120817

The Addled Egg

This job can affect one’s health. I remember one case that made me swear off breakfast for two months. And I have a pretty strong stomach. You have to, in this business. The name’s Deadbolt … Hasp Deadbolt. I’m a P.I.

It started pleasantly enough. Alma and I were dining al fresco at the Café Belgique. I like that place because the food is excellent, and I get a 25 percent discount whenever I eat there. The owner was quite grateful at the end of a job (the details of which I am not at liberty to divulge) that I like to call The Goose of Gold. At any rate, Alma and I were having breakfast out on the patio, the sun was coming up, and the geraniums in the window boxes were in full bloom. It was not yet hot. In short, a perfect morning to make a proposal of marriage. Yes, those of you who have been reading my little tales know that Alma and I have been an item for more than a year, and I had decided to propose something more formal.

“Alma,” I said, during a lull in our conversation, “I have a request.”

She looked sharply at me, sensing something in my tone. “If this is a proposal,” she began, but she was interrupted. At that very moment, a large object plummeted past us to shatter on the sidewalk not two feet from where we sat. We were both thoroughly drenched with raw egg. It was as though an egg six feet long had exploded. Which is exactly what had happened, I realized, standing and surveying the debris. I recognized Humpty Dumpty from a large shell fragment that, moments before, had been the back of his head.

Alma recognized him too. “Oh my God, it’s Humpty Dumpty!” she screamed, leaping to her feet and dabbing at her soaked dress with gooey hands. She was a sight. I blinked egg out of my eyes and grabbed some napkins off a nearby table. I handed them to Alma and sprinted into the restaurant. It seemed likely that Dumpty had fallen, or been pushed, from the roof. I squelched through the dining room, into the kitchen, and looked around. Everyone was staring at me like I had egg on my face.

“The stairs,” I demanded. “Where are the stairs to the roof?” One of the busboys pointed. “Thanks,” I said, and ran up two steps at a time. The roof was deserted. I searched for clues as best I could with Humpty’s guts all over me, but didn’t find anything. By the time I finished the sun was up, it was getting hot, and it felt like the egg on me was beginning to cook. I could hear egg sizzling on the roof where it had dripped off of me. I looked over the edge. A bunch of the Royal Mounted Guards were down there, trampling on the mess in the street and probably destroying evidence. I headed back to the stairwell just as Detective Poyrow and Sargeant Satyrday emerged.

“You’re a mess, Deadbeat,” smirked Poyrow, “even worse than usual.”

“People just cling to me,” I said, “especially if they’re my clients.” Dumpty wasn’t my client, of course, but I wanted to solve this one. No one splashes egg innards on Alma and gets away with it. If Detective Poyrow and Sargeant Satyrday thought I’d been working for the victim, they might be more forthcoming with information.

“You were employed by the deceased?” Sargeant Satyrday asked, consulting a small black notebook. “We haven’t heard that from anyone else, including Miss, ah …”

“Alma isn’t involved in my business,” I interjected, “and the egg kept his cards close to his shell. Do you have any leads to who murdered him?”

“What makes you think it was murder? Did he have any enemies?”

“It just doesn’t make sense that he would be this careless,” I said, “given his delicate condition. I believe it was murder.” Actually, I had no idea. But I sure wasn’t going to score any juicy tidbits calling it an accident.

“Well, you know best, I suppose,” Satyrday said, “but I know one thing. You better go home and get cleaned up before you start to stink even worse than you do right now.”

I did that thing and then I hit the streets. If the egg had had enemies, I needed to know who they were.

I searched all night in the lowest and darkest parts of the city, to no avail. Anyone who’d harbored ill feeling toward Humpty Dumpty had kept it to him- or herself. There remained one possibility—it could have been a family affair. The low lifes and scum I’d spent the night with couldn’t help me there. I needed to pay a visit to the farm where Dumpty had been laid.

At Squawking Rooster Farm I spoke to the head rooster. He was not very informative, unless you can glean a lot more from cock-a-doodle-doo than I can. Next, I interviewed the chief hen.

“Yes, I remember him. Kinda hard to forget an egg that size, whether it hatches or no. No, you can’t speak to the hen that laid it. Laying Humpty darn near killed her, and she retired soon after. Don’t rightly know where you could find her now. Nice old biddy, but a bit dim. Kinda ironic that she had such a brilliant (and eccentric) son.

“Enemies? Not around here. He was a good egg. He came in for a lot of teasing, though, and I often wondered if it was making him suicidal. Now I hear he’s killed himself. Poor boy! It’s my belief that he had “issues” about being an overgrown baby, if you will, in a grown-up world.”

Well, I could have done without the pop psychology, but at least I had made a start. I talked to other animals on the farm, and got pretty much the same answer from all of those that remembered Humpty.

I decided I needed to track down Mrs. Dumpty, so I started visiting all the farms in the area. Pretty soon I met an old goat on a dairy farm who directed me to Feathered Acres, a combined retirement home and dude ranch on the other side of the valley. Feathered Acres had one of those impressive archways over the entrance with the name of the place picked out in fancy lettering. On either side of the arch was a topiary shrub: a sow, rampant, on the left, and a hen scratching in the dirt on the right. A gravel drive began at the arch and wound up a hill through a manicured lawn dotted with fruit trees. When I reached the top of the hill I found some neat little farm buildings arrayed before me. On the left a white clapboard house bore the legend “Office” over the front door, so I parked there and went in.

There was no one behind the reception desk. In fact, there was no one in the whole place. I went back out and searched the other buildings. Empty as a sailor’s wallet on Sunday. Finally, just as I was about to get in my car, a fox drove up in a BMW convertible. A lawyer, of course.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. This is private property.”

“I want to visit a resident, a Mrs. Dumpty. She’s a chicken.” I replied.

The fox shook his head. “No residents here. This place has been sold to the company I represent.”

I asked where the residents had gone, but the fox shook his head. That was private information, he told me. I copied the company name off of his car: Consolidated Real Assets Partnership. I was going to do some digging, and I didn’t care how high the pile got, I was going to get to the bottom of things.

CRAP, Inc. was headquartered on the west side of town in a pretty ritzy neighborhood, but they had a branch office up north. I decided to try there first. It turned out that the northside office was out in the country. Northside is a pretty area: rolling hills, farmland, oak woods, some small lakes. The only problem is the smell.

“It’s that damn slaughterhouse,” one old geezer told me when I stopped for gas and directions. “Ever since they went in, this place just stinks. And trucks coming in at all hours of the night, bringin’ the latest victims to their doom. I would sell out and move in a New York minute, but who would buy a place out here?

“What’s that? CRAP, Inc.? Well I don’t know, but I can tell you you’re headed in the right direction. It must be up near the slaughterhouse, matter of fact. I can’t see why anyone would want to live up there, or work either, if they didn’t have to.”

The old guy was right. CRAP’s office was very close to the slaughterhouse. In fact, the office WAS the slaughterhouse. As I sat in my car, parked across the highway from the noisome place, I had a funny feeling that this was where Mrs. Dumpty had ended up, along with the rest of the former residents of Feathered Acres. And if that was the case, and Humpty had known about it, well, Robert E. Howard killed himself when his mother died.

“I still don’t believe it,” Alma repeated, as she rearranged the roses I’d brought her. “Humpty and I went way back. He wasn’t a quitter. Something else is going on here.” As she busied herself at the kitchen counter I mused on what she’d said. I kind of agreed with her. But if we were right, what had happened on the roof of the Café B? I put in a call to the police department. I left a message for Satyrday to call me at Alma’s when he got a chance. I had some information to trade.

Satyrday called back while we were eating. I excused myself for a minute so I could talk to him. I told him all about how Humpty’s mom had gone to slaughterhouse, and what CRAP, Inc. seemed to have done to the retired chicken home. He was interested. That’s when I asked him about the autopsy data.

“What autopsy?” he asked.

“Come on, Satyrday,” I said. “Don’t play coy with me. You ordered an autopsy on the egg. I know the way your mind works. You didn’t believe it was murder, but just in case…” It took a little more cajoling, but he gave it to me.

“Humpty had ergot alkaloids in his system,” he told me. “Maybe he ate some spoiled biscuits and gravy for breakfast.”

“Ergot?”

“You know, a fungus. Causes hallucinations, even death. Some people think it was responsible for the insanity that led to the Salem witch trials, not to mention the erratic behavior of Goldilocks.”

“That wasn’t drugs,” I replied absently, “she was just mean. Can you get ergot if you want it?”
“Sure, it still affects grain crops when the weather’s wet. It’s easy to find if you want it badly enough. But what are you thinking? Who’s the poisoner?”

I told him I didn’t know yet and said goodbye. After dinner I stuck around at Alma’s for a while. Then I went back out to the slaughterhouse. There was one light on, in a small building off to one side. A fat man in a three-piece suit was in there doing some paperwork. I went in and locked the door behind me.

The fat guy didn’t look up till I cocked my gun.

“Who are you?!” he demanded.

“I’ll ask the questions here,” I said, talking tough, “what happened to all the residents of Feathered Acres?”

“Feathered Acres? Never heard of it. You’ve got the wrong…”

I blew apart his coffee mug. He flinched and then cowered in his chair.

“Give!” I said. “I know all about the rest home to slaughterhouse scheme.” I pointed the pistol at his knee.

“Oh! Now I remember,” he said. It wasn’t his idea. He’d just gone along with everybody else. Besides, they were “just a bunch of talking animals.” I nearly blew him away right then. As many people know, I have a fondness for animals that goes pretty deep. I called Sargeant Satyrday and told him I had someone who wanted to turn state’s evidence.

“So they just took all those retired hens and turned them into breasts and thighs and barbequed wings?” Alma was horrified.

“And pork chops, bacon, mutton, etcetera. It was profitable, but not profitable enough, so they cleaned Feathered Acres out. They were going to turn the place into tract housing.”

Alma shook her head in disbelief. “They thought they could get away with this?”

“They might have done just that if Humpty hadn’t gone out there to visit his mother and seen some goats being hustled into a van.” She snuggled in closer and I put my arm around her. “He kept asking questions, and they knew it was just a matter of time before he went to the authorities. The fox slipped him some ergot and then arranged a breakfast meeting on the roof. The fox did not, of course, show up, but he was nearby in case Humpty didn’t fall on his own. They figured that if anyone did any digging they’d find out about his mother and just chalk him up as a suicide.”

“But killing the animals was already illegal!”

“No, that was the crazy part of the whole thing. As far as I can tell, although they behaved reprehensibly from the start, they didn’t break the law until they murdered Humpty, because he was a storybook character, and not just some anonymous egg.”


Reprinted from Nursery Rhyme Noir -- https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42875