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.