No Police Like Holmes (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two
-
On the Hook

The earth twirled on its axis and revolved around the sun. Eons passed as Woollcott Chalmers stared at Lynda and me, letting Mac's last words hang in the air like humidity in August. Renata looked confused, as if unsure whether to accept the witness that her husband wasn't a murderer after all.

Finally, Lynda said, “Maybe we went around the curves a little too fast with this idea.”

“If that's supposed to be an apology,” Chalmers said, “I'll have to talk to my lawyer before I accept.”

“This game has gone on too long,” Mac said. “I must tell you that the murderer is-''

“Mr. Chalmers!”

It wasn't an accusation this time, just the always-annoying Graham Bentley Post calling to Chalmers from the doorway. Even on a Sunday afternoon the man from the Library of Popular Culture was dressed for business. His three-piece gray suit had the requisite stripes and if the shirt had any more starch in it, it would have been one big Roman collar. His thick, gray mustache was trimmed with precision.

“I have interrupted nothing important, I trust.” Post's manner as he approached Chalmers was so patently ingratiating that it almost made me ill.

“Nothing important,” Chalmers agreed with a sideways glance at Lynda and me.

Post ignored the byplay and heard what he wanted to hear as he approached the old man. “Good, because what I have to say
is
important, Mr. Chalmers. It is about the Woollcott Chalmers Collection.”

“Then you should be saying it to these men, not to me.” He waved vaguely in the direction of Mac and me. “They represent St. Benignus College, which for good or ill owns the Collection now.”

“Not irrevocably,” Post said with a triumphant smirk. “It is quite obvious that the collection has been treated shabbily by its new owner. Books have been stolen, a man murdered. The college clearly has not maintained the security of the collection as promised in the agreement under which you made your donation. As a result, I believe that the donation can be voided, freeing you to put the Chalmers Collection in the hands of an institution that is prepared to give it the proper care it deserves.”

“Such as the Library of Popular Culture,” Lynda interpreted.

Post executed a little bow in her direction. “I am virtually certain our lawyers can make it happen.”

“Your lawyers,” Mac drawled, “will have to go through me and the college's lawyers first. They will find the task neither easy nor enjoyable.”

“On the contrary,” Post said. “You don't know my lawyers. These particular legal talents
will
enjoy it. In the case of the Renfield Collection of Disney cartoon cells-”

Lynda pulled on my arm and kept pulling until we were through the doors of the Hearth Room. “I couldn't stand anymore of that,” she explained.

“It wasn't a lot of fun,” I agreed. “I guess we aren't very good sleuths. We kind of made fools out of ourselves back there.”

“What do you mean, ‘kind of''? We'll never live this down. McCabe won't let us.”

We started wandering through Muckerheide Center. I took Lynda's hand and she didn't jerk it back. I still wasn't sure where our relationship was going, but at least it looked like we had one. So I wasn't as depressed as I should have been about the fiasco we were leaving behind us.

“Maybe Post killed Matheson,” I said. “He was on Mac's list. And look at how he benefits from this whole mess if he can use it to convince Chalmers to back legal action against the college.”

Lynda shook her head. “That's too indirect and too uncertain to be a motive for murder.”

“I know,” I sighed as we passed the President's Dining Room, “but it's too bad. I'd love seeing that prig in prison gray.”

“What do you suppose Mac has up his sleeve?”

“Don't ask me. As far as he's concerned I'm just his idiot Watson. He hasn't even explained to me the part about Matheson not stealing the books. That could be the solution to the murder for all I know.”

Without destination in mind we found ourselves heading aimlessly down the back stairs. The main level of Muckerheide looked as if it had been hit by a neutron bomb. The bookstore, the gallery, the main dining room were all dark. The only living being in sight was the Viking girl at the information desk and the only sound was the small TV she was watching, probably WWE wrestling.

As we kept walking down the stairs toward the next level, Lynda pulled the agenda for the colloquium out of her purse.

“This is practically a timetable of events leading up to the murder,” she said. “There must be a clue in here somewhere. It always worked for Hercule Poirot.”

“Max Cutter does not use timetables.”

She went on, ignoring me. “Obviously, the crucial time period is between the end of Kate's talk - Matheson was still alive then - and when I found the body an hour or so later. Where was everybody then?”

I mentally worked my way through Mac's list. “I don't know about Pfannenstiel, Pinkwater, or Post - three P's in a pod! - but we're not looking at any of them as serious suspects. Molly Crocker and Noah Queensbury alibi each other. Renata Chalmers was getting dressed and putting her hair up in those fancy ringlets. Her husband supposedly was discussing some obscure point in a Sherlock Holmes story with Mac, but you've effectively questioned that.”

By now we were on the lowest level of Muckerheide Center. The game room was still open, attracting a few stranded dormies, but not many.

“And now Mac is giving Chalmers an alibi again,” Lynda mused. “Chalmers couldn't have hit me on the head. But wait a minute! It didn't have to be the killer who did that. If you and I figured out that Chalmers had the book, somebody else could have done the same thing - somebody bent on stealing it.”

So Mac could be wrong. Or maybe he didn't have to be. My brother-in-law never stopped playing games, especially word games. Had he ever actually said that Chalmers wasn't guilty? I wasn't sure. What I remembered was Mac talking as if the coroner's report and the TV segment on the Chalmers Collection revealed something critical to the case.

“There's something in my office I think we ought to take a look at,” I told Lynda. “It might be the answer to the whole thing.”

“What whole thing? What are you talking about?”

“A video of the-”

I shut up. We'd just turned a corner and encountered a horrendous sight. Staring malevolently at a row of soft drink and snack machines was Oscar Hummel. The source of his anguish was elementary to someone who knew the chief as well as I did: He had just worked himself up to having to actually
buy
cigarettes, then had gone looking for a cigarette vending machine, only to realize that there isn't a single such mechanism on campus.

Oscar heard our footsteps and whirled around.

“Teal!” He managed a smile, of a sort. “You're a lifesaver. I need-”

“The love of a good woman,” Lynda told him. “But what you want is a cigarette. Sorry, Chief, I quit. Remember? Let me buy you a root beer.”

With a grunt and a sour expression on his face, Oscar ungraciously accepted the offer. Lynda bought Diet Cokes for the two of us and a Dad's Root Beer for Oscar. Drinks in hand, we took over a little Formica-topped table in a grimy alcove. I wanted to get out of there, to take Lynda to my office and show her something, but there was no way to exit gracefully. Besides, I wanted to hear what the official investigation had turned up.

“You saved me some shoe leather,” Oscar said. “I was just about to go looking for you guys.”

“So, Chief,” I said, putting it on the professional level, “did you find the gun?”

Oscar knocked back his Dad's as if it were his favorite brew, a local product called Hudepohl 14K. “No gun. And our second witness says Kane wasn't the redhead she saw coming out of Matheson's room.” The expression on his face was disappointment and a little more, maybe discomfort. “A redheaded man
and
a blondish woman, it turns out. That's what the witness saw. Funny coincidence, that's just what I'm seeing now as I look at you two.”

“Funny,” Lynda agreed, looking grim. “But actually I've never thought of myself as exactly a blonde. I'd say my hair leans more toward light brown.”

“I consider it dark honey,” I chipped in. My stomach felt like some sailor had been using it for knot-tying practice.

Oscar drummed his right hand on the table, like he didn't know what to do without a cigarette in it. “I don't like coincidences. So I asked a few questions, Teal, and I found out that you spent a lot of time hanging around Matheson yesterday.”

She shrugged. “I already told you I sat next to him a few times. We talked about Sherlock Holmes.”

“And that's all - with Matheson's reputation as a lady-killer and your thing with Jeff here on the rocks?” He shook his head. “That's hard to believe. No, I figure you got a lot cozier than that. He probably gave you the key card to his room. It wasn't on his body or anywhere in the room. Then Jeff walked in on you two later. Anybody who knows Jeff knows how jealous he is when it comes to you. Goodbye lawyer.”

“What!” I could feel myself starting to sweat.

“When we were talking earlier today it was obvious you were trying to point the finger at somebody, almost anybody - Molly Crocker, Al Kane. Now I can see you were really just pointing away from you.”

This was my worst nightmare come true. “You can't be serious, Oscar.”

“Am I laughing? Believe me, old buddy, I take no pleasure in this. In fact, it's hurting me more than it is you.”

Before I could express my sincere doubt about that, Lynda said, “Bullshit. You're eating this up. But your stupid theory makes no sense. Why would I leave the room with Jeff if he'd killed a man I'd been intimate with, which by the way I hadn't? Why would I be telling you right now that you're crazy instead of putting the finger on him?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's because you like the idea that a man killed for you.”

Lynda threw up her hands with an appropriate amount of drama. “I give up. Oscar, you are certifiable.”

Oscar took a long pull on his root beer. “We'll see what my witness says when she sees you two. Meanwhile, why don't you just empty your purse for me?”

“What for?” Lynda said.

“To see if you have Matheson's missing room key.”

“Are you trying to humiliate me just because you can't bum cigarettes off of me anymore?”

Oh, damn. She did still have the key. No, she couldn't have been that stupid. But so much had happened, maybe she'd had no time to think about it... The knots in my stomach grew tighter.

“So you won't let me look in your purse?” Oscar said.

“I'd feel violated.”

“Uh-huh.” He ostentatiously twiddled his thumbs.

“You don't have a search warrant,” I pointed out.

Oscar raised his eyebrows, all innocence. “You know, I was really hoping I was wrong and we wouldn't have to go the search warrant route, the line-up-”

“Okay, okay,” Lynda said. “I'll open my damned purse.”

She pulled the gray-blue leather bag off of her lap by its strap and raked the contents out on the Formica table top, carefully avoiding the water rings from our drinks.

The variety was incredible: a change purse, a wad of crumpled tissues, three packs of gum (all opened), a key chain with a little canister of mace, a wallet, Lynda's Android, one loose key, a plastic tampon holder, a rosary, assorted loose change, four pieces of hard candy (Werther's), a notebook, a pen, a pencil, six bobby pins, a nail clipper, two tickets stubs from a 2008 Cincinnati Reds game, a compact, the agenda for “Investigating Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes,” a sucker, a checkbook, a hair brush, and a Sussex County map.

Oscar picked up the key chain and squinted at each key in turn. There must have been a dozen of them.

“You're enjoying this, aren't you?” I griped.

“Not me,” Oscar said, but I didn't believe him. He had reasons to have it in for Lynda, and he wasn't a particularly forgiving kind. “I don't know why you have all these keys, but none of 'em's from the Winfield.”

“I know,” Lynda said. I knew, too, because none of them was a key card.

Oscar held up the one loose key and I saw that it was the key to Mac's house. He studied it, shook his head, and gave that, too, back to Lynda. She passed it on to me in a casual, unobtrusive gesture beneath the table that Oscar wasn't supposed to catch but did. He snickered. I knew what he was thinking and I didn't bother to set him straight.

“Now empty out the change purse,” he ordered.

Lynda looked at me, sighed, and complied.

This is it, I thought. I made up my mind that if I had to toss up the contents of my wrenching stomach I'd do it in Oscar's substantial lap.

But there was no key card amid the quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies, and blessed medals in the change purse.

Lynda started to put things back in the purse.

“The wallet!” Oscar cried out.

He reached across the table and jerked it out of Lynda's hand. I knew that wallet: It was a Coach, a present from me on Lynda's twenty-sixth birthday, a little more than three years ago. We'd been dating less than a year at the time. Slowly, at Oscar's demand, Lynda unfolded all the little flaps and windows where one might stick a key card.

Might, but hadn't. The Winfield key wasn't in there among the paper money and the plastic credit cards, either.

Oscar slammed the wallet on the table in front of Lynda and stood up, letting his chair clatter to the floor behind him. “You win this round,” he barked, “but that doesn't mean I'm through with you two.”