No Police Like Holmes (8 page)

Chapter Fourteen
-
Master of Disguise

Barry Landers was a student of Mac's, which put his most likely age between eighteen and twenty-one. Wearing jeans and a yellow and black Sherlock Holmes T-shirt as he stood at the lectern, he looked even younger. He was short, overweight, baby-faced.

But he talked with confidence and authority, using a vocabulary that was closer to Sebastian McCabe than something he might have picked up from watching teen-oriented television.

“Sherlock Holmes is, to use an overused phrase, a ‘master of disguise,' ” he said. “We're not only told this in the canon, we're shown it. At different times Holmes appears as a common loafer, a drunken groom, the Irish-American Altamont, the rakish young plumber Escott, a French workman, an Italian priest, a Non-conformist clergyman, Captain Basil, an opium smoker, the explorer Sigerson, an elderly bookseller, and an old woman.”

Disguise, yet. And Mac sat there, back at the front of the room now, hanging on every word as if he could disguise himself as, say, a “rakish young plumber.” Was he really on to something with whatever he had asked Decker or was it just B.S.? A toss-up. With Mac you could never tell. He was, after all, a professor.

“What is interesting to note,” Barry Landers went on as I inched my way toward the door, “is that Holmes himself is more than once fooled by disguise. In
A Study in Scarlet
, Jefferson Hope's friend poses as an older woman, causing Holmes to say later, ‘We were old women to be taken in.' And in another famous sex reversal, Irene Adler dresses as a man the evening she walks by Holmes in Baker Street and says, ‘Good-night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.' ”

By this time I was in the corridor, pulling out my phone. I called Decker.

“You again?” he grumped.

“Show some gratitude. I saved your butt from a TV crew today, now I hear you're talking about the crime to Mac.”

“He caught me by surprise.” Decker did not sound pleased.

“What did he ask you?”

“A bunch of stuff about keys to the room where the books were stolen,” Decker said. “Things like, ‘How many are there?' and ‘Who has them?' Pretty basic.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“Running down the keys wasn't exactly brain surgery,” Decker said. “We did that before I went to bed this morning. Call it five keys altogether, counting the masters that open every door in Muckerheide. Nick Caruso and Bobby Deere each have masters they carry all the time.” Caruso runs the Center by day; Deere sleeps there at night. “Campus Security has another master that's picked up by the guard at the beginning of his shift. The Muckerheide Center office has two individual keys to Hearth Room C. One was safely locked away there last night; Deere showed it to us. The other was on loan to Gene Pfannenstiel, who recklessly gave it out-”

“-to Sebastian McCabe,” I finished. “So every key is accounted for?”

“Tighter than a drum. Pfannenstiel swears up and down he never had his key out of his hands until he slipped it to McCabe around seven last night. And the one that was still in the Center office hadn't been signed out all day.”

“And what did Mac say to that?”

“He wanted to know if it was shiny. I told him I didn't know.”

“Shiny? What's that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

“Damned if I know. He's your brother-in-law.”

“Don't rub it in. Did he say anything else?”

“Yeah. He said I should find out, and that the key he used last night - the one I made him turn in to me -
wasn't
shiny.”

Chapter Fifteen
-
“Women Are Never to Be Trusted”

I was supposed to meet Graham Bentley Post at five-thirty. Eager as I was to be on with it, my watch told me that was still forty-five minutes away. I returned to the Hearth Room, standing just inside the door at the front where, for a change, I could scan the faces of the crowd instead of bad haircuts.

My sister was at the lectern.

“... and Holmes himself repeatedly misstates his own posture toward the female of the species. In
The Sign of Four
, for example, he says that ‘love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself lest I bias my judgment.' Holmes implies here a calculated neutrality with regard to women. This is patently false. Elsewhere in the same book Holmes tells the good Watson, ‘women are never to be trusted - not the best of them.' That is hardly a neutral attitude.”

Hugh Matheson slid his arm across the back of Lynda's chair as he leaned forward to whisper some sweet nothing. Pained, I looked around the room, making a little game out of seeing how many faces I recognized. There were quite a few: Kane, Queensbury, Crocker, Nakamora, the ineffable Professor Whippet...

“And in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,' ” Kate continued, “Watson reports that Holmes ‘never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.' Does that sound like a man purged of all emotions toward the opposite sex? On the contrary, Holmes displays quite a strong emotion - a negative one. Was he, then, a born misogynist as some would have us believe - or even a homosexual? I submit that the opposite is true. At some point in his unrecorded past Sherlock Holmes loved well but not wisely. He was, in short, ‘burned.'”

Now
there
was something I could relate to, I thought bitterly.

Kate went on to talk about Irene Adler (“
the
woman”), Mary Sutherland, Violet Hunter, and other strong females in the canon. She attributed their dynamic portrayals to the influence of Arthur Conan Doyle's own strong-willed mother. Dr. Queensbury was just rising, apparently to object to this gratuitous reference to Conan Doyle, when I checked my watch again and saw that nearly half an hour had flown by and Kate's talk was running over. If I didn't make tracks I'd keep the man from the Library of Popular Culture waiting.

My brother-in-law, sitting near the lectern just across from where I was standing, seemed too engaged in the looming confrontation between his wife and Queensbury to notice my departure. In the corridor I thought I had gotten away clean until one of the voices I know best called after me. “Jeff!”

Lynda Teal.

I retracted my foot from the down escalator, almost slipping in the process.

For once Lynda looked slightly less than perfect, even to me. One or two strands of honey-colored hair were out of place and her blouse was disheveled. She was chewing gum. Still, I found myself having to fight off thoughts of a romantic and even biological nature.

“Where are you sneaking off to?” she demanded.

“The men's room,” I said, the first thing that came into my head.

“Baloney. You don't have to go downstairs for a john. Look, I saw you and Mac conniving during the last break. You two are up to something and I want to know what it is. It's something about those stolen books, right?”

“So it's not my rugged good looks or my charming personality that has you so interested in my activities all of a sudden. You're just chasing a story.”

“Well, yeah. It's what I do.” She leaned against the escalator. “I'm a journalist.”
As if I needed reminding.

I shook my head sadly. “And to think we used to have such good times together.”

“Didn't we, Jeff? And always I'll remember. Now, what's Mac got you doing this time?”

I snorted. “This is my game plan, not Mac's.”

“Okay. What is it, then - a clue, a witness, a suspect?”

“Something like that. I'm supposed to meet a guy in-” I looked at my watch. “Damn. Ten minutes. I'll never make it.”

“I'll give you a ride. My car'll get you wherever you're going a lot faster than that bicycle of yours. You
are
still riding the bike everywhere you don't walk, aren't you?”

“Not everywhere. I still have the Beetle for trips over ten miles.” Even to me that sounded lame. I hurried on. “This is a solo venture, Lynda. Besides, you wouldn't want to leave the great Hugh Matheson all alone, would you?”

“He's got his ego to keep him company.”

“You didn't seem to mind while you were sitting with him all day.”

“I was being polite.”

“Polite? He was whispering in your ear!”

“Yeah, mostly about his favorite subject - him.”

“This has been great, Lynda, but I really-”

“You have less time now than you did five minutes ago. How about that ride?”

The doors of the Hearth Room sprang open and people started pouring out. Matheson was near the head of the herd, busy bending Judge Crocker's ear.

“Okay, okay,” I said, making the snap decision that put me right in the thick of the mess that followed. “Let's just get out of here.”

We ran down the escalator to the main level of Muckerheide Center and out a side door to the campus street where Lynda's yellow Mustang was illegally parked.

As soon as I got into the car, I noticed something different.

“Hey, it doesn't smell like an ashtray anymore,” I said.

“I gave up smoking and took up running,” Lynda explained as she set her camera and purse on the floor behind the driver's seat.

I stared at her. She studiously ignored me.

“That's great,” I said finally. “Good for you. Why didn't you do that all those years I was nagging you to?”

“Because you were nagging me to. Now, who is this guy you're supposed to meet?”

While she drove the car and chewed a fresh stick of gum, I filled her in on Graham Bentley Post and his obsession to possess the Woollcott Chalmers Collection for his museum. By the time we reached the Sussex County Library, she knew as much about Post as I did.

The main branch happens to be on Mulberry Street, not Main. It's an Andrew Carnegie library, a brick and stone structure built more than a hundred years ago and seemingly good for at least a hundred more.

From several blocks away I spotted the man pacing in front of the broad front steps. He was in his early fifties, medium height and build, with thick black hair, a gray mustache, and the chiseled features of a comic book superhero. Lynda parked in front of the fire hydrant and I hopped out.

“Thanks for the ride,” I told Lynda.

“Oh, no, you don't. I'm not just your damned chauffeur.”

She got out of the car and scrambled after me. There was nothing I could do without creating a scene in front of Graham Bentley Post, assuming it was he.

“Mr. Post?” I said, approaching him with an extended hand. “I'm Thomas Jefferson Cody.”

Post was wearing a tailored blue suit without a single loose threat. He glanced at the slightly battered Mustang and then at me as if he doubted my statement, but he shook my hand anyway. I introduced Lynda as my associate.

“Partner,” she said firmly.
Hey, I like the sound of that! Too bad you don't really mean it; not the way I'd like.

Post skipped the small talk. “You are late, Mr. Cody. I can only trust that your arrival will prove worth waiting for. Let me be succinct: What kind of a deal can we cut that will put the Chalmers Collection into my hands?”

“We're not-” Lynda began.

“We're not sure what you have in mind,” I interrupted. “The college can never sell the Collection, of course. It was a gift.”

“Perhaps not,” Post conceded, fingering his mustache, “but with the right inducement - perhaps the promise of naming a small edifice on campus in his honor - Mr. Chalmers might be persuaded to withdraw his gift and sell it to the Library of Popular Culture at a handsome price.”

“And what would be in that for the college?” I asked.

“I believe I could arrange for another collection to be donated to St. Benignus, one with greater prestige and monetary value but of less interest to my institution.”

“Quite a scenario,” I said. “Machiavelli would be green with envy. You should bounce the idea off of our provost.”

Post looked at me as if he had smelled something bad and I was it. “You have no authority to negotiate?” “None.”

“Then you have wasted my time. We have nothing to discuss.” He started to walk away.

“I was hoping you could tell me - us - a little about the market for those parts of the collection that were stolen last night,” I called after him.

That stopped him cold. “Stolen? What the devil are you talking about?”

“Didn't you read about it in the local paper this morning?” Lynda asked.

“I only read the
New York Times
and I find it appalling that I was unable to purchase a copy at my hotel this morning.”

While Lynda looked daggers at the blowhard, fuming silently, I told Post what had been taken.

“Virtually priceless,” Post gasped. “Of course they have a very high monetary value, hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, but that is quite beside the point. Those are one-of-a-kind items - and stolen right out from under your nose. I assure you nothing like that could ever happen at the Library of Popular Culture!”

“I bet you can't wait to give Chalmers the same assurance,” Lynda said. “You'd probably even pay for some legal talent to help him withdraw his donation. Then he could give the collection to an institution where it would be safe - yours, for example.”

“That is... preposterous,” Post sputtered. “It would be highly unethical for us to take advantage of this unfortunate situation.”

Lynda snorted. “That's not the worst thing you might be suspected of before this is all over.”

Post's jaw obeyed the law of gravity. He fixed Lynda with eyes of ice. “Are you daring to imply that I might be connected in any way with this criminal activity?”

“She's saying some people might think so,” I interpreted, trying to unruffled his feathers a bit. “It's awfully convenient that you just happened to be in Erin the day that stuff was stolen.”

“I have a perfectly good reason for being in this insufferable little burg,” Post said.

After an awkward pause, I prodded him: “Care to tell us what it is?”

“No, I would not! It's a highly confidential matter, as many of our acquisitions are.”

“I can appreciate that,” I said with what I hoped was a gracious nod.“But I'm sort of working with Campus Security in this matter, and I'm sure it would help them to rule you out of any possible involvement if you'd reveal why you're in town.”

“No.”

“I'm just afraid that if Campus Security calls you in for an interview the press might get wind of it,” I said. I was playing good cop/bad cop against the hypothetical media. “You know how they are,” Lynda chimed in.

“Oh, all right, then,” Post snapped. “But only if you agree to keep this strictly confidential.” We agreed, although I could read the reluctance in Lynda's eyes as if it were a newspaper headline. She was agreeing to go off the record without the slightest idea of what she was going to hear. “I am in Erin negotiating with a man named Jaspers to acquire the largest privately held collection of Harvey Comics, some issues going back to the beginnings of the company in 1940.”

The smug look on his face told me this was something special, but I didn't get it. I mean, everybody knows Superman. Spider-Man and Batman I'd read as a kid. X-Men I was familiar with from the movies. But who was Harvey, other than an invisible bunny in an old movie?

“Harvey Comics is Casper the Friendly Ghost,” Post explained, “as well as Richie Rich, Baby Huey, Little Audrey - virtually a treasure house of popular culture.”

It was the mission of the Library of Popular Culture to acquire popular forms of literature for public display and for the use of scholars, Post explained. In pursuit of that mission he'd been trying for years to convince Alfred Jaspers, Sr., to sell his Harvey Comics collection, but without success. Jaspers had died last fall, however, and his son was willing to cash out. The younger Jaspers had invited Post to Erin to discuss the price on Friday. The bargaining was hard and carried over to today, when a deal was struck.

The story seemed plausible and checkable. Post did have a good reason for being in Erin other than the presence of the Chalmers Collection. He readily admitted, however, that he had visited Gene Pfannenstiel on Friday - unaware that the young man had no bargaining authority - before keeping his appointment with Jaspers.

“We have tens of thousands of comics at the Library of Popular Culture, but little Sherlockiana,” Post said. “It would be a tremendous coup to fill that gap by acquiring one of the largest and most prestigious Sherlock Holmes collections in private hands.”

“What you're saying is, you were hungry,” Lynda pointed out. “So hungry you weren't going to give up even after Chalmers had decided on his donation to the college. Who knew that?”

Post shrugged. “Assorted bibliophiles, I suppose. Word gets around. Why?”

“Because no ordinary thief took that stuff in hopes of fencing it,” I said, catching her reasoning right away. “It was either a Sherlockian who wanted to gloat over the books in private or somebody who knew where the market was for things like that. And it looks like you're the market.”

Post drew himself up in a dignified posture reminiscent of the ramrod-straight Woollcott Chalmers. “I am not a receiver of stolen goods, Mr. Cody!”

“Of course not,” I agreed, visions of a slander suit dancing in my head. “But please get in touch with me or with Lieutenant Decker of our Campus Security if you even suspect that someone is trying approach you with those books.” I gave him my card.