The Case of the Missing Commas

Perry Lassiter

“The commas are missing.”

Her blue eyes met mine across the desk.

“Commas? The only commas I know are punctuation marks.”

“Exactly,” she said. She held out a book by someone named Faulkner. “Find me a comma.”

The book cracked open. Fine binding, nice smell. I paged through the text. Lots of long sentences. Periods here and there – not enough of them I thought. No commas.

“Odd. I don’t see any commas at all.”

"That's because there aren't any. Faulkner wrote with commas, and we cheated a bit and added a few to make the text read a little more clearly. The galley proofs even have commas. But when the book was printed, the commas just disappeared."

“Very odd indeed.”

"Exactly right. My name is Elizabeth Barrett. I am Production Editor of Classical Books Limited, Incorporated. We are a small house and all of us pitch in. We publish few books but very distinguished books."

“Do you have any suspects? I mean any explanation?”

"’Suspects’ is correct, and we have one. I'm sure our rival Contemporary Publishers Incorporated, Limited are the culprits."

"Why them?"

"They like to publish writers in the Hemingway tradition. You know. Short sentences, few or no commas. They use lots of periods. I suspect they have come on a rare modern work full of commas. While they are oversupplied with periods, I suspect they are quite out of commas."

"So they stole yours so they could publish their book."

"Right. And I want you to stop them and get our commas back!"

*** *** *** *** *** *** ***

Contemporary Publishers Incorporated, Limited occupied the top three floors of a fancy mirrored skyscraper . I got light-headed riding up the elevator. Faster than lightning they advertise. Faster than my stomach anyway. I left the lift on the top floor and waited a minute for my breakfast to catch up.

The gold letters "CPI Inc.Ltd." marked the glass doors in front of me. One set on each door. Otherwise I would have walked right into the glass. They were that spotless. So was the receptionist's desk placed squarely in the center of the open space in front of me.

"May I help you, sir?" She asked.

"Who's boss of this outfit?"

"You mean the chief executive officer, the chief operating officer, the managing editor, or the chairman of the board?"

"Who's on top."

"Oh. That would be Ms. Jacquiline Nixon. "

"What's her title?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think anyone knows. She just showed up one day in the corner office and started running things. No one had the nerve to throw her out. Then the business just got better and better. So I guess we started paying her or something."

"Until you found you were flat out of commas."

Her hand went to her mouth. "You know about that."

"Yes ma'am. Now . . . which corner?"

"Why that one, but... You can't go . . ." She frantically hit some buzzers and came running after me. One shoe came off and she stopped to put it on again.

I turned the knob at one end of the room and kept walking. The hall ended at a door marked simply Nixon. Again, I just went in. The room was all windows. I was surrounded by the tallest buildings in the big city

The woman standing behind the desk took my eyes off the architecture. Her architecture was something else. She was as tall as I was, slim and red-headed with lips you wanted to lose yourself in.

"Ms. Nixon, my name is Diamond, and I'm looking for commas."

The door burst open behind me. The receptionist burst in, followed by two or three men and women. One of the men thought he was tough. I could tell by his eyes and the way he bared his teeth.

"It's all right, Shari. Gentlemen. Mr. Diamond and I have business to discuss. Sit down, Mr. Diamond." The others left without a word. Who was this woman?

"I like the way you just walked in. I did that myself a few years ago, and nobody had the cojones to throw me out. So I showed them how to run a publishing house, and we all made money. Who's paying you to look for commas?”

"Can't tell you who hired me, Ms. Nixon. Have you got the commas?"

"If I did, would I be standing here talking to you? Look at this." She picked up a book from her desk and flipped it spinning toward me. I grabbed it. Some writer I never heard of, Dashing Hamburger or something, as I recall. I looked through the book. I saw what my client had talked about. He wrote with many short sentences. But some of them were longer. And those longer sentences had no commas. In fact I found no commas in the book.

"You see, Mr. Diamond. We, too, want to know who is stealing the commas. We don't need many. But we don't have any. Periods, yes. But no commas. Not one. Who's stealing our commas, Mr. Diamond? Find them for us, and I will add to whatever reward the other publisher is paying you."

"Do you have any suggestions, Jacquiline? "

"Only one. The woman who manages Traditional or Classical Publishers or whatever. They use so many commas they might try to corner the market. Their old fashioned books need so many commas.."

"No, ma'am. They're in the same boat you are. Can't publish."

Suddenly, she grabbed me and looked deeply into my eyes. “Please, Mr. Diamond, find the commas for us!”

I said I'd be in touch and left.

Whew! Some woman! Some women! Where were all the mousy types you expect in publishing. Maybe I need a career change.

***** ***** *****

I went to the Verbal Bar, my favorite watering hole. I took a booth back in the corner and read the badly copied fax on the table. Tonight's forum was on sin taxes, those vicious taxes laid on alcohol, tobacco, and gambling by those who don't sin but do pay taxes. At the Verbal all kinds of debates go on, both at the tables and on the stage. Gender, race, even punctuation don't matter. Neither does knowledge for that matter.

The joint is fixed up with a radio - TV theme. Cast off mikes and even TV cameras are stuck here and there. Headlines are pasted on the walls, and news scripts torn off an old AP wire are scattered on the tables. Apart from that, it's a normal bar and cafe. Good burgers and chili. And the smell of the burgers told me I was hungry. I ordered one all the way with my usual giant cola on the side.

I pulled out my notepad and doodled and thought. What did I have? Two very different publishing houses and no commas. Each accused the other of stealing. If neither did it, who could be guilty? Live and learn, but I always thought there were plenty of commas to go around.

Phyllis brought my order and dropped it on my table. She was pitiful – stringy hair, lopsided skirt, bubble gum.

"Phyllis, have you seen any stray commas lately?"

She just looked at me and walked off. Then she stopped dead. Turned around and came slowly back.

"You said commas?"

"Yes."

"You were serious."

"Very"

"Matter of fact, I was noticing yesterday a whole lot of commas in an ad for Lester the Magician. Like all the tricks he does in his act? There were like maybe twenty of them and there were commas between every one of them. And I thought this was making me crazy. Why didn't they put them one under the other like sometimes they do you know, but they didn't, they were all in a list. You want to see?"

She was back in a minute with a slick color ad with a portrait surrounded by action shots and bold print with time, place, date, and prices.

"See. Right there, Mr. Diamond!" She stuck her hand triumphantly in the middle of the ad and right in front of my face. I gently removed her hand so I could see. Blast it if she wasn't right! The list with commas stood out crassly compared to the rest of the ad.

"Thank you Phyllis. You may have put me on to something."

In the lower corner of the ad was a copyright notice by Metropolitan Advertising Agency Limited and Incorporated. I finished my hamburger and scotch. I paid the bill and borrowed the phone directory. Then I hiked out for Metro Ad!

***** ***** ***** *****

Metropolitan Advertising had sleek modern offices on the bottom floor of another skyscraper. Their entrance sign looked something like this:

M e T r O P o l i T a N a D v E r T i S i N g

Or maybe they divided them UP aNd down a different way. It was dumb anyway they did it. Naturally the lobby had steel and white modern with touches of black.

The African-American receptionist in the white dress completed the scheme.

"I'm Diamond. I want to see your boss."

"Well I'm Ruby and I say you can't see her, dude. She doesn't see anyone who isn't a client."

"Oh yeah? How does she get clients? Which way is her office?"

"You can leave a card, dude, and I'll have someone get in touch with you. That's how it's done here."

"Well, that's not how I do it and that's not how I'm going to do it. Now tell me where her office is or I'm going to start opening doors until I find the right one."

"You can't do that, man."

"Watch me."

I walked past her, taking the back corridor to the end and opened the corner office on the back. Where else? And got a surprise.

This one was different. She was short and barefooted, wearing blue jeans and a paint-stained white t-shirt. She looked to be about twenty, but had a hairstyle about fifty years out of date - a "page-boy" bob with bangs. Brown hair and dark black eyes and restless energy. The room had no desk, just drawing boards on every side. Papers and drawings were scattered all over the floor and the girl/woman was sitting cross-legged in front of one of them. She twisted around to look up at me. I saw only amusement in her eyes.

"You came for the commas."

"Yes ma'am."

"How many do you need?"

"Hadn't thought about it. All of them I'd guess. Should be enough to go around."

"There are now." She looked past me at the helpless receptionist. "Alice, bring Mr. Diamond a chair."

"How did you know who I was?"

She giggled. The giggle fit her. "You're not the only person who can detect, you know," she said playing coy.

I sat down. "What do you mean 'There are now'?"

"I've got the commas stored in an old gymnasium we use as a warehouse. Normally we stock paper and all kinds of stuff there. Well, we were running low on commas and that fool Barrett woman had thousands more than she needed. Nobody reads that junk she publishes anymore anyway. So we borrowed them and put them in the back of the gym. But we found out something!" She clapped her hands together and her eyes flashed!

"They propagate!"

"They what?" I leaned forward.

"Yes!" She half crawled toward me and stood on her knees. Her eyes were shining. "I don't know how they do it. But where they covered just the back third of the building, now the entire gym is packed and running over." She jumped to her feet. "Come on, I'll show you."

She almost dragged me out of the building to her car.

The gym sat on the edge of town. Aggie Marple (age 33, I had found on the way) and I drove into the parking lot, and I could see she was right. Commas were scattered all over the pale concrete of the lot. Commas of all sizes. I bent over to look closely. There were thousands the size of newspaper commas. Some were so big you could see them ten feet away. I guess they were for advertising posters or billboards. They hadn't yet covered the ground, so we could still walk over them.

At the double doors to the gym she stopped. She had a key in her hands.

"I don't know what to expect, so get ready."

Aggie unlocked the door, and we stood to the side as she pulled it open. A rush of commas fell out and spread on the ground. Imagine a room full of those insane polyethylene "peanuts" they use for packing. The commas fell out the same way. We peered around the door and over the fallen heap of commas. We could see nothing beyond the space cleared by the falling punctuation marks. The gym was still packed almost full.

She looked at me and giggled.

"See. I told you so. What do we do now?"

"I'm sure you recognize I must call my client."

"Fine. Have her send a truck or two or three and come pick up all the commas she wants. I'm certainly not going to send them to her."

"What if she decides to prosecute?"

"On what grounds? Raping syntax? Felonious phraseology, or homicidal punctuation?"

"Good point. Let's discuss it over supper."

"And maybe a glass of wine afterwards."

"My place or yours?"