Daddykins

1

It was a few days into the year 3000 and I sat in my office on 59th St, waiting for either money or a girl to fall into my lap.

As it happened, I got both.

 

Unlike the fancy qualifications hanging on my wall, the girl wasn't a hologram. She looked like she belonged more to the age of telegrams. She wore a thick ermine coat and a scarf with a couple of fox heads at the end.

 

'I'm here about Daddykins' she said.

 

'Daddykins?'

 

'My father.'

 

'I see' I said, 'and how can I help Daddykins?'

 

'He's looking for a nemesis.'

 

I sighed and picked up a remote. Pointing it at the wall, I projected an image of a notice, headed NEMESIS WANTED. The notice read: "Gentleman villain seeks nemesis for the usual mayhem." It was signed "Mortimer Wilkins".

 

'I don't suppose he'd be responsible for this, would he?'

 

'That's daddy' she said, without much enthusiasm.

 

'I got it in my mailbox this morning. You can tell daddy dearest that I don't play games.'

 

One corner of her mouth tilted up. 'Even for a hundred thousand credits?'

 

We took a cab to Daddykins. It flew between buildings at a fast clip and I looked in people's windows feeling smug. I was about to be a lot flusher than any of them, toiling away at their desks.

 

The cab descended to street level all of a sudden and I almost lost my lunch.

 

The house was on 88th Ave, where all the rich eccentrics lived. We were shown up two flights of stairs and into a parlour. There were brown leather chairs, liquor cabinets, taxidermied eagles on high perches, and a dead body.

 

A man I took to be Mr Wilkins sat smoking a pipe. He was elderly and wore a purple housecoat. He checked his watch.

 

'Took you long enough' he said.

 

I crouched beside the body. It was a man, 30 or so, dressed a bit like me in a long brown coat. He, however, was handsome. Soft brown hair and eyes, strong jaw. He looked a fair bit like a younger and more virile version of Daddykins.

 

'He's dead' I deduced.

 

'He's a sharp one, then' said Mr Wilkins, puffing his pipe.

 

'What I mean is' I said, standing up, 'is that you have a real dead body on your floor. I was led to believe that this was a game, not an actual murder.'

 

'Everything's a game' said the old man, his eyes twinkling. 'The man you see before you is my daughter's husband, Colonel Kyriss.'

 

Daisy sat near her father with her eyes closed. 'He was... beastly to me' she said.

 

'So, you killed your son-in-law. What's that got to do with me?'

 

'You're obliged to report it.'

 

'I am,' I said, though I hadn't been planning to. I was hoping that he wouldn't know about the private detective's obligation to report crimes.

 

'And when you do, I'll tell the police exactly what I'm telling you now: I didn't kill him.' He winked at me. 'But, of course, I did, and it's up to you to prove how.'

 

I didn't know what to make of it, so I just assumed that the old man was crackers and phoned in the crime. The daughter seemed sane enough and I was hoping that she'd honour my fee, though it occurred to me that I hadn't made her sign anything.

 

Too late now, she'd been taken downtown with daddy and the dead body. Police swarmed the elegant townhouse on 88th Ave. I chatted with Chief Inspector Riley as his boys secured the crime scene.

 

A police doctor ran a medical wand about the size of a cattle prod over the corpse and determined that no sudden trauma or known poisons had killed him. The wand flashed and buzzed in the doctor's hand like it was baffled by its inability to determine what had happened.

 

Riley and I sat in another room. He suddenly put a finger in his ear.

 

'I see... Yes,' he said. He removed his finger. 'The old man's insisting on his innocence.'

 

'He confessed to me!'

 

'You know full well that a PI's word means nothing in court.'

 

I sighed. 'I suppose that's why he chose me as his nemesis.'

 

'Eh? Nemesis?'

 

I showed him the advertisement. Riley, a large man who'd seen it all and a bit extra, furrowed his brow. He'd been sweating in the warmth of the house, but suddenly didn't seem to notice it.

 

'So, the chap kills his son-in-law on his daughter's behalf, then sends her out to pick up a private investigator just so he can challenge you to figure out how he did it?'

 

'Looks that way.'

 

We took a trip to the National Air and Space and Time Museum. On the way, Riley explained to me that the late Colonel Kyriss had been a war hero with the Space Marines.

 

'Killed a million termites' he said. 'They called him The Exterminator. He was raised in an orphanage, the Kyriss District Children's Refuge, which gave him his name. No one has any idea who his family are.'

 

'Doorstep baby?'

 

'Of a sort. It seems that he was placed in a handbag and tele-mailed to the Kyriss front office, with no return address.'

 

We arrived at the museum and it was by a replica of the first time machine that Riley explained to me why we'd gone there. 'The doc didn't manage to find what killed him, but he did find traces of a certain residue in the room. It looks like Mister Wilkins has recently been time travelling.'

 

I looked up at the machine. Various pipes terminated in mid-air, to illustrate where the various necessary oils had gone. A school of children swam by, black and white and green and yellow and even purple, and I marvelled at how multi-ethnic the city had become.

 

Riley put his finger in his ear again. Frown lines turned his face into a field of trenches. 'Bad news?' I asked.

 

'I'm not sure' he replied. 'The widow's just gone into labour.'

 

2

 

Riley and I researched Mortimer's family history, based on a hunch of mine. Turned out his mother had had an affair and disappeared for six months when the old man was just nine years old. We were stood in the public records department of Central Library, Riley and I, surrounded by scholars and students at tables.  

 

There were no books in Central Library, hadn't been for a hundred years, and successive head librarians had actually tried banning them because of the dust and grime they supposedly brought with them. Riley manipulated a holo-machine as it displayed various web pages before us.

 

On one I could see a 3D moving image of Wilkins Sr, accompanied by his wife and Daddykins. They were stood outside the Kyriss District Charity School, the headline beneath them declaring Wilkins Sr to be the establishment's generous benefactor. PHILANTHROPIST GIVES HOPE TO CITY'S CHILD UNDERCLASS. Mrs Wilkins, I noticed, was in possession of a nervous expression. She had one hand on her stomach and what was once described as a particular glow.

 

From the opening of the Kyriss school, we went to hospital records indicating that Mrs Mabel Wilkins, wife of the prominent industrialist, had gone to the hospital for an emergency operation after six months of isolation at a health spa. Her husband was touring one of his outposts on Venus at the time.

 

'I don't suppose there's a way to trace abandoned children from over half a century ago, is there?' I asked Riley, only to be shushed by a librarian, with three fingers poised at three different mouths.

 

3

 

Going back in time never appealed to me. I'd been on a couple of the tours. Spend a weekend at a German beer hall in the last days before World War II, revel in the last days of Rome (venereal disease antidotes included), that sort of thing. But the whirring and spitting of the gears made me ill, and being propelled through linear time gave me a level of car sickness that required a bucket.

 

Nonetheless, I agreed to travel back ninety-one years with Riley, which wasn't too bad. We used the machine in the police department's basement. Only Chief Inspectors and higher-ranking officers were allowed keys to it. Sitting in the booth, above a nightmarish network of endless cogs and pipes and gears, I took off my hat to use as a bucket just in case.

 

We arrived in the year 2909, in the basement of the Central District station, the same one we'd departed from. Only this time there was no locked cage keeping the time machine away from the common constable.  

 

On the wall was a poster with BEWARE POLKA GANGS written on it, below a picture of a blue alien with pink spots, smoking a cigarette and looking dangerous. You have to marvel at how politically incorrect your elders can be.

 

Hover cars were only for the rich, so on registering our visit to this time period and leaving the station, we had to walk like common people through the city streets.  

 

Riley had picked up from the station a handheld computer drive, plugged it into his bracelet, and as we made our way to the poorer sections of the city generated a hologram of the man we were looking for. Josef Esteban, deli owner, thirty-one years old and judging by his picture a first-class hunk, as well as the spitting image of a certain Colonel. His son, Michael Esteban (not yet born), would rise through the ranks of industry to lead a labour union and work closely with such prominent business families as the Wilkinses.

 

When we arrived at the tenement block where he lived we saw police already there, and a body being wheeled out on a stretcher, down the stairs and into an ambulance as the indifferent sun danced cheerily across car rooves.

 

'Looks like we're too late to tell him that one day he'll be a grandfather’ said Riley.

 

4

 

The smug smile disappearing from Mortimer Wilkins' face was a sight to match the Great Wonders in its delightfulness. He'd been so assured of his victory that he'd generously lain out a puzzle for the likes of a fifth-rate detective like me. Or, rather, he'd allowed me to notify the police after stringing me along for his own amusement. The game, however, was up.

 

Though he remained stoic and tight-lipped in defeat, the truth came tumbling out of his daughter. We interviewed her in the hospital, once she was well enough.

 

'It was dad's idea' she said. 'He told me about my uncle, said that if I wanted to help him preserve the family line I'd marry the man and have his child. It made sense, and there'd be no chance of deformity or some such thing.  

 

'It's not the dark ages, any side effect of mixing DNA in a conception like that could be traced and dealt with medically before he was even born. As it happened, I didn't need to worry.' She smiled proudly at an incubator with an apple-cheeked child inside. 'Little Danny's a healthy baby.'

 

I stared at her. A difficult pregnancy was her only concern? What about the conception? I decided not to ask, for my own sanity. If Freud could be revived in the year 3000, he might understand.

 

I went to the station to talk to Daddykins. When Riley and I told him how he killed Colonel Kyriss, he looked like he'd been punched in the face. 'How the hell could you know...'

 

'Even us low-bred types know a little science' I said. 'It occurred to the Chief Inspector and me that you look an awful lot like the dead man, only much older. The natural assumption would be that he's your son, but there's nothing natural about you, is there?'

 

He looked ready to spit at me. Before he could, I continued: 'Colonel Kyriss was your half-brother, the bastard son of your mother and a man she had an affair with when you were nine years old. To avoid scandal she delivered him to an orphanage with no name or way of tracing his lineage, having been attended by private doctors who falsified records.

 

'They did a great job, too. I'm guessing you only found out when you decided to trace your family tree, which you did because you and Daisy were the only Wilkinses left, weren't you? In the old days there'd be a third or fourth cousin to marry, and so keep your precious bloodline pure. But Daisy doesn't even have a brother. So you searched and searched, and then somehow, perhaps having dug out your mother's papers, you hit upon the scandal.

 

'Only it was perfect, wasn't it? You could travel back in time, kidnap the child, anonymously deliver him to Kyriss orphanage at around the time your own daughter was born, then travel back to the present and arrange things from there. Who could turn down the beautiful daughter of the richest man on 88th Avenue? The only thing left to do was dispose of him once he'd seeded your daughter.'

 

The old man leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed. 'And how did I do it?' he said. Squeezing my shoulder as he sat beside me in the interrogation room, Chief Inspector Riley leaned forward. 'I'll take it from here' he said, and placed a charge sheet on the table. 'Mortimer Wilkins, I am arresting you for the murder of Josef Esteban, and the resultant death by Grandfather Paradox of Colonel Chris Kyriss.' As I said, like one of the Great Wonders, seeing that face fall.

'Should I ask the daily news to take down your NEMESIS WANTED post, Daddykins?' I asked Wilkins. And then he did spit at me.