Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  “That’s what I got, that and a ’phone call. Now, it’s not unusual to get a case over the ’phone, but I like to meet my clients face-to-face, and the lady didn’t seem all that eager to meet with me. Refused, in fact. And paid cash in an envelope delivered by messenger—not a service either, just a kid, a shabby one. The whole set-up made me feel pretty uncomfortable.”

  “Thinking that perhaps you were being brought into something less than legal?”

  “That there was something shady here, and I don’t like being played for a chump.”

  “‘Played for a chump’,” Holmes repeated to himself as he bent over the note with his pocket magnifying-glass. “A flavourful sample of the vernacular. Hmm. What can you tell me about your telephone caller?”

  “Woman, like I said.”

  “Woman, or lady?”

  “I guess I’d call her a lady, if we set aside the question of whatever it is she’s up to. Anyway, she talked like someone who’d been educated. In the South—deep South, that is.”

  Holmes’ head snapped up from the handwritten note. “A Southern woman?” he said sharply. “From what part of the South?”

  “That I couldn’t say. Not Texas, deeper than that—Alabama, Georgia, maybe the Carolinas, that sort of thing. Slow like molasses, you know?”

  But Holmes was not so easily satisfied. “Did she use any words that struck you as slightly unusual?” he pressed. “What about her vowels—what did her a’s sound like? Did she employ any hidden diphthongs?”

  Hammett, however, could be no clearer than he had been; Holmes shook his head and returned to the note, leaving the younger man to feel that he had let down the Pinkerton side rather badly.

  “You getting anything out of that?” he asked, sounding a trifle short.

  “Very little,” Holmes admitted, but before Hammett could make a pointed display of his own impatience, Holmes continued. “Criminals print because it conceals everything about them up to and including their sex. I see very little here, other than the obvious, of course: that she is right-handed, middle-aged, in good health, and educated; that she is probably American—hence the profligate scattering of full-stops—but has spent long enough in Europe that ‘six May’ rather than ‘May six’ comes to her pen; that said pen is expensive and probably gold-nibbed but the ink is not her own, as it shows an unfortunate tendency to clump and dry unevenly. The paper itself might reward enquiries from the city’s stationers, although the watermark appears neither remarkable nor exclusive. And I should say that, behind its careful formation of the letters, the lady’s hand betrays a tendency toward self-centredness such as one sees in the hand of most career criminals.”

  “The lady’s a crook? Well, that sure narrows things down in a town this size.”

  “I shouldn’t hold my breath,” Holmes agreed, folding his magnifying-glass into its pocket and handing back the brief note. “Businessmen and even mere social climbers often display the same traits.”

  “You don’t say?” Hammett mused, holding the note up into the light as if to follow the track of the older man’s deductions.

  “Graphology is far from an exact science, but it does reward study.” Holmes sat back in the chair, took out his pipe and got it going, then fixed his host with a sharp grey eye. “So, Mr Hammett, am I to understand that you wish to terminate your employment with the lady from the South?”

  “Not sure how I can do that; I took her money.”

  “Have you spent it?”

  In answer, Hammett opened the file again and took out the envelope that gave it its thickness, handing it to Holmes. “I opened it to see how much there was, and since then it’s sat there, untouched.”

  Holmes opened the flap and ran his thumb slowly up the side of the bills within, taking note of their number and their denomination. His eyebrow arched and he looked at Hammett, who nodded as if in agreement.

  “Yeah, way too much money for a couple days’ trailing.”

  “But as, what is the term? ‘Hush money’?”

  “You can see why I got nervous.”

  Holmes dropped the envelope back in the file; Hammett flipped the cover shut as if to put the money out of sight. “What I can see,” said Holmes, “is that I’m dealing with a man who prefers to choose his employer.”

  “Mr Holmes, I’ve got a family. I’m not a whole lot of good to them, the state I’m in, but I’d be a lot less good in prison.”

  Despite Hammett’s explanation, Holmes thought that the threat of gaol was less of a deterrent than the young man’s distaste for villainy. As unlike Watson as a person could be physically, nonetheless the two were brothers under the skin—and he had no doubt that, like the externally sensible Watson, Hammett’s fictional maunderings would lay a thin coating of hard action over the most romantic of sensibilities.

  “Very well, Mr Hammett. How would you like to work for me instead?”

  “Turncoating has never had much appeal, Mr Holmes.”

  “Have you spent any of the lady’s money?”

  “I told you I hadn’t.”

  “Has she given you a means of getting into contact with her?”

  “That note was it. The boy brought it with the money, stuck it in my hand, and left. When I phoned my buddy to ask what the hell it all meant, he hadn’t a clue, didn’t know who it was, just some woman who needed a job done that he couldn’t take on right away.”

  “Then you’ve done no more than keep the lady’s money safe for a few days until you might return it with your regrets. Is that not so?”

  Hammett sat in thought, not caring for the situation, torn between the implied but undeclared contract represented by the money in the folder and the undeniable pull of curiosity. And another thing: “You think this has something to do with the person who took a shot at your wife?”

  “Pacific Heights is an unlikely venue for a random madman with a gun,” Holmes pointed out grimly.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, Mr Holmes, I’ll take your job, so long as it doesn’t involve outright betrayal. If it turns out that coming to me is what opens that lady up for a fall, I’m telling you now that I’m going to stand back and take my hands off both sides of it.”

  “Your rigid sense of ethics, Mr Hammett, will have done you no good in the world of the Pinkertons. But I agree.”

  The two men shook hands, and Hammett reached for the bottle again to seal the agreement.

  “So, where do you want me to start?”

  “First, you need to know what might be called ‘the full picture,’” Holmes said, rapping his pipe out into the ash-tray and pulling out his pouch. “It would appear to have its beginnings a number of years ago, when my wife’s family died on a road south of the city.”

  Hammett scrabbled through the débris on the table and came up with a note-book and a pen, which he uncapped and shook into life. His cigarette dangled unnoticed from between the fingers of his left hand as he hunched over the note-book on his knee, listening. After a few minutes, however, his occasional notes stopped, and his back slowly straightened against the chair-back, until finally he put up a hand.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re laying pretty much everything out in front of me.”

  “More or less,” Holmes agreed mildly.

  “Her father’s job, the falling balcony in Egypt—”

  “Aden,” Holmes corrected.

  “Aden. Do you honestly think all that’s got anything to do with what’s going on here?”

  “Do I think so? There is not sufficient evidence one way or the other. But the balcony was a recent and unexplained event, and the possibility of its being linked should not be ignored.”

  “If you say so. But really, are you sure you want me to know all this?”

  “If you do not know the past, how can you know what of the present is of importance?”

  “I just mean—”

  “You mean that, seeing as our initial meeting was adversarial, I ought not to trust you too wholehearted
ly.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “Mr Hammett, are you trustworthy?”

  The thin man opened his mouth to answer, closed it again, and then began to chuckle. “There’s no answer I can give to that—‘yes’ would probably mean ‘no,’ and ‘no’ would mean I’m a complete boob, and ‘I don’t know’ means you’d be a damned fool to trust me with so much as a butter-knife.”

  Holmes was smiling in response. “Precisely.”

  “So what you’re saying is, ‘It’s my look-out, shut up and listen’?”

  “Mr Hammett, you have a way with the American vernacular that bodes well for your future as a writer of popular fiction.”

  “Okay, it is your look-out. So I’ll shut up and listen.”

  And he did, attentively, his dark eyes alive in that gaunt face. His occasional grunt and question told Holmes all he needed to know about the man’s brains, and he told Hammett even more than he had originally intended. Very nearly everything.

  It was late when they finished, or early. Hammett took out his package of Bull Durham again, glancing over his notes as his fingers sprinkled the tobacco and rolled the paper, every motion precise.

  Eventually he nodded. “Yeah, I can see that you need another set of hands here.”

  “And eyes. In the normal run of events, those would belong to Russell—to my wife. However, of late she has been . . . indisposed.”

  “Too close to things to see clearly,” Hammett suggested.

  “It is temporary, I have no doubt. But until she returns to herself, she is . . .” Again Holmes paused, searching for a word that might be accurate without being traitorous; he was unable to find one, and finished the sentence with a sigh and the word “unreliable.”

  “So what do you want me to do first?”

  “Do you know anything about motorcars?”

  “They have four wheels and tip over real easy—when I’m driving, anyway. I usually ask a friend to drive me.”

  “You don’t like guns and you don’t like motorcars. Are you certain you’re American?”

  “I’ve hurt people with both of them, didn’t like the feeling.”

  “Very well, then; ask a friend to drive you.”

  Holmes reached into his inner pocket and pulled out his long leather note-case, taking from it a slip of paper with some notes in a small, difficult, but precise hand: his handwriting. “This is what I know about the motorcar crash. What we’re looking for is evidence of foul play, any evidence at all. The police report is quite clear that it was an accident, so the best we can hope for is a faint discrepancy.” He watched to see if Hammett looked puzzled, but the man was nodding.

  “Something that smells off.”

  “Quite. It is, after all this time, highly doubtful that there was enough of the motor to salvage, and even less of a chance the wreckage has anything to tell us, but it is just possible that no-one could decide what to do with the thing, and either left it on the cliffside or pulled it up and hauled it into a corner until its ownership was decided. The convolutions of the American legal system,” he added, “occasionally have inadvertent benefits.”

  “Can’t you just ask your wife’s lawyer what happened to the car?”

  “I’d rather not bring him into it.”

  “I see. You’d rather pay me to go down on a fool’s task and look at a ten-year-old burned-out hulk.”

  “It is an avenue of enquiry that must be pursued to its end, no matter how soon that end is reached.”

  Hammett studied the piece of paper for a moment with a faint smile on his expressive mouth, then he picked it up without comment and tucked it away in his note-book. Sure, investigating the car might be a red herring designed for nothing more than getting him out of town for a couple of days, but what of it? There was trust, and there was stupidity, and despite his snooty accent, this Holmes was no jerk.

  And the Limey’s money couldn’t be any dirtier than the pile of bills in the file.

  As if he had followed the line of thought, Holmes addressed himself to the leather wallet again, pulling out five twenty-dollar notes and laying them onto the table. “That should be sufficient as a retainer. You see, I do not make the mistake of paying too generously.”

  “No, Mr Holmes, I don’t think you make too many mistakes. Anything other than the car you want me to be getting on?”

  “That is the first order of business, I think. Oh, but Hammett? You saw my wife tonight. Well enough to recognise her again?”

  “Girl with glasses, her height, hair, and posture—she doesn’t exactly fade into the crowd. But if she was sitting, had a hat on? I don’t know.”

  “Quite.” Holmes bent his head for a moment in thought before he slid two fingers into the note-case, this time drawing out a photograph— or rather, a square neatly snipped from a larger photograph. Reluctantly (Reluctant to show it to me? wondered Hammett. Or to show he had it at all? The Englishman seemed a person who would not reveal his affections readily.), Holmes slid it across the table for Hammett to examine.

  It was of a young woman on a street, clearly unaware of the camera. Her head was up, showing a determined chin and graceful neck. The day had been bright but not sunny enough to make her spectacles throw shadows or reflections, so that behind the wire frames were revealed a pair of light-coloured eyes. Her hair was fair and gathered on top of her head in a way Hammett hadn’t seen in years—and hadn’t seen on the woman getting out of the car the night before.

  “She’s cut her hair since this was taken?”

  “Yes,” Holmes said, with a trace of regret that made Hammett’s mouth curve again, although he did not comment.

  “And her eyes—blue or green?”

  “Blue. And to American ears, she speaks with a pure English accent.”

  Hammett handed the photograph back across the table. “Okay,” he said, making it a question.

  Tucking the photograph back into its hold, Holmes said, “I showed you this because I think it possible that Russell will decide to travel in the same direction you are going, sometime in the next day or two. It would be as well if she didn’t take too much notice of you.”

  “I hear you.” Hammett put the money into his own wallet, dashed the last contents of his glass down his throat, and stood up to shake the hand of his new employer. “Mr Holmes, this has been an interesting evening.”

  Grey eyes looked into brown, understanding each other well.

  Chapter Twelve

  At that hour, with only the occasional vehicle to impede a walker’s straight line, Holmes’ long stride took him back to the hotel in twenty minutes—and that included doubling back twice to ensure that he had no one else on his heels. The doorman was dozing in his corner, the man on the desk jerked around, startled, at this late entrance, and the dim sea of posts and chairs that made up the lobby resembled a theatre after the curtains had fallen.

  The boy on the elevator, by contrast, was bright-eyed and longing for company. He commented on the weather, mentioned a Harold Lloyd comedy showing at a nearby cinema house the following afternoon that Holmes might care to avail himself of, and admired the cut of Holmes’ hat. The lad seemed disappointed that Holmes did not seize the opportunity for conversation, and threw open the door in a subdued manner that not even a coin could assuage.

  Russell was still out. He stood uncertainly inside the door, wondering if he should return to the bright cabaret where he had left her, then shook his head and closed the door firmly. It was unlikely that the young people had remained at one gin palace during the course of an evening, and he should end up haring all over town for her. She would return.

  He exchanged his outer garments for a dressing-gown, then picked up the telephone to ask for a pot of coffee. When it had come, he assembled a nest of cushions and settled into it with coffee, tobacco, and his thoughts.

  Two hours later, the faint rattle of the lift door was accompanied by voices raised in a manner guaranteed to wake the other guests: Russell and the ele
vator boy, exchanging jests. A moment later the key clattered about in the door, giving her problems before it finally slipped into place and Russell tumbled into the room.

  “Good Lord, Holmes, are you still up? Had I known, I’d have rung you and had you come along. I know it’s not exactly your kind of music, but you might have found the experience interesting. There was this extraordinary singer named Belinda Birdsong,” she said, and regaled him with the details of music, dance, and conversation. As she talked she wandered in and out of the room, kicking her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe, washing her face, putting on night-clothes. She finally got into bed, but once there she sat bolt upright in the most exulted of spirits, prattling on—Russell, prattling!—about her evening with Miss Greenfield’s cronies. Spirits of the liquid variety contributed to her mood, he diagnosed, but they simply enhanced the feverish look she had worn for longer than he cared to remember.

  If she went on in this manner much longer, he would have to locate some morphia and knock her out forcibly.

  He scraped out the cold contents of his pipe into the ash-tray, extricated himself from the cushions, and went about the business of emptying pockets and undoing buttons, getting ready for bed. Russell looked as if she might be up for the rest of the night.

  A name, or perhaps the way in which she’d said it, caught at his attention from the spate, and he paused on his way to the bath-room to listen. “—and a friend of Flo’s friend Donny, who’s a few years older than she is, was very kindly sitting out a dance with me and I mentioned what I had been doing today—or yesterday, I suppose—and he said that he remembered her.”

  “Remembered whom?” asked Holmes, just to be sure.

  “Are you not listening to me?”

  “I was pulling my vest over my head.”

  Sure sign of her state of mind was the ready way in which she accepted it, without even stopping to consider. “I was talking about Dr Ginzberg. Apparently she was rather well known in the city before . . . Anyway, this friend of Donny’s—his name was Terry, I think, or was it Jerry? I don’t know, the music was rather loud—he said he remembered that people used to say she was good at getting her patients to remember things, ‘mesmerism,’ he called it although that’s rather an old-fashioned name—even when I knew her she called it ‘hypnosis.’ You remember her techniques, Holmes.”