World's Greatest Sleuth!

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Thanks.”

  Old Red snatched the envelope away, spun on his heel, and made a beeline for the doors.

  “But … but…”

  “Sorry, folks—we’re in a bit of a hurry,” I said. “Need a picture for the folks back home before we go?”

  I threw one arm around Mr. President, the other around the wide-eyed matron beside him.

  “Fire away,” I told the photographer.

  He pushed the camera button, there was a blinding flash, and then I was gone in a literal puff of smoke.

  I caught up to my brother outside. He’d already ripped the envelope open and pulled out yet another small, stiff card. I took it and read out the following:

  Large shrinks to small

  With the right point of view

  Just as small turns to large

  With a lens to look through.

  So for giants so tiny

  You can’t see them by eye

  Go to the biggest of biggerers

  And look to the sky.

  “Tiny giants?” Old Red fumed. “The biggest of biggerers? This is bullshit!”

  “No, it’s not,” said Basil, the young fellow who’d been pushing me around. “It’s obvious.”

  “Yeah,” said Al, Gustav’s wheelchair man.

  They were resting in their chairs at the bottom of the steps, and as we came down to join them they looked at each other and spoke in unison.

  “The Yerkes telescope.”

  “The what?” Old Red asked.

  “The world’s biggest telescope,” said Basil.

  “Right in the middle of Columbia Avenue,” said Al.

  “Over in the Liberal Arts Building,” said Basil.

  “We can have you there in five minutes,” said Al.

  “For two more dollars,” said Basil.

  “Apiece,” said Al.

  “Why, you little—” said I.

  Basil jerked his chin at a man in a dark overcoat scurrying down the path toward the North Dakota Building. “Hey, you’re lucky we’re still here at all. That guy just offered us two bucks to go with him.”

  The man peered back over his shoulder just long enough to give us a glimpse of bushy black beard.

  “He tried to hire both of you?” Old Red asked. “What for?”

  Al shrugged. “He didn’t say. He just wanted us to leave before you—”

  “But you didn’t so thank you so let’s go!” I said, sprinting for Basil’s wheelchair.

  The young men sprang to their feet, but Basil was shaking his head as he did so.

  “We flipped a coin,” he told me. “You’re with Al now.”

  “Well,” I said to Al as I plopped myself in his chair, “I assume that means you won.”

  “Yeah, right,” Al groaned, and off we went.

  Basil and Al took us west past more grandiose state buildings and the imposing colonnades of the Fine Arts Museum before swinging south through a whole new stretch of wonders I won’t catalog here except to impart my general impressions.

  “Whoa! What in the—? Oh, my. Is that really a—? Golly. Egad!”

  And so on.

  Basil and Al were as good as their word, reaching the massive Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building in mere minutes. Yet it took minutes more just to get to the right entrance.

  “Telescope … south … end,” poor Al gasped as we rolled along the loooooooooooooooooong eastern edge of the building.

  To the southwest, near a canal-spanning footbridge back to the Court of Honor, I could see the very bandstand from which we’d started. We’d traveled in a huge loop through the White City, ending up not a hundred paces from where we’d begun.

  The gazebo was deserted now, the crowd and the band and Pinkerton and Smythe and all the rest of them nowhere in sight.

  “This … is … it,” Basil said, staggering to a stop.

  Al just let my chair go and bent over panting as I coasted the last few feet to the doors.

  “Thanks, boys! We’d have been lost without you!”

  “We … noticed,” Al said.

  I hopped from my chair and stuffed my hand in my pocket.

  My stiff, scratchy, empty pocket.

  “Oh, no.”

  Basil and Al shot each other the same weary-eyed glower.

  “Let us guess,” said Basil.

  “You left your money in your other pants,” said Al.

  “Well, I did!”

  “Here’s all we got for now,” Old Red said, and he smacked what looked like three nickels, a penny, and some crumbs into Basil’s hand. “We’re good for the rest, though, don’t you fret.”

  “Yeah!” I called over my shoulder, following my brother as he pushed through the doors. “We’ll come back and pay you soon as we’re done winnin’ in here!”

  Unfortunately, the Liberal Arts and Manufactures Building isn’t just notable for its size. Its acoustics are pretty awe-inspiring, too. Or, in this case, nausea-inducing.

  My last words—“soon as we’re done winnin’ in here!”—echoed out through the vast cavern of glass and steel, turning hundreds of heads our way just as the band nearby launched into the French national anthem.

  Ahead of us, looming up over the crowd, was an immense spyglass atop a tower three stories tall. A spiral staircase wound its way up to it, six figures spaced out along the steps.

  King Brady at the bottom.

  Diana and Colonel Crowe halfway up.

  Armstrong B. Curtis and William Pinkerton up a little higher.

  And at the top, one hand clasped in Pinkerton’s, the other cradling a gleaming golden egg the size of a brick, was the Frenchman, Eugene Valmont.

  7

  MISS LARSON

  Or, A Newshound Appears on Our Trail, and She Seems to Smell Blood

  I longed to creep into a dark corner and quietly disappear, but there was no such corner to creep to. The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building was (and remains) the largest man-made structure in the world, and the interior was vast and open, as if God had reached down from His cloud to plop a giant birdcage over an entire town. True, I could’ve darted into the art gallery to our left or the display of German clockworks to our right or any of a dozen other showrooms within quick dodging distance. Hell, I could’ve simply whirled around and bolted out the door. Gustav and I were still getting stares aplenty, though, and turning tail would only multiply our humiliation a hundredfold. So I stood my ground and applauded for Eugene Valmont, and Old Red did the same.

  “Don’t worry, Brother,” I said through a glued-on grin. “We’ll have other chances to come out ahead. There’s three more days of this, remember?”

  “Three more days of this? And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Ummm … yeah?”

  The band wrapped up “La Marseillaise,” and the crowd started to scatter in every direction.

  “Round two begins tomorrow at noon in the Court of Honor!” Armstrong B. Curtis bellowed. “Don’t miss it!”

  “Come on,” my brother muttered. “Let’s get outta here before—”

  “Hey, Deadwood Dick!” a man called out. “Better luck tomorrow!”

  “Yeah!” someone else threw in. “See if you can’t find that egg instead of just getting it all over your face!”

  There was a smattering of laughs as we fled for the doors.

  “Otto! Mr. Amlingmeyer! Wait!”

  I looked back to find a big, black-clad blob clumping after us.

  Urias Smythe.

  We stopped just long enough for him to catch up. “Gimme six bucks,” I said, hoping to head off another “I’m dooooooooomed.” “We got us some expenses.”

  “You’ve got expenses? Do you realize what all this is costing me? How much I’m paying for the honor of rack and ruin? I can’t afford to—”

  “Please, Mr. Smythe,” I sighed. “Just think of it as an advance until I’m wearin’ my own britches again.”

  Smythe pr
oduced his billfold and pulled out six ones with such obvious pain you’d have thought he was peeling away strips of his own skin.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And just so’s you know, this is money well spent. You wouldn’t want people sayin’ your champions was deadbeats, would you?”

  I stepped outside looking for Basil and Al and found them talking to the willowy, fair-haired woman King Brady had squired away from the bandstand—Miss Larson, he’d called her.

  “Deadbeats,” Al was telling her.

  “And none too bright,” Basil added.

  “They wouldn’t have made it as far as they did without us,” Al said.

  “And what’s the story with the big one’s clothes?” Basil asked.

  “It looks like someone shellacked him,” Al said.

  Miss Larson was encouraging them with nods and mmm-hmms while she wrote down their every word.

  I walked up waving the bills in my hands like little flags. “Uhhhh, fellers?”

  “Oh,” said Basil.

  “Oh,” said Al.

  They both looked ashamed. Which didn’t stop them from taking the money.

  “Well,” said one.

  “We’d better get back to work,” said the other.

  And they grabbed their wheeled chairs and went whizzing away.

  “As you can see,” I said to Miss Larson, “deadbeats we are not.”

  I couldn’t help noticing she didn’t write that down.

  Though she still looked pretty, up close I noticed she wasn’t simply slender but almost gaunt. She seemed to be but a few years older than me—somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five, I’d have guessed—yet she looked somehow withered, desiccated, like all the juice had been baked right out of her.

  “Otto Amlingmeyer,” I said with a tip of the Stetson. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “You haven’t made it yet,” the lady replied dryly. She put pencil to notepad and leaned to look past me. “Any thoughts on today’s outcome, Mr. Smythe?”

  Smythe stepped up to join us, Old Red lagging a little behind, moving slow and wary. Women of a certain age—approximately fifteen to fifty—tend to spook my brother, and he looked like he wanted to give this one the kind of distance you’d usually reserve for something with a rattle at the end of its tail.

  “I couldn’t be more pleased with the turnout,” Smythe said. “We had more than eight hundred spectators on hand, by my count.”

  “Five hundred twenty-nine by my count,” Miss Larson said, “but that’s not what I was asking about. I’m wondering how it felt to see your ‘sleuths’ come in last.”

  She hung those quotes around “sleuths” with just the slightest pucker of her thin lips. Other than that, her face remained utterly blank, her voice flat.

  “That … well … I … uhhhh…” Smythe wiped a hankie across his sweat-beaded brow, then tried again. “It’s … uhhh … well … I…”

  “What Mr. Smythe’s trying to say,” I cut in, “is that you seem to have overlooked something, miss. My brother and I did not come in last. Boothby Greene, I believe, has yet to put in an appearance.”

  Miss Larson conceded my point with a little tilt of the head.

  “So,” she said to Smythe, “how did it feel seeing your ‘sleuths’ come in second to last?” She swung her dead-eyed gaze back my way. “Better?”

  “Much.”

  “Actually, miss, I got questions for you,” Old Red said. He’d been half-hiding behind Smythe, but now he stepped out and managed to drag his gaze up from his own toes. “Like, for one, are you from McClure’s Magazine?”

  The lady nodded. “I’m Lucille Larson, McClure’s special correspondent. However did you guess?”

  Gustav looked irked by the suggestion that he’d stoop to guessing when a thing might be deduced.

  “You’re obviously a reporter,” he said, “and it only seemed natural McClure’s would want someone here to write up their contest for ’em. Which leads me to my next question: How’d you feel findin’ out Mr. Curtis was runnin’ things? It don’t seem like him makin’ up the rules was in the plan anyone agreed to, and as I understand it he’s been known to write for another magazine.”

  “How did I feel?” The lady shrugged in a listless way that suggested she rarely felt much of anything. “Curious, mostly. I am a journalist. That’s my nature. For instance, I keep wondering: Did something happen to your eyes or are those spectacles just an affectation?”

  Old Red’s fingers—slightly atremble, I noticed—brushed over the rims of his shaded cheaters.

  “Yeah, something happened. But I get by.”

  “What a relief.” Miss Larson turned back to Smythe, pencil hovering over paper again. “So you didn’t have to replace a boy detective with a blind one, then?”

  Smythe twitched as if his plush bottom had been pricked with a pin. “Yes, well, I, ummmm … ah!”

  Something off to the north, in the shadow of the vast building behind us, slapped a smile of relief onto the man’s blubbery face.

  “So you’ve joined us at last!” he crowed.

  The rest of us turned to find Sherlock Holmes strolling up to join us. More or less. (The latter, Armstrong B. Curtis probably would’ve said, if he could but prove it.)

  It was the Englishman, Boothby Greene.

  “I get the uneasy feeling,” he said, “that you’re not waiting here to congratulate me on my imminent victory.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Smythe chuckled. “You’ll have to do better tomorrow if you want to make good on your publisher’s investment.”

  “As much as I appreciate Mr. Blackheath-Murray’s patronage, it’s not him I’m worried about. It’s what will happen to me back in England if I let a Frenchman win. I hope you’re not about to tell me that it was M. Valmont who—?”

  Smythe nodded, grinning.

  “Ah, well,” Greene sighed. “I can but hope tomorrow’s challenge proves a better showcase for my humble talents. Riddles and trivia don’t often come into play in real detective work. Observation and ratiocination—those are the province of a true sleuth.”

  “Hear, hear!” I cheered. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Miss Larson said.

  I looked over at my brother, wondering why he didn’t weigh in: He was passing up the chance to both pontificate on detecting and rag on my big mouth, which seemed mighty unlike him.

  Old Red hadn’t even been listening, though. He was staring at Diana Crowe.

  She and her father (and I’ll pause here for a final father!?!) had just left the Liberal Arts Building and were headed for the footbridge to the Court of Honor. If they’d noticed us, they hadn’t let on.

  A hand planted itself on my back and began pushing me the same direction as the Crowes.

  “Well, I’m sure you have some questions for Mr. Greene here,” Smythe said to Miss Larson. He put his other hand on my brother’s back, but Gustav’s glare had him snatching it away so fast you’d have thought he’d touched a hot griddle. “We need to be toddling along. There’s that … man we need to see about that … thing. Remember?”

  “Yeah, right,” I dutifully replied. “Can’t keep the man with the thing waitin’.”

  “I understand entirely,” Miss Larson said. From the way her pinched face seemed, for just a moment, on the verge of a smirk, I believed she did.

  “Oh,” Greene said as we started walking away, “I don’t think any of you were on hand for the formal invitation this morning. Blackheath-Murray is hosting a dinner to celebrate the commencement of the contest. At Rector’s Restaurant, I believe it’s called. Seven o’clock. All the other contestants and sponsors will be there.”

  He stole a glance back at the bridge. Diana and the colonel were now halfway across.

  “Including your friends the Crowes,” Greene said with just the slightest arch of an eyebrow. Apparently, the man didn’t just look like Holmes: He could see like him, too. “I hope you’ll join us.”r />
  Smythe never stopped moving toward the bridge. “Well, it’s been such a busy day…”

  “I’m looking forward to observing a dinner party with so many notable detectives,” Miss Larson said. “If the Amlingmeyers weren’t to come, it would be such a conspicuous omission, don’t you think?”

  “As if we’d pass up an invitation to Rector’s!” Smythe said, still back-stepping away. “Until tonight, then!”

  He finally whirled around and scurried off. I scurried along beside him while Old Red fell behind, unwilling to commit himself to more than a trudge.

  “You wasn’t worried we’d embarrass you, were you?” I asked Smythe.

  He let that slide by without reply.

  “Blast it all,” he muttered instead. “I’ll have to get Cohn back again.”

  “Who’s Cohn?”

  “Your tailor.”

  “He ain’t my tailor,” Gustav said.

  “Oh, so you’ll be wearing your own tuxedo, then?” Smythe threw over his shoulder. “Because you’re not getting into Rector’s without one.”

  “Well, then it’s high time we were tuxed,” I answered for Old Red. “Right, Brother?”

  “Feh.”

  “Feh?” Smythe turned to me for a translation. “What does that mean, anyway?”

  “It means ‘Anything you say, boss,’ ” I replied.

  “It means ‘Feh,’ ” Gustav said.

  He was still staring ahead, at the Crowes. They were on the other side of the canal now. The colonel had his arm wrapped around his daughter’s again, and he didn’t seem to be escorting her so much as chaining her to his side.

  “Looks like Pa Crowe’s keepin’ a tight rein on his daughter,” I said. “Don’t expect we’ll get many chances to socialize. Be a shame to pass one up when we had it.”

  Behind me, Old Red grumbled something I couldn’t quite catch.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “I said,” my brother growled back, “anything you say, boss.”

  8

  PRÉLUDES

  Or, Our First Brush with Haute Cuisine Ends with Several Low Blows

  Take your average badger on a bad day, poke him in the eye, step on his toes, and wrap him in swaddling clothes, tight. Then put chipped ice down his back. I guarantee you, he’ll look happier than my brother in a tuxedo.