Dead Men Scare Me Stupid

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 16
^th
?... 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.

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
yelling 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.