“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“And tell me this, I’m very interested: What happened, in your cases, when you did not succeed?”
“Pardon me?”
“When you could not solve the case?”
“We always solved the case.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“You never failed once?”
“Never.”
“Let me ask you about this mystery then: Why do you think Caroline killed herself?”
“I do not know.”
“Is it because the world is an evil place? Is it impossible to defeat evil, in the end? Is that the lesson then: That she was simply morally weak?”
The boy detective looks at his watch again.
The doctor nods, smiling. “How is your medication working out?”
“It makes me feel slow sometimes.”
“It will even out soon enough,” the therapist says, still nodding. “But it won’t change the feelings you have. It won’t change what has happened.”
“My time is up, doctor. I apologize. I must be going.”
The boy detective and the Mumford children are sitting on the front porch in silence.
“I don’t understand,” Billy whispers.
“We are not allowed to be alone with you anymore,” Effie Mumford says again. “My mother thinks you might be a psychopath. She says she didn’t know you were a resident across the street and everything. She said she thought you were a real detective.”
“I am a real detective.”
“No, like a
real
one and everything.”
“But I found a clue. We will have the case solved within a few days.”
“She says you can sit on the front porch and talk to us, if you like. But we’re not to leave earshot, she said.”
“I see.”
What are you going to do now?
Gus Mumford asks, passing Billy a note.
“I will go on with the investigation on my own.”
It might be dangerous,
Gus Mumford replies, passing him another piece of paper.
“I understand. But perhaps, if I can solve this case, your mother will think differently of me.”
“Maybe,” Effie Mumford says. “But probably not.”
“No, probably not.”
The three of them are silent for a while, until Gus Mumford asks, with another note:
So what’s next?
“Tonight, I must go to the wax museum.”
“The wax museum?”
“Yes.”
Be careful,
Gus quickly replies with a piece of paper.
“I will. The both of you remember the cardinal rules now.”
“The cardinal rules?”
“Yes, the cardinal rules. Number one: You must solve any inexplicable mystery.”
“Yes,” the Mumford children pledge, Gus nodding.
“Number two: You must foil any criminal caper you can.”
“OK.”
“And cardinal rule number three: You must always be true to your friends.”
The two children raise their hands in a formal vow and nod. Billy nods in reply and they all shake hands.
“Here.” Effie Mumford digs into her winter jacket and gently gives the boy detective a small silver horseshoe. “It’s for good luck. I always win the science fair when I carry it.”
“Thank you.”
Gus hands him a small white note:
Good night, Billy.
“Good night.”
As the invitation described, the boy detective discovers the wax museum is indeed located in a mini-mall, directly between a Quick Stop convenience store and a Korean nail salon. It is now nearly midnight. The door to the wax museum is unlocked, and carefully, as stealthily as he can, the boy detective sneaks inside. At first it is dark, and Billy notices the interior of the museum looks as if it has been hit with a wrecking ball: Broken hunks of plaster hang down from the ceiling beside loose pipes and wiring. Very cautious now, Billy stumbles about, stopping before a large wax display entitled
Hall of Rogues
, where he reads this:
One particular series of unsolved crimes were the work of the Torso Killer of Kingsbury Run in Cleveland, which occurred during the 1930s. At the time, Kingsbury Run was a shadowy divide: a small, pock marked shanty town that stretched along the banks of the Cuyahoga riverbed. Beginning in 1934 and through 1938, Kingsbury Run was the daring stalking grounds of the Torso Killer with at least thirteen documented murders.
In 1934, famed detective Elliot Ness arrived in the city of Cleveland, immediately charged with heading the investigation of the unsolved Torso Murders. But the Torso Killer continued on with his devilish work: from January of 1936 through August 1938, eight more people would be murdered by the Torso Killer. Most of them were decapitated; their torsos and other body parts were found in the train yards near Kingsbury Run.
Finally on August 16th, 1938, the Torso Killer boldly discarded the torso of an unidentified woman at East 9th and Lakeside, in clear view of Elliot Ness’s office. Elliot Ness then arrested a suspect by the name of Frank Dolezal for two of the murders but the suspect died in jail from injuries sustained while he was in police custody before going to trial.
Despite the death of this suspect, Elliot Ness publicly claimed that he solved the Kingsbury Run murders. In the end, Detective Ness was just as tragic a victim as the poor souls who had been dismembered, forever maligned for mishandling of the Kingsbury Run murders. When he later ran for Mayor of Cleveland, some voters hung the body parts of mannequins from their trees in objection.
In the end, of course, the detective lost the election.
The boy detective looks up to see that Elliot Ness, dapper in a pinstripe suit, his head cleaved off by a fallen arch, rests atop a dismembered Al Capone. Beside them, John Dillinger, his jaw melted to the floor, has begun to disintegrate at the feet of Adolph Hitler, small and lifeless and shrunken from the heat. Billy stares in the dark and regards the wax effigies, their gnarled hands still reaching out to ring the necks of the good and noble men of the early part of their century.
Billy climbs over piles of broken wax limbs and soiled hair, searching for a clue, a sign, a missing puzzle piece. In a moment, there is an evil shriek, and several black-winged bats hurry past, and Billy—terrified of the small, sharp-eyed creatures—trips and falls, stumbling to his knees. He feels a dull pain in the palm of his hand and notices he has cut himself somehow. The thought slowly turns in his mind—
You are no longer a boy. You are no longer a detective. Go back now, Billy
—and then his whole body begins to tremble. He holds his hand against his heart and now knows what he has feared: he is once again lost. He has no idea how to proceed—in his life, in this case, in this strange place—and very soon, a soft fluttering of tears begin to sparkle in his eyes.
It is then that he notices the small silver horseshoe, the token of good luck from Effie Mumford, shining brightly in his other hand. All is not so dark then. With this tiny glimmer of luminescence, Billy looks up and sees the passage before him, though craggy and dark, is not impassible. He pulls himself to his feet and slowly begins walking again.
Billy stops and removes a dismembered Napoleon blocking the path, the emperor now desiccated and torn apart by rats. He turns suddenly and hears the echo of a hideous laugh. It is then that, from out of the shadows, a strange-looking villain steps, his bizarre appearance made more terrible by his troubling amusement at having found the boy detective lost and wandering about his secret lair. It is none other than the Blank, in a white mask, small black holes for eyes, a black suit and tie obscuring the rest of his body. In the dark, the strange white head seems almost to be floating.
Billy turns and faces the Blank with a frown.
“I apologize,” Billy whispers. “I did not expect to find you here.”
“Boy detective, it is I am who is truly surprised,” the Blank says in a whisper.
“I have been away a really long time,” Billy says, stepping forward. “I do not know what I’m doing here really in the first place. It was a mistake. I will be leaving now. As I said, I truly apologize.”
Strangely, the Blank only nods and holds his hand out.
“No, my dear friend, it is I who must apologize,” he whispers. “I have much work to do and so must end our reunion now. Again, I am sorry for this.”
It is then that the fiend retrieves a dull silver pistol from a black shoulder holster. In silence, without another word, he shoots the boy detective, point blank.
At the hospital, the boy detective reads detective magazines. The left side of his temple has only been grazed by the bullet’s path, yet his entire head has been bandaged, and so he must sit alone—no one has come to visit—staring down at his adventure stories for two days straight.
When released, the boy detective wobbles onto the bus and spills a handful of silver and bronze change everywhere, which roll like bells down the empty aisle. The bus driver groans and waves him on and Billy, his head still thoroughly bandaged, elicits many stares from the other equally strange-looking passengers. In a moment, a man in a full-size pink-and-white rabbit suit climbs aboard the bus and decides to sit right beside him.
At the empty end of the parking lot belonging to the XXX Bunny Hop XXX, the boy detective meets with an old ally, former detective Browning, who is now a security guard at a particularly pathetic strip club. He is much rounder now, his dark hair going bald, his bright blue uniform replaced by a dull maroon windbreaker. Overhead a neon sign flashes from pink to blue, the enormous shape of a voluminous woman shaking her voluminous hips up in the dark sky. The light flashes down across Billy and the former detective’s face.
“I saw him with my own eyes. He is planning some sort of big caper,” Billy says. “He has begun an organization of some kind.”
“I don’t know,” former detective Browning mumbles through a mouth full of cigarette smoke. “I haven’t heard anything, Billy. Though it’s not like I am exactly looking for trouble anymore,” he says.
“Yes, I am surprised to have found you here,” Billy replies.
The former detective nods. “So am I.” He itches his nose, which is round and red, and then takes another puff on his cigarette. “I thought, you know, what the heck. I’ve had enough of being the garbage man for the rest of the world. I did one good thing—one good thing—and that ruined me.”
“You saved a boy from drowning. You saved another person’s life.”
“Yep,” the former detective says. “But I ruined mine. After that, I was in all the papers and then people started expecting me to do that all the time. My wife, my kids—they all looked at me like I was some hero after that, which I knew I wasn’t. It practically killed me. I couldn’t do it again. I mean, I would drive around at night, alone, after my shift, and look for somebody to save. I never found anyone. I don’t know how hard I was looking exactly, but, well, like I said, saving that boy was the worst thing I ever did.”
“I do not believe that.”
“It doesn’t matter if
you
believe it. I’ve thought about it for a long time now. Maybe we only do one good thing ever, like in our whole lives. Like me pulling that kid out of the river: Maybe that’s all we’re capable of. Maybe some of us don’t even get that. Maybe we’re really pretty awful, except for once. Maybe for one brief moment in our lives where—by accident or fate or circumstance—we just happen to do the right thing, the best thing, and then, well, then we go around the rest of our lives trying to fool ourselves that what we did wasn’t just a fluke or mistake. I don’t know, you tell me. I’m just a security guard now.”
“I don’t know about any of that, Detective Browning.”
“It’s just Frank now. Just Frank, the guy in the corner watching to make sure you don’t grab nothing for free. That’s what I’m supposed to be proud of now: I stop someone from slapping some stripper’s behind.”
“Sir, there is no caper that you have heard about being planned?”
“If there was, I wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“I see. Thank you, sir.”
“I got to give you credit, Billy. You still think someone is going to thank you or something, huh? That if you help enough people, it’s really gonna matter? Look at me, Billy. I’m proof that good doesn’t ever conquer evil.”
“Thank you for you time, Detective Browning.”
“Frank.”
“Yes, thank you, Frank.”
“No problem.” Detective Browning lights another cigarette and then stares at Billy for a moment. “Hey, do you mind telling me what happened to your head there, Billy?”
“I was shot. I was shot in the head.”
Former Detective Browning nods sadly in response.
The boy detective turns, and just then Frank gives a shout, hurrying to Billy’s side.
“Wait a minute, just wait a minute. Look—If I show you something, will you … will you pretend you ain’t never seen it?”
Billy shrugs, staring into the other man’s face. Frank nods and digs beneath his windbreaker, pulling out a small slip of paper.
Convocation of Evil
, it reads. At the bottom is an address of a nearby nondescript hotel, and a date and time that reveal an event only two days away.
“This guy in a purple mask and cape was in here last week. He got thrown out for grabbing the girls, and, well, I found this on the sidewalk the next day.”
“Sir?”
“OK, OK, I think, well, I think, they’re having a convention of some kind,” the former detective says.
The boy detective returns to Shady Glens that evening and finds Nurse Eloise in the kitchen baking a cake and, at the same time, crying. Small silver tears fall from her nose and directly into the white cake batter. She is arguing with herself.
Why is she doing that?
the boy detective wonders, as the young nurse stirs the bowl with a great wooden spoon, damp lines streaming down her soft, round face. Billy stands there hiding behind the soda machine and watches as Nurse Eloise looks up and frowns at him. She whispers, “I am tired of being hurt by people.”
“I understand,” Billy whispers.
“I came home last night and found my ex-boyfriend, the magician, taking all of my things. He said he needed the money for a new trick rabbit or something.”