alt.sherlock.holmes

by Gini Koch

  “What do you think about all this Chicago business, Sherlock?”

  “I don’t. Who’s going to be President won’t make even a bit of difference. Politics doesn’t have to do with society, or anything that really matters. Johnson hasn’t done anything different since Kennedy was shot. You think McCarthy or Humphrey or whoever comes out of Chicago will? Those aren’t the real men in power, John. You should know that by now, with the shrapnel in your shoulder and your medical practice focused on servicing the Factory’s eclectic needs.”

  “I saw Andy yesterday. I asked him what he thought about those Yippies and their pranks. They’re nominating a pig for President, and they tried to levitate the Pentagon with their minds, but it didn’t work. ‘Something should have happened.’ he said. ‘Snowflakes or flashing lights or something. It was unsatisfying, like a story without an ending.’ Then he got sidetracked as to how Abbie Hoffman compared him to Castro, like they were the different types of medicine the world might need. ‘I never felt so manly.’”

  “So what, John? Does any of this matter to the people out on Avenue B, or to Mrs. Hendrix? We’re just shuffling the faces of government, the ones who face the music and pay for the sins of those with real power, the faceless, enduring people you don’t hear of. You think the elected control things? You don’t believe in the creation myth of this country, do you?”

  “My god, Sherlock. What’s gotten into you?”

  He looked at me, then, his eyes flashing with indecision. “I’ve had a message from my brother Mycroft. Any understanding I have of how power works is because of him. He works for the government. The real one. The one that actually runs thing. He sent me a note congratulating us on our new housing situation. Reminding me that, despite the fact that I never talk to him, he knows where I am, what I’m doing. He supposedly serves law and order, but who watches over him, Watson? No one. It’s people like my brother who decides what laws are made and what they mean. He is—he might be—more intelligent than I am. He’s certainly more in tune with American values, from his too-big house with its white picket fence in Virginia, but his American values are the only ones that really count.”

  “You didn’t tell him about moving in here? How did he know?”

  “I don’t talk to him if I can help it. I don’t even go home for Christmas. It’s meaningless. I’m not a Christian, so why would I celebrate the birth of their god, any more than I would celebrate Hercules Day or the passing of Zeus down from Olympus? No. No, I didn’t tell him anything, but he knows anyway. He knows about you.”

  “What does he know?”

  “Doctor, Army captain, that you’ve been ‘treating’ a lot of the satellites of Warhol’s world. Doesn’t seem to mind, at the moment, but that’s probably so that he can have something to use to get me to do a ‘favor’ for him later, or maybe you. That’s how they work—they get information on you and then use that to make you do things for them. Mycroft is particularly good at it.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Well, right now he wants to make sure that we stay away from Chicago and all the people there. He doesn’t have the faintest actual understanding about me, really. I have no interest in going to Chicago. That’s the kind of thing he cares about. Public relations and perception. Manufacturing complacency and a docile public. I know that something as inconsequential as a Presidential election can’t cause them any real problems. I don’t know what would, to be honest. Anyway, we’re not going to Chicago.”

  I changed the subject, trying to find a happier mood. “There’s a party at the Factory next month. Andy’s decided to come out into society again, like a debutante, presented back to his adoring public, or at least the two hundred or so closest of them. He’s decided to stop moping.”

  Sherlock looked up. “I suppose. I’m not sure that the Factory is living up to its reputation. There isn’t much in the way of work coming out of it, nor much of interest—ideas and so forth. I get bored, John. So bored. It was all very fun for a while, seeing how that world worked, but now I’m getting tired of navigating all the petty personal politics. It’s exhausting, not really challenging. Honestly, if Andy hadn’t been shot, we would have drifted away from them when they moved to Union Square.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He was right—it had gotten tiring, having to keep up with all the different factions and Andy’s whims—but that’s where Sherlock and I had met, and I wondered if I hadn’t become boring. The target of Sherlock’s acidic sense of humor. Boring was the worst thing you could be.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t mean you, John. You’re the best thing that came out of that place. I just mean... it’s an interesting idea, a factory where you can manufacture culture out of drugs and the lives of broken people, but there’s the persistent influence of money creeping in to it, isn’t there? Ever since Adler and the society types came in. The profit motive, maybe. It’s always been a little bit about what who could do for you, but now... I think our days there are numbered. We should find something interesting to occupy our time.”

  three

  TURNED AWAY

  THE STICKY EDGE came off the heat of summer as August grew into September. The nights cooled off just like the mood of the country once the news stopped showing young people being beaten up. There wasn’t any LSD running out of the taps, and Sherlock was right—nothing more lasting than broken bones came out of all that protest in Chicago, even though the politicians on both sides tried to use it to their advantage. Nixon talked about bringing law and order back. Humphrey’s victory showed that the Democrats still didn’t care about the war, or anything but being elected.

  Andy’s coming out party rolled around and I brought over a nearly full prescription pad the day before, and left with it nearly empty, Edie’s money bulging in my wallet.

  When we showed up for the party, Paul was out front. He made a show of shuffling through the paper on his clipboard twice.

  “Sorry, Doc, but you’re not on the list. It’s intimate tonight. I think if we had a few more you’d be fine, but Andy said he didn’t want anyone coming in.”

  “Really, Paul?” I was at a loss for words. “I saw Andy yesterday, remember? He said he’d see me tonight.”

  Paul pointed at the list and shrugged.

  “Come on, Doc, let’s go to that party in Hell’s Kitchen.” Sherlock to the rescue. I was stunned. I’d been to all the Warhol parties, even the most exclusive ones. I had a standing invite to dinners at Max’s, and usually didn’t pay, even though we drank more than we ate. I knew I wasn’t ‘cast out,’ because Andy had actually been friendly with me the day before. He was getting more and more reclusive. I guess he was a target now that he was so famous, so recognizable. They were talking about him everywhere, and you couldn’t blame him for being afraid after being shot.

  We stood outside in the cooling evening air, wondering where we should go.

  “Don’t look now, John, but we’re being watched.” Sherlock took out his tobacco and papers and rolled cigarettes for both of us, leaning over to light mine with his match. “It’s hard to see, but I think it’s Ondine over in the square, see there on the bench next to the subway entrance? Just the perfect spot to see who comes and goes into the Factory. I think he was writing in a notebook.”

  “It is him. He’s staring at us like a dog looking at an open can of dog food. Like he’s panting. What the hell is he doing over there?”

  Sherlock smoked for a moment, looking at me. “Let’s actually go to Hell’s Kitchen. I have a little game I’d like to play: you point out people to me and I’ll tell you what their story is. I want to stretch my brain out a little. You know, when you have a problem turning around in your head and you gnaw on it, worry at it, and then when you stop thinking about it, the solution comes to you? I need distraction. Come along. Let’s go and see what we can shake out from the hidden corners of my mind.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I was partly devastated. I felt lost and adrift,
cut off from anything, except Sherlock, and he was... not what I wanted right then. “No, Holmes, I’m... I’m going to go home, I think. I’m suddenly very tired.”

  He looked at me for a full minute, then nodded, and turned and walked away.

  I WATCHED SHERLOCK walk across the street and over to the subway station, wondering if I’d done the right thing. Should I have gone with him? I could just about catch him, probably, if I ran now.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Watson. Forgive the intrusion.”

  A tall man, taller than Sherlock even, with a loud rumpled yellow plaid jacket under a London Fog overcoat. He reeked of cigarettes and yellow nicotine stains vied with the blotches of ink on his hands.

  “Call me Doc, please. What can I help you with?”

  “My name is Richard Wellsley. I’m with Collins magazine. You’re familiar with it? Good. I was down here, trying to get in to see Andy or someone from the Factory at Max’s, hoping to do an interview with someone about Valerie Solanas, and the Factory and Warhol, and all of that, but no one would talk to me. They said Andy wanted to put all that behind him. I was sitting there wondering who I could talk to, and then I looked up and recognized you. You spoke at Solanas’s arraignment, didn’t you?”

  I laughed. “I did. She said she wanted me as her doctor, if you can believe it. She told me that Holmes and I were just about the only men she almost trusted.”

  “Could we set up some time for an interview?”

  I didn’t know what to think. Collins wasn’t your regular magazine. It was widely read, but also insightful. Not quite the New Yorker, but deep, thoughtful, and well-regarded. Still, I was wary. I didn’t really want to spend my time talking to someone who would go on and twist my words. Sometimes people didn’t get what I had to say—I had to explain it in a different way for them—and no matter how good a magazine, the writers were after a story; and maybe not the story I had to tell. This is also how I got started, being more famous as a writer than a doctor.

  I had notes, where I wrote down most of what happened around the time of the shooting. Sherlock was raving, locked away in our bedroom, and between caring for him I had a lot of downtime. I’d tried to get all of what he talked about straight in my head, piecing together what I could from the nights around the Blue-induced haze and the shock of Andy’s shooting. The story was convoluted and I wanted it straight, laid out on paper. I’d almost got it straight, I thought. I wouldn’t really know if it sounded crazy unless I wrote it out.

  “There is a story in it. It sounds crazy, though. I don’t really want to do an interview. It’s complicated. Convoluted. I’m not sure I could explain it, but I could write it for you, maybe? My friend Holmes and I knew Solanas, talked to her a lot right before she got the gun. I’ve been writing it down, trying to make sense of it. What if I finish it and then you could polish it up if it’s not fit to print?”

  He looked right through my flimsy excuses with his unlit cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “So you wanna be a writer, eh? All right. Writing’s tougher than you’d think, you know, but we can start with that. We’ll have to share the byline, but I haven’t got any other leads and this story’s going to go cold. Think you could get me something by next Thursday?”

  I thought about my journal and the unlikely hero that shared my bed, just waiting to be typed up, with a few excisions.

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “It’s just that, see, if I can get it by Thursday I’ll have time to read it, see if I need to work on it on the weekend. If you can’t do it by then, I can still get that interview, right? I know there’s a story. I’m happy to share the byline with you, but I want the inside scoop.”

  “No problem.”

  four

  A FAVOR, AND A CASE

  Oh Sherlock—

  Nice article. Sounds like you’re having an exciting life up there with Dr. Watson.

  —Mycroft

  THE LESS SAID about that winter the better. It was cold, and long. It took me a few weeks to write up the story, and then it went back and forth with Richard and the editors. Richard had liked it well enough, said it just needed a polish, but they were waiting for the trial to go to print. Or, as it turned out, a slow news week.

  “Good morning, John. Or should I say good afternoon?”

  I woke up, bleary-eyed in the cold March light, to Sherlock standing over me with a smile on his face; a smile that had less warmth in it than the wintry sun outside. It was practically cruel.

  “What’s this here? I wasn’t aware that you’d gotten a job at one of the nation’s more prestigious journals. Congratulations.”

  When he was angry he got excited. This was something else. Something that made me feel small, like a child who’d walked in on his parents making it. He was waving a folded-up copy of Collins with Valerie’s picture on the front. I’d almost forgotten about the article. The trial wasn’t for months, but for some reason they’d decided to run the feature. At least I’d get paid now.

  “I don’t have a job, Sherlock. I just wrote up what happened with Solanas. I thought it was an interesting story, and one that nobody else would tell. Or could tell. What’s wrong? I didn’t put in any of the stuff about the Blue Beauties or you and me. Just enough to suggest that there was more to the murder than Sirhan Sirhan, that you were trying to figure out who would believe you if you called the FBI or the LAPD, or someone who might believe you. I was there. It happened. Just because we were high doesn’t mean that everyone shouldn’t know how brilliant you are.” I laughed, it was so preposterous. “You figured out something even the FBI doesn’t know, and you were high. That’s the story that should be told.”

  “No, John, I’m not talking about that. I don’t care about fame, real or imagined. That’s not the problem. You just made it all sound glamorous, like I’m some kind of magician. You didn’t talk about how simple it was. It was fascinating, but you didn’t simply write about the patterns that are all right there in front of our eyes. The mud on Valerie’s clothes. The clear and obvious signs of coercion. The easy availability of guns. Adler’s inexplicable movements. Anyone could have figured it out; they just didn’t pay attention. But you make it sound like... a novel or something. I look like an idiot.”

  “You don’t, Sherlock. Really. But it’s cool, what you do, man.”

  “Then why can’t you just focus on the facts? I heard Girodias was a problem, so I went and talked to him. I was able to see that he was a power-hungry, money-grubbing bastard. I could see what Solanas was, how she was selling herself and devoting energy to running scams for money. Her life was just affected by a specific range of problems: cash, money, talent, and abuse. If you can put those things together, you can easily triangulate where the stresses were coming from and find out who was trying to use her as a puppet. It was really straightforward. She wasn’t anything like what you’ve written. Focus on what matters, John, not the... speculation about emotions. Or leave me out of your new writing career.”

  I snatched the magazine. “You can be a real bastard sometimes, you know that? I was just trying to be nice, and I think you come off really well in the piece. I worked on that, even when the editor wanted to cut some of it out. It was important to me.”

  “Well, maybe you should have some other priority.”

  He turned to the window and picked up his brown, smoky tobacco, rolling a cigarette without looking at it and staring out the window.

  “Fine. I’ve got to be at Max’s at eight if you want to come.”

  I went downstairs for a glass of water, and sat, looking out of the kitchen window. I hated it when he got like this. We smoked cigarette after cigarette like that, one atop the other, until around 7, when we silently got ready to go.

  “EXCUSE ME, MR. Holmes, Dr. Watson? Have you got a few minutes?”

  Sherlock looked at me and glanced at the door. “Of course, Mrs. Hendrix. How can we help?”

  “Well, you remember when you stomped through with muddy shoes the
other day, and made such a mess and a racket during the morning rush, and said you owed us a favor?”

  I don’t know if Sherlock remembered any of this, but I certainly did. I thought she was going to throw us out, and I’d had to take hold of my high and force myself straight. “We did. I’m really sorry. It was... Holmes here was sick. Really sick.

  Mrs. Hendrix fidgeted for a few minutes. “Look, this is a little strange, but have you heard about those Black Panthers up in Harlem?”

  “Sure, I’ve heard about them,” I said. “They’re in the papers all the time. They’ve been having shoot-outs with police in Oakland and Chicago and they’re loud and they shout about killing the white man and overthrow the government and everything. They say they’re activists, but it seems to me that they’re just thugs with guns, ruining the civil rights struggle for reasonable people.”

  Mrs. Hendrix looked at me, then at Sherlock. A look passed between them that left me completely out of the loop. Not for the first time.

  “John, please, don’t. Mrs. Hendrix. What can we do for you?”

  Mrs. Hendrix looked at me and I missed the warmth in her gaze. “It’s my nephew. You know Joseph—works down here sometimes.”

  “I do. He’s a good boy. He went out and got pizza slices for us the other day, and wouldn’t take any money. I had to force him to let us pay for his.”

  “That’s Joseph. Always has time to help people out. He can be a little hot-headed, but my sister and me, we kept him away from gangs and all that. He’s bright. Very bright. Too bright for school and everything. Can’t stay focused, always looking out the window, wanting to read his own books. Not inspired by school, you know.”

  “I do know. I don’t think that either Dr. Watson or I had good experiences with traditional schooling.”

  “Joseph’s supposed to be learning a trade. My sister asked me if I could take him on, teach him a few things, but he was always more interested in other stuff. Typical young man. Girls. Music. Lord knows. Plus, he’s all the way up in Harlem. He’s so far uptown he’s past uptown. Don’t want to spend an hour getting all the way down here all the time. No jobs up there, though.