“I cannot see why you feel the need to tell me all this about flies.”
“Oh, Mr. Ternac,” Holmes clucked in mock sympathy. “But you do. You do see. Jimmy Bowen, much like a fly, did not die from the amanita muscaria you gave him. He fell into a coma, that much is probably true, but you couldn’t risk his waking. Not after he figured it out, about the poison... That is why you were forced to put a cushion over his face and smother him.”
“That’s—that’s a lie. I had no reason to wish him dead.”
“I know. That’s what confused me at first. But once Joseph Henzley has had a chance to examine the broken glass from the witch’s bottle, I think we shall learn the truth—No, no don’t bother,” he cautioned as Ternac shot a glance at the door. “There are men coming here to arrest you. They will not feel kindly toward you if they are forced to chase you in this heat.”
Watson rose nevertheless, and moved to block any attempts to flee, but Wenzel Ternac, caught in the icy mien of Sherlock Holmes’ condemnation, could not seem to find his feet.
Holmes continued, “I’ve been told that the secret to creating the finest of small lenses is not as much in the grinding of the glass as in the formulation of the glass itself. And of that particular clear, fine glass the late Vandernedon was a master. That was the secret everyone believed he’d taken to his grave. Even Jimmy thought so, but you knew otherwise, didn’t you? You knew Vandernedon had shared his secret with the boy, even if Jimmy didn’t realise it himself. You knew it the first time he showed you the bottle he’d made for his mother. The very one she later filled with nails and pins and urine in order to protect her son from the girl you said had cursed him with witchcraft.”
Ternac drew in a deep shuddering breath. “He was going to stay for that dull ugly girl. I offered him a chance to better himself, I offered prestige, honour, the chance for greatness, and he wanted to stay here—with a dairymaid! What could I do?”
“Murder, apparently.”
“I’D’VE THOUGHT GROUND glass’d be the first choice of a glazier,” Cafferty said, over a much deserved pint at the Ram’s Head. It was his own ale from his own buttery, as he was also the proprietor.
“A glazier, of all people, would have known that doesn’t work, Mr. Cafferty.”
“What? Ground glass? It does! My cousin’s friend in Dudley heard of a woman that killed her husband with it.”
“She may well have killed him, sir, but not with ground glass. The mouth and tongue are sensitive instruments, able to detect a bit of grit or a tiny stone in a spoonful of beans. Enough ground glass to kill a person would be very obvious in the mouth; if it were ground fine enough that the victim didn’t notice, it would pass through the gut with only mild discomfort, and perhaps not even that. The human body is a remarkably efficient machine.”
“A machine doesn’t commit murder, Holmes,” Watson said.
He rolled a silver ring back and forth beneath his palm. They’d found it amongst the effects Jimmy had hidden under the floor boards beneath the bed in which he’d been murdered: earnest efforts at poetics, a lock of black hair and other indications of mutual affection. These items were in Watson’s pocket, to be given to Reverend Lilly with the ring, so that he might give it to Alice. He hoped it would be some measure of comfort to her. Noting the ring and easily deciphering Watson’s expression, Holmes smiled.“Nor does it love, you will tell me. But one day man will create a machine as intricate as the human body, and that machine will find us ridiculous and flawed and wicked, and that machine will justifiably end us.”
“An old philosophical discussion I am much too tired to have with you tonight.”
“All right, all right, old friend, I shall spare you my gloomy predictions. Have you set a guard on Rob Duggar as I suggested, Mr. Cafferty?”
“He’s in the stocks, Mr. Holmes. Where can he go?”
“He’s escaped before. As I’ve mentioned. More than once.”
“Yes, I’ll see to it.” But he went over to talk to the barman instead.
“He’ll not be there by morning.”
“Who? Duggar?”
“He has an accomplice in town. A young seamstress with a talent for lining coats.”
“Well, you’d best tell the deputy constable hadn’t you?”
“I don’t see why I should do all the work for him. But you and I should take extra precautions on our journey home. Loaded pistols, my friend, just in case.”
Watson shook his head wearily and rose to make his way to their room and a bed. He could scarcely believe they’d solved a murder, saved a girl from the gallows and sent the guilty party to it—and all before the sun had set.
The Adventure of the Speckled Bandana
J. E. Cohen
I came by Julie Cohen when another author I’d approached contacted me to give his regrets, and threw her under the wheels of my fury; and it’s just as well he did. Aside from discovering that I’d walked home past her house every day for three years(!), I got an immensely fun Holmes story set in the late ’seventies (one of three stories with a New York-based Holmes investigating a crime on the West Coast, which is a weird coincidence), full of pop culture references. I can’t actually tell you why I reallylove ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Bandana’ without spoiling it, so I’ll just leave it there...
IN MY MANY years as the intimate companion of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, we inevitably were called upon to investigate confidential matters. Sometimes these involved international security; at other times the cases dealt with the hardly less delicate world of celebrity. Of course everyone is aware of the role that Holmes played in solving the Puzzle of the Grassy Knoll, and his key actions laying bare the full extent of the Watergate Scandal; but in my extensive notes, I also find records of the sensational case of the Abhorrent Disco, and the shocking affair of the Squealing Louse—both matters where the utmost discretion was required to avert an international scandal, or indeed warfare.
All my papers relating to these cases are safely locked away in my old dispatch box. The press has attempted persuasion, bribery and, more recently, burglary to access the box. Every attempt has failed—and I will take this opportunity to warn the parties involved that every similar attempt will fail, as I have security advice from no less a person than Mr. Mycroft Holmes, late of the CIA.
This week, however, I received a letter from Holmes himself, written from his retirement maple-tapping in the Okanagan woods. The envelope contained only two objects: a folded and creased page torn from a tabloid newspaper, and a note written in Holmes’s characteristic laconic scrawl. Both made my heart sink.
He has passed on to a better world at last. He is safe. You may write about the speckled bandana. SH
It was a Thursday in the summer of ’77, then, that I called upon Holmes in his quarters at 221B Bleecker Street in Manhattan, during a break from my medical duties. Despite the hot weather I found him in a fug of smoke, an empty packet of Winstons at his knee; he greeted me in his habitual offhand way, by tossing a plastic specimen bag at me.
“Watson,” said he, “what do you make of this?”
I held the bag up to the light. At first, it appeared to me to be empty, but upon inspection I saw that it contained no fewer than three hairs.
“Is it the forensic evidence from some crime scene? Traces left behind by a murderer, perhaps?”
“No no, nothing so exciting. I stepped out this afternoon, and I’ve had a caller in my absence. These hairs were left on the cushion of the very sofa where you sit now, Watson. Who is our prospective client? You know my methods; apply them.”
I peered more closely at the hairs in the bag. “It was a woman?” I hazarded. “They’re all over six inches long.”
“Watson, you are the one fixed point in a changing age,” remarked Holmes, laughing. “You, of course, keep your military crew cut, but for the rest of us, fashions have changed.”
“You think it was a man, then?”
“I know it was a man, for the simple rea
son that Mrs. Hudson informed me that his name was Kevin. But what sort of man, Watson? And what is his likely business with us?”
“How can we tell his business from his hair, Holmes?”
He merely raised his eyebrows, passed me a magnifying glass, and opened another packet of Winstons.
I applied myself to the task at hand. After a very few moments I put down the glass in satisfaction and said, “He’s a hairdresser.”
“Good, Watson, good! You noticed, of course, that the three hairs aren’t from the same head.”
“One is curly and red, one straight and black, and the third is black and kinky. He must have cut the hair of all of these people before he came to Bleecker Street.”
“A very sensible guess. However, it is a guess, and it is wrong. If our visitor is a hairdresser, why are the hairs all full-length? Why are there no smaller cut hairs left behind as well? One would expect there to be many more shorter-cut hairs adhering to a hairdresser’s clothes than long ones.”
“What is the explanation, then?”
“You are a medical man—examine the hairs more closely. Do you not notice a certain sheen to them? Open the bag; do you not detect an odour?”
“Hairspray?”
“No no, it is self-evident that this man is—but here, if I am not mistaken, is his tread upon the stair, and he can tell us the facts himself. Hello, Mr. Kevin Lowe. I apologise that I was absent when you came by earlier.”
The man who entered the room had hair slightly longer than average, even for the current style, but it was brown, with bushy sideburns. He wore a denim jacket and a yellow shirt, with a wide pointed collar open to an expanse of chest hair, and brown satin bell-bottom trousers. Although no more than of the average height, his platform boots gave him several extra inches, and he wore a diamond ring on his finger, and a small gold earring in the lobe of his left ear. His hands were fine and sensitive, as was his mouth, giving the impression of an artist or a fine craftsman. Holmes waved him to a chair, and offered him a cigarette, which he accepted and lit with an engraved Zippo from his pocket.
“Oh man, I’m glad that I caught you,” he said.“My flight back to Vegas takes off in three hours, and I was hoping you’d be on it with me.”
“This is my colleague, Dr. Watson, before whom you may be as frank as before myself. Pray tell, Mr. Lowe, what’s so urgent in the wax museum business that you need me to fly to Nevada immediately?”
Our client’s eyes widened. “I didn’t think I’d left my card behind.”
“You didn’t.”
“Well, Mr. Holmes, I’d heard you were good, or I wouldn’t have flown all the way across the country. But I didn’t know you were that good. Or have you visited Lowe’s House of Stars?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“You’d be a rare person if you had. Business isn’t exactly booming.” He sighed, letting out a long stream of smoke. “I’ve studied my craft all over the world, and I like to think of myself as an artist, but when it comes down to it, I’m not much competition for a plain old onearmed bandit. I’d sure like to know how you knew what my job was.”
“The hairs!” I cried. “Their smell and their unnatural sheen told you that they were not from any human head. But how did you deduce the wax museum, Holmes? Why not a wigmaker?”
“You accuse me of not keeping up with popular culture, my dear Watson. But when a man leaves behind hairs that clearly resemble not only those owned by recording artists Cher and Michael Jackson, but also the star of this year’s new smash Broadway hit, Annie, he would have to be a wig-maker to the stars indeed.”
“You’ve got it right, Mr. Holmes. I spent yesterday updating Cher and little Michael, and I pulled an all-nighter working on a new Annie model that hasn’t even made it to display yet. And I guess I didn’t bother to change my jacket before I hopped on a plane out here to see you. I didn’t have time, after what I discovered this morning.”
Holmes stubbed out his cigarette and leaned forward. “I am all attention.”
“Well, I’ll give you a little bit of background. I’m not only the owner of Lowe’s House of Stars, but I’m the chief wax modeler. I learned my craft at Madame Tussaud’s in London, followed up at the Musée Grévin in Paris, and carried on at the Hollywood Wax Museum; I worked at all three of them for many years as chief modeller, and I’m not boasting, only telling you fact, when I say that I was the best in three countries in the end, before deciding to set up for myself with my own collection of celebrities. Pop stars and movie stars, presidents and murderers. I’ve got all the stars, all in their latest outfits, with their latest hairstyles. Last month I added Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and I’m working on Chewbacca as soon as Annie is finished. You can imagine the work it’s going to take to glue all that hair on, but I have a hint that Star Wars is going to get even bigger.”
“Do you think they’ll make a sequel?” I asked, despite myself. I had seen the film at the Strand, and I had found myself thrilling to the adventures in a galaxy far, far away.
“Word from L.A. is that there might even be two.”
“And the case?” inquired Holmes, who had declined to see Star Wars with me, and who still insisted, in odd hours, that the sun orbited the Earth.
“I’d always dreamed of setting up on my own, but I couldn’t do it until my rich old Uncle Vernon died and left me his fortune. I left Hollywood and spent over two years creating my own waxworks, working day and night. No expense spared, every one of them based on the latest photos and using the most modern techniques, though my brother Louie thought I was wasting my money, and wanted me to invest in time shares in Reno. I got a pitch in the basement of the Starlight casino, and I sat back and waited for the money to roll in. Well, Mr. Holmes, it hasn’t happened. I don’t know what’s worse, the basement location, or the lure of those one-armed-bandits, but I’ve been losing money hand over fist since I opened up. Fortunately, thanks to Uncle Vernon, I can afford it.”
“You haven’t come all this way to consult me over your lack of business.”
“No, I haven’t. There’s no mystery to that; I need to lower my prices and find a new location for my waxworks if I want to start making money. No, my troubles started this morning when I walked into my museum and found it empty.”
“Completely?”
“Almost. There was nothing left in the room except for two things: my model of Toto from The Wizard of Oz, kicked into a corner onto its side, poor little fellow. And an envelope containing twenty thousand dollars in cash.”
I sat up straight in my chair. “Twenty thousand dollars!”
“The police think I’m crazy for being upset. They think I’ve made a pretty good bargain, since the raw materials cost a lot less than that. But I don’t want the money. I want my work back.”
“Pray start from the beginning. Every detail may be important.” Holmes steepled his fingers under his chin, and his eyes took on the dreamy, introspective air that belied the fierce analytical intelligence of that formidable brain. “Have you had any threats, or any offers to buy? Any hints that someone may have set their sights on your collection of celebrities?”
Mr. Lowe tilted his well-coiffed head to the side, thinking. “It’s been quiet. We’ve had a few visitors, mainly families with kids, or some retired couples taking a break from the canasta tables. Though, come to think of it, Wednesday was busier than normal. For one thing, my brother Louie turned up.”
“And this was unusual?”
“Not as much as it should be,” said Mr. Lowe, grimly. “He seems to think that if he only harangues me enough, I’ll give up the waxwork business and join him in his investments in Reno. We got into an argument and it ended up with him storming out.”
“In your opinion, were his feelings high enough to justify his stealing your waxwork collection?”
“Louie’s never been a big one for hard work, to be honest. I can’t imagine him renting a truck large enough to hold the collection, let alone
hunking all the figures into it. I had fifty-six of them, and though they’re made of wax, they’re not light.”
“But he knows your habits, and presumably has a motivation to put you out of business, if he wants the support of your investments?”
“I suppose so. But if he had twenty grand, why wouldn’t he use that?”
“Do you have the envelope with you?”
“I do. It’s been checked for fingerprints.” Mr. Lowe extended the article in question.
“Pity.” Holmes examined it with his glass. “A standard manila envelope, no marks, unsealed. The bills are all hundreds, nonsequential. Any evidence will have been destroyed by the police when they handled it.” He handed it back to Lowe, who tucked it into his denim jacket. “Besides your brother, were there any other visitors of note that day?”
“There was, actually. An old white guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt. We get a lot of retired people, so he wasn’t all that unusual, but he was alone, that was one thing. And the other thing was, he hardly spent any time at all in the museum. Normally people come in, they wander around, take some photos, ask some questions, maybe. Not this guy. He paid for a ticket, walked in and through and out in about thirty seconds.”
“Singular,” commented Holmes. “Did he seem to take a particular interest in any waxwork?”
“I couldn’t tell. I was too busy arguing with my brother.”
“And you spent that night working on your Annie exhibit. Where is your workshop? Is it on the premises?”
“No, it’s about two miles away, in an old garage on the outskirts of town. I have a small apartment at the back, where I live.”
“So your museum was empty at night. Unguarded?”
“There’s security outside the casino, but the only entrance to the museum is down a side alley.”
“This side alley—is it big enough to drive a truck or van down?”
“I’d say so.”
“Any witnesses?”
“I haven’t found any, Mr. Holmes, and nor have the police.”
Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets Page 5
