Detective Paco and the Case of the Cretaceous Crap

(H/T to Currency Lad for the idea)

I was sitting in the office with my feet on the desk, nursing a hot cuppa joe, reading an article in the Washington Post about the bazillion dollar stimulus bill being floated by the Democrats – and wondering if a more appropriate medium for the story might not have been True Crime Magazine - when Sheila poked her golden head through the door.

“Paco, you’ve got a visitor.”

“If it’s a bill collector, tell him my government bailout’s still in the works.”

“This looks like a paying client; a Mr. Smythe-Pooter, from England.”

“Well, shoot the old boy in!”

I lowered my boats from the desk, and assumed a look of intense concentration while I studied a piece of paper – actually, just a dry-cleaning bill for one of my fedoras, but as far as Smythe-Pooter knew, it might be the death-bed confession of an ax-murderer, or a communiqué from an informer working for the Cosa Nostra.

Sheila escorted the gentleman in. He was a short but plump little fellow in a dated three-piece blue suit set off by a regimental necktie. He was holding a bowler hat, both hands tightly clutching the brim as if he were steering a semi down a steep, winding mountain road, and his gleaming bald head protruded from a fringe of graying hair like an ostrich egg settled comfortably in its downy nest. A pair of wire-rim spectacles magnified the anxiety expressed in his watery blue eyes, while a neatly-trimmed military mustache stood guard over his upper lip. Sheila gave our new friend a kindly smile, which made his hairless pate glow like the taillight on a caboose, and she looked for all the world as if she were going to reach into the pocket of her skirt and pull out a dog-treat for him; as it was, I could tell that she just barely restrained herself from patting him on the head. He shuffled over to my desk and extended a cool little hand.

“Detective Paco, I’m so glad to meet you. My name is Percival Smythe-Pooter, and I’m assistant curator at the London Natural History Museum.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smythe-Pooter. Grab a chair. You look like a man with some troubles.”

“Oh, I am, indeed, Mr. Paco. Something horrible has happened. A valuable piece of coprolite has been stolen from our museum.”

“Coprolite?”

“Yes, a piece of fossilized excrement, in this case, a specimen from the Titanosaurus, a sauropod of the late Cretaceous period.”

“You mean…dinosaur doo-doo?”

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, yes; dinosaur doo-doo. We’re terribly worried about Molly.”

“Molly? Who is she? A museum employee harmed during the robbery?”

Smythe-Pooter’s dome began glowing again, and he gave an embarrassed little cough. “No, no. Molly is the nickname of the…of the coprolite specimen. You see, through long familiarity with the pieces in our museum, we tend to grow rather fond of them and we give them little names. It’s silly, I suppose, but there you are.”

I was thinking that “Stinky” might have been a more appropriate moniker, but I let it go. “So, is the thing valuable?”

“Oh, my, yes, Mr. Paco! This kind of thing is very scarce.”

“I see. One of the ‘crown stools’, eh?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Skip it. How much is it worth?”

“It would be difficult to put a price on it.”

“Well, lucky for you, it’s not hard at all to put a price on my services: a hundred dollars a day, plus expenses. Incidentally, tell me something. If this rock disappeared in England, why would you come all the way to America to hire a private detective?”

“Oh, I didn’t come for that express purpose. I’m in town for a convention of paleontologists; there’s a very interesting seminar on a new American dinosaur discovery – a sauropod called Erketu ellisoni.”

I scratched my chin. “No…no, you wouldn’t want to miss that. But that still doesn’t explain why you’d want an American PI on the case of your missing turd.”

Smythe-Pooter ran his bowler through his fingers a few times, nervously; finally, he cleared his throat and proceeded to give me something I could use.

“Mr. Paco, there is something that I should tell you. It is a matter of the greatest confidentiality, and I have to be careful not to sully a colleague’s good name…but…”

“But you’ve got some scoop on who stole the poop?”

He smiled feebly. “You have a marvelously lyrical way of putting things, Mr. Paco. Yes, I think I may be able to cast some light on the subject. You’ve heard, perhaps, of an Australian paleontologist named Tim Flannery? He’s a well-known proponent of the theory of global warming.”

“What’s dinosaur crap have to do with global warming?”

“Nothing, truth to tell; that’s another kind of…er…crap, altogether, as you might say.” Smythe-Pooter obviously didn’t buy into the climate change racket; I was liking him better by the minute. “But his expertise is in paleontology, and he was visiting the museum in London on the same day that the coprolite was stolen; in fact, we had lunch together. As it happens, we were also sponsoring a ‘live’ exhibit that day of Neanderthal Man, and had hired a few people to wander around the museum in skins, carrying clubs, that sort of thing.”

“Were they museum employees?”

“No, they were local rugby fans; as you can imagine, practically no training was needed to put them in proper character, and they agreed to do the job for a case of stout. Anyway, it was a bit of a disaster; a few of the Neanderthals got hold of a diplodocus skull and began ‘scrumming’, if that’s the word I want, and we had a time getting it away from them. But as I was putting the skull back where it belonged, I noticed one of the Neanderthals hanging around the coprolite exhibit. He seemed to be a bit ‘out of uniform’, so to speak; he was wearing an old deerskin, all right, but he also had on white socks and a pair of brogues; and his beard was very neatly styled. And here’s the remarkable thing: he strongly resembled Professor Flannery! Not only that, but when security was interviewing the rugby fellows who had made such a ruckus with the skull, they claimed that someone had paid them to do it. I’m quoting from memory, but when the ringleader was asked who had paid them to create a disturbance, he said ‘’im wit the nancy beard and the oscillatin’ eyeballs is who!’ Now, what do you think of that?”

“Sounds like the episode with the dinosaur skull was a diversion, and that Flannery is a prime suspect.”

“Which brings me to why I’ve called on you, Mr. Paco. Professor Flannery is in town for the convention. He came here straight from England, and so, if he’s the culprit, he may well still have the coprolite in his possession.”

I took down the information from Smythe-Pooter about the hotel where the convention was being held, and told him I’d see what I could do. Then I sent him back to the hotel so he could enjoy the booze and the strippers, wear funny hats, practice the secret handshake, short-sheet his buddies – whatever it was that paleontologists do when they find themselves on the loose in a big town with no adult supervision – and considered a course of action.
* * *

“Paco, it is not a Peruvian admiral’s uniform. It is a very fashionable security guard’s outfit that I purchased for one of our previous assignments, as you well know.”

“I didn’t mean it as a jab, Wronwright. I just didn’t know how else to describe it. Seriously, I think it’s a…a thing of great beauty. All I’m asking is that you temporarily remove the epaulettes and a couple of pounds of gold braid so that you look more like a regular hotel security guy, and less like a naval commander on the losing side of the War of the Pacific. But, anyway, are you in?”

I had explained the scenario. Professor Flannery was the suspect, and I needed Wronwright to hang around the lobby, keeping an eye on his comings and goings so I could sneak into his room and look for the coprolite. Simple.

“Well…it seems like a lot of fuss over a piece of prehistoric crap, but ok. Er, can I wear the…”

“Cocked hat? No.”
* * *

It was going very smoothly. At 6:00 pm in the evening, Wronwright and I were in the lobby of the hotel – I was sitting in a chair gazing over the top of a newspaper at Wronwright, who was looming in the hall by the elevators. After about 15 minutes, Wronwright gave me the signal: he took his glasses off and began polishing them. This meant that Flannery had just gotten off the elevator. I watched and saw the famous bone enthusiast hurry toward the revolving door and out into the street.

I walked quickly to the bank of elevators, and slowed my pace just long enough to review the situation with my partner.

“Ok, I’m going up to his room. If you see him return, call me on your cell phone. Got it?”

“Check,” he said (somewhat absently, as a gorgeous red head sauntered by, wearing a low-cut evening dress from which her gleaming white bosom seemed destined to escape as soon as she took a deep breath).

“Wronwright, over here! Focus on the mission! You’ve got your cell phone?” He pulled the phone from his pocket and waggled it in front of my face.

“Ok, I’m heading upstairs.”

Smythe-Pooter had found out Flannery’s room number and given it to me earlier in the day. I took the elevator up to the third floor and went to room 326. I had obtained a pass key from a bell hop, after convincing him of my bona fides and promising him complete confidentiality, although I think it was the fifty bucks that finally did the trick. I looked around carefully and entered the room.

I guess Flannery had figured he was home free, because as soon as I opened his suitcase, I found a small cardboard box with the lump of coprolite in it (I recognized it from a photo that Smythe-Pooter had shown me – a wallet photo, of all things, situated between pictures of his wife and his cat). I closed the suitcase, put it back where I had found it, dropped the rock in the pocket of my trench coat and turned to leave – when the door was suddenly thrown open to reveal the room’s very startled legal occupant.

“Who are you?” he shouted.

“Er…hotel staff, sir. Do you need your sheets turned down?” I was too busy mentally cursing Wronwright to think up an excuse. Why hadn’t he called to warn me? Was the red head been keen on men in uniform, and had she stopped to chat him up?

Flannery slowly closed the door behind him – and bolted it, which I thought was interesting.

“Since when do hotel maids wear trench coats, pin-striped suits and fedoras?”

“Well, times are tough for us Wall Street bankers, you know. Maybe you haven’t been reading the economic news.”

He pulled something from his coat pocket; it resembled a big stone. Damn, I thought. More fossil poop? What was this guy trying to do, corner the market?

Whatever happened, it was essential that he didn’t find out that I had already palmed the coprolite, so I came clean – more or less.

“All right, Professor, you’ve got me dead to rights. I’m a private detective and I’ve been hired to recover the coprolite that you stole from the London Museum of Natural History. I was just about to search the room when you showed up. If you return the rock, there will be no questions asked, I assure you. Besides, that one you’ve got there in your hand looks pretty nice; what do you want with two of them?”

“This,” Flannery said, hefting the thing in his hand, “is the fossilized molar of a Gomphothere, a prehistoric relative of the modern elephant, and a mere decorative ornament for my office. It is also the object that I intend to hit you over the head with if you try any funny moves.”

“You seem to be going to an awful lot of trouble to collect fossils, Professor. Why run such big risks? And is that one stolen, too?”

“No, not this one. I bought it at one of the exhibits downstairs. But you ask me why I need these things. They’re all part of my great work.”

“And that would be what, exactly?”

“I’ve got a considerable amount of prestige invested in the proposition that global warming is real. And it is real, damn it!” For a moment he looked off into the middle distance, with a furious expression on his face - almost as if he heard a large crowd of people laughing at him. “I just haven’t been able to find sufficient hard evidence. But I’m working on a new project – the analysis of fossil excrement from the Jurassic period through the Paleocene epoch, primarily – that I’m sure will support the truth of my assertions. But the stuff is hard to find, so I have to get hold of it anywhere I can, in any way that I can. The earth is heating up, the oceans are receding and the glaciers are melting. Do you know what it will mean when water becomes more scarce than gold?”

“Well, I take my whiskey neat, so I don’t see a problem, myself.”

He waved the fossil tooth in his hand menacingly. “Joke about it if you insist, you fool! But if one day you wind up dying in the street, your lips dry and burnt, your skin like parchment from dehydration, your lungs scarred by greenhouse emissions –“

“That reminds me; do you mind if I smoke?”

I’m not sure he heard me. Flannery was obviously bonkers; I figured that any second he was likely to start fanning his lips with an index finger and making “bibbidy-bibbidy-bibbidy” noises. He was muttering something about comparative carbon analysis of fecal matter through the ages. I had to admit, if that’s what he wanted to do for a living, I didn’t think he’d have much competition.

Finally, he came back to himself. He reached for the telephone and called security. I was in a tight spot, and no mistake; I didn’t have any legal right to be in his room, and a close search would reveal that I had lifted the coprolite, which Smythe-Pooter claimed he could identify, but to which he surely didn’t have anything like a title deed.

To Flannery's surprise, and mine, there was a knock on the door barely twenty seconds after he had made the call. He opened the door and there stood…Wronwright.

“That was fast,” Flannery said, in a slightly puzzled tone of voice.

“Uh huh”, he said, tucking his thumbs in his belt and walking into the room. “What’s the trouble here?”

Flannery returned to earth long enough to handle his present crisis. “This man broke into my room. Please take him away!”

Wronwright took out a pair of handcuffs and placed them on my wrists.

“Aren’t you overdoing this?” I whispered to him in some dismay

“Verisimilitude,” he whispered back. Turning to Flannery, he asked, “Do you want to press charges, sir?”

“No, I don’t have time to bother. Just get him out of here and keep him out of here.”

As soon as the door closed behind us, we walked briskly down the hall.

“Why the hell didn’t you call me?”

“Yeah, now, about the phone. You remember that red-haired girl we saw downstairs a while ago?” (I knew it!). “Her cell phone wasn’t working, and the pay-phones were all being used, and she said that she desperately needed to call her dressmaker, so I, er, loaned her my cell.”

“You mean her huddled fun bags yearning to breathe free got their wish?”

“And how! So, I gave her my cell phone, and then damned if she didn’t go into the ladies’ room to make some kind of temporary fix with the gown while she was gabbing with her dressmaker. Flannery came into the hotel about that time and I couldn’t think of any way to stall him, so I waited a few minutes and just came up.”

“A very timely arrival. He had just called the desk to ask for security.”

We took the steps down to the rear of the hotel. I planned to call Smythe-Pooter later and give him the good news. Meanwhile, I was eager to get out of the handcuffs.

“Listen, take out your key and unlock these things, will you?”

“Yeah, now, about the key...”