alt.sherlock.holmes

by Gini Koch

  “Where will you stay?”

  “Good question. It usually depends.”

  Sherlock sighed and put his head in his hands. “Bill, listen. I’m interested, and happy to help you, but you’ve got to be straight with me, you understand? You’ve got to tell me what you’re really doing in New York, not lie to me. I can’t answer your questions without facts to build a chain of logic around.”

  Bill looked down, sighed, and then reached over and took his notebook back from Sherlock and shut it. He stood up from the table and took a deep breath, looking at the table, and then breathed out again.

  “You know I’m an anti-war activist. I’m against all types of oppression. I’m working with some other movements, and I can’t tell you about them, not without their consent. It’s delicate, not to mention that I actually, at this point, do not know where I’m going to be or when. We’re trying to create something, but it’s about more than just me, here. All you have to do is listen to people like Joseph, what happens to them. Black people. Hispanics. It’s reasonable that I’d be nervous.”

  Sherlock looked at me, then back. “It is. That’s why I’m still here waiting to see if you’re going to trust us or not.”

  “I’ll most likely be staying up in Spanish Harlem. I don’t know when, exactly, and I don’t have the address on me. Can I let you know?”

  “See, John? We’re going to have to get a telephone. Tell you what, I’ll give you the number of the payphone near us. I’ll get someone to watch it. Call, say, between seven and seven-thirty on Tuesday evening. Any Tuesday. Leave a message with whoever answers—just say ‘this is Doctor Bill,’ and then give the details, the date and the address, and we’ll come and meet you.”

  Bill looked at the number he was writing on a scrap of paper. “You act like you know more than you let on, Mr. Holmes.”

  “You can’t be too careful, Doctor Bill. No, no, don’t tell me your full name, not yet. I don’t want to know. Could be paranoia, but I really think it’s best, don’t you? Sorry, I’m a little bit hungry. I’ll get your coffee, and Joseph’s. Watson, do you mind waiting with me while I eat? Doctor Bill, thank you and goodbye.”

  Bill stood up, looking a bit flustered at his dismissal. He stood there for a moment, as Sherlock turned his attention away.

  “Excuse me, miss? Could we get a plate of French fries over here, and some more coffee? Do you want anything, Watson?”

  “Sure, make it two orders of fries.” Hell, I was hungry, why not. Bill was wandering away from us, looking a bit like a lost puppy. I’m sure he was wondering if he’d made a mistake, talking to Sherlock. I sure was.

  Sherlock’s voice dropped. “Don’t be too obvious, but look for someone really square. Short hair, probably blue eyes, chiseled jaw. You know. All-American. Elliot Ness. Anyone who gets up to leave and follow Bill there.”

  I turned to look at Holmes after scanning the room around me. “I don’t see any cop-types. You think that’s his real name?”

  “Yes, actually. Despite my own precautions I think Dr. Bill is telling the truth. Did you notice his pupils when I pointed out his notebook? He wasn’t lying, so unless he really is completely absentminded and left it in his pocket, he’s as surprised as you were when we got blanked by Andy. I do think Bill is his real name, and I think he’s in quite a lot of danger. The question is, of course, is it because of something he’s done, something he’s going to do or something someone thinks he might do?”

  I WOKE UP to Sherlock’s absence all day on Sunday; he came to find me Monday afternoon. The day’s light was fading and Sherlock brought us outside to stand shivering next to the payphone on the street corner. I was uncommonly tired, and almost ready to sit on the two-foot-high pile of the compacted grey snow that lined the New York streets in the winter. A tall black man walked up, at least six-foot-six, and beautiful. Half black, short hair, black leather jacket, thin and lean. He moved with power, and he was intimidating. I might have been a little in love, and it was confusing to me. Black, in this case, certainly was beautiful.

  “Dr. Watson, this is Tyrone. Tyrone has agreed to be our answering service. Tyrone, this is Watson, or you can call him Doc. He’s as good to receive messages as I am.”

  “Tuesdays, right? Between seven and seven-thirty?”

  “That’s right. Remember an extra five when he calls. Somebody’s got to wait for it, every week. And to watch out if you see any funny characters hanging out, okay?”

  “Me and my boys’ll be on it, don’t you worry, Mr. Holmes.” He and Sherlock shook hands, and it was like an earthquake went off in my head, right there in Manhattan. It was the same handshake that I’d seen negroes in Vietnam using when they were handing off heroin. Sherlock wasn’t interested in street drugs, though, and all he had to do was talk to me. I had a clean, guaranteed supply of whatever he wanted.

  Tyrone walked away, smiling to himself.

  “This is our new answering service, Sherlock?”

  “It’s helpful to have someone invisible, John. Tyrone and his ‘boys’ are always out on the street, and they’re just the type to be ignored by... anyone who might be watching for us. It’s good for us to have eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “How did you get him to agree?”

  “He had a little problem. I helped him out with it. It was interesting, in a way. His mother was getting consistently underpaid for her work at the two hotels she cleans at. It was pretty simple for me to put on a tweed jacket and red bow tie and make up a card identifying myself as a city auditor. I’ve been reading this book, An Actor Prepares, by Konstantin Stanislavsky. It’s important to the Soviets, but it isn’t widely available in translation, and I thought I could try out some of his methods. A quick audit and the discovery that the owner was... well, pocketing the worker’s wages isn’t exactly right. Accidentally underpaid, I think is what he said. He paid the arrears and I’ve promised to re-audit in a few months, and I handed the number around to all the workers to call for a re-audit just in case, and the city—well, I suppose, myself as an undesignated representative of the city—graciously decided not to fine the hotels. Tyrone offered to pay me, but I asked him if he was interested in doing some odd jobs for us from time to time. He’s going to get us some work, too, John. Send people over to us who have problems that a little bit of knowledge and a modicum of brain power could solve. The thousand mysteries of the daily lives of the proletariat. He liked the idea, and so here we are.”

  Sherlock—

  You’ve always been such a Nice Young Man. Keep helping people out like that. It’s a good outlet for your creative energies.

  —Mycroft

  SHERLOCK CAME IN with a thick envelope from Bill a week later. It was full of photocopies and a typewritten list of journal articles, names, and addresses—but we didn’t know that, not yet. Sherlock had the envelope in a bag, and he had a pair of gloves with him, thin cotton ones like a Disney character. He drew on the gloves, pulled the envelope out, and examined it, turning it over.

  “Check it out, John. The postmark is from Haverford, Pennsylvania. Hmmm. Look here, see the smudges on the flap? I don’t think they quite match up.” He turned on all the lamps and held the envelope up to look at it from the edges. “This has been examined. I’m not sure, but I think it’s been opened. Let’s see what it contains.”

  He got a letter opener and slit the envelope open, but he didn’t pull the contents out right away. He pulled back the cut edge of the flap, gently, looking at the glue where it was sealed. “Oh, hello there. You have been opened.” He looked at the edge of the stack of papers in the envelope, holding them up to the light, then motioned for me to clear a space on his workbench. He poured out the papers without touching them, setting the envelope aside. He examined the stack of papers, their edges and all over the top, then went through them, one by one, looking at each one in turn.

  “This is getting boring, Sherlock. I might go for a walk.”

  He ignored me and kept paging through the
pile of papers, looking at the corners and the edges of each one. I watched him for a while, completely captivated in the moment, and then turned to go. I was at the door when he finally answered.

  “How can you go, John? This is so captivating. Have you seen anything like this? The variety of the areas is... This is surely bigger than any... I need some quiet, please, John.”

  I hadn’t spoken in at least five minutes, standing there like an idiot, waiting for a response. Sherlock returned to his examination. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was idiosyncratic, like he was so often. The things he did that made me want to be his friend were exactly the things that he did that drove me away. I left the apartment in a brown study.

  seven

  THE WAITING, THE GARBAGE

  BILL’S CALL DIDN’T come for months, but we didn’t spend all that time waiting. Tyrone made good on his promise: he brought in people who had problems, and we—well, Sherlock, actually—untangled them. I have to say that I was wrong most of the time, but it made Sherlock look good. Once or twice my medical knowledge helped out. It was during that time, April or May of 1969, that Sherlock found and identified the Wandering It Girl, which got him more press and another article in Collins. They didn’t want me to write it, this time, but Sherlock told them he wouldn’t be interviewed by anyone else. We had another fight about the content, but I made sure to put in some of his careful explanations of bloodstains and footprints. He thought the article was too focused on him rather than how he solved it. Soon after, we had a line of people coming to the bakery most days. At first he would take ten, twenty, fifty dollars off people, depending what they could afford, listen to what they had to say, and then, usually without even bothering to leave the bakery, tell people where to go or who was in the wrong, and give them an idea how to fix it.

  Richard Wellsley from Collins came to me and asked if I would write a regular feature. Sherlock’s two exploits made for fascinating reading, and bumped up sales quite a bit, and the advertisers loved it, too. This was the time Sherlock started to get famous, at least partly due to the articles. The Wandering Heiress confirmed that people wanted to read about Sherlock, and cases like the Park Avenue Bachelor and the Secret of the East Village Tunnels really got people hooked.

  The problem was, Sherlock started to get bored. He wanted more interesting work. The first time he rejected a case was when a lady walked in in a short raincoat with a tied up belt. Fashionable. Makeup done just so. He just looked her up and down as she walked in the door and sighed, loudly. “No, thank you. He’s not going to be found. He’s gone. He knows you cheated on him. Knows, not suspects. And you haven’t even stopped. I can see by the way you’re walking. You’ve been in flagrante with your other man—the one whose picture is in your purse—on your way here? Your hair is still a mess. Shameless. No, I don’t want your money. Just please leave and don’t come back. Watson, can you tell them all, no more lonely hearts, break-ups, cheating husbands? No matter how much they’re paying. I’m just not interested.”

  And that was the end of the profitable few. We did fine, though. He loved the attention, but he had to take fewer cases. He’d do half of them free; he’d charge those he thought could afford our fees. He liked being a show-off, too. I liked being around someone so smart. I was no dummy, but I felt like one next to Sherlock Holmes. All of his explanations seemed so goddamn obvious once they were out there. Sure, sometimes you might not know the difference between East River and Hudson mud, but if you could see two different colors of dried mud, it must mean something.

  The springtime grew hot, and Sherlock’s patience started to fray. We had the windows open, but the ovens from the Bakery just didn’t quit; no matter how much we opened the windows, we felt like we just couldn’t breathe. Summer was coming, and it was already brutal in June.

  “I feel like an accountant doing multiplication tables all day long.” Sherlock sat and drummed his fingers. “No word from Tyrone. All I can think about is Bill and his notebook, even when I’m solving these little problems.”

  Sherlock looked around at the stuff we’d accumulated. It was nearly a year since we’d moved in together, and I had a strongbox full of interesting chemicals upstairs. Sherlock had his own clutter: he’d got a chemistry set that he’d fiddle with, and an Erector Set that he was definitely using to test out some kind of theory. He had a drafting table and books on engineering, economics, politics, criminology, and current events as well as incomplete sets of different encyclopedias. He was making himself a lock picking set and he had a door with six slots for locks in it, and a tool bench a mechanic gave him for showing him how his tire guys were skimming off of him, littered with cloth and sewing supplies, different kinds of cigarettes, and boxes of bugs. We talked about putting up a curtain or a wall up, but I think Sherlock liked the effect it had on people, his mad scientist’s lair.

  “We’ve got three days, John, before Tuesday. I’ve told Mrs. Hendrix to turn away anyone else this weekend. Let’s go on a private vacation. What exactly are these? And these?”

  Sherlock had clearly got further in his lock picking than I’d given him credit for. He’d been through the strongbox and had enough pills in his hands to keep us occupied all weekend.

  I WON’T GO into details about that weekend. We survived, and the New York Police Department ended up standing around and scratching their heads at the sudden appearance of correct solutions to dozens of unsolved cases under the windshield wipers of unmarked detective cars across the city. Six officers were reported in the Times for stellar casework. Sherlock took note of who they were. The rest apparently showed the notes to their superiors, so we were in the news again, but unnamed. Sherlock and I laughed and laughed, imagining what kind of idiot would let a case go based on mistrust of an anonymous tip.

  We crawled through Monday with the aid of a half-dozen pecan pies, two dozen doughnuts, and all the coffee south of 14th Street, but Sherlock thought we shouldn’t take the edge off with anything stronger than coffee—it “might dull the mind.”

  “Tomorrow is Tuesday, John. Every Tuesday for the past month I’ve been afraid of being at anything but my peak performance. I want to hear Tyrone’s voice, and get the information from Bill. We should make sure to get some rest, to be at our best for tonight. We might have to go. Who knows when we’ll next sleep?”

  We didn’t sleep, couldn’t really, but we found ways to relax ourselves.

  The shadows of the evening were drawing in by the time we went out to find Tyrone. The summers weren’t going to get much longer, and you could still see blue up above, but the buildings blocked everything out, kept us in a fake twilight, from four o’clock until dusk. He was there, on the corner, in a tank top and an afro with the comb sticking up. He was lean and muscular, his triceps flexing as he played with the toothpick he was chewing on. A mint toothpick, I bet. I knew that trick. Try to trick your body into thinking part of it was cool and that would get you to pretend the rest of you was, too.

  “Hey there, Mr. Holmes, Doc. How you doing tonight? I got something for you. That phone rang and it was some man named Bill. Gave me his number and everything. Been watching for one of them cars, too. Plymouth Fury was right over there, a while ago, man sitting in it. Blonde, blue-eyed, square jaw. Looked like he should be a football player from, I don’t know, Iowa or Kansas or something. Like the pictures on recruitment posters. Sitting there looking at Hendrix Bakery like something was going to happen. Plymouth Fury. Six cylinder, three hundred and thirty horsepower. Man, I’d love to get behind the wheel of one of them, yeah. Drive around fast, late at night. Maybe I should go be a pig, huh? He’s gone, now, anyway, about twenty minutes ago. Back to his little piggy family.”

  “Thank you, Tyrone. Just in case, though, I’m going to need you to visibly ‘sell’ me something, which obviously won’t be drugs, but just the address.” Sherlock took out a twenty dollar bill folded it in quarters and walked over and shook Tyrone’s hand in the passing maneuver known to everyone from
chief of police down to the lowest street dealer, and then spoke, loudly. “No thank you, but, young man, you should get over to the soup kitchen on Fourth. They’ll give you a hot meal any night from seven o’clock.”

  Sherlock walked away and around the corner, heading for the subway, and I followed him.

  “Holmes, you didn’t think that was going to fool anyone, did you? Everyone on the planet who’s ever seen a drug knows that handshake.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on, John. Tyrone doesn’t have anything on him and neither do I, but I am hoping to flush out anyone who might be watching. He knows the risk that he’s going to be stopped and searched.”

  Sherlock paused there, around the corner, out of sight of anyone who might be listening. “Wait for it, John. Ah, yes. There it is.”

  I heard Tyrone’s protest from around the corner, a voice that managed to be outraged while at the same time sounding bored, repeating a litany of arguments it had used a hundred thousand times. “What? What have I done? What’s the probable cause for this stop? Or the one last week, or the two the week before that? This is an outrage. I want my lawyer. I demand my rights.” On and on it went, while the voices spoke in their clipped New York accents, voices that had grown up idolizing Sam Spade and Eliot Ness. They’d imagined they would grow up and get their man, until they were faced with the tedious reality of everyday policing in New York. Polyester uniforms in cold winters and hot summers, and nothing they did made a damned bit of difference. No wonder they hid behind their badges.

  “Damn. Now they’re on to me. We’re going to have to find a new way of communicating, Watson.”

  “Jesus, Holmes. Haven’t you got a scrap of heart for Tyrone there?”

  “I do, John, but he’ll be fine. We’ve discussed it. They’ll have nothing to hold him on. He’ll be freed in a few minutes, or a couple of hours at most. Our casework has given us the financial freedom to pay lawyers if we have to. We’re going to have to set up a network of people who can help out. The invisible to society. Weirdos and irregular people that can travel anywhere to get and pass information.”