World's Greatest Sleuth! (13 page)

“Oh, I’ve got me a notion about that. A deduction, you might even call it.”

“Let me guess,” I sighed. “You ain’t gonna tell me what it is.”

“Revenge is sweet,” Gustav said.

He started for the stockyards.

13

THE TRAIL

Or, The Killer’s Tracks Take Us out of the Mire and into the Frying Pan

Revenge may be sweet,
but the same can’t be said of what you’ll find carpeting a cattle pen. So I couldn’t share my brother’s enthusiasm as he crept along the edge of the stockyards giving the eye to each and every cow pie he could find. And he found plenty.

“You got us to the right haystack, alright,” he said, crouching down to inspect a particularly intriguing mound of brown on the other side of the fence. “I just hope we can find the right needle.”

“I wish it
was
a needle we were lookin’ for. At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about smellin’ up my new—”

“Hel-lo!”

Old Red clambered over the fence and dropped down beside a prodigious heap near a corner of the pen. One edge had been mashed down and smeared across the ground.

“That our needle?”

“Most likely.” Gustav knelt beside the patty, cocking his head to peer at it first from one side, then the other. “Unless someone’s been breedin’ cows to wear brogans.” He pointed to a lumpy smudge on one of the fence rails nearby. “And climb outta their pens in ’em.”

“So that settles it. Curtis paid a call on the cattle before headin’ over to the Mammoth Cheese.”

Old Red scowled at me, his eyes flashing such naked disdain I suddenly missed his shaded cheaters.

“Why would you assume this here footprint belongs to Armstrong Curtis?”

“Uhhh … because he’s the one who smelled like shit?”

“Yeah.
His head
.”

“You sayin’ he did a handstand in there?”

“Just think about it,” Gustav said. “Might make for a nice change of pace.”

Up to then, the Herefords in the pen had been keeping their distance. But now a big, curious Bossie started ambling toward the fence with a thunderous “Moo!” She was a lot of cow, fifteen hundred pounds if she was an ounce—and my scrawny brother was squatting down directly in her path.

“Better move ’fore you’re flat as that patty!” I called out.

Old Red didn’t budge.

“Throw me your coat!” he barked.

“What?”

“I said—aww, hell!”

The heifer was almost on Gustav now, and he had to hop to his feet and leap aside to keep from being trampled.

The cow put a hoof down in our evidence, smooshing what little of it wasn’t already smooshed.

“Dammit, Otto!” my brother raged.

“Hey, don’t blame me. If you really wanted to save that thing, you should’ve used your new hat instead of goin’ for my coat. Anyway, I’m not the one who did the steppin’.”

The heifer lowed as if in apology and pushed at Old Red with her huge, wet muzzle.

“You I don’t blame,” Gustav said, giving her a pat. “Cows are
supposed
to be stupid.”

He turned and scrambled over the fence, and then he was off, zigzagging away up the path that separated the cattle pens from the Stock Pavilion. His eyes were pointed straight down.

I didn’t have to ask what he was looking for. When a man’s walking around bent-over, nose-to-the-ground like a chicken pecking at grubs—and when that man happens to be my brother—you can bet he’s hunting up a trail.

“Did you gentlemen lose something?” a kindly old man asked as we crossed his path, and once upon a time, I knew, I would’ve shot back “Only our minds” or some such. Now, though, I just tipped my hat and told him not to worry himself on our account.

This was what we did. This was what our lives looked like, thanks to Sherlock Holmes. I hadn’t just come to accept it, I realized. I liked it that way.

Eventually, Gustav lurched and veered his way around the pavilion to the back of the Agriculture Building. After nosing around the first entrance we came to—and nearly ramming hat-first into a dozen tourists—he took to inspecting the windows lining the back wall. While by no means crude or ugly, they were simple pane-and-windowsill affairs, nowhere near as ornate as their awesomely large, arching brethren along the other three sides of the building. Old Red sped past half a dozen before skidding to a stop with a cheery (for him) “Well, well, well!”

On the sill was a conspicuous brown smudge.

With but a little fiddling, my brother got the window to crack open on pivoting hinges.

“You’d think with the World’s Greatest Everything around here, they’d have ’em some decent locks,” he said.

“I guess they weren’t worried about someone makin’ off with the Mammoth Cheese or the gum-paste Columbus or the Brooklyn Bridge made out of ham or what have you.”

“Well, they should’ve taken more care. This thing didn’t slow me down ten seconds, and everything I know about lock-pickin’ I learned from Nick goddamn Carter.”

Before I could ask what we were to do next, Old Red was doing it: He hoisted himself up and slithered through the window. I took a moment to make sure none of the passersby thereabouts were watching us and, finding that only two dozen or so were, took another moment to convince myself I didn’t care. Then I followed my brother.

Being a fellow of some size, a certain amount of squirming and kicking and gut-sucking was required to get me inside, but eventually I teeter-tottered forward and spilled out onto the floor.

“And who’s that?” I heard a woman ask.

“My brother,” Gustav replied.

“I might’ve known,” the woman said.

I rolled to my feet and found Old Red in one of the display stalls lining the walkways of the Agriculture Building. Looming up to one side of him was a cask the size of a railroad water tank with
WORLD
’
S LARGEST FLOUR BARREL
stenciled on the side. On his other side stood a plump old Negro woman with smiling eyes and apple cheeks and a yellow handkerchief wrapped round her head. There was a wall of red boxes just beyond her, each adorned with the woman’s beaming face under the words
AUNT JEMIMA READY-MIX FOR PANCAKES.

“Sorry to barge in on you like this, Miss Jemima,” I said.

The woman chuckled. “It’s Miss Green, thank you. Or Miss Nancy, if you prefer. The only place you’ll find ‘Aunt Jemima’ is on those boxes. And no need to apologize. I was just sitting here waiting for my next performance.”

“Oh?”

Miss Nancy nodded at a large stove nearby. The top was all griddle, by far the biggest I’d ever seen.

“Every quarter hour I whip up a stack of pancakes as tall as you. Wait around and you can have first pick of the next batch.”

I suddenly realized that lunchtime had long come and gone with no actual lunch to it.

“Them Ready-Mix flapjacks any good?” I asked.

Miss Nancy peeped slyly to the left and right before whispering her answer.

“Not as good as mine.”

“We ain’t here to swap recipes,” Gustav growled, and he got to stalking around eyeballing the floor.

“I think your skinny brother could use a nice big plate of pancakes,” Miss Nancy said to me. “Might improve his disposition.”

“Ma’am, if it were as easy as that to put him in a good mood, I’d buy every box of Aunt Jemima you got.”

Miss Nancy laughed. Once again—as if I need to tell you—Old Red did not.

“You notice any strange stains here today?” he asked. “Anything smelly?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Miss Nancy said. “There were five or six smears along the floor when I came in this morning. Looked like you-know-what, though for the life of me I can’t see how it got here … and I’d really rather not know. I had one of the custodians mop it up first thing.”

Gustav stopped his pacing. “So it’s all gone now.”

“Of course it is. I’m not going to stand here cooking all day with
that
under my feet.”

“But you’d be willing to swear you saw it? If someone else asked you? The police, say?”

“I suppose.” Miss Nancy glanced at the window we’d slid in through as if she expected the guards from the sanitarium to come climbing in after us. “Is it
important
that I saw doodie on the floor?”

“It’s a matter of life and death!” Old Red declared, and off he went, staring at the floor again.

“My brother works for the sanitation department,” I explained. “He takes these things very seriously.” I tipped my hat and started after Gustav. “Thank you, ma’am. You’ve been a great help.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that,” Miss Nancy said. “Come back in ten minutes if you want those pancakes!”

I caught up with Old Red just in time to keep him from walking into a pyramid of jarred capers.

“That’s it,” he said. “No more trail. Even if it hadn’t been mopped up, I couldn’t pick it out again—not with all the folks stompin’ new stains over it all day.”

“So what now?”

Gustav pried his eyes from the floorboards. “We don’t need no footprints to know where the killer went once he was done here.”

It took but a moment’s thought to see what he meant.

“The Columbian,” I said.

My brother nodded.

Whoever the murderer might be, it was obvious where he’d spent the night: our very own hotel.

14

STOLEC

Or, Though the Dung Trail Ends, We’re Handed a New Load of Bull

We returned to our
hotel. And I could simply leave it at that. “We returned to our hotel.” Five little words. Yet that utterly fails to capture the drama of the ordeal. In fact, I could devote an entire chapter to our long, arduous journey, so fraught was it with peril and death-defying derring-do.

On Stony Island Avenue, it was a trolley that almost got us. On Sixty-fourth Street, it was a dray hauling garbage. And on Madison Avenue, we were almost flattened by an omnibus
and
a locomotive
and
a policeman infuriated by both Old Red’s wide-eyed stumbling through traffic and his less-than-respectful reply when advised to “get [his] hick ass out of the damned street.” Time and time again, I had to steer my city-hating brother out of harm’s way (though it was considerably easier now that he didn’t have his smoked spectacles half-blinding him). So it was every single time we ventured from the White City to our hotel and vice versa, but to keep this book from stretching out to the intolerable lengths favored by Mr. Tolstoy and his highfalutin ilk, I’ll just circle back to those five little words.

We returned to our hotel.

Mrs. Jasinska, the proprietress, was at her usual post behind the desk near the entrance, and she greeted us with the merry “Welcome back!” that was her custom.

“Ma’am,” Gustav began gravely, “there’s something I need to—”

“What do you think about poor Mr. Curtis?” the lady prattled on without a hint of anxiety or sorrow to cloud her sunny disposition. “So untimely. So tragic. So deliciously mysterious!”

“You know about that already?”

Mrs. Jasinska gave my brother a cheerful nod. “That lovely Miss Crowe told me all about it.”

“She did?” It took Old Red a moment to stow away his surprise. “Well … it must have been a terrible shock to you, losing a guest like that.”

Mrs. Jasinska nodded again—and, without realizing it, confirmed my brother’s guess. Before that, we hadn’t known whether Curtis was staying at the Columbian or not.

“Oh, yes. It truly is upsetting.” Mrs. Jasinska leaned over her desk and dropped her voice, though there was no one else in sight. “You don’t think he was
murdered
, do you?”

Gustav bent down and took to whispering as well. “Frankly, ma’am, I have my suspicions, which is why my brother and I have been doin’ some pokin’ around. And you know who could be the greatest help to us with that?”

“Who?” Mrs. Jasinska asked breathlessly.

“You. Cuz you’re the only one who could get us a look at—”

The lady was shaking her head before my brother even finished.

“Miss Crowe asked that, too, and I had to give the same answer. I can’t let you into Mr. Curtis’s room. There was a Canadian gentleman who hung himself in two-twenty the first week of the Fair, and the police were ever so irritated with me just because I let some of the other guests in to have a peek. Dear me—the language those officers used! No, I’m afraid that’s out of the question. But I’m sure I can be of service in other ways. Miss Crowe certainly seemed to think so. She asked me oh so many questions. You know, at first I wasn’t sure how I felt about a young lady taking part in your little tournament, but she’s won me over completely. Such a pretty, clever little thing, don’t you think?”

Old Red cleared his throat and looked down to make sure his toes were still attached.

Yes. He did think.

“Would you mind tellin’ us what you told her?” he said.

“Well, as I explained to Miss Crowe, I’m honor-bound to protect my guests’ privacy. But…”

Mrs. Jasinska glanced over her shoulder. A stooped figure had begun shuffling over the sun-bleached lobby carpet. It was Jerzy, the Columbian’s withered, weary-looking bell coot. (It had been many a year since you could have called him a bell
boy
.) He’d emerged from some shadowy corner, where I suspect his employer kept him propped up like a disused broom, and was now trudging toward us with all the speed and spritely vigor of a sleepwalking tortoise. At his current speed, he wouldn’t reach the front desk until around June of 1902.

We were, for all intents and purposes, alone.

“Alright, you talked me into it,” Mrs. Jasinska said. “Actually, it’s rather exciting helping you sleuths with a real case. Do you think that wonderful Mr. Brady will want to question me, too?”

“Feh,” Gustav growled. “I don’t know any
wonderful
Mr. Brady. The only Brady I’ve seen hereabouts is about as wonderful as a dose of—”

I clapped my brother on the back with a forced laugh. “Always joshin’ the competition, this one! ‘Old Funnybone,’ they call him. But all japes aside, ma’am, what is it Miss Crowe wanted to know?”

“Well, mostly she was curious about everyone’s comings and goings last night. I told her the first coming
and
going were both Mr. Curtis: I saw him stagger up to his room in a shocking state around eight thirty, then stagger out again almost immediately.”