Sherlock Holmes In America

by Martin H. Greenberg

  Later that day, I sat with Sherlock Holmes at a fine restaurant he had pointed out in our guidebook among the elegant, tree-lined rows of aristocratic Boston. This outing took me quite by surprise, given my friend’s thrifty tastes. Only once we were on our way there, did I realize he had carried Mollie with us in the green bag. I suggested that the restaurant would not permit her, and, even if we were to smuggle her inside, were she to begin meowing incessantly (as was her custom), we would be thrown out.

  “I suppose you are correct, as this is not Paris, where they are permissive of animal companions,” Holmes said. He tied a long ribbon he had in his pocket from her neck to a lamppost that could be seen from the restaurant’s window. It was a rather strange sight, I suppose, to the American pedestrians. Shortly into our meal, two young women in expensive silk dresses stopped and reached down for Mollie, who backed away and looked coolly at them. After some unsuccessful inducements to prove their friendship, the women yielded. Later, as Holmes uncharacteristically ordered dessert, a more dramatic trial came for the poor creature. Two well-dressed boys began to throw rocks at her. Mollie cried out and tried to run toward the restaurant.

  I rose from my chair and readied my walking stick as a weapon. To my surprise, Holmes did not stir.

  “Holmes, would you allow such torment by those little devils?”

  The imps now crossed to Mollie’s side of the street, as their aim had been fortunately bad. Just as I was about to step into the fray, a hail of rocks flew at the perpetrators instead of the kitten. I craned my neck out the window and recognized three boys from Mrs. Smith’s Kindness Club. Though they were smaller than Mollie’s tormentors, they outnumbered the evildoers, successfully chasing them away and likely warning them never to harm helpless animals again without fearing their little club’s vengeance.

  “Do you not think it somewhat strange,” I remarked when we exited, “those Kindness boys from Mrs. Smith’s club would be in this part of the city!”

  “I do not think it strange at all,” replied Holmes, untying our little pet, and taking her up with one hand, “as I directed them to come. You must know I should want nothing to happen to our little colleague, Watson.”

  Leaving my companion afterwards, I visited my old friend Lavey, who was weeping with news that the prosecuting attorney brought the most severe counts against him in his indictment. He begged me to convince his jailers to allow me to administer medicine to him. By this, I knew, he meant his opium, as I watched him trembling, perspiring, and yawning uncontrollably.

  Holmes, meanwhile, had spent the day in leisurely visits to scientific correspondents at the laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to the site near Harvard of the famous Parkman case. Knowing the remarkable character of Sherlock Holmes’s mind, I had eliminated any doubt as to his commitment to Lavey’s case. I was therefore not surprised upon returning to our lodging house when Holmes met me at the door and requested that I repair immediately to the police station and inform Detective Dugan that we wished to visit their prison in Charlestown in the morning. He also provided some particular requests for Dugan to fulfill for our arrival.

  “Shall I tell him the purpose of all this, Holmes?” I asked.

  “I see you wonder about my methods in this case, Watson. Were you to have considered the data and my actions at each step, you would cease to. Yet, your friendship with the suspected murderer has prevented that, I fancy, for you think about the welfare of the man, not about the logic of the crime, a fatal mistake that has reduced many a detective into a charitable worker. In this case the man was a simple clue, nothing more. As for Dugan, you may tell him that if he grants my peculiar wishes, I shall point out for him a brutal fugitive sought by the law across New England.”

  The next morning, we had no sooner arrived at the Charlestown prison than it was apparent to me that Dugan had carried out Holmes’s requests with strict deference. Crowded into a small courtyard were no less than fifteen criminals guarded on all sides. Holmes, striding in, removed a lens from his pocket and examined their hands and arms as he walked. Without looking up at their faces, he stopped in front of a particular prisoner and waved for Dugan.

  “Detective, what has this man been arrested for, and what does he claim as his name?” Holmes asked.

  “Horse thievery, Mr. Holmes. His name is Julius McArthur, and he is serving two months.”

  “If I am not mistaken,” replied Holmes, “you shall find McArthur a mere alias. His name is George Simpson, a murderer of a deputy sheriff in Brunswick, as well as a bigamist, a forger, and the true killer of Mary Painting—the housemaid you know as Mary Ann Pinton.”

  “Mary dead?” the man in question exploded at Holmes. “How could it be? I didn’t mean to be rough, I only wanted her to come away with me! Mary, not my Mary!” he howled her name several more times as he fell to his knees and sobbed. Two prison guards ushered the pitiful beast away. I turned and stared at Holmes as did the detective. I could not, at that moment, remember him ever completing a case in so abrupt and unexpected a fashion as to locate the perpetrator already inside the walls of a prison!

  “Why, Holmes, you have saved Lavey! But how is it you knew the girl’s killer to be in this prison?” I asked. “And how, just by looking at the hands of this assortment of rascally men?”

  “My dear Watson, you ask me to reveal my methods to an audience of eager ears in gray flannel who might put them to use. I have learned by telegram that we must soon depart at once for New York to attend to a grave affair with my old friend Hargreave. If Detective Dugan will accompany us on one final errand, I will happily explain the steps that have now brought a very bad fellow to justice. Detective, would you be kind enough?”

  “I would not think of doing otherwise!” Dugan declared, still awestruck at the turn of events.

  At Carver Street, we were ushered back into the parlor of Anna Harris Smith at the Animal Rescue League. I sat on an armchair with a cat as black as Poe’s, the poor animal having been the victim of neglect but now recuperating nicely, while Detective Dugan shared the crimson sofa with the same lazy specimen of feline (who I now heard Mrs. Smith refer to as “Stuffy”) who had been in that spot on our last visit.

  “Mr. Holmes, I cannot wait a moment longer to hear!” Detective Dugan exclaimed with such fervor that even Stuffy seemed interested. Mrs. Smith stood to the side with a curious smile.

  “Very well,” said Holmes, placing down the green case. He opened the flap and our fluffy orange and white kitten, with the heterochromatic eyes, crawled out to check her surroundings.

  “You know this kitten, Watson?” asked Holmes.

  “Why, of course I do. It is our Mollie.”

  “The same dear kitten I saved from the residence of Dr. Lavey, and gave over to Mrs. Smith with my own hands,” added Detective Dugan.

  “Wrong,” Holmes said.

  Suddenly, a second orange and white kitten climbed into view from inside the bag. She was identical in every way, down to boasting one blue and one gray eye, though they had now switched places so that the blue was on the right and the gray on the left.

  “Heavens above, Holmes! There are two of them. They are regular Dromios!” I cried, thinking of the dual figures in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, a production of which I had recently taken in with an artistic female friend at Terry’s Theater, London.

  “But what does this second cat have to do with the murder?” Dugan asked.

  “Everything, my dear Detective!” Holmes answered. “When you removed Mollie from the scene of the murder, Detective Dugan, you had unknowingly displaced the only revealing clue in the entire place. You shall see it for yourself. When I first heard that Mary had brought a young kitten into Dr. Lavey’s home, I presumed at once that it was a gift someone had made to her. Mother cats are protective of their young, and do not part with their offspring willingly. A mother cat could meet with accident or malice, leaving her kittens behind, but the poor creatures in that circumstance
will seldom survive a night, often contracting the diseases peculiar to their race or falling victim to other animals of the streets. So, the circumstances of Mary, not owning a cat, and then coming in possession of a healthy kitten, suggested that the animal had been presented to her from somewhere else.”

  “Yes, yes. That seems quite probable,” Detective Dugan agreed.

  Holmes continued. “Dr. Lavey, who had employed Mary for the last two years, said Mary never had visitors and had no signs of any friends or relatives. It might be noted that whenever a person seems to have no friends or relatives, the fact is almost surely just the opposite: that the person has friends or relatives of very formidable and oppressive natures whom the apparently lonesome soul wishes to avoid at all costs. It was a fact at hand that Mary had been distracted and depressed in recent weeks, which I surmised was a product of fearing the return of some old element in her life from which she was surely hiding. But to return to the kitten: I suspected that the gift was from one of the housemaid’s supposedly nonexistent friends, perhaps one that Mary accidentally met while out in Boston. This feeling was confirmed when, taking possession of Mollie, I determined through a little research that she was a mix of an Angora and a Coon—two quite expensive and prized breeds of cat, often the winners, in fact, of the premium in recent years of Boston cat shows. It was sound logic that little Mollie had come, therefore, from a fashionable region of Boston, a suspicion made stronger upon examining a map drawn up by Watson of the locations of Mary’s errands in her final weeks. Choosing a place near where Mary had been on an errand in the days before receiving the kitten, Dr. Watson will now remember that we watched from a restaurant window as two young women, aristocrats to the core, stopped at Mollie filled with surprise and recognition. Their surprise was enhanced when Mollie behaved as though she did not know them and had never before seen them. You see, I counted on the fact that Mollie’s mother had given birth to more than one kitten and, hoping that at least some of the physical traits of Mollie’s brothers or sisters would be superficially similar, she would be mistaken for having escaped from her home nearby.

  “I had arranged for the services of several of Mrs. Smith’s Kindness Club boys to follow any persons who exhibited unusual interest in the kitten while she remained tied on the street. This occurring, the boys sent me back a note that night that the two fashionable young Brahmins had knocked at a nearby mansion and saw to their surprise this kitten, Miss Puff, Mollie’s sister. I was fortunate, for the purposes of my scheme, that this kitten was more remarkably like Mollie than I could hope, and at a glance identical, except the colors of the eyes were switched, which a person with no scholarship in optical matters would rarely notice. Shown by a butler that Miss Puff was, in fact, sleeping soundly by a breezy window, the girls were satisfied that they had been mistaken in their recognition of the kitten at the lamppost. Now I knew who had given Mollie to Mary Ann Pinton.

  “Telephoning this woman, who had retired to a house by the shore for the summer months, I inquired to whom she had given the second kitten with prismatic eyes.

  “‘Why, to my poor dear friend Mary,’ she said to me.

  “‘Forgive me, madam, I am a stranger here. Is it customary for a woman of society to have a friend who is a housekeeper?’

  “‘No, Mr. Holmes, it is certainly not. Mary Painting was a school friend of mine when we were mere girls. We had all heard she had married and moved west. When I happened to see her on the street in the dress of a housemaid, my heart broke for her! She seemed aloof and nervous. My house girl, Betsy, said she had recognized the woman I had been speaking with from the intelligence office, and believed she kept a position with a Dr. Lavey over the last years. I thought having one of our beautiful kittens would bring her cheer.’

  “‘So you left Mollie the kitten for her?’

  “‘Not I, Mr. Holmes! That doctor resided in a neighborhood I do not dare enter myself without an acute loss of reputation. I had one of my domestics give her to Mary. Mollie, is that what she named her? Why, that sounds like a housemaid. Why not just name the poor thing Biddy!’

  “From that point on, my path ahead to resolving Dr. Lavey’s case was quite clear thanks to what Mollie’s former owner had revealed. I consulted the city records and found that a Mary Painting had married one George Fitzbeck five years ago. The name immediately meant something to me. When I was in Maine last week, attending to personal affairs, I had read in the newspaper there about the fugitive George Smith who was wanted for murdering a deputy sheriff in Brunswick after a daring escape. Smith had been in prison there for bigamy and forgery, and had pretended to be insane so that he would be transferred to the asylum, where he easily managed an escape. The sheriff’s men had found him with a stolen horse when Smith, without warning, fired from behind some rocks and blew off the deputy’s head. The newspaper had listed several of Smith’s aliases which included Fitzbeck.

  “Whether or not Mary Painting knew what kind of man her lover was when she married him in her youth, we shall leave to the imagination. She moved with him out west, as her old Boston friends had correctly heard, where his criminal history records several outstanding warrants for horse theft in his youth and, later, for bigamy. When she recognized the extent of his character, or perhaps found out about his other wives, she returned to Boston and assumed a new name—Mary Ann Pinton—in order to hide. Penniless and likely disavowed long ago by her Boston family, she concealed herself in a humble station a universe away from her Beacon Hill girlhood, as a housemaid who told her employer she had never been married and had no family. There she remained safely hidden.”

  “Until Fitzbeck escaped,” I said.

  “Correct, Watson. Mary read of the escape and feared for her life. We have heard from Dr. Lavey that she had become distracted and emotionally shattered in the very weeks after his escape, and often locked herself in her room. Nor, we can safely imagine, did she feel she could tell Dr. Lavey without losing her station for lying about her history. Mary feared more than anything that her husband would find her, and she was right. Through means Detective Dugan may ascertain later in questioning the murderer, the fugitive discovered her whereabouts. Entering the house by the rear door, he found Mary in the kitchen. From Detective Dugan’s accurate examinations of the injuries, I suspect Fitzbeck was attempting to convince her to leave with him, when she refused and tried to scream. He covered her face with his hand to stop her from screaming as he continued his attempt to persuade, but in her struggling against him his grip became harder, smothering her mouth and nose and suffocating her. When Dr. Lavey, in his habitual haze of opium, finally heard a noise and started down the stairs, the fugitive fled. The fugitive did not know he had just killed the girl, I might add.”

  “Astounding, Mr. Holmes! But how did you know the murderer would be found in our prison?” Detective Dugan asked.

  “Quite easy, Detective Dugan. I assumed it was likely the ruffian waited near the house hoping to find a time to speak again with Mary. When he heard shouting for the police, he fell into a panic. It has been my longstanding observation that the instinct of even the hardened criminal when panicked returns to his earliest form of offense—in this case, horse theft. I knew from Mrs. Smith that, in addition to the usual work of the Boston police, the Animal Rescue League had begun to place a secret service of detectives around Boston to diminish the terrible effect of horse theft on the unwilling beasts. Therefore, I did not think it unlikely that by the morning, the stolen horse, if there were one, would have been traced to its captor. Now, Fitzbeck knows enough of police to know that if he resisted and was captured, he would be investigated closely and in all probability found to be a wanted fugitive. However, if he went quietly, protesting that he mistook the horse as his own, and giving a false name, he would be handed a perfunctory sentence of a few months. I telephoned the police in Maine to retrieve George Smith’s Bertillon measurements, and then asked that Watson bring them to you with instructions to gather the prisoners that
met those specifics.”

  “But Mr. Holmes, you were able to identify the murderer without looking at his face! I could hardly believe it!”

  “Detective Dugan, I did this not to put on a spectacle, but because I knew nothing of what George Fitzbeck, or George Smith, looked like. A forger, by rule, is quite skilled at changing his appearance through small adjustments in habits of grooming and hygiene. However, knowing that he had fooled the police in Maine into transferring him to an insane asylum, I examined his hands and arms. Criminals wishing to appear insane will usually chew off their fingernails or make cuts across their wrists that appear to be suicidal marks but in fact remain superficial and harmless. These marks could not be concealed even three or four weeks later. Our man, I found, had both of these on him, and was taken in as a horse thief. Concluding that while in prison he had not yet heard that his encounter with Mary had left her dead, I counted on further confirmation of his identity on my mention of Mary’s decease—as you saw with your own eyes.”

  “There is one point I don’t understand,” I interjected, turning to our hostess. “Mrs. Smith, when we arrived here you were quite adamant that a cat could not be taken out of this building unless it is to a permanent home. Yet, you allowed Mollie to come with us to be used as an accessory in this case.”

  “I am not deaf to reality, Dr. Watson,” Mrs. Smith replied forthrightly. “Our donations in these first months have been far more modest than we will need for our organization to survive more than a year. There are men and women standing high in religious and charitable enterprises who would celebrate our demise, who say that caring for animals is an affront when so much money is needed for men, women, and children. Even though when we receive a gift of one hundred dollars it is considered news, but if the new library or an institution of art receives ten thousand dollars, it is met with a shrug. But we will pass that by. Mr. Holmes assuring me that the League would be publicly credited with helping to save an innocent man from prison and capture a murderer, I agreed to his bargain. If the public can see the cause of an animal helping people, and the cause of people helping animals, we shall one day find our acceptance.”