The Time Machine Did It

by John Swartzwelder

  The Time Machine Did It

  Frank Burly 1

  John Swartzwelder

  CHAPTER ONE

  Frank Burly is my name. Okay, it’s not my name. I lied about that. My name is Edward R. Torgeson Jr. I changed it for the business. You’ve got to have a tough sounding name if you want people to hire you as a private detective out of a phone book. I chose one that would give prospective clients the idea that I was a burly kind of man, the kind of man who would have the strength and endurance to solve their cases for them, and who would be frank with them at all times. Hence the name.

  As my exciting story opens, I am being punched in the stomach. But I guess a lot of stories start that way. Most of mine do anyway. The guy who was punching me was a lot burlier than I was, so it hurt plenty. But I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me at all, that I actually liked it. It was hard to do this convincingly, because he had kind of knocked the wind out of me there, so all I could do was smile and wink and give him the thumbs up while I waited to be able to breath again. He thought I was making fun of him and started punching me in the stomach harder. Meanwhile, I’m not any closer to getting my breath back. Some days are like that.

  This case I was working on wasn’t a criminal case or anything glamorous like that. It was just a bodyguard job. I don’t like doing that kind of work. We private eyes are a proud race. But you’ve got to keep the old money coming in if you want to eat regularly. Which I do.

  The body I was guarding belonged to an 18 year old punk named Eddie. He was afraid that some other punk was going to cause him some trouble that night, so he hired me. Kids have too much money these days, if you ask me. Anyway, he was right about the trouble. It started in a vacant lot with the usual name calling and shoving; the same kind of thing that I heard started World War I. Before things could get that bad, I stepped in front of my client to guard him from harm, as per our agreement. This is when I got my big surprise. The other punk whistled and some big guy stepped in to protect him. He had a bodyguard too. So that’s how this fight got started; the one involving my stomach.

  I’ve got to admit that my stomach is an enticing target. Not that I’m out of shape, you understand. I’m 190 pounds of rock hard muscle, underneath 40 pounds of sturdy protective fat. It’s important to have that layer of fat. You can’t have guys hitting you in your muscles all the time. But that extra padding also cushions the blow for your opponent’s fists, which allows him to slug you longer and with more abandon. So that layer of fat is both a good and a bad thing, I guess. It works both ways is what I’m saying.

  While we were beating the tar out of each other, I noticed that Eddie and the other punk were sitting off to one side watching us fight and smoking a joint. I found out later that they were friends. They had decided to hire bodyguards and watch them fight because there was nothing good playing at the theater. That kind of stuff makes me mad.

  The fight was fairly even for awhile, but then the other guy got in a lucky roundhouse punch to my jaw, followed by three lucky kicks to my ribs, then he had the good fortune to step on my face. That pretty much ended the fight right about there, with the victory going to my opponent. But that’s okay. You can’t win them all, is a saying of mine. I’ll win the next fight. Or one of the ones next month. While I was unconscious, Eddie stuffed some money in my pocket and he and his pal wandered off. Probably to see if they could start a war or a famine or something and watch that. I don’t know about kids today. Television’s to blame, I guess. Or radio. Some kind of broadcasting.

  It was pretty late when I woke up. I felt the money in my pocket, pulled it out, counted it, and grunted with satisfaction. I had taken bigger beatings for less money, so I didn’t really feel like I could complain. Besides, there wasn’t anybody around to complain to. I had been out for quite awhile apparently. There were some soft drink containers on me that had been tossed there by passing motorists. I’ve been told by people that I’m shaped kind of like a garbage can, but I don’t know if that’s the truth, or just some kind of an insult. Anyway, it would explain all the soft drink containers. Also I noticed there was a rabbit hiding under me. So I must have been laying there quite awhile. I decided to get out of there, maybe get something to eat.

  I know people reading stories like these want to know all the little intimate details about guys like me. What we like to eat and where we like to take a crap and so on. So, for the record, when I sat down at a nearby diner, I ordered a ham sandwich with all the trimmings. And since it was payday for me, I also ordered the fries-of-the-day. In fact, I announced, fries for everybody. There were only a couple other people in the place, so the gesture didn’t cost me much.

  While I was eating, I thought I saw something strange out of the corner of my eye. It looked like one of the patrons sitting in the back booth kind of shimmered and went out of focus a little. In fact, the whole booth shimmered. When things had stopped shimmering he had a stack of hundred dollar bills in front of him and a 3 day growth of beard.

  Now, I’m not the most observant of men, which is unfortunate, because I’m a private eye. I’m supposed to notice things. It’s my job. People pay me large sums of money to notice things on their behalf. When I don’t notice enough things, these same people yell at me that they’re going to give me X amount of more chances to notice things or I’m going to be replaced by Y or Z, whatever comes into their minds to replace me with. But sometimes I get lucky and actually see something that’s going on. This was one of those times.

  The guy who had been doing all the shimmering and beard growing saw me looking at him, felt his chin, then put on a pair of sunglasses.

  Something weird is going on, I thought to myself. Right here in the diner. I decided to investigate.

  I walked over to where the guy was sitting. He quickly closed a briefcase he had open in front of him, which made me kind of wonder what was in it.

  He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

  “Could you do that again?” I said. “That suspicious movement you made there a minute ago? I missed most of it. All that shimmering and going out of focus, I mean. Let me see that one again.”

  “You a cop?”

  I handed him a card. I had cards printed up saying I’m a private eye, so I guess until someone prints up some cards saying I’m not, I am.

  He looked it over with contempt. “Snooper, eh? Get lost.”

  He tore up the card and threw it on the floor. I winced. If he knew how much those cards cost he wouldn’t tear them up like that. He wouldn’t frame them or anything. They’re not that valuable. But he wouldn’t tear them up. But it was my fault for giving it to him, I guess. We live and learn, I’ve noticed.

  I got lost as requested and sat back down at the counter. I asked the guy behind the counter if he had seen anything weird.

  “Every day, pal,” he said. “You want to see life in all its permutations? Work behind a lunch counter.”

  He started recounting all the weird things he’d seen, starting from about 1973. I tried to get him to fast forward a little to more modern times so we could get to the thing I was asking about, but you know lunch counter guys. One story reminded him of another - mostly because they were all exactly the same - and pretty soon we were back to 1973 again. My head was still hurting from my recent beating and I’d heard the lunch counter guy’s stories before, so I finished my coffee and left.

  I wasn’t interested in looking into it any further anyway. Call me disinquisitive, if you like, if there is such a word, but if what I had seen in the diner was part of some fascinating seemingly insolvable crime, I didn’t want any part of it. The thing about fascinating seemingly insolvable crimes is that they don’t pay any better than crimes you can understand. You’
ve got to pick and choose in this business is all I’m saying.

  The kind of case I like is where I’ve just deposited my retainer in the bank and I turn around and there’s the missing person I’ve been hired to find and I say something like ‘hey your horseshit wife is looking for you’ and he says something like ‘No kidding! Thanks for the tip. I’ll call her up right now’. And the case is solved. That’s the kind of case I like.

  The next morning I parked my car in the garage and took the elevator up to my office to start what I hoped would be a good day. I try to maintain a positive attitude at all times, because clients notice little things like that, and if you’re frowning and crying all the time and saying “why? why?”, they get worried. So I try to stay upbeat.

  The words on the door to my office said “Frank Burly Private Investigations.” I looked at it with pride. Not everybody has a door with his name on it. Though I suppose everybody could. Paint’s pretty cheap. But I was proud anyway.

  I entered the office and paused in my reception area (not everyone has a reception area) to talk to my secretary, Elizabeth Squirrel. She was reading one of those love magazines that tell you what love is like.

  “Any calls?” I asked.

  She didn’t look up from her magazine. “What am I, your secretary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look, just leave me alone.”

  I went into my inner office and sat down at my desk. I wondered if I’d had any calls.

  When I started my business I tried getting one of those wisecracking secretaries who is everybody’s pal and a good egg and practically solves all the crimes by herself, like those secretaries they have in the movies, but I couldn’t find any secretaries like that around here. They’re probably all in Hollywood, making movies and important wisecracks. The one I have is worse at cracking wise than I am. But I figure when you hire the cheapest secretary you can find - when you base your hiring choice on price alone - this is what happens.

  I looked around my office with quiet satisfaction. The place looked pretty nice. I had pictures on the walls of me posing with clues, getting yelled at by the mayor, and so on. There was a calendar on one wall that was running a couple of years slow, but it looked okay and had the months right, so I left it up. On another wall was a sign that said “DO IT TOMORROW”. I got it cheap because it’s bad advice.

  I had been a detective for about four years at this point. Before that I had just had regular jobs. Those jobs that burly men get; lifting things, carrying things, keeping things from rolling any farther, jobs like that. Then one day I had seen an ad in a magazine that hinted that I might just be the guy the exciting field of crime detection was looking for. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I got out a pencil and took their simple and fun detective test and it determined that I had the interest to become a serious student at their school. So I quit my job, rented an office, and sent away for their mail order detective course.

  This will probably surprise you as much as it did me, but the whole thing turned out to be a scam. Yes it did. The first couple of lessons taught me how to dress like a detective and spell “detective”, but the last 38 lessons were just torn up newspapers. I could have gotten those anyplace. I didn’t need to wait for them to show up in the mail.

  This experience would probably have turned some people off from the detective business just when they were getting started, but after I had spent two months tracking down the guy who ran the school and then forced him to give me my 3 dollars back, I started thinking maybe I did have what it took. Solving crimes is hard tedious work. It’s not for everybody. But I am a hard tedious guy. Once I get started doing something, I can’t think of anything else to do. So I keep at it. This made me think I should give the detecting game a try. And here I was four years later, still giving it a try.

  It’s tough to make a living in my racket. Most people who need detecting done just go to the cops. They’re free. I have to charge money for essentially the same service. Another thing that makes it tough is that I’m not the best detective in town. In fact in this building you have to pass the offices of three detectives who are better than me to get to my place. So I guess I lose some business that way.

  But I don’t blame people for going with the more qualified detectives. Let’s face facts here. If you’re in a hurry to have some crime solved you shouldn’t come to me. I mean, if that’s all you want out of a detective is a quick solution to your problem, maybe you’d be better off hiring someone else, because solving crimes is hard for me. That doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Not at all. Of course, it doesn’t mean I’m a genius either. It could go either way. We need more information.

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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.