The Case of the Missing Ear Drops
a fantastical mystery by Jon Wesick
In which we offer another Morris Pillbottle mystery. Check out The Big Snooze for the first foray. And as with that one, The Pillbottle Detective Agency must match wits with unusual critters and circumstances, including talking animals, giant chickens, and a political candidate with a numeric vendetta.
Do you need a content warning? Fine. Absurdity and similes abound, like a clone army of Cthulhus square-dancing in a James Bond-themed fusion restaurant offering deep fried calamari with curried Beefaroni.
If you can fully download that image into your head without imploding, you are ready to continue.
The Case of the Missing Ear Drops
by Jon Wesick
“Yeah mom, I know the rent is due. No, I don’t want a Hot Pocket. Why didn’t you tell me I have a client? Send him up.” I hung up and smoothed the racecar-pattern sheets on my double bed.
I answered the knock on my bedroom door and found an aardvark in the hallway. He was a medium sized, burrowing mammal with a piglike snout, protruding ears, and was not to be confused with a South American anteater.
“Is this the Pillbottle Detective Agency?”
“Morris Pillbottle, at your service.” I shook his claw. “Pardon the mess. My office is being remodeled after that giant meteor.” I ushered him into my room. “What can I do for you?”
“My packages keep getting stolen out of the mail room.” He hiked up his tweed pants, sat on my bed, and looked at the faded Ferris Bueller poster tacked to the wall. “The cops won’t do anything.”
“What kind of packages are we talking about?”
“Eight-hundred dollars’ worth of earwax-removal drops.”
“Seems like a lot.”
“Hey, I got waxy ears! Is that a crime?”
“All right. All right.” One look at his powerful, digging claws told me he was one mammal I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of. “What’s your name and where do you live?”
“The name’s Al Bania and I live in Manchester, New Hampshire.”
“How does two-hundred dollars a day plus expenses sound?” I asked.
“Like rap music on a chalkboard.” He walked to the dusty bookshelf and picked up my third-place karate trophy from thirty years ago.
“I suppose you could write off your losses.” I turned back to the Call of Duty game on my laptop.
“All right.” He replaced my trophy. “I’ll hire you because it’s the principle of the thing. I mean, if you can’t trust three-hundred strangers living in the same apartment complex, who can you trust?”
***
I stuffed dead batteries and used fluorescent bulbs in a FedEx box along with an AirTag tracker and shipped it to Bania’s address. In advance of the New Hampshire primary, Manchester was full of grifters trying to convince the rubes that the agendas of the rich and powerful were their own. There were more McGuffins, red herrings, con games, and bald-faced lies than in a thousand David Mamet plays. With all the candidates in town, most hotels were booked, but I snagged a penthouse suite at the Hilton. Wayne Fillmore, the incumbent, was running unopposed for the Democratic nomination except for the fringe candidate Rudolf Floyd Kovacs, who proposed outlawing the number zero to erase the national debt. The package was still in transit so I strolled to the SNHU Arena to attend Fillmore’s rally.
I pressed my fedora to my head against the gale-force winds, stepped into the lobby, and found a seat on the bleachers. I was as alone as a hydrogen atom in interstellar space because Fillmore stirred up as much enthusiasm as an IRS Schedule C. This was a good thing. The more boring a politician is, the better. Those who were exciting, sent us to war, took away our rights, or bankrupted nations. Hitler was exciting. So were Stalin and Mao.
Fillmore’s robot avatar rolled onto the stage and stopped behind a podium marked with the presidential seal. This was a stopgap measure as the ninety-two-year-old president’s brain floated in a nutrient-rich bath in the White House basement while waiting for the appropriate donor body. In terms of the uncanny valley, the robot occupied a bungalow next to a rusty toaster. It had six road wheels, a cubic body, LCD screen showing a smiley face, and one elastomer arm for shaking hands. Its voice, transmitted from the White House, sounded like Stephen Hawking with laryngitis. I couldn’t remember one word of his speech. It was the tofu of speeches, the boiled rice of speeches, the overcooked oatmeal of speeches. After he finished, Fillmore’s wheels caught on the edge of the stage, forcing three Secret-Service agents to carry him down the stairs.
***
I crumpled a bag of vending-machine corn chips, tossed an apple core in the trash, and drained my cup of hotel coffee. I’d gotten a late start because the cable channel didn’t show softcore porn before 1:00 AM. No matter. FedEx hadn’t delivered the package to Al Bania’s address yet. I turned the TV to an episode of NCIS and settled in for a long stakeout. I watched the team bust an arms ring, recover a hijacked aircraft carrier, and prevent nuclear war but I couldn’t escape the campaign commercials.
“I’m Earl Tapenade and I’m running to be your Republican candidate for president.” Tapenade was a tech billionaire who’d inherited two billion from his father and lost half of that in business. He wore a gray, Nehru jacket that hung off his skinny frame like a deflated blimp. “When aliens abducted me last year, they inserted more than an anal probe. They inserted the knowledge that turmeric cures cancer, vaccines are a hoax, and I’m the reincarnation of Herman Goering. If elected, I’ll pardon Klystron!”
Of the Republicans in the race, Tapenade was the most sensible, but he was still several points behind the lead, Gerhard Klystron who was serving a thirty-year sentence at the Institute for the Criminally Insane on Albatross Island. I turned off the TV and checked the tracker app on my smartphone. The package was on the move. It crossed the Queen Street bridge, headed south, and stopped at an address on River Road. I grabbed my fedora and hung the maid-service sign on the doorknob.
***
I parked in a strip mall and stared at the storefront. Someone had crossed out Halloween Costume Outlet with spray paint and hung a “Gerhard Klystron for President” sign in the plate glass window. I bought a hand-held pump sprayer at a hardware store, changed into overalls, and returned.
“Hear you got yourselves a black-legged tick infestation,” I told the volunteer at the reception desk. “They’re like illegal aliens. When nature sends its critters, she doesn’t send her best. She sends bloodsuckers infected with Tunguska fever. Comes out of South America and causes impotence. One day you think you’re fine. Next thing you know the old sausage is limp as boiled asparagus. There’s no cure, either. It laughs at Viagra. Only thing that will kill the little buggers is Agent Orange, like I got right here.” I worked the hand pump on the spray can to build up pressure. “The pussies at the EPA say it causes cancer, but it hasn’t hurt me none.” I coughed and sprayed the baseboards. “Don’t mind the fumes. I’ll be done in an hour.”
“I think I’ll break for lunch.” The receptionist and staff beat it out of there faster than a Jamaican sprinter heading toward an all-you-can-eat, ackee-and-saltfish buffet.
“What kind of a country is it when a man can’t threaten witnesses?” a computerized voice said from a wall monitor displaying Klystron’s face. He had a shaved head, dark eyebrows, and wore a cape with a pointy collar. Klystron wrote his speeches on toilet paper and smuggled them out via his attorney.
I entered the largest office. The coffee cup on the mahogany desk was still warm and, in his haste to leave, the occupant had left the safe unlocked. It contained designs for America’s latest ballistic missile submarine, D.B Cooper’s birth certificate, the captain’s logbook from the Marie Celeste, the Zodiac killer’s confession, a decoded Voynich Manuscript, the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s body, oaths of fealty to “Our Reptile Overlords” signed in blood, and an autographed selfie from Vladimir Putin, but there were no ear drops so I went to the loading bay. Packages from FedEx, UPS, Amazon, and the post office filled the room to the height of my shoulders. I waded in, looking for Al Bania’s ear drops. Then I heard a noise and picked up the sprayer.
“Where is everybody?” a man in a chalk-striped suit asked. He wore a black shirt with a white tie and twirled a pocket watch on its gold chain.
“Don’t know. Nobody tells me anything.” I sprayed the baseboards. “I’m just an exterminator.”
“That’s funny. I’m an exterminator, too. Let me ask you a question. Do you think this suit makes me look fat?”
“No, vertical stripes are slimming. Horizontal are the ones you want to stay away from.”
“My girlfriend wants me to go on the turmeric diet where you put a tablespoon of the stuff on everything you eat. Says her best friend lost twenty pounds that way. Of course, her skin turned as yellow as a rubber duck eating a banana. Anyway, I got a truck out back to pick up the merchandise. Tell Doug we’ll make a deposit in his Cayman Island account.”
“Wish I could but I’ve got another appointment in a half hour. Maybe you should leave a note.”
“Good idea.” The visitor left a note at the front desk while workers loaded the stolen packages into the back of a box truck with a Hákarl Seafood logo on the side.
As I was leaving, I pocketed the note and left one of my own.
“Don’t worry about the ticks. I sprayed enough Agent Orange to kill anything.”
***
I put my Hyundai into gear and followed the truck onto I-293 heading south. Since the tracker informed me of the truck’s location, I hung back to avoid being spotted, settled in for a long drive, and turned on the radio.
“Spokesmen at the UNH genomics lab said today that a large chicken by the name of Gigi escaped her coop on campus. By combining chicken DNA with that of elephants and great blue whales, scientists hope to increase the efficiency of chicken-tenders production thus bringing the cost of combination plates down by forty-percent. In a related story, scientists at MIT have developed a strain of bacteria that turns plastic waste into duck sauce.”
A twelve-story-tall, chantecler chicken came flapping through the woods. She was white with a red face, beak the color of turmeric, and supersonic clucks louder than an Engine Alliance GP7000 turbofan on takeoff. Even worse, her foot came down on the Hákarl truck and flattened it into a grisly entrée served at a chicken-and-waffle house from hell. Motorists slammed on their brakes and bailed out of their vehicles. Since everyone in New Hampshire owns at least one rifle, all opened fire at the giant, clucking monstrosity. Say what you want about the AR-15, but when it comes to fighting off giant barnyard fowl, its ergonomics and rate of fire can’t be beat. Squawking annoyance, the beast burst through the toll plaza without paying and clucked off toward Massachusetts.
With the loss of the Hákarl truck and the tracker, my investigation needed a new strategy. I reached into my pocket for the note left at campaign headquarters.
“Doug, picked up the goods. Nicky,” it said.
I examined the note more closely. It was on the back of a green-and-white guest check.
“$5,000 donation from Kelly the panhandler. Corner of Elm and Concord.”
***
Elm Street could make a guy in a fedora’s heart sing. With its six-story brick buildings, flat roofs, arched doorways, and rusty fire escapes, I could almost hear a saxophone playing “Harlem Nocturne” in the background.
“Buy a struggling writer a coffee?” a guy sitting on the sidewalk in front of Viking Curry asked. He wore a coat held together with duct tape, and had a beard that reached the middle of his chest.
“You Kelly?” I handed him two quarters.
“You’re not from the outfit. Are you?” He pocketed the change.
“No, last outfit I bought was this trench coat in 1995.”
“1995 was the last great year. I’m voting for Klystron because he’ll take us back to MS-DOS. Anyway, Kelly’s shift starts at 4:00. Want a receipt?”
A blonde hostess with gaps between her teeth wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer through greeted me when I entered the restaurant.
“Why is a curry house named after Vikings?” I asked.
“They got around back then. Ever hear of Egil Yellowtooth?”
“No, what did he do?”
“Brought turmeric to Europe. Just you?” She took a menu from the stack.
“Sorry. I didn’t hear you. Wax buildup.” I scratched my ear. “Got anything for that?”
“Table for one?” she said louder.
I nodded and she sat me near the bathrooms. The joint did a brisk business as a gourmet soup kitchen. Unshaved men in torn clothing filled all twenty tables. I opened the menu and reached for my blood-pressure pills. Tea cost a hundred dollars, soup five hundred, and butter chicken cost a thousand.
“What can I get for you?” the waiter asked.
“These prices are outrageous.”
“You’re not from the outfit? Sorry.” He handed me a different menu.
“Chai with aquavit and a lutefisk biryani.”
Viking Curry was a money-laundering scheme. The outfit gave the homeless drug money which they spent at the restaurant but that didn’t get me any closer to finding Al Bania’s ear drops. I finished my lunch, exited onto Elm Street, and ran into Wayne Fillmore’s robot avatar accompanied by a Secret Service agent on a skateboard.
“Hello, I’m Wayne Fillmore. A lot of voters are asking me about that zero thing. I want you to know that I hear you. Hope you’ll vote for me in the New Hampshire primary.” The robot extended his artificial hand.
In this strange perversion of the Turing test, I couldn’t tell whether it was Fillmore’s brain speaking or some AI trained to repeat what voters wanted to hear. I shook the robot’s hand.
***
I put my smart phone down and sipped my latte. I’d been staking out Viking Curry from the coffee shop across the street for hours. I didn’t know why mobsters handed out dirty money when they could just give the homeless free meals and say they got paid. Maybe it was due to some obscure tax law or maybe they did it for the simple joy of chasing down those who absconded with their cash and breaking their legs.
A crowd gathered around 3:30. Minutes later a flatbed truck with side panels pulled to the curb. Two men who could bench press Bagger 293 bucket-wheel excavators exited the cab, climbed into the bed, and used snow shovels to toss bundles of cash onto the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the driver handed out receipt pads and pencils to the waiting crowd. I set off down the sidewalk, trying not to move so fast that I’d draw the mobsters’ attention but I wasn’t going to get to my Hyundai before the truck drove off. Then a solution presented itself.
An electric scooter leaned against a lamppost. I scanned the QR code on my smart phone and kicked off as the truck pulled away. I didn’t worry about getting recognized because nothing is more inconspicuous than a guy in a trench coat on a scooter. As the truck passed Gaucho Souvlaki, Visigoth Sushi, and the Samurai Tapas Bar, an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, shaped like a hubcap welded to a chicken-pot pie, appeared overhead. A turmeric-colored tractor beam lifted the truck into the craft’s belly and, like the genetically modified chicken, it sped off toward Massachusetts. What was I going to do now?
***
The building occupied by Viking Curry belonged to Ryuichi Takamura, the Paella King of New Hampshire. On Tuesday mornings, he rehearsed the part of Tom Winfield in the Palace Theater’s production of The Glass Menagerie. I arrived at 11:19 AM and waited outside. At 11:43, a man with hair frosted at the tips exited. He wore a puffy coat and Doc Martens. As soon as he saw my fedora, Takamura took off in a free run, vaulting over garbage cans, somersaulting over parked cars, and swinging from fire escapes to change direction. I followed as best I could but skidded to a halt when Gerhard Klystron rolled a self-propelled cherry picker to a stop on Granite Street, raised the basket, and held up a set of spiral-bound cuneiform tablets.
“How dare you try to imprison me! Now you will feel my wrath!” Klystron recited an incantation in Sumerian. A giant tentacle burst through the pavement, snatched Takamura off the sidewalk, and stuffed him into its maw. I guess that was just parkour for the course. Zombies, riders of the apocalypse atop horses with halitosis, hell hounds with ghastly squeaky toys, blob monsters, LCD-monitor lizards, vampires, and killer robots playing annoying computer themes streamed out of the portal. They raped hamsters, deep-fried babies in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, ruined property values, and created a poor business environment. If I could somehow manage to take the clay tablets from Klystron’s hands, I could end the carnage but that would get me no closer to solving the mystery of the missing ear drops.
***
“Do you have any ear drops?” I asked the pharmacist.
The trail had gone cold so I did the only thing I could. I billed Al Bania eight-hundred dollars to pay a “confidential informant.”
“Aisle fourteen.”
“I’ll take everything you have.” I spread eight, crisp, hundred-dollar bills on the counter.
***
The corgi backed away from the hairpin and curled his left lip. He had ears like A-frames, stubby legs, and big adorable eyes. Before I could learn the other things Grady didn’t like, a campaign commercial interrupted the video.
“Friends, UAPs are inserting more anal probes than gastroenterologists, a giant chicken is rampaging the east coast, and hell hounds are peeing on mail carriers everywhere, yet Republicans refuse to outlaw the number zero,” President Fillmore’s brain said from the White House basement. The image showed his gray matter floated in a beaker filled with a fluid the color of an oaky Chardonnay that would go well with chicken or seafood. “If reelected, I will introduce the Mathematics as Gaslighting Act. By next year, students will do long division in Roman numerals…”
“The mail came.” Mom dropped a stack of letters on my bed.
One asked for donations of $9.99, $99.99, or $999.99 to the Fillmore campaign. When told, “You always get the rulers you deserve,” my buddy Vinny Stopwatch would reply, “Why do I have to get stuck with the rulers THEY deserve?” When it comes to rulers, I prefer the metric system. I put a dollar in the return envelope with a note saying, “I’m tossing in an extra penny. Here’s a million.”
Meet the Author:
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Underside Stories. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception.
