Nightmare at the Book Fair Read online

  “I see you had an ace up your sleeve,” Mr. Idiom told them. “Well, the Alliterator may have the gift of gab. But I’m top banana now. And what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, something dropped out of the sky and landed on Mr. Idiom. It was a man, and he had a big letter L on his chest.

  “It’s Lee Literal!” shouted Captain Obvious and the Exaggerator.

  “That’s right!” said Lee Literal. “It is I, the superhero who takes everything literally.”

  “Tear him limb from limb!” shouted the Exaggerator.

  Lee Literal proceeded to tear Mr. Idiom’s arms and legs off.

  “Oooh, that’s gotta hurt!” yelled Captain Obvious.

  “Kick his butt!” shouted the Exaggerator.

  Lee Literal proceeded to kick Mr. Idiom’s butt.

  “Punch his lights out!” shouted the Exaggerator.

  “What lights?” asked Lee Literal. “He doesn’t have any lights.”

  “Forget it,” Captain Obvious said. “He’s not breathing, and he has no pulse. I think he’s dead.”

  “The big bad bum bled big bad blood badly,” I said.

  “As always, we have conquered the forces of evil,” said Captain Obvious, high-fiving the Exaggerator.

  “We couldn’t have done it without your help, Alliterator,” the Exaggerator told me.

  “How much dew would a dewdrop drop, if a dewdrop did drop dew?” I asked.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Captain Obvious.

  “Are you suggesting that anything up till now has made sense?” asked the Exaggerator.

  It had been a long day. Twenty-four hours long, to be exact. I was glad it was over. All of those silly characters were just so annoying to be around.

  “Well, our work here is done,” said Captain Obvious.

  “After all that excitement, I need to blow off some steam,” said Lee Literal.

  So we went inside Mr. Idiom’s house and put a teapot on the stove. When steam started coming out of it, Lee Literal blew it off.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Before we part company, let’s say inappropriate and immature words,” Captain Obvious suggested.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because they’re funny!” said Captain Obvious.

  So we proceeded to say the most inappropriate and immature words we could think of.

  “Fart.”

  “Doody-face.”

  “Boogers and snot.”

  Chapter 7

  Mystery

  Who Was the Killer of Principal Miller?

  “Boogers and snot,” said my friend Lionel, “would be a good name for a rock band.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “like Guns N’ Roses.”

  I was at school, in the hallway outside the main office. Kids and teachers were rushing around. It must be before first period. There was a sign on the door with an arrow pointing to the media center: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE A BOOK FAIR! I was wearing my backpack. Everything looked so…normal! I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. It hurt.

  What a relief! I could go back to my normal life. At last.

  And then suddenly…

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkkkkkkk!”

  Our school secretary, Mrs. Conners, came running out of the office.

  “It’s Principal Miller!” she shouted. “He’s…dead!”

  Panic. There was yelling and running and sobbing. Cell phones appeared instantly and everybody was dialing 911. The nurse, Mrs. Robinson, came running over from her office with a first aid kit. The vice principal, Mrs. DeLuca, came running out of her office.

  It seemed as if only a few seconds had passed before sirens were screaming down the street and cars screeched to a halt outside school. Cops came running in with their guns drawn. Detectives. Emergency medical teams. It was pandemonium.

  A lot of kids headed for the exits, but Lionel and I stuck around to see what would happen next. Principal Miller had been a great guy. All the kids had loved him. He had won the Principal of the Year award a few years back. You’d always see him around town at sporting events and charity functions. It was hard to believe anyone would kill him. We waited patiently in the hall for a long time, until finally one of the policemen came out of the office and told us he had an announcement.

  “My name is Officer Joseph Bolton,” he said. “Principal Miller is deceased. The cause of death was heart failure, brought on by intense electrical stimulation. We have examined all the clues and evidence. There is one person of interest we need to question immediately. It is crucial that we find a young man named…”

  He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and read it.

  “…Trip Dinkleman.”

  What????!!!!

  Everybody gasped and turned to look at me.

  “Dink didn’t do anything!” Lionel shouted.

  “I’m Trip Dinkleman,” I said. “Why do you need to question me?”

  Officer Bolton looked me up and down slowly.

  “Why don’t you just tell the truth, Dinkleman?” he said. “You can make it easy on all of us.”

  “The truth is I was at the book fair and some books fell on my head,” I explained, “and the next thing I knew I was at some haunted house where some guy tried to give me a face transplant. And then I was at the Super Bowl. And then—”

  “The kid is an obvious liar,” Officer Bolton said. “Let me see his backpack, boys.”

  A couple of cops came over. I willingly handed over my backpack.

  “Go ahead and check it,” I told them. “I have nothing to hide.”

  The two cops brought my backpack over to Officer Bolton. He unzipped the larger pocket and reached inside.

  “Well, maybe you should have hidden this,” he said, as he pulled out a small black device that was about the size of a deck of cards.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “I’ve never seen that before.”

  “You know perfectly well what it is, Mr. Dinkleman,” said Officer Bolton. “It’s a stun gun!”

  Everybody gasped, including me. I felt a hundred pairs of eyes peering into my soul.

  “What’s the deal, Dink?” Lionel asked.

  “Miller had a weak heart,” Officer Bolton said. “Fifty thousand volts was more than enough to stop it.”

  “Trip! How could you?” Vice Principal DeLuca said. “You were always such a nice boy!”

  “How could I do what?” I protested.

  “You killed Principal Miller!” said Mrs. Conners, and she broke down crying.

  “I did not!” I shouted. “I didn’t put that in my backpack.”

  “Tell it to the judge, kid,” said Officer Bolton.

  I didn’t know what to do. How did that stun gun get into my backpack? There was no time to think things over. I could stay there and argue my case, but it wasn’t looking good. Everyone was staring at me with venom in their eyes. Even Lionel.

  I made a snap decision. I bolted out of there. I yanked open the stairwell door and dashed down to the ground floor. The front door to the school was open, and I jumped down the front steps. I don’t think my feet ever touched the ground.

  They would be coming after me: that was for sure. I had never run so fast in my life. I peeked behind me quickly. The cops weren’t there yet.

  Going home was out of the question. That would be the first place the cops would look. I headed downtown, down to the sleazier part of town.

  I was out of breath, but I couldn’t stop running. Not yet. There had to be a place to hide until I could collect my thoughts. People on the street glanced at me as I ran past, but nobody tried to stop me. In this part of town, it’s not unusual to see people running from the law.

  The street was filled with bars, pawnshops, and low-rent beauty parlors. I had to find a place soon or I’d collapse. Then I saw a sign: JAMES SNARK, PRIVATE EYE. I ducked in the doorway and slammed the door behind me.

  “Don’
t you know how to knock?” somebody muttered. I turned around to see who said it.

  Leaning back in a battered leather chair was a guy wearing one of those old-time felt hats with a brim. His feet were up on an old wooden desk. There was a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “Are you James Snark?” I asked, panting between words.

  “That’s what it says on the alimony checks,” he replied.

  “You’ve gotta help me, Mr. Snark! The police are after me!”

  “Calm down,” he said. “Take a load off. You’re safe here. The cops are afraid to come into this neighborhood.”

  I told him the whole story of what had happened to me at school. He grabbed a pad out of his desk drawer and started scribbling notes. When I was finished, he let out a whistle.

  “Lemme make one thing clear, kid,” he said. “I charge top dollar for my services. This is gonna cost you a pretty penny.”

  “My parents will pay,” I told him. “I can call them—”

  He slammed his hand down on the phone before I could pick up the receiver.

  “The cops are at your house right now,” he said. “Bet on it. You say you didn’t kill Principal Miller. Is that the truth, or are you lying to me?”

  “It’s the truth,” I said. “I swear it.”

  “Well, somebody’s lying,” Snark said. “That somebody must’ve zapped Miller and planted the stun gun in your backpack. Do you have any enemies?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What about that kid Lionel?”

  “He’s my best friend,” I said. “He would never do that.” I decided not to mention that Lionel had pushed me out of a plane once.

  “How about Principal Miller?” Snark asked. “Did anybody hate him?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” I said. “I always liked him.”

  “Huh, and you’re the one they’re trying to pin his murder on. Life is funny that way. I’m gonna have to do a little snooping around.”

  Snark got up and put his coat on.

  “If I can’t go home, where should I go?” I asked.

  “You can cool your heels upstairs in my place until the heat’s off,” he told me. “There are some Pop-Tarts in the fridge.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any funnel cake?” I asked.

  “Funnel cake?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Snark.”

  “Just doing my job, kid,” he said, slamming the door behind him.

  Snark here. I spent the next few weeks snooping around on behalf of the Dinkleman kid, seeing what dirt I could dig up on the Miller murder. And believe me, I dug up a lot. Turns out sweet old Principal Miller wasn’t such a pillar of the community after all. He was a rotten principal, a rotten husband, a rotten father, and a rotten man. He had more than a few enemies and lots of skeletons in his closet, not to mention some really ugly ties. In fact, just about everybody hated him. It was only a matter of time before somebody decided to off him.

  After I finished my investigation, I called all the interested parties into my office, including the Dinkleman kid. The murder had been all over the papers, and there had been a nationwide manhunt for Dinkleman, but nobody had thought to look in my guest room. I invited Officer Joseph Bolton and Miller’s widow to the big pow-wow too.

  This is how it went down…

  “Ladies and gentleman,” I said, once they got over the shock of seeing Dinkleman sitting there alive and well, “my name is James Snark, and I’m a private investigator. I called you all here to discuss the stun-gun murder of Principal Horace Miller on April 18.”

  A few of them started sobbing, but I didn’t break stride. Sometimes it’s my job to make people cry.

  “Are you suggesting that one of us is a suspect?” asked Sharon DeLuca, the vice principal at Miller’s school.

  “No, sweetheart,” I told her. “I’m suggesting that all of you are suspects. All of you had a motive to kill Principal Miller. I know exactly who did it, and I’m going to name names.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Mrs. DeLuca replied.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” I said. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions, Mrs. DeLuca?”

  “Ask away,” she said. “I’ll take a lie detector test if you want.”

  “Did you kill Principal Miller?” I asked directly. No point beating around the bush.

  “Of course not!” she said, looking as guilty as sin to me.

  “Mrs. DeLuca,” I said politely, “two years ago, when the previous principal retired, you were next in line to be principal, weren’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” she replied.

  “You would have gotten a nice raise in salary if you had been promoted to principal. But they hired Horace Miller from another school instead.”

  “Your point?” she asked.

  “You wanted that principal’s job, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “I made no secret about that.”

  “MAYBE YOU WANTED IT BADLY ENOUGH TO KILL HIM!” I shouted, spitting the words in her direction.

  “That’s preposterous!” she exclaimed, flustered.

  “Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” I said. I had a few more questions to ask her, but there were other fish I wanted to fry first.

  I turned my attention to the president of the PTA, a Mrs. Jennifer Pontoon.

  “Mrs. Pontoon,” I said, “last fall you were planning to hold a fund-raiser to buy the school one of those computerized whiteboards, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was,” she replied.

  “But Principal Miller wouldn’t let you sell gift wrap to raise money, is that correct?”

  “Yes, so what?” she blabbered.

  “How did that make you feel?” I asked.

  “Upset,” Mrs. Pontoon admitted. “A little angry.”

  “ANGRY ENOUGH TO KILL HIM?” I asked.

  “I would never kill anybody!” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m with the PTA!”

  “Um-hmmm,” I muttered. “What about you, Mrs. Robinson? You’re the school nurse. Is it true that you have access to a number of toxic chemicals—shall we say poisons—in the nurse’s office?”

  “Certainly,” she replied. “I have a lot of medicine, and some of it can be toxic if taken in large doses.”

  “DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH TO KILL A MAN?” I asked. “Or should I say, did you have enough before you killed Principal Miller?”

  “The principal had a heart attack!” she yelled at me, her eyes fiery. “You said somebody caused it with a stun gun!”

  “What if I were to tell you,” I said, “that the autopsy revealed a large quantity of ibuprofen in Principal Miller’s body?”

  “I’d say that he must have had a headache,” she replied.

  “A HEADACHE BAD ENOUGH TO KILL HIM?” I asked.

  “I didn’t do it!” she yelled at me. But I ignored her and turned my attention to the school secretary.

  “Mrs. Conners, can you tell us what a school secretary does?”

  “I make announcements, sort the mail, keep track of which students are absent, things like that,” Mrs. Conners said.

  “But Principal Miller made you do other things too, didn’t he?” I asked. “He made you buy a gift for his wife when he forgot their anniversary. He made you give his dog a haircut. He made you wash his car, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, so what?” she said.

  “You have a master’s degree in business, don’t you, Mrs. Conners?” I asked her. “You worked hard to earn that degree, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did,” she replied.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Conners. Does a person with a master’s degree like or dislike giving haircuts to a dog?”

  She squirmed in her seat.

  “I disliked it,” she admitted.

  “DID YOU DISLIKE IT ENOUGH TO KILL HIM?”

  I didn’t even give her the chance to answer. I swiveled my chair around until I was facing the school custodian, a guy named Herb Dunn.

&
nbsp; “Mr. Dunn, you didn’t like Principal Miller very much, did you?”

  “Lots of people hated him,” Dunn said in broken English.

  “Just answer the question,” I said, sighing. “Yes or no?”

  “No, I didn’t like him,” said Dunn.

  “He didn’t give you enough time to mop the floor of the cafeteria and let it dry before the kids came in for afternoon assemblies, isn’t that right?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Were there any other things he did that bothered you?” I asked.

  “Sure, lots of things,” Mr. Dunn said.

  “ENOUGH THINGS THAT YOU’D WANT TO KILL HIM?”

  I turned my attention to the science teacher, Mr. Reggie Chan.

  “Mr. Chan, where were you on the morning of April 18?” I asked.

  “I was in the science room, as always,” Chan replied.

  “What if I told you that surveillance video shows the science room was empty at the moment when Principal Miller was murdered?” I said.

  “Perhaps I stepped out briefly,” Chan said.

  “Yes, I guess you had a little time…TO KILL!”

  They were sweating now, all of them. Nobody was saying anything about arresting the Dinkleman kid anymore. Any one of them could have zapped Principal Miller and stashed the stun gun in Dinkleman’s backpack. They all had motives and they all looked guilty. I turned to the school media specialist, Miss Rosemary Durkin.

  “You have a difficult job, don’t you, Miss Durkin?”

  “We all do,” she replied.

  “But we all don’t have to be the librarian at two schools a mile apart,” I pointed out. “We all didn’t have Principal Miller take away our assistant due to budget cuts last year. We all don’t have to teach eight classes a day, every day. We all don’t have to shelve books by ourselves. We all don’t have to do story time with whining first graders. Isn’t it true that you barely have time to go to the bathroom during the day? Isn’t it true that nobody ever thanks you for all you do at school? Isn’t it true that when you get home at the end of the day, you’re so tired you eat frozen dinners without even heating them up?”

  “Yes, it’s true!” she complained. “So what?”

  “And isn’t it true that one day in the teacher’s lounge you said you wished Principal Miller would drop dead?” I asked.