Butler University was founded at a time when Americans had manners, so that pretty much leapfrogged it backwards over the twentieth century into the nineteenth. All the bigshot robber barons of America’s gilded age employed Butler U alums. Every doorbell in every dump owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Reptilicus C. Gorn was answered by a Butler University butler.
By the time the twentieth century arrived the school was already on the skids. The flame that burned bright had been doused by a rising standard of living. Men who a couple of generations before would have gone into butlering, stage coach robbing or tuberculosis succumbing wound up finding work as systems analysts, whatever the hell that was.
There was one last spike in popularity for the nation’s leading manservant school during the robot butler craze in the 1970s. That is, until one of Butler U’s Servo Unit Eights accidentally snorted three pounds of coke up its intake port at Studio 00110110 00111001 and wound up compacting Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol into six inch by six in cubes. That unit had been been given a Nobel prize and was made Time’s artificial man of the year, but the rest of them had their plugs pulled just in case they decided to make sponges out of somebody who wasn’t a total asshole. From then on, it was back to a rapid decline without so much as a single blip of a heartbeat on the monitor to demonstrate there was any hope of life to the dump. Until about a year ago.
The formerly destitute Butler University had experienced a remarkable reversal of fortunes in the past year. The place that had been falling apart for decades had undergone a renaissance, and as I strolled onto the grounds that afternoon its future seemed about as bright and shiny as mine didn’t.
I passed through the giant wrought iron gates flanked by two columns on which stood guard a pair of sinister granite penguins dolled up with carved bowties.
I hate going undercover. For one thing, stealing a Nazi uniform that fits is a lot harder than the movies let on. I once infiltrated a maniac’s volcano lair and had to knock out five henchmen before I found a jumpsuit that didn’t ride up in the crotch. And unless you plan to bring along your personal tailor, expect tight shoulders and short pants in that North Korean major’s uniform or to have to poke new holes in your Red Army belt.
This day was at least superficially okay on the infiltration front, since I’d rented a What the Tux? monkey suit to blend in. Since I had spent literally my last dime on my phone call to Mannix and now had nothing left with which to pay the piper but pocket lint, I’d charged it to Craig Bunion, the faceless ex-auto dealer and current YMCA resident who was the final stop for any bills that I had no intention of paying. At least the tuxedo bill would probably wind up being the last one, so the hole Bunion was trying to dig his way out of wouldn’t get any deeper for the bankrupt bastard.
I was afraid my legendary cheerfulness wouldn’t blend in with the stiff upper lip atmosphere of Butler University. As it turned out -- thanks to my devastatingly clever camouflage that had never occurred to anybody else in the history of the human race -- nobody in the main quad paid me any attention.
I’d arrived between classes and the joint was packed wall to ivy-covered wall with tuxedos. I was just another face in the crowd. Although, granted, mine was a mug more gorgeous than any of the blasé kissers that passed by, snoots shoved firmly in the air and textbooks on the art of napkin folding sticking out of Yves Saint Laurent backpacks.
“Excuse me, sir.”
“Pardon me, sir.”
“I’m terribly sorry, sir.”
“Forgive me, sir.”
I didn’t know how classes ever started at the dump, since everybody was going out of his way to apologize to everybody else for being in everybody’s way. Still, there was a flow to the foot traffic that I didn’t quite have the hang of, mostly because I didn’t give a rat’s ass about learning it, opting instead to shove every SOB out of my way as politely as my impeccable goddamn manners dictated.
I redirected one Jeeves straight into the trunk of a sycamore.
“Freshmen,” he droned, explaining away in two condescending syllables the source of every vulgar faux pas on campus.
There was a large public message board hammered into the grass at the corner of the quad. Arrows pointed directions to nearby classes like “Bowtie Tying 101,” “Advanced Bowtie Tying,” “Devastating Bon Mot English for Beginners,” and “Sandwiches: Crust or Decrust?” At the top, the university offered directions to the various buildings around the joint. The one I was looking for was at the end of the line.
I reentered the crush of tuxedos that was as busy as any subway station at rush hour. I was fully aware as I walked along that I was merely an ant who’d infiltrated a wasp’s nest wearing a yellow and black striped sweater. I’d gone unnoticed so far, but one command and the entire school population would turn their stingers on me.
The Alfred Pennyworth Administration Building was a modern, two-story monstrosity of glass and chrome. Foot traffic had thinned by the time I reached the front doors, since most of the training wheels butler set had peeled away and disappeared inside the brick buildings along the way.
There was virtually nobody in the lobby. A couple of professors late for class hustled past me arguing about the efficacy of club soda as a carpet stain remover. There were no guards that I could see. An arrow directed me right to Dean Arthur Cain’s office.
I had already spent the past few days as a cliché. First, I’d been the clichéd P.I. amnesiac, to hilarious, near-fatal effect. I was currently undercover in an outfit that was giving me terrifying PTSD flashbacks of my wedding day and which as a detective move was hoarier than Heidi Fleiss. I figured by this point the cliché thumb was already resting so heavily on my cosmic scale that what harm would one more do?
Once I reached the hallway outside the dean’s office, I waited until I was sure nobody was looking then pulled the nearest fire alarm.
Most places post warnings for an orderly evacuation in case of fire, which signs go largely unnoticed during actual emergencies what with all the stampeding and shoving and people acting like the miserable SOBs that they are, but with immolation as an excuse. Butler U didn’t need to waste money on signs ordering an orderly evacuation.
Doors opened up and down the hallway. Men in prom costumes filed out in such synchronized perfection they made a choreographed Busby Berkeley water routine look like a bunch of panicked horses in a whirlpool.
There were a few old office worker dames in pointy Far Side glasses mixed in with the butler corps. Some of the women tried to engage in idle chatter but were invariably shushed or given a “madam, really” condescending warning by the black-and-white brigade.
I hung back at the end of the hall just inside an open supply closet door and waited for the evacuation of the dean’s office. Eventually, a couple of broads sashayed out and joined the ass end of the mass exodus.
The last to exit was an old buzzard with white hair, baggy eyes and frown lines so deep you could have lost a sofa’s worth of pocket change down them. The hilariously named Dean Cain wore a red Izod polo shirt and clashing green golf pants decorated in a wild plaid pattern that looked like the offspring of a Scotsman’s kilt and a lumberjack’s shirt nine months after a poorly considered tryst in a laundry hamper.
My dizzy eyes were still attempting to adjust the horizontal hold on the dean’s psychedelic trousers as he hustled out the door, slamming it behind him.
I hurried down the empty hall and slipped into Dean Cain’s office.
The fire alarm shrieked slightly less stridently inside.
There were four desks in the dean’s outer office and the only visible computer was a Digital Rainbow desktop, circa 19-goddamn-22. The museum piece PC was wrapped in clear plastic and looked like it hadn’t been touched since delivery. In the shadows cast by the venetian blinds, a bunch of olde tyme wood file cabinets stood at silent attention.
Lucky for me Doris hadn’t found temp work in Dean Cain’s office or I would have had to look for Norman Gruntz either in twenty-five drawers other than the right one or on the end of a janitor’s pitchfork and being fed into the university’s incinerator.
My hail Mary guess paid off. It was quick work finding Gruntz’s file.
The furry necromancer was listed as a member of the university’s board of trustees, which was nowhere near as impressive at it sounded. The board wasn’t so much a board as it was a stick of flimsy balsa wood. All the members could have met in a Burger King booth with enough room left over for the big fat asses and bigger, fatter mouths of both Rosie O’Donnell and Kirstie Alley. A quick tiptoe through the filing cabinets turned up only one more Butler U trustee. Dr. Jedediah Gobsmack.
The reason neither Mannix nor I had been able to find a home address for Gruntz in the outside world was because the university was putting the bastard up. Butler University maintained a bunch of Victorian era homes on the east side of the campus for crème de la crumb teacher types, whose rarified professorial air was apparently also inhaled up the hairy nostrils of Norman Gruntz, necromancer.
I grabbed up one of the desk phones and spun the wheel until Mannix’s voice came on the line.
“Hello! I’m not able to answer my phone right now. I’m very, very sorry for that. But if you leave a message, I’ll do my best to return your call as fast as possible!”
“I’ve got Gruntz cornered,” I announced after the goddamn beep. “Or at least we’re going to pretend he’s home and not hiding out at one of a million strip clubs around town. Pass this address along to the dame doc.”
I gave Mannix’s machine Gruntz’s home address and hoped like hell he’d check his messages before my funeral.
I slammed down the phone. For an instant I thought somebody had wired up the cradle to double as the off switch to the university’s fire alarm. All at once, the muffled shriek of the fire alarm was abruptly strangled silent.
I hadn’t been in the office for more than three minutes. Not a good sign.
The fire department couldn’t have arrived that fast, which meant the alarm had been shut off on campus. Which meant somebody realized it was a false alarm and had already called the local fire brigade to cancel the hook-and-ladder cavalry.
It didn’t matter. I’d gotten what I’d come for.
I abandoned the file cabinets and moved my ass swiftly and calmly to the nearest exit. When I yanked open the door I was nearly buried under the three goons who fell into the room.
I had to jump to one side to avoid the collapsing bodies. The three goons landed in a heap of creased trousers and spit-shined shoes. The mound of butlers excused themselves to one another a dozen times as they disentangled limbs and climbed to their feet.
“Banyon!”
The voice came not from the floor but from the door.
Despite years of matrimonial bliss with my scabrous, neutering queen, I had never heard my name spit quite so venomously before. If lizards could suntan (which I don’t think they can, but who am I, goddamn Marlin Perkins?) they’d look like the quivering, white-capped figure furiously frothing outside the Butler University dean’s office door.
Dr. Jedediah Gobsmack flicked his tongue as he cursed my name, inadvertently hammering home the impression of an anthropomorphic komodo dragon in a Yogi Bear necktie. He had replaced the cane I’d swiped with a cheaper generic walking stick. He raised the shiny black shillelagh like an epee.
Gobsmack’s wasn’t the only cane in the house. Next to Holy Mackerel University Hospital’s chief of medicine stood Dean Arthur Cain, looking angry, bewildered, and dressed for an afternoon golf foursome. His tartan pimp country club ensemble was a stark contrast to the formalwear of the two dozen dead-eyed butlers packed into the hall around both Dean Cain and Dr. Jedediah Gobsmack.
By now the trio who’d tumbled into the room had made it to their feet and were spread out at attention at my back in an incredibly polite and simultaneously menacing semicircle.
“Thought you had it all figured out, did you, smart guy?” Gobsmack snarled, triumphantly hissing drool and stabbing the end of his cane at my chest.
“I did,” I assured him. “I do,” I continued. “And on occasion, I am,” I conceded.
I grabbed the end of the old scumbag’s thrusting cane and yanked.
The last I saw of the ancient bastard M.D. he was off his feet and launching in the direction of the door, which I promptly slammed in his shocked Coppertone iguana face. The loud, satisfying thump that sounded from the other side of the closed door was pretty much certainly that of a tan, reptilian forehead.
As I twisted the key in the lock, dozens of hands were already pounding furiously on the door. Framed photographs bounced the mamba on the wall, skipping off nails. Wood frames cracked to bits and glass shattered on tabletops and floor.
The instant I’d turned the key, I dropped to one knee. Not an instant too soon. Three sets of gloved hands that had been in the process of lunging for my throat from behind slammed into the door.
The trio of butlers who were trapped in the room with me had misjudged where their hands would be, and in lunging so hard for a now-missing target hit the door with such force that I heard the audible snap of a host of courteous fingers.
I shoved through the murderous bastards at a crouch. A charging butler knee cracked into my shoulder and I half-fell, half-crawled into the center of the room, springing to my feet as quick as the rusty hinges in my out-of-shape legs would allow.
I promptly took out one SOB with a home-run cane to the back of his head before he could turn around. The butler dropped like the New Year’s ball on Times Square, all sparkly lights, cheering mobs and Zombie Dick Clark assaulting the crowd and singing “Auld Brains Syne.” (Although, granted, that last bullshit might have been attributable to the unintoxicated adrenaline that was currently screaming to every detoxing cell in my body like accelerated protons through my Hadron Collider nervous system.)
The other pair came at me, hands outstretched, broken fingers twisted at ugly angles within gray cotton gloves.
“If sir will kindly allow us to strangle sir,” one droned
He got the cane to the side of the head. The bastard went down like a cheerleader on prom night.
The cheap cane cracked at the midpoint and the busted end spiraled off uselessly into a corner.
“Sir is being recalcitrant,” the last Jeeves standing insisted as he placidly lunged at me with murderous goddamn intent.
A stake to the heart works as well for maniac servants as it does for vampires, a fact I discovered by planting the busted end of Dr. Asshole Gobsmack’s replacement cane deeply and firmly into the charging bastard’s chest.
The butler stopped dead, eyes opening wide. The twisted ends of his busted fingers grabbed weakly at the new handle sprouting from his thorax.
“How very rude,” he chastised, spraying a mouthful of blood. He fell, first to his knees and then face first to the carpet. His falling body hammered the jagged cane straight through his ribcage and steepled the back of his neatly dry-cleaned suit.
I didn’t have time to worry about the murder charges Gobsmack or his lackey, the side-splittingly named Dean Cain, would surely try to pin on my act of self-defense. The world wouldn’t know my fatal kebobbing of the student butler wasn’t murder, justifiable homicide or even technically killing if I didn’t get the hell out of there, tout suite.
The pounding continued unabated on the door. There was a gathering army out there trying to get in. Crazy, NASCAR cracks sped up and down the wall. Chunks of plaster came loose and dropped to the rug, which was covered now in white plaster dust, busted glass and a seeping pool of dead butler blood. A hanging florescent light fixture broke from one mooring side and swung down like a pendulum do.
One of the butlers on the floor groaned. As I dashed for the window, I reminded him that he should be unconscious by kicking him in the side of the head.
I swept aside piles of stacked paperwork from the tops of the file cabinets, dumping a cascade of manila crap to the floor.
Whoever designed louvered blinds must have built bear traps and roach motels in his spare time. I nearly lost the ten second battle I was forced to engage in with a sadistic window treatment as I climbed up onto the file cabinets and out into fresh air.
The dean’s offices were on the side of the building, which opened to a second story drop to a basement loading platform.
For a second I thought I’d stepped out onto a South Pole glacier. A hundred butlers stood at silent attention below me, staring up like a flock of starving penguins who’d mistaken a National Geographic helicopter for a flying herring.
The utter silence of the tuxedoed mob was unnerving, but didn’t last. As soon as I made my appearance, the dead-eyed bastards began winging silver serving trays up at me like polished Frisbees. Trays clanged off the wall and slammed into my back. One crashed through the window above my head, raining down shards of glass.
As I edged along the second floor ledge, dodging trays and falling glass, there came a sudden tornado crash from inside the Butler University dean’s office.
By the sounds of it, the whole wall of Jericho had come tumbling down. I heard the sounds of dozens of highly polished shoes scurrying across the rubble.
The first set of gloved hands jammed through the venetian blinds at my shoulder, grasping empty air.
I grabbed the unseen butler by the wrist and gave a good yank that nearly knocked me from my precarious perch. The middle aged butler soared out the open window entangled in the dean’s blinds. He shouted an apology to his companions on his way to the ground where he flopped on top of three of the bastards down below.
More arms jutted from all the dean’s windows, but by now I was circling around the back of the building. The crowd below tried to follow, but were incommoded by a fortuitously placed hedge at which they began to hack away to only minimal success with silver fountain pens, melon ballers, and the blunt edges of their serving trays.
An open window at the rear of the building proved to be blessedly butler free. I slipped back inside what turned out to be the supply closet in which I’d hidden out during the building’s evacuation.
I managed only one cautious tiptoe toward the door when I felt a strong hand grab onto the back of my jacket collar. I was yanked roughly back to the window.
“Sir will kindly drop to his death!” a lugubrious voice droned in my ear.
The majordomo bastard had followed me along the ledge from the dean’s office. I caught a glimpse of him from the corner of my eye as I tried to pull away. He was squatting in the open window, braced firmly with one hand on the frame. The bald son of a bitch must have been a circus strongman in his past life. He was a formidable figure, and he was twisting furiously on my coat as he attempted to drag me back outside.
Since I hadn’t rented the tux under my own name and would, thus, be only morally and not legally responsible for any damage thereto, I shrugged off the jacket that the grabby bastard seemed so enamored of.
For an instant the butler lost his balance. He teetered on the ledge at an awkward squat, one hand clutching my empty coat, the other barely holding onto the window frame with white-knuckled urgency.
“Oh, dear,” he murmured. “I have, mayhap, made in error in judgment.”
Before he could regain his footing, I shoved the impeccable SOB in the chest and mayhapped his ass sailing out into empty space. Both he and jacket -- the latter rented courtesy Craig Bunion, of the YMCA Bunions -- plummeted to their respective deaths. Although in the case of the falling Jeeves, it was his second trip to the last roundup.
My missing jacket revealed my holster and gat. I slipped the gun into my hand, even though I knew the noise from using it now would draw the battle straight for me.
Before any more unwanted guests could play strip poker with my remaining ensemble, I darted on fleet-goddamn-feet to the supply room door.
I peeked out into the hallway as cautiously as my rank cowardice prescribed.
All I could see was the missing wall to the dean’s office. The army of butlers had apparently knocked down half the hallway in their determination to tear me limb from limb. The marauding horde didn’t care that they’d taken out a couple of supporting columns along the way. Part of what I’d heard crashing down was the ceiling and a corner of an upstairs classroom. A couple of desks were visible sticking up out of the rubble on the floor, and a couple of kicking legs dangled from a hole in the ceiling.
I could hear the mass of men shuffling around inside the ruins of the office. More glass shattered as the remnants of the windows were cleared away. A couple of venetian blinds that were in the way came sailing out into the hallway. Over it all I could make out Dr. Jedediah Gobsmack’s flicked-tongue rasp directing the troops.
“Follow him out! Go! Go!”
Gobsmack was encouraging the butlers-in-training out onto the ledge at the top of his lungs.
I was in trouble fore and aft.
In the hallway before me was the collapsed wall of Dean Cain’s office and, just beyond that horizon, a pile of murderous butlers.
Across the small room at my back, I suddenly heard a soft shuffling. It was close, but still out of sight. One of the little birdies had made it out of the nest and was just rounding the corner of the building. A new butler shadow would fall across the supply closet window any second now, followed closely by a phalanx of the shadow’s civilized, bloodthirsty compatriots, eager to roll into the closet and stone me to death with napkin rings and 3-minute silver egg cups.
I hated to disappoint my fans, but I had about a hundred bookie dependents, not to mention a drinking habit that relied solely on me to trash my liver. If I continued to be as neglectful of my primary vices as I had been these past few days, at any moment a social services SWAT team would be kicking in my door with a six pack and a handful of lottery tickets.
Once I was sure nobody was looking my way, I darted like hell across the hall and slipped through the fire door.
To my astonishment, the stairwell was free of anybody who wanted to kill me, which was such a pleasant surprise for such a shitty week that I nearly broke into a chorus of “Oh, What a Beautiful Goddamn Morning.”
I took the stairs two at a time, but by the fourth step I remembered I was a middle-aged disaster and switched over to a calmly panicked one at a time.
Apparently, I’d been spotted after all. The steady drumbeat of dress shoes marching in rhythmic doom suddenly echoed like patent leather thunder off the cement walls of the stairwell. A roar rose up from above.
“If sir would kindly stop, we would very much like to eviscerate sir!”
I made it to the ground floor, which was a subbasement level in the lower rear part of the building. The footfalls continued behind me as I exploded out the fire door.
Thin woods spread out before me. Beyond, the silvery glint of a river and the whitewashed back of a boathouse. The Butler U rowing team held regular competitions with Doorman College, Maitre d’ Technical Institute and Irish Tenor Brewery & Madrasa. If I could just get through the woods, then down to the river.
I could heist a skiff. It was a short ride downriver to the nearest bridge. A pedestrian path went up the shore to the road on which sat the house where Norman Gruntz was hiding out. It was still doable. I could still end this madness.
I started to run, lungs burning, heart pounding.
With my peripheral vision, I glimpsed a balding emperor penguin in a sharp, black bowtie to my left. I was not, unfortunately, loaded, so I knew what my eyes had just semi-seen was real and not just my formalwear take on a pink elephant.
I spun my gat to the figure, but as usual I was a day late and a buck short.
I felt something hard strike me from behind.
A blow to the head was supposed to be the cure-all for amnesia, but I’d learned from hard experience that this old trick only worked for Bugs Bunny, and even then only the second time around. I’d already been rapped on my cartoon noggin twice that week, and both times had only made for a hippocampus that was as untrustworthy as a real estate lawyer’s marital vows. As far as being cracked on a skull that had already spent half the week being tenderized like a bad steak, the third time was definitely not the charm.
Stars burst behind my eyes. The world momentarily became very bright, like some otherworldly force was shining an ethereal light at me. As quickly as the light appeared, the cosmos realized it had dialed a wrong number and quickly turned the celestial beacon on somebody more worthy, like a Mafia hitman or a porno producer.
The light winked out before I could make a mad dash for it and the promise of eternal bliss contained therein, the world went dark, and my brains (presumably) became a scrambled egg mess spilling out of the cracked shell remains of a skull which, frankly, probably deserved a better life than the miserable one I’d inflicted on it.