“And is there anything else of Doyle’s that you have? Or that Christopher might have received?”
“Oh. Do you know Christopher?”
“Somewhat,” I said. “It’s he who first got me interested in Doyle.”
“There’s a trunk that once belonged to the doctor,” she said. “It’s upstairs.”
“A trunk.”
“Yes. James had it. My husband.”
“May I ask what’s in it?”
“I use it for general storage. Mostly I pack off-season clothes in it.”
“Is there anything connected with Doyle?”
“Not anymore.”
“I see. But there was something at one time?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “My husband never bothered with it. When I first looked into it, it was packed with old clothes and a few books. And several folders filled with manuscript pages. The books were not in good condition. I got rid of them, got rid of everything, except the manuscripts. I thought someone might be interested in them. A scholar, perhaps.”
“Where are they now?”
“The manuscripts? I gave them to Chris. He was an English teacher. I knew he’d find a use for them. He used to show them to his students.”
“You gave them away?”
“I wasn’t giving them away, Inspector. I knew they might be valuable. But Chris was a member of the family.”
“And he showed them to his students?”
“Oh, yes. He has all kinds of stories about their reactions.”
I was sure he did. “But you never read them?”
“Have you ever seen Conan’s handwriting?”
When I got to McBride’s place, he was waiting. “I expected you earlier,” he said.
“Emma called you.”
“Yes.”
We stood facing each other. “You didn’t write the Holmes stories, did you?”
“Doyle wrote them.”
“Why didn’t he publish them?”
He retreated inside and left the door open for me. “He considered them beneath him. Stevenson quotes him as saying he didn’t want to have his name associated with cheapjack thrillers. That was the way he thought of them.”
“But he wrote eight stories.”
McBride nodded. “As far as he was concerned, they were entertainments for him. What we would call guilty pleasures. Something he did in his spare time. God knows where he found spare time. Stevenson suggested he publish them under a pseudonym, but Doyle believed the truth would leak out. It always does, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.” Finally, we sat. “That was what was in the two letters you removed from the library.”
“Stevenson had read two of the stories. ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ And ‘A Case of Identity.’ He pleaded with Doyle to publish. But Doyle’s career as a historical novelist was just taking off. And that was the way he wanted to be remembered.”
“The other letter? The one to Payn?”
“Payn had a chance to publish A Study in Scarlet. In 1886, I believe. He was editor of the Cornhill magazine then.” McBride shook his head slowly at the blindness of the world. “He rejected it. Rejected A Study in Scarlet. Imagine. So Stevenson wrote to him. He mentioned Holmes and Watson in his letter and told Payn he’d missed a golden opportunity. He suggested he reconsider his decision.”
“Did Payn ever respond?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Where did you get the false driver’s license? Michael Y. Naismith?”
“I’m sure you know of places where that can be done. When you spend years with adolescents, finding an establishment that sells IDs is not really difficult.”
“Of course.” Suddenly he had another glass of bourbon in his hand. I didn’t know where it had come from. “And Cable knew.”
“Yes.” His eyes grew dark. “He’d seen the letters that very day. And he couldn’t wait to come over here and confront me.”
“Didn’t you think, before you stole the stories, that you’d be found out eventually?”
“The stories were mine,” he said. “I found them.”
“Why did you not move Holmes into modern times?”
“It would have lost the atmosphere.” He finished his drink and stared at the glass. “No. I thought it best to leave Mr. Holmes where he was.”
“So Doyle’s characters became world famous, and you with them.”
“Yes. That is what happened. Although they were my characters, not Doyle’s. He had no faith in them. I was the one who recognized them for what they were. The world would not have Holmes and Watson, had I not intervened.”
“And you’d expected to continue the series yourself.”
“Yes. I thought it would be easy to imitate Doyle’s style. I’d established my name as a major writer. I thought the rest would come easily enough.”
“But it hasn’t.”
He managed a smile. “I’ve had some difficulty. But given time, I would be all right.”
“So, last Friday evening, Cable walked in and challenged you. What happened? Did you decide you couldn’t trust a blackmailer?”
“Oh, no. He wasn’t here to blackmail me, Inspector. He was hellbent on exposing me.”
“So you killed him.”
“I never intended to. I really didn’t. Even now, I can hardly believe it happened. But he was enjoying himself. He was laughing at me. I offered money. He told me that he wasn’t for sale. That I would get exactly what was coming to me. That I deserved to be held up to public scorn. And he walked out.”
“You did it in the driveway.”
“I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. But I was outraged.”
“Then you hosed it down.”
“If you say so, Inspector.”
“What was the weapon?”
“My driver.”
“Ah, yes. You’re an accomplished golfer. I’d forgotten. So you put him in the boot and drove him over to the shopping center and, when you got a chance, you dumped the body in the woods.”
He looked away. Into the dining room, where it was dark. “You took his keys, went to his house, and stole his computer. In case there was anything on it about the Stevenson letters. And you made it look like a burglary.”
He remained silent.
“I thought signing a book for him, after the fact, was a nice touch. You knew we’d tie you into it, that we’d come here, so you had your story ready.”
“Inspector, you’ve no proof of any of this. And you can do nothing more than ruin my reputation. I suspect you can’t be bribed, but I would be extremely grateful if you looked the other way. You owe me that much. And you owe it to the world. I can make Holmes and Watson immortal.”
“It’s over, McBride. I have some people outside. And a warrant. I can’t bring myself to believe you would have destroyed the Doyle manuscripts. They’re here somewhere.”
“Yes, they are,” he said. “But that will only show that I allowed my name to be used on someone else’s work. That’s serious enough, but it isn’t murder.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But I’ll be surprised if we don’t also find the Stevenson letters. Not that it would matter at this point. We can probably match your handwriting on the register at the library. Combined with everything else, I think it will be more than enough to persuade a jury.”
On the way into town, he asked whether I’d read the Holmes stories. I told him I had.
“I wish he’d listened to Stevenson,” he said. “Can you imagine what might have been had he gone on to create a series with Holmes and Watson? What a pity.” Tears appeared in his eyes. “What a loss.”
G-Men:--Kristine Kathryn Rusch
In addition to science fiction and fantasy, Kristine Kathryn Rusch is also a prolific writer of mystery and romance. She has won multiple awards in all three genres, including the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Ellery Queen Reader’s Choice Award, and the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Paranormal Romance.
She’s made several bestseller lists and been translated into thirteen languages. It’s hard to make me feel lazy, but she succeeds. She also succeeds admirably in the story that follows, with a Sixties’ era tale of murder and the FBI that could easily be a novel in its own right.
“There’s something addicting about a secret.”
--J. Edgar Hoover
The squalid little alley smelled of piss. Detective Seamus O’Reilly tugged his overcoat closed and wished he’d worn boots. He could feel the chill of his metal flashlight through the worn glove on his right hand.
Two beat cops stood in front of the bodies, and the coroner crouched over them. His assistant was already setting up the gurneys, body bags draped over his arm. The coroner’s van had blocked the alley’s entrance, only a few yards away.
O’Reilly’s partner, Joseph McKinnon, followed him. McKinnon had trained his own flashlight on the fire escapes above, unintentionally alerting any residents to the police presence.
But they probably already knew. Shootings in this part of the city were common. The neighborhood teetered between swank and corrupt. Far enough from Central Park for degenerates and muggers to use the alleys as corridors, and, conversely, close enough for new money to want to live with a peek of the city’s most famous expanse of green.
The coroner, Thomas Brunner, had set up two expensive, battery-operated lights on garbage can lids placed on top of the dirty ice, one at the top of the bodies, the other near the feet. O’Reilly crouched so he wouldn’t create any more shadows.
“What’ve we got?” he asked.
“Dunno yet.” Brunner was using his gloved hands to part the hair on the back of the nearest corpse’s skull. “It could be one of those nights.”
O’Reilly had worked with Brunner for eighteen years now, since they both got back from the war, and he hated it when Brunner said it could be one of those nights. That meant the corpses would stack up, which was usually a summer thing, but almost never happened in the middle of winter.
“Why?” O’Reilly asked. “What else we got?”
“Some colored limo driver shot two blocks from here.” Brunner was still parting the hair. It took O’Reilly a minute to realize it was matted with blood. “And two white guys pulled out of their cars and shot about four blocks from that.”
O’Reilly felt a shiver run through him that had nothing to do with the cold. “You think the shootings are related?”
“Dunno,” Brunner said. “But I think it’s odd, don’t you? Five dead in the space of an hour, all in a six-block radius.”
O’Reilly closed his eyes for a moment. Two white guys pulled out of their cars, one Negro driver of a limo, and now two white guys in an alley. Maybe they were related, maybe they weren’t.
He opened his eyes, then wished he hadn’t. Brunner had his finger inside a bullet hole, a quick way to judge caliber.
“Same type of bullet,” Brunner said.
“You handled the other shootings?”
“I was on scene with the driver when some fag called this one in.”
O’Reilly looked at Brunner. Eighteen years, and he still wasn’t used to the man’s casual bigotry.
“How did you know the guy was queer?” O’Reilly asked. “You talk to him?”
“Didn’t have to.” Brunner nodded toward the building in front of them. “Weekly party for degenerates in the penthouse apartment every Thursday night. Thought you knew.”
O’Reilly looked up. Now he understood why McKinnon had been shining his flashlight at the upper story windows. McKinnon had worked Vice before he got promoted to Homicide.
“Why would I know?” O’Reilly said.
McKinnon was the one who answered. “Because of the standing orders.”
“I’m not playing twenty questions,” O’Reilly said. “I don’t know about a party in this building and I don’t know about standing orders.”
“The standing orders are,” McKinnon said as if he were an elementary school teacher, “not to bust it, no matter what kind of lead you got. You see someone go in, you forget about it. You see someone come out, you avert your eyes. You complain, you get moved to a different shift, maybe a different precinct.”
“Jesus.” O’Reilly was too far below to see if there was any movement against the glass in the penthouse suite. But whoever lived there--whoever partied there--had learned to shut off the lights before the cops arrived.
“Shot in the back of the head,” Brunner said before O’Reilly could process all of the information. “That’s just damn strange.”
O’Reilly looked at the corpses--really looked at them--for the first time. Two men, both rather heavy set. Their faces were gone, probably splattered all over the walls. Gloved hands, nice shoes, one of them wearing a white scarf that caught the light.
Brunner had to search for the wound in the back of the head which made that the entry point. The exit wounds had destroyed the faces.
O’Reilly looked behind him. No door on that building, but there was one on the building where the party was held. If they’d been exiting the building and were surprised by a queer basher or a mugger, they’d’ve been shot in the front, not the back.
“How many times were they shot?” O’Reilly asked.
“Looks like just the once. Large caliber, close range. I’d say it was a purposeful headshot, designed to do maximum damage.” Brunner felt the back of the closest corpse. “There doesn’t seem to be anything on the torso.”
“They still got their wallets?” McKinnon asked.
“Haven’t checked yet.” Brunner reached into the back pants pocket of the corpse he’d been searching and clearly found nothing. So he grabbed the front of the overcoat and reached inside.
He removed a long thin wallet--old fashioned, the kind made for the larger bills of forty years before. Hand-tailored, beautifully made.
These men weren’t hurting for money.
Brunner handed the wallet to O’Reilly, who opened it. And stopped when he saw the badge inside. His mouth went dry.
“We got a feebee,” he said, his voice sounding strangled.
“What?” McKinnon asked.
“FBI,” Brunner said dryly. McKinnon had only moved to homicide the year before. Vice rarely had to deal with FBI. Homicide did only on sensational cases. O’Reilly could count on one hand the number of times he’d spoken to agents in the New York Bureau.
“Not just any feebee either,” O’Reilly said. “The Associate Director. Clyde A. Tolson.”
McKinnon whistled. “Who’s the other guy?”
This time, O’Reilly did the search. The other corpse, the heavier of the two, also smelled faintly of perfume. This man had kept his wallet in the inner pocket of his suit coat, just like his companion had.
O’Reilly opened the wallet. Another badge, just like he expected. But he didn’t expect the bulldog face glaring at him from the wallet’s interior.
Nor had he expected the name.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said.
“What’ve we got?” McKinnon asked.
O’Reilly handed him the wallet, opened to the slim paper identification.
“The Director of the FBI,” he said, his voice shaking. “Public Hero Number One. J. Edgar Hoover.”
Francis Xavier Bryce--Frank to his friends, what few of them he still had left--had just dropped off to sleep when the phone rang. He cursed, caught himself, apologized to Mary, and then remembered she wasn’t there.
The phone rang again and he fumbled for the light, knocking over the highball glass he’d used to mix his mom’s recipe for sleepless nights: hot milk, butter, and honey. It turned out that, at the tender age of thirty-six, hot milk and butter laced with honey wasn’t a recipe for sleep; it was a recipe for heartburn.
And for a smelly carpet if he didn’t clean the mess up.
He found the phone before he found the light.
“What?” he snapped.
“You live near Central Park, right?” A voice he didn
’t recognize, but one that was clearly official, asked the question without a hello or an introduction.
“More or less.” Bryce rarely talked about his apartment. His parents had left it to him and, as his wife was fond of sniping, it was too fancy for a junior G-Man.
The voice rattled off an address. “How far is that from you?”
“About five minutes.” If he didn’t clean up the mess on the floor. If he spent thirty seconds pulling on the clothes he’d piled onto the chair beside the bed.
“Get there. Now. We got a situation.”
“What about my partner?” Bryce’s partner lived in Queens.
“You’ll have back-up. You just have to get to the scene. The moment you get there, you shut it down.”
“Um.” Bryce hated sounding uncertain, but he had no choice. “First, sir, I need to know who I’m talking to. Then I need to know what I’ll find.”
“You’ll find a double homicide. And you’re talking to Eugene Hart, the Special Agent in Charge. I shouldn’t have to identify myself to you.”
Now that he had, Bryce recognized Hart’s voice. “Sorry, sir. It’s just procedure.”
“Fuck procedure. Take over that scene. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” Bryce said, but he was talking into an empty phone line. He hung up, hands shaking, wishing he had some BromoSeltzer.
He’d just come off a long, messy investigation of another agent. Walter Cain had been about to get married when he remembered he had to inform the Bureau of that fact and, as per regulation, get his bride vetted before walking down the aisle.
Bryce had been the one to investigate the future Mrs. Cain, and had been the one to find out about her rather seamy past--two Vice convictions under a different name, and one hospitalization after a rather messy backstreet abortion. Turned out Cain knew about his future wife’s past, but the Bureau hadn’t liked it.
And two nights ago, Bryce had to be the one to tell Cain that he couldn’t marry his now-reformed, somewhat religious, beloved. The soon-to-be Mrs. Cain had taken the news hard. She had gone to Bellevue this afternoon after slashing her wrists.
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