Musings of a Restless Mind

This is a story from 1973, and I’m publishing it here as part of the story of how my wife and I got together.

“Egor Simean awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a baby gorilla.”

I looked at the typewriter with a certain satisfaction. Private dicking barely paid well enough to support my writing habit, but I felt this one would really drop my name into the business with the force of a fall from the Empire State Building. The main character was going to go on a crusade for better treatment of animals and eventually lead the S.P.C.A. on a war of liberation into Africa, but my thoughts were interrupted by the creak of my door delicately swinging open. What was behind it looked even more delicate, but she swooped into my office like a lighted stick of TNT rolling towards a munitions depot. This dame had “handle with care” written all over her.

“Are you Mr. O’Hara?”

“That’s me, Seamus O’Hara, private dick.”

“Are you Irish?”

“No, are you Jewish?”

“No.”

“Then we’re even. What can I do for you Sister?”

“My father’s been kidnapped.”

“Wrong building. The police are 2 blocks down,” I said, turning back to my typewriter.

“You don’t understand. The police can’t help me.”

I’d heard that line before, but I could see this one wasn’t about to leave, so I snapped, “All right, spill it, but make it short, my typewriter needs a rest, and this looks like it’s going to be a long story.”

“My name’s Susan Grey, and I’m a chemist. My father’s Darwin Grey, the anthropologist, and the two of us were working on an experiment in Brazil when my father disappeared. This was the only thing found at the scene.”

She plunked a copy of Transformation by Charles Imp on my desk. I opened it and read, “Harry Jones awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a baby gorilla.”

I read the jacket synopsis and discovered that Jones became head of the A.S.P.C.A and invaded South America on a war of liberation. It was the third idea this year that Imp had beaten me to.

“Have you read this?”

“Yes, it’s very good, but the point is that it hasn’t been released yet. Imp’s works are published by Random House. I’ve done some checking, and besides Imp, only the three owners of Random House could have copies before it’s released, Howard Tweed, Gregory Flannel, and Amos Pipe, but the police won’t do anything because the kidnapping took place in Brazil.”

I took the case. I was glad for anything to get this Imp whom I suspected of spying on my brain. I picked up all the info I could get from Susie and sent her home. My next stop was the docks. The only way to bring a kidnap victim from Brazil to New York without detection is by ship. Only six ships had checked in from Brazil since the kidnapping. Three were coffee shipments, the other three were bananas, all headed for the same place, Monastery N.Y. Before I took a trip upstate, though, I thought I’d check out the big three and see if one bolted.

Flannel was first on the list, but I got there too late. When no one answered, I pushed the unlocked door open and got a scenic view of Flannel spread across the carpet. His lumpy body reminded me of the Rockies at sunset as it lay splattered with red from the hole in his chest. A piece of paper was at his stiff fingertips. I picked it up, hoping to find the name of the killer, but all that was written on it was the single word, “Chiquita.”

I heard a muffled sound and jumped for the protection of the desk like an exclamation point towards the roll bar of an Olivetti. Soon I realized it was coming from the bedroom, so I kicked open the door, my Remington ready, only to find a doll with more curves than Paradise Lost typed in italics, lying on the bed trussed up better than a Hitchcock plot.

“Thanks, I thought I was going to take a long walk off a short pier for sure,” she said as I set her loose, “Who are you?”

“Seamus O’Hara, private detective, and you, Sister?”

“Rhonda Goldberg, private detective.”

Noting my raised eyebrow, she snapped, “What’s the matter. You men think you’re the only Dicks in the ciry?”

“This story’s getting a little out of hand, so it’d be better if you just skip all the confidentiality bit and tell me what you’ve got.”

“Well, I was hired by a writer who’s had the plots of his last few three page mysteries lifted by this guy, Charles Imp. It seems Imp just can’t be found, however. Do you know how many Imps thre are in the New York phone book? I came to Flannel because only he, Tweed, and Pipe know Imp’s middle name. Flannel was nervous, got very upset by my questions and managed to get the drop on me. About 20 minutes ago, I heard a shot, then you arrived.”

“Who’s Chiquita?”

“Search me.”

I considered the idea carefully and then suggested we look up Pipe. She picked up her purse, and we soon found ourselves experiencing a great feeling of deja vu as Pipe lay gasping and bleeding across four or five unpublished manuscripts. He was pretty far gone, but Rhonda dropped her purse and astutely started pumping him immediately.

“Imp’s middle name! What is it?”

“Howard,” was all he could gasp out before he died.

Howard! Everything fell into place now. That was the last letter on the printer’s block. Pretty soon my typewriter would be able to kiss us all goodbye and get that rest it needed.

“Let’s go, we’ve got a long trip upstate.”

“What about Tweed?”

“Forget Tweed.”

I called Susan, and soon all three of us were headed upstate. We pulled up outside the only structure in Monastery, New York, a factory-like building, but there was something missing.

“Where are the cars of all the workers”? asked Susan as we walked towards the building.

“There aren’t any workers,” I said as we watched a truck marked “Chiquita” pull up and start to unload its truckful of bananas, “Except those who unload the banana and paper trucks.”

“Paper trucks?” asked Rhonda.

“Yes, I had Susan do some more checking before I went to see Flannel. Random House owns this place. Several truckloads of bananas and paper are sent here every day, but no one works here, and nothing apparently is ever produced,” I said as I skillfully picked the lock. We entered to an amazing din found only in newspaper offices a half-hour before deadline. The sound was muffled by another door.

“But what do bananas and Random House to do with my father?” asked Susan.

“Just this,” I said kicking in the inner door and getting the drop on Tweed who was in the midst of tongue-lashing Dr. Grey. All around the room were thousands upon thousands of monkeys strapped to chairs and madly beating on typewriters. I continued my explanation as Susan and Dr. Grey enjoyed their reunion, “You see Tweed, Flannel, and Pipe came up with the fantastic idea of using monkeys as authors.”

“Yes, and we’d practically cornered the poetry market too,” said Tweed.

“But fiction was a little tougher, wasn’t it? Not everybody reads James Joyce. That’s where the Professor came in. He and Susan had developed a way of giving apes limited intelligence through his teaching methods and a formula she had developed. So you kidnapped him and forced him to work for you, but your partners didn’t like the idea of kidnapping, so you had to bump them off.”

“How did you find all this out?”

“Little things like three banana shipments sent to a publishing house and a dying man scrawling “Chiquita” on a piece of paper, but finding out Imp’s middle name was Howard was what clinched it. An author who no one ever sees and whose name is C. H. Imp? Come on Tweed, that was pretty tacky. I always knew you publishers had no imagination.”

“Very clever, Seamus,” said Rhonda pulling a gun on me.

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot about you, Rhonda. There are certain foreign powers which would love to get their hands on those monkeys to write their propaganda.”

“I don’t know how you found out, but it won’t do you any good,” she said as she pointed her pearl-handled heater at me and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened of course.

“I removed the bullets last page when you dropped your purse.”

“But how did you know she was a foreign agent?” asked Susan.

“Only a foreigner would choose a name like Goldberg as a cover for a private detetive. Besides, she claimed her client had had the plots of his three-page mysteries stolen Everybody knows it’s impossible to write a first-class mystery in three pages.”