Sherlock Holmes In America

by Martin H. Greenberg

  Gideon Patrell took his usual seat behind his desk. “Are there any more of those pastries your mother sent, Dash?” he asked. “What did you call them again?”

  “Kifli,” I said. “And I’m afraid Mr. Grader has eaten the last one.”

  “Grader! I’ve never seen a living skeleton with such a sweet tooth,” said Patrell.

  “Sorry, boss,” he said, patting his concave stomach.

  “So, what’s this all about?” asked Patrell, cracking a walnut with a juggling club. “Where is your brother, by the way?”

  “Right here,” said Harry, entering the room with the “Wild Man of Borneo” in tow. “Sorry for the delay. Mr. Kendricks and I needed to make preparations for this evening’s performance.”

  “Performance?” asked Patrell. “We’ve done our eight turns today, Houdini. It’s time to go home.”

  “Please indulge me for just a few moments longer,” said Harry. “I’ve planned an encore, never before seen on any stage. Tonight, my brother and I intend to recreate the dreadful crime that took place in this office.”

  “Recreate the crime?” Patrell stared at him. “For what possible reason?”

  “You have indicated that you would like to find Mr. Tate and recover your money.”

  “Yes, but he’s long gone by now. And our money with him.”

  “Perhaps not.” Harry straightened his tie. “Indeed, I believe the solution is closer than you think. Mr. Patrell, for purposes of our demonstration you will remain just as you are, behind the desk. Dash, you will be playing the role of Addison Tate in this evening’s drama.”

  I stepped forward.

  “Now,” my brother continued, turning to the others, “Mr. Patrell has stated that Addison Tate returned to the office to demand the money after the rest of you departed. Dash—demand the money.”

  I shrugged. “Give me the money,” I said.

  “No, no,” said Harry, stepping forward. “It is essential that you are believable in the part. Take out your gun! Threaten him!”

  I pulled out the Navy Colt. “Give me the money,” I repeated, somewhat apologetically.

  “You’re hopeless, Dash,” said Harry, snatching the Colt from my hands. “Here’s how it’s done.” He turned to Patrell and snarled at him across the desk, waving the gun menacingly. “See here, you low-down, four-flushing, no-account, miserable, rotten, lousy, cheap, dishonest—”

  “I think we get the point, Houdini,” said Patrell.

  “Quite so,” Harry agreed, in a much brighter tone. He set the gun down and turned away, twirling a juggling club carelessly at the tips of his fingers. “And then, when you refused to surrender the money, he shot you and stole away under cover of darkness.”

  Ben Zalor squirmed uncomfortably atop his packing crate. “We know all this, Houdini,” he said.

  “Indeed,” said my brother, clearing his throat, “but later that same evening, something even more remarkable occurred. I believe that Addison Tate had no sooner fled into the night than he realized that he could not leave Mr. Patrell alive to tell what he knew. Tate would never be able to show his face again for fear of being arrested. The charge would be attempted murder.”

  Emma Henderson gave a horrified gasp. “You’re saying that Tate came back here to finish Mr. Patrell off?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying, my dear lady. But Tate found himself in a terrible quandary. He knew that he had wounded his victim, but he could not enter the office and confront him directly. Patrell had likely summoned help by this time. What’s more, Tate had dropped his gun earlier. He was unarmed. So what did he do? Ah, here was the genius of the thing. Creeping stealthily into the back room, Tate noticed a ventilator duct that communicated directly with Mr. Patrell’s office.”

  “Ventilator duct?” asked Grader, scratching his skull-like head.

  “Yes, for the circulation of fresh air. Essential in a property that had once been a fish market. Tate noticed a faint light glowing through the opening, which told him that Mr. Patrell was still in his office. The absence of noise confirmed that his victim was alone, possibly even unconscious from the gunshot. Tate seized this opportunity without hesitation. Reaching into the folds of his cloak, he withdrew a small but deadly swamp adder, the deadliest snake in India, which he had secured during his dealings with—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Mr. Houdini,” cried Miss Henderson. “This is the most absurd yarn I’ve ever heard!”

  “It’s preposterous,” said Patrell, reaching for another walnut. “And by the way, aren’t you describing the plot of a Sherlock Holmes adventure? The Speckled Band, wasn’t it?”

  Harry waved the objections aside. “Perhaps that put the idea into Tate’s head. In any event, the problem now remained of inducing the deadly snake to travel through the ventilator passage into Mr. Patrell’s office. How could this be achieved? Searching through the back room, Tate chanced upon—” Harry broke off at the sound of a walnut cracking. An enormous smile broke across his face. “You see it, Dash?” he cried, springing forward. “You see it?”

  “I see it, Harry.”

  “See what, Dash?” asked Ben Zalor. “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you see what Mr. Patrell is holding in his hands?” I asked.

  Zalor turned to the desk. “Your gun. What of it?”

  “Do you see what he’s doing with it?”

  “He cracked a walnut. So what?”

  “He cracked a walnut with the butt of an ivory-handled Navy pistol. We know he’s done it more than once because there are markings on the handle that weren’t there when Addison Tate cared for the gun.”

  “But what does it matter?” asked Miss Hendricks.

  “Addison Tate didn’t shoot Mr. Patrell,” I told them. “Patrell shot himself. Again and again, we’ve seen that Mr. Patrell has a fondness for walnuts, and a tendency to crack the shells with whatever implement is at hand—a table knife, a rock, a juggling club. Tonight, Harry set the gun down on his desk and walked away with the juggling club. When Patrell had his next impulse to crack a walnut, he grabbed for the closest heavy object.”

  “The gun,” said Zalor.

  “Exactly. And the same thing happened on the night Mr. Patrell was injured—the night he claims that Addison Tate shot him. But Tate didn’t shoot anyone. Gideon Patrell shot himself, accidentally, while cracking a walnut.”

  “Tonight, the gun didn’t go off,” Harry put in, “because Dash had adjusted the trigger mechanism. But Tate liked a lighter touch—almost a hair trigger—so the gun went off when Mr. Patrell cracked the handle against the nut. He’s lucky he wasn’t killed.”

  “This is absurd!” shouted Patrell, his face darkening. “It’s crazier than the story about the swamp adder!”

  “The wonder of the thing is that you did it twice,” I said. “You’d think that a man who had shot himself once would be a little more careful.”

  “That’s why I had to distract you with my spellbinding story,” Harry said. “So that you wouldn’t notice what you were doing. As long as your arm has been in that sling, you’ve simply grabbed for whatever object was close at hand.”

  Emma Henderson was staring at Patrell with an expression of fascination mixed with horror. “Why would he do such a thing? If it was an accident, why would he blame Addison Tate?”

  “Two reasons,” I said. “First, with Tate out of the way, he believed he had an opportunity to win the affections of Miss Horn.” The young lady blushed deeply and turned away. “At the same time,” I continued, “it allowed Patrell to salt away the money for himself. I have to give him credit. At the very instant that he shot himself, he figured out a way to turn it to his profit. He certainly showed a cool head.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Miss Henderson. “Why didn’t Addison Tate simply speak up and defend himself? He left Mr. Patrell’s office that evening when all the rest of us did. We would have vouched for him.”

  “Tate returned later that evening. That part of th
e story is true. He wanted to try again to convince Patrell to let him have the money. When Patrell refused a second time, Tate saw that it was hopeless. He turned to go, leaving his gun behind as he always did, to be locked up in the strongbox overnight. Later, when he heard that Patrell had been shot and the police were looking for him, he panicked and ran.”

  “Incredible,” said Zalor. “So that whole cock-and-bull story about recreating the crime, about snakes in the ventilator—you were just waiting for Mr. Patrell to crack a walnut?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “It’s a pack of lies,” said Patrell, his voice sinking to a menacing register. “You’ve made the whole thing up.”

  “Not at all,” said Harry. “Once we realized what had happened, it was a simple matter to find Addison Tate—with Miss Horn’s help, of course.”

  “You found him?” asked Miss Henderson. “Where?”

  “Why, visiting his mother, of course,” said Harry. “She’s in the hospital awaiting an operation, just as Mr. Tate had said. He has been at her bedside every day, though he took the precaution of shaving off his ‘Wild West’ beard and moustache so that he wouldn’t be easily recognized. This afternoon, he told the entire story to a friend of ours down at the police department.”

  “More lies!” insisted Patrell. “He’ll be halfway across the Atlantic by now.”

  Just then, there was a stirring at the back of the room as the “Wild Man of Borneo” struggled to pull off his wig and mask, revealing not the familiar sight of Nigel Kendricks but a younger, smoother face.

  Patrell gave a hoarse cry. “You! This is—”

  “Hello, Gideon,” said Addison Tate. “Would you mind returning my Colt?”

  “But it was ridiculous!” I told Harry at breakfast the next morning. “Ridiculous on a grand scale!”

  “All part of the plan,” said Harry. “You told me to keep talking until he reached for the gun.”

  “I know,” I said, “but really . . . a swamp adder in the ventilator?”

  “I thought it was a rather tidy explanation,” said Harry, reaching for a slice of brown toast. “And after all, there was a poisonous snake in the room, if you count Mr. Patrell himself. But come now, Dash, you still haven’t explained how Sherlock Holmes provided the solution to the matter.”

  “No, I suppose not,” I said. “Things got a bit chaotic last night.”

  “For a few moments I thought Tate really would shoot Patrell,” said Bess. “And once the police arrived and demanded explanations, it seemed as if we’d never get out of there. Lieutenant Murray is a good man, but he’s a fiend for details.”

  “Even he wasn’t quite sure what to do with Mr. Patrell,” I said. “Patrell never made a formal complaint against Addison Tate, so the nature of the crime is unclear.”

  “I overheard Mr. Patrell offering to pay the medical expenses for Tate’s mother,” said Bess. “I’m guessing that Tate will let the matter drop, especially if Mathilda Horn has anything to do with it. She clearly wants to run away with him and live happily ever after.”

  “A remarkable woman,” I said. “She never wavered in her belief that he was innocent.”

  “Indeed,” said Bess, patting my arm. “We knew there had to be some reason she was able to resist your attentions.”

  “But what about Sherlock Holmes!” demanded Harry. “My letter came back unopened!”

  “Actually, Harry, it began with something you said. When the case began to get frustrating, you said something about ‘turning things upside-down.’ That put a seed in my head. Then, when I saw the letter to Sherlock Holmes, it all fell into place.”

  “But how?” Harry took the envelope from his pocket and studied it. “It’s simply an unopened letter.”

  “With a message on the outside. And what is the message instructing us to do?”

  “I don’t understand. The message is simply telling us to—ah!” A smile broke across Harry’s face. “The message is telling us to turn it over! Turn it over and look at the other side. Which is exactly what you did with the gun. You turned it over and looked at the other side.”

  “And once I did that, I saw that it hadn’t been used as a weapon, but as a nutcracker.”

  “You turned things upside-down, just as I said.” Harry leaned back and gave a sigh of satisfaction. “I must say, Dash, you have been positively brilliant in this business.”

  “My blushes, Harry.”

  “Almost as brilliant as—”

  “As the man who wrote the message on that envelope?”

  He fingered the envelope tenderly for a moment. “Really, Dash,” he said, slipping it back into his pocket. “Now who’s being ridiculous?”

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOSTON DROMIO

  Matthew Pearl

  Matthew Pearl is the author of the historical novels The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens. His nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and Legal Affairs. He has taught literature and creative writing at Harvard University and Emerson College.

  “‘More morphine!’ ‘More chloral!’” he cried, his eyes small and restless. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe, Watson, how American patients order you about as if you were the stable boy.”

  This commentary I heard over breakfast with Dr. Joseph Lavey, the surgeon who had ministered to my injuries in Afghanistan, during my restorative tour through America. Lavey, formerly of London and now of Commercial Street, Boston, had remained in disconsolate and solitary spirits in the years since his wife had died of pneumonia. He was highly distracted and complained of matters large and small, whether the dwindled profits in his medical practice, or the incompetence in recent weeks of his housemaid.

  “She has brought me plates of food never requested,” he said about this. “She has spent daytime hours locked in her little room instead of at her duties!”

  I could not know then what startling events the moody statements of my old friend Dr. Lavey portended.

  Lavey’s misery was so robust, I was relieved at the end of our breakfast to be left in peace with some free time and my guidebook to Boston. Two days later, Lavey returned to my lodgings at dinner. He was out of breath and had fear painted across his face.

  “Why, Lavey, you are not well,” I said. “Let us have something to eat.” I wanted to get a closer look at him, thinking I had recognized in him some telltale signs of an opium eater.

  He cried out in a muttering voice, his hands clapped to his brow, “Dead!”

  “What?”

  “She is dead, Watson! And the detectives’ eyes are hot with suspicion. My dear Watson, I know you have experience in the line of queer criminal happenings. You are the only friend remaining to me in the wide world. You must help!”

  During the night, Lavey said, he had been awakened to a loud thumping. Dressing hastily and taking a rifle from the wall, he nearly tumbled down the stairs before finding his housemaid, Mary Ann Pinton, lying dead on his kitchen floor. That was all he could remember. When next conscious, he was lying on top of her body with his rifle and the police were shaking him. It occurred to me that the whole fantastic tale had been some mental production of his opiates.

  “Lavey, remain here with me in my lodgings,” I implored him.

  “No. She is gone; I must take care of her!” he said cryptically, and hurried away from the premises deaf to my pleas.

  Opening the next morning’s paper, I found news of the most alarming type: Dr. Joseph Lavey, the man to whom I owed my life, arrested for the murder of Mary Ann Pinton!

  I cabled my friend and traveling companion, Sherlock Holmes, at once requesting that he depart on the earliest train for Boston. He had remained at our hotel in Portland, Maine, on business of a personal nature while I had continued our tour of New England.

  During these same days, my name and Holmes’s could be found in the Boston news columns. It was said that I had decided to hide Sherlock Holmes from the public of Boston. That when we
had crossed through New Hampshire, I kept my coat draped over his face. That I had refused to make him available in any public appearances. Various editors called for Holmes to banish me back to England and replace me with an improved companion, preferably a Yankee. Meanwhile, I received piles of notes from portrait artists and photographers proposing Holmes the honor of sitting for them, and others from admirers offering up to twenty dollars for locks of his hair!

  All this interrupted my attempts on poor Lavey’s behalf. As I sat at my small desk writing letters to lawyers one afternoon, I was surprised in turning around for my water carafe to find that the armchair by the open window was now occupied.

  “Holmes!” I cried.

  “Boston is a city of overgrown college men,” Sherlock Holmes said abstractedly.

  I was overjoyed to have my friend back by my side.

  Holmes had been suffering from the variety of mild ailments to the skin, nails, and lungs that many English visitors to United States cities experienced from the stale air and the lack of ventilation inside buildings and trains. Yet, as though his spirits compensated for his physical depression, Holmes had more than usual pluck and smartness in his slender, swift frame. I explained in detail what I knew about Lavey’s case.

  “You say your reunion with this man at this lodging house was less than pleasant?” Holmes asked, steepling his long fingers together.

  “Lavey is by disposition a temperamental man. Still, he had been a well-meaning citizen at the side of his American wife, Amelia, a good and strong woman I counted as my friend. Since her death by pneumonia, I believe he has reverted to his former state, and turned to drugs for comfort.”

  “You had not seen him for many years, then.”

  “No. Yet I am fully inclined to give the old fellow assistance when requested—his dutiful services when an army surgeon having saved my life in the base hospital at Peshawar.”

  “That is an old grudge,” Holmes observed.