The Baker Street Letters (12 page)

“Just what was it my brother said to you?” said Reggie.

She studied Reggie's face uncertainly for a moment. “He asked about some letters,” she said finally as she handed him a bottled water. “Seemed like a decent guy, actually. But he asked if I wrote a letter to Sherlock Holmes last month.” She stopped with that and glared defensively. “I'm not stupid. I don't wait up for Santa Claus, and I don't write letters to characters of fiction.”

“Perhaps you waited up for Santa Claus when you were a child?”

She looked at Reggie for a moment, then nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “When I was only eight and didn't know any better. I mean, I read a lot, but—you know, it's not like I knew about the world. And I was desperate. So I wrote a letter to Sherlock Holmes.”

“Just the one letter when you were eight? You didn't write again recently?”

“Of course not. Why would I?”

“No reason,” said Reggie. “What else did my brother say to you?”

“I really didn't give him the chance to say much of anything,” she said.

“You're sure there was nothing else? You've told me nothing that can help me find him.”

“Well, you guys weren't much help finding my father!” she blurted, and then she quickly recovered. “I mean—whoever got my letter wasn't. And the police didn't do jack.”

“It must have seemed that way when you were eight,” said Reggie. “I'm sure the locals did the best they—”

“I'm sure you don't know what you're talking about,” Mara said heatedly. “First they said they had to wait awhile, then they said he must be on a bender and sleeping it off, then they said he must have run away because he lost at Santa Anita.”

“Sorry,” said Reggie, “I didn't mean to—”

“Well, all right, he drank a little. And he went to the track once in a while. I drink wine with my lunch—well, sometimes—and I bought a lotto ticket once. Does that mean if I disappear, nobody should come find me?”

“Someone would certainly come find
you
,” said Reggie, and then he immediately wished he hadn't—or at least not with the inflection he had given it.

Her eyes narrowed, and her chin tilted up.

“But the point now is,” Reggie said quickly, “Nigel came here
in response to your letter. If I knew exactly what you sent—it might help me find him.”

“Why do you need me for that? Don't you have the letter?”

“It's gone, actually. And whatever you sent with it. There was an enclosure, wasn't there?”

“There was something I sent with it, yes,” Mara said after a moment.

“I think if I had that—I'd be able to figure out where my brother is—or at least what he's trying to do.”

Reggie moved closer and made eye contact to say that. Mara looked directly back at him.

“Can you be trusted?” she said.

“Yes,” said Reggie.

She was still studying him closely.

“I can sort of see the family resemblance,” she said, “though you don't have your brother's eyes, exactly.”

She got up and crossed to the mantel above a gas fireplace. She moved aside framed photographs and several old books that hid a tin box. Then she came back and sat on the couch with one leg tucked underneath her, the Saint Bernard lying comfortably with its head at her knees.

She put the box between herself and Reggie and opened it.

Reggie leaned forward and caught a glimpse of the contents as she sorted through them. There was a vehicle ownership certificate, some ticket stubs, a small gold butterfly pin, and—

Suddenly she stopped. Then she started from the top again. She thumbed carefully through, past greeting cards and ticket stubs, handwritten notes that might have been poems—until she had reached the bottom.

She looked at Reggie with what he took to be genuine surprise.

“It's gone,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure,” she said, annoyed. She withdrew the box protectively to her lap; she stared at the contents with a puzzled expression, then at Reggie with an accusatory one.

“I just got here,” said Reggie. “Just what is it that's missing?”

“The thing you're asking about,” she said.

She got up and walked to the window near her paintings. “My father was in his study,” she said. “I came in, and he had these sheets of really thin paper that he was looking at. They were on the desk, on the floor, all over the place. I wanted him to play. I sat down and started drawing on one with a crayon. He got really angry, he said the papers were very, very important, and he picked them up and put them in the bottom drawer of his desk.”

“You seem to remember it very clearly.”

“I should; I thought it was the reason he went away.”

She paused when she said that, then continued. “After he went missing, I made copies of all of it. I walked all the way to the stationery store and made them. It took a ton of dimes. And then I came back, and—you have to understand, I was barely eight, and I read a lot, but mostly just novels, and—”

“I understand,” said Reggie.

“I sent one copy in my letter to Sherlock Holmes. And I kept the other copy in this box; you couldn't miss it if it was here.”

“Does anyone else have access to your apartment? A boyfriend, or—”

“None of your business,” she said. Then she added, “No. No one else has access.”

“Have you had a break-in?”

“No. I mean, I don't think so.”

Reggie considered it for a moment. He wanted to be careful
about this, but there seemed only one possible connection to make.

“This neighbor of yours—the one I saw on the steps the other day—”

“What about him?”

“Has he had access?”

Mara looked at Reggie, then out the window as if to express her amazement to the world, and then back at Reggie again, and Reggie realized he might have phrased it better.

“You've got to be kidding,” she said with precise emphasis.

“I don't mean access to—you—that is, I only meant, could he have had the opportunity to—”

“Look, it's like this,” she said. “The guy moved into the building a month or so ago—and right away he's hanging around the mailbox when I come home, every single day. And playing that ‘I really want to get to know the real you' shtick to the hilt.”

“Always at the mailbox?”

“Well, yes. But he pretty much never has any mail. I can tell he's just waiting there for me.”

“To chat you up.”

“Exactly. And he had a shtick.”

“Good shtick?”

“Not that good. But I did make the mistake once—just once—of letting him come up for coffee. And he laid it on real thick about getting to know the real me. Asking about my family—and we're talking about how I grew up, and how tough it was when my dad left, and did I ever hear from him again, did I get to have a quinceañera, what kind of stuff did I keep from when I was a kid, and—”

She stopped abruptly when she said that and stared down with realization at her box of keepsakes.

“Did you show any of this to him?” said Reggie.

She nodded. “I showed him my maternal grandmother's recipe for Irish burritos—and next thing I know, he's got his hand on my knee. And then—”

Now there was a sharp, authoritative knock at the door.

“And then I threw him out,” said Mara, and she might have continued—but now the knock at the door was even more commanding. She got up quickly and started toward the door, Mookie trotting alongside.

She left the box behind, and Reggie looked in closely. In a bottom corner, a scrap of thin photostat paper was wedged into the crease of the box. As if someone had pulled something out hastily, and this piece, caught in the crease, had torn off and been left behind.

The dog stuck its head between Mara and the door and emitted that now familiar rumble from its throat. From his vantage point, Reggie could not see who it was, but he could hear the voice. It was Lieutenant Mendoza, introducing himself to Mara.

Reggie extracted the bit of paper from the joint of the box and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Then he got up and went quickly into the kitchen, out of the line of sight should Mendoza step in.

Mercifully, Mendoza did not step in. Not yet. But he was still within earshot.

Reggie heard Mendoza ask if Mara knew her neighbor well—a man named Howard Fallon.

Mara replied that she didn't know any Howard. Her neighbor's name was Lance—Lance Slaughter.

That was the name on the man's Screen Actors Guild card, Reggie heard the detective say. But the name on his driver's license was Howard Fallon.

So Mara's neighbor had been using a stage name.

And a bad one at that.

Mendoza then said something in a softer voice that Reggie did not quite catch. For a moment, as near as he could tell, neither Mara nor Mendoza said a word. But the dog started a low growl.

“I . . . really didn't know him very well,” Reggie heard Mara say.

Reggie held his breath. He supposed Mendoza would ask now if Mara had noticed anyone of British extraction hanging about.

But Mookie was getting louder, and Mara told him to hush. Reggie strained to hear. Mendoza was giving her his card. He was going away.

Reggie waited until he heard the receding footsteps; then he stepped out from behind the kitchen door.

Mara, still standing at the open doorway, stared at Reggie. Mookie was pressed protectively against her legs.

“You knew this?” she said; then she demanded, “Did you know about this?”

“About what . . . exactly?” Reggie said in his closest approximation of an innocent voice.

“Get out,” she said. “Now.” The dog was not growling; it was looking at Reggie as though it had sighted a rabbit.

Reggie found as much space as he could and edged out the doorway.

Then the door slammed shut, and the young woman turned the locks behind him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reggie hurried down the stairs and then checked for the detective's car before stepping out of the stairwell.

He didn't know why Mara had not revealed his presence to Mendoza; for all he knew, she had changed her mind and was calling the police right now. It was probably not a good time to be seen about.

And he was beginning to wish he'd rented a car.

He walked four blocks and caught the first taxi he found.

“Where to?”

“One moment.”

Reggie called the local SAG office on his new mobile, provided the stage name used by Mara's neighbor, and got the name and address of the talent agent who handled Lance Slaughter.

As they drove, Reggie reached into his coat pocket and found the slip of paper he had taken from Mara's box of keepsakes.

It was just a scrap, one corner and a few square inches, but it was enough to make a very general guess at its purpose.

The copy was not great quality, but he could see that the original had been printed with thin vertical lines—one column listing depths and the other displaying a series of faded handwritten marks—chemical symbols, percentages, and other notations.

And in the corner heading was a date and something that was probably an identifier—or at least might be to someone who knew the acronyms.

Reggie called Ms. Brinks in London, catching her just as she was about to leave for the day.

“I need your help,” he said.

“Of course.”

“I'm going to send you a fax,” he said. “Some sort of geological analysis, I think. Find someone who can tell you exactly. Ring me back as soon as you can.”

The cabbie found a place for Reggie to send the fax. Then they drove north on La Brea and turned right on Sunset, heading for the agent's office.

It was Reggie's first time in Hollywood. He was not impressed. The architecture was less than ordinary, and the streets were dirty.

They drove two blocks, then stopped at a three-story pink stucco building dating probably to the thirties. At the entrance were placards for a dance studio and an actor's studio on the ground floor. The Silberman Agency—and several similar establishments—was listed for the first floor up.

The dance studio was just now letting out. Young women in form-fitting spandex were escaping rapidly in all directions. Into compact Hondas on the adjacent residential street, into other studio classes in the same building, and one or two striding
boldly and quickly down the boulevard, looking neither right nor left but drawing hostile glares from two ladies of the afternoon posing at the corner.

A slender young woman, wearing faded jeans over dance leotards, her high cheekbones pink and glowing from her workout, and with hair that fell in perfect dampness behind her ears, opened the door and stepped out as Reggie was going in.

Of course, what had he been thinking? The city's reputation for glamour had never been for its architecture.