(A parenthetical aside: Some of you, having read this far, are by now sophisticated enough to understand that what often appears to be a significant event is not in fact significant at all, and here I refer, of course, to the appearance of a fourth Scuttlesby in this saga. In this instance, I didn’t even have to ask our Mrs. Scuttlesby if she were related to the Enforcer of Official Orchestra Systems who served the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1946, because, for one thing, that Scuttlesby had a first name – Lucifinda; and for another thing, nowhere in the Los Angeles Times account is either the title Miss or Mrs. coupled with her name. These variations from the pattern of the previous Scuttlesbys make it clear that this is but an anomaly, with no connection, and certainly not worth investigating at the expense of nine more detectives dead in nine more tornadoes. Although I never put the question to our Mrs. Scuttlesby, she came forth unsolicited to assure me that indeed she had never heard of Lucifinda Scuttlesby. For me, that put the matter to rest, because the assurances of our esteemed Mrs. Scuttlesby have the same quality of irrefutable finality as death by dynamite, and they are delivered with a sincerity that equals in intensity the ghastly pressure of those great oceanic depths that can crush the steel hull of a submarine as though it were tissue paper.)
(Yes, this is another parenthetical aside. I sincerely apologize for the proliferation of these annoying interruptions of the main narrative. I am acutely aware of the stress you experience when you are required to read the parenthesis at the top and bottom of the aside, first the left-oriented convex “(,” and then the right-oriented convex “),” which place considerably more demands on the mind than any letter of the alphabet or other form of punctuation. To compensate for this, I have attempted to use fewer italics than is usually my style, and I have edited out a slew of semicolons that I would have liked to include. We are in this together, you and I, and since you were kind enough to adjust my lap blanket, I feel obligated to make your experience of this narrative as pleasant as possible.)
(You may be grinding your teeth at yet another parenthetical aside – or perhaps that is only the sound of the robotic monkeys gnawing at the bulletproof windows. In any event, if you will bear with me, I am sure that you will find this particular aside of some interest, especially if you are a classical-music buff. Were you aware that the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which we’ve so recently been speaking, is the only symphony orchestra in the world that has a six-chair theremin section to provide eerie here-comes-the-monster moments where applicable in the compositions of Beethoven and Bach? No, I didn’t think you were aware of that. Furthermore, no other orchestra can boast a two-chair gun section in which a pair of fine musicians are armed with everything from simple revolvers to fully automatic combat weapons to produce punctuations of sound that help the audience more fully imagine the bloody shootouts that are such important themes in everything by Tchaikovsky and George Gershwin.)
You’ll notice this paragraph is not preceded by a parenthesis, nor does one of those damnable things come at the end, for now we have returned to the primary narrative, where I will tell you about Buddy Vishnu, investment adviser to the criminally insane. Buddy came into the possession of Counted Sorrows in 1947, while on a trip to Colorado to purchase a 120,000-acre cattle ranch for the real-estate portfolio of the Cleveland Strangler. Not three months thereafter – in fact, it was only one month – at the opening of a new Manhattan art gallery owned by the Milwaukee Mauler, as Buddy Vishnu was engaged in a discussion about the merits of investing in antique codpieces, his head exploded.
In June of 1948, Phylo P. Phillium, a world-renowned architect of vomitoriums, was given the fateful book by his niece, as a present on the occasion of the third anniversary of his successful buttocks-reduction surgery. On the ninth of August, Phylo entirely swallowed himself while having dinner at the beautiful Bel Air Hotel, an event covered extensively in a lovely article in that December’s issue of Bon Appetit.