The Game is Aface!

Watson, I’ve got it! This has been a most exhausting case, but I believe the time has come to put away your obscure (but most entertaining) theories about the fate of the Imandhi diamond. Piecing together the clues, there can be only one possibility for a solution to this fascinating crime. Don’t you see, Watson—the motive, means, and suspect all become quite clear when one realizes that Colonel Smithson’s pancakes were mere holograms all along.

What’s that you say? Impossible? Uh….yeah, you might be right. I’m actually not real sure on this one. To tell you the truth, I’ve even been going back through some of our old cases, like The Adventure of the Speckled Band, or The Red-Headed League, and I’m coming to realize that I probably only got about fifty percent of the solutions right. I was just way off base some of the time, now that I think of it. I feel kind of bad for those people in jail.

Oh heck, I’m just going to come out and say it: I think we should get out of this sleuthing racket entirely. I’ve totally lost any semblance of professionalism, and you’ve never been any help at all, so let me bounce a couple of notions off you. First, what do you think of my idea to sell personalized grocery belt dividers? You know what I’m talking about, the sticks that keep your muffins and lemon Pledge and such from the stuff of the person in front of you in line? We could charge fifteen, twenty bucks a piece for ones that people keep permanently and have their names engraved on, don’t you think? In a variety of colors, so the iMac set gets all excited? Second, I’m still thinking that a lot of advertising space could be sold on the sides of zoo animals. They just stand there all day, people gawk at them---why not put a message about Diet Sprite on the side of a giraffe? Doesn’t have to be a banner weighing them down and messing up their spines; you could spray-paint it right on with some kind of non-toxic gunk.

Neither one of those ideas floats your boat? Okay, I was ready for that, so let me give you the golden ticket: I know a guy in the East End who can sell us ten thousand bottles of diet pills for next to nothing. We could slap a logo on them, market our name---“Holmes and Watson’s Baker Street Weight Loss Miracle”---fat people would lap it up. Am I wrong?

Do you want to talk about the time machine idea again? And before you ask, the answer is no, I still don’t have any scientific ideas about building one that would function; the whole point is that it’s just a big hollow box, but by the time people realize it we’ve already pocketed eight hundred pounds and we’re just vapor, we’re gone, we’re an exhaust cloud. I’m willing to come around on the percentage if that’s your hesitation.

Okay, I can see your mind is wandering yet again and your head’s not in this conversation. So we’ll talk about something else. What did you think about the obnoxious comment Professor Moriarty made on that blood-stained cryptogram he sent over, the one about my meerschaum pipe? What was the snide little implication there? You’d tell me if I look like an idiot with that thing in my mouth, right? Right?