The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters

by Michael Kurland

  Ingram greeted us, adorned with a businessman’s smile. The man looked made for the part of a banker—sleek, pink-cheeked, and freshly shaved. His light brown hair flowed back from a smooth forehead, and his hearty moustache was neatly combed and trimmed. His starched and gleaming shirt front had not yet begun to wilt in the heat, and his pants still kept their press. The heavy gold chain that looped from his watch pocket to the buttonhole of his grey jacket murmured reassuringly of success and prosperity.

  He shook hands with me. “Mr Stevenson—good to see you again. How are the plans going for your trip to Scotland?” he asked cordially—the friendship of bankers being one of the advantages conferred on the struggling author by a sizeable cheque from home.

  “Well enough. I think we’ll be leaving for San Francisco in a few days. I’m going to miss the mountain air.”

  “You’re looking the better for it, I’d say. This is a healthy climate,” Ingram said proudly, turning to Holmes. “It’ll build you back up like no place else I know.”

  I introduced Holmes to him. “Mr Holmes was a passenger on the stage that was held up yesterday.”

  Ingram’s smile faltered, and he looked at Holmes a little suspiciously. “You didn’t lose anything, I hope.”

  “No,” Holmes said. “The gentleman took only the express box. I asked Mr Stevenson to introduce me to you because I believe I may be able to help you catch the robber.”

  Ingram’s eyes narrowed. “Why talk to me? Why not the sheriff?”

  “Because I’ll need certain information from you to follow up on the clues I’ve found.”

  “You know I can’t give you any information about the bank’s customers,” Ingram warned.

  “I do; I’m not looking for anything of that sort.”

  Ingram shrugged and said, “All right. Come into my office.”

  He showed us to two chairs in front of his desk and closed the door behind him, then pulled out his own chair and sank heavily into it. He leaned back, folded his hands across his vest at about the level of his watch chain, and appraised Holmes with narrowed eyes. “So—why do you think you can help us?”

  Holmes began, with his usual coolness, “The sheriff told me that the last two robberies of the Lakeport stage both happened when it was carrying the Cinnabar Flats mine payroll.”

  “Yes,” Ingram answered. “I’m aware of that.”

  “I assume you’ve considered the possibility that it was what the police would call an inside job.”

  Ingram looked less than surprised. “The second one only happened yesterday, so I haven’t had much time to think about it, but yes, the thought has crossed my mind.”

  “Do you suspect anyone?”

  Ingram thought for a moment. “Not yet. I think I know my clerks pretty well.”

  “Who knows when the payroll is shipped?”

  “All of us, I guess.”

  “Has anyone quit recently?”

  “No.” He thought for a second, and added, “And all of us were here yesterday.”

  “Ah,” Holmes said. “Could someone have told an outsider about the shipments?”

  “You mean someone here might have been in cahoots with the robber? It’s a possibility, I suppose, but I’d be surprised. All my men are honest, upright fellows.” Another pause. “As far as telling someone by accident, everyone here knows that we don’t discuss bank business with outsiders—and that would go double with something like a payroll shipment. But why are you asking me all this, anyway?”

  Holmes explained. “I have some professional experience investigating crime. This one happened right before my eyes, and,” he paused for a second as if choosing his words, “there are some details about it that interest me.”

  “So,” Ingram asked, “are you trying to get me to hire you?”

  “No,” Holmes answered. “I assume the standard reward will be offered. I’m not asking you to pay me, just provide me some information.”

  “Perhaps,” Ingram said. “It depends on what you’re asking for.”

  “I’d like to talk with the bank employees individually, if that would be all right.”

  “They have work to do—“ Ingram started to say, but changed his mind, possibly deciding that the offer of free help solving the robbery was worth the sacrifice of a few minutes of work time. “But I guess we could spare them for a bit.”

  Ingram had his secretary show us to a small room near the vault. “Stay here with me,” Holmes said to me. “It’s useful to have a witness, and if you don’t mind, you can take notes.”

  One by one we called the men in, and Holmes questioned them. All of them seemed honest in their insistence that they had said nothing to anyone about the payroll shipment.

  The last bank worker to be questioned was Ingram’s secretary, Frank Leiden. We waited a few minutes, and when he did not come in, I went to find him. “Oh, he left a while ago,” one of the clerks told me. “Said he was feeling poorly.”

  Holmes went to Ingram’s office and knocked on the door. Ingram was surprised to see us. “Where’s Frank?” he asked.

  “‘He left before we could question him,” Holmes responded. “Can you tell us where he lives?” Ingram directed us to a clerk who looked up Leiden’s address—a boarding house in town—in a ledger book.

  The house was a few blocks south of the main street. Leiden’s landlady told us she hadn’t seen him since he left for work that morning, and his key was still on its hook in the hall. “If you don’t mind, we’ll wait for him,” Holmes said.

  We sat in the parlour, Holmes leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, but opening them whenever anyone came or went, like a cat sitting outside a mouse hole. Lacking his patience, I strolled out every couple of hours to look around town for Leiden.

  I found him a little after sunset, in a dim and weatherbeaten saloon next to the railroad depot. He was sitting at the far end of the bar, staring straight ahead, with an empty whisky glass in front of him. He gave a start when I put my hand on his shoulder, and turned to me with a look of haggard despair. I told him Mr Holmes was waiting for him at his boarding house, and he rose a little unsteadily to his feet.

  Leiden was about my height, not a bad-looking man, but a little soft and beginning to run to fat. His hair, dark brown and lank, had been combed back and parted in the centre, but was falling forward onto his forehead. He pushed it back now and again with an almost unconscious gesture. He had a thick, dark moustache, but no beard; his face was sallow with heavy-lidded black eyes, a sensual mouth, and the beginnings of a double chin. On the walk back to the boarding house, he swayed and occasionally stumbled against me.

  When we came through the door, he looked at Holmes and, with a groan and a heavy shake of his head, fetched his key and led us upstairs to his room.

  Leiden offered us the only two chairs and sat slumped on the bed, with his head bent over his knees. “Oh, God, I’m in trouble,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Why is that?” Holmes asked, the even tone of his voice conveying no accusation.

  Leiden looked up at us despairingly. “You know. That’s why you’re here. I’m the one who told about the mine payroll. I’m going to lose my job over it, maybe go to jail.”

  “Why did you do it?” Holmes asked.

  Leiden looked at him, alarmed. “Look, I didn’t have anything to do with the robberies,” he said. “I talked to a damned whore, that was all. It was pure stupidity, I was drunk and running my mouth. She must have had a beau. I can’t believe she’d do this to me.” He slumped forward, shook his head, and gave a long, tremulous sigh.

  “Whom did you tell?” Holmes asked.

  Leiden looked darkly across the room at nothing in particular for a second or two, then back at Holmes. “Her name is Russian Annie—Antonia. She’s one of the girls at Mrs Bannerman’s house in St Helena.” He lumbered to his feet and made his way to a small desk, where he took something from a drawer. Handing it to Holmes, he slumped down again on the bed. �
��That’s her picture.”

  It was a pasteboard photograph of a pretty young woman with long-lashed, languid eyes. She was looking over her shoulder in a coquettish pose and wearing a dress that showed a bit more of white shoulder and trim little ankle than propriety might allow.

  “When was the last time you saw her?’ Holmes asked.

  “Last Saturday night.”

  “Do you see her often?”

  “Couple of times a month—about as much as I can afford to. I kind of liked her, and I thought she felt a little something for me. Am I in trouble with the law over this?”

  “Not if you’re telling the truth,” Holmes said. “And I suppose we’ll know that when we talk to her.”

  “I’m in a hell of a mess, whatever happens,” Leiden said bitterly. “Damn fool girl. I hope you find the son-of-a-bitch that did it.” He slumped forward again, muttering curses to his shoes.

  Leaving Leiden to the examination of his conscience, we found rooms at Cheeseborough’s Hotel. Before retiring, Holmes asked me if I was free to ride with him to St Helena. I was too caught up in the chase to turn him down, so the next morning, I left a note to be sent to Fanny by the Lakeport stage, to let her know I had survived the night and would be spending the day in the valley.

  In St Helena, we found Mrs Bannerman’s house by asking the barman at the first saloon we saw in town.

  “I’m afraid you gentlemen will be disappointed, though,” he said. “Miss Bannerman’s ain’t open for business this early in the day.”

  We declined his kind offer to direct us to a lady whose hours might better suit ours, and he wished us good hunting. “You just come back here if she don’t give you what you want.”

  Mrs Bannerman’s was a respectable-looking gabled house on a lane just outside the town. A dark-skinned maid answered the door and led us into a parlour bedecked with red velvet drapes, a thick flowered carpet, and a piano whose dark wood was polished to a high shine.

  I’d expected, for some reason that the lady we had come to see would be middle-aged, but Mrs Bannerman didn’t look much past thirty. Her chestnut hair was elaborately dressed, and she wore a yellow silk dress whose tight contours showed a fine figure, but her face was powdered and rouged, and behind her graceful manner and pleasant smile her grey eyes were watchful and calculating.

  As she held out a kid-gloved hand and said, ‘How may I help you gentlemen?’ her eyes seemed to be trying to size up what we wanted and what she could get out of us. Fanny would have called her “a tough customer.”

  Holmes did the talking, and I tried to do my part by looking grave and nodding at appropriate points. He suggested, without actually saying, that we were bank detectives looking for Miss Antonia to ask her some questions about one of her gentleman callers. When Mrs Bannerman asked what it was about, he hemmed and hawed unctuously about the need for discretion and the protection of the confidences of bank customers.

  “Surely, Mrs Bannerman, as a woman of business, you know how it is to be entrusted with, ah, sensitive information about one’s clients,” he intoned.

  Mrs Bannerman, flattered, smiled and said she was willing to help if she could. ‘We keep a nice establishment here, and I wouldn’t want trouble. I’m afraid I can’t introduce you to Annie, though. She left two days ago, all of a sudden. She said she was going to San Francisco for awhile. She and another girl who used to work here, Josette.”

  “Did she tell you where she would be staying?” Holmes asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Mrs Bannerman answered.

  “Do you know why she was going there?”

  “She didn’t say, but my guess would be to find a doctor for Josette.”

  “So her friend is ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she just left without giving any notice? That must be difficult for you,” Holmes said sympathetically.

  “Oh, you have no idea,” Mrs Bannerman sighed. “This whole business has been a trial. Annie can’t think of anything but Josette. She was too distracted; the men notice. She kept talking about getting Josette to some sanitarium Dr Jenkins—he’s the doctor I send my girls to—told her about up in Colorado. She was saving money for it; she asked me once to lend her the rest, but I said no. I’m not a rich woman, and these girls are so flighty—who knows if I’d ever get it back?” She unfurled a lacy fan, fluttered it a few times, and gave Holmes a look that assumed that of course he would understand.

  Then her expression changed, as if she’d thought of something, and she asked Holmes, “Do you think they ran off with the man you’re looking for?”

  “We don’t know at this point,” Holmes said. “Did she have a—uh—gentleman friend?”

  “A fancy man, do you mean? No, not Annie. She never stepped out with anyone, so far as I know.”

  “Do you know how they were travelling?” Holmes asked.

  “These days, everybody takes the train,” Mrs Bannerman answered. “But I hear Josette is at death’s door, and if that’s so, I don’t know how they’re even going to get to San Francisco.”

  “We asked what Josette’s illness was, and Mrs Bannerman said, “Consumption. Poor girl.” She formed her face into an expression of sympathy.

  “Indeed,” Holmes said with the proper touch of gravity. “A pity.” He paused for a second of appropriate silence, and then returned, as if reluctantly, to the business at hand. “Can you tell us what they look like?”

  “Well,” Mrs Bannerman answered, “Annie is a bit taller than I am, and I’m five feet five inches. She has auburn hair, thick and straight, fair skin, grey eyes, a bit of a foreign accent—some of the men call her Russian Annie. Josette’s a Creole from New Orleans, dainty as a little doll, with wavy brown hair and big dark eyes. Before she got so sick, she was so pretty, the men just loved her.”

  “What are their full names?” Holmes asked.

  Mrs Bannerman gave an artificial laugh and looked at us under her eyelashes. “I can tell you what they told me, but you know, these girls almost never tell the truth about their pasts. Oh, my—let’s see—Annie goes by the name Antonia Greenwood. She told me once what her real name was—something foreign, I don’t remember what. Josette called herself Josette Duverger.”

  “Do you know anything else about them?”

  “Not really. They showed up here, together, oh, six months ago—Annie said they’d been working in a house in Sacramento, but came up here for Josette’s health.”

  “You said Miss Duverger wasn’t working here?” Holmes asked. “Where was she staying?”

  She gave him another sly look. “You gentlemen seem real interested in them. How big a deal is this? Is there a reward?”

  Holmes ignored her question and asked if she’d mind if we took a look around Annie’s room. Mrs Bannerman, obviously hoping to catch a crumb or two of information, offered to show us upstairs herself and led us up a stairway with carpeted treads and polished banisters.

  A maid was in the room, cleaning it. The window was open, and the sun shining through white curtains gave the place a poignant air of innocence. In the wardrobe hung a wrapper of silk and lace and a couple of evening dresses. Some satin slippers had been left on the floor beneath them. Little else remained of the girl who had worn them, except a box of dusting powder and a worn hairbrush on the dressing table. Holmes picked up the hairbrush and examined it and looked into the drawers of the table and dresser. Mrs Bannerman followed after him, peering over his shoulder.

  When he had finished, he turned to her and thanked her, with a positively courtly bow. “If you should hear from Miss Greenwood, or learn anything about where she might be, please, by all means, send word to Mr Ingram at the Bank of Calistoga.”

  As we walked downstairs, Mrs Bannerman gave Holmes directions to the boarding house where Josette lived and to Dr Jenkins’s office. She showed us to the door herself, and as we left, said again that she would certainly help if she could.

  “I really don’t want trouble here. I just hope they�
��re all right,” she said sweetly, looking deeply into Holmes’s eyes. “You will tell me, won’t you?”

  “But of course,” Holmes said, with a bow.

  Dr Jenkins’s office was on the way to the boarding house. He was seeing a patient in his surgery, but when he finished, he showed us into his study and offered us a glass of sherry. He was a spare, greying man, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a weary air of having seen enough sickness and death to have despaired of finding any divine plan in it.

  When I mentioned Miss Duverger, he shook his head. “A hopeless case,” he said. “There’s nothing left to do for her.”

  Holmes told him what Mrs Bannerman had said. “Oh, God,” he sighed, and closed his eyes. “That Annie. I tried again and again to tell her, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept that it was the end. I’ve seen mothers like that with children; they just can’t stop fighting.”

  He remembered mentioning a sanitarium in the Colorado mountains. “Run by an old friend of mine, Harvey McKinnon, so I know the place is on the up-and-up. No one but quacks promise anything with this disease, but mountain air seems to help in some cases. Not Josette, she’s too far gone. But Annie wouldn’t listen; she had to have some hope, even a false one. So I gave her the name. Not that she could afford it; a woman in the life doesn’t make that kind of money. So I told her about a specialist I know in San Francisco, Silbermann. That was awhile ago, though. At this point, Josette probably couldn’t make the trip.”

  He was surprised and saddened when Holmes told him the two women had left St Helena. “Honestly, she was too sick to travel; I saw her just the other day. It would have been kinder to let her die in her own bed.”

  After thanking the doctor, we rode to the boarding house, where the landlady, a grey sparrow of a woman, told us, with much fluttering, that Miss Duverger and her friend had left that morning.