No Police Like Holmes (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine
-
Police Procedures

“Popcorn told me I'd find you here.”

“Oscar, you look ridiculous in that deerstalker,” I said.

“I'm just trying it on.” At least he had just enough taste to sound a little defensive. “You liked the Panama hat better?”

I ignored that.

We started walking toward a bench across from the studio.

“How's the investigation going?”

“It's continuing.”

Wow, that was informative.
“Throw me a bone here, Oscar. For instance, did you find out who it was your witness saw coming out of Matheson's room, wearing the deerstalker?” He hesitated, as if he didn't want to tell me, so I went into persuasion mode. “Come on, Oscar. I have a stake in this. We're on my turf here. I just want to know where things stand.”

He shook his head. “Nobody admitted it, and it could have been just about any clown in this carnival.”

We sat down.

“Including a woman?” I pressed. “You said ‘he' when you told me about it, but couldn't it have been a woman, like Molly Crocker, for example?” I was having a hard time letting go of that particular bone, even though I liked her.

“I guess so, if she were dressed in a man's clothing or something that could pass for it - gender-neutral, I guess you'd call it. Funny you should mention the judge, though. We had an interesting conversation, for reasons I won't get into. I think she's clean. If she hasn't killed that lunatic she's married to, I figure she wouldn't kill anybody.”

I could see his point. That would make an interesting defense strategy.

“So you're nowhere on the deerstalkers?”

“I didn't say that and don't put words in my mouth. I got the names of the five people who bought deerstalkers from that guy selling them along with the books. I've got Gibbons working the list.”

Damn. I should have pressed Pinkwater on that.

“Five not counting you, I presume. Anybody I know?”

“I don't know who you know, but I'm drawing the line there, pal. I'm not giving you any names. Besides, it may not mean anything anyway. We've got a new witness, a woman on the housekeeping staff, who got a better look at a guy coming out of Matheson's room.”

Now he tells me. In the news business, that's what is known as “burying the lead.”

“He was a redhead,” Oscar added. “That's all I know right now. What I wanted to tell you is, I'm going back to the Winfield right now to interview the witness myself.”

Somebody saw me.
Fighting panic, I tried to pretend my hair wasn't the color of a carrot and this couldn't possibly have anything to do with me.

“Al Kane is a red-head,” I mused, hating myself for casting suspicion on one of my favorite writers. “And we know he likes guns.” I was thinking of all those years of National Pistol Association commercials that ended with him pointing a Magnum .357 right at the viewer.

“He claims he's never even owned a gun,” Oscar said. “I've got a search warrant to have all the hotel rooms checked. We're looking for a .32 revolver. The bullet was still in the body, didn't go right through. That and the fact that there were no powder burns - ‘tattooing' they call it - probably means the killer wasn't too close to the body. Now, that's kind of odd. How far away can you get in a hotel room? But it doesn't tell us much. And, of course, the killer wiped the place clean of fingerprints.”

Happy as I was that I hadn't missed any of my prints or Lynda's, I also felt guilty that I'd possibly destroyed important evidence. But what were the chances of that, really? In detective stories, fingerprints are almost always false clues that get the wrong people in trouble. Surely whoever killed Matheson knew enough to wipe up afterwards.

“But I have a hard time figuring Al Kane for this,” Oscar went on. “From what I can tell, he's about the least popular guy here but that's just because he isn't one of those Sherlockian wackos. I don't see a motive. In fact, I don't see a reason for anybody to kill Matheson. But then again, I also don't see why a guy with all his dough would steal the stuff from that collection. Kleptomania, maybe?”

“What!”

Oscar looked puzzled. “Didn't Ed Decker tell you? I told my guys to let him know. We found two of the missing books in Matheson's hotel room.”

Chapter Thirty
-
Not Tonight, I Have a Headache

My surprise was a put-on, of course. Oscar's force is small but not incompetent. I knew they would find the books sooner or later, or the housekeeping staff would.

But Oscar wasn't within a mile of solving this murder. And so far as I could tell, neither was Mac - never mind his mysterious pronouncements designed to give that impression.

That left it up to me - and Lynda. Having no more real questions for the chief, I wrapped up the conversation and walked out of Muckerheide Center as casually as I could muster.

Then I broke into a jog.

Not much more than fifteen minutes later, taking a few shortcuts along the way, I arrived at the old McCabe house on Half Moon Street. I didn't have my key, having given it to Lynda, so I banged the iron door knocker. A long minute passed without the door opening. I banged again, loud enough to wake the dead. Still no answer.

Finally I turned the doorknob and gave an experimental push. The door opened.

“Anybody home?” I yelled, standing in the hallway. The words seemed to echo off the brass hall tree, the antique secretary, the framed paintings. Everything was familiar, yet somehow ominous. The silence was creeping me out. “Lynda!” I called

No response.

She might have completed her reconnaissance mission in Mac's guest suite and returned to St. Benignus already - except that I'd seen her yellow Mustang in the driveway outside my carriage house apartment.

I moved through the house slowly, like a thief in the night. That made no sense at all after the racket I'd already made, but I was functioning on the level of raw nerves and instinct now; sense or nonsense had nothing to do with it.

Within several feet of the guest suite I could see that the door was open. Nothing surprising about that, but it made the hair on the nape of my neck do handstands. I walked even slower, trying to prepare myself for whatever I might find in the room.

It didn't work, of course; nothing could prepare me for the awful sight of Lynda lying just inside the guest room, limp and lifeless as a marionette with its strings cut. Her body was curled almost in a fetal position, with her legs bent back and one of her blue-gray shoes off.

Unsteady on my legs, I dropped to my knees and felt her pulse. It was strong.

Satisfied that she was in no danger of dying, I held her hand and kissed her on the forehead. “Lynda, Lynda,” I murmured, not expecting her to hear. “If we could get back together, I'd never be a jerk again.”

Her eyelashes flickered. Her lips parted and a sound came out, halfway between a moan and a mumble.

“Lynda! Easy now,” I said. “Don't strain yourself, honey.”

She muttered something. I put my left ear next to her lips.

“Jeff.” She swallowed.

“Yes?”

“What you just said. Was that a promise?”

“Well, I could try.”

She managed a rueful grin. “Nice loophole. Listen, Jeff, I want you to know that Maggie didn't really break her ankle in a parachuting accident. She barely strained it.”

“What?” This was so out of left field I wondered if she were delirious. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm fessing up. I'm telling you that I ordered Maggie to stay home and nurse her ankle yesterday so I could assign myself to the story because I missed you. You're a bundle of neurotic ticks and only slightly less crazy than McCabe, but I missed you so much that I just had to see you again.”

That was somewhat like being slapped with her hand, then kissed by her lips, but the overall effect put me in serious danger of levitating. I tried not to show it.

“Then why'd you get rid of my picture in your apartment?” I asked.

“I didn't. I just moved it to the dresser in my bedroom. Get that leer off your face.” She winced. “
Mamma mia
, what a headache. It feels like - Oh! Oh, no!” With a look of wild panic on her face, she jerked her hand away from mine, pulled herself up from the floor, and stumbled to the bathroom. Immediately came the sickening sound of repeated vomiting. When Lynda emerged again she was pale, washed out. I put my arm around her.

“I actually used to like mysteries,” she said. “After this weekend, I'm not sure I can read them anymore.”

“You never liked mine.”

“I never said that. They're really pretty good, except for all that macho crap and the sexism.”

Fighting the urge to respond to that, I said, “What the hell happened here?”

“I was in that other little room, the sitting room with the bookcases, when I thought I heard a sound in here. The room looked empty, but when I went on to check out the hallway I got conked from behind.”

“The bastard must have been hiding in the bathroom. Let me look at your head.”

Gently as I could I separated the matted hair to get a look at the wound. It was a bloody bump about the size of a quarter. I accidentally touched it with the tip of my index finger.

“Ow!” Lynda jerked away. “Sadist.”

“It doesn't look too bad,” I said, “but I understand that head wounds are tricky. You should go to the hospital.”

“I should use dental floss and give up red meat, too. At least, that's what you used to tell me.” She took a deep breath. “I don't want some doctor tapping my knee with his little mallet. Just give me a minute, I'll be okay.”

“Whatever you say.”
The new Jeff Cody is non-directional.
“Did you find anything while you were poking around?”

She shook her head, then winced. “No chance to. Why did somebody do this to me?”

“Because somebody wanted you out of the way before you could prove the identity of the killer.”

“Chalmers?”

“I can't think of a better candidate. He looks frail, but maybe he hit you with his cane.”

It didn't make sense that Chalmers would just leave her there, right in the place he was staying, but then maybe that's what we were supposed to think.

“The book,” Lynda said suddenly, gripping my shoulder. “We still have to look for that missing Holmes book.”

I talked her into letting me clean her wound first with soap and water and peroxide from the bathroom cabinet.

“As you said, this is where the killer had to be hiding,” she pointed out as we stood in the bathroom. “We might as well start our search here.”

I couldn't see hiding a priceless book in a room where people were taking showers and flushing the toilet. Humidity is death on paper products. But we gave it a go. It wasn't an especially large bathroom, and a few minutes of intensive searching was enough to convince both of us that
Beeton's Christmas Annual
of 1887 wasn't hidden in the towels or wrapped in waterproof plastic inside the toilet bowl.

“Maybe it isn't hidden at all,” I suggested. “Chalmers probably never dreamed anybody would be rude enough to search his rooms, not even his host's brother-in-law.”

“And then maybe he didn't have time to hide it after he knocked me out,” Lynda added. (Actually, that sounds pretty weak right now, but it didn't then.)

In the bedroom, she tackled Renata's dresser and I took Woollcott's - just the places a person might casually stick a book that wasn't much more than a fat pamphlet. I started my search with a once-over at the top of both dressers. His still had keys and coins and a bottle of pills, just as I'd seen that morning. Hers had all those womanly things like lipstick, a hair brush, a jewelry box, eye shadows, and powders.

And yet I had a nagging feeling that something was missing, something was not as it had been earlier that morning.

I opened a wine-colored bathrobe from the top drawer of Chalmers's dresser and unfolded it. No book hidden inside.

“How do you like this?”

I turned around to see Lynda holding up a red satin-and-lace nightie that clearly wouldn't hide anything.

“It's the real you,” I assured her, my voice a little dry.

“You wish.” She refolded the garment and put it back in Renata's drawer. “If the book was ever here it was probably removed while I was unconscious. Or maybe the whole idea that Chalmers killed-”

“Hold it.”

I'd found something sandwiched between pairs of white undershorts. It was a little book with paper covers, about half an inch thick, five and a half inches wide and eight and a half long. There was a drawing on the cover in brown, a man lighting an old-fashioned lamp. Most of the printing was in black, including the part across the top where it said
Beeton's Christmas Annual
. But the title of the lead story, appropriately, was in big red letters -
A Study in Scarlet
. Gently, I turned to the first page and found a faded inscription in a handwriting I'd seen before:

Dear Ma'am,

I hope this little detective tale brings you some enjoyment.

A.C.D.

“This may be why you were hit on the head,” I told Lynda. “To keep you from finding this.”

Chapter Thirty-One
-
The Return of Sebastian McCabe

“It's the biggest story of my career,” Lynda said as we drove back to Muckerheide Center in her Mustang, me at the wheel. “Murder, jealousy, sex, burglary, brilliant detective work - it has it all.”

“Everything,” I agreed, by no means happy.

I could imagine the headline stretched across the top of the
Observer
tomorrow - or the website today, for that matter. Even worse, I could see Ralph Pendergast's reaction to the news that the killer was Mac's house guest. Oh, this was going to get real ugly real fast.

Mac's talk on “Humor in the Canon” was over and a Sherlockian auction was underway by the time we arrived at Muckerheide Center. In fact, my elephantine brother-in-law was nowhere to be seen as we slipped into the seats at the back of the Hearth Room. The seat next to Kate was empty.

Sherlockian books and memorabilia donated by participants in the seminar were being sold to pay bills not covered by the modest registration fee and to build a kitty for next year's program, a highly optimistic presumption at this point. Some of the stuff on the block raised (or lowered) the word “obscure” to new levels. Tie tacks, greeting cards, mugs, Christmas ornaments, you name it - anything with a connection to Sherlock Holmes, no matter how tenuous, seemed to be fair game.

Bob Nakamora, acting as auctioneer, held up a volume about the size of a normal hardback book but with a faded red cover of paper. The illustration showed Holmes in his dressing gown.

“Here we have a rare edition of
The Incunabular Sherlock Holmes
,” he announced. “There were only three hundred and fifty signed and numbered copies printed by the Baker Street Irregulars in 1958. This is number” - he opened the cover just a crack and peered inside - “ninety-four. What am I bid?”

Noah Queensbury, a couple of rows ahead of us, offered a dollar.

After some hesitation, a large woman in a print dress pushed it up to a dollar and a quarter.

“You may not have heard of this because it's so rare,” Nakamora said, “but it was edited by the late, great Sherlockian Edgar W. Smith.”

“Five dollars,” Woollcott Chalmers said from across the room. He sat next to Renata, watching the auctioneer with eyes that betrayed an intensity of engagement. He cared what happened here.

“Six,” Queensbury counter-bid.

“Ten.” Chalmers's voice betrayed the ragged edge of irritation.

“What the hell's he coming on so strong for?” Lynda whispered. “He already owns every Holmes book known to humankind.”

“Not anymore,” I pointed out. “Besides, it's how you play the game that counts for somebody like him, and he plays the game to win.”

Queensbury hung in until the bidding climbed up to twenty-five dollars, then flashed a nervous look at his spouse, the judge. Molly Crocker stirred in her seat. With obvious reluctance, Queensbury shook his head at Nakamora, silently taking himself out of the competition.

The smile on Chalmers's craggy face was a sort of victory flag as he limped up to claim his hard-won prize. He had plenty more to smile about in the next half-hour as a dozen or so other books piled up on Renata's lap.

“He must be trying to rebuild his whole blasted collection,” Lynda said.

“Starting with that, I suppose,” I said, nodding at the
Beeton's
concealed in a paper bag in Lynda's hand.

Just as the last item was sold (a
Hound of the Baskervilles
scarf that went to Barry Landers), Mac strode into the Hearth Room and up to the lectern. He removed the unlit cigar from his mouth as if to speak, but instead tossed the cigar into the air - where it turned into a yellow rose. He caught the flower and pinned it onto his boutonniere. Will the man never grow up?

“Weekends are always too short,” he commented, “and this one has been shorter than most. Though marred by tragedy, this first annual ‘Investigating Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes' colloquium has fulfilled all my hopes for a program that would be both entertaining and enlightening. What I mean is, it worked.”

The crowd showed its agreement with applause - a little less thunderous than at other times during the weekend since maybe a third of the crowd had left early. Mac responded with a promise to reprise the program as long as they kept coming back.

“Until next time, then,” he concluded, “I bid you farewell and beg you to remember: There's no police like Holmes!”

As he moved away from the lectern, he was mobbed by friends. Lynda and I finally cornered him a long five or ten minutes later. Being Mac, he acted like we'd been the ones missing in action.

“I need your report, Jefferson,” he harrumphed.

“Where have you been while we were doing your legwork?” Lynda demanded.

“I was involved in legwork of my own, as it turned out,” Mac said. “For one thing, I procured a verbal summary of the Sussex County coroner's findings.”

“Oscar told me about that,” I said. “There was a .32 revolver bullet still lodged in the body, no powder burns.” Apparently shot from a distance, Oscar had said.

“Precisely, old boy! It makes the truth about the weapon transparent, does it not? Of course, the TV4 report was already highly suggestive in that matter.”

“TV4?” I repeated. “What did the-”

“We can discuss that later. What did you find out from Gene Pfannenstiel? Molly Crocker? Renata and Woollcott? Noah Queensbury? Reuben Pinkwater?” He spit out the names like shots from a Tommy gun.

For all the talk
about
Queensbury, we hadn't actually talked
to
him, I realized now. But I unloaded everything I had, leaving out only Lynda's misadventure in Mac's house. Deliberately, I ended with Molly Crocker's bombshell about Renata and Matheson as a buildup to our own suspicion of Chalmers.

“I was, of course, aware of that most unfortunate dalliance,” Mac said.

“Of course,” I snapped, peeved at his attitude. “Then maybe you're also aware that your own house guest is the killer.”

“House guest?” If Mac had one of his big cigars in his mouth right then it would have fallen out.

“Woollcott Chalmers,” Lynda said with deliberation, twisting the knife.

“Ah, Jefferson, Lynda-” He looked from one to the other of us with sadness.

“Did somebody take my name in vain?”

All three of us looked around.

Chalmers, his face screwed into a smile, was holding tight to Renata like a metaphor of dependency.

Lynda pulled the
Beeton's Christmas Annual
out of the brown bag we'd swiped from the underwear drawer in Chalmers's room. She thrust it in front of the old man's face. “Is this what it seems to be?”

Chalmers took it from her and sank down into a chair to page through the annual with painstaking care. “Yes,” he said finally, “it is absolutely authentic. This is wonderful! Where did you get it?”

“From your dresser in the McCabes' guest suite,” Lynda said.

Mac pulled on his beard and Renata gasped.

“You went into my dresser? This is an outrage!” Chalmers sputtered.

“At least a lapse of etiquette,” I agreed. “But not as impolite as murder.”

Chalmers beseeched Mac. “Perhaps you can tell me what your brother-in-law is ranting about.”

Mac ignited a cigar. Apparently this was no time to obey the NO SMOKING signs, which he usually did in less stressful situations. (Friday night when he used the lit cigar to break the balloon didn't count because that fit into the category of “just showing off.”)

“I am afraid, Woollcott, that Jefferson believes you killed Hugh,” he said between puffs to stoke up. “If I perceive the scenario correctly, your motives were primarily jealousy and secondarily to retrieve the stolen Sherlockiana which was in Hugh's possession.”

“But I didn't have the
Beeton's
,” the old man protested. “Somebody must have put it in that drawer. You tell them, Renata.”

She seemed somehow to pull away from her husband, distancing herself from him, without physically moving at all. “I don't go into your drawers, Woollcott. You wouldn't like that.”

Chalmers grew older, smaller, in his chair.

“We didn't think jealousy was the main motive at all,” Lynda said. “It was the blow to his pride when he found out that he was being cuckolded, the realization that Matheson had taken away from him something that he regarded as his.”

Renata stepped away from her husband, a look of horror mixed with fear on her face. At least, that's how I read it. I could have sworn she believed he'd killed her lover.

Summoning up a reserve of strength, Chalmers tightened his grip on the arms of his chair and peered up at us with a fierce look. “How dare you people pry into my personal affairs? You have no damned right to invade my privacy with your amateur meddling!” He reminded me of the villain in a Sherlock Holmes story I read once, the one with the snake.

“Woollcott,” Mac said with a surprising gentleness, “the matter is scarcely a secret within the Anglo-Indian Club.”

Chalmers slumped back into the chair, as if exhausted. “Renata is a young woman and I am an old man.” His voice was distant and dry, like the sound of old newspapers rustling together. “I couldn't blame her for having a little fling with Matheson. I knew it was merely physical.”

“I'm not... I'm not... a
tramp
,” his wife said, gripping the back of Chalmers's chair. In the weird, surreal circumstances it struck me as an old-fashioned word. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply for a second. “My needs were not just physical. I could never make you understand that, Woollcott. I loved you and I wanted your companionship - I wanted to talk to you about art and music and films. But you were so absorbed in that collection... Hugh at least pretended to be interested in me. I was fool. I knew his reputation, but somehow I convinced myself it was different with me, that we had something real.”

Chalmers stared straight ahead as he talked about his wife as though she weren't there. “I had no reason to kill Matheson. I knew if I forced Renata to choose between him and me our marriage would be over, so I decided to endure it as long as they were discreet. I was sure that Matheson would soon tire of her and move on to some new conquest, although that hadn't happened yet.”

“Discreet?” I echoed. “Molly Crocker heard you and Matheson arguing about it in a bar before a meeting of the Anglo-Indian Club!”

“That was an aberration, something that only happened once. He'd just lost an important case that day and had too much to drink. Apparently he felt the need to mortify me by a graphic explication of his relationship with my wife. That's how I first found out about it.”

“And you couldn't stand the public humiliation,” I said. “That's why you killed Matheson.”

“I assure you, Renata knows quite well that I did not.”

She looked away from him.

“That book from your dresser drawer says otherwise,” Lynda told Chalmers. “That's why you bopped me on the head to keep me from finding it.”

In response to shocked looks all around, we gave the
Cliffs Notes
version of Lynda's morning adventure.

“Why would Woollcott render Lynda unconscious to prevent her from finding the
Beeton's
, then leave it in the drawer?” Mac objected. “That is, even assuming he had the physical stamina to do so.”

“He was scared away by the sound of me calling for Lynda,” I reasoned. “Things aren't always so neat in real life.”

“Granted, but you're saying our killer was so frightened by your arrival that he forgot the object of his quest?” Mac said. “That is hardly likely. And getting past you once you were in the house would have been impossible. There is no exit directly outside from the guest suite. Moreover, from the timetable that you have presented, all of the events at my house must have taken place during my talk on ‘Humor in the Canon.'”

“So?” Lynda said.

“So I personally noted Woollcott's presence in the audience during my entire talk. I assure you, he could not possibly have been the individual who hit you over the head, my dear Lynda.”