Quade kept a straight face. “Well, we’ll just skip your question, Willie. Someone else, please, ask me something. Anything.”
“I’ll play,” said Bill Morgan. “I used to fly down in South America. Look, Quade, what’s the chief product exported from Chile?”
“Nitrate,” Quade replied laconically. “It constitutes more than half of all Chile’s exports. The total value of the Chilean nitrate exported every year is $100,000,000 of which the government through taxation gets approximately $20,000,000.”
Murmurs went around the room at that. “You’re dead right!” exclaimed Bill Morgan. “But I’ve got another question—”
“One to a customer,” said Quade. “Miss Lane, what about you?”
“I was just thinking,” smiled the air hostess. “I lived in England a while. So I’ll ask an English question. ‘What is a galee?’”
“A coal miner. A man who operates a coal mine under a government lease, which is called a gale.”
The saturnine, lean Alan McGregor threw in a question, then. “How far is it from St. Louis to Chicago?”
“Two hundred and eighty-five miles,” Quade replied quickly.
And now the game took on. Olga Larsen asked a question, then Ben Slade. Gustave Lund, too. He answered every question thrown at him, quickly and accurately. But suddenly he called a halt.
“And now I’m going to show you how you yourselves can learn the answers to all questions anyone can ask you! I’m going to give each one of you an opportunity to be a Human Encyclopedia!”
Charlie Boston was fumbling with the bag he had lugged with him earlier in the evening. He opened it and produced a thick volume. He handed it to Quade.
“Here it is, folks, The Compendium of Human Knowledge, the knowledge of the ages in one volume! Twelve hundred pages of facts and knowledge! The answers to any questions anyone can ever ask you! A complete education crammed into one volume! And folks,” Quade leaned forward and lowered his voice, “what do you think I am asking for this marvelous book, this complete college education? Twenty-five dollars? Twenty? No, not even fifteen, or ten, or five! Just a measly two dollars and ninety-five cents. Think of it, folks! Twelve hundred pages of education for only two dollars and ninety-five cents! Charlie, the gentleman over there.” He pointed at Willie Scharnhorst.
Charlie Boston had his hands full, his arms full of books. He strode briskly across the room.
“Here you are, Willie,” he said, “and worth its weight in silver fox skins!”
Willie Scharnhorst looked stupidly at the grinning Boston, and then he reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a fistfull of bills. Charlie whisked away three of the bills expertly and dropped the copy of The Compendium of Human Knowledge on Scharnhorst’s lap. He turned away abruptly and attacked the others in the room.
In the meantime Quade was continuing his exhortation. Boston sold more copies of the book, one to Bill Morgan, one to Alan McGregor. He passed up Mona Lane — because he liked her — and forced one upon Olga Larsen, who protested. Boston ignored her and collected from Ben Slade for two volumes. Charlie paused before Gustave Lund, but Lund wasn’t having any. Charlie grinned wickedly at Karl Becker and said:
“It wouldn’t do you any good. You couldn’t read English!”
“Phooie!” said Becker. “What’s this business anyway? What did I do, that all this should happen to me in one day? I don’t like it, I tell you.”
“Neither do I,” groaned Gustave Lund. “First the airplane, then a man murdered, and now this craziness!”
Willie Scharnhorst was fumbling around with his newly purchased copy of The Compendium of Human Knowledge. His ears heard the word “murder.”
“Someone get killed when the airplane fell?”
“Somebody got killed all right,” said Alan McGregor. “But it wasn’t by the crash. It was a bullet right smack in the back of his head!”
Quade, looking at Scharnhorst, saw the startled expression that leaped into his eyes.
“Why should anyone want to shoot someone in an airplane?” Willie asked.
“That’s a question we were talking about when you broke in with your pal,” replied Quade. “It’s the screwiest situation I ever heard of; the airplane crashes, and then we find that the pilot is dead with a bullet in his head.”
“Were you on the plane?” asked Scharnhorst.
“No, that’s one thing I can’t be blamed for. The person who murdered the pilot is one of these others.” He waved a hand about the room.
Willie Scharnhorst’s eyes went around the room. He passed over Morgan, the co-pilot, still with Mona, the hostess, looked long at Alan McGregor and passed on to the two ice skaters and their manager. His eyes went back to McGregor. After a moment he said:
“You, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
McGregor looked steadily at Scharnhorst. “I don’t know. Have you?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Were we ever in the same police line-up?” asked McGregor, a slight sneer in his tone.
“Yeah,” said Scharnhorst thoughtfully. “I think I remember now. Only it wasn’t in a police line-up that I saw you. It was in Duke Kennard’s place in Kansas City. Remember?”
“My memory’s very bad,” replied McGregor.
Willie Scharnhorst got up from his chair, laid the book on it and walked slowly toward McGregor. When he was three or four feet away, he made a swift movement which brought him behind McGregor. He stabbed his gun into the lean man’s spine and frisked him quickly. The result was a pearl-handled .32 automatic. He backed away.
“That was very careless of me,” he said. “I should have had Louie frisk everyone here.”
He looked around the room again. “Well, I guess that’s about all the artillery, except—” he nodded at Quade. “How about you?”
“Not me,” said Quade. “I never carried a gun in my life. I don’t have to.”
Willie examined the gun he had taken from McGregor. He dropped the clip into his hand and smelled the muzzle.
“Cleaned it, huh?” he said.
“Not for two weeks,” replied McGregor.
“Personally,” said Quade, “I think the pilot was killed with a .38. And I also think that the person who really killed the pilot had all sorts of chances to throw away the gun and probably did.”
“Eh?” said Scharnhorst. “You don’t think it was this fellow?”
“It could have been. He might have had another gun.”
“Well, who’s your candidate then? You’re a wise guy, you know everything.”
Quade grinned wryly and shook his head.
The door banged open and in came Oscar and Julius with Louie behind them. Louie was shivering from the cold.
“It’s forty below zero outside, maybe sixty or seventy even. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stay out there all night.”
Scharnhorst sighed. “Always complaining. How much more work have you got to do?”
“I just told you,” snarled Louie. “The pelts are strung up on lines. We got to take ’em down, tie ’em in bundles and load ’em in the truck. It’ll take us until morning to load all those skins.”
Scharnhorst scowled. “We should have waited until tomorrow night. Maybe all these guests wouldn’t have been here, and Becker might have had them baled for us. Well, you know how things are, Louie, the snow’ll keep people from coming here tonight, and we’ll have to make the most of it. Get yourself warmed up, and then give it another whack. Me, I’ve got my hands full right here.”