Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  I joined Flo and Donny at the car, but before I got in, I turned to study the garage and its adjoining café.

  Something was missing here; either that, or I was missing something. Trim building, petrol pumps, big gum tree growing around one side, a general air of prosperity; the air smelt of eucalyptus oil, the sea, petrol, and frying meat from the café; the sounds were the chugging of the pump, the cries of sea-birds, voices in conversation, a dog somewhere barking in play; I couldn’t put my finger on what should have been there but was not.

  “Do you see something missing?” I asked my companions. When they did not answer, I glanced around and saw their expressions, which were frankly concerned. Belatedly, I realised that my peremptory commands of the morning, given without explanation, had left them wondering as to my stability.

  “It’s okay,” I said with a rather forced laugh. “I know I’ve been a bit lunatic this morning, but really, I simply remembered that there was something I needed to do in the city, and hadn’t made other arrangements. Sorry I’ve been so pushy. And here, well, I’m trying to remember what it is.”

  Both of them dutifully turned to study the front of the garage. Donny cleared his throat and suggested, “These kinds of places sometimes have signs standing out in the road,” but that did not feel right. With a sigh of resignation I climbed into my assigned seat.

  My thoughts were so distracting that all the way back up to the city, I was scarcely aware that I was not the one driving.

  Back at the St Francis, I invited them in for a cup of tea. They hesitated, then Flo said that she knew it was early but she’d really like a drink, and so they left their car with the valet and came in. The waiter brought their “tea” in long-stemmed glasses with an olive in each, although I stuck to the more traditional English stimulant. I excused myself for a moment to go up to the room, but there was no sign of Holmes, and the only message was from Mr Braithwaite at the hospital, giving me the information I’d asked for regarding Dr Ginzberg’s death. I read it, noticed the house keys on top of the dressing-table and pocketed them, then went back downstairs.

  I made an effort to redeem myself and be friendly and relaxed, but when Flo and Donny left, amidst a flurry of affectionate cries and kisses worthy of her mother, I felt a great burden depart with them. I waved them away, thought about the empty room upstairs, thought too about the possibility that Holmes could return at any time, and asked the man for a taxi: If the keys were here, Holmes was not at the house, and I could have some quiet in which to meditate.

  During the short trip into Pacific Heights, I considered what I would do with the remainder of the day. After I had absorbed some silence, I would go to police headquarters and locate the officer who had investigated Dr Ginzberg’s death, whom the note identified as James Roley. Then I would locate the bread company whose van that false insurance agent had hired, find out at what garage their van had spent the previous day, and hunt down the man through the garage’s mechanic.

  The taxi stopped in front of the house, and I paid the driver and got out, walking briskly up the walk and working the key without hesitation, then locked the door behind me.

  I took one step, and froze: There were lights in the house, and movement.

  My hands dove for my hand-bag of their own accord, slapping at the clasp and fumbling for the cool touch of the revolver before Holmes appeared at the far end of the hall-way. I straightened, allowing the weight to slip back inside, and gave a startled laugh as I started down the hall.

  “Why didn’t you bring the keys with you, Holmes? Did your pick-locks need practice, or did you have a copy—”

  My voice strangled at the sight of the well-dressed figure sitting before the library’s fireplace: legs as awkwardly long as Holmes’ own, skeletal fingers on the chair’s arm, an incongruously healthy head of red hair going grey at the temples: a man I’d last seen driving away from the beach at the base of the cliffs.

  In an instant, with no fumbling, the gun was out and level. “Holmes, move away from that man. He’s working for the people who killed my parents.”

  Holmes did not move, and I glanced briefly at him, keeping the gun steady.

  Why the devil was my husband positively grinning—and with what looked remarkably like relief?

  BOOK FOUR

  Holmes

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The previous morning, Tuesday, Holmes had been up long before dawn. With Russell safely retired to the lake-house for another thirty-six hours, Holmes was free to sit amongst his cushions behind closed curtains and drink his morning coffee in solitude, raising as much of a stink as he wished with the black and reeking tobacco he preferred for times of ratiocination.

  The question was not so much a matter of whether or not he could convince Hammett to work a play of deception on his erstwhile employer, as whether he should.

  The note sent to Hammett by the woman with the Southern accent had said that she would telephone to him on Tuesday morning at eight o’clock. By that time Hammett would need to decide: Should he openly decline her offer of employment and arrange the return of her money, or use the opportunity to lay a trap—feeding her false information, stressing the importance of a meeting?

  Clearly, the trap was desirable, but pressing this ex-Pinkerton to be the active cause of the woman’s downfall was fraught with delicate ethical considerations. As Hammett had put it, “If I get the better of a guy who’s been cheating me, I’ve got no problems with helping myself to his wallet. But if I take his job and then sell him to someone else, that’s worse than stealing, it’s plain dirty. A verbal contract’s still a contract, and it’s got to be broken before it can be ignored.”

  Holmes did not know if he ought to force the deception on him. Doing so ran the risk of alienating Hammett completely, having him simply declare a curse on both their houses and go home to the Underwood on his kitchen table.

  Actually, Holmes reflected, knocking the first pipe out and reaching for the tobacco, on closer consideration the question might actually be whether he could convince the man to turn coat.

  In the end, the previous evening he had simply presented his case for bringing the lady—or even her agent—into the open, that she might be located, identified, and assessed. Then he had left Hammett to make up his own mind.

  Holmes tried to console himself with the idea that, even were Hammett to decline the job, she would have to venture into the open to retrieve her cash. Of course, if she had any sense, she’d write the money off rather than risk exposure; whether or not she did so would in itself tell him a great deal.

  When he had exhausted the possibilities of Hammett’s telephone conversation, Holmes removed his mind from that and turned his thoughts to his father-in-law’s will, his mother-in-law’s garden journals, and the tantalising words on the burnt scraps of paper.

  The hands of the clock moved with agonising slowness. Holmes sat, motionless for long periods on the cushions, his hooded eyes glittering in the dim light of the room, and waited for his telephone to ring.

  At sixteen minutes after the hour, the device emitted the strangled burble that was its mechanical equivalent of a throat-clearing, and he snatched it up before it could go on to its ring.

  “Yes,” he demanded.

  “She ’phoned, right on the dot of eight,” Hammett’s voice told him. “I told her I couldn’t take the case.”

  “I see.” Holmes was not surprised.

  “She wasn’t happy about it. Cursed me in a couple of languages, and I had to raise my voice to ask her where I should send her money. She finally heard me, said I should keep it for a while, that maybe I’d change my mind. Said it like a threat. So I had to tell her that, if I didn’t hear from her by Friday morning, I was going to tack the envelope up to the entranceway of the apartment building and leave it there for anyone to help themselves to.”

  “What was her response?”

  “She just said she’d be in touch and hung up. With a bang. When I got the exchange
, the girl said that the call had been put through from a public office on the other side of town, but when I called there, the woman had left already. She’s pretty good at this.”

  “I expected nothing less. Hammett, it might be a good idea—”

  “Yeah, I know, I’ll need to be back here before my wife comes home with the kid for lunch, just in case we have a visitor with a gun. But I think I’ll use some of your money to send them both down to Santa Cruz for a couple of days. She’s been talking about going. Once they’re out of the way I’ll be yours for what you need.”

  “You might also make sure you don’t leave any notes concerning the case lying about in the open.”

  “I’ll do that. So, what do you want me to do this morning?”

  “How far did you get on the Ginzberg death?”

  “Found the man in charge; he was tied up with a fresh case.”

  “I’d like to have something to give Russell on that when she gets back tomorrow. See what you can do with it.”

  “Right you are. You need me, I’m at police headquarters ’til noon, then back here.”

  “And I shall check in with the hotel during the day, to ask if any messages have been left me,” Holmes told him, then, “Hammett?”

  “Still here.”

  “I was thinking of placing an advert in one of the papers, asking for information regarding the delivery of an envelope to your address. That lad might be able to tell us something.”

  “Are you asking my opinion?”

  “I suppose I am,” Holmes said, rather surprised at the fact.

  “Then I’d say not. Later, maybe, but doing it now, you’d risk scaring them off. You’d also be risking their getting to the kid first.”

  “You feel they could remove him?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “I’m afraid I agree with you, Hammett. Thank you.” Holmes set the earpiece back on its hook, and pulled back the curtains to let the day in. He leant his shoulder against the window-frame, staring unseeing down at the street, weighing his options—or, rather, weighing his opponent’s options. His picture of her was more blank space than anything else, but he did not have the impression that the woman had unlimited resources. Her efforts had been too focussed for that, and her fury at Hammett’s refusal indicated that she had rather a lot tied up in him—although her anger could as easily have been due to the waste of time rather than money. However, there was also the fact of her overgenerous payment to Hammett: In Holmes’ experience, someone with a great deal of money was less likely to misjudge the cost of a thing, or of a person.

  All in all, he thought that the woman’s resources could well be somewhat stretched, and she would want that money back. He considered his available stock of Irregulars: Hammett was not only noticeable but known to the woman; Long would stand out anywhere outside Chinatown; the lad Tyson could not be trusted to keep to the shadows—he would want to sail in, guns blazing.

  No, there was nothing for it: time to recruit.

  Holmes went to the trunks that had been stashed, as he’d insisted, not in the hotel store-room but against the back wall of the bedroom. He unearthed the one he wanted and, sorting through the layers of clothing Oriental and Western, eventually put together a costume that would be unremarkable in the part of town he intended to visit. The lift-man looked at him askance, but said nothing.

  His first task was to determine if a surveillance of the Hammett apartment was even a viable proposition—watching the front door of an apartment building was of little use without a detailed description of the quarry. He sought out the delivery alley that ran in back of Hammett’s building, and was gratified to find that the fire-escape doors possessed small windows at each level. By the judicious rearrangement of dust-bins and the hook of his walking-stick, he scrambled onto the metal escape and moments later was looking straight down the hall-way at Hammett’s door.

  Humming a tune under his breath, he dropped out of the heights and went out to recruit a platoon of Irregulars.

  The modern fashion for universal compulsory education had put a distinct cramp into the style of a consulting detective. In his Baker Street days, he’d been regularly able to summon a group of street arabs to serve at his beck and call, but now—and particularly in this democratic republic of America—all his most valuable resources were parked behind desks, chafing at the restrictions and wasting their most productive years while their heads were filled with mathematical formulae they would never use and the names of cities they would never visit.

  Fortunately, the truant officer who worked Hammett’s neighbourhood did not appear to be among the most stringent. Three streets away from Hammett’s apartment, Holmes heard the sound of children’s voices from down an alley. He sauntered down the dim recesses between two buildings until he could see their figures, gathered in a lump against a brick wall. Then he halted, leaning against the wall and taking out his cigarettes. He lit one, to ensure that he had their attention, and they went silent for a moment while they considered the necessity of flight.

  Children, Holmes had found, were like wild dogs: Liable to slink away at the merest threat when encountered in their solitary state, in a pack they were curious, intelligent, potentially vicious, affectionate to their friends, and immensely loyal to the pack leader. Sure enough, before the cigarette was halfway down a small child was standing in front of him, just far enough away to dance out of reach of the walking-stick. Holmes studied the end of his cigarette, and stifled a yawn.

  “Say, mister, what do you want?”

  Holmes turned his head as if noticing the child for the first time. “Are you the boss-kid here?” he asked.

  “Nah,” the young scout admitted.

  “Then my business isn’t with you,” he told the infant, and went back to leaning against the wall.

  The child returned to his pack; whispers gave way to a sharp command; the sounds of their game resumed—penny pitching, Holmes heard, rather than dice or cards. He came to the end of his cigarette, ground it out under his heel, and leisurely lit another; it wasn’t until the third time his match flared that the pack leader’s curiosity overcame him.

  He was a lad of about ten years, by no means the tallest of the half-dozen children, and not quite the oldest. His heritage owed something to both Ireland and Mexico, but he’d have fit right in among the Whitechapel urchins Holmes had known for so many years: scuffed shoes, too-short trousers, too-long coat, and a tweed cap worn at a rakish angle. Holmes had to conceal his smile with the cigarette, while waiting for the boy to speak.

  “What do you want?” the ruler of the alleyway demanded.

  “I need a job done,” Holmes told him. “I thought maybe you’d have an older brother who’d be interested.”

  As he’d anticipated, the boy ignored the open acknowledgement that he was the pack’s leader and fell for the implication that he was not man enough for the “job.” He drew himself up to his full four feet and bristled.

  “I got two older brothers. One’s a drunk and one’s in prison. Which one do you want?”

  “By the sound of it, neither of them. I need someone who’s wise enough not to fall into a bottle and bright enough not to get caught when he does something slick. How smart are you?”

  “Smarter’n you, mister, if you think I’ll fall for that guff.”

  “Up to you. I need a job done, and I’m willing to pay, but if you’re not interested, I’ll find someone else.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “The kind of job that takes brains and the ability to keep his friends under control.”

  The boy looked at the friends in question, standing in a knot just a little further down the alley. Then he looked back at Holmes, and took a couple of steps closer. “Like I said—what kind of a job?”

  The negotiations that followed would have done a wigged barrister proud, but in the end, Holmes had bought the day’s services of the boy’s pack: keeping constant watch over the Hammett door, running a messenger to
the St Francis if anyone came to the apartment, and following discreetly when the intruder left.

  “You’ll need to be wary of the boot-leggers on the ground floor,” he warned his new lieutenant. “They may stand watch in the evenings. And if an intruder comes, you are not to approach him, or her as the case may be. You will follow, at a distance, for as long as you can. If she—or he—gets into a taxi, don’t try to run behind or draw attention to yourself by trying to hail a taxi of your own. Just get the cab’s number and we can later find where the driver went. Er, I am correct in assuming you can all read numbers?” The scornful snort the lad gave out reminded Holmes of Russell; it also satisfied him, and he went on. “If she goes into a shop, one of you go around the back to make sure—”

  “Mister,” the leader interrupted with infinite disdain, “we know all this. My uncle runs a betting shop, and when one of his customers don’t pay up, sometimes he asks us to help lay hands on the guy. You’re doin’ what he calls ‘Teaching granny to suck eggs,’ whatever that means. Sounds disgusting, but that’s what you’re doin’.”

  Holmes beamed at the boy and reached out a hand to pat the disreputable tweed cap, then changed the gesture to the offer of a hand-shake, which the lad eyed curiously, then accepted. “You give me hope for the coming generation,” he said. “You needn’t continue all night, as the man who lives there will be at home, but if nothing has happened today, I’d like you back here tomorrow. Same rates. I’ll come back here first thing in the morning, to pay you what I owe you and receive your report.” He handed over the agreed-to retainer of two dollars and left the pack to their work.

  At the end of the alleyway, he stopped to change his neck-tie for one less gaudy, reverse his coat so that its staid side was facing out, snap the brim of his hat down into dignity, and brush the dust from his trouser-legs and shoes.

  He entered Chinatown with the appearance of just another stray from the financial district, looking for a late lunch.