“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.”
Gustav looked over at the tall, pyramid-topped pedestal upon which the Tiffany Diamond had once glimmered.
“A jewel’s gonna be pretty safe up there. How’s a thief even gonna get at it? Ain’t just anybody who can pull up a ladder in the middle of the day. I assume this one here was set up at Mr. Pinkerton’s request?”
By this point, all the Tiffany & Co. men nearby had broken into such a sweat they were practically gleaming like diamonds themselves.
“Yes!” one of them said. “Of course, we were happy to cooperate. When a man like William Pinkerton asks a favor—”
“What exactly are you suggesting?” Pinkerton growled.
“I ain’t suggestin’ nothing,” Old Red said. “I’m just tryin’ to show why things have played out the way they have.” He focused on the Tiffany men again. “I assume the diamond was moved somewhere safe while the egg took its place?”
“Yes. We have our own vault here.”
“And you got a guard on it, do you?”
The Tiffanys nearly jumped out of their spats.
“All the guards are up here to handle the crowd!” one of them said. He waved a floppy hand at the display cases and dark, oak-paneled cloisters that receded into blackness at the back of the pavilion. “But there’s no way anyone could get past—”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” a man said from behind us, and Colonel Crowe and Diana marched out of the gloom no one could supposedly get to.
“Two ways, in this case,” Diana said. “Ours and his.”
Boothby Greene was walking between them—and their guns, which were surreptitiously pressed into his sides.
Gustav slumped and rubbed at his chin.
“Finally,” he said under his breath. “I thought my damn jaw was gonna drop off.”
“What’s the meaning of this?” Blackheath-Murray demanded, puffing himself up with all the considerable indignation his big, bluff British frame could muster. “Unhand him at once!”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, sir,” I said. “Seems Mr. Greene’s gotten into the habit of killin’ people, and I’d hate to give him another chance at it.”
34
LINDENBAUM & CO.
Or, Old Red Sleuths Up the Jewels in His Deducifying Crown
There was another general uproar all through the great hall, but my brother didn’t wait for it to die down this time. He’d been stalling with his speechifying, but there was no need to beat around any bushes now. It was high time to just chop the things down.
He didn’t get off his perch on the ladder, though, and when he went on talking his voice still rang out loud and clear. He didn’t ask our audience to quiet down and listen, either, yet this they did.
“You got anything to say for yourself, Mr. Greene or Mr. Lindenbaum or Mr. Whatever Your Real Name Is?”
“I’d prefer it if we stuck with Greene,” the man replied with a small smile, “and I think what we have here is a simple misunderstanding. I was helping myself to a private tour of the Tiffany & Co. exhibit, yes, but I hardly think that justifies—”
Old Red was shaking his head. “Ain’t no misunderstandin’, I’m sorry to say. In fact, I understand things all too plain. I’ve got Miz-yer Valmont to thank for that.”
“You do?” the Frenchman said.
“Yessir. You gave the pot a right good stir this morning, and it scraped up more than you saw. It was the part about Mr. Greene and his little trick at the dinner Monday that cinched it. When you talked about it, I noticed you made you an assumption—the same one we all made that night: that when Greene whipped off that beard and said he’d been servin’ up snails all along, he really had been. It was him who’d invited everyone to the restaurant, remember, so he knew none of us would be back at the hotel. Which gave him the perfect opportunity—by his own arrangement—to slip into Armstrong Curtis’s room and get a look at the clues. He had to be sure Mr. Curtis hadn’t handed them over to Pinkerton. Cuz if he hadn’t, that meant there was only one person who knew what those clues were really supposed to be. And if he got rid of that person…”
Gustav threw a sidelong glance at Greene, inviting him to take over the story and spare him more blather.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Greene said. He still had on his little smile, though, and a strange one it was—like the smirk of a boy accused of stealing candy who’s still got half a lemon drop in his mouth.
Old Red sighed. “I guess I’ll just have to fill you in, then. Mr. Curtis told us all where he was headed Monday night—back to the fairgrounds—and you followed him and you killed him. Once that was out of the way, you had to get rid of his clues and whip up your own, because the whole point was to use this moment right here, the big finish of the contest, as a diversion. So them … props, I guess you’d call them, they had to go. The box of snails and the squirrel and what all. There was no way you could come up with such crazy clues for all us sleuths for today, and what’s more Pink
erton couldn’t carry on usin’ the others without Mr. Curtis alive to explain what the heck they meant. So you had quite a night there in the contest’s office in the Administration Building—where you knew you’d find the typewriter you needed to make your riddles look the same as Curtis’s. I assume he had some extry cards in his room? Spare blanks you could borrow?”
Greene just kept on smiling.
Gustav went on talking.
“Well, anyway, by the time you were done, you must’ve been all played out, not on your toes. Cuz you let someone catch sight of you. Through a window or some such, I ain’t heard the dee-tails. All I know is somebody thought they saw Sherlock Holmes lurkin’ around that night, and you look enough like how they draw him to be the Man himself—or his ghost.”
“This is ludicrous!” Blackheath-Murray protested.
My brother nodded. “You ain’t the first person to say that today. Ludicrous don’t mean untrue, though, and I got more to back it up, too. The killer got certain stains on his shoes, for instance, and after some sniffin’ around I found out them shoes was foreign. Mr. Greene there knew I was checkin’ up on that, and, as I’m sure you’ll remember, he told me he always got his shoes from America. Selby & Harte of Chicago. That struck me as funny, at first. An Englishman comin’ all the way to Chicago in Chicago-made shoes. Then I realized I had only his word for it that he had, and if he needed to get him some new shoes—cuz he knew I was huntin’ his old pair, which came from Europe—what would he do? Why, get him some new, American shoes fast as he could.”
“Oh, that’s just rank—”
“Something else that don’t sit right,” Old Red plowed on over Blackheath-Murray. “The contestant who didn’t make it here, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. He got jumped and beat so bad he had to bow out, I’m told. Well, that just has to make a feller wonder: Was that so’s he couldn’t recognize a certain somebody who’d be here? An English yegg with a talent for crackin’ safes and a strikin’ resemblance to Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”
“Ludicrous!” Blackheath-Murray snorted again.
“You have no proof,” Greene said, still smirking.
“You want proof?” Old Red said. “Well, why don’t you offer some. Prove to us you were huntin’ for your second clue when you went to the Midway this afternoon. Show us the card that led you here.”
Greene patted the pockets of his heavy coat. “Oh, my. I seem to have misplaced it.”
“Don’t bother pretendin’,” Gustav said. “It’d be easy enough to send one of Mr. Pinkerton’s boys over to the Midway to check, but we both know what they’d find: your clue still where Pinkerton left it for you. You didn’t have time to grab it—cuz you had your hands full tryin’ to roast me and my brother before gettin’ back here. It was risky, comin’ after us like that, but I guess you figured it was riskier lettin’ us live. With what we’d dug up, we might’ve put the finger on you the second the big hullabaloo broke.”
“The big ‘hullabaloo’?” Greene said, cocking his head and batting his eyes.
“Come on now,” Old Red replied. “I been tryin’ to let you end this thing with a little dignity left, but oh well. Colonel Crowe? If you wouldn’t mind?”
“Mind? We should’ve done this five minutes ago!”
The little man stuffed his gun away in a shoulder holster, then got to moving his hands over Greene’s long coat. He pulled nothing from the pockets at first, but he did pucker his lips in a satisfied/irritated way all his own. He went on to unbutton the coat, which proved to be brown on the inside, with more big, flap-topped pockets.
“Reversible,” the colonel reported. “There’s the brown overcoat you were looking for.”
There were mutters from the assembled tourists—what a story they’d have to tell when they got back to Topeka or wherever—and the noise of it grew ever louder as Col. Crowe started taking things from Greene’s pockets and holding them up for all to see.
“False beard. Box of matches. Pepper-box revolver. Kit of tools … for safe-breaking, I’ll warrant.”
Yet the more he discovered, the more the colonel scowled, and when he was done with every pocket on Greene’s person, from topcoat to suit coat to trousers, he grunted in disgust.
“It’s not here.”
“It is,” Gustav said. “You’re just gonna have to go at it a tad less gentleman-like.” He looked back out over the crowd. “I would suggest that females, children, and the weak of nerve avert their eyes!”
“That won’t be necessary,” Greene said. “If I may?”
Old Red looked first at Diana, then the colonel, then nodded.
Greene turned his back to the crowd—with Diana pivoting with him, the barrel of her cute little derringer never leaving his side. She kept her gaze steady on his face as he fiddled around for a moment, and then the two of them turned again.
In Greene’s hands was the Tiffany Diamond. He’d packed the jewel away with those of the family variety.
There was many a gasp, though all of them together couldn’t match for sheer volume the sudden raspy intake of breath the three Tiffany men took in chorus. The one with the least wits scared out of him managed to scurry forward and—after carefully covering his fingers with a handkerchief—retrieve the diamond.
“Greene! How could you?” Blackheath-Murray said.
Greene gave him a nonchalant shrug. “Sorry, old man. I suppose I’m just a rotter.”
“Oh, you ain’t so bad,” Gustav said. “There you are tryin’ to cover for your chum, and that counts for something. But please. Now that we got that big rock back and everything else out on the table, ain’t none of us got to pretend anymore.” He swung his gaze over to Blackheath-Murray. “From the beginning, I thought it was a tall order, one feller convincin’ another to take a nap facedown in cheese. Makes a lot more sense if it’s two men. And don’t forget, you told me you wear them Selby & Harte shoes, too—which means you bought a new pair this week as well. And you can’t tell me you put your money behind a would-be Holmes who just happened to be a criminal mastermind. Nope. You two are in it together. Grabbin’ that diamond was what brought you both to Chicago in the first place.”
As Old Red spoke, everyone near Blackheath-Murray—Smythe, Tousey, Brady, Pinkerton, the Tiffany gents—shrank back from the man like he was a leper asking for a hug. He stood stock-still, though, impaling my brother on a hateful stare.
“Bravo, Mr. Amlingmeyer,” Greene said. “You’re close. Yet you haven’t grasped the full scope of our endeavor. From the beginning, this has been a two-birds-with-one-stone enterprise, and it’s not necessarily over. For the moment, we need merely target a different bird.”
I figured out what the man was getting at about half a second after Blackheath-Murray did—which is why the big Englishman got a jump on me going for a gun. His was a snub-nosed Webley Bulldog yanked cross-draw style from somewhere beneath his frock coat. As he brought it up, Greene snatched the wrist of Diana’s right hand and jerked it—and her derringer—toward the ceiling.
Blackheath-Murray took aim at his “bird”: Diana.
Now, I’ve never been much of one for quick draws, and if I’d stopped to think about it, I would’ve realized this was hardly the time to get in some practice, what with a thousand innocent bystanders in the vicinity. Stopping to think, however, would also get the lady quite dead. So I did what I suppose Gustav would say I do best and I didn’t think. I just drew my Colt and fired.
There followed three sounds in such quick succession you could hardly tear them apart: the roar of my revolver, a clank as my shot hit Blackheath-Murray’s Bulldog and ripped it from his grip, and the shattering of glass and porcelain as the bullet ricocheted away into the shadowy bowels of the Tiffany Pavilion.
Then there was silence. Then a great stomping of feet as Old King Brady and a platoon of Columbian Guards rushed in and threw themselves on Blackheath-Murray. Then a nasty little crack as Diana brought up her free hand and, with a deftness one had to admire, broke
Boothby Greene’s thin, hawk-like nose. Then finally, when it was clear the scuffling was over and the danger passed, the sound that really caught me by surprise: light rain falling on a tin roof.
It took me a moment to realize it was actually applause, and by then the little sprinkle had turned into a downpour. Hundreds upon hundreds of hands were clapping together, and there were whistles and hurrahs and yeehas, too.
I looked over at Gustav and found him blinking out at the crowd in wonderment as he came down off his ladder.
“Nice shootin’, Brother,” he mumbled, looking like a man both walking and talking in his sleep.
“I was aimin’ at his head,” I said.
That was when the dam burst and the mob surged forward, and before I knew it I was watching cheering, grinning men hoist Old Red up on their shoulders. I was next (though it took my bearers a little more work to get me off the ground), and in the distance, Major Bacon and his boys lit into “Home on the Range” as we were paraded around the hall.
We rode the churning current of the throng, my brother and I, sometimes close together, sometimes swept far apart. For years the two of us had been dragged this way and that by the wild tides of fate, yet never had it seemed so literal.
The third or fourth time we passed each other, at some point after every hand in the place had either shaken mine or slapped me on the back (or rump if that’s all they could reach), I saw Gustav trying to shout something at me. All I could do was shake my head and shrug, though, for his words were swallowed up by the echoing blasts of the brass band and the chant our new admirers had taken up and would repeat again and again for what seemed like—and what I wished could have been—forever.
“World’s Greatest Sleuth! World’s Greatest Sleuth! World’s Greatest Sleuth! World’s Greatest Sleuth!”
35
HIGH TIME
Or, The Amlingmeyer Boys Finally Find Themselves on Top of the World
World's Greatest Sleuth! Page 27
