Read Online The Exploding Detective by John Swartzwelder - Free Book Online Page B

Elephant eggs, or
talking caviar or something. I’m kind of new at this - don’t really know all
the ins and outs yet. But don’t tell anybody.”
    “You told
somebody.”
    “Yes, but I don’t
want you to.”
    “That doesn’t
seem fair to me. I want to tell somebody.”
    “No.”
    “Oh all right.
New at this, eh? How long have you been a super villain?”
    “Eleven months.
But what I lack in experience I make up for in perseverance, stick-to-it-iveness
and get-up-and-go.”
    “I’m not trying
to hire you. I just wanted to know.”
    “Eleven months.”
    He told me his
story. He hadn’t started out life as a super villain. He was a toy
manufacturer. The president of the Overmyer Toy Company of Flint, Michigan. He
asked if I’d heard of it. I said it was my favorite.
    “Authenticity was
our trademark,” he said proudly. “All our toys and models were authentic down
to the last detail. Our toy police cars, for example, could actually arrest
people. They had that authority built in. That’s the kind of thing kids want,
you know. They don’t want a toy. They want the real thing, just on a smaller
scale. ‘The Real Thing, For The Price Of A Toy,’ was the slogan we had for all
our toys and models. That and ‘If You Truly Love Your Boy, Buy Him A
True-To-Life Overmyer Toy.’ I thought up the slogans as well as doing the
initial designs.”
    “I just love
those slogans. And I’ll bet the initial designs were outstanding.”
    “It pleases me
that you think so.” He beamed at me.
    His products had
done so well, he told me, that the company had gone public and he had made
several billion dollars overnight. But that windfall proved to be his undoing.
Six months later when the newly installed board of directors of this now
publicly controlled company met for the first time, they forced him out in
favor of a younger man who could talk faster.
    “So I was out at
52. Finished. I had enough money to do anything I wanted with the remainder of
my life, but what I wanted to do was run my toy company. And that had been
taken away from me. Kill, Maim, Frighten, Destroy!”
    He paused in his
story to smash his end of the table to pieces with his fists, his head changing
shape with anger. After the moment had passed, he sat back down, patted his
head back into close to its original shape, and looked at me.
    “You were
saying?” he asked.
    “You were telling
me your back-story.”
    “Oh, yes, that’s
right. So, anyway, I found myself sitting around the house all day, not knowing
what to do with myself, and feeling kind of worthless. We are carefully
programmed by society, you know, to believe that life is about work. Working
for them. If you’re not working for them, life has no meaning, they say. That
all sounded a little too convenient for society to me. A little too pat. I rebelled
against the idea. I didn’t want to be a cog in a machine. I wanted to be a cog
running free, doing what it wanted. Cogging around, having a good time. But I
didn’t know what I wanted to do.
    “I tried
collecting stamps. People said that was a fun and instructional way to pass the
time. But once you’ve collected them, what do you have? Stamps! That’s what no
one told me.”
    I made a
sympathetic sound. I had collected a stamp once too. Bunch of bullshit.
    He smoothed out
the last few bulges in his head, and continued: “I grew angry at a system that
would allow a man to be shoved out of the company he had inherited from his
dad, who in turn had stolen it from someone else’s dad, who had built it with
his own two hands, on land he had stolen from the Indians. It just didn’t seem
right. I looked for a way to strike back at this system, and at the same time
have a few laughs.”
    “Good thinking.”
    “I bought a
secret island from another secret guy and started building my ‘Fortress of
Revenge’, as I call it.”
    “Great name.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You know what’s
great about you? Everything!”
    “Don’t lay it