World's Greatest Sleuth!

by Steve Hockensmith

We made a circle around the base of the Ferris wheel in the center of the Midway (Old Red keeping his back to the massive contraption the whole time) and ended up before the warren of shops and fake mosques known as “A Street in Cairo.”

  “It’s no use,” my brother said. “This ain’t the prairie. Five strides any which way, and a man could disappear.”

  “That don’t mean we gotta give up stridin’ ourselves. And if we split up, we could cover twice as much ground.”

  Gustav stroked his mustache a moment, mulling it over. Then his expression soured and he turned toward the barker shouting at passersby from a Street in Cairo doorway.

  “Step this way, gentlemen, step this way, and feast your eyes on Little Egypt and her famous—her infamous!—‘belly dance.’ Some call it the danse du ventre, some call it the Hoochie-Coochie, but I guarantee, my friends, I gehr-own-TEE, that you will call it unforgettable! Just twenty-five cents, one quarter of a dollar, will buy you sights and sounds so exotic, so hypnotic, you will swear you’ve been transported à la magic carpet to a sheik’s harem in far-off Araby!”

  Old Red swiveled his glower back my way.

  “You almost had me,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Hey, who’s to say Smythe ain’t in there?”

  “Me.” He threw another glance back at the barker. “Lord … he talks almost as much as you.”

  “Well, you know the best way to shut me up, and I’d say it was about that time, if we’re givin’ up on Smythe.”

  “I ain’t hungry.”

  “You would be if you knew what was good for you. We ain’t slowed down long enough to eat in what … eight, nine hours? Think of your brain, if not your stomach, Brother. It’s gotta have something to work on.”

  “Well…”

  “Good!”

  I started tugging Gustav toward the German village nearby—and, more importantly, the huge German beer garden I’d read was inside.

  “Some schnitzel and potato salad, and you’ll be a new man,” I said. “And we’ll finally get us a chance to talk without bein’ on the run, so you can tell me why you … what?”

  Old Red had stopped dead in his tracks.

  “On second thought,” he said, “I think you were right about us splittin’ up. Huntin’ for Smythe or studyin’ up for tomorrow’s contest, either or, we can do a lot more apart than together.”

  “Oh, come on, now…”

  I took a step toward him.

  He took a step back.

  “Don’t forget,” he said. “We’re meetin’ Diana at the Ho-Jo Pen at twenty past nine. I’ll see you there.”

  Then he turned and hurried off toward the eastern end of the Midway.

  “It’s ‘Ho-o-den,’ you stubborn fool!” I shouted after him. “How you gonna find it when you can’t even say it?”

  Gustav just waved a hand over his head without looking back. He wouldn’t come out and admit it, of course, but I knew what he was running from. Whatever the story was behind those spectacles of his, he wasn’t ready to tell it yet.

  I just stood there for a minute, thinking, before I was sure.

  Yes, I was still ready to eat.

  I carried on to the German village.

  After some schnitzel and kartoffelsalat that wasn’t a patch on my mother’s, I headed into the White City. Though I stayed on the lookout for Smythe and the Bearded Man and the Unbearded Man and Gustav, too, my heart wasn’t really in it. Here I was, at liberty at last at the World’s Columbian Exposition. It was time to do me some sightseeing.

  For simplicity’s sake, I confined myself to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. As it housed by far the biggest assemblage of displays at the fair, I reasoned, odds were the competition would take us there again before the week was out. Unfortunately, though I hoped to get the lay of the land, it proved unlayable for anyone without the exploring skills of Columbus himself. Inside the gigantic building were exhibits touting the wares of nearly every nation on earth, and there wasn’t a field of enterprise known to man that didn’t get its own sizable section. A family could spend a week just perusing the wing devoted to stoves, and the collection of gas lamps and fixtures took up enough acreage to accommodate a small farm.

  With so much to see, my eyes and mind wearied fast, one display blurring into the next, and eventually only the most vivid experiences made any impression at all.

  A man playing a beautiful melody on Beethoven’s grand piano.

  An up-down ride on an Otis-Hale “elevator.”

  The world’s largest “gray canary” diamond sparkling as it spun on a rotating pedestal of pure gold.

  I was standing mesmerized by this last when I felt a tap on the shoulder, and a Tiffany & Co. clerk informed me that the building was closing for the night. Nearby, a brawny fellow—no clerk, he—was frowning at me as he tugged on the heavy sliding doors that would turn the Tiffany Pavilion into its own little fortress for the night. His suit coat bulged slightly at the right breast in a way I recognized right off: Like me, the man had a fondness for shoulder holsters.

  I tipped my hat and got on my way.

  It was nine o’clock, almost time to rendezvous with Gustav and Diana, yet outside there was no lack of light. Electricity blazed everywhere and on everything, and if you’d taken the time to count them up, I do believe the Westinghouse bulbs would have outnumbered the stars above. Great searchlights upon the rooftops were throwing beams of color all around the fairgrounds as well, bright circles of emerald, azure, and scarlet sweeping over the buildings and water and people.

  The Wooded Island, home to the Ho-o-den, was lit up, too, though it was rows of round red paper lanterns that did the job. They gave the island’s garden-lined paths a soft pink glow, like the light of a dawn that never quite came.

  “Beautiful,” I said as I sat down next to Old Red, who was waiting on a bench facing the squat, boxy Japanese temples.

  “Spooky,” he said.

  “Hello,” said Diana.

  We both hopped to our feet.

  The lady was smiling as she walked up, and I wanted to tell her the Exposition wasn’t a patch on her when it came to radiance—dark hair, dark eyes, dark dress, yet still she seemed to shine. Somehow, I managed to hold myself to an “Evening, miss” and a tip of the hat.

  “Where’s the colonel?” Gustav asked, throwing glances this way and that as though he expected the man to leap from some black patch brandishing a tomahawk.

  “He’s concentrating on the northern end of the White City tonight,” Diana said. “He got it in his head that we could familiarize ourselves with the fairgrounds twice as quickly if we split up.”

  “What an interestin’ idea,” I said. “The colonel got it in his head or someone put it there?”

  The lady’s smile turned sly. “Oh, it was the colonel’s idea … I just helped him have it.”

  “Crowe lets you run around unchaperoned at night?” my brother grumbled. “When there’s a murderer on the prowl?”

  “I work for the colonel, remember? The White City’s probably the nicest place he’s ever let me run around unchaperoned. Anyway, he still doesn’t believe there has been a murder.”

  “Did you tell him what we found this afternoon?” I asked. “The stains in the Agriculture Building and all that peculiar whatnot dumped out Curtis’s window?”

  “I did … though, of course, I had to improvise a bit in the telling. If he knew we’d been working together, he wouldn’t let me out of his sight a second the rest of the week.”

  Gustav snorted. “And he still ain’t convinced something shady’s goin’ on? That mule-headed little—”

  “You can hardly blame him when William Pinkerton and the police are treating Curtis’s death as an accident,” Diana cut in. “Speaking of which, were you able to pry anything useful out of Mr. Pinkerton and Sergeant Ryan this afternoon?”

  I shook my head. “All we got from them was guff.”

  “It was the same for me, I’m afraid,” Diana said. �
��They were impervious to persuasion. Fortunately, Guardsman Karr was in a far more loquacious mood.”

  “Guardsman Karr?” I said.

  “Loquacious?” said Old Red.

  “Talkative,” I said. Then, again: “Guardsman Karr?”

  But it was my brother who answered.

  “Let me guess. He’s one of the Columbian Guards who was lockin’ up the Agriculture Building tonight.”

  Diana told him he’d guessed right—and that she wanted to know how—with a cocked eyebrow.

  “You wanted to meet here at nine twenty,” he explained. “Not nine, not nine thirty, not even nine fifteen. Well, this ain’t five minutes’ walk from the Agriculture Building, and that closes at nine. So it stood to reason you was givin’ yourself a quarter of an hour to—”

  “Oh, stop showin’ off,” I snapped. “Miss Crowe wanted to catch one of the guards at closin’ time. You don’t gotta flower it up with deductions.” I turned back to the lady, and suddenly my voice was dripping honey. “And this Guardsman Karr had something to say, did he?”

  He did, and Diana proceeded to spool it out for us.

  Every night, it was Karr who locked the Agriculture Building’s westernmost doors—those nearest the Stock Pavilion. And exactly twenty-four hours earlier, a gentleman had come stumbling up to him waving an OFFICIAL badge. The man declared himself to be Armstrong B. Curtis, Esquire, and he said he had “confidential business” to conduct inside. Alone. Every Columbian Guard knew of the contest, of course, and they all had orders to cooperate with Mr. Pinkerton’s associate Mr. Curtis no matter how eccentric his requests might seem. So Karr reluctantly let Curtis in (the reluctance stemming largely from the wobble and weave of the man’s step). After waiting twenty minutes for him to come out again, Karr had gone in to hunt him down and drag him out. Curtis was nowhere in sight, though, and after a brief search, Karr gave up looking. One of his fellow Guardsmen had let Curtis out through another exit, he figured. Or the man had simply staggered out the way he’d come in while Karr was hunting for him. Of course, it never occurred to him to check the Mammoth Cheese of Canada for a new occupant. He just locked up and called it a night.

  “Goodness,” I said when Diana was done. “Loquacious don’t even do it justice. Sounds like Guardsman Karr did everything but act it out with puppets.”

  Diana shrugged. “It was the least he could do for the dead man’s grieving widow.”

  I gaped at the lady a moment, then offered her a deep bow. “Allow me to say what a pleasure it is to be workin’ with you again, Miss Crowe.”

  “Yeah, yeah—that all helps paint the picture,” Old Red said. “Howzabout after Otto and me got called off to the office this afternoon? You able to finagle any new data outta Brady or Tousey or the others?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t get the chance to ask questions. I was too busy answering them. Miss Larson took quite the interest in you after you left. Where you’re from, what you’re like, how you came to be here—she wanted to know everything.”

  “Well, what do you expect? She might seem like a cold fish”—I spread out my arms as if putting myself on display—“but who doesn’t warm to good looks and charm sooner or later?”

  “It was actually Gustav she was interested in. Exclusively.”

  “Really? I am both puzzled and appalled.” I rubbed my chin as I mulled it over. “And maybe relieved.”

  “Enough tomfoolery,” Old Red said. “It’s our turn.”

  He didn’t need to say any more than that. My brother handles the deducifying in our little partnership, while recapitulations, banter, and walloping people are usually left to me. If it was time to swap information, then I would be the swapper.

  I described what we’d dug up the last few hours: Valmont’s scandal back in France, Boothby Greene’s real name, the conspicuously clean shoes from the Columbian, and, last but certainly not least, the genuine master of disguise who’d taken an inexplicable interest in Urias Smythe.

  Diana listened intently, if without reaction, up till this final revelation. After hearing of the Unbearded Man, however, she frowned and furrowed her brow.

  “We’ve been focusing all our energies on individuals from the contest group. If the killer has outside allies, though, that means we’re up against some kind of conspiracy.”

  “Conspiracy?” Gustav said. “I don’t know if I’d use as fancy a word as that.”

  “What other word applies?” Diana replied. “We’ve got two outside parties we can’t account for: the Bearded Man and the Unbearded Man. And someone broke into Curtis’s room and meddled with his things, which tells us his death wasn’t simply the result of an argument gone wrong. There was a specific purpose behind it—a purpose we don’t yet know.”

  “Well, if all that makes it a conspiracy, then I guess … you’re…”

  Old Red’s words trailed off, and his gaze shifted ever so slightly to the right, so that he was squinting over Diana’s shoulder at one of the island’s dimly lit paths. I could see nothing there but round balls of reddish lantern light and the black, blobby shapes of shrubs and topiary, but from his sudden, rigid stillness, I knew my brother saw something more.

  My fingers twitched out of habit, anxious to wrap around the grip of a gun I didn’t have.

  “You may as well come on out,” Gustav said. “I reckon you’ve heard just about everything.”

  About thirty feet from us, a shadow broke in two. Half seemed to be a rosebush. The other half walked toward us. It was so small, at first I took it for a lost child.

  Diana gasped as it drew up close.

  “So now you know,” Colonel Crowe said to her. “Your doting old godfather isn’t half as gullible as you like to think.”

  “You followed me? Eavesdropped on us?”

  “I’d say it was my right when I’m being lied to.”

  “Colonel,” Old Red said, and from the muted tone of his voice I knew he was working hard to tamp down his usual tetchiness, “if you were eavesdroppin’, then you know we ain’t makin’ any of this up. Something’s afoot here. Something strange and dangerous.”

  Colonel Crowe stepped up to Diana. It looked like he meant to take her by the arm and drag her away, but he stopped beside her instead.

  “Yes,” he said. “I grant you that. It seems I was hasty in my judgment this afternoon. Yet that still doesn’t make any of this our business. Diana and I are here to win a contest, not do Sergeant Ryan’s work for him.”

  “But if the contest and the murder are tied up together, it is your business, sir,” Gustav replied. He paused a moment, giving the colonel a chance to dispute that “murder,” but the little man said nothing. “And if the points start pilin’ up the wrong way, who’s to say Curtis is the only one who’s gonna end up dead?”

  “It’s in your own interests to look into this with us,” I threw in. I’m supposed to be the persuasive one of the two of us, so it was purely out of habit. It was also a big mistake.

  The colonel’s expression instantly soured. “I’m surprised you’d want any assistance from ‘the kind of military mind that could make Custer look like a model of common sense and cool-headedness.’ ”

  I went numb from head to toe.

  Colonel Crowe was quoting one of my own books back to me.

  “Oh, well, heh heh, that was just an unfortunate turn of phrase for comical—”

  “My brother is a horse’s ass, and for that I apologize,” Old Red said. “That don’t change the situation, though. We’d all be better off if we worked together.”

  Colonel Crowe just stewed for a moment (while I fumed over that “horse’s ass” crack).

  “I’ll think about it,” the colonel finally said, and at last he did wrap an arm around Diana and begin guiding her away.

  “Good night, gentlemen,” the lady said.

  Before she turned her back to us fully, she favored us with a quick wink.

  “That woman,” Gustav said, shaking his head, once the Crowes were
gone.

  I shook my head, too. “Oh, yeah. That woman.”

  My brother threw me a dubious look. “Do you even know what I’m talkin’ about?”

  “Sure.” I pointed at the path Diana had just departed on. “That woman.”

  Old Red sighed in a way that seemed to call me a horse’s ass all over again.

  “What?” I said.

  “She knew the colonel would follow her. She wanted him to overhear that conversation. She set up the whole thing so he’d see there’s no hanky-panky between us and we ain’t crazy to say Curtis was murdered.”

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  I pushed back my hat and whistled and said the only thing that seemed to fit the moment.

  “That … woman.”

  23

  PROMISES, PROMISES

  Or, We Fail to Hold a Suspect’s Feet to the Fire, and Gustav and I Go Toe-to-Toe

  We returned to our hotel. And aside from one “Shit!” in the midst of a particularly close call with a hard-charging hansom, my brother said nothing.

  “Hel-lo!” was the word (or words?) that finally broke his silence. We’d just stepped onto our floor at the Columbian to find two pairs of shoes set out for shining. One was beside a door about halfway down the hall, the other no more than six steps from us.

  Gustav pounced on the nearest shoes, snatched one up, and stared down into it.

  “We got us a maker’s mark,” he whispered.

  When I was close enough to look inside for myself, I saw a circle of words stamped into the dark leather of the insole.

  RUGGERO E ROMANO • MILAN

  “Italian,” I said, careful to keep my voice low. Most likely, the shoe’s owner could be found lounging on a bed just beyond one very thin door.

  My brother grunted, then flipped the shoe over to get a look at the sole. Stuck to it were four blobs of white goo, two on the heel, two closer to the toe. All had been smashed flat into wavy-edged discs about the size of a quarter.

  “What the hell is that?” Old Red said softly.

  I leaned in and gave the little globules a whiff.

  “Juicy Fruit.”

  “Oh.”

  My brother gave the shoe a smell, too, not restricting himself to the flattened chewing wax. I was just wondering whose aroma he was sampling when Fate handed me the answer. And as is usual with Fate, I’ve found, it didn’t go about it gently.