by Marvin Kaye
“Lye?” I exclaimed, looking up from a copy of The Echo I had procured from a vendor on our way home. “Mr Vamberry or his wife must have used a perfectly aged wine barrel to make soap, of all things.”
“Or perhaps something sinister,” Holmes guessed. He tinkered with several decanters for about an hour, saying nary a word, then he cried loudly: “It is so! We haven’t a second to waste, my good man. Get your hat and coat—we’re about to roust Constable Thornburgh out of his bed-clothes for the second time this week.”
Without protest, I complied with anticipation, for I knew the climax of Holmes’s investigation was not far off. In the darkness, through patches of fog, we made our way to the Underground and were aboard the night-express to the far West End for another foray into Hampshire. We awakened the manager of the livery stable and hired another carriage that would take us to the constabulary headquarters. There, Holmes stunned the officer in charge by declaring he had crucial evidence in the homicide of McHugh and the death of Mrs Vamberry.
“The death of Mrs Vamberry?” the officer challenged. “You say she’s dead, do you? Well, we have a suspect in custody who can lead us to her alive, mister.”
“May I speak with him?” Holmes implored.
“Not without the permission of Constable Thornburgh, and I’m not disturbing him in bed again,” the officer contended, his voice raised. “You’ll have to wait until morning. He’ll be here at eight o’clock sharp.”
The officer was unrelenting, even when Holmes argued that morning might be too late.
“Here! Here! What’s all this fuss about?” came another booming voice from across the squad room. It belonged to Special Constable Isaac Thornburgh, who, as it turned out, had been unable to sleep, thinking that his prisoner might have had a change of heart and decided to come clean about the whereabouts of Mrs Vamberry. Constable Thornburgh addressed the officer in charge, sarcastically:
“McGee, this is no way to treat Scotland Yard’s most indispensible assistant. Mr Sherlock Holmes has come all the way from the city at an ungodly hour to lecture us on how to proceed.” He turned to Holmes and bowed with a flair in mock respect. “Tell us, Mr Holmes, what have we done to get it wrong?”
Holmes contained his anger admirably and informed the special constable that the man in custody was not guilty of a kidnapping.
Constable Thornburgh laughed. “But we have incontrovertible evidence, you see. He was in possession of a diamond-studded brooch that Mrs Vamberry was wearing the day she was abducted. Dan Fullen, a common thief until he joined a higher class of criminals, tried to sell the brooch to a pawn broker in Winchester. We had circulated a description of Mrs Vamberry’s jewelry to all the merchants and were notified when Fullen attempted to turn the brooch into cash. We apprehended him red-handed, so to speak. He denied any knowledge of Mrs Vamberry, but now we are waiting for him to sing a different tune.”
“What tune did he sing when you arrested him?” Holmes wanted to learn.
“Oh, he claimed to have snatched the brooch off the blouse of an elderly woman shopping at Berkeley Square in London,” Constable Thornburgh related, shaking his head and clucking.
“Have you made an effort to verify or discredit his story?” Holmes asked, adding: “Scotland Yard surely would have a report—I presume the woman exists—and she could easily identify this scoundrel Fullen, as well as the brooch he stole.”
“There is no need, Mr Holmes. Heathcliff Vamberry has confirmed that the brooch belongs to his wife,” Constable Thornburgh insisted.
“And what if Dan Fullen is not the prevaricator, only a strong-arm robber?” queried Holmes, a question which Constable Thornburgh greeted with disbelief.
“There is another way to make certain who is telling the truth,” Holmes continued. “Accompany Dr Watson and me to the winery tonight. There is no time to lose.”
Constable Thornburgh resisted, saying it was too late at night and that if Holmes were off-course with his hunch, the wine maker would be justifiably resentful of the police because of the unwarranted intrusion.
“Then follow us there and stay in the background,” Holmes proposed. “Dr Watson and I will confront Mr Vamberry alone.” This the special constable found acceptable, and we departed at once.
We arrived to find the winery and house in pitch darkness, and there was no response when Holmes banged the knocker on the front door of the residence. We were about to leave when Holmes stepped to the rear of the building. “Come here, Watson, and tell me what you see,” he cajoled, pointing into the vastness of the vineyard. To my surprise, there was the glow of a lantern off in the distance.
“Tell Constable Thornburgh to join us this instant, for we are in the nick of time to witness the completion of the crime,” Holmes ordered. I walked quickly to the end of the drive and persuaded the special constable to follow me to where Holmes stood vigil.
We moved stealthily along the rows between the bare vines toward the stationary light. “Quietly, now,” Holmes whispered as we drew nearer. When we got to within ten paces of the lantern, we watched in amazement as Heathcliff Vamberry worked with a digging iron and shovel to enlarge a hole for the barrel that sat on a wheelbarrow behind him.
“The bereaved husband is preparing to lay his beloved wife to rest, in peace,” Holmes bellowed, sending the man slumping to his knees.
“Oh, Lord, forgive me for what I have done,” he moaned. “She was an abominable nag, always wanting more than I could provide, but I loved her so. I only meant to silence her—yet my grip on her neck was too strong and she died in my arms, her beautiful brown eyes open. How did you know, Mr Holmes?”
“I suspected you almost from the start, Mr Vamberry,” Holmes told him. “When I learned at your bank that you had not, in fact, withdrawn thirty thousand pounds for your wife’s ransom, I deduced that you had constructed the first bogus note from the kidnappers as a ruse to cover your tracks and to defraud your brother-in-law of a part of his fortune. Every turn of events after that merely defined my theory. And today I also discovered this barrel, and I noticed where you had spilled the lye in your effort to hasten the decomposition of the remains and mask a tell-tale odour.”
“Please get up off your knees, Mr Vamberry,” Constable Thornburgh requested, holding out a pair of handcuffs.
Vamberry, still shaken, leaned on the wheelbarrow for balance and accidentally tipped it over, hurling the barrel onto the ground with a terrible impact, which caused the lid to break apart. To our horror, the head and shoulders of an emaciated, tiny woman landed in the shallow grave.
“Oh, my precious Phoebe,” Vamberry lamented.
Constable Thornburgh clasped Vamberry’s wrists in the handcuffs and we strode without speaking toward our vehicles. When we reached the winery, Holmes stopped and wondered aloud if Vamberry wanted to make a clean breast of the entire affair. “Since there were no kidnappers,” said Holmes dryly, “would you care to tell us how you killed Bascomb McHugh?”
“But I didn’t—” Vamberry began to say.
Holmes interrupted him in mid-sentence. “If you would unlock your safe, it will prove your innocence.”
“The money is all there—seventy thousand pounds, twenty thousand from the first night on the bridge, and fifty thousand from the second,” Vamberry confessed. “He was an interfering, arrogant buffoon and I hated every bone in his body.”
“It was an obvious crime of passion,” Holmes explained to Constable Thornburgh, “because of the numerous mortal wounds. That the victim was seated in the brougham, and not slain on the deck of the bridge while fighting off an attacker, led me to conclude that the murder was committed by a passenger on his right. The killer could only have been his confederate in the delivery of the ransom money.”
“What becomes of me now?” Vamberry asked, overwrought, his head drooped in a display of contrition.
“If I have anything to say about it, I’ll see you get a short drop at the Old Bailey,” Constable Thornburgh answered ven
omously. “As for you,” he said proudly, turning to Sherlock Holmes, “I shall make mention of your assisting the police when I meet with the press in the morning to announce that I have solved two murders at one time.”
UP TO NO GOOD, by Laird Long
It was a busy night at the old hotel, two guests checking out permanently …
I was the outside woman, stationed in the lobby behind a newspaper to keep track of any unusual comings and goings. While my partner in the PI biz, Reg Wyant, was the inside man, up in Tommy O’Halloran’s room on the seventh floor of the old brownstone residential hotel.
Tommy O’Halloran was Ma Bennigan’s kept man, her intimate friend outside of marriage. There was a brewing war between the four major factions that controlled the city’s underworld, and Ma didn’t want any collateral harm coming to her loved one. So she’d hired Reg and I to act as bodyguards/watchdogs for the sveltely-built O’Halloran.
It was a nice, easy assignment the first day and night. The following night, things went a little sideways.
I was ensconced in one of the armchairs in the lobby, when I eyeballed Tess Orlov flouncing through the front doors of the hotel. Tess was the mistress of the head of one of the other crime families, as beautiful as Tommy was handsome.
I watched her sashay over to the ancient elevator, press the button. Surprised and suspicious as I was at her appearance, I still wished her luck, knowing from frustrated personal experience that that particular lift, an old cage model, was as slow as molasses in January. And it was January.
Tess waited and waited, glancing at her watch, before the feeble bell finally dinged and she pushed the grate open, stepped inside, shut the grate and slowly rose. At 9:15.
She was back down and out of the elevator at 9:30. Just missing Julie Deng by a minute or so. Julie was a ranking lieutenant in another crime family. She slipped through the hotel front doors and sailed up the stairs at the rear of the lobby.
I lost interest in the news of the day in the paper, as I tried to figure out the current events here and now. But I had little time for the skull-session, before Julie Deng was back down the stairs and out the doors. At 9:35.
My gut senses really churned when Sollie DiPietro lumbered into the lobby not five minutes after Julie had left. Sollie was a well-known collector/enforcer with the fourth largest crime family that fed in the city’s underbelly. He hit the elevator button and stood there, scowling. Then he rabbit-punched the button for action.
He went up at 9:40, came down at 9:45—via the stairs.
It was too much coincidence for one evening. I beeped my partner’s number on my cellphone. No answer. I buzzed Tommy O’Halloran’s room phone. Ditto. I climbed the stairs up to the seventh floor three at a time.
My partner and Ma Bennigan’s lover were as dead as Jimmy Hoffa up in Room 705. A silencer-equipped .32 lay on the floor next to their bodies.
I could’ve called the cops, should’ve called Ma Bennigan. But I knew my tuchus was on the line if I didn’t at least round up the murderer, and quick. So I gathered together Tess Orlov, Julie Deng, and Sollie DiPietro in my office for a chinwag. My .38 and I chaired the meeting.
“Why did you pay Tommy O’Halloran a visit tonight, Tess?”
“I—I just wanted to introduce myself, compare… notes, sort of.”
I grunted, swivelled my gun and gaze over to Julie. “And you?”
“I was authorized to offer Tommy a deal—to provide information to our organization.”
I snorted, shook down Sollie with my personality and persuader.
“I was supposed to collect some gambling debts the guy owed one of our operators.”
I groaned. I didn’t have all night, perhaps many more nights. “Any of you been to Tommy’s hotel before tonight, up to his room?”
All three shook their heads, solemnly innocent as could be.
I grinned. Then levelled an accusing steel barrel stare at the murderer. “Ever meet Ma Bennigan before?” I asked the guilty party.
Julie Deng coolly regarded me and my gun, not about to confess to the murder of Tommy O’Halloran and Reg Wyant on my say-so.
I spilled the beans to her and the others. “All three of you claimed you’d never been to Tommy O’Halloran’s hotel before, yet Julie here used the stairs to get up to his room on the seventh floor—as if she knew the ancient elevator would slow down any quick entrance and exit. Like she’d been there before, to case the set-up for the whack job.”
The other two faded out of the picture. Leaving me and Julie. And Ma made three.
CARTOON, by Steve Coupe
WE’RE UPSIDE DOWN AND INSIDE OUT, by Jay Carey
The house looked as if it had exploded. The four walls had fallen open, flat against the ground. On them, instead of shingles or siding, you saw curled wallpaper and accordioned blinds. Pieces of the roof were scattered nearby.
This was what happened when hurricane winds broke a window. The storm got inside the house and lifted the roof the way air lifts the wing of a plane. Then it was tossed aside.
Detective Eureka Kilburn had seen a lot of hurricane wreckage in the past decade. By 2048 she was used to the bizarre post-storm landscape: bright sunlight over broken foliage, shattered white wood, and earth so wet it was like walking on a sponge. But sometimes even Eureka marveled at the different ways that high winds could destroy things.
There was a curious beauty to the scene. The water in the lawn reflected the shimmering heavens so it looked as if grass was growing up through a bright shining sky.
She was here on Tangerine Drive because shortly before the storm someone claimed to have seen a man featured on one of the “CrimeWatch” program cycles. They played these things monthly till the person was caught, and sometimes the cycle seemed to go on forever. Thanks to the chaos created by rising sea levels, Florida had become a haven of sorts for criminals and deadbeats. Mostly, the residents of Sarasota left them alone. But the screen had a powerful allure. It conferred glamour on turning a man in.
The sighting was unusually credible because the wanted man, named Nat Serpas, had once lived in the neighborhood where he was spotted. It made sense that he would return to his old haunts. Years ago, when he was in his twenties, he’d used phony credit card numbers “by mistake.” Now he was wanted in Atlanta for tricking a 72-year old woman out of her life savings, just the sort of larger career he’d been heading for.
Det. Kilburn exited the squad car with caution. From the road, the house looked as if all its secrets had been exposed. But it was peeled open the way a magician can make a trick box collapse to display its deceptive emptiness. Next thing you know, a pigeon is flying out or a goldfish is swimming in a bowl in front of your very eyes.
The house had consisted of a single story. The inner walls were gone, and the taller furniture seemed to have ended up out in the yard. A refrigerator leaned against a palm tree. A leather sofa tilted back as if it had turned into a porch swing. A car was completely overturned, its wheels sticking up like Mickey Mouse ears. There were few cars on the road any more, so the presence of this one probably meant that someone had driven it down from the north.
As she approached the floor of the house she heard a muffled shout. And another. There was a man in the car, upside down, stuck between the front and back seats. His face was contorted, and his mouth was open. Although he was forming words, they were deadened. This was to be expected, as the windows were closed, but the sound was eerily reminiscent of a person trapped underwater. The large glittering puddles added to the effect.
He was repeating slowly and emphatically, “Get. Me. Out.”
It was hard to assess his condition. His inverted position confounded the brain. His neck was curled, and the back of his head was flat against the crushed top of the car.
“Are you all right?” She exaggerated the movement of her mouth to help him read her lips.
She thought she deciphered, “Leg is broken.”
Which meant he could be going into sho
ck.
He went on to say something else at length and with increasing exasperation. She could not make it out.
This man was not Nat Serpas. He was older and heavier than Serpas, with a square, Irish face and salt-and-pepper hair so neatly trimmed it stayed smooth even upside down. He looked familiar, though, and she went back through her memory as she automatically tried the doors.
“I. Will. Get. Tools,” she said finally, bending down for a good look at him. He seemed to be sensitive to her scrutiny, and the self-consciously bland control he exerted over himself as he looked back at her struck a chord. She tried to place it.
She associated him with some sort of disconnect, something more than just his topsy-turvy position. The disparity was between this particular Celtic face and the name attached to it.
Ghotikar! His name was Kevin Ghotikar, and he’d been on TV, too. Not on a “CrimeWatch” most-wanted type program like Serpas, but rather its opposite. He’d been tried and acquitted of murdering his wealthy wife on the outskirts of Charlotte a few months before. He was a banker who’d made a fortune by manipulating financial data of some sort.
During the trial his defense attorney had offered up an alternate suspect: a stranger who’d come to the house on the morning of the murder, asking if the victim had any chores he could do. When Ghotikar took the stand, he described the ensuing confrontation. He’d known immediately that the stranger was up to no good. He told him he wasn’t giving out charity that day and asked why he didn’t get a job for a change. In response, the stranger swore he’d come back with a gun and kill them both.
Ghotikar then chased him off the porch, threatening to call the police. He did not call them, however, because the exchange had already made him late for a meeting upon which millions of dollars depended. On the stand, when asked to describe the man, Ghotikar became agitated and cried that he would recognize him anywhere. He was in his mid-thirties, six feet two, 180 pounds, with black eyes and a black beard.