Holmes Sweet Holmes

by Dan Andriacco

He was crouched in the frame of an open window, breathing heavily but no more than you’d expect from an overweight man forced to double over like that. He was wearing a tweed suit, a brown bow tie, a dark beard, and an idiotic grin.

  I was damned glad to see him alive and in one piece.

  “Mac! What the hell -”

  “Please quit blubbering and help me down.”

  It’s no laughing matter when a man less than six feet tall, say five-ten, and somewhere close to a hundred pounds overweight has to jump out of a window eight feet off the ground. But if he thought I was going to take a chance on getting crushed beneath that massive frame he had boulders in his head.

  “I can’t catch you,” I warned.

  “I’ll slide down. You break my fall.”

  Break is the right word, all right.

  Somehow, heaving and straining, we worked it out without killing either of us. We got him on the ground.

  “Why didn’t you just walk out the front door like everybody else?” I said.

  “I decided that it would be impolitic to call attention to myself.” Feet firmly on the ground, Mac immediately lit a cigar.

  Damned if I’d ask him what he was yapping about. That’s what he expected me to do. “But the fire! You could have been turned into a French fry while half the campus skipped classes to watch.” And French fries are unhealthful.

  “I am pleased to assure you that danger did not exist for the very good reason that there is no fire, old boy.”

  I sputtered. “But all that smoke -”

  Mac removed his cigar. “Precisely! All that smoke - and yet no fire. You assumed there was fire because you saw a lot of smoke. However, you assumed wrong. Jefferson, I have just convincingly debunked one of the oldest, hoariest of all clichés: ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’ Nonsense. You need never believe that again. Smoke can come from many sources that do not involve fire. Smoke bombs, for example!”

  “How many?” I asked weakly.

  “I only set about a dozen, but strategically placed throughout the building for maximum effect.”

  “Lower your voice.” I’d suddenly realized we were still standing on a sidewalk right outside the building in question. “And let’s get out of here.”

  We walked around the back, and headed toward Mac’s office as I’d originally intended.

  “I can’t believe you would pull a stunt like this just to disprove a cliché,” I told him.

  “I prefer to think of it as an experiment in human nature rather than as a stunt, Jefferson. You know how fond I am of doing things just to see how people react. It is my greatest tool as a writer, and in this case it has been most instructive.

  “Observation A: People see what they expect to see.

  “Observation B: Misdirection, the magician’s best friend, works just as well off stage as on. Do you realize I could have walked into nearly any office on this side of campus five minutes ago and walked out with half of the furniture - and all of the files, where they still have paper files. The professors and the secretaries were all out there on the quadrangle.”

  “The practical application of that somehow escapes me.”

  Mac smoked serenely. “Sometimes we academics pursue knowledge for its own sake. Of course, it could be that I am writing yet another mystery novel. Remember ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’ wherein Sherlock Holmes uses a smoke bomb and the cry of fire to trick Irene Adler into running for the hidden letters? Think of how the same stratagem could be employed to opposite effect - to lure someone away from the scene, perhaps the scene of a crime. Put that in a mystery novel and what have we done? Taken an honored old gambit of the mystery genre and twisted it into a new shape. That is quite my favorite writing ploy.”

  I wasn’t impressed. In fact, I was pissed. “Tell that to Eb Schonert and the volunteers back there. They’re working their asses off to fight a fire that doesn’t exist just because you decided to play one of your psychological games.”

  Mac waved away the objection like so much cigar smoke.

  “They need the practice. There hasn’t been a fire in Erin in nearly a year.”

  “What about the water damage they’re going to inflict on the Chemistry Building with their hoses?”

  “Hmm! Well, that is indeed regrettable.”

  “Regrettable? It’s criminal!”

  I calmed myself down enough to drop the topic on the threshold of Mac’s office.

  “Good afternoon, Professor McCabe,” Heidi Guildenstern said. She was never anything less than professionally polite to Mac. “Here are your telephone messages.” She turned away from whatever she was filing - the paperless office hasn’t arrived yet - to pick up a stack of yellow slips of paper off one corner of her desk and hand them to Mac. Yes, we all have voicemail at St. Benignus, but we also have a corporate culture that encourages the involvement of human beings where possible.

  “Thank you, Heidi. Come along, Jefferson.”

  He waved me into the inner office first, and then turned back to Heidi as an afterthought. “Why is it, Heidi, that we find you inside instead of watching the big excitement outside?”

  She ran a hand through her graying hair - not primping; it was just a nervous habit. “Because, Professor McCabe, I have always considered voyeurism vulgar.”

  She must have waited a lifetime to say that.

  “Most commendable,” Mac allowed. He shut the door, tossed the message slips on his desk, and plunked down in his creaky chair on wheels. He struck a match against the “Thank You For Not Breathing While I Smoke” sign and relit his cigar.

  “Don’t look so damned comfortable,” I said, lifting a pile of student papers off a chair and sitting down. The fact that he was pumping second-hand smoke into my lungs only ratcheted up a level of peevishness that had been high to start with. “One of the problems with you, Mac” - I try to limit myself to discussing one at a time - “is that you have absolutely no instinct for self-preservation.” I bent over the intercom unit, just like the one on my desk, and flipped it into the “off” position.

  In response, Mac lifted an eyebrow.

  “Ralph could roast you over an open flame for what you just pulled,” I said. “And the three-quarters of the faculty that you’ve skewered in The Write Stuff would be there to help him turn the spit. Why didn’t you tell me The Observer was doing a story on it?” Why didn’t Lynda? “Never mind. That isn’t the real issue. You should have scrapped that blog in the planning stages. And I told you so at the time!”

  He looked as wounded as a man could look with his feet on his desk and a cozy mess of his own making all about him. “The Write Stuff is not simply some ego massage, Jefferson. It is a noble defense of our embattled mother tongue. I am serious about it.”

  I snorted. “Then the English language must be the only thing you’re serious about.”

  “Not so, old boy. I am also deadly earnest about French, Spanish, German, and especially Italian.”

  “That’s just great.” I’m panicking and he’s showing off how many languages he speaks. My patience, never too great to begin with, was wearing thinner than the rear end in a pair of twelve-year-old pants. “You can fill out résumés in all five languages.”

  Mac chuckled. “That would hardly be necessary, Jefferson, even if your fear came to pass. My mystery novels have been printed in all of the languages you mentioned, and a dozen others besides. My income from writing is substantial. It would be even more substantial if I spent all my time on it instead of teaching and running this minuscule program. Job security is not foremost in my thoughts.”

  “That’s obvious. But you do care about popular culture. It’s what you do.”

  Mac waved the cigar. “That I readily concede. Besides, I enjoy teaching and I enjoy playing the academic game as much as any other game. But I can
not give credence to the notion that I have endangered my position here at St. Benignus as much as you assume. I have assailed Joseph’s shoddy writing more than once and he is still speaking to me.”

  Father Pirelli’s affection for a former student named Sebastian McCabe is one of his best known and most indefensible weaknesses.

  “So the president is in your corner,” I admitted. “Chalk one up for you. But he isn’t all-powerful - not now that Ralph Pendergast is on the scene with the support of the board of trustees, especially the white shirt and power-tie types.”

  My brother-in-law puffed thoughtfully. For one hare-brained moment, I even believed he might be on the verge of worry.

  “Well, it is true that Ralph has been scheming to get the popular culture program killed when it comes up for review later this year,” he said finally. “Put your jaw back in place, old boy. I have known for weeks.”

  “How?’’ I demanded.

  “Through the kindness of some information-sharing work-study students. Have you ever paid any attention to the students in your office?”

  “Not much.” I just knew they were there helping Popcorn do whatever it is she does, and that there were never enough of them.

  “Ralph doesn’t notice his either,” Mac said. “From his point of view that is an unfortunate error. Two of the faceless work-study drones in his office happen to be former students of mine. Somehow they picked up that little secret about Ralph’s plans and shared it with me.”

  That wasn’t hard to believe, now that he laid it out for me. Sebastian McCabe is the most popular professor on campus - with students. Even if he offended the small portion of the faculty that he has missed so far, he’d still have a loyal legion of former pupils willing to march into hell for him - or at least up to the gates of Hades. They sure wouldn’t stick at a little academic espionage.

  “Let me guess what comes next,” I said. “No doubt you have a plan. Will it save my job, too?”

  “I have a high degree of confidence that it . . . might. What I intend is to deflect the criticism that popular culture is an unworthy academic discipline. I will do so by bathing our program in the light of favorable publicity that also will reflect well on the college as a whole.”

  “That sounds like my turf,” I objected. “What did you have in mind?”

  Cigar butt in hand, Mac looked around the room for a place to trash it. The ashtray was too full to add the last vestige of his cigar without spilling ashes, and the wastebasket was overflowing. Finally he opened the window behind him and tossed the butt out as he answered:

  “I have arranged on very short notice for the popular culture program and the St. Benignus Film Society to bring Peter Gerard to campus for a lecture later this month.”

  You have to remember how acclaimed Peter Gerard was even before 221B Bourbon Street. Among independent filmmakers he was a Sundance favorite and one of the era’s leading multi-hyphenates, having written, starred in and directed two hit movies. Critics were comparing him to Edward Burns and Quentin Tarantino, not for his style of film but for his range of talents and independence from Hollywood.

  A New Orleans native who now lived in Bloomington, Indiana, he shot his movies in places like Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and Jim Thorpe, Pennylvania. Hollywood at first ignored him, then laughed, then imitated him after Whodunnit? was a big hit and Red Herring even bigger. He’d sparked a whole new film trend in what Mac would call “classical” detective stories, the kind with clever twists and not much fisticuffs - the kind of books Sebastian McCabe writes.

  Then came a totally unexpected twist with 221B Bourbon Street, set and filmed in Gerard’s hometown in a boost to its post-Katrina recovery. In transporting Holmes and the whole Baker Street menagerie from Victorian London to 1920s New Orleans, Gerard sparked the biggest uproar among Sherlockians since the late lamented Metropolis Pictures hired a rake named Stephen Worth to write the script for The Speckled Band in 1940.

  Mac, being Mac, defended Gerard’s heresy as no different from re-envisioning and updating Shakespeare, which has been done at least since the time of David Garrick in the eighteenth century. Orson Welles, for example, replanted Julius Caesar in fascist Italy.

  Perhaps even more boldly, Mac professed to be unfazed by Gerard playing Holmes in a goatee. After all, he said, Holmes wore just such facial hair in the short story called “His Last Bow,” and was illustrated that way by Frederick Dorr Steele for the cover of Collier’s magazine in 1917.

  And so forth.

  You probably saw the movie. Almost everybody did that summer - or else later, after the murders. But unless you are a dedicated Sherlockian, you may not realize how cleverly Gerard knit together three unrelated Conan Doyle stories in his script. I didn’t appreciate it myself until Mac had me re-read “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League” (my favorite Holmes story because of my own hair color), “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” and “The Final Problem.” They come together in 221B Bourbon Street almost like a three-act drama.

  In the final third of the movie, Holmes announces to his African-American friend, Doc Watson, that a single intelligence was behind both the Red-Headed League scam and the doings of master blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton - as well as most of the other evildoing in Prohibition-era New Orleans. He is a retired Princeton University professor named Moriarty. From there the plot follows familiar lines leading to a climatic conclusion at Niagara Falls. At the end of the movie Doc Watson believes that Holmes is dead, setting the stage for the inevitable Return to 221B film, which already had been widely speculated but not confirmed.

  Not being a Sherlock Holmes purist, I enjoyed the movie a lot - especially the change-ups from the source material. And I was impressed that Mac was getting Gerard to come to our little campus, even though I knew they were old friends from Mac’s grad school days at Indiana University, site of a large Sherlock Holmes collection in the Lilly Library.

  “But how is that going to dig us out of the hole we’re in?” I asked Mac.

  “Jefferson, what do you suppose I have arranged for Peter to say when he gives that lecture . . . and when he talks to reporters from sixty miles around or so who come to interview him? He will say that he is delighted to be here because the popular culture program on this campus, though woefully under-funded, is exemplary. To make that under-funding slightly less woeful, he will make a token contribution of ten thousand dollars in the hope of inspiring other contributors. He also will say the town of Erin would be a fine place to film a motion picture.”

  “And he’s really willing to put his money where his mouth is?”

  “Actually, the cash is coming from my own back pocket. I have had a good year.”

  “I bet that’s where the idea of making a movie around here came from, too - your own back pocket.”

  Mac did his best to look offended. “Do try to curb your cynicism, old boy. This is as good a place to film as any Peter has used already. It would be an excellent location for shooting my novel Hocus-Pocus, for example.”

  “I hate to be a spoilsport -”

  “That is patently untrue!”

  “But as great as all this may be, you don’t really think for a minute it’s going to change Ralph’s mind, do you?”

  He shook his head sadly, like every master sleuth dealing with his dim-witted Watson since the dawn of detective fiction. “You miss my point entirely, Jefferson. I said I intend to deflect our provost and academic vice president’s criticism, not answer it. I have no hope of changing his negative viewpoint. What I aim to do is render him incapable of doing anything about it. When a program attracts money, the praise of an acclaimed personage, and favorable publicity for the institution, it becomes hard to kill. And the moment Peter Gerard raises the possibility of filming in Erin, Ralph’s businessman allies on the board of trustees are going to start calculating the favora
ble economic impact for the community. The mayor may wind up giving us the key to the city!”

  That last was pure McCabe. Still, I looked at his plan upside down and sideways and I could only see one flaw.

  “This cockamamie scheme might actually work,” I conceded, “but only if it comes off without a hitch. You’d better say your prayers that nothing goes wrong.”

  Either he didn’t pray hard enough, or Somebody wasn’t listening.

  The Unlocked Room Mystery

  Oscar Hummel was quick to catch the full import of the body in the Faculty Club.

  “Hell’s bells!” he exclaimed. “We’re going to be on CNN! This is bigger than the Matheson killing.”

  Oscar had had a heart attack once, years ago, before he retired from the Dayton, Ohio, police force and moved down to Erin as police chief. He always seems to be on the verge of another cardiac episode if a state of near-apoplexy is any indication. Even when we’re on the river he’s the most restless fisherman I’ve ever seen.

  “Sorry to disturb you at night,” I said.

  Oscar waved that way. “It’s Wednesday. I was playing poker. You gave me a great excuse to quit while I was behind.”

  After Ralph had called 911, and before Erin’s Finest had arrived, I’d gone to the rest room to make a call of my own. Lynda answered on the twelfth ring. The announcement of my name did not provoke the pleased response I might have hoped for.

  “What time is it?” I bet that even Lauren Bacall never sounded so sexy half-sleep. But this was no time to say so.

  “Not that late. Listen, I didn’t call just to whisper sweet nothings in your ear.” Not that I wouldn’t like to. “I’m giving you a tip, but you didn’t hear it from me. Get a reporter over to the Faculty Club right now. Peter Gerard is dead.”

  That woke her up. “What happened?”

  “He was murdered, and the story is all yours.” Brownie points, please. “I’d better get back there. Goodbye and good luck.” I kind of liked that sign-off.