“Come along, Catson, no time to dawdle.”
“Where are we going?” I hurried to catch up.
“Back to our place.”
I was about to correct him—there was no our place; there was only my place—but then a happy thought crossed my mind.
“You mean it’s time for a nap?” I said, relieved.
“Don’t be daft!” Bones barked a laugh.
“Then what? What are we going back to my place for?”
“We need,” Bones announced self-importantly, “to send a few telegrams.”
On the way home, Bones became distracted by some chew toys in a shop window. His tongue hung out at the sight.
“Come along, Bones,” I prodded him away, only to be stopped myself by an attractive display of yarn in the window of a crafts store. I do appreciate a good skein of yarn.
“Come along, Catson,” he said, his turn to prod.
And so we continued, with only a few more stops at shop windows, until we arrived at my front door.
I was about to ask about those telegrams, but no sooner did I leap through my door than I smelled the most wonderful aroma coming from upstairs. Following my nose, I raced to the kitchen to find Mr. Javier stirring something at the stove.
“What are you cooking, Mr. Javier?” I asked. “It smells delicious.”
“Salmon croquettes!” Mr. Javier said proudly, still wearing his jetpack. Only now, he had his chef’s apron tied over it. “Normally, I’d never attempt such a complicated dish. Going to the fish monger’s and the grocery on the same day? Too far. It would take me a week! But with this?” He pointed at the jetpack on his back. “I made it there and back again so quickly, I even had time for my programs.”
Mr. Javier does like his soap operas on the radio. One might say he’s obsessed with them. He fell in love with the radio and the soap operas regularly broadcasted on the device not long after I hired him, which was several years ago. No sooner had I received my medical license and moved into my apartments at 221B Baker Street than I found myself in need of some personal assistance. For one thing, I was too busy being a surgeon to worry about the daily requirements of home ownership, like cooking and cleaning. For another, while I may be fastidious about my own bodily cleanliness, that doesn’t mean I want to spend my spare time running around with a dust rag and broom. So I went to an agency, a rude giraffe behind the counter showed me a book with possible cook/housekeepers, and I selected Mr. Javier. We’ve been happily together ever since.
“That Mr. Bones,” Mr. Javier said now, “he is so smart. I think we should keep him, Boss.”
“Yes, well, that’s not going to happen.” I ignored the turtle’s sad expression as I asked, “So what time will dinner be ready?”
“Not for a while, Boss.”
“Great. I have some important things to attend to.”
“Soooo,” Mr. Javier said, dragging out the word, “how was your day, Boss?”
This was new.
Traditionally, in the years we’d been together, my conversations with the turtle had mostly revolved around the grocery-shopping list and whether or not the place was dusted to my satisfaction. True, he might tell me little bits about his favorite soap opera, but I only listened with half an ear as it was impossible for me to keep Erica and Carly straight. But he’d never asked about my day before. Perhaps because, outside of going off to the Cat Wars, I’d never done anything very interesting in his eyes before today?
So I told him.
I filled him in on the case thus far: how we’d found the dead human in the abandoned house and I’d deduced the cause of death to be cyanide poisoning; how the dog had said the word RACHE scrawled on the wall was not a woman’s name interrupted, but rather, the German word for revenge; how the dog had concluded that two men had arrived at the abandoned house as friends, driven there by a cab, but only one had remained behind—the dead one, of course; how a woman’s gold wedding ring had been found at the scene; how Constable Gibberish had described a tall, funny-smelling man with tiny feet returning to the scene, and the dog assumed he’d come back for the ring.
“So,” I said, having completed my tally of important points, “what do you make of all that?”
“How should I know?” the turtle said. “I have the salmon croquettes to attend to here. I was simply being polite.”
I shrugged and went out to the living room where Bones had thoroughly—and disturbingly—made himself at home. He had spread out writing implements and papers all over my table and was hard at work.
Hopping up onto the cushion in front of the bay window, I settled down, curled up on my side and placed a paw over my eyes.
“What are you doing, Catson?” Bones said. “We have telegrams to write! We have a case to solve!”
“Who are the telegrams for?” I asked.
“One is to the London News. I want them to put a notice in the early evening edition.”
It wasn’t even early evening? Without the usual sixteen naps, this day was taking forever.
“What will the notice say?” I asked.
“I’m going to say that we’ve found a ring, a golden wedding ring.”
“HA!” I snorted. “That should bring all the crazies out.”
“Perhaps. But hopefully, it’ll draw the murderer out too. After all, if he was so eager to retrieve that ring that he was willing to risk getting caught by returning to the scene of the crime … ”
It annoyed me to admit it, but the dog had a possible point.
“Then,” Bones said, “I’m going to go to the jewelry store and buy an exact copy of the ring to show to whomever answers the notice.”
“Sounds marvelous,” I muttered, so close to sleep now, I barely knew what I was saying.
“Of course, I’m putting your name down as the finder of the ring.”
“Mmmm … What? Why?”
“Because my name is too famous? If the criminal sees ‘Sherlock Bones’ listed as the finder, he might suspect that something is up and steer clear.”
Well, that made sense.
“I’m also saying in the notice,” he continued, “that the ring was found in the street. This way, the criminal won’t know a connection has been made between the dead body and the ring.”
I supposed this made sense too.
“Don’t you want to help with the telegrams?” Bones said.
I briefly revived just long enough to consider this. Of course I’d received many telegrams in my day but had never sent one. I was curious. How did it work? But then:
“No, thank you,” I said.
“The jewelry store then? Wouldn’t you like to go there?”
Perhaps if it was the craft store, I’d be tempted; all that lovely yarn. I tightened my paw more closely around my head. “Only in my dreams … ”
As I drifted off, I could have almost sworn I heard Bones say, “Very well. Perhaps I’ll send Mr. Javier? He likes getting out now that he has his new jetpack.”
Some time later, we were in the midst of our salmon croquettes when our dinner was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell ringing.
I was going to get up to answer it myself—I certainly wasn’t about to let the dog answer my door a second time—when I was stopped short by the sight of Mr. Javier, bobbing through with his jetpack.
“Don’t worry, Boss!” he cried excitedly as he picked up speed and flew down the stairs. “I’ve got it! This time, I’ve finally got it! I’ve—”
Crash.
I can only imagine how much it hurt his little turtle head when he smashed into the heavy wooden door.
But whatever the damage, a moment later he was back in the room announcing, “Visitor to see you, Boss, for Mr. Bones too. Says there was a notice in the paper.”
I was glad I’d taken my nap so I could be alert right now because this—this!—was exciting.
There was the sound of a slow, heavy tread on the stairs. Apparentl
y, our visitor was not as speedy as a turtle with a jetpack. Well, who is? Bones and I hurried to the living room where we waited eagerly for our visitor to appear.
I don’t know what we were expecting, exactly.
Actually, I do know.
We were expecting a man about six feet tall with incredibly tiny feet and a funny smell about him. In short, we were expecting our murderer.
Not a little old lady.
“I’m here about the ring?” her creaky voice stated as she came into view. A scarf covered what little hair she appeared to still have, and her body was so badly stooped over that it was impossible to tell how tall she might be if her form were fully stretched out. Since the upper half of her body was practically parallel to the floor I could not see her eyes as she prompted, “The ring?”
I knew Bones’s newspaper ad would draw out all the crazies.
Judging from her frayed and torn scarf, she did not appear to be well off. I suspected that, having seen the notice about the ring in the paper, she was likely trying to claim it so that she could immediately sell it for cash.
There was no way the golden wedding ring we’d found was hers.
“Of course,” Bones said. “I’ll go get it for you right away.” He turned to exit the room.
Oh, Bones. I groaned inwardly. If I didn’t think it would be interpreted as rude, I’d shake my head in disappointment and disgust. The dog was just going to hand over the wedding ring—or at least the copy he’d had made while I was sleeping—to this obvious charlatan? (I always wanted to use the word charlatan, meaning “imposter.”) What an idiot. The dog, that is, not the old woman. She was obviously quite clever in her own way.
“There’s only one thing,” the dog said, pausing in the doorway and then turning to face us once more. “Could you describe it for us, please?”
Could she …
Oh, Bones! I thought. Good one! Previously, he had only relaxed her into thinking he would just hand the ring right over, but now he was going to trap her by demanding she provide a description.
“Well,” the old woman said after a long pause for deep consideration, “it’s gold, isn’t it?”
Bones likewise paused for several long moments, then brightly said, “Right! Well, that should do it! I’ll just go get … ”
I was tempted to slap him. Well, it’s gold, isn’t it? That was enough description to satisfy him that this was the true owner? Come on, Bones!
Idiot.
Once more, Bones paused in the doorway, turned.
“Yes,” he spoke slowly, “the ring is gold, as you say. But can you tell me anything more about it?”
OK, so maybe not such an idiot.
“What more can there possibly be?” She looked puzzled. Then: “Unless of course you mean the scratch inside it that looks like the letter Z?”
I shot a questioning glance at Bones, who nodded back at me. I supposed I should have examined the ring more closely earlier, but he apparently had.
“It does indeed have such a marking,” he said before finally succeeding in exiting the room.
So, the ring we’d found had the telltale Z on it. Then she really was …
“Then you really are the true owner?” Bones asked, returning with the fake ring, complete with the letter Z, which he promptly handed over.
“Of course not!” She laughed, more of a cackle really.
She wasn’t? And he just gave her the—
“It’s my daughter’s!” She laughed that cackle again. “What would one such as I be doing with a ring like this?”
She placed the ring in her skirt pocket and then slowly turned her back on us.
“How did your daughter lose the ring?” Bones shouted after her.
He must have been thinking of the abandoned building where we’d found it, beneath a murder victim no less. How had it got there?
“Not for me to say, is it?” the woman said. “I’m not the one who lost it.”
And then she was gone.
Or at least as quickly as a hunched-over old woman can be gone when first she needs to negotiate a long flight of stairs.
“Well, that’s that,” I said.
“Of course, that is not that,” Bones said witheringly. Then he raced to the front window. I raced after him and jumped onto the cushion. And so it was that I was able to see what he saw when he pushed the curtains aside:
It was the old woman, below us, hopping into the front passenger side of a cab. For one so old and bent, that hop was disturbingly nimble.
“Mr. Javier!” Bones cried.
Mr. Javier almost instantly hovered in the air beside us. “Yes, Boss?”
How I resented that Yes, Boss. Previously, I had been the only Boss around here. But my resentment didn’t get much time to fester, not with all the crackling excitement in the air as the dog screamed at the turtle:
“Follow that old woman in that cab!”
“Even you have to admit,” the dog said, as we continued to gaze out the window, “it’s come in quite handy.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, the jetpack, of course. Look at Mr. Javier go!”
I watched as Mr. Javier raced through the air, catching up to the horse-drawn cab just as it was about to disappear around the corner.
“I know how to steal a ride on the back of a cab, but even I have been thrown off a time or two. And, as fast as I am,” the dog said, “I never could have caught that cab in time, not as quickly as it’s moving.”
“Yes,” I admitted grudgingly, “the jetpack has turned out to have its uses. There’s just one problem.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m worried about Mr. Javier’s head.”
“His head?”
I remembered, with a shudder, a few minutes earlier when Mr. Javier had flown down the staircase only to crash into the door once more.
I reminded the dog of this now.
“Huh,” he said, mildly disturbed. “I hadn’t noticed that part.”
For one who had superior powers of observation in so many ways, there really was quite a lot that the dog missed.
“Well, no matter.” The dog shrugged, his expression clearing.
“No matter?” I was incensed. “No matter? What if Mr. Javier gets brain damage?”
“I hardly think that’s going to happen,” Bones snorted.
“It will if he keeps banging his head!”
“He has a hard shell.”
“On his back! Not on his head!”
The dog waved a dismissive paw. “He’ll be fine.”
“Fine? Why did you send him to chase after the old woman in the cab anyway?”
The dog yawned, as though the answer to his question was obvious. “Because I want to know where she goes, don’t I? Shall we finish our dinner while we wait? There’s no telling how long the turtle might be.”
So we did that, returning to the dining room and our salmon croquettes.
While we ate, the dog regaled me with stories of his past cases, most involving murders, although there were a few grand thefts and a few examples of “Must Save The Day Before The World As We Know It Ends Completely!” thrown in.
Dinner finished, I rose from the table—so full—and made the leisurely stroll into the living room.
“Naptime again?” Bones asked. Wait. Was that a note of sarcasm I detected there?
No big deal. I shrugged, leapt up onto the cushion, curled up, and closed my eyes.
“You’re finally catching on,” I said. “What about you? Don’t you need to nap? After all, as you pointed out, who knows how long it’ll take Mr. Javier to return?”
“Yes, our turtle may be a while yet.”
Our—
“But there’ll be no napping for me,” Bones said, before I could object. Really, our turtle? “When there’s a case going on, I never sleep until it’s solved.”
I might have known.
“It must have been a disguise!”
I woke to the sound of the dog being his usual excitable self. He was speaking in exclamations and running around in circles on the carpet. Give him another moment, I thought, and he’ll start chasing his own tail.
“What’s going on?” I asked, groggy.
“Wake up, Catson,” the dog ordered. “The turtle is back!”
Now I was fully awake, and sure enough, there was Mr. Javier.
“Mr. Javier was just telling me the most extraordinary thing,” the dog said, before Mr. Javier could even open his mouth to speak, “that when the cab reached its destination, a man stepped out of it, not an old woman.”
“It’s true, Boss,” Mr. Javier said eagerly.
It took me a moment to register that when Mr. Javier said this, he was looking at Bones. There it was again: the turtle calling the dog “Boss.”
Before I could object to this—or better yet, correct him—the turtle continued.
“As the man walked away, I peered inside the cab. You know, I figured, maybe the man had already been inside when the old woman first got in? Maybe she was still in there?”
“And?” I prompted.
“And there was no one else inside, not even a cabdriver, Boss.” At least now he was calling the right person “Boss.”
“How is that possible?” I demanded.
“As I said, it must have been a disguise!” the dog said.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“Elementary,” the dog said, although initially, I failed to see how this could be so. “There never was an old woman to start with. It was someone else, wearing an old-woman disguise.”
“This is just like the story of Snow White!” Now I was the eager one.
“Excuse me?” the dog said.
“Snow White! You know, when she’s staying with the dwarves, and there’s a knock at the door, and at first it seems to be a kindly old woman, all hunched over, a head covering obscuring most of her hair, but in reality it’s the evil queen, and then she gives Snow White the poisoned apple?”
“This is nothing like that.” The dog snorted. Then he turned his attention to Mr. Javier. “How tall was the man who stepped out of the cab?”
Sherlock Bones 1: Doggone Page 4
