The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars

by Anthony Boucher

  “How?”

  “Well—supposing A kills B and then makes off with the corpse. People hear a shot, find blood and signs of a row; but both A and B are missing. Maybe the stupid authorities—that’s Finch and me—think B killed A and set out a dragnet for the wrong man while A gets away clear.”

  “It sounds too much like algebra. When you start calling people A and B, right away you expect them to divide up their apples.”

  “I thought you said no heckling. But that’s no good either, because whoever A might be, Maureen knows who B was and A knows that she knows. And that goes no matter how you figure it. You might run off with a body if you wanted to leave a confusion as to the time of death—it might be a question of survivorship; or if you wanted to make it appear that the murder had happened someplace else—someplace you couldn’t possibly have been. But why? And, for the matter of that, how? How could any one of those people have had time to go wandering about with a corpse tucked underneath his arm? Except perhaps Ridgly—the boy that wants me to suspect him. Anybody else would have had to have an outside accomplice. And I don’t,” Jackson added plaintively, “I don’t like accomplices.”

  “Andy!” Judith exclaimed suddenly. “I know I’m just supposed to be listening to you but I can’t help it—I just had an idea myself. Supposing it wasn’t a corpse?”

  “Wasn’t a corpse?” This inspiration hit Jackson in the midst of a swig of beer and resulted in some mildly spectacular gurgling.

  “No. Supposing the shot didn’t kill Worth—just stunned him. Shock, you know. So then the murderer—or A, if you must have it that way, though X has more menace to it—then the murderer carries him off to where he can finish the murder leisurely and efficiently.”

  Regretfully Jackson shook his head. “Sorry, Judith. Nice going, but two big objections. First the time element. If your X had that much leisure after the crime, he can’t have been anyone in that house; and if so, how did he get in? Second, the girl saw the wound, and we’ve got to accept her story unless she’s X herself. The bullet went straight into the heart. No, we come right back to the same thing: if you know there was a witness who saw who was killed, how he was killed, when he was killed, and where he was killed, why the sweet hell do you steal the body?”

  “Maybe he didn’t think there was a witness. Maybe he thought he’d killed the girl, too.”

  “If he’d meant to kill her, would he have stopped at a crack on the skull when he had a gun in his hand? And then carefully stolen one corpse while he left the other there for us to find? No. There’s no sensible answer to this unless—” He finished his beer, licked the foam from his lips, and murmured “—unless”—again with a tensely rising inflection. Then suddenly he burst forth with most unwonted excitement. “Judith, my dear, you’re marvelous. What would I do without you? What would the Los Angeles Police Department do without you?”

  Judith recoiled slightly. She could hardly be blamed. “Why, what have I done?”

  “I think,” said Lieutenant Jackson—“mind you, I guarantee nothing—but I think that you’ve found Stephen Worth.”

  Sergeant Watson, at this moment, was making himself comfortable for the night. He dragged the most promising chair from the living room out into the hall and placed it between the stairs and the front door. On the telephone table, within easy reach, he set a package of Lifesavers, a copy of Dread Stories, and the thermos of black coffee which Mrs. Hudson had prepared for him. Two of his charges had left 221B (Finch had instructed him that they were to go as they pleased, but that anyone entering was to be held for questioning); but upstairs he could hear the everyday noises of the other three getting ready for bed.

  The Sergeant didn’t know quite why he was there. Murderers didn’t repeat themselves so soon, not if they had any sense. The current issue of his favorite pulp promised to be much more exciting than anything that might happen at 221B that night. He cast an appreciative eye over the luscious blonde on the cover, who was about to be bloodily shredded by an apparatus suggesting the collaboration of the Marquis de Sade with Rube Goldberg, and opened to Bride for the Seventh Zombie.

  “Sergeant!” It was the high voice of Harrison Ridgly. Clothed in the apogee of Sirrah-styled dressing gowns, he stood on the stairs, taut and nervous.

  Reluctantly Sergeant Watson laid Dread Stories to one side. “What’s the matter?”

  “Will you please help me make a search? My automatic has disappeared.”

  “What a strange lot of men the Irregulars are!” Maureen observed to Drew Furness as they drove along Sunset.

  “I suppose they are. I’d never thought of it before all this.”

  “Tell me, Drew. How on earth did you ever happen to—?”

  He smiled. “You mean how did anyone as ordinary and prosaic as I am happen to be chosen in such a group?”

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that. But tell me.”

  “Even an academic man has his lighter side. English professors, in particular, grow weary of composing learned dissertations upon minutely insignificant points in order to make immortal contributions to human knowledge—and incidentally to assure themselves of a promotion in the department. In such a vein of weariness some two years ago, I amused myself by writing a short article clarifying, by the best research methods, the hitherto unsolved problem of the nomenclature of the brothers Moriarty. I wrote it, as you might say, with a dead pan, and sent it in to the JEGPH.”

  “To the which?”

  “The JEGPH—The Journal of English and Germanic Philology—an invaluable scholarly publication which the layman, I fear, would find intolerably dreary. That feeling, I may add, is not necessarily confined to the layman. My ill-advised article was, of course, returned to me, and the head of the department delivered a gentle rebuke for my thoughtless irreverence. I redeemed myself with a monograph tracing the sources of William Ireland’s pseudo-Shakespearean Vortigern, and thought no more of the matter. But in some way word of my hoax had reached Christopher Morley, who wrote asking for a copy of my article. I gladly submitted it to him, and shortly received an invitation to join the Irregulars.”

  “That sounds like fun. Could I read it sometime?”

  “You mean you would really like to read my poor effort? Miss O’Breen …”

  “Look. I called you Drew, didn’t I? We might as well be consistent. Of course I’d like to read it; but what I’d really like now is some beer. And there, since the gods are benign, stands the Rathskeller. Pretty please, could we?”

  Drew Furness looked sadly out of place in a beer garden—even more so than he had seemed in the commissary at Metropolis. “I must do something about that,” Maureen thought, and was surprised at what she found herself thinking. She fished in her bag for a penny and tossed it in front of the abstracted academician.

  He looked down with a start. “What is that?”

  “For your thoughts.”

  “Oh—To be frank, Miss—”

  She made a reproving noise.

  “To be frank, Maureen, I was thinking about my aunt.”

  “You don’t think anybody believed that wild story, do you?”

  “No. No, I don’t. But there is just enough nucleus of—You see, Maureen, the fact is that my aunt—Oh, I suppose one might call it simply mild senility or some such polite name; but more and more I fear that she is not quite sane. She does have this absurd delusion of persecution. Who ‘They’ are heaven only knows; I’m sure Aunt Belle doesn’t But her obsession with Them continues to grow. I’m afraid even that someday I may have to—to take steps. It isn’t nice to think about. And to have it dragged out like this, even in such a ridiculously twisted form …”

  The waiter came just then, with a vast foaming stein for Maureen (who was that rare wonder of her sex—a woman who truly likes beer) and a small glass of white wine recklessly ordered by her escort. Maureen said nothing; something inhibited the easy Irish words of sympathy which she would normally have found. She could see how Drew’s nerves
would have been twisted by Dr. Bottomley’s story. She could see too how the rumor of a crazy relative would not help a man’s standing in academic life. She wanted to do something to rouse him from the melancholy preoccupation into which she could see him sinking.

  “Look,” she said. “Here’s a challenge for you as an Irregular. See that girl alone at the next table? Her man must have stepped in back for a minute. Now let’s see you deduce him for me before he returns.”

  Drew Furness smiled, almost as though he realized the motive for her question. But he accepted the challenge eagerly and turned to survey the table.

  In a moment he faced Maureen again, his lean face aglow with childlike pleasure. “There is nothing,” he said, “so good for the soul as the influence of the Master. You would laugh, Maureen, if I told you how dearly I love those Writings.”

  “That’s all very well. But tell me about the man.”

  “Oh, that.” He was being devilishly offhand. “He is between forty and fifty, well and expensively dressed, of average height but much more than average weight, with a round bald spot on the back of his head.”

  Maureen gasped. “Are you fooling?”

  “Of course not. That would be sacrilege. The description, I admit, is guesswork; but it follows from the deductions. Put together a blonde as pretty as that, wearing a large diamond which is manifestly not an engagement ring, and the band of a Corona Corona Corona in the ash tray; and you see that her escort must be an elderly and prosperous—ah—what I believe they call ‘sugar-daddy.’”

  “Nice,” said Maureen. “That is really pretty.”

  “Elementary,” said Drew Furness.

  At this point the missing man returned to the next table. He was Detective Lieutenant A. Jackson.

  Chapter 17

  “So that,” Maureen concluded chortling, as the two couples gathered at one larger table, “is the correct picture, according to Holmesian deduction, of you, Lieutenant.”

  Jackson laughed heartily. “Beautiful job, Furness.”

  “But good heavens, Lieutenant,” Drew Furness protested, “you don’t mean to tell me that you smoke Corona Corona Coronas?”

  “On my salary? I should say not. The waiter forgot to empty the ash tray, that’s all.”

  “And the young lady’s diamond?”

  Judith smiled. “From Woolworth’s.”

  A mightily crestfallen Drew Furness sipped his wine. “What sort of an establishment is this?” he asked. “I’ve never been here before.”

  Jackson shrugged. “That’s a question I wouldn’t mind knowing the exact answer to. Some things about it you can see at a glance. It’s got a pretty sort of fake arbor effect, the four-piece orchestra plays dull American fox trots and first-rate Viennese waltzes, the floor’s small but good, and the beer is the best in town.”

  “It sounds pleasant.”

  “It is pleasant. But—”

  “But what?”

  “Mmm!” sighed Maureen. “Count of Luxemburg waltz. Want to try it, Drew?”

  Furness was slipping back into his shell. “I’m afraid not. I am really exceedingly inept. Out of consideration for your shoes I should refrain.”

  “There!” She turned to Judith. “What do you do with a man like that?”

  Judith grinned. “Andy used to pull that on me when I wanted to try a polka or something fancy. I just said, ‘Yes, it is easier to get a new man than new shoes,’ and he generally gave in.”

  “All right, I’ll try.” Maureen looked formally forbidding as she announced: “Mr. Furness, it is easier to get a new man than new shoes.”

  Drew Furness looked at her strangely—not at her so much as though he were looking in a mirror for the first time. Then he said, with a nearly successful attempt at a worldly swagger, “I fear, Miss O’Breen, that you’ll have to be satisfied with the man you’ve got, and deuce take your shoes.”

  And off they went to the floor, as Maureen winked at Judith over her escort’s shoulder.

  “There’s a sample,” said Jackson resignedly. “You see the kind of suspects I’ve got in this case? A lot of overeducated screwballs. God knows I’ve taken some ribbing on the force because I’m a college man myself; but I’d sooner handle the crummiest drifters on Skid Row than this mob.”

  “Didn’t you learn anything tonight?”

  “I told you their stories—five of the goddamnedest I’ve ever heard in all the evidence I’ve listened to, and I don’t see where we’re any further ahead than we were last night. This is what it all adds up to: everybody’s story digs up a piece of scandal about somebody else. Some of it—Furness’ half-mad aunt and John O’Dab’s ghostwriting—turns out to be true. Some of it—Federhut’s spying and Ridgly’s murdering his sister—is fantastic. The business about Bottomley and the nurse in the rest home I just don’t get.

  “And there’s only two answers: either everybody took this opportunity to reveal ‘accidentally’ something about one of the others, which is pretty coincidental; or somebody planned the whole set of adventures. It must be that; they’re too neat to be just a happenstance. Every story has two Holmes angles—a paralled to one of the written stories and a tie-in with the name of one of the unwritten.”

  “Double, double, Doyle, and trouble,” Judith contributed.

  “‘And trouble’ is right; everyone also gives away a secret, or pretends to. Now who would arrange a scheme like that? I’ve got a pretty good idea that there’s only one possible …”

  “Oof!” Maureen gasped as she and her partner returned to the table. “You may be right about men and shoes, Judith; but shoes go on the budget.”

  “Please forgive me,” Furness ventured stiffly. “You will recall that I gave you fair warning—”

  “Hush now. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. But I’m going to give you some private lessons in slippers before we venture out again—which is taking a lot for granted, isn’t it? Or is it?” she added pensively.

  “You know,” Furness replied, “I’m not sure that it is.”

  “I think I’ve just had a gallant speech made to me.” She let her hand rest on the professor’s for a moment, then turned to Jackson. “Guess who we saw?” She felt Furness’ hand wince slightly at the who and instantly withdrew her own.

  “How should I know? I don’t know all your little friends.”

  “This is one of your friends, and not so little. Over there in the corner. He didn’t see us.”

  Jackson craned his neck and saw the man. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  Judith craned too, but it didn’t help. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Another of our menagerie. Otto Federhut.”

  “What’s so surprising about that, Andy? He’s a German, isn’t he? Wouldn’t he naturally come here?”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Jackson slowly. “Nowadays there are two kinds of Germans.”

  At 221B the blonde heroine had been reduced to one single last garment which barely covered her firm, high, rounded, quivering breasts. On the floor at her feet lay the mangled and desecrated body of the girl who had succumbed to the unearthly lust of the sixth zombie. No garment save the flowing red of blood covered her high, quivering, rounded, firm breasts.

  With a sinister leer on his scarred face, Dr. Vladimir Radin pulled the switch which poured the vivifying current into the seventh zombie. The monster lurched awkwardly to its feet and stumbled across the laboratory. His clumsy hands tore the last thin garment from the heroine’s rounded, firm, quivering, high breasts.

  In agony the hero strained at his bonds, forced to watch this abominable creature defile with his slavering lips the quivering, rounded …

  Sergeant Watson heard a rap at the door. In an instant his mind had left Dr. Radin’s laboratory for the more prosaic setting of the hallway of 221B. The Sergeant might not be bright, but he was dutiful. He took his gun from the holster, pulled back the safety catch, and slowly advanced to the door. As he neared it, the rap was repeated—this time in a
sort of rhythm.

  Sergeant Watson smiled and relaxed, but he kept the door on the latch as he opened it.

  “It’s all right, Watson,” came Lieutenant Finch’s voice. “You can let me in.”

  Watson unlatched the door. “Anything wrong?”

  “Not a thing, Sergeant. It’s just that I—This sounds haywire, but I got a hunch. Something bothered me. I kept saying to myself, ‘You’d better take a look at 221B.’ ‘Horse feathers!’ I’d say right back at myself. But it went right on worrying me until I couldn’t stand it. So I took the fifty thousand dollars, and here I am.”

  “Nothing wrong here,” said the Sergeant.

  “What happened at the session tonight?”

  “Nothing much. They told a lot of funny stories. I don’t mean funny stories, Lieutenant. I mean funny stories. You know, funnylike. Then the one with the beard got mad and went off to his room, and the dark nasty one got drunk and tried to start a fight until Jackson told him he’d better go to bed. I guess that sort of broke up the party.”

  “They’re all here now?”

  “All but the German and the professor. You said I could let them go if they wanted to.”

  “I know. We’ve got no legal right to detain them, and we might get into trouble with Metropolis. But I hoped they’d stick around anyway. Well, it can’t be helped. And you’re sure nothing happened?”

  “Not a thing, Lieutenant.”

  Finch smiled at his own foolishness. “This’ll teach me to play hunches. Well, Sergeant,” his eye lit on the pulp cover, and the smile broadened, “enjoy yourself.” He turned back to the door.

  “Just a minute. There was something. The worst one—what’s his name?”

  “I take it you mean Harrison Ridgly III?” Finch’s tone was almost as unpleasant as Ridgly’s own.

  “That’s it. Ridgly. He came down and said his automatic was missing and we searched all the rooms, only we didn’t find it.”