The Seventh Bullet (22 page)

“Indeed,” Buchanan said softly once my friend had finished. The Senator’s expression had changed not at all throughout Holmes’s indictment. In the same soft voice Buchanan asked, “Now why would Altamont want to do all that, Mr. Holmes?”

“Because, Senator, he was working for you, and you were becoming frightened that Mrs. Frevert’s desire to re-open the enquiry into her brother’s death would ultimately implicate you.”

Buchanan sipped his drink again; neither Holmes nor I had touched ours.

“There were many people,” Buchanan said, “let alone senators, who wanted to see Phillips dead. Why pick on me, sir?”

I had heard stories about the ability of American legislators to remain so calm during their heated debates that they could refer to their contemned rivals as “The Honourable” or “Most Distinguished Gentleman.” Now I was witnessing just such a performance firsthand, the volatile Buchanan appearing as civil as if he were conducting a harmless
tête-à-tête.
Instead, he was being accused of murder.

“Allow me to explain,” Holmes said. “As much as I detest conjecture, the trail of this case was quite cold, and thus I had to rely on surmise as well as on the historical record. There were only two senators with a sufficiently compelling motive to have killed Phillips in January of 1911—the two who had lost their attempts at re-election the previous November thanks in great measure to Phillips’s writings. One of those two senators is dead. You, of course, are the other.

“I assume that your hatred for Phillips had been growing ever since you first read the article he’d written about you in
The Treason of the Senate.
After meeting Goldsborough at a concert or some
other cultural event and discovering his fascination with Phillips, you must have dangled the promise of money in front of him even before you actually decided to murder Phillips. You perceived that Goldsborough was an impressionable young man, suffering no doubt from what Dr. Freud might term paranoia. You cultivated his neurosis, twisting his interest in Phillips to a kind of repulsion. It must have been you who convinced him that his own sister was portrayed in that novel by Phillips and that Phillips himself was drawing the very identity out of Goldsborough’s body.

“I further believe that after the November election, with the help of Viereck’s book and those claims about vampires—not to mention the pledge of more money to come in January after he had done the villainous deed—you persisted in prodding the poor wretch to destroy the cause of his anguish. I think you aided Goldsborough in finding rooms across from Phillips’s flat and had your man Altamont follow him to be certain the murder was completed successfully. I believe that Altamont—or you—forged Goldsborough’s diary, and that no doubt it was Altamont who, hiding behind the shrubbery just as he attempted to do when he obviously followed us to Gramercy Park, fired that extra bullet into Phillips’s guts to assure himself of Phillips’s death. I imagine that in all probability he was even prepared to finish off Goldsborough if the poor soul hadn’t done it himself.”

“An interesting tale, Mr. Holmes,” Buchanan said. He still sounded as controlled as he had at the start of our interview, although I thought I detected a slight jerk of the hand holding the glass at Holmes’s utterance of the word “guts.”

“Maybe,” the Senator continued, “in a fit of madness Altamont believed Phillips had harmed me and deserved to be dispatched.
Or maybe he mistakenly thought I did order Phillips killed, just as you suggest, and believed he was protecting me. Or maybe, unbeknownst to myself, he was under the secret employ of any one of the dozen other senators who, I tell you in the strictest confidence, were more than happy to see Phillips dead. But even if all that you ascribe to Altamont is true, I see no link to myself.”

“What about your copy of the Viereck book found at Van den Acker’s murder?”

“So I loaned it to Altamont. I can’t be responsible for what he did with it. No, Mr. Holmes, I’m afraid you will have to do better than that.”

Buchanan put down his glass. At the same time Sherlock Holmes reached inside his jacket and produced his small notebook. From between its well-worn pages, he extracted the newspaper cutting we had discovered with Altamont’s body. Holmes slid the small piece of paper across the shiny tabletop.

Buchanan perused the story about himself and Goldsborough; but, as collected as ever, he simply slid the paper back to Holmes. “Would you gentlemen care for a cigar?” he asked innocently.

Holmes and I both replied in the negative.

Buchanan shrugged. “Just as well. Three on a match always brings bad luck.” Then beginning to rise, he said, “But now you’ll have to excuse me, gentlemen; I’ve kept my wife waiting long enough. As far as I’m concerned, this interview is concluded.” With that, he turned and strode from the room.

“What now, Holmes?” I asked. “He totally ignored the newspaper cutting.” My companion, however, was still looking at the lengthy corridor through which Buchanan had left. Holmes’s steely eyes narrowed, and he put his fingers together like steeples
as he so often did when he was engaged in thought.

When he finally did speak again, it was not to answer my question, but rather to ask one of his own. “Did you note his decided emphasis on the culpability of other senators, Watson?”

“Now that you mention it, Holmes, he did suggest that Altamont might have been working for others. Why, to hear Buchanan state the case, a great number of senators would have enjoyed some sort of revenge against Phillips. But what about his failure to react to the story in the
Post
?”

“Not important, old fellow. What
is
significant is that he seemed to be laying the groundwork for a collective guilt of some sort.” Holmes reached for the brandy and soda that Buchanan had originally offered.

“You don’t suppose,” I asked, “that we’re talking about more than one culprit, do you?”

Sherlock Holmes sampled the drink. Observing the light in the room as it danced through the facets of the crystal he was holding, he said slowly, “Murder is a strange act, my friend. Sometimes it is a very private affair, and other times it is a deed that can be sparked only by the inducement of others. But come,” he concluded, setting the glass on the table, “let us return to your home and ponder this matter further.”

We walked quickly back to Queen Anne Street. Holmes may well indeed have pondered the case further that night; I, on the other hand, was too heavily burdened with the necessity of sleep to ponder anything deeper than the softness of my pillow.

I slept late the following day only to be greeted by a wet April morning whose darkness had no doubt aided the powers of Morpheus. Holmes had already gone about his adventures
by the time I entered the morning room. A note upon the table announced that he planned to return before tea after a day in the haberdasheries of Oxford and Regent Streets—to what end I could not begin to imagine.

I spent the ensuing afternoon writing a letter to my wife in which, veiling the unfinished business upon which Holmes and I were embarking, I described my adventures in New York City. I did my best, as in fact I have attempted throughout this narrative, to minimise the lighthearted aspects of my stay there. After all, in spite of her aversion to sea travel, Mrs. Watson had always been curious about the States, so there was no point in attaching a sense of holiday to a trip that under the circumstances certainly did not warrant such an appellation.

A few ticks past four, Polly showed Holmes into the sitting room. I was about to ask him what he had been doing all afternoon when he raised a finger to his lips.

“In good time, Watson,” he cautioned me, and then announced to Polly, “Show them in!”

Whatever I was expecting, it certainly was not a procession of some ten young lads little older than twelve or thirteen each dressed in the velveteen livery of the establishments that employed them. With their brass buttons shining, they marched into the room like an occupying army except that, in carrying the assorted parcels Holmes had obviously purchased on his outing, they looked no more menacing than a junior chorus line from some modern-dress production of
The Yeoman of the Guard.
One half expected them to break into song!

Pointing to a nearby table, Holmes instructed the boys to set down their burden, and then with the snap of his fingers he ordered
the brigade to follow him out the door. Awaiting Holmes’s return, I could easily see that the packages bore the names of various shops from Bond Street, the Strand, and St. James’s Street as well as those thoroughfares he’d named in his earlier note to me. Of their contents and purpose, however, I had not a clue.

“Holmes!” I cried when he re-entered the sitting room, “I know that members of the fairer sex often rely on shopping excursions to relieve a troubled mind, but I never expected you to fall victim to such a passion.”

“Steady, old fellow,” Holmes said with a wink. “Let us have our tea, and afterwards I shall make all clear.”

I rang for Polly to bring us the tray, while Holmes removed the parcels to the bedroom I had made available for him. He partook of the tea and cucumber sandwiches with great enthusiasm; I, on the other hand, was distracted, trying unsuccessfully to fathom just how he intended to ensnare Buchanan.

After finishing yet a second cup of tea, Holmes finally retired to his bedroom only to pop out a moment later to survey the chamber he had just vacated. His eye came to rest on the chesterfield of blue velvet upon which I was then sitting. “Perfect!” he exclaimed, and, snatching up the flattest of the cushions leaning against the arm, returned with it into the privacy of his room.

For well over half an hour I could hear him moving back and forth behind the door. Presumably he was dressing, but what costume he was preparing and for what reason he needed the cushion I could not guess.

“Are you ready, Watson?” he cried at last. Only after I answered in a bewildered affirmative did he make his entrance into the sitting room.

I knew Sherlock Holmes to be a wizard of subterfuge; indeed, I knew that at one time he had at least five retreats throughout London where he could don his various disguises; and yet I never ceased to marvel at his singular ability to conceal his own identity with a minimum of greasepaint. It was in creating the total effect that he excelled, the conception, as it were, of a completely different person from his own self—not an imitation of another personage, but another person entirely.

Thus did David Graham Phillips stand before me. The flowery silk-faced suit, I later learned, was from Shingleton’s; the white linen shirt, from Sampson and Company; the pearl-button boots, from James Taylor and Son of nearby Paddington Street.

“Since chrysanthemums are out of season,” he explained, “I had to settle for this carnation, which I confess to having plucked from your neighbour’s window box; I had no time to track down hothouse flowers. This extraordinarily ridiculous collar I purchased from a shop in Tottenham Court Road after a most challenging search.” His newly darkened hair was parted in the middle. He had applied a small amount of putty to broaden his nose. He had slightly increased his girth with the aid of the small cushion, and he was somehow able to replace his own angular movements with the more fluid motions of the younger Phillips.

“Amazing, Holmes!” I said in astonishment as he walked to the cheval mirror.

“Not so bad, really, Watson,” he concurred as he admired himself in the looking glass. “Especially when you consider I haven’t seen my subject in well over ten years. For inspiration, I had to rely on that portrait from my file—not to mention my own memory.”

Scrutinising himself in the mirror, Holmes checked that his nose was firmly planted and then pressed both his palms against his ribs—or rather against the flat cushion—to ascertain that his foundations were equally secure.

“In light of the reflection you cast, Holmes,” I quipped, “you’re at least one David Graham Phillips that isn’t a vampire.”

“Right you are, Watson, but this is no time for joking. There’s game to be hunted tonight if I’m not mistaken. Mr. Buchanan may have spent much of his life amongst the high society of New York and Washington; but in his heart he is just a poor farm lad who, as you yourself have already observed, is still full of the superstitions and fears with which he grew up, weaknesses we can well hope to exploit thoroughly. Let’s be off!”

“But where to, Holmes? You’ve yet to tell me.”

“To the Royal Larder, man! Down the road from Buchanan’s hotel. Where else?”

Where else indeed? I wondered.

Despite Holmes’s enthusiasm, however, our pace was immediately hampered by the unseasonably thick yellow fog we confronted as soon as we walked out of my front door. Indeed, it was only because we knew the way and because the distance to be traversed was so short that we dared make the journey at all. I could scarcely see my hand before my eyes.

Holding on to the wrought-iron railing on our left that was illuminated by the beams from the fanlight above the door, we felt our way down the four steps to the pavement, then turned left, and began our short trek eastward. The lights along the roadway spilled an eerie golden glow on the ground, and the long row of fencing kept us travelling in a straight line.

“How can we be sure that Buchanan will even be there?” I asked. To have made such an effort only to miss our man seemed pointless indeed.

“Because, Watson, I took the liberty of sending the senator a duplicitous telegram while I was on my travels this afternoon. I asked him to meet me in the Royal Larder at seven-fifteen.”

Alert to the low rumble of whatever traffic braved the carriageway on such a night, we gingerly stepped off the kerb and crossed Wimpole Street.

Approaching Harley Street a few minutes later, I resumed my questioning. “The Royal Larder was Phillips’s favourite public house, was it not, Holmes?”

I sensed more than saw the Phillips mask smile at me. “Yes, indeed, Watson. A bit of poetic justice, I should think. But more to the point: The room is dark; it will be difficult to see. Not much different from this blasted fog! My disguise should be most effective under such conditions. I told Buchanan he would recognise me by my black hat, and I signed the message ‘A friend of Altamont.’ That should lure him. You, of course, will have to hide yourself, for if he should lay eyes on you, we are undone.”