World's Greatest Sleuth! (11 page)

“If Curtis was murdered, the killer won’t stand a chance with the World’s Greatest Sleuths on the job,” I said.

“I reckon not.” Old Red squared his hat again, pulling the brim low, as if readying himself for a gust of wind he felt stirring around him. “Unless, of course, he is one of them.”

11

LE PARFUM DE LA MORT

Or, My Brother Gets a Whiff of BS, and Our Fellow Sleuths Sling Some Around

Within ten minutes, we
had them gathered: four of the greatest detectives the world had ever seen.

Well, the four greatest detectives we could find, anyway. (King Brady had disappeared.) The four greatest who were willing to speak to us. (Pinkerton was still atop Mt. Cheddar with the Columbian Guards.) And the greatness of three of these detectives we had to take on credit. (We’d seen Diana’s firsthand in the past. Boothby Greene and Eugene Valmont and Colonel Crowe, though…?)

So, to be a tad more accurate, within ten minutes we had them gathered: a great detective and three men who called themselves detectives but who, for all we knew, couldn’t detect their way to flames if their pants were on fire. Still, it was a start.

All it had taken was a few quick whispers with the Crowes, a jerk of the head to Greene, and a Lucille Larson-ectomy for Valmont. (The Frenchman had come hustling up with the lady reporter attached to his side just as we were leaving the Agriculture Building. “There’s a body in the Mammoth Cheese,” Diana said. “Pinkerton won’t let anyone up to look at it.” “Oh, really?” Miss Larson said, and she shot off for the cheese like she’d been fired from the Krupp Gun. Valmont we steered outside with us.)

Now here we all were, bunched up around a bench beside the shimmering waters of the Grand Basin. It had been a long, long time since I’d seen my brother crack a smile, and though he certainly wasn’t about to pop off with one now, there was a grim satisfaction upon his face that counted, for him, almost as a grin. At long last, he wasn’t just dreaming of being a sleuth. Here he was amongst people he might call peers, extraordinary individuals who shared his passion for detectiving. And they weren’t competing against each other now. They were gathered together for a common purpose … and they were looking at
him
.

He took in a deep breath and clapped his hands together.

“So,” he said, “let’s begin with—”

“Who put you in charge?” Colonel Crowe snapped.

“I just figured since—”

“Where are your speck-tickles?” Valmont asked.

“That’s neither here nor—”

“It’s a clear, sunny day,” Greene said, “yet you don’t seem bothered by the light.”

“Like I said, that’s not—”

“And your bruh-THERE’s coat,” Valmont said with a nod my way. “He was not wearing it when the contest began.”

“Listen, could we just stick to—?”

“It barely fits across his chest,” Greene observed. “As if it weren’t his coat at all.”

“Well, it’s not, but that’s a different—”

“I still want to know why we should be listening to you,” Crowe said.

“Because he’s the only one of us who’s had a good look at the body,” Diana told him. “What’s more, he’s the smartest man here.”

Greene and Valmont looked surprised by the lady’s endorsement. Her father simply looked exasperated.

“Now, Gustav,” Diana said, “why don’t you tell us what you saw?”

“Thank you, miss,” my brother mumbled, and it took a moment more for the blush her words slapped across his face to fade away. “Mr. Curtis was still in his evenin’ clothes, stretched out straight, facedown, arms at his sides. He was back a ways from that egg thing, which was smack-dab in the center of the cheese, right under the viewhole. So it might’ve been possible—if you wasn’t payin’ much mind to what you were doin’—to glance down and not notice the man at all. I reckon that’s how he could fester there all day till we came along: They had the cheese blocked off for the contest, and all Pinkerton or whoever saw was that the egg was in place.”

“Did you see anything indicating how Curtis might have died?” Greene asked.

“Oh, that was clear as day. He was mushed into the cheese pretty good. Mouth and nose totally covered. Ain’t no way the man could breathe. Somebody suffocated him.”

“Why ‘Somebody suffocated him?’ Why not simply ‘He suffocated’?”

“Cuz cheese ain’t quicksand, Mr. Greene. A feller ain’t gonna smother in it without havin’ him some help.”

“I must disagree,” Valmont said. “In one of my own cases in Frawnce, a diaboli-KELL master chef killed his wife by drugging her din-NAIR and arranging for her to collapse upon and asphyxilate in a carefully placed blancmange. He would have escaped ju-STESS if I had not noticed the telltale odor of bitter almonds in the
coq au vin
. Rather than face the guillotine, he later killed himself with a poisoned beignet slipped to him by his love-AIR in a basket of … but I digress.”

“You sure as hell do,” Old Red said under his breath.

“I propose a similar scenario for M. Curtis—minus a crime,” Valmont went on obliviously. “Our Puzzlema-STAIR came here last night to lay his egg. He was, as we all saw, quite detoxicated. So, when he climbed or fell down into the cheese recepti-KELL…” The Frenchman waved his hands before his face and fluttered his eyelids, wobbling from side to side. “He was overcome by che-DARE fumes, fainted, and—
voilà
—suffocated in cheese.”

There was a long silence while we chewed this theory over. It left a bad taste in my mouth, though I couldn’t say why. Fortunately, someone else could.

“Allow me to remind you, monsieur,” Diana said. “We aren’t talking about the Mammoth Camembert or the Mammoth Brie. Mr. Curtis died atop the Mammoth
Cheddar
. And you of all people should see why that makes a difference.”

“Ah!
Touché
!” Valmont offered the lady a little bow. “You are not just a detec-TEEV, you are a true
connoisseur
.”

“At the risk of sounding like neither,” I said, “what’s so special about cheddar?”

“It is zeamy ard,” Valmont explained … if that particular grouping of sounds could be said to explain anything.

“Semihard,” Diana explained with a good bit more success. “A nonsoft cheese.”

“Well, there you go!” Old Red crowed. “Curtis’s face is buried in the stuff! How could that happen on its own?”

For backing, he turned to the closest thing we had on hand to Sherlock Holmes: Boothby Greene. Yet the Englishman shook his head.

“I hate to point out the fly in the ointment, as it were, but the answer to your question is ‘Very easily.’ We would consider butter hard when it’s first taken from the icebox. Given time at room temperature, however, even so light a thing as a sprig of parsley might sink into it. Lying there as poor Curtis is—and has been for half a day, presumably—we might very well see the same effect. After all, it’s
semi
hard cheese we have here, not parmigiana or pecorino.”

“Not what or what?” I asked.

Valmont looked at me sadly. “They are more chee-ZES,
mon ami
. You do not have them in the West?”

“Friend,” I said, “where I come from, there’s two kinds of cheese and two kinds only: the kind that comes from a cow and the kind that comes from a goat.”

Valmont’s pity turned to horror.

“Jehoshaphat!” Colonel Crowe cried out. “This is getting us nowhere!”

Diana threw a glance at Gustav, her big brown eyes widening ever so slightly. She’d handed him a chance to show off—perhaps win her father over—and so far all he’d done was open up a debate about the relative hardness and softness of exotic cheeses. He’d have to do a lot better if he was going to prove himself the smartest man there.

“The colonel’s right,” he said. “Let’s set the cheese talk aside, for now. There’s something else that needs figurin’. Something mighty peculiar I noticed about the body.”

“Yes?” Diana asked eagerly.

“When I swung in close to Curtis’s head,” my brother said, “I smelled dung.”

Diana winced, while her father rolled his eyes.

“I hate to be undelicate,” Valmont said, “but when a man dies, certain inavoidable processes are to be expec-TED. The result I like to call ‘
le parfum de la mort
.’ The sickly-sweet smell of death.”

“Hell’s bells, I know what a stiff smells like,” my brother fumed. “Ain’t nothin’ ‘sickly sweet’ to it, if it’s fresh. Anyway, I’m talkin’ about Curtis’s head, not his trousers. I’m tellin’ you, I got a whiff of dung.
Cow
dung.”

“Could it have been a hair oil or pomade of some kind?” Greene asked.

“You ever heard of a pomade that smells like cow shit?” Old Red snapped back. He was growing so vexed, even his hero’s stand-in wasn’t spared a splash of acid.

“If you please, sir!” The colonel jerked his head at Diana. “Watch your language around the lady!”

Gustav swiped a hand at the man. “Aww, she’s heard a lot worse outta me.”

Diana’s shoulders slumped, as if she wanted to pull herself down into her dress like a turtle retreating into its shell.

“Perhaps what you smelled was the cheese going rotten,” Greene mused. “The odor of it is quite overpowering. I can only imagine what it would be like up close. In fact, I’m surprised you could detect any scent at all other than—”

“Mr. Greene,” Old Red said, “I’ve been around cattle all my life, and I’ve spent many a looooonnnnng stretch ridin’ behind herds thousands strong. So I’ve come across more cow pies than there are stars in the sky. Bury my head in cheese or stick garlic up my nose, it won’t matter. You put a whiff of plop from a hay-fed Hereford anywhere near me, I’ll know it. And that’s exactly what I got a whiff of.”

“Oh, well, when you put it like that, it makes perfect sense,” Colonel Crowe sneered. “After all, what other deduction could we expect from the Holmes of the Range?” He swung his snarl on Diana. “Curtis was murdered by a cow!”

Dozens of tourists had ambled past since we’d started our little impromptu caucus. The ones nearby now stopped to stare.

“You are a card, Colonel.” I guffawed for their benefit. “Now let me tell you the one about the chicken and the traveling salesman!”

The tourists went on their way again.

“All I know is what I smelled,” Gustav said, quiet but firm. “And I smelled manure.”

“Of course you did,” Colonel Crowe growled. “Because you’re full of it.”

My brother let loose a gruff, aggravated sigh and once again turned to Greene for support. And once again, he didn’t get it.

“I’m afraid I’m also unconvinced,” Greene said, and he went on to roll out one of the (in my opinion) crumbiest of Sherlock Holmes’s crumbs of wisdom, intoning it with somber, sonorous solemnity like he was reading scripture from the pulpit. “Let us not forget: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ It’s safe to say that a killer cow is impossible while death by one’s leavings would be highly improbable, at the very least. M. Valmont’s theory, on the other hand, doesn’t even strike me as unlikely. An intoxicated man met an untimely and undignified end. It’s plain to see which way Occam’s Razor would cut. That leaves us with an explanation that is, perhaps, disappointingly prosaic, for those in our line. Yet we shouldn’t let a predilection for labyrinthine convolution blind us to the obvious conclusion.”

I doubt my brother understood half of what the man said, but the gist he got, and he gave it a shake of the head and a quiet “Feh.”

“Our English friend puts it very well,” Valmont said. “If you were ho-PING, M. Amlingmeyer, that we would lunch an inquery of our own, I must disappoint you. I am a policeman myself. I will not interfere in an official investigation. Besides…” He drew up his shoulders in a rueful shrug. “I do not think there is anything to investigate.”

“Fine,” Gustav spat. “I guess some of us came here to play games, and some came ready for real detective work.” He turned to Greene and threw his own Holmes quote at him. “ ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.’ I say it’s too early to write this off as an accident. Especially when what little data we do have is so damned strange.”

“I fear the data might not be the problem so much as its source,” Diana said.

Old Red frowned at her. Or not at her so much as the truth she spoke.

No one was taking his clues seriously because he alone could vouch for them. And no one was taking
him
seriously because he was … him.

“We’ll have to see what we can do about that,” he said.

The “we” there wasn’t lost on Colonel Crowe.

“Yes. You and
your brother
do that,” he said, taking Diana by the arm and tugging her away. “There are still obscure clues to hunt for. Fanciful deductions to make. Heifers to round up for questioning. We’ll leave you to it while we prepare for tomorrow’s contest.”

“Our Puzzlemaster’s dead,” my brother said as the colonel and his daughter walked off. “How can you be so sure there’s even gonna
be
a competition tomorrow?”

Colonel Crowe never looked back. Diana did, though—just long enough to throw us a look that seemed to promise … well, something. It wasn’t much to cling to, but I grabbed it with both hands.

Greene and Valmont soon peeled themselves away as well, the two of them heading off together toward the long, column-studded Peristyle that separated the east end of the Grand Basin from Lake Michigan beyond. Greene, at least, had the decency to offer apologies before leaving. He knew he was letting my brother down.

“So much for our posse,” I said as the Crowes receded to pinpricks in one direction, Greene and Valmont in the other.

“Yeah, well … us bein’ on our own ain’t nothing new.”

“Nope. I do believe I’m tirin’ of it, though.”

Gustav turned to look at me. It was the first time I’d been able to look him full in the eyes in quite a while, and it was almost a shock to see the soft sky blue of them again. For some reason, I’d remembered them as steely gray.

“Me, too,” Old Red said.

I was about to ask him about those eyes of his—why he’d kept them hidden behind smoked glass so long after he had to. Somehow, it didn’t seem like the time or place for that, though, and instead I just said, “What next?”