Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes

by Estleman, Loren D.

  “Phil,” he sighed, polishing his glasses, “you know damn well that the sherlock boys only tell me what I pull out of them. They just about run things here now. When I retire they will run things. I was able to find out that this Vindebeer boy was from Norway, though. He’d been in the country only six days, and spent very little time in the hotel. He’d been out looking for a job—he was some sort of technician. A couple of nights he went to a bar called The Norseman on 204th Street. We got all this from the doorman at the hotel who’d talked to him a couple of times. Seems he’d been kind of lonely. There were no fingerprints in the hotel room except for his own. No one suspicious was seen entering or leaving the hotel before or after the murder; nobody heard anything. One of the sherlocks found a brown hair that didn’t belong to the victim. That’s all there is now; Virgil says he’s still running olfactory tests on a kind of rosewater scent the sherlocks detected.” He paused. “You have no idea who broke into your place and left the notes?”

  “Nope.” I got up to leave, slowly, because I knew Rutgers didn’t want me to go yet. He was rubbing his spectacles thoughtfully and I sat down again. I knew what was coming since we’d been through it before.

  “Plants need watering, Jack,” I said. “Look a bit dried out.”

  He stopped polishing, pointed his spectacles at me, and said, in a confidential sort of way, “You know, twenty years ago you and I would have hated each other’s guts—in a respectful kind of way. The police captain and the sharp young detective, eyeball to eyeball.” He shook his head. “I know it was never really like that, Phil, but still, the way it was was better than this. They think they can solve every crime with little sensors, data banks, and electric eyes. Well, I don’t think they work as well as men do.”

  “I don’t, either,” I said. “But apparently the things work. And somebody above you thinks they’re worth the investment. I may be old-fashioned, Jack, and I know I’ll never use one of those things. But if someone else wants to use them that’s fine with me. I’ll still rely on my own wits, even if I go down trying.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and then he was silent, cleaning his glasses. “Keep in touch, Phil.”

  “I will. Thanks for the information.” And this time, when I got up, I left.

  • • •

  The docks of north New York City are nestled in a basin by Inwood. The Hudson River used to flow there before it was diverted inland into New Jersey, through and behind the cliffs. Don’t ask me why the Hudson River was chopped up like a birthday cake and put back together somewhere else, because I don’t really know. It was some sort of public works project, and the money was there, so it got done. I think there’s an amusement park in Jersey on the banks where the river goes by now.

  When the river was drained at Inwood, natural walls were left against the river banks, and the empty basin that was formed was coated with quickly constructed transport offices and launching docks and turned into a cargo port. The place looked nice in the beginning: thirty years later the better facilities in Philadelphia and Virginia had most of the shuttle cargo business and the Inwood docking area was pretty much a ghost port. Now a lot of it was abandoned, and the other parts were used by fly-by-night transporters. The surrounding neighborhood wasn’t too nice, either.

  I took the creaky east-end elevator down to basin level, staring up at the launch gantry and empty, dilapidated control towers. When the car finally wheezed to a halt at the bottom I threw the rusting metal caging back and stepped out.

  A long block of shabby structures—abandoned travel offices, mostly—lay in front of me. The block stretched straight as an arrow to the west end of the docks, and I could make out the creaky framework of the other elevator from where I stood.

  I checked my watch and noted that it was now two thirty. Fifteen minutes went by. No one used the elevator or came down the shabby lane to meet me. After a half hour my feet got tired; twenty minutes later I decided to give up. As I turned around to get back on the elevator I heard a shuffling noise behind me and then everything turned black.

  Even though I don’t use a sherlock, I do make certain concessions to modern technology. There was a piece of equipment which I wore that probably saved my head from being split open. It’s a thin membrane of ultra-high-impact plastic, which fits skin-tight at the base of my skull and up around my ears. I can’t feel it when it’s there, and unless you look close it can’t be seen. A friend of mine had sent it to me; one just like it had saved his head a couple of times from the poundings of annoyed husbands.

  The impact of the blow knocked me down. I was staggering to my feet when suddenly everything went dark gray and I dropped out cold. Someone had used gas on me—and I wasn’t wearing a nose filter.

  I awoke in a small room. There was a tiny light bulb on the ceiling directly over my head that threw off sour light that hurt my eyes. There weren’t any windows. When I tried to get up I discovered that my arms were tied to the bottom of the bed I was lying on.

  Someone came and stood over me, cutting off the sour light. It was a young girl, with long, straggly brown hair and a small chin and a grim, set mouth. Not very pretty. She held her hair back with one hand and leaned over me.

  “You’re not groggy?” Her voice was throaty, hard-edged.

  “A little,” I said. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  She straightened up, and I saw what looked like a smirk on her face. “I think we’d better have this out now.”

  I just looked at her.

  “I’ll make this concise,” she went on. “If you don’t leave my father alone, I’ll do anything I have to to stop you. You have no business with us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’ll—”

  “I’ve warned you,” she said, and then she uncovered something in her hand, moving it close to my face, and the next thing I knew I was waking up in front of the east-end elevator.

  I made my way back home. There weren’t any notes waiting for me there. An hour later I had just settled into a warm bath when Jack Rutgers called to tell me that another young technician from Norway had been murdered.

  • • •

  This victim had lived in one of the nicer parts of town, a swanky apartment building in the lower 90s. The front of the place was sealed tight and operated by a voice print–activated computer that wouldn’t let me in. There were no police outside, but I finally was able to get in when an elderly, wide-eyed couple, who had obviously just heard about the murder, left the building. Once inside I merely followed the line of uniformed policemen who had been dropped like peas along the route to the victim’s apartment.

  When I walked into the living room I found Buckers and Virgil bent over a woman on the couch. She’d been stabbed in the chest. Buckers was tracing the outline of her body with the tentacles attached to his sherlock; a few more men were crawling here and there, little black boxes in hand.

  I got the woman’s name, Ingri Hoffman, from one of the cops standing outside. After waiting around for a while I discovered that that was about all they knew. I stayed out of Virgil’s way. I thought I smelled a hint of rosewater, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I stood watching the sherlocks work for a few minutes. I can’t help it, I just don’t like the little black boxes. They have retracting tentacles, electronic eyes, olfactory filters, and audio sensors; they collect data, sniff out criminal odors, study fingerprints, footprints, breathprints, collect bits of clothing and skin and strands of hair, beep, whiz, talk to each other, correlate information with a central data bank. And though the courts were still tied up in knots over whether the evidence presented via sherlock was admissible, it seemed that after eight long years they were slowly coming around to favor the little machines.

  The last image I had in my eyes as I turned to leave was of Ingri Hoffman on the couch; and Buckers, bright and eager as a puppy, sliding the slender cold tentacles of his sherlock over her dead body.
r />   • • •

  The Norseman Inn was what I would call a gimmick bar. It was small, dark, and congenial, and everything in it was made of different-sized pieces of wood. The beer mugs and wine goblets were wooden, the tables were square slabs of wood, the bar itself was half a tree, sliced lengthwise and resting on huge wooden blocks. There were horned helmets and carved spears on the wall behind the bar, and though there was piped-in music, it was set low enough so that people could talk. Things were very carefully engineered: you could see and hear only the people in your immediate vicinity. There were a lot of young working girls.

  I pulled a heavy wooden stool up close to the bar and motioned for the bartender to stay after he’d poured a beer for me. I asked him if he knew Helmut Vindebeer.

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head and frowned. He was built like a Viking, of course, and the frown he made through his beard when I repeated the name told me he didn’t know Vindebeer by name. I described the technician to him and his memory seemed to warm a little.

  “I remember him,” he said, the Viking persona dissolving into a Brooklyn accent. “He was in here three, maybe four nights in a row. That was about it. He looked like he belonged in the place, very Norwegian-looking, very naïve-looking too. I guess he came in because of the name, thought he’d meet a lot of Scandinavians, who knows. But I remember that the first time he came in it didn’t take him long to meet a few people—there were one, maybe two people I remember him latching onto. As a matter of fact, they were Scandinavians. Wait here a minute.”

  He went to the other end of the bar, looking out over the crowd. He served a couple of customers down there, then came back.

  “I think I found the two he was talking to: a guy and a girl. They’re sitting at a table along the wall in the back. She’s got a blue-and-white striped dress on, pretty good-looking. The guy has short black hair. Okay?” He smiled his Viking smile through the beard.

  I thanked him and took my beer to the back room, threading my way through a lot of wooden tables and chairs.

  The guy and the girl both had nice smiles, and they were sitting together on one side of a booth. They responded to Vindebeer’s name when I asked if they knew him. The guy asked me to sit down on the other side of the table and I did so. His name was William Anderson—when he talked he sounded Scandinavian. So did the girl.

  It turned out that they had met both Vindebeer and each other the first night Vindebeer had come into the bar. Vindebeer had been very shy, but friendly, and his accent had drawn them to him. Then Anderson told me that there had been another girl who had attached herself to their little group that night also.

  “She was very animated, very bright,” he said. He then went on to describe the girl I had seen dead an hour before.

  They’d known about Vindebeer’s death, but when I told them that the girl was dead too, they got a little upset.

  “I don’t understand,” the girl, Helga, said after a few moments. She looked a bit older than she dressed, and she now held Anderson’s hand tightly. “They both looked so happy. We were all so happy that first night. All of us had been alone, and then we all met at once.”

  I asked her if they’d gotten together with Vindebeer or the girl again.

  “Yes,” she said. “We met a couple of nights later, and once again the night after that. Helmut was very happy that last night because Ingri was going to get him a job.”

  “She was trying to get him a job,” William corrected. “She worked for a research scientist, a well-known man, as his assistant, and was trying to get Helmut a job with his project. They were both technicians.”

  Neither could remember the scientist’s name. I took a sip of my beer, which was now flat. “Did anything strange happen that night you were together? Did you meet anyone else?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Did they say anything about the job Helmut was trying to get?”

  “Not much,” Anderson answered. “Just that this scientist needed another assistant. They mostly talked about how strange this scientist and his daughter were.”

  “Strange?”

  The girl spoke up. “Ingri told us some very funny stories about the things these two people had done, how they were always complaining about being bothered, that people wouldn’t leave them alone.”

  She looked down at her drink, and I looked down at mine. There was silence for a few minutes.

  “Do you think someone would try to hurt William or me?” the girl said.

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” I said. “Can I get you two another drink?”

  “No, thank you,” Anderson said. “I think we’ll be leaving soon. Actually, we came here tonight to see if Ingri might come.”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, is there anything else you can remember? Anything at all?”

  There was another silence, this one longer. Then Helga said, and she was almost crying, “Only . . . that they looked very happy together. I thought they looked very happy.”

  On the way out I met Buckers coming in, who gave me a nasty look and passed on. Virgil was close behind him. I stepped in front of him so he couldn’t avoid me.

  “What’s new, Lieutenant?” I said.

  He scowled and made a motion to walk around me, then stopped. “I told you to stay out of this, Matheson.”

  “You know I’ve been hired to look into it.”

  “By who—the Man in the Moon?” He gave a short laugh. “You don’t even know who your client is.”

  “Would you like to bet I get to the bottom of this before your sherlocks do?” I knew I was putting my foot in my mouth, but couldn’t help it.

  “You’re on,” he said. “Fifty bucks?”

  “Fifty bucks it is, Lieutenant. See you around.”

  He walked back towards the bar, shaking his head.

  I took a long walk home, and when I got there, there was another note from my anonymous employer waiting for me. This one was taped to the refrigerator door and read:

  GO BACK TO THE NORTH DOCKS AT 9:00 TOMORROW MORNING.

  I rolled it into a ball and threw it away. It was just about midnight. I grabbed a flashlight, made sure my neck guard was in place, put in my nose filters, and left for the North Docks.

  • • •

  To say the least, the docks were dark. I took the west-end elevator down, thinking it might be in better running order than the other one and make less noise, but if anything it groaned even louder. When I got to the bottom I could barely make out where I was, but flicking the beam of my flash this way and that soon told me what I already knew—that I was at the opposite end of the street bordered with travel offices that ran to the east end. I began to slowly make my way up one side of the street, pausing at each closed building with my flash off, trying to detect the least sound or possibly a flicker of light coming from inside.

  When I’d gone about halfway up the block I thought I heard something close behind me, a footstep or a shifting in the dark. I stopped but nothing followed it; but as I turned to go on, someone rushed out at me from the darkened doorway I’d just passed and grabbed at me from behind.

  I felt a little jab in the side and was down and out in about four seconds.

  When I woke up there was one hell of a sore spot on my left side where a needle had been pushed in crookedly. I was trussed up again in the room with the sour yellow light.

  “Your doing this twice to me is quite embarrassing,” I said. The girl was standing off to one side, her back to me. It looked like she was going through my billfold.

  “Keep quiet.” She turned around, and I saw that she held a sherlock in her hand. She replaced my billfold in my breast pocket and then moved the sherlock slowly over my body.

  “Where did you get that thing?” I asked.

  She ignored my question. “You’re a detective?” I nodded. “You’re not who I thought you were,” she said evenly. “Who sent you to look for my father and me?”

  “I don�
��t know, to tell you the truth.” I told her about the notes to see what kind of reaction I’d get.

  She finished with the sherlock and put it on a table behind her.

  I said, “Is your father here now?”

  “If he was anywhere near here you’d be dead.”

  She stood still for a moment, just staring at me, and then she left the room. When she came back she leaned over me.

  I smelled rosewater, and my heart almost stopped.

  She grabbed at something on a table against the wall. I was sure it was a knife, long-bladed and plastic-handled; but after the split second it took my eyes to tell my brain what it was seeing, I realised that it was a hypodermic. She plunged it savagely into my arm, and I quickly went under. When I swam up I found myself once again at the base of the elevator.

  • • •

  The next morning I called on Jack Rutgers to see if anyone had come up with anything on Ingri Hoffman.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “Virgil did come up with something. There was a partial print on the knife’s handle this time, and also another strand of long brown hair, which was found on the rug near the body. The olfactory tests also showed a correlation on a type of perfume detected at the scene of the first murder. It’s a kind of rosewater, from Scandinavia.”

  “Has anyone been able to find out who she was working for?”

  “No. And we may have some trouble finding out because it now looks as though the girl was in the country illegally; Vindebeer wasn’t but that doesn’t help because he hadn’t really started working for this fellow yet.”

  I told him about my two visits to the North Docks, and he listened in silence, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief. “You went there last night alone?”

  I smiled sheepishly. “Sure it was stupid. But even though this girl’s father is the scientist who hired Vindebeer and Ingri Hoffman, everything still doesn’t fit. The girl may be the killer, but then again maybe she’s not. And I still don’t know who hired me, or why.”