World's Greatest Sleuth!

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Did you see anything indicating how Curtis might have died?” Greene asked.

  “Oh, that was clear as day. He was mushed into the cheese pretty good. Mouth and nose totally covered. Ain’t no way the man could breathe. Somebody suffocated him.”

  “Why ‘Somebody suffocated him?’ Why not simply ‘He suffocated’?”

  “Cuz cheese ain’t quicksand, Mr. Greene. A feller ain’t gonna smother in it without havin’ him some help.”

  “I must disagree,” Valmont said. “In one of my own cases in Frawnce, a diaboli-KELL master chef killed his wife by drugging her din-NAIR and arranging for her to collapse upon and asphyxilate in a carefully placed blancmange. He would have escaped ju-STESS if I had not noticed the telltale odor of bitter almonds in the coq au vin. Rather than face the guillotine, he later killed himself with a poisoned beignet slipped to him by his love-AIR in a basket of … but I digress.”

  “You sure as hell do,” Old Red said under his breath.

  “I propose a similar scenario for M. Curtis—minus a crime,” Valmont went on obliviously. “Our Puzzlema-STAIR came here last night to lay his egg. He was, as we all saw, quite detoxicated. So, when he climbed or fell down into the cheese recepti-KELL…” The Frenchman waved his hands before his face and fluttered his eyelids, wobbling from side to side. “He was overcome by che-DARE fumes, fainted, and—voilà—suffocated in cheese.”

  There was a long silence while we chewed this theory over. It left a bad taste in my mouth, though I couldn’t say why. Fortunately, someone else could.

  “Allow me to remind you, monsieur,” Diana said. “We aren’t talking about the Mammoth Camembert or the Mammoth Brie. Mr. Curtis died atop the Mammoth Cheddar. And you of all people should see why that makes a difference.”

  “Ah! Touché!” Valmont offered the lady a little bow. “You are not just a detec-TEEV, you are a true connoisseur.”

  “At the risk of sounding like neither,” I said, “what’s so special about cheddar?”

  “It is zeamy ard,” Valmont explained … if that particular grouping of sounds could be said to explain anything.

  “Semihard,” Diana explained with a good bit more success. “A nonsoft cheese.”

  “Well, there you go!” Old Red crowed. “Curtis’s face is buried in the stuff! How could that happen on its own?”

  For backing, he turned to the closest thing we had on hand to Sherlock Holmes: Boothby Greene. Yet the Englishman shook his head.

  “I hate to point out the fly in the ointment, as it were, but the answer to your question is ‘Very easily.’ We would consider butter hard when it’s first taken from the icebox. Given time at room temperature, however, even so light a thing as a sprig of parsley might sink into it. Lying there as poor Curtis is—and has been for half a day, presumably—we might very well see the same effect. After all, it’s semihard cheese we have here, not parmigiana or pecorino.”

  “Not what or what?” I asked.

  Valmont looked at me sadly. “They are more chee-ZES, mon ami. You do not have them in the West?”

  “Friend,” I said, “where I come from, there’s two kinds of cheese and two kinds only: the kind that comes from a cow and the kind that comes from a goat.”

  Valmont’s pity turned to horror.

  “Jehoshaphat!” Colonel Crowe cried out. “This is getting us nowhere!”

  Diana threw a glance at Gustav, her big brown eyes widening ever so slightly. She’d handed him a chance to show off—perhaps win her father over—and so far all he’d done was open up a debate about the relative hardness and softness of exotic cheeses. He’d have to do a lot better if he was going to prove himself the smartest man there.

  “The colonel’s right,” he said. “Let’s set the cheese talk aside, for now. There’s something else that needs figurin’. Something mighty peculiar I noticed about the body.”

  “Yes?” Diana asked eagerly.

  “When I swung in close to Curtis’s head,” my brother said, “I smelled dung.”

  Diana winced, while her father rolled his eyes.

  “I hate to be undelicate,” Valmont said, “but when a man dies, certain inavoidable processes are to be expec-TED. The result I like to call ‘le parfum de la mort.’ The sickly-sweet smell of death.”

  “Hell’s bells, I know what a stiff smells like,” my brother fumed. “Ain’t nothin’ ‘sickly sweet’ to it, if it’s fresh. Anyway, I’m talkin’ about Curtis’s head, not his trousers. I’m tellin’ you, I got a whiff of dung. Cow dung.”

  “Could it have been a hair oil or pomade of some kind?” Greene asked.

  “You ever heard of a pomade that smells like cow shit?” Old Red snapped back. He was growing so vexed, even his hero’s stand-in wasn’t spared a splash of acid.

  “If you please, sir!” The colonel jerked his head at Diana. “Watch your language around the lady!”

  Gustav swiped a hand at the man. “Aww, she’s heard a lot worse outta me.”

  Diana’s shoulders slumped, as if she wanted to pull herself down into her dress like a turtle retreating into its shell.

  “Perhaps what you smelled was the cheese going rotten,” Greene mused. “The odor of it is quite overpowering. I can only imagine what it would be like up close. In fact, I’m surprised you could detect any scent at all other than—”

  “Mr. Greene,” Old Red said, “I’ve been around cattle all my life, and I’ve spent many a looooonnnnng stretch ridin’ behind herds thousands strong. So I’ve come across more cow pies than there are stars in the sky. Bury my head in cheese or stick garlic up my nose, it won’t matter. You put a whiff of plop from a hay-fed Hereford anywhere near me, I’ll know it. And that’s exactly what I got a whiff of.”

  “Oh, well, when you put it like that, it makes perfect sense,” Colonel Crowe sneered. “After all, what other deduction could we expect from the Holmes of the Range?” He swung his snarl on Diana. “Curtis was murdered by a cow!”

  Dozens of tourists had ambled past since we’d started our little impromptu caucus. The ones nearby now stopped to stare.

  “You are a card, Colonel.” I guffawed for their benefit. “Now let me tell you the one about the chicken and the traveling salesman!”

  The tourists went on their way again.

  “All I know is what I smelled,” Gustav said, quiet but firm. “And I smelled manure.”

  “Of course you did,” Colonel Crowe growled. “Because you’re full of it.”

  My brother let loose a gruff, aggravated sigh and once again turned to Greene for support. And once again, he didn’t get it.

  “I’m afraid I’m also unconvinced,” Greene said, and he went on to roll out one of the (in my opinion) crumbiest of Sherlock Holmes’s crumbs of wisdom, intoning it with somber, sonorous solemnity like he was reading scripture from the pulpit. “Let us not forget: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ It’s safe to say that a killer cow is impossible while death by one’s leavings would be highly improbable, at the very least. M. Valmont’s theory, on the other hand, doesn’t even strike me as unlikely. An intoxicated man met an untimely and undignified end. It’s plain to see which way Occam’s Razor would cut. That leaves us with an explanation that is, perhaps, disappointingly prosaic, for those in our line. Yet we shouldn’t let a predilection for labyrinthine convolution blind us to the obvious conclusion.”

  I doubt my brother understood half of what the man said, but the gist he got, and he gave it a shake of the head and a quiet “Feh.”

  “Our English friend puts it very well,” Valmont said. “If you were ho-PING, M. Amlingmeyer, that we would lunch an inquery of our own, I must disappoint you. I am a policeman myself. I will not interfere in an official investigation. Besides…” He drew up his shoulders in a rueful shrug. “I do not think there is anything to investigate.”

  “Fine,” Gustav spat. “I guess some of us came here to play games, and some came ready for re
al detective work.” He turned to Greene and threw his own Holmes quote at him. “ ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.’ I say it’s too early to write this off as an accident. Especially when what little data we do have is so damned strange.”

  “I fear the data might not be the problem so much as its source,” Diana said.

  Old Red frowned at her. Or not at her so much as the truth she spoke.

  No one was taking his clues seriously because he alone could vouch for them. And no one was taking him seriously because he was … him.

  “We’ll have to see what we can do about that,” he said.

  The “we” there wasn’t lost on Colonel Crowe.

  “Yes. You and your brother do that,” he said, taking Diana by the arm and tugging her away. “There are still obscure clues to hunt for. Fanciful deductions to make. Heifers to round up for questioning. We’ll leave you to it while we prepare for tomorrow’s contest.”

  “Our Puzzlemaster’s dead,” my brother said as the colonel and his daughter walked off. “How can you be so sure there’s even gonna be a competition tomorrow?”

  Colonel Crowe never looked back. Diana did, though—just long enough to throw us a look that seemed to promise … well, something. It wasn’t much to cling to, but I grabbed it with both hands.

  Greene and Valmont soon peeled themselves away as well, the two of them heading off together toward the long, column-studded Peristyle that separated the east end of the Grand Basin from Lake Michigan beyond. Greene, at least, had the decency to offer apologies before leaving. He knew he was letting my brother down.

  “So much for our posse,” I said as the Crowes receded to pinpricks in one direction, Greene and Valmont in the other.

  “Yeah, well … us bein’ on our own ain’t nothing new.”

  “Nope. I do believe I’m tirin’ of it, though.”

  Gustav turned to look at me. It was the first time I’d been able to look him full in the eyes in quite a while, and it was almost a shock to see the soft sky blue of them again. For some reason, I’d remembered them as steely gray.

  “Me, too,” Old Red said.

  I was about to ask him about those eyes of his—why he’d kept them hidden behind smoked glass so long after he had to. Somehow, it didn’t seem like the time or place for that, though, and instead I just said, “What next?”

  Before my brother could answer, a heavy tromping sound turned us both back toward the Agriculture Building. A gaggle of Columbian Guards was trotting inside lugging what looked like stretchers—a lot of them.

  “That,” Gustav said. And off he went.

  12

  WALLS

  Or, Pinkerton Tries to Avoid a Big Stink, and Gustav and I Go Hunting for One

  Only two of the Guardsmen were carrying a stretcher, it turned out. The rest were toting dressing screens, which they proceeded to set up in a circle around the top of the Mammoth Cheese from Canada.

  “They don’t want an audience when they fish out the body,” Old Red muttered.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d seen it?” someone said, and a thin, wraith-like figure popped out from behind a display of Professor Pertwee’s Health Miracle Nut Butter.

  My brother and I jumped halfway to the ceiling with a simultaneous, near-harmonious “Yahhh!”

  “Miss Larson,” I said after we’d taken a moment to catch our breath and climb back into our skin, “what are you doin’ lurkin’ around here?”

  “The same thing as you: keeping an eye on the cheese,” the lady reporter replied. “Now what about the body?”

  “Why would you think we got a look at it?” Gustav asked.

  “I talked to some of the spectators who were still milling around. They said you two were on top of the Mammoth Cheese before the Columbian Guards sealed it off. Diana Crowe and King Brady, too. Funny none of you told me that.”

  “Well, you didn’t give us a chance, did you?” I said. “You went runnin’ off like a bloodhound on the scent the second you heard someone was dead. What were we to do?”

  Miss Larson gave me a long, hard look that made it clear she knew I was full of crap but felt it beneath her to come right out and say it.

  “It’s Curtis, isn’t it?” she said.

  She brought up her notepad and pencil and held them at the ready.

  “Why does it chill me to the bone every time you do that?” I asked.

  “What makes you think Mr. Curtis is dead?” asked Gustav.

  “Really,” Miss Larson said, “must you two answer my every question with more questions?”

  I blinked her at innocently. “Oh … are we doin’ that?”

  She gave me a longer, harder look that said it was beneath her to knee me in the huevos, too, but she was tempted to do it anyway.

  “What have we here?” Old Red said, and he nodded toward yet another Guardsman hustling past. With him was a grim-faced fellow in a dark business suit. The guards at the bottom of the steps didn’t just swing aside to let the gent up. They hopped out of his way like a couple toreadors dodging a charging bull.

  “Well, well,” Miss Larson said as the man went clomping up the stairs. “Talk about the big cheese.”

  Gustav and I looked at each other.

  He frowned. I shrugged.

  “The big cheese?” I asked Miss Larson.

  “Oh, no. You still haven’t answered any of my questions. It’s time for a little quid pro quo.” The lady narrowed her eyes. “That means tit for tat. A deal. An answer for an answer.”

  Old Red rubbed at his mustache a moment before giving her a nod.

  I brought up my right hand, spit in the palm, then held the hand out toward Miss Larson.

  “Put ’er there, pardner,” I drawled.

  Miss Larson stared at me with such disgust you’d have thought I was offering her a handful of moldy lard.

  “We know what quid pro quo means,” I told her. (And it was even half true, for I knew.)

  Point made, I reached for a hankie to clean off my hand—only realizing then I didn’t have one on me. I ended up wiping my palm on the inside of my coat pocket as surreptitiously as I could.

  “I’ve had bad luck with tits for tat before,” Gustav said. “So if you don’t mind, I’ll do my askin’ first.” He jerked his head at the Mammoth Cheese. “What makes you so sure that’s Curtis?”

  Miss Larson accepted my brother’s terms without a blink.

  “He was missing this morning, for one thing. For another, the egg was found up there—I hear the Crowes were today’s winners—and that means he was up there, too, at some point. And the way Curtis was acting last night, it would hardly come as a surprise to learn he fell victim to some kind of accident.”

  “You mean accident or”—Old Red gave the lady an exaggerated wink—“ ‘accident’?”

  Miss Larson just stared at him, her lips pressed tight.

  “Alright. Yeah. It was Curtis,” my brother said. “He was lyin’ inside the tub, facedown, almost like he drowned. Now … my turn again. Who was that feller who just went up the cheese?”

  “Daniel Burnham, the Exposition’s director of works. And I’ll give you a little more for free. You can bet he and Pinkerton are going to do everything in their power to keep Curtis’s death under wraps, at least until the fair’s over. The Exposition Company’s got less than a week to grab as much cash as it can before going out in a blaze of glory. The directors, the vendors, the mayor—none of them will want to see these last days tainted. Now. Me again.”

  Miss Larson started to turn back toward the Mammoth Cheddar, then changed her mind and squinted at Old Red’s face, instead.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Excuse me?” my brother said.

  “Why come back here? Why ask questions? Why care?”

  “A man’s died under mysterious circumstances,” I said. “We’re sleuths. What else we gonna do?”

  “I don’t see any of the other sleuths here.”

  I s
hrugged. “They don’t find what happened so mysterious.”

  “That still doesn’t answer my question.” Miss Larson turned back to my brother. “Why do you care?”

  “I liked the man,” Gustav said.

  Miss Larson nodded. “Ahh, I see. Because you worshipped at the same altar. Still, you barely knew him, correct? It’s not like Armstrong B. Curtis was your friend.”

  “No … but I reckon we might have us a common enemy.”

  “What does that mean? You’re worried the killer’s going to come after you next? Why should he do that?”

  “We don’t know why Curtis was killed, so we don’t know what the killer was after—or if he’s got it yet.”

  “But by openly pursuing an investigation, wouldn’t you be provoking the killer, assuming there is one? Or is that part of your plan?”

  “Hey. Yeah.” I turned on my brother. “What she said.”

  Old Red shook his head. “Time for my next question. What do you know about Curtis, Miss Larson?”

  The lady took in a deep breath. “He’s from California. He’s an attorney. He’s made an obsessive study of the cases of Sherlock Holmes. He’s made an obsessive study of the rivals of Sherlock Holmes. He’s written an exposé of Nick Carter for Scribner’s, and he might be planning another article along the same lines. He also might be crazy. And all of this should have been in the past tense, because he’s dead. That’s everything I know. Was there ever anything really wrong with your eyes?”

  The way Miss Larson went sliding right into her next question caught my brother off guard. He seemed to remember at last that this was a young woman we’d been conversing with so intently, and he coughed and slouched and looked away.