Sideways In Crime

by Sideways In Crime v2 lit

  They were the most likely culprits. The liucuz and the kly--not to mention the miserable flappa--were equally aggressive players of the Great Game, but were not prone to such crude and direct methods.

  The human creature answered. But again the reply made no sense.

  “Snoopy’s on the doghouse and his bowl is empty.”

  Other than the term “Snoopy”--perhaps it was a name--all of the words were recognizable, even the peculiar “doghouse” with its odd connotations. But the statement as a whole conveyed no sensible meaning.

  “Perhaps,” suggested the gnuzzit, “it is implicating the first Kennedy’s spouse. ‘On the doghouse’ might be a reference to marital tensions. Perhaps she was his direct employer, recruited by the jatts because of her animosity and acting on their behalf.”

  Fuyd considered the scenario. Unlikely, but...

  There was no reason not to investigate. The Drasspunt Accord carried no prohibition against testing for trace elements. Not even the excessively legalistic tlatla advanced such a claim. Naturally, there was no prohibition against violating the quaint customs and taboos of playee species. Their anatomies could not be probed, but their reliquaries could.

  “Disinter the first Kennedy spouse and examine the corpse for trace elements of our opponents.”

  2

  The newly elected President of the United States had expected any number of surprises once he assumed office. He’d even made a joke to his wife that maybe he’d finally know the truth about Roswell and Area 51.

  It had been a joke.

  He stared at the national security adviser--not the National Security Adviser, who was just as new as he was to her post and whose eyes were as round with surprise as his own--but at the wrinkled little man who seemed to be at least eighty years old and was apparently the official keeper of the nation’s deepest secrets. His name was H. Saddler. Just “H.” It seemed that not even the President of the US was cleared to know his first name. Nor his actual title.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” the President said, managing not to splutter outright, “that, we abducted Jimmy Hoffa?”

  The little old man seemed to wince. At least, two or three more wrinkles appeared on his face.

  “Please, Mr. President. We did not abduct Hoffa. The aliens did. We simply fingered him to them. On account of the Kennedy assassination and what he might know about it, which we’d just as soon he didn’t talk about.”

  “Which might be what?” demanded Janet Dailey, the new NSA. “You told us not more than an hour ago that the nation’s security specialists were certain there was no conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy.”

  “There wasn’t,” came the firm reply. “Lee Harvey Oswald acted on his own, sure enough. But there were a lot of conspiracies around the whole JFK business, if you know what I mean. Most of which involved us versus the Cubans--very delicate stuff, you understand--and it’s almost certain Hoffa had his thumb in at least one of them.” The old man’s expression grew pious. “Being as how he had it in for Mr. Kennedy on account of him being a crook and the Kennedys being the bane of his life. That’s why Robert Kennedy got assassinated, we’re pretty sure.”

  The President thought his head might start spinning. “Hoffa ordered RFK murdered? Sirhan Sirhan was supposed to have been acting alone also.”

  “Well, sure, he was. Guy was a complete fruitcake. And I didn’t say Jimmy Hoffa did it. Would have been a neat trick, since he was still in prison at the time. What I meant was that we’re almost certain Sirhan Sirhan was abducted and brainwashed by the aliens--a different set, we think--so that by killing Robert Kennedy they could cast suspicion on Jimmy Hoffa.”

  Now, the President’s head did feel like it was spinning.

  “That makes no sense at all, Mr. Saddler,” protested the National Security Adviser.

  “I know that, Ms. Dailey.” The old man’s tone was lugubrious. “They’re aliens, like I said. We’re not sure if they’re actually stupid or just barking mad. I’m inclined to the latter suspicion myself, seeing as how the whole thing apparently started with the Lincoln assassination, ‘way back a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Lincoln was assassinated by aliens?”

  “No, ma’am.” Saddler gave her a reproachful look. “Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Everyone knows that. But after what happened at Roswell--that’s tomorrow’s briefing-”

  “I can’t wait,” muttered the President.

  “--we got suspicious about some of the inconsistencies and ordered the disinterment of Edwin Booth’s body from where it was buried in Massachusetts, as well as all of his relatives that we could find.” Somehow, the pattern of wrinkles exuded triumph. “Sure enough. John Wilkes Booth’s older brother was not human. Close, mind you, but no cigar. The body had too many bones in the feet. Which means he wasn’t actually his brother at all.”

  The President and the NSA stared at Saddler. The old man shrugged. “We don’t think the older Booth brother himself--or itself, maybe--had anything to do with the Lincoln assassination. Which, like I said, we don’t actually have any suspicions was anything other than it looked to be. But we’re now dead certain that Edwin Booth--maybe his alien confederates--must have brooded about the matter afterward. And that’s why they assassinated Garfield and McKinley.”

  “You’re referring to Presidents Garfield and McKinley,” said Janet Dailey. Her voice sounded a little feeble.

  “Well, sure. Garfield the cat’s still alive and he isn’t real anyway. We’re not positive about the Garfield business, I need to add by way of caution, on account of the only parts of his assassin Guiteau’s body we could get hold of were his skeleton, brain, and spleen. They kept them in a jar, so to speak, at the museum at Walter Reed Hospital. The spleen’s suspiciously large, but that’s not much to go on. There’s no question about the McKinley assassination, though. First, because Leon Frank Czolgosz--he was the assassin--was just about the silliest caricature of an anarchist you can imagine. He actually voted Republican! The stated motive didn’t make any sense at all.”

  Apparently, unlike the President himself, Ms. Dailey was beginning to make sense out of this lunacy. “Another case of alien abduction and brainwashing, you’re saying?”

  Mr. Saddler smiled at her approvingly. “Yes, ma’am. It’s obvious. Sulfuric acid and lye were thrown into his coffin, you know, and all of his possessions were burned. Letters, clothes, the lot. There’s only one logical reason to do that: cover up the evidence.”

  Forcibly, the President reminded himself that he had been elected not only by a landslide in the electoral college but by almost 56 percent of the popular vote. Leadership was called for here.

  “You’re contradicting yourself, Mr. Saddler,” he said sternly, trying to sound as if he were following the logic instead of thinking he’d fallen into a rabbit hole. “If Cholo--whatever his name was-- had to have his body destroyed, then presumably he was an alien himself. Not an--ah--abductee.”

  Saddler went back to his lugubrious head-shaking. “No, sir. They would have destroyed the body and the possessions to eliminate any traces of their own DNA--or whatever they have instead of DNA. Like with the feet, it’s close but no cigar. In fact, we’re almost sure there are at least three species of aliens involved, from the stuff we found at the Roswell crash. From the sets of almost-like-DNA traces, you understand. As I’ll explain tomorrow. Well, tomorrow and the day afterward. It’s pretty complicated stuff.”

  The President and the NSA stared at him again. Eventually, the President said: “This is sheer lunacy.”

  Mr. Saddler nodded his head. “That’s what the Rand people think. The gist of every one of their analyses is that all these aliens are just plain bonkers. I have to admit there are times I almost think they’re right, especially when I go back over the Alydar case. Can’t call it a murder, of course.”

  Seeing the blank look on the President’s face, he added: “Alydar was a race horse, Mr. President. Pretty famous
one, if you’re a racing fan. He got euthanized after breaking his leg twice in a stall when he was the leading sire in the country. Foul play was suspected on account of the insurance involved--there was a tidy forty-five million dollar payout, and eventually there was even a conviction. But we dug up the carcass and, once again, there are just too many damn bones. But why would aliens kill a horse, unless they were simply insane?”

  “This is all ‘simply insane,’“ snarled the President. “Mr. Saddler, I have to tell you--”

  There was an interruption, as one of the President’s staff entered the Oval Office.

  “Excuse me, Mr. President,” Raul Sanchez said apologetically. “This isn’t normally something I imagine you’d--well--”

  The young man seemed nonplussed. That wasn’t perhaps surprising since he was just as new to his post as almost everyone in the White House, starting with the President himself. Sanchez didn’t really have any more of an idea what was “normally something” than anyone else.

  “Well,” he concluded diffidently, “I thought you’d want to see it anyway.”

  He laid the newspaper he was holding down on the desk, the front page facing up.

  It was the morning edition of the Washington Post. The President stared down at the blaring headline.

  JACKIE O’S GRAVE DESECRATED President Kennedy’s grave left untouched by vandals

  Mr. Saddler rose from his chair just enough to read the title. Then, looking very self-satisfied, slouched back into it. “Like I said, Mr. President.”

  3

  “In other words, you got no rights at all.”

  The gnuzzit interrogator wriggled its neck. “What are ‘rights,’ Master Hoffa?”

  The squat little human shook its head. “Just call me Jimmy, willya? I’m a labor man. Can’t organize your way out of a paper bag, you insist on formalities.”

  The Hoffa human reached up and scratched its head. It could do that because after Mistress Fuyd had left the chamber, the gnuzzit had released the shackles on the human’s upper limbs.

  Dubiously, the interrogator eyed the head-scratching. The cilia were being given a treatment almost as rough as they’d gotten from the torture device.

  “That is not painful?”

  “Meaning no offense, Jock, but you guys aren’t exactly the sharpest pencils in the box. That includes Missus Toadstool.”

  The phrase about pencils made little sense. Neither did the cognomen “Jock,” which was not even an approximation of the interrogator’s name. But the gnuzzit had come to understand by now that the Hoffa human was two things.

  First, it was peculiar. Second, it was extremely intelligent. Much more so than the interrogator, and certainly more so than Mistress Fuyd.

  So, the Hoffa human was worth listening to. The gnuzzit was still puzzled by “rights,” but it had no trouble at all understanding the concept of “grievances,” which Hoffa had introduced the first time Mistress Fuyd left the interrogation chamber.

  “So, if I’ve got this right, if you guys tried to fight for a decent contract, the other side would just refuse to negotiate.”

  “What is ‘negotiate?’“ asked the gnuzzit. “Whatever it is, the bluipta don’t do it. Neither do the jatts or the liucuz or the kly or the flappa. Not even the fussy tlatla. If any of the servant species fail to perform as expected, any of the master species will have the offender exterminated.”

  “Right.” Hoffa lowered its hand. The creature’s thick chest rose and fell in a peculiar manner the gnuzzit had noticed before. It was more pronounced than the human’s regular breathing. Perhaps that indicated frustration or aggravation. It was hard to know, of course, with such a bizarre life-form. The gnuzzit still found it upsetting to watch the creature move about on only two legs.

  “Right,” the human repeated. “So we gotta start with the ABCs. Damn, I wish you’d snatched Farrell Dobbs too. I never held with his commie ideas, but he’d sure be handy in this situation. Guy knew his stuff.”

  “What is ‘commie?’“ asked the gnuzzit.

  For the first time since he’d met the human, Hoffa’s face expressed something other than stolidity. It would have been extremely alarming, actually, except the teeth displayed were so blunt.

  “You are,” said the human, its voice seeming to gurgle a bit. “Regular Bolshies, all of you downtrodden gnuzzit, starting from this moment forward.”

  “What is ‘regular Bolsh--?’“

  “We’ll get to that,” interrupted Hoffa. “First, I gotta explain some of the basic ingredients. We’ll start with ‘general strike.’ Then we’ll move on to ‘insurrection.’“

  4

  As he always did when he came into Roswell, Ken Phipps grinned at the sign just outside the town limits. The Chamber of Commerce put up the billboards, in a feeble attempt to maintain a semblance of respectability.

  WELCOME TO ROSWELL!

  Dairy Capital of the Southwest

  Ken drove past the billboard, looking for the first signs of the town’s true principal industry. They started appearing almost immediately. Every other storefront, one way or another, was hawking something related to aliens. The pious and stodgy Chamber of Commerce notwithstanding, Roswell’s real business was milking tourists, not cows. If he didn’t know better, Ken would have suspected the whole thing was a hoax invented by some of the town’s more ingenious inhabitants.

  As he usually did unless he was in a real hurry, Ken stopped for lunch at the big restaurant located at the town’s main intersection. The Cover-Up Cafe, that was, whose menu was a faithful reflection of the name. Beneath the clever plays on aliens and cover-ups, of course, the food just amounted to the standard burger-and-fries fare one found in any small American town. Still, it tickled Ken’s fancy.

  After paying the bill and leaving a generous tip, he wandered down Main Street, window-shopping as if he were any tourist. Eventually, satisfied that no one was following him, he slipped into one of the more nondescript gift shops on the street.

  “Hi, Jock,” he said to the proprietor, who was sitting on a stool behind the cash register. “How’s tricks?”

  The proprietor frowned--tried to, anyway; he still didn’t really have the expression right. “I do not understand the relevance of ‘tricks’ to the question. And my name is not Jock, as you know.”

  There was no heat to the complaint. This was an old routine, by now. Ken simply shrugged.

  “Nobody can pronounce your name. And that means nobody, according to you.”

  “We are a much oppressed people,” said the proprietor sullenly. For a moment, he lost control and his neck did a little wriggle that would have instantly alerted anyone not in the know that this was no human being in front of them.

  “Yeah, that’s what they all say,” replied Ken. “Life’s hard and all that. Mr. Henderson still wants to know why you’re short-changing him.” He mustered his best gangster glower--which was in fact very good. Given that he was a no-fooling gangster, that was hardly surprising.

  The gnuzzit managed an actual sneer. Ken was impressed.

  “Fucking coyotes.” The alien had mastered essential gerunds and participles early on in their acquaintance. “We have decided to discontinue paying Mr. Henderson his smuggling fees. They are unconscionably high. Besides, we have decided to adopt a different course of action.”

  Ken’s sneer was way better, of course. “‘Unconscionably,’ no less. Listen, snake-neck. It costs money to smuggle aliens into the United States, especially no-fooling alien aliens. Mr. Henderson even provides them with jobs.”

  “Washing dishes. Making beds. Mowing grass.”

  Ken shrugged. “You got no other skills. Other than running spaceships and things like that that don’t exist here. Whaddaya expect?”

  The store proprietor--which he was, too; even legitimately-- pushed a button on the cash register. A little chime sounded.

  Stalling for time, obviously. Ken did his best gangster-threatening hunch, which was every bit as good as his
glower. “And enough already. I’m warning you, Jock, Mr. Henderson’s not a man to waste time arguing. He’ll just--”

  He felt himself seized, as if by a giant pair of hands. Then, lifted into midair.

  “Hey! What are you up to?” He twisted his neck, but couldn’t see anyone behind him.

  “You are being abducted,” said the gnuzzit. “The man wants to talk to you.”

  5

  “You can’t be Jimmy Hoffa,” Ken protested. “You disappeared more’n thirty years ago--and you wasn’t no spring chicken then. You’d have to be... jeez...”

  “What’s the date?” asked the square-headed man sitting across from Ken at what seemed like a table except Ken couldn’t see any legs holding it up.

  The man did look like Jimmy Hoffa, from a few photos Ken remembered.

  “What’s the date?” the man repeated.

  “Uh... Well, I don’t know how much time passed since they... uh...”

  “The date, asshole!”

  Now he really did look like Hoffa. The Hoffa.

  “It was August 2 on Thursday.”

  “What year?”

  “Huh?”

  “Jesus, they snatched me a dimwit,” muttered Hoffa to himself. “I told ‘em I needed muscle, but I didn’t mean between the ears.”

  Ken wasn’t even offended, for some reason. “2007.”

  Hoffa nodded. “I was born in 1913. February 14, Valentine’s Day. Means I’d be ninety-four and a half years old.” He grinned, very coldly. “Funny how time flies. Last time I looked in a mirror-- which they ain’t got on this ship--I didn’t look a day over sixty.”

  Ken stared at him. The truth was, Hoffa didn’t look much over sixty.

  The burly labor leader--ex-labor leader?--shrugged. “What I can tell, the way these alien ships move around, there’s some kind of time tricks involved. I think Einstein explained it once.”

  Actually, Ken had some serious problems with the Special Theory of Relativity, but nobody wanted a hit man who could quote Shakespeare and argue quantum mechanics, so he put on his most thuggish expression and tried to remember not to use any three-syllable words.