator on a sidewalk. I scratched my head. Scratching my head made
pieces of it come off and reminded me that I needed some bandages for about 90%
of my body. So I resumed walking home. I’d come back and look into the elevator
mystery again later.

I turned the corner and headed up
a residential street, bumping into a half-knocked down mailbox. I straightened
it. Then I noticed the name on the mailbox: Professor Groggins. That name rang
a bell. I looked up at the house. The door was wide open and hanging on one
hinge. The front window was broken, and there was a trail of valuables leading
from the porch to the sidewalk. Looked like trouble at the old Groggins place.
I headed into the house to take a look.

It was obvious that Professor
Groggins’ house had been robbed very thoroughly. There were even empty spaces
on the wall where it looked like some diplomas had been hanging. I remembered
the diplomas on Small-Time Charlie’s wall. There was some connection there. I’d
figure out what it was in a minute. I found the door to the basement and went
down to see if anything was missing down there.

The basement was set up as some
kind of a laboratory. It had been tossed pretty good too. All that was left
were a lot of half finished inventions. It began to dawn on me that this guy
Groggins must be an inventor.

I could see why the burglars would
have left all these gadgets behind. Pawnshops and fences weren’t interested in
unfinished merchandise, no matter what their scientific importance – they’d
been burned by Einstein and his crowd before - so there was no easy way to turn
these things into cash. But one invention had definitely been stolen from the
room. A glass case had been smashed open and the contents had been removed.
Above the case was a sign that said “Time Machine - Mark V”.

Mandible was still living in the
gutter when I got there, but now he had a tramp butler. So I guess things were
looking up for him. The butler stepped in front of me and asked me my business.
I told him I came to see Mandible.

“I’ll see if he’s in, sir,” said
the butler.

“I can see him sitting in the sewer.”

“I will see if he’s in sir,”
repeated the butler firmly.

The butler announced me to
Mandible, who waved regally for me to approach him. He was using a couple of
stray dogs as a table, and had his feet up on some crud. I sloshed over into
his august presence and told him he might not be so crazy after all.

He snorted. “Tell me something I
don’t know.”

“All right. I’m not sure if it has
anything to do with the loss of your figurine, but the criminals in this town
seem to have a time machine.”

“What!”

I recounted to him some of the
strange things I’d seen lately and what I’d found at Professor Groggins’ house.

“So that’s how it was done! Of
course!” He gave me a look. “I see you’re finally beginning to believe my
story.”

“Maybe some of it”, I said. “I don’t
know. I still don’t want your autograph yet.”

“But you’re back on the case?
Good. Now I want you to find that time machine, get hold of it somehow, then
report back to me for further instructions. Here’s another blank check.”

He absently reached into his
pocket, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. I looked at it. It was
a fast food wrapper. It was probably as valuable as anything else he’d given
me, so I stuck it in my wallet. As I walked away I looked back and saw that
Mandible seemed to be doing his best to rebuild his fortune, using what he had
at hand.

“Turds for sale!” he shouted.
“I’ve got turds!”

Since I didn’t know
what the time machine looked like, or where it might be, the first thing I did
was check out a few places I wanted to go anyway; the ball game, the movie
theater, I went ice skating. Then, acting on a hunch, I bought a new suit. It
all goes on the old expense account. I mean, all the time I’m doing these other
things, I’m thinking about your important case. However, I made a mental note
not to overdo this sort of thing or next year I might be reclassified as a
crook. I’m always making mental notes like that. You’ve got to keep improving
yourself or you’ll go nuts.