For the Sake of the Game

by Laurie R. King

Over the course of the evening, the Irregulars brought over three more suspect Sherlocks, all of whom they eliminated.

  One hadn’t arrived at the con until long after the panel ended, which they verified with the hotel valet who’d parked his car.

  Another said he was at a different panel, and when Vincent talked to the monitor for that panel, she remembered the guy asking long-winded questions and buttonholing a panelist afterward to argue with him. Tilda neither asked nor cared what they argued about.

  A third Sherlock had been in the right panel, in the right costume, but he was mostly confined to his wheelchair. He was only able to stand long enough for photos, and couldn’t walk unassisted.

  After that, they stalled. One was a partial view of a Sherlock in bad light, but should have stood out because he had red hair and freckles, unusual for a Sherlock, and his deerstalker was too big. The other was both more and less promising. On the good side, he was slipping through the same EMPLOYEES ONLY door Vincent had taken Tilda through to get to the ballroom, which seemed suspicious, and he had a more muscular build than most Sherlocks. On the bad side, the actual subject of the photo was a pair of Moriarty cosplayers, leaving Sherlock out of focus. Maybe it was staring at them so long, but both pictures looked almost familiar—Tilda just couldn’t figure out why.

  They stayed at their station well into the evening, eating dinner off the bar menu, but even though the lobby was thick with Sherlocks, they couldn’t spot either of the ones they wanted. When Vincent wandered off to consult with cronies, Tilda decided it was time for a beer, and looked around for Ed. He saw her wave and started over.

  That’s when Tilda realized why Out-of-Focus Sherlock looked familiar.

  Ed asked, “What can I get for you, Tilda?”

  “How about an answer?” Tilda said. “What were you doing in the hall behind the ballroom right before Michael Lee’s last panel?”

  The waiter wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Who says I was there?”

  Tilda hoped his daughter Penny’s acting skills were better than his. Rather than answer, she waited him out.

  After a pause, he folded. “Okay, I was back there. So what?”

  “In disguise?”

  “What disguise? I dressed up to join in on the fun.”

  “You’re not in costume now.”

  “My manager said it was against policy.”

  “Right. And you were behind the ballroom because . . . ?”

  “I had to get something, and the main halls were crowded, so—”

  “Not buying it, Ed. You were looking for Lee, weren’t you?”

  He sat down at the table. “Okay, I wanted to talk to him. Maybe do more than talk.”

  “Like planting a water bottle dosed with a peanut product?”

  “No! I mean I wanted to punch him for what he did to my daughter!”

  “What did he do?” Tilda said gently, with Harvey Weinstein–like crimes in mind.

  “A fat lot of nothing!”

  She blinked. “You’ve lost me.”

  “You know the con was here last year, right? Penny was a big fan of Lee, so she makes sure to work that weekend. When he comes in here for a drink, I get her to come by and introduce them. Like I told Vincent, she wants to be in movies, and I thought he might have some pointers. Networking, you know. They must have talked an hour. He even pulls out a script and they read lines together. Here where I could see them, of course. I wouldn’t have let her go up to his room.”

  Obviously Tilda wasn’t the only one thinking about Weinstein and his ilk.

  “He says she has real talent, and that he knows the perfect project for her, so he’s going to talk to his agent and call her next week. Penny’s over the moon! She tells her friends at school how she might have to drop out and move to Hollywood.

  “Only he doesn’t call. Another week. He doesn’t call. Another week. No call. Penny isn’t doing her homework, she isn’t eating, she isn’t sleeping. She thinks he’s lost her number. So I get his phone number from when he registered at the hotel, and I give it to her.

  “She calls him and leaves a message, then waits for him to call back. Nothing. A couple of days later, she calls again, leaves another message. Nothing. The kids in her classes are laughing behind her back, saying she made the whole thing up, and trashing her online. But she still believes it’s just a misunderstanding. Until the day she calls and the bastard has blocked her number.” Tilda jumped as he slammed his fist against the table. “He didn’t even have the guts to tell her it was all talk, that he isn’t going to do anything for her.”

  “Honestly, he probably didn’t have the juice to help her,” Tilda said. “One cult TV show does not a power player make, and he’d done nothing but minor guest shots since Sherlock’s Home.”

  “Then he shouldn’t have broken my girl’s heart! If I’d seen Lee on fire, I wouldn’t have bothered to spit on him to put it out.”

  “I don’t blame you, but why go after him in the ballroom?”

  “I didn’t want him in my bar—if I lose my temper here, I lose my job. I thought if I got to him somewhere more private, it would be my word against his. But he wasn’t there, and other people were, so I decided to try again later. I came back to work. And the next time I saw him was when they were wheeling him out.”

  She kept at him a while longer, but she was sure Ed wasn’t their guy. Maybe he could have left the water bottles, but if he’d been on duty at the end of the panel, he couldn’t have retrieved them. He left just as Vincent came back.

  “Wow. Poor Penny,” Vincent said when she told him what had happened.

  “Tell me you got something.”

  “Nothing to help, just a rumor that Anderson is moving ahead with the plan to bring Sherlock’s Home back. Here’s hoping he finds a better actor than Lee’s last replacement.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t care a lot right now.”

  “Hey, we’re down to the last Sherlock,” he said. “That’s good, right?”

  “Only if we find him.” She sighed. “I’m ready to call it a night.” Not only was she tired, but she suspected that Ed wasn’t going to come back to their table anytime soon. Their golden hours of VIP service were over.

  Tilda was not feeling optimistic the next morning. The convention was coming to an end, and with it, their chance of solving Lee’s murder. When Vincent texted to ask her to join him for breakfast, she almost turned him down, but figured she had to eat, so she met him at the hotel restaurant. She could tell he was discouraged, too—he hadn’t bothered to chat up the waitress.

  Still, once they’d filled their plates from the breakfast buffet, he said, “So what next?”

  “I’ve got nothing.”

  “What about the last Sherlock?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s got to be the one, Tilda.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we can’t find him. He’s probably already left anyway.” She’d love to skip out early, too, but had a market that wanted a write-up of the memorial service, no matter how tediously maudlin it was.

  “We could post his picture online. I’m in a lot of Sherlockian fan groups. Someone must know him.”

  “Then what? Once the con’s over, how could we find any proof that he’s a killer? No, if he’s gone already, we’re out of luck.”

  “Then maybe it wasn’t the sixth Sherlock after all. Let’s look at the other five again.”

  “Which one? The Sherlock who changes costumes at the drop of a hat? The one who wasn’t even at the hotel at the time? I know, maybe they were in it together!”

  “Hey, be nice!”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why you’ve been putting up with me.”

  “Because you’re my best shot at saving this con, for me anyway. If we can’t solve it, I won’t come back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There are other cons,” he said, “but I do like this one. Why did he have to kill somebody here?”

  A
thought struck her. “Why did he have to kill somebody here? Why commit murder in the middle of a convention, of all places?”

  “I don’t know. What are you thinking?”

  “Access to Lee is the obvious answer. Like Ed waiting for his chance to slug him. And Lee was kind of a jerk, so somebody else could have had a grudge, but did he really have enough time to give somebody a reason to kill him?”

  “The con kept him pretty busy.”

  “So if it wasn’t access, maybe the point was camouflage.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “If you killed somebody at your office, the police would look at all the people who worked there. If you killed somebody here, they’d look at you, but they’d also have a lot of other people to look at.”

  “Lee didn’t have an office, and hadn’t had a regular job since Sherlock’s Home. Do you think Anderson did it?”

  Instead of answering, she pulled out her laptop and started tapping away. It didn’t take long to find the pictures she was looking for. “Finish up your breakfast—we need to find Regina.”

  Just before noon, subdued fans filed into the ballroom. Regina had stationed Irregulars around the room armed with photos of the man Tilda thought was the killer, and they would have no trouble spotting him if he was in the audience.

  In the meantime, she, Vincent, and Regina were waiting for Anderson in the green room, which was no more plush than Security HQ, but at least it was free of pizza boxes. The plan was to explain the situation to Anderson before the service to enlist his help, but under the circumstances, his aid wasn’t needed. The killer walked in with him. Though he was dressed in a somber dark suit, Tilda recognized him immediately as the last Sherlock.

  “Tilda,” Anderson said. “I’ve been meaning to thank you for what you tried to do for Michael. You, too, Vincent.”

  “I just wish we’d been able to do more.” She spoke to the man with him. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

  “I don’t believe so,” he lied.

  “Tilda, this is Jeremiah Bourreau. You may remember him from the later days of Sherlock’s Home.”

  “Of course!” she said. “You replaced Michael Lee in the Sherlock re-creations. Didn’t I see somewhere that you started out as a production assistant on the show, and got promoted when Lee left?”

  “That’s right.”

  Anderson said, “In fact, we’ll be making an announcement about Jeremiah stepping in for Michael again. Not today, of course. I don’t think that would be appropriate.”

  “Wow, that’s big news. Mr. Bourreau, will you be playing Sherlock or Watson?”

  He looked puzzled. “Sherlock, of course.”

  “Really? You did so well as Watson Friday night. That mustache you were wearing was a bit over the top, but otherwise, a solid performance. Though you might want to brush up on your medical skills if you’re going to play a doctor. Or a nurse.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Noah, shouldn’t we be going in for the service?”

  “There’s still time,” Tilda said, noting that Regina was blocking the door. “You know, you really confused us, showing up as both Holmes and Watson that night. But it was an easy switch, wasn’t it? Put on the Inverness cape and the deerstalker, and you were just one Sherlock among many so it was easy to leave the poisoned water bottle for Lee. But you were worried some of the fans would recognize you, so you added a wig and drew on some freckles. You’d have been perfect for the red-headed league.”

  Tilda was disappointed he didn’t seem to recognize the reference.

  She went on. “Even the wig and freckles might not have fooled Lee or Anderson—especially Anderson, because he was used to seeing you dressed as Sherlock. Plus you needed to get up close for the next part of the plan. So you dumped the cape and wig, put on a different hat, and used the ridiculous mustache to cover the freckles and most of your face. Then you could be Nurse Watson. What did you do with Lee’s EpiPen anyway? I didn’t see it, but you must have made a switch when you pretended to drop Lee’s, and then did the same thing with the one the woman from the audience gave you. I imagine you got the EpiPens you used in Canada—you can get them without a prescription there. Did you just empty them or dose them with more peanut?”

  Bourreau said, “Noah, I don’t know—”

  “Never mind. Mere details.” Tilda was hoping the police would be able to locate the discarded EpiPens at the hospital or wherever they’d been disposed of to verify her suspicion. “Once the EMTs came, you ducked out and switched back to Holmes so you could take the tainted bottles away. You really lucked out when it turned out Lee had been exposed to peanuts earlier, making it look as if he’d had a delayed reaction. But even without that, you were in the clear because nobody knew you were here.”

  “I wasn’t here!” Bourreau protested. “I only came in yesterday to support Lee.”

  “That’ll be easy enough for the police to check on, especially if they can find the hotel you stayed at Friday night. Besides, people love to take pictures at a con. We’ve already got plenty of you pretending to help Lee, and one of you as Sherlock.” It struck her that hiding a Sherlock among the Sherlocks owed more to Poe and his purloined letter than it did to Doyle’s work, but Tilda didn’t think Bourreau would appreciate the literary irony.

  “Jeremiah, is this true?” Anderson asked.

  “Of course it’s not true! It’s nuts! This woman is a crazy fan! You know what they’re like!”

  “Noah, I do have one question for you,” Tilda said. “That meal that started the Food Feud, the one where peanut oil was used? Did you cook it yourself?”

  “No, Jeremiah—” He looked at Bourreau with his eyes wide, then stepped away from him. “God, Jeremiah. You didn’t!”

  Regina took over after that, bringing in hotel security and police to take custody of Bourreau. The memorial service ended up starting an hour late, but it did go on, and pictures of Anderson breaking down in tears went viral immediately.

  Unfortunately, Tilda wasn’t there to cover it, because the police wanted to talk to her, but Vincent took enough pictures and notes on her behalf for several articles.

  As she told Vincent later, there’s that something Bourreau hadn’t realized, but all Sherlockians know: a Sherlock is only as good as his Watson.

  THE CASE OF THE NAKED BUTTERFLY

  by William Kotzwinkle and Joe Servello

  BOTTOM LINE

  by D. P. Lyle

  “It don’t make no sense,” Billy Whitehead said.

  He was standing across the cold, metal table from Wilbert Scoggins, owner of Scoggins’ Funeral Home and the county coroner for more years than Billy could remember. The man he’d worked for going on five years now.

  “What don’t make sense?” Wilbert asked.

  “Why would Carl kill hisself?”

  The body on the table was one Carl Draper. He looked nothing like he had two days ago, the last time Billy had seen him, standing behind the counter in his store, that friendly lopsided smile on his face. Now he was pale, waxy, face mottled with blue-gray splotches, head lolled to the left, a blood-crusted hole just above and behind his right ear clearly evident beneath the harsh overhead bulb light.

  “Don’t know for sure,” Wilbert said. “I hear tell his business wasn’t doing all that good and he was worried about the future—how was he going to keep things going? That kind of thing.”

  “That don’t make sense neither. Back when I worked for him we was always busy. Ever time I go in there now, he and Cora are hopping like one-armed paper hangers. Far as I could see anyway.”

  Wilbert sighed. “That’s the tricky part of owning a business. Things can get out of sorts pretty quick.” He waved a hand. “I’d be lying if I said I was doing as well now as I was five years ago, the last time you worked for Carl over at the hardware.”

  “You’re doing okay.”

  “Yeah, mostly. But we’ve had fewer customers lately. Comes with the shrinking popu
lation around here. Ever since the shoe factory closed. That, and all my expenses have crept up. Little things like caskets and embalming fluid. Cost nearly half again as much as they did a few years ago. It adds up. And I suspect Carl was going through the same thing. Ain’t cheap to keep a hardware store stocked. And the drop-off in home building around the county sure don’t help much.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well, all I know is both Carl and Cora have been stressed lately. Money getting tighter.”

  “We going to do an autopsy?” Billy asked.

  “Don’t see much need for that. Pretty obvious what happened.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “The sooner I get my report done the quicker Cora can plan the funeral.”

  “She’ll appreciate that.”

  “Let’s cut his clothes off and then we can make a better examination.”

  Took five minutes to scissor away Carl’s pants and bloody shirt, the leakage from his head wound having soaked down onto the shoulder and back of his white shirt. Looked rusty brown now. Wilbert gave Carl a good look-see, head to foot, then they rolled him over.

  “Only got the entry wound,” Wilbert said. “Bullet’s still in there somewhere.”

  “Shouldn’t we take it out?”

  Wilbert shook his head. “No. If we open him up, his head anyway, it’ll make the embalming messier. And I’m sure Cora don’t want his head all bandaged at the visitation. She’d rather it be an open viewing. Closed caskets make folks uncomfortable.”

  Billy nodded.

  “What is it?” Wilbert asked.

  “You sure he did it to hisself?”

  “Sure am. He was lying on floor, the gun was right there beside him.”

  “Someone could’ve put it there.”

  “Now, who on God’s green earth would want to shoot Carl?”

  “Don’t know.” Billy walked around the table. He pointed to the wound. “But don’t you think that’s a funny place to shoot yourself?”

  “In the head? Happens all the time if someone wants to make sure.”

  “Seems like it’s pretty far back.”