The Case of the Exploding Speakeasy

by David E. Fessenden

  Reading the look on my face, he chuckled once again. “Don’t worry, Mr. Watson, my drill bits are packed away for the day. Just ask your questions, and I’ll tell you all I know—though it puzzles me as to how I can help you.”

  “Well, doctor, as I said, I’m here to ask about your patient, the late Harry Ragan. I understand he was given the anesthesia nitrous oxide.” I could already tell this interview was going to be problematic: seated in a chair and tilted back, squinting my eyes against the bright examination light, I found it impossible to have eye contact with the man unless he faced me directly and bent over. Most of the time, it seemed, he was behind me, clattering his instruments.

  “Yes, we administer it with this mask and apparatus.” The dentist stepped into my line of vision and held up a rubber cup-shaped object with a long hose that connected to a small pair of tanks. “And it is most fortunate for Mr. Ragan that he came to me, because not all dentists have nitrous oxide available. You see, his teeth were badly neglected and needed extensive work. The decay was quite close to the nerve.” He caressed the rubber mask with his long, thin fingers.

  Such words as “decay” and “nerve” sent chills up my spine. No, indeed, this interview was not a good idea. With a jittery forefinger, I tugged at my shirt collar and noticed it was damp with sweat. I decided I had best cut this short and get to my point. “I understand that a patient on nitrous oxide can become quite talkative. Can you tell me if Mr. Ragan ever spoke of his business interests while under influence of the gas?”

  “His business interests? Why, what business was he in?”

  “Really, Doctor? Do you mean to tell me that you had no idea that Ragan ran an illegal saloon and gambling den? Wouldn’t you have wanted to know that information before extending him credit?”

  I heard a nervous laugh behind me and Thompson returned to my field of vision. “Why, where would you get the idea that I was extending him credit?” he said with a tremor in his voice. I guess my nervousness was becoming contagious. “Mr. Ragan always paid up front—in cash. Do you have any other questions?”

  It seemed I was striking out on this interview, so it was with a hopeless sort of resignation that I asked my final question, the one I had asked so many others, but without success: “Did Ragan ever mention anyone by the name of ‘Painless’?”

  Suddenly, the smile disappeared from the dentist’s face and he made a slight choking sound in his throat. I wondered at his reaction—until I raised myself up in the chair and looked over his shoulder at the writing on the outside door: Charles S. Thompson, D.D.S.—Painless Dentistry!

  Now I knew. And as he followed my gaze over his shoulder, Dr. Thompson knew I knew.

  The mask was clamped over my face before I could resist. I hesitated in my reaction just long enough for Thompson to turn the valve. A tingling sensation began immediately in my nostrils and I tried to push the mask away, but the dentist had a grip of iron desperation.

  It was impossible to wrestle with the man without taking a breath now and then. As much as I tried not to yield, eventually my arms began to feel like lead, and I started to wonder just exactly why I was struggling. Maybe I should just relax a while and see what this strange man bending over me was really up to. The lights in the room grew dim, and in the distance—oh, so far away—I heard the musical tinkling of breaking glass, along with some other voices. It struck me for the first time in my life just how funny the sound of breaking glass could be, and I giggled like a schoolgirl. I lowered my arms to my sides, closed my eyes, and gave myself over to the sweet music of the breaking glass . . .

  Someone was slapping my face. Strange that I couldn’t really feel it. I opened my eyes to see what was the matter. The blurry, watery image before me gradually coalesced into the face of Basil.

  “Are you all right, Master Thomas? Please, please tell me you are all right!”

  “Basil, Basil,” I slurred. “What are you so worked up about? Hey, did you know that Dr. Thompson is Painless? Oh, yes, I suppose he was trying to kill me, wasn’t he?” I started to giggle again, and the worried look on Basil’s face only deepened. He just didn’t understand. I had Thompson right where I wanted him.

  CHAPTER 18

  I lay on the couch in a deliciously half-awake state, as Maggie gently stroked my forehead with a wet cloth. Ah, what pleasure. The only thing that kept me from drifting off to a restful sleep was the incessant droning of Mycroft, as he held court, explaining the details of the case in his slow, pedantic manner to a gathering of our friends—Captain Bill, Basil, Rose, and Feeney.

  “The solution to the mystery was simple,” Mycroft explained, resting his hand on the mantelpiece. “Your mistake, young man, was your obsession with the victim, Harry Ragan. He was a mere item, an incidental appendage to the problem. The most common investigative error is the failure to focus on the most bizarre or unexpected detail of the case.”

  “I suppose the explosion is the most bizarre detail?” I mumbled.

  Mycroft stared at me, his bushy eyebrows forming a V, like the wingspread of a bird of prey. Then his countenance softened, and I could see he was taking note of my weakened physical state and forgiving me for interrupting his monologue.

  “You are nearly right, Thomas. Certainly the explosion was strange. Beyond it being a rather unlikely method of execution, its very nature was odd: not a blast powerful enough to kill, nor caused by the normal methods of detonation, such as dynamite or gunpowder. But I am talking about the one detail in our friend Basil’s narrative which was obviously bizarre, even to the police.”

  “You mean the look of rage on Harry Ragan’s face when Basil peeked through the keyhole?”

  “Exactly.”

  I shifted my position so I could look straight at him. “Then the mystery is centered on Harry Ragan, and I was on the right track, after all!”

  A flutter of nervous laughter spread around the room, and Mycroft’s shoulders slumped as he exhaled an impatient sigh. A helpless weariness crept around his eyes. He was losing control of his audience, and he did not appreciate it.

  “No, no, no! What made the look of rage bizarre was not that it contorted Ragan’s face—we already know Ragan was a volatile man, so rage would hardly be an unusual emotion for him. The look of rage—and if you remember, I was very careful in my examination of Basil’s testimony to verify this point—was frozen on Ragan’s face. An animated man such as Ragan rarely has any expression on his face for long, and especially not a look of rage. No, that look had to have been artificially produced.

  “Now, what would produce an artificial look of rage on a man’s face? It could be nothing other than a drug. The fact that the men suffocated in a room full of air is further evidence of the presence of a powerful drug—one that would arrest the involuntary action of the muscles used in breathing.”

  Now that the audience was once again under his control, Mycroft began to pace again, and he assumed a professorial air. “Drugs, as we know, may be administered in a number of ways—by injection, orally by liquid or pill, or by inhalation. Since it resulted in his death, we can assume Ragan ingested the drug without his knowledge, and since he never ate or drank anything that didn’t come by the hand of his trusted butler, we can assume the drug was inhaled.”

  “Gas! You said the room was filled with gas!” I sat up with a start, almost colliding heads with Maggie, who had been leaning over me with a damp washcloth.

  “Yes, and what profession was Ragan most recently in contact with which uses gas as a drug, specifically, as anesthesia? Dentistry!” Mycroft slammed a beefy fist on the side table, making the tea set rattle dangerously. “The crowning touch is this passage in my research on nitrous oxide: ‘Common symptoms of overdosing include a tightening of the facial muscles, which produces a characteristic grimace or look of rage’. ”

  What a fool I had been! I had reviewed his research notes, but I ignored the overdos
e symptoms to read about the more common effects of talkativeness and loss of inhibition, and I had concluded that perhaps Ragan had said something during his appointment that the dentist had overheard.

  And yet, it still made no sense! How had the dentist put the gas in the room? And what was his motive for killing Ragan and his friends? The fog in my head was not yet fully clear, so I thought it best to lean back and rest a while as I contemplated my next move. I settled down among the delicious pillows and yielded to the soft ministrations of the beautiful Maggie. And for a moment, the room was blessedly quiet.

  Mycroft, however, had not yet finished his presentation. “No doubt you are wondering about Dr. Thompson’s motive. You could have discovered this as well, young man, if you had taken my advice. As you may recall, I told you that there was something peculiar about Ragan’s ledger. If you had studied it, you would have seen that there were several appointments scheduled for extensive dental work, yet there was one thing missing. Can you guess what that was?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I replied wearily.

  “Very well, I will tell you. The ledger contained the price he paid for cigars, for groceries, for having his shirts pressed. Don’t you think he would have noted his payments for the dental appointments? But there were no payments! They are mysteriously absent. No businessman, not even one in the medical profession, allows a client to go without paying, appointment after appointment. Well, then, perhaps Ragan has something on this dentist. When I learned the missing card player’s name was ‘Painless,’ it all made sense. Thompson was giving Ragan free dental services to pay off his gambling debts!”

  I groaned inwardly. Of course, he must be right. And yet . . . my mind was beginning to clear to the point that I could see a logical flaw in that scenario. Something did not fit. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when Captain Bill spoke up. “Not sure I follow ye, Mr. Holmes. So he killed Ragan and the others to get out of his gambling debts? Seems like a rather extreme solution to me.”

  “Ah, that is one of the most interesting twists to the story, my good man. I suggest that the overdosing deaths of the card players and the resulting explosion were entirely unintentional. Dr. Thompson was quite deeply in debt, I suspect. He arrived at the speakeasy in a long coat, walking stiffly. He must have been carrying a portable tank of nitrous oxide, with a hose attached to slide it under the door. He planned to anesthetize the card players, then sneak into the room to steal the kitty. But he must have underestimated the potency of the gas in such a small room. Or, as I suspect, the valve broke and emptied the entire contents of the tank into the room.”

  Mycroft paused for a moment to allow his explanation to sink in. “And then, of course, he could not grab the money when he discovered, just as Basil did, that the door was locked from the inside.”

  I snickered. “Perhaps you should be a witness for the defense at Thompson’s trial, Mycroft!”

  “I would be happy to do so, should they ask me. Actually, I feel a bit sorry for him. It was a foolish move by a desperate man. But in his heart he’s no killer.”

  I sat up once more, nearly colliding again with Maggie. “He tried to kill me!”

  “Desperation will drive normally cautious people to make stupid and dangerous choices.” Mycroft stepped into my line of sight and squinted at me through his monocle. “Not unlike someone else we all know.”

  I was about to lose my temper, but he winked and grinned at me. Then the others in the room began to laugh, and I saw the dark humor of it all: I had stumbled onto the killer and almost became his next victim, all because I was desperate to win a bet!

  Rather than remain the butt of Mycroft’s joke, I figured it was best to change the subject. “It’s a plausible theory, the robbery motive, but you can’t really prove that Thompson had no intention of murdering those men.”

  Mycroft shoved his hands into his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, I can prove it and I will. Remember the bicycle pump in the corner? He must have been attempting to pump air into the room under the door, hoping to give the dying men some oxygen. You see? He was trying to save them, not to kill them, when he heard our friend Basil coming down the hall. He hastily pulled the pump hose out from under the door, creating the chip on the door that you found, Basil—”

  “Actually, I found it,” I interrupted, but my feeble protest was not about to halt Mycroft’s rhetorical flow.

  “Then he hid in the closet,” continued Mycroft, “as you stumbled by on your way to the kitchen—under the influence, I should mention, of the gas.”

  Basil stretched his neck out of his shirt collar and his eyes grew wide with surprise. “Why, I must have looked through the keyhole, made an involuntary gasp, and sucked in a snootful of nitrous oxide. Is that what you mean, Mr. Holmes?”

  Mycroft nodded, closing his eyes and pulling down the corners of his mouth. “Then you continued to stare, breathing in more and more of the potent atmosphere streaming through the keyhole.”

  I was pondering that scenario when Feeney spoke up with the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue: “But what caused the explosion, Mr. Holmes?”

  Instead of speaking, the old man pulled out his research notes once more and handed them to me, pointing to an obscure paragraph on the last page. I propped myself up on one elbow and read it aloud. “Care must be taken to keep the apparatus clean. Nitrous oxide, while not explosive itself, may serve as a catalyst for the combustion of airborne dust particles.”

  I recalled Basil’s description of the room—how Ragan scattered sawdust on the floor to soak up spills and refused to let anyone clean up in there. The same thing must have come to Basil’s mind. As he set a cup of tea at Mycroft’s elbow, he commented, “The bicycle pump under the door must have blown up the sawdust and dirt from the floor, creating an explosive atmosphere, aided by the nitrous oxide. Is that about the size of it, Mr. Holmes?”

  Mycroft nodded. “What set it off? The lamp? A lighted cigar? Who knows? The only logical conclusion, of course, is that the explosion was a fluke. ‘Painless’ was no cold-blooded killer. Just a foolish man, caught in an impossible situation, and the unwitting cause of an improbable accident.”

  Pausing in his explanation, Mycroft gave me a strange look I could not interpret. “Thomas, my boy, I was speaking in jest before when I alluded to your visit to the dentist, but in all seriousness, I owe you an apology. I allowed you to walk into a dangerous situation utterly unprepared.”

  His words astonished me. Imagine—Mycroft Holmes, admitting to a mistake! But an even more amazing confession followed.

  “I suppose—” Mycroft cleared his throat with a pained look. “I suppose this only points up one of my brother’s gifts which I lack: an understanding of the criminal mind. I assumed—foolishly, I see now—that since the killer had caused the deaths of these men and the resulting explosion accidentally, he would not be as dangerous and desperate as he was.”

  “But thanks to Basil’s quick thinking, you’re safe now,” Maggie said, patting me playfully on the cheek with the damp cloth. Her tone indicated that my safety was important to her. I liked that. “Once he learned from Mr. Holmes who the killer was, he tracked down Officer Feeney. They both hopped the trolley to Chestnut Hill and were able to rescue you in time.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Basil,” I said. “Oh, and you, too, Officer.” I looked over the back of the couch at Feeney, standing by the coat rack with his arms folded, as impassive as a cigar-store Indian. Basil, on the other hand, tilted his head and broke into a shy smile.

  “Mind you, if Thomas had practiced the principles of observation and deduction that Sherlock and I have tried to drill into him since he was a child, he would have solved the mystery on his own, and he never would have been in danger,” Mycroft added, speaking to the group almost defensively. Once more, he laid his hand on the mantelpiece and unconsciously assumed a pose. The old Holmes pers
onality was reasserting itself—which, of course, had only been a matter of time.

  The police must be having a heyday with their interrogation, I thought. Such subtleties of motive and intent by the dentist, not to mention the complexities of the chemical interaction that caused the explosion, would be lost on them. No doubt there’s a flurry of activity at the station house, with patrolmen, curious bystanders, reporters . . .

  Reporters! I sat up suddenly again, and this time I actually did collide with Maggie, poor thing. I mumbled an apology, but I had no time to explain further. I had to get to the newspaper office and write up my story before someone else did—especially Larry Jones!

  I jumped up, grabbed my hat and writing pad, muttered an explanation, and left the room with barely any wobble to my stride. As I headed out the door, I overheard Mycroft saying, “Where does he get all this energy?”

  CHAPTER 19

  Running a half-dozen blocks to catch the downtown trolley, then another few blocks to the newspaper office, had the unexpected benefit of clearing my head. By the time I entered the lobby, the lingering effects of the gas had worn off and my mind was quite clear, though I still suffered from a dull headache. After a short ride up the elevator, I stood outside the wide double doors to the editorial department. I paused for a moment and smiled. Here I was, the conquering hero, about to make my grand entrance.

  The first set of eyes I locked onto were those of Larry Jones. His eyebrows leaped up, but then he quickly resumed his mask of bored sophistication. I had no time to trade barbs with him. I rushed to my old desk—which I noticed with a certain pleasure had not been in use since I left—and sat down. The chair welcomed me with its familiar, friendly squawk. I slipped a sheet of paper into the typewriter and adjusted the top edge under the guide bar. Usually, I never noticed the rasping sound of the rubber roller as I advanced the page, but for some strange reason the newsroom was unnaturally quiet.