Holmes Sweet Holmes

by Dan Andriacco

  Mac thought the voice on the phone, the person who called for Gerard, was the key. It was woman, Hoffer had said. Quandra Hall was a woman. You noticed that, Jeff? Brilliant! The only other woman I knew to be strongly connected to Gerard was his wife, Alice. But she wouldn’t have been calling him in Erin - she’d have known he wasn’t there. Come to think of it, so would Quandra!

  I threw my pen on the desk. Some sleuth I was. If I couldn’t do any better than that at coming up with suspects, I might as well get back to work.

  Maybe what this college needed was a slick multi-media presentation, something really shallow. I thought of my old buddy Bill Payne at the University of Cincinnati. He’d spent a ton of money on a YouTube video, partly hilarious and partly inspirational, that had gone viral. It helped push up applications by 17.4 percent the following quarter. At least, that’s what he had told me recently at a conference, somewhere south of midnight and north of his fourth drink. At the time I’d thought that maybe kids deciding to go to graduate school because they couldn’t get jobs in this lousy economy had more to do with it. Maybe I’d been too cynical.

  So I gave Bill a call.

  “Been reading about St. Benignus, Jeff,” he said. “You couldn’t buy that kind of publicity.”

  “I wouldn’t want to.”

  Bill has the physique of a football player, the head of a Buddhist monk, and the personality of a Dale Carnegie graduate.

  “Tell me about how your YouTube video came together,” I said. “I’m thinking of maybe doing something along those lines myself. Of course, I’d have to hire a high school kid to do it.” Wait a minute, Jeff - that’s one helluva good idea! Who would know better what to put into a YouTube video aimed at high school kids and their parents than a high school kid?

  I almost hung up and called a high school kid, but that would have been rude. So for the next twenty-five minutes I listened to Bill talking with the enthusiasm of a televangelist. I scratched out some notes on a yellow pad, the same one on which I’d fooled around with brochure ideas for most of the day. Even when Mac had come in to tell me about his call from Reverend Semple I’d had the pad in front of me. There in the upper right hand corner of one of the inside sheets I’d absent-mindedly written “Karl Hoffer.”

  I blinked at the name. Something clicked.

  Hoffer. UC. Stonecipher.

  Karl Hoffer and Rodney Stonecipher had both attended the University of Cincinnati. There was a connection. Maybe Hoffer had known Stonecipher - well enough to kill him? No, that was impossible - I was part of his alibi myself. But he could have had an accomplice do the dirty work. Reverend Semple’s advice to investigate Hoffer might not have been so far-fetched after all. I decided to follow it. And I had the means right at hand.

  “Sounds great, send me the information,” I told Bill, cutting off whatever he was saying. “I need another favor, too. You can get into school records, can’t you?”

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Well, if it’s important, I mean real important, I guess I could pull a string or two. What do you need?”

  “Whatever you can get on a character named Karl Hoffer - that’s Karl with a ‘K.’ His degree was in psychology, so that would be the College of Arts & Sciences. I want to know about his academic record, any indications he was in trouble when he was there, and anything else you can find - especially anything that would tie him with a Rodney Stonecipher.”

  “Your murder victim? You mean this guy is -”

  “He’s a professor. I don’t know whether he’s guilty of any crimes or not.”

  “Do you have his Social Security number? Never mind; I can probably get the info with just his name and graduation year. I’ll let you know what I dig up.”

  I gave him Hoffer’s graduation year from the form Hoffer had filled out for my office. I also offered him effusive thanks and the promise of a return favor some day. The phone was barely in the cradle before it rang again. It was Mac.

  “Can’t you leave me alone so I can get some work done?”

  “You are working?” The incredulous tone pissed me off.

  “Actually, I’m working on the murder,” I snapped. “I bet you never realized that both Hoffer and Stonecipher went to UC. Oh. Well, I’m doing something about it. I’ve got a friend at UC nosing around there now to see if he can find any connection between the two.”

  “Excellent! Well done, old boy! I should think it unlikely, however, that the two would have been at college at the same time. Hoffer has to be in his mid-forties at least, a good eight or nine years older than Mr. Stonecipher. And the University of Cincinnati was Hoffer’s undergraduate school, meaning he was probably in his early twenties when he left there - unless he was a non-traditional student, like me.”

  “No.” I knew from looking at his curriculum vitae that he had earned his bachelor’s degree from UC four years after graduating from high school in Toledo. The master’s degree and then the doctorate at Michigan State came after a gap, presumably when he’d been working as a magician.

  “Well, then, how old would Mr. Stonecipher have been when Hoffer was at the university.”

  “How the hell do I know?” I was steamed, mostly because he was making a good point. “Maybe he was a child genius who went to college at twelve. Have you come up with anything better?”

  “Not precisely, at least not yet. I was calling to suggest we do a little fishing.”

  “That’s all we’ve been doing.”

  “I meant go on a literal fishing trip, not a figurative one.”

  I tried to imagine Mac sitting on the banks of the river where Oscar fishes, a tributary of the mighty Ohio, bow tie and all, with a fishing pole in his hand.

  “What are you giggling about?” he demanded.

  “You fishing.”

  “Let us say I only recently developed the urge.”

  “Let us say you came up with a not-very-subtle way to exploit our dubious friendship with the chief of police. That is what you have in mind, isn’t it - to go fishing with Oscar and pump him for information about the case?”

  “I am appalled at your deviousness, Jefferson. However, since you suggested it, it does seem an efficient way to find out what the police have learned - and what they are thinking.”

  It didn’t feel right, trying to get Oscar at his most relaxed and take advantage of him. It wasn’t what friends did. But Oscar worried me. He may not be the most sophisticated or polished person ever to don a police uniform, but he’s not the dim bulb he sometimes likes to appear. And he might be smart enough to get thinking along a line that eventually was going to take him straight to Sebastian McCabe. I’d feel better if I knew what he was up to, and there was no better way than a little casual talk over the fishing pole.

  “I don’t like it,” I told Mac, “but I’ll do it.”

  Over the next couple of hours, I called Oscar to set up a fishing date for early the next morning, Saturday, then dawdled over the brochure, and pondered where to find the high school kids to make a YouTube video. I’d just had a brainstorm to turn the video project into a contest - best video wins the kid a one-year partial scholarship! - when Bill Payne called back.

  “That was quick,” I said.

  “Sometimes it doesn’t take long to find nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks like you were misinformed, Jeff. There’s no record of a Karl Hoffer anywhere near the year you said he graduated.”

  At the House of Sebastian McCabe

  That evening I picked up Lynda in the Beetle for our dinner at the McCabes’ house. Surprisingly, she hadn’t objected that I lived only a few feet away in Mac’s carriage house and she was quite capable of driving herself.

  The rainy morning had given way to a sunny aftern
oon and crisp temperatures, a beautiful first day of autumn that made me want to eat caramel apples even though they’re bad for your teeth.

  Lynda was wearing a camel-colored angora dress with a high collar and a black belt, not the martial arts kind. Around her neck was a scarf of autumn-leaf colors that I’d seen before. The dress was soft and I liked the way it felt beneath my hand when I touched her back guiding her into the car.

  “You look a little stressed,” I said. “Tough day at the office?”

  “Sort of,” she said, buckling up her seat belt. “Never mind that now. This was not exactly the dinner with you I had in mind when I left that message the other day.”

  “Me neither.” Is that grammatically correct? “It doesn’t count as my rain check. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about you and me and the whole relationship thing.”

  “Oh, Jeff, you poor dear! I must be confusing the hell out of you.”

  Bingo! Prudently, I maintained radio silence as I drove, forcing her to do the talking.

  She looked out the window. “I’ve been confused myself. That night last spring when I told you we were through, I said you were domineering, neurotic, self-righteous -”

  “You can stop there,” I said. “I remember the whole litany.”

  “But you’ve changed, Jeff, in a way I never thought you could. It’s sweet the way you’ve tried so hard.” Who am I to argue? “I’d love you anyway, but now it’s so much easier to like you.”

  This is too good to be true. “Then why do I still feel this distance between us, Lyn?”

  “It’s my fault, Jeff - my baggage.” She didn’t have to spell it out. Her parents had divorced when she was young. She’d told me more than once that she didn’t want to repeat their mistakes, although she never got into much detail. I didn’t know whether she didn’t want to be like her mother or didn’t want to marry a man like her father - or maybe both.

  “You mean your family history,” I said, just to show I was connecting the dots.

  She nodded. “I’ve told you before that I’m looking for an unlimited partnership.” Sign me up! “I’m still working through being able to hold up my end of that.”

  By this time we were sitting in front of Mac’s house and I’d had enough talk. I kissed her, not on the cheek. She did not seem offended. In fact, we lost track of the time for a while.

  “Um, I guess we’d better go in,” Lynda said finally.

  “Yeah, I guess so. We can talk more later.”

  “That was not talking.” No, but I think I got my message across.

  Once inside, Lynda made the ceremonial offer to help Kate with dinner and Kate accepted. I was relieved to see the two of them trot off to the kitchen together, clinging to the forlorn hope that Lynda might be able to improve whatever disaster Kate was about to unleash on us for dinner. My sister is a wonderful artist, but she should stick to painting food and leave the cooking to somebody else. Mac isn’t bad at it, but he had other things on his mind tonight.

  After Mac fixed Lynda a Knob Creek bourbon on the rocks from the bar and delivered it to her - “your pre-prandial beverage,” he called it - Mac and I adjourned to his sizable study like a couple of characters in a Noël Coward play. It’s the finest man-cave I’ve ever seen: books on all four walls, a handsome computer desk where Mac writes his books, leather chairs, a love seat, and a wide flat-screen TV over the small wet bar with a beer tap.

  Secure in the knowledge that studies show moderate drinkers have fewer heart attacks than teetotalers, and feeling exuberant that things were going so well with Lynda, I tapped myself a Moerlein OTR Ale. I could hold back on dessert later to make up the calories. I don’t often allow myself adult beverages - not because I don’t like them, but because I do. I also tend to overdo, and my mouth gets away from me. Tonight I decided to indulge, limiting the risk by keeping the intake moderate.

  “Out with it, Jefferson,” Mac commanded as I settled into my favorite chair, with a good view of the fireplace on the east wall. Standing at the bar, he quaffed his own beer. “You are entirely too self-satisfied. What is it - some astounding revelation about the case?”

  He always could read me like a large-print book.

  “Don’t sound so damned patronizing,” I said “It is astounding. Karl Hoffer must have lied about graduating from UC. He doesn’t show up in the school records.”

  I gave him the whole story and Mac declared himself impressed by what I’d found. “Academic fraud is no minor matter, and the consequences go beyond academia,” he said. “Not long ago a member of the German government was forced to resign because it was discovered he had falsified his doctorate degree. This is an important discovery you have made. Well done, indeed, old boy!”

  Embarrassingly, I was starting to feel an unseemly glow when Mac added, “I still fail to see a connection to Rodney Stonecipher, who attended UC some years later, and still less to murder.”

  I don’t mind so much that Mac’s a genius and I’m not. It just galls me that he keeps proving it. It galled me all the way through dinner, while Lynda tried to pump Mac for information and he played her like a violin. My nieces and nephew had been fed first, so it was just the four of us.

  “Very nice, Kate,” Lynda lied over the overcooked salmon. “But I didn’t come here for the cuisine. I want to know what you’re up to, Mac.”

  “In reference to what, exactly?” He spread his hands. “I am a man of many endeavors.”

  “B.S. In reference to murder, of course. I saw your ad in my paper and it can only mean one thing: You have a line of some kind on the killer. Or at least you think you do.”

  “May we go off the record?”

  Like any good journalist, Lynda knew that sometimes that was the only way to get answers. The usual techniques are to plead to go on the record after getting the information, or, failing that, to try to get the same information from an on-the-record source.

  “How about this,” Lynda said. “I won’t use whatever you give me until the time is right, and you get to tell me when the time is right.”

  Mac nodded. “That is certainly acceptable. Under that proviso, I can confirm that Jefferson and I have made inquiries regarding the murder.”

  Lynda gave me a quizzical look. I gave a “no-bid-deal” shrug. “You mean you’re playing detective again,” Lynda told Mac. “Don’t you trust Chief Hummel and the police to solve the murder?”

  “I have the highest regard for the chief and his troops, but you must concede that their record in solving homicides this year has not been stellar.”

  “Does writing novels make you more qualified to catch a killer than professionals honed by years on the job backed up by the county crime lab?”

  “Again, Lynda, I appeal to history. I have had some success in this regard - not unlike Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his several ventures into real-life crime-solving, I might add.”

  “And how are things going on this case? Are you making any progress?”

  “Progress oftentimes can only be measured after the fact. What appears to be progress now may turn out to be an illusion and what appears to be a stalled inquiry may turn out to be slow progress.”

  Lynda, meanwhile, was doing a slow burn. “Why don’t you just cut the crap, Mac? You’re not telling me anything.”

  “No more than I intend.”

  Foreplay over, she cut to the chase. “What’s the meaning of your ad about the telephone call?”

  “Surely that is transparent.”

  “Then you won’t mind explaining it to me. Obviously, you’re trying to find somebody who made a phone call on the night of the murder. I traced down the phone number listed in the ad and it’s in the Faculty Club. So you’re looking for whoever made the phone call that took Rodney Stonecipher into the murder room. That much is clear, but that’s as far as I can go
with it.”

  “I shall take you no further.”

  “You know my husband,” Kate said to Lynda. “Stubborn.” She looked at him with exasperation and affection. I’ve been looked at him like that myself, but heavier on the exasperation.

  “What do you expect to find out from whoever made that call?” Lynda asked Mac.

  “I have always admired the journalist’s trick of asking the same question in different ways until it is answered, but I do not intend to fall prey to it.”

  “Look, whatever you tell me is embargoed. Quit doing your imitation of a clam.”

  He spread out his hands. “I’m sure this is frustrating to you and I beg your indulgence. I have an idea. My idea could well be wrong, and if it is I would look foolish. I would hate very much to look foolish in your eyes, Lynda.”

  Professional that she is, Lynda ignored the Irish malarkey and plowed on. “Okay, let’s try something more general. Who do you think was the intended victim?”

  “There is no more important question in this case. If we knew the answer to that, the case would be half solved. Unfortunately we do not.”

  “Peter Gerard is trying to be a supersleuth, too,” Lynda said, “and he thinks Rodney Stonecipher was the intended victim all along.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “He was in my office today and we talked at some length.” Was that your tough day at work, Lynda - hobnobbing with last summer’s hottest celebrity? I was just curious.

  “From what I’ve seen of him on television, he seems to be a charming man,” my sister said, holding out her cup to Mac for a refill.

  “Yeah,” I said, “charming.” And handsome and famous and rich. Well, at least I have nice penmanship. If I hadn’t given up jealousy along with all my other character defects this might be bothering me.

  “What was he doing in your office?” Mac asked Lynda while he poured decaf into Kate’s cup from the pot behind him on the sideboard.