“You know I - Mac!”
He had just come into view behind Linda, holding hands with my sister. She looked queenly in a regal dress of almost the same shade of red as her hair. He looked big in a bow tie.
I turned back to Lynda. “I’ll look for you inside. Right now, I need to get to Mac alone. Family business.”
She almost smiled. “Right. Just make sure I get the story first again.”
I hope nobody gets this story, ever. Without answering, which would be hard to do and remain both truthful and injury-free, I gave Lynda a quick - all too quick - kiss on the lips and moved toward Mac. The crowd was thinning out now as people left the lobby to find their seats or claim a place to stand.
“We have to talk,” I told Mac as I reached his side.
He looked at his wristwatch, which has a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes on the face. “Not now, Jefferson. The lecture begins in fifteen minutes and I have the honor of introducing Peter Gerard to his public.”
“Not until you answer a few questions.”
“Surely this can wait.”
“It can, but it won’t. You’re not going in there until I get those answers. Lem Carpenter gave me some already. I want the rest from you.”
Mac let out a long sigh. “Mr. Carpenter, eh? I see. Very well. Kate -”
“Whatever this is about, Mac, I don’t want to know.” Have I mentioned how smart my big sister is? “Just take care of yourselves and tell me when it’s over. I’ll find our seats.”
Mac and I stepped outside, like a couple of teenagers ready to rumble. And that’s just about how I felt.
The doors clicked shut behind us and we were wrapped in the dark chill of an unseasonably cool night for early fall, in a year in which the Ohio summer had been boiling. The day had seen drizzle, fog, clouds, and finally a little sun in the afternoon.
“Now, look, Mac,” I said, “I know enough that you can’t con me anymore. I know you hired Rodney Stonecipher. That means you realized all along, before Gibbons looked at the IDs, that it wasn’t Peter Gerard lying dead on that desk. It means you knew why the poor victim was playing this charade and you didn’t say anything - not to me, not to the police. You’re withholding important evidence in a murder investigation. You could wind up behind bars for that kind of shenanigans!”
Mac lit a cigar. “I had reasons, I assure you.”
“You always have reasons, whether they make sense to anybody else or not. They’d better be damned good reasons this time. We’ve already got one man dead, another in danger, and both of our jobs on the line.”
“What do you think would happen to our professional positions, or at least mine, if my involvement with the unfortunate Rodney Stonecipher became known? I might even be suspected of engineering the murder myself, though I can’t imagine what motive might be trumped up. Handing that to Ralph would be like throwing meat to a lion. That was my first reason for maintaining silence.
“The second was that knowledge is power. I know why Rodney Stonecipher was at that dinner last night, but the killer may not. That could give me an advantage over the killer as I attempt to solve the murder. If that fact were widely known, the edge would be lost.
“My third motivation for not disclosing my role in this distressing business is the disgraceful nature of that role. Perhaps you noticed my somewhat subdued mood this morning at breakfast. I feel keenly my own potential responsibility for Mr. Stonecipher’s death. It is quite possible that man would be breathing the cool night air at this moment if I hadn’t hired him for my little experiment.”
“Experiment!” The word came out too loud and carried too far across the still air. I struggled to keep my voice under better control. “That’s what you called it when you practically caused a campus-wide panic with your silly smoke bombs. What was the point this time?”
“Simply this: Karl Hoffer has built himself a large and growing reputation for exposing frauds and charlatans. Could he spot one sitting at the dinner table with him, one of the semi-professional doubles I’d read about in The Observer and News-Ledger? I did not think so. As it turned out, I was right.”
“What have you got against Hoffer? You barely know the guy.”
“I know him well enough to perceive that he thinks rather too much of himself. I would have enjoyed seeing that particular balloon pricked by the revelation of Mr. Stonecipher’s true identity. Hoffer, however, was not my target. I was aiming at the clay feet of our beloved provost, who puts such great faith in Hoffer - particularly, I suspect, in Hoffer’s ability to bring favorable attention to the college through his best-sellerdom and his television appearances.”
The chutzpah was mind-boggling. “You mean you set up the dinner and hired Stonecipher just to embarrass Hoffer and gall Ralph, who already has you at the top of his shit list? That’s like playing Russian roulette with an automatic. You may have an IQ higher than Ty Cobb’s batting average, but sometimes you act like you’ve got crap for brains. And do you know what really pisses me off?”
“At the moment, old boy, almost everything.”
“You didn’t let me in on any part of this scheme, that’s what rankles. Not before the fact, not afterwards. And when Gerard told me he’d never been invited to that dinner, you even tried to throw me off the track by implying that Heidi had made the dining arrangements. That’s deceit on top of deception.”
He spread out his arms in a placating gesture. “I had little choice. If I had told you before the murder, you would have attempted to stop me. And afterwards, well, I thought you were better off not knowing, for your own protection. In addition, I must concede that I also wanted to see if you could ferret out the truth yourself. And, by thunder, you did it! I am pleased and proud. How did you -”
“Never mind that now. The question is, where do we go from here?”
“I solve the murder, of course. It’s the only way I can wash Mr. Stonecipher’s blood off my hands.”
“If you think I’m going to let you run off and play detective by yourself, you’re delusional. Every time you try to fix one of these messes, you get yourself into worse trouble than you were in to start with. Not that I care if you dig your own grave, but your troubles have a way of landing me in the soup.”
“That is your subtle way of saying - what?”
“From now on, we’re going to work on this together whether you like it or now. We’re partners, just like Spade and Archer in The Maltese Falcon.”
Mac raised an eyebrow. “Just don’t forget, old boy: Archer got killed.”
Mayhem
Mac made it to the podium in Bauer Auditorium three minutes late, which is about par. For once he didn’t hog the stage. He gave a quick plug for the film society and the popular culture program, told everybody to buy his books, and managed to introduce Peter Gerard without alluding to the tragedy of the night before. The murder was the elephant in the auditorium, of course. Sitting out in the audience with Lynda, who had saved me a seat, I could hear people whispering about it all around me.
Gerard, dressed in a bulky sweater and casual slacks, was modest and witty and humorous - all the things you want in an entertaining speaker. What he had to say was mostly crap, according to my crap-o-meter, but it was good crap. It kept you listening. I tweeted some of it, and I also kept notes in my reporter’s notebook for a press release the next day and maybe an article for the alumni magazine. Here’s a little of what he said:
“Nobody knows for sure why people like mysteries, but there’s no lack of theories. W.H. Auden called them modern man’s Passion Play. Charles Rolo saw them as blood-stained fairy tales. Rex Stout said, ‘My theory is that people who don’t like mystery stories are anarchists.’”
Appreciative chuckles rippled throughout the auditorium.
“Don’t laugh,” Gerard said. “The particular variety of mystery called the de
tective story is a purely democratic art form. Think about it. The entire genre is based on fair play and the rule of law. You don’t find much of a detective story tradition in countries where citizens can be rousted out of their beds in the middle of night and made to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
“But I’m not sure that a love of democracy really explains why the detective story form is so enduring. I think it has more to do with a craving for order. Detective stories are puzzles that always have solutions. They are neater than our daily lives, where we may bounce from problem to problem without anything being solved. Modern fiction and modern films are all too often like that, too. When I came to write movies and to make them, I decided I wanted to tell stories. No genre fits that description better than the traditional mystery. It’s a form for which I have great respect. I want to see it live forever - whether I continue to make mystery movies in the future or not.
“So when my old friend Sebastian McCabe asked me to come and talk about ‘Mystery and Mayhem in the Movies,’ I was happy to do it. The popular culture program here at St. Benignus College is widely known to mystery fanciers throughout the country as the repository of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection of Sherlockiana, as well as its teaching of mysteries, science fiction, comics, and movies. It’s a small program, and I would like to see it grow. I am proud to announce tonight that I am making a twenty-five thousand dollar contribution to the program in hopes that others will be inspired to make similar donations.”
If I could read Mac’s face correctly, I wasn’t the only one surprised that Gerard had upped the ante from the ten thousand that Mac had talked about originally. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one hoping that it was going to be Gerard’s money.
Spontaneous applause rocked the auditorium at the announcement as I tweeted: Peter Gerard just announced $25K contribution to St. Benignus popular culture program. A few people stood up, then more, then everybody was standing. “He sure knows how to appeal to a crowd,” Lynda said into my ear. Her breath made my ear tingle.
“It’s his living,” I reminded her. “Every movie he makes has to appeal to millions of people.”
Standing ovations don’t last long. After twenty or thirty seconds you could see heads bobbing down all over the auditorium until there was just one guy left, a dude in a leather jacket a dozen seats in front of me and to the right, in an aisle seat. His hand went into the jacket and brought something out. I watched in horror as he held up the metallic object and pointed it at Gerard, not more than fifty feet away on the stage.
“Ever thus to Moriarty’s minions!” he yelled.
I jumped out of my seat and scrambled for the end of the row, not paying any attention to who I stepped on or kicked in the process. Nor did I have any idea what I could do that trained police officers couldn’t. Maybe in some Max Cutter fantasy corner of my mind I thought I was going to tackle the assailant or jump on him or some damned thing. More likely, I was just reacting, not thinking at all.
Meanwhile, the guy who was standing acted. He pulled the trigger before I or anybody else could reach him.
The gun made a small plop, not the explosion I was expecting. He fired again, and yet again while I was still trying to clamber over a fat, gray-haired man snoozing in the last seat of my row. Meanwhile, three policemen piled on top of the guy with the gun - Officer Gibbons and two others I recognized from around the cop shop. There was shouting and confusion all around. The only thing that comes back to me with much clarity is the shooter at the bottom of the pile yelling, “Hey, ease up! You’re smothering me down here!”
I did not detect a great deal of sympathy for his plight among the officers of the law.
Glancing up at the stage, I was surprised to see Peter Gerard looking confused but otherwise unfazed. Was he the luckiest guy in the world or the target of the worst shot?
As I was wondering, Oscar Hummel hustled up next to me, with Mac close behind. Oscar reached down and picked up a dark blue firearm lying about three feet from the assailant’s outstretched hand, where an officer had kicked it.
“I’ll be double-damned,” Oscar swore, looking from the gun to the man under the pile with an expression of fury and disgust in equal parts. “I don’t believe it. This asshole was taking potshots with a friggin’ cap gun!”
McCabe on the Case
Later that night, Oscar boasted that if the gun had been the real, his officers would have had the killer pinned.
“The only trouble with that scenario,” Mac rumbled the next day in his office, “is that by then the killer would have been a double murderer as well as the murderer of the double. Fortunately, that was not the case. I wonder, who was this deranged fellow with the cap gun?”
“I have intel on that.”
Mac cocked an eyebrow at me. “Tell.”
“His name is Geoffrey Kenlake - Geoffrey with a ‘G,’ like Chaucer.”
“How delightfully British!”
“He’s from Lexington, Kentucky, where he is a member of a group called The Peculiar Persecutors of John Vincent Harden.”
“You don’t mean -”
“Yes, I do mean. He was a disgruntled Sherlockian, infuriated by 221B Bourbon Street.” I was rather enjoying this on all fronts. I had found out something before Mac, and he didn’t like it. “I guess we’re lucky he only wanted to make a statement, not a corpse.”
“How do you know this? It was not reported in the newspaper. Did Oscar tell you?” Envious, aren’t you?
I shook my head. “No, I found out this morning from Lynda, who found out after press time from Triple M. Kenlake is in jail on a disturbing the peace rap.”
Lynda’s best friend, Sister Mary Margaret Malone - whom I call Triple M and Lynda calls Polly - volunteers as a chaplain at Oscar’s lockup in her off hours from her job as a campus minister at St. Benignus. She and Lynda also take taekwondo lessons together on Monday nights, but that is beside the point.
My before-breakfast phone conversation with Lynda was not overtly romantic, but we shared. That’s good for a relationship, isn’t it?
Now Mac and I were sharing, too. For the first time, we were trying to think this thing through together.
“I have friends who are members of the Persecutors,” he said. “I will see what they know about this fellow.”
Fine, but I had more important information for him than the identity of the wacko with the cap gun.
“Gerard’s partner, Howard Fitzwater, has a better motive than Gerard let on,” I told Mac. “Quandra told me that those two don’t get along and Fitzwater has Gerard insured for ten million dollars. That’s pretty interesting. But doesn’t that fact that nobody really tried to kill Gerard last night mean that Stonecipher was the intended victim all along?”
I thought that Mac would leap on it. After all, if Stonecipher wasn’t killed because he was doing the job Mac had hired him for - impersonating Peter Gerard - then the moral responsibility Mac felt for his death was misplaced. But Mac’s response was slow.
“Possibly,” he said finally, putting his feet upon the incredibly cluttered desk. “Or possibly the killer just did not like the odds last night. Killing Peter might have been easy enough, but judging by the way Oscar’s troops landed on that jokester last night, I should say that getting away would have been dubious. Still, the killer could have made an attempt at some other time, some other place since Peter arrived in town. The fact that he did not does weight in favor of Mr. Stonecipher as the intended victim.”
This yo-yoing back and forth bugged me. I wish he’d just pick one theory and stick with it. But I had another concern.
“I’m worried about what Oscar and your old friend Peter “Maybe-the-Target-and-Maybe-Not” Gerard will turn up about you when they start poking around. I’m especially afraid of Gerard. After all, you certainly can’t say he’s lacking in imagination, which you�
��ve said about Oscar more than once.”
“What makes you think Peter is serious about this loose talk of solving his own murder?”
“Quandra. When we talked at dinner last night, she seemed pretty convinced he was going ahead with it.”
“He did not mention any such intention in his speech last night.”
“But he never got to finish that speech, remember? I think he’s a threat. Whether he figures Stonecipher for the intended victim or not, he’s bound to focus on the mechanics of how Stonecipher was able to substitute himself for Gerard - and why he was doing it. If he traces that back to you - it’s not impossible; I did it - your ass is really going to be in the sling for concealing material evidence at the least. And the charge could get a lot nastier.”
“Nonsense.” Mac was firm. “I have no conceivable motive for killing the unfortunate Mr. Stonecipher. In addition, I have the same impeccable alibi as everyone else in the dinner room that night: I was with the rest of you while the victim was being murdered.”
“The problem is, if you even get to the point where you have to talk about motives and alibis with Oscar, your academic career is probably going to be over - and maybe mine along with it.”
Without responding, Mac pushed aside enough paperwork to create a clearing on his desk. From his jacket pocket he produced a deck of cards, which he spread out face up on the clearing. It seemed to be a normal deck, with both colors and all four suits. He flipped over the edge of one card, causing the entire deck to do the same. The back of the cards, a blue Bicycle design, showed for just a second before Mac flipped the deck again the other way. Now the deck was made up of only the red cards, the diamonds and hearts.
“Your fear is a valid one,” he conceded. “And there is probably no way we can forestall Oscar or Peter or both from eventually finding my fingerprints all over this unseemly episode, metaphorically speaking. Our only hope is to solve the murder before they get that far.”
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