“There,” Old Red said, and he nodded at a familiar figure working his way toward the stage.
We sidled into a shadowy corner from which to watch Smythe make his rendezvous. He didn’t seem to be searching for a particular face in the crowd, though: His gaze remained glued to the dancing girls.
“Funny,” I said, squinting at the dark-haired, wide-hipped gal who seemed to be monopolizing Smythe’s attention. “That don’t look like the Bearded Man.”
“Just wait. And watch.”
Of course, I couldn’t imagine a place I’d rather do some waiting and watching, though it proved a challenge to keep my eyes on Smythe. Every time I did manage to glance at the man, he looked more happy and relaxed than I’d ever seen him. If he was up to some kind of skullduggery, he sure was cheerful about it.
Much as I hated to bring our surveillance to an end, after thirty minutes or so even I couldn’t deny we wouldn’t be surveilling anything useful.
“You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” I finally said.
Usually, my brother hates to admit that he’d stoop so low as to share a thought with me (or that I had thoughts anyone could share), but there was no avoiding the obvious.
“Yeah,” Old Red said, starting toward Smythe. “Might as well stop wastin’ our time and come at the man straight.”
Smythe didn’t notice us as we approached. He wouldn’t have noticed the approach of a herd of buffalo, in fact, so enraptured was he by the oscillations onstage. I think Gustav had to tap him on the shoulder four times before he finally turned around.
“Oh, my!” he said when he saw us. His eyes popped wide and his spine snapped straight and his wattles quivered and swayed.
“We need to talk,” Old Red said. “Outside.”
“But … but … but … of course.”
A minute later, we were back on the Midway, all of us squinting and blinking even in the dimming light of the early evening sun. A passing matron shot us a haughty glare as we left the theater. Her husband gave us a wink.
“Now what’s this all about?” Smythe asked. He tugged down on his vest and smoothed back the nonexistent hair atop his head in a vain effort to regain his poise.
“That was a clumsy lie you told Mrs. Jasinska Monday night,” Gustav said. “About wantin’ cigars you don’t even smoke.”
Smythe shot me a resentful look. “Yes, well. Force of habit, I suppose. It’s what I tell my wife when I want to get out of the house and … you know … whenever I need a little privacy. She knows I don’t smoke, of course, but she understands.”
“And it was here you was comin’ to for your ‘privacy’?” Old Red asked. “That night and yesterday afternoon, too?”
“Yes. I find it calms me in times of anxiety.”
I jerked a thumb at the theater. “That calms you?”
“It distracts me from my woes.” Smythe put on his wounded puppy face. “I have so many.”
“Well, I reckon we got another for you,” Gustav said. “That bearded feller we told Pinkerton about? The one who was so anxious to see us lose? Well, we got a letter offa him when we tangled yesterday. And it was from you.”
Smythe looked genuinely surprised. “From me?”
I did my best to recite from memory. “Enclosed you will find the money order I sent your father. Have him take you to the train station at once. He knows how to find me. Don’t delay, my little friend! We face many challenges, but glory lies ahead. Your pal, Urias Smythe.”
“Ohhhhhhhh, nnnnnnnnnoooooo…”
Smythe clapped his hands to his head and held them there as if trying to keep his skull from exploding.
“You wanna tell us why your friend’s been tryin’ to trip us up in the contest?” Old Red asked.
“He’s no friend of mine. At least, not anymore. Not now that I know who he really is.”
“And that would be…?” I prompted.
“Billy Steele, Boy Detective.”
My brother and I looked at each other. We knew Billy Steele well. He’d brought us to Chicago, in a way, for the magazine devoted to his adventures was so gloriously, stupendously awful I’d felt encouraged to approach the publisher with my own humble tales. If they’ll commit this BS to print, I’d thought, the folks at Smythe & Associates Publishing are gonna think I’m the next Mark Twain.
“I hate to tell you this, Mr. Smythe,” I said, “but your boy detective has a beard and doesn’t seem to have been a boy since the Civil War.”
“Yes, I know that now! But I didn’t last week. He’d always represented his stories to me as true, just like you do.”
“Hold on a tick,” Gustav said. “I just remembered one of Miss Larson’s cracks about us the first day of the contest. She said something about you replacin’ a boy detective with a blind one. I never got a chance to ask about it in all the brouhaha, and now I guess I don’t have to.”
I saw where he was headed and finished for him. “We weren’t your first choice for the competition. Billy Steele was.”
“No, alas. Dan Slick, the Dude Dick was my first choice. Then I found out he doesn’t exist.”
“So you turned to Billy Steele,” I said.
“No. I turned to Lady X, Society Sleuth.”
“Let me guess,” Gustav said. “Doesn’t exist.”
“Precisely. So I sent for the boy … only he turned out to be a forty-year-old Armenian named Emile Agajanian!”
“Then you called for me and my brother,” I said.
“Yes. Much to my relief, you both actually existed … though to be honest, I was almost hoping your stories would prove as exaggerated as Agajanian’s. I needed someone who’d go along with the costumes and props—who’d be the Holmes of the Range of my covers. And to discover that your brother isn’t just as physically unimpressive as you’ve described him but every bit as disagreeable as well…?”
Smythe sighed and shook his head sadly.
Old Red, to my surprise, did not remove said head from Smythe’s shoulders.
“What I don’t understand,” he grumbled, “is why this Agajanian would come to Chicago if you thought he was a kid. Didn’t he know it would be a problem, him bein’ him?”
“No. He actually thought it shouldn’t matter. When I told him he couldn’t be in the contest, he flew into a rage. It was a frightful thing to see. It left me positively discombobulated for days!”
“So on top of bein’ a fraud—” Gustav began.
“The Bearded Man’s crazy,” I said. “I guess that shouldn’t come as a shock, given how he’s been actin’.”
“Just how deep does his crazy run, though, and in which direction?”
“I don’t follow you.”
My brother turned back to Smythe. “You think Agajanian’s mad enough to try to mess with the contest, somehow?”
“Well, yes. Obviously, from the things he’s done to you.”
“I ain’t talkin’ about us. I’m talkin’ about the contest.”
Smythe’s face turned the color of buttermilk. “You mean would he…? Could he have…? Curtis? That never even occurred to me. I don’t know.”
“You got any idea where he’s stayin’?”
“No. Not anymore. He was going to check into the Columbian Hotel, of course, but after our quarrel, I don’t know where he went.”
“That’s how he knew to look for us there,” I said to Old Red. “Maybe how he knew where Curtis was stayin’, too.”
Gustav nodded vacantly, staring off at nothing. Then his gaze locked on Smythe again, eyes narrowed to slits.
“There’s something else we ain’t let you in on yet. That other feller my brother told Pinkerton about? The Unbearded Man? The one tied in with King Brady? When we first crossed paths with him, he was followin’ you.”
Smythe’s complexion went from buttermilk yellow to moldy cheese green. “Following me? You’re sure?”
“Yup. He was but twenty steps behind you when you came walkin’ thisaway yesterday. You got any idea why that migh
t be?”
“No, really, I … wait just a minute.”
I hoped this was the sort of “wait just a minute” that precedes a till-then-forgotten memory that cracks a mystery wide open. You know the kind: “Hang on … now that I think of it, I saw the butler walk out of Mrs. Moonbeam’s room with a bloody axe just before she was found decapitated in bed. Do you think that might be significant, somehow?”
Sadly, it was not to be.
“That means you were following me, too,” Smythe said. “Just like today. You didn’t simply stumble upon me back there. You’ve been watching me. Spying on me!”
“Just lookin’ out for you,” I lied. “There’ve been some mighty shady goings-on, and naturally we were concerned about—”
“Flapdoodle!” Smythe barked. “You’ve been sneaking around behind my back prying into my private affairs. After all I’ve done for you! You wreck my nerves, you squander my money, you put me in dutch with William Pinkerton, and now what? You suspect me of murder? I’ve had it! We’re done. We’re through. I want nothing to do with you from now on!”
He whirled like a great flabby top and started stomping away. After he’d gone but a few steps, though, he stopped and faced us again.
“Unless you get to the egg first tomorrow. Then perhaps we’ll talk.”
He flashed us a fleeting, tight-lipped smile, then went on into the theater. He had troubles to forget, and he was the lucky man who knew just how to go about it.
Me, I didn’t feel so lucky.
28
THE CHOPHOUSE
Or, A New “Friend” Treats Us to a Meal, but It Ends Up Going to the Dogs
Heartbreak never hits you where you want it to. The shoulder you want to cry on, the booze you want to guzzle, the sheets you want to pull up over your head—they’re not around when you need them most, nor do they come running when you call. No, you’ve got to make the Trudge. I’m sure you’re no stranger to it yourself, dear reader: that long, dejected slog to consolation when your mind has nothing to do but dwell on your failures and your heart has nothing to do but break a little more.
I’ve undertaken the Trudge several times in my life. Few were more discouraging than the one I took there in Chicago, though. After months trying to sell my stories and years scrambling not to starve, my first publisher, my one backer, my much prayed-for patron had just told me to go to hell—and now I had to walk eight blocks to my hotel in a suit that felt like someone had tried to wash it with me still in it.
I was not, in short, in high spirits.
“For a feller who’s so tight-lipped, you sure managed to get a lot of foot up in your mouth back there,” I said to my brother.
“I’m sorry things went that way,” Gustav said. I was about to let loose a hosanna in the highest in thanks for this miracle—two actual apologies in as many days!—but then he added, “The question had to be asked, though.”
“Not like that, it didn’t. I know you can muster a light touch when you want to, but no. You just went and dropped the Unbearded Man on Smythe like an anvil off the roof. Couldn’t you have finessed how we first run across him? Smoothed it out a little? You know. Lied?”
“Sure, I could’ve, but…” Old Red sighed and looked over and up into my eyes. “Alright. I should’ve.”
I gave him a clap on the back of the brotherly/manly kind that says “Apology accepted—what’s done is done.”
“Aww, it probably don’t matter, anyhow,” I said. “I get the feelin’ Smythe wasn’t gonna be our bosom chum by the end of the week, no matter how things played out. And there’s other publishers than him. Maybe I oughta run some of my stories under Blackheath-Murray’s nose.”
“Why not Frank Tousey?”
“Ha! First you admit you were wrong, then you crack a joke! You are in rare form today, Brother. I don’t know what to expect from you next. A belly dance?”
Gustav did not, of course, bust out with some hoochie-coochie, nor did he look in the slightest amused, and I began to wonder if he’d been joking at all. I couldn’t imagine Tousey desiring any dealings with us, though, excepting the dirty kind that would keep us from asking further questions about King Brady.
Imagine my surprise, then, when we walked into the Columbian Hotel only to have Tousey himself cheerfully halloo us from the lobby.
“Just the gentleman I was hoping to see,” he said, bustling up to me. “There’s something I’d like to discuss with you. Your brother as well, of course. Would you care to do it over dinner? On me?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Tousey,” I said. “Arsenic doesn’t agree with me.”
It wasn’t much of a quip, I admit, yet the way Tousey roared you’d have thought I was Oscar Wilde.
“I don’t blame you for being suspicious after the way I spoke to you yesterday,” he said once he caught his breath. “Please. Let me make amends for my rudeness.”
“That’s mighty nice of you, sir,” Old Red said. “It’d be ungracious of us not to give you the chance.”
“I hoped you’d see it that way!”
“Do y’all mind if I at least run up and put on something dry first?” I said. “Feels like I been walkin’ around with tadpoles in my pockets.”
Tousey laughed again. It was a little unnerving, actually, having someone guffaw at my every funny. I was more used to silence or, at most, “Feh.”
“Tell you what,” Gustav said, “is the place you got in mind close by, Mr. Tousey?”
“Sure. It’s just over on Sheridan. The American. It’s a chophouse.”
“Fine. Why don’t you run up and get changed, Otto? We’ll head over to the American and put in an order for you. By the time you get there, you’ll probably have a steak waitin’.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Before bounding up the stairs to our room, I was treated to the bewildering sight of Old Red and Tousey chatting amiably as they strolled away. It was like seeing two rattlesnakes sit down to take tea together. I couldn’t imagine it’d be long before the fangs came into play.
I washed up and threw on a new suit quick as I could, then scurried over to the American no more than a quarter hour behind the others. When I joined them at a table in the middle of the restaurant, they were still gabbing at each other in a pleasant, relaxed way I found remarkable. My brother had taken my earlier admonishment about finesse and smooth talking to heart, it seemed, for going fifteen whole minutes without grievously insulting someone ran contrary to his very nature.
“Mr. Tousey was just tellin’ me how this here contest got started,” Gustav said as I sat down. “It’s quite a story.”
From the way he said it, I knew it was a story he’d be passing along soon, too—with some deductions mixed in with the telling.
“We were talking about you as well, Otto,” Tousey said.
“Oh? Comparing notes on your admiration and envy, I trust.”
“Something like that,” Tousey chuckled.
“Mr. Tousey’s been readin’ your tales,” Old Red said. “He’s a big admirer. Maybe as big as Mr. Curtis was.”
Tousey was reaching for a glass of red wine and, for just a second, he froze solid.
“I certainly liked what I saw.” He took a quick sip that couldn’t have done more than moisten his lips, then put the glass down again. “I did have a few thoughts, though.”
I felt my upper arms and shoulders tingle and tighten, as if someone had ever-so-lightly swiped an icicle over the skin.
“ ‘Thoughts’ as in criticisms?”
Tousey smiled. He was a dapper man, with gold cufflinks and rings on his pinkies and a diamond-studded stickpin through his silver satin cravat, and somehow the smile seemed like just one more little bauble he affixed to himself so as to make the right impression.
“As in suggestions, Otto,” he said soothingly. “To make your stories more palatable to the masses. Sand some of the edges off.”
“I didn’t know my stories were edgy.”
“They could just
be a little smoother, that’s all. Simpler. Pithier.”
“Not so danged gabby,” Gustav said.
I glared at him.
He seemed to enjoy it.
“Shorter would be good, yes,” Tousey said, “and you’ve got some trimmings I think should be trimmed, to be frank. Those chapter headings of yours, for instance. Are they really necessary?”
“I don’t know about necessary, but I like ’em.”
Tousey shook his head. “They’re old-fashioned and they slow the reader down. Cut them. And those prologues you always put at the beginning? The ‘preludes,’ I think you call them. What are those for?”
“That’s just me trying to start things off with something exciting. To grab folks’ attention.”
“But then you have to circle back later to explain it. It’s confusing. Anyway, who’s going to remember by chapter nine what happened in the prologue? You don’t want anyone to remember. You just want them to keep turning pages, pushing ahead, not looking back.”
“Well, maybe, but—”
“I know what I’m talking about,” Tousey cut in. “I put out dozens of dime novels every year. And when I look at you, do you know what I see? Raw clay just waiting to be molded by the right hands. A good publisher could turn you into the next John Watson. But with the wrong publisher, you’re going to keep making the same mistakes, and that’ll get you nowhere. Tell me, Otto—what’s Urias paying you per word?”
“Per word? I don’t rightly know. He gives me two hundred bucks for the long stuff, twenty for the short.”
Tousey rolled his eyes. “As usual, Urias doesn’t know what he’s got. Otto, you shouldn’t accept anything less than four hundred dollars for your next novel … and I want you to accept it from me.”
I had to put my hands flat on the table to steady myself. When I was a kid, I once took a roll down a hill in an empty flour barrel, and when I stumbled out I hadn’t felt half as dizzy and disoriented as I did now. Things had gone too fast in a direction I hadn’t expected.
“I truly appreciate the offer, sir. In fact, you wouldn’t believe how fortuitous your timing—”
“Of course, we’d hate to betray Mr. Smythe like that,” my brother said. “Especially now, with everything that’s been goin’ on.”
World's Greatest Sleuth! Page 21
