Текст книги "No Police Like Holmes: Introducing Sebastian McCabe"
Автор книги: Dan Andriacco
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
Chapter Thirty-Four – End of the Game
In the deep silence that followed, Renata looked around as if trying to read our faces. The hallway grew smaller.
“You can’t be serious,” she told Mac in a choked voice.
“How fervently I wish that I were not!” Mac said. “We had better sit down, all of us. This will not come easy or quick.”
Chalmers and Renata exchanged looks that nobody but them would understand, then followed Kate into the McCabes’ long living room. Lynda and I came next, with Mac hanging back as if uneager.
Once in the room, my brother-in-law enthroned himself in his favorite fireside chair. Kate flanked him on the other side of the bar in a matching wingback, while Lynda and I sat in two other chairs and the Chalmerses shared the couch.
“It was all perfectly obvious from the first,” Mac said, looking longingly at his cigar. “Obvious, that is, that Woollcott was supposed to be guilty of killing Hugh. He apparently had not just one motive for revenge but two – books and Renata. You all know the sordid details of the latter, as did I and several others.
“What I did not know, but soon began to suspect, was that Woollcott’s cane is actually a specially machined air gun, probably powered by a CO2 cartridge.”
Mac motioned with the cigar at the cane/gun, which I held loosely between the legs in front of me.
“It was designed, of course, to emulate the one made for Colonel Sebastian Moran,” Mac said. “Cane guns were quite popular in those days. We know from ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ that Moran’s air gun fired soft revolver bullets, although the caliber was unspecified. Woollcott’s weapon here fires standard .32 bullets, not the customary air rifle pellets. It was very custom-made indeed.”
“Not a very powerful weapon, however,” Chalmers said. “Or so I was warned.”
“That’s why the bullet didn’t go all the way through, not because it was fired from a distance,” Mac said. “The gun was fired at close range into Hugh Matheson’s carotid artery. High power wasn’t needed. Of far more importance was that the gun was virtually silent, which is helpful if you plan to shoot someone in a hotel room.”
I let go of the cane for a moment and rubbed my sweating hands on my pants leg.
“Yet another strong indication that Woollcott had murdered Hugh was the missing Beeton’s Christmas Annual which Lynda and Jefferson found in his room here. Obviously, Woollcott retrieved the book after killing the one who had stolen it from Muckerheide Center.
“Unfortunately” – Mac allowed himself an ironic smile – “I have a penchant for rejecting the obvious. Perhaps that reflects too many years of writing mystery stories and even more years of reading them, but it has served me well. Woollcott was altogether too convenient a killer. Additionally, I knew that he had been in my sight virtually from the moment we left this house last night until Jefferson and Lynda entered the President’s Dining Room. And I knew that he had been in the audience all through my talk this morning when Lynda was struck. Jefferson and Lynda were free to suspect that I was mistaken on both counts, but I knew that I was not.”
Lynda paused in the middle of unwrapping a stick of gum. “We figured it didn’t have to be the killer who hit me. It could have been another Sherlockian who wanted the Beeton’s.”
“And left without it?” Mac’s voice was rich with skepticism. “A thief who failed to find the book himself would have waited for Lynda to find it before he knocked her out. No, the killer assaulted Lynda and the killer left that book behind because the killer wanted it found. Why? To frame Woollcott Chalmers. And who could comfortably enter this house and do that? Eliminating myself and those in this room with no conceivable motive, I was left with an unpleasant but inescapable confirmation of a conclusion I had already reached: Renata Chalmers was that killer.”
Renata flinched. She was sitting up straight on the couch, about a foot from her husband. The old man stared at her, but she gave Mac her full attention. “Go on,” she said. “Play your game.”
“Hugh’s mysterious visitor in the deerstalker must have been someone he knew, for he chose to open the door,” Mac said. “Renata certainly qualifies on that score. And the cap – Woollcott’s, of course – would make a good disguise for a woman with long hair, à la Irene Adler dressing as a man in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ You will recall that Renata was already wearing a suit with slacks yesterday.”
“Hold it, Mac,” Lynda interrupted. “You mentioned long hair. Renata may not have been with her husband at the time of the murder, but we know she was putting her hair into ringlets to go with her Victorian outfit for the evening. I saw her earlier in the day and I saw her later with her hair fixed up and I know from experience how long that work can take.”
Renata flashed her a look of gratitude. But Kate said, “Not if you just put on a wig with the ringlets already on it.” My sister sat forward in her chair. “Mac, is that why you asked me this morning whether Renata’s hair-’’
“Exactly. Now Jefferson, think back to your first visit to the guest suite this morning. Undoubtedly you looked around at the dressers before Renata stopped you. Did you see a curling iron? No? I thought not. How about a wig?”
I closed my eyes and tried to bring it all back. Yes, in my mental image there was a lump of hair sitting with the jewelry box and the makeup and the hair brush. But was it just the power of Mac’s suggestion that had put it there? Unsure, I shook my head. “Sorry, Mac, I can’t-”
“Yes,” Woollcott Chalmers said, looking at his wife. “Renata brought one of her hairpieces. I never thought...” He licked his lips and fell silent.
“But there wasn’t any hair when Jeff and I searched the room for the book,” Lynda said.
“Of course not,” Mac agreed. “Renata removed it after she knocked you unconscious. Perhaps she secreted it in that large handbag she carries. The question would be easily settled, Renata, if you would care to let us look inside.”
“No!” For a second her eyes were wild, like a cornered animal. “That suggestion is insulting.”
“I did not think you would like it.” Again Mac turned his attention to Lynda and me. “Renata undoubtedly knew that her flimsy alibi would fall apart if you realized that her elaborate Victorian coiffure was the work of a few moments. Hence her need to knock you out, Lynda, and spirit away the wig. However, her primary reason for being in the suite was to plant the Beeton’s in her husband’s drawer so that it would be there to incriminate him when you two looked for it.”
“This is all speculation,” Renata said in a firm voice. “You have no proof for any of it.”
“Perhaps not,” Mac conceded. “What would happen, however, if the police showed your photograph around the Winfield? Is there no one who would remember such a strikingly attractive woman in the hotel around the time of the murder? I suspect you kept the deerstalker in your handbag, not on your head, until you reached the proper floor. And then there is the matter of that cane, which I am quite certain will turn out to be the murder weapon. It was used to throw suspicion on Woollcott, but you had equal access to it, Renata. And Woollcott has an alibi for the murder, which you lack.”
The fight went out of Renata. She stared at the dried flower arrangement in front of the fireplace screen.
“Why?” her husband breathed. “Why, Renata?”
“And how come you had to come back when I was here?” Lynda asked. Unconsciously her right hand stole to the tender part at the back of her head. She winced.
Renata looked at her with a strangely graceful, almost regal movement in which she moved her head but not her body. “I am sorry about that, Lynda. I had intended to slip the book into Woollcott’s dresser this morning, after he and our hosts left for the symposium. But then your friend showed up.” Renata nodded at me. “I thought he was there to search for the book – and I was certain that he’d be back.”
“Nothing could have been better for your plans, of course,” Mac said.
“Of course,” Renata agreed. “It meant I wouldn’t have to somehow maneuver Kate into ‘discovering’ the book as I had planned. The trick was to plant the book in an easily uncovered hiding place before Jeff returned. When I saw him leave the lecture hall with Bob Nakamora, that was my opening. With him out of the way, I didn’t expect any company here. When you showed up, Lynda, that completely unnerved me. That’s why I hit you – not because I was afraid you’d see the wig. Taking the wig was an afterthought. I grabbed it and ran. I must have been running through the kitchen and out the back of the house about the time Jeff was coming in the front.”
“And from there we played right into your hands,” I said with a bitterness I could almost taste.
“Not entirely.” She was a cool one, seemingly unfazed by the collapse of her carefully contrived plans. “You were supposed to find the gun right away. I hid it from Woollcott yesterday when we came back to change our clothes because I knew I was going to use it on Hugh. And I kept it hidden today until Woollcott was out of the house.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What did you think happened to it, Chalmers? I’m sure you don’t just misplace unique objects like that.”
“Actually, he does,” Renata said coldly before he could answer. “His memory is failing along with several functions, except when it comes to his damned Sherlock Holmes. After he was out of the house, I put it where you should have seen it the first time.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Lynda murmured.
“But why?” Kate cried. “Why frame your husband? Why kill your lover?”
“Lover?” Renata repeated, unconsciously forming a fist with her right hand. Her icy coolness was slipping. “He didn’t love me. Neither of them did. I was a possession, a trinket, another collectible for the two of them to squabble over. That’s just what I heard them doing in the bar one night before an Anglo-Indian Club meeting. I decided that this was one battle of male egos they would both lose. I would make them pay. It was only a matter of waiting for the right moment. The moment came and I did it and I’m glad I did it and the only thing I’m sorry about is that Woollcott didn’t suffer enough.”
She sat back, exhausted, but without loosening her posture.
“I am reminded,” said Mac, “of a Persian proverb quoted by Sherlock Holmes in ‘A Case of Identity’ – ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’”
Chalmers blinked and fidgeted with his hands, a man who knew something awful had happened to him but didn’t understand quite what. Lynda turned to him.
“You must have known,” she said. “You must have realized Renata killed your old rival, and yet you kept silent.”
“How could I have guessed?” His old eyes darted around the room, pathetic and pleading.
“You knew your air gun was missing and you knew your wife didn’t really have an alibi,” Lynda said. “You’re too shrewd not to have added it all up.”
“We never spoke of it,” he said. I leaned forward to hear. “But I did suspect. I thought she did it for me – because Matheson stole my books, stole my whole life practically.”
Renata stood up, arms folded, and laughed in a way that sent bumps goose-stepping down my spine. “I stole your precious books, you silly old fool, not Hugh. That was part of the setup, to give you a solid motive for killing him. I knew that jealousy over me wasn’t enough.”
She paced in front of the fireplace, no more than a couple of feet in front of me, suddenly overcome with nervous energy.
“It was clear to me early on that you took those books,” Mac said. “‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ There was no forced entrance into the exhibit room. The keys were all accounted for and there were no obvious indications that a duplicate had been made. Ergo, there was no burglary. On Friday afternoon, when you and Woollcott visited the display, you grabbed those three books when you were unobserved and took them away in that immense handbag of yours, didn’t you?”
Mac seemed to take Renata’s stony silence for assent. “I was certain that you didn’t do it out of a simple desire to possess the books. Why, then? I concluded it was an attempt to malign Hugh, the most likely suspect in the theft based on motive. I didn’t know why, however. Hugh didn’t appear to be in any imminent danger of arrest, so I kept my thoughts to myself until I could see what you were up to. Possibly that decision of mine cost a man his life, and I shall have to live with that guilty knowledge for the rest of mine. When Hugh was killed, Renata, I suspected you at once.”
I whirled on my brother-in-law, barely holding myself together as my voice rose. “You knew it was her and you let me run around acting like an amateur detective in a stupid book, making a fool out of myself for nothing?” This was just too much to take without protest.
“By no means was it for nothing, Jefferson! Au contraire, your activities were crucial. I needed to know whether any other explanation was possible. I was hoping with all my heart-”
He was still talking when I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye: Renata coming at me. Before I could react she had snatched the cane/gun from my loose grip.
She held the stick in her left hand, the handle in her right, jamming the wicked device up against her husband’s ear. Immobilized by panic, Chalmers’s eyes widened and his skin turned a color I’d most recently seen on the corpse of Hugh Matheson.
It was all I could do to keep from losing control of my bladder, but Mac barely raised an eyebrow. “Framing your husband was never the end game of the plan, was it, Renata?” he said. “That wouldn’t have been enough.”
She shook her head. “The evidence was all circumstantial. There was no guarantee he’d be convicted, but I didn’t need that. I just needed for him to be suspected as a killer while I was his brave and innocent trophy wife. Then some day when I had to shoot him in self-defense I’d be seen as the real victim, not him. But he is going to be the victim – right now.”
With that Renata shoved forward the metallic ring near the top of the cane and turned the decorative handle a quarter-turn to the right. My entire body was tensed for the whoosh of deadly air, the site of blood.
But the sound was muted and nothing happened to Chalmers. Renata’s face contorted in shock and fury and she repeated the action. Click, click, click. Nothing happened.
Desperate, she turned, first to me and then to Mac. “What have you done?”
From the side pocket of his tweed suit coat, Mac held up a bullet. “It seemed to me that removing the bullet was the prudent thing to do, once I had it figured out. I was a trifle late getting back to the colloquium.”
With an inarticulate cry Renata lifted the cane above her head, turning it into a club. Woollcott Chalmers cringed in front of her, still paralyzed with shock. I started to move, but Lynda moved faster.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, wresting the heavy stick from Renata’s hands. “You’re not going to hit anybody else with that damned thing.”
Chapter Thirty-Five – The Wrap-up
This time I didn’t disguise my voice when I called 911. No more Minnie Mouse. Officer Gibbons and a phalanx of Erin’s Finest were there on the double, Oscar not among them. I suspect he was chowing down with his mother at the Bob Evans restaurant just off the highway.
That was a few months ago but seems longer as I write this account in mid-summer. In the light of Renata’s confession, I’m happy to report that the identities of the man and woman seen outside Matheson’s hotel room and that of the person who phoned in the murder have fallen off the chief’s radar screen. Or maybe he’d rather not know.
Ralph Pendergast, less forgiving or forgetting, is still spitting nails about the whole business, but there’s not much he can do about it. It’s kind of hard for him to distance himself from the Chalmers Collection, and thereby all the chaos it wrought, considering that I still have my iPhone video of him speaking so eloquently about St. Benignus being honored to receive the Collection. I haven’t posted it to YouTube, but the unspoken threat is there.
Renata Chalmers is still awaiting trial, out on a huge bail posted by her husband. He also hired Aristotle O’Doul, the most prominent criminal defense attorney in the country. Speculation has it that O’Doul is going to try to mount a novel defense based on battered lover syndrome. I wish I had the popcorn concession for that circus.
Lynda’s first-person account of the showdown on Half Moon Street won kudos all around, and there are probably some journalism awards awaiting her and maybe a promotion if there is any justice in the world.
You may be wondering about Lynda and me. So am I. I’m not sure that we’re dating again, but we’re definitely no longer not dating. She’s changed her Relationship status on Facebook to “It’s Complicated,” and so have I. Standing over a dead body, concealing information from the police, being accused of murder, facing down a killer – those are bonding experiences when a man and woman do them together. So we’re moving toward each other again – at glacial speed and sometimes two steps forward and one step back, but moving nonetheless.
Sebastian McCabe, meanwhile, remains insufferable. He did, after all, solve the murder. Now he’s more convinced than ever that I’m his Watson. And now that I’ve written this, I guess I am.
A Few Words of Thanks
On behalf of my friend Thomas Jefferson Cody, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the following family members, friends, and experts whose contributions to the preparation of this manuscript for publication were invaluable:
Ann Brauer Andriacco
Michael J. Andriacco
Felicia Carparelli
Alistair Duncan
Paul D. Herbert
Bill Schrand
Special thanks to Jeff Suess for his editing and proofreading on this second edition.
Whatever errors remain are solely the responsibility of the author and his literary agent.
Dan Andriacco
May 2015
About the Author
Dan Andriacco has been reading mysteries since he discovered Sherlock Holmes at the age of nine, and writing them almost as long. The first five books in his popular Sebastian McCabe – Jeff Cody series are No Police Like Holmes, Holmes Sweet Holmes, The 1895 Murder, The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore, and Rogues Gallery. He is also the co-author, with Kieran McMullen, of The Amateur Executioner, The Poisoned Penman, and The Egyptian Curse mysteries solved by Enoch Hale with Sherlock Holmes.
A member of the Tankerville Club, the Illustrious Clients, the Vatican Cameos, and the John H. Watson Society, and an associate member of the Diogenes Club of Washington, D.C., Dan is also the author of Baker Street Beat: An Eclectic Collection of Sherlockian Scribblings. Follow his blog at www.danandriacco.com, his tweets at @DanAndriacco, and his Facebook Fan Page at: www.facebook.com/DanAndriaccoMysteries.
Dr. Dan and his wife, Ann, have three grown children and five grandchildren. They live in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, about forty miles downriver from Erin.
Praise for the McCabe – Cody series
“You’re in the hands of a master of mystery plotting here. Rogues Gallery is a delightful read, hard to put down, and highly recommended. And did I say fun?”
–Hollywood screenwriter Bonnie MacBird
“The villain is hard to discern and the motives involved are even more obscure. All-in-all, this (The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore) is a fun read in a series that keeps getting better with each new tale.”
–Philip K. Jones
“The 1895 Murder is the most smoothly-plotted and written Cody/McCabe mystery yet. Mr. Andriacco plays fair with the reader, but his clues are deftly hidden, much as Sebastian McCabe hides the secrets to his magic tricks under an entertaining run of palaver.”
–The Well-Read Sherlockian
“I loved Dan Andriacco’s first novel about Sebastian McCabe and Jeff Cody, and I’m delighted to recommend (Holmes Sweet Holmes), which has a curiously topical touch.”
–Roger Johnson, Sherlock Holmes Society of London
“No Police Like Holmes is a chocolate bar of a novel – delicious, addictive, and leaves a craving for more.”
–Girl Meets Sherlock
