World's Greatest Sleuth!

by Steve Hockensmith

  Whether he could recompose himself enough to go on trading “tits for tat” proved a moot question, however, for at that moment Daniel Burnham came stomping down the steps from the cheese again—with William Pinkerton and half a dozen Columbian Guards right behind him.

  Gustav and I spun around and pretended to inspect the nearest jars of Professor Pertwee’s nut butter. This was no doubt a pointless enterprise, as with our Stetsons and contrasting, big-little frames, my brother and I would be just as recognizable from the back as the front. Fortunately, someone thoughtfully provided a distraction.

  “Mr. Burnham! Mr. Pinkerton!” Miss Larson darted away from us. “A moment of your time, please!”

  I can’t say for certain how Mr. Burnham or Mr. Pinkerton reacted, for I went right on studying the label on Professor Pertwee’s jar. (Note to Professor Pertwee: I’d get rid of the giant smiling peanut man, if I were you. It’s danged creepy.) When I finally dared a peek around, Burnham, Pinkerton, and Miss Larson were all gone.

  The two Columbian Guards who’d been stationed at the bottom of the Mammoth Cheese had apparently gone with them. In their place was a new Guardsman, one of the bunch that had brought the dressing screens up not long before.

  Old Red eyed him warily.

  “Think you can talk us past that feller?”

  “No harm in tryin’,” I said. “Unless he pulls his sword on us.”

  Gustav gave me a push toward the cheese. “Go on, then.”

  I went. My brother came, too.

  The guard was a ramrod-spined fellow who appeared to be striving with all his soul to live up to the overdone ornamentation of his uniform. The piping, the epaulets, the braids, the badge, the plume-tipped cap, the gold-plated scabbard for his sword—you’d have thought he was Admiral Nelson instead of a two-dollar-a-day copper, and he wore a haughty, stern expression as puffed-up as his duds.

  A smile and a “Howdy!” were out of the question.

  “Afternoon, Officer,” I said with the brusque, businesslike tone of a Colonel Crowe. “Mr. Amlingmeyer and I are assisting with the investigation, and we just need a moment to—”

  Old Red and I skidded to a halt side by side. I’d hoped we could bluff our way up through pure momentum, but the Guardsman was purer inertia. If we hadn’t stopped, we’d have flattened ourselves against his chest like a couple snow balls splatting on the side of a barn.

  “No one goes up,” he said. “Orders.”

  “I understand. Orders are orders. But I’m tellin’ you, ‘no one’ means them.” I jerked a thumb at the tourists strolling through the exhibition hall behind us. “Not the two of us. We’re o-fficial.”

  “My orders were no one,” the guard said. “Especially not a couple redheaded clowns wearing cowboy hats.”

  “Oh. Well, what if we were to take the hats off?”

  The Guardsman did not surprise me by smiling.

  “Beat it,” he said.

  “Come on,” Gustav grumbled, spinning around and stomping away.

  “Speakin’ of orders, I’ve got one for you,” I told the guard before following. “Only there are children present, so I can’t say mine aloud.”

  A moment later, I was falling into step beside my brother.

  “Shit—that’s all we got to work with now,” he said. “One little here-and-gone whiff of cowpat.”

  “Nothing new about that. We’ve had shit for clues plenty of times.”

  My brother, like the Guardsman, did not laugh, did not smile. I was probably lucky he didn’t stop to kick me.

  “Look,” I said, “if you really smelled manure—”

  “I did.”

  “—which, of course, you did, then it’s easy to figure what we should do next.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. We just go where the manure is.”

  “And where would that be? The Bullshit Building?”

  “No need to get snuffy, Brother. I’m bein’ serious. I’ve done some studyin’ on the Fair, and I’ve got me a notion. A deduction, you might even call it.”

  “I can guess what I’d call it.”

  “Well, let’s put it to the test, then.”

  I steered us toward the nearest exit. When we popped outside, we were facing the imposing, ominously droning Machinery Building not far away. A narrow, enclosed walkway snaked off from it, tendril-like, toward an identical wing from the Agriculture Building, and the two joined up to form something not unlike a high-walled stockade.

  “Now, why do you think they’d feel the need to have them two buildings a-touchin’ like that?” I asked Gustav.

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  I started for the spot where the Agriculture Building and the Machinery Building came together. “Oh, come on. You’ve played coy with your deducifyin’ so many times, you can’t begrudge me one little moment of my own.”

  “Yes, I can,” Old Red growled. But he followed me all the same.

  When we were about fifty yards from the covered hallway linking the two buildings, my brother raised his head slightly and sniffed.

  When we were forty yards off, he didn’t have to bother, for the smell was swirling all around us.

  When we were thirty yards off, you could hear what we were about to see.

  The last twenty-something yards I can’t report on, for they flew by too fast.

  Gustav had broken into a dash, and I kept up. I wasn’t going to miss the look on his face when he came out on the other side of that passageway.

  In one door and out the other, and there it was: wide-eyed wonderment.

  I pulled out my guidebook, flipped through the pages till I found what I wanted, and started reading.

  “ ‘The Live Stock Pavilion is an oval amphitheater of diameters 280 and 440 feet, under the roof of which will be exhibited and judged the blooded stock of every description competing for the prize awards. Back of the pavilion are the tremendous live stock sheds, seventy-five in number, covering a space of forty acres. The collection of cattle contained here will be the most stupendous ever contemplated for—’ ”

  “Christ,” Old Red said, taking in the tall, white, pennant-pocked pavilion. “Even the damn barns ’round here are beautiful.” He turned and gazed back at the high, long walls of the Machinery and Agriculture buildings. “Well, I’ll be. It’s a barrier. To keep the animal stink out of the White City.”

  “Works pretty good, too,” I said. “I mean, to hide the smell of cattle from a man who knows it like you do.”

  That reminded Gustav why we were there, and he started off around the Stock Pavilion, not stopping until he could see the pens just beyond. In some of the closest ones were heavy-jowled red-and-white cows.

  I stopped beside my brother and spread my arms wide. “Herefords, just like you said. And I already see enough meadow muffins to fill the Grand Canyon. Now all we gotta do is figure out how one of ’em got on Curtis’s head.”

  Old Red’s expression brightened. There was no actual smile, of course, those having been banished from his face long ago. But maybe, just maybe, you could call the little curl of the lip tucked under his mustache a smirk.

  “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!”