Текст книги "No Police Like Holmes: Introducing Sebastian McCabe"
Автор книги: Dan Andriacco
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
Chapter Three – Night Work
Renata Chalmers had to be a good four decades younger than her husband and prettier than your average beauty queen. A cynic might look at the estimated girth of the old man’s investment portfolio and draw conclusions, but whoever accused me of being a cynic?
“Jefferson is a cynic,” my brother-in-law declared by way of further introduction. He stuck a long, green cigar in his mouth. In years gone by he would have fired it up with a lighter shaped like a hand grenade. Nowadays he mostly uses the cigar as a prop, yielding to Kate’s no-smoking zone inside the house and sometimes to my protests about second-hand smoke outside of it.
“Why do you say that?” Renata asked.
“Because it is true,” Mac said grandly. “Only a cynic – a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, according to Oscar Wilde – could share Jefferson’s total incomprehension of the joys of collecting.”
I confessed that the passion to pay big money for things that nobody really needs, like multiple editions of the same Sherlock Holmes book and even variant printings of the same edition, was way beyond my ken.
“But maybe you can explain it,” I told Chalmers. I whipped out my notebook and prepared for enlightenment. There could be a news release or an alumni mag article in this lunacy, which I would then tweet a link to.
“Think of it as a game,” Chalmers said, leaning back on the couch, relaxed and in his element. “It’s a chase that’s always changing. Sometimes you know what you’re looking for, but you don’t know where to find it. Other times you know who has some unique item and the challenge is to make it yours. In Moscow, for example, I once talked a policeman out of a Russian first edition of His Last Bow.”
“And you almost went to Lubyanka Prison or someplace equally awful on smuggling charges when you tried to take it out of the country,” his wife reminded him.
Chalmers nodded at the memory. “There was no real crime involved, of course, except the extortion directed at me. Generous amounts of hard currency got me out of that pickle rather quickly. Overcoming obstacles – whether corrupt foreign officials or rival collectors – only adds zest to the game, Jeff.”
Just thinking about it was enough to light the fire of battle in Chalmers’s clear blue eyes.
“Oh, my collection isn’t the largest,” he went on, “but it is distinctive. No one else, for example, owns fully half the hand-written manuscript of The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
I could imagine a nice photo spread of that, but why only half the MS? “Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.
“Scattered,” Chalmers said, “as it has been for more than a century. The manuscript was broken up and sent to book dealers as part of a promotion for the book’s American publication in 1902. Various libraries and just a few private collectors own the other pages. One sold not so long ago for seventy-eight thousand dollars. Alas, I was not the purchaser.”
“Then you obviously haven’t been able to get everything you’ve gone after,” I said.
Chalmers sat forward. His grip on the cane tightened. “Perhaps not, young man, but I always left the other fellow knowing he’d been in a fight. I play to win. Isn’t that right, Renata?”
She nodded, her smile slipping a bit.
“And now you’re just going to give away the Woollcott Chalmers Collection,” I said. “I don’t understand that part, either.”
With an avuncular smile, Chalmers pointed his cane at Mac. “Blame your brother-in-law. He talked me into it.”
Staying at a bed and breakfast in Savannah, Georgia, a couple of years back, I met a man who had once sold a refrigerator to an Eskimo in Alaska (who used it as a cigar humidor). Well, that guy had nothing on Sebastian McCabe when it comes to persuasion. But Mac refused the credit.
“Slander!” he thundered. “Calumny and character assassination! I talked you into nothing. I had heard that you were ready to share your collection, Woollcott, and I merely suggested that St. Benignus College would be a most grateful recipient.”
Chalmers nodded. “True enough. There comes a time when hoarding it all to yourself is no longer satisfying. It becomes rather like Renata playing her violin to an empty concert hall or an actor performing to a darkened theater. Besides, after forty years the challenge has mostly disappeared. So I decided to give the collection away while I’m still alive to enjoy the gratitude – and the tax deduction.”
“Perhaps Jefferson would enjoy a private tour of the exhibit right now,” Mac rumbled.
The whole collection wasn’t even unpacked yet, but some of the highlights were set up in a room next to the one where the speakers would be holding forth in the colloquium. Although I’d written about the exhibit in press releases and talked about it in pitching stories, I hadn’t yet had a chance to see it. So I was mildly curious.
“But you can’t just leave the party,” I told Mac. “You’re the host.”
Mac looked at his watch, which had a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes on the face. “It is barely ten o’clock. With my charming wife presiding as hostess and ample adult beverages on hand to lubricate the guests, this jamboree will still be going strong long after we get back. We may not even be missed.”
Further pro forma protests on my part proved predictably futile. Within ten minutes the four of us had piled into Mac’s 1959 Chevy convertible, headed for Muckerheide Center on the St. Benignus campus. The car is fire-engine red with immense tail fins. It’s no vehicle for a grown man at all, but it fits Sebastian McCabe just fine. Chalmers sat in front with Mac, apparently because it was easier on the older man’s bum leg, and I sat in back next to Renata. She was a delightful conversationalist (although I can’t remember a word she said – maybe something about her musical career) and she smelled so good I felt guilty just breathing around her.
A guard let us into Muckerheide Center, thanks to an advance call to Bobby Deere, who runs the center at night. The place was fully lighted, but eerily empty. The clicks of our heels on the tile floor echoed far down the wide corridors as we walked along.
On the first floor we passed the darkened offices, the abandoned Information Desk, and the empty racks that hold the campus newspaper when school is in session. Walking up the immobile escalator to the second level, Chalmers moved slowly, relying heavily on his cane. Just outside Hearth Room C, where the display from the Woollcott Chalmers Collection was set up behind closed doors, I realized we weren’t going any farther without help.
“We need to get a key from that guard,” I said in a near-whisper. The place had me a little spooked. “This baby’s locked.” By way of demonstration, I jiggled the handle. The door didn’t move.
“No mere lock can stop Sebastian McCabe,” my brother-in-law announced. He did not whisper. From his breast pocket he produced a yellow balloon. “Be so good as to blow this up, please,” he asked Renata Chalmers as he handed it to her. She hesitated, clearly bewildered by Mac’s madcap actions. Apparently she didn’t know him very well.
“Humor him,” I said as Mac lit a cigar. “You may have children of your own some day.”
Looking resigned rather than enthusiastic, she blew up the balloon. Her husband, at Mac’s request, tied the balloon shut and handed it over to Mac – who immediately applied the hot tip of his cigar to the latex. The balloon popped and something clattered to the floor. Renata picked it up and handed it to Mac – an old-fashioned metal key.
“I believe this will facilitate our entrance,” Mac said.
Woollcott Chalmers tucked his cane under his right arm and clapped softly in appreciation of this sophomoric parlor trick. “Bravo!” His wife smiled, the rough equivalent of turning on a mega-watt spotlight.
“Can’t you ever do anything the easy way?” I asked Mac.
“What would be the fun of that, old boy?”
He used the key to open the door. At first he fumbled for a light switch, then found it on the wall to his left. The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling blinked on with the flickering brightness of lightning.
The Chalmers Collection filled the room, some of it spread out on tables, some on the walls, some in bookcases. There were books, posters, calendars, records – anything to which the name or image of Sherlock Holmes had been applied. It was hard to take it all in. And this was only a small sampling of the collection; the bulk of it remained in packing boxes over at the library.
“Incredible,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor will you,” Chalmers assured me. “There is nothing like it. Perhaps that is immodest, but as Holmes once said, ‘I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.’”
He watched in silence from the doorway as the rest of us strolled through the room. Mac dawdled over some faded paperbacks, the particular kind of book toward which his own collection mania is bent. I got caught up in the bizarre design of a Firesign Theatre record album called “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.”
“Don’t waste your time with that,” Chalmers said when he saw what I was up to. He pointed with his cane to a glass case against the far wall. “There lay the real gems of my forty years of collecting Sherlockiana.”
I put the album down and joined Mac and Renata in following Chalmers across the room.
The case to which the collector had pointed was lined in red velvet, giving it the air of a reliquary. Reposing on the cloth were several letters, a calling card from Arthur Conan Doyle with a note scribbled on it, a small playbill from an early performance of the melodrama Sherlock Holmes signed by the lead actor, William Gillette, and several books whose bibliographical significance escaped me.
Chalmers said, “Until I found it, no one even suspected the existence of-”
“Woollcott!”
Renata, grabbing his arm tightly, didn’t need to say anything else. Chalmers’s blue eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, grew even wider as he instantly saw what his wife was too flustered to voice.
“I don’t-” He hesitated, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. This afternoon... everything was here when we left.”
His wife nodded. “I know.”
“What is it?” Mac asked sharply. “What’s missing?”
“The Hound of the Baskervilles manuscript,” Renata replied.
“Much more than that,” Chalmers added in an agitated voice. “There was also a first edition of the Hound inscribed by Conan Doyle to Fletcher Robinson himself. And a Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, the rarest of all Sherlockian books, made even rarer by a hand-written note on the first page from Conan Doyle to his mother.”
I whistled. “That kind of stuff must be worth a pretty penny.”
“Priceless!” Mac thundered. He tugged on his beard. “I find it hard to credit that our librarian misplaced them.”
“There’s no chance of that,” Renata said. “They were here when we left this afternoon after helping set up the display. They’ve been stolen.”
Chapter Four – “We’ve Had a Little Incident”
“And it’s only my first month on the job,” Gene Pfannenstiel moaned, shaking his shaggy head.
“I know,” I told the young librarian.
“Nothing like this ever happened anywhere else I’ve worked,” he assured me.
“You said that already,” I reminded him. “Twice.”
Gene’s broad face, usually alive with the excitement of some bookish pursuit that would have put me to sleep, was a study in earnest concern. Or as earnest as a chunky man can look in a frizzy beard and no mustache.
In pleated black slacks and a white shirt open at the collar, he was dressed more like an Amish storekeeper than the curator of special collections at the Lee J. Bennish Memorial Library. Blinking around at the rest of us, he looked about as worldly, too.
“I should have asked to have special guards posted outside,” he fretted.
“That’s obvious,” said Lieutenant Ed Decker of Campus Security.
“Not particularly helpful at this juncture, however,” Mac rumbled.
By this time he had driven Woollcott and Renata Chalmers back to the McCabe house, where they were staying the weekend. The old man had left looking about ten years older.
I wasn’t feeling so hot myself. It didn’t take a public relations genius to figure that news of the Sherlockian thefts would quickly overshadow everything else happening on campus this weekend. A major gift to the college – or parts of it, anyway – had been stolen almost as soon as the collection had arrived. That made us look like a bunch of rubes. Plus there was the Holmes connection, guaranteed to set off a media feeding frenzy. Dealing with the press would be a headache on this one, and that was the least of my worries. A certain unbearable college administrator was sure to make my life really miserable.
The facts of the theft were not in doubt: Both of the Chalmerses and Gene Pfannenstiel agreed that the missing materials had been in the glass case before Gene locked up the room that afternoon in front of the couple. With much hocus-pocus Mac had unlocked the room many hours later using the same key, borrowed from Gene. In between, something had happened.
“Grand theft,” Decker pronounced unnecessarily. “I understand the stolen goods were worth way into five figures, maybe six. Right?”
Mac shrugged his shoulders, which is akin to a mountain moving. “How does one assess the value of something that is one of a kind?”
“And Mr. Pfannenstiel here simply gave you the key, Professor? How do you rate such treatment?”
From the look on his face, the question worried Gene, but not Mac. “Rank has its privileges, Lieutenant,” he said, “and I am a full professor well known to the library staff.”
“Damned sloppy security,” Decker said with a snort. “The display case wasn’t even locked.” He glared at Gene, who withered under the attention and didn’t bother to explain that he hadn’t thought that to be necessary in a room that was itself locked.
Decker looked mean. But then, Decker always looks mean, even when he hasn’t been hauled into work late on a Friday evening. He’s built like one of those beefy football players whose jersey number, according to legend, is higher than his IQ. So you probably expect me to say he’s really a heck of a nice guy and a Rhodes scholars on top of it. Not quite. Oh, he’s cooperative enough – letting me know routinely about requests for demonstration permits, for example, so I can be prepared to respond for the media. But Decker is no genius, just a thoroughly professional police officer with skin the color of anthracite, a broad flat nose, a thin mustache, high cheek bones and arms the size of Mac’s thighs.
“I already have a list and description of what Mr. Chalmers knows was taken,” Decker said, tapping a small notebook in his hand, “but I’ll need you to do a complete inventory, Mr. Pfannenstiel, to make sure nothing else is missing.”
“Right away, Lieutenant.”
“Good. Anything else I need to know?”
“Yes!” Mac thundered. “I call your attention to what Sherlock Holmes might have called the curious incident of the broken lock.”
“But the lock wasn’t broken,” Decker protested.
“That was the curious incident. How did our burglar get in there without breaking the lock?”
“You tell us,” I snapped. “You’re the magician.”
Mac slowly shook his massive head. “I have no special insight. Houdini could get into places as well as out of them, but most often he had the help of a concealed lock pick. When you examine the lock, as I did before the lieutenant arrived, you will notice there are virtually no scratches around the lock. It is difficult, if not impossible, to use a lock pick without making scratches.”
Muttering something under his breath (I distinctly caught the phrase “frickin’ amateurs”), Decker went off to direct two newly arrived officers in dusting for fingerprints or whatever it is cops do at a crime scene.
“I can’t put if off any longer,” I told Mac. “I’ve got to call Ralph.”
“You have my deepest sympathy.”
I didn’t want to do this in front of an audience, so I walked over to the other side of the escalator before I pulled out my iPhone and selected the number in my contacts list I’d been dreading to call.
Ralph Pendergast is vice president of academic affairs and provost at St. Benignus College, which makes him both Mac’s boss and mine. That’s dicey enough. But on top of that, his strong ties to several members of the college’s board of trustees make him almost as powerful in every facet of college life as our legendary president, Father Joseph F. Pirelli, C.T.L. – “Father Joe” – himself. And yet Ralph is relatively new to campus, brought in by the board just this academic year to tighten up the ship.
The guiding dream of Ralph’s life seems to be a campus where nothing out of the mainstream is ever taught, nothing controversial ever happens, and the bottom line is always written in black ink. I bet his favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla. No surprise, then, that The Write Stuff, Mac’s blog nitpicking the grammatical foibles in faculty and staff writing on our campus – including Ralph’s administrative memos – sent Ralph’s blood pressure off the charts. Mac’s other eccentricities, such as his penchant for bagpipes and his success in writing mystery novels, only rubbed salt in the wound.
Ralph Pendergast, let me make clear, does not like Sebastian McCabe. He also does not like me because of my inability to keep Mac’s escapades out of the local press. And he absolutely hates surprises, which is why I was calling him with the bad news at this hour instead of letting him find out in the morning from the stories I was almost certain would appear in our local media.
He picked up the phone on the fifth ring, his voice groggy. Early to bed, early to rise.
“Sorry to wake you, Ralph,” I said. “This is Jeff Cody.”
“Cody? Oh, no.”
“Yes, sir. We’ve had a little incident you should know about.” I quickly outlined the situation.
“This is a disaster,” Ralph announced. “Simply a disaster.” I could imagine him pressing together his thin lips, running a hand through his slicked-back hair, maybe fumbling at his bedside for his wire-rimmed glasses. “I personally secured the corporate sponsors for this Chalmers Collection. Do you have any idea what this theft will do to our reputation in the business community?”
It wasn’t really a question.
I looked across the way. Mac was standing outside the exhibit room, next to the NO SMOKING sign, smoking a cigar.
“I should have known better than to let myself become involved in any McCabe project,” Ralph continued. “Sherlock Holmes, indeed!”
“You can hardly blame Mac this time,” I pointed out, grudgingly, out of my irrepressible sense of fairness. “As academic vice president, you’re in charge of the damned library. If your curator of special collections had taken some precautions-”
Why was I throwing Gene under the bus like that?
“Don’t let them play it cute,” Ralph interrupted.
“What?”
“The media. Don’t let them say it’s another case for Sherlock Holmes or something like that. They’ll put that on the front page. Get them to play it straight.”
“The media aren’t the enemy here, Ralph.” You are. “The best way to handle a public relations crisis is to be as open and accurate and responsive with the media as you can. If you’ve made a mistake, admit it and apologize. Have a bad day, if necessary, and get it behind you, move on.”
“We didn’t make a mistake. Don’t make this about the college. How the media choose to cover this is the issue.”
I took a deep breath. “Get real, Ralph. There’s no way I can tell the media how to play a story.”
“Then what good are you? And I was certainly under the impression that you had... connections, shall we say, at the Observer.”
“Don’t get personal, Ralph. Besides, that’s all over.”
“Emphasize the law enforcement angle,” Ralph went on, ignoring me as usual. “Campus Security is on the case, near a solution, that sort of thing.”
I barely heard him. On the other side of the escalator a stocky man in his mid-fifties, dressed in a dapper twill suit, was sidling up to my brother-in-law.
“Okay, Ralph,” I blurted into the phone, “I’ll take care of it. If you get any media calls, send them to me. But I have to go now. The press is already on the scene.”
