Failed Openings To Mystery Novels I'll Never Finish Writing

 

The Eyeball Eating Corgi Caper

“Go on, you and your crummy ventriloquist dummy get th’hell outta here. Neither I or the children love you anymore.” Those were Gertie Plutachrisides’s last words to her husband.

And those so happened to be the last words spoken to Felix Plutachrisides by any immediate member of his family before he moved on to a skid-row hotel where he successfully assembled an army of cockroaches to take over, what he believed to be the epicenter of the city – the revolving restaurant with its faded waiters and carpeting and maybe even faded pee stains around the lobby, in a needle-like tower with a saucer-like protrusion near the top that was the actual restaurant and where people revolved and ate Waldorf salads and leech pudding and ostrich-foot consommé and nibbled the earlobes of sloths as well as their own betrothed. And if that wasn’t enough his dummy wasn’t sleeping properly, keeping the both of them up all night with its incessant talking and nattering and hacking and coughing and gum-chewing and in the wee hours, though Felix was loathe to admit it, the sound of masturbating, especially when one of its new dummy magazines had arrived in the mail.

So when Gertie turned up dead the next morning, her pet Corgi having eaten her eyeballs inexplicably before nuzzling up to her body which is how the police found the two of them, the children fortunately still at school, Felix was amazed when the cops showed up at his flea-bag hotel room and asked him to come downtown. Especially because the downtown had burned down months ago during a riot over free twist ties at the Chez Maurice Chevalier Institute of Science and Technology. Oddly, when told of their mother’s death a day later, Piltron, the son asked his sister, Verbia, “Do you think the Corgi finally ate her eyeballs?”

Verbia could only nod her head in agreement. Everyone knew the family Corgi had a hankering for eyeballs day or night and they all walked around with protective eyewear on like what you’d wear at a construction site, for fear of losing their sight when Balthazar, the Corgi, tried to eat their eyeballs, be it in the kitchen, the bedroom, the garage or the den nodding out in front of the TV, one of the best spots for eyeball eating Balthazar discovered though he truly, in his heart, wasn’t that discerning as long as eyeballs were on the menu.

“The queen’s corgis never ate no one’s eyeballs,” Felix would say but Gertie would ignore him or reply, “She’s got all the money in the world to hush up all her corgi eyeball-eating lawsuits, that’s why you never hear about it, you dumbbell.”

It was these exact words that the homicide detectives threw back in Felix’s face like an old washcloth used to swab a prize-winning pig after a particularly strenuous showing at the 4-H Club, but Felix just looked at them blankly while deep inside his mind he began jerking his nerve-endings into telepathy-carrying waves in order to call his cockroach army into action and break him out of this two-bit excuse for an investigation. Plus he didn’t kill his wife but he thought he might know who did.

But to prove it he’d need every cockroach in the city on his side along with the mayor, two dentists, an entertainment director at a senior’s home, a butcher, a wombat impersonator and carte blanche at a Buddhist funeral supply store. Then, once they’d settled into their revolving restaurant headquarters he could proceed with his big plan. The steps leading up to it just chicken feed as far as he was concerned. The real work would begin once they were up there in the clouds, looking down and spinning around on some rusty hydraulic system, sucking on vintage bread crusts for sustenance as he and his dummy and his cockroach army tried to figure out how to save the entire human race. And it all began with the murder of his wife that pointed towards an international conspiracy of incredible proportions and would eventually stretch from the tony neighbourhoods of Beverly Hills to the slums of the Antarctic.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning when Thurman Pipler, the father of the modern revolving restaurant was himself being hatched in a petri dish back in a dustbowl dead horse town in 1936 by a most unusual doctor and the world had no idea that at that moment the entire course of history would change and would coincidentally parallel the arrival of the complimentary bread basket to the restaurant dining table. But that’s a whole other story.

Failed Openings to Mystery Novels I'll Never Finish Writing

The Roman Toilet Ultimatum
by  Torrance P. DerSitis (my thriller novel pen-name)

 

“City coroner,” the voice on the other side of the door stated with all the authority you would expect from a person who was allowed to exhume the dead on just a whim, rip open their bodies and poke around to their heart’s content and Chisley Torgair thought, “But wait, I’m not deceased. What could the coroner possibly want with me?”

That was to be his final thought because just then a pigeon began cooing madly at the window of his dingy one-room walk-up and when he turned to look he was met with a .22 slug right through the head. He never heard the breaking glass. Oddly, his last question was answered with the pull of a trigger.

A shadowy figure on the fire escape, still holding a smoldering gun then uttered some seemingly nonsensical words that would soon reverberate not only through the local precinct house but internationally from a yurt in Irkutsk to a back deck barbeque party in Tobermory at the tip of Georgian Bay with everyone in casual slacks, plus a couple of stops on some ice floes along the way, beneath which lay secret laboratories where recreational mutants were being bred, part insect, part mammal to undermine the willpower of the human race, the project headed up by a group of disgruntled ex-KGB and CIA agents and scientists who were not happy with their severance pay, or so some said. “Makes the Cold War seem like Miami, eh, Yuri?” was the joke they liked to beat like a dead horse around the facilities. A dead horse they would have gladly eaten instead of having to chow down on freeze-dried and microwavable entrees with names like “Glucose mit Hoof und Meatbowls and Chocolate Cesspool Pit.”

“Tungsten spit-croft filberts divisional seepage trust wingo-wingo gestational crust,” were the enigmatically strung-together words the shadowy figure murmured reverently as he watched Chisley Torgair momentarily twitch on the ground before his lights went out. Doesn’t take long with a .22 drilling you a third eye while a pigeon shits in that sad excuse for a flowerbox outside your rooming-house window that you fill with your stubbed-out cigarette butts and lung oysters hawked up morning, noon and night and all that despite your first name being Chisley. How did Chisley Torgair, a broken-down and alcoholic Venetian blind assembler, though once the scion of a wealthy family until he got into black market guinea pig breeding and tried to pass off a couple of rats with glued on hair he cut from passed-out drunks sleeping in his alleyway as “show pigs”, now currently jobless and his only family that hadn’t disowned him the yellowed and mottled pictures that came with his wallet, fit into the big picture? Moments later the city coroner and his assistant broke down the rooming-house door but they were too late. The assassin had disappeared.

“Goddamnit, Plitzsky, we’re too late!”

“I know, didn’t you just say that a moment ago?”

“No, that must’ve been someone else or else you’re hearing things. When’s the last time you got some sleep, Plitzsky?

“Don’t worry about me, Chief. I can run on empty until I’m mummified.”

“If you say so. Anyway, this guy’s playing us like a marlin on 120 Ib. test line. Teasing us for hours until we just wanna give up, fling ourselves in the boat and die.”

“I hear you, boss. My gills are hurting just thinking about it.”

This gave the coroner pause for as far as he knew his assistant had never before displayed any type of affinity or affiliation with fish species.

A hundred miles away in the countryside in a heavily secured barn surrounded by an electrified fence, rows of cows stood, their skullcaps cut away and plexi-glass domes placed over their brain cavities. Their udders were hooked up to lie detector machines and the cows were being asked questions by a group of men in lab coats.

“Your mother’s maiden name?” one man barked.

“You have eight apples. Sally takes away two. Then a laser disintegrates another. But the laser is so swift it’s actually beaming into the future. So, did those apples actually exist in the past or did you create them with extrapolations based partly on memory, partly on misguided future desires mixed with an overwhelming sense of regret and despair?” yelled another. The cows looked neither confused nor intrigued. They appeared neutral as did their test results.

In an office overlooking the barn floor below, Dr. Mibley Forblooth took it all in and lit a stick of incense before placing it gently in the makeshift shrine he had erected to Phil Horvance, philosopher, god, chartered accountant and his recently deceased brother-in-law and who had vouched for his initiation into the secret sect of which he was now president. A sect that was now poised to take over the world if they played their cards right and the detonation buoys they’d contracted out to a bunch of undergrad engineering students to build were both working and had been placed in the right freighter shipping lanes. Of course all the students would have to be killed afterwards.

As he placed the incense into the shrine built from the limbs of superhero toys, condiment packs pilfered from fast food restaurants and rat droppings, and ignoring a text message on his phone asking “How’s it going with the bovine?” he intoned the holy words, the words actually not nonsensical at all but a code for a very simple set of instructions with nevertheless complex and catastrophic repercussions beginning with the downfall of the three great superpowers of the world. And with all the technology of today to think that this entire, crazy scheme had actually been hatched way back when in the lavatories of Rome when some bad mutton had sent a bunch of scheming senators into the communal facilities where they then, between grunts and gas-passing swore and plotted revenge on all emperors, past, present and future. But as they say, “when in Rome…” I guess the same could be said for Sudbury after the sun’s gone down.