The Seventh Bullet

by Daniel D Victor

  A provocative description, I thought, looking up from my reading once more. With a little imagination, it could put one in mind of the pallid, dark-eyed chauffeur furnished us by Senator Beveridge. Or was I unfairly linking everyone I had met in New York to the people in Goldsborough’s diary? Blinking my eyes to reduce the strain, I returned to the crimped text before me.

  “Called last night on Ph[illips]. They said he had gone to Pittsfield, Mass. If so my trouble has been in vain. ... Phillips’ ignoring my last letter and twice excusing himself after it, is in itself a confession of guilt of a sort. A man who has done no wrong will listen to one who claims he has. Moreover, the tone of that letter shows my intentions to be as amicable as he would let them be.”

  The next photograph contained a shorter entry. It was dated four days later:

  “June 15, 1910. Forgot to mention that I passed a man in Central Park on the 13th of June that looked very much like D.G. Phillips. He was with a girl and walking about toward Seventy-fifth Street. I wish I could have been introduced to him some time ago.

  “A girl,” I muttered. “Could this one have been Mrs. Frevert, or was she the same younger woman Goldsborough had described at Phillips’s window?” Holmes made no response, however. He simply remained in that characteristic pose, eyes closed, drawing on his pipe.

  The third photograph was almost devoid of writing. It contained but five words printed in capital letters: “LOVE, CRIME, MONEY, SEX, ATHLETICS.” Beneath the words were two small cartoonlike drawings of open umbrellas.

  The fourth photograph was more provocative still. It reproduced the page Holmes had spoken of earlier in reference to Goldsborough’s anticipated wealth.

  “October 18, 1910. In ten weeks I will be earning $50 a week.”

  What followed next was nothing less than bizarre:

  “Notes—Data for Vampire. Note: To create characters with real blood in their veins, beyond the powers of many writers. Much easier to take them from real life, to utilise their actual flesh and blood by the easy, distinguished, legalised, and lucrative method of literary vampirism. ... How to safeguard against being guilty of vampirism. ... Brotherly love the only safeguard. ... One could picture the vampire as a scoundrel, a trenchant pen perhaps, egotist, possessed of intense pride, keen sense of artistic value, but not that which moves the sun in the heavens and all the stars. Vengeance unjustifiable, wrong to use poisoned arrows on any enemy.”

  “But this is amazing, Holmes,” I said. “All this supernatural fol-de-rol. Once you allayed the fears of poor Bob Ferguson in Sussex so many years ago, I never expected to be investigating vampires again. Where does it come from this time?”

  In reply Holmes returned to the Gladstone and extracted a thin, grey volume, which he handed to me.

  “You forget the book we discussed with Mrs. Frevert in England, Watson.”

  “The House of the Vampire by George Sylvestre Viereck,” I read aloud from the cover.

  “A novel that was quite the rage a few years ago,” Holmes explained. “I found this copy at Hatchard’s and perused it on board ship only yesterday. It recounts the tale of one Reginald Clarke, a patron of the arts who produced works of literature that captivated the entire artistic world. What no-one knew, of course, was that Mr. Clarke was feeding, if you will, off the intellect of a small entourage of artistes whose company he solicited. The more he fed, the more genius he gained, and the more his victims’ minds were depleted. What’s more, unlike Mr. Stoker’s Dracula, Viereck’s vampire is not defeated in the end.”

  “Utter claptrap!” I responded. “Who would be foolish enough to believe such a tale?”

  “The novel was popular enough to have been followed by a theatrical production called The Vampire, which was based on the same theme. And if this diary can be construed as truth, an assumption I am not yet ready to grant, then we may conclude that Mr. Goldsborough was affected by it as well. Goldsborough seemed to believe that Phillips’s literary skills were being sucked out of Goldsborough’s very essence.”

  “Only a madman could be so persuaded, Holmes,” I offered.

  “Exactly, Watson. ‘Persuaded’ is le mot juste.”

  “Then we have our motive, demented as it is?”

  “Perhaps,” Holmes said. “And yet I also learned from Stead that Goldsborough had been demanding through the post that Phillips stop writing about Goldsborough’s sister. It would appear that he was offended by the domineering role of the heroine in Phillips’s novel, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig. Goldsborough was most protective. I am told that he got into arguments with his father for reprimanding his sister—they almost came to blows, in fact.”

  “Indeed! How extraordinary!”

  “And yet not so extraordinary, my good fellow, when we recall the other pair of siblings connected with this case. Let us not forget that it was Phillips’s closeness with his own sister, Mrs. Frevert, which brought her to England to seek our aid in the first place.”

  I was astounded at the implications of Holmes’s observation. “Holmes,” I said, “you seem to be drawing a very close parallel between the murderer and his victim.”

  Holmes smiled. “Yet another reason—albeit distastefully psychological, Watson—for Goldsborough’s imagining himself to be Phillips.”

  “But if Goldsborough thought that he was really Phillips,” I reasoned, “and if Goldsborough was also put off by how Phillips— or should I say ‘Goldsborough’—was treating his own sister, then Goldsborough must have been terribly upset with himself. Killing Phillips was like destroying his own alter ego; moreover, to his deranged way of thinking, he would have to kill himself to complete the grisly job.”

  “Quite a thorny problem, eh, Watson? No doubt worthy of the distinguished Dr. Freud.”

  Before I could answer, Holmes swept up the photographs and replaced them in the bag. He then proceeded to forage for something else within it, continuing to speak as he searched. “But let us not allow such complexities to cloud the actual history of this diary. It seems to have fallen from the assassin’s pocket when he shot himself. It was then picked up by a citizen at the murder scene who presented it to an assistant district attorney who in turn claimed to have kept it locked in a safe for the rest of the night and most of the following day. Indeed, it was not relinquished to the coroner until late the next night. And, according to Mr. Stead, the coroner was most displeased. In point of fact, Watson—” and here Holmes looked up to emphasise the issue—“the coroner actually accused the assistant district attorney of holding back evidence.”

  “But why, Holmes? To alter the diary, do you suppose?”

  “A moment,” Holmes said, finally producing yet another photograph from the seemingly bottomless Gladstone. This reproduction depicted numerous bits of paper, each with variations of the name Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough written on it. The smallest pieces contained only the name itself; the larger pieces, his name written more than a dozen times around a common axis. There were also figures of stars and wheels, the lines and spokes respectively comprised of variations in Goldsborough’s signature.

  “Why would a man write his name so often?” I asked.

  “Perhaps, Watson, we might ask why someone else might have the need to practise writing a single name so often.”

  “To perfect the handwriting?” I offered.

  “Capital! Now, if we have the suggestion of a copied hand and certainly the time in which to do the copying—not to mention the clear case of a confused individual who up to this point was like the distraught King Lear, more sinned against than sinning— then I believe we can see the foundations of a conspiratorial plot. Couple these observations with Goldsborough’s belief that he was being followed.”

  “But if the diary was altered, why not delete such incriminating evidence?”

  “It is always easier to add than detract, Watson. Especially when Mr. Goldsborough obligingly left so much space unwritten upon. If pages had been deleted or cut, anyone would have not
iced. But in restricting one’s alterations to exaggerations of what people already know to be true, one can create the most extraordinary scenarios.”

  “Who would have believed it?” I asked.

  “All is most circumstantial at this point, old fellow,” Holmes cautioned. “But when a murder is more then a year old and the rail has grown cold, even the dearly departed Toby would have had a difficult time picking up the scent. Although I do not like to trifle with surmise, sometimes, like a Platonic shadow, it can reflect reality.”

  I leaned back in my chair, trying to take in the enormity of the crime at which Holmes was hinting.

  “Come, Watson,” he said with a smile. Despite the lateness of the hour, his grey eyes were keen and sharp. “You have been keeping notes on your own investigation, and I would like to see what you have been up to.”

  Sitting in Central Park, I had believed my observations quite important. Now, compared to the diary I had just been permitted to read, I thought my rambling naive and pedestrian. Nonetheless, after furnishing Holmes with a brief report on my memorable visit to Sagamore Hill, I handed over my notes. He in turn leaned back in his chair, relit his pipe, and proceeded to spend the rest of the evening learning as much as I knew about the principal characters in the drama. The electric light in the sitting room remained ablaze when I retired to bed.

  Seven

  POLICE PROCEDURAL

  “It is one of the most curious and delightful fast of psychology that anyone easily deceived at it than any other.”

  —David Graham Phillips, Hayseed

  Greeting us with a grey face, Sunday, the twenty-ninth of March, did not appear to be the ideal day for a stroll in the park, but that was just what Sherlock Holmes had planned for Mrs. Frevert and me that morning. It was time to visit in daylight the scene of Phillip’s murder. Thus, after we had partaken of an early breakfast, Holmes and I located the omnipresent Rollins in front of the hotel and instructed him to convey us to the National Arts Club.

  Dressed in a black fur coat to protect her from the cold, Mrs. Frevert was waiting for us in front of the building. Holmes consulted his watch with a quick smile. “There is nothing so desirable—or rare—as a punctual woman, Watson,” he observed as we alighted from the automobile.

  “Oh, Mr. Holmes,” Carolyn Frevert said, “I’m so glad to see you again. Your very presence makes me feel as if we are getting closer to the truth.”

  My friend smiled and, pointing his ebony walking stick east, announced, “Let us begin.”

  What a bundled-up troupe we must have seemed to any of the few pedestrians that early Sunday hour who bothered to look our way—Mrs. Frevert in her heavy fur, I in my ulster, bowler, and scarf, Holmes in his well-worn inverness and ear-flapped travelling cap.

  “Graham and I breakfasted a little later than usual on the day he was killed,” Mrs. Frevert explained as we walked down Nineteenth Street. “He slept late following a long night of his work that very session. As it was, he didn’t get to bed until seven in the morning. And it wasn’t until one-thirty in the afternoon that he wrapped himself up in his overcoat and left for the Princeton Club to check his mail. He walked east on Nineteenth Street—just as we are doing—to get to Irving Place and then to the park.”

  “He walked on the north side?”

  “Of course, Mr. Holmes. There would have been no point in his crossing over.”

  Holmes had stopped and was staring at the other side of the road. The object of his gaze was an old red-brick tenement house that faced the National Arts Club. “The Rand School of Social Science, Watson,” he explained. “The lair of the assassin.”

  It was a nondescript place as drab as many of the other brownstones nearby. There was certainly nothing to distinguish it as the spawning ground of so heinous a crime as murder.

  Just as suddenly as he had stopped, Holmes turned left and began walking north on the west side of Irving Place where a few sparse trees lined the roadway. In the winter, when Phillips had been killed, they would have been sparser still. Although relying every so often on the support of his stick, Holmes could maintain quite a rapid pace; thus, it was apparent that the deliberateness of his gait resulted from a desire to view the scene with great care and not from any significant debilitation of his physical powers.

  Despite Holmes’s lingering attentiveness, it took but a few minutes to traverse the distance to the fenced enclosure known as Gramercy Park, which Irving Place itself actually abutted. In England, such an area would be called a “square,” blocks of building surrounding a pleasantly rectangular plot of grass, offering the fortunate nearby residents who had access through its high, black and locked metal gates an oasis-like haven in which to rest and reflect.

  Mrs. Frevert directed us to the left once we encountered the metal fencing. Our path took us along the pedestrian walkway that followed the turn of the railing and pointed us north once more. Through the black vertical bars we could observe the lawns and hedges and trees of the park, the same vista that Phillips himself would have seen scarcely more than a year earlier. Across the road to our left, stately houses marked our progress.

  When we reached Twenty-first Street, the northern boundary of Gramercy Park, Mrs. Frevert halted and pointed a gloved finger towards the middle of the walkway. She seemed to be directing our attention to a location just before the entrance of Lexington Avenue, the northerly street that, like Irving Place to the south, terminated at the park. “Right there,” Mrs. Frevert said, “across from number 155. That’s where Graham was shot.”

  “A moment,” Holmes said despite the importance of her pronouncement. With his stick he seemed to be stirring up some green leaves and white flower petals on the pavement near the rounded corner of the fencing. Quite suddenly, however, he began walking again, taking markedly long strides until he reached the spot Mrs. Frevert had indicated.

  “Two of Graham’s colleagues were leaving the Princeton Club at Twenty-first and Lexington over there”—again she pointed, this time at a red brownstone building with white woodworking— “when they saw a man leaning against the fence about half the distance between where we are now standing and the entrance to the Club. It was Goldsborough, of course. He walked up to Graham and shot him in the stomach. ‘That’ll do for you,’ the cretin said, and then he quickly fired five more times.” Here Mrs. Frevert bit her lip but, displaying the same kind of strength she had revealed in recounting the story to us in Sussex, continued bravely. “Graham swayed and grasped onto this iron fence for support until his friends carried him into the Princeton Club and an ambulance finally arrived.”

  “And Goldsborough?” Holmes asked.

  “He shot himself in the head and died instantly,” she said. “His body lay right there in the street untended for hours. It should have rotted in the gutter.”

  “Quite,” Holmes offered. “But what did happen to it?”

  “The police took it to the East Twenty-second Street Station.”

  “I see,” he said softly.

  Sherlock Holmes looked up and down the road and then regarded the brownstones with their garniture. Squinting, he eyed the thin trees that lined the walkway near where Phillips had fallen against the railing. With the ring of his footfalls the only sound we could hear, he marched to the precise spot of the murder and then, with arms folded, looked directly at the façade of the Princeton Club, which, behind short, thick bushes and a waist-high fence, seemed to stare defiantly back.

  “That building has its own macabre story to tell,” he observed.

  Mrs. Frevert nodded, but I had not a clue to what they were referring.

  “It used to be the home of Stanford White, Watson,” Holmes explained, “the celebrated architect. He was shot and killed in 1906 by the husband of a woman whose company he had been keeping before she had married.”

  “Before she had married’!” I repeated. “By God, despite the beauty of this place, it would appear that murder is all around us.”

  “Remember the
Garden of Eden, Dr. Watson,” Mrs. Frevert said.

  During this brief conversation, Holmes had not taken his eyes from the front of the Princeton Club. But now he slowly began to rotate his body to the right, allowing his gaze to encompass the entire panorama beginning with the building itself, then the adjacent roadway, and finally the tall limestone palazzo with its projecting balconies at the corner of Twenty-first Street and Lexington.

  Suddenly what I recognised instantly as a pistol shot cracked the fragile stillness of the grey morning.

  A tiny rain of sparkles accompanied the report as a projectile struck the rail of fencing not two feet from Holmes’s head. I was aware of a quick movement in the bushes at the far corner of the Princeton Club, but Mrs. Frevert emitted a cry of fear, and it was only after the brief moments it took for her to regain her composure that I could focus my attention on what had happened. By this time, I could barely hear the echo of running footsteps fading into silence.

  Holmes, however, was already sprinting across the road in the direction of the gunshot, his walking stick still in hand.

  “Watson!” he shouted back to me. “Look to the lady!”

  The younger Holmes of our Baker Street days might have had some change of apprehending the culprit whoever it was; but age and retirement did little to enable Holmes’s still-agile frame to keep pace with an obviously younger assailant.

  I did my best to comfort Mrs. Frevert, all the while keeping a keen eye on Lexington Avenue, the road down which Holmes had disappeared. What would happen if my old friend actually succeeded in confronting his quarry I could only guess. To the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t carrying a pistol. I for one had left mine in the hotel. Presumably, the armed gunman Holmes was pursuing could easily overpower a man accoutred with only a walking stick. Each passing minute rendered me more anxious about Holmes’s welfare.

  My nervousness, however, did little to prepare me for the ludicrous scene that soon transpired. Rounding the corner where I had last seen him and looking for all the world like a common villain came Sherlock Holmes in the company of two uniformed policemen. A third man, wearing a bowler, a khaki overcoat on his stocky frame, and who, judging by his familiarity with the other two, was obviously a policeman himself, carried Holmes’s stick.