He let it cool.
Then he walked outside, and he stared up at the moon. It was almost full.
He wondered how many villagers knew that his son had died as a baby. He remembered his wife, but her face was distant, and he had no portraits or photographs of her. He thought that there was nothing he was so suited for on the face of the earth as to keep the black, bulletlike bees on the side of this high, high hill. There was no other man who knew their temperament as he did.
The water had cooled. He lifted the now solid block of beeswax out of the water, placed it on the boards of the bed to finish cooling. He took the cloth filled with dirt and impurities out of the pot. And then, because he too was, in his way, a detective, and once you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth, he drank the sweet water in the pot. There is a lot of honey in slurry, after all, even after the majority of it has dripped through a cloth and been purified. The water tasted of honey, but not a honey that Gao had ever tasted before. It tasted of smoke, and metal, and strange flowers, and odd perfumes. It tasted, Gao thought, a little like sex.
He drank it all down, and then he slept, with his head on the ceramic pillow.
When he woke, he thought, he would decide how to deal with his cousin, who would expect to inherit the twelve hives on the hill when Old Gao went missing.
He would be an illegitimate son, perhaps, the young man who would return in the days to come. Or perhaps a son. Young Gao. Who would remember, now? It did not matter.
He would go to the city and then he would return, and he would keep the black bees on the side of the mountain for as long as days and circumstances would allow.
Neil Gaiman is the only author to have won both the Carnegie and Newbery Medals, for his novel The Graveyard Book, and to have won a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for his Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft tale “A Study in Emerald.” He first encountered Holmes at the age of ten, in the library of Ardingly College Junior School, and immediately added the Great Detective to the list of People He Wanted to Be When He Grew Up, a list that at that point probably included P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith and Michael Moorcock’s Elric. He became a writer when he grew up, which is almost as good.
Gaiman was invested into the Baker Street Irregulars in 2005, under the name of The Devil’s Foot.
The only information in the Sherlock Holmes Canon about Holmes’s interest in bees may be found in the stories entitled “The Lion’s Mane” and “His Last Bow.” The latter, which takes place in 1914, mentions Holmes’s “magnum opus of [his] latter years”: Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.
A TRIUMPH OF LOGIC
Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon
Linwood Boothby was catching a smoke outside the Franklin County courthouse. He’d cut down to one cigarette a day, midafternoon, to revive himself during jury trials. There was no courtroom work today, but he was indulging himself anyway.
“Hi, Judge.” I stepped out onto the courthouse portico. “I heard a good one today.”
Boothby raised his red, bushy eyebrows, which contrasted with his bald head and were his most distinctive facial feature.
“What do you call a Maine lawyer who doesn’t know anything?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Artie. What do you call a Maine lawyer who doesn’t know anything?”
“Your Honor.”
He let out something between a chuckle and a growl, inhaled his cigarette, then took it out of his mouth and studied it. “Artie, what do you call a Maine law clerk who’s a wiseass?”
“I don’t know, what?”
“Unemployed.”
“Uh-uh.” I raised my index finger. “Empty threat. You already fired me last week.”
“Yeah, but it felt so good I wanted to do it again.”
“Besides, your eminence, you need a vassal, a Dr. Watson if you will, both to preserve your record for history”—I did a small genuflection—“as well as to announce your visitors, such as the one awaiting you at this very moment, in your chambers above.”
“Who?” He raised the cigarette to his lips again.
“Emmy Holcrofts.”
Boothby looked at me in mid-puff, and the eyebrows shot up again, this time in surprise. Emmy was a court reporter, and court reporters were usually seen only during trials and hearings; they spent the rest of their professional lives cloistered, transcribing their notes.
Boothby looked longingly at his Pall Mall, snubbed it out in the cigarette receptacle, and followed me into the building.
“Hi, Judge Boothby.”
As he mounted the stairs to his office ahead of me, Boothby looked up. Emmy Holcrofts was waiting for him in the hall. Compact, with a halo of gray curls, she wore trifocals on a softly lined face.
“Hi, Emmy. Go on in.” He climbed the final two steps and followed her across the threshold.
Inside the room she turned. “Could Artie stay, too? I’m in a bind, and I’d be grateful if I could bounce some questions off both of you.”
“Sure, if you don’t mind sitting in a confined space with Frank Zappa.” He pointed at me. Boothby loved prodding me about my nonlawyerly—my steadfastly, ardently nonlawyerly—appearance. I rolled my eyes, but when he motioned me in I went gladly, grateful for a reprieve from the law library.
“Grab a seat, Emmy,” Boothby said. “What’s up?”
Emmy sat on the brown leather couch, and I on a matching armchair.
“You probably know I’m Ina Lederer’s executor.” Emmy arranged her skirt.
Boothby had taken the other armchair against the adjoining wall. “I’m not surprised. I’m sorry, Emmy. You and she were close, weren’t you?”
“Yes …” Staring down at her hands, she folded them in her lap. “She was my niece, and I’ve been inventorying her possessions …” She stopped, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Take your time,” Boothby said gently. Emmy had been working with him for more than a decade.
“Thank you.” She gave a weak smile. “Ina was a difficult child. In college she got into drugs, flunked out, and had nowhere to go—her parents were furious. I took her in, and a year later she’d cleaned up. But then she didn’t have anything to do.” She sighed. “She hadn’t liked college, and I didn’t want her flipping burgers because she was so bright. So I showed her the basics of my steno machine. That interested her, and I covered her expenses while she studied stenography. After she was certified, she applied to the court system and they took her. She was just twenty-four, and I thought she was on her way.” She shook her head.
Boothby furrowed his forehead, eyebrows nearly meeting. “What do you think happened?” The newspapers had reported a suicide.
“I don’t know.” She scanned the walls blankly. “The police found a suicide note saying she’d let everybody down. When traces of cocaine were discovered in her system, they concluded she’d been depressed about her addiction.”
He leaned forward. “What can we do?”
“Well, two things. First, I’ve found some of Ina’s steno notes that may need to be transcribed. Is there anything you want quickly?”
Boothby considered. “Yes. A few weeks ago she recorded a discussion I had here, in chambers, about an agreement between the Feds and the state. It was with defense counsel and the persecutor.” Boothby referred to the DA’s prosecutors as the “persecutors” in jest, but also, I think, to remind them of what they weren’t supposed to be. “The defendant’s name was Doak. He agreed to cooperate with the DEA, and if they liked what he disclosed, they’d drop all federal charges and he’d plead to lesser state charges.”
“Okay,” she said, “that shouldn’t take long. The second thing is, I found something the police don’t know about: an account book and thirty-five hundred dollars cash. They were wrapped together in plastic and hidden in the bottom of a garbage can under the trash bag. The account book shows some big transactions, sometimes exceeding two thousand
dollars. What do I do? That stuff suggests she might’ve been selling drugs, which is police business, but if I tell them, they may confiscate the cash as evidence. I’m administering the estate, so I’m supposed to protect its assets for the heirs—her two brothers—aren’t I?”
Boothby and I exchanged uncertain glances.
Emmy continued: “If I inventory it and claim it for the estate in my report to the probate court, are the heirs benefiting from what might be her illegal activity? And am I an accomplice after the fact?” She looked at her hands, still clasped in her lap, and awaited an answer.
“Jeez.” Boothby tugged at his left eyebrow. “You put me in a difficult position. Judges can’t give legal advice, you know. You need a lawyer.”
She nodded but said nothing.
He gazed upward and spoke at the ceiling. “On the other hand, it’s okay if Artie and I brainify out loud”—“brainify”: sometimes I think he wants to sound like an idiot—“even though you’re sitting right here.” He cocked his head and glanced at me conspiratorially.
I chuckled.
“So, thinking aloud, Artie, I’d say the police can’t bring a case against Ina because she’s dead. But maybe the greenbacks are evidence against someone else, especially if they’re marked bills, and Emmy doesn’t need an obstruction of justice charge. So she could put the bills in a safety deposit box and file with the probate court an inventory listing the money as an asset. That’s what it is, after all. Artie?”
“Good so far,” I said.
“And maybe I’d put the account book in the same safety deposit box. But before I did any of that, I’d photocopy the bills and the book for the police. That way nobody hid anything from anyone.”
I nodded agreement, but Emmy didn’t look comfortable.
“I don’t want to get Ina’s friends in trouble,” she said. “She mentioned one friend in her diary a lot. Someone named Teenie, but Teenie also shows up in the account book. I can’t betray the people Ina cared about.”
“Her diary?” Boothby scratched his ear. “Think the cops need that, Artie?”
“Judge,” I answered, maintaining the pretense, “if Teenie was really her friend she wouldn’t be in the account book, right? Ina would be sharing whatever it was with her, not selling it.”
“Makes sense,” he answered.
“So it doesn’t compromise a friendship if you make photocopies and give them to the police. At this point, I think it’s CYA.”
Boothby nodded. “And I’d preserve the original diary in the safety deposit box.”
“Yup,” I said.
“Okay.” Boothby poked a finger at Emmy. “My clerk and I think you’d better get a lawyer—you can charge it to the estate. Notwithstanding you overheard us, you ain’t suing us for malpractice ’cause we didn’t give you any legal advice. All we told you is, get a lawyer.”
“Thanks, Judge.” She smiled briefly as she stood up. “I felt so alone. You’ve helped me a lot.”
Boothby and I stood to shake her hand.
“We’re here for you, Emmy,” he told her. “Any time.”
As her eyes became watery again, she turned quickly and walked out of the office.
Boothby considered me. “This young court reporter … Ina … I’d never noticed her.” He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. “She was like a piece of courtroom furniture to me—fingers attached to a steno machine. A life I never took interest in, Artie, until it was over.”
The Depression-era ditty “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was just audible over the hubbub. That and other paeans to poverty bespoke the theme of Judge Gibson Watts’s “The Taxman Goeth” party, held annually on the first Saturday after April 15.
The Watts home was a 3,500-square-foot log building, sitting on fifteen acres with six hundred feet of shoreline on Muscongus Bay in Maine. It was built in the 1920s by a New York City physician who wanted to combine the New England experiences of a log home and a view of Maine’s rocky coast. So he ordered a spruce log palace, appropriate for snow country in the northern woods and mountains, to be built overlooking the coastline, where it fit in like a Shinto temple along the Thames. The Watts family had bought it in the fifties, when Maine real estate was dirt cheap by their Baltimore standards and the Spruce Goose, as the locals called it, was even cheaper. Watts and his two sisters inherited it when their mother died in 1971; he bought them out soon thereafter and moved into it when he relocated to Maine from Maryland to practice law. A lifelong bachelor, Watts had the place to himself.
An eclectic group of the judge’s friends had shown up, including other judges, lawyers, assorted court personnel, lobstermen, the proprietor of the local convenience store, and the chief of the Maine State Police (a former client). Those expecting tax refunds received happy face stickers to wear. Those experiencing “taxectomy” received tin cups with which to solicit charitable donations.
Boothby was filling his tin cup with cashews at the dining room table, and I was at the sideboard sampling the shrimp, when I heard someone rip off a couple of arpeggios on the piano across the hall. A semiskilled pianist, I knew great technique when I heard it. When the pianist started in on Chopin’s D-flat nocturne I headed into the living room. The reprise section has a filigree that’s beyond my skill, and I wanted to see it done up close.
I recognized the pianist as Julia Austrian, a Juilliard-trained concert pianist who had a home in nearby Damariscotta. I pulled up a chair behind her just as she approached the difficult passage: her right hand glided gracefully over the keyboard, her fingers touching the keys with an astonishing combination of speed, precision, and apparent ease.
“How do you do that?” I asked after she had finished.
She turned around and smiled. “Four hundred thousand hours of practice.” We both laughed, and she added, “Are you a pianist?”
“I’m a wish-I-could pianist, but I see I should keep my day job. By the way, I’m Artie Morey.” I extended my hand.
She shook it. “Julia Austrian, Artie. Since you’re a pianist, let me ask you: did you notice anything in the left hand?”
I hesitated, unsure of what to say. “It was as smooth as maple syrup. I’d give my right arm if it made my left hand that silky.”
“Thanks! That means I carried it off.”
“Carried it off?”
“Before starting I noticed that a couple of the low notes were off key,” she explained. “Probably brand-new strings—new strings stretch out of tune—so I had to substitute notes.”
“You improvised on the fly?”
Austrian nodded. My jaw dropped in awe.
She shrugged and smiled. “The best thing I learned at Juilliard was how to fake it.”
“Juilliard trains pianists to fake?”
“Sure. What do you do when you have a memory lapse? You can’t just stop.”
“That was wonderful, Julia.” Judge Watts appeared beside us, smiling broadly, and handed her a glass of white wine. “Better than any concert we ever get around here.”
Watts was a tall, wiry man with wide shoulders, a full head of curly gray hair, and a profile like Basil Rathbone’s. He looked as if he’d been a basketball player—small forward, perhaps—and he was astonishingly smart. When he’d come onto the trial bench a year or so earlier nobody expected him to stay at that level for long. He had an almost magical intuition for law that enabled him to resolve legal issues as quickly as lawyers could state them. Other judges sought him out for help with difficult cases, and he came to be known as the Sherlock Holmes of the judiciary for more than his silhouette. It was said that if the entire Maine Supreme Court bench of seven justices died in a plane crash the governor could replace them all with Gibson Watts.
“Thanks, Judge.” She pointed to the nine-foot Steinway grand. “I rarely find an instrument this superb in a private home. I had to try it.”
“Glad you did!” Taciturn, even dour, around the courthouse—thinking too deeply to be bothered with civility—he wa
s the opposite here, an enthusiastic and warm host.
“Do you play?” she asked him.
He chuckled. “Dumb fingers. I keep the piano tuned because it’s too beautiful to ignore.” He lifted his glass toward me. “Alas, Mr. Morey, I’d have brought you some wine too, but the King of Reversible Error is looking for you and prefers you not slur your words.”
“Thanks, Judge,” I replied. “A pleasure, Ms. Austrian.”
“Thanks, Artie.”
I crossed the hall and found King Boothby in the dining room at the salmon.
I approached semireverently. “Judge Watts delivered your summons.”
He looked up as he was shoving the last of his salmon sandwich into his mouth. Holding his index finger in the air, he chewed for a moment and then gulped it down. “Emmy Holcrofts arrived a few minutes ago. She’s agitated about her niece and wants to talk right away. I asked her to wait in the library. Would you like to join us?”
I followed Boothby to a small, book-lined room. A wood fire in the modest fieldstone fireplace made it cozy—an atmosphere to calm the nerves.
Emmy started to stand, but Boothby waved her back into her seat. “What’s the matter, Emmy?”
He and I took chairs.
“I’ve been going through Ina’s steno tapes to find her notes of the Doak case—the one you asked me to transcribe?” When he nodded, she continued. “I found them and was preparing a transcript when I got a visit from a federal drug enforcement investigator. She asked if I had information about Ina’s relationship with Harold Doak—the same man. Doak had named Ina as a customer.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Ina was the court reporter who took notes of a plea bargain, for her very own supplier?”
“And the Feds wanted to keep the plea bargain secret,” Boothby added, “so neither Doak’s suppliers nor his customers would know. Christ. Ina had to realize DEA agents would be on her doorstep soon. Maybe that explains her suicide.”
“No, I think you’re wrong,” said Emmy. “I read her diary again. That’s where she put her emotional entries—happy, sad, angry, all kinds of feelings. What the police are calling her ‘suicide note’ was on the tape in her steno machine. Why there and not in her diary? I spent the last two days reviewing all the tapes of all the hearings she attended for the last year. The only personal entry is that single note the police found.”
A Study in Sherlock Page 16