The Case of the Whipped Watchmen...

It was a sunny day in Hollywood, and I had spent the morning breaking the news to Mike Myers that I had solved the mystery of why The Love Guru tanked, it wasn't funny. He took it hard, crawling under my couch with a bottle of my cheapest, nastiest, bourbon, which I was using to sterilize my combs, and begging me to take the case of his missing talent.

I told that I'm not a miracle worker.

He called me a dick.

And he was right, I'm a dick, a private dick.

There was a knock on my door. Not just any knock, but one heavy with foreboding and menace. Then I realized that I left my collection of suspenseful background music playing on my iPod.

"Come in," I said, and in came trouble, in the form of one of the morbidly obese Warner Brothers. I believe it was Time Warner, the older brother and leader of that particular portly pack.

"Don't come any closer," I said, drawing my Colt .45 and taking a swig of malt liquor.

"I won't," answered Time Warner, "because I'm stuck in your door."

"Yeah," I said, putting away my Colt .45 and took out a .38 Special and pointed it at him.

"Put away that old school Southern Rock band," said Time Warner. "I want to hire you."

"Why me?" I asked, "we didn't get along that well the last time."

"Your driving a tank through my office wall shows you have gumption," said Time Warner, "and obviously good credit to rent it. I admire gumption, almost as much as I admire small companies that I can take over."

"What's your problem?" I asked returning .38 Special to the closet they shared with The Knack.

"I can't use the Watchmen," said Time Warner.

"Don't you have too much anyway?" I asked. "You got producers showing product to other companies left and right, your precious synergy at work, and you're delaying big projects for specious reasons, why not one more."

"Quit bringing up our weak business practices," said Time Warner, "I want to find out the real reason why we can't have the Watchmen. They've all been locked up, and I want to know why!"

"Don't you already have lawyers and that to figure it all out?"

"Yes," grumbled Time Warner, "but they use big words, and big words make me tired. Solve this case and I'll let you keep the wallet you and Harry Potter stole the last time."

"All right," I said. "But on one condition."

"Name it."

"The next Superman movie can't suck," I said, "damn he was a whiny bastard."

***

My first stop was to get the story right from the horse's mouth.

But the horse didn't have the gift of speech, being a horse, which made me wonder why I kept going to him for information.

So I went to talk to the Watchmen themselves.

They were locked up in a special prison downtown, and were normally denied visitors, but since I wasn't normal, I was let in.

"They're in the last cell on the left," said the guard, a surly man who thought Right Guard was only for his right armpit, "next to the cast of The Hobbit."

They were all there, Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre 1 & 2, Nite Owl, Rorschach, The Comedian, and Ozymandias.

"Hey pal," said the Comedian, "what's the deal with airline peanuts?"

Damn it, he wasn't going to be any use, he was doing early Seinfeld.

"Does anyone know who I am?" I asked.

"I do," said Ozymandias, "but I won't tell. Because if anyone else knew what I knew, I wouldn't be the smartest man in the world anymore."

"Am I blue..." sang Dr. Manhattan, obviously driven insane by his incarceration.

"Oooh-oooh! Mr. Kotter! Mr. Kotter!" said Rorschach, forgetting that he wasn't Horshak.

"Let me cut to the chase," I said, "I'm a private dick hired to find out why you're locked up."

"We don't know," said Nite Owl.

"I know," said Ozymandias, "but I'm not telling."

"Shut the fuck up you cracker bastard," snapped the Comedian, moving into Richard Pryor.

"Try asking the lawyers," said Silk Spectre 1, flashing me a wink.

"Don't be such a skank," snapped her daughter Silk Spectre 2.

"Ladies," I said, "you can both share when you get out."

"We weren't fighting over you," snapped both women. "We were just fighting."

"Here we go again," said Nite Owl.

I knew that further questioning wasn't going to get me anything but references to history, poety, William S. Burroughs, and pop culture, so I left to see the lawyers.

***

"Hello Sugarbuns," I said the receptionist, Sugarbuns McGee.

"Hello Furious," she answered while giving her extensions a flirty flip. "What can Screwem, Hard, & Long do for you?"

"I need to know why the Watchmen are locked up?" I asked.

"There's nothing we can do about it," she answered, "their lockup was ordered by the Fox."

"Michael J. Fox?"

"The Fox," answered Sugarbuns, "the 20th Century Fox."

"Then I should go pay this Fox a visit."

***

The 20th Century Fox lived in a castle made entirely of recycled tabloid newspapers. I gave a short rap to the front door, but the front door didn't respond to my particular brand of freestyle hip-hop, so I knocked.

"Who's got the cobblers to bother me!" growled a voice with a distinctive Aussie flavour, "I was just about to toss another shrimp on the barbie!" Then came the shriek and sizzle of a little person being tossed on a grill. "I'll beat their arse!"

A face, attached to a head, which was stuck to a body, peered over the battlement.

"What d'ya want you arsehole?" said the Face.

"Are you the 20th Century Fox?"

"I preferred to just be called Fox," answered The Fox.

"I came here to find out why you locked up the Watchmen," I said.

"That's easy," responded the Fox, "they were supposed to work for me, but then they went to work for the Warner Brothers, but I own their asses!"

"If you own their asses," I asked, "why didn't you do anything when they tried working with the other studios, why lock them up now?"

"Because those other jobs didn't go through," growled the Fox, "but the Warner Brothers actually got them working, and to top it all off, the trailer looks pretty bad-ass, and since my business plan of driving away all potential hitmakers kept me from having any $100 million+ hits this summer, I decided to be a dick about everything and sue."

I shrugged, it was the only thing that came close to making sense in Hollywood.

CASE CLOSED