Love & Other Crimes

by Sara Paretsky

  Race Williams proclaimed: “Right and wrong are not written on the statutes for me, nor do I find my code of morals in the essays of long-winded professors. My ethics are my own. I’m not saying they’re good and I’m not admitting they’re bad, and what’s more I’m not interested in the opinions of others on that subject.”

  I wanted to humanize Race, make him less two-dimensional. He needed a foil, and I decided the perfect foil to the ultimate hardboiled detective would be someone in Amelia Butterworth’s or Miss Marple’s mold. It would be impossible to rewrite the widely known and venerated Jane Marple’s story, but someone who seemed like her—an elderly spinster, dismissed by outsiders as a dithering old woman—deserved a passionate backstory of her own, and so I brought Charlotte Palmer (name courtesy of Sense and Sensibility) to Chicago for the World’s Fair.

  Note: I am indebted to Erin Mitchell for finding this story in the Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine and making a Word document for me. It’s a mystery to me, but my own copy of this story in all formats had disappeared.

  The Curious Affair of the Italian Art Dealer

  My wife having been called to the bedside of the governess who had been almost a mother to her, I was spending some weeks in my old lodgings on Baker Street. My wife’s departure to Exeter, where her governess had for nine years run a select seminary for young ladies, coincided with my own desire to spend time with my old friend and flatmate, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. On the one recent occasion when we had persuaded him to dine with us, I had seen that Holmes had fallen into that state of nervous irritability he was subject to when no case or other intellectual pursuit occupied his mind.

  As was typical of him in such states, he screeched away on his violin at all hours. I found the sound painful enough, but the occupants of the flat above threatened an action at law if he didn’t desist between the hours of 2:00 and 6:00 a.m. “We know Mr. Holmes is a great genius who has often saved our monarch from acute embarrassment, but we must beg for a few hours’ repose,” their solicitor explained. Whereupon my old friend took up his pernicious cocaine habit once again.

  I pled both as a friend and a medical attendant, to no avail: Holmes hunched himself deep in his chair and muttered that he had not inflicted his company upon mine, that I had chosen to come uninvited, when I could have been in uxorious attendance on Mary in Exeter. In states like this, my friend often displayed a petulant jealousy of my wife, or perhaps of my preference for her company: upon our marriage he was wounded by our refusal to take lodgings across the landing from his own.

  In an effort to rouse him from his stupor, I tried to draw Holmes’s attention to crimes reported in the sensationalist press. The stabbing of a cabman in Fleet Street “was banal beyond bearing,” while the theft of the Duchess of Hoovering’s emerald tiara “would prove to be the work of a criminal housemaid.” When later reports confirmed he was wrong in both cases—the Hoovering cadet, bitter at the privations of a youngest son, had sold the tiara to fund a disastrous trip to Monte Carlo, while the cabman turned out to have been a Russian spy trying to overhear secrets of a Hapsburg diplomat—Holmes sank deeper into his drugged stupor.

  I could not neglect my own practice, or perhaps I should say, my other patients, who were usually more willing to follow my advice than was my brilliant but capricious friend. It was at the start of the third week of my stay with him that I was summoned to the Gloucester Hotel to attend a man who had been violently assaulted in the night.

  The hotel manager, a Mr. Gryce, was more anxious that my arrival should be kept a secret than he was for the welfare of his battered guest. “An Italian prince and a French countess are among our current guests,” he said as he led me up to the second floor by way of the servants’ staircase. “Any scandal or fear that assaults are part of everyday life at the Gloucester would be most detrimental to our business.”

  I turned around in the middle of the stairwell. “I hope your guests believe that your solicitude for their welfare would cause you to respect the medical man you brought in to examine them. If you can’t take me up by the main stairs, then I will return to my surgery, where a number of patients no doubt await me already.”

  Mr. Gryce hurriedly begged my pardon, took me to the first floor and down the red-carpeted hall to the main staircase, which was filled at this hour with ladies on their way down to the street to shop or meet friends for coffee. On the second floor, the wounded guest lay in a suite near the hotel’s northeast corner, a secluded part of the building that afforded but a poor view, since the flats on Cassowary Road obscured all but the tallest trees in Hyde Park. A secondary stair led from this wing to the hotel mews.

  My patient was a man perhaps in his mid-twenties. Despite his Italian name—Frances Fontana, visiting from Buffalo, New York—he was a fair man, probably attractive when not swathed in bandages.

  The sufferer had been badly struck around the face and had significant cuts in his fingertips. I could make no sense of the wounds, nor of the man’s story. Fontana claimed he had been sound asleep when he was awakened around three by the lighting of the gas lamp in the main entrance to his suite.

  “I got out of bed and instantly called out, demanding to know who was there. No one answered, but my attacker, his face covered by a mask, rushed through the sitting room and struck me about the head, demanding all the while where ‘it’ was. I hit out as hard as I could, but the man was clothed and I was in my nightshirt; he trod on my foot, demanding ‘it.’

  “Finally, it transpired he wanted a small painting I had brought with me from America. Family legend ascribed it to Titian and I had wanted an opinion from Carrera’s on Bond Street. My assailant ransacked my luggage, looking for it, and found it in a secret compartment in my trunk. We fought for it, but he was stronger than I, and as I say, clothed and shod. As soon as he had left, I raced to the ground floor, where they thought I was perfectly demented, but when they saw my wounds, the night man bathed and dressed them. I lodged a complaint, of course, for how did the man get into my room, if not through their carelessness in giving him a key?”

  Mr. Gryce looked reproachfully at Fontana. “We didn’t, Mr. Fontana, you know we went into this very thoroughly with the night porter and the night manager both, and no one asked for a key to your suite last night. It’s possible that you yourself failed to lock the door.”

  Fontana protested angrily, but I cut short his outburst by unwrapping the bandages and forcing him to sit while I examined his wounds. The one on his right cheekbone was the most severe: he seemed to have been struck with some heavy object, perhaps a truncheon. I bathed the wounds with peroxide, put on a salve that contained a small amount of an opiate to relieve the worst of the pain, and looked at his fingers.

  “How did you come to injure your fingers? I have found a glass fragment in one of them and they all seem to have been cut with glass. At first I thought perhaps you had grasped a razor in your attacker’s hands.”

  “What difference does it make? Are you as insensible as this man Gryce? Am I to be catechized when instead I need medical attention? I suppose the glass over the picture broke in our struggle. It’s highly likely, after all.”

  I forbore to argue, simply checking each digit with my magnifying glass to make sure I had removed any minute glass fragments. I anointed his fingers with the same salve I used on his face and told him in a day he would be able to dress and eat without pain, but that for the next twenty-four hours he would do well to avoid using his hands.

  He seemed to accept this with a good enough grace, said his man, who was lodged in the servants’ wing, would take care of his most urgent needs, and would sleep in a truckle bed the hotel was bringing up so that he need not fear a second intrusion.

  “And no word of this should get to my sister, mind you,” he added as I restored my implements to the bag.

  “Your sister?” I inquired. “Miss Fontana is also a guest in the hotel?”

  “No. She is lodging with friends in Kensington. But she is likel
y to call, and I would have her believe I’ve gone to the country for a few days. It will alarm her greatly if word of this attack should reach her.”

  Mr. Gryce promised readily as did I, in case the sister should learn that a medical man had been called in to consult with her brother. “I foresee no complications,” I said as I put on my hat and coat, “but should you need me, you may send word through Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose guest I currently am.” Holmes’s name acted powerfully upon Fontana, as I confess I hoped it might. He said nothing, however, and I didn’t press the matter further.

  As Gryce and I left, I looked around the living room of the suite and saw the signs of struggle clearly enough: drawers removed from the bureau, cushions from the divan lying at cockeyed angles, and my patient’s trunk, with the secret drawer smashed into splinters. Gryce interpreted my gaze as criticism and hastily promised that a chambermaid would be sent up at once to put matters to rights.

  When I returned to Baker Street that evening, greatly fatigued, for the day had included a most difficult lying-in, where I barely outwitted the Angel of Death, I had forgotten my American patient. I was startled, then, to see him fully dressed, outside our lodgings, in argument with a beggar woman.

  “Ah, there you are, doctor. This wretched woman has followed me, I swear to heaven that she has been on my trail all the way from Hyde Park Corner. Begone, you harridan, or I’ll send for a constable.”

  “Ah, you be a sly one, b’ain’t you, mister? Thinking to do a poor beggar woman out of her widow’s mite, but there be no need to call for a lawman. I ain’t a going to do you no harm, no sir.”

  I stepped closer, to order her away from my patient, but the odor rising from her many shawls and skirts was as thick as her country accent. I took Fontana by the arm, instead, and bustled him into our entryway.

  On the way up the stairs I asked how he came to be so imprudent as to rise from his couch. He said my mentioning Holmes’s name had made him think his best course was to place his situation in the eminent detective’s hands. “The police sent a Mr. Whicher, but I didn’t care for his manner, no, not one iota. He seemed to blame me for being the victim of a crime.”

  The eminent detective, sprawled languidly in the armchair, still in his stained dressing gown, didn’t look any more prepossessing than the beggar woman outside our door. Nor was the smell any more propitiating, although in Holmes’s case it rose from the chemicals he’d been playing with all day. The dull eye he turned on me as we entered turned to anger when he realized I had brought a guest.

  Fontana seemed to find nothing odd in the consulting detective’s dress or manner—perhaps he had been warned that the great genius was eccentric to a degree. He plunged without invitation into a pouring out of his woes. As he spoke, my friend’s eyes shut, but not, as I’d feared, in a stupor, for he pressed his fingertips together, as was his habit when he was concentrating intently on a narrative.

  When Fontana finished, Holmes murmured, without opening his eyes, “And who knew that you were taking the painting from America to England with you?”

  “No one,” Fontana said.

  “Not even your sister,” Holmes said.

  “Oh! Beatrice. Yes, of course she knew.”

  “Your father was a classical scholar,” Holmes said.

  “My father is a banker, sir, or at least was until a stroke deprived him of his faculties a year ago. It is my mother who has a great love of the Italian classics. But why is that relevant, and how did you know?”

  “You are named for one of the great Renaissance poets, and your sister for the inamorata of another,” Holmes said languidly, his eyes still shut. “But your accent surprises me: I hear it on the lips of graduates from Winchester College more than from Americans.”

  Fontana’s lips tightened, but he said with a semblance of nonchalance that his mother, whose family hailed from Guilford, had caused him to be educated at Winchester.

  “Yes, I thought as much,” Holmes said. “I have composed a monograph on the accents of the different public colleges of England and I am seldom mistaken. But to return to the business at hand, had you in fact called at Carrera’s?”

  “I had stopped at the gallery yesterday morning, but Signor Carrera was not in, and I had no wish to put such an important commission in the hands of an underling. I left my card and my direction and asked that he call on me, but, though I lay in bed all day per Dr. Watson’s instructions, he never arrived.” Fontana’s tone was angry. “The English are famous for their manners, but few of the people I have encountered seem to have any consideration whatsoever, whether the police or the hotel manager, or even a gallery owner who might be interested in a large commission.”

  Holmes pointed out that Signor Carrera was not himself English, but added, “Perhaps he was your nighttime assailant. If he had wrested the painting from you, then he would know there was no need to call on you to examine it.”

  Fontana’s eyes brightened at the idea: his shoulders relaxed and the choler in his eyes faded.

  “And your sister, Miss Beatrice Fontana, she agreed with your mission to get a proper valuation of the painting?”

  Fontana shifted uneasily. “She saw no point in calling public attention to it, should it prove valuable, nor of disappointing our parents, should it prove not to be the work of the great Titian.”

  “And she is staying with friends in Kensington, you say? Did she cross the Atlantic with you?”

  “Yes; it was her voyage that decided me on my own. My mother felt that Mrs. Som—that is, an old friend of hers—could introduce my sister into society, since my mother herself is tied up wholly in care for my father.” Fontana then reiterated his plea that his sister not be told; her worries for their father were sufficient. She did not need to know that her brother had been assaulted and the family’s valuable painting stolen.

  Holmes sat up slightly and looked at me.

  “My dear fellow, you are all in—I see you have attended a difficult lying-in today—but perhaps, since he is here, you might examine your patient’s wounds and change the dressing.”

  I wondered how he knew of my professional duties this afternoon, but knowing him as I do, assumed there was some aspect of my dress that was habitual with me on such cases. I unwrapped Fontana’s bandages and was pleased to see that healing was already under way, judging by the deepening discoloration around the wounds, as well as the incipient scabbing. Holmes actually pushed himself from his armchair and looked on gravely as I bathed and anointed the injuries. While I rewrapped them in fresh bandages, my friend withdrew, and I heard the sound of water pouring into the bath—a welcome signal indeed!

  I escorted Fontana to the street, but it took some time to hail a hackney cab. At length, I saw my patient safely bundled inside. I rather thought that the beggar who had accosted Fontana earlier was watching from a doorway at the corner, but as the nearness of Paddington Station makes Baker Street a popular spot for women of her ilk, I could not be certain in the dark streets.

  By the time I returned upstairs, Holmes had finished bathing. For the first time in many days he was dressed, and in clean linen. Mrs. Hudson was just in the act of laying a plate of grilled kidneys in front of him, a sort of compromise meal of breakfast and supper, with potatoes and a dressed salad. For me she had grilled a steak.

  My friend ate with all the relish of a man deprived of nourishment for some weeks.

  “A very pretty problem, Watson, very pretty indeed.”

  “What did you make of his story?” I asked.

  “It was the painting that interested me,” Holmes said. “That, and the fact that his wounds were self-inflicted.”

  “Self-inflicted?” I repeated. “That blow on his cheek very nearly shattered the bone.”

  “He’s left-handed, as I noted when he opened his card case,” Holmes remarked. “You observed, of course, how much more severe the blow to his right cheek was than to the left, and yet the placement of the blows was symmetrical.”

 
; He picked up a sock stuffed with rags and handed it to me, instructing me to strike myself in the face. I reluctantly did so. The sock struck in both cases just beneath the eye socket. In my case, being right-handed, I felt the blow much more on the left than on the right side, and had to concede the point.

  “And the glass in his fingertips? Did he do that to himself as well?”

  “Ah, that’s a most interesting point. I believe we have two calls to make, one on the Carrera Gallery in Bond Street, and the other to the home of Mrs. Chloë Someringforth in Cadogan Gardens, Kensington.”

  At my puzzled expression, Holmes held up his directory of London boroughs and street addresses. “There are seventeen households in Kensington with owners whose last names begin with ‘Som,’ but only one of sufficient size to admit of enough rooms to include a young lady making her society debut. And Mr. Neil Someringforth has a position in the Foreign Office, Undersecretary of State for Oriental Affairs. He is at present in Cairo, leaving his lady with enough time to visit any number of balls and ridottos.”

  Now that Holmes had recovered his spirit, and had food inside him, he was ready to act on the instant, to go first to Bond Street and then to the Someringforth home in Cadogan Gardens.

  I grumbled to Holmes that the gallery would be closed at this hour, that not everyone had the luxury of sleeping all day and imagining that the world was ready to conduct business at night.

  “My dear chap, you’ve been badgering me for weeks to get up, to be active. Don’t urge me to my bed now. And besides, it’s Thursday, the night that new shows open in Bond Street’s galleries. Carrera will be there, with wine and nuts and a desire to be accommodating, but if the fatigues of the day are such that you wish to retire, I can safely handle this business on my own.”