Sherlock's Sisters

by Nick Rennison

  ‘Another one?’ asked Adele finally.

  Constance was by this time genuinely alarmed at the sudden unwonted effect on herself. ‘N-no,’ she replied dubiously, ‘I don’t think I want to take any more, just yet.’

  ‘Not another?’ asked Adele in surprise. ‘I wish they would affect me that way. Sometimes I have to take the whole dozen before they have any effect.’

  They chatted for a few minutes, and finally Adele rose.

  ‘Well,’ she remarked with a nervous twitching of her body, as if she were eager to be doing something, ‘I really must be going. I can’t say I feel any too well myself.’

  ‘I think I’ll take a walk with you,’ answered Constance, who did not like the continued effect of the two powders. ‘I feel the need of exercise – and air.’

  Adele hesitated, but Constance already had her hat on. She had seen Drummond watching Dr Price’s door, and it interested her to know whether he could possibly have been following Adele or someone else.

  As they walked along Adele quickened her pace, until they came again to the drug store.

  ‘I believe I’ll go in and get something,’ she remarked, pausing.

  For the first time in several minutes Constance looked at the face of her friend. She was amazed to discover that Adele looked as if she had had a spell of sickness. Her eyes were large and glassy, her skin cold and sweaty, and she looked positively pallid and thin.

  As they entered the store Muller, the druggist, bowed again and looked at Adele a moment as she leaned over the counter and whispered something to him. Without a word he went into the arcana behind the partition that cuts off the mysteries of the prescription room in every drug store from the front of the store.

  When Muller returned he handed her a packet, for which she paid and which she dropped quickly into her pocketbook, hugging the pocketbook close to herself.

  Adele turned and was about to hurry from the store with Constance. ‘Oh, excuse me,’ she said suddenly as if she had just recollected something, ‘I promised a friend of mine I’d telephone this afternoon, and I have forgotten to do it. I see a pay station here.’ Constance waited.

  Adele returned much quicker than one would have expected she could call up a number, but Constance thought nothing of it at the time. She did notice, however, that as her friend emerged from the booth a most marvellous change had taken place in her. Her step was firm, her eye clear, her hand steady. Whatever it was, reasoned Constance, it could not have been serious to have disappeared so quickly.

  It was with some curiosity as to just what she might expect that Constance went around to the famous cabaret that night. The Mayfair occupied two floors of what had been a wide brownstone house before business and pleasure had crowded the residence district further and further uptown. It was a very well-known bohemian rendezvous, where under-, demi- and upper-world rubbed elbows without friction and seemed to enjoy the novelty and be willing to pay for it.

  Adele, who was one of the performers, had not arrived yet, but Constance, who had come with her mind still full of the two unexpected encounters with Drummond, was startled to see him here again. Fortunately he did not see her, and she slipped unobserved into an angle near the window overlooking the street.

  Drummond had been engrossed in watching someone already there, and Constance made the best use she could of her eyes to determine who it was. The outdoor walk and a good dinner had checked her headache, and now the excitement of the chase of something, she knew not what, completed the cure.

  It was not long before she discovered that Drummond was watching intently, without seeming to do so, a nervous-looking fellow whose general washed-out appearance of face was especially unattractive for some reason or other. He was very thin, very pale, and very stary about the eyes. Then, too, it seemed as if the bone in his nose was going, due perhaps to the shrinkage of the blood vessels from some cause.

  Constance noticed a couple of girls whom she had seen Adele speak to on several other occasions approaching the young man.

  There came an opportune lull in the music and from around the corner of her protecting angle Constance could just catch the greeting of one of the girls, ‘Hello, Sleighbells! Got any snow?’

  It was a remark that seemed particularly malapropos to the sultry weather, and Constance half expected a burst of laughter at the unexpected sally.

  Instead, she was surprised to hear the young man reply in a very serious and matter-of-fact manner, ‘Sure. Got any money, May?’

  She craned her neck, carefully avoiding coming into Drummond’s line of vision, and as she did so she saw two silver quarters gleam momentarily from hand to hand, and the young man passed each girl stealthily a small white paper packet.

  Others came to him, both men and women. It seemed to be an established thing, and Constance noted that Drummond watched it all covertly.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Constance of the waiter who had served her sometimes when she had been with Adele, and knew her.

  ‘Why, they call him Sleighbells Charley,’ he replied, ‘a coke fiend.’

  ‘Which means a cocaine fiend, I suppose!’ she queried.

  ‘Yes. He’s a lobbygow for the grapevine system they have now of selling the dope in spite of this new law.’

  ‘Where does he get the stuff!’ she asked.

  The waiter shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nobody knows, I guess. I don’t. But he gets it in spite of the law and peddles it. Oh, it’s all adulterated – with some white stuff, I don’t know what, and the price they charge is outrageous. They must make an ounce retail at five or six times the cost. Oh, you can bet that someone who is at the top is making a pile of money out of that graft, all right.’

  He said it not with any air of righteous indignation, but with a certain envy.

  Constance was thinking the thing over in her mind. Where did the ‘coke’ come from? The ‘grapevine’ system interested her.

  ‘Sleighbells’ seemed to have disposed of all the ‘coke’ he had brought with him. As the last packet went, he rose slowly, and shuffled out. Constance, who knew that Adele would not come for some time, determined to follow him. She rose quietly and, under cover of a party going out, managed to disappear without, as far as she knew, letting Drummond catch a glimpse of her. This would not only employ her time, but it was better to avoid Drummond as far as possible, at present, too, she felt.

  At a distance of about half a block she followed the curiously shuffling figure. He crossed the avenue, turned and went uptown, turned again, and, before she knew it, disappeared in a drug store. She had been so engrossed in following the lobbygow that it was with a start that she realised that he had entered Muller’s.

  What did it all mean? Was the druggist, Muller, the man higher up? She recalled suddenly her own experience of the afternoon. Had Muller tried to palm off something on her? The more she thought of it the more sure she was that the powders she had taken had been doped.

  Slowly, turning the matter over in her mind, she returned to the Mayfair. As she peered in cautiously before entering she saw that Drummond had gone. Adele had not come in yet, and she went in and sat down again in her old place.

  Perhaps half an hour later, outside, she heard a car drive up with a furious rattle of gears. She looked out of the window and, as far as she could determine in the shadows, it was Dr Price. A woman got out, Adele. For a moment she stopped to talk, then Dr Price waved a gay goodbye and was off. All she could catch was a hasty, ‘No; I don’t think I’d better come in tonight,’ from him.

  As Adele entered the Mayfair she glanced about, caught sight of Constance and came and sat down by her.

  It would have been impossible for her to enter unobserved, so popular was she. It was not long before the two girls whom Constance had seen dealing with ‘Sleighbells’ sauntered over.

  ‘Your friend was here tonight,’ remarked one to Adele.r />
  ‘Which one?’ laughed Adele.

  ‘The one who admired your dancing the other night and wanted to take lessons.’

  ‘You mean the young fellow who was selling something?’ asked Constance pointedly.

  ‘Oh, no,’ returned the girl quite casually. ‘That was Sleighbells,’ and they all laughed.

  Constance thought immediately of Drummond. ‘The other one, then,’ she said, ‘the thick-set man who was all alone!’

  ‘Yes; he went away afterward. Do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve seen him somewhere,’ evaded Constance; ‘but I just can’t quite place him.’

  She had not noticed Adele particularly until now. Under the light she had a peculiar worn look, the same as she had had before.

  The waiter came up to them. ‘Your turn is next,’ he hinted to Adele.

  ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she apologised to the rest of the party. ‘I must fix up a bit. No,’ she added to Constance, ‘don’t come with me.’

  She returned from the dressing room a different person, and plunged into the wild dance for which the limited orchestra was already tuning up. It was a veritable riot of whirl and rhythm. Never before had Constance seen Adele dance with such abandon. As she executed the wild mazes of a newly imported dance, she held even the jaded Mayfair spellbound. And when she concluded with one daring figure and sat down, flushed and excited, the diners applauded and even shouted approval. It was an event for even the dance-mad Mayfair.

  Constance did not share in the applause. At last she understood. Adele was a dope fiend, too.

  She felt it with a sense of pain. Always, she knew, the fiends tried to get away alone somewhere for a few minutes to snuff some of their favourite nepenthe. She had heard before of the cocaine ‘snuffers’ who took a little of the deadly powder, placed it on the back of the hand, and inhaled it up the nose with a quick intake of breath. Adele was one. It was not Adele who danced. It was the dope.

  Constance was determined to speak.

  ‘You remember that man the girls spoke of?’ she began.

  ‘Yes. What of him?’ asked Adele with almost a note of defiance.

  ‘Well, I really do know him,’ confessed Constance. ‘He is a detective.’

  Constance watched her companion curiously, for at the mere word she had stopped short and faced her. ‘He is?’ she asked quickly. ‘Then that was why Dr Price –’

  She managed to suppress the remark and continued her walk home without another word.

  In Adele’s little apartment Constance was quick to note that the same haggard look had returned to her friend’s face.

  Adele had reached for her pocketbook with a sort of clutching eagerness and was about to leave the room.

  Constance rose. ‘Why don’t you give up the stuff?’ she asked earnestly. ‘Don’t you want to?’

  For a moment Adele faced her angrily. Then her real nature seemed slowly to come to the surface. ‘Yes,’ she murmured frankly.

  ‘Then why don’t you?’ pleaded Constance.

  ‘I haven’t the power. There is an indescribable excitement to do something great, to make a mark. It’s soon gone, but while it lasts, I can sing, dance, do anything – and then – every part of my body begins crying for more of the stuff again.’

  There was no longer any necessity of concealment from Constance. She took a pinch of the stuff, placed it on the back of her wrist and quickly sniffed it. The change in her was magical. From a quivering wretched girl she became a self-confident neurasthenic.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she laughed hollowly now. ‘Yes, I know what you are going to tell me. Soon I’ll be “hunting the cocaine bug”, as they call it, imagining that in my skin, under the flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps see them, see the little animals running around and biting me.’

  She said it with a half-reckless cynicism. ‘Oh, you don’t know. There are two souls in the cocainist – one tortured by the pain of not having the stuff, the other laughing and mocking at the dangers of it. It stimulates. It makes your mind work – without effort, by itself. And it gives such visions of success, makes you feel able to do so much, and to forget. All the girls use it.’

  ‘Where do they get it?’ asked Constance ‘I thought the new law prohibited it.’

  ‘Get it?’ repeated Adele. ‘Why, they get it from that fellow they call “Sleighbells”. They call it “snow”, you know, and the girls who use it “snowbirds”. The law does prohibit its sale, but…’

  She paused significantly.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Constance; ‘but Sleighbells is only a part of the system after all. Who is the man at the top?’

  Adele shrugged her shoulders and was silent. Still, Constance did not fail to note a sudden look of suspicion which Adele shot at her. Was Adele shielding someone?

  Constance knew that someone must be getting rich from the traffic, probably selling hundreds of ounces a week and making thousands of dollars. Somehow she felt a sort of indignation at the whole thing. Who was it? Who was the man higher up?

  In the morning as she was working about her little kitchenette an idea came to her. Why not hire the vacant apartment across the hall from Adele? An optician, who was a friend of hers, in the course of a recent conversation, had mentioned an invention, a model of which he had made for the inventor. She would try it.

  Since, with Constance, the outlining of a plan was tantamount to the execution, it was not many hours later before she had both the apartment and the model of the invention.

  Her wall separated her from the drug store and by careful calculation she determined about where came the little prescription department. Carefully, so as to arouse no suspicion, she began to bore away at the wall with various tools, until finally she had a small, almost imperceptible opening. It was tedious work, and toward the end needed great care so as not to excite suspicion. But finally she was rewarded. Through it she could see just a trace of daylight, and by squinting could see a row of bottles on a shelf opposite.

  Then, through the hole, she pushed a long, narrow tube, like a putty blower. When at last she placed her eye at it, she gave a low exclamation of satisfaction. She could now see the whole of the little room.

  It was a detectascope, invented by Gaillard Smith, adapter of the detectaphone, an instrument built up on the principle of the cytoscope which physicians use to explore internally down the throat. Only, in the end of the tube, instead of an ordinary lens, was placed what is known as a ‘fish-eye’ lens, which had a range something like nature has given the eyes of fishes, hence the name. Ordinarily cameras, because of the flatness of their lenses, have a range of only a few degrees, the greatest being scarcely more than ninety. But this lens was globular, and, like a drop of water, refracted light from all directions. When placed so that half of it caught the light it ‘saw’ through an angle of 180 degrees, ‘saw’ everything in the room instead of just that little row of bottles on the shelf opposite.

  Constance set herself to watch, and it was not long before her suspicions were confirmed, and she was sure that this was nothing more than a ‘coke’ joint. Still she wondered whether Muller was the real source of the traffic of which Sleighbells was the messenger. She was determined to find out.

  All day she watched through her detectascope. Once she saw Adele come in and buy more dope. It was with difficulty that she kept from interfering. But, she reflected, the time was not ripe. She had thought the thing out. There was no use in trying to get at it through Adele. The only way was to stop the whole curse at its source, to dam the stream. People came and went. She soon found that he was selling them packets from a box hidden in the woodwork. That much she had learned, anyhow.

  Constance watched faithfully all day with only time enough taken out for dinner. It was after her return from this brief interval that she felt her heart give a leap of apprehension, as she looked again through the detectascope.
There was Drummond in the back of the store talking to Muller and a woman who looked as if she might be Mrs Muller, for both seemed nervous and anxious.

  As nearly as she could make out, Drummond was alternately threatening and arguing with Muller. Finally the three seemed to agree, for Drummond walked over to a typewriter on a table, took a fresh sheet of carbon paper from a drawer, placed it between two sheets of paper, and hastily wrote something.

  Drummond read over what he had written. It seemed to be short, and the three apparently agreed on it. Then, in a trembling hand, Muller signed the two copies which Drummond had made, one of which Drummond himself kept and the other he sealed in an envelope and sent away by a boy. Drummond reached into his pocket and pulled out a huge roll of bills of large denomination. He counted out what seemed to be approximately half, handed it to the woman, and replaced the rest in his pocket. What it was all about Constance could only vaguely guess. She longed to know what was in the letter and why the money had been paid to the woman.

  Perhaps a quarter of an hour after Drummond left Adele appeared again, pleading for more dope. Muller went back of the partition and made up a fresh paper of it from a bottle also concealed.

  Constance was torn by conflicting impulses. She did not want to miss anything in the perplexing drama that was being enacted before her, yet she wished to interfere with the deadly course of Adele. Still, perhaps the girl would resent interference if she found out that Constance was spying on her. She determined to wait a little while before seeing Adele. It was only after a decided effort that she tore herself away from the detectascope and knocked on Adele’s door as if she had just come in for a visit. Again she knocked, but still there was no answer. Every minute something might be happening next door. She hurried back to her post of observation.

  One of the worst aspects of the use of cocaine, she knew, was the desire of the user to share his experience with someone else. The passing on of the habit, which seemed to be one of the strongest desires of the drug fiend, made him even more dangerous to society than he would otherwise have been. That thought gave Constance an idea.