The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Like this,” said Pons.

  He seized hold of a tweezers and caught the remarkable worm of Idomeno Persano between them. Instantly the four horns on the creature’s thick body shot forth fangs; from two of them a thin brown fluid still trickled.

  “Only one of these found its mark,” said Pons dryly. “It seems to have been enough.” He gazed at me with twinkling eyes and added, “I believe you had the commendable foresight not to include snake venom in that list of poisons you were confident had not brought about Persano’s death.”

  For a moment I was too nonplussed to reply. “But this is the merest guesswork,” I protested finally.

  “You yourself eliminated virtually all other possibilities,” countered Pons. “You have left me scarcely any other choice.”

  “But what of the dog?” I cried.

  “What dog?” asked Pons with amazement he did not conceal.

  “If I recall rightly, Mrs. White said that Persano spoke of a dog. A dog’s tooth might well have made that gash.”

  “Ah, Parker, you are straying afield,” said Pons with that air of patient tolerance I always found so trying. “There was no such dog. Mrs. White herself said so.”

  “You suggest, then, that Mrs. White misunderstood her employer’s dying words?”

  “Not at all. I daresay she understood him correctly.”

  “I see. Persano spoke of a dog, but there was no dog,” I said with a bitterness which did not escape Pons.

  “Come, come, Parker!” replied Pons, smiling. “One would not expect you to be a master of my profession any more than one could look to me as a master of yours. Let us just see how skillfully this is made.”

  As he spoke, he proceeded with the utmost care to cut away the fur and the material beneath. He was cautious not to release the spring again, and presently revealed a most intricate and wonderfully wrought mechanism, which sprang the trap and forced the venom from small rubber sacks attached to the fangs by tubes.

  “Are those not unusually small fangs?” I asked.

  “If I were to venture a guess, I should say they belonged to the coral or harlequin snake, Micrurus fulvius, common to the southern United States and the Mississippi Valley. Its poison is a neurotoxin; it may have been utilized, but certainly not in its pure state. It was most probably adulterated with some form of alkaloid poison to prolong Persano’s death and complicate any medication Persano may have sought. The snake belongs to the Proteroglyphs, or front-fanged type of which cobras and mambas are most common in their latitudes. The ‘worm’ was designed to spring the fangs when touched; it was accordingly well packed so that its venom would not be discharged by rough handling in transit.” He cocked an eye at me. “Does this deduction meet with your approval, Parker?”

  “It is very largely hypothetical.”

  “Let us grant that it is improbable, if no more so than the worm itself. Is it within the bounds of possibility?”

  “I would not say it was not.”

  “Capital! We make progress.”

  “But I should regard it as a highly dubious method of committing murder.”

  “Beyond doubt. Had it failed, its author would have tried again. He meant to kill Persano. He succeeded. If he tried previously to do so, we have no record of it. Persano was a secretive man, but he had anticipated that an attempt would be made. He had had what was certainly a warning.”

  “The post-card?”

  Pons nodded. “Let us compare the writing on the card with that on the wrapping of the package.”

  It required little more than a glance to reveal that the script on the wrapping of the package which had contained the lethal worm was entirely different from that on the post-card. But if Pons was disappointed, he did not show it; his eyes were fairly dancing with delight, and the hint of a smile touched his thin lips.

  “We shall just leave this for Inspector Taylor to see. Meanwhile, the hour is not yet nine; I shall be able to reach certain sources of information without delay. If Taylor should precede my return, pray detain him until I come.”

  With an annoyingly enigmatic smile, Pons took his leave.

  —

  It was close to midnight when my companion returned to our quarters. A fog pressed whitely against the windows of 7B, and the familiar sounds from outside—the chimes of the clock a few streets away, the rattle of passing traffic, the occasional clip-clop of a hansom cab—had all but died away.

  Inspector Taylor had been waiting for an hour. I had already shown him the remarkably ingenious instrument of death designed by the murderer of Idomeno Persano, and he had scrutinized the post-card, only to confess himself as baffled as I by any meaning it might have. Yet he had an unshakable faith in my companion’s striking faculties of deduction and logical synthesis and made no complaint at Pons’s delay.

  Pons slipped so silently into the room as to startle us.

  “Ah, Taylor, I trust you have not been kept waiting long,” he said.

  “Only an hour,” answered the Inspector.

  “Pray forgive me. I thought, insofar as I had succeeded in identifying the murderer of Idomeno Persano, I might trouble also to look him up for you.”

  “Mr. Pons, you’re joking!”

  “On the contrary. You will find him at the ‘Sailor’s Rest’ in Wapping. He is a short, dark-skinned man of Italian or Spanish parentage. His hair is dark and curly, but showing grey at the temples. He carries a bad scar on his temple above and a little retracted from his right eye. There is a lesser scar on his throat. His name in Angelo Perro. His motive was vengeance. Persano had appeared against him in the United States a dozen years ago. Lose no time in taking him; once he learns Persano is dead, he will leave London at the earliest moment. Come around tomorrow, and you shall have all the facts.”

  Inspector Taylor was off with scarcely more than a mutter of thanks. It did not occur to him to question Pons’s dictum.

  “Surely this is somewhat extraordinary even for you, Pons,” I said, before the echo of Taylor’s footsteps had died down the stairs.

  “You exaggerate my poor powers, Parker,” answered Pons. “The matter was most elementary, I assure you.”

  “I’m afraid it’s quite beyond me. Consider—you knew nothing of this man, Persano. You made no enquiries….”

  “On the contrary, I knew a good deal about him,” interrupted Pons. “He was an expatriate American of independent means. He dabbled in entomology. He lived alone. He had no telephone. He was manifestly content to live in seclusion. Why?—if not because he feared someone? If he feared someone, I submit it is logical to assume that the source of his fear lay in the United States.”

  “But what manner of thing did he fear that he could be upset by this card?” I asked.

  Pons tossed the card over to me “Though it may tell you nothing, Parker, manifestly it conveyed something to Persano.”

  “It could surely not have been in the address. It must be in the picture.”

  “Capital! Capital!” cried Pons, rubbing his hands together. “You show marked improvement, Parker. Pray proceed.”

  “Well, then,” I went on, emboldened by his enthusiasm, “the picture can hardly convey more than that a big fat man is running away from a little dog who has broken his leash.”

  “My dear fellow, I congratulate you!”

  I gazed at him, I fear, in utter astonishment. “But, Pons, what other meaning has it?”

  “None but that. Coupled with the suggestion of the holiday which appears in the commercial lettering, the card could readily be interpreted to say: ‘Your holiday is over. The dog is loose.’ A fat man running to escape a dog. Persano was corpulent.”

  “Indeed he was!”

  “Very well, then. The post-card is the first incidence of a ‘dog’ in the little drama which is drawing to a close at Inspector Taylor’s capable hands in Wapping. Mrs. White, you recalled to my attention only a few hours ago, told us that her late employer muttered ‘the dog’ several times before he lapsed
into silence. That was the second occurrence. And then, finally, this match-box cover announces ‘Little dog catches big cat.’ My dear fellow, could anything be plainer?”

  “I hardly know what to say. I have still ringing in my ears your emphatic pronouncement that there was no dog in the matter,” I said coldly.

  “I believe my words were ‘no such dog.’ Your reference was clearly to a quadruped, a member of the Canis group of Carnivora. There is no such dog.”

  “You speak increasingly in riddles.”

  “Perhaps one of these clippings may help.”

  As he spoke, Pons took from his pocket a trio of clippings cut from The Chicago Tribune of seven weeks before. He selected one and handed it to me.

  “That should elucidate the matter for you, Parker.”

  The clipping was a short news-article. I read it with care.

  “Chicago, June 29: Prisoners paroled from Ft. Leavenworth yesterday included four Chicagoans. They were Mao Hsuieh-Chang, Angelo Perro, Robert Salliker, and Franz Witkenstein. They were convicted in 1914 on a charge of transporting and distributing narcotics. They had served eleven years. Evidence against them was furnished by a fifth member of the gang known as ‘Big Id’ Persano, who was given a suspended sentence for his part in their conviction. ‘Big Id’ dropped out of sight immediately after the trial. The four ex-convicts plan to return to Chicago.”

  Two of the convicts were pictured in the article; one of them was Perro. Pons must have made the rounds of hotels and inns in Wapping, showing Perro’s photograph, in order to find him at the “Sailor’s Rest.”

  “I take it ‘Big Id’ was our client’s employer,” I said, handing the clipping back to him.

  “Precisely.”

  “But pray tell me, how did you arrive at Perro as the murderer?”

  “Dear me, Parker, surely that is plain as a pikestaff?”

  I shook my head. “I should have looked to the Chinaman. The device of the worm is Oriental in concept.”

  “An admirable deduction. Quite probably they were all in it together and the worm was the work of the Chinaman. But the murderer was Perro. I fear your education in the Humanities has been sadly neglected.

  “The card, which was postmarked but two days after this item appeared in the papers, was an announcement from a friend of Persano’s to tell him that the ‘little dog’ was free. The ‘little dog’ undoubtedly had information about Persano’s whereabouts, and knew how to find him, even if Persano perhaps did not realize how much of his life in London was known in America. Persano understood the card at once.

  “Had Perro not wished Persano to know who meant to kill him, I might have had a far more difficult time of it. ‘Little dog catches big cat.’ Perro is a little man. Persano was big. Perro is the Spanish for ‘dog.’ It should not be necessary to add that Persano is the Spanish for ‘Persian.’ And a Persian is a variety of cat.

  “An ingenious little puzzle, Parker, however elementary in final analysis.”

  The Enchanted Garden

  H. F. HEARD

  THE ENGLISH SOCIAL historian and author of science and mystery fiction Henry FitzGerald Heard (1889–1971) was born in London, studied at Cambridge University, then turned to writing essays and books on historical, scientific, religious, mystical, cultural, and social subjects, signing them Gerald Heard, the name under which all his nonfiction appeared. He moved to the United States in 1937 to head a commune in California, and later appeared as a character in several Aldous Huxley novels, notably as William Propter, a mystic, in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939).

  A Taste for Honey (1941) introduced Mr. Mycroft, a tall, slender gentleman who has retired to Sussex to keep bees. The story is told by Sydney Silchester, a reclusive man who loves honey, which he obtains from Mr. and Mrs. Heregrove, the village beekeepers, until he discovers the lady’s body, black and swollen from bee stings. After the coroner’s inquest, Silchester turns to Mr. Mycroft for a fresh supply of honey and receives a warning about Heregrove’s killer bees.

  Anthony Marriott, along with Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho (1959) and many other novels and stories, adapted the novel for a truly awful contemporary screenplay titled The Deadly Bees (1966). For an episode of television’s The Elgin Hour, Alvin Sapinsley wrote the script for “Sting of Death,” which starred Boris Karloff as Mr. Mycroft; it aired on February 22, 1955.

  Mr. Mycroft appeared in two additional novels by Heard: Reply Paid (1942) and The Notched Hairpin (1949). Among Heard’s other science fiction and mystery novels, perhaps his best-known work is the short story “The President of the U.S.A., Detective,” which won the first prize in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s contest in 1947.

  “The Enchanted Garden” originally was published in the March 1949 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

  H. F. Heard

  “ ‘NATURE’S A queer one,’ said Mr. Squeers,” I remarked.

  “I know what moves you to misquote Dickens,” was Mr. Mycroft’s reply.

  Here was a double provocation: first, there was the injury of being told that the subject on which one was going to inform someone was already known to him, and secondly, there was the insult that the happy literary quotation with which the information was to be introduced was dismissed as inaccurate. Still it’s no use getting irritated with Mr. Mycroft. The only hope was to lure his pride onto the brink of ignorance.

  “Then tell me,” I remarked demurely, “what I have just been reading?”

  “The sad, and it is to be feared, fatal accident that befell Miss Hetty Hess who is said to be extremely rich, and a ‘colorful personality’ and ‘young for her years’—the evidence for these last two statements being a color photograph in the photogravure section of the paper which establishes that her frock made up for its brevity only by the intense virility of its green color.”

  I am seldom untruthful deliberately, even when considerably nonplussed; besides it was no use: Mr. Mycroft was as usual one move ahead. He filled in the silence with: “I should have countered that naturalists are the queer ones.”

  I had had a moment to recover, and felt that I could retrieve at least a portion of my lost initiative. “But there’s no reason to link the accident with the death. The notice only mentions that she had had a fall a few weeks previously. The cause of death was ‘intestinal stasis.’ ”

  “Cause!” said Mr. Mycroft. He looked and sounded so like an old raven as he put his head on one side and uttered “caws,” that I couldn’t help laughing.

  “Murder’s no laughing matter!” he remonstrated.

  “But surely, cher maître, you sometimes are unwilling to allow that death can ever be through natural causes!”

  “Cause? There’s sufficient cause here.”

  “Post hoc, propter hoc.” I was glad to get off one of my few classic tags. “Because a lady of uncertain years dies considerably after a fall from which her doctor vouched there were no immediate ill effects, you would surely not maintain that it was on account of the fall that the rhythm of her secondary nervous system struck and stopped for good? And even if it was, who’s to blame?”

  “Cause.” At this third quothing of the Raven I let my only comment be a rather longer laugh—and waited for my lecture. Mr. Mycroft did not fail me. He went on: “I’ll own I know nothing about causality in the outer world, for I believe no one does really. But I have spent my life, not unprofitably, in tracing human causality. As you’re fond of Dickens, I’ll illustrate from Copperfield’s Mr. Dick. The causes of King Charles’s head coming off may have been due to four inches of iron going through his neck. I feel on safer ground when I say it was due to his failing to get on with his parliament. You say Miss Hess died naturally—that is to say (1) her death, (2) her accident a fortnight before, and (3) the place where that accident took place, all have only a chance connection. Maybe your case would stand were I not watching another line of causality.”

  “You mean a mo
tive?”

  “Naturally.”

  “But motives aren’t proof! Or every natural death would be followed by a number of unnatural ones—to wit, executions of executors and legatees!”

  “I don’t know whether I agree with your rather severe view of human nature. What I do know is that when a death proves to be far too happy an accident for someone who survives, then we old sleuths start with a trail which often ends with our holding proofs that not even a jury can fail to see.”

  “Still,” I said, “suspicion can’t always be right!”

  What had been no more than an after-lunch sparring-match suddenly loomed up as active service with Mr. Mycroft’s, “Well, the police agree with you in thinking that there’s no proof, and with me in suspecting it is murder. That’s why I’m going this afternoon to view the scene of the accident, unaccompanied—unless, of course, you would care to accompany me?”

  I may sometimes seem vain but I know my uses. So often I get a ringside seat because, as Mr. Mycroft has often remarked, my appearance disarms suspicion.

  “We are headed,” Mr. Mycroft resumed as we bowled along in our taxi, “for what I am creditably informed is in both senses of the word a gem of a sanctuary—gem, because it is both small and jewelled.”

  We had been swaying and sweeping up one of those narrow rather desolate canyons in southern California through which the famous “Thirteen suburbs in search of a city” have thrust corkscrew concrete highways. The lots became more stately and secluded, the houses more embowered and enwalled, until the ride, the road, and the canyon itself all ended in a portico of such Hispano-Moorish impressiveness that it might have been the entrance to a veritable Arabian Nights Entertainments. There was no one else about, but remarking, “This is Visitors’ Day,” Mr. Mycroft alit, told our driver to wait, and strolled up to the heavily grilled gate. One of the large gilt nails which bossed the gate’s carved timbers had etched round it in elongated English so as to pretend to be Kufic or at least ordinary Arabic the word PRESS. And certainly it was as good as its word. For not only did the stud sink into the gate, the gate followed suit and sank into the arch, and we strolled over the threshold into as charming an enclosure as I have ever seen. The gate closed softly behind us. Indeed, there was nothing to suggest that we weren’t in an enchanted garden. The ground must have risen steeply on either hand. But you didn’t see any ground—all manner of hanging vines and flowering shrubs rose in festoons, hanging in garlands, swinging in delicate sprays. The crowds of blossom against the vivid blue sky, shot through by the sun, made the place intensely vivid. And in this web of color, like quick bobbins, the shuttling flight of hummingbirds was everywhere. The place was, in fact, alive with birds. But not a single human being could I see.