Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (7 page)

“You’ve got it right, Mr. Holmes. I spent yesterday updating Cher and little Michael, and I pulled an all-nighter working on a new Annie model that hasn’t even made it to display yet. And I guess I didn’t bother to change my jacket before I hopped on a plane out here to see you. I didn’t have time, after what I discovered this morning.”

Holmes stubbed out his cigarette and leaned forward. “I am all attention.”

“Well, I’ll give you a little bit of background. I’m not only the owner of Lowe’s House of Stars, but I’m the chief wax modeler. I learned my craft at Madame Tussaud’s in London, followed up at the Musée Grévin in Paris, and carried on at the Hollywood Wax Museum; I worked at all three of them for many years as chief modeller, and I’m not boasting, only telling you fact, when I say that I was the best in three countries in the end, before deciding to set up for myself with my own collection of celebrities. Pop stars and movie stars, presidents and murderers. I’ve got all the stars, all in their latest outfits, with their latest hairstyles. Last month I added Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and I’m working on Chewbacca as soon as Annie is finished. You can imagine the work it’s going to take to glue all that hair on, but I have a hint that
Star Wars
is going to get even bigger.”

“Do you think they’ll make a sequel?” I asked, despite myself. I had seen the film at the Strand, and I had found myself thrilling to the adventures in a galaxy far, far away.

“Word from L.A. is that there might even be two.”

“And the case?” inquired Holmes, who had declined to see
Star Wars
with me, and who still insisted, in odd hours, that the sun orbited the Earth.

“I’d always dreamed of setting up on my own, but I couldn’t do it until my rich old Uncle Vernon died and left me his fortune. I left Hollywood and spent over two years creating my own waxworks, working day and night. No expense spared, every one of them based on the latest photos and using the most modern techniques, though my brother Louie thought I was wasting my money, and wanted me to invest in time shares in Reno. I got a pitch in the basement of the Starlight casino, and I sat back and waited for the money to roll in. Well, Mr. Holmes, it hasn’t happened. I don’t know what’s worse, the basement location, or the lure of those one-armed-bandits, but I’ve been losing money hand over fist since I opened up. Fortunately, thanks to Uncle Vernon, I can afford it.”

“You haven’t come all this way to consult me over your lack of business.”

“No, I haven’t. There’s no mystery to that; I need to lower my prices and find a new location for my waxworks if I want to start making money. No, my troubles started this morning when I walked into my museum and found it empty.”

“Completely?”

“Almost. There was nothing left in the room except for two things: my model of Toto from
The Wizard of Oz
, kicked into a corner onto its side, poor little fellow. And an envelope containing twenty thousand dollars in cash.”

I sat up straight in my chair. “Twenty thousand dollars!”

“The police think I’m crazy for being upset. They think I’ve made a pretty good bargain, since the raw materials cost a lot less than that. But I don’t want the money. I want my work back.”

“Pray start from the beginning. Every detail may be important.” Holmes steepled his fingers under his chin, and his eyes took on the dreamy, introspective air that belied the fierce analytical intelligence of that formidable brain. “Have you had any threats, or any offers to buy? Any hints that someone may have set their sights on your collection of celebrities?”

Mr. Lowe tilted his well-coiffed head to the side, thinking. “It’s been quiet. We’ve had a few visitors, mainly families with kids, or some retired couples taking a break from the canasta tables. Though, come to think of it, Wednesday was busier than normal. For one thing, my brother Louie turned up.”

“And this was unusual?”

“Not as much as it should be,” said Mr. Lowe, grimly. “He seems to think that if he only harangues me enough, I’ll give up the waxwork business and join him in his investments in Reno. We got into an argument and it ended up with him storming out.”

“In your opinion, were his feelings high enough to justify his stealing your waxwork collection?”

“Louie’s never been a big one for hard work, to be honest. I can’t imagine him renting a truck large enough to hold the collection, let alone hunking all the figures into it. I had fifty-six of them, and though they’re made of wax, they’re not light.”

“But he knows your habits, and presumably has a motivation to put you out of business, if he wants the support of your investments?”

“I suppose so. But if he had twenty grand, why wouldn’t he use that?”

“Do you have the envelope with you?”

“I do. It’s been checked for fingerprints.” Mr. Lowe extended the article in question.

“Pity.” Holmes examined it with his glass. “A standard manila envelope, no marks, unsealed. The bills are all hundreds, nonsequential. Any evidence will have been destroyed by the police when they handled it.” He handed it back to Lowe, who tucked it into his denim jacket. “Besides your brother, were there any other visitors of note that day?”

“There was, actually. An old white guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt. We get a lot of retired people, so he wasn’t all that unusual, but he was alone, that was one thing. And the other thing was, he hardly spent any time at all in the museum. Normally people come in, they wander around, take some photos, ask some questions, maybe. Not this guy. He paid for a ticket, walked in and through and out in about thirty seconds.”

“Singular,” commented Holmes. “Did he seem to take a particular interest in any waxwork?”

“I couldn’t tell. I was too busy arguing with my brother.”

“And you spent that night working on your
Annie
exhibit. Where is your workshop? Is it on the premises?”

“No, it’s about two miles away, in an old garage on the outskirts of town. I have a small apartment at the back, where I live.”

“So your museum was empty at night. Unguarded?”

“There’s security outside the casino, but the only entrance to the museum is down a side alley.”

“This side alley—is it big enough to drive a truck or van down?”

“I’d say so.”

“Any witnesses?”

“I haven’t found any, Mr. Holmes, and nor have the police.”

“Were the doors forced?”

“No. They were locked from the outside when I came to work this morning, as usual.”

“Does anyone but you possess a key?”

“My brother does.”

“You walked in and discovered the place empty?” I asked. “You called the police, I imagine. Did they find any fingerprints?”

“They dusted every inch, but even a museum as unfrequented as mine has a lot of fingerprints in it. As soon as I discovered that my life’s work had gone, you can imagine that I was anxious to find any clues that I could. When we couldn’t find anything, and the police seemed not to have the slightest idea, I jumped on the first plane I could get to, to ask your advice, Mr. Holmes, before the trail was cold. Will you come out to Vegas with me?”

“It would give me a great deal of pleasure,” said Holmes. He saw his client out, arranging to meet him at the airport in two hours’ time.

“You will come, Watson? I may need an extra pair of eyes.”

“Ashcroft will be happy to take on my practice for a few days.”

“Excellent. If we put aside the question of the money in the envelope, the chief suspicion falls on the brother. It seems clear that if one Mr. Lowe is forced out of business, the other Mr. Lowe may find himself the recipient of some investment for his time shares. But the twenty thousand dollars changes everything.”

T
HUS WE FOUND
ourselves on the red-eye to Vegas. Lowe and Holmes chose seats in the smoking section, which was, to be honest, trying, even to someone with my iron constitution. “All the latest medical research indicates that smoking is hazardous to your health,” I told Holmes as he puffed away. But he waved aside my objections, choosing to spend the flight quizzing Kevin Lowe about his techniques for modelling from life in wax.

Recalling Holmes’s experiments in this very art, in the adventure of the Abandoned Condominium, I occupied myself with talking to the very pretty stewardess, regaling her with anecdotes of my time in service, until the plane touched down at McCarran Airport.

It was too late that evening to do much more than a cursory inspection of the basement of the Starlight Casino, which had until recently housed Lowe’s House of Stars. Holmes examined the doors and their stout padlock, and the alleyway leading up the side of the building, which was indeed dingy and ill-lit. Inside the museum, all that remained was some furniture which presumably the waxworks had been posed upon, and the forlorn figure of the dog Toto, lying on his side by the wall.

“We won’t get much more tonight,” declared Holmes, straightening from his scrutiny of a footmark that was invisible to the rest of us. “Mr. Lowe, tomorrow we may pursue our own methods. Stay by a phone; we will call you as soon as we have any news.

“Mr. Lowe is a true artist,” he said to me, when we were in the elevator ascending to our rooms in the Starlight Hotel, above the casino. “Look at this leaflet for his museum, Watson. I think you’ll agree that the figures are so lifelike as to defy belief. I made some calls before we left, and all of them confirmed that Mr Kevin Lowe is the foremost waxwork modeller of his generation.”

I turned over the folder in my hands, marveling at the depictions of Reggie Jackson and President Carter. “He’s very good. Do you plan to visit the brother tomorrow? Or track down that mysterious visitor in the Hawaiian shirt?”

“I will be very much mistaken if one does not lead to the other. Goodnight, my friend, and stay away from the roulette table.”

A
FTER A BRACING
visit to the breakfast buffet the next morning, Holmes and I were ready to go. He spent some more time in the alleyway, pacing its length, once or twice flinging himself onto all fours to examine the tarmac in the daylight. Finally, he straightened. “Most instructive. Let’s hail a taxi to Mr. Louie Lowe’s office.”

The office was a single-storey building near the edge of the desert, with a low-pitched roof and an adobe front. The gold lettering on the glass door informed us that we had called on
Mr. Louis Lowe, Travel Agent
.

Mr. Louis Lowe himself was a slight, weaselly man, with greased-back hair and a plaid suit. He wore a heavy medallion on his chest, and platform shoes even higher than his brother’s. When we entered his office, he reclined in his leather chair, his hands behind his head, his feet propped on his desk.

“You’ve come about the robbery at Kev’s place, I guess. If you can call it a robbery, since he was paid for what was taken.”

“Your brother mentioned an argument about money,” said Holmes.

“I wanted my half of Uncle Vern’s dough to invest in condos in Reno, fair enough. But you know what? I’ve decided I don’t need it after all. Kev can keep it, for all the good it does him.”

“Of course, it doesn’t do him much good if he’s lost his life’s work,” said I.

Louie Lowe shrugged.

“You noticed, of course,” said Holmes as we left, “the map on the wall?”

“Of all of Nevada. But Holmes, the area is vast.”

“It’s slightly less vast when one has a greasy fingerprint for guidance.”

There was a Hertz office nearby, and within half an hour we were heading out into the desert in a rented Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

“Mr. Louis Lowe wanted money,” explained Holmes as I drove. “He wanted it badly enough to argue with his brother on Wednesday. And yet by Friday morning, he is no longer looking for investment in his Reno time shares. What do you suppose has changed his circumstances?”

“The possession of a key to Lowe’s House of Stars, and the ability to look the other way.”

“So much seems obvious. The question is why, Watson? Who would pay Mr. Louie Lowe to betray his brother?”

“A jealous waxwork museum owner, who wants to steal Kevin Lowe’s masterpieces?”

“Possibly. And yet why would they give Kevin Lowe twenty thousand dollars?” Holmes tailed off into silence, breaking it only to direct me. His memory was photographic, and he recalled the location marked by the greasy fingerprint without having to consult another map, although it took us nearly three hours’ driving to reach it. It was a featureless expanse of desert next to Route 267. The sand and gravel baked in the midday sun when we stopped. The air wavered with heat, and as soon as I opened the door of the air-conditioned car and stepped outside, sweat sprang onto my skin. Sherlock Holmes, however, looked cool as ever as he pointed at the ground.

“Observe, Watson, the same Goodyear tread with the wearing on the back offside tire as in the alleyway.” He set off at a pace over the sand and I followed, wiping perspiration from my brow.

The ground was cracked from the sun, uniformly flat and bare other than the very occasional scrub. Although the tire tracks were invisible to my untrained eye, Holmes followed them with the skill of a bloodhound. When he stopped short, however, I didn’t need his superior senses to know why.

I let out a cry of dismay. The light-coloured ground before us was blackened with soot in a radius of about fifteen feet. Clearly there had been a large fire here, and in the centre was a grey substance that was neither ash nor sand. Holmes stooped and put his hand into it.

“It’s wax,” he said sadly. “The figures have been melted down.”

I touched it. It was unmistakably wax; the ash that lay around it in clumps was undoubtedly the remains of the mannequins’ clothing and hair. With a sickening thrill, I spotted a glass eye gazing at me out of the mess. It was bright blue.

“So much for a jealous waxwork owner,” I said, straightening. “Do you think it’s revenge, Holmes? Or some sort of spite?”

“I think it’s...”

Holmes trailed off again, but this time it was not because he was thinking. He had spotted something. He took off at a run across the baked earth, and I followed.

It was a scrap of fabric, fluttering from the branches of one of the rare scrubby bushes. Holmes caught it up, but he only glanced at it for a moment before he was again scanning the featureless landscape around us.