Dead Men Scare Me Stupid
Frank Burly 4
John Swartzwelder
CHAPTER ONE
Well, they found Amelia Earhart. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, they found her in the trunk of my car. Boy, was my face red. I had a lot of explaining to do there. And after I had explained everything, they didn’t believe me! You probably won’t believe me either, come to think of it. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.
It all began a few months ago. I was in the middle of a murder investigation.
“SOMEONE IN THIS STADIUM IS THE KILLER…Killer…killer,” I announced over the PA system.
A mighty roar of surprise and anger went up. Everyone thought they were here for a free ball game. But there would be no double header today. Babe Ruth Jr. wasn’t here, despite what the posters promised. And they wouldn’t be seeing a race around the bases between a man and a tidal wave. Nor would the National Anthem be sung by an owl. It was all a ruse to get them into the ballpark so I could ask them a few questions about a little murder I was working on. I’d gotten the idea for this ruse from a detective novel.
I’ve always been an avid reader of detective novels. They’re full of useful tips that can help a detective like me – I mean one of my quality - do his job. I’ve always needed all the help I can get doing my job, because finding criminals is hard. They don’t want to be found, for one thing. They keep moving around. It gets confusing. You keep forgetting who you searched already, and who still needs to be searched. Sometimes I wish everybody would just stand still for a minute so I could get us sorted out.
And criminals don’t always return to the scene of the crime. People say they do, but they don’t. So there’s no point in standing there with handcuffs and a jury. Chances are, they’re not coming.
If you could spot them by their criminal shape, if they were all bent and twisty or something, that would make things easier. Or if we just had to look for the blinking lights on their heads. Or their tell-tale names (“This looks like the work of I. M. Guilty, and his oriental sidekick Mee Too”). But maybe that would make the detective business too easy. I dunno. There should be someplace in the middle we could all live with. Some middle ground. The way it stands now, it’s too hard.
Anyway, this ruse I’d come across in my reading involved gathering all of the suspects together in one room under some phony pretext – a dinner party or a hootenanny or something – and then suddenly bolting the door. Voila! You’ve got your criminal. He’s in there somewhere. Now all you have to do is discover which one he is. You do this by carefully recounting all the facts of the case, event by event, clue by clue, until someone cracks and confesses to the crime. Then you turn to the cops and say “Take him away, boys!” or “He’s all yours, Inspector Lazy!” – some wisecrack like that – and the job is done.
That sounded like a better plan than the way I was currently doing it, which was sitting in my office staring at the phone, waiting for the murderer to turn himself in to the police and call me up to tell me the results of his trial. Detectives get calls like that sometimes, but you can’t count on them.
Assembling all the suspects in one place turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. I was going to rent a banquet room at the hotel, but after I had added up all the people I suspected, I had to rent a multi-purpose sports stadium. The biggest one in the world. The overflow I packed into the parking lot, and the rest I put in a nearby train station. One small suspect had to sit in my lap. When I was sure everyone was there, I started my investigation over the stadium’s PA system.
“You people in the blimp, can you hear me all right up there?”
They signaled that they could hear me.
“All right then. Let’s get started. And when you confess, wave your arms so a uniformed policeman can locate you. Now… let’s see here…Seat 42A, Upper Right Field Grandstand, where were you on the night of May 16th?... Seat 42A, Upper Right Field Grandstand? Is he here?... I didn’t know we had a concession stand… well, when he gets back, tell him he’s got some questions to answer. All right then, let’s move on to Seat 106 Left Field Loge Level. Do you recognize this topcoat? You should, because… Seat 106?... Is everyone sitting in their assigned seats? You teenage suspects quit moving around like that.”
Once I had gotten everyone back in their seats, I started going over the case point by point, just like it said to do in the detective novels, putting suspect after suspect on the hot seat, grilling them as unmercifully as a person over a PA system can.
It went pretty well, though I ran into a few snags. For one thing, the crowd didn’t have PA systems like mine so I had a hard time hearing their answers. I had to keep saying “What?” and “Confess louder” all the time. I wasn’t sure whether they were cracking over there or not. Then my investigation had to be halted for several minutes, because of a dog being on the field.
But the biggest problem I had was that I didn’t know what I was talking about. My reconstruction of the case was all mixed up, and had to be corrected by the crowd at numerous key points. The crime had occurred at night, not during the day. And the victims died after they were shot, not before. And nothing in the case had anything to do with the circus. The crowd got pretty exasperated with me there a few times. And I didn’t blame them. You’ve got to have your facts straight in a complicated case like this. That’s what I learned that day.
Once my lack of preparation had become apparent to everyone, the crowd lost interest in what I was saying and beach balls started being batted around. I batted a few of them myself. It was kind of fun, but it wasn’t getting us anywhere. It wasn’t what we had come for.
Finally, as it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to nail the guilty party until I had gotten the facts straighter in my head, the crowd began to thin out as suspects left early to beat the traffic. At that point I decided I might as well leave early too.
“That was a bust,” said one of the suspects as we walked up the tunnel towards the street.
“You said it, brother,” I agreed. $14,082 for the stadium rental. $2500 to use the electronic scoreboard. $25 to rent the dog. All wasted.
On my drive home, I tried to figure out what to do next. Should I try the same ruse again later when I was better prepared, or just take the detective novel back to the library and throw it in the librarian’s face? Option A was more likely to result in an arrest, but Option B was cheaper and easier, and more my style, so I was leaning towards that one.
While I was pondering this, I suddenly thought I saw one of my old clients under a street light waving at me. I looked in my rear view mirror, but he was gone. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Still nothing. I shook my head to clear it. I was seeing things.
It had certainly looked like one of my old clients - a guy named Brannigan - but I knew it couldn’t be him, because he was dead due to my incompetence. Like a lot of people, my blunders have resulted in the deaths of many of those around me. The man I thought I had seen had perished months ago, during what I call “The Case of the Dead Client”. Actually a lot of my cases are named that. Maybe I should number them instead of naming them. Less confusing that way. But of all the mistakes I had ever made that resulted in people getting killed, none had ever come back to haunt me. Until now, apparently.
A half mile farther down the road, the same man was under another street light. He tipped his hat to me. A block later I saw him again. This time he tipped his head.
CHAPTER TWO
Now I’m not one of those guys who gets afraid of things all the time. No money in it, is one reason. No one pays you for it. No matter how frightened you get. And I’m usually too tired anyway. Being afraid takes energy. You have to run around ye
lling and pointing at the thing you’re afraid of, and climbing over things trying to get away from whatever it is, and looking back over those same things to see if it’s still coming, and so on. It’s a lot of work. And, like I said, at the end of the day there’s no paycheck waiting for you. So I figure the hell with it.
But ghosts are different. Ghosts scare me stupid. I don’t worry about the financial end, or how tired I am, or anything else when I see a ghost. I just run. Something about being dead but still being able to scream in my face bothers me. It doesn’t seem right. I mean, I’m no doctor, but I don’t think dead people should be able to do that.
Because of this fear of mine, I was pretty jittery by the time I got home. I looked the whole house over carefully before I finally started to relax. All clear. No ghosts anywhere. I guess I forgot to check the bathroom though, because that’s where he was.
I saw him in my bathroom mirror when I was getting ready for bed. “Hi, Burly,” he said cheerfully. I let out a yell, then quickly yanked opened the medicine cabinet door and looked inside. As I did this I heard something fall out of the mirror and land in the bathtub. I turned and saw a glimpse of it as it was fading away rubbing its head. It was that same ghost all right.
I had a hard time sleeping that night. Somebody in my bedroom had the hiccups. I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I knew who it was.
The next morning I squeezed him out onto my toothbrush.
“Hi, Burly!”
Horrified, I stared at him, then, still in a daze, began brushing my teeth. I hardly heard his muffled complaints.
After I took my shower, I found I was toweling off with a bigger towel than usual. And it was wearing a hat. It let out an unearthly laugh. I dropped the towel. Women screamed.
“You women get out of my house!” I yelled. They ran out, screaming. I guess I must have left my front door open. That’s the only explanation I can think of.
All the way to my office I kept seeing that same ghost everywhere; his face was in every traffic light, either happy, sad, or worried, depending on the light’s color; he was on every billboard, pointing out quality products he apparently felt were bargains; and for the whole drive I couldn’t get anything on my car radio, on any station, except “Hi, Burly”.
I tried to get some work done when I got to the office, but it was impossible. I couldn’t concentrate. I kept suddenly turning around and looking behind me, because I thought I heard a ghost back there. Then I’d have to turn around the other way, for the same reason. And so on, all day long. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re spinning around like that.
All this supernatural stuff was really starting to get to me. I figured I must be cracking up. At first I thought maybe I had just been working too hard, but everybody I knew laughed at that idea. After awhile I laughed too. Working too hard! Me! Hah! That’s rich.
A magazine in my waiting room had a test in it that was supposed to tell you if you were nuts or not, so I took that. But all the questions and answers turned out to be jokes. All I got out of it was some big laughs. No actual information.
On the way home, I bought a sanity home testing kit at the store that promised quick sketchy results. You just had to push a strip of colored paper into your mind through your ear. If it turned a certain color, you were crazy. If it turned any other color, you might have a problem. In which case, they recommended you buy more tests. As many tests as the store had. The instructions didn’t say what it meant if you lost the colored strip of paper in your head during the test, which is what I did. But I knew that wherever that strip of paper was, and whatever crazy color it had turned, I had a problem.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Frank Burly nuts? Get outta here. We weren’t born yesterday, most of us. But I knew something was wrong. I had to consult a professional about this. I headed downtown to the Psychiatrist District.
On my way there I was delayed for nearly an hour when a Russian army appeared in front of me, slowly marching across the intersection, with their legs going way up in the air in that funny way they do – like careful Nazis.
“Aw crap,” I said, craning my neck to see how long the army was. It was extremely long. I honked my horn, but that did about as much good as it usually does. It made the army go a little faster, but not much. Just when I thought I was never going to get through that intersection, the army suddenly disappeared, like it was never there, and the American flag on a nearby building went back to fifty stars from twenty two.
“There we go!” I said, and continued on my way. These sorts of hallucinations had been happening a lot lately. Everybody had noticed them and wondered about them. But I knew they were nothing to worry about. If something needed to be done about them, our government would do whatever was necessary when the time was right. Nobody is smarter than our government officials. Even I knew that, I thought smugly. Besides, I had problems of my own to take care of.
“I think I’m going nuts, Doc,” I said a little while later, as I sat down on Dr. Smirky’s couch. “What do you think?”
“What do you think?” he replied.
I repeated my question. “What do you think?”
“What do you think?” he agreed.
After an hour I got fed up with paying good money for “what do you think?” over and over. Call that psychiatry? Because I sure don’t. Screw that. I got up to go.
Just then the real Dr. Smirky came in and hung up his coat. I realized I hadn’t been talking to him at all! I had thought the guy I was talking to looked a lot like a parrot, but I didn’t want to say anything. People are sensitive about their looks. Parrots too, for all I know.
I sat back down and outlined my problem for the doctor. After I had given him all the facts, I asked: “Do you suppose I feel guilty for getting my client killed? And maybe that’s why I keep thinking I’m seeing him?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“It’s not?”
“No, that would be too simple. Psychiatry isn’t simple, Mr. Burly. You have to go to school for years and years to be a psychiatrist.”
“Sure, I know, but…”
“Expensive schools, too. No, Mr. Burly, the human brain is too complicated for simple answers like the one you have suggested. Why, it might be years before you are completely cured.” He tapped out some numbers on his desk calculator, looked at a brochure for a boat, then tapped out some more numbers. “Nine years,” he said.
“Well I only have enough money for this one visit.”
He looked disappointed. He put his calculator and boat brochure away. “I see… yes… well, in that case we’ll have to keep it simple.”
“Good. So what do you think might be causing me to see this ghost?”
“What do you think?”
The psychiatrist frowned. “Somebody shut that parrot up.”
A nurse came in and took the parrot away.
“Give it to me straight, Doc. Am I insane?” I asked, worriedly.
“Everyone is a little crazy,” he said, soothingly.
I thought about this fact. “That’s lucky for you.”
“Yes.”
“That’s money in your pocket.”
“Yes.” He smiled, in a professional way, but I saw him feeling his pocket to make sure the money was still there.
Over the course of the next hour, Dr. Smirky gave me just about every psychiatric test there was: ink blots, word association tests, everything. We even, at my insistence, did “role reversal”, where I pretended I was Dr. Smirky, and got to be the one who looked at the boat brochure, while he had to pretend he was a crap detective with a brain that didn’t work.
Throughout my examination he kept telling me to quit pointing at the ghost and saying “there he is, Doc”, because he said that wasn’t helping with my cure at all. I guess it wasn’t, but I mean there he was!
When all the tests had been concluded, the doctor looked them over, then sat me down and explained to me what my problem really was. That’s what finally cured m
e. That talk.
I walked out of the building knowing I would never see another ghost again. Dr. Smirky had explained it all. There was nothing wrong with me. It was everybody else who was screwy. The constant pressure they were unfairly putting on me to quickly solve their cases for them was putting undue pressure on my otherwise fine mind. That was all that was happening here. I felt like slapping those other people silly for causing me so much trouble. They had nearly driven me nuts there for a minute. But now I was cured. And I felt great. I’ve always wondered why people pay so much money to go to psychiatrists. Now I know. You can’t put a price on bullshit like that.
On the way home I saw two ghosts: my regular visitor, and another of my dead clients. They were sitting on the hood of my car, looking through my windshield at me with binoculars, waving at me, and saying: “yoo hoo”.
I had to bounce Dr. Smirky around a little, but I finally got all my money back. Cured, my ass. As I left, he told me I was a very sick man, but I said I wasn’t falling for that one again. Try it on somebody else.
The patients in his waiting room saw me coming out counting my money, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a room full of people so surprised in my life. They hadn’t realized you could get your money back on a deal like this. They thought that all of the money they’d spent on being crazy was gone. They crowded into Dr. Smirky’s office, loudly demanding their money back too. I didn’t stay to see how it all came out, but some of them must have gotten paid back, because for the rest of the day the streets were filled with screaming crowds of crazy people running towards Dr. Smirky’s office, gibbering with excitement.
I went back to my office and spent the rest of the afternoon thinking the whole thing over. The simplest solution, I finally decided, was that I wasn’t crazy, that there were ghosts, and that that’s why I was seeing them. That line of reasoning appealed to me because it was so easy to understand. You don’t have to delve into your subconscious or relive your whole lousy childhood to understand that you are seeing something because it’s there. That’s the kind of simple cause and effect relationship I like. So I decided to go with that.
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