World's Greatest Sleuth! (23 page)

“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 your 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.”

Old Red squirmed like a worm on the hook.

Then, just like that, he stopped. His spine straightened, so he wasn’t cringing anymore, and he looked over at the lady with a gaze that stayed steady.

“Two days ago, the most interestin’ gent around was King Brady, am I right?”

“I followed him the first day of the contest, yes. For reasons I’m sure are quite obvious. He’s by far the most famous detective here.”

“What’d you think of his sleuthin’?”

Miss Larson shrugged. “I didn’t really see any. He just ran around a lot.”

“Well, from what you could see, did it seem like the man lived up to his reputation?”

“Not for a second. I’d say the man’s a conceited fraud.”

“You mean like Nick Carter? Just a pipe dream?”

“Uhhhh, Brother,” I said. “That’d be kinda hard to pull off, wouldn’t it? You know. Seein’ as the man’s
right down them steps
.”

Miss Larson was shaking her head. “No, no,” she said to Gustav. “Brady’s a real detective, alright. You see stories about him in the legitimate press from time to time. News articles, I mean, not entertainments. He’s a private investigator in New York City. That’s fact. It’s just that Tousey’s built him up to be the American Sherlock Holmes when there’s nothing remotely clever about him.”

“Or brave,” Old Red said, no doubt thinking of the way Brady went weak at the knee when we stumbled upon Curtis’s body the day before.

A great “Hurrah!” went up from the crowd, and the band launched into Sousa’s “The Gladiator.”

King Brady was at last headed up the stairs to join us on the bandstand. He paused every couple steps to wave or doff his hat, the cheers growing louder and wilder with each repetition.

“Go get ’em, King!”

“We’re behind you all the way, King!”

“Show us what you got, King!”

“Yeah,” Gustav muttered. “Come and show us what you got.”

No doubt about it, King Brady was the people’s favorite.

In a very different way, it seemed, he’d become my brother’s, too.

25

THE CONTEST (ROUND THREE)

Or, My Brother’s Suspicions Come to a Head, and I Get In over Mine

Before long, Boothby Greene,
Blackheath-Murray, and Eugene Valmont followed King Brady and Frank Tousey up onto the bandstand. As soon as all us contestants were lined up, Pinkerton stepped to the podium and addressed the crowd.

If his introductory speech Monday had been halfhearted, he was down to quarterhearted now. He re-presented the competitors with all the zeal of a schoolboy giving a report on the benefits of eating spinach, then asked for a moment of silence “for those whom tragedy has kept from being with us today.” The silence wasn’t particularly silent, though, what with the splashings of the nearby fountains and occasional cries along the lines of “We love you, King!” After all of ten seconds, it was over, and a great cheer went up as Pinkerton produced the clues, held them aloft, and turned to hand them out.

The second our envelope was in my hand, I tore it open and read out the neatly typed message within.

Then I asked God what He had against us.

Foul swamp! In thy slow, oozing flow

Of murky and muddied water,

Black as the grave where no light goes,

No thing can grow; so we ask how

Leviathan can say “Meow”

And sire there such monstrous daughters

“Sweet Jesus. It don’t even make enough sense to be a proper riddle.”

“It don’t matter,” Old Red said.

“It don’t?”

“Nope.”

To the right of us, Valmont, Greene, and the Crowes were all still puzzling over their own clues, but—much to the delight of the masses—King Brady was on the move, marching with quick, certain purpose toward the stairs.