World's Greatest Sleuth!

by Steve Hockensmith

  The door before us swung open, and there stood Frank Tousey gaping down at us.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Admirin’ fine craftsmanship!” I enthused, bolting upright. “You might not believe it, but I’m something of a fashion plate, when finances allow, and I’ve been mighty impressed by your sartorial sense. You, sir, are pure gentleman from head to, quite literally, toe. So I couldn’t resist the urge to learn where you’d acquired such stylish footwear.”

  As I spoke, Gustav straightened up beside me and folded his arms across his chest. Tousey looked back and forth between the two of us, the sneer on his face making it clear he regarded the Amlingmeyer brothers with the same esteem one would usually reserve for Juicy Fruit—or worse—stuck to the bottom of one’s fine Italian shoes.

  “You were right when you said I might not believe it,” he said. “Because I don’t.”

  “You always wear Eye-talian-made shoes?” my brother asked.

  Tousey barked out a nasty laugh. “Don’t tell me you’re a fashion plate, too.”

  “Nope. Just curious.”

  “Well, the answer’s yes.” Tousey pointed at his feet, which were clad in nothing but black socks. “Except when I’m just trying to get to the damn water closet to take a damn piss. Now would you step aside, please?”

  I got out of the man’s way.

  Old Red didn’t.

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to ask, long as we’re havin’ us a chat. Last night, Mr. Curtis said something puzzlin’ about your man Brady: that we should ask him about his birthday. You know what that was all about?”

  “Yes,” Tousey said. “It was about Armstrong Curtis being a complete madman. Now get out of my way.”

  Gustav finally moved aside, and Tousey stepped into the hall, picked up his shoes, and tossed them into his room. Then he closed his door—and pulled out a key and locked it, for good measure.

  “You know,” he said, “if you two had one brain between you, you’d forget about Curtis and concentrate on the contest. Because in case you hadn’t noticed, nobody but you is in any hurry to stir up a stink the last week of the Columbian Exposition. If—if—that Sergeant Ryan decides Curtis had help smothering himself, you can bet the Exposition board, Mayor Harrison, and probably Grover goddamn Cleveland wouldn’t want him saying so until after the Fair’s … oh, forget it. I’m about to bust.”

  He hustled down the hall toward the WC. My brother just stood there watching him, silent and still.

  “What’re you lookin’ at?” I asked.

  “I’m hopin’ he don’t make it.”

  Tousey reached the end of the hall, pivoted stiffly, and fairly threw himself into the privy.

  “Oh, well,” Old Red said. “Let’s get a look at them other shoes.”

  They were outside Smythe’s door, they were high-sided black-and-white button-ups, and they were not, it turned out, Italian.

  No, they were English, the products of (embossing on the sole told us) GUNDRY & SONS, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON.

  “Damn,” Gustav sighed. “Don’t nobody make nothin’ this side of the Atlantic anymore?”

  I brought up a fist and let it hover a couple inches from the door.

  “Shall we ask Smythe what he’s got against American shoes? We could throw the Bearded Man in his face, too. About time we asked about that note.”

  Old Red thought it over a moment, then jerked his head at the other end of the hall, back toward our rooms. He didn’t speak till we were both well away from Smythe’s door.

  “You saw how Tousey bluffed his way past us. Let’s not waste our ammunition on Smythe till we got him dead to rights.”

  “Dead to rights doin’ what?”

  “Whatever it is he’s doin’,” Gustav said with a shrug. “In the meantime, might as well call it a night.”

  He stopped before his door. I did, too.

  “I’ll take first watch,” I said as he pulled out his key.

  Old Red froze. “What makes you think we’re bunkin’ together?”

  “The fact that there’s most likely a murderer a door or two down, and he no doubt knows we been sniffin’ around after him.”

  “Our doors got locks.”

  “So did the one to Mr. Curtis’s room. So did that window into the Agriculture Building. A lock ain’t nothing to bet our lives on—and you’d admit that yourself, if you weren’t so stubborn.”

  “I ain’t bein’—”

  “Yes, you are. You’re bound and determined not to talk about them cheaters of yours. So much so, you were about to make a fool mistake just to avoid it. Well, if it’ll keep you from slittin’ our throats for us, I’m willin’ to make a deal: no questions about your eyes tonight.”

  My brother squinted at me a moment before heaving a mighty sigh. “Promise?”

  “You got my word.”

  “Fine.” Old Red opened the door. “But if you break it, I’ll kill you.”

  Soon after, he was stretched out on the bed, while I was on the floor with my guidebook and a useless Peacemaker. (Well, the shiny new Colt that came with Mr. Cohn’s cowboy costume wasn’t entirely useless. We had no bullets for it, true, but the ivory handle would make a fine club, if need be.)

  “Night,” I said.

  “Night.”

  I let a minute pass. Then another. Then another.

  Just when I heard my brother’s breathing deepen, catch in his chest in that raspy way that would soon be snores, I spoke again.

  “Funny thing about promises, though…”

  “Christ. Here we go.”

  “A few months back, you promised there’d never be any lies between us again. Yet then you up and lied about your eyes.”

  “I never lied about that.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. I just … let you make some assumptions.”

  “Like thinkin’ you was still hurtin’ when you really weren’t?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Yeah. I coulda got rid of them glasses a week ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  There was an even longer pause.

  “Hey, I’m on watch here,” I said. “If you’re waitin’ for me to fall asleep, it ain’t gonna work. So you’d best just answer me: Why?”

  Gustav mumbled something.

  “What was that?”

  “I said, I don’t know!”

  Of course, that’s an old dodge, “I don’t know.” It usually means “I don’t want to say.” Yet I could tell my brother meant it. He was as baffled by himself as by any mystery he might set out to solve.

  “Theorize, then,” I said. “Guess.”

  To my surprise, Old Red tried.

  “I reckon maybe … I liked havin’ a reason to fail. An excuse. If this detectivin’ thing don’t work out, you know what we got to fall back on.”

  “Sure. Nothing.”

  “I was gonna say droverin’, but yeah. Same thing. We ain’t got no jobs, no family, no home. If I can’t give us any of that again … I guess I didn’t want it to be cuz I just wasn’t good enough.”

  Good God, do my ears deceive me? I almost scoffed. Old Red Amlingmeyer, the Holmes of the Range … humble?

  This wasn’t the Holmes of the Range I was hearing, though. It wasn’t even Old Red Amlingmeyer. It was just Gustav, my brother, stretching his neck out like a tortoise leaving its shell. And I’m glad it wasn’t Big Red Amlingmeyer who answered him. It was his little brother Otto.

  “Of course you’re good enough,” I said. “You’re better than good enough. You’re great! If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have dragged you to Chicago—and you wouldn’t have Diana Crowe fightin’ for you the way she is. Sure, she likes us, but that ain’t what it’s about. The lady’s a professional, and she can see you could be, too. Maybe the best there is. And if you’ve lost sight of that, then you’re as bad as Smythe and Pinkerton and Tousey and the colonel, cuz you’re makin’ the same mistake they are: judgin’ yourself by you
r secondhand clothes instead of your first-rate mind.”

  “F-”

  “Don’t you ‘feh’ me! That’s false modesty. That’s them specs all over again, and they are gone. You ain’t got no excuses, and you ain’t gonna need any. Cuz whether it’s by winnin’ the contest or ropin’ in a murderer or both, you’re gonna prove to the world what Diana and I already know—and you never should’ve forgotten.”

  This, I believe, was altogether too much brotherly approbation for Gustav to take, and he felt the need to cut through it with a good Old Red–style snarl.

  “I ain’t been runnin’ around today chasin’ bullshit and beards to make myself look good! A man’s dead, and we’re rubbin’ elbows with his killer. That’s what matters. To think of turnin’ that to our advantage somehow … I will give it a ‘feh’! Feh!”

  “Alright, alright. You can consider me chastised and the subject dropped.”

  “Good.”

  I busied myself with my guidebook, pleased to have squeezed not just an explanation from my brother but some honest-to-goodness soul-baring. I hadn’t managed to drag an apology out with it, but one can’t expect more than one miracle in a day.

  Just when I’d started to think Gustav was asleep, I heard him speak.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t square with you,” he said softly. “It won’t happen again, I swear.”

  I put my book down and crawled over to the side of the bed.

  “I truly appreciate that,” I said. “Still, let’s see you cross your heart and hope to die, this time.”

  There was a muffled thud, and everything went black.

  Old Red had hit me over the head with his pillow.

  “Close enough,” I said.

  24

  FAVORITES

  Or, An Idol Gets Tarnished While Someone Surprising Takes a Shine to Gustav

  When the time came to return to the Court of Honor for the next round of the contest, we found Major Bacon and His Hoosier One Hundred tooting out Sousafied favorites for a throng twice as large as the one that had packed in around the gazebo the day before. Gustav stopped at the edge of the crowd, pausing to work up his nerve before wading on into it.

  “Wouldn’t you know,” he grumbled. “A man gets killed, and out come the buzzards.”

  We were attired as we had been the day before—him in rough work clothes, me in a suit, both of us topped with Stetsons—and enough folks recognized us to draw a steady stream of back-pats and go-get-’ems as we made our way toward the bandstand. Old Red endured the attention with obvious uneasiness, body rigid, face twitchy, eyes ever darting this way and that.

  “Relax, Brother,” I told him. “Folks are just showin’ their support. I know it’s not in you to smile, but could you at least look like you ain’t about to bite ’em?”

  “I’ll try. But there are sure a lotta fellers with beards around here.”

  “Say … there are, aren’t there?”

  My eyes started doing some darting, too.

  When we finally reached the gazebo, we found our path blocked by a small, milling herd of clamoring men. There were perhaps a dozen of them, all wearing cheap suits and boaters and identical looks of frenzied intensity. They were squeezed in around the stairs up to the platform, the only thing keeping them from rushing it, it seemed, being a single Columbian Guard standing on the first step.

  “Was he drunk?” one of them shouted at us.

  “Was he crazy?” another called out.

  “Did you see the body?”

  “Was he really trying to eat the cheese?”

  “Did the ghost get him?”

  “What’s King Brady like?”

  “Yes, kinda, yes, I doubt it, what in God’s name are you talkin’ about, you couldn’t print it even if I told you, and who the heck are you, anyway?” I replied.

  The men didn’t really need to answer my question—especially not when they all bent over little pads of paper and got to scribbling like a pack of Lucille Larsons. To the left of them stood a man behind a camera-topped tripod, but apparently he didn’t think us worth any flash powder.

  “Was the ‘I doubt it’ to the ghost or eating the cheese?” one of the newsmen said.

  “What have you got against King Brady, idol of millions?” another asked.

  “Take your pick,” I said. It seemed like a fine enough reply to either question.

  My brother, meanwhile, had a question of his own. “What was that about a ghost?”

  “The ghost of Sherlock Holmes!” said a stubble-faced fellow in a white seersucker suit so wrinkled it looked like an unmade bed. “It materialized in the Administration Building at the stroke of midnight—just after Curtis Armstrong was killed!”

  The other reporters groaned in chorus.

  “Aww, pshaw,” said one.

  “Where does he get this stuff?” said a second.

  “It’s Armstrong Curtis, Phil,” said a third.

  “That’s the Journal for you,” said a fourth.

  “Just ignore him,” said a fifth.

  “That’s what we do,” said a sixth.

  “Hey!” said a seventh. “Here comes King Brady!”

  Then my brother and I were the ones being ignored, apart from cries of “Step aside!” and “Let the man through!”

  Gustav and I dutifully hopped out of the way as Brady and Frank Tousey came striding along smiling.

  “Was he drunk, King?”

  “Was he crazy, King?”

  “Did you see the body, King?”

  “Was he really trying to eat the cheese, King?”

  “Did the ghost get him, King?”

  “What are you really like, King?”

  “King! King! Look this way!”

  “No pictures!” Tousey snapped, his smile gone in a flash, and he bolted forward to block the camera with his chest.

  The photographer responded by calling Tousey several unprintable (though, in my mind, entirely accurate) names.

  “I’m sorry,” Tousey said, drifting back to Brady’s side, “but if someone wants a picture of King, they’ll have to pick up a copy of New York Detective Library.” He held his hands up toward Brady’s so-perfect-it-hurt face. “You don’t just give away something like this for free, do you?”

  The newspapermen wasted all of half a breath on obligatory chuckles, then launched right back into their questions—the same ones shouted twice as loud.

  Standing off to the side as we were, I could see Tousey put a hand to the small of Brady’s back and give him a little pat. It was almost as though he was cranking the key on a windup toy, for Brady immediately opened his mouth and got to making noise.

  “I know you’re curious about Mr. Curtis’s untimely passing, but I’m not the person to turn to for answers. My good friends at the Chicago Police Department have the matter well in hand, and when the wheels of justice are turning smoothly, there’s no need for King Brady to intervene. Should those wheels bog down, however, the authorities know that King Brady, as always, stands ready to help.”

  “And Gustav Amlingmeyer stands ready to puke,” Old Red grumbled. We slinked off unnoticed as King Brady went on extolling the virtues of King Brady’s unparalleled King Bradyness.

  When we reached the top of the stairs, we found Diana, Colonel Crowe, William Pinkerton, Lucille Larson, and Urias Smythe already there. I started steering us toward the Crowes, curious to know if the colonel had altered his thinking in the past half day, but Miss Larson peeled herself from Smythe’s side to intercept us.

  Smythe looked relieved. Gustav looked alarmed.

  “Well, it’s all settled,” Miss Larson said, and she slid in beside my brother and took him by the arm. “For the rest of the afternoon, you’re the exclusive property of McClure’s Magazine.”

  “E-excuse me?” Old Red stammered.

  “Each day of the contest, I’ve followed a different sleuth. After your little performance yesterday, Mr. Amlingmeyer, I decided you should be next.”

  �
�M-my little performance?”

  My brother was blushing and staring at the floorboards and generally looking like he’d gnaw off his own arm to escape the lady. The day before, with a fresh murder on his mind, he’d seemed to forget that this was a prettyish woman. Now, though, with her bony frame pressed up close, his old gal-jitters were back bad as ever.

  “Yesterday, during the gathering in the lobby, everyone else was bickering, dithering,” Miss Larson said. “You were the only one to actually do something, and it was beautiful.”

  “Oh? What’d I do?” Old Red asked as if he didn’t know the answer.

  For me, it wasn’t an act. “Yeah … what’d he do?”

  Miss Larson shook her head and smirked.

  “Still answering questions with questions,” she said. To Gustav. She was paying me no more mind than you would a speck of dust floating by on the breeze. “You can stop being coy.”

  My brother was looking at anything and everything but the lady—the crowd, the Grand Basin, the ceiling, his shoes.

  “Coy?” he said.

  To my surprise, Miss Larson started to look annoyed. The surprise being that she hadn’t started sooner.

  “Everyone was arguing about how to continue the contest,” she said. “By putting it to a vote, you forced each and every one of us—even me—to take a stand one way or another. Commit ourselves. Whether the contest would continue as is was secondary. In truth, you were fabricating a pretext for assessing possible motives.”

  “Miss, you sure use a lotta ten-cent words.” Old Red finally met the lady’s gaze. He was able to hold it, too. For two or three seconds, anyway. “But I expect you’re right. I wanted to know where folks stood with Curtis gone. Cuz that’d tell me who most wanted him gone.”

  He took to picking at a loose thread on his sleeve.

  “See?” Miss Larson said, finally speaking to me. “Beautiful.”

  “That’s a word I never thought I’d hear applied to my brother,” I said.

  “Either you’re the only one who believes Curtis was murdered or you’re the only one who’s willing to act on it openly,” Miss Larson went on, speaking to Gustav again. She tightened her grip on his arm, pulling him tighter to her scrawny side. “Either way, that makes you the most interesting man here right now.”