World's Greatest Sleuth! (21 page)

After a couple minutes standing vigil, I looked over at the gent working the door.

“Say, as long as I’m not actually going in…”

The Chinaman was an older fellow outfitted in traditional silken robes and pillbox hat, yet he spoke with no hint of an accent, and his next words demonstrated his mastery of both the English language and American business practices.

“No refunds.”

I went back to waiting. Yet though there was a steady flow of folks out of the building, I never saw the Other Bearded Man.

Eventually, Gustav shuffled out looking disgusted. In his hands was a big black bundle—a rolled-up coat, I saw once he got up close.

“I thought you were manhuntin’, not clothes shoppin’,” I said.

Old Red unrolled the coat. Wrapped up in it were a slouch hat, crushed flat, and a U-shaped patch of black hair with an oval hole dead center.

“That ain’t what I think it is, is it?”

My brother nodded glumly. “I found these stuffed under a seat in the theater.”

“Sweet Jesus … a fake beard. I thought them things only existed in Nick Carter stories.”

“And King Brady stories,” Gustav said. “And Boothby Greene stories, too, should anyone ever write any.”

“Yeah, maybe. Only that feller wasn’t Brady or Greene, if that’s what you’re thinkin’. He was older. Bigger.”

“I know. And he could be anywhere, by now. I figure he walked out right past us not long after we got here.”

“Well, at least we got another new coat out of it. Why is it these bearded SOBs feel such a need to build up our wardrobe? Speakin’ of which…”

I reached for the coat, but Old Red just shook his head.

“I already checked. The tailor’s tag’s been removed. Same for the hat. The pockets are empty, too.”

“Damn. This feller thinks of everything.”

“Yup. Knows how to fight dirty, too. That little trick he pulled when we put the pinch on him? That surely wasn’t the first time he’s done that.”

“So we’re up against another professional, you’re sayin’?”

Gustav looked out at the Midway, slowly moving his gaze over the dozens of sightseers strolling this way and that through the gloomy gray of oncoming evening. Any twenty or thirty of them could have been the man we were looking for.

“Oh, yeah. He’s a professional, alright,” Old Red said. “The question is … what kind?”

22

CONSPIRACY

Or, Three Birds of a Feather Flock Together and Find They Have a New Tail

Though we’d lost the
(we now knew) Unbearded Man and had no way to find him again, we weren’t finished yet. It was Urias Smythe we’d been following in the first place, and it sure looked like he was headed for the Midway Plaisance when we got sidetracked. So we decided to make a sweep for him.

The Midway was not an easy place to sweep, however. Night was coming on, for one thing, and even with electric lights flaring to life all around us, there was still more than enough shadow to hide a hundred men, let alone one. For another thing, a search thereabouts could prove an expensive prospect. The Midway was a purely for-profit, pay-as-you-go enterprise, and if we wanted to hunt through the Ottoman Hippodrome or the Hawaiian cyclorama or Hagenbeck’s Animal Show or the Turkish, Javan, Laplander, or Dahomey villages, we’d have to shell out two bits a go just like everyone else.

We made a circle around the base of the Ferris wheel in the center of the Midway (Old Red keeping his back to the massive contraption the whole time) and ended up before the warren of shops and fake mosques known as “A Street in Cairo.”

“It’s no use,” my brother said. “This ain’t the prairie. Five strides any which way, and a man could disappear.”

“That don’t mean we gotta give up stridin’ ourselves. And if we split up, we could cover twice as much ground.”

Gustav stroked his mustache a moment, mulling it over. Then his expression soured and he turned toward the barker shouting at passersby from a Street in Cairo doorway.

“Step this way, gentlemen, step this way, and feast your eyes on Little Egypt and her famous—her infamous!—‘belly dance.’ Some call it the
danse du ventre,
some call it the Hoochie-Coochie, but I guarantee, my friends, I gehr-own-TEE, that you will call it unforgettable! Just twenty-five cents, one quarter of a dollar, will buy you sights and sounds so exotic, so hypnotic, you will swear you’ve been transported
à la
magic carpet to a sheik’s harem in far-off Araby!”

Old Red swiveled his glower back my way.

“You almost had me,” he said.

I shrugged. “Hey, who’s to say Smythe
ain’t
in there?”

“Me.” He threw another glance back at the barker. “Lord … he talks almost as much as you.”

“Well, you know the best way to shut me up, and I’d say it was about that time, if we’re givin’ up on Smythe.”

“I ain’t hungry.”

“You would be if you knew what was good for you. We ain’t slowed down long enough to eat in what … eight, nine hours? Think of your brain, if not your stomach, Brother. It’s gotta have something to work on.”

“Well…”

“Good!”

I started tugging Gustav toward the German village nearby—and, more importantly, the huge German beer garden I’d read was inside.

“Some schnitzel and potato salad, and you’ll be a new man,” I said. “And we’ll finally get us a chance to talk without bein’ on the run, so you can tell me why you … what?”

Old Red had stopped dead in his tracks.

“On second thought,” he said, “I think you were right about us splittin’ up. Huntin’ for Smythe or studyin’ up for tomorrow’s contest, either or, we can do a lot more apart than together.”

“Oh, come on, now…”

I took a step toward him.

He took a step back.

“Don’t forget,” he said. “We’re meetin’ Diana at the Ho-Jo Pen at twenty past nine. I’ll see you there.”

Then he turned and hurried off toward the eastern end of the Midway.

“It’s ‘Ho-o-den,’ you stubborn fool!” I shouted after him. “How you gonna find it when you can’t even say it?”

Gustav just waved a hand over his head without looking back. He wouldn’t come out and admit it, of course, but I knew what he was running from. Whatever the story was behind those spectacles of his, he wasn’t ready to tell it yet.

I just stood there for a minute, thinking, before I was sure.

Yes,
I
was still ready to eat.

I carried on to the German village.

After some schnitzel and kartoffelsalat that wasn’t a patch on my mother’s, I headed into the White City. Though I stayed on the lookout for Smythe and the Bearded Man and the Unbearded Man and Gustav, too, my heart wasn’t really in it. Here I was, at liberty at last at the World’s Columbian Exposition. It was time to do me some sightseeing.

For simplicity’s sake, I confined myself to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. As it housed by far the biggest assemblage of displays at the fair, I reasoned, odds were the competition would take us there again before the week was out. Unfortunately, though I hoped to get the lay of the land, it proved unlayable for anyone without the exploring skills of Columbus himself. Inside the gigantic building were exhibits touting the wares of nearly every nation on earth, and there wasn’t a field of enterprise known to man that didn’t get its own sizable section. A family could spend a week just perusing the wing devoted to stoves, and the collection of gas lamps and fixtures took up enough acreage to accommodate a small farm.

With so much to see, my eyes and mind wearied fast, one display blurring into the next, and eventually only the most vivid experiences made any impression at all.

A man playing a beautiful melody on Beethoven’s grand piano.

An up-down ride on an Otis-Hale “elevator.”

The world’s largest “gray canary” diamond sparkling as it spun on a rotating pedestal of pure gold.

I was standing mesmerized by this last when I felt a tap on the shoulder, and a Tiffany & Co. clerk informed me that the building was closing for the night. Nearby, a brawny fellow—no clerk, he—was frowning at me as he tugged on the heavy sliding doors that would turn the Tiffany Pavilion into its own little fortress for the night. His suit coat bulged slightly at the right breast in a way I recognized right off: Like me, the man had a fondness for shoulder holsters.

I tipped my hat and got on my way.

It was nine o’clock, almost time to rendezvous with Gustav and Diana, yet outside there was no lack of light. Electricity blazed everywhere and on everything, and if you’d taken the time to count them up, I do believe the Westinghouse bulbs would have outnumbered the stars above. Great searchlights upon the rooftops were throwing beams of color all around the fairgrounds as well, bright circles of emerald, azure, and scarlet sweeping over the buildings and water and people.

The Wooded Island, home to the Ho-o-den, was lit up, too, though it was rows of round red paper lanterns that did the job. They gave the island’s garden-lined paths a soft pink glow, like the light of a dawn that never quite came.

“Beautiful,” I said as I sat down next to Old Red, who was waiting on a bench facing the squat, boxy Japanese temples.

“Spooky,” he said.

“Hello,” said Diana.

We both hopped to our feet.

The lady was smiling as she walked up, and I wanted to tell her the Exposition wasn’t a patch on her when it came to radiance—dark hair, dark eyes, dark dress, yet still she seemed to shine. Somehow, I managed to hold myself to an “Evening, miss” and a tip of the hat.

“Where’s the colonel?” Gustav asked, throwing glances this way and that as though he expected the man to leap from some black patch brandishing a tomahawk.

“He’s concentrating on the northern end of the White City tonight,” Diana said. “He got it in his head that we could familiarize ourselves with the fairgrounds twice as quickly if we split up.”

“What an interestin’ idea,” I said. “The colonel got it in his head or someone put it there?”

The lady’s smile turned sly. “Oh, it was the colonel’s idea … I just helped him have it.”

“Crowe lets you run around unchaperoned at night?” my brother grumbled. “When there’s a murderer on the prowl?”

“I work for the colonel, remember? The White City’s probably the
nicest
place he’s ever let me run around unchaperoned. Anyway, he still doesn’t believe there has been a murder.”

“Did you tell him what we found this afternoon?” I asked. “The stains in the Agriculture Building and all that peculiar whatnot dumped out Curtis’s window?”

“I did … though, of course, I had to improvise a bit in the telling. If he knew we’d been working together, he wouldn’t let me out of his sight a second the rest of the week.”

Gustav snorted. “And he still ain’t convinced something shady’s goin’ on? That mule-headed little—”

“You can hardly blame him when William Pinkerton and the police are treating Curtis’s death as an accident,” Diana cut in. “Speaking of which, were you able to pry anything useful out of Mr. Pinkerton and Sergeant Ryan this afternoon?”

I shook my head. “All we got from them was guff.”

“It was the same for me, I’m afraid,” Diana said. “They were impervious to persuasion. Fortunately, Guardsman Karr was in a far more loquacious mood.”

“Guardsman Karr?” I said.

“Loquacious?” said Old Red.

“Talkative,” I said. Then, again: “Guardsman Karr?”

But it was my brother who answered.

“Let me guess. He’s one of the Columbian Guards who was lockin’ up the Agriculture Building tonight.”

Diana told him he’d guessed right—and that she wanted to know how—with a cocked eyebrow.

“You wanted to meet here at nine twenty,” he explained. “Not nine, not nine thirty, not even nine fifteen. Well, this ain’t five minutes’ walk from the Agriculture Building, and that closes at nine. So it stood to reason you was givin’ yourself a quarter of an hour to—”

“Oh, stop showin’ off,” I snapped. “Miss Crowe wanted to catch one of the guards at closin’ time. You don’t gotta flower it up with deductions.” I turned back to the lady, and suddenly my voice was dripping honey. “And this Guardsman Karr had something to say, did he?”

He did, and Diana proceeded to spool it out for us.

Every night, it was Karr who locked the Agriculture Building’s westernmost doors—those nearest the Stock Pavilion. And exactly twenty-four hours earlier, a gentleman had come stumbling up to him waving an
OFFICIAL
badge. The man declared himself to be Armstrong B. Curtis, Esquire, and he said he had “confidential business” to conduct inside. Alone. Every Columbian Guard knew of the contest, of course, and they all had orders to cooperate with Mr. Pinkerton’s associate Mr. Curtis no matter how eccentric his requests might seem. So Karr reluctantly let Curtis in (the reluctance stemming largely from the wobble and weave of the man’s step). After waiting twenty minutes for him to come out again, Karr had gone in to hunt him down and drag him out. Curtis was nowhere in sight, though, and after a brief search, Karr gave up looking. One of his fellow Guardsmen had let Curtis out through another exit, he figured. Or the man had simply staggered out the way he’d come in while Karr was hunting for him. Of course, it never occurred to him to check the Mammoth Cheese of Canada for a new occupant. He just locked up and called it a night.

“Goodness,” I said when Diana was done. “Loquacious don’t even do it justice. Sounds like Guardsman Karr did everything but act it out with puppets.”

Diana shrugged. “It was the least he could do for the dead man’s grieving widow.”

I gaped at the lady a moment, then offered her a deep bow. “Allow me to say what a pleasure it is to be workin’ with you again, Miss Crowe.”

“Yeah, yeah—that all helps paint the picture,” Old Red said. “Howzabout after Otto and me got called off to the office this afternoon? You able to finagle any new data outta Brady or Tousey or the others?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t get the chance to ask questions. I was too busy answering them. Miss Larson took quite the interest in you after you left. Where you’re from, what you’re like, how you came to be here—she wanted to know everything.”