Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  “You look like your day’s been as lucky as mine,” he told Holmes.

  “What universal law, I wonder, determines that all potential witnesses be either missing, amnesiac, or comprehensively stupid?” Holmes reflected. “The retired milkman is off visiting his sister in San Jose; one of the Russells’ old neighbours took an hour to decide that the ‘nice Jewish girl’ he remembered was not actually Judith Russell but one of the good-time girls who moved into the park in early May; another of the neighbours insisted that I was a ‘Fuller Brush Man’ and chased me down the street with a broom he had bought which had fallen apart, only stopping when his daughter caught up with him and told me that he’d been fixed against broom salesmen ever since his wife ran off with one in 1903; and the rabbi of the synagogue Judith Russell attended is a young man who will have to consult with the elders before he submits any names for my attention. The only thing I have accomplished of even marginal import all afternoon has been to arrange for a chimney sweep, so that one corner of the house might be inhabited without risk of a conflagration.”

  Hammett was grinning like a greyhound. “The fast life of a private dick—ain’t it great?”

  “I hope to heaven that the stories you write don’t glamorise the job as much as Watson’s did. He was generally so occupied with his practice or his wife, he had no idea how many hours I put in while he wasn’t there to see.”

  “Nah, my stuff’s a little harder edged than his. But you know, when you’re putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits.”

  “I suppose necessity must. In any case, Hammett, what have you to show for the day?”

  “Not a heck of a lot more than you.” Their food arrived as he was taking his note-book from his pocket, but he unfolded it on the table and reported in between bites. “The paper the Southern lady used is a bust, just too common to trace. Spent a couple hours on that, and decided it was a waste of my time and your greenbacks. I’ll keep going if you want, but—”

  “Let’s abandon the lady’s note-paper for now,” Holmes said. The chops on his plate were more mutton than lamb, but nicely grilled and he was hungry. Hammett went on.

  “The rest of the day I spent with the cops. They’ve got nothing at all on your Chinese friend. You knew his parents were found murdered at that same address you gave me? It’s still on the books, more or less—not exactly near the top of the pile. They did question him, but he said he was at school—training as a doctor, back in Chicago—and as soon as they got confirmation of that, he was cleared. The only funny thing in the file was, someone wondered how two Chinese servants could afford to buy a three-storey building in Chinatown. There wasn’t a follow-up to that, probably decided the old folks ran an opium den on the side or something. Might be something to look into.”

  “There’s nothing there,” Holmes reassured him. “What about the others?”

  Hammett’s fork and knife paused while he studied the older man, then he shrugged. “If you say so. Auberon’s name is Howard, he’s got one charge of running a card game back when he was a teenager, but nothing since then.”

  “Wait a minute, he must be in his late forties now. I thought all the records burnt in 1906?”

  “Police records were saved, though they’re in a hell of a mess. It was the City Hall stuff that went—births, property rights, you name it. If you own a house, you might have God’s own time proving it, but an ancient arrest for drunkenness will follow along like a stink on your shoe. Anyway, talk is that your boy on the desk doesn’t run anything too organised, but like any desk man, he can get you anything from a bottle to a companion, for the right bill.”

  Auberon, then, was about as clean as could be expected.

  “And as for your wife’s old man, he was a positive paragon of virtue. He came from money, but then you’d know that. Picked up once when some of the boys he was with had a little too much to drink, broke some windows, that kind of thing. He spent the night in the jug, paid for the repairs, stayed clean after, at least in San Francisco.”

  “When would this have been?”

  “Oh, let’s see. Yeah, here it is, 1891.”

  Charles Russell would have been twenty-three years old, and fresh out of university; four years later he’d gone to Europe, there to meet and marry Judith Klein. “Did you get the names of his companions in drunkenness?”

  By way of answer, Hammett reached for his note-book, tore out a page, and slid it across to Holmes:

  Thomas Octavio Hodges (San Francisco)

  Martin Sullivan (San Francisco)

  Robert Greenfield (New York)

  Laurence Goldberg (New York)

  Calvin Francis O’Malley (San Francisco)

  Holmes studied the names: The only one he might identify was that of Robert Greenfield, who could be the father of Russell’s childhood friend Flo. “You know any of these men?”

  “No, I only got the list about an hour ago. You want me to find out about them?”

  “Let’s leave that on our list of Things To Do. Before that, however, we need to look into this one.” He took from his pocket the piece of paper he’d copied at the hotel. “This woman was killed two weeks before the Longs were. That address is her home and her office as well. She was a psychiatrist. She was treating my wife.”

  Hammett’s eyes came up from the scrap of paper, meeting those of Holmes. “Your wife’s doctor, your wife’s family servants, your wife’s parents. The same wife who got herself shot at the other day.”

  “I want this settled before she gets back into town the day after tomorrow.” The grey eyes had gone cold and hard.

  After a minute, Hammett looked away, and folded the page with the name into his note-book.

  “Then I guess we’d better get to work.”

  BOOK THREE

  Russell

  Chapter Seventeen

  I stood on the roadway that bright and blustery Sunday morning, inches away from the continent’s edge, and looked at the rocks that had taken my family. In ten years, some things had changed; others were the same. The guard-rail had been repaired, for example, but the outline of the rocks against the sea—were I to walk over to a spot fifteen feet from Donny’s front head-lamp, drop to the ground, and turn my head due west, the jagged shapes would match precisely those seared onto my brain. I had been thrown from the motor’s backseat onto that place on the rough-graded roadway; the brother with whom I had been arguing, the father who had turned from the wheel in irritation, the mother who had sat sharply forward, her hand on the dash-board and her mouth open to cry a warning—all three of the motorcar’s other passengers had remained where they were. I alone had shot out over the side and hit the road, hard and broken, and only chance had determined that I came to rest with my face pointing towards the sea. My stunned eyes had been open to receive the impression of the motorcar dropping out of existence, had stayed open to witness the rotund flare of exploding petrol, had remained open and passively staring as the other, on-coming motor swerved and slithered to a halt before disgorging one pair of legs, then another. One set of feet had hurried to where I lay, accompanied by unintelligible squawks of sound; the other went to the shattered guard-rail for a moment, only to retreat rapidly from the cloud of oily smoke roaring up the rocks.

  As the second pair of shoes came towards me, my eyes had drifted shut.

  I had been fighting noisily with my brother, as my father’s brand-new Maxwell motorcar had climbed the hill; I had distracted my father at a crucial moment, a fatal moment. I had killed my family, and survived, and in ten years, I had told only two people of my rôle in the disaster: Dr Ginzberg and, five years later, Holmes. She had soothed me, a temporary solution; Holmes had given me an emotional safe-box in which I could lock the knowledge, knowing its shape but no longer consumed by it.

  Had I been told that I must return to this place, my first act setting foot in San Francisco would have been to hire a lorry-load of dynamite to blow the entire cliffside into the sea.
I still was not certain how I had ended up here, staring at the great grey Pacific. Something Holmes had said, or rather the way he had said it, had made it seem not only necessary, but essential.

  “Mary?” Flo’s voice made me think she’d said my name more than a couple of times, for it sounded worried, and was accompanied by a hand on my arm. She’d been hovering near me, I realised, ever since we’d left the motor. “Mary, do you want to go now? I don’t think we need—”

  “No, I’m fine,” I told her. I blinked, and the past retreated a fraction. I was on the piece of ground I hated most in all the universe, ground I should gladly have consigned to the waves below, but it was also merely a piece of precipitous roadway built far too close to the edge of the world.

  There was another motor there, as well, I noticed. Some sort of baker’s van, although the bow-legged man standing across the roadway from it looked nothing like a baker. As I walked up to him, my first impression was confirmed: Grease, not flour, lay in his finger-nails, boots, and pores. And although he wore a cap, he also held in his hands a grey soft hat, turning it round and round in his blunt, blackened fingers. I stopped at the edge of the cliff near the baker’s mechanic (Sunday, my mind processed automatically: no bread deliveries, good day to borrow the van) and looked out across the sea, the expanse of green merging into grey-blue with specks of white here and there, and a trace of mist lingering over the horizon. Then I looked down.

  A man was working his way along the rocks, a dozen feet above the waves. His head was bare, a shock of greying red hair blowing about in the wind, the brightest object in sight against the dark grey of his overcoat and darker grey of the wet boulders below. His sideways progress was purposeful, undelayed by any consideration but the safest place for his hands and feet. Whatever he’d climbed down after, he’d either already found it, or decided it was lost. I did not even entertain the possibility that he was there for sport, a dare, or drunken whim: A man his age did not launch himself into danger for no good reason. And his companion, the mechanic with the grey hat in his hand, showed even less sign of intoxication than the man picking his deliberate way along the hazardous surface.

  I raised my voice against the stiff wind. “What has he lost?”

  The man looked up, startled, although I could not tell if his surprise was at my words or at my unexpected presence breaking into his intent concentration. “What?” he asked, half shouting.

  “Your friend, what has he lost down there?”

  The mechanic shook his head and returned his gaze to the cliff-side. “I don’t know. And he ain’t a friend, just some guy paid me to drive him out here. Insurance, he said. Didn’t think he’d be pulling a stunt like this.” He shook his head again and began muttering; I moved closer to hear his words. “Hands me his hat and down he goes. Didn’t even have a rope in case he falls, and seeing the kind of shape he’s in, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he did fall, damned fool, and what’ll I tell the wife if I let the guy kill himself down there? Shoulda said no, call yourself a taxi, shoulda.” His voice drifted off and his eyes remained locked on the man who’d hired him, as if the strength of his gaze might be all that held the climber to the cliff face.

  In a few minutes, the man below had crept around the worst of the boulders, and appeared to have a straight, if laborious, scramble to the sandy beach. The mechanic stirred and slapped the felt hat against his leg, his back straightening with the beginnings of relief. “Well, I’ll go down and pick him up. Oughta charge him extra for the years he’s taken off me.”

  I stood at the cliff’s edge for a moment longer, then turned away and said to Flo, “Shall we go down there, too, and see what on earth that man was doing?”

  I climbed inside the car expectantly, giving them little chance to argue. Donny held Flo’s elbow across the uneven ground, as her ankle-strap sandals were more suited to urban pavements; her right hand remained firmly clamped to her hat.

  At the bottom of the hill Donny pulled into the lay-by near the bread van, and we got out to wait beside its driver. The climber emerged from the rocks, stumbling in exhaustion as he came up the beach. I revised my estimate of his age, and his condition, downward. His hair was thick and its grey premature—he wasn’t much older than Donny. But as the mechanic had said, this was not a well man, in no condition, I’d have said, to go clambering around dangerous rocks for a lost article. When he’d dropped heavily onto the floor of the van and put together a cigarette with shaking fingers, Donny reached around me to light it for him—less a gesture of good manners perhaps than for fear the man would set his coat alight if he tried to manipulate a match. The man accepted it, and after a moment’s silent appreciation, raised his eyes to give me a look that was oddly appraising, as if we’d met sometime before. I was sure we hadn’t, however—I’d have remembered that face.

  “That looked a rather dangerous climb,” I said mildly, by way of breaking the ice.

  “Not something I’d do for fun,” he said dismissively.

  So the gentleman did not care for amusing repartee; very well, I too would be blunt. “So why were you doing it? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  He was not interested in giving out any information, but I had often found that by handing over a revelation of my own it served to, as it were, prime the pump.

  So I told him that someone I knew had died there, and with that his words began to flow.

  It seemed that he was an insurance investigator looking into a death claim that might have been faked. It also seemed that this corner was infamous as a killer of motorcars.

  Indeed.

  He finished his cigarette, and by the looks of it the driver’s flask, then with a tip of the grey fedora he climbed into the back of the van. The other man slammed the door behind him and hurried around to the driver’s side; in moments he had the van turned around and headed back north.

  Flo held out a packet of something in my direction. “You want a piece of chewing gum, Mary?”

  “Thanks, no,” I said, and she helped herself, folding the stick into her pretty mouth. “Well, can we go now? It’s too windy to smoke and I’m freezing to death standing here.”

  “I was thinking we might go back to Serra Beach and have a drink or something.”

  “Back? Mary, we’re running late as it is. And it’s a pig to drive a strange road in the dark. Wouldn’t you say, Donny?”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” he said, but we could both hear the doubt in his voice. “If it’s a jolt you want, I’ve got my flask.”

  Body-temperature gin was not what I needed at the moment. “As I said, I’m happy to take over the driving,” I told him, but was not much surprised when I received the same response I’d got when I’d made the offer out in front of the St Francis: a polite and disbelieving smile. Clearly to Donny’s mind, “girls” didn’t drive unless there wasn’t a man around to do that job.

  The van had reached the tight curve at the top of the hill, and disappeared around it. My thoughts followed it for a few moments, but I decided that yes, the episode had been slightly odd, but it could hardly be judged as ominous: As coincidences go, this one was scarcely worth noting.

  “Okay,” I told my companions, resigning myself to the backseat again. “Let’s keep going.”

  Flo bundled herself back into her fur rug as Donny worked the starter and put the powerful car into gear. Another motor was parked at the far end of the little beach, I noticed as we drove past; a closed Pierce-Arrow, about as far from Donny’s blue monster as could be imagined, with a bored-looking driver and half-shut curtains in the passenger compartment: old lady come to the beach for a Sunday drive, I diagnosed. No more ominous than finding a Fresno insurance agent hiring a local mechanic with a temporarily unemployed bread-delivery truck. I was, I realised, looking for something—anything—to distract me from the empty sensation that had been growing since we had left San Francisco.

  And even before that—what else would explain my having asked two perfect strangers to
accompany me to the Lodge? When I’d telephoned to Flo the previous morning, I had only meant to tell her that I wouldn’t be joining the Monday party she’d talked about, but in the process of telling her where I was going, I’d somehow ended up inviting her. And then she suggested that Donny could drive us, and—I’d had qualms the instant I hung up the earpiece.

  I told myself that, if their presence became too much of a strain, I could as easily send them back and hire a car to take me when I was ready.

  I did not know why the death of Dr Ginzberg was hitting me as hard as it was. Yes, the woman had been an important influence at a vulnerable time in my life, but that was ten years past, and during that time weeks, even months might go by without my so much as thinking of her. Still, hitting me it was.

  Looking back over the previous two days, I had to be grateful to Holmes for having pulled me out of Friday’s deep funk, first by dumping me into a hot bath and then force-feeding me tea and conversation.

  However, there is a drawback to allowing Holmes to involve himself in a project, particularly when he is bored to begin with—for example, following a long and tedious ocean crossing: The machinery of his mind cannot bear to run without engaging, so that he tends to adopt hobbyhorses.

  Even before my emotional collapse on Friday, the minor conundra surrounding the house and the death of my parents had shown every sign of becoming his latest project, into which he had thrown himself with all the intensity that he would have given to a crucial case of international relations. There was no point whatsoever in telling him that the mystery of the house-breaking was of less import to me than the eternal mystery of why a woman cannot buy a pair of shoes that fit: His teeth had seized the bit, and he would run with his chosen investigation until it was either solved or had reached an insoluble dead-end.