The Seventh Bullet

by Daniel D Victor

  We followed Mrs. Hudson to a pair of open French windows at the rear of the cottage. Through the casements we could see four dramatic horizontal stripes: the cloudless, azure sky; the slate-blue sea highlighted intermittently with tiny white horses like frozen dollops of cream on a gelatinous dessert; the chalky white earth; and the broad green lawn directly behind the house into which the chalk melded.

  Suddenly, as if making his entry on stage from the wings, Sherlock Holmes stepped into the scene. Except for the flecks of grey in the receding hair at his temples, he looked unchanged from his Baker Street days. It is true that he navigated more slowly and that on his perambulations he often carried a walking stick out of necessity rather than as a nod to any current fashion; but, tall and lean, he appeared ready to spring into action when so summoned. Holmes was robed in his favourite dressing gown, once royal purple now a faded mouse colour. In his left hand was a copy of the T.W. Cowan British Bee-Keeper’s Guide Book, in his right, the graceful amber curve of a calabash. The latter was a recent gift of the American actor William Gillette, who, in his theatrical impersonation of Holmes, had found the large pipe a more dramatic prop than Holmes’s smaller ones made of bentwood or clay. Although the colour of Holmes’s amber-hued calabash had not yet metamorphosed into the more familiar henna, a thick halo of blue smoke wafting heavenward from the creamy meerschaum bowl suggested it soon would.

  “My dear Watson!” Holmes exclaimed. “How good it is to see you. And this must be Mrs. Frevert about whom you telegraphed.” Setting the book on a nearby table and the pipe in a large, iridescent abalone shell which seemed set out for just such a purpose, Sherlock Holmes stepped forward to take her two hands in his. “May I say, Mrs. Frevert, how saddened I was to hear of your brother’s death. On occasion, Dr. Watson and I would join him for a tankard of ale at the Royal Larder, his favourite public house. His death was a great loss to your family, of course, but perhaps an even greater loss, if I may be permitted to say so, to that brotherhood of modern knights errant who do their jousting with pens rather than with swords.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Holmes. You may indeed be permitted to bestow such compliments upon my brother. As I have told Dr. Watson, Graham had only the kindest words for you both. Such faith in his work from so valued a source means a great deal to me.”

  Holmes smiled in response. Then, while exchanging his dressing gown for a Norfolk jacket, he announced, “Mrs. Hudson has prepared a luncheon for us. Since the winds have subsided, she insists that we eat outside. Afterwards we will discuss the matter that has brought you here.”

  As the long journey to the Downs had awakened in both Mrs. Frevert and myself a hearty appetite, we immediately followed Holmes’s lead through the open French windows. We proceeded to discover waiting for us on the terrace a wooden table, its rusticity softened by the white table covering upon which Mrs. Hudson had placed her dishes and silver. The salmon mayonnaise, cucumber salad, petit pois à la française, and champagne sorbet provided the perfect afternoon meal. Indeed, dining in such an idyllic setting with the sea stretching to the horizon, one could almost forget that the reason for our outing that day was to talk of murder; but just as the undulatory ocean looked calm only from a distance, and the thunder of the waves breaking not so far beneath us reminded one of its violent force, so the persiflage at the luncheon table belied the terrible seriousness of the thoughts that were roiling just below the surface of our spoken words.

  Once Mrs. Hudson had cleared the table and Sherlock Holmes had filled the calabash with his favourite shag still kept in the Persian slipper, we all seemed ready to confront the business that had been hanging just above us.

  “Pray, Mrs. Frevert,” Holmes said, exhaling a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, “tell us, if you would, what you think was wrong with the publicised account of your brother’s death.”

  From the brocade black reticule that she kept on the floor by her side, Mrs. Frevert extracted her black lace fan and began fluttering it once more. “Thank you for the invitation, Mr. Holmes,” she said. “Let me refresh your memory of that darkest of days. Much of what I know is, of course, from what I myself read in the newspapers or even from what the police have told me. And I imagine I should say at the start that I have little reason to contradict most of what they all have reported. It is rather with their conclusions that I am forced to differ.”

  Holmes nodded. “Please, go on,” he said. At Baker Street he might have closed his eyes as he pulled on the pipe and took in the narrative. Here on the South Downs, however, he stared off at the hazy conjunction of sea and sky. The raucous crying of the terns and gulls overhead and the angry pounding of the surf far below were the only counterpoints to Mrs. Frevert’s story.

  “It’s a bizarre tale, Mr. Holmes. Even though Graham was my brother, it doesn’t make me unable to see the strangeness of the events leading up to his death. I myself learned of the shooting while I was out shopping. I was selecting the bill of fare for our dinner that night when the butcher, who obviously had already heard the tragic story, said that I wouldn’t be needing anything to eat at home that evening. I’m sure I didn’t know what he meant at the time. And how he had gotten the news so quickly I never did discover.”

  “Quite,” said Sherlock Holmes impatiently. “But what about the tragedy itself?”Mrs. Frevert returned to the black bag on the floor. This time she removed a handkerchief of Irish linen framed with delicate lace. She held it in the same hand with which she gripped the fan. No-one need have told us it was for the ineluctable tears that would accompany the most wrenching part of the story.

  “My brother, Mr. Holmes,” she said firmly, “received a telegram on the day of his death. It was addressed, as you might expect, to David Graham Phillips. It was dated January 23, 1911, and it read: ‘This is your last day.’ But here is the really strange part, Mr. Holmes—it was signed ‘David Graham Phillips.’”

  Both Sherlock Holmes and I had heard of this peculiarity before. If we had not, it surely would have aroused Holmes’s curiosity more than it did on this occasion; for after first reading in The Times of the strange happenstance, he had observed with not a little admiration that a self-signed death threat delivered to the victim on the day of his murder was a plan demented enough to be worthy of the late Professor Moriarty himself. Today, however, he kept his judgements to himself.

  “How did your brother react to the message?” Holmes asked simply.

  “He took very little notice of it, I’m sure, Mr. Holmes. You see, ever since Graham had written those articles on the Senate back in 1906, the receipt of threatening letters and telegrams had become a way of life.”

  “The Treason of the Senate the series was titled, if I’m not mistaken,” Holmes said.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Frevert replied. “I’m flattered that its title is familiar here in England.”

  “The topic is very much a part of our history too, Mrs. Frevert. The Tower of London is a grim reminder of our own bouts with treason, isn’t that so, Watson?”

  “Of course,” I replied, but I confess in these pages that I recognised the title of Phillips’s articles that day only because I remembered at the time of their publication that they were written by a friend—not because I had ever actually read them myself.

  “At any rate,” Mrs. Frevert continued, “Graham took little notice of these threats. He’d grown accustomed to such rubbish and had long since vowed not to let himself be vexed by messages of that kind or by the sick minds who composed them.”

  “But surely,” Holmes said, “a telegram addressed to and signed by oneself is unique enough to cause even the most inured recipient to take some notice?” This last comment was more of a statement than a question.

  “It was not the first of its kind, Mr. Holmes. Graham thought them the work of a crank. I have already learned that material only becomes evidence in retrospect—after the crime has been committed—however unspeakable the deed.”

  At the word “crime,” Mrs. Frevert
seemed to shudder. Clutching the white handkerchief and black fan more tightly, she intensified her waving.

  “Graham left our apartment shortly after receiving the telegram. He was bound for the nearby Princeton Club in Gramercy Park where he picked up his mail. It was a cold day, and I can still see him walking out the door in his black hat and great raglan coat.” Mrs. Frevert smiled. “It seems pointless now to recall that I was worrying he might not be warm enough.”

  “Yes,” Holmes said quietly. His pipe having extinguished in the brief silence that followed, he extracted from his dressing-gown pocket a silver match container. It was the one I recalled him receiving as payment for his help in returning the abducted son of a London mortician and was fashioned to look like a skull. Holmes had always enjoyed the responses it provoked. In this instance, however, he concealed it in the palm of his hand as best he could. Striking a Vesta, he held the flame just above the pipe’s bowl. Again, the smoke wafted upward.

  “How was your brother travelling?” he asked when both he and his guest were ready to resume.

  “Graham was on foot,” Mrs. Frevert answered with renewed vigour. “He loved to walk whenever he got the chance. He thought it was good for his health.”

  “Ah, yes,” Holmes observed. “The carriage is the vehicle of the rich, I believe he wrote. Stick to the pavement and you’ll never lose touch with the masses.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Holmes. I see you are familiar with my brother’s writing.”

  “I try to keep up with current trends, Mrs. Frevert,” Holmes surprised me by saying. He tended to shun contemporary literature unless of the most sensational variety. Examining the latter provided him with a perspective altogether foreign to his nature. Of belles lettres, he had always been surprisingly ignorant; but, as he himself went on to explain, his retirement had enabled him to alter his reading habits. “Since I am rather isolated here in Sussex,” Holmes said, “my idle moments have provided me with the opportunity to keep abreast of many a modern novelist. But, pray, continue.”

  “My brother started for the Princeton Club that horrible afternoon, but just before he reached his destination, that wretch Goldsborough—Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough—accosted Graham—shot him six times—and then immediately turned the gun on himself. Goldsborough was dressed like a vagrant; and Graham, poor soul, was about to offer him a coin. The police said that Goldsborough had stretched his arm out rigidly and fired in a circular manner to hit as many parts of Graham’s body as possible. After he was wounded, Graham held himself up against the fence as best he could until he was carried into his club by some of its members. Finally, an ambulance took him to Bellevue Hospital. And would you believe that during that night his condition actually improved? But late the next evening he died.”

  If the tears were going to come, I expected them now, but despite the ever-ready square of linen, they did not flow. Like her brother the journalist, Mrs. Frevert reported—bravely— the story as she knew it, her only display of greater stress the tighter clenching of her white handkerchief. Unlike many others of the fair sex who in our old sitting room had told similarly heart-wrenching stories of grief, Mrs. Frevert did not require comforting. That she was neither frail nor fragile seemed to give greater credibility to her account.

  “After he was shot, Mr. Holmes, he said, ‘I could have beaten four bullets, but six were too many.’”

  Holmes nodded, allowing the remark to register. Then he asked, “Did he say anything else?”

  “Only that no-one should tell our mother, who was living in California at the time. Graham feared the news would kill her. That was Graham, always thinking about someone else—even when he was mortally wounded. And, do you know, she did die less than half a year after hearing of her son’s murder?”

  “A tragic story indeed, Mrs. Frevert,” Sherlock Holmes said. Then, propping his pipe back in the abalone shell and placing the fingertips of both hands together, he looked at her with his hawklike eyes and proceeded to ask her the paramount question: “Since all these details are known to the police, why do you believe that there is any more to be examined?”

  The sky was beginning to darken, a reminder that, if we were to catch the 5:15 train from Eastbourne back to London, we would have to leave the cottage shortly. But here was the crux of what had brought the determined Mrs. Frevert to see Sherlock Holmes in the first place. She was not about to squander the opportunity.

  Awaiting her answer, Holmes leaned forward in his chair, chin now resting on his interlocking fingers.

  “Some people might call it women’s intuition, Mr. Holmes—”

  Her response, obviously deemed meagre by Holmes, caused him to lean back with an audible sigh.

  “—but,” she continued, “I just cannot for the life of me ignore the numerous and, I might add, powerful enemies my brother had. Too many people in high places had threatened him—to his face or indirectly. He even reported them to the police.”

  “I’m sure that is the case, Mrs. Frevert, but I’m afraid it’s hardly enough to dispute the official findings. If, as Watson informed me, you were seeking my advice, I fear I’m going to have to disappoint you. Now, as you have a train to catch—” Holmes rose and indicated with a sweep of his arm the direction back into the house.

  Mrs. Frevert, too, stood up, fixing her eyes on my friend. “Mr. Holmes,” she said, “do you take me for a fool? I didn’t travel all the way from New York to tell you about intuition. What’s more, I’d thank you to at least extend the courtesy of hearing me out.”

  Holmes’s humble smile and nodding head, an attitude he seldom displayed—especially to a woman—righted the moment. “Pray be seated,” he said softly, and they both resumed their chairs.

  “There is also the question of the bullets,” she announced triumphantly.

  “Bullets?” I repeated.

  “The number, I mean.”

  “He was shot six times,” Holmes reminded us.

  “Precisely!” Mrs. Frevert exclaimed. “All the reports agree. Six times! And then the assassin pointed the gun at his head, firing once.”

  “I see,” Holmes said slowly. He appeared to possess some sense of the direction in which her argument was going. For my part, I must admit to having been a bit startled to hear a woman of Mrs. Frevert’s refined nature speaking so intimately about firearms.

  “Don’t you understand, Mr. Holmes? That’s seven shots! Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, my brother’s alleged lone assassin, carried a single revolver that held only six bullets.”

  One needn’t have been Sherlock Holmes to see the anomaly once the facts were made known; but allowing himself a restrained smile, my friend got up, walked into his library, and returned a moment later with a small box full of as-yet unfiled newspaper cuttings. He rummaged through them for a moment until he found what he was looking for. “Allow me to read the following, Mrs. Frevert, from your own New York Times dated January 24, 1911:

  “David Graham Phillips, the novelist, was shot six times yesterday afternoon by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough. ... After sending six bullets into Mr. Phillips’s chest, abdomen and limbs with a .32 calibre automatic revolver, Goldsborough put the weapon up to his own right temple and fired one of the four remaining bullets in the magazine, killing himself instantly.”

  “A ten-chamber, automatic revolver quite satisfactorily accounts for the six wounds to your brother and the assassin’s suicide, I should expect.”

  “It would, Mr. Holmes, except for Algeron Lee, the witness who said Goldsborough had been firing a six-shooter.”*

  For a brief moment Holmes was speechless. Only the cries of the birds above seemed a commentary on Mrs. Frevert’s assertion. “Even so, Mrs. Frevert,” he said finally, “the number of bullets could have been miscounted. Perhaps the doctors weren’t sure.”

  “They tracked the paths of all six bullets, Mr. Holmes. They were quite sure. And nearby witnesses confirmed there were six shots. As did the most authoritative witness of them all—my brother! Re
member, he said that he could have beaten four bullets but that six were too many.”

  “An interesting theory, but merely hearsay,” Holmes said.

  “There is also the matter of Goldsborough’s diary, Mr. Holmes. The evidence that the police used to identify Goldsborough’s motive came from his journal, a notebook that was found by some person on the street.”

  “Yes,” Holmes said, “careless detective work. The journal presented the singular notion that Phillips was some kind of literary vampire sucking out Mr. Goldsborough’s identity. Phillips was becoming Goldsborough or Goldsborough, Phillips. I forget which. Hence the peculiar telegram your brother received. A belief based on the melodramatic novel The House of the Vampire by one George Sylvestre Viereck, I think.”

  “You’re absolutely correct, Mr. Holmes. And that diary, which was so conveniently found at the scene of the crime and in which all of this nonsense was discovered, was then handed over to an assistant district attorney who kept it the entire day of the murder. He held it so long that even the coroner was furious. What’s more, Mr. Holmes, the diary was written in a crooked and shaky handwriting sprinkled with blots of ink. Those jottings could have been made by anyone.”

  This latest charge certainly seemed a possibility to me. It also seemed to have piqued the curiosity of Sherlock Holmes. Instead of replying immediately as he had been doing, he sat rapt in thought.

  Sensing his vulnerability, Mrs. Frevert was quick to exploit her advantage. “Say you’ll help me, Mr. Holmes. Graham was too courageous a man to allow his murder to be dismissed so casually. In point of fact, he ruined the careers of many a fraud and changed the course of American history. Oh, that Goldsborough shot my brother I have no doubt. But that he acted alone I cannot believe. At the very least I want to know who put him up to it. Who hired him? And that seventh bullet raises an obvious question: If Goldsborough shot himself with one of the six, and Graham was struck six times, who fired the seventh? Who was the other assassin? The authorities are no longer interested. Trust me, I’ve asked. The police have gotten their killer. Why should they reopen an investigation that I believe might implicate some prominent people after they’ve already closed the case? I’ve come to you, Mr. Holmes, with the hope of appealing to your regard for my brother to help clear up the mystery surrounding his death.”