World's Greatest Sleuth! (33 page)

“Get down from there this instant,” Tousey demanded, coming closer. Pinkerton was right behind him, and the guards were taking an interest, too.

I squared my feet and clenched my fists. “My brother’s got something to say.”

I just wished he’d hurry up and say it.

Then, at last, he did.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you would give me your attention, please! These proceedings are not yet over! There are two important matters that still need to be seen to! One is fraud, and the other, I’m afraid, is murder!”

33

TWO BULLS IN THE CHINA SHOP

Or, My Brother Holds Court and Unmasks a Pretender to the Throne

There were four hundred
and sixty-seven gasps, three hundred and twenty-eight
My God
s and
Good Lord
s, ninety-five nervous titters, thirteen screams, and four faintings. More or less.

There was also one “Don’t just stand there—get him down!” courtesy of Frank Tousey. It was directed at the nearest guards, who turned, to a man, toward William Pinkerton. As did I.

“Gustav’s laid the cards on the table,” I said. “Best let him play ’em out, wouldn’t you say?”

Just in case he didn’t get the point, I let my eyes dart to the side, toward the reporters clumped up behind him.

Pinkerton had his choice of flaps: whatever Gustav meant to stir up or the two of us tussling with the guards in the middle of the Tiffany Pavilion, and the contest he’d overseen ending with a million or so dollars in property damage. Either way, the whole world would be watching.

“He can have his say,” Pinkerton grated out.

“Thank you, sir,” Old Red said, and then he looked out over the crowd again and got to orating with a boom to his voice I never would’ve guessed he had in him. “Let’s take the fraud first, shall we? A short while ago, everybody in this contest but one went tearin’ straight to the same place: the Midway Plaisance. Our second clues of the day were hidden there. Everyone’s. Includin’ his.” He pointed down at King Brady, who was gaping up at my brother with a strange mixture of hatred and helpless horror on his too-perfect face. “Yet he didn’t hurry out to the Midway right away, as the rest of us did. Nope. We saw him headin’ over to the Wooded Island first. Now, why would he do that?”

“This is ludicrous!” Brady protested. “I made a mistake, that’s all. I went to the Japanese garden on the island when I should have gone to the Javanese settlement on the Midway. Fortunately, I realized where I’d gone wrong before it was too late.”

Gustav shook his head. “I might be inclined to believe you if your ‘mistake’ wasn’t so typical. You’ve been takin’ these little detours all week. Why, the first day of the contest, Miss Larson there tells me, you ended up in a … a private spot when you should’ve been runnin’ for your next clue. And then yesterday, I saw you head right back to the very same…” A touch of color came to my brother’s cheeks as he debated the use of the words “privy” or “john” in his debut as a public speaker. “… uhh … location. Which was why you had to switch up and find a new place to go today.”

“If you won’t shut him up, I will,” Tousey snarled at Pinkerton. Then he turned our way and started a step he never finished.

My hand was on the butt of my gun. My eyes were on him.

“Keep goin’, Brother,” I said.

Gustav cleared his throat and carried on with only the slightest quaver to his voice.

“It should strike us all a mite strange, friends. All week long, this feller’s been shakin’ hands, takin’ bows, everything but kissin’ babies. Yet when the time comes for the contest, he needs solitude all of a sudden. And anytime a camera’s pointed his way, why, he turns his pretty face away while his publisher jumps in front of the lens. It only makes sense if you put it together with a comment the late, lamented Armstrong B. Curtis made Monday night. Mr. Curtis had done him a little snoopin’ on us sleuths, you see, and he got to droppin’ hints as to what skeletons we had hung up our in closets. ‘Ask Mr. Brady about his birthday,’ he said. Which makes me think Curtis had dug that birthday up somehow, and it didn’t fit with what he found before him. Didn’t fit the man. It did fit someone else here, though … and I think it’s time he stepped forward and came clean.”

There was a moment of silence that stretched on forever. It didn’t seem possible so many people could stay so quiet so long. With my brother up on a stepladder smoothly sermonizing for a horde of hundreds, though, I suppose it was hardly the time to say what was impossible and what wasn’t.

“The jig is up, as you yourself have been known to say, sir,” Old Red said, gaze moving slowly over the crowd. “It’d go a long way toward clearin’ all this up if you’d show yourself. Otherwise, what you been up to is gonna get wove in with Mr. Curtis’s death, and I know you wouldn’t wanna make that tangle any worse than it already is.”

“This is ridiculous,” Tousey said. I didn’t need to remind him to shut up, though. Whatever he might’ve said next would’ve been drowned out by the sound of a thousand gasps.

A big, burly, bearded man was slipping under the velvet rope and stepping onto the red carpet about forty yards from us. Even from a distance, I recognized him straight off: It was the Unbearded Man, another fake beard in place on his broad face. A couple Columbian Guards took hesitant steps toward him, but my brother waved them back.

“Let him come on up,” he said. “He should’ve been with us all along.”

A great wave of murmurings arose as the man came closer, growing louder with his every step. Gustav spoke again just when it seemed no single voice could be heard above the clamor.

“Do you wanna introduce yourself, or should I?”

The crowd quieted down.

The Unbearded Man stopped, feet planted wide, back straight. What with the fuzz over his face and his slouch hat pulled low and a black topcoat wrapped around his body, there was little to see of the real him. Just big hands, thick gray eyebrows, and a piercing stare. That was enough to give you the measure of the man, though. He’d been around a while and been through a thing or two and knew how to handle himself. And he wasn’t happy to be where he was now.

“I’ll do it,” he said in a deep, gravelly-gruff voice. He turned his head to the side, speaking to the multitudes behind him without fully showing them his face. “I’m King Brady.”

It was half a minute before the crowd quieted this time.

“I assume the masquerade was Mr. Tousey’s idea,” Old Red said as the din at last died down.

“Yes,” Brady said. He was ignoring Tousey, who fumed at him while the other, younger “King Brady” practically cowered behind his back. “In my line of work, it pays to keep your real looks under wraps. My clients see me, of course. My contacts and the police in New York. But that’s it. What they draw in the magazine … that has nothing to do with me, and that’s how I like it. Tousey knew that. And he knew what he
wished
King Brady looked like. So he found a way for both of us to get what we want.”

“He hired him a … a…”

“Proxy,” I whispered.

“A proxy,” Gustav said. “A Young King Brady to do all the posin’ while the Old King Brady did the real deducifyin’. He picked up the clues, you tried to figure ’em out.”

King Brady (the old, real one) nodded. “It was risky. If that actor there—and that’s what he is, by the way—if he got his face in the papers, someone back in New York was bound to figure out the truth. With Armstrong Curtis stirring up doubt about all us magazine detectives, I couldn’t afford for that to happen. Tousey assured me it wouldn’t come to that, though. I didn’t see any of this as cheating, by the way. It was still my wits pitted against all of yours. If anything, I put myself at a disadvantage, having to work through someone else.”

“I reckon you did, Mr. Brady. And I appreciate that you did you a little detectivin’ after Mr. Curtis died. Followin’ Urias Smythe and whatnot. You turn anything up?”

Brady glanced over at Smythe, who was wearing a blush so deep he looked like an overgrown eggplant. “Nothing I’d care to mention here.”

“Excuse me,” Lucille Larson said, and she walked over to stare up at my brother from beside me at the foot of the ladder. “Is this where we finally get to the murder, Mr. Amlingmeyer?”

I glanced back, fearing I’d see Gustav lose his nerve at last. He’d been doing fine facing things safe from his roost, like a man peeking over the top of a rampart, but perhaps one overinquisitive young lady would finally throw him.

I needn’t have wasted even the half second I spent fretting.

“Indeed it is, miss,” he said with but a here-and-gone peek down at the lady. He was determined to keep the crowd with him, and he knew (because I’d told him as much) that meant making each and every person there feel like he was talking straight to them, up close and one to one. This he immediately got back to doing.

“As you probably know, we had us a tragedy the other night. The Mr. Curtis we’ve been speakin’ of—the gentlemen who whipped up the puzzles for this contest—was found dead over to the Agriculture Building. I won’t go into the particulars, so let’s just say it could’ve been an accident, but there was reason to be suspicious, and our friend Mr. Pinkerton and the Chicago Police Department embarked upon an investigation of … admirable subtlety.”

Our friend Mr. Pinkerton remained stone-faced. I could but hope he appreciated Old Red’s uncharacteristic diplomacy, given that his “investigation” had been so subtle it could barely be said to exist at all.

“My brother and me were a little more blunt about it,” Gustav went on. “Heck, we were two bulls in the china shop. We did get us some results, though. We learned that the killer—and yes, Mr. Curtis was murdered—might have been wearin’ shoes made overseas. We learned he paid a call on Mr. Curtis’s hotel room and threw some very odd objects into the trash, including a box of dead snails and some garlic and a ferry ticket.”

The word “murder” had sent murmurs rippling through our audience, and with the snails and the garlic they grew louder.

Old Red put up his hands.

“Stay with me here, folks,” he said loud and firm, and he swept the crowd with a stern look that would do any schoolmarm proud. It worked, too. Soon there was as much silence as one could expect from a thousand-ish people packed in together.

“Then this very day,” my brother continued, “we learned that the killer has a way with a false beard, like just about everyone else around here, it seems, and that he’s wearin’ a brown coat. But none of that’s nearly so instructive, as a certain English sleuth might say, as what happened right here not ten minutes ago.”

Gustav looked around the hall again, and until he spoke there was such a hush a mouse fart would’ve seemed like the roar of a cannon.

“No one won. If the killer did away with Mr. Curtis out of anger or a thirst for revenge or what have you, why go to his room and mess with the man’s things? And if he was hopin’ to win the competition by gettin’ an early peek at the clues, which were sittin’ right there atop a dresser … well, why didn’t he? Why would we have a four-way tie? What was the killer after? Miz-yer Valmont?”

The Frenchman was still standing a few yards off, where we’d abandoned him a while before, and his eyes popped wide at the sound of his name.

“Yes?”

“This morning at that little breakfast of yours, you said the clues you’ve been gettin’ are in French—and it’s been gettin’ worse as the week went on.”

“
Oui
. Yes. It is true.”

“So the first day the French was pretty good?”

“Yes.
Très bon
.”

“And today?”

“Maddy-NING. I could barely make from it head or tay-ELS.”

Gustav nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, I understand the feelin’. And you know what, folks? The French in Miz-yer Valmont’s clues wasn’t the only thing that got worse as the week went on. The clues themselves got dumber and dumber, even though Mr. Curtis warned us the night he died that things would be gettin’
trickier
. Well, it’s obvious what happened—although I didn’t see it till those snails pointed the way.”

Old Red pointed over at the golden egg Pinkerton still held in his hands.

“Yesterday, that was hidden in the Mining Building near a copy of the Statue of Liberty carved outta salt. Now, I’ll admit I ain’t the most far-traveled or wide-read man, but I do know this: The Statue of Liberty is on an island you can only reach by boat, and it came from France—where, I learned earlier this week, snails in garlic and butter are actually considered food—and salt causes snails to shrivel up and die. So that box with the snail shells and the ferry ticket and the garlic? That was part of a puzzle Curtis thunk up that never got used. He didn’t mean for us to be runnin’ around after puns and bad poems all week. He was gonna scatter around real clues, set up little scenes or some such. We’ll never really know, cuz the killer threw all that out and whipped up his own riddles based on what Curtis gave us the first day. Only his French wasn’t as good as Curtis’s, and it—and the riddles themselves—only got worse through the course of what must’ve been a very long night of writin’. So there we go. We’ve got half the ‘Why?’ figured. The killer wanted Curtis out of the way so he could muck with the contest. Yet that still doesn’t give us the other half: ‘To what end?’ ”

My brother took yet another long, silent look around. It wasn’t that he was getting cocky with his dramatic pauses, though. I figured he was starting to wonder—as was I—how much longer we’d have to drag this out. If we were lucky, the last piece of the puzzle would be handed over wrapped in ribbons any second. On the other hand, if we weren’t lucky—which is to say, if things went as per usual—we’d end up with more egg on our faces than a whole henhouse could produce in a month.

“Sherlock Holmes had him a rule for gettin’ to the heart of dark deeds,” Gustav said. “Accordin’ to him, the question you need to ask yourself is this: ‘Who is it who profits by it?’ Now here, you could say, ‘Nobody! No one won the contest.’ But I’d say that’s lookin’ at it out the wrong window, cuz there’s other directions to come at a profit. Those of you who’ve been followin’ the contest from the beginning know the egg’s been hidden in a different building off the Court of Honor each day. Yet today, for the first time, we came back to somewhere we’d already been before. This building—and not just that, but the part of this building that’s home to the most valuable single thing in all the White City, so far as I know.”