The Case of the Exploding Speakeasy

by David E. Fessenden

  The old man has a heart after all. I began to relate our little run-in with Feeney, but Basil took over the narrative, embellishing it with touches of humor and irony that I had failed to observe. Mycroft grinned and then shook with silent laughter, squeezing his eyes shut, as if seeking to contain himself. Finally, he exhaled deeply, wiped a tear or two from his eyes, and looked up at me.

  “Well, you certainly have a knack for finding trouble, young man. Now your first task should be taking a good look at those two documents.”

  “Officer Feeney was kind to let us keep these items,” Basil said, and submitted the materials to the old man for inspection.

  “Only because he knew they were useless,” I replied. “That Feeney has done it to me again—putting up a roadblock just when I was starting to get somewhere.”

  Mycroft, who had been reviewing the ledger and appointment book with a silent, stone-faced expression, came to life when I complained about Feeney’s interference. He reacted strongly—a bit too strongly, I’d say.

  “Enough of that! Don’t be so quick to judge Officer Feeney, Thomas. He’s between a rock and a hard place. The poor man sounds like an honest cop in a corrupt police force. He probably was trying to help. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, boy.”

  I ignored his clumsy attempt to be colloquial in his speech and launched into an attack of my own. “He was trying to help? What kind of nonsense is that? How does it help to interrupt my search for clues and bar me from what might be my only source of information?”

  Mycroft remained silent for a moment, which I took to be an inability to overturn my incisive logic. I had much to learn.

  A deep sigh escaped his lips, like the howling of a winter wind. “My boy, you are so insufferably dense sometimes—” He paused and sighed again. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just that you compound a foolish and illegal attempt to gather clues with a total misunderstanding of the situation. Officer Feeney was protecting you. If you had been caught by anyone else, you would have been thrown in jail for trespassing, interfering with a police investigation, and whatever other charges they might have trumped up against you. Then where would you be?”

  “But—but we had a key! And Basil said it was all right—”

  “Basil is a man used to taking orders, not making leadership decisions. You should have asked my advice before going off on your own. Just be glad Officer Feeney caught you when he did. It is high time, Thomas, that you rid yourself of this juvenile independent streak, learn to trust those around you, and gather all the facts before you impugn the motives of your friends.”

  “Oh, no you don’t—don’t turn away from me,” I cried out, as Mycroft shifted in his chair and picked up the newspaper. “You can’t make an accusation like that and expect the conversation to end.” I paced the floor in anger, clenching and unclenching my fists. “I swear, I thought I had seen the limits of the arrogance of the Holmes brothers, but this is insufferable. You’ve been here a grand total of—what is it, two days?—and you presume to know who my friends are. So tell me, O fountain of wisdom, what makes you think Feeney is my friend?”

  “I wasn’t referring to Officer Feeney, but to myself.” Mycroft’s voice was no more than a whisper. “If I had been more fully awake and realized what you were going to do, I would have stopped you before you left. After all, who do you think told Feeney where to find you?”

  “You? How could you possibly know about Feeney?”

  “You were talking about him, and your plans to get back into the speakeasy, when you came back earlier. After you left, and I realized the foolishness of what you were planning, I stepped out onto the street and accosted the first policeman I could find.”

  As I stood there stunned, the silence broken only by my labored breathing, Mycroft flipped through the ledger and appointment book with growing interest, his bristly eyebrows doing push-ups on his forehead.

  “You really should look through these books, Thomas,” he said with a commanding tone. “They contain a great deal of information. You may think that you were tossed out before finding anything worthwhile, but it’s possible you may have inadvertently picked up the two most valuable items in the office.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mycroft rolled his eyes, then carried the books over to the kitchen table and dramatically laid them open. Placing his fingers on a page of each book, he motioned for us to join him. I could hear the impatient tap-tap-tap of his foot under the table.

  Basil and I exchanged glances. We had hoped to study the ledger and appointment book at our leisure and without an audience. Reluctantly we got up and stood on either side of Mycroft, and the three of us put our heads together over the documents—quite literally, in fact.

  “Look here. Whatever might be said of Harry Ragan, he was a fairly organized man. These two documents are a comprehensive record of his entire life—business and personal. It’s all mixed in here, with beer deliveries, booking dates for entertainers, and payroll included with his dental appointments and his Monday-night card games. It’s all in the appointment book. And then in the ledger he recorded the corresponding payments. He didn’t separate his business from his personal life. He even wrote his grocery bills in the ledger.”

  “So? You’re telling me he was a stickler for detail. So what?”

  “Don’t you see? These two books contain everything. If you study them closely, you’ll learn a lot about Ragan. You may even be able to identify his killer.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I was unconvinced. But Mycroft continued to pore over the two books, going back and forth with each, and comparing the entries from one to those in the other.

  “As you can see here,” he began in his most didactic tone, “the appointments and the dates generally seem to coincide with payments and receipts in the ledger. Harry Ragan recorded every event, if these documents are any indication of his attention to detail. Almost an obsession, it seems. Look here”—and at this, Mycroft picked up the ledger and pushed it under my nose, as if he thought its aroma might stimulate my deductive powers. “He notes even the smallest purchases and income. And for every shipment of beer in his appointment book, we find a corresponding payment. Most of his business was cash-and-carry.”

  “Yes, very interesting, Mycroft, but—”

  “I also observe that Ragan made no distinction between his personal and business transactions, as I said before. In his appointment book he listed beer deliveries alongside dental appointments, and he tucked laundry tickets into a flap on the back cover. With the payments to the beer distributor are his winnings at the card game that evening. And note how the dates correspond.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and began massaging my scalp. This was giving me a headache. “And what is your point?”

  Mycroft looked in my face and blinked his eyes. “You don’t see the significance? Well, if you can’t identify the patterns here, I’m wasting my time. At the very least, you should be able to see the importance of this.” And he laid a stubby finger across a short line of words in the ledger: “Painless owes me $112.50.”

  Now it was my turn to blink. “So what? Who is ‘Painless’?”

  “Ah, that is the question!” Mycroft fairly shouted, and slammed the ledger shut with a decisiveness that made me glad I had pulled my hand away in time. He began pacing up and down my small flat, showing more energy than I had ever seen in him.

  “Don’t you see, Thomas? That entry was only one of several in the ledger: ‘Painless owes me . . . Painless owes me . . . Painless owes me . . .’ Here at last we have a viable suspect with a serious motive. A man who finds himself that far in debt to Harry Ragan surely would have a motive for murder.”

  The old man was right, and I wanted to kick myself. All this time I had discounted Mycroft’s information, thinking that he was losing it. But he still had more “it” than I ever hoped to have.
Why hadn’t I seen that pattern, which now seemed to jump off the page? Whoever this “Painless” was, he was certainly worth questioning, and possibly worthy of being considered a suspect.

  Basil admitted he had heard Ragan mention him but had little to offer beyond that. “A card player in the back room was called by that name, but I don’t remember much about him. He hardly fit the description of a hired assassin—tall, thin, balding—but then, who is to say what a killer may look like?”

  “A hired assassin? Why do you think he was a killer?”

  “What other occupation would be suitable for a man nicknamed ‘Painless’?”

  “Don’t you know anything else about him?” Now I was drumming my fingers on the table. I strode across the room, laid one hand on the mantel, put the other in my pocket, and turned to him in silent challenge.

  Basil leveled a baleful pair of hound-dog eyes on me. “Master Thomas, I stayed out of my employer’s business—not only was I taught discretion as a butler, but I also learned quickly that it was safer for me not to know too much.”

  The conversation lapsed into morose silence, to be broken a moment later by the sound of Mycroft clearing his throat. Basil looked over in his direction expectantly.

  “My dear Basil, the only question that Thomas has left unasked is the most important one of all. Do you know if this ‘Painless’ fellow was in the speakeasy that night?”

  “Mycroft, how could he know that? He never entered the back room!” I spit out the words with more exasperation than I expected. I suppose the implication that I had missed the most important question annoyed me.

  “Thomas, your naiveté astounds me!” Mycroft’s thin lips curled into a smug grin. “If you had ever been in one of these establishments, you would have known that the typical customer comes in, has a few drinks at the bar, and then toddles along to the card game in the back. Wouldn’t you say that was about the size of it, Basil?”

  “Yes, Mr. Holmes, but that wasn’t the practice of this man called ‘Painless’,” Basil responded. Mycroft exhaled noisily and turned his head away. Now it was my turn to be smug.

  “But I do believe he was there that night,” Basil added after a pause. Mycroft turned his head in my direction and gave me his most triumphant stare. “And yet, so much has happened since then, and as I told you, I was a bit dazed by the explosion . . .”

  “But it was only two nights ago—surely you can remember. Think!” I knew I was beginning to badger him, but I couldn’t help myself. Basil ignored my rudeness, however, and leaned on the kitchen table as he scratched his head and puckered his lips.

  “Let’s see . . . yes, I think I did see him, but not in the back room where the card game was going on. I saw him in the front room, near the bar. And it was a while after the game started. He stood around for a few minutes, then stepped into the hallway that leads to the back room.”

  “Is it possible that ‘Painless’ was among the bodies at the morgue?” Mycroft asked. He grasped his chin between thumb and forefinger and began massaging it vigorously. “But how would we know, since Basil did not see the bodies, did he? You were the one at the morgue, isn’t that right, Thomas?”

  “Well, yes, I was,” I said hesitantly. My mind ran back to that strange room, the awful smell, and those clammy, gray bodies with blue lips. They had died of suffocation, the coroner said. But how? With that confusing report ringing in my ears, I had viewed the ugly corpses of those card players. And now Mycroft was suggesting that I might be able to verify that one of those bodies was a man I had never met?

  “What were the distinguishing characteristics of this man, Basil?” Mycroft was not going to let the matter drop.

  “He was—well, as I already said, he was tall, thin and balding,” the butler mumbled after an awkward pause. Mycroft frowned in disapproval. He lumbered over to the fireplace and scraped out his pipe, letting the ashes fall into the grating.

  “Well, Thomas?” Mycroft continued scouring the bowl of the pipe furiously. “Did any of the bodies fit that description?”

  “No,” I replied, without a moment’s hesitation. “None of them.”

  Actually, I had no idea whether any of the bodies fit that description. The gruesome experience in the morgue was nothing but a blur.

  “Funny thing, though.” Basil scratched his chin. “I never saw him return to the front room, even though I was held up at the bar for a while, waiting for the barmaid to fill an order. Maybe he was in the card game after all. But no, they would not have let him join the game that long after it had started. Ragan had strict rules about that sort of thing, and I’m sure they had dealt several hands by that time. In any case, you said that none of the bodies at the morgue fit the description of Painless, didn’t you?”

  I nodded, though I felt guilty compounding a lie. I didn’t want to admit to Mycroft that my visit to the morgue was quite brief, that I hadn’t had the stomach to make a close examination of the bodies.

  “Anything else you recall? Remember, the smallest detail could be important.” I was starting to sound like Sherlock.

  “Hmm . . . now that you mention it, he was limping that night—not characteristic of him. And he was wearing a long coat, so you know what that could mean.”

  “No, I’m not sure I do.”

  Basil raised an eyebrow and looked at me with some surprise, as if he could not believe I was so ignorant. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and smiled indulgently—not unlike Mycroft in his more patronizing moments.

  “Don’t you know why they call it bootlegging?” And with his elbows on the table, cradling his chin in his hands, he proceeded to describe some of the more elaborate methods of transporting illegal booze, including long, narrow flasks that the owner hides inside his boot and straps to his leg. “They can hold a surprising amount of liquid, and with all that weight on his leg, a fellow might limp.”

  I pondered this for a moment. “But wait a minute, Basil! Why would a man bring liquor into a speakeasy?”

  Basil stared at me once more, like I was a visitor from a far-flung land. “You really don’t know about any of this, do you?” He said it not as a question, but as a statement, like he had just discovered an interesting and ironic piece of trivia.

  “No, Basil, I’m not familiar with how a speakeasy works. Until today, I’d never been in one.” I laughed inwardly at myself for feeling defensive about being law-abiding, but I succumbed to the pressure to explain. “Remember, I’m an immigrant, and not a citizen. I have to keep my nose clean.” Immediately I regretted that comment, because it sounded so self-righteous—and it was a ridiculous excuse, considering that I was talking to another immigrant who had actually worked in a speakeasy.

  “Well,” said Basil after an uncomfortable pause, “you would find that in most speakeasies—at least those in Germantown, anyway—they normally serve nothing but beer and wine at the bar. The customers typically bring in their own pocket flasks of the hard liquor. Of course, those who come to a speakeasy with the larger boot flasks are usually couriers for a distiller.”

  So Painless was not there to play cards that night; he was just distributing liquor. That might explain why he went down the hall—he was probably selling his wares to the boys in the card game. And if Basil didn’t simply fail to see him return, and he didn’t just leave the way he came, then maybe Painless continued down the hallway and left by way of the kitchen. It seemed logical. The man appeared to be friends with Ragan and quite familiar with his establishment, so why not leave by the kitchen and save himself a few steps? It was just another dead end—but maybe not!

  “Basil, why would a professional assassin take on a lowly position as a delivery boy for a distillery?”

  I could tell that this question had never occurred to him. “That is a good question. Perhaps we have this man all wrong. Maybe ‘Painless’ was a nickname given to him because that’s what you would be a
fter drinking his liquor.” Basil snickered into his shirt cuff. “All I can say is that the other card players seemed to think his nickname was a fine joke. He seemed quite annoyed by the attention.”

  So, perhaps this “Painless” was not a professional killer, but a lowly delivery boy. That certainly made it easier for me to prove that the killings were not a mob hit—if someone in organized crime wanted to kill Ragan, he most certainly would have hired a professional. But if “Painless” were the prime suspect (as it was beginning to appear), and yet not a hit man, then the explosion clearly was not a mob hit. (Mycroft, as well as Sherlock, had often warned me not to string together too many “ifs,” but I didn’t care.)

  On the other hand, if “Painless” is just a delivery boy for a distiller, how could he have the cash or the influence with Ragan to merit a seat at the card game? Back to square one.

  “Well, I suppose we’ve wrung all we can out of that line of reasoning,” Mycroft said after another long, uncomfortable silence. “One more thing I’m curious about, however. Before you were interrupted by Officer Feeney, were you able to examine any other part of the building? The hallway, perhaps?”

  His eyes rested heavily on me, and I succumbed once again to his interrogation. “It was a hallway, Mycroft. The door to the card players’ room was still locked, so we didn’t have much to examine.”

  “Don’t forget the bicycle pump,” Basil added.

  “Oh, I’m not going to bother Mycroft with trivia,” I said with a shrug, contradicting what I had just said about the importance of details. Actually, I had forgotten all about the pump, and both of my listeners knew it.

  Mycroft shook his head. “Thomas, when will you learn that even the smallest elements in a case can have significance? Now what about this bicycle pump?”

  “We found it in a corner of the hallway, leaning against the wall. End of story.”

  With a dismissive thrust of his chin, Mycroft turned to Basil. “Had you ever seen this bicycle pump before?”