The Boy Detective Fails (11 page)
“I am very sorry to hear that,” Billy mumbles, staring down at his feet.
“He stole one of my dresses for some new assistant,” Nurse Eloise hisses and then continues stirring and crying.
The boy detective is surprised to receive a mysterious letter in the mail when he returns to his room. There is no postmark or address. The envelope, in small black handwriting, simply says:
To the boy detective
. Billy slowly opens the letter, slipping his finger beneath the fold of paper and tearing. Inside is a single piece of yellowed paper that reads:
X1: 5-12-15-15-2,
26-11-2 11-4-25-8 2-18-24 9-18-21-10-18-23-23-8-17 16-8?
It is a secret code, but sent from who? The boy detective thinks
Caroline
immediately, and then admonishes himself for thinking that at all. He stares at it for a few moments more before giving up, hiding it under his bed, afraid of what it may be.
Perhaps dear reader, you might help him. Match the code X1 with the decoder wheel found on the back flap of this volume.
The boy detective, in his bed, holds the bandages against his forehead and wonders if there is a test of some kind—an exam, an X-ray, a blood sample—that would reveal who is good and who is bad. That is what he would like, he thinks. It is the strain of walking around the world—down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place—and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula. In the end, it is the invisibility of those who might really hate you that makes him so sad. He stares at the invitation to the Convocation of Evil, holding it above his face, turning it over in his hands.
In an hour, Billy strolls down the hall and is horrified to find Nurse Eloise has finished her cake: It is a red velvet cake with white frosting, in the shape of a severed bunny.
The boy detective, at work, mumbles into the telephone: “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.”
The blank terror of the dial tone is the customer’s only response.
Larry peeks from over his cubicle at Billy and winks.
“Billy, old pal, what happened to your head?”
“I was shot.”
“Shot?”
“It only grazed me.”
“Oh, only grazed, huh? Well, how are your sales going today?”
“I do not like selling people things they don’t need. It is criminal, I think.”
“Oh, come on now. Think about it. You’re doing these people a favor. You’re offering these people consolation. Conversation. You find out what they’re missing, sell it to them, and they get exactly what they’ve been dreaming of. And you get your sales tallied. It’s mutually beneficial. For instance, say an old lady lost her husband. Nothing like a brand new Princess Eternity model to help pep her up, restore her spirits and all. Say a fellah is sick, all his hair has gone. A victim of a motorcycle crash? A Dashing Gentleman mustache and eyebrow kit will do the trick. Make him feel human again. You just listen and see what they say and offer them help the only way you can: with quality hair-replacement products. If you look at it like that, it’s like you’re doing a good deed for all these people.”
“It’s not a good deed. It’s not. And I know it’s not.”
“Well, who wants to live in a world of gloom all day? Who wants to accept the fact that no matter what we do, we’re all probably going to be stabbed to death by someone we love? That to me is the real tragedy—accepting evil, accepting defeat.”
“You’re not convincing me, Larry.”
“You’ve lost somebody, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Who?”
“My sister.”
“You feel any better about it sitting here grieving, thinking about her all the time, talking to her in your sleep?”
“No.”
“You feel helpless, powerless. Maybe this is just the kind of thing you’re missing. A moment to feel a little better. A moment to feel whole again. Human. This may be the answer to that question—that terrible question: What do you do when bad things happen to good people?”
“I don’t think you can buy that answer with a fake mustache, Larry.”
“Well, you’re the one who’s got to face it, not me. Whatever you do, don’t talk to any customer for more than ten minutes. If you can’t sell them in the first ten, they’re not buying. Good luck, kid.”
Larry pats the boy detective on the shoulder once more, then crosses back to his desk. Billy picks up the phone glumly. He stares at it and, before long, realizes he has already begun talking into it.
“Yes, it’s exactly that, ma’am, 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.”
Billy looks around the office and wonders what effect all these telephone calls are having. He closes his eyes and goes back to speaking.
When he leaves for the evening, Billy steals a Gallant Sailor hair replacement kit: The black mustache and black beard get hidden tightly beneath his blue sweater.
At school, sitting in class, Effie Mumford has to hold her old taped glasses onto her face as she looks down at her American History book. Suddenly, at the back of her neck, she feels a sharp pain, and sees she has been hit by something. She looks over her shoulder and sees Parker Lane, a narrow-faced girl with blue eye shadow, glaring back. Parker Lane points toward the floor and Effie Mumford’s gaze follows.
It is a note, folded into a tiny white triangle, which has hit Effie in the back of the head. She reaches over, opens it up, and reads:
You’re right. You are way ugly. Nobody in the whole world likes you.
She folds up the note and presses her broken glasses up against her eyes and forehead, not knowing what to do with her face. It is the school library where Effie Mumford goes to hide during lunch period. She does not eat at school. She is too afraid someone will take advantage of her while her mouth is open and that she will eat an item from her lunch which has somehow been poisoned. Poisoning someone does not require much imagination and she believes that, if given the opportunity, her classmates would surely take it.
It is later in the school day that she realizes today is the day of the science fair. She has nothing prepared. Her experiment having been ruined by the death of her rabbit, she walks about the small, terribly arranged exhibits—past a display for a rocket-car of the future, past a papier-mâché model of a volcano, past a bumpy bust describing the science of phrenology—to Parker Lane’s prize-winning presentation, entitled, “How Water Totally Becomes Ice.” Effie Mumford stops and stares, dumfounded, glaring at the horrible Magic-Markered illustrations, the torn and oddly pasted
National Geographic
pages, and worse, a rectangular ice cube tray from which Parker, grinning, offers samples.
Effie Mumford’s small hands turn red, as does her face; what is so bothersome is the knowledge that she could have easily won if she had only tried again. It is this knowledge that makes her cry—not for the murder of her bunny, not about the enduring, pervasive insults, not because of her terrible, taped-together glasses. It is knowing that she could have done better than all of this and did not, which forces the small, shiny tears from her eyes. She has allowed herself, once again, to be defeated by mediocrity, and it is this thought—the apparent triumph of the uninspired and average—that truly makes her angry. Out of both rage and frustration, she purposefully knocks over Parker Lane’s poorly assembled display, the poster boards crashing to the gymnasium floor as Effie runs away.
The boy detective suddenly realizes it is Professor Von Golum, his lifelong archenemy, who is sitting across from him on the bus on his way home from work that evening. The Professor is out of sorts—perhaps it is his medication or the consequence of his age, but he is pressing the yellow
Stop Request
button very angrily. He is being ignored; the button does not seems to be working.
“Professor?” Billy mutters. The boy detective looks around and becomes aware that there are no other passengers aboard. “Do you want some help, Professor?”
“We demand this bus takes us directly to the Gotham City Bank. And …” the Professor takes a breath, inhaling through his small, skull-like nose, “the combination to the Gotham City safe.”
“
We
? There is no one else here, Professor,” Billy says.
“We, the Gotham City Gang, demand it. And we demand you get punished for your sniveling backtalk.”
“The Gang is all dead, Professor,” the boy detective says sadly. “All dead?”
“All but you, sir.”
“Chet the Blind Safecracker?”
“Yes.”
“Waldo the Heaviest Man Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Pete the Elastic-Faced Boy? What about Pete?”
“Pete the Elastic-Faced Man. Yes sir, dead.”
“Oh God, where are we going?” the Professor asks nervously, reaching across the aisle, holding the boy detective’s hand. “I’d just like to know where I’m supposed to be going.”
The boy detective goes silent.
Professor Von Golum takes a seat beside him and nearly collapses. “I don’t know what I’m doing with this,” he says, handing Billy a small silver test tube clearly labeled
ACID
.
Billy takes the vial and stares at a small note in Professor Von Golum’s other hand. It reads:
today
go to store
buy acid
kill boy detective
The boy detective holds the vial tightly in his hand and stares down at his feet, frowning.
At the Convocation of Evil, the schedule of events reads:
9:00-9:30: Welcome with coffee and assorted muffins and bagels
9:30-10:30: Break-out groups:
• Crime as Your Career: Investing for the Future
• Kidnapping: More Hassle Than It’s Worth?
• High-Grade Explosives from Everyday Chemicals
10:30-11:30: Featured Presentation: A Century of Madmen
11:30-12:00: Featured Panel: To Wear a Mask?
12:00-1:00: Lunch
1:00-2:00: Officers and Sub-Committee Elections
2:00-3:00: Featured Guest: Senator Jonah Klee (R-Texas)
3:00-4:00: Closing Remarks: “Our Evil Architectural Plans”
On the stage at the podium in the Van Buren room of the Gotham Hotel, the Blank is speaking. The Blank is not the name his parents would have preferred, but honestly, it is better than the one they gave him. There he stands, in his white mask, black suit and tie, the clothing giving the appearance that there is indeed a phantom’s face hanging in the air above the wooden podium. He does not move his arms or gesture with his hands. He looks down at his notes and marches through his words, one after another, without much charisma at all. He is not a very good public speaker: His voice is high and weak, and he is terrified of looking up and actually seeing the audience listening.
Some of what the Blank is saying is this: “Our evil plans include world domination—as one might imagine—through the use of right angles and right angles only. We will only adhere to the highest order of very straight lines. We will not rest until we have achieved global uniformity. As you can see in my first slide”—a perfectly rectangular town with perfectly rectangular buildings appears on the screen behind him—“all other buildings must be destroyed.”
The audience does not seem very impressed with any of it. In fact, they seem bored. They stare down at their feet, they whisper to one another, they sip on their complimentary cups of coffee. As a cadre of villains from near and far, they are very uninterested: Mr. Brow sighs and picks at a nail on his left hand. The Mug fills nearly two seats, his enormous shoulders crowding Tinyface Thompson, who snoozes loudly beside him. The audience—Boris the Bandit, Handsome George, Dr. Hammer—dreams of getting up and leaving, suddenly uncomfortable in their strange attire, each wishing they had not bothered to respond to the strange invitation.
The masked man behind the podium makes the tragic mistake of looking up just then and notices his audience is no longer interested. He hurries through his notes and in doing so, skips some important points. He immediately begins stuttering and, to grab their attention, he rushes to his surprise announcement.
“We have decided as a show of our seriousness, we will make another building in this very town disappear tonight.”
The audience looks up. A man in a cape and mask raises his hand.
“Whoever asks a question at this point in the presentation will most definitely be asked to leave.”
The man lowers his hand.
The boy detective, his face covered in white bandages and disguised with a beard and mustache, attempts to enter the strange meeting. He creeps down the white-wallpapered hallway without incident. He finds the Van Buren meeting room and moves to slowly open the doors. It is then that he is troubled to find that the Convocation of Evil has hired its own private detective: Her name is Violet Dew and Billy recognizes her immediately. Seeing her in a white blouse and a soft brown skirt, her chestnut hair bobbing beside a dainty chin, Billy feels his heart flutter.
Violet Dew, the smartest girl in the world,
or so she, at the age of twelve, had proclaimed.
Violet spots him, smiles, and walks toward him quickly. “Stop right there, Billy.”
“I will not.”
“You will,” she says, holding up her small left hand and pressing it against his chest. “Because I know you’d never hit a girl.”
Billy nods. “Violet.”
“Billy.”
“Your hair looks the same,” he says.
“I’m in a rut,” she says.
“I think it looks lovely.”
Billy stares down at her small, narrow fingers and frowns. “I thought you were married.”