The Boy Detective Fails (17 page)
“Hello,” he says to the catalog. “I am sorry for scaring you away again.”
At lunch time, the boy detective goes to the office kitchen to retrieve his piece of buttercream cake, but it is gone. He stares at the spot in the refrigerator, the blue napkin lying there empty, a few golden crumbs hidden in its folds. He turns and begins to look around the office: Someone else has eaten it—he is sure of it. The boy detective has a reasonable suspicion that the culprit is Tad from accounting, but he is too preoccupied to bother tracking him down. His medication does not seem to be working very well today; he cannot concentrate. He returns to his desk and sighs. He is supposed to be making calls, but he ignores the phone and instead stares at the drawing of the lady in pink.
“Someone ate my cake,” he says to the picture.
The picture seems to smile empathetically.
“I know. These people are savages.”
The picture cheers him to go on.
“Some of them are OK.”
The picture seems to tilt an ear closer to him.
“With you, I feel very comfortable,” he says. “With you, I feel I can say anything.”
* * *
The boy detective is on the phone later that day: “Yes, it’s exactly that, sir, a miracle. A miracle of modern living. Hair-replacement surgery can be expensive and dangerous. So why risk it? What we offer you is quality hair replacement without the serious dangers and side effects.”
“What’s your name, again?”
“Billy, Billy Argo. Mammoth Life-Like …”
“Billy, I want you to listen to me: I just lost everything I had in a fire. It’s like I wasn’t even supposed to be alive and yet here I am.”
“I see.”
“It’s all gone. My whole life. Everything.”
“Yes.”
“I lost my wife. I lost my wife. I lost her, too.”
“I am so sorry, sir …”
“Billy, I did some awful things. I made some awful mistakes. I want to apologize to her right now and I can’t. I want to tell her how sorry I am. Do you think she still might hear me? Do you think?”
“I do not know,” Billy whispers.
“Billy Argo, my greatest fear is to die alone.”
“Noted.”
“Billy Argo, now you tell me your greatest fear.”
The boy detective is quiet for some time. He holds his breath and listens to the sound of the other man crying.
“I am afraid of not knowing the answer to something.”
“I don’t understand,” the man says.
“I am afraid that when the time comes, I won’t know the answer to the question someone is asking.”
“Oh,” the man says. “That’s very understandable.”
“Yes,” Billy adds, “love is one of the questions I do not even know how to begin to answer.”
After that phone call, the boy detective hides in the washroom, crying in front of the dirty mirror. He washes his face again and again in case someone walks in and wonders why he is only standing there, sobbing. He finds a Seroquel in his pocket and takes it, drinking a handful of water from the sink.
At the end of the work day, the boy detective once again passes the ladies’ wigs division. He glances at Eric Quimby’s desk and sees the small gold placard has mysteriously been changed: It now reads
Penelope Anders
, and there is no mark of the previous occupant’s presence. Billy hurries back to his desk, collects his things, and just then his telephone begins to ring. He answers it quickly and a high whine hums through the wires.
The voice, strange and metallic, begins to sing:
“It’s always twilight for lovers … It’s always twilight for love …”
Billy slams down the phone and gazes around the empty office, then hurries toward the elevator. The device is slow to arrive at the boy detective’s floor. He is looking around nervously, panicked. He thinks he can hear someone walking slowly up the stairwell. The elevator draws near, the golden needle above the entrance to the machine rising, indicating it is now only a few floors away. Right then the stairwell door opens and a strange masked woman in a gray flannel skirt approaches, stops, stares at Billy, then places a hand beneath a plastic flower pinned to her blouse. Immediately the flower begins glowing.
In that moment, Billy is stunned.
He begins backing away, pressing the call button to the elevator hurriedly, as the masked woman approaches. The villain does not speak, only steps slowly forward to follow as Billy struggles to escape, crashing backwards into a tall golden cigarette ashtray. The masked woman aims the flower, which shoots an invisible malignant ink and which vaporizes the ashtray from existence. Billy howls with fear, stamping his feet. As the masked woman moves very close to Billy, the elevator chimes, the mechanical doors open, and Billy rushes inside, securing a narrow escape. When the doors shudder closed, the masked woman makes a final attempt, the stream of acid hissing through the panels, before the machine rattles downward, ending her attack.
In the lobby, the boy detective hurries outside and finds a strange-looking delivery van parked at the curb, idling. Inside the gray vehicle are four well-dressed women, all wearing black masquerade masks. Billy stumbles to a halt as the van pulls away and, in a glimpse, he catches the faded lettering of the rear door:
Property of Gotham Amusement Park.
In his notepad, Billy makes the appropriate marks and wonders onto what strange villains he has stumbled, and upon what nefarious scheme.
Safe at Shady Glens: The boy detective is attempting to watch an episode of
Modern Police Cadet
, but the television room is much too noisy. Why? It is because Mr. Pluto is crying. Professor Von Golum is pacing in front of the television screen, shouting something angrily. Mr. Lunt, in the orange chair beside Billy, is snoring loudly. Each, in his own way, is destroying Billy. Why? The boy detective is getting very agitated, having never seen this episode of
Modern Police Cadet
before. He is unsure where it fits into the nearly seven years of the program’s history. In the show the Cadet is wearing a black tie, which usually signifies an episode from Season Two. However, the Cadet is driving the police coupe instead of riding as a passenger, which signals it is the program’s very last season. He is also wearing a silver badge—which to the discerning eye means he has already graduated from the Scotland Yard Academy—but his partner from the first three seasons, Benny, a wise-cracking street-tough detective from Edinburgh transplanted to the strange world of London crime, is riding beside him. More disconcerting than all that, the Modern Police Cadet’s flat is totally foreign: The Cadet seems to be living alone, no university textbooks from his second-season wife, Trish. Additionally, the Modern Police Cadet is kissing some strange woman, a brunette with very long hair, and because the noise in the television room is so loud, Billy has no idea why any of this might be happening.
Professor Von Golum hisses something at him and he tries to look past and it seems, on the TV, the Modern Police Cadet is now proposing marriage to this strange woman, placing a gigantic ring on her finger. In the next scene, they are actually getting married—the woman in a pretty white dress with a gray veil, Leopold Jones in his cadet uniform, walking down the aisle—and now Billy is pushing Professor Von Golum aside, placing his ear against the television screen.
The boy detective thinks,
Is this woman a spy from the London mob or a plant from ORACLE, Scotland Yard ’s enemy organization, perhaps? How will Leopold Jones fare in love with someone I have never seen before? How will it all be resolved by the end of the hour?
Before Billy can discover the answers to these important questions, the show is over and the credits are rolling.
The boy detective sits on the porch as the Mumford children prepare to test a third rocket, their flashlights flashing in the dark. It is late and the neighborhood is sound asleep, the streetlights flickering solemnly at the end of the narrow street. The Mumford children in their pajamas hurry back and forth on the lawn making final preparations: Gus Mumford in blue, Effie Mumford in purple to match her winter jacket.
“May I ask what is the point of your experiment?” Billy calls out in a hushed voice.
“We are trying to prove that people are social beings coerced by society to be distrustful of one another even though we are all naturally fond and curious of one another. I have it all here in my notes,” Effie Mumford says, passing Billy her notepad. “It is my new experiment for next year’s science fair.”
“Very interesting,” Billy says. “And how do you mean to prove that?”
“With this rocket, like a message in a bottle adrift at sea, we are attempting to gain the attention of some other human being. Our first two attempts were, for various reasons, unsuccessful. But the sky is clear tonight and we think we have solved our problem with the firing mechanism.”
We have definitely solved the firing mechanism problem!
it says in Gus Mumford’s note.
“Are we ready?” Effie Mumford asks.
Everyone nods. Billy smiles as Effie Mumford holds the silver launch device in her hand.
“We will begin the countdown. Launch in 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. Launch!” When she presses her small fingers against the silver button, the rocket quickly ignites and shoots deftly through a clearing in the trees straight into the plains of the high night sky. In a moment, the rocket explodes, and in large silver letters a single message becomes brilliant and clear:
HULLO, ANYONE OUT THERE
.
“We misspelled ‘hello,’” Effie Mumford whispers, making a note of this in her notebook.
Billy glances up at the sky again and very slowly the silver letters begin to sparkle and fade, and fade, and fade, and soon they are only a glimmer of floating black paper and smoke.
“Now what?” Billy asks.
“Now we wait,” Effie Mumford whispers, leaning her elbows on her knees.
“Wait for what?”
“For somebody to reply.”
“I see.”
The trio sit on the front porch, staring up at the night sky, the stars doing their best twinkling, the moon a quiet coin in a dark fountain, the Mumford children watching and waiting and slowly getting drowsy. Effie Mumford leans against the railing, her eyes fluttering, Gus Mumford has tightened himself into a small ball, and Billy, head growing heavy, begins to drift away, all of them quiet and content beside each other on the Mumford’s front porch.
In our town, we feature a variety of adultthemed bookstores; we think you may be familiar with the kind. Along the narrow and dusty aisles are thousands of doe-eyed women caught in the most mysterious of poses. Why are there so many terrible places like this in our town? Because the heart is terrible—like a rotten tooth, it is small and soft and weak. It has a terrible requirement, and that terrible requirement is mystery. For example, there is one particular magazine in one particular aisle in one particular dirty bookstore in our town called
Girls in Turtlenecks
. That is all there is: shot after shot of blushing gals in tight-fitting turtlenecks, naked from the waist down. We stare at a copy and feel flush. And somehow, silently, we know the truth: Airbrushed and honeyed, they are still no match for the feeling we get waiting to kiss.
In the morning, the boy detective thinks he sees the lady in pink as he is riding the bus. She is a lovely woman in a pink hat hurrying down the street and then—
poof
—she is gone like a dream. Looking out the window, he is surprised when the Sterling Tower, the tallest building in our town, likewise disappears.
Moments later, as the bus moves past the fallen industrial sites toward its destination downtown, the boy detective begins to once again remember the Case of the Haunted Candy Factory. At his best, at his smartest, at his most daring: He returns to remember what he once was—the boy with all the answers, not a miserable young man who is obviously failing, quite miserably.
Following the light through the air vent, the two siblings found themselves directly on the catwalk far above the candy factory. Below them, two gunmen were jimmying the Grape Dynamite machine.
For a second, the two gunmen stared up in disbelief at Billy and Caroline.
“The boy detective!” one of the gunmen snarled. “So
you’re
the snooping pests we’ve caught!”
There was a strange rumbling from within the tunnel behind the opened vent. A skinny man, breathing hard, huffing and puffing, crept out. The boy detective and his sister recognized him almost instantly: the strange bearded dentist, John Victor, their number-one suspect.
The dentist glared at the boy detective.
“What are
those
two doing here?” he asked.
“That’s for you to discover,” the boy detective retorted.
“How did you ever escape?” the dentist asked. “Those doors were locked!”
“The only tool a good detective ever needs is ingenuity.”
“You may have discovered I was the culprit, but it looks like your ingenuity has all but run out.”
“We better get rid of these kids right now,” one of the gunmen muttered, drawing his pistol near.
“Not so fast!” came a voice just before the factory lights flooded on. Within a moment, the gunmen were surrounded by armed policemen. Flashlights and sirens filled the scene with brightness.
“Just in the nick of time!” the boy detective and his sister shouted with surprise. Daisy Hollis hugged them as well, thanking them for a job well done—
No
.
No.
That is wrong again.
Daisy Hollis was already dead then. Not dead, but missing. Indefinitely. Her remains had never been recovered. The only victim of the Pawn Shop Kidnapper never to be found.
Daisy Hollis did not have the chance to be hugged by anyone again.
Daisy Hollis.
It is a terrible thought. It is a terrible thought the boy detective does not like to consider.
At recess, Gus Mumford does not punch anyone in the guts, he does not hurl smaller children through the air, he does not poke anyone in the eye: Today he is a lamb. He sits swinging beside the small bald boy, both of their feet dangling in the air. Neither of them speak. In their silence, more than a dozen secrets are shared. Gus Mumford smiles as the other boy smiles and blushes as he blushes. He watches the fold of the other boy’s neck and the dimples in his cheeks. He likes the shape of the boy’s ears, small and like seashells. He likes how he smells, like powder and fall leaves. He knows he cannot put into words all the thoughts he is thinking so he does not write, he only watches and hopes that the other boy does not suddenly turn to vapor and vanish. When the bell begins to ring, marking the end of recess, the small bald boy quickly rises, takes Gus Mumford’s hand and without a word, gently presses Gus’s forefinger against his long, pale eyelashes. Look, look, there is one now stuck at the end of his finger. Gus Mumford stares at it and beams. He watches it as all the other children hurry past, disappearing back inside, his heart light and glowing.
