The Case of the Exploding Speakeasy

by David E. Fessenden

  Charlie scooped up the pile of papers with a laugh, and I sensed that any doubts he had about my story were fading fast. “Go ahead, get outta here,” he said with a smile. “Since it’s almost noon, and you worked Monday evening on the speakeasy story, you can visit the coroner and then take the rest of the day off.”

  I grabbed my jacket and sprinted toward the door.

  “Watson!” Charlie called over his shoulder. “Remember, this is just a little legwork, to give you some practice at reporting and to satisfy my curiosity. There’s no real story here.”

  “Not yet, maybe, but you just wait!” I called out. I plowed through the swinging door of the newsroom and gave Jones, who was just coming in, a good smack on the nose. I took the stairs two at a time, ignoring his curses and threats.

  I had been told not to visit the coroner too soon before or after a meal, but I thought such advice was merely a joke. I was wrong. The pungent chemical stench was like a hot poker up my nose, and the sight of the corpses made my stomach lurch. Four naked bodies lay in a row on huge sheet-metal trays, their skin as gray as the cement-block walls, one with its chest splayed open in a crude dissection, from crotch to chin. A tray of bloody instruments perched on the gleaming counter near the corpse’s head.

  The coroner was dressed in white linen, including a linen cap shaped something like a hatbox turned upside down. His apron was smeared with blood and other unidentifiable matter, and all the while he spoke to me (a bit too cheerfully, I thought) he held in his hand the end of a rubber hose that was attached to a large container hanging from the ceiling. I didn’t dare ask what that was for.

  I’m sure I’ll never remove some of those images from my brain. After a few attempts to carry on an interview in those gruesome surroundings, I felt so ill that I skipped lunch and took the first trolley back to Germantown.

  The ride home in the open air revived me, and I felt much like my old self when I entered the apartment. So it was something of a surprise when Mycroft greeted me with, “What did the coroner have to say about the victims of the explosion?”

  My puzzled look made him smile. He raised one eyebrow and said, “The distinctive aroma of formaldehyde and carbolic acid leaves little doubt as to where you have been, Thomas. So what did the coroner say?”

  “That’s the strange part,” I said, hoping to stump Mycroft, who seemed to think this curious chain of events was blatantly obvious. “The card players weren’t killed by the explosion at all—they were asphyxiated!”

  I watched Mycroft expectantly, hoping for a startled reaction. Instead, he shook his head and snorted in disgust.

  “What incompetence! That coroner’s position must be a political appointment. Of course they were asphyxiated! The explosion itself proves that. The question is, what caused the asphyxiation?”

  “A lack of oxygen?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Well, at least you’ve mastered the obvious,” Mycroft replied. Whether he recognized my sarcasm and was dishing it back to me, or he actually thought I was that stupid, I’ll never know.

  “Can’t you see?” he continued. “If the explosion blew out the windows, but left the bodies intact, it could not have been caused by dynamite. A concentrated detonation such as that caused by a bomb would have a more centralized area of damage, and would most likely have torn and dismembered the bodies.”

  Mycroft stood and began to pace in front of me, like a schoolmaster before a dull student. “Now tell me, young man,” he said, wagging his sagging jowls at me imperiously, “what else is explosive besides a solid? What would fill the room so pervasively as to blow out every window?”

  “A gas,” I whispered, suddenly realizing what a fool I had been.

  “Exactly! An explosive atmosphere!” Mycroft cried triumphantly, spreading out his hands and seeming to gesture to an imaginary audience. Then he turned abruptly, puffed out his cheeks and flopped back into his chair as if the strain of being my tutor had exhausted him.

  “And an explosive gas would have certainly been poisonous,” I added. “So, of course, they were asphyxiated.”

  Mycroft put his elbow on the arm of the chair and cradled his head in his hand. “No, my boy,” he replied with some impatience. “Then they would have died of poisoning, not asphyxiation. The coroner, even as woefully unqualified as this one, would have examined the skin and the lungs and concluded that a blue tint indicated a lack of oxygen. A poisonous gas would have given the tissues a different hue.”

  “That’s right!” I answered, slapping my hand on the table. “I remember now—the bodies were a grayish-blue color.”

  Holmes looked at me severely, as if I had committed a serious violation of etiquette. “And when were you planning to tell me this?” he demanded. “Thomas, you cannot expect me to help you if you fail to give me complete and accurate information. I cannot make bricks without clay.” He held up one finger commandingly, his gesture still effective despite the slight quiver that revealed his age. “Observation, my boy, observation. That is your greatest tool.”

  The silence that followed was palpable. We sat in the darkening living room of the apartment like two stone sphinxes, he with an air of disappointment, I with an inward confusion, trying to fathom the puzzle. Suddenly I saw it: the flaw in his argument. I knew he must be wrong, but I also knew that unless I were to phrase it just right, the proud old warhorse would never admit it. Finally, I decided to pose it in the form of a question.

  “Mycroft,” I asked, “since combustion requires oxygen, how could an explosion occur if there was insufficient oxygen in the room?”

  “I never said there was insufficient oxygen.”

  “But if there was enough oxygen, how could they suffocate?”

  Mycroft merely waved his hand and answered, “Enough of this! I’ve spoon-fed you far too much as it is. You’ll have to figure out the rest for yourself.” Then he fixed a devilish look on me and added, “But I’ll give you one more clue—one and no more. The atmosphere was explosive, but it was not a combustible gas if my suspicions are correct. Strictly speaking, the explosive was solid after all. Chew on that for a while.” And with a dismissive wave of his hand, he promptly closed his eyes and soon began snoring loudly.

  Basil quietly stepped into the room and removed Mycroft’s empty teacup, not wanting to awaken him. Here was my chance to ask a few questions without having the discussion taken over by the old man. “Basil,” I whispered, glancing anxiously at Mycroft, “you said the room was a cheap wood addition. But if only the windows blew out, then the explosion could not have been very powerful.”

  “And I deduce,” added Mycroft, startling us both because we thought he was asleep, “that the room was not often cleaned.” I put my hand to my forehead and sighed. How could this man be so obsessed with trivialities?

  “Well, yes, that is true,” Basil said, nodding his head. “Mr. Ragan wouldn’t allow any of us in that room to tidy up. He just got a bag of sawdust to throw on the floor whenever someone spilled his beer.”

  “Sawdust? I hadn’t anticipated that. Well, that settles it,” Mycroft said with a sigh. “You have all you need now, Thomas, to explain how these men died. The case is solved.”

  Ignoring the fact that I didn’t know how the murders occurred, I asked, “But who committed the crime? You haven’t even mentioned that.”

  “Well, if that’s what you’re looking for, I suppose the case isn’t solved after all. You told me you needed to prove it was not a mob hit. I think you have enough evidence to prove that the murders, and subsequent explosion, were too sophisticated and unconventional to be committed by a mob boss’s goons.”

  “Mycroft, you don’t understand. Your subtle and highly finessed reasoning will be lost on those I have to convince. The only way I’m going to win that bet is by solving the entire mystery—and that means finding out who killed these men, how and why.”

  �
�Ah, sounds like a job for the likes of my brother. He was always willing to hunt down every detail, building an airtight case that even a dull prosecutor, a dim-witted judge, and a jury of fools could not fail to understand. I haven’t got that kind of patience.” With that, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes again.

  I drew Basil aside, where Mycroft would not overhear. “I’ve got to find out more about Ragan and who his enemies might be.” I paused, hoping he might suggest something, and I was not disappointed.

  “Would it help to get access to his office?”

  “Well, I suppose so, but how am I going to do that? By now the police must have the remaining portions of the building locked up tight.”

  Basil’s mouth curled into a lopsided grin and he jingled a set of keys. “I guess it would help to know the fellow who opens the doors every afternoon.”

  I glanced over at Mycroft, snoring away in the next chair; surely by now he was definitely asleep. “Basil, you’re amazing!” I said. He responded with a shy smile and a slight bow. “I don’t suppose you could join me for a couple hours of reconnaissance?” I asked. Then tilting my head toward my housemate, I added, “But you’ve got Mycroft to take care of.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he replied in a low conspiratorial voice. “Mr. Holmes will be ‘otherwise occupied’ for most of the afternoon. He won’t even know I’m gone.”

  “Yes, I will,” Mycroft said, “but I won’t care.”

  CHAPTER 7

  A brisk walk of a few blocks brought us to the building, a converted brick mansion. As we stepped from the sidewalk to the back of the building, we could hear the broken glass crunching under our feet. The back room, which jutted out into the tiny rear yard, was an empty shell. Small triangular glass fragments lined the soot-stained window frames, making them look like a row of huge toothy mouths, opened in surprise. The sickly weeds in the yard were fanned out on the ground, trampled by the bystanders and firemen from the night before. I noticed the afternoon sun reflecting off a stray shard of glass here and there, but most of the debris had been cleared away. As I stared at the blown-out windows of the back room, I recalled the earlier night, as the police and the coroner had pulled the bodies out through these same openings. One guy—it might have been Ragan—had been a bit too fat to come out through those comparatively narrow windows, but they pushed and shoved until he popped through. I couldn’t stand the sound of that lifeless skin being shredded by the glass slivers still remaining in the window frame: Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. A wave of nausea swept over me as I remembered that gruesome scene.

  Basil led the way through the back gate and down a dark and narrow alleyway between the buildings. Though it was too dark to see them, I heard the rustle of newspaper, the clatter of tin cans, and the sharp clink of empty bottles as our feet disturbed the piles of trash strewn along the passage. “We’ll use the side door,” he said, but I knew that his air of self-assurance was all bluster; he kept looking over his shoulder, his eyes glazed with fear. I couldn’t blame him. Even though it was only late afternoon, in the deep shade of the alley, with my hand running along the clammy brick wall for support, I felt like a grave robber in the dead of night.

  The door gave way easily to Basil’s key, and once inside, we both relaxed, even though the building was in shadows and silent as a tomb. In the half-light that peeked through the shuttered windows, I could just make out the shape of long, narrow counters and hanging clusters of odd-shaped utensils, which cast even odder shadows on the far wall—we were in the kitchen. We crept across the tiled floor, down the hallway toward the barroom, Basil leading the way. “Probably the first place you’ll want to look for clues is in the office,” he said.

  “Wait a minute, Basil. I want to see the door to the back room.” I tried to sound more confident than I felt. The dim light and the eerie quietness made my stomach quiver.

  Reluctantly, Basil led me down the hall and pointed to the door. Out of habit more than anything else, I tried the knob; as expected, it was still locked. The police had removed the bodies through the windows, so there had been no reason to unlock it. It probably hadn’t been touched since the explosion.

  I pulled out a flashlight and began to examine the door, trying to imagine what Sherlock might look for in such a situation. My father had seen him do this dozens of times—a painstaking inspection of doors, walls, shelves, and furniture, contorting his body in the most unimaginable ways to examine the most minute crevices and unreachable crannies. But I detected nothing unusual. It was a plain wood door, nothing more. The paint, an atrocious green, was cracked and bubbled with age, but it was otherwise indistinctive.

  Along the bottom edge, however, I discovered an odd-looking spot. Aiming my light at it, I examined it more closely. A portion of the paint, perhaps the size of a fingernail, had been chipped off—and it looked fresh. I was puzzling over this when I heard a cry of surprise from Basil.

  “What on earth is this doing here?” Basil asked. “It should be in the closet at the end of the hall.” My eyes followed his pointing finger to an object in a dark corner. The flashlight beam revealed a bicycle pump.

  “Could this have been here in the corner on the night of the explosion, Basil?” I picked up the pump to inspect it.

  “Well, perhaps. An elephant could have been standing at the end of the hall and I might not have noticed it, considering how distracted I was.”

  Something hung from the end of the pump’s hose, caught in the metal tip. I pried it out and looked it over. It was a half-circle of dried paint. On an impulse, I stooped down and placed it on the chipped spot at the bottom of the door. It fit perfectly.

  Basil did not seem impressed. “We can’t hang around here all day. We’ll get caught. Let’s check out the rest of the place.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have no time for that.” Puzzled, we both looked in the direction the voice was coming from, and were startled to find Officer Feeney’s bulky form filling the kitchen doorway.

  I was about to speak, but Feeney held up his hand with a weary look. “Don’t start with the excuses. I don’t want to hear it. You have no business here, so just leave before I run you in.” He shook his head. “How did you get in here? Didn’t you see the signs plastered across the front of the building? This place is cordoned off for a police investigation, and you’re tampering with it.”

  “What signs? We never went to the front. We came from the back alley, and Basil used his key at the side door.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew I had made a mistake. Immediately Feeney demanded the key. Basil tried to argue, but it was no use; neither one of us had the guts or the wit to bluff our way out of it. My opportunity to gather some clues was slipping through my fingers.

  Feeney pocketed the key, then pointed through the kitchen to the outside door. I was about to leave when Basil spoke up.

  “You don’t understand, Officer. I rented a room upstairs. I was merely coming by to pick up my belongings.” Feeney was obviously not convinced, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “Fine,” he said after a long pause, spitting out the word like it tasted bad. It didn’t sound like he thought it was fine. He held up a beefy fist and stabbed the air with his index finger, in the general direction of the end of the hallway. “Go pack up your things. And you had better only take what clearly belongs to you.”

  We scrounged a few boxes from the kitchen and trudged down the hall, Feeney taking up the rear. As Basil pushed open the swinging service door, I caught an enticing glimpse of a long bar with a shiny brass foot rail and rows of bottles on mirrored shelves. We then ascended a squeaky set of stairs to a drab and dusty hallway.

  Basil unlocked the second door on the left. “I suppose, Officer Feeney, I should give you this key as well.” Basil placed the room key in Feeney’s waiting hand. Then we proceeded to pack up the butler’s meager possessions, under the cop’s watchful eye. Soon we found
ourselves back on the street with a load of boxes and strict orders not to come back again.

  “Well, that was a wasted effort,” I said after Feeney was out of earshot. I stumbled across the cracked sidewalk toward the apartment, my arms overloaded with Basil’s belongings.

  “Wait, Master Thomas,” Basil said. “Maybe there’s another way. But we’ll have to take these boxes back to the apartment first.”

  It didn’t make any sense to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. After dropping off Basil’s things and taking care not to wake Mycroft, we headed back toward the speakeasy. About a block or so away, Basil suggested we take a side street, “just so Officer Feeney doesn’t get suspicious.” He took a right turn down the next street. We walked past several nondescript buildings and houses, then took a left turn at the next block. About thirty feet past the corner, a high wooden fence rose up on the left. About halfway down the block, a break in the fence, just the width of a truck, was identified by a sign that said, “Deliveries.”

  We were facing the back entrance to a soda-bottling plant, which I realized was directly across the street from the speakeasy. A large back lot could be seen through the opening in the fence, and several loading docks. About a half-dozen workers were milling about, some moving material around with handcarts, others loading a truck with crates of bottles. The words “Mueller Bottling Works” were emblazoned on its side. Basil put a finger on his lips and motioned for me to follow.

  Through the opening we strolled as if we owned the place. Basil was as bold as brass, but I began shifting my eyes to the left and right, hunching my shoulders, and instinctively walking on my toes. Where was he taking us? Wasn’t this trespassing? Would he land us in jail? My fears seemed to be justified when a large man with a pork-pie hat and rolled-up sleeves spotted us and stood in the middle of our path.

  “Just where do you think you’re going?” the big bruiser demanded, folding his arms across his chest.