A Study in Sherlock

by Laurie R. King

  Boothby slowly got to his feet. He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Gibson, get a lawyer. Please.” He motioned to me and I followed him out.

  The next Tuesday afternoon I was in the law library thrilling at Maine’s case law on easements by prescription when the court clerk told me Boothby wanted me to meet him in the park again. It took a while, but finally I found him by the pond. He looked grumpy, so I decided to try to lighten his mood.

  “Hi, Judge.” I pointed to the three Canada geese paddling across the pond. “You know how to tell a male Canada goose from a female Canada goose?”

  “I don’t know, Artie. How do you tell a male Canada goose from a female Canada goose?”

  “Simple: the males are white and gray and black, whereas the females are black and gray and white.”

  Boothby raised his left eyebrow and looked at me, snorted with the tiniest smile, and shook his head.

  “Artie,” he said, “how the fuck did you ever pass the bar exam?”

  Well, it worked, sort of. He watched the geese for a while, then pulled out his Pall Malls for his afternoon treat. His movements were unhurried, and he didn’t say anything. Nor did I.

  Finally: “I just learned—don’t tell anyone—that Gibson Watts has taken leave to attend a four-week rehab program.” He put a cigarette to his mouth and lit it.

  I nodded. This would end Watts’s judicial career and maybe bring him beyond the tipping point for reasonable doubt about murder.

  “After dropping you off on Saturday,” he said, “I called the State Police. I told their investigator everything we’d learned. And I’ve hardly gotten any sleep since.” An inhale followed by a smoke ring. “What did you learn from this experience, Artie?”

  “It’s good to be suspicious of coincidences.”

  “Right. And it’s good to exercise logic. Over the past few days you and I analyzed the evidence logically, so we probably solved the crime—in fact, an especially odious one because, if I may paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, when a judge goes wrong he’s the worst of criminals. And we’re just like Holmes, aren’t we? We achieved a triumph of logic. And that’s what we lawyers are trained for. So I should feel triumphant, shouldn’t I? So why do I feel like dogshit?”

  I couldn’t resist; nobody was going to out-Conan-Doyle me: “Because,” I said, “as Moriarty once told Holmes, the situation had become an impossible one. In other words, there was no satisfactory outcome.”

  “That’s true.” He flicked the ash off the end of his cigarette. “But that’s not what’s bothering me.” Another inhale. “Now that we’re in Sherlock Holmes mode, do you remember ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’?”

  Well, he had me there. “No,” I admitted.

  “Then let me enlighten you with my favorite Holmesian quotation.” He smiled at me unenthusiastically. “ ‘Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.’ What do you think of that, Artie?”

  I didn’t have a clue, so I shrugged.

  “It’s as fictitious as Holmes himself.” He paused and looked toward the geese again. He was gathering himself.

  “Ina was murdered, Artie. Murdered. The closest I’d ever been to murder was in the courtroom, where all I do is control the proceedings so the defendant gets a proper trial. A purely formal process, the less emotional the better. I’d never known someone who was murdered, let alone someone who did it, so I’d never experienced its horror personally. No triumph of logic, no intellectual grand slam, can tame my reaction to such hideousness. It can’t lessen my outrage over Ina’s death, or my sympathy for Emmy, or, for that matter, my anguish for Gibson, a great friend, and what he’s become.”

  He turned to me. “So here’s what I learned: that’s how it should be. It’s emotion that fulfills us, Artie, not intellect. Pure logic is sterile, an emotionless refuge for incomplete people. In the end, what’s important isn’t how capably we think, it’s how capably we feel.”

  I realized something: “Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict, wasn’t he?”

  He stared at me for a moment. The eyebrows went up.

  “And a bachelor.”

  He dropped his cigarette on the ground and smushed it slowly with his shoe. When he’d finished he looked up and poked me in the arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  Longtime admirers of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, John Sheldon and Gayle Lynds are also partners in crime and life. They live together in rural Maine, where “A Triumph of Logic” is set. The story’s hero, Judge Linwood Boothby, comes from John’s experience as a Maine prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge, and a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School. He’s working on his first suspense novel featuring, of course, Judge Boothby and Artie Morey. The pianist in the story, Julia Austrian, is the heroine of Gayle’s book Mosaic. Gayle is a New York Times bestselling spy thriller author. Her new novel is The Book of Spies, named one of the best thrillers of the year by Library Journal. She is cofounder (with David Morrell) of International Thriller Writers and is a member of the Association for Intelligence Officers.

  Readers are invited to search this story for clues to a subplot: Dr. Watson has murdered Sherlock Holmes’s love, Irene Adler, and his crime has been solved by the combined efforts of Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, and, of all people, Holmes’s archenemy Moriarty.

  THE LAST OF SHEILA-LOCKE HOLMES

  Laura Lippman

  Years later, when people tried to tease her about the summer she turned eleven and opened her own detective agency, she always changed the subject. People thought she was embarrassed because she wore a deerstalker cap with a sweatshirt and utility belt and advertised her services under the name Sheila Locke-Holmes, which was almost her real name anyway. She was actually Sheila Locke-Weiner, but it was bad enough to be that in real life. The only case she ever solved was the one about her father’s missing Wall Street Journal and she disbanded her agency by summer’s end.

  Besides, it didn’t begin with the deerstalker cap, despite what her parents think they remember. She was already open for business when she found the cap, on her mother’s side of the walk-in closet, in a box full of odd things. Because her mother was Firmly Against Clutter—a pronouncement she made often, usually to Sheila’s father, who was apparently on the side of clutter—this unmarked box was particularly interesting to Sheila. It contained the deerstalker cap, although she did not know to call it that; a very faded orange T-shirt that said GO CLIMB A ROCK; a sky blue wool cape with a red plaid lining; and a silver charm bracelet.

  She took the box to her mother, who told Sheila that she really must learn to respect other people’s privacy and property. “We talked about this. Remember, Sheila? You promised to do better.”

  “But I have to practice searching for things,” Sheila said. “It’s my job. May I have the T-shirt? It’s cool, like the shirts people buy at Abercrombie, only even better because it’s really old, not fake-old.”

  “Don’t you want the cape, too? And the charm bracelet? I think those things are back in style as well.”

  Sheila maintained a polite silence. Her mother was not the kind of mother who was actually up-to-date on what was cool. She just thought she was. “I like the cap. It’s like the one on that book that Daddy is always reading, the one he says he wants to work on if it ever becomes a film.”

  Her mother looked puzzled. “Sherlock Holmes?”

  “No, the one about the stupid people who fought for the South in the Civil War.”

  “Stupid people?”

  “The dunces.”

  “The dunces—oh, no, Sheila, that’s not what the book is about. But, yes, the man in A Confederacy of Dunces wears a cap like this. And writes things down on Big Chief tablets, sort of like you’ve been doing.”

  Sheila could not let this pass. “I use black-and-white composition books like Harriet M. Welsch in Harriet the Spy.”

  She took the cap, though, to be nice. Grown-ups thought they
were always watching out for children’s feelings, but Sheila believed it was the other way around just as often. Sheila was tender with her mother, who was sensitive in her own way, and indulgent of her father, who was dreamy and absentminded, usually lost inside whatever film he was editing. He had worked on some very famous films, but he worked in an office, no closer to the movie stars than Sheila was when she watched a movie on her computer, so no one at school thought what her father did was cool. Her mother was a lawyer, which definitely wasn’t cool. It wasn’t uncool. It just was.

  Sheila sometimes went to her father’s workplace, all the way downtown, on Canal Street. This usually happened on school holidays that her mother’s law office didn’t recognize as holidays or during the summer because of what her parents called child-care chaos. They had a lot of child-care chaos the summer that Sheila was eleven. On these days, Sheila and her father took the 1 train, which irritated her father because it was a local, but she liked all the extra stops. There were more people coming and going. She tried to make up a story about each person in the car. They tended to be sad stories.

  Her father worked at a big Mac computer and it was always exciting—for the first half hour or so. Sheila would even start to think that maybe she would be a film editor. She enjoyed her father’s lectures about the choices he had, how he sometimes had to find the film that the filmmaker failed to make, that it was like trying to cook a meal with only what was already in the pantry. But it was slow, tedious work. She eventually got bored, wandered to the lunchroom where the bagels were set out, or asked if there was a computer she could use, or played games on her father’s phone. Most often, though, she pulled out a book, usually a mystery or something with magic.

  “You’re on a crime spree,” her father joked. But she was not an indiscriminate reader of mystery books. She started with Encyclopedia Brown and tried very hard not to cheat by looking up the solutions in the back, but some of the clues were awfully small. (How was she supposed to know that Southerners called the Battle of Bull Run the Battle of Manassas?) She read books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, which were sort of like mysteries, and Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, the sequel, which she liked even better. Despite her deerstalker cap, she did not read Sherlock Holmes. Nor did she read Nancy Drew. Sheila hated Nancy Drew, who reminded her of a girl in her class and not just because she had red hair. Like Nancy Drew, Trista had two friends, Caitlin and Harmony, whose job seemed to be to advertise her wonderfulness. Oh Trista, they would moan, you are so smart, you are so pretty, your clothes are the best. They said this over and over again and somehow it all became true. When it wasn’t, not in Sheila’s opinion.

  Sheila talked to her father about Trista and her friends because her father was interested in why people did the things they did, whereas her mother said such conversations were merely gossip, which she forbade, along with Gossip Girl. Her father said it was psychoanalysis and that gossip was fine, anyway, as long as it didn’t become like the Gossip Game in The Last of Sheila, a film that he particularly liked. Sheila pretended to like it, too, because it seemed important to her father. He needed her to like The Last of Sheila, Paths of Glory, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Magnificent Ambersons, Miller’s Crossing, and Funny Bones. So she did, and she never told him that Funny Bones was very scary for what was supposed to be a funny movie and that she didn’t understand what anyone in Miller’s Crossing was talking about, no matter how many times she watched it.

  “It’s like this Trista has her own PR firm,” Sheila’s father said.

  “Puerto Rican?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what they call the Sharks in West Side Story. PRs.” Her father had shown her the film on television, telling her to look at the color of the sky as Tony walked through the alleys, singing of Maria. He was critical of the editing, although it had won an Oscar, according to the white-haired man, the one who talked after the movies on that channel. “Awards don’t mean anything,” her father told Sheila, yet his awards—none of them Oscars—were framed and hanging in his office.

  “Oh, I meant public relations. You know, people who are hired to tell other people how great people are.”

  “Could I have someone like that? Instead of a babysitter? Could you hire someone to tell people I’m great?”

  Her father laughed. But Sheila was serious. She had not had a good year in fifth grade and she was dreading sixth grade. She was not sure a vintage GO CLIMB A ROCK T-shirt could solve all her problems, although she hoped it would be a start. But how much easier it would be if someone would go to the school and tell everyone she was great. Sheila the Great. There was a book by that name, a Judy Blume, but it made her sad, because the Sheila in that book was so clearly not great.

  However, Sheila did not realize how bad fifth grade had been until her parents received a call from the school, suggesting they come in for a conference before the new school year began. “Just to make sure we’re all on the same page as far as Sheila’s behavior is concerned.” She knew this because she picked up the extension in her parents’ bedroom and her father caught her.

  “Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves,” he said.

  “It’s part of my job. I have to know things. That’s how I found out what was happening to your newspaper. I heard the super complaining to the doorman that people were subscribing to newspapers and leaving them downstairs for days at a time, so he was just going to start throwing them away if people didn’t come down and get them by nine.”

  “I’m down by nine.”

  Sheila gave her father a look. “Almost never. You leave for work at ten or eleven and, most nights, don’t come home until after my bedtime.”

  He gave her a story by Saki, which apparently was related to what her mother drank from the little carafe at the sushi place. The story was about a cat, Tobermory, that learned to talk and told everyone’s secrets and the people then plotted to poison him. They didn’t get a chance—he was killed in a fight by another cat—but that didn’t worry Sheila. She knew how to get around being poisoned. You just made sure that someone else tasted your food first. She also decided that if she ever was allowed to have a cat, she would name him Tobermory and call him Toby for short. She thought about changing the name of her stuffed white-and-gray tabby, which had been passed down to her by her mother, but it didn’t seem right, changing someone’s name when he was so old. Her mother was fifty, so her stuffed animals must be … almost fifty. Sheila had wanted to change her own name. Last year she had asked if she could be Sheila Locke instead of Locke-Weiner. She argued that a girl should have her mother’s surname, that it was good for women’s rights. Her mother said such a change would hurt her father’s feelings, that he had managed to grow up with the same name and all Sheila had to do was remind people, politely, that it was pronounced whiner.

  Like that was so much better.

  After solving the case of her father’s missing newspaper, Sheila felt she needed more work. She put up a small note, advertising her services, but the super scolded her and said such postings were not allowed in the hallways. Her family’s building had lots of rules like that, almost more than school. For example, no delivery people were ever allowed past the lobby, which was part of the reason that all those newspapers ended up on a table and then got thrown away by the angry super.

  People in the building were always stressing that this rule was very good for the kids because they could come and go throughout the building and their parents would know that they would never meet an outsider. But there weren’t that many kids and Sheila wasn’t friends with them anyway so she would have gladly traded that rule for having Chinese food brought right to the door with everybody already in pajamas. There was nothing cozier than eating Chinese food with her parents with everyone already in pajamas. But because someone had to go downstairs to fetch it, they never ended up doing it that way. Besides, they seldom ate dinner as a family because her father worked late. He said he couldn’t help being a night owl. Sometimes
her mother ate with Sheila; sometimes she drank a glass of wine while Sheila ate dinner by herself. They had a formal dining room, but it was rare for them to eat in there because it was so formal. They were not formal people, her father said. They all preferred the little breakfast bar in the kitchen, which was bright and cheerful.

  But everyone else, guests and strangers, loved the dining room with its scary crimson walls and the chandelier that looked like something that might become a monster at night. It’s a beautiful apartment. That’s what everyone said, upon entering. What a beautiful apartment. They praised her parents’ taste. They expressed envy for the bookshelves, for the tiny study that her parents shared, for the floors, which were parquet, which Sheila eventually figured out was not a type of margarine. But whenever her mother led someone down the hall with the bedrooms, she would say apologetically: “The bedrooms are kind of mean.” Sheila felt this made their bedrooms sound much more exciting than they were. They were small and square with such limited closet space that the smallest one, in the middle, had been transformed into a walk-in closet/dressing room. Her father got one side, her mother got the other. Sheila remained stuck with the little stinky one in her room.

  The summer she turned eleven, she began to spend a lot of time in the walk-in closet and that was how she found her mother’s deerstalker cap.