Holmes Sweet Holmes

by Dan Andriacco

  Title Page

  HOLMES SWEET HOLMES

  A Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody Mystery

  by

  Dan Andriacco

  Publisher Information

  First edition published in 2012 by MX Publishing

  335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,

  London, N11 3GX

  www.mxpublishing.com

  Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Cover design by www.staunch.com

  © Copyright 2012 Dan Andriacco

  The right of Dan Andriacco to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not of MX Publishing.

  Dedication

  This book is lovingly dedicated to

  ANN BRAUER ANDRIACCO

  because for me she is the woman

  Evening of Deception

  “Wherever MacGregor sits is the head of the table,” according to a Scottish proverb.

  Forget MacGregor, whoever he may be. When the Mac I know best held forth at the Faculty Club the night murder came to our campus, it was on him that all eyes focused. Less than six feet tall but significantly overweight and bearded, Sebastian McCabe, Ph.D., cuts an imposing (if unhealthy) figure.

  He also has an imposing title, for he is the Lorenzo Smythe Professor of English Literature and head of the popular culture program at St. Benignus College.

  Intensely interested in everything and everyone, Mac charges through life like a fullback - not always to the joy of other players in the field. He particularly fancies mysteries, magic, practical jokes, hoaxes, languages, reading, talking, eating, writing, drama, arguing, and smoking cigars. And he is more or less proficient at all those things.

  Sometimes he drives me nuts, even though he is my best friend and my only sister’s husband. But he does capture one’s attention. Even Peter Gerard, the guest of honor at this private dinner party and a face you would pick out of any crowd, waited expectantly when Mac loudly cleared his throat after the last plate had been carried away.

  Sebastian McCabe looked at his guests around the table, mostly academics, and favored us with a boyish smile as looked longingly at a big green cigar that he was forbidden from lighting.

  “This is an interesting group we have here tonight,” he said; “diverse, but with more in common than you might imagine. Several of us, for example, pursue careers largely or solely based on the practice of illusion, deception.”

  Was he including yours truly, Thomas Jefferson Cody, in that statement? It wouldn’t have surprised me. As the public relations director for St. Benignus, I’ve been called “flack,” “spinmeister,” and far less flattering epithets by those don’t understand my job - which, by the way, also includes government relations, marketing, the website, and social media as well as dealing with the public and the press.

  I didn’t react, but Ralph Pendergast, St. Benignus’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, snorted and scrunched his face into what he thought was a smile. “A typically provocative statement, Professor McCabe,” said Ralph. “But surely you couldn’t be speaking of serious scholars like Father Pirelli, Professor Hoffer, and me?”

  “Why not?” Mac said. “Good academicians are always first-rate illusionists.” While Ralph was still trying to figure out whether he’d been insulted, Mac went on: “But no, I did not mean you or Joseph.” He smiled at the Reverend Joseph Pirelli, C.T.L. - the legendary and beloved “Father Joe.” Our silver-haired president’s piercing blue eyes twinkled in response. “The illusions I had in mind are the sort practiced by the mystery writer, the magician, the filmmaker, and the flimflam artist.”

  So he wasn’t including my profession among the deceptive arts. In fact, I didn’t fit into this conversation at all. The others around the table barely seemed to know that I was there, even though I stand six-foot-one and have red hair. I had no idea then why Mac had invited me. That I only learned later.

  “These four professions all employ remarkably similar techniques of deception, but to greatly different effect,” Mac went on. Knowing my brother-in-law, I settled in for a lecture.

  “You all know that I am a mystery writer as well as a professor and head of an academic program,” he began. “I am also a magician, and was once a professional at that as well. The magician creates an illusion and does not explain. He or she does, however, approach the whole business with a wink of the eye that lets us know that he knows we know it’s all a sham. That is part of the fun because we know we are being fooled but we do not know how. The filmmaker and Professor Hoffer’s charlatans, on the other hand, in their different ways attempt to maintain the illusion from beginning to end.”

  He nodded toward Dr. Karl Hoffer. The assistant professor of psychology, new to St. Benignus, had a minor reputation for unmasking psychic frauds and religious hucksters. His book, The Great Miracle Scam, published just after he signed a contract to join our faculty, was getting a lot of media hype and seemed destined for best-sellerdom. I’d been a little surprised to find him on the guest list tonight because I knew that Mac considered the book - and its author - overrated.

  “So you’re comparing me to gurus who levitate and preachers who raise people from the dead,” our guest for the evening said with a laugh. “Thanks a lot.”

  Peter Gerard’s face is familiar to anyone who didn’t happen to be in Timbuktu that scorching hot summer of his biggest hit movie, 221B Bourbon Street. He peered at you from the magazines in the supermarket aisles all summer long, months before the murder. Dirty blond hair, curly, with a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache of a darker shade. My favorite magazine cover was the issue of Tick with Gerard’s mug under the headline Holmes Sweet Holmes? The celebrated actor-screenwriter-director had done the unthinkable. Not only had he played Sherlock Holmes wearing a goatee, but he had moved Holmes and his faithful Dr. Watson from Victorian London to 1920s New Orleans, Gerard’s hometown. Some Sherlockians were still howling.

  So the looks of the man sitting next to Mac were no surprise. But at about Mac’s height, say five-ten, he was shorter than I’d expected from seeing Gerard on the screen. Actually, Gerard wasn’t the name he was born with, but I’ll call him that to keep it simple.

  Karl Hoffer, who up to now had been mostly sucking on his unlit pipe and looking wise, rose to Gerard’s defense.

  “I’m sure that Professor McCabe recognizes the difference between the benign illusion of the filmmaker and the deception of the mountebank.” He spoke softly and earnestly, just as if he were leaning across a studio-set desk to explain it to David Letterman or Jay Leno. With salt-and-pepper hair thinning out at the top above his high forehead, Hoffer was perfectly cast for a talk-show psychologist. He even wore a three-piece gray suit.

  “It’s quite true,” Hoffer said, “that a filmmaker does attempt to create the illusion of reality - but only for the space o
f two hours or so, and only so that the viewer may be more perfectly entertained and perhaps instructed.”

  “Sure,” Gerard agreed. “If you sit in the theater thinking, ‘This isn’t real’ because you spot the zipper on the monster suit, then the film isn’t working. It hasn’t made you accept the reality of the fiction long enough to become involved in what’s happening on the screen.”

  Hoffer nodded. “The table tippers, the spoon benders, and their ilk that I expose want to involve you, too - but for a much darker purpose.” His professorial voice took on a sharper edge. “Usually they are in pursuit of money, or power, or both. In my new book -”

  “Wait a minute,” Gerard said. “No matter what the purpose, every illusion depends to some extent on self-illusion, the conscious or unconscious willingness to be fooled.” He leaned across the table, deadly earnest. “That’s actually your field, isn’t it, Professor Hoffer - the psychology of self-deception?”

  “Yes,” Hoffer said slowly. “It has been my special interest for some years.”

  “I thought so,” Gerard said. “And I’m sure you’d agree that we all fool ourselves all the time.”

  “Surely that is a bit of an overstatement!” Ralph Pendergast objected. Tonight he was wearing a blue suit without pinstripes instead of a blue suit with pinstripes. I figured he was trying to look laid back. “I certainly don’t accept the notion that my own life is built on a series of self-deceptions.”

  “I am quite certain, Ralph, that your greatest delusion is that you have none,” Mac said. “Perhaps I can change your mind if you will only lend me a twenty-dollar bill.”

  He hates to be called Ralph, by the way, which is why Mac and I do it. With his slicked back dark hair and those gray eyes shining through rimless glasses, the provost looked something like a hedgehog as he recoiled at the modest proposal. “What now, some sort of parlor trick?”

  “Oh, Ralph, don’t be so stuffy,” Father Joe said, which was a little bit like telling a snake not to slither. “One might almost suspect you’re afraid Sebastian will change your mind.”

  Ralph snorted, but he dug out an Andy Jackson and handed it to Mac just the same.

  “Now the point is, Ralph, that you have probably convinced yourself the whole time you have had this bill that it is genuine U.S. currency.” Mac held it up at eye level in his left hand.

  “Of course it is,” Ralph snapped. “What else could it be, McCabe?”

  “Counterfeit, of course. The twenty is, after all, the most commonly counterfeited of all U.S. bills.”

  “Nonsense. You’re playing games with me, and I find it highly inappropriate.”

  “That’s hardly a well reasoned response to a perfectly reasonable suggestion,” Mac objected. “You are getting a bit testy, Ralph, because you do not wish to concede the validity of my argument. The truth is, however, that you cannot say with certainty that this is government-issue money. You merely assume it is, lacking evidence to the contrary. You could be deceiving yourself because you both expect and desire that it is the real thing.”

  “I sincerely doubt that it is anything but,” Ralph said.’

  “The sincerity of your doubt is totally immaterial to the facts of the situation. Fortunately, I know a simple test of whether this bill is authentic or bogus. But first I hope you will indulge me in one of my vices.”

  With that he put the unlit cigar into his mouth. From his right sport coat pocket he pulled out a lighter shaped like a hand grenade and lit the cigar. Ralph opened his mouth, almost certainly to remind Mac that the Faculty Club was a non-smoking facility (like all the other buildings on campus). But before he could say a word, Mac applied the flame in his right hand to the twenty-dollar bill in his left.

  I’d never seen anything burn that fast. Just whoosh! and it was gone; not even ashes were left.

  “By thunder, Ralph, you were right all along!” Mac announced. “That was a real bill. The counterfeits don’t do that.”

  Magic, Mystery - and Murder

  Ralph’s nostrils quivered and his breathing speeded up. He opened his mouth, then shut it again, looking like a goldfish. What we had here was a guy about to lose a major battle for self-control. He didn’t trust himself to speak yet. But when he did -

  The telephone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Karl Hoffer said.

  Not being too familiar with the Faculty Club, Hoffer first had to find the telephone. We were in a private room with heavy moldings at the ceiling and ancient paintings on the walls. The phone was in a small room adjacent to ours, but at the far end with the door closed. It was a sort of study for conducting minor business, equipped with an eighteenth-century desk, an old-fashioned rotary phone, a couple of overstuffed chairs, and venerable old books that everybody loves and nobody reads.

  I pointed Hoffer in the right direction and he scurried off to answer the phone.

  “Sebastian McCabe, you are abominable,” Ralph said at last, enunciating every word for maximum power, but stressing the last. “And extinguish that stogie!”

  “I am not abominable, I am incorrigible,” Mac said. “And this is not a stogie, it is a Fuente Fuente Opus X. Nevertheless, fair is fair and I owe you your twenty dollars.”

  He took the cigar out of his mouth, broke it in half, and pulled out of it a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. He handed the money to Ralph. “This is your original bill, by the way, not an illusion.”

  While Father Joe clapped, Ralph exploded. “A parlor trick! I knew it!”

  Hoffer stuck his head out of the little study at the other end of the room. “It’s for you, Mr. Gerard.”

  The guest of honor hesitated and looked across the table at Mac, who merely cocked an eyebrow. Finally Gerard rose and disappeared into the little study with Hoffer.

  Mac turned back to the disgruntled provost. “I did say that I was a magician. Magic, in fact, has been a fascination of mine for more than three decades. It is so instructive in the practice of deception, for one thing. ‘I have in my hand a perfectly ordinary handkerchief,’ the magician says. Odds are rather good it isn’t ordinary, and it may not even be a handkerchief. Or perhaps it is indeed both - but now the magician has you watching this innocent piece of cloth while he stuffs it into a seemingly hollow tube that is the key to the whole trick.

  “The magician’s art, you see, is based almost solely on the technique of misdirection. So is the craft of the mystery writer. Who better, then, to unravel fictional riddles than a magician? That was my thinking when I came to write the sort of mystery I wanted to write, the kind with a proper amateur sleuth in the grand tradition.”

  No matter what my sister Kate thinks, I’m not jealous that Mac’s Damon Devlin mysteries are wildly popular and I haven’t yet found a publisher for my Max Cutter private eye novels. But it’s not my favorite thing to dwell on. So I was relieved when Karl Hoffer slipped into the empty chair next to Mac that Gerard had vacated.

  “In real life, too, the magician - the charlatan or shaman of ancient times - has often assumed a new role as debunker of miracles in modern days,” Hoffer said, joining in the conversation as if he’d never been gone.

  “Would you care to expound on that point, Professor?” Ralph asked, all attention.

  “Surely.” Hoffer went into talk-show mode again. “Houdini, of course, was famous for his exposure of fraudulent mediums. Hermann the Great joined the psychologist Joseph Jastrow in a scientific study of the principles of deception. The Amazing Randi has mounted a long crusade against ‘paranormal’ flimflam artists -”

  “And then there’s you,” I said.

  Hoffer nodded. “In a modest way, and perhaps for some of the same reasons, I suppose you could say I fall into that tradition. After all, I was a professional magician, too.”

  Mac stirred. Ralph gave Hoffer an “Et tu, Brute?” sort of look. Father Joe
leaned forward and said, “How interesting!”

  Personally, I was miffed. No, not personally - professionally. As director of public relations for St. Benignus, that was just the sort of interesting tidbit I always looked for when faculty members submitted their curriculum vitae to me in mid-summer. It was something I could build a useable news release around. But Hoffer hadn’t mentioned it. All he gave out was the usual dry academic stuff - undergrad degree from the University of Cincinnati, master’s and doctorate degrees from Michigan State.

  “I didn’t know you’d been a magician,” I said, trying not to show my irritation about my ignorance. “What happened?”

  Hoffer held up his hands in a show of modesty. “Nothing very dramatic, I’m afraid. I simply found myself growing less interested in working my craft and more interested in how it worked. Like Hermann the Great, I became fascinated with the principles of deception as a psychological study. And so I studied it and became a psychologist. It was the subject of my master’s thesis. And Peter Gerard is right: It is largely a matter of self-deception.”

  “What the devil is Peter doing?” Mac said. “This is supposed to be his party.”

  “I’ll give him a prod,” Hoffer said. He left the table and knocked on the door of the little study, his back half turned to us.

  “Mr. Gerard? Are you about finished in there?” he called.

  “Just a minute,” came the faint reply.

  Hoffer shrugged indulgently and returned to his seat.

  Ralph leaned his way. “I am most interested in your work, Professor Hoffer. I consider it a manifestation of the highest ideals of higher education - pursuit of the truth wherever it may lead, however it may offend.”

  He let his eyes steal ever so slightly toward Mac. His respect for the college’s small popular culture program was nil; he’d been trying to kill it off ever since he’d arrived on campus the previous academic year.