Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  “Mrs. Cocchi,” Kron replied, disgusted. “Get the men down here as fast as you can before I pass out.”

  Grace walked up to the opening and looked down, amazed. There was a door set in the bottom of the dirt. It was battered and almost destroyed, but it was a door. They brushed off the dirt and coal and lifted it up before setting it into a corner. It was not on any hinges. But it did cover an oblong hole, a vault, six feet by six feet, which someone had broken into the cement floor. The flash lamps glinted at its rounded corners.

  “Bully for you, Kronnie,” Grace said.

  After her detective was hoisted out, Grace told everyone to hold tight and wait at the candy store. She then went to the borough president, then the Bureau of Sidewalks and Vaults to apply for the right to tunnel under the sidewalk through the coal vault. She knew there would be a legal question over this eventually, and she wasn’t going to take any chances. Grace also asked around to see who the plumber was who had installed the pipes in the cellar.

  “He’s dead,” said Mrs. Cocchi.

  But Grace didn’t believe it; she still suspected that Mrs. Cocchi always knew more than she was saying. After searching through building permits and talking to construction company officials, Grace indeed found the plumber. He gave Grace a diagram of the building, but it didn’t have what she was looking for—a way into that damned cellar. Grace had to think.

  When Grace returned, she walked past the candy store and made a quick, prearranged sign with her hands. The two laborers, Peter McAntee and John Spittle, saw her through the window. They grabbed their tools.

  As they turned the corner, they walked directly down to the motorcycle shop in a group. For the first time, there was no subterfuge. They were going in under Grace’s direction. Mrs. Cocchi appeared with her baby in her arms and shouted, “Where are you going?” Just as her men approached the coal chute with their tools, Grace reached into her dress and waved the permit she had just obtained from the borough president in Mrs. Cocchi’s face. People from the neighborhood began to gather and point. Grace gave the order, and the flash lamps lit an area almost too narrow for a child.

  Mrs. Cocchi returned to her chair in front of the store. Defeated, she sank into it. But then she started smiling. She began bouncing her baby on her knee.

  “They won’t find anything,” Mrs. Cocchi said, to anyone who would listen.

  “They’re crazy.”

  Grace and her men found nothing that first day except for more of the white substance that looked a bit like plaster. It had finally been identified as quicklime, which Kron had suspected all along. Later in the day, a sudden downpour of rain forced all the onlookers to head for cover inside Cocchi’s shop. There they stood, in the cool store, looking at the silent, single-eyed motorcycles. Grace gave the order for the men to come up out of the watery vault before it flooded. Grace politely asked Mrs. Cocchi if her men might use the inside door to the coal cellar by the front stairwell. Maria politely refused. As the rain blew down, the men had to be drawn out by rope, dripping wet, through the filthy outdoor chute. All of the people on the street felt worn out and cold. This grand display of digging was, like everything else thus far, an endeavor that led to nothing but more empty space. There was no evidence to be seen. Grace, wet, grimly vowed that digging “would be resumed to-morrow.”

  The next morning, the police department put a hold on Grace’s promise until they could figure out if her permit was actually legal. By late afternoon, the assistant corporation counsel agreed that the borough could authorize such an action—the opening of the vault underneath the sidewalk—but only if there was no permit for its presence in the first place. The underground of New York was still relatively uncharted. Just as the city built up, some saw the world beneath as an untapped resource for train tunnels and living space. Some forward thinkers dreamed of pneumatic tubes swooshing passengers out to Coney Island. A permit for the vault was searched for, but none was found. So at five o’clock, the police obtained a digging permit from the commissioner of public works to allow Grace and her men to keep digging.

  The next day, June 13, the skies had cleared, and it was hot again, though the rains had helped loosen the earth a little bit. As Kron, McGee, and his laborers dug, one of their flashlights caught something shiny. They fished out a tin sign, just like the ones hanging outside the motorcycle shop. It looked brand new. Then they hit an oil can. Then another sign. Kron pulled out a huge empty gasoline tin. These artifacts came out of the pit and were carefully placed to the side.

  The next thing they found was a newspaper. They handed it up to Grace. It was an Italian paper dated July 15, 1916, almost one year earlier. At the bottom of the hole were hard, dark stones. They tried the pickaxes, but they just sparked against the rocks. They tried to lift the stones out, but they were too heavy. So they got a block and tackle from the toolbox and hooked it up. The men threaded the rope through the pulleys and worked them out, back and forth. Eventually, the stones came up and out and into the air. The men piled them into the corner. They looked into the blackness and saw something small. It was white.

  The thing looked like a flower. Once it was free, they passed it up to Grace. She shook it loose as clumps of dirt fell to the ground. It was small and light. She turned it over in her hands lightly and recognized it as an embroidered corset cover, once beautiful, now crumpled and dirty. It had not been long in the ground. Their stomachs were in their mouths.

  Someone shouted. They had found something else. Kron lifted the small object out and stared, speechless. He brought it up to Grace, slowly. It was a small piece of rounded, discolored bone. Grace turned it in her hand like a jewel. No one could see her face under the black hat. She handed it over to Kron. He placed it in his pocket.

  As a crowd gathered to peer down the chute, Grace looked at her watch. The vault was almost completely cleared, as far as they could tell. She headed for the car. Where are you going, they asked.

  A wedding, said Grace. They stared at her in disbelief. But Grace didn’t care. She was already late.

  Before she left, Kron spoke with her in private. “There’s no guesswork there,” he said. “Cocchi didn’t bury a ten-gallon tin of gasoline under that load of coal for any other reason than to fill up the space.”

  “That hole was intended for a grave,” Kron said.

  There was just one problem: no one was in it.

  “Station three or four guards outside the place before you leave,” Grace ordered. “Give them instructions to note everyone who calls at the place and to follow anyone who leaves with any suspicious-looking bundle.” Grace gave another quick look around. “So long, Kron,” she said.

  Some of the men couldn’t understand how the lead detective on a case this big could leave for a wedding, but Kron understood. That was Mrs. Humiston.

  The men kept digging until they heard the shovel hit something hard and loud. The worker tapped it.

  “A box, probably,” McAntee said, wiping his forehead. “Might take about half an hour to get it out.” He paused. “But it’s 5 o’clock now and my quitting time.”

  They seemed so close now to what everyone was thinking, but no one was talking about. This wasn’t a secret chamber. It wasn’t an elaborate hiding place. It was a hole in the ground. It was something they didn’t want to say.

  “No,” said Kron. “It will take a good four hours to get that box out—if there is one—at the rate we’ve been digging to-day. Better call it a day’s work, and we’ll go at it again in the morning.”

  When they emerged into that late afternoon light, McGee went last, padlocking the chute. By this time, real crowds had gathered in the streets about the shop, and the police had thrown a cordon of lights around the cellar entrance. Someone made an announcement to the crowd, which had grown with each passing hour. The crowd groaned and murmured, some among them even offering to pay for the workers’ overtime. There were plenty of reporters. But Kron was adamant. He was not authorized to pay for any overtime. />
  “I’m bossing the job,” he kept saying.

  “What are you going to do now?” McGee asked. “We’re on the right track, I’m telling you.”

  “We could go ahead and dig,” Kron said. “But I’m hungry and awfully tired.”

  Kron wasn’t lying. But he wasn’t completely telling the truth, either.

  Kron was indeed hungry, and certainly tired, but he was by no means off the clock. So after leaving his partners and workers, Kron worked his night hours. That was the only time he could get any real work done by himself. McGee was all right, for a cop, but Kron had some things that he had to do for Grace first. So Kron took the bone over to Doctor Alling of Columbia University.

  “Those are butcher’s bones,” the doctor said. “Nothing human about them. But they are very fresh. Apparently somebody is trying to play a trick on you.”

  Reached at the wedding, Grace didn’t seem surprised. “We expect to go on with the excavation in the Cocchi cellar to-morrow. That cellar has been under suspicion for some time, and it should have been dug up a long time ago.” Privately, Grace was wondering if they might be able to legally tunnel all the way into the actual cellar through the sidewalk vault.

  “Naw, the whole place would fall down,” said the plumber she called up. “You’d have to get a mason or buy the place,” he joked. When Grace talked to Kron on the phone for the last time that night, she said, “Meet me outside Cocchi’s cellar to-morrow. To-morrow will write the finish to the Cruger mystery.”

  But Kron still had one more task to accomplish. He had put it off long enough. He took the corset cover, which was just a scrap of a thing, and took it over to the Crugers’ apartment. It weighed more heavily in his pocket than it should have. Mrs. Cruger was too ill to look at it for more than a moment. Mr. Cruger stared at it for a very long time. He said he was sure that the apparel had not belonged to his daughter. Going home, Kron wondered. They had labored long in the earth and found things that meant nothing. Kron felt as if someone was mocking them.

  The next day, Kron was still tracking down leads as Grace used their newly unearthed discoveries to convince Swann to open an immediate investigation of Alfredo Cocchi by the grand jury. Grace was still intent at getting to the actual cellar. After reading of the so-called horrors found in the vault yesterday, a substantial crowd had already gathered outside the motorcycle shop. There were men in suits and white straw hats. There were children, too—pushed up to the front, their fathers’ hands pressed flat against their chests.

  From down the street, Kron, McGee, and their two workers headed toward Cocchi’s store. Grace was nowhere to be found—she was presumably at court—but had left instructions with Kron to try to negotiate an entrance that didn’t involve the coal chute. Kron held up a hand and walked to the front door. He needed to get the cellar keys from Mrs. Cocchi. After he knocked, he saw her on the other side, separated by the dark glass. With a grand jury opening an investigation and all the things they had found, Kron thought she might be willing to finally bury the hatchet. She was, but not in the way he hoped.

  Mrs. Cocchi opened the door with a hammer in her hand.

  “Get out of here, or I’ll throw this hammer at you!” she shouted, her eyes flashing.

  Kron stopped in his tracks. She raised the black mallet high above her head.

  “I don’t care if the whole Police Department and a regiment of soldiers came here! No more digging in my cellar!” She pushed forward and Kron ran back to the sidewalk.

  “She told me to get out,” Kron told McGee. “She won’t give up the keys.”

  McGee looked at Mrs. Cocchi from the street and thought he might as well give it a try. He walked up, and she actually let him inside the store. Kron watched closely through the glass. They could see McGee show Mrs. Cocchi his badge, shiny and solid. Mrs. Cocchi looked flushed and waved her hands. McGee trudged out, defeated. Apparently, there would be no digging today. They weren’t going to fight her in the streets. Kron had to tell Grace. A grand jury investigation didn’t mean they had a warrant for anything.

  That afternoon, Aaron Marcus, who was Mrs. Cocchi’s attorney, issued a statement that said any further excavations would be refused because the crowd that had gathered frightened away prospective customers.

  “Mrs. Cocchi’s attitude is not an unfriendly one,” said Marcus. “She has helped the authorities with the investigation in the past.”

  By five o’clock, Grace had arrived on the scene with good news. The Commissioner of Public Works had granted her a full digging permit, including the cellar. Grace’s men resumed their work in the dirt. The so-called “box” was just another sign. But before they could get any further, Grace was summoned back to court for obstructing the sidewalk with the big pile of dirt that her men had been unearthing. Grace knew that Mrs. Cocchi’s lawyer was behind the complaint. He was good. Grace hired wagons, on her own dime, to cart away the soil. But then the court summoned her again, saying that the dirt had belonged to the landlord and couldn’t be removed without her say-so. Grace was ordered to return it. For the rest of the week, Grace went back and forth between the bench and Cocchi’s shop. The workers waited in the candy shop. Nothing was getting done. By Friday, at the end of another long week, the court ordered her to stop digging altogether by the end of Saturday.

  City officials were not being helpful. Deputy Police Commissioner Scull said of Ruth and Cocchi that “there was no connection between their disappearances.” “There was no such thing as abduction,” Scull said to reporters. He had never seen it happen before.

  “No one has ever disappeared in such a manner in New York,” agreed Captain Cooper.

  That night, Grace went back to her office. It was now the middle of June and almost three months’ hard work had gone for nothing. They had expended all this time and work tunneling toward a small basement that the police had already searched at least twice. Even Kron had found nothing in his brief time down there. They had found some things under the sidewalk, but nothing even remotely conclusive. Were they grasping at straws? At nothingness? Cocchi himself was halfway around the world. That night, Henry Cruger visited Grace, as he did every night, anxious for the day’s report. They sat around her office, now quiet, not knowing what to do or say. They had less than a day before the digging permit expired.

  A thought occurred to Grace that if a building inspector could look over the basement, he might find something they overlooked that could translate to a real, honest-to-goodness warrant. Henry Cruger piped up that he knew an inspector named Paddy Solan who worked in the Erie Railroad offices. Solan was summoned to the office and agreed to help. He had an Irish accent and wore a suit that seemed strapped to the shoulders of his short, thin frame. As they worked up a plan, Grace went to make a few more calls.

  The next morning, on Saturday, Solan, disguised as a laborer (at Grace’s suggestion), followed Kron and McGee to the cellar. Grace was late, as usual, but Kron knew they had only so much time left before their permit expired. He looked at his watch. The streets were clear so they started without her. They looked at the door, which was locked, and the stairs, which were now impassable because of all the dirt and debris. They would have to go through the coal chute.

  Solan, because he was short, went down through the sidewalk first and into the vault. He was surprised by all the dirt that had been dug up. When he got to the basement door leading to the cellar, he shouted up to the street and asked McGee if he could go in. McGee stuck his head in and told him to hold on; there was something going on outside.

  Up on the street, Kron stared at the front of the motorcycle store. Something was different. He had been looking at that store for so many weeks now that even the slightest difference was glaring. Then Kron saw it—Mrs. Cocchi had taken away the SELLING OUT sign. Kron asked around the crowd. Someone said she had sold it to an auctioneer. One of the diggers groaned. A new owner could make things infinitely worse for them, especially if it meant the property would have to go throu
gh a lengthy auction procedure first. Some wondered if it wasn’t a ploy to get out from under the permit that was expiring today. Or perhaps Mrs. Cocchi knew what was coming and wanted to make herself scarce. Normally, she would be watching over them like a hawk. Kron looked around. She was nowhere.

  But Kron, who had spent some time around very smart people the past years, saw a brilliant plan at work. By selling her store, Maria Cocchi could now make the case that Grace’s digging had ruined her sole means of income. She would then have a good case when she sued Grace—and perhaps Kron—for trashing her store. This might be Maria Cocchi’s last-ditch attempt at cashing out before she had nothing—destroying her enemies in the process. Kron guessed that this would probably put a halt on their permit until the property changed hands. They would be stuck yet again.

  Grace finally arrived, customarily late, and Kron rose to tell her the bad news. She saw the men sitting in the dirt and dust. Grace pointed for them to get down there.

  Into her basement.

  While they had been digging under the sidewalk, Grace had contacted Edward Lind and Charles Greenbaum, the real estate auctioneers in charge of selling the Cocchi store. For weeks, Grace had been using her secretly planted aide, Marie Vanello, to try to urge Mrs. Cocchi to put her house on the market. When she finally did, Grace immediately began the paperwork to buy it. The plan came together flawlessly, and the property was sold on June 16 to Mrs. Grace Humiston, Esq. Mrs. Cocchi had no idea. Kron smiled. At least he was right about this being a brilliant plan.

  Grace couldn’t make it down the narrow coal chute, so she watched as her men, with flashlights, were lowered into the vault. Entrance through the chute would be difficult and require a bit of elbow grease, but they had most of the day. So instead of staying and being useless, Grace went to her downtown office to check the morning mail. She knew that this whole process would take a good long while, and she had other work to do.