It was stiflingly hot and humid when the three of us headed back to the Chambeaux & Deyer offices. The sun shone bright, and vampires and other nocturnal dwellers returned to their lairs, grumbling. Robin and Sheyenne had admin work to do, and I needed to pick up the frog that had come out of Stentor’s throat before I went to see the Wannovichs.
In the hallway outside the door to our second-floor offices, we encountered a shriveled old hunchback in a lab coat pacing impatiently. He was bald, with drooping earlobes, and his face had so many wrinkles that it looked like a wadded ball of flesh-colored tissue paper. He wore enormous round black spectacles with magnifying-glass lenses that made his eyes look the size of dinner plates.
Sheyenne had taped a note to the door, promising to “Be back soon.”
The shriveled old man peered at us through his telescopic glasses, swung his hunch around, and tapped a finger meaningfully on his wristwatch. “It’s fifteen minutes past soon. I can’t wait all day. I need to hire your services, and you were the only zombie private detective listed in the Yellow Pages.”
“You actually looked in the Yellow Pages?” Sheyenne asked. “I guess the ad was worthwhile.”
“I also ran an Internet search.” The wrinkled old man rounded on me, poking his head forward like an emperor penguin I had once seen in a nature documentary, back when I had the time to watch nature documentaries. “But first, a test to see how good your detective skills are.” The hunchback waggled a finger at me, aiming to stab at the center of my chest but ending up only reaching my abdomen. “I’m a lab assistant for a mad scientist who uses only Apple products. Can you figure out my name?”
I had a sense of foreboding that I was about to get hit with a McGoo-level bad joke, but I played it straight in case he was on the level. I tried to remember all the lab assistants and mad scientists I knew in the Quarter, regardless of their preference for electronic devices. “Should I have heard of you?”
“I want you to figure it out.” His voice held a hint of a pout. “It’s a riddle.”
“I’m a detective, not a riddler. Is there a crime you’d like me to investigate?”
“Maybe not, if you’re going to be a stick-in-the-mud.”
Robin crossed her arms over her chest. “A mad scientist’s assistant who uses only Apple products? Your name is iGor.”
The shrunken man laughed aloud and pranced in the hallway. Under his lab coat the hunchback bounced up and down like a beach ball. “Yes! Get it? iGor—”
“I get it,” I said, “but that’s not your real name.”
“No, but I had you going. Ha, ha! In fact, I fooled you in every way.”
Sheyenne used her poltergeist skills to unlock the door without bothering to use a key. “Won’t you come inside? Be careful, you look rather frail.”
“Fooled you again!” He unbuttoned his lab coat and shucked it off, squirming from side to side, then unbuckled a strap across his chest. His entire hunch fell off to land in a tumble next to the discarded lab coat. He straightened with a groan. “Oh, that thing is heavy, and it makes my back stiff!”
Next, he dug fingernails into his wattled throat, pried loose a pink edge of skin, tugging and stretching flesh-colored rubber. He was too eager, though, and the mask ripped. Finally, he discarded the whole thing, peeled off a skullcap, and shook his head to reveal a freckle-faced redheaded boy with blue eyes and a sparkling grin. “Golly, that’s so much better! Now I can really introduce myself. My name is Jody, Jody Caligari, junior mad scientist and master of disguise.”
“And also potential client, I presume?” Sheyenne said.
I stood next to the kid. “How old are you?”
“Twelve,” Jody said, “and well on my way to being somebody. You’ll want to say you knew me when.” He blushed and looked away. “So I’d appreciate a little help out of a tight spot. You won’t regret it. When I become an evil genius, or the world’s most powerful supervillain, I’ll remember my friends and supporters.”
“Are you here because you’ve read those Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. books?” I asked, wanting to get rid of any unrealistic expectations from the beginning.
Jody looked confused. “No, have they been turned into graphic novels?”
“Not yet, but I’m sure that’s in the works.”
“I did my research.” Jody piled his torn wrinkled mask on top of the false hunchback and his lab coat, then took a seat at Sheyenne’s desk, spinning around in the office swivel chair. “And I’ve decided to present you with a great opportunity to do some pro bono work.”
Sheyenne, the most practical member of our office team, frowned. “Right, because opportunities to investigate cases for free so rarely present themselves?” Her tone was teasing, but Jody didn’t seem to notice.
He nodded. “Especially an opportunity like this one! I need your expertise, and it’ll make you feel good, I promise. There’s nothing like that warm, fuzzy glow when you help somebody reach his potential.”
“Assisting supervillains in training isn’t necessarily the most surefire way to feel good,” I said.
Jody’s grin was irresistible. Even I thought he looked adorable, and I’m not a soft sell. “But what if I end up being a good supervillain?”
The kid was so eager and earnest I didn’t want to correct his misunderstanding. I resisted the urge to tousle his hair.
“Do your parents know you’re here?” Sheyenne asked. “Won’t they be worried about you?”
“I’m at Junior Mad Scientist Camp, and I send them postcards. I’m here on a scholarship.”
Robin said, “Well, then, they must be very proud of you.”
“Not really, but they try. My dad’s an insurance salesman and my mom’s an accountant. They don’t understand my interests. They smile and attend my science fairs, but they think this whole mad scientist thing is just a phase I’ll grow out of.” Jody flushed. “But, golly, I want to change the world! Ever since I got my first chemistry set when I was eight years old, I’ve been creating potions and experiments. I turned the neighbor’s poodle into a German shepherd and then back again, just to prove the concept.”
“Is there practical value in that?” I asked.
The kid shrugged. “Doesn’t every poodle aspire to be a German shepherd? Anyway, I was hooked. Once, I blew up the garage and created a blob that ingested half the block before I found a way to evaporate it. My parents were worried and sent me to a counselor. Fortunately, the counselor encouraged me rather than trying to cure me.”
“That’s a rare kind of counselor,” Sheyenne said.
“I came out here hoping to make my mark. I set up a world-class laboratory in prime mad-scientist real estate and was making unbelievable progress in the development of a supervillain—even analyzed and reproduced a bunch of the classic powers. I might have become the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize in superhero dynamics.”
“All right, kid, you’ve got me interested.” I hung my fedora and jacket on the rack. “What’s your case? How can we help?”
“I need you to retrieve my stolen work. And, Ms. Deyer, I could use your legal expertise, too. This is a heinous, heinous miscarriage of justice.”
“Describe for me how heinous it is.” Robin pulled out her special yellow legal pad and set it on the table, where the magic pencil began taking notes.
“I had a lab down in the sewers, the full nine yards … although as a scientist I really should be using the metric system. My landlord evicted me,” Jody said. “He’s a corrupt slumlord, with no patience and no sense of humor. We didn’t get along at all. He marched in one day with his eviction goons—gator-guys—and kicked me out, just like that! He said professional lab space was at a premium, and that he had a waiting list for the unit. Every mad scientist wants a secret lab down in the sewers, you know. So he took all my stuff and chased me out. No argument, no notice.” Jody flushed. “He said I’m just a child, and the lab space should go to a more deserving mad scientist.”
Robin looked angry, and I could tell Jody had pushed just the right buttons. “That’s age discrimination. You can’t evict a tenant on the basis of age.”
“That’s exactly what I said,” Jody replied, “but without sounding so legal about it. He confiscated everything: my lab notebooks, my experiments, my supervillain devices, my patent applications, my costume. It was my life’s work.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Life’s work? How long did it take you?”
“At least six months. I started it even before I came to the Quarter.”
“So he stole your work. Doesn’t that make him a villain, too?”
“Villains have style, Mr. Chambeaux. He’s just a bully.”
Under other circumstances I might have found the whole situation amusing, but Jody looked so earnest with his puppy-dog eyes. He seemed to have been incarnated from a Norman Rockwell painting, and he exuded a nostalgic innocence that everyone missed but few people ever experienced. Again, I had to resist a strong urge to tousle his hair.
Robin wore a stormy expression, and the magic pencil furiously wrote down notes. She paced back and forth. “If what you say is true, he had no basis for evicting his tenant and absolutely no cause to seize your private possessions. Can you place a value on them?”
Jody nodded. “Yes, I can—they’re priceless.”
“We’ll need an itemized list,” I suggested.
“No, I truly mean they’re priceless. That’s all of my research. The sky is the limit, or as we used to say down in the sewers, the manhole’s the limit. Gosh, don’t treat me like a silly kid just like my landlord did.” He sounded stung.
“We don’t think you’re silly,” Sheyenne said. “But, remember, you’re the one who came dressed up as a fake hunchback lab assistant.”
Jody snickered. “Yeah, iGor—that was a good one. Wait until you see my other disguises.” Then he became angry again. “I can prove I’m a serious researcher. I have five patents under review at the Mad Scientists Patent Office. You can check that out for yourself. They take me seriously. I’m a prodigy.”
“And modest, too,” I said.
“Hey, you don’t get ahead in the mad scientist world by being shy and polite. Did Dr. Frankenstein say, ‘I’d consider it a great favor if you would please throw the switch’? No, he was forceful and commanding: ‘Throw the switch!’”
“All right, you convinced me,” I said. “We’ll look into your landlord and see what we can do about retrieving your possessions.”
Robin didn’t want to stop there. “And I can file a suit against him for wrongful eviction.” The pencil tapped itself against her legal pad as she pondered. “On the other hand, I’m not sure how a lease signed by a minor would be valid. He must have found some kind of loophole.”
Sheyenne took out a new client contract. “We’re running a business here, however. We need to come to terms about your method of payment for our services.”
Jody blinked his blue eyes at her. “Golly, I thought we agreed it was a pro bono case?”
“You suggested that it be pro bono.…” Sheyenne said.
He kept looking at her and grinning hopefully.
Robin’s heart had already melted as her indignation rose, and I said, “It might be a good idea to show some generosity. You never know when it’ll come in handy to have a junior mad scientist and possible future supervillain on your side.”
Sheyenne, unable to maintain her stern expression, tore up the client agreement. “All right, pro bono it is.”
I glanced down at the remnants of Jody’s disguise on the floor. “Don’t forget your hump on the way out.”