Holmes Sweet Holmes

by Dan Andriacco

  There’s no use pretending I had any idea what he was talking about. I wasn’t supposed to. He was baiting me and it worked: I was hooked.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to explain, partner?”

  He had the grace to look apologetic. “I have not had the opportunity to inform you that I finally received a response to my advertisement.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Ah. That must be him now, almost right on time, which is quite surprising.”

  Mac opened the front door on a young man I could best describe as looking like a flea market refugee. He was wearing a brown and deep-blue plaid shirt, brown buckle shoes, and denim jeans a size too big. The jeans were held up by suspenders, and on him that looked right. He was a little shorter than Mac, say five-nine, and lean. His hair was sandy and cropped so close to the head it almost disappeared, but it wasn’t shaved. Standing in the doorway he blinked at us through round glasses in clear plastic frames, reminding me of the little chick in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons.

  “Oh, hello, Professor McCabe,” he said with the air of one constantly surprised by life. He had a soft, almost feminine voice.

  “Lamont, a pleasure to see you,” Mac enthused, putting his arm around the visitor and shepherding him into the study.

  His name, it turned out, was Lamont Miller. “Lamont is a former student of mine,” Mac said. “He is majoring in - what is it this semester, Lamont?”

  “Psychology. But I’m thinking of changing.”

  “Is there a course of study you have not yet majored in?”

  “English, with a concentration in popular culture. I’d like to write a paper on British imperialism as seen in the 1960s television program Danger Man, known as Secret Agent in the United States. I’ve been considering the switch ever since I took your class in detective stories last spring. I think maybe I should be a writer.”

  “Someday you may even become a junior.”

  “Next semester. It’s taken four and a half years because of all the majors.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, “but can we get to the part about the call on the murder night?”

  “I was in no danger of forgetting it,” Mac said acidly. “When Lamont called me at the office today, I asked him to come here because I wanted to debrief him at length without being overheard. You see, it was Lamont who phoned that little room at the Faculty Club - the murder room - on the night that Rodney Stonecipher was killed.”

  “But you said no one did!” I protested.

  “I did not. I said no one called for Peter Gerard. Lamont, tell Jefferson what you told me when you called this afternoon.”

  “Well, the phone number that was in your ad in The Spectator, I’m pretty sure I called it last Wednesday, the night of the murder.”

  “You mean you’re not positive?” I said.

  “I wasn’t trying to call that number. I was trying to call 2771, the information desk at the Muckerheide Center, but I got a wrong number. I couldn’t swear to it, I guess, but I bet I punched 2761 - the number that was in the ad.”

  “And who answered?” Mac asked.

  “It was a man’s voice, somehow familiar, but he didn’t identify himself. When I said, ‘Is this Information,’ he just said something like, ‘No, I’m sorry, it’s not,’ and hung up. He was polite, but not exactly chatty.”

  “But the person who called when Hoffer answered the phone - he thought it was a woman - did ask for Gerard,” I said. “You must have called before or after that person. What time was your call?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Cody, but I’m no longer into the concept of time.” He held up his wrist. “I don’t wear a watch. But it wasn’t early.”

  “No, probably not,” I said. “You probably called after Stonecipher was already in the room. He must have answered - or else the murderer did!”

  “Why didn’t we hear the telephone ring the second time?” Mac asked, presumably testing me.

  “For the same reason we didn’t hear the struggle, if any, when Stonecipher was being killed. The door to that side room was closed and we were engrossed in conversation. When the phone rang the first time we heard it because the door was open and everybody was quiet - it was right after you incinerated Ralph’s twenty-dollar bill.”

  “Most plausible,” Mac conceded.

  “But why did you wait so long to come forward?” I asked Lamont Miller. “Professor McCabe’s ad has been running for days.”

  “I didn’t want to get involved,” he said. “But I read in The Spectator today that the professor’s in trouble, and these murders seem to be part of it. I thought maybe if I told him what I knew it might help.”

  “Lamont, I am deeply touched,” Mac said, the trace of a tear lingering in the vicinity of his right eye, although that might have been caused by smoke from the fireplace.

  “Call me a party pooper,” I said after we’d ushered Lamont out into the gathering chill - if he were still into the concept of temperature - “but that doesn’t really help much, does it? All we know that’s new is that the killer is a man, presuming that’s who answered the phone. That narrows it a little. But we still don’t know who called for Gerard, and that seemed to be what you were so eager to find out. Oh, I forgot. You said nobody called for

  Gerard.” I hadn’t really forgotten; I was trying to goad him.

  “Jefferson, you stun me. Is it really possible you could have so completely misread young Lamont’s testimony? He just told us who the killer is, you yourself gave me a strong clue as to how it was done, and the why is not beyond conjecture.”

  Sure. Piece of cake. “What in the name of Sherlock Holmes are you babbling about?”

  “Tomorrow night I plan to conduct a little demonstration - Archie Goodwin would undoubtedly call it a ‘charade’ - that will make clear just what I am talking about, and will reveal the identity of the murderer.”

  I shook my head. “I’m totally not getting what this is all about.”

  “Illusion!” my brother-in-law thundered. “That’s what it’s all about, old boy. And I have been the biggest victim of it. Remember at the beginning when I said the death of Rodney Stonecipher was a locked room mystery? I was right. Paradoxically, once you understand that, there is no mystery.”

  Scene of the Crime

  I’ve always hated those books where the Great Detective announces that he has the solution to the murder in his back pocket, but refuses to tell his dogsbody assistant diddly-squat. In real life, I liked it even less. I protested, but the mountain remained unmoved.

  “It is imperative to my design that you be as surprised as anyone else at my little demonstration,” Mac rumbled.

  Some excuse. He just wanted me to be part of his admiring audience. At least he wasn’t calling it an experiment. That word still sent me bad vibes.

  “What about our deal?” I fumed. “We’re supposed to be partners, remember?” Forget what I said after we found Gerard’s body.

  “We are partners,” Mac agreed. “Your part is to watch and be surprised.”

  That was on Monday night. I worked on him Tuesday morning and afternoon, too, but only to fight the good fight. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere and I didn’t.

  He called me around five o’clock that afternoon to tell me that the guest list for the evening was all in place.

  “We’ll meet at the Faculty Club at eight,” he said.

  “The scene of the crime? How corny can you get? I suppose you’re going to reconstruct the crime and unmask the killer.”

  “Precisely.”

  I groaned. “I thought I was kidding. And people actually agreed to take part in this melodrama?”

  “Yes, without exception.”

  “Who’s going to be there?”

  “First, everyone who was at the murder dinner -”

&
nbsp; “Even Ralph?”

  “He will be a most reluctant participant, but a participant nonetheless. I argued that if my actions were going to be as outrageous as he seemed to anticipate, then it was his duty to be on hand as a witness to my madness. Naturally, he could not resist a new opportunity to observe and report my folly to the trustees. Also present will be Quandra Hall, Lem Carpenter, Howard Fitzwater, Chickory Williams, your fiancée, and, of course, Oscar.”

  At least that told me something: The guest list included six people who hadn’t been together at the table when Rodney Stonecipher had been killed, one of whom could have slipped through the unwatched door and bashed in the poor man’s head.

  Lynda made me dinner that night in her apartment, spaghetti with turkey meatballs. Mamma mia, that woman can cook! It was hard to believe that I was cashing in a rain check from less than a week ago. The world had changed since then. Lynda and I were not only no longer in limbo, we were engaged. It had happened so quickly I hadn’t even gotten around to changing my relationship status on Facebook.

  “So what do you think Mac’s up to?” Lynda asked as she heaped sauce on my plate.

  And so forth.

  I told her everything I knew, the whole enchilada. It just didn’t seem right to be holding back from my fiancée - yes, my fiancée! how cool is that? - on the first full day of our engagement. It took the whole dinner to tell the tale, and there wasn’t time for much else.

  We’d smooched and hugged a bit during the dinner preparation, but tonight romance was more on hold than on the menu. Lynda and I knew we had a lot to talk about, talking that we’d avoided for some months, but we postponed that by unspoken agreement as we looked ahead no further than the next few hours - with one exception. We needed a celebration, and this wasn’t quite it. So somewhere between the last fork of pasta and the first spoonful of gelato we decided to take in a romantic dinner at Ricoletti’s Ristorante on Saturday and talk wedding plans.

  Lynda prefers to drive, and I have no hang-up about it, so she took us to the Faculty Club in the Mustang. As she was locking up the car in the parking lot, I was suddenly seized by the enormity of what I had committed to with this marriage thing. Then I seized her. She did not object. In fact, she responded to my initiative with enthusiasm.

  “Hell’s bells! Don’t you two ever stop?”

  Actually, we’d barely begun, but that yell killed the mood faster than a cold shower. Oscar Hummel, his face scowling beneath the kind of hat formerly seen on Soviet premiers, was huffing and puffing his way toward us up a slight grade.

  “Why, Chief, we haven’t violated any laws, have we?” Lynda asked in her most innocent voice, which made her sound guilty as hell of something or other.

  “I’m not sure,” he said grimly, “and I’m even less sure about McCabe.”

  “What’s he done now?” Lynda asked, as if she didn’t know. The hairs on the back of my neck were creeping halfway up my skull. This couldn’t be good.

  “I just got a call from a woman named Chickory Williams,” Oscar said. “Seems she was a friend of Rodney Stonecipher, never mind that we thought he didn’t have any friends. She claims she knows who hired Stonecipher to play Peter Gerard the night he died, and it was somebody near and dear to us all.”

  “You’re saying it was Mac?” said Lynda. I made a mental note at how good she is at dissembling without lying.

  Oscar nodded solemnly. He wasn’t enjoying this, I’ll give him that.

  “What brought this Williams woman out of the woodwork all of a sudden?” I asked.

  “She said she confronted Mac about this last week. He talked her out of going to law enforcement, told her some cock and bull story about solving the murder himself. Then he called her back today, asked her to come here tonight. Said she’d be interested. She pretended to go along, but she didn’t like it one bit. Thought maybe it was an ambush or something. So she called me.”

  “And you know what this is all about,” I said. “It’s Mac’s silly idea of calling all the suspects together like a scene out of a 1939 Charlie Chan movie. You were invited yourself.”

  “Yeah, sure I know that. What I don’t know is what his game is. Mac hired Rodney Stonecipher to impersonate Peter Gerard - through some strange company, if I get this right. And that means he’s in this mess up to his big neck and he’s going to need more than a bunch of four-syllable words to get out of it.”

  “My game is quite simple, Oscar,” said a familiar voice behind me. “Sebastian McCabe: mysteries created and mysteries solved, on the page and in the flesh.”

  Oscar whirled on him with a swiftness and energy you wouldn’t expect from a man of his age and bulk. “You! You’ve known all along that I suspected there was somebody behind Stonecipher, but you didn’t step forward and say it was you. Tell me how that’s not concealing evidence in a murder, Mac.”

  “My reasons for silence, like my reasons for hiring Mr. Stonecipher to do a perfectly legal job, are personal. I see no reason to -”

  “Then you admit you put Stonecipher up to the impersonation that cost him his life?”

  “I acknowledge it,” Mac said. “‘Admit’ is a word fraught with negative connotations. And I do not concede any validity in your implication that my involvement is particularly pivotal in understanding this crime. Ultimately, the reason that Mr. Stonecipher was on the scene that fateful night is irrelevant.”

  “That’s your line. I ought to throw you in the lockup right now as a material witness.”

  “Oscar, I strongly suspect you of toying with me. Surely you can’t really believe that I am in any way culpable in a nasty pair of murders?”

  “Can’t I? Well, maybe not, but all I know is that you’ve been holding out on me since day one. And I don’t see any evidence from you pointing to anybody else.”

  “Evidence is difficult. What I plan to offer you by the end of the evening is a confession from the killer. That should satisfy the ends of justice.”

  “You expect me to let you go through with this return-to-the-scene-of-the-crime crap, given what I know now?”

  “Why not, Chief?” Lynda said. “What could it hurt? If you want to throw McCabe in the pokey afterwards you still can. He isn’t going anywhere.”

  And whatever happened in the Faculty Club, it would be a helluva story for Lynda.

  “You got a cigarette?” Oscar asked her.

  She reached into her purse. “I knew you’d ask. I bought you a pack.”

  Oscar lit up a cigarette and sucked on it like a thirsty boy at a water fountain. He blew smoke back out of his lungs, clouds billowing in the fall air, and considered Sebastian McCabe.

  “Well, it’s not like you can run away,” he mused. “You’re not built for it.”

  Charade

  Being back in the private room where we’d dined on the night of the murder was eerie. With the elegant moldings on the ceiling and the portraits of serious-looking men (mostly) and women (a few) on the walls, it was all just the same. That didn’t seem right. Murder should have changed something.

  Besides, a hundred years had passed. No, it was only one day short of a week. I took Lynda’s hand and held it.

  Over the next ten or fifteen minutes I watched the faces of people who came into the room: Father Joe Pirelli, looking his age, face lined and warn; Ralph Pendergast, by turns agitated and pompous; Karl Hoffer, chatting in that infuriatingly rational way refined on the talk show circuit; Lamont Miller, curious and asking lots of questions; Willie Nelson, going by the name of Lem Carpenter, a fish out of water in the elegant surroundings. Quandra Hall and Howard Fitzwater came in last, together, not fighting. Three of Erin’s finest, including the unflappable Officer Gibbons, stood on the edges of the room, looking about as casual as a Marine Corps color guard.

  Somewhere in that crowd, if Mac was right, lurked the face o
f a double murderer.

  When Quandra and Fitzwater had arrived, Mac cleared his throat, a sound roughly equivalent to that of a bull in heat. The nervous chatter around the room dried up like an overcooked hamburger.

  He asked everybody to sit down and we did, spread out over two tables.

  “I wish to begin this highly irregular convocation by thanking you all for coming,” Mac said.

  “The conventional response that you are welcome would be highly hypocritical on my part,” Ralph retorted. “I, for one, am here under protest. The only reason I am here at all is because of my respect for Father Pirelli, who requested my presence.”

  Talk about ‘hypocritical’ . . . !

  “I thought it important that we hear you out, Sebastian,” Father Joe said, “but to call this gathering merely ‘irregular’ is a substantial understatement.”

  Mac nodded. “Understandably, the entire concept of what I propose, re-enacting the murder of Rodney Stonecipher, has been dismissed as, quote, corny.” He seemed pained that he couldn’t come up with a longer word. “However, this corniness has a purpose. I intend to demonstrate how the murder was accomplished. For without that demonstration, no one in this room would believe my explanation possible.”

  “Shitfire,” Fitzwater mumbled.

  “Mr. Fitzwater, would you consent to play the part of the late Mr. Stonecipher?”

  The beefy businessman looked around uneasily, as if expecting a trap but not being able to figure out whether the trap would be sprung by saying yes or by saying no.

  “I don’t like the - oh, what the hell, why not. I’m not really going to get killed, am I?” He forced a laugh, like a man who knows his joke isn’t really very funny.

  “With all of these armed policeman on hand, you should feel perfectly safe,” Mac assured him. I had a feeling that wasn’t just for Fitzwater’s benefit. “Just be certain to follow my instructions to the letter. Now for the telephone call that Rodney Stonecipher answered that night.”