by Louis H. Anders III
The man stood in the doorway, the rain dripping in irritating little patterns from his worn out seersucker. Apart from the cantaloupe suspended from a guitar strap over his shoulder and a look of mild indifference, there was nothing to distinguish him from anything supposedly blasŽ. Nothing, that is, apart from a very large chicken.
"Ah," said the pernicious Waldorph as though he were expecting this man. "I've been expecting you," as indeed he had. Hardly taken aback, the man, whose name it emerged was Harrison, and whose fowl's pseudonym was Rex (the chicken's actual nomenclature remained a mystery), explained his problem. It seemed, through a series of misadventures, he had found himself recently a foreigner in this country ("Hence the cantaloupe," observed the quixotic Waldorph to no one but himself) who had come not only under, but through and between dire straights. Sadly, knowing no one but an estranged uncle and the urchins that lived in his basement, he had unwisely enlisted the aid of a professional loan shark, a seedy man of wistful demeanor named Joe Cold, but known only on the street as Cold Joe.
"Taking money from a loan shark," exclaimed Waldorph's assistant, Reginald.
"Quiet, Reginald," instructed the ever alert Waldorph. "There is more to his tale. If my hunch is correct, that's not all."
"No, that's not all," complied Harrison in an accent that wasn't exactly Greek and wasn't wholly Gaelic. "He made me agree to certain terms." Harrison explained that his loan came with a stipulationÑthat he carry Rex the chicken around until he had paid off his debt. Reginald, truly throttled by the information, peeled his peach and said nothing.
"I see the source of your perturbation," said Waldorph with an air of authority so thick and confident it had a fog and a mild drizzle. In response to Reginald's look of puzzled confusion, slightly different from his regular demeanor but only to the trained eye, Sgt. Waldorph continued. "The man, Reginald, is a bricklayer and hence has been unable to pay off his debt.
"It's true," said Harrison, his accent now a daunting blend of Swedish and Indonesian. "I am unable to lay bricks, as I can not put down this chicken.
Rex the chicken said nothing. Perhaps he was just being playing it cool.
"What am I to do?" Oh, what am I to do?" whimpered Harrison. He would have keened, but he didn't want to exude too many signals.
"Fear not, Harrison," said Sgt. Waldorph. "I can deliver you from the hands of Cold Joe."
"How?"
"Yes, how?" exclaimed the usually taciturn Reginald.
"You can lay aside your profession temporarily, and earn back the money you owe by selling the eggs. Thusly, you shall be delivered from the clutches of Joe Cold."
Harrison thanked the gregarious Waldorph profusely in subtle Nigerian tones and left.
II.
Reginald was a tall, thinning man with the cold grey eyes of a pile of ash sitting comfortably prior to being scattered across the floor. He was a deputy.
Emerson was a tall, thinning man with the cold grey eyes of a pile of ash sitting comfortably prior to being scattered across the floor. He was a deputy.
Reginald and Emerson were twins of the same litter.
Sergeant Waldorph couldn't tell them apart, but he exacted a silent revenge by calling them both Reginald and only writing out one paycheck at the end of the week.
Reginald and/or Emerson, both trained legal aids and authorized deputies, none-the-less doubled as a receptionist for Sgt. Waldorf. Thus it was that one or the other of them came to be behind the desk this Tuesday morning when the Sgt. arrived. Waldorph, a portly man with a strange dangling mole over his left eye, inviting stares, entered his office like a man intent upon sitting down.
"Morning, Reginald," he said, not bothering even to glance at a countenance he knew remained unchanged.
"We've no cases this morning, Sergeant," said the man who might have been Reginald and might have been Emerson.
"Nonsense. Cases come and cases go. Trust me on this. I know," rhymed Waldorf, the ph in his name deciding finally to become an f. The less than loquacious Reginald said nothing. But he bit one nail in an off-the-cuff manner.
Just then, the phone rang.
"Sgt. Waldorf," said a mysterious voice. "I must speak with you on a matter of some urgency."
"What makes you think we could both fit," replied the undaunted Waldorph, slipping back into the more comfortable ph. Reginald, unnoticed, took the opportunity to also slip, albeit out the back door of the office, to be replaced immediately by his brother, Emerson.
The voice, no longer mysterious, turned out to belong to one Horace Z. Witherspoon, MD., a man with not only a problem, but an uncompromising middle initial. Waldorph nodded haphazardly as the other man talked.
Witherspoon has a mustache so agile that it twitched across the phone lines, leaving a kind of hollow vacuum sound that suggested twitching.
"My," Waldorph exhaled with a breath like the face of God, "we'll be right over. Mind the store, Reginald," he called over his shoulder, albeit to the wrong man.
When Sgt. Waldorph arrived on the scene, pulling up in his Maroon Studebaker, a group of dirty-faced children mouthed rude words and threw bananas. Upon closer inspection, the Sergeant realized that they were dwarves. Greeting Waldorph at the door, Witherspoon apologized for their discourteous behavior, explaining that his landlord doubled as a circus manager. The two fell to talking like estranged lovers, and soon were well on their way to a divorce. It seemed Z. Witherspoon was a victim of harassment. He strongly suspected his furniture of locking him out of the apartment. Squeezing his prodigious bulk inside, Sgt. Waldorph examined the carpentry in question. Though the Chippendale wardrobe clashed appallingly with the Zebra-skin hassock, still there was nothing to suggest a proclivity towards mobility.
"No, Witherspoon," said Waldorph, "Your furniture has not in fact been ganging up against you."
"Who then?" queried Witherspoon.
"Those rude fruit hurlers in your cellar have been sneaking into your apartment, locking you out, and stealing your fruit for ammunition. You see, I noticed a suspicious lack of bananas the moment I entered your domicile."
"But it can't be the dwarves," protested Witherspoon, his mustache now visibly twitching, "as I always bolt the door and none of them can reach the window."
"Ah, that is where you are wrong," broadcast the astute Waldorph. "The dwarves were stacked against you. You see, while one dwarf alone cannot reach the window, four or five of them in tandem could easily orchestrate such a feat. Therefore, simply tell your landlord to desist from bring his work home and I believe you shall find your problem solved."
The sexually repressed Witherspoon was nonplused.
III.
Emerson had been kidnapped. Waldorph was assured it was Old Doc Wizzleteeth and his gang of Blue Boys, but he was not without quandary. The predicament Waldorph experienced went thusly: how to rescue a man whose existence you have heretofore stubbornly denied. And how to do so without doubling his wages. Previously, the Sergeant acknowledged only Reginald, the other member of the twins, as his sole employee. Now, what he had always dreaded had finally happened. Some deranged nemesis, seeking reprisal for being justly trounced by Waldorph in the past, had kidnapped the wrong assistant. Waldorph always rhymed when he wasn't utilizing his brain, a custom that sometimes had the effect of making him appear artful, but more likely than not had a tendency to make him seem stupid. Still, it was a convention he relied upon for relaxation and intermittent inspiration.
Now, as Reginald awaited auspiciously, the Sergeant mused, "Fiddle-de-diddle-de-dee, the clock ran up the tree. Fiddle-de-diddle-de-dum, some tike is sucking my thumb." Nothing but nothing came to his astute brain. The Sergeant rose, his well-aged Herringbone Tweed creaking like a thistle, and promptly stubbed the grander of his toes on his left foot. White light and cold porridge flashed behind his eyes. Abruptly, in a moment of epiphany, he had an answer.
Doc Wizzleteeth had secreted himself on the Lower East Side of the Western burbs in an abandoned Dental Floss manufactory that went belly-up in the worst way possible. Peculiar rumors and suspicious accusations of cat gut and fishing line had brought in the health inspector. Wizzleteeth had sworn revenge on the municipality, and would nearly have deprived the good citizens of oral hygiene products had not he been stopped in the nick of time by erstwhile Sgt. Waldorph. Now, ten years and seven days subsequent, Wizzleteeth was exacting his revenge.
But being prepared is incumbent of a Sergeant as well as a trained boy scout, and our man Waldorph was no anomaly. Now, plans burst from his brain like pimples.
"Reginald," he said, "I think I need some dental floss."
"What? But, sir, what about Emerson, sir?" said Reginald, pausing from biting his toenails.
"Emerson, who?" pretended Waldorph patting his belly. He was feigning ignorance and looking particularly satisfied with his fat. "Got a bit of rhubarb lodged between my incisors. Just run out to the old Wizzleteeth Floss factory and see what you can find."
"But that factory has been closed for years! demurred Reginald.
"Won't have to pay much then, I suppose," countered Waldorph.
"Wait! You're just trying to keep from admitting you know about Emerson! That's what you're doing, isn't it, Sergeant?"
"Don't ask questions, boy, it's a bad habit to get into for one so young!" Properly chastised, Emerson returned his attention to his toenails, until he remembered that he was roughly three years the Sergeant's senior.
Later that same afternoon, Waldorph had Reginald scout out the Floss Factory. According to Waldorph's stratagem, events went thusly. Reginald, hardly nimble nor discreet, was immediately detected by Doc Wizzleteeth. The Doc, upon espying Reginald, mistook him for Emerson and was convinced his captive had escaped. Forthwith, he returned to confirm his conviction. Meanwhile, the master of subterfuge, sneaky Sgt. Waldorph, trailed the villain inconspicuously in his maroon Studebaker, shadowing the dirty doctor to his lair and gleaning the location of his hapless captive.
"Sgt. Waldorph!" shouted the bound and gagged Emerson upon beholding his potential savior.
"Send you for floss and get tied up, eh Reginald?" said Waldorph.
"But sir, I'm Emerson," complained Emerson.
"Who?"
Just then, Doc Wizzleteeth reappeared, brandishing garlic.
"Your days are numbered, Wizzleteeth!" ejaculated the Sergeant.
"I doubt that," vouched the persnickety Wizzleteeth.
"Caltrops and cardigans!" exclaimed Waldorph. It was an expression he saved for particularly singular occasions, its effectiveness promptly demonstrated as Wizzleteeth was left speechless.
In the interval that followed, Waldorph properly trounced him again.
IV.
Waldorph burst threw the office door, scattering roaches and puffing puffs, a little like a highspeed rail crashing into a pastry shop, but a whole lot more like a fat man rushing into his own office. He held a banana in one hand, a revolver in the other. His assistant, Reginald, dove for cover behind a cluttered desk. It seemed the proper thing to do.
"Old Doc Wizzleteeth is back," exclaimed the Sergeant. "In fact, he's back front and sideways, positions that can only spell one thing for righteous men."
"What? Apart from backfrontsideways?" said Reginald, the occasional prankster inside shining merry behind his maple-grey eyes.
"Well, two things, and trouble is one of them," replied the Sergeant, who was not a man to be dismayed by linguistic exactitude. "The evidence is right here, in this banana!"
The Sergeant held the fruit aloft, stretching it high overhead as though he were the corpulent twin of the statue of liberty, an action which almost certainly might have caused it some embarrassment. Though if the banana felt any shame, it held its simple tongue.
"You see, Reginald," began the fleshy investigator, placing the abstruse but edible pulpy mass down upon his desk, "I chanced upon this fruit by divine ordinance. I was over by the Chinese laundry whenÑ"
Just then, Doc Wizzleteeth burst into the office, trailing Blue Boys like a bitch in heat. They were a sight taller than his previous batch, and to a man, each of them were armed with a deadly banana.
"Too late you have uncovered my clever ruse, Waldorph," cackled the evil Wizzleteeth in a voice somewhat like a chicken coughing up a hairball, but a little more like an old man with post-nasal congestion. "Two late you have learned what I have discovered, that the static cling generated by electric dryers can be grasped and stored in potassium-laden fruit."
"You're mad, Wizzleteeth," chastised the Sergeant with a cut as choice as it was lean.
"Mad, am I?" laughed Wizzleteeth, causing the Sergeant to wonder if he had a hearing problem.
Unbeknownst to all, Reginald, craven coward or shameless opportunist, crouched under the office desk where he had simi-successfully flung himself upon the Blue Boy's abrupt entrance. Now, he pondered how to save the day, his skin, some self-respect and/or all of the above.
"Yes, Wizzleteeth," slammed Waldorph, "You're mad."
It was served up well, and Wizzleteeth was unsure how best to return it. He could feel the tension in the air, the pressure from his expectant Blue Boys, the face that he would almost certainly lose could he not retort cleverly like the best of the evil villains. A single bead of crystal sweat trickled down from his forehead, to cling tenaciously to his knarled nostril.
Suddenly, he had the perfect quip, the absolutely indisputable witticism, the hum-dinger of the cute comebacks. It came to him like the angel Gabriel on tidings of joy.
"I am not."
Without warning, Reginald sneezed. Esurient Sergeant Waldorph, master of mastication that he was, took advantage of the confusion to eat the bananas, peel and all, static cling tickling his ribs like so many ribbed-ticklers, electric blue belches bursting like little bombs from his bulbous beak, and might well have started on the Blue Boys, had not they judiciously retreated. Deprived of both his bananas and his boys, Wizzleteeth fled forthwith.
"Wonderful diversion, Reginald," congratulated Waldorph. "Really first rate Sergeant stuff that was. Didn't know you had it in you."
And from behind the desk, this reply. "But Sergeant, it was an accident."
V.
The little boy, nostril effluvia dangling gallantly from the appropriate pores, stared up at the tall, thinning and supposedly balding man behind the desk. A nameplate on the desk read "Reginald" and nothing more. The thin man, staring hawkish from behind his eyeware, neither smiled nor spoke.
"Scuse me, Mr. Reginald," said the boy, apparently gathering nerve as he tugged his britches.
"Excuse yourself," replied the man, tipping the nameplate over on the desk. It now read, "Emerson." The man, however, read the same.
"Mr., uh, Emerson, sir, I, uh...."
"Come back tomorrow, thank you. We're closed."
"But it's only twelve o'clock."
"Lunch break then. Good day."
"It's j-just ... t-that is, my bear ..." The boy stopped in mid-stutter, as the mahogany nameplate, brightly polished and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, now read, "Reginald." The boy was sure he hadn't seen it change.
"Most annoying of children, isn't it obvious that I don't want to be disturbed?" retorted the man, sizing up the child like a cobra about to slip comfortably into a mongoose pie.
"B-but isn't this a detective agency?" said the waif, more confused than abused.
"I wouldn't know," rapidly retorted the rude Reginald, "I only work here." The nameplate, now inlaid with gold on real imitation leather, read Emerson anew.
"Don't you go minding him," boomed a boomish voice from the back of the office. "He's really more afraid of you than you are of him."
"It's true," said Reginald, and returned to his macramŽ. The child, his nose dry but cold, turned his attention to the source of the sound. He spied a large man, massive as a mounted moose, squeezing his monumental magnitude awkwardly through the proportionally narrow office doorway, knocking the nameplate, which read a modest "Sgt. Waldorph, Detecting & Detecting" onto the floor, cracking it irreparably. The colossal man glanced casually at the shattered plate, batted merely half an eye and no more, and stepped gallantly into the room. He walked with an ungainly stride that suggested he was a man who' d prefer a more non-bipedal form of conveyance.
"You're not a dwarf are you, son?" queried Sgt. Waldorph.
"SÑSir?"
"Didn't think so. Now, what seems to be the problem?" The child's speech vanished as his stutter widened like a black hole, his remaining vocabulary exiting into whatever extra-curricular dimension words disappear into, the vacuum of his gaping mouth shamelessly exposed for all to see. Finally, after an awkward eternity, sound returned with vision.
"Do you know you got a thing on your eye, Mr.?"
The child's name, it turned out, was Mitch, but everyone called him Gregory for short. And Gregory for short had a problem. His enigma was this: someone, or some thing (ominous tones implied) had stolen his teddy bear. Waldorph, whose keen brain was matched only by the depth of his heart, generously volunteered to take the case, provided of course that his modest fee of $200 an hour was paid in full by the child's father.
"A teddy bear, sir?" mocked Reginald, in the derisive tones he did so well.
"Nonsense, Reginald," pontificated Waldorph, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever, and a man's bear is no hassle."
Gregory thanked Waldorph as only one so young can. Waldorph, smiling, patted his belly and worked out his next belch. The tall, thinning and supposedly balding man said nothing. He bit his tongue and flipped his nameplate. A squirrel, who doesn't factor into this tale again, paused from his nut-cracking to utter an apocalyptic chitter.
And, from their vantage point fifty miles above the earth's surface, the aliens monitored everything as only aliens do, stockpiling stuffed animals.
Armageddon loomed immanent..
To be continued...
©1992 by Louis H. Anders III