Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  “I still hope I can change your mind,” she said as she departed.

  A man and woman in Victorian costume were just leaving the Sherlock Shoppe as she approached. “Fine deerstalkers,” the man commented. “The best quality I’ve seen.” He was an American, something that surprised Susan. With those costumes she’d somehow assumed they were all British.

  She knew Wor the instant she saw him behind the counter. He exactly fitted Emmy Spring’s description of him. His accent was thickly Germanic, as it had been on the phone. Whereas Fritz Eiger had seemed dull and studious, this man looked her over as if he might invite her into bed at any moment. “Miss Holt, all the way from America! You are even more charming in person than on the telephone.”

  She smiled, deciding to go along with his game. He was fairly handsome, maybe still in his late thirties. “I’ve come to charm you out of a few gross of deerstalkers, with special Reichenbach Falls labels sewn in.”

  “The police believe someone has been murdered.”

  “I know that. If true it’s too bad, but commerce must go on. Why would you cancel an order because of a possible murder that doesn’t concern you?”

  “It may concern the shop. The parcel of deerstalkers was mailed from here.”

  “You told me on the phone it was packed by one of your women. May I speak with her?”

  “That would be Bruni Zandt. She’s ill today.”

  “I would think this is one of your busiest days, with all those Sherlockians about.”

  “I know. The rest of us have been very busy.”

  As they spoke, more costumed visitors entered the shop. Bernard Wor’s two clerks were both working the cash registers and he went off to summon more help from the workroom out back. When he returned he said apologetically, “I’m sorry, but we must continue this in the morning. We’re just too busy today.”

  “I understand.”

  In truth Susan was beginning to feel some jet lag after her all-night flight from New York. She’d never been great at sleeping on planes, and this time she hadn’t slept at all. She left the Shoppe intending to return to her hotel room, but when she saw a group of Victorian-clad tourists heading toward the falls a short walk away she decided to join them. It was, after all, the Reichenbach Falls that had inspired Conan Doyle to set his story in this beautiful place. All else had come from that fact.

  The falls were an awesome spectacle. They were really a cascade of five consecutive waterfalls, narrow and thundering through a cleft in the Alpine rock. A woman’s voice behind Susan spoke into her ear above the roar. “This is the best time of year to see them, when the melting snows from up the mountain make them a real torrent.”

  She turned and saw that it was the British woman, Rima Fredericks, from the Holmes Museum. “Hello there! I wanted a look at them before I turned in early. Has the museum closed?”

  “I was on the early shift today. How long will you be in town?”

  “A day or two, depending on how long it takes me to straighten out this business.” She put a hand on the railing to steady herself.

  “Fritz was a fool to cancel the agreement. It’s good publicity for us. I’m sure when the director returns he’ll straighten things out.”

  “Bernard Wor canceled too,” she told the woman. “I think he fears one of his employees is involved in this ear business.”

  “Which one? I often visit them in the workroom.”

  “He said Bruni Zandt sent the package, but she seems unavailable for questioning.”

  They’d stepped back from the edge of the falls, the better to converse, and the others had wandered up ahead of them. Some appeared awed to be standing on the ledge where Holmes and Moriarty had engaged in their final struggle. For the first time, Susan became aware of a funicular with a red gondola that ran down the side of the cliff, providing a better view of the falls. “That only operates in the summer,” Rima Fredericks said, following her gaze. “But you might be here till then if you’re waiting to see Bruni.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She took off last month. The rumor is she embezzled money from Mr. Wor.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t tell me that.”

  “He doesn’t talk about his business affairs. When he first opened that place some of the residents thought he was cheapening our town. They said a name like Sherlock Shoppe sounded too commercial, too American.”

  “Your whole town is commercial, in case you haven’t noticed it. You’ve built an industry around Holmes’s plunge into the falls.”

  The Englishwoman gestured around her. “Obviously it’s what the tourists want. They travel here as an homage to Sherlock Holmes and they want to see the memorial tablets, statues, and museum. They want to take back a deerstalker and a magnifying glass as souvenirs.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Susan replied, too tired by now to argue about it. She took one last look over the ledge at the cascading white water and said, “I really have to get some sleep. Jet lag, you know.”

  “Come by the museum in the morning. I want to help. I still see that poor Emmy opening the box and finding the ear on top of the caps.”

  Susan promised to be there, remembering she had more questions for Fritz Eiger too. She walked back alone to the Sherlock Holmes Hotel with every intention of going straight to bed. But it was dinnertime and she decided she was hungry. After that, finally in her room, she remembered the time difference and decided to phone Sergeant Mulligan back in New York.

  She recognized his voice immediately. “Mulligan here.”

  “Sergeant, this is Susan Holt from Mayfield’s. I’m phoning from Switzerland.”

  “Doing a little mountain climbing, Miss Holt?”

  I’m trying to keep our promotion plans alive. Your police are apparently a bit heavy-handed over here.”

  “To the best of my knowledge I have no authority over the Swiss police.”

  “I’m calling about the ear.”

  “Have you found a body to go with it?”

  “Not yet, but I’m looking. Has your lab examined it?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did they find?”

  “It was hacked off, not cleanly removed. We believe it came from an adult woman, but we can’t be sure.”

  “Why a woman?”

  “The size, for one thing. And the lobe is pierced for an earring. Of course that’s not conclusive. It could be from a man or boy.”

  “How recent was it?”

  “Hard to tell for sure. There’s evidence it was preserved in rough salt and possibly frozen for a time. It could be weeks or months old. Of course the whole thing still could be a publicity stunt. The ears of that Holmes story were preserved in salt.”

  “Yes, but—” she began and then left it hanging.

  “You might suggest the police there check back a bit if they’ve got no recent killings.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll let you know if they find anything here.”

  “I’m sure they’ll advise me, Miss Holt,” he answered drily.

  After that she slept.

  By morning the tourists had put away their Victorian costumes and the crowds had thinned out. Refreshed after a good night’s sleep, Susan ate breakfast at the hotel and then went off to see Bernard Wor once again. He smiled as she entered, and came around the counter to greet her. “I am so pleased that you could return, Miss Holt. Yesterday was too busy for a proper conversation. Let me show you around.”

  His hand rested lightly on her shoulder as he guided her into the workroom at the rear of the shop. She managed to edge casually away and asked, “Do you make the caps back here?”

  “We do the final sewing and assembly. Most of the other items, like the magnifying glasses, are purchased at wholesale, though we affix our Sherlock Shoppe sticker to them.”

  Susan glanced at the mailing table. “Is this where the parcel would have been wrapped for us?”

  “Right here,” he confirmed.

  “How
is it possible that a human ear could have been added to the package without anyone noticing?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a small thing, easily concealed in the hand. Then too, Bruni often works late getting out overseas shipments.”

  “I was told that Bruni Zandt has been gone for some weeks.”

  He peered at her and said, without changing expression, “Did I say Bruni? I meant Eva, the woman who took Bruni’s place. I haven’t gotten used to the change yet.”

  “Could I speak with Eva?”

  “Certainly. She’s right over here.”

  Eva was very young, probably still in her late teens, and she spoke no English. Bernard Wor stood by to translate, but there was no way she could question the girl about the missing Bruni or anything else. She turned back to Wor. “Do you have an office where we could talk?”

  He led her up a flight of stairs to the second floor above the Sherlock Shoppe. The office had windows looking down on the workroom and others at the front of the building looking out on the Holmes Museum in the old church. Susan gestured out the window and said, “If you were to change your mind and join in our promotion, I believe Mr. Eiger would too. The other shops we need would fall in line as well.”

  “The police have been here already about the ear,” he said.

  “The ear’s not going to disappear just because you back off on your commitments. In fact, the police might decide you have something to hide.”

  He seemed to grow pale at her words. “If Eiger goes along with you, I will too,” he decided.

  “I’m on my way to speak to him now.” She took some papers from her big purse and ran over the terms of the agreement again. “I’m authorized to increase our order for deerstalkers by three gross, in assorted sizes, if you sign a contract today.”

  “See me after you have Eiger’s signature.”

  “I want yours first, to use as a bargaining chip.”

  “Increase your order by five gross and I’ll sign.”

  “That’s more than we can sell.”

  “Nonsense! You’ll sell out in a week with that publicity about the severed ear. I might even suggest including a nice Swiss chocolate ear with each cap. White chocolate, of course, since I understand the ear was white.”

  She couldn’t believe he was serious. “Mayfield’s would never do anything like that.”

  “More’s the pity.”

  Susan gathered up her papers. “Emmy Spring said you could be difficult.” He smiled and said, “Give my regards to Emmy.”

  As she was leaving the office she noticed some boxes of lethal-looking objects. “What do these axes have to do with Holmes?”

  “Nothing. I have a second shop down the street that sells mountain climbing equipment. These are a new type of ice axe. Man cannot live by Sherlock alone, even in Meiringen.”

  She picked one up and hefted it. “You could kill somebody with one of these. Or tear an ear off.”

  “Maybe you could. Not me.”

  She dropped it back in the box. “I’ll return when I have Eiger’s agreement. Can I at least tell him he can call you?”

  “Of course.”

  She left the Sherlock Shoppe and walked down the street to the museum. There was still a chill in the air, but she couldn’t expect much better for the first week in May. A few tourists went in just ahead of her and she waited till they cleared the front desk before approaching Rima Fredericks.

  “Hello again,” the Englishwoman said with a smile. “Is Mr. Eiger in?”

  The dark-haired woman hesitated. “He is, but the police are with him now. Just a moment while I ring his office.”

  Susan waited with growing apprehension while she spoke a few quiet words into the phone and listened to the response. “You can go in,” the woman told her. “They wish to speak with you too.”

  She took a deep breath and entered the indicated door. Two beefy men in open trench coats sat across the desk from Fritz Eiger. One of them rose and introduced himself in heavily accented English. “I am Captain Altdorf of the Swiss police. You are the American who discovered the severed ear in the parcel of deerstalker caps?”

  “I’m Susan Holt. I work at Mayfield’s in New York with Emmy Spring, the woman who actually found the ear.”

  “Ah, yes. but you were present at the time?”

  “I was.”

  “It was a left ear?”

  She had to think for an instant. “Yes, the left.” The vision of it was still there, unwanted, in her memory.

  “A body was found two weeks ago along the banks of the Aar River north of here. It was badly battered and decomposed and we have only now been able to identify it through dental records. It was the body of Bruni Zandt, a young woman employed at the Sherlock Shoppe here in town. She had been missing for about a month. As you may know, the Reichenbach is a tributary of the Aar River. If a body went over the falls here it might come to rest on the banks of the Aar.”

  “Her ear—”.

  “The body was missing its left ear. We thought nothing of it at first, because of the condition of the corpse. But when we received the report from the New York police, someone remembered the woman on the riverbank. We retraced her possible route back up to the falls and started checking on missing persons in this area. The dental records identified her.”

  “But the ear wasn’t lost when she went over the falls,” Susan insisted. “It would have been more damaged than it was. And it would probably have vanished somewhere in the river, eaten by predators.”

  “Exactly, Miss Holt. The existence of the ear tells us two things. Bruni Zandt was murdered, and it was her killer who mailed the ear to your office.”

  “The parcel came from the Sherlock Shoppe, as you know. Perhaps Mr. Wor can tell you something.”

  “I have men questioning him at this moment. I am going there myself now. What brings you to Meiringen, Miss Holt?”

  She explained about the store’s promotion plans and the problems that had arisen. “Some believe that the dead woman fled after embezzling money from Wor’s shop,” she told them.

  “We are aware of that.”

  “I can’t imagine there was very much money involved.”

  Captain Altdorf smiled. “Mr. Wor has foreign business connections. The amount could have been sizeable.”

  “I’d like to get to the bottom of this before I return to America.”

  The stocky man kept smiling, but his tone was icy. “I notice you have the same initials as the great detective, Miss Holt. Do not try to emulate him. We don’t want another body going over Reichenbach Falls.”

  Susan waited until the police finished questioning Wor, then entered the Sherlock Shoppe. She purchased a Holmes-style pipe for Russell and was charging it on her credit when Bernard Wor came down from his office, looking a bit haggard. “The situation has changed since our talk, Miss Holt.”

  “I know. Your police have identified Bruni Zandt’s body.”

  He glanced at the sales clerks on duty. “Come up to my office, please.”

  Once upstairs, he seated himself behind the desk. “How much do you know?”

  “Some people think she embezzled money from you, possibly a large amount of money.”

  “I have various investors in other countries. A large amount of money was delivered to me in cash, in Italian lira. I foolishly thought it could remain in my safe overnight, until I took it to a bank in Zurich the following day.”

  “This Bruni had the combination?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Just a month ago today.” He got up and walked over to the windows that looked down on the workroom. “You can see the safe from here, under the table at the far end of the room.”

  “How much money did she take?”

  “In your currency, it would be about eighty-five thousand dollars.”

  “It must be insured.”

  Bernard Wor smiled sadly. “There is only my word that it was ever here, or that she took it.
”

  “Look, I have to clear up this matter of the store promotion. Can you come with me right now to see Fritz Eiger? Maybe then I can help you with your problem.”

  Rima Fredericks directed them to the museum basement, where Eiger was busy arranging the various components of the Holmes sitting room. “We have signs telling them not to touch anything, but they do, of course. Sometimes, when no one’s on duty down here, they even steal something— Holmes’s jackknife that skewers the mail to the mantel, for instance. Boys like to take those. Once one of Dr. Watson’s scimitars was missing from between the windows.”

  Susan gazed at it all, imagining it reproduced on the fourth floor of Mayfield’s: the furniture, the Victorian wallpaper, the Times of London, the bullet marks in the wall, even teacups and plates on the table. “When was the scimitar taken?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Back in the winter sometime. But we keep extras of everything.”

  “Look, I’ve got you both together and I’d like to resolve this business. The police have a body to go with that severed ear now. no one things it’s a publicity stunt any longer. There’ll be money and publicity for both of you if you stick with your original agreements, and I’m sure other local merchants would join in. You’d be putting Meiringen right on Fifth Avenue!”

  It took another twenty minutes of discussion, and a slight sweetening of the original terms, but in the end she had them. At least the problem that had brought her there was solved. When she left the museum she went at once to her hotel room and placed a call to the store. Emmy had taken the day off to move to a larger apartment, so she was forced to give the good news to Mike Brentnor.

  “They’ve both signed,” she told him. “We’re set. I’ve increased your order for deerstalkers by five gross.”

  “Five—”

  “It was that or nothing. I’m going to meet with the manager of Sherlock Holmes Hotel before I fly back tomorrow. He might be interested in a tie-in of some sort.”

  “That’s fine. You’ll be back tomorrow, then?”

  “My plane’s due at JFK at two thirty-five. I should be in the office before four.”