Echoes of Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  The reporter gives Angela an earnest look. “As a female director—”

  “Just ‘director,’” she says, cutting him off. “You don’t say ‘female reporter,’ or ‘female postal worker.’”

  The reporter colors. Licks his lips. “I understand you’re finished shooting a sequel and starting something new? Can you tell me more?”

  Angela luxuriates in the question. Over the reporter’s shoulder she sees Ruby surrounded by photographers. Anthony Fox is trying to edge into the limelight. Unnoticed, Glenn Lancaster moves quickly through the crowd, making his way into the theater. There are no photo ops for executive producers. Angela feels sorry for the beautiful young woman on his arm. She looks familiar, and after a moment Angela realizes she might have been one of the production assistants that worked on Scandal. In charge of props? Possibly.

  The lights in the theater lobby are flashing and ushers are shooing people inside. Angela answers the reporter’s question and a few more before excusing herself. She hurries inside and takes her seat next to Ruby.

  The house lights go down. The theater reverberates with music as the movie starts. There, among the opening credits, is Angela’s production company: Adventuress Films LLC. The logo is the red outline of two women, both wearing slinky low-cut gowns. Their arms are linked.

  MARTIN X

  by Gary Phillips

  The dean of black empowerment lay dead on the worn throw rug. A ragged bullet hole violated Professor Lincoln Barrow’s wrinkled forehead. He was dressed in slacks and slippers, a ratty robe splayed open over an athletic T-shirt covering his pot belly. Near his outstretched hand was the spilled cup of tea he’d been holding. The stuff had soaked into the rug, the cup and saucer amazingly unbroken though the summation was he’d dropped to the floor instantly after being shot.

  “That was part of a set C.L.R. James had given him,” said the beefier of the two men who stood looking down at the body. He meant the fine china items on the floor. “He mentioned it to me once,” he added, as if that meant the murdered man had shared a confidence.

  The one he told this to was also over six feet. He had shoulders like a linebacker, thick Fu Manchu mustache, modest sideburns, and hair flattened on top and close-cropped at the sides, what they called a “fade” in uptown barbershops. John “Dock” Watson turned from the body and began inspecting the spacious room—chamber, he supposed it would be called in the Post. Two walls were composed of tall built-in bookshelves. On those packed shelves were numerous first and rare editions, from W.E.B. DuBois’ The Soul of Black Folk to Capital by Karl Marx and a personally signed copy of I am not Spock by the actor Leonard Nimoy.

  Watson knew one of the late leader’s guilty pleasures was being a science fiction fan. He could imagine a future when all were free to pursue their hopes and dreams. But now his resourceful intellect had been stilled, his inspiring voice silenced to inspire no more. Replacing the biography, his roaming gaze indicated nothing on the shelves had been disturbed—but Watson knew better than to believe such. He knew at some point it might mean all the books would have to be taken down and the surfaces behind them studied carefully for a hole, possibly hidden among the wood grain—or even a hole that had been recently patched from the other side. He quickly took in the rest of the great man’s private library and study. There weren’t many framed photos or plaques on the walls, though what there were of them chronicled the stalwarts of the domestic and international freedom struggle. An animated Fidel Castro, intense Malcolm X, and the good Doctor sitting around a table when Castro had stayed at the Hotel Teresa in Harlem, the time he came to speak at the U.N. Grace Lee Boggs accepting an award from the doctor-professor at some ceremony, and a grainy shot taken of him marching with farm workers, in the lead alongside organizers Delores Huerta and Cesar Chavez in California’s agricultural-rich Central Valley.

  There were rectangular windows high up on the walls, and Watson stood on a footstool the deceased man had also used. Though he was taller than Barrow had been, Watson couldn’t reach the windows over the bookshelves.

  “There must be some sort of extension he used,” he said to the other man.

  “Here it is.” He began to reach for a length of slim pole with a catch on the end of it leaning against the dead man’s desk.

  “Don’t touch it,” Watson said, looking over his shoulder.

  “But it would be normal for our prints to be in here.”

  “I know, but you’re going to tell the cops everything the way it happened—only, leave me out.”

  “Right on.”

  Watson moved the footstool about, standing on it and studying each window. The room was a basement construction and the windows let out onto the sidewalk. They were barred on the inside and as far as he could tell, each was latched in place.

  “The heat ain’t gonna like it I busted in the door,” said the good-sized Tony “Squelch” Waller.

  “You were doing your job.”

  “If I was doing my job, Dr. Barrow would be alive.”

  Watson smiled grimly. “Don’t beat yourself up, brother. This was his sanctum sanctorum.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning this is where he went to be alone, to get away from the masses to read and contemplate, or to work on his writing. It wasn’t unusual for him to be holed up days on end.”

  “But they got to him, Dock,” Squelch Waller said, strain and worry contorting his mild features. “What the hell we gonna do, man?”

  Watson crouched down, studying the doorjamb, faceplate, and lock mechanisms. The door locked from the inside but it wasn’t a sophisticated piece of equipment, no doubt once upon a time bought at the neighborhood hardware store. The door wasn’t that heavy either, but solid wood, dating back to the thirties was his guess. The door chain had also been in place when Waller used his shoulder and a fire axe to get in.

  “You walked with Dr. Barrow here two days ago?” Watson asked.

  “Yes,” Waller answered. “We’d been at the meeting planning the anti-apartheid teach-in and we stopped at the store to get him some groceries. I carried his bags back here and left him in good shape.” A faraway look settled his face.

  “And Martin called him earlier this morning? Here in his library?” There was an adjacent back room to the study that had a cot, hot plate, and mini-refrigerator.

  “Said he’d been calling off and on since last night. He’d sent somebody to his apartment and he wasn’t there. That’s why our folks started to get worried.”

  Watson again examined the locks, looking for signs of tampering. “Then you get called because you were last seen with him.”

  “So I came around, knowing Doctor Barrow was always up early like. I knocked and knocked but got no answer.” He gestured with his hands. “Him being up there in age, I figured it was best to get in here and see to him.”

  Watson removed his Minox mini-camera from his jean jacket pocket. He was clicking away as he talked and walked around the space. “We play this like it lays out, Squelch, at least as far as the fuzz is concerned.” He paused at the desk, examining the papers and letters on the desktop. Before he’d entered the room, he’d put on his lambskin gloves. Watson sifted through the material. He snapped pictures of the various sheets of paper and letters as well.

  “Did you call me using this phone?” Watson asked, pointing at the rotary sitting on a corner of the desk.

  “Hell no, went around the corner and two blocks up and called you from one of the followers. Sister Mable. She’s an early riser too.” It was just edging toward six in the morning.

  “She gonna get rattled in case the cops question her?”

  Waller shook his massive head side to side. “Man, she been around since the Palmer raids. She’s stand-up before they invented the word.”

  “Solid. I’m out of here. Call Sid and tell him what you found. Tell him everything but me being here. Then he can call the law and be here with you when they arrive so they don’t jack you around.” />
  “Okay.” Waller rubbed the back of his neck. “What are you gonna tell Martin?”

  Watson was at the broken-in door which, according to the big man, had been locked and bolted from the inside when he got here. “What he’s going to already know. It’s going to be on him to keep a lid on things . . . if he can.”

  “Yeah,” the other man drawled, “that might be a big if, soul brother.”

  “You ain’t never lied.” Watson nodded curtly and left. He ascended the concrete steps to the kitchen in the rear of Francine’s Southern Cantonese Style Café. There was one person already there, a cook who was busy chopping onions, celery, and peppers and sautéing the vegetables in a wok as big around as a radar dish. As the savory aroma from the mix filled Watson’s nose, he exited by a side door onto a narrow passageway that was surprisingly trash free. At the open end of this he checked the quiet street and then walked briskly along Amsterdam Avenue away from the crime scene.

  A bleary-eyed afro-Latina no more than twenty-three, dressed in a waist jacket with a dirty fake fur collar, jean shorts, torn fishnet stockings, and scuffed Chuck Taylor All-Stars, weaved on the sidewalk. A half-smoked Kool cigarette dangled from a corner of her slack mouth, miraculously not dropping to the pavement. She was heading in the opposite direction and veered into Watson’s path as he strode past. They bumped shoulders and she rocked back on her heels, giving him a crooked grin.

  “Hey, Stagolee, what’s your hurry, baby? Shit,” she said, wiping her nose with the side of her hand. She looked him up and down. “Huh, for a quick twenty I’ll polish your knob till steam blows out of those big ears of yours.” She giggled, barely able to keep herself upright.

  He frowned pityingly at the junkie, briefly considering giving her money but knowing she would only use it getting her next fix. He moved on. She watched him go, a bemused set to her now closed mouth. The thin cigarette smoke trailed upward past her face and unkempt hair.

  By one o’clock that same day, there were more than three thousand people gathered before the Gothic and Tudor Revival designed Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street. A small stage with a podium had been placed on the sidewalk, and though a rally permit hadn’t been secured, given such short notice, the police had been advised by the mayor’s office not to interfere but to be on alert. The compact man now on the stage leafed through his notes, then contemplatively removed his fedora and placed it on the podium.

  The blackout last year, happening at the same time the city’s economy went into the toilet, then the ongoing hunt for the Son of Sam, and the resulting looting, firebombings, and rioting, had pushed the city to its limits. Now more than twelve months on, with no relief in the temperature during the sweltering summer, Martin Collins, former pimp and drug dealer Newark Red, now known as Martin X, stood between order and chaos—depending on what he said today. No one had a clue what that would be from this civil rights leader, this firebrand who’d been the target of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s considerable dirty tricks counter-intelligence efforts.

  Martin X paused, gazing at his audience. He again looked out on the throng of expectant faces, mostly black, some whites not including the police, and a smattering of Puerto Ricans and Chinese Americans he was pleased to see.

  “Brothers and sisters, friends and allies,” he began, several microphones taped in place before him. Various television news crews were covering the presentation, more than one news van close to the stage. Several cameramen were stationed about with their bulky video cameras harnessed to their bodies and porta-packs like an astronaut’s oxygen tank strapped to their backs. There were also several others still using 16mm film cameras and didn’t have to be tethered to control panels. Cables of various gauges were strewn everywhere, leading back to news vans double- and triple-parked up and down the packed street. Agile radio reporters, mobile with their light-weight microphones plugged into cassette decks, easily eddied through the crowd as well.

  “This is a troubling day for us, for the movement.” A palpable wave surged through the crowd. “Our beloved Doctor Professor Lincoln Mills Barrow has been cut down savagely, cowardly.” As one of the uniformed police who stood about tensed at these words, Martin X paused and gazed at his audience.

  “That it was murder is obvious. That this heinous act is meant to dishearten and subvert the long march we have been on is all too evident as well. Like the bombing of those innocent children in their church in Birmingham and the kidnapping and brutal murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, fear and terror are the twin instruments of repression visited upon us,” he continued, his voice rising in accordance to the import of his words. “These forces are out to deter our inevitable and irrevocable advance to freedom and equality. But we will not be dissuaded, we will not be intimidated nor stopped. No sir. Not today, not tomorrow, not any day.”

  Applause and yells of support went up from the gathered. Martin X gripped the podium on either side, rocking the thing slightly. “I stand today before this magnificent house of worship not to implore the powers that be to bring our beloved Lincoln Barrows’s murderers to ground. No, I say this city, this state, has no choice but to drag these villains into the light and wherever the truth lies as to who put the gunman in motion, so be it.”

  “Tell it,” several exclaimed loudly as the murmuring grew. More than one police officer tightened his grip on their sheathed nightstick, wiping the tip of their tongues across dry lips.

  “There is no choice but accountability in this regard,” Martin X declared, sweat prominent on his brow. “Too long have we peacefully demanded justice for the wrongs waylaid against us, and too long have we had to grin and bear it.”

  There was more clapping and whoops of approval. Dock Watson scanned faces, cops and civilians, as he stood behind Martin X, but not on the small stage. Oddly, situations like this didn’t cause him to have flashbacks to this or that firefight he’d been in, going on a decade ago. Rather, he found himself centered, his heart rate and pulse slowed, errant sounds as distinct to him as glass bursting in slow motion, so he heard the tinkling of each shard. Off to one side he zeroed in on a cameraman who had just tilted his device upward. What the hell?

  Watson craned his head around. “Dammit,” he muttered, looking for his short-barreled .44 revolver in its rig under his jean jacket.

  “Then we must not wait any longer,” bellowed a figure from the roof of the church. He was dressed in a colorful dashiki and black pants. But this wasn’t just some rogue rabble rouser suddenly piggybacking on Martin X’s thunder. People gasped as word spread through the crowd like sub-atomic particles: the man up there looked like the recently murdered Lincoln Barrow. “We must show the system we can’t be fooled,” the figure shouted. “There must be retribution in blood.”

  As if in reply, gunfire exploded from the WZIX news van near the stage. But Dock Watson was already in motion. He tackled Martin X as bullets splintered the podium into firewood. A round nicked the back of his calf as the two men landed hard on the sidewalk. All around him people were panicking and there was the squealing of tires and the continued thudding of gunfire as the news van tore away, a police car roaring after it in pursuit.

  “You okay?” Watson demanded.

  “Yes, yes I think I’m fine, John,” said the civil rights leader. He was shaken but not coming unglued.

  “Rasheed, Elliot—get Martin inside the church,” he told two of the security team. They rushed to the man as Watson was up and running.

  The news van bounced off the side of a double-parked station wagon, tearing loose the vehicle’s front bumper. The van’s back doors banged open and a machine gun on a tripod streamed gunfire in all directions. Bullets peppered the chasing police car’s windshield. Blinded, the wounded driver crashed into a junk cart. A discarded toilet on the cart skidded along the sidewalk while sections of copper pipe and loose girly magazines flew through the air.

  A man on a Triumph motorcycle zoomed into view. He adeptly
weaved and maneuvered in such a way that the machine gun, operating by a pre-set electrical-mechanical device, shot impotently at the rider. As the weapon swung left, he went right and vice versa. Dock Watson was running and, when possible, given the density, jumping from car rooftop to rooftop in pursuit as well. The news van rounded a corner and bore down on two movers carrying a couch out of an apartment to their truck. The two cursed, dropped the couch, and scrambled for safety. The van slammed into the couch then fishtailed into a lamppost on the sidewalk. This was in front of Peoples Clinic No. 3.

  Snapped loose from its moorings, the lamppost’s live wires snaked and sizzled about on the street. The Triumph circled the corner, and the rider intentionally laid it down in a flurry of sparks. The motorcycle slid under the rear of the van, the ruined machine wrapping around the rear axle, immobilizing the vehicle. Gas spurted from the Triumph’s gas tank onto the roadway. The rider had rolled when his bike went down. Now he was up and running toward the van. He flung open the driver’s door.

  “I didn’t have a choice!” the cameraman at the wheel of the van pleaded.

  “I know,” the motorcycle rider said. He had a hawk-like nose and combed-back black hair longish to the nape of his neck, and his grey probing eyes seemed to take everything in at once. “Let’s get out of here before this thing goes up.”

  “I can’t,” the other man said, worry in his voice. “He told me I had to drive until I couldn’t drive any more. And if I was stopped I couldn’t leave the driver’s seat. I had to be—” he choked off as his voice became garbled with emotion.