Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (31 page)

I remember that day as if it were yesterday, and yet I know that I can not recall even a scintilla of the detail that Merridew retained. But even that tiniest amount, even that small iota of recollection, is enough to haunt me to the end of my days.

Doctor Rhys regarded John Watson, his eyes wide with sympathetic horror.

“I can’t help but think of all those young men,” John continued, waving towards the door and indicating the whole of Holloway Sanatorium beyond, “those tending the garden, or around the snooker table, or else just lounging in the corridors. So young, with so much life ahead of them, and yet their minds are fixed on the horrors of the trenches, their attentions forever fixed on the Great War.”

John leaned forward, meeting the doctor’s gaze.

“If it were up to me, doctor,” John went on, “you would spend less time studying how it is that we remember, and marveling over the prodigious memories of the past, and instead devote your attentions to discovering how it is that we
forget
.”

John closed his eyes, and eased back in his chair.

“Memory is no wonder, Dr. Rhys, nor is it a blessing.”

John pressed his lips together tightly, trying to forget that awful day, and the smells that lingered beneath the scent of bleach and lye.

“Memory is a
curse
.”

Red Sunset

Red Sunset

by Bob Madison

The sky was red when a hot wind blew in from the south. Sunset in Los Angeles can be a funny thing. It can make a man feel beaten and maybe a little lonely. Whichever, it didn’t make me feel good.

I had never met the old man before. They moved him over the big drink for safe keeping when Hitler started bombing London. They said that morale would crumble if the Nazis took him out, so he was smuggled into New York by submarine and wheeled over like a pasha to the coast. Then, we pretty much forgot about him, warehousing him with the other fossils once we got into the war ourselves. I heard that the old guy was screwy, but I thought screwy was just what I needed about now.

They set him up in an old folk’s home near Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a gray old dump, crumbling and shaky, just like the people who lived there. The nurse at the front desk made a big show getting me ‘approved’ to see the old man, even though I flashed my badge and explained that it was business. When she thought I had waited long enough, she led me down a dimly lit hall and knocked on the door.

A reedy voice said, “Yes?”

“Visitor for you,” she said.

“Send him away.”

She smiled at the door. A cruel smile, I thought. “He always says that. Just go in.”

I watched her walk away before I took hold of the doorknob and entered.

It was rank in the old man’s room. It smelled of stale clothes and medicine and something vaguely sick in the air. There were two windows facing south and the room was flooded with the red sunset. Books, some opened, some not, were scattered about, and the floor was littered with copies of
The Times
. The drapes were a little ragged and the carpet frayed. On the desk was an old photograph of a good looking man with a thick moustache.

The old man sat huddled in a wheelchair, small and brittle in his clothes. He wore an over-sized dressing gown and the collar of his shirt needed ironing. He had a beaky face that was a battlefield of wrinkles, and his gray hair was pulled far back from his temples. His lips were thin and blue with age, his teeth brown with nicotine. I heard he was over one hundred, and it was a miracle that the old man was still alive.

His brows came together and he squinted at me. “You smoke cigarettes, I perceive.”

I nodded.

“Give me one.”

I fished a pack of Luckies from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. His clawed fingertips touched mine and they were cold. “They think that smoking is bad for me and have taken away my pipe,” he wheezed. “Colossal stupidity.”

The old man wheeled over to his desk and took down a large box of wooden matches. He lit a Lucky and inhaled gratefully. Then he coughed, his bones rattling. When he started breathing again, he looked at me.

“Oh,” he croaked. “Thank you. That will be all.” He put the cigarettes in his dressing gown pocket.

“Wait a minute. I need to talk to you.”

He sighed heavily and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You want me to do the trick? Young man, I was quite elderly before you were born. I am not a performing flea and will not entertain you in return for a cigarette.”

“You kept the whole pack,” I said.

He took another drag and gave me a dirty look. It was a thin smile that could curdle milk. He clawed at his chest for a satin ribbon and pulled an old fashioned
pince-nez
from the folds of his robe. He held these up to his eyes, which magnified like big, gray headlights.

“Very well. You,” he said, “are a dick.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That is, I believe, the American vernacular for a consulting detective. You’re an operative for one of the larger firms, Chandler or Continental, perhaps. You have smoked cigarettes for some thirty years. You are from the American mid-West, Nebraska or some other wild territory. You are unmarried and not engaged or in any other permanent arrangement with a woman. You never eat at home and your diet is appalling. It is quite some time since you’ve bought a new suit of clothes. You write your reports with a typewriter on which the ‘A’ key is loose. You own a motor car, a rather gaudy one, I should think. You carry a revolver and have recently been in an altercation that has occasioned the use of fisticuffs.”

I looked at him.

“You’ve been in a fight.”

“Yeah.”

That curdled smile again, then another drag. “Hauntingly concise. Thank you and good-bye.” He wheeled around, his back to me.

“I’ve come here for help.”

“I’m not interested. I’m retired. I’m too old. I don’t care. Go away.”

“I shot a man yesterday.”

“I understand from the cinema that your type often does.”

“I shot him three times.”

“Once I could shoot my Sovereign’s initials in my parlor wall. Do better.”

“I shot him twice in the chest and once in the head. Then he got up and walked away.”

Silence. Then he slowly wheeled around again to face me. His eyes had caught the red light outside. He pursed his lips, thinking of what to say next. “You have another package of cigarettes in your left breast pocket, I perceive. Give them to me.”

I handed them over and he squirreled that pack away with the other. “Pray take a seat.”

I pulled up the only other chair in the room — a wooden straight-back that was once part of a kitchen set. I took the violin off of it and placed it gently on the desk before sitting. “Do you have a smoke?” I asked.

He smiled thinly, giving one of my cigarettes back to me. He kept the pack. I struck a light on my shoe and puffed. “About five days ago a dame comes into my office. She’s just what you want, you know? Long and slinky, blonde, but probably not natural, her eyes were puffy and she had that haunted look, but not enough that it would put her on the shelf. I sit her in the chair across from my desk and offer her a drink. The light played on her rings when she moved her hands, and—”

He cut me off. “Do you talk like this all the time? Could you please dispense with the poetry? I’m over one hundred years old and I don’t have much time.”

I made it short. “She says that her husband’s vanished. He’s an importer. His business was mostly through Europe, but with the war business has dried up. They were doing OK — better than most, I’d say. But times have been tough for the past few years.”

“Does this
dame
have a name? Or her husband, for that matter?”

“Landau. Monica Landau. Husband is Miles Landau. He started the business, Landau Consignments, in the early ‘30s. Business did well and he made enough for a big spread in Marina Del Rey. He and his wife moved there in ’38. Aside from the problems with business because of the war, she thought they were happy.”

“What were the circumstances of his disappearance?”

“There were no circumstances. He just never came home.”

“You searched his office, naturally.”

“Yeah. Landau Consignments is down by the Vivica Docks. It’s the swankiest building there — he didn’t do things on the cheap. He’s got only one full-time employee, an old dame named Theresa Vincenzo. Everyone else he uses is freelance or part of the importation crew. Vincenzo has to be a hundred. No offense, of course.” I stubbed my cigarette into the clean ashtray on the desk. “Went through his phone book. No dames. No tell-tale signs of hanky panky, either.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He was the age, you know? Don’t get me wrong, Monica Landau is a doll, but Miles was pushing fifty, and that’s when a man is looking for a little excitement.”

“I believe I understand. Pray continue.”

“Well, when a guy pushing fifty disappears, it’s usually one of three things. Either he’s got a broad on the side or he’s gambling or drinking — something that gets him into trouble. Or, sometimes, he’s had some kind of accident and no one knows it yet.”

“Astonishing,” he said, blandly, lighting another of my cigarettes. “I could, with a modicum of imagination, create hundreds of reasons for a man to disappear, but no matter. I assume you followed your usual lines of investigation.”

“Yeah. Nothing large missing from the bank account. No booze hidden in the office. Vincenzo says no unexplained phone calls. I even went to the cat house four blocks down, you know, on Lindstrom?”

He blew smoke. “I can’t say I do, but I shall take your word for it.”

“Never heard of him. So, I get a picture from the Landau dame and go to each and every hospital and morgue in town. Nothing. Check with the police on the car. Nothing.”

“Come back to the motor car, please. What do you mean,
nothing
?”

“It could still be on the road, but it hasn’t turned up wrecked or abandoned. A black sedan.”

“I see. So Landau drove to work in a motor car?”

“Yeah. Why?” He just brushed the question aside, so I went on. “So, then I’m thinking that maybe it’s the dame, you know? Maybe she’s getting me in on it, so, after her husband’s body turns up, no one would know she killed him. You know?”

The old man crushed his butt in the ash tray. “It is a considerable deductive leap to suddenly believe this young lady would commit murder simply because you cannot find her husband.”

“Yeah, but you know dames.” He gave me that smile again, really venomous this time. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. When I’m around you it’s just a pleasure to be alive. Now tell me. I assume that Monica Landau had also gone to the police and reported her husband missing. I also assume that you found nothing to incriminate her in his disappearance. And, I conclude that you returned to the case with that indefatigable energy that you have thus far demonstrated. Would that be an accurate summation?”

“Yeah. So, then I figured, hell, maybe it was something to do with his business.”

“Ah ha, a colleague after all. Pray continue.”

“As I said, business for Landau had not been so good since the war. I went over his import/export records for the last few years. He shipped all around the world, but there was nothing consistent that got me suspicious. He worked the Orient, but not enough for him to be big into dope, you know? And he did enough with Germany, but that all dried up in the late 30s, so I didn’t think he was a Fifth Columnist, either. And he did just as much with the French and Brits as he did with the Germans.

“For the past few years, though, he’s been concentrating mostly on Canada and Mexico … a little to Alaska, too. Nothing there, though, just business as usual as far as I could make out. And then, going through the records from four months ago, I come across something that got me thinking. He had a client who needed fifty boxes shipped out of Romania. Bam. Out of nowhere, he’s dealing with Europe again.

“So, I looked into it. It was right around the time that the King Michael coup over there deposed Antonescu and got Romania out of the Axis and back with the Allies. It was legit enough, but, like I said, it came from out of nowhere. Fifty boxes, six and a half feet long, three feet wide and three feet deep.”

The old man leaned back in his wheelchair. He looked like I spat on him. “What’s the matter?”

He stared into the distance. “Nothing. Just renewing an acquaintance. Pray continue.”

“Well, I checked the manifests and records. The boxes arrived on Tuesday, April 30.”

“Walpurgis night,” the old man said. He motioned me to go on.

“That’s the last day Monica Landau saw him alive.”

“Where are these boxes now?”

“That’s where it gets screwy. I was in his office all day yesterday. Vincenzo is still putting in full days; I think she manages the cash flow and she’s paying herself, hoping that Landau comes back and that there’s still a job for her. I was getting close to the end of his business records, so I stayed on until late into the night, paging through them. Landau Consignments is right across from the Beroil Club, you know. I had my feet on the desk and I was smoking a cigarette. The air was unusually hot and my tie was open. The Beroil has a neon sign and—”

The old man smacked a desiccated fist on the arm of his wheelchair. “Yes, yes, yes.
And the neon light beat a steady tattoo on the wall and somewhere I heard a melancholy saxophone play.
I know. Get on with the story man!”

He got on my last good nerve so I gave it to him hard and plain. “I suddenly felt that someone else was in the room. I looked up and there was Landau, standing in the doorway. I had been carrying his picture with me for the past few days, and he’s impossible to miss. Tall guy. Was blond once, but now a little gray at the temples. Jowly, but not fat. He was wearing a dark suit, probably the one he was wearing the day he vanished because it has dirt stains on the knees and elbows.

“I got up and made my way around the desk. I was about to ask him where he’d been and let him know his wife was worried when he snarled at me like an animal and grabbed me by the wrist. He pulled me forward and I slammed into the wall hard enough to crack it. I shook my head to work the brain when he came at me again. His eyes were glowing red … I swear to God, his eyes were glowing red. And his breath. Jesus, he smelled like rotten meat and stale farts. He reached for my collar and I ducked and weaved around him.