by Dan Simmons
In a private moment before the group assembled, Holmes had asked Drummond if he thought that Chicago had the honor of hosting the most corrupt police department in the country. Finally Chief Drummond had nodded. “Now that the last of the Tweed ring is out of New York and the new corrupters haven’t yet taken their place, Chicago is the most corrupt. It runs in their veins like the booze they consume. But there are good men on the force there and very few out of the hundreds who’d aid and abet in the murder of a president.”
Holmes had nodded.
Now Chief O’Malley said loudly, “What do you mean when you say that the Chicago Police Department won’t be responsible for President Cleveland’s safety?”
“From the door of the Lexington Hotel until he reaches the Exposition grounds—the so-called White City down in Jackson Park—the C.P.D. will be the responsible agency,” said Holmes. “But once the procession enters the sacrosanct grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the group directly responsible for the safety of the President of the United States—not to mention the forty or fifty other dignitaries there that day, the President of Brazil, I’m told, being the people’s favorite—shifts to the Columbian Guard.”
“What the hell is the Columbian Guard?” asked O’Malley.
Drummond answered, “It’s the private police force that Daniel Burn-ham put together just for the World’s Fair.”
“No Chicago police?” said Moore.
“None,” said Secret Service Chief Drummond. “On the fairgrounds, the Columbian Guard have the power to detain, interrogate, and arrest—there’s a nice little Columbian Guard jail just off the Midway Plaisance, but mostly of course they will be rounding up lost children, giving directions, intervening before private drunkenness becomes a public problem, and being courteous to hundreds of thousands of customers who’ve come to the Exposition to have a wonderful time.”
“How many of these Columbian Guardsmen are there?” asked Vice-President Stevenson.
Holmes answered, “Just over two thousand, Mr. Vice-President.”
“Two thousand!” exploded Washington P.D. Major and Superintendent Moore. “That’s an army.”
“That, I believe,” said Holmes, “was Daniel Burnham’s intention. The so-called White City will be electrified far beyond the current dreams of Chicago, New York, Washington, or any other major American city. Pleasant street lights and glowing electrical ‘lanterns’ and radiant store fronts and searchlights and lighting from huge windows and path lights illuminating more than six hundred acres of World’s Fairgrounds—combined with the highest percentage of trained police officers, uniformed and plainclothes alike, to the number of citizens—will make the White City the safest urban environment in the world.”
“As long as it’s safe for President Cleveland during the hours he shall be there,” said Vice-President Stevenson.
“What kind of weapons do these Columbian Guardsmen carry?” asked Moore.
Holmes smiled. “Most of them carry a whistle and a short sword in a scabbard.”
* * *
Henry Adams came into his study wearing his dressing gown and slippers. He frowned at the detective, who remained seated. “I see you’ve made yourself comfortably at home, Mr. Holmes.”
Holmes smiled and nodded.
“And no doubt taken the time to ransack my drawers and cabinets.”
“Only to the extent of pouring myself a drink for the long wait, Mr. Adams. An excellent whiskey.”
“I hadn’t planned on ever seeing you again,” said Adams.
Holmes nodded.
Adams went around to his side of the desk, hesitating as if debating whether he would acknowledge Holmes’s presence more by sitting or by standing. He sat.
“I thought that I had made it abundantly clear at our last meeting, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams, “that it was our last meeting. That we have nothing more to discuss, either in public or private.”
Holmes removed one of the small She-was-murdered cards from his pocket and set it on Adams’s green leather desk blotter.
“This has nothing to do with me,” said Adams. He tore the card into shreds and dropped them into his wastebasket.
“Ned Hooper hired me to find out who was sending out these cards to you and survivors of the Five Hearts each year, and since he’s now also dead, you were the closest relative, through your late wife, to whom I could report,” said Holmes.
“By your own admission,” said Adams, “you met my wife’s late brother for less than an hour some two years ago. That hardly gives you the right, Mr. Holmes, to call Edward ‘Ned’ as his family and friends did. If you must refer to him, you may use ‘Mr. Fowler.’ ”
Holmes nodded. “I was paid by Mr. Fowler to use my skills to discover who was sending these cards—and also, in his very words, ‘To see if Clover actually died by her own hand or by some means more sinister’—so in Mr. Fowler’s absence, I shall report to you.”
Adams had turned his face toward the windows but now he shot a glance at Holmes. “You know who’s been sending those cards the last seven years?”
“Yes.”
A charred log collapsed in Adams’s small fireplace. Even on warming spring days, he evidently kept a small fire burning in his study. Holmes wondered if the widower historian suffered from a permanent chill.
After a stretch of silence, Adams snapped, “Well, are you going to tell me or not?”
“No,” said Holmes.
Henry Adams’s face flushed even while his lips grew whiter. “You said that because your client, Ned, took his own life in December, you were duty bound to report to me. Now you say you won’t tell me the identity of this person who has been hounding and harassing the four of us these past six years? Such insolence! If I were a few years younger, Mr. Holmes . . .”
Holmes nodded as if he could see such a prospect as scholarly Henry Adams giving the detective a beating. “I’ve deduced who the person is who typed and sent those cards,” he said, “but I require a private, personal interview with that person. Such an interview isn’t possible right now, but will be carried out by the first week in May.”
“In other words,” spat Adams, “you’re guessing!”
“I never guess,” said Sherlock Holmes. He’d steepled his long, pale fingers under his chin and his gaze seemed fixed on something very far away. His expression, which so often seemed impassive when not in the throes of excitement or strong intellectual emotion, now looked stern. That sternness was not directed at Henry Adams, but it still made the historian uneasy.
“I don’t suppose you’ve discovered anything about the rest of this ‘mystery’ of my poor wife’s death . . . which was never a mystery,” said Adams. It had been a clumsy sentence and Adams, the constant writer and consummate editor, frowned at it.
Holmes seemed to return from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “Oh, yes,” he said almost off-handedly, “I’ve confirmed beyond doubt that Clover . . . Mrs. Adams . . . was murdered.”
Adams’s bearded jaw dropped and, although he quickly shut his mouth and attempted to control his expression, it was thirty seconds or more before he could speak. “Murdered? How? By whom? And for what possible reason?”
“I expect to have the answer to all three of your new questions before the fortnight is out,” said Holmes. “As to the ‘how’, there is no doubt that her death resulted from the administration of arsenic from her own photographic developing liquids. But the question stays on the list because we’re not certain of how that poison was administered.”
“So, in truth, you’re still blindly guessing about everything,” said Adams.
“I never guess, sir.”
“Do you even have . . . what are they called in your cheap mystery tales? . . . suspects?”
“I know the murderer was one of three people,” said Holmes, “with your name being the third on that list of possibilities.”
“Me!” cried Adams, jumping to his feet. “You have the insulting, insufferable . . .”
Words failed him and Adams reached for his walking stick propped behind him.
“You had the time, the knowledge of and access to the poison, and, as for motives, murders of a spouse always have the most complicated, personal, and opaque of motives,” said Holmes. “In this case, everyone around you knows that your wife had always had a melancholy streak—she herself had written letters home during your long honeymoon in Egypt and elsewhere in which she admitted to her father that she’d been too . . . ‘overcome by my old nemesis of melancholy’ was how she put it, I believe . . . even to speak to you, her new husband, or to anyone else for almost two weeks. Such melancholy, always hovering nearby over the years, grows wearing on a spouse and you yourself have described how more deeply lost in unhealthy sadness she’d been for much of that last year after the death of her father in March of eighteen eighty-five.”
Henry Adams gritted his teeth so hard that the grinding of molars was louder than the cracklings of the fireplace. He lifted the heavy walking stick like a club, his knuckles white from the intensity of his grip.
Holmes did not stir or try to protect himself as Henry Adams leaned over the desktop toward him, the cane raised and shaking from the man’s fury. Holmes’s own stick was propped against another chair some six feet away. He made no motion toward it, but remained seated, his eyes on Adams’s face, his hands calmly folded on his lap.
Adams dropped the cane onto the Persian carpet and collapsed into his chair, slumping down and shielding his eyes with one hand. After a moment, he said, “You must know that I did not . . . kill . . . my beloved Clover.”
“Oh, I know you did not,” said Holmes, now resting his chin on his folded fingers, propping his elbows on the polished wooden arms of his chair. “But any competent police officer, much less a competent and ambitious district attorney, could have—and probably should have, since you were investigated so shallowly primarily due to your station in society and your wealth—ended with you condemned to the gallows by a jury of your peers.”
Adams’s jaw dropped again and this time he did not soon think to close his mouth. He peered through his fingers at Holmes the way a child might peep through her fingers at a possible monster in a dark closet.
“You had the time, you knew where Mrs. Adams kept her deadly arsenic, and no servants on duty that morning saw you leave for this sudden Sunday-morning appointment with your dentist. Since you never saw your dentist that morning, you could have been waiting half a block down the street along the park’s edge, waiting until you saw Rebecca Lorne come to your doorway. She was, in a sense, your alibi.”
“If you think all this,” rasped Adams, “then why do you not believe me to be guilty of this murder?”
Holmes walked over to the open secretary where the bottles were kept, replenished his Scotch whiskey, and poured a stiff drink of brandy for Adams, setting it in front of him on the desk rather than handing it to him.
“I know you are innocent not merely because of your obvious qualities,” said Holmes, “but because you did not see Rebecca Lorne waiting at the front door of your home, pondering whether to knock and go up, as you testified to the police. Rather, you saw Miss Lorne come rushing out of your home, flinging the door wide, in a state of near-hysteria. It had been she, not you, who first discovered Mrs. Adams’s body.”
“How do you know that?” demanded Adams and took a long drink of brandy.
“You yourself ran two blocks to your doctor’s home—and returned on the run with him—and Dr. Charles E. Hagner later reported to the press that the vial of potassium cyanide sat, still opened and venting its terrible fumes, on a table across the room from where Mrs. Adams’s body had fallen to the floor in front of her favorite chair, and that an empty water glass lay on the carpet beside her,” said Holmes. “Dr. Hagner also mentioned that Miss Rebecca Lorne was waiting in the room adjoining Mrs. Adams’s bedroom when the two of you arrived and that Miss Lorne was so upset that he had to administer a tranquilizing drug to her. The police report, done under the investigation of Lieutenant Hammond—who arrived with two men some twenty minutes after you and Hagner did but who remained only a few minutes before you demanded absolute isolation with your wife’s body—mentioned the position of the body and the vial of cyanide, now corked again, but made no mention of the water glass on the carpet.”
“The scene is forever branded into my brain,” said Adams, “but I remember no water glass on the floor.”
“The bottle of poison was on a table some distance from where Mrs. Adams had lain on the carpet before you carried her body to the couch,” said Holmes, tapping his lips with two steepled forefingers. “All agree on that. And yet there had been a spill of the chemical near where your wife’s body had been lying. Your housekeeper commented that the lethal liquid had discolored the edge of the carpet and a bit of the polished floor. Her people had cut the carpet’s nap and re-finished the floor-board to get rid of the stains, she said.”
Adams’s temples and cheeks grew flushed again. “My housekeeper had the temerity to talk to you about . . .”
Holmes held up both hands, palms outward. “There was not much of a police investigation, sir, but the servants did have to give statements to the police while you were in your darkest hours of mourning. I understand that you spent two days and nights alone with the body and did not later announce the time or fact of Mrs. Adams’s funeral on December nine so your surviving Three Hearts friends could attend. At any rate, this information about the stained carpet and floorboard were in Lieutenant Hammond’s notes.”
“What’s the importance of any of this?” shouted Adams.
“There was, lying near Mrs. Adams’s body, a water glass that had obviously been the vessel from which she drank the poison, still lying there when Dr. Hagner arrived with you,” said Holmes. “The stains on the carpet and floorboard must have come from the residue of the terrible liquid that remained in the glass when Mrs. Adams dropped it. Yet the glass was gone when Detective Hammond arrived about half an hour later.”
Holmes leaned forward, his gray eyes as piercing as a predator’s. “Someone removed that glass in that half-hour interim,” he said softly. “Your housekeeper, Mrs. Soames, told the police three days after the death that there were only eleven small water glasses in the cupboard off the kitchen where they were usually kept. The glass had come from a set of twelve.”
Adams finished the brandy. “Who? If not the servants, who would have removed the glass . . . the mythical glass I do not even remember seeing? The police?”
“They say they did not, sir.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t understand the significance of a water glass or . . . or the vial of cyanide,” managed Adams. “Why does it make any difference?”
“It would be easier to make someone drink from the glass than from a vial,” Holmes said.
Adams’s dark eyes seemed to recede in their sockets. “Make them drink? Someone might have forced Clover to drink that terrible, corrosive, painful, deadly poison?”
“Yes,” said Holmes. “More than that, there is the time involved. Were there usually water glasses left in her bedroom?”
“No,” said Adams, his voice totally flat. “Clover hated rings on the furniture.”
“In the adjoining bathroom?”
“No,” repeated Adams. “There are glasses in our bathrooms, but not those small water glasses. And Clover’s was . . . still there . . . when I looked in her bathroom some days later.”
“From the time you left to see your dentist to the time you turned around and came back because of the commotion Miss Lorne was making as she came out of your front door”—began Holmes and noticed when Adams did not interrupt or contradict him—“it would have been very difficult for Mrs. Adams to go downstairs through the annex to the kitchen where the water glasses were stored . . . and to avoid being noticed by Mrs. Ryan, your chief cook, who was working in the kitchen at the time . . . and then to carry it upstairs and then to walk the length of the second floor to her
darkroom and the special locked cupboard where she kept her photographic developing chemicals, then to return to her bedroom to take the poison.”
Adams shook his head like a man in a bad dream. “You’re suggesting that . . . someone else had carried up the glass and poison vial and was waiting somewhere upstairs, hiding nearby, listening, waiting for her to be alone even while I was talking to Clover before I left to see my dentist?”
“It is a distinct possibility,” said Holmes.
“And it must have been Rebecca Lorne, whom Clover liked and trusted and who I also relied upon in the days after . . . after . . .” rasped Adams. “It would have to be Rebecca Lorne because she would have been the only one who could have taken the glass between the visits of the doctor and the police lieutenant.”
“She almost certainly took the glass away with her,” said Holmes, “but she is not the only suspect if it was murder rather than suicide. There is another.”
Adams stared so hard at Holmes that the detective felt almost burned by the historian’s gaze.
“Clifton Richards, Miss Lorne’s . . . cousin . . . may have been involved,” said Holmes. “He may have been in the house and gone down the back way, the servants’ stairs, and out of the house even as Rebecca Lorne rushed up the main stairway to warn Mrs. Adams.”
“To warn her,” Adams repeated dully. He managed to focus his eyes on Holmes’s face. “Who killed my wife, Mr. Holmes? I beg of you . . . if you know, tell me.”
“I’ll know for a certainty in the next few weeks, Mr. Adams. Which is why I need to ask a favor of you.”
Adams may have nodded an infinitesimal bit.
“I’ve convinced John Hay and Cabot Lodge to move the visit to the Chicago World’s Fair up a couple of weeks for the actual opening on May first, arriving in his private car perhaps a day or two early,” said Holmes. “And Senator Cameron has his private yacht . . . the Great Lakes Yacht, I believe they call it . . . ready to anchor just off the pier of the Exposition.”
“Going to the wretched Exposition will help reveal my Clover’s murderer and bring him or her to justice?” said Adams.