Willie, who was up at the pencil sharpener getting his pencils ready, said later he had a chill go clear down his backbone. He made a run for a seat and who should be making a run from a different direction but Jackie Carr. Running into Jackie is just like hitting an inner-spring mattress. Willie bounced off Jackie and shot backwards with his arms waving right into the teacher, which she may have taken as a personal insult. When everything got settled down, she told us that we were to be in our seats when the bell rang or else, but she concentrated the telling most on Willie.
Well, the next day Willie and I got to Health and Safety a couple of minutes early, and Willie asked the teacher if he could go to the rest-room. He got back to his seat just as the bell was ringing. Then at mid-period, when the teacher said we’d have a study period, Willie, who was looking sweaty, asked could he look for the restroom again because he couldn’t find it the first time.
The teacher rushed Willie out and showed him where to go and told him that when he had permission he could ignore her rule about being in his seat when the bell rang. Willie said she acted helpful, but she still scared him so much he hated to think what this class was going to do to his own personal health and safety. Anyway, what Ronald has been saying around is that Willie is the kind of detective that can’t even find a rest-room. Which is a lie since Willie is a good detective, as everyone will see in this true story coming up.
Because when Willie kept urging me to write our second case and let it be read in class, I got to thinking how Ronald might have a stroke if I wrote up a bunch of Willie and my cases and got famous and also how I’d be ready ahead of time for these writing assignments we keep having. I don’t know what the next assignment is to be called yet, but just about any title will fit this story. There’s just one drawback. Willie thinks maybe all this thinking and sitting will stunt my growth, so he’s going to measure my height and muscles before and after each story to keep a scientific check. If I seem to be getting stunted, I will have to drop the whole idea. I’d rather be big than famous.
Well, to go back to the beginning of our detective career, after we got paid three dollars twice right there on the playground in front of everybody for successfully solving our first case (this was two years ago in the fifth grade), we were hired for several minor jobs. We located missing articles: Jackie Carr’s Boy Scout knife, which it turned out his little sister had sold to Freddie Clark for two cents; Jackie Carr’s baseball glove, which it turned out his little sister had sold to Freddie Clark for fifteen cents; Jackie Carr’s bicycle, which it turned out his little sister had sold to Freddie Clark for sixty-three cents; and finally, Jackie Carr’s little sister, which it turned out he was supposed to be taking care of only he forgot about her until time for his mother to get home, and we found her sitting in front of the doctor’s office with dark glasses and a cup and sign saying, Help The Blind. She had seventeen cents in the cup.
Jackie was our best customer. Only it got so he was calling us all the time to locate something, and then he always charged it. The only job he paid for was when we found James, his dog, who had been missing two days. This was a minor case, but it proves how fast Willie developed as a detective. James wasn’t the kind of dog you wanted to find, but Jackie swore he would not charge it to his account with Blair & Perkins, Private Eyes. He swore in blood. We had to cut Jackie’s little sister’s finger because Jackie was afraid to cut his, and it had to be his family’s blood to be legal. And Jackie’s little sister likes to be in on everything.
We started the investigation in our usual methodical way. Willie went over to Freddie Clark’s to look around, while I started questioning Jackie. I didn’t have much luck because Jackie’s mind wanders around so much, until I asked if James had seemed upset lately. Jackie said James had been steady as a rock, and then he gave us — Willie had come back — our first clue. He said that twice when Mrs. Dewey had come calling on his mother, James was lying in the driveway and instead of moving when old Mrs. Dewey drove her car right up to his nose, he just sort of bunched himself up growling, and Mrs. Dewey finally had to back out instead of going on around the drive.
I said I thought this was a clue. I said we had to get into James’s mind.
Willie said if he was a dog that had just bluffed a car, he would try a train next. Which just shows the kind of detective Willie is. Because, sure enough, there was James pretty dead down on the railroad tracks. Jackie said he could just see old James standing in the middle of the track not giving an inch, and he was so pleased that he borrowed some money from his little sister and paid us in banana splits.
We were getting a lot of practice with Jackie but no cash, so we went to see Willie’s Aunt Gertrude, who needed a detective more than anyone else we could think of, and she gave us the job of finding her glasses which she had mislaid and couldn’t see to find. Willie located them right away. He sat down on a table to think over where they might be and there they were — under him.
You find out a lot about human nature in the detective business. Aunt Gertrude didn’t even offer to pay us after we had found the glasses. Willie said the way she carried on about a little crack you could hardly notice in one lens you’d have thought he sat on her eyeball.
We had counted on a lot of business after our first case was so successful, so you can see how disappointing it was to have bankrupts like Jackie Carr and welshers like Aunt Gertrude for our only clients. And the worst thing was that we live in a town where I can’t remember anybody ever getting even close to being murdered, except maybe Willie and me by our fathers that time we found the keys in Willie’s father’s car and drove halfway around the block before Aunt Gertrude came along taking our side of the road.
And then, right when everything was blackest, Homer XVIII, Willie’s frog, got loose and started our second big case. Willie almost always has a frog on him. He kept Homer in his desk at school, and at recess time on this particular day when he was taking Homer out for a breath of fresh air, Homer got away behind a table and a filing cabinet in the back of the room.
Willie told me about it later. He was under the table trying to reach Homer when Miss Easter, our geography and history teacher, and Miss Crockett, another teacher, came back into the room. They didn’t see Willie, and naturally he kept quiet because the day he had lifted the lid on his desk and Homer had unexpectedly jumped on Betsy Miller, Miss Easter had taken Betsy’s part, which was really a surprise. I mean, here Miss Easter wore eyeglasses that had a sort of butterfly thing in jewels on one corner of the frame. Willie had checked up on the name of it in a scientific book, and as Willie said, you’d think anybody who would go around all the time with a male Io up over one eye would be fond of wild life. But she had told Willie very definitely to leave Homer at home, which was impossible. Willie’s mother is against frogs.
So Willie kept quiet waiting for them to leave and he couldn’t help hearing this conversation about Mr. Barrie. As everybody knows, Mr. Barrie was always talking to Miss Easter in the hall and coming into her room on errands. He got his own class taught and spent a lot of time in our room too, which shows how much the tax payers were getting for their money out of Mr. Barrie. Also, he’s a teacher who tells you about important things. For instance, one day he brought in a praying mantis, which he said ate flies, and Freddie Clark happened to have some dead ones wrapped up in paper in his desk. Freddie is very saving. But Miss Easter, instead of being pleased, made Freddie clean out his desk, and then as an afterthought made Willie clean his, too.