No Police Like Holmes

by Dan Andriacco

  Kane took a drink of what appeared to be bourbon, then set down his glass on the dining room table. “That story satirizes the Baker Street Irregular types, not Holmes himself. I respect Holmes as the protagonist of the modern-day private eye of fiction. What I don’t like is the game some people play, pretending that Holmes is real and Conan Doyle was nothing more than a literary agent.”

  “But of course Holmes is real!”

  That didn’t come from me, you may be sure. The fellow with the Basil Rathbone nose, the one I’d seen in the living room, had butted into the conversation. He introduced himself as Dr. Noah Queensbury, Official Secretary of the Anglo-Indian Club. That’s the Holmes group in Cincinnati, about forty miles downriver from Erin, to which Mac and many of the other colloquium participants belonged. Apparently the group took its name from a club mentioned in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

  “Perhaps you missed my monograph on ‘Ten Proofs for the Existence of Sherlock Holmes,’” Queensbury said.

  Kane gave me a “What the hell?” look.

  “Proof number one.” Queensbury held up a finger. “There used to be a Metropolitan Line train on the London underground called The Sherlock Holmes. The British do not name trains after fictional characters.”

  I abandoned my unfinished Diet Coke and opened the Samuel Adams Light. This was not to be endured without fortification. My sister, still hovering over the cheese ball, gave me a weak smile as I swallowed the brew.

  “Proof number two,” Queensbury droned on. “In 1988, I wrote a letter to Mr. Holmes at 221B Baker Street, London. It was answered by a secretary. Fictional characters do not have secretaries. Proof number three-”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Sherlock Holmes has to be a fictional character. It says so on Wikipedia.” I just assumed that, having never looked it up.

  Queensbury snorted. “That almost proves my case. Everyone knows Wikipedia is unreliable.”

  “You’re impossible,” Kane growled.

  “Proof number three-” Queensbury persisted, unruffled.

  I’d intended to press Kane on the state of detective fiction for an article in the alumni magazine, but that obviously would have to wait. I had to get out of there before I started screaming. I edged past Queensbury, who didn’t seem to notice, and into the now-crowded hallway.

  For a minute I felt trapped there amid the dozen or so lunatics gibbering about Sherlock Holmes. Then I spotted Mac on the other side of the hall, sitting by the unlit fire in his thirty-foot living room.

  “Ah, Jefferson,” he said as I approached. “Driven you to drink, have we?”

  He thought he was joking. I know that because he laughed, his bearded chins wobbling above a polka-dot bow tie. With his whale-like body settled in a wingback chair, he looked innocent enough. There was no indication, for example, of his predilection for marching down the college quadrangle clad in a kilt and playing the bagpipes on the first day of every spring semester. There was nothing to tell you that he enjoyed writing a blog critiquing the faulty grammar in official communications around campus, delighting the undergrads and putting half the faculty and administration in an uproar. And there wasn’t the slightest hint that he fancied himself a Great Detective lacking only a case. He’s my best friend, and the biggest thorn in my side. When we’d first met as college students at St. Benignus he was already something of an enfant terrible. Now, pushing forty (three years older than me), he’s no longer an enfant, but still terrible.

  “Come and meet Woollcott,” he said, waving me into a nearby couch.

  Woollcott Chalmers, sitting at the end of the couch closest to Mac, looked to be in his mid- to late-seventies, if the whiteness of his hair and thin mustache weren’t deceiving. His eyes, enlarged by lenses in his black-framed glasses, were blue and penetrating. He was impeccably dressed in a black suit and red foulard tie. He held a cane loosely between his legs. I knew from Mac that he’d inherited a few million dollars, increased it about ten-fold during a career of investing money for himself and others, and had never been shy about spending goodly quantities of it on pet arts projects or his collection of Sherlockiana. Said collection was the third largest still in private hands, and he was donating it all to St. Benignus - a big coup for a college our size. Some local corporations were putting up the money to maintain it.

  Chalmers rose and shook my hand, exuding the sort of charm you’d expect from a guy who looked like a retired British admiral. His skin was as soft as a baby’s. He had a pleasant smile, showing teeth that were too perfect to be real.

  “Delighted to meet you at last, young man,” he said. “I’ve heard much about you from your admiring sister. I should very much like you to meet my wife.” He leaned forward on the cane, looking toward a small knot of people at the other end of the living room, and raised his voice. “Renata?”

  One of the women disengaged herself, flashed a brilliant smile at the group she was leaving, and joined our corner of the universe. Chalmers unnecessarily pronounced my name and his wife’s.

  “We’ve sort of already met,” Renata Chalmers explained to her husband as she shook my hand.

  “I’m afraid I drank most of that light beer you asked for,” I said.

  “No worries.”

  What the hell, then. I gulped down the rest of it.

  Chapter Three - Night Work

  Renata Chalmers had to be a good four decades younger than her husband and prettier than your average beauty queen. A cynic might look at the estimated girth of the old man’s investment portfolio and draw conclusions, but whoever accused me of being a cynic?

  “Jefferson is a cynic,” my brother-in-law declared by way of further introduction. He stuck a long, green cigar in his mouth. In years gone by he would have fired it up with a lighter shaped like a hand grenade. Nowadays he mostly uses the cigar as a prop, yielding to Kate’s no-smoking zone inside the house and sometimes to my protests about second-hand smoke outside of it.

  “Why do you say that?” Renata asked.

  “Because it is true,” Mac said grandly. “Only a cynic - a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, according to Oscar Wilde - could share Jefferson’s total incomprehension of the joys of collecting.”

  I confessed that the passion to pay big money for things that nobody really needs, like multiple editions of the same Sherlock Holmes book and even variant printings of the same edition, was way beyond my ken.

  “But maybe you can explain it,” I told Chalmers. I whipped out my notebook and prepared for enlightenment. There could be a news release or an alumni mag article in this lunacy, which I would then tweet a link to.

  “Think of it as a game,” Chalmers said, leaning back on the couch, relaxed and in his element. “It’s a chase that’s always changing. Sometimes you know what you’re looking for, but you don’t know where to find it. Other times you know who has some unique item and the challenge is to make it yours. In Moscow, for example, I once talked a policeman out of a Russian first edition of His Last Bow.”

  “And you almost went to Lubyanka Prison or someplace equally awful on smuggling charges when you tried to take it out of the country,” his wife reminded him.

  Chalmers nodded at the memory. “There was no real crime involved, of course, except the extortion directed at me. Generous amounts of hard currency got me out of that pickle rather quickly. Overcoming obstacles - whether corrupt foreign officials or rival collectors - only adds zest to the game, Jeff.”

  Just thinking about it was enough to light the fire of battle in Chalmers’s clear blue eyes.

  “Oh, my collection isn’t the largest,” he went on, “but it is distinctive. No one else, for example, owns fully half the hand-written manuscript of The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

  I could imagine a nice photo spread of that, but why only half the MS? “Where’
s the rest of it?” I asked.

  “Scattered,” Chalmers said, “as it has been for more than a century. The manuscript was broken up and sent to book dealers as part of a promotion for the book’s American publication in 1902. Various libraries and just a few private collectors own the other pages. One sold not so long ago for seventy-eight thousand dollars. Alas, I was not the purchaser.”

  “Then you obviously haven’t been able to get everything you’ve gone after,” I said.

  Chalmers sat forward. His grip on the cane tightened. “Perhaps not, young man, but I always left the other fellow knowing he’d been in a fight. I play to win. Isn’t that right, Renata?”

  She nodded, her smile slipping a bit.

  “And now you’re just going to give away the Woollcott Chalmers Collection,” I said. “I don’t understand that part, either.”

  With an avuncular smile, Chalmers pointed his cane at Mac. “Blame your brother-in-law. He talked me into it.”

  Staying at a bed and breakfast in Savannah, Georgia, a couple of years back, I met a man who had once sold a refrigerator to an Eskimo in Alaska (who used it as a cigar humidor). Well, that guy had nothing on Sebastian McCabe when it comes to persuasion. But Mac refused the credit.

  “Slander!” he thundered. “Calumny and character assassination! I talked you into nothing. I had heard that you were ready to share your collection, Woollcott, and I merely suggested that St. Benignus College would be a most grateful recipient.”

  Chalmers nodded. “True enough. There comes a time when hoarding it all to yourself is no longer satisfying. It becomes rather like Renata playing her violin to an empty concert hall or an actor performing to a darkened theater. Besides, after forty years the challenge has mostly disappeared. So I decided to give the collection away while I’m still alive to enjoy the gratitude - and the tax deduction.”

  “Perhaps Jefferson would enjoy a private tour of the exhibit right now,” Mac rumbled.

  The whole collection wasn’t even unpacked yet, but some of the highlights were set up in a room next to the one where the speakers would be holding forth in the colloquium. Although I’d written about the exhibit in press releases and talked about it in pitching stories, I hadn’t yet had a chance to see it. So I was mildly curious.

  “But you can’t just leave the party,” I told Mac. “You’re the host.”

  Mac looked at his watch, which had a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes on the face. “It is barely ten o’clock. With my charming wife presiding as hostess and ample adult beverages on hand to lubricate the guests, this jamboree will still be going strong long after we get back. We may not even be missed.”

  Further pro forma protests on my part proved predictably futile. Within ten minutes the four of us had piled into Mac’s 1959 Chevy convertible, headed for Muckerheide Center on the St. Benignus campus. The car is fire-engine red with immense tail fins. It’s no vehicle for a grown man at all, but it fits Sebastian McCabe just fine. Chalmers sat in front with Mac, apparently because it was easier on the older man’s bum leg, and I sat in back next to Renata. She was a delightful conversationalist (although I can’t remember a word she said - maybe something about her musical career) and she smelled so good I felt guilty just breathing around her.

  A guard let us into Muckerheide Center, thanks to an advance call to Bobby Deere, who runs the center at night. The place was fully lighted, but eerily empty. The clicks of our heels on the tile floor echoed far down the wide corridors as we walked along.

  On the first floor we passed the darkened offices, the abandoned Information Desk, and the empty racks that hold the campus newspaper when school is in session. Walking up the immobile escalator to the second level, Chalmers moved slowly, relying heavily on his cane. Just outside Hearth Room C, where the display from the Woollcott Chalmers Collection was set up behind closed doors, I realized we weren’t going any farther without help.

  “We need to get a key from that guard,” I said in a near-whisper. The place had me a little spooked. “This baby’s locked.” By way of demonstration, I jiggled the handle. The door didn’t move.

  “No mere lock can stop Sebastian McCabe,” my brother-in-law announced. He did not whisper. From his breast pocket he produced a yellow balloon. “Be so good as to blow this up, please,” he asked Renata Chalmers as he handed it to her. She hesitated, clearly bewildered by Mac’s madcap actions. Apparently she didn’t know him very well.

  “Humor him,” I said as Mac lit a cigar. “You may have children of your own some day.”

  Looking resigned rather than enthusiastic, she blew up the balloon. Her husband, at Mac’s request, tied the balloon shut and handed it over to Mac - who immediately applied the hot tip of his cigar to the latex. The balloon popped and something clattered to the floor. Renata picked it up and handed it to Mac - an old-fashioned metal key.

  “I believe this will facilitate our entrance,” Mac said.

  Woollcott Chalmers tucked his cane under his right arm and clapped softly in appreciation of this sophomoric parlor trick. “Bravo!” His wife smiled, the rough equivalent of turning on a mega-watt spotlight.

  “Can’t you ever do anything the easy way?” I asked Mac.

  “What would be the fun of that, old boy?”

  He used the key to open the door. At first he fumbled for a light switch, then found it on the wall to his left. The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling blinked on with the flickering brightness of lightning.

  The Chalmers Collection filled the room, some of it spread out on tables, some on the walls, some in bookcases. There were books, posters, calendars, records - anything to which the name or image of Sherlock Holmes had been applied. It was hard to take it all in. And this was only a small sampling of the collection; the bulk of it remained in packing boxes over at the library.

  “Incredible,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Nor will you,” Chalmers assured me. “There is nothing like it. Perhaps that is immodest, but as Holmes once said, ‘I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.’”

  He watched in silence from the doorway as the rest of us strolled through the room. Mac dawdled over some faded paperbacks, the particular kind of book toward which his own collection mania is bent. I got caught up in the bizarre design of a Firesign Theatre record album called “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.”

  “Don’t waste your time with that,” Chalmers said when he saw what I was up to. He pointed with his cane to a glass case against the far wall. “There lay the real gems of my forty years of collecting Sherlockiana.”

  I put the album down and joined Mac and Renata in following Chalmers across the room.

  The case to which the collector had pointed was lined in red velvet, giving it the air of a reliquary. Reposing on the cloth were several letters, a calling card from Arthur Conan Doyle with a note scribbled on it, a small playbill from an early performance of the melodrama Sherlock Holmes signed by the lead actor, William Gillette, and several books whose bibliographical significance escaped me.

  Chalmers said, “Until I found it, no one even suspected the existence of-”

  “Woollcott!”

  Renata, grabbing his arm tightly, didn’t need to say anything else. Chalmers’s blue eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, grew even wider as he instantly saw what his wife was too flustered to voice.

  “I don’t-” He hesitated, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. This afternoon... everything was here when we left.”

  His wife nodded. “I know.”

  “What is it?” Mac asked sharply. “What’s missing?”

  “The Hound of the Baskervilles manuscript,” Renata replied.

  “Much more than that,” Chalmers added in an agitated voice. “There was also a first edition of the Hound inscribed by Conan Doyle to Fletcher Robinson himself. And
a Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, the rarest of all Sherlockian books, made even rarer by a hand-written note on the first page from Conan Doyle to his mother.”

  I whistled. “That kind of stuff must be worth a pretty penny.”

  “Priceless!” Mac thundered. He tugged on his beard. “I find it hard to credit that our librarian misplaced them.”

  “There’s no chance of that,” Renata said. “They were here when we left this afternoon after helping set up the display. They’ve been stolen.”

  Chapter Four - “We’ve Had a Little Incident”

  “And it’s only my first month on the job,” Gene Pfannenstiel moaned, shaking his shaggy head.

  “I know,” I told the young librarian.

  “Nothing like this ever happened anywhere else I’ve worked,” he assured me.

  “You said that already,” I reminded him. “Twice.”

  Gene’s broad face, usually alive with the excitement of some bookish pursuit that would have put me to sleep, was a study in earnest concern. Or as earnest as a chunky man can look in a frizzy beard and no mustache.

  In pleated black slacks and a white shirt open at the collar, he was dressed more like an Amish storekeeper than the curator of special collections at the Lee J. Bennish Memorial Library. Blinking around at the rest of us, he looked about as worldly, too.

  “I should have asked to have special guards posted outside,” he fretted.

  “That’s obvious,” said Lieutenant Ed Decker of Campus Security.

  “Not particularly helpful at this juncture, however,” Mac rumbled.

  By this time he had driven Woollcott and Renata Chalmers back to the McCabe house, where they were staying the weekend. The old man had left looking about ten years older.

  I wasn’t feeling so hot myself. It didn’t take a public relations genius to figure that news of the Sherlockian thefts would quickly overshadow everything else happening on campus this weekend. A major gift to the college - or parts of it, anyway - had been stolen almost as soon as the collection had arrived. That made us look like a bunch of rubes. Plus there was the Holmes connection, guaranteed to set off a media feeding frenzy. Dealing with the press would be a headache on this one, and that was the least of my worries. A certain unbearable college administrator was sure to make my life really miserable.