Sherlock Holmes In America

by Martin H. Greenberg

  “My time in your city is short as well. But I charge no fee for a brief consultation, and perhaps I could make some suggestions toward solving your problem.”

  “That’s very kind of you. Please sit down, gentlemen, and I’ll tell you about it. You know a bit of this, Armitage, but not the most recent development. When that reporter was here, he asked me my opinion of Glenn ‘Pop’ Warner, my opposite number at the Carlisle Indian School. You may have noted some hesitation in my answer. Glenn and I are unlike in many ways. I once planned to become a minister, changing course only because I couldn’t preach for sour apples and believed I could serve God more effectively as a coach. Glenn by contrast trained as a lawyer. He is profane in his language. The strongest word my players ever hear from me is jackass, though I’ll confess they hear that all too frequently.

  “While I have tried to improve our game with my colleagues on the rules committee, Glenn has given us little help, but when we do change or introduce a rule, he is quick to exploit it. Last year, we allowed the forward pass for the first time, and no one has made more effective use of it than Glenn Warner. Sometimes, we have to make another new rule to close whatever loophole he has exposed.

  “No one in coaching will soon forget Warner’s hidden-ball trick against Harvard in ’03: The Carlisle players pulled closely together to receive the kick-off, and the Harvard men could not tell who had the ball. One player—Dillon was his name—put his empty arms out in front of him as he ran down the field and was ignored by the Harvard defenders, who concentrated on searching among the other Carlisle players for the ball-carrier. Dillon crossed the Harvard goal line, produced the ball from the back of his sweater, and scored an unimpeded touchdown.”

  “Surely that’s not cricket,” I said.

  “Obviously not,” Holmes said humorously. “But is it American football?”

  Stagg said, “Mr. Holmes, in that famous expression about cricket, your countrymen express a devotion to sportsmanship that goes beyond the importance of winning. To us in America, winning is the thing. We will honor the letter of the law, but not always the spirit. Glenn Warner will do anything to win within the rules, and I cannot in good conscience criticize him for that. I have always respected him as a coach and as a man, but now something has shaken that respect.

  “I was pleased at your hearty endorsement of amateur sport in Dr. Watson’s account of the ‘Missing Three-Quarter.’ Despite our minor differences in philosophy, in my country as in yours, the teamwork and ideals of sport mold boys into men, making my profession of coaching a sacred calling. Did not Wellington say, ‘The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’?

  “But when I read that story of a missing rugby player, I never imagined that a similar situation might confront me. It has. A young man named Clayton Cumberland enrolled this year at the University and turned out for the team. I knew immediately he could be a player of great ability and versatility. He has shown in practice that he can do everything our game requires—run, block, punt, pass, tackle—and I have had the luxury of developing his potential slowly. Others did the job for me through the Big Ten season, but I believed I would need more in our upcoming game against Warner’s Carlisle team. I was planning to unveil Cumberland as a sort of secret weapon.

  “But the day before yesterday, a mere three days before the game, Cumberland suddenly vanished from his dormitory. His roommate had sensed something was worrying him but could provide no clue to where he might have gone. His professors say only that he had been diligent in his studies. With no evidence of violence, I could hardly enlist the efforts of the police. I was not so much worried about the game, Mr. Holmes, as the welfare of the young man. Then in this morning’s mail, I received this.”

  He passed over a plain envelope addressed to him at the University. There was no return address. Inside was a crumpled sheet of paper that Holmes and I looked at in turn. It had a Carlisle Indian School letterhead, and a typewritten message was crowded into the top half of the page, followed by a handwritten signature.

  Dear Mr. Cumberland:

  As we discussed, there will be no problem in obtaining documentation of your Indian blood. We are delighted you will be joining our team here at Carlisle.

  Sincerely yours,

  Glenn “Pop” Warner

  “You see the implication,” Stagg said. “Warner is now stealing players from other coaches by nefarious means. I don’t believe Clayton Cumberland has any Indian blood at all. It seems Warner will do anything he can to gain an advantage. This goes beyond bending the rules. This is flat-out cheating.”

  “This is Warner’s true signature?” Holmes said.

  “I have seen his signature, and I believe it to be authentic. Mind you, I am no expert in handwriting analysis. But if this were merely a matter of Cumberland leaving Chicago to go to Carlisle, why would the young man not simply come and tell me what he was planning to do, or at least write his decision to me in a letter? Why just disappear one day?”

  Holmes turned to me. “Armitage, if I may impose upon your time for a few hours more, it is possible we can make some sense of this.” I readily agreed. For who would decline the chance to be substitute Watson?

  We were fortunate to find the roommate, a young ministerial student named Chad Armbruster, in his dormitory room, and eager to talk to us. While Holmes continued to use the alias Mr. Benson, we made no effort to conceal that he was a detective.

  “Are you English, Mr. Benson?” Armbruster asked. “Cumberland’s parents were English.”

  “Indeed,” said Holmes. “Are they living?”

  “No, I believe they’re both dead.”

  “You told Coach Stagg that Cumberland was worried about something.”

  “He certainly wasn’t himself the past week or so.”

  “Did he say nothing to suggest the source of his worry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did he say anything out of the ordinary that might help us?”

  “There was one very odd thing, now that you mention it, but I can’t imagine how it will help you. I returned to the room late one evening to find Cumberland sitting at his desk, just staring into space. I heard him say to himself, speaking in a low voice but very clearly, as if unaware I had entered the room, ‘It all comes down to the missing three quarters.’”

  Holmes and I exchanged a glance. “Could it have been the ‘Missing Three-Quarter?’” I ventured tentatively. “There was a story in Collier’s Weekly by that title. I can’t recall the author.”

  “Can’t you really?” Armbruster said with a laugh. “That was a Sherlock Holmes story, and a corker at that, but I doubt Cumberland read it. He is far too serious for any light literature. Anyway, he distinctly said ‘missing three quarters.’ Plural.”

  “Did you ask him what he meant?” Holmes asked.

  “I did. He looked rather startled. He obviously hadn’t known I’d heard him. He tried to laugh it off. ‘I carelessly left three quarters on this table last week,’ he said, ‘and they’ve disappeared. I know you’re too pious and holy to be a thief, Armbruster, but one of our visitors must be light-fingered.’ Then he claimed he was hungry and suggested we go hunt down some sustenance. He was very eager to change the subject.”

  “So you didn’t accept his explanation,” I said, rather obviously.

  “Not for a moment. But what could it all mean?”

  “Did Cumberland ever typewrite his papers?” Holmes asked. An odd question, I thought, and Armbruster seemed equally nonplussed.

  “No. I don’t believe he knows how to typewrite. He has a beautiful hand, though. Perfectly legible.”

  With Armbruster’s permission, Holmes looked through the books and other papers on Cumberland’s desk. I saw him slip a sheet of paper and an envelope into his pocket, not ostentatiously but not with any obvious furtiveness either.

  As we were leaving, Armbruster asked, “Mr. Benson, as a detective yourself, have you learned anything from reading about Sherlock
Holmes?”

  “Not a thing,” declared Holmes. “A most inferior fellow. Dupin and Lecoq were both far more capable.”

  Ensconced in a cab that would take us back to Holmes’s hotel, I ventured to ask, “What could the reference to the missing three quarters refer to? Cumberland’s explanation was obviously a clumsy improvisation.”

  “I agree. But you have the advantage over me in these matters, Armitage. Does the expression have any significance in American football?”

  “Well, the game is played in four quarters, but I don’t know how you could be missing three of them. There is a position in American football called quarterback, but there is only one on the field at a time.” Sudden inspiration struck me. “What about that reference in the note from ‘Pop’ Warner about Cumberland’s supposed Indian blood? Perhaps Cumberland was one quarter Indian and Warner can only recruit fullblooded Indians, making the missing three quarters problematic.”

  My exultation at the brilliance of my theory was short-lived. Holmes shook his head. “It leaves too much unexplained,” he said. “But there may be a clue in this letter. Also a clue to his present whereabouts, assuming, as I believe, his disappearance was at least semi-voluntary.”

  He handed over the letter and envelope, which I perused quickly. The envelope bore the address in the city of one James Gustavson, but the letter was unfinished, as if Cumberland had been interrupted in its writing. As Armbruster had proclaimed, his roommate had an attractive and easily readable hand.

  Dear Oscar,

  Thanks for your encouraging letter. Your old pal Saucy knew he could rely on a teammate. You are right that it was a breach of contract, and no one knows that blackguard O’Hara better than you. Don’t know how you lasted out the season. But does receiving less than promised really mean what we would like it to mean? For now, I am staying on here, but if events make it necessary, I shall certainly avail myself

  And there it broke off in midsentence.

  “What does it mean?” I wondered. “He addresses the envelope to James and writes a letter to Oscar. And who the devil is Saucy?”

  Holmes told me, “I have an idea about that, but time is short. We must go our separate ways for the next few hours.” He instructed the cabby, then instructed me.

  My assigned task was a puzzling one.

  “You want me to do what?” I exclaimed. “But why?”

  “There’s no time to explain. Simply get it done and meet me back at my hotel at seven this evening.”

  Now I knew how Watson felt when kept in the dark. I grumbled a bit, but of course agreed to the mission.

  The next morning, we were once again in Stagg’s office, and this time young Clayton Cumberland, clearly unharmed but shamefaced, was present as well. I still did not know the entire story yet, and listened closely to Holmes as he explained it to Stagg.

  “To begin with, that message from Warner was obviously faked. The signature was positioned right in the middle of the page, suggesting that Warner’s secretary—I hardly think the great coach typewrites his own correspondence—is singularly lacking in the rudiments of his profession. Surely the body of the letter should be centered on the page, with the signature nearer the bottom. The implication was obvious: someone had obtained Coach Warner’s signature on a sheet of Carlisle Indian School letterhead, probably on the pretense of being an autograph collector, then added the typewritten message after the fact. Every typewriter has its own peculiarities. The one used for the bogus Warner letter had a small letter ‘e’ that struck slightly above the line and a small letter ‘o’ that was filled in because of a dirty key.”

  “But, Mr. Holmes, who would do that, and why?” Stagg asked.

  “Though I was puzzled as to his motive, I suspected Cumberland might have composed the message himself. However, his roommate told me that Cumberland does not typewrite, and I found no typewritten sheets among his papers that shared those characteristics.”

  “Then who was responsible for the false message?” Stagg demanded.

  “Armitage came up with a good idea.” (Had I? Not that I could remember.) “Could the person who faked the message be the reporter, Perry Garth? He told us that he was under pressure to recruit you as a writer, but you had spurned all his overtures. If he could make you angry enough about abuses by one of your coaching brethren, perhaps he believed he could get an exclusive story for his paper, and a lively one. We knew he had interviewed Warner at the Carlisle Indian School, so he could have obtained his autograph then. I asked Armitage to visit Garth’s office and obtain a sample of his typewritten copy. The peculiarities of the type proved the same machine had produced the supposed letter from Warner.

  “But to make his plan work, Cumberland had to vanish. How could Garth manage that? What hold did he have over Cumberland? An unfinished letter on the young man’s desk gave me a clue. Stagg, you are well-known as a champion of amateur sports. Are your athletes allowed to play professionally?”

  “Certainly not!” Stagg was outraged at the idea. “Playing professionally carries a stigma. It could result in disqualification and perhaps expulsion.”

  “And if a college player were to play professionally as well, could he cover his tracks?”

  “He might play under an alias,” Stagg said reluctantly, disgust in his tone.

  “Exactly. Cumberland had addressed the envelope to James Gustavson, but the salutation of the letter was ‘Dear Oscar.’ In the third person, he referred to himself as Saucy.”

  Holmes turned to me. “Cumberland sauce, Armitage. I’m sure you’ve enjoyed it on game dishes many times, as have I. Any Englishman would know it, including Cumberland as the product of an English family, thus the odd choice of alias. As teammates, the two young men called each other by their assumed names, and other clues in the letter suggest that they were paid for their efforts. The words ‘I shall certainly avail myself’ I suspected might refer to an invitation from this Oscar to stay with him should Cumberland feel the need to leave the University abruptly.”

  Holmes gazed for a moment at Cumberland, who was looking more miserable by the moment.

  “While Armitage was performing his errand at Garth’s office, I went to the address on the letter, found the two young men, and got the whole story out of them,” Holmes resumed. “Two summers ago, Cumberland briefly played professional baseball for a suburban team managed by a tight-fisted fellow named Brian O’Hara.”

  “O’Hara promised me twenty dollars but paid me only five,” Cumberland muttered. “He claimed the box-office receipts had only been a quarter of what he expected.”

  “Thus,” said Holmes, “the missing three quarters referred to by Cumberland. He asked some other players, including Gustavson, whom he knew as Oscar, if they had been similarly shorted, and learned they had not, but also that O’Hara was an unscrupulous employer who would cut every corner he could, and would often test new men by reneging on promises.”

  Cumberland turned to Stagg. “I was so mad, Coach, I quit the team then and there. I never thought of myself as a professional, and after that experience I never even wanted to be a professional. I found another job, and as soon as I could, I sent O’Hara’s lousy five bucks back to him.”

  “And how did Garth come into it?” Stagg asked him.

  “He’d heard about my mistake some way and approached me one day after practice.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “That’s not how he put it. Oh, no, he was my friend. He was going to help me out. He claimed O’Hara was threatening to go to you with the truth. Garth said he knew a way to deter O’Hara, but it would be dangerous for me to be on campus. Not dangerous to me, Coach! Garth convinced me that if his plan failed, and O’Hara made his information public, my presence on campus would destroy University of Chicago football, and your own reputation with it.”

  “And how was that to happen?” Stagg demanded skeptically.

  “I don’t know. I was confused. Gustavson is studying law and had it in his mind that O’H
ara’s breach of contract, plus my return of the one quarter he did pay me, somehow removed the taint of professionalism from my record.”

  “That’s nonsense, boy!”

  “I wasn’t convinced either,” Cumberland said ruefully. “I was working on that letter to Gustavson when a message came from Garth to leave the campus immediately. Coach Stagg, all I wanted was to play football for the University of Chicago!”

  Stagg’s features hardened, his stare intensified, and we glimpsed for that moment his practice-field visage. “You jackass! You should have come to me and explained what was happening! Perhaps I could have helped you.”

  “I didn’t think you’d understand. Everybody knows how down you are on professionals. Of course, I know now that Garth never meant to help me. He just wanted me out of the way until after the Carlisle game.”

  “And he did all this to convince me to write for his newspaper?” Stagg said incredulously.

  Holmes shook his head. “Garth was heavily involved in illicit gambling on college football games. He was depending on his wagers on the Carlisle Indians to erase a large debt to the bookmakers, needed Cumberland out of the way, and had uncovered the means to do so. Implicating Warner was secondary. His two aims fit neatly together, but his indebtedness to the bookmakers was the more dangerous problem.”

  Stagg shook his head sadly, his anger dissipated as swiftly as it had come. “We’re all of us imperfect sinners. God willing, this incident made you grow as a man, Cumberland.”

  “You know, Stagg,” I said tentatively, “once Holmes and I confronted Garth, he promised to destroy the evidence he had of Cumberland’s secret, and leave town for points west. To make sure, Holmes and I accompanied him to the railroad station to bid him farewell, and he has every incentive never to return to Chicago. As for O’Hara, the man had no role in Garth’s plans for the definitive reason that he died last winter. Thus, no one ever need know any of this. I shall be discreet, and I’m certain Holmes will.”