Sherlock Holmes In America

by Martin H. Greenberg

  I had arrived at my mother’s flat early that morning. In those days I fancied myself as something of a man about town, and kept a room at Mrs. Arthur’s boardinghouse several blocks away, so as to be free to enjoy the lively and vigorous social life befitting an eligible young bachelor in New York City. In point of fact, my social life was largely confined to solitary walks in the park and reading books at the public library. I lived in hope, however.

  Harry continued to live at home even after his marriage to Bess, an arrangement that appealed not only to his all-encompassing sense of devotion to our mother but also to his frugal nature. Harry and Bess were already seated at the breakfast table when I arrived. Mother stood at the stove, as always, busying herself with a pot of oatmeal.

  “Sit,” she said as I came through the door. “I’ll get you something to eat. You look thin.”

  “Good morning, Dash,” said my sister-in-law. “Is that a new tie? It’s very spruce.”

  “Not exactly new, Bess,” I said. “They made me a deal at Scott’s bazaar.” I fingered the wide pukka silk tie at my throat, which, if I had unbuttoned the jacket of my double-breasted windowpane suit, would have displayed a grease stain left by the previous owner. “I was hoping to make a good impression on Mr. Patrell.”

  I turned to my brother. “Good morning, Harry,” I said. He scowled and did not look up from buttering a piece of brown toast.

  I looked back at Bess. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s sulking,” she said. “He doesn’t want to go back to the Ten-in-One.”

  “It’s beneath me!” Harry cried, brandishing the butter knife. “Ten different acts for a dime! Ten performers lined up along the platform, displayed like prize hogs at a county fair! Jugglers and bearded ladies and rubber men and tattooed girls and—”

  “All right, Harry,” said Bess. “Calm down. It’s just that there isn’t much—”

  “I am Harry Houdini, the justly celebrated self-liberator! The man whom the Middletown Daily Argus called ‘a most winning and competent entertainer.’”

  “High praise indeed, Harry,” continued Bess in a soothing tone, “but even Houdini has to pay the rent. We haven’t worked in nearly a month.”

  Harry grunted and resumed buttering his toast.

  Bess pressed her advantage. “And Mr. Patrell was good enough to come and see us here at home, rather than bring us all the way downtown.”

  “Ha!” cried my brother. “Dash would have been perfectly happy to ride down to 13th Street. Mr. Patrell offered to come here only because Mama gave him a slice of blackberry torte the last time.”

  Harry was undoubtedly correct about this, as my mother’s skills with a pastry brush and dough docker were legendary. “Look, Harry,” I said, “the important thing is that he has an opening. Nobody wants to work in the dime museums forever, but we need to keep the wolf from the door. At least let’s hear what Mr. Patrell has to say, all right? If you don’t like his offer, we’ll find something else.”

  “Very well,” said Harry. “I will listen. Apart from that, I promise nothing.”

  At the appointed hour Mr. Patrell appeared at the door of the flat, greeting my mother with elaborate courtesy. His mood was buoyant, but his face looked pale and gaunt, and he wore his left arm in a heavy canvas sling. Stepping inside, he waved off our questions about his bandaged arm, assuring us that it was only a minor injury. Placing his dove-grey homburg on the sideboard, he took a seat at the breakfast table and grinned broadly as a slice of dobos torte was placed before him. Bess, meanwhile, chatted amiably with him about the potentially ruinous effects of the recent consolidation of New York’s five boroughs. At length, when Patrell had submitted the misdeeds of Mayor Van Wyck to a lengthy analysis, my sister-in-law attempted to guide the conversation to business.

  “Do I understand, sir,” said Bess, “that there may be an opening at Patrell’s Wonder Emporium?”

  “Ah!” said the proprietor brightly, waving his good arm in the air. “Allow me to demonstrate!” Pulling a linen pocket square from his coat, he dabbed at his lips and gave a discreet cough. Then, with a brief flourish, he reached into his mouth and withdrew a large, whole walnut in its shell. “My mouth is empty,” he said, turning to my brother to allow a brief examination, “and I shall take a sip of tea to demonstrate that my esophageal passages are clear. But see!” With a sweep of his hand he withdrew a second walnut, placing it beside the first on the edge of the kitchen table.

  This peculiar display was repeated four more times until there was a neat row of six walnuts arrayed before him. “What do you think?” he asked, waving a hand over the harvest. “Rather good, is it not?”

  I should perhaps explain that Mr. Patrell’s exhibition was not without precedent. At that time the sideshows and carnivals were experiencing a modest vogue of what was called the “regurgitator act,” an outgrowth of sword-swallowing and water-spouting. The regurgitator act would take many curious forms before the fad had run its course. Some regurgitators would swallow and then reproduce small stones and rocks, while other even hardier souls turned their skills to goldfish and frogs. One inventive practitioner found a means of swallowing assorted small objects—coins, thimbles, and the like—only to reproduce them in the order called for by his audience. It must be said that regurgitators were not my favorite class of entertainer, and I disliked sharing a stage with them. The act, depending as it did upon grotesquerie, tended to put the audience in a skittish, even hostile frame of mind. Worse yet, it produced a foul odor.

  My sister-in-law shared my sense of distaste. “Mr. Patrell,” said Bess, “I have always found acts of this type to be unseemly.”

  “Still,” I said, eager not to offend a potential employer, “six walnuts! That’s rather good.”

  “I can do seven,” said Harry. “Plus a potato.”

  “Can you?” asked Patrell, looking a touch crestfallen. “Well, I’m still something of a novice. My difficulty is this accursed arm sling. I can’t juggle with one arm, and if I can’t juggle, how am I going to get the marks to pony up their dimes?”

  It was a fair question. The sight of Gideon Patrell juggling a set of Indian clubs was a familiar one in New York City. He would stand on the sidewalk outside of his Wonder Emporium before each show doing wondrous cascades and showers as a crowd gathered to watch. This was his version of the time-honored “bally,” the free act performed outside a carnival tent while the outside talker—we didn’t call them “barkers” in those days—enticed the crowd to “step right up” and pay their admission. I was a competent juggler myself at that stage of my career, but Patrell was an artist. His overhand-eight pattern was a wonder to behold.

  “Mr. Patrell,” said Bess, folding her hands, “I am truly sorry for your difficulty, but surely there are better options than this? Do you honestly believe that coughing up a handful of walnuts will bring in paying customers?”

  Patrell’s face clouded. “What am I to do?” he asked. “I need something to go along with the spiel.”

  “I could do my handcuff act,” said Harry. “That will bring them running!”

  “God, Harry, don’t start blathering on about that handcuff act again! What do I need with a—what do you keep calling yourself? An escapitator?”

  “An escapologist.”

  “Whatever. Nobody’s ever going to want to see a guy slip out of a pair of handcuffs, Harry. Stick with your magic act.”

  Harry folded his arms.

  “You’ll forgive me for asking, Mr. Patrell,” I said, “but if you don’t want Harry to do his escape act, why are you here?”

  “I need a magician—I need a ‘King of Kards.’”

  “What happened to Addison Tate?” I asked. “Only last month you were telling me that he was the best card mechanic you’ve ever had.”

  “Tate!” Patrell’s face darkened. “I took that man into my troupe when no one else would have him! Gave him two slots on the bill! And this is how he repays me!”

>   Harry leaned forward. “He skipped out on you?”

  “Skipped out on me! No, Houdini—he shot me!”

  Bess and I were too startled to speak, but Harry appeared delighted by this news.

  “Ah!” he cried, bridging his fingertips. “A mystery!”

  “A mystery? There’s no mystery about it,” cried Patrell. “He took out a gun and shot me! And when I get my hands on him, he’ll regret the day he crossed my path. Even with one arm, I’ll give him a thrashing.”

  “Your case fills me with interest,” said my brother. “Pray give us the essential facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards question you as to those details which seem to me to be most important. Omit nothing. It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”

  Patrell stared. “I must say, Houdini, you’re acting very strangely. What in the world are you going on about?”

  The answer, of course, was Sherlock Holmes. My brother, though not a great reader, was a devoted admirer of the Great Detective, whose adventures he followed religiously in the pages of Harper’s Weekly until the death of Mr. Holmes at the hands of Professor Moriarty, an event that left Harry despondent for several weeks. Even now, roughly five years later, Harry refused to accept that the detective’s adventures had come to an end. Whenever the subject was broached, he would simply shake his head and insist that Dr. Watson’s account of the events at the Reichenbach Falls must have been a deception of some kind. “The good doctor must have had his reasons,” he would say.

  If anything, Harry’s enthusiasm had increased since the Great Detective’s passing. The previous year we had been thrown quite inadvertently into the investigation of the murder of a Fifth Avenue tycoon, under a set of circumstances, as Dr. Watson might have said, that I have recorded elsewhere. Our unexpected success in this matter left Harry with the distinct, if unwarranted, impression that he had been anointed as the heir apparent to Sherlock Holmes.

  “Perhaps you should tell us a bit more about this unusual turn of events, Mr. Patrell,” said Bess. “I can’t say I’m entirely at ease with the idea of a Ten-in-One where the performers are apt to shoot one another.”

  Patrell sighed and fingered one of the walnuts lined up on the table in front of him. “There isn’t much to tell,” he began. “Addison Tate joined the troupe in late July. He’s a fine performer, and he is willing to step in wherever he is needed, but I had my doubts about him. We’ve all heard rumors that he served a stretch in prison as a young man. They say he shot a man in a gambling hall.”

  “He denies it,” I said. “I’ve played cards with the man on many occasions. He says a crooked dealer got shot and the police arrested everyone at the table. He insists he had no part in any wrongdoing.”

  “I know what he says, Dash.” Patrell picked up a table knife and began tapping at the shell of a walnut. “And I believed him. Truly I did. But almost from the first he began pumping me for more money. He told me his mother needed an operation! Of all the cock-and-bull—”

  “I am sorry to learn that his mother is unwell,” said Harry.

  “Unwell? Houdini, his mother doesn’t need an operation! That’s the oldest line of patter in the book! I’m surprised he didn’t try to sell me a share in a gold mine.” Using his bandaged arm as a buttress, Patrell wedged the blade of his table knife into the seam of the walnut and pried it open.

  “This still does not explain how you came to be shot,” Harry said.

  Patrell picked out several pieces of walnut and began chewing. “The night before last, Tate brought every single member of the troupe to my office after the final show—the whole lot of them, even the bearded lady. He knew that I would be tallying the receipts for the week and preparing the pay packets. We’d had a fairly good draw, so there was a considerable pile of money sitting on my desk. Tate came to me with his hat in his hand and begged me to give him the entire week’s receipts. He made a good show of it, I’ll grant you. He said he had spoken with everyone and they had all agreed to put their salaries toward his mother’s operation.”

  “The entire troupe was willing to do this?” I asked.

  Patrell nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. He said he would pay them all back as soon as he was able. He must have been remarkably convincing.”

  “It does seem extraordinary,” said Bess, “but, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Patrell, what business is it of yours if your employees chose to give their wages to Mr. Tate?”

  “You’re quite right about that, Mrs. Houdini, but that wasn’t all he was after. He wanted me to surrender the entire gate—every last dime I made for the week. It was quite impossible. I have overhead. It would have shut us down.”

  “You refused?” Harry asked.

  “Of course I refused! And Tate assured me that he bore no ill will. We shook hands and parted as friends—or so I believed. But he returned later, when the others had gone. Said he was going to give me one last chance to do the decent thing. When I again refused, he informed me that I no longer had a choice in the matter. ‘It pains me to do this,’ he said, ‘but I am a desperate man.’ That’s when he pulled out his gun.”

  “The Navy Colt,” I said. “With the ivory grips.”

  Harry raised his eyebrows. “How could you possibly know that, Dash?”

  “Harry, Addison Tate does a ‘Wild West’ act. He’s the best trick shooter in all of New York. I’ve seen that pistol dozens of times. So have you. He treats that gun like precious jewel.”

  Harry stroked his chin. “A regrettable lapse. I saw, but I did not observe.”

  I turned back to Patrell. “I can’t believe that Addison Tate would do such a thing. I know the man.”

  “I don’t think he intended to shoot me, Dash,” Patrell said, wincing slightly as his hand went to his bandaged shoulder. “I was so convinced of it, in fact, that when he reached for the money, I pushed him away and tried to scoop the money back into my strongbox. That’s the last thing I remember, apart from the sound of the gun. When I came to my senses, the room was full of people and my shoulder hurt like the devil, but Tate and the money were gone.”

  “It must have been an accident,” I said. “He keeps a hair-trigger on that pistol.”

  “Taking the money was no accident, Dash. And whether he meant to shoot me or not, it’s all one and the same in the eyes of the law. I’ll see him in Sing Sing before this is over. If only he can be found!”

  “And so we come to the business at hand,” said Harry, spreading his palms on the table before him. “You wish to hire me.”

  “Obviously,” said Patrell.

  “Yes, just so. Obviously. You should have consulted me sooner. By this time, no doubt, the police have trodden on any number of vital clues, but perhaps I might uncover the truth by questioning—”

  “I must say, Houdini, you don’t seem quite yourself today.” Patrell brushed the last of the walnut shells into his handkerchief. “Do I understand that you fancy yourself a detective now?”

  “You’ve come to the right man. I shall locate Addison Tate for you, and I shall solve the mystery of his disappearance, or my name isn’t—”

  “But there’s no mystery about it, Houdini! He simply fled after the gun went off. The police will find him soon enough.”

  Harry’s face fell. “No mystery? Then why have you come to see me?”

  “You’re still a magician, aren’t you?”

  “I am ‘The King of Kards,’” said Harry, straightening his back. “The foremost pasteboard manipulator in the country, capable of making the cards—”

  “—Capable of making the cards shimmer and dance upon your fingertips,” said Patrell, finishing Harry’s boast in the weary tone of one who had heard it countless times. “Well, Houdini, making the cards shimmer and dance is another service that Addison Tate had undertaken for Patrell’s Wonder Emporium, and rather capably, I will admit. I need someone to fill his slot. I’d do it myself, but with my arm in a sling I couldn’t possi
bly pull off a manipulation act.”

  “Harry would be very pleased to accommodate you,” I said, assuming my de facto role as my brother’s manager, “provided that you are willing to meet his terms.”

  “I’ll pay him three dollars a week,” said Patrell, “which is fifty cents more than I was paying Mr. Tate.”

  “My professional charges are upon a fixed scale,” said Harry. “I do not vary them, save when I remit them altogether.”

  “What?” asked Patrell.

  “Three dollars a week will be fine,” I said quickly.

  “Yes,” said Harry, tapping his nose meaningfully. “Perhaps it would be best if I joined the company as a mere performer. We must not advertise the real reason for my presence. It would inhibit my investigation.”

  Patrell turned to me. “Dash?”

  “Three dollars a week will be fine,” I repeated.

  “It is a perfect deception,” Harry said, as he journeyed downtown to join Patrell’s Wonder Emporium that afternoon. “I shall pose as a simple card manipulator. No one will suspect that I am silently observing each and every detail.”

  “Harry,” said Bess with a sigh. “You are a simple card manipulator. Mr. Patrell told us to leave Addison Tate to the police. There’s nothing to investigate.”

  “Bess is right, Harry,” I said. “Don’t mess this up. We need the money. Keep your mind on your act.”

  “I shall perform my duties with my usual skill and professionalism,” said Harry. “Of that you may be assured.” His voice took on a faraway quality. “The stage lost a fine actor when I became a specialist in crime.”